Episode 140: The Third Run - Phase World (3)

Every aberrant we met on the road, Franc had taken to bringing down herself, and somewhere in the middle of it I realized something. What that something was...

"That one's a Mid Grade aberrant. Phase Power of 606, so..."

"A lightning bolt of sixty-one TP ought to suffice, then. Hah!!"

KRA-KOOM—!

KKWEEEEK!

A toad-like aberrant, mottled red and black, took Franc's lightning dead-on and screamed its last. The bolt had forked from her palm and struck its back, punching a hole clean through as if a drill had bored it, and the flesh around the wound was charred black, sizzling as it cooked.

"I'd call that conclusive."

"Yes."

What I had realized was this: the higher an aberrant's grade, the greater its resistance to attack. A Lowest Grade, for instance, electrocuted and died from a bolt of about 1 TP. At 9 TP a Low Grade was a certain one-shot, and a Mid-Low Grade was a guaranteed kill around 50. A Mid Grade took somewhere between 70 and 150. Fall short of that, and... how was I even supposed to explain it?

"Penetration."

"Ah. Right. Penetration."

Loose a bolt of 4 TP or less at a Low Grade aberrant, and something like a blue membrane rose over its skin, cutting the lightning's power by a wide margin. A damage-reduction shield, if I had to put a name to it. It couldn't block forever, though. The membrane had durability; absorb a total just shy of 5 TP in attacks and it shattered, and only then did the damage go in properly. That durability seemed to scale with how much Phase Power the aberrant had stored—roughly a tenth of the total, by my estimate.

"The Soul Reaper that showed up at the museum was the same. Ability users poured elemental rounds into ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it, and the blue membrane shuddered, then broke."

A broken membrane seemed to mend very slowly. I had killed one aberrant, shattered its membrane, and watched for four hours, and it never fully recovered. Once broken, a membrane looked as if it would need a good long while—ten hours or so—before it restored itself.

The important part was that I had never seen this happen when I fired a Mana Bullet. A Mana Bullet simply blew an aberrant away, whether it was Mid Grade or Lowest Grade.

"Ignoring the barrier is nice and all, but I can't shake the feeling it won't be able to ignore every barrier without exception, and it's been eating at me."

"So that is why you wished to experiment?"

"Yeah. High-Rank and Peak-Rank Variants are what they call the true aberrants."

"Then I ought to be careful as well. From High-Rank Variants onward, there is a real chance my lightning will not serve particularly well."

"It won't be blocked completely, though. Ordinary ability users raid High-Rank and Peak-Rank Variants all the time. And you can spend over four million TP."

"Even so, there is no harm in caution. We are only the two of us."

"True."

Talking it through with Franc, I looked out at Elephanturos Mountain, standing alone on the far horizon. Seven days, and all of them spent on the move. How much farther before we actually reached it?

Two more days of travel, and the easy plains gave way to rolling hills carpeted in green grass.

"Ah, this is the place! I remember these hills. Because of them, raids and ambushes were a little difficult, and I remember that being rather comfortable!"

From the sound of it, Elephanturos Mountain was right in front of us.

"Then it ought to show itself soon."

Twelve hours later, the foothills of Elephanturos Mountain began to come into view.

"If we approach in broad daylight, I fear the Elephanturos on watch will spot us. Shall we wait here until night, and approach then?"

"Let's do that."

On the advice of Lady Franc, proud owner of a terrifying pair of eyes, we called off travel for the day and settled in to wait for dark. Once night fell and the world narrowed, Spatial Perception would actually be on my side.

Four hours of that. The sun was still hanging high overhead, and sitting still in silver grass grown as tall as I was got a little tedious.

"It is a shame I cannot go out scouting, now that I have a body."

Franc, seated with her hip pressed to mine, murmured it with her head on my shoulder, but there was not a trace of regret in her voice. I had the perimeter covered with Spatial Perception. There was no danger in it.

I dropped my gaze and stared at the front of my school uniform, gone black by now. The bodyguard noona's blood had dried completely and gave off no smell at all. Even so, every time I looked at it my heart lurched, and some emotion I didn't know tried to surge up.

I cut the thought and the feeling short and flopped onto my back. Franc rose, poked her head above the silver grass to look around, then sat again and offered me her lap. Feeling her stroke my forehead, I muttered.

"It's four, so we've got at least three more hours."

I rolled over and buried my face between Franc's firm thighs. She let out a small shriek and poked my cheek, and each time she did I rubbed my face wildly against that smooth skin until she broke into a bright, bubbling laugh and pressed my head down so I couldn't move. Then, little by little, she parted her thighs, and it felt exactly as if she were tempting me.

Well then. I'd give her exactly what she wanted.

True to form, Franc was weak to tickling. I got her in the side and she clapped both hands over her mouth, legs kicking as she laughed. I pinned her like that and jabbed at the soft underside of her rear and the northern hemisphere of her breasts, and I could feel her heat-switch flickering on the edge of flipping.

Ugh. I wanted to take this straight to the main event. More than nine days of holding back, and I was about to start forming relics. I wanted to yank off that string dress, the one that left her shoulders bare, and lick and suck and tease the heavy breasts that could set a man's chest on fire—but I buried my face in her cleavage, locked my arms around her waist, and endured.

"Um... Seoha? R-right now, there isn't anything around us..."

The way she stroked the back of my head and spoke, low and suggestive, in a voice thick with sex—I nearly threw her down right there.

"No. The enemy's right in front of us. I'm holding on for dear life myself, so don't tempt me."

"Hnnn..."

At the firmness in my voice her face crumpled just a little, and she hugged my head tight. Time slipped past easily enough while we stayed like that, until the sun caught on the horizon and the sky began to burn.

Around then, Spatial Perception caught three Elephanturos, 1.3 kilometers out, heading for Elephanturos Mountain. All three read as Mid-Rank Variants with Phase Power around 1,000. Two males and one female, none of them wearing anything like armor, wooden spears and stone axes in their hands.

Just as Franc had said, the upper body was human and the lower body elephant—though the human half looked more like an ape midway through evolving into a person. A dead ringer for the Australopithecus out of a textbook. They stood nearly ten meters tall, and male or female, they were mountains of muscle. If they had any custom of clothing, I saw no sign of it; both sexes went bare from the waist up. The female's enormous twin peaks in particular, each a good meter across...!

I felt nothing.

...I wanted to believe I'd felt nothing.

If they had a distinguishing feature, it was the eyes. Reddish, and fierce, the irises like crystals of ice—deeply alien. And perhaps because they were classed as aberrants, all I could see was the Phase Power condensed near the heart. No type. Once a fight started, that Phase Power would probably pattern itself, the way it had with the master of Breast Mountain, or the Wind Raccoon.

They were hauling aberrant carcasses on the elephant backs of their lower halves like packs of luggage—heading home from a hunt, maybe. I told Franc what I'd seen. She straightened her disheveled clothes, came to stand beside me, and poked her head above the silver grass. She found the three almost at ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠once.

"Ah, there they are. Only... those are not of high standing within the species."

"How can you tell?"

"The eleph—the Elephanturos that barred my path, back when I was the Giant Iljeok, wore armor that looked to be made of wood. There were aberrants that draped hides over their bodies like ornaments as well. Elephanturos of that sort were few. Most carried wooden spears worked from logs, or stone axes, just as those do."

"That so..."

"If they are Mid Grade, we should have no difficulty facing them. Shall we make contact?"

"Is there still one on watch?"

"Mmm... yes. An Elephanturos bearing a metal weapon ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠is watching the others gather toward the mountain."

Evening, then. Hunt and forage finished, and now they were coming in to the village. If those three sat in the lower ranks, the higher ranks were likely Mid-High Grade, and the ones that had stood against Franc were High Grade, no question. Mid Grade detection range seemed to run a little past a hundred meters, but how far would Mid-High Grade or High Grade reach? Let's see. Low Grade had been 7 meters, Mid-Low Grade about 28. Did the range quadruple with every grade? Then Mid Grade would land around 112 meters, Mid-High Grade around 448, and High Grade at 1.7 kilometers. I wasn't certain, but if I assumed roughly that, a High Grade would spot us. Wouldn't it have me read before I read it?

Franc's expression hardened a little as she heard the assumption out.

"...Let's wait, for now. Once it's night, we circle along the foothills and use Spatial Perception to find out how many Elephanturos live on the mountain. The hunt comes after."

"Yes."

At the word hunt, killing intent began to drift through Franc's blue eyes.

After the sun had gone down completely, I triggered Mana Mode - Acceleration and ran for the foothills. The wind hissing past my ears was a little loud, but I focused and scoured everything inside my Spatial Perception range. Ten minutes of running covered fifteen kilometers in a rush, and the foothills began to enter detection range.

The mountain was enormous up close. Even with my own eyes I could see a huge hole partway up the slope, and a dozen or more Elephanturos coming and going through it. Nothing of them showed inside my Spatial Perception range. Had they all gone into that hole because it was night?

TP consumption had passed fifty percent, so I cut Acceleration Mode and closed on the start of the foothills with only Mana Mode active. The slope happened to be thick with trees, the smallest of them over forty meters tall, so I didn't have to worry about the lookouts spotting us. Phase Power detection was the only thing to watch.

Hidden in that dense, towering forest, I spoke as we climbed.

"A peak this big, standing alone—Korea doesn't have anything like it. Feels strange."

"If there is a mountain in the real world that rises this solitary, would it be the Matterhorn? Annapurna is tall as well, but that is a range."

"Isn't the Matterhorn surrounded by mountains too?"

"They say that viewed from the lakeshore, it appears to stand entirely alone."

"Huh. Is that so."

I bounded along, tucked myself behind a large boulder, and looked around. Maybe because the mountain was a gentle triangle and everything around it was plains and hills, the view opened out completely.

"So that's why the Elephanturos nested here."

"Yes. I should think it is because this is the only mountain nearby."

I moved along the foothills half-tensed, waiting for a village or a pack of aberrants, and somehow I couldn't see a single living thing—not an Elephanturos, not an aberrant, not an animal.

"You said the Elephanturos were traveling with aberrant corpses on their backs, did you not? That place was well over ten kilometers from the mountain, and yet they had come out that far. That would mean the animals and aberrants fit to serve as food around here have dwindled, or are gone entirely."

I climbed the largest tree in the area and looked toward the mouth of the den. Only four remained standing guard near the hole; the ones that had been coming and going were gone. I climbed back down and, keeping my Phase Power at about eighty percent, began to circle the whole of Elephanturos Mountain in the dead of night.

Two hours, and one full circuit, told me the shape of it. Elephanturos Mountain rose gently up to the mid-slope, but from the point where the Elephanturos had made their nest, the ridgeline shot up sharp. There wasn't a single village or nest anywhere else. The inside of the cave those four were watching had to be their den. The mountain was so vast that Spatial Perception, with its radius of 1.5 kilometers, couldn't sense so much as a quarter of it. To confirm the den underground at the mid-slope, we would have to get closer.

I gave the slightly tense Franc a small nod and moved to the side of the mountain opposite their den mouth.

"A mountain this big, you'd think every kind of aberrant would be tearing each other apart over whose land it is. And those things have it all to themselves?"

"I think... that may have been because of me."

"Huh? You mean back when you were an aberrant?"

"Yes. When I first arrived here, three aberrant species were dividing the mountain into three and fighting over it. A pack of Silver White Wolves, led by a Giant Silver Fang—what a Silver White Wolf becomes if it evolves to the utmost—a pack of No-Head Mantises under a Giant Killer Mantis Queen, and that Elephanturos herd."

"Giant Killer Mantis Queen? I know Giant Silver Fang, but that's a new one."

A mantis that hunted giants?

"A High-Rank Variant, and a herd that takes a matriarch for its head, much as an ordinary colony of insects might. The Mantis Queen was an enormous dark-crimson monster, with four forelegs and eight wings in all—four blade-like wings upon its back, and four wings overturning the upper portion of its abdomen. The claw sword you carry now, Seoha, would differ from that Mantis Queen's foreleg as a toy knife differs from a treasured blade."

...The comparison was so outrageous I couldn't even picture it.

"Of the three herds, the Elephanturos were the weakest in strength. While I shattered the Giant Silver Fang pack, and then the Mantis Queen pack in turn, they hung back and only watched me fight."

"And when you went to shatter the Elephanturos, they fought you just enough and then the whole lot ran, and once you gave up and went back to the cliff, they returned to this mountain and took it for themselves."

Franc nodded quietly.

We moved carefully for about two kilometers, passed through the forest, and climbed to the mid-slope, and part of the Elephanturos den—tunnels that seemed dug into the mountain—began to register on Spatial Perception. Where we stood, yellowish-brown earth lay exposed, littered with small rocks and gravel. Nowhere to hide. Then I found a gap between boulders about the size of a grown man. The crevice was wide enough for two to sit side by side, so Franc and I hid ourselves there and examined the tunnels.

"Mmm... I can't see all of it, but judging by the part I can, it's shaped like an anthill... and I only see about thirty-three Elephanturos."

I didn't think those thirty-three were all of them. I didn't even know how big the burrow was.

"As I recall, the Elephanturos that fled my final raid numbered fewer than forty... Is it the lack of natural enemies? They have grown considerably. How great is their Phase Power?"

"Hmm..."

Most of what detection caught were Mid-Rank Variants, with the occasional Mid-High Rank Variant. The odd part was that there wasn't a single Mid-Low Rank Variant, or anything below.

"Let's move and look somewhere else."

The lookouts only guarded the cave mouth. They didn't seem to patrol the foothills, which made the scouting easy. I wandered farther and examined the den under the mountain, and the passages tangled loosely through the ground beneath it were anthill-shaped, no question. The Elephanturos I had identified by then numbered a little over two hundred, and one of them carried an unusual amount of Phase Power. It occupied a large cavern a little off the mountain's center, harboring a Phase Power of 24,922 and a Phase Stone of 23,000 in its heart.

"Is that the leader?"

"A being that leads more than a hundred Mid Grades and dozens of Mid-High Rank Variants, and is itself only Mid-High Grade... it does not seem like an aberrant species that prizes strength."

"But the next one down from that thing only barely has a Phase Stone starting to form."

"The Giant Silver Fang was High Grade, and the Giant Killer Mantis Queen as well. The leader of the Elephanturos will be High Grade, without question."

"Hmm. So maybe there's more cave farther in, where my Spatial Perception doesn't reach?"

"The Elephanturos leader is very likely to be there."

If so, how strong was the High-Rank Variant that kept a creature nearly at High Grade as its subordinate?

Just then, the thing stopped what it was doing and began to glare in my direction.

"That one... I think it sensed me."

"...!"

It wasn't a mistake. It hadn't happened to glance this way while turning its head. It had been staring toward me for over thirty seconds already. That ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠one had to be the second-in-command. It was about four hundred meters from me in a straight line, and it was too unnatural to call coincidence.

And the situation was something else. The second had a Mid Grade female Elephanturos by the hair and was in the middle of the act, driving down on her hard enough to crush her genitals, and when he stopped, the female pinned beneath him turned and mumbled something. In that instant he swung a fist and smashed it into her skull.

I had never seen a son of a bitch like that.

The female he had struck sprayed blood from her nose and mouth and toppled forward. Her eyes had lost their focus, and blood was running from her ears as well. Critical, at a glance. She went slack, not so much as twitching, blood streaming from her ear, her nose, and her mouth.

He hadn't killed her, had he?

The second didn't stop there. He turned, kicked her belly with a hind leg like a pillar of wood, and stamped his weight down on her stomach. Under blows heavy enough to heave a bulk of more than ten meters, she vomited blood again. Half-conscious, she tried to crawl out of the cavern, only for him to fall on her once more and force his enormous genitals into her. She writhed and cried out in pain, and he paid her no mind—sating only his own lust while his fists fell, again and again, on her torso, her head, her waist.

...Fuck.

Watching the second laugh vilely as he dealt out violence, extreme revulsion and disgust crashed over me. What was the root of this disgust? Loathing of my own kind? As if to say the guess was right, my heart gave one hard kick. Was it my true heart, wanting to go into rut and rampage at a female showing weakness? Was that the act I wanted?

No. I had used physical violence. There had been times I'd treated Yeongeun's breasts like a punching bag, and times I'd left Franc's belly, and Hwayeon's, in a state that wasn't natural. Revulsion and disgust turned, soon enough, into self-loathing, and gnawed at body and mind alike.

I clutched my churning chest and kept watching what the second was doing, and a future streamed through my head like a panorama—me, dealing out violence, making sexual playthings of Franc and Hwayeon and Yeongeun.

"...Seoha?"

"Uh—huh?"

"Are you all right? Your color has suddenly gone poor."

"Ah... I'm fine. The second's behavior was just... a shock."

Seeing my face, Franc gathered my head gently into her arms, worry written all through her own. I buried my face in her embrace and let a groan slip inward.

Just what the hell kind of thing was I made to be...