Episode 15: Day Four, The Female Giant 2 (3)
From the scraps of wood strewn across the ground, I picked out three decent stick-shaped pieces, each about seventy centimeters long, and used the horn awl to punch a groove that would seat the broken claw. Then I spent two hours tearing the lining out of my school blazer and twisting it into cord. At last, a serviceable handle was done.
If I had to describe the shape as simply as possible, it was a wall socket. A socket for plugging in the giant monster mole's claw. I only meant to stab with it, not swing, and I had no plans to use it for long — something thrown together like this was bound to have miserable durability. Even so, given how sharp that claw was, I figured it would hit about as hard as a level-one hero in an RPG equipping a level-twenty weapon, and I was looking forward to it.
"Let's see."
I carefully fitted the flat of the mole's claw into the triangular, socket-shaped groove at the tip of the claw-spear, the one I'd cut to match its outline. I'd left a gap around the sharp edges so the wood wouldn't get sliced and chewed apart against them, and luckily the fit fell within tolerance. It seated without a problem. I'd tapered the mouth so it narrowed as it went, and the moment the claw slid home it locked flush, the joint biting down in a way that sent a strange little thrill through me.
"Perfect fit."
I wound the cord I'd made from the blazer lining tight around the section gripping the claw and knotted it, and claw and wood locked together solid. The knot that never comes undone was something I'd learned in Survival Studies. Man, Survival Studies is actually useful, isn't it?
Analysis, riding on the Detection ability, had been an enormous help with the work. I didn't have to keep holding pieces up against each other — the lengths calculated themselves in my head. On top of that, and maybe it was only an optical illusion, whatever I pictured rose in front of me like a hologram at life size, so I didn't need to calculate anything or draft a blueprint. I just carved to the shape, and the work went faster than I'd expected. A working diagram even floated off to one side, easy to glance at. With Analysis helping this much, failing to make the thing properly would've just made me an idiot.
It was like a game interface. Maybe my gamer brain was bleeding into Detection as well. Truth was, there was plenty I didn't know and plenty I was only guessing at, but with nothing certain to go on, if my gut said the Detection ability worked like such-and-such, I had no choice but to treat that as the answer.
And that approach wasn't even wrong. Using an ability or a technique came down entirely to a judgment issued in the ability user's own brain. You didn't learn the exact operating principle and follow a sequence. You decided you were going to use it, and that decision itself became the trigger that set the ability off. That was straight out of the Survival Studies textbook — when an ability user got an intuition about their own ability, that intuition was usually right, or so the conclusion went among the various scholars and scientists who had researched abilities and techniques. In other words, the ability user's own mental image mattered most. That was probably why Survival Studies told you, the moment you gained an ability or a technique, to lock down a concept of it as fast as you could.
Anyway, without Detection I could have stuck to this all day and still never managed a handle like this. I would have broken it halfway through, failed to account for the edges, sliced through the precious cloth cord, and had to start over at least five more times. Even the scrap wood had come easy, because Detection had quietly pointed me toward where the right pieces were. Without that, just finding the wood would have taken forever.
At any rate, the finished shape looked like the sort of lance a medieval knight might carry into a cavalry charge — even if it curved downward toward the tip, and even if it was short. I gripped the handle carefully in both hands and tried a few thrusts. For a weapon 170 centimeters long, it was light enough that the weight never dragged my stance apart mid-stab. Wood or not, there was enough volume there to make three baseball bats. That alone should have been over two kilograms, and the claw had weight of its own... Had I gotten stronger?
Either way, it was a good thing. I settled into a stance, tucking my arm in against my side, hauling the handle tight with one hand, and wedging the leftover length between my arm and my body. It locked in nicely. Like this, I figured I could charge an animal or an Aberrant and just ram the point home. The moment I tried a tentative swing, though, something felt wrong... Yeah. Better to hold off on swinging. Crude in every other respect, maybe, but I had made a weapon with real killing power with my own two hands, and I liked it.
"Hmm... should I twist some thin branches into cord and reinforce it a little more?"
The handle was bare heartwood under the bark, and the feel of it wasn't great. I had the horned pup's hide set aside; I could tan that and wrap the grip. Honestly, I didn't even need to tan anything. I could just tear the left sleeve off the blazer and wind that around the handle. But the uniform was as good as armor, and I didn't want to damage it any more than I had to.
From grilling meat at lunch, to reaching the place where the female giant and the mole lay dead, to finishing the claw-spear — five hours in all. Judging by where the sun hung, it would be fully down in about two hours. If I gave myself a generous hour and a half to get back, it was already time to return to the cave in the cliff.
...Or would it be fine to just find a tall tree nearby and spend the night? In the aftermath of the fight between the female giant and the mole, tonight at least ought to be safe. I'd felt it while I worked on the handle, sensing the surroundings without a break: the situation right now was plainly high-risk, high-return. Set against the gain of soaking up Phase Power all day in a place this saturated with it, taking on a certain amount of risk seemed acceptable. Of course, I was only making that call because I knew the wild animals and the weaker Aberrants had all fled the fight between the female giant and the giant mole.
And what if some strong Aberrant saw the two of them dead and came scavenging for an easy profit — what then? Even if I were somewhere far away, that thing would sense me, chase me down, and kill me. So. That was that. For the moment, even if I stockpiled Phase Power, I had nothing to spend it on... I felt the lack of an attack technique all over again. Still — Detection, Analysis, and Penetration alone were nothing to sneeze at.
I tossed aside the wooden staff I'd had tied behind my waist, tucked the horn awl in at my left hip, and lifted the claw-spear in my left hand as I muttered.
"Now that I've got a real weapon, a damn mutt ought to be within my reach."
A claw that had mercilessly split and sheared the Phase Power-laced hide of the female giant — against a Lowest-Rank Variant, at least, I wouldn't die unable even to resist for lack of a weapon.
Whooooo— A strangely cold wind prickled over my skin and raised goosebumps. For a moment I was afraid some other High-Tier Variant, some other monster, was on its way, but if I flinched at every fear like this, nothing that could get done ever would. I shook my head hard and forced the thought away.
"Maybe I'll go with that one today..."
I started climbing the biggest tree around. Detection put the trunk at four meters across and the height at nineteen. Hide at the very top, and I had a feeling nothing ordinary would spot me. Before I climbed, I sensed the leaves. Their composition hadn't shifted from what I'd eaten during the day, so I relaxed.
"Oh?"
I'd scrambled ten meters up, and there were far too many good places to rest. I ran Detection hard and checked. Looking in from outside, looking up from below — thanks to the thick branches and leaves, there were at least three spots where I wouldn't be easily found, and where I could lie down and rest in comfort. And with Detection, if I closed my eyes, everything within an eighty-meter radius was as good as sitting in the palm of my hand. If anything approached, I'd know at once. Perfect conditions for hiding and keeping watch.
The thought of settling in quickly, resting, and stacking Phase Power left me feeling — at least in this one moment — that I was alive, that I was living hard, and somehow that put me in a good mood. Daydreaming while messing around alone, or out on a walk, was fine too, but this came with a bigger sense of accomplishment. Maybe. The problem was that the accomplishment came seasoned with anxiety.
I moved to a spot where the branches wove together dense as a net, the leaves thick enough that it was practically a hammock. Analysis reported that the supporting branch was nearly half as thick as my torso, so I didn't need to worry about the limbs snapping and dropping me. Super convenient, Analysis!
I fixed the claw-spear securely by my head so it wouldn't fall. Then I settled in as Analysis had indicated and lay down, and my spine stretched out with a crack — a long, relieved groan slipped out of me, it was that comfortable. I reached up, plucked a single leaf, popped it into my mouth, and chewed, feeling the Phase Power soak into my body.
Two hours ago I'd measured my total Phase Power at 115. Three hours on, it had climbed to 145. This close to the female giant's corpse, the ratio of air to Phase Power seemed to be about one to nine. Just breathing, I could feel Phase Power piling up inside me like mad. No wonder it had jumped by thirty in three hours.
I closed my eyes and ran Detection over every inch of the female giant's body. Some playboy had once said a pretty woman was humanity's treasure. Her body was covered in hideous wounds, and she was terrifyingly huge, but viewed through Detection the scale didn't really register. As I quietly sensed her, her expression and her pose locked together, and it started to feel like I was looking at a work of art. Why art? That's what the art teacher said. If looking at it gets you worked up, it's obscenity. If it doesn't, it's art.
I plucked another leaf, put it in my mouth, and drifted a little, and the current of my thoughts began to run toward the abilities I'd gained. Good timing. I might as well take this chance to look them over carefully.
The abilities I'd gained upon becoming an ability user came to three. Detection, Analysis, and Penetration. I hadn't been able to think of anything better, so I'd lumped them together and named the whole thing the Detection ability — but set beside other Detection users' Detection, it was so monstrous I almost felt bad calling it that.
First, Detection. For starters, the range was absurdly wide. Centered on me, a radius of eighty meters — that was the distance when I closed my eyes, shut off my sight, and focused entirely on sensing. Eyes open, the maximum dropped to a radius of twenty-seven meters. Compared with another Detection user's range, it was the difference between heaven and earth. And anything that entered that range, moving or still, I sensed all of it.
By what principle could I grasp objects, and everything in motion, as if I were watching reality from a third-person viewpoint? Normally I only paid moderate attention, but if I really focused, so many objects registered that it put a load on my head. The count was somewhere around 120,000. The moment I concentrated even a little, hundreds of leaves trembling on the wind all registered at once, and my head throbbed faintly. And yet the moment I let my attention go, the flutter of leaves and grass in the breeze got filtered out automatically. Go figure.
Second, Analysis. This one, too, was so ridiculously capable that it felt less like a sub-skill and more like an entirely separate ability. The reason I'd been able to make the claw-spear's handle in a single go was that Analysis had told me, piece by piece, the posture, the angle to carve, the shape, how much force to use when gouging, and the rest. I'd thought hard about how that could be possible. If Detection precision-scanned a target, Analysis seemed to break that target down in whatever direction I wanted and tell me what action to take. It had shown me an image of the finished product and told me everything — what materials to gather, how to carve them down, what shape to build. A byproduct of my delusions... no, of my imagination, maybe?
The way to trigger it was to focus Detection on a specific part; Analysis would then start on whatever I was focusing on. A flood of information rode in through my head at that point, and if I didn't particularly pay attention, it filtered itself out. But the moment I focused even a little, information surfaced in a stream, the way a computer search does. Analysis also seemed to run on my own knowledge, though. About things I didn't know, or was simply ignorant of, the ability gave off a feeling of Yeah, I don't know that either~. Even so, as of now, I didn't feel a single thing lacking.
And I'd just noticed something even more astonishing. The female giant's naked body, from before I'd gained Detection, was still sitting in my memory — and after I gained the ability and sensed and analyzed her body, that old shower scene had been corrected inside my brain under Detection's influence and saved in my head as a vivid video. I closed my eyes and called the image up, and I could take it in from every direction, a full three-sixty. Only the model, though. The background looked like a panorama photo, which made it a little awkward. But if I went to that place and used Detection, I figured a perfect virtual-reality video would come together.
To think I'd succeeded in securing an X-rated video I could watch anytime, no matter who else might be looking. My own ability was starting to scare me. Heh heh heh.
Then I turned my gaze to a scrap of wood, and Analysis informed me that if I carved it this way and that, I'd end up with a wooden figure. I tried it, whittling lazily with the horn awl, and in a flash a carving was done — the female giant drinking at the waterfall.
"......"
A little more delicately with the horn awl... the chest, say, or the rear, or the space between the thighs. I poured myself into it, scraping away with a soft rasp, and even I had to admit the quality was astonishing.
"Whoa. I could make money with this."
As a test, I tried to call up the girls exercising during P.E., but the thought came that this one wouldn't work, and the correction failed. Too bad.
Uh... come to think of it, hadn't my head gotten insanely good? My memory had shot up to a terrifying degree. And if everything I saw through Detection stuck, my ability to memorize must have become monstrous too. Ehehe. Then once I got back to reality and sat an exam, perfect scores on the memorization subjects would be a piece of cake. Skim a textbook and the related books once, run Detection and Analysis over them, and the whole lot would be stored in my head. And with Detection, I could cheat in a way that would never, ever get caught, couldn't I? Jackpot.
...With an ability this good, the things I wanted to do with it were voyeur shots and cheat sheets. It felt like I was staring at the limits of my own brain, and that made me sad.
Third was Penetration. If Detection sensed and remembered every external part, Penetration let me see the inside. Detection and Penetration looked; Analysis unpacked what they saw and divided it into individual elements and properties. Put simply, examining the organs inside my own body without affecting them at all, looking through the female giant over there, looking through the giant mole, looking through the tree I was lying in — all of that, I figured, was Penetration's domain. I wasn't seeing any of it directly with my eyes, of course. But in that it was stored in my head as an object I could watch like footage, it was no different from seeing through things, was it? The outside of a body was Detection. Anything deeper — the heart, the organs, the interior — was Penetration.
The high school I attended belonged to the largest and finest private educational foundation in the country, running everything from kindergarten through university in order to cultivate talent, so it was extremely famous, and gifted students poured in from all over the nation. Wealthy mothers and fathers with a fierce passion for their children's education sent their kids there too, and since they came from moneyed households they dressed well — the girls in particular were all better-looking than average, so just looking at them was a feast for the eyes.
Seriously... I had to survive and get back, no matter what it took.
Oh, and there was something the three abilities had produced by linking up with one another. An automatic map-making function. I'd shortened the name to Mapping. Maybe my brain had kicked into gear when I awakened, because my memory had gotten ridiculously good, and that memory, combined with Detection and Penetration, seemed to be what had given birth to the ability. Thinking about the principle, it was simple. As I moved, I remembered the various objects that entered my Detection range, saw through them, and recorded them in my head. Later, if I called it up, I could watch every path I'd walked so far inside my mind, like virtual reality. And if I thought of a specific spot in a region that had surfaced as a map, the analysis I'd done of that place came up with it.
If I had to name a comparison, it was similar to the maps offered by the big search portals on the internet — a vastly superior version of that kind of map service. Maybe because I liked games, the way the things I learned through Detection, Analysis, and Penetration got presented to me, and the look of the abilities themselves, felt like they were turning into a game interface. Memory was the database. Detection and Penetration were the input. Analysis was the search bar. Search a given word, and the related content scrolled up in sentences and video. Give that entry your attention, and it felt as if the whole thing unfolded before your eyes in VR. In an urgent situation, though, the information seemed to pierce straight through the brain, so directly I couldn't even register the process.
Down the line, would a status window actually pop up neat and clear in front of my eyes, the way it did in those virtual-reality game novels?
"Like — status window! Hehehe."
Lastly, I wasn't sure, but it seemed like I'd picked up a premonition as well. I just couldn't be certain. Right before I met the giant mole, the back of my skull had throbbed in little stabs, and I'd had a strong feeling I was supposed to come here, too — but I couldn't say whether that had been a premonition or not. Above all, I hadn't even awakened back then. Calling it a premonition on the strength of that much experience felt like a stretch, and besides, premonition, foresight, and prophecy existed separately as Special abilities...
Even while I thought, I kept busily plucking and eating leaves, and bit by bit my stomach filled and the hunger and thirst faded. I considered taking a bite of the belt to top up my calories, but I'd grilled meat for lunch, so maybe I'd save it today. It had originally been two meters long, but it was still emergency rations. Better to conserve it if I could.
I glanced at the female giant, and at the giant mole's carcass pinned beneath her. I felt like I could probably eat those, too... but the female giant was human-shaped, and I didn't want to. If I were truly on the verge of starving to death I'd eat to live, but I still had the emergency-ration belt. The giant mole was off-putting in a different sense, and I didn't want to eat that either. I'd heard of mole meat before, but this felt like a much stronger revulsion than that. So I'd better save the belt.
Hm? Come to think of it, I hadn't taken a single proper dump since I fell into the Phase World. I'd been pissing here and there... constipation? Ugh. A little undignified, but maybe I should see through my guts. Nothing was as dangerous as suddenly needing to go in the middle of an emergency.
I started slowly at the esophagus, passed the stomach, went through the duodenum, and looked all the way along the small intestine and the large intestine — but it wasn't much different from when I'd used Penetration back in the cave. Come to think of it, at lunch I'd eaten a mass of meat nearly a third the size of my torso. Where had it all gone? There ought to have been undigested remnants left...
Hmm. The residue currently sitting in my small and large intestines — urgh — was what remained of the belt I'd chewed for calories, and that had come from reality. So did the things I'd eaten here in the Phase World just break down perfectly, without a trace? As a test, I kept Penetration on my stomach for a while, and I could confirm that the watery leaves I'd chewed were breaking down bit by bit, being absorbed, and then mostly vanishing. What remained was only a trace of leaf and a little moisture. That moisture looked like it would soon be absorbed into my body and disappear as well. Then was the water pooled in my stomach the little I'd drunk when I crossed the river earlier? What was the difference between the moisture in the leaves and the water flowing in the river?
......
Ah, come on. I'd meant to look back over my abilities, figure out what lineage they belonged to, and guess at the techniques and abilities I might gain later, and here I was thinking about nothing but nonsense. I'd confirmed there was nothing wrong with my body, so it wasn't important. I shook my head hard, shook off the useless thoughts, and went back to the abilities.
What type of ability user was I? When I'd crossed the river earlier, I'd seen my face reflected on the water, and my body hadn't changed, so I wasn't a Physical Reinforcement type. I couldn't unfold an element, and I couldn't use a recovery or healing ability, so I wasn't an Elemental type or a Healing/Recovery type either. It resembled presence-sense, and analysis abilities, but it was completely different, so I wasn't a Detection type either.
Oh — if I forced it, my brain had been reinforced, so could that count as Physical Reinforcement? But I shook my head. From somewhere deep in my skull, a voice denying it rang out. That's not it. So I was a Special type too, wasn't I? Unusual abilities mostly fell under the Special type.
I spent three hours on this worry and that thought, and before I knew it the sun had set and night had come — but there was no sign of any animal or Aberrant drawing near. There was a time-check function, too, which was nice. Right now, though, it literally only showed how much time had passed so far, so it was basically just a stopwatch. If I lost consciousness, Detection would stop at the same moment and everything would halt, so if I wanted to know the time for certain, I ought to carry a watch at least. After I returned, of course. If I'd learned how to make a sundial, and how to read one, it would have come in handy in a situation like this.
Anyway, the Phase Power I'd absorbed and expanded over those three hours had grown by thirty, from 145 to 175. Seventy-five in a single day — no, in half a day... As a multiplier, I had become 1.75 times what I'd been in this one day. If Phase Power kept expanding at this rate straight through until tomorrow morning, and I put the time now at roughly eight in the evening, then by eight in the morning, twelve hours later, my Phase Power would hit 295.
Neither Survival Studies nor biology had taught anything about rates of Phase Power growth, so I knew nothing — but even I could tell that the speed at which my Phase Power was rising right now was absolutely not normal. It wasn't a bad thing, though, so if anything it was luck. An ability gained after nearly dying three times, and on top of that a rapid expansion of Phase Power. I couldn't tell whether this was the pleasure that arrives at the end of hardship.
Over the eleven days I had left, I hoped I'd pick up at least one means of attack that used Phase Power... but the ability I'd awakened with first was non-combat, so the odds of that weren't great, were they?
Tsk.