Day Five: Up the Cliff (2)
I ran harder and faster than I ever had with that bastard of a dog on my heels, and the instant the river came into sight, I dove.
SPLOOOSH!!
"Blub-blub-glub!!"
Then I thrashed, violent and desperate, shaking loose the blood and scraps of meat plastered to my body. I flailed underwater for a long stretch, until my breath gave out and I couldn't hold any longer, and burst back up into the air.
"Pwah! Hah! Hah...!"
Aaah, this is terrible for my mental health!! It really is!!
The soft, springy give I'd felt through my clothes, the blood dripping down the nape of my neck and into my ears, the slick, nameless slide of entrails — it was all still there...
"Gyaaah!!"
I shook my neck and ears furiously, then dove under again.
I think I finally understand why wind-ability users and telekinetic ability users are the ones tasked with pulling Phase Stones out of Aberrants!!
Crawl into an Aberrant's body yourself to extract one, get hooked on a sensation like this, and you'd turn into a full-blown pleasure-addicted killer!
I scrubbed like a maniac for nearly an hour before I finally calmed enough to wade back to shore.
I dropped onto the gravel, panting as I caught my breath, set down the claw spear and the horn fang that had somehow stayed put, and glared at the Phase Stone with a look muddled somewhere between love and hate.
"Ugh. Didn't get it all off, did I."
I shoved the Phase Stone into my pants pocket, walked back into the water, stripped, and started splashing around, washing off whatever was still stuck to me. It wasn't only blood. Something clear and thick was smeared on me too... uuugh.
Whether I'd hit my limit in mind, in body, or in the sensing ability itself, the trembling throughout me wouldn't stop.
That was when a rake-shaped branch drifting down the river caught my eye.
"..."
The thought arrived late, and I beat my head with both palms.
I could have just used a tool!! Where in the world do you find a lunatic who decides there's no other way, splits a belly open, and crawls inside!!
Anyway, as my reason crept back, I realized that until a moment ago I'd been in full panic, and my sensing ability had briefly shut off.
When I called the map up in my head, nothing had been drawn from the female giant's corpse to here. The sensing ability must have stopped completely, and the automapping function had switched off with it.
That was actually dangerous!
"Krgh."
Apparently, when my mind is pushed to the brink, the sensing ability turns unreliable too — or the switch just drops. So fainting isn't the only thing I have to watch for now.
I'd washed my clothes and my body for ages, and still the sweet stink of blood kept tickling the inside of my nose.
A mud pack. That's what I need.
I cupped both hands and flung water hard onto the bank, grabbed a decently long branch, and stabbed, split, and turned the earth, sprinkling water as I went until I'd worked it into mud.
Huh? This feels a little different in stickiness from the soil near the dog hole.
I rubbed the mud between thumb and forefinger. Definitely less grit.
...?
Even running analysis, the grains here were much smaller and finer, and something was different — but I couldn't tell what.
Trying hard not to think about the female giant, I rolled in the mud pit I'd made and slapped mud all over my face and hair. Cold mud clung to my clothes and skin, then warmed with my body heat until it felt snug, and my mind began to settle.
Hoo.
My chest was still trembling, but give it a little time and I'd be all right.
"I think I get why pigs roll around in mud and coat themselves in it."
Well, they say it's for cleanliness, and to keep pests like mosquitoes and flies off — and on top of that, the warm-and-cool of it feels damn good. I remembered middle school, sprawled on the living-room floor, teasing my older sister for spreading mud across her face and getting kicked for it when she lost her temper. Only now do I think I understand why she did those mud packs. She used to force them on Mom, too. At first Mom had recoiled and demanded to know what all this was, but later she'd come to like them even more.
Anyway, I'd turned my nerves aside with idle thoughts and steadied my mind with the mud pack, and I could feel my thoughts racing back toward sanity. From here on, if anything like this happens again, I'll either use a tool to get the Phase Stone out, or I'll give it up. If this happens even once more, my mind is going to be in real danger.
Gathering my weapons and heading back toward the female giant's corpse, I learned the river was a good three kilometers from the ruins. Follow the river ten kilometers upstream and I'd reach the place where I first met the giant mole — so had I more or less come back the way I'd come?
On the way back, I used analysis to review the footage recorded in my head — the ground around the female giant and the giant mole's carcasses, the devastated trees — and I kept feeling I'd missed something. It seemed tied to my ability. But what on earth...
Is my ability about to branch? Doesn't feel like it. Is a skill about to form? Doesn't feel like that either.
Ugh, what is it? It's right there and not there, my head itching, my chest itching — it's eating me alive!
Ah, forget it. Climb a tree, sit with the Phase Power while I think, and it'll come to me.
Running like a madman, I'd reached the river in minutes. Walking, it took nearly an hour. The mud had set well enough on the way that it wouldn't flake off up in a tree and give me away.
I looked up at the tree I'd rested in yesterday... Huh?
How... did I climb that thing again?
I looked down at the claw spear in my left hand, then back up at the tree, baffled by how I'd climbed it yesterday. I'd definitely gone up on one hand and two legs, hadn't I? Thinking on it, last night's scramble up the trunk began to play back in my head like a recording.
Aaah!! That was it!!
The realization hit, and my eyes snapped wide as I checked several points on the trunk. A few spots began to stand out with particular force — exactly where I'd planted my right hand and both feet yesterday, climbing on my right hand and two legs alone! But when I closed my eyes again, the markers vanished. I opened them, and the positions were marked once more.
"...What is this. It only shows when my eyes are open?"
Climb first. Think the rest up there.
Claw spear in my left hand, I planted my right hand and feet where the markers said, and the way I needed to move, the parts of my body I needed to use, rose on their own as analysis taught me even how to climb a tree. Moving the way the posture in my head demanded, I made it ten meters up with ridiculous ease.
This was the piece I'd felt I'd missed! Yesterday I'd been tangled in stray thoughts, and it had sunk away into my unconscious!
Analysis was displaying the actions I needed to take right in front of my eyes, and a hard, sudden certainty hit me that this would be extremely useful from here on. A simple application that tells me every movement, every posture, how much force to use and how little — but for a klutz like me, incredibly useful!
Was that why I'd unconsciously tried to use this ability when I went to climb the giant mole's torso?
...Maybe I could climb the cliff, too!
I'd probably have to see the cliff with my own eyes to know. I couldn't confirm it from the cliff footage the automapping function had stored, but it didn't seem impossible. Over these five days my body had kept changing, and my physical abilities seemed to have risen across the board! Physically I was roughly a notch above an average grown man, and they do say the gap between an expert and a non-expert is exactly that notch!
I slipped a hand into my right pocket and drew out the Phase Stone.
Palm-sized, it was a slightly deep water-blue, the surface a little uneven, but overall a round circle. I ran my sensing ability over it and felt Phase Power radiating outward; when I focused and pushed concentrated sensing and analysis, I could feel an enormous quantity of Phase Power packed solid inside.
If I roughly converted that quantity into numbers...
Hmm. No idea. Even running sense-analysis, all I got was that it was a monstrous amount — no exact figure appeared. Maybe the composition had shifted a little as it compressed... and since the analysis for that wouldn't trigger either, my ability wasn't completely all-powerful after all.
Even so, aside from the Phase Power soaking in through my whole body, a separate current was flowing in through the hand gripping the Phase Stone. The amount seemed to be about two-thirds of what my body was taking in.
At this rate, maybe I don't need to tough it out in a place this dangerous? As time passes, the Phase Power spread through the air will keep dispersing, and the concentration will thin. I'd felt it going to the river and back — the range the female giant's Phase Power had spread had grown by three kilometers since yesterday. Which meant the Phase Power released at her death was spreading in every direction, and the concentration at the center had actually thinned.
It was still the dead center, so the ratio of air to Phase Power was three to seven, but in about three days? By then the concentration would probably drop to eight to two. So three days was likely the longest I could hold out...
Add what my body absorbs to what I take in through the Phase Stone and the total is absurd, so enduring here for as much of those three days as I can manage, soaking up Phase Power, wouldn't be a bad plan either. But I have no real common skills, no attack techniques, no attack abilities — I'm guessing I'm a special-type ability user. And this is beneath a cliff where abnormal Aberrants show up.
The vast Phase Power hanging in the air around me is a shame to leave behind, but there might be something else down here that I don't know about. Wouldn't it be better to hide, or to train, somewhere near the spot where I first appeared up on the cliff, and spend my time that way?
Decision made at last, I looked for a moment at the two corpses that had given me fear, dread, and pain, and had each left me a gift — an awakening, and a Phase Stone.
The giant mole lay as it had at first, on its back against the ground, and the female giant was a complete ruin thanks to how roughly I'd... handled her. An enormous amount of blood had poured out from between her thighs as well...
Without the wounds, she would have looked as if she were lying there at peace. I wanted to dig a grave and bury her, but with my abilities, a pit big enough for a body that size would take more than a day. A day, even with the time analysis had shortened.
Rationally, I ought to take that female giant as an Aberrant. But her first impression had been too strong — I didn't think I could fully accept her as one.
I closed my eyes for a brief moment of silence, then slid back down the tree and turned my feet toward the cliff.
Tch. If I'd realized a little sooner, I wouldn't have burned two hours going back and forth.
Still grumbling, I reached the riverbank and saw the sun clearing the cliff. Around eleven? I'd woken at eight, so three hours had passed, but it felt like a dozen or more. Those three hours must have pressed that hard on me.
Of the cliff faces I'd checked while moving, the lowest had been about fifty meters, the highest sixty. Before I had any abilities I'd thought it the height of a twenty-five-story apartment, but if a floor runs about three and a half meters, it would be closer to fifteen stories.
Still high!!
Honestly, if it really had been twenty-five stories, dropping into the water from that height would probably have killed me on impact. Fifteen stories, and a proper entry, were why I'd survived the agony.
"Ah, right. The hide."
The claw spear's grip, which had started to feel rough under my hand, reminded me I still needed to collect the hide from where I'd roasted and eaten the horned pup. I crossed the river again, made another mud pit, rolled in it, and headed for where I'd spread the horned pup's hide to dry. Moving a little fast, it was about a forty-minute walk.
Keeping close to the cliff as I went, I turned over whether I'd missed any other uses, opening my eyes more often than before and looking up at the rock as I moved. On the cliff, places I could set a hand or a foot were definitely marked for my eyes. But most of them didn't run all the way up — they broke off in stretches. From those gaps, a handhold or foothold would connect again much higher. With my current body, I probably couldn't climb those sections.
Some were cut off completely in the middle. Those looked either slick and smooth or damp, with nowhere to fix a hand or foot, or so rough my stamina would give out halfway.
Then a thought came, and I dropped into an attacking stance. I raised the claw spear and repeated thrusts and swings, and one posture surfaced in my head.
"Sure enough."
Analysis had shown me how to move, based on my own actions. Sensing my posture with the sensing ability, I took the stance it had given me. To put real force behind it, the left leg bends to forty-five degrees, the right plants firmly back on a diagonal, the torso drops a little, and the left hand sits at the innermost part of the grip. The grip tucks into the armpit, and the right hand locks onto the end of the handle.
Taking the stance with the claw spear, the grip was so short it felt wrong — but the instant I set it, the motion of driving the spear forward rose in my head. I followed it and thrust, and though only slightly, I could stab the spot I'd aimed for with a steadiness I hadn't had before. Without analysis backing me, I would obviously have flailed around looking like a fool.
After stabbing empty air a few times and growing a little used to the attack, I lowered the claw spear and looked back over the cliff. If I could just climb this thing, maybe I wouldn't have to spend all my time running. Before that, I'd need a spear sheath to stow the claw spear while I climbed. Or maybe not a sheath? A cord to tie it and sling it over my shoulder would do.
So: tan the hide, make a strap for the claw spear, practice climbing the cliff, and train in how to use the claw spear... Thinking the day would be too short, I grinned.