Chapter 19: Day Six, Revenge (1)
Ah... so I didn't sleep today either.
I'd been trying to drift off when Telescopic Vision kept snapping on without warning, jolting me awake over and over through the night. In the end I gave up on sleep entirely and spent the whole night clinging to the skill, forcing myself to adapt to it. I settled my mind and let my limbs hang slack, and there was a soft, cozy feeling to it — but it never quite tipped over into actual sleep, like something teasing me right at the edge. Holding that posture and that image wasn't perfect, but it seemed to stand in for a tiny scrap of rest. A big part of it was probably that there were no little bugs crawling around to scrape at my nerves. Maybe it helped that the female giant's roar had swept them all clean away.
A second night without sleep. My body was fine, but my mind felt worn thin. I'd feel better once I started moving. Enough lying around.
Seven in the morning. I stuffed a Phase Stone into my pants pocket, gathered my weapons, and crawled the thirty meters out of the burrow. The light stung my eyes a little, but I adjusted soon enough.
"Guess this is goodbye to this hole, as of today."
Out of the burrow I loosened my arms and neck, stretching the stiffness out of my body. Claw-spear in my left hand, wooden spear in my right, I got it into my head that I'd become some twin-spear warrior. I struck a pose I decided was cool, swung one way and thrust the other, and hopped around for a while...
...then quit, because it was embarrassing.
For breakfast I tore off about ten leaves and took a bite of the belt to make up the rest, then headed toward the waterfall, looking for a good point to climb the cliff. I was after the mutt — the bastard responsible for dropping me down here. If I were thinking about safety, going the other way would be smarter. But I couldn't give up on revenge against the one that had licked its chops at the sight of me.
The trouble was the gaps. I couldn't see anywhere I could actually get up...
Two hours of walking brought me to the place where I'd first met the giant mole.
"What? Was I always this fast?"
It should have been a little over a three-hour walk, and I'd done it in two. I cocked my head, kept Detection running to watch my surroundings, and pressed on.
I walked and walked and walked until the sun stood over my head. Far off, water came thundering down from the top of the cliff — but I still hadn't found a climbable point, and I was just starting to droop when—
"There!"
Thirty meters left of the waterfall, I could see a way up. I flicked on Telescopic Vision and swept the area in a hurry, looking for anything that might be a threat. As expected, nothing living. Not so much as a single minnow in the plunge pool.
The female giant's roar had a monstrous range. The ruins were something like eighteen kilometers from here, and there still wasn't one living creature. I caught myself marveling all over again at a Peak-Rank Aberrant's power, and for a moment I considered going back to where she'd died to soak up more Phase Power. Then I dropped the idea. It had been three days. A little over seventy hours. What if the roar's influence had faded and something dangerous had come back? And if there was anything far out in that forest less dangerous than the female giant, it was about time it showed itself. So today, I was climbing the cliff. I glared at the various routes along the face and swore it to myself.
First I set the claw-spear and the wooden spear down. Rather than the point that ran all the way to the top, I picked a roughly decent spot a little farther off and decided to try it as a practice climb. Loosening up and learning the knack of it came first — but also, if I smashed a handhold while calling it practice, I'd have to find another route, wouldn't I?
I stuck myself to the cliff and moved slowly, shifting hands and feet in the order Detection and Analysis dictated, checking each next hold with my eyes. After a little while I got the feeling I'd come up quite a ways, and I looked down... and...
"Eek."
"I-it's high!!"
My knees started to shake. I forced down the rough breathing from the climb and the fear hammering in my chest, steadied myself, and ran Detection. Sixteen meters. About the height of a five-story apartment. Picturing myself stuck to the outer wall of a fifth floor made my sphincter cinch up tight. Forget it. I had to forget it.
I looked back down around my feet, stepped on the holds one by one, and came down slowly. Fifteen minutes later I had ground under me again. Descending meant using different footholds, and I learned that going down was harder than going up.
"Phew..."
My heart was pounding, but the thought that I could actually do this left me feeling light. For having crawled fifteen meters up a cliff, my arms and legs were fine, and if I just did what Analysis told me, there was nothing hard about it. Confidence flooded in. In high spirits, I started preparing to climb for real.
First I took off my jacket, bundled the two spears together, and undid my belt — whoops!
"What the hell..."
The moment the belt came loose, my pants slid down in a rush. I grabbed them and stared blankly at my stomach. Had I lost my gut?
I looked myself over with Detection. Somewhere along the way I'd grown two centimeters, up to 164, and my weight — over eighty kilograms — had dropped enough that the belly fat was gone. Even my scrawny arms and legs had put on a little muscle.
"Whoaaa."
Taller, and lighter. Long live Phase Power! At this rate, by the time I got back to reality, wouldn't I be up to 180? Heh heh. The important part, though, was that without the belt my pants fell down.
I'd meant to tie the belt to the jacket bundling the two spears and sling it over my shoulder to climb... Fine. I'd take the pants off instead of the jacket. Nobody around to see me, so it wasn't even embarrassing. But had my legs always been this short? Dad, Mom, and my older sister all had long legs; I was the only one with short ones. Remembering it made me a little sad, but I swallowed it, shoved the wooden spear and the claw-spear through the pant legs, cinched the cuffs tight, ran the belt through the gap, and slung the bundle over my shoulder. I picked up the horn awl from the ground, tucked it into the jacket's inner pocket, and finished getting ready.
"Hoo..."
I looked up the cliff, drew a deep breath, and stuck myself to the rock.
About a third of the way up, the belt on my shoulder kept trying to slip, little by little, and it nagged at me. I'd tied it like one of those handbags women carry on a shoulder and slung it over one side without a second thought. I should have crossed it over my chest. The idle thought didn't last. Sweat slicked my hands, and shaky near-slips started happening one after another, so I poured every nerve into climbing the wall.
Carefully, following the images Analysis raised in my head, I went up one step at a time. Forty minutes. Around the time my fingertips were trembling and the feeling started to leave my toes, I finally finished the climb.
"Aaaah..."
I shoved aside the bushes growing along the cliff edge that blocked the last of it, stabbed the horn awl into the ground, hauled myself up, and flopped flat on my back.
"I did iiiit..."
A complete beginner, one practice run, and I'd climbed a cliff over fifty meters. The rush of it hit me all at once. My heart hammered and sweat poured off me like rain, but every time the wind blew and cooled it, accomplishment rolled in with a deep satisfaction. Near the top, the sweat on my right hand had nearly made me slip, and it startled me badly enough that my heart felt like it stopped. In that instant I'd clenched my left hand with everything I had and jammed both feet into the wall to hold on. Good thing I had. If I'd fallen, my head would have split like a smashed watermelon.
"Urgh..."
A chill ran through me at my own imagination. I scratched all over, then swept the area with Telescopic Vision. Lying there, moving only my head, I scanned around. Sure enough, every tree, insect, bug, and bird within range was dead. No Aberrants in sight either. There was a difference in elevation, but there was no way the roar hadn't carried up onto the cliff.
...Don't tell me that son of a bitch is dead too?
After resting a bit and catching my breath, I got up, put my pants back on, took my weapons, and made myself fully ready. I was properly armed. Something on the level of that mutt, I could finish in one go. My stamina alone was nothing like six days ago. Since entering the Phase World, it had been improving steadily, and once my Phase Power hit a full 100, my overall physical ability rose enough that I could feel it for certain — almost to the level of a grown adult. If it hadn't, I never could have climbed the cliff.
But why did the trees up here look bigger? Had they grown better for getting sunlight longer? The ones below averaged about sixteen meters. Up here, the shortest looked like seventeen, and a glance said the tallest around was over thirty. Down below they'd grown pretty dense; up here they were spread wider. That was probably why, on the first day, I could run from the mutt without trees blocking me.
Anyway, from here on I had to stay sharp again. I'd entered a zone where mobs around my level were likely to show up. Better than down below, sure, but up here was dangerous all the same. Letting your guard down in a hunting ground "around your level," getting jumped, and dying — that was a hardcore RPG cliché, wasn't it? Truth was, Aberrants or not, Lowest-Rank and Peak-Rank together, I'd only seen three of them. Even so, the place I'd first been sucked into the Phase World was up on this cliff, so part of me had been straining to get back near the starting point no matter what. The survival studies books said you were forcibly summoned where low-density Phase Power was spread thin, and right after I crossed over I'd immediately run into a Lowest-Rank Aberrant.
I turned my head for a moment and looked at the forest below the cliff. A sea of trees stretched all the way to the horizon, too vast to fit in my sight. A place that had given me all sorts of things and taught me more than a little. The sea of trees that had handed me countless firsts swayed in the wind like waves.
"..."
The thought crossed my mind that I might not forget this sight until the day I died, and a small swell of feeling came with it.
But I was exhausted! I'd run muscles I never used at full throttle and, a total beginner with one practice climb, hauled myself up a fifty-seven-meter cliff. I'd rested a little, but every muscle in my body was screaming.
"Yeah... I should rest a bit more before I move."
I trudged toward the waterfall pouring down on my right, dragging the wooden spear behind me. Near the cliff where the river fell away, Detection easily found a tree with a decent spot to rest. Tree-climbing had gotten familiar by now. I laid myself along a suitable branch, kept Telescopic Vision and X-Ray running while I watched my surroundings, and fiddled with the Phase Stone in my left hand. An hour of that, and the sweat had cooled and the fatigue had eased somewhat. The spot being comfortable had a lot to do with it. It wasn't quite the branch hammock from the night before last, but four limbs of wood curved and joined like a sofa, and lying on them let me sprawl out loose.
I checked the time. A little past two in the afternoon. I looked at the river ahead — twenty meters wide, flowing pretty fast — and sank into thought.
The original plan, once I was up the cliff, had been to look for the mutt while figuring out how much Phase Power a Lowest-Rank Aberrant held, and the range and method of its detection. If I learned that much, I figured my safety would be more or less guaranteed. Now that I was up top, absurd Peak-Rank Aberrants like the ones below the cliff shouldn't show up. The first Aberrant I'd met above the cliff was the Long-snouted Lean Wolf, a regular in the survivor accounts, while the things I'd met below were Peak-Rank — the one-eyed giant, a horned puppy I'd never even heard of, and the giant mole. Based on that, I'd simply assumed that up here, just as the other accounts said, only Lowest-Rank Aberrants would appear.
But would that be all right? As always, nothing in the world was absolute. Putting together the stories of ability users who'd made it back, it was always the same shape: at the starting point they killed or avoided weak Aberrants, everyone gained an ability, and by their own methods they survived fifteen days or more and came home. I'd never once seen an essay from someone who'd run into Peak-Rank Aberrants the way I had. Even in the hero ability-user novels, everyone awakened early by fighting weak Aberrants. I'd never read a story where someone got ground between Peak-Rank Aberrants and giant beasts, half-dead the whole time, the way I had. No — I had seen it. In some sloppily written munchkin fantasy novel. The idea that Lowest-Rank and High-Tier would split their appearances with nothing but a cliff between them didn't hold up if you thought about it rationally.
So I wanted a way to attack Aberrants while still putting my safety first. Failing that, it would be nice if I could control the Phase Power in my body and pull off a temporary physical reinforcement, so the weapons I already had would be enough to handle them.
"..."
But there was no way to do it. For now, the smart move was to stay careful with Telescopic Vision, hide myself slowly, and look for places to rest. And while I was at it, find that mutt and wreck it.
My stamina was back and my thoughts were more or less sorted, so first I'd follow the river and look for a living tree. It was the third day since the trees had died. The leaves were starting to discolor, and some of their properties were changing bit by bit, so I didn't think I could eat them carelessly anymore. I had Search, so in a pinch I could nibble a little at a time and X-Ray and Analyze how my body reacted — but experimenting on myself was for the absolute worst case.
I picked a few leaves that still looked all right, chewed them on the way down, and climbed out of the tree. Time to wash off the sweat, and do that mud-wallow I'd started to feel incomplete without!
Detection, though, said the current was seriously fast. Fall in once and I'd go nonstop to the waterfall and straight over the edge. Compared to the river below the cliff, it was more than four times as fast, and looking calm on the surface only made it scarier. It wasn't like the lower river either, where sediment had built a gentle slope from bank to bed. There was a slope, but only the bank itself was slightly gentle; go in even a little and it dropped off sharp. In short, let your guard down and you'd get a free ride on the waterfall waterslide.
I scooped water by hand and splashed it on the bank, but there wasn't much sediment, so mud didn't really form. This was just muddy water, wasn't it? I used the horn awl to chop the soil as fine as I could and smeared it on, but when I ran Detection and looked at myself, I just looked like someone who'd been doused in it.
...I mixed in more soil, smeared it carefully over myself once more, and only then headed upstream along the river.