Floating Sky Islands (1)
My sister shrugged out of her suit jacket, pulled on the summer shirt I'd handed her, and settled the jacket back over it. She fussed with the collar, ducked her chin down into the cloth, and let out a soft, pleased little chuckle. For some reason, she looked delighted.
I had no idea what was so amusing. A faint hunger was starting to gnaw, though, and when I rubbed my stomach she undid her belt and used the cutter on the buckle to slice off a mouthful of emergency ration and pass it over.
That much was enough to count as breakfast, but it didn't feel like I'd eaten. Catching one of the flying aberrants and roasting some meat would have been nice, except the clouds smothering all of Star Island refused to break, and lighting a fire was out of the question.
I spent a while with my head in her lap, and before long the slightly damp interior of the hollow had grown quite warm. The blouse we'd hung over the entrance seemed to be doing a lot of work keeping the moisture out.
When I scanned the wooden bowl, enough water had already gathered for about three mouthfuls. At this rate, water wouldn't be a problem.
We'd get by like this for the time being. Once my sister awakened as an ability user, I'd get her a reasonable amount of real combat experience and start exploring Star Island.
I'd drifted off when the sense of something approaching snapped my eyes open.
"What's wrong? It hasn't been that long. Sleep a little more."
"No. Hyenas are coming."
Whether they belonged to the same pack as the five that had attacked us earlier, about ten of them were closing in on the baobab we were hiding in.
I shot out of the hollow and dropped the three that had been creeping closer, one punch each. The rest locked up stiff, prey that had just locked eyes with a predator.
Kill them outright, or threaten them into running? If I went with the latter, the others might get scared enough to stay away — but then there'd be a chance my sister got attacked.
...The former, then.
I beat the rest of them to death in a breath, hurled the carcasses as far as I could so the flying aberrants overhead wouldn't come sniffing, and came back.
After that I half-dozed with my head in her lap until around lunch, but hyenas kept prowling the tree in between. Not a single gray wolf or jackal came close. Only the hyenas kept whining and edging in, as if we'd stashed food somewhere.
They seemed to be tracking my sister's scent and following prey, so I smashed them the moment they appeared — the way you'd crush enemy workers scouting your base — and flung the corpses far off. After a while I started to wonder if scaring them off from the start would have been the better call.
So when a fourth group of five approached, I wrapped myself in Mana Sieve visibly enough for them to see, killed two as brutally as I could, and hurled the corpses into the two that remained, striking them square. They fled in a panic.
Direct intimidation had been the right answer after all. Not a single hyena came near us after that.
I was dozing a little more comfortably, now that they'd stopped coming, when my sister said she was cold. We switched places. I sat her between my legs and held her from behind.
"I was always the one holding you..."
She kept shifting, maybe because the posture was unfamiliar. Over the past four months I'd grown nearly six inches and filled out enough that it was no longer practical for her to hold me, so there was nothing to be done about it.
I was half-asleep like that when she, fidgeting boredly in my arms, suddenly let her head drop and went limp. I flinched awake and checked her. The Phase Power in her heart had reached exactly ten.
Did people lose consciousness when they awakened as ability users? Come to think of it, I'd blacked out for a moment too, hadn't I?
I remembered that the survival textbook had said nothing about this, and clicked my tongue. No wonder the survival rate was in the gutter. Awaken while you're running from an aberrant, or collapse in some extreme environment, and you just die.
Thinking about it another way, though, I could understand the silence. Awakening came whenever it pleased. Tell people about the blackout, and some of them would get so anxious they'd hide somewhere and refuse to move. Maybe the textbooks kept quiet on purpose, afraid folks would starve or die of thirst that way.
If you knew you could lose consciousness without warning, most people would hole up and not budge. And the longer you stayed in one place, the thicker your scent got, and the more likely beasts or aberrants were to find you.
That was as far as my head would take it. In any case, I didn't know what might happen to her if I moved, so I stayed perfectly still and watched the inside of her body with Spatial Perception.
The Phase Power pooled in her heart lingered there, then slowly spread through her whole body. The energy that had been clinging around her heart like water soon drew together into a single stream, and began to waver in an irregular band with the heart at its center.
When it started taking on the color of water, I drew my brows together. An irregular band of Phase Power, water-hued — a water attribute? Not a bad ability. For usefulness, it sat at the very top alongside wind.
Roughly a minute of stillness passed before my sister, unconscious with her eyes half-open, slowly opened them and blinked.
"...Oh my."
Dazed and bewildered, she turned her head and looked at me.
"How long was I out?"
"About a minute. How's it feel, being an ability user?"
"So I really became one... It feels strange."
She closed her eyes again and sat still for a moment, then pushed herself upright and opened both hands. In that instant the Phase Power inside her wavered, and water welled from her palms as if from a spring, streaming down in rivulets.
"Whoa!"
It overflowed in a flash, soaking her skirt and legs and leaving a shallow pool on the floor. She flustered and wiggled her fingers, and the water bubbling up from her palms stopped.
"Ah, geez."
Flustered, she looked down at the water on the floor, then tilted her head as if something felt off. She reached toward the pool — and suddenly it began to slosh.
Her eyes sharpened as she stared at it. The water lapped in little peaked waves, then, following the motion of her hand, slowly began to move, filing out through the entrance in a trickling line. When the procession had finished leaving, she let out a small sigh.
"Whew. So that's how you do it."
No way. Was this even possible? A freshly awakened I-Class ability user, already controlling matter of her own attribute?
I felt along the floor where the water had been, but there wasn't a trace of moisture. Her Phase Power had dropped to four — she'd spent it on the control just now — and even so, the talent left me speechless.
Controlling her attribute the moment she awakened? Normally, right after awakening, all you could manage was firing off a couple of weak attribute shots. Manipulating anything related to your attribute was supposed to come only after you reached F-Class. Anyone who heard this would tell me to quit lying.
Were geniuses just built different? Wondering what her aptitude might come out as, I spoke.
"Awakened in a single day, and attribute control the instant you awaken — your aptitude isn't S-rank, is it?"
"Hehe. Still not as good as you, though, Seoha? Anyway, I hope it comes out high. So I can be of help to you."
She smiled, shy, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth, then sat beside me and hugged my arm. A restless prickle crawled up my back and I nearly shook her off, but I held still and answered.
"Even if your aptitude isn't high, you've already helped me more than I can say. More than anything, you won't get forcibly summoned to the Phase World anymore, so I can breathe easy. Good thing you were summoned while I was right there. If I hadn't been... ugh."
"I know."
She smiled softly at my sigh. She looked happier about how I felt than about awakening in a day, or about being able to control her ability.
Her Phase Power recovered much more slowly than mine, but it seemed about twice as fast as an ordinary ability user's. According to Yeongeun, a normal ability user recovered about one percent every ten minutes in the Phase World, where Phase Power ran thick, and one percent every hundred minutes back in reality. My sister had recovered one percent in five minutes. Twice as fast.
Did recovery differ with aptitude? I'd never seen a post like that on the Certifier community, though. And my own aptitude was A+.
My head tilted on its own, but well — she'd sort that out herself. More importantly, now that she was an ability user too, if I injected her with TP, wouldn't she grow to D-Class in no time?
I watched her meditating with her eyes closed, waited for her to finish, then explained what my Mana Sieve could do and asked whether she'd like an easy way to build Phase Power. She shook her head without even thinking about it.
"That TP injection forcibly increases the target's Phase Power, right? What if, when yours is still low, taking mine in changes its nature? Like... that fox you took in."
The moment I heard that, it hit me like a hammer to the skull.
Don't tell me that's why Yeongeun blacked out when her ability rose to B-Class. But my TP had been identical to a Phase Stone's.
When my expression hardened, she started carefully watching my face, worried she'd said something wrong. I nodded.
"There's more unknown about this ability than known, so caution's the right call. Then let's find some aberrants and hunt them to build your Phase Power."
"Okay."
She seemed curious about why my face had gone stiff, but I couldn't tell her yet.
It was past one in the afternoon, and the clouds still blanketed everything. Reading the surroundings with the naked eye was impossible, but Spatial Perception made it easy enough to find aberrants worth hunting. Five to seven flying ones were circling the air above the tree we were hiding in — out on a hunt, maybe. Some looked like eagles. Others like crows, pigeons, and absurdly enormous sparrows.
First we'd have to lure them out.
We settled lunch by tearing off a bit of the ration belt, then left the hollow to test my sister's shooting.
With the clouds covering the island, long-range shots were out. Maybe we should start by practicing on something alive.
"The clouds are making this a bad situation, so let's circle the needle-sharp mountain in the center and get a look at the island while we're at it. If anything comes at us, we can test your attribute shots too."
"Got it. But the clouds really aren't breaking."
"There are grasses and bushes and trees growing all over, which means sunlight does reach here. It'll clear eventually."
"Yeah. You're right."
Coming out of the hollow, she remembered the hyena attack on top of being cut off from sight, and stuck close to my side with my hand gripped tight.
The temperature had dropped enough, given the situation, that it felt a little chilly. Even with her suit jacket over my summer shirt, she was shivering in little tremors.
If only we could light a fire.
We took our time, keeping the needle-sharp mountain at the center of Star Island as our axis and circling counterclockwise, looking for something that could serve as a target. The hyenas had all fled, but wolves and jackals were starting to prowl around us.
The fog-like clouds blocked our view completely, but the beasts seemed to have pinned our location by scent and sound, creeping closer while they measured the distance. Once the gray wolves and jackals gathered, the hyenas that had run off grew bold again. Six of them started circling us, letting out cries uncomfortably like human laughter.
Still holding my hand, my sister shuddered and whipped her head around, looking both disgusted and frightened.
"Ugh. That crying gives me the creeps! It's worse because the clouds mean I can't see!"
"Hm. Try firing an attribute shot toward the sound."
"An attribute shot? You mean a Water Ball?"
"Yeah."
I'd gotten stuck calling them attribute shots, but once I looked into it, people tacked the attribute on the front and called them Fire Bolt, Water Ball, Wind Cutter, Earth Missile. The names varied by country, though the general fashion followed the British and American style.
Still gripping my hand with her left, she closed her eyes and listened, then extended the fingers of her right hand and began moving them this way and that, as if aiming. Wherever those fingertips pointed, there was a hyena.
Her hearing wasn't bad.
Once she'd finished aiming, a Water Ball — an attribute shot of 1 TP — launched from her fingertip.
With a sharp fwip, a bead of water the size of a quarter flew and punched clean through the skull of the hyena yapping closest to us. Closest still meant two hundred feet off. A hole blown through its head, the hyena let out a strangled kwek almost like a human scream, collapsed, twitched, and went still.
Not bad power. That might hit harder than a gun.
The other five seemed to have heard one of their own go down. I felt them flinch and freeze. In that instant my sister's five Water Balls in a row punched through three more — torso, thigh, and jaw — and they thrashed, shrieking.
Insane. She couldn't even see them. What kind of accuracy was that? Had she picked up a detection ability too?
The three wounded ones started limping and staggering away, and the two the Water Balls had missed — not a scratch on them — panicked and fled, yapping. Two gray wolves and three jackals either felt threatened or were going after the wounded hyenas; they left us and chased after them. At the sound of them running, my sister, who had been clinging to my arm, touched her forehead as if spending that much Phase Power had left her a little dizzy, then turned to me.
"S-so? How'd it go? I heard hits."
"You hit four out of six. One's dead. Three ran off wounded, and the two that were fine ran too. The gray wolves and jackals went after the fleeing hyenas."
"Really? Whew, thank goodness."
Watching her sigh in relief and press a hand to her chest, I asked.
"You couldn't even see them. How'd you hit them? Did you shoot by ear?"
"Mm. There was the sound, and all of this is liquid that's vaporized, right? I could sort of feel the clouds moving, so I shot on instinct."
She shrugged as she said it, and I couldn't help admiring her.
I'd thought she was working from hearing. She'd attacked on an even surer basis. She really was a genius.
But that was that, and this was this.
Watching her shrug and preen, I put on a stern face so she wouldn't get cocky.
"But only one of them died, and three had no trouble moving at all. The other two even got away. Your Phase Power's basically empty now, isn't it?"
"You don't have to put it like that. I know. I only used my ability so freely because you were here. If I'd been alone, I wouldn't even have gone out hunting like this, you know?"
Since I hadn't praised her, she whipped her head away with a sulky look. She wasn't the perfect superhuman sister she always was — she was like a cute little sister — and I had to force down the smile trying to tug at my mouth as I quietly stroked her hair a couple of times.
Anyway, we had bait. Time to use it to draw down the aberrants overhead.
I walked toward the hyena sprawled dead with a hole in its head, and my sister, who had been huffing and grumbling, startled and stuck close to my side. Even so, she didn't drop the pout. Fear was fear, and sulking was sulking, apparently.
"Are we looking for more animals?"
"No. I'm thinking of using the one you killed to call down the aberrants in the sky."
Maybe becoming an ability user had hardened her mind. She didn't seem to feel any guilt over having killed a living thing.
Or so I thought. That judgment had been premature. When she saw the carcass — a hole blown through its skull by the Water Ball she'd fired, brain matter slowly leaking from the wound — her face went sheet-white. She squeezed her eyes shut and clung to my arm.
So she'd only been fine because the clouds had hidden the body.
I sighed inwardly, then drew a Mana Laser out thin and short, split the dead hyena's belly, pulled out the entrails, and cut the throat.
Scatter blood and guts, and the ones circling overhead right now would come down. Right?
"Eek."
At the sight of the carcass hacked into large chunks in my hands, she shuddered as if her skin were crawling.
"You've gutted fish, and back in the countryside you even caught and dressed chickens. What's there to be shocked about?"
"Th-that's different!"
"How? Because you eat one and not the other? Well, this one isn't an aberrant, so I guess eating it would be dubious."
"Ugh, you, seriously!"
Annoyed that I kept talking back, she reached over and started pinching my side. I fought back by pinching hers, and we made our way to a nearby baobab.
This tree was too small to hollow out easily. I punched a hole in the trunk with a micro Mana Bullet, and my sister, rubbing the side I'd pinched, looked at an opening big enough for two people to crawl into and lie down.
"We're waiting here?"
"Yeah. Once they come down... we won't be able to see them through the clouds, so it can't be helped. I'll kill them all. You just absorb the Phase Power."
"Okay. More importantly, isn't your throat dry? It's been a while since you drank anything."
Had it? Now that I thought about it, I was a little thirsty. She stuck her hand out of the hollow, conjured water in the air to wash her hands, then cupped them like a bowl, made water in her palms, and held it out to me.
It was pleasantly cool. More refreshing than the drinking water ability users had produced during ability verification.
Anyway, it was a good thing she'd gotten a water attribute. We wouldn't have to worry about drinking water anymore.
About twenty minutes after we'd hidden ourselves, one of the seven aberrants overhead — an eagle — began slowly losing altitude.
"One of them's dropping. Did it punch through this cloud and spot the hyena carcasses?"
Honestly, I hadn't expected them to find anything. I was thinking their senses were better than I'd given them credit for when my sister pointed something out.
"The cloud density probably isn't uniform. Maybe a thinner patch opened up for a second?"
"...That'd be it."
I nodded just as the eagle aberrant landed about fifteen paces from the carcass and glanced around warily. Then a pigeon-like one and a sparrow-like aberrant each came down as well, hopping about and scanning the area.
"They're here."
All three were Low-Rank Variants, Phase Power between 60 and 80. Based on the rat from the first run, their detection range was probably around seven meters.
The distance from there to here was twenty-three. No way they'd notice us. Still, just in case, I hid my sister behind my back and started watching the three of them carefully.
That was when several of the ones circling about two hundred meters up dove like arrows, trying to snatch the hyena carcass.
"Those ones?!"
I burst out and sprayed Mana Laser at the ones trying to make off with the chopped pieces, shearing their wings. Then I killed the eagle, the pigeon, and the sparrow, all of which had startled at my appearance and reflexively tried to attack.
I felt my sister flinch at the sound of something large and heavy thudding down.
"Come out."
The four aberrants still in the sky either hadn't caught on, or simply kept circling without any particular movement.
I took her hand and approached the carcasses. Bodies hacked in half, guts spilled, already dead — and three more with their wings cut, thrashing — came into view. Unlike before, she didn't panic. Tense, she calmly watched the ones shrieking.
"I thought you'd be shaking like earlier, but you're fine?"
"Ugh. I'm an ability user now too. I'm going to see this kind of thing a lot, so I have to get used to it."
"Ooh. Good girl, good girl."
I stroked her hair as if impressed. She shot me a sharp glare, looked at the living aberrants, raised a finger, and killed them with Water Balls.
When the three stopped struggling, her shoulders trembled slightly, but she soon squared them and approached the corpses.
Water-hued Phase Power spread from the dead aberrants and seeped into her body, but she didn't seem to feel it. She was just looking down at them.
"Sis. Phase Power is being absorbed into you. Don't you feel anything?"
"Huh? Oh my?"
Startled, she clenched both hands and looked around, but whether she saw nothing or felt nothing, she only tilted her head.
The Phase Power of three among the six dead aberrants came to about 410 altogether, and twenty percent of that — 82 — was flowing into her body.
The instant her Phase Power, drinking in the aberrants' energy without her even knowing it, reached 50, energy spread from her heart once more and began forming a second band.
So attribute users really did gain one layer each time their class rose a stage.
But the second band of her Phase Power was not the color of water.
It was black.