Floating Sky Islands (2)
I looked twice, three times, and then again. The band was pitch-black — nothing at all like the first one's azure.
Black? A darkness attribute? Gaining two attributes was astonishing enough, and one of them was rare? Seriously?
I was too dumbfounded for words. I'd heard you gained a new ability at E-Class and a third at C-Class. Was adding an attribute something else entirely? She hadn't even awakened with two. An attribute had shown up when she classed up from I-Class to H-Class, of all times.
Hmm. Maybe the water attribute had surfaced first simply because there'd only been one band. I thought of Cha Soyoung, the only dual-attribute ability user I'd ever seen, but she'd already been C-Class the first time I laid eyes on her. Nothing there was going to answer this.
I was ready to take the win and move on — a good thing was a good thing — when every attribute-type I'd met came crowding back. Most of them had personalities cut from the same cloth as their attributes, didn't they?
Hwa Joong-kang had burned hot as the fire he wielded, and Team Leader Yoo Min-hee, head over heels for Hwayeon, ran so hot she was practically scalding. Fitting, for a fire attribute. Team Leader Kim Ga-min carried a breeze-light air about her, and Park Cho-rong and Park Hyun-ji, as I recalled, had been solemn in a way that felt weighty and gentle.
Cha Soyoung, though, was calm and quiet. Water and earth would have suited her, and yet she was fire and wind. The branch chief, for a fire attribute, had seemed a little lukewarm too.
Hmm. Now that I thought about it, the branch chief was B-Class with only a single fire attribute. Was dual-attribute incredibly rare as well?
Water and darkness, though. Somehow they suited Sis perfectly. Considering Asura Mode, a darkness attribute was only natural — and in ordinary moments her nature was soft and warm as water.
I kept watch over her as she stood there in a daze. The band, thinner than a thread, drank greedily at the Phase Power flowing from her heart, widening and thickening as it went. The first band, the color of water, thickened a little as well.
Only after the second band of black Phase Power had taken perfect form did she open her eyes. I stepped closer, and a brilliant smile bloomed across her face as she moved to throw her arms around me.
"Seoha~! Guess what — I became a dual-attribute ability user!"
"Yeah, I saw. You're seriously incredible, Sis."
"Ehehe. Can you even tell what attribute I got?"
"Darkness, isn't it?"
"That's right! A rare darkness attribute! Now our raid team has an ultra-rare ability user and a rare-attribute ability user — two of them!"
The ultra-rare one is me? Then the rare attributes would mean Franc and Sis.
She caught my hand and bounced in place, overjoyed. For a while she couldn't contain it, capering about, until I told her to test the ability. She forced the excitement down and concentrated.
The Phase Power she'd fully recovered in the class-up surged, and the two bands began to writhe more formlessly than ever. According to Lydia, the light attribute covered a wide area but was weaker than darkness. I found myself wondering just how powerful darkness really was.
Soon she conjured pitch-black darkness at her fingertips, glanced around, and fired an attribute bullet into an empty patch of ground.
The darkness bullet, no bigger than a bean, looked like condensed smoke, and it wasn't particularly fast — a little slower even than a Water Ball, said to be the second-fastest of the four common attributes. Just as disappointment at the speed was setting in, it struck the earth, spread to about the width of two palms together, and began to melt everything inside that range.
Not as a figure of speech. The ground was literally melting.
It wasn't even aqua regia. Sis stared at the earth fizzing softly out of existence where the darkness bullet had burst, and the words seemed to leave her.
I snapped my fingers to pull her back and offered my impression.
"I'd only heard rumors about the darkness attribute. It's a nastier ability than I expected."
"What kind of rumors?"
"The known effects were hiding inside darkness, darkening a set area, and dealing fatal wounds to any living thing caught in a darkness explosion."
"If whatever it touches melts away, that is pretty fatal."
I was picturing it striking a throat or a belly — skin melting, guts spilling — when a faintly squeamish look crossed her face. She set her jaw almost at once, shook her head, and corrected herself.
"Abilities exist to deal with aberrants anyway. So what if it's a little cruel? The stronger it is, the more it'll help you, Seoha, so it's actually a good thing!"
"Oh~ Look at that positive mindset."
"Hehe."
Triumphant, as if this were precisely the level of help I ought to be getting, she started needling me — jealous of her dual attributes, was I? When she caught my scoff, she moved to pinch me.
She'd said eagle-aberrant feathers sold for a decent price as arrow fletching, but we had neither the tools nor the gear to take them, so we left them behind. I was curious what eagle-aberrant meat tasted like. In damp like this, though, there was no starting a fire, and no telling when the clouds would clear.
And the hunt wasn't over. Leave the corpses as they were and they'd put other flying aberrants of the same kind on their guard. Better to erase them.
We left only the hyena's carcass, wiped out every flying aberrant's remains with Mana Bullets, and hid once more in the hollow of the baobab trunk. A few flying aberrants began to slink closer.
"Are those things birdbrains? They ought to suspect something. Coming down without a shred of fear."
"They are birds."
The look she gave me — what kind of idiotic thing are you saying — left me sheepish. I scratched my head, then caught the flying aberrants descending and turned my attention that way.
This time there were four: two eagles, a pigeon, and a crow. They did seem capable of thought. Rather than eyeing the hyena's carcass, they were searching for where the ones that had come down earlier had vanished. The way their heads swung back and forth, they could tell something was wrong.
The crow, more than a meter from beak to tail, wandered in puzzlement between the pit Sis had made and the spots where I'd erased the corpses with Mana Bullets, inspecting the ground around them.
Birdbrain or not, it's using its head. Weren't crows supposed to be the smartest of the birds? I'd better take that one first.
Conveniently, all of them measured only about a meter. I slipped a hand out of the tree hollow, drew a Mana Laser, and simply dragged my finger sideways. All four lost their heads from their bodies at once, spraying blood as they fell.
I confirmed the deaths with Spatial Perception, and Sis and I climbed back out and approached the corpses. She looked down in silence at the severed heads and bodies, then sighed.
"That ability is cheating."
"You're a monster too, you know. Awakening in a single day, then picking up a darkness attribute at H-Class."
"A monster?!"
She hadn't expected to hear that. Wearing a look that said I'd gone too far, she smacked my back — and I caught her wrist and pushed it into the Phase Power spilling outward so she would absorb it.
Sixty, seventy, seventy-two, eighty-one. Of the 283 Phase Power the four held between them, the twenty percent she could absorb — 56 — was drawn to her at once. Her Phase Power had already been close to the H-Class limit, though, and she hit 100 in no time, rising to G-Class. The third band forming inside her began to turn white.
I watched the brilliantly shining mass of light in her hand and let out a sigh.
"This is actually insane. I guess you really are my sister."
"If I'm not your sister, whose sister am I supposed to be?"
"Like, the sibling pair was the real cheat? Is that it? This is way too much, isn't it? Fine — water at awakening, and attribute manipulation on top of it. You're a genius, so I'll grant you that. But darkness second, and light third? Planning to pick up lightning next?"
"...Why are you taking it out on me! What am I supposed to do about abilities just showing up!"
Looking at the abilities alone, congratulating her on water, light, and darkness was the obvious thing. But I'd heard that not a single person in the entire world possessed three or more rare abilities. Sis said she hadn't heard of anyone either.
"If your aptitude comes back A or higher on top of this, it'll be chaos. I'm already drawing more than enough attention as it is."
She couldn't quite bring herself to be purely glad about it either. Half joy, a quarter fluster, and the rest pure disbelief — she looked down at her own body through that tangle of feelings.
"Anyway, congratulations. A genuine cheat character, Sis."
"Don't stick weird nicknames on me."
"What? Look at me. I walked around with a little Mana Sieve focused in my eyes and they hung the ridiculous nickname Blue Genius on me. When we get back, won't they be calling you the Black and White Girl?"
"...Ah."
Her face went stiff all at once. She looked at me, and — as if it no longer felt like someone else's problem — her expression turned dizzy. If she got a nickname, I'd have to tease her without mercy.
"In the East, they might even call you the Saintess of Light and Darkness~"
"Augh! Stop!"
She was starting to worry what she'd do if a nickname like that actually stuck. I took her hand, and we started walking again.
She'd reached G-Class earlier than I'd expected, so with the time we had left I figured we should adjust the plan and confirm the overall shape of Star Island first.
Needle Peak at the center held hundreds of Mid-Low Rank Variants as well, but perhaps because the clouds blanketed the whole island, they showed no thought of taking flight and still sat in their nests with their eyes shut. We could charge in. If hundreds or thousands came at once, though, Sis might be in danger, so there was no point provoking them for nothing. Even a stray bites in its own yard.
We walked for about an hour around Needle Peak and arrived back at the baobab where we'd first rested. As expected, Star Island had no water — nothing but grassland and baobab trees. At four o'clock we found a path connecting to the next island. It was so long that only after I greatly expanded Spatial Perception could I barely reach the far end of that next island.
Just how big is it...
The way over was a massive slope: 107 meters wide, 2.4 kilometers long, and 1.2 kilometers high. The grade was fairly steep, but it didn't look impossible to walk. I thought for a moment, then called to her.
"Want to head up to the next island? It's higher ground than here, so the clouds don't seem to reach its surface."
"Let's. Staying somewhere this damp for too long isn't good."
"Yeah."
A couple of hours walking through the clouds had soaked us through. Sis retrieved her blouse from the temporary shelter and used attribute manipulation to dry herself until she was soft and warm.
"Do me too."
Dry in an instant, she looked at me standing there with my arms spread, laughed, and gave her fingers a little flick. The moisture beaded on my clothes and skin ran off like water and seeped into the ground.
She put her blouse back on. I pulled on the summer-uniform shirt she handed me, and we set off for the next island.
"No matter how I look at it, these clouds are only wrapping Star Island for a while, aren't they?"
"Huh? How can you tell?"
"The aberrants on Needle Peak, at the center of the island, aren't thinking about hunting. They just keep sleeping. If this cloud cover lasted a long time, there'd be plenty of them flying around to hunt, right?"
"That's true. Now that I think about it, if clouds like this covered the island even half the year, all of Star Island would've already turned into a swamp."
"Let's check the next island. If there aren't many aberrants, we can come back for the Mid-Low Rank Variants once the clouds lift."
"Okay."
From I-Class through to G-Class, gathering 100 was enough to advance. From G-Class and F-Class, though, the Phase Power required quadrupled, and from E-Class on it multiplied by twelve with each rank. If we wanted to stockpile as much as we could before we got out of here, we had to keep moving.
And yet, the part that truly left me speechless...
"Seoha~ Look at this! I can use light and darkness separately, one in each hand!"
In the hands she held up so proudly, light and black mist glittered and welled, spilling down in separate streams.
On the way toward the next island she'd gotten bored and kept poking and tickling me, so I'd smacked her on the back and told her to practice attribute control if she had nothing better to do — and for a moment she'd looked ready to eat me alive. That wasn't the important part. She'd taken the words and practiced, firing attribute bullets, pouring light from her body, breathing out something like dark mist, and somewhere along the way she'd reached the point of wielding a different attribute in each hand.
"Why not just combine both and make one more attack skill?"
"Mmm. I think I could if I tried, but I keep getting the feeling I shouldn't. Not right now. So I can't."
Unbelievable. The more I watched, the less I had to say. She was already catching an intuitive feel for her own abilities. Worried, I told her so.
"You know only you can set the standard for your own ability, right? You have to pay attention to your instincts about it, and remember them."
"I know. I'll be careful."
I didn't have all that much experience myself, but I'd entered the Phase World about four months before she had, and in that time I'd scoured the Certifier community until I'd built a foundation of basic knowledge. Naming an ability, for instance, so your own recognition of it sharpened. That sort of thing.
I taught her as we walked, and somehow she already seemed to know all of it. Even so, she didn't let on — just listened with sparkling eyes. I had no idea what kind of act that was.
After about forty minutes we reached the slope leading to the next island, and unlike the crossing from Cloud Island to Star Island, I could feel just how absurdly wide this one was. No need to worry about falling at all.
Sis looked left and right and murmured.
"A slope this wide and this long... the next island might be enormous after all."
"Huh? Oh — that hunting-territory thing?"
"That too. And if what you said is right, it's over a hundred meters wide, a kilometer high, and two kilometers long? Mmm. It might just be a feeling, but that's the sense I get."
"It might be, and it might not. We just can't let our guard down. If I put my mind to it, I can kill a High-Rank Variant in an instant by myself."
During the ability verification there'd been too many eyes, so I hadn't been able to go all out. Now I had Mana Bullets, and I could throw Spatial Manipulation around as freely as I liked without watching anyone's face. I held her hand tight and started up the somewhat steep slope.
The higher we climbed, the wider the connection to Star Island grew in my Spatial Perception, spreading like a fan. Walking that path, vast as a mountainside, we watched the clouds slowly begin to lift.
Fifteen minutes of the steep climb had her panting hard, so I asked.
"You tired? Want me to carry you?"
"Ugh. N-no. L-let's rest a little, then go."
For an instant a tempted look crossed her face, but she soon shook her head and plopped her backside down on the slightly damp slope. Her snow-white skirt was turning into a mess of dirt, but she seemed to have decided not to care anymore.
She gasped for a while, then quickly found a steady breath and started up again. All the while I kept Spatial Perception spread, checking for anything approaching, but no flying aberrants came this way. There were things in the air. It just felt as if they were deliberately avoiding this side.
As the clouds continued to clear, the view opened. Encouraged that they were lifting, Sis put a little more strength into her steps, and when about a third of the distance to the next island remained, we broke completely free of their reach.
We stopped for a moment and looked back the way we'd come. Below our feet, in the middle of an endless sea of clouds, a mountain thrust skyward like an awl.
"That's Needle Peak."
"Whoa... It has to be more than four kilometers away, and it still looks huge."
It didn't look like a mountain so much as a stone spire. The color was a pale gray, a tree or two growing in the cracks here and there, and on every rough face black clumps were gathered. Comparing the position and the shape to what I'd seen through Spatial Perception, I knew what they were.
"Those black dots — every one of them is an aberrant's nest."
"There are so many. If we hunted all of those, how many Phase Stones would we get?"
"Roughly two thousand. Most are Lowest Grade, and Low Grade through Mid-Low Grade don't even add up to three hundred. Of those, only fifteen Mid-Low Grades actually have Phase Stones."
"Ehh? That's all?"
"Yeah. Add up all the Phase Power in those Phase Stones and it doesn't even reach five thousand."
In money that was still tens of billions of won. A single Phase Stone from a Mid-High Grade aberrant, though, would pour out dozens of times that value.
"So let's leave them until we've grown a bit more. There's no profit in it right now, is there?"
"Mmm."
I lifted my head, and all that met my eyes was blue sky without a single cloud. It was good to see the sun again after nearly a day. The light wasn't all that harsh — did that put us in the northern hemisphere, or the southern? I'd heard the northern reaches of the north and the southern reaches of the south stayed cool even in summer, and this place felt exactly like that.
I turned from the sea of clouds to what lay ahead, and a colossal cliff, stretching endlessly left and right, rose above the clouds into view. It felt as if a vast landmass, as though it had only just thrust up out of the earth, barred the way before my eyes. A deeply unreal sensation.
Her breathing steady now, Sis got to her feet, washed the dirt from her skirt with a twist of water, and started walking.
"Let's go. There isn't much distance left."
I took her hand again and spoke as we climbed.
"You handle water that well, you won't even need to bathe."
"You have to bathe every day. What are you talking about?"
"Not in reality! In the Phase World."
"Oh."
"During the ability verification exam they used a communal shower. Washing up alongside a bunch of other people felt kind of off."
"Mm-hm. I don't like showing my figure in front of other people."
Not her figure. She doesn't like showing that flat chest... gack!
"Wh-why are you poking me?!"
"You just thought something weird!"
"What! What thought!"
"Grr — do I really have to say it out loud?!"
Bickering over this and that bit of nonsense, we climbed the slope to its end, and just before her breath gave out entirely, we set foot on the next island.
Faced with a view blocked by some enormous ridge, she stretched and sighed.
"Hnn— haah. I didn't think the whole island would unfold the moment we got up here, but having a hill blocking the view right in front of me is somehow annoying."
I tugged her along toward the hill as I answered.
"There's nothing blocking the view past that hill, so once we're up there we should be able to see the whole island. Probably."
"Mmm."
As she said it, she put her index finger in her mouth and swallowed.
"What are you doing?"
"Pfft. I drank some water. Want some too?"
...Ingenious.
I had no idea how a ridge of earth the height of a ten-story building had come to stretch on like this, but once we reached the hilltop, the island's true form revealed itself — so vast that calling it enormous fell short.
"I think it's bigger than the city of Seoul."
The island was wide enough to justify the murmur. Its center sank like a basin, grassland and forest spread in fair measure, and at the heart of it lay a vast lake. There wasn't all that much grassland. Seven-tenths of the basin was forest.
"Seoha... Look over there. Isn't that a temple?"
She grabbed my arm and shook it, pointing. Between us and the lake at the island's center lay grassland, and roughly halfway across it a pure-white structure stood tall, shaped like a Greek temple.
"Ah, there's one over there too. And there!"
She kept pointing across the island and found two more temples. The three of them, set in a triangle around the central lake, showed not the slightest sign of age or weathering.
"I have a bad feeling about this..."
I raised my head. Far off — easily more than fifty kilometers away — a line of cliffs stood like a folding screen, faint as if wrapped in mist. The sense of distance was a little strange, but they looked at least ten times taller and longer than what I'd seen climbing the slope. Even in that faint outline, I could tell the land was as large as the island we stood on, or larger.
Another island. Somehow, it was starting to feel as if everything until now had only been the beginning.
