Chapter 194: Floating Sky Islands (4)
July 9th, by the look of it. We'd entered on the night of the 7th, so a day and twelve hours had passed.
For breakfast we cut a little off Noona's emergency-ration belt, and once we were on our feet I decided to test her shooting.
I pointed at a thicket about a hundred and twenty meters off and asked if she could hit it. Confident, she shaped her hand into a gun, took a brief aim, and fired a Water Ball of roughly 1 TP that struck the center of the brush dead on.
"Ahem. How's that?"
I was still looking at the track the Water Ball had punched clean through the thicket when she asked, triumphant. Chest out, shoulders shrugged — she was cute enough that a laugh slipped out of me.
"Not bad. Let's back off and test it again."
I twisted some grass into a knot at the very top of the thicket, walked out to two hundred meters, and called back.
"Can you see the knot?"
"Mmm... not really."
"Go up close, check where I tied it, and come back."
"Ugh. You could've said that sooner."
Grumbling, she walked over to the thicket, came right back, and settled into her stance.
"You mean the green grass knotted at the very top of that thicket, right?"
"Yeah. Looks like your eyes got better when you awakened, too."
"Guess so. Now that I've checked, I can see it from here."
The Water Ball she fired next blew the grass knot apart with perfect accuracy.
Her hit rate was flawless out to five hundred meters. Past that it fell off the farther she went, until a target beyond a kilometer was lucky to take one hit in ten. Perfect for pulling Aberrants in from a distance. If I fired a Mana Bullet, I'd just disintegrate them.
Once I had a sense of how solid her marksmanship was, I decided the two of us would make a circuit of the island. I'd told her I wanted her to grow to at least E-Class before we returned — D-Class, if we reached high — and she'd nodded and said she hoped for the same. So even if it ran a little dangerous, we'd move while keeping as sharp an eye as we could on the temples toward the basin, and any Aberrant we found off on its own, we'd pull and take down.
While we were at it, I needed to look for a way across to the island faintly visible in the east. Basin Island might not have a Return Point.
"What are you looking at?"
"Huh? Nothing. It's just... you seem a little different."
She'd been stealing glances at my face, so I'd turned with a puzzled look and asked. She waved her hands as if flustered.
"Different? Me? How?"
"Well... should I say dependable? I just thought, oh — so you really are a boy."
"I'm a guy. What, was I supposed to be a girl?"
I snorted like it was nonsense, and she giggled and chimed right in.
"Right?"
As we started along the hills, she took my hand. Since we'd come into the Phase World she'd been grabbing it more often, and holding on longer, but I put it down to her being a little tense. I'd already confirmed as much. She hadn't looked fine because she was brave. She'd looked fine because she had me for a mental pillar.
Heading due south, a broad, deep-looking river came into view, born from a lake that seemed a little smaller than Namsan Mountain back home, cutting through the basin wall and plunging outward like a waterfall.
"The river looks deep, and an awful lot of water is spilling off Basin Island. So why isn't that lake drying up?"
"Right? You think there's something in that lake?"
By the time the river neared the basin wall it had split in two, and the delta between the branches held a fairly wide stretch of forest and grassland. No Aberrants in sight, but a few antelope and bison, and small rabbit-like animals, were tucked away here and there among the trees and brush.
If we were eating meat anyway, I wanted rabbit. I'd heard it was mild, with a good chew to it.
Passing the river and moving toward the south side of Basin Island, I spotted a sparrow-type Mid-Low Rank Variant resting up in a tree.
"Noona. See that Aberrant resting in the tree? Sparrow-looking thing, a little over a meter."
She searched where I was pointing for a good while, then nodded.
"Yeah. Are we taking that?"
"We have to. It's a Mid-Low Rank Variant. Kill it, and it'll be nourishment for you."
She nodded at that and looked at me. I stared right back, and she startled, pointing at herself.
"You want me to catch it?"
"What, you want me to? I'll be hiding over there. Do your best."
"Huh?! Ah, ugh..."
She flustered, then fidgeted, and let out a long, tense sigh. Steeling herself, she clenched both hands, studied the sparrow Aberrant for a moment, and extended a finger to point at it. She held the pose, glanced at me, and when I nodded for her to go ahead, fired a Water Ball with a tense face.
The sparrow, about 1.2 kilometers out, flinched as the Water Ball skimmed past, whipped its head around, locked onto her at once, and launched into the sky.
"I missed! It's— it's coming!"
"Calm down."
For something that only resembled a sparrow, it didn't even seem to live in a flock. It shot straight up, then began to glide toward her, a mass of Phase Power surging and spinning hard around its body. A Physical Reinforcement type. I'd planned to charge out and kill it once it closed inside two hundred meters, but she kept firing Water Balls from her left hand as it reached five hundred, and the sparrow, busy dodging this way and that, slowed, its path stretching out.
At three hundred meters she brought around the right hand she'd been hiding behind her back and fired the dark-attribute round she'd had ready — a Dark Ball.
Too slow to be much use... wait. It's guided?
Still juking the Water Balls, the sparrow Aberrant caught sight of the Dark Ball coming for it, flapped in a panic, broke off its approach, and swung into a wide turn. That was its mistake. As if she'd been waiting for exactly that, she cut the Water Balls and started pouring everything into Dark Balls. What had been a single shot soon became more than ten, chasing the thing's tail, and the homing seemed to demand her focus — sweat beaded on her forehead.
The sparrow was faster than the Dark Balls. At this rate she wouldn't catch it. Then, the instant the count hit seventeen, she fired a Light Bolt, quicker than a Water Ball.
Cheep!?
The Light Bolt sheared past the tip of its beak. The sparrow Aberrant startled, its movement broke, and the gap to the Dark Balls closed. Ping— ching—. By the time two more Light Bolts had gone out, its wingbeats were a frantic mess. Even I could see it had lost its composure.
Face grave, holding the Dark Balls while she fired, her TP plunged to 20 in an instant. Then she stopped the Light Bolts, put on a dizzy look, and swayed. The Dark Balls slowed a little with her.
That's an act.
I'd fallen for that act dozens of times, so I knew it well. She was luring the sparrow Aberrant in. But would a trick like that work on a sparrow...
It did. The moment she swayed, it wheeled and dove at her at half again its previous speed.
Just in case, I switched on Mana Mode - Acceleration, ready to burst out, and kept a close watch. Oblivious to the trap, it spread its wings wide and plunged like an arrow — and the instant the distance closed to a hundred meters, she gathered 3 TP at her fingertips and fired a Water Ball like lightning, blowing the sparrow Aberrant's head clean off.
A headshot...
Then a problem. The Dark Balls trailing it didn't vanish when their target did. They flew straight on and poured down on her. She noticed them a beat late, eyes going wide.
That wasn't an act. With a sigh I unfolded Spatial Perception and Spatial Manipulation together and erased all seventeen Dark Balls at once.
"You idiot. Why'd you fire that many Dark Balls? Guided or not, of course they couldn't keep up with that speed."
At the scolding she flushed and protested.
"Th-that was all part of the plan!"
"Getting blown up by your own guided missiles was part of the plan too?"
"..."
She clamped her mouth shut, face red. I grinned, and she pouted and turned her head away.
Anyway, the Light Bolt Lydia had fired was far faster than the one Noona shot. A difference in class, and in Phase Power control? Come to think of it, could I turn my Mana Sieve into a technique? Well, Mana Sieve itself seemed like a higher form of Phase Power control, and even if I made a technique of it, something along the lines of a Phase Power control skill would probably just come out.
I retrieved the headless corpse of the sparrow Aberrant where it had crashed near the hill and helped her absorb its Phase Power.
After that, covering half the island took close to eight hours. Along the way she fought the Aberrants I pointed out, getting a firmer grip on attribute rounds and settling her nerve for combat. From the fourth one on, she started taking them down without much trouble — calm, precise shooting.
Elemental ability users outclass Physical Reinforcement types in raw power, so they can handle a Low-Rank Variant one-on-one without much difficulty. But Mid-Low Rank Variants, this easily? A genius is a genius, I suppose. And she was a three-attribute user on top of that — water, light, and darkness — two of them rare.
Had she studied ballistics somewhere? Her marksmanship climbed at an absurd rate. She'd send three Dark Balls out first, then slip Light Bolts in between Water Balls to cut off their paths, and the stupid Aberrants couldn't answer properly. A Dark Ball would land and melt part of a body, or they'd force a dodge and get their torso punched through by a Light Bolt or a Water Ball as often as not. She read the direction of the dodge off the homing Dark Balls and fired Light Bolts into it, and they dropped one after another, hit with nearly every shot. Hard to believe she'd struggled with that first sparrow at all.
Watching her fight from the side, I learned a good deal myself. She predicted her shots and predicted their dodges, sealed off anywhere they might run, and confirmed the kill. I, by contrast, had basically just been spraying with no plan at all, trusting nothing but mental acceleration and the rate of fire on my Mana Bullets.
Even a genius like her had one dangerous moment along the way.
About halfway around the island we met a wind-attribute Mid-Low Rank Variant, a green kite — one of those birds of prey. An elemental type, same as her, so once it turned into a shooting match a number of problems started to show. The kite rode the wind, wrapped more of it around its body with Phase Power, and flew at a terrifying speed while hurling Wind Cutters at her. Next to that she was slow, and she had no way to defend herself.
An overwhelming gap in speed, the disadvantage of the height difference, and nothing to protect her own body with — those were her problems. Burning with fighting spirit, she pulled off the feat of intercepting incoming Wind Cutters with Light Bolts, but the kite was bursting the Dark Balls on its tail with Wind Cutters of its own, and in a battle of attrition she was obviously the one at a disadvantage. She kept trading with it somehow, until one mistake left her side cut fairly deep by a Wind Cutter.
I'd been watching in accelerated thought, as focused as I could be, and I'd judged the Wind Cutter wouldn't threaten her life. Taking a wound once might even be better for her, I'd thought, so I let it happen. Then I actually saw her go down, blood spraying from her waist, and my mind went white.
I pulled myself together quickly, but in that brief span I'd already cast Healing Wave over her — and as for the kite, not content with carving it into dozens of pieces with a Mana Laser, I'd fired a Mana Bullet and evaporated what was left.
I stared blankly at the place where not even a trace of the kite Aberrant remained, then rushed to her and checked the wound. Wounds dealt by Phase Power clearly healed a little slower. Healing Touch had set Aunt Hyeryeong's bent spine right in two seconds, and yet even with a Healing Wave on top of it, three seconds passed and this still hadn't fully closed.
Blood and foreign matter pushed out from inside the cut; severed organs and the torn side knit back together as it closed. Watching it made my chest ache. Her face had gone pale, cold sweat running as she rode out the pain. I wiped it from her forehead and spoke.
"I'm sorry, Noona. I should've stepped in sooner."
Her complexion had turned stark white from the blood she'd lost in that short span. She winced in pain, and still she forced a smile.
"Don't make that face. If it weren't for you, I couldn't have practiced this comfortably, or this safely."
"..."
Through the sharply sliced gap in her suit jacket and blouse, her fair skin showed, the wound already gone. But the blood-soaked hem made my chest throb.
"Come on. I said I'm fine. Thanks to this handsome little brother of mine, one more and I'll be F-Class too. F-Class in less than two days, you know?"
Without a word I laid Healing Touch on her side again. She smiled brightly and stroked my head.
"When we get back, I should start basic conditioning with Soyoung. I never understood why she'd put herself through training that hard as an elemental type, but now that I'm an elemental ability user myself, I think I get it."
"Yeah..."
The kite bastard that had cut her was shredded into dozens of pieces by my hand and vanished from the sky without leaving so much as dust, so she never got to absorb its Phase Power. If she'd only taken that one in, she would have hit F-Class and shaken off the shock of the wound in no time.
We kept hunting after that. I kept glancing at the blood staining her side, so she conjured water and washed the stains out entirely. By then the blood loss seemed to have drained her, and for her sake I dug a wide, deep hole under a hill for her to rest in, then slipped down into the basin.
She'd lost blood. Meat would put it back.
I crept up on an antelope nearby, opened its throat with a Mana Laser, drained the blood and emptied the guts, and took only the two broad, meaty hind legs. I erased the traces with a Mana Bullet and headed back to the burrow. I'd gathered plenty of branches to roast them, and she, resting inside, lit up at the sight of the meat.
"Whoa, this is enough to eat our fill."
"Step back a second. I'm making a spot for the fire."
The hole was big enough that starting a fire inside was no trouble, so we decided to roast and eat in the burrow. Once it was going, she started on the meat. Meanwhile I brought in a chunk of wood, shaped it into a wooden dagger, and ran TP through it to harden the thing. She used it to slice the roasted haunch thin and ate with obvious pleasure.
She put away about twice what she usually did, said she was full and warm from the campfire, and started nodding off with her eyes half closed. I decided we'd rest here for the day and made her a place to sleep in comfort. The sun would be down soon anyway.
I put the rest of the meat away in my own stomach, brought in a little more wood, and sat beside her as she slept, keeping the fire fed.
"Noona. You asleep?"
"..."
"Noona. Noona, Noona, Noona."
"..."
Mm. Out cold.
Once I was sure she was deep under, I climbed out of the pit and looked up at the island floating to the east, bigger than Basin Island. It had looked large and tall even from far off, but up close the cliff seemed nearly... taller than Lotte Tower, supposedly the tallest building in the country. A wall like that stretched left and right until it filled my whole view. The weight of it was no joke.
I'd wondered whether the top was anything like this place. My instinct warned me it wasn't.
A warning...? Are there things up there even worse than what we've got down here?
In any case, the island floating higher than Basin Island to the east couldn't be made out from below, and even with Spatial Perception stretched to its limit I couldn't so much as reach its edge. No way to tell its shape. More than that, there was no way across. No bridge joining them, nothing of the sort.
And there was something Noona had found by chance — an island about a quarter the size of Basin Island, hidden in the clouds. Not a single blade of grass grew on it. A barren island. One sat at about seven o'clock off Basin Island, and another at five.
So far, then: Cloud Island, Star Island, Basin Island, two wasteland islands, and one large island. That was the count, as far as I could tell.
I had no idea why islands like these were floating in the sky. Was this one of the hidden realms said to exist in the Phase World? I'd heard those hidden realms held traces of civilizations no one could identify...
Before I knew it the sun had slipped west and the light was gone, so I went back to the burrow. Tonight I'd keep watch beside her with Spatial Perception.
Same as yesterday, I toggled the three-dimensional map on and off, stepped outside for a bit to look over the pure-white temples, and when the firewood ran low I gathered more so the campfire wouldn't die. That was how the time went.
Mmm. Sit still and my body starts to lock up. Let's see, the time... past midnight?
I came out, stood on the hill, scanned the surroundings, and was stretching when she woke and crawled out of the hole.
"Seoha? You there?"
"Yeah. Over here."
Maybe because the sky was so close, the moon hung enormous and sharp, the stars blazing. I was taking it in when she came up beside me and looked up at the night sky too.
"I think there are more stars than the night we saw when the family went camping on the east coast, back in my freshman year of high school."
"That was the ground. This is up in the sky. We're closer, so of course more of them show, right?"
She giggled at that, set one hand on her forehead, took mine with the other, and sighed.
"I don't think I could live without you."
"What's that supposed to mean. I'm not planning to die either, but as long as I'm an ability user, there's no telling where or how I might die on a raid. Even if I'm gone, you have to look after Mom and Dad—"
"No! You can't die!"
If not wanting to die were enough to keep you alive, nobody in the world would ever die. She cut me off, shot to her feet, caught my hand in both of hers and lifted it, her face desperate.
"You can't die. If it's dangerous, run — even if you're alone. Okay? With your ability, you can do that easily enough."
"People gathered because they trusted me. You're telling me to abandon them and run just because it's dangerous?"
The ones who'd ambushed me. The C-Class who'd left his comrades behind and fled. My face twisted at the memory, and seeing it, she let her brows droop and lowered the arm holding my hand.
"That's all the more reason to look after yourself. Tens of thousands of people are depending on you alone..."
"You know better than anyone that doesn't make sense. And I'm building my strength so it never comes to that, so help me. From right beside me."
"Okay..."
She couldn't bring herself to say any more. She sat beside me, fiddling with my hand, and just looked down at me for a while. I had no idea why she was suddenly acting like a little kid.
Then she reached out, brushed my bangs back, and spoke with a look as if something long familiar had struck her anew.
"When did that tiny little kid get this big?"
"Heh. I'm basically your height now, you know? Give it a little while and I'll be looking down at you."
"What? Don't make me laugh. Boys' growth plates close by senior year of high school, remember? You got a little taller when you became an ability user, but that's the end of it!"
I couldn't just let that pass. I stood and looked down at her.
"I really can't let that go. Stand up. We can measure."
So I said. A check with Spatial Perception put me about a centimeter shorter than her. She, though, stood back to back with me as if she couldn't believe it, took a rough measure of our heights, and looked genuinely horrified.
"Y-you put height insoles in!"
"Oh, come on!"
We bickered for a while — I'm taller, no you're shorter — until she parted her small lips in a yawn and rubbed her eyes.
"If you're sleepy, go in the hole and sleep."
"No. I've slept plenty, so now you rest. I'll keep watch. This time, you sleep."
"I'd rather not get ambushed by an Aberrant in my sleep, thanks."
"Whaat?"
I pinched the cheek of her dumbfounded face. She let out a muffled mmph-mmph and pinched the back of my hand.
"I'm saying it because I have a way to rest. You only just became an ability user, so you need to eat well, sleep well, and grow your ability."
"I've never heard of eating well and sleeping well raising your ability!"
"Heh. You've been an ability user for, what, two days?"
She narrowed her eyes at me, trying to work out where this was going, so I went on.
"I'm past a hundred days now. That makes me your senior. So listen to me."
"In life, I'm your senior!"
"At work, I'm the one above you, aren't I?"
"..."
I grinned at her speechless face. And I still had more to say.
"Between Physical Reinforcement and Mana Sieve, my recovery's excellent too. Tomorrow we're out hunting Aberrants again, and if you don't sleep properly and start yawning and staggering around, your life's the one in danger."
"Ugh."
Maybe because it had been a fair point, she only scrunched her face, let out a long sigh, and sat down beside me.
"I can sleep here, can't I?"
"It's warmer inside the burrow. There's a campfire."
"It's not cold out here either."
And with that she sprawled out, head pillowed on my thigh. She could have gone into the burrow and slept in comfort... I couldn't bring myself to insist. I brushed her bangs back without a word, and she giggled, caught my hand, and smiled.