Day Six: Revenge (2)
An hour and twenty-one minutes of walking upstream along the river, and the trees around me had changed — half of them dead, half of them dying.
An hour ago they had been almost entirely dead. Only recently had living ones begun to show between the corpses, a trunk here and there half-dead or slowly recovering. Bugs and insects had appeared as well, underground and on the surface. Most of what I found was still dead, of course, but if I kept following the river upstream, the dead forest would give way to a living one.
Thirty-two kilometers. That was the distance between where I stood and where the female giant lay dead.
The sheer reach of her influence pulled a sigh out of me on its own. Even without running Search, I could feel a faint vitality in the air, and it drove home all over again how desolate and barren a dead forest really was. When I nudged the Detection object count up just a little and swept the area, the life pressing in from every side tugged a small smile onto my face.
The odds of running into an Aberrant were about to climb. I wiped the smile off and pushed on, leaning on Detection and Telescopic Vision more often as I advanced.
Another twenty minutes upstream, where fresh green trees crowded in on every side, I found a Long-snouted Lean Wolf sprawled out at its ease.
"……!"
I dropped flat. The wind was at the Long-snouted Lean Wolf's back, blowing toward me, so my scent hadn't given me away, and hitting the ground fast meant it hadn't spotted me either. Two hundred and seventy meters ahead it lay prone on the riverbank, snout wet — just arrived, by the look of it, having drunk its fill and settled in to rest.
Meeting the thing again after six days, I almost felt glad to see it. Is this the bastard that charged me, meaning to eat me? It had all happened in a blink, and I'd never gotten a calm look at that son of a bitch's face, so I couldn't be sure. Thinking of all the grief that dog had put me through since...
My teeth ground together on their own. Sure, falling off the cliff had handed me an incredible ability, but that was that and this was this. I'd nearly died three times. Just the thought of it made my jaw creak.
First, put Telescopic Vision on the Long-snouted Lean Wolf and run Clairvoyance and Analysis through its insides. I worried a little that the wind might shift — but the moment it did, and that thing caught my scent, would be the moment we fought. I'd been doused in muddy water, though, so some of my scent ought to have washed off. I probably wouldn't be found out in an instant.
The horned puppy hadn't noticed when I examined it with Detection. How would a Long-snouted Lean Wolf do? I swallowed hard, held Telescopic Vision, and triggered Analysis and Clairvoyance. A quick sweep, and luckily the wolf didn't sense a thing.
For one, since it hadn't found me, its Phase Power detection range was under 270 meters. And the Phase Power inside the Long-snouted Lean Wolf was 22.
……Twenty-two??
The horned puppy had been 10. Thinking about how even a Phase Power of 22 hadn't been enough to chase me down properly... maybe this thing was incredibly weak?
A bitter taste lingered in my mouth. I worked my jaw, then started peering through its body again. Telescopic Vision lagged before the information came in, which was a little frustrating, but I put up with it — and what I found was a shock.
The horned puppy. The Long-snouted Lean Wolf was the horned puppy's adult form.
On its forehead, almost exactly where the horned puppy's horn had sat, the faintest trace of a horn remained. Compare the skeleton, the spread of muscle fiber, the placement of the organs, and it was certain — one hundred percent the same species. I hadn't expected that at all. So that cute little thing grew up into this hideous wreck.
Knowing it changed how the creature looked. Like a horned puppy that had never eaten properly, and then, from that starved state, had only lengthened and swollen into bone. And somehow I was getting more and more irritated. Nobody had even been trying to trick me, and yet I kept feeling fooled. It pissed me off.
I swallowed the irritation and kept studying the Long-snouted Lean Wolf. The horn must have been absorbed into the skull as it grew, hardening the bone and enlarging it. The skull was absurdly thick — probably about as hard as the horn awl — and the rest was roughly on par with human bone, or a little worse. Beyond that, the muscle fiber was pitifully scarce. Calling it muscle felt like an apology. Well. That was why they called it a long-snouted lean wolf.
I should have caught on the moment an animal, of all things, turned out to have worse stamina than a person. A juvenile would obviously be weaker than a Long-snouted Lean Wolf — and I'd been tense enough to shake, facing a horned puppy? I was suddenly grateful no one had been around to see it. How pathetic I must have looked.
Last, I decided to read its emotions by running Detection over the Long-snouted Lean Wolf's brain. The instant I focused, the thing shot upright and started whipping its head around, scanning the area.
D-did it notice me? A notch above the horned puppy, then. But why? Did anything with a certain amount of Phase Power notice when you projected a detection ability straight into its brain? I'd have to remember that.
Since I'd already been found out, I kept analyzing while peering through the brain, and what came back was anger threaded with a little confusion. Nothing was in sight, but it seemed to know something was spying on it. As it slid deeper into rage, it started prowling with a sputtering, rattling growl, looking around as it went. In all that shifting it closed to 170 meters, and still it didn't find me.
Either it couldn't spot anything outside its line of sight, or its detection range was under 170 meters. Its emotions were a tangle — rage, bewilderment, surprise, irritation, wariness, fear. The rage kept swelling until it swallowed the rest, and in the end the whole mess collapsed into a single feeling. Fury.
Then, with no target even in view, it started barking loud enough to spray spit from its snout. There was clearly an enemy somewhere, and it couldn't find one. The thing looked absolutely pissed.
One item left on the checklist. Taking extreme care not to be seen, I picked a nearby tree and climbed. From a spot screened on every side by leaves, I restarted the Detection I'd paused, wove in Clairvoyance and Analysis, and focused as if I were examining every fold of the brain one by one.
And then—
KRAAAAAANG!! Krrra-ra-ra-rack!!
Its rage gauge must have blown. It started rampaging in a circle, and the sight of that shabby thing — drool stringing from its mouth, tongue dangling and swinging — was so ridiculous I nearly laughed. It came within twenty meters of my tree and still couldn't find me.
Is it leaning that hard on its five senses to search? If so, its ability to sense Phase Power was as good as nonexistent. The bastard bounded off into the distance again and, as if possessed, barked like mad and thrashed. This looked less like Detection was damaging its brain, and more like it simply couldn't control its own temper. My ability might have been stoking the rage, too.
It carried on like that for a good ten minutes before it finally wore itself out, panting, and collapsed in a heap — stopping the Search on its brain partway through had probably helped. The Long-snouted Lean Wolf had dropped in the opposite direction from me, heaving endlessly, body gone slack. It looked spent. To me, that looked like an opening.
Seventy meters between us. Long if you called it long, short if you called it short, but inside my Search range either way. I waited, sweeping the surroundings with Telescopic Vision in case some other Aberrant came running at the sound of its fit. Five minutes passed with nothing, so I stripped off the makeshift sheath covering the claw spear's blade and climbed down the tree without a sound.
Claw spear in hand, I shut both eyes and used Detection to pick out only the spots that wouldn't make noise, stepping from one to the next as I closed in. Sixty meters. Fifty. Forty. Thirty. My heart started pounding. Beat too hard, and that son of a bitch might hear it. I left the brain alone and watched only the muscles, ready to rush in and drive the claw spear home the moment anything so much as twitched.
Twenty meters. Ten!
This is insane. Can this thing not sense Phase Power at all? I'd gotten this close, and it still hadn't noticed me. Terrified the thudding of my heart would carry, I locked up, breathed as quietly as I could, and poured every ounce of focus into creeping closer.
The instant my foot touched seven meters from that bastard, I saw its body flinch.
"AAAAAGH!!"
Kkhryeeerek?!
The thought that I'd been found hit at the same moment I screamed with everything I had, before I even knew I was doing it — strength driven through my whole body as I charged at full tilt. The mutt spun toward me, suddenly there at its back, and freaked. It couldn't even get its feet under it. It only thrashed, and barked.
Yipe! Yiiiipe!!
"Die!!"
Into the gap collapsing between us I traced, picture-perfect, the thrust I'd drilled hundreds of times yesterday afternoon, and drove for the Long-snouted Lean Wolf's throat.
Shunk.
Kek...
The claw spear smashed the neck bone and punched clean through, light, with no sense of catching. The moment I thought I felt the slightest resistance, it had already severed the bastard's neck. I hauled the spear back just before the mutt, loosing its last death-cry, went down, and the body dropped limp to the ground.
Right after the neck bone snapped, the mutt spasmed once, then went still. Hot blood gushed from the cut face of the pierced throat. I couldn't fathom how a body that gaunt held so much of it.
"……! Hah— hah!"
Only then did I realize I hadn't been breathing. My windpipe opened late, and air rushed down my throat. My heart hammered like mad, and the world in front of me reeled as if I were dizzy.
The thrill of revenge lasted only a moment. Looking down at the lean wolf's carcass, dead with its throat run through, I felt something in my head go cold. I'd killed a living thing, and I didn't feel a shred of guilt. Only the sense that I'd done what had to be done. Because it wasn't a person?
Not a bad feeling, all told. I had a hunch I'd sleep easy tonight. Just a hunch, of course. Just a hunch. If I couldn't get the Search ability sorted out, sleep was a lost cause from here on anyway.
I'd thought it couldn't sense Phase Power, but the flinch the instant the distance hit seven meters meant it could, after all. The range was just extremely short. I looked down at the claw spear that had taken the bastard's neck. There wasn't even blood on it. Seeing it split and pierce the female giant's skin, I'd figured the edge was exceptional — but to shear through an Aberrant's bone this easily, the thing needed a handle-with-care sticker.
"Heh heh."
Snickering under my breath in front of a wolf's corpse nearly the size of a person, I was having the idle thought that this was hardly a hero's image — when, all at once, water-blue Phase Power rippled out of the bastard's corpse in pulsing waves.
"Huh?"
……So this is how Phase Power flows out when an Aberrant dies? But—
Seriously? That's all?
Even the Phase Power leaking into the air from the Phase Stone in my pants pocket — the portion I hadn't fully absorbed — was more than this. A dribble. Truly a dribble. I checked it with Detection. If this amount was 22, then the Phase Power that had saturated the ground around the female giant had to be over a hundred thousand.
……The scale isn't even the same. Factor in what had already dispersed into the air, and it came to more than ten thousand times as much. I clicked my tongue and tried to take the spreading Phase Power into my body — except it showed no interest in coming to me.
Huh? Why aren't you coming in?
I waved my hands at it — hurry up, get into my body — and it only speckled out into the air before soon blending into the natural Phase Power all around.
What the hell is this?!
I didn't get it. Wasn't the Phase Power released into the air when you killed an Aberrant supposed to be absorbed, in some set amount, by any Anomalous Ability User nearby? It felt like that son of a bitch had flipped me off even in death, and it pissed me off.
The vanished Phase Power was a lost cause, so — the Long-snouted Lean Wolf. Ugh! And the name was obnoxiously long on top of everything else. I looked the lean bastard's corpse over. Even if I'd wanted to eat it, the filthy fur hanging in ragged, mop-like strands killed the appetite, and that gaunt body — gut it, scrape the flesh together — wouldn't even make a mouthful.
I scowled at the shabby carcass, then forced my face smooth. It left a bad taste, but I'd grant it had been my first real opponent. In that spirit, I'd give it a burial at sea.
Blood dripping, I dragged the lean bastard by a hind leg down to the river and hurled the corpse in. At that size it barely cleared ten kilograms, which only drove home how unbelievably lean the thing really was.
Splash!
I heaved it with everything I had, and it flew about twenty meters before hitting the water. The bastard's corpse never surfaced again. The swift current caught it and carried it far downstream, and watching it sweep beyond my Detection range in an instant sent a small chill through me.
……Yeah. Best not to linger by the river.
Light with the feeling of having taken revenge on something I'd counted an enemy, I headed back to the tree I'd hidden in, to retrieve my wooden spear. A thought came with me. Was a detection range of about seven meters unique to that lean bastard, or were the other Lowest-Rank Variants the same?
Pathetic Phase Power. A pathetic Phase Power detection range. Pathetic stamina. It felt like a level-1 monster in a game's newbie zone — though that was probably only because I had a weapon and an ability. The moment I figured the other Lowest-Rank Variants might be much the same, confidence surged up in me.
Don't get careless. Find a hiding place, keep an eye on the surroundings, hold out nine more days, and I can go back to reality!
But why hadn't the Phase Power spreading from the corpse been absorbed into me? Strange.
Either way, maybe because I'd wound myself far too tight over a first real fight, the fatigue was settling in — mental and physical both. I reached the tree where I'd hidden to watch the lean bastard, recovered the wooden spear, and decided to rest a little before taking a slow look around.