Episode 202: Floating Sky Islands (12)
"Seoha?"
"......Sis?"
My head was still empty. The moment I saw my sister looking down at me, her face drawn tight with worry, the tears broke loose all at once.
"Ah?! Are you all right?! Are you hurt?!"
"N-no. I don't know why. The tears just......"
"Really? You're sure you're okay?"
"I'm fine."
It felt as if I'd dreamed something, but not a single image of it remained. I knew a dream had happened. That was all. The contents were gone, and the blankness of it itched.
Under her worried eyes I pushed myself upright, and there it was. The winged woman's corpse, crushed flat as if a dump truck had rolled over her.
Her head and parts of her limbs were intact. Her torso had been mashed into a pancake.
I looked up. The enormous sphere the storm clouds and lightning had knotted themselves into, the thing that had blotted out the sky, was gone.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, turned to her, and asked.
"What happened?"
"I don't knooow. You collapsed, and this orange half-transparent wall showed up in the sky, and then it blew apart with the storm clouds and the lightning sphere. All of it just vanished."
"......You don't know what happened to me?"
"Mm-mm. I was pretty far, and the trees were in the way. I couldn't see well."
She said I'd collapsed, and that I'd been down for less than two minutes. And yet in those two minutes I was sure I'd had some important dream. I just couldn't remember what it was.
What the hell had happened......
My head was too foggy to do anything but sit there. Then thick Phase Power began to seep from the dead winged woman's corpse.
......I should let Sis take it first. A 3.3-million aberrant. The amount an ability user can ordinarily absorb is 660,000. If she takes all of that, her Phase Power will break 800,000.
That puts her at mid-tier C-Class, and with two rare attributes besides, she won't be looked down on anywhere she goes.
A rare three-attribute ability user, and Grand Blue's Director of Integrated Management.
Hell of a calling card.
"Whaaat?! No! You have to absorb all of it!"
"......Idiot sister."
She hadn't changed one bit since the first winged woman. I let out a long sigh and pounced on her.
"Hey! You really keep— huh? Aaah?!"
"Be still, and accept your bonds."
I took the sleeve of the blouse I'd set aside for her on the second day, bound her arms and legs together, and got out of there fast.
She thrashed like a caterpillar and raised hell for me to untie her. I pretended not to hear. Putting distance between myself and the winged woman's corpse, I thought it through.
Even if Sis takes 660,000, 2.64 million remains. My Phase Power right now is 2.02 million. Draw in 1.48 million through Mana Sieve and I hit 3.5 million. B-Class. The leftover 1.16 million falls outside the absorption limit and gets thrown away.
......Huh? Then I didn't actually need to get clear of it?
Whatever. My head felt like someone had hung a weight off the nape of my neck. Heavy, dull, and too much of a pain to think with.
From a distance I watched the Phase Power of my sister, still flailing with her hands and feet tied. When she crept just past 800,000 and the absorption stopped, I went back to her.
I stood beside her and began drawing the leftover Phase Power into my body, cycling Mana Sieve. She stopped thrashing and glared up at me, her face packed full of complaint.
Haa...... Dense Phase Power circling inside me, spreading through my whole body. It doesn't beat sex with my lovers. It still feels damn good.
No. A different kind of good. If I had to name it, it's the feeling of falling asleep after sex, my lovers' soft, warm, naked bodies pulled over me like a blanket.
The more Phase Power entered me, the more my body and mind, slack as waterlogged cotton, began to wake.
Then, the instant it hit 3.5 million and I crossed into B-Class, vitality flooded every corner of me. I felt each individual cell coming awake.
Rapture beyond words. Enough that it stung, knowing I'd get to feel something like this twice more at most.
I was savoring the sense of being born anew when I tilted my head.
Strange. It hadn't been like this when I reached C-Class. Well. B-Class is a different thing, I suppose. B-Class is what people call the limit of an ordinary ability user.
"Untie me already!"
Her tantrum reached me in the middle of it. I ignored her and focused on the Phase Power filling me.
I turned it slowly with Mana Sieve, and a clarity sharper than cold water on a bone-dry throat washed through me. The heavy, stifling fog in my head cleared.
Haaa......
......?
Ah.
I remembered all of it. How I'd killed the winged woman. With my head clear, the scattered pieces clicked into place one by one.
The longer she prayed, the more her expression, even with fatal wounds, had settled into peace. Overhead the storm clouds had kept gathering, swelling the lightning sphere larger and larger.
And once that sphere reached a certain size, it had begun a slow descent.
If it touched the basin and burst, Sis would die. That certainty had stripped my reason away. When I came back to myself......
I had pushed Physical Reinforcement to its limit, concentrated Mana Sieve into my legs as hard as I could, and driven a full-power soccer kick into the head of the winged woman where she lay folded in prayer, prostrate like someone bowing.
The only thing in my head was that Sis would die if this went on, and that I had to stop it.
I kicked meaning to burst her skull. The wing-bone shielding her head snapped, and a blonde head, shriveled as if fire had curled it, was laid bare.
I drove another soccer kick into that head.
A choked croak.
Her head whipped sideways. The winged-woman aberrant let out a groan no human throat could make, and the pain broke her prayer. Her pure-white body shuddered.
The moment I understood it. A leg dyed blue with concentrated Mana Sieve, paired with Physical Reinforcement overheated by burning a massive amount of TP, could punch through a High-Tier Variant's bodily defense and land a real blow.
I drove that blue-glowing leg forward with everything I had, stomped her neck, and snapped the bone.
A wet crack.
A strangled shriek.
Even with her neck broken she didn't die. She spasmed, limbs flailing, and I stamped down again with mechanical precision, grinding my foot the way you'd stub out a cigarette. The scream stopped. Only the twitching remained.
How the hell is a High-Tier Variant's life this stubborn? She isn't a rubber band.
Irritation surged. I wanted to crush this bitch flat, erase her from the world, and in that instant an image rose in my mind with the clarity of something driven into the brain.
As if possessed by it, I ran Mana Sieve through my entire body. Blue light wrapped me. I gestured at the winged woman's torso.
A shriek!
My Phase Power met Phase Power in its natural state, underwent a change of form, and manifested as an amber rectangular pillar.
The winged woman was crushed for several seconds beneath the transparent amber wall that had appeared as if overlapping her body. Then, with a wet crunch, her torso was mashed as if it had been fed into a press.
Under the pressure, watery blood and organs burst from her mouth and her anus with a sputtering sound.
She couldn't endure even that. The light left her pupils. The twitching of her limbs faded.
I looked down, indifferent, at the winged woman dead on the spot, then lifted my head to the lightning sphere still descending.
Facing the storm clouds and the sphere gathered over Basin Island, I raised both hands, set my palms together, and slowly drew them apart. An amber wall began to spread wide across the path of the falling sphere.
The more of it I deployed, the more my Phase Power dropped in proportion. The instant an amber Wall of Space covered the whole sky over Basin Island, the lightning sphere, several kilometers across, touched it.
A flash—
With a colossal explosion of light, the amber wall, the storm clouds, and the lightning sphere all vanished.
And I passed out, because my Phase Power had hit empty.
"I see."
I walked her through how I'd killed the winged woman, the worst of it trimmed, and undid the blouse-sleeve cord binding her arms and legs. She sighed, sat, and rubbed at her wrists and ankles.
"There!"
She drove a fist into my stomach. I tensed my gut the instant it landed, and she was the one who grabbed her wrist and grimaced.
"Who trusses someone up like luggage and just dumps them?!"
"If you'd quietly listened to me, you wouldn't have been tied up and put through that. Why'd you have to fight me?"
"What?!"
Stung, she pinched my cheek, yanked my ear long, grabbed my neck and shook me back and forth, then seemed to wear herself out on her own. She let out a heavy sigh and dropped down beside me.
Aberrant or not, take away the wings and she had looked like an ordinary woman. Seeing her dead in that state made my sister's face twist.
And yet that frowning face seemed, somehow, to glitter. To give off a light of its own.
I blinked and looked her up and down.
Hair that had already been smooth as silk had grown even finer. Her skin was cleaner and softer than a baby's, and even the faint blemishes that had barely been there were gone. Call it a goddess's skin and I would have believed it.
Her face had already been perfect enough that a cosmetic surgeon might have taken it as the final goal of the craft. Add the skin and the hair to that, and...... huh?
Her chest had grown too. About a C-cup now.
She'd lost her bra in an accident, so she was going without one, and the summer shirt was thin enough that the volume had nowhere to hide. I was sure of it.
Well, damn. From less than an A-cup all the way to a C. Phase Power really is miracle water, a cure-all spring out of a legend.
"Sis, you got prettier when you hit C-Class."
"Wh— s-suddenly what are you saying?"
I'd said it straight, and she flushed and shot me a look like I was talking nonsense.
"No, you really did get prettier. Score it and it's a hundred and ten out of a hundred?"
If her chest were just a little bigger, it would've been a hundred and twenty.
"......You just thought my chest was small, didn't you."
This perceptive little ghost. I avoided the narrowed eyes and opened my mouth.
"Anyway. I never imagined Spatial Manipulation only shows its real power when you concentrate Mana Sieve to use it."
She glared at me for changing the subject, pinched my back once, then let her gaze slide over the crushed remains and spoke.
"That orange wall was Spatial Manipulation?"
"Yeah. More precisely, the Wall of Space."
Her eyes wandered. Then, as if gathering her courage, she looked straight at the crushed aberrant's corpse and frowned again.
"The Wall of Space is powerful enough to do that to a High-Tier Variant?"
"Not quite. That winged human already had a broken neck and was about to die, so her barrier was probably gone too."
"Barrier? ......Ah, you mean an energy field? The thing aberrants have."
Is that blue film of Phase Power an energy field? She shrugged once, her face saying it hardly mattered, then turned back to me. Proud, she patted my back and smiled.
"You reached B-Class all on your own, without a raid team's help...... You're my little brother, but I'm really proud of you. I never dreamed you'd become one of the highest ability users in the world. Heh."
She seemed happier that I'd become B-Class than that she'd stepped into C-Class herself.
"Anything change when you hit B-Class?"
"That's the real point, isn't it."
"Ehehe."
Curious about my abilities. Sis was a full ability user now. At that bright little smile I snorted a laugh of my own and ran a check.
"Mm...... First, Mana Mode's efficiency went up another tier. In ordinary Mana Mode I can perform at the level of a D-Class Physical Reinforcement user, and if I use Acceleration I can reach B-Class. Hwayeon's level."
"Whoa, for real?"
"Yeah, for real. Thought acceleration in Mana Mode - Acceleration feels like it went from fifty percent to seventy."
Use Acceleration and you literally enter a slow-motion world. I'm the only one thinking and perceiving at full speed. Everything else drops to half speed or less.
TP consumption for Mana Mode - Acceleration had dropped hard too, from three percent a minute to one percent a minute. So long as I wasn't spending Phase Power on other abilities, I could run Mana Mode - Acceleration without limit in the Phase World.
Probably the effect of another band being added to the tree-ring pattern of my Phase Power when I became B-Class.
Use Mana Mode now and eight bands circle my heart.
"The biggest change is that if I concentrate Mana Sieve through my whole body, I can make a Wall of Space."
As I said it I ran Mana Sieve through my entire body, showed her the blue-dyed state, struck a rectangular Wall of Space into the ground, and stepped up onto it.
I'd sensed it the moment I first saw the thing, and sure enough it had no effect on me at all.
Of course it wouldn't. It's a wall I grasp through Spatial Perception and create by manipulation. The idea that I, standing inside my own range, would be affected by it is absurd.
Besides, other attribute users take less damage from their own attribute the higher their dominion over it.
Hmm. Make a shelter out of this, and maybe I could protect other people too.
The Wall of Space had the amber of fine whiskey. I shaped a spiral staircase in empty air and walked up it, and my sister's eyes grew wider and wider.
"Whoa, whoa! Can I get on that too?"
"No. Don't touch it. Touch it and you're in serious trouble."
At the warning, the finger she'd been slowly extending flinched back.
The Wall of Space is safe so long as you don't touch it. I could make a hiding place of it and have someone hide inside, but only on the assumption they stay still.
Thrash around and slam into the wall, and I don't know exactly what happens. I am certain they wouldn't come out intact.
She stared at me like a dog whose owner had refused to play. I spread the Wall of Space again, made a square platform in the air, and sat on it. She watched, a finger at her lips, openly envious.
"My Spatial Perception range grew enormously too."
"Enormously? How enormous?"
"A radius of four and a half kilometers."
"......You're a human radar, you know that? That's enough range to sense a third of Seoul north of the Han River......"
"Saying I'm not a person is too much!"
I shaped the Wall of Space into a slide, rode it down, and flicked her forehead. She giggled, then looked at the wall with deep envy written all over her.
"Can you make the Wall of Space any shape you want?"
"Yeah. It forms the way I picture it."
"Hmmm. It's exactly like that movie hero's power. The one with the green lantern."
"No. He can grab his and swing it. This stays fixed in the air."
Playing with the wall, I worked out that a one-meter cube cost 100 TP.
A hundred TP per cubic meter. Push my Phase Power to the maximum and I could raise a Wall of Space a meter wide, a meter tall, and thirty-five kilometers long. No wonder I'd been able to cover the sky over Basin Island.
The drawback is that Phase Power spent raising the wall doesn't recover while the wall is up. I'll have to be careful.
To check the effect I made a long rectangular wall and told Sis to attack it. She blinked, then hurled Fusion Dark-Water straight into the Wall of Space.
It touched the translucent amber and, the instant it entered, unraveled like ink dropped in water, thinned, and vanished without a trace.
"Huh? What?"
This time she raised her staff and fired Fusion Light-Water and Light Bolts without pause. All of them disappeared into the Wall of Space.
......And every bit of TP spent on the vanished skills, I absorbed.
"That's a cheat!"
"Yeah. About as much of a cheat as you."
"......"
I turned from her dumbfounded face and looked down at the winged woman's remains.
Only the head and limbs intact. The torso nothing but hide, half-sunk in a broad pool of blood. The winged woman.
......Looking at her like this, something needled at my skull. A thought on the verge of surfacing, and not quite......
Rather than wrench out something that wouldn't come, I decided to collect whatever might be worth money.
First I tore the four wings off the corpse and stacked them aside, ripped the hide over the chest, and pulled out a Phase Stone the size of my fist.
A high-grade Phase Stone worth 3.01 million. Sell this alone and it's three trillion won? Add a premium and this one stone is one percent of Korea's annual budget.
Not that I could sell it through ordinary channels.
I shot a glare at my sister, dry-heaving at the sight of me dressing the corpse, pocketed the Phase Stone, and started rolling the unsightly remains the way you'd roll a sheet of paper. She sucked in a sharp breath.
I gathered both arms and both legs, rolled the body up tight as a spring roll, and flung it into the Wall of Space. The instant the corpse entered, it felt like something intruding on my domain. The winged woman's body twisted, warped, and slowly came apart, vanishing as if it were being dismantled.
Hmm. When I'd killed her, the effect had been a press stamping her flat. The corpse just decomposes.
"S-Seoha......?"
"The Wall of Space seems to carry something of a Mana Bullet's effect."
Hmm. She'd been crushed and compressed because the energy field was there. Without one, does anything that touches the Wall of Space come apart on contact? But Sis's color was bad.
"What's wrong? You look pale."
"That's...... Seoha. Even if she was an aberrant......"
"Hm?"
She was wearing a look that said I was a little frightening.
Ah. When I'd rolled the corpse, blood and pulped organs had spilled out, and she'd gone pale and twisted her face. Was that it?
"It's an aberrant's corpse. Not a person. If it were a person I'd hold a funeral or cremate them, but that thing was an aberrant that tried to kill us."
"Mm. Right? Maybe I got too sensitive. Sorry?"
"It's fine."
At that her color stayed a little wan, but she forced a smile and apologized. She didn't have to go that far.
Anyway, for a test, I took from my pocket a Mid-Low Grade Phase Stone I'd picked up while hunting flying aberrants and threw it into the Wall of Space.
The stone entered, drifted slowly through, passed out the far side, and fell.
Hmm. TP manifested as a skill gets absorbed, but the Phase Power inside a Phase Stone doesn't?
This ability is completely broken. I can shape it however I want, the power is strong, it doesn't tear the terrain into a wasteland, the Phase Power cost isn't that steep, and it absorbs skills and turns them into my TP.
I'll be making good use of the Wall of Space from here on.
Mana Bullets hit hard, but the terrain destruction is too much. The Wall of Space can only be worked inside my Spatial Perception range, but it's extremely clean, and I can strike only the area I choose. Used right, it might even serve for capture.
Mana Bullets and the rest of that line have probably only gotten stronger in raw mana power, whatever you look at. I'll check that later, slowly. What's left......
I turned to Sis and checked her heart through Spatial Perception. Seven bands of Phase Power ringed it.
Three lines were light. The other four were split evenly between darkness and water. So her highest aptitude is light.
"Did you get any new ability when you became C-Class?"
"Nothing really new...... Earlier, when you were in danger, I happened to fully fuse light and darkness, so now I can fire Dark Thunder. A few applications got smoother and easier to use, and the skills hit harder. That's all."
She showed me, making clones and moving each one on its own, firing abilities from them.
The first clones she'd made had been crude enough that you knew at a glance they were fakes. Now, from the outside alone, they were identical enough that you couldn't tell. Expressions natural. Not the slightest oddness in the movement.
"And I can do this, too?"
The clone rippled once and became Franc and Hwayeon.
"......"
I miss Franc. And Hwayeon. And Yeongeun. They vanished right in front of me, so Franc and Hwayeon especially must have been shocked. Everyone's all right, aren't they?
"Ah...... Sorry."
"You apologize for the strangest things."
She apologized with an oh-no look. I told her not to mind it and stepped up to the clone she'd made.
Bare eyes, not Mana Vision and not Spatial Perception. It was the spitting image of Franc and Hwayeon. I poked a cheek. My finger sank in with a soft give, and the cold of water came through.
"Would an ability like this even help in the Phase World? I can't think of a use besides decoys."
"Mm. I think so too. In the real world it has a few uses."
"Nothing else?"
"Nope."
"Then the ability check's done. Let's look over the two o'clock temple and rest there today. Tomorrow we go to the six o'clock temple and take the winged woman there."
I snorted at her hesitation, gathered the four wings the winged woman had left, and took my sister's hand. She fiddled with it this way and that, and only then did the stiffness leave her face. She smiled, bright.
"Shame. Looks like that winged human's staff was completely destroyed."
Walking beside me, leaning on her staff, she glanced back with regret. Come to think of it, there hadn't been a staff when the woman fell from the sky, either.
"Must've broken on my Mana Bullet."
"Such a waste. If we'd secured one more of those, we could've sold it for a ridiculous price."
"Don't sell it. Keep it. We might use it as bait to recruit a light-attribute ability user."
"A light-attribute ability user? Who? Don't tell me you mean Princess Lydia?"
"Ah. Right, there was her too. Think I could coax her if I take it slow?"
I'd said it in the spirit of if it works, good, and if not, whatever. Sis shook her head.
"Don't be ridiculous. Ability like that, and royalty besides. Britain would never let her go. Coax a princess and Britain won't sit still."
"If they don't sit still, then what? They going to pick a fight?"
I grinned as I said it. She thought a moment, then spoke, worried.
"No matter how strong you are, fighting a whole country would be hard, wouldn't it?"
"What's the hard part?"
"I've worked out a few strategies from watching you fight for real. Every Mana Bullet is strategic-weapon class, and you can spam them with almost no restriction. You haven't tested the upgraded Mana Cannon yet, right?"
"Yeah."
She nodded as if she'd expected that and swayed her staff.
"Factor that in, and I think the sum of your force is above any one country. Physical ability matching B-Class, and thought acceleration more than double anyone else's. A Spatial Barrier that can take a Mana Bullet's blast and stay intact. A Wall of Space that crushes even a High-Tier Variant, and a recovery ability on top of it."
"Hm hm."
"Even so. First, the variety of plans that comes from a difference in numbers is more than you can answer alone. What if they detach part of the military to deal with you and hit your home base with the rest?"
"Hmm......"
"If you're at the base, you can protect it, sure. But you can't win by only defending. The longer you're tied to one place, the more tactics the enemy will have time to run."
So that's it. The numbers are the problem.
"But I can squash anyone who attacks pretty easily now. Hold the main base, block the attacks, drop one M-Cannon on their base, and I win."
At that a flicker of fear crossed her face, and she tapped my shoulder with her staff.
"That's a scenario where you and the enemy both go down. Their leadership would be wiped out, but you'd become the worst ability user in history for the mass slaughter. And the damage all lands on innocent citizens."
Is that bad? I figure a nation's choices are the people's responsibility too. They aren't even my countrymen. Complete strangers from an enemy state. What happens to them isn't my problem.
Say that out loud and Sis would be terribly sad, so I didn't.
"If it were only our family left alive, I think I could feed every one of them...... Ah, forget it. I don't want to turn this power on people either. But if someone lays a hand on my family, I won't sit still. I'll spam M-Cannons and go as far as it takes."
"M-Cannon?"
"The upgraded Mana Cannon. At D-Class I could run up to ten thousand TP. Now that I'm B-Class, I don't know how much further I can compress it."
"How big is a Mana Cannon's strike range?"
"Mm. When I was D-Class, a Mana Cannon left a crater a kilometer across where it went off."
Her face went bloodless at the blast range.
"Th-then an M-Cannon's expected blast range is...... twenty kilometers?"
"Probably? The more you compress TP, the more the range grows, exponentially, so twenty thousand TP might erase something like a hundred kilometers. That was at D-Class, though. Now that I'm B-Class, even I don't know how far it goes."
"E-even that already exceeds the indirect strike range of a twenty-one-kiloton tactical nuclear bomb."
"Does it? Hm. If I set off a hundred-thousand-TP M-Cannon later......"
I don't know how big twenty-one kilotons is. But the range widens the more TP is compressed, so a rough calculation says a hundred-thousand-TP M-Cannon means an explosion of at least a thousand kilometers.
Set that off in Seoul and most of Japan next door gets swept under, part of Russia with it, and Beijing, China's capital, falls inside the radius too.
She asked, looking like she couldn't get air.
"Are you planning to destroy the Earth?"
At the firmness of it she recoiled, grabbed my arm, and shook.
"Then just don't hand them an excuse in the first place! Your ability is so absurdly broken that rare attributes don't even impress you, but poach a rare ability user and that instant it really is war! Don't you know that eighty years ago Japan nearly destroyed itself poaching special-type ability users from all over the world, and almost got the country wrecked by global trade retaliation and political sanctions?!"
"Those bastards were dumb enough to steal them by the hundreds and thousands!"
How can she lump me in with people that thoughtless? I glared at her, reproachful, and she glared right back, eyes blazing.
"You really can't! Just throw the British royal family one high-grade Phase Stone and ask them to send talent. If you go around picking fights over nothing, I will not let it go!"
She smacked the back of my hand, eyes fierce. I watched her, sullen, then said I understood.
"All right. I won't deliberately do anything that'll start trouble. That good enough?"
"Yeah. That's enough. If they touch us first and something comes of it, I'll help you pay them back."
Help, she says. More like she'll be my brake. But...... that much is fine.
Whether that was the answer she'd wanted, she closed her eyes and let out a long breath of relief.
"Still. How can one person have power like that? The more I think about it, the less I understand."
After that she started hanging strange nicknames on me. Walking tactical weapon. Human missile. I smacked her across the back and tickled her side without mercy. She screamed and ran.
I chased her and kept at her ribs. She laughed until tears came, crouched, and covered her side with her arms. Ticklish spots aren't only on the ribs, though.
I caught her long hair and tickled the nape of her neck and her earlobes, and she started rolling across the grass in agony.
Watching that, I thought about it.
I wonder how many I'd end up dropping on Japan.
Around the time the day grew dusky, we reached the temple at two o'clock.
It had the same exterior, the same size, and the same bird statue as the eleven o'clock temple. Only the mural differed a little. Here the composition was a dog and a bird.
While Sis sent several spheres of light up into the air and looked the place over, it hit me that I'd left the video recorder running ever since we escaped Cloud Island.
......That footage doesn't have Sis naked on it, does it?
No idea if I can cut and splice the recording. I'll have to find out later whether it can be edited.
Using the Certifier's recorder, I started capturing the mural in detail. The twenty-meter bird statue too, and the interior of the cella.
Once I had a rough record, I took the mural in.
The story carved there was a little different from the eleven o'clock temple.
A dog, smaller than the Supergiant Turtle but still enormous, with two tails and an angry face, spewing from its mouth something that might have been wind or fire, glaring at an island floating in the sky and at a bird.
For some reason the bird on the floating island was angry too, its whole body bristling with something that might have been flame or feathers.
Around the dog, every kind of four-legged beast crowded together, and between the dog and the bird, winged humans and beasts were locked in combat. Each wall showed them fighting in the mountains, in the sea, on the plains.
"A turtle, a dog, and a bird. If the six o'clock temple has a snake, maybe it means the Four Guardians? What do you think, Sis?"
"Mmm~ The turtle's drawn pretty simply, and this one is less a White Tiger than a dog with two tails, so it'd be hard to call them the Four Guardians, wouldn't it?"
"Hmm. If the bird carved here is the same grade as that Supergiant Turtle I saw, there's absolutely no beating it. And since I've killed two of the winged humans who seem to worship this bird, if we run into it, it'll attack on sight, won't it?"
"Don't scare me!"
Half frightened, half angry, she raised her staff and rapped my head. I ignored the staff knocking on my skull like a wooden temple block, looked at the bird statue, and muttered.
"If I hadn't killed the Pegasus that came at us on the first day, maybe we could have talked......"
If so, maybe I could have heard something about the Supergiant Turtle too.
Then it occurred to me that the winged-woman aberrant had spoken first, but she hadn't treated us as equal persons. The Pegasus had attacked me without preamble too.
Were they a hostile species from the start?
If they were rational, intelligent beings, they ought to judge right and wrong properly. And yet it had been more like, whatever the reason, you dared kill a Pegasus? You're the enemy.
More than that, the winged-woman aberrant was a High-Tier Variant.
If I'd let her get close and strike first, the one who died might not have been that winged woman. It might have been me. And Sis had been right there.
If she'd been caught in the aftermath of a first strike and hurt, or killed...... God.
A chill ran through me, and I brushed my arm.
I was turning all this over when Sis, who'd been watching my face, spoke.
"The Pegasus attacked first, didn't it? Hostile and aggressive enough to strike first. Even if you'd left it alone, it would've turned into a fight because of that. The second winged human was the same. No interest in talking. Just full of the will to fight."
"Yeah."
I talked it through with her, finished the mural, then slowly walked the inside of the temple, and somehow the place felt eerie.
A species unfriendly to humans...... Sis must have felt something similar. She shivered and started tugging my arm.
"Seoha. Let's just go back to camp."
"Yeah. I've taken a dislike to this place too. Resting here wouldn't feel like rest."
Cool air moved through the temple, but there was a chill under it, a sense of being pushed out. The winged women must have lived in a place like this. No wonder their personalities were that foul.
I looked up at the darkened sky, got Sis onto my back, gathered the four wings, and ran for the nine o'clock camp.