Chapter 203: Floating Sky Islands (13)
The camp we'd put up toward three o'clock was closer to the two o'clock temple. Even so, for whatever reason, Siha and I both ended up moving to the one at nine.
Probably because of what was sitting in front of me. The corpse of a winged-woman aberrant, hidden under a heaped mound of branches and needle-sharp leaves.
The body was wound in its own wings like a cocoon. Over it I'd laid four wings, each more than three meters long, and then I'd dropped down nearby with no particular care for how I landed. Sitting made me want to lie flat, so I flopped onto my back, looked up at a sky soaked orange, and turned over the new ability I'd picked up today.
I'd been so caught up in the fact that I could touch a Wall of Space that I started wondering whether I could use the thing as a weapon. But inside my Spatial Perception I can already form it wherever I want. Hardly any point in bothering to shape it like a weapon, is there?
Just in case, I made a Wall of Space into a round rod and tried to take it in my hand. No matter how I strained, it stayed locked in empty air and would not budge an inch, as if the laws of physics were telling me to eat shit.
I formed another Wall of Space into a broad plank overhead and flopped onto my back on top of it. Down below, Siha — staff in hand, drilling her skills — looked up at me with open envy.
Mm. If it fixes itself to the spot where I create it, I can't make armor out of it either. I raised a Spatial Barrier just to check, but the barrier had no effect on the Wall of Space at all.
Within range of my Spatial Perception, I could probably cage even a Phase Cannon's blast with a Wall of Space. But if I can do that, I'd be better off attacking with the Wall itself. Firing a Phase Cannon and then controlling it again with a Wall of Space would just be digging the same hole twice.
I took the Spatial Barrier down and was still turning it over when Siha called up from below.
"Seoha~."
"Yeah."
"Show me the Phase Stone you got earlier."
I met those sparkling eyes, fished the high-grade Phase Stone out of my pocket, and tossed it to her. She caught it in both hands and turned it this way and that, admiring a stone that caught the moonlight and seemed to pour out a cold, piercing blue.
"So pretty~. They said the higher the grade, the prettier a Phase Stone is — prettier than a blue diamond, even......"
She gulped.
A Phase Stone that shines with a water-light grows clearer the higher its grade. A high-grade one, I'd heard, holds a radiance more beautiful than a blue diamond. However greed might itch at her, she couldn't quite bring herself to covet a stone worth three million TP, and she kept swallowing, face full of regret.
"The second winged human had a Phase Stone nestled in her heart. Talk about a jackpot. I hear most high-grade Phase Stones only move through state-to-state barter or auction. Wonder how much we could get for it."
She'd been going hehehe for a good while, holding the stone up to the moonlight, pressing it to her cheek, perfectly happy. Then she heard me. Her brows drew in, and she looked up.
"......Why are you looking at me like that. Like you're looking at a monster."
At that, Siha poured the words out as if she'd been waiting for them.
"I really wasn't going to say this. Are you even human? You saw the marks where that light-lightning hit the ground, right? You blocked that with your bare body and a single barrier, no special gear at all. On top of that, if I told anyone else that you took down a Peak-Rank Variant by yourself, they'd treat me like a crazy woman."
"So what are you trying to say......"
"You, who caught a Peak-Rank Variant alone, are a scarier monster than the Peak-Rank Variant!"
"That's not fair!"
I was protesting to a sister who had just classified her own little brother as a monster, and she shouted back with a face that said she truly had nothing left to say to me.
"You're the one being unfair! Do you have any idea how a raid team prepares when they're going after a Peak-Rank Variant? Eyes burning, everything on the line. The moment Combat Support locks one in as a target, they analyze every single thing about that aberrant. Analyze and analyze, until they've got the optimal gear to face it, resistance gear, physical-resistance gear! They start from the formation and run combat simulations dozens of times, hundreds of times! And even that isn't enough, so they bring in a tactician to analyze the flow of the fight itself — and you threw up a barrier, sent Phase Bullets whipping out, took I don't know how many lightning strikes without so much as a flinch, kept firing Phase Bullets, and then when you dropped, something went whoosh-whoosh and you just caught the Peak-Rank Variant!"
She'd dumped it all out without a pause for breath. She drew one deep breath, and then she threw something worse.
"You monster!"
"Wondering how much a high-grade Phase Stone would sell for was thoughtless enough to deserve all that? No — if I caught a Peak-Rank Variant by myself, you ought to praise me. Why am I getting scolded?!"
One idle question, and a whole storm of scolding. Figures.
"Ugh...... Think about why Hwarang only hunts one-eyed giants, you blockhead."
"Because they're easy to catch, I guess."
I answered flat, and she bristled.
"No! It's because that much know-how has piled up, gear specialized for one-eyed giants has piled up, and the team has specialized! Time River was world rank twenty-one, but Hwarang was twenty-five too! Their boss is a C-Class sensory ability user — have you never once thought about why they're world rank twenty-five?"
Why would I think about that. If I'm going to spare attention for a raid team, I'll spare it for Time River, or for my lovers.
Maybe she read it off my face. She thumped her chest, looking thoroughly fed up.
"For heaven's sake~! Among the world's top raid teams, a team that safely hunts a single kind of aberrant without a single casualty — and among the teams specialized for taking one kind, that kind being a Peak-Rank Variant — Hwarang stands alone. Even a raid team like that only stumbles into one or two high-grade Phase Stones, they're that hard to get, and you talked about it like you'd ducked into a neighborhood hole-in-the-wall and said, 'Ma'am, how much is this?'!"
"You see something expensive, it's normal to wonder what it goes for. Seriously."
I grumbled that she was awfully snippy over a Phase Stone, and she flared up and swung the staff through the air, whoosh, whoosh.
"The lady who built Hwarang is remarkable, and Boss Park Jiwoong, who's led a raid team like that all this time without any real trouble, is remarkable too. What you did was no different from shaming the both of them!"
"Don't turn it into a novel!"
"It's not a novel! That was the context, okay?!"
"I don't care. So what. I'm confident now I can just go catch Peak-Rank Variants on my own, you know? I'm more impressive!"
Getting chewed out over nothing, I was about ready to burst with spite.
She seemed just as unable to stand my attitude. She pounded her chest, the corners of her eyes gone sharp, and glared at me.
"Ugh, honestly. If you weren't my little brother......"
"If I weren't, then what. I'm stronger than you, aren't I?"
I said it as I dismissed the Wall of Space and stepped down onto the ground, and she couldn't hold it in. The staff came down on my head with a bonk.
"Must be nice, being so strong!"
"Ow! Why'd you hit me!"
"Because you're obnoxious, that's why!"
She raised the staff and bonked my head again, so I snatched it out of her hands and swung it into her backside. She yelped and ran.
"Kya!"
And while she ran, she fired Water Balls at me.
Pop. Pop-pop— splash!
She hadn't meant to hit me with them. She burst the Water Balls near me, and thanks to that I ended up looking like a drowned rat.
I stood there and said nothing. Then I growled, took up the staff, and went after her — and a flash burst right in front of my eyes, and the world went black. A Blind? I searched for her with Spatial Perception and found her fleeing, far off...... That was a clone.
Hiding with Shadow Jump? I probed for her Phase Power and felt it in a shadow in the bushes nearby. I strode toward it, and a waterfall dumped out of empty air.
"Pbbt—! Hey, what the—! Blrgh! Pwah!"
I took the water one dump after another and reached the place where she was, and she wasn't there. She'd bolted again.
"Nyah-nyah!"
Siha had appeared some thirty meters off, tongue flicking, making a fool of me. Her jump distance had grown again? Never mind that.
"If I catch you, you're not walking away!"
Aside from physical reinforcement I had no way to catch her, so I raised Mana Mode and gave chase. She used light, water, and Shadow Jump to slip around me, throwing water bombs and toying with me the whole way.
"Whoa~! Shadow Jump is so annoying! I can't catch her on physical reinforcement alone!"
"Ahaha!"
She kept vanishing by a hair — pop, pop — setting off water bombs and flashes right in my eyes, and I couldn't lay a hand on her, and my blood pressure—!
Truly fed up, I lit Mana Mode—Acceleration on top of it and shot after her like lightning. She smiled, bright as anything, and fled in slow motion, and threw a Dark Ball into the air. In that instant she vanished, and popped back out from inside the Dark Ball's darkness.
"What?!"
Then she threw Dark Ball after Dark Ball, using them as mediums, and Shadow Jumped through empty air — pop, pop, pop. For a moment I was so floored I forgot to chase at all.
"Come and catch me~?"
That was...... ha. Seriously.
"......You think I can't catch you?!"
We kept at it until the sun was all the way down and the moon and stars had come up, and then, as if none of it had happened, we giggled and started on dinner.
On the eleventh day since we'd come in, we went down into the basin without a second thought, caught an antelope, and gorged on meat from morning on. Around lunch we set out at an easy pace to take the winged human at the six o'clock temple.
Meaning to move our base, we brought the first winged woman's corpse — the one we'd kept — and the second winged woman's four wings, and shifted to the camp on the six o'clock hill at the outer edge of Basin Island. We hid the corpse and the wings well, and looked over the last temple.
"That temple's the same. Only a winged-woman aberrant and one Pegasus. The winged woman is a Peak-Rank Variant with 2.2 million Phase Power, and the Pegasus is a Mid-High Rank Variant."
Spatial Perception had expanded hard, out to 4.5 kilometers, so even from the hilltop the temple came through in full detail. I'd set the temple at the very edge of my range to sense it, and the winged woman didn't seem to have noticed us.
She was kneeling in front of the bird statue, hands pressed together, offering a prayer. The Pegasus sat behind her, head drooped to the ground, eyes closed.
I ran Spatial Perception over the winged woman from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet and compared her to the corpse I'd hidden. They were identical, as if they'd been pressed from the same mold. The second winged-woman aberrant, the one that had been completely annihilated, had looked exactly the same too, hadn't she?
Phase Power around 2.2 million, so unfortunately there was no Phase Stone. Still, we'd already scored one worth three million. I'd have to be satisfied with that.
For the record, that Phase Stone was sitting quietly in Siha's pocket. She wanted to hold onto it only until we returned to reality, or so she said.
We ate an early lunch and started getting ready to fight, and she looked at me and asked.
"What'll you do? You gonna kill her right away with a Wall of Space?"
"No. I want to try talking first."
"......Isn't that a little too much nerve?"
"I really am curious about the Supergiant Turtle. If we can't communicate and she attacks first, I'll deal with her right away. If not, I want to talk. If it isn't her, I don't think there's any way to learn about the Supergiant Turtle."
"Hmm."
She seemed bothered, somehow, that I'd only now thought of talking. I watched her face and asked.
"You don't like that we've already caught two, and now I want to talk?"
"A little. I keep getting the feeling that we're being selfish......"
"......Then should we just not?"
What she'd offered looked emotional, but in her eyes all kinds of thoughts were flickering past. So I asked what she wanted, and she flustered and apologized all over again.
"Huh?! N-no, no! I'm sorry. I said something tactless for no reason, didn't I? Come on, let's go. This time I'll hide in the forest again, watch, and support you?"
"No. That wasn't what I meant by asking."
"Mm. I know what you're trying to say. I just suddenly had a weird thought from out of nowhere. Don't mind it, let's go!"
"Huh? H-hey."
She took the lead down the slope ahead of me. I followed, and opened my mouth.
"Your support yesterday was the best. If you hadn't pinned its position with black lightning, I might still be fighting."
"Hmph~ Say compliments like that a little earlier!"
The tone was pure scolding. Her face, though, was smiling, soft and bright. I smiled back, and we closed on the temple — and the moment the distance to the winged-woman aberrant dropped under four kilometers, she rose from where she sat and started looking our way.
So a Peak-Rank Variant's Phase Power detection range was four kilometers?
"Sis. This time, don't act first until the fight actually starts. Got it?"
"Got it."
The second time, maybe that horse-head had come charging like it was having a fit because Siha used a dark-attribute ability. Only a guess. No way to know if it was true. Being careful couldn't hurt.
Ah, should I have told her to leave that staff behind too? As if. Then she'd have had to leave the Phase Stone in her pocket as well.
Anyway, I let both arms hang loose, meaning no harm, and walked slowly toward the temple. The winged-woman aberrant came out of the cella, and the Pegasus came out behind her.
She walked as far as the edge of the stone platform and stopped. When we came out of the short stretch of forest, she looked dead at us.
Ability-user correction had sharpened my eyes and Siha's, but a face at about a kilometer was still hard to make out...... The winged woman, being an aberrant, seemed to be looking at our faces.
I didn't stop. I kept walking, and when I'd closed the distance to 440 meters, the Pegasus flinched and started watching me with caution.
Was a Mid-High Grade's Phase Power detection range 440 meters? That Elephantros second-in-command had seemed to have a longer one......
The Pegasus was wary, so I stopped. The winged woman, who had been standing in silence, opened her mouth.
"What is your business, apostate?"
A voice that, at this distance, should have been impossible to hear rang through my head. More importantly — apostate? She was looking at me, so was she talking to me? Why would I be an apostate. I don't even have a religion.
I cleared my throat and raised my voice.
"There's something I want to ask, so I came looking. I know it's rude, but would you answer?"
"The stench rising from your soul is an agony difficult to face. Go back."
Ah— irritation surged up hot from my gut. So I'm rotten all the way down to my soul? What, you want a look at the darling little demon-prince of carnivores?
"Rude, for a first meeting."
"The rudeness was yours from the start. How shameless are you, to harm my sisters and then come to me with questions?"
......Not just me. Siha's face went red too.
She'd known? No, of course she would have...... Even so, she was only wary, faintly, with no sign of moving to attack. Relieved at that much, I spoke.
"My sister and I were only defending ourselves. They came at us. We couldn't just stand there and say please kill us."
"That is precisely why I, too, am remaining still. To hope that an answer to your curiosity will leave my mouth is the same as hoping that %!@%$ will ^$&@!."
What were those two words in the middle? I couldn't understand them, and I couldn't have pronounced them if I tried.
"It isn't much. I only want to ask one thing. About a giant turtle, over twenty kilometers tall."
"......Why is it that you know of &%^@?"
A faint twitch passed over the winged woman's face, expressionless until then. I didn't miss it. My eyes lit, and I asked again.
"If I tell you, will you answer the question?"
She was silent.
Siha had gone still, breath held, focused on the exchange between me and the winged woman. The Pegasus looked from one of us to the other, showing a faint wariness of its own.
For now, the way things were flowing didn't seem all that bad......
The winged woman closed her eyes, looking as if she were deliberating, so I just opened my mouth.
"A while back — not even a hundred days ago, if you count by the date — I met it in person. And it asked something of me. 'Do not hate them.' I want to know what that turtle is, and why it said that to me."
"...You... I cannot answer that question."
Hmm. Her face all but said, I cannot tell the likes of you that. An oddly easy face to read, so I tried again, just in case.
"You won't? Or you can't? ......You don't know?"
Nothing.
"......Is there someone who can tell me?"
Nothing.
"Are they on the great island to the east?"
The silence stretched.
"Can the one with three pairs of wings tell me?"
"Y-you......"
Every time I put a question to her, her eyebrow trembled. At the last, her brows kinked the wrong way, and she looked at me as if to ask whether I was reading her mind.
"Every thought you've got shows on your face."
The winged woman knit her brows, then let her head sink.
"Anyway, thanks for talking. A return courtesy, maybe — I don't know if it counts — but we'll behave for the time we have left, and then we'll go. Don't attack us either."
Siha sent me a look that asked whether this wasn't far too careless. But I had a hunch that winged woman wouldn't attack us, and that was why I could make the call. Not because she liked us, or anything like that. More like there was a reason I couldn't name.
"Sis. Let's go."
"Mm."
The winged woman and the Pegasus stayed exactly as they were until we entered the forest. Spatial Perception showed the Pegasus, as if worried, lightly nudging her shoulder with its muzzle.
She was silent a moment. Then she lifted her head, sent a hollow, empty look after us, and went back into the temple, and began praying to the bird statue in the exact same posture as when we'd first seen her.
On the way to camp, I said it.
"Mm. If I shape a Wall of Space into a foothold, I could cross to the island beside us. But that six-winged winged human supposedly on that island feels like it'd be a Highest-Rank Variant, and I'm scared to cross."
If a fight broke out, the disaster wouldn't be a small one. I was turning that over when Siha, trudging along looking drained from the few minutes of facing the winged woman, asked.
"......You're not thinking of crossing to The Great Island next to us, are you?"
"Even if I go, I'll cross alone. I'm not taking you."
"No! Don't go, okay? What if a Highest-Rank Variant comes at you with no sense of restraint, like that second winged human?!"
"I'm scared too. I don't want to go right now. Don't worry."
"Whew...... Anyway, is it really all right to go back like this? We never checked the temple murals."
"I already checked all of it with Spatial Perception. Just as you guessed, the six o'clock temple had a mural of an immensely long serpent and a firebird glaring at each other. The giant serpent was floating in the air with its body coiled round and round, and the ground was a carving cut into the stone, packed with every kind of snake and lizards standing on two legs. Only, unlike the mural on the two o'clock side, it was a mural where no fight had broken out?"
"Mmm...... I think you're right. These temples and murals do seem like they have something to do with the gods of the four directions. The composition would just be a difference in how close each one is to the master of the firebird statue."
"So they're on terrible terms with the dog, so-so with the turtle, and nothing at all to the snake......"
I was muttering it when Siha started glancing at me again, anxious all over. She didn't want me crossing to the eastern island. I brought up something else, to pull her mind off it.
"For now I've got video of Cloud Island, Star Island, and Basin Island, and of the gray whales and the temples, and I've taken photos too. Once we're out, if we hand it to an expert, they'll turn up some small clue at least, right?"
"When did you film that? I didn't even notice you taking pictures."
"I just filmed a bit to show off to the kids at school. Doesn't look like I'll get to brag, though."
She found the answer so absurd that her face went blank with it, and then she broke into a short laugh. The anxious look thinned. Seemed I'd managed to change the subject.
Back at the six o'clock camp, we were standing there looking at the winged woman's corpse, the four wings, and a single unicorn horn when Siha prodded my backside with the staff and asked.
"So what now? We've got about four days left. You just going to train, and then head back?"
"That's the plan. And before we go back, I should fire the Phase Cannon at least once, at minimum output."
Right now it was the eleventh day and eighteen hours. In three days and six hours, Siha would return to reality. The odds that I would were very low.
While we'd been moving through the basin, I'd swept all of Basin Island with Spatial Perception. I hadn't found a Return Point.
I glanced aside. Siha was fiddling with the high-grade Phase Stone, grinning slack and happy.
At the latest, I have to decide on the last day. Wait for the support team to come in, or cross to The Great Island in the east.
After that, at Siha's insistent request, we set up one more camp on the side with a view of Star Island, off at eleven o'clock. We called it a camp, which was generous. Dug a single mole-tunnel in the ground, hauled a bush over whole as a screen, and that was that.
If I had to guess, she wanted to see the gray whales gliding through the cloud sea one more time before she went back.
......Honestly, I want to catch that gray whale.
Siha hid behind the screen, stripped stark naked, and kept practicing Fusion Darklight. Even for a genius like her it seemed to be hard work. She failed again and again, flinging light and black mist everywhere.
Had the shot she'd landed on the Pegasus been a fluke? Dark Thunder came off readily enough, but Darklight seemed to be another matter.
It was a relief the explosions didn't hurt her. The problem was the dark-attribute black mist. Every time she failed, the black mist billowed out thick and melted everything nearby except her.
I was watching her practice through Spatial Perception when I decided to test the Phase Cannon myself. I settled my mind and started on a deep breath, and she must have sensed something. She scrambled into her clothes and came running, eyes bright, to watch.
I composed myself and condensed the minimum, 5,000 TP, in my palm. Then I gathered Phase Power and laid it over the top, and a blue bead was finished — the color of water in the dreadful deep, terrible just to look at.
The center of the bead rotated with the quiet of a typhoon's eye. The surface lay still as a lake. That contradiction was what made it dreadful. If this thing detonated......
I heard Siha swallow, and I fired the Phase Cannon at the sky, tuned to fly as far as it possibly could.
In five seconds it left my Spatial Perception, out past 4.5 kilometers, and climbed, and climbed. It vanished from sight in an instant, and for a long while it didn't blow.
"......When's it going to blow?"
"Right? I just sent it as far as I could...... Wonder when it goes."
We waited, wondering when it would detonate, until we were tired of waiting. Then, high in that sky, light flashed and burst outward.
It looked like a star exploding.
A shockwave spread first, a ring like a planet's belt, and at the center a sphere like a star in nuclear fission blasted sun-bright light in every direction......
The roar arrived late, and it laid a prickling chill over me. Siha stroked the nape of her neck. She'd gotten the chills too.
She'd been looking up at a second sun, briefly born in the sky. Startled, she turned to me and asked.
"It blew after ten minutes, right? How fast was it? If we calculate the distance, I think we can estimate the blast radius."
"It left 4.5 kilometers in five seconds, so...... 900 meters a second? Simple math, it detonated 540 kilometers out."
"Mmm......"
She flicked a calculator around in her head, her face went grave, and she shook it.
"If a Phase Cannon fell on a city, the whole city would evaporate."
"......The range is that big?"
"Run it through the formula and it's roughly fifty kilometers."
"Pfft, smaller than I thought. I figured it'd clear a hundred."
"You idiot. I mean the actual blast radius is fifty kilometers. Didn't you see the shockwave spread like a ring when it blew? Lump in the indirect range and the affected zone is hundreds of kilometers."
Maybe because we'd already gone back and forth yesterday about the Phase Cannon's blast radius, it wasn't quite enough to knock me flat. Even so, my color was bad.
Even Siha doesn't seem to realize. That was a Phase Cannon fired at minimum TP.
Anyway, if I had to give my impression of actually demonstrating the thing — whichever way you cut it, this was an ability I shouldn't use in reality. I'd fired the minimum TP and it was that bad. Gather 20,000 TP, and then what?
I'd tuned it to detonate as far off as possible, and that had still been 540 kilometers out, and the shockwave and the roar had reached all the way here. One slip and I'd be a suicide weapon. I'd be fine, of course, thanks to the barrier. But still.
Best to hold the Phase Cannon back, as much as I could.
Then again, when I fire a Mana Bullet or a Mana Cannon, there's a clear, lovely sound, like a string being plucked. Phase Bullets and the Phase Cannon don't have that. A little disappointing.