Floating Sky Islands (14)
Today was the day Sis was going home.
I'd taken a place at the eleven o'clock camp and spent the last few days watching her train, but the gray whale never showed itself again.
She gazed out over the navy-blue sea of clouds, regret written plain across her face.
"Mmm... I wish that child would come just one more time."
...Child? That monster? I'll never understand how women feel about these things. She'd fainted dead away at the gray whale's cry, and now she was pining to see it again.
When I asked what she'd liked so much about it, she said she simply wanted to hear that plaintive cry one more time.
Over my wistful sister's hand, three orbs shedding black light turned in slow circles. That was the Fusion Darklight she'd finally managed to pull off yesterday — the fruit of failure after failure, until she saw my mana cannon and took her inspiration from it.
Condense a dark attribute at the core, wrap the outside in light, then set the whole thing turning slowly from the center outward, and black light bled out from within like ink through water, until at last an orb pouring pure blackness was complete. That was what she had now.
To test its power, we'd tracked down a Mid Grade flying aberrant and fired. The speed sat about even with a Light Bolt, and it homed besides. The instant it touched the thing, black mist blew outward like a chemical weapon, and pitch-black lightning poured down in writhing sheets, roasting the aberrant and boiling it away to nothing.
The raw force was close to a Mana Bullet. The difference was the spread. A Mana Bullet unmakes a wide field all at once; Darklight felt like it erased a patch not even a meter across. And it drank far more TP to do it.
Fusion Darklight melted earth, water, and timber without caring which was which, and Sis had taken such a shine to it that she was grinning as she practiced forming the orbs faster and more stably. The ones turning over her hand were that practice. The more of them she kept aloft, the harder they were to handle, so even floating them and setting them spinning counted as training.
Right after she'd made the first one yesterday, she could manage a single orb. By the time we ate, she had two. Now she was working three. Her proficiency was climbing fast, so I'd congratulated her — and she'd shaken her head, as if I had it wrong.
"Three is already a nightmare to control. I'm going to keep practicing until I can throw five around without even thinking!"
And with that she went back to spinning them, full of drive.
Nine hours from now, Sis would return to reality. She didn't seem to have noticed, but Spatial Perception picked up an invisible mass of light hovering around her, drinking in Phase Power. Once that thing had absorbed enough, it would send her home.
So. Should I tell her?
"Sis. I've got something important to say."
"Hm? What is it?"
"Nine hours from now, you're going back to reality."
"..."
She must have already seen where this was going. The color left her face.
"There's a good chance I won't be able to go back. And I can't bring Grand Blue's raiders in here, either."
At that her eyes flew wide. She hurled the Darklight into the sky, closed on me, seized my arm, and shook it.
"What?! Don't tell me you're planning to cross over to that island?!"
"Afraid so."
"No — you can't! We came in together, didn't we?! Maybe we can go back together too...!"
"I've been thinking about it, and honestly, the fact that I got pulled in with you at all feels like luck."
As I said it, I remembered the sensation of something trying to shove me back out when the Phase World swallowed us, and tears welled in her eyes.
"Th-then just wait here! I'll bring people back with me, so there's no reason to go sticking your foot into somewhere dangerous, is there? Even if you went down to the surface..."
"That's my line. There's no reason to drag Grand Blue's main force into a dangerous place for nothing."
As I spoke, I raised a Space Wall and stepped up onto it.
"I've got a way to walk the sky now, so I don't need a wind-attribute user either."
"..."
"So I'm going to practice walking the sky, in case I have to run. After that I'll cross to the Great Island in the east and look for a Return Point."
I showed her — building the Space Wall out slowly, and walking it.
I'd been a little worried when I couldn't find a Return Point in the basin either, but now that I had a way to move through the sky, that was a relief.
"Ugh. Then I'll stay too!"
"Does that even make sense? Quit acting like an idiot and calm down. When you go back, haul the winged woman's corpse and the rest of it with you. Once you're through, explain things properly to Franc and Hwayeon. Tell them I'll be back soon too."
"Uuuugh."
Tears, a wilted sulk, and a funeral gloom, all fighting for the same face. It was honestly hilarious. I grinned and pinched her cheek, and she pinched the back of my hand with a look that said oh, is that how it is?
"Don't worry. You know what my abilities can do by now, don't you? I'll look the Great Island over, and if there's nothing there I'll drop down through the sea of clouds and check the ground side too. You go back to reality and let people know I've reached B-Class and gotten even stronger, so they can relax. And spread the word that I can throw my weight around now."
"Throw your weight around?"
"Yeah. Throw my weight around."
"...Pfft."
Was the phrasing that funny? Hwayeon had snorted at it, Yeongeun had snorted, and now Sis was laughing too. Either way, it seemed to have settled her.
She'd been sensitive about my safety since we were little, so I couldn't say I didn't understand — but I still wished she'd ease off a little. She kept watching my back with that worried look while I practiced shaping the Space Wall into every form I could think of.
They say that no matter how much a child grows, parents only ever see a little kid. To Sis, it seemed, no matter how strong I got, I was still nothing but a fragile little brother she had to protect.
Once I was reasonably used to raising a Space Wall and dismissing it, I shut off the Mana Sieve and tried making one without it.
Hmm. Maybe because I'd made so many already, I could still put a Space Wall up — but only simple shapes, rectangles and squares, and it laid a heavy load on my head. It felt like something dense had settled at the base of my skull, the way it does after an all-night online game.
I kept producing them without a break for ten minutes, and the ache at the back of my head tightened until a headache started creeping up. I focused the Mana Sieve on my skull, and the headache and the stiffness eased a little. But that was only a stopgap. Ten minutes later a fatigue hit me like an hour of distance running followed by an hour of swimming on top of it.
"Using the Space Wall without the Mana Sieve might be too much."
On any other day Sis would have reacted to my muttering. Instead her attention had been stolen by the mass of light drifting around her. It had begun to glow, faintly, four hours ago; by the time lunch was behind us, it was bright enough to be seen even in sunlight.
I sighed, cleared the Space Wall away, and flopped onto my back on the hill to give my tired head a rest.
And then I shot upright. That mass of light — that was a Return Point reserved for first-timers, wasn't it? Pour Phase Power into it, and she'd go back right away, wouldn't she?
"Sis! Sis, Sis, Sis, Sis!"
I ran over in an undignified flurry, calling her name over and over, and she looked up at me with startled eyes — still seated, still poking the light-mass with a fingertip.
"Huh? What? What is it?"
"I've got something I need to test!"
I left her looking dazed and fetched the winged woman's corpse and the four wings I'd hidden in the shade. Should I keep the unicorn horn? It was sturdy. Might serve as a weapon, just in case. Then I set the corpse on my seated sister's lap and stacked all four wings on top of it.
"Ack?! Wh-why are you doing this?"
"You might be able to go back right now!"
"Kya—! Ow, ow, ow! W-wait! Seoha, wait—! Just wait a second!"
I froze at the scream. She thrashed, shoved the corpse and the wings off her lap, sprang to her feet, and started whaling on my back.
"Ow, that stings!"
"Say something first! You just dropped over a hundred kilos on my lap! Are you trying to kill your sister?!"
The four wings were about five kilograms each, twenty altogether, and the winged woman's corpse was around a hundred — a hundred and twenty combined. Having well over a hundred kilograms land on your lap must have felt like torture.
"Thanks to the Mana Sieve your body's tough, so maybe you don't feel it, but ordinary people get their legs broken if a hundred-kilo object lands on their lap!"
"You're a C-Class ability user now too. I know this much is fine. Team Leader Kim Ga-min walked around perfectly well with a hundred-kilo pack on her back when the verification team came home."
"Hey! I haven't done a single strength workout! Do you have any idea how hard Team Leader Kim Ga-min and Cha Soyoung train?! And doing it without a word is not the same as doing it when someone's braced for it!"
I flinched under the glare she cut at me. S-so that was how it was?
At the sight of me standing there like a fool, she sighed, stretched both legs out, and with a strained grunt hauled the cocoon-wrapped corpse of the winged woman onto her lap. She settled her posture for a moment, then gestured for the rest of the wings.
I stuck my lip out and set all four on her the way she'd asked, and a Water Ball came flying and cracked me in the head.
Splat!
"Hey! One at a time! One at a time!"
...Just you wait.
Whetting my revenge, I handed the wings over one by one, just as she'd said. With the corpse and all four wings piled on her thighs, Sis squinted faintly at the weight. At last she took her staff in hand, eyed the unicorn horn in mine, and asked:
"You don't have to bring that?"
"Just in case. I'll carry it as a staff, and take it with me when I go back. You've got the high-grade Phase Stone safe, right?"
"It's tucked in my skirt pocket."
She turned her hand and tapped one spot on the skirt. I confirmed the stone was there with Spatial Perception, then spoke.
"I figure you'll handle things fine once you're back, but put Mom and Dad at ease, and get word to Franc and Hwayeon. I'll return as fast as I can."
"Got it. But can I really go back right now?"
"Newly awakened ability users, the first time through, can't operate Phase Power — but I've got the Mana Sieve. A Return Point's formed around you, so if I feed it Phase Power, you ought to be able to go back right away."
I told her how, at the end of my own first time in the Phase World, I'd killed the two-tailed fox and made it back early on the Phase Power that spilled from the fox's corpse.
"Hmm. So that can happen."
"Oh — right. Can't you use Phase Power techniques too?"
"Huh? I can't."
She looked up at me as if I'd said something absurd. She really couldn't? I'd thought she was metering TP in her attack skills...
"Ah, that just sort of became possible on its own."
She'd gone a little tense, it seemed; she clutched the four wings to her chest, looking uneasy. I sat down beside her and drew her into my arms. She rested her head against my chest and sighed.
"...I wish we could go back together, just like this."
"Don't worry. Even if I can't go with you, I'll find a Return Point as fast as I can and follow."
Once I was sure she'd steeled herself, I reached out and touched the mass of light floating before her.
I fed TP into it slowly, with the sense of pushing it in, and the light began to swell, the clumps growing larger and brighter. But as I'd expected, though the space around us rippled, I felt nothing at all.
"I'll be right behind you. Go on ahead."
"Y-yeah! You'd better follow right away, you hear me!?"
Brightened to its limit, the mass of light flared all at once as if it meant to explode, and then went past brightness altogether, washing my vision pure white. By the time the glare had grown so strong I couldn't see a thing, I felt Sis's hand tighten where it gripped my waist — and the next instant my arms were empty, and her presence was gone.
When the light faded and the world settled back to what it had been, I was sitting alone in the camp.
I'd expected it. Actually being left behind still felt hollow.
I shook off the lingering attachment and got to my feet. Being completely alone, without even Franc, restlessness and unease lifted their heads — so I dusted myself off and forced the pair of them to bow. I stood a moment, looking down at the place where Sis had been sitting, and gripped the unicorn horn hard.
"All right. First, let's have a look at the small island at seven o'clock."
Cloud Island and Star Island lay off Basin Island's ten o'clock, and at seven o'clock and four o'clock there was one island each, about a quarter of Basin Island's size. As a C-Class I'd had no way across, so I'd left them be. Now that I was B-Class and could raise a Space Wall, I could walk the sky — which meant I ought to go and see.
The isolated island at seven o'clock from Basin Island was a wasteland. Look closely, and there were traces of something that had once bridged Basin Island and that barren ground. A passage, maybe, that the gray whale had rammed to pieces. After that, the herbivores trapped on the wasteland island would have stripped it bare, and once the food was gone the animals would have starved — and that, I figured, was how it had ended up a wasteland like this.
The island sat about two kilometers below Basin Island's surface, sunk in the sea of clouds, invisible by ordinary means. When the clouds sat lower you could make it out faintly, but today they had climbed quite high.
"Does this sea of clouds have tides, too?"
Idle nonsense. I built a diagonal slide connecting me to the wasteland island and went whooshing down it, and in an instant I was standing on the ground.
A Space Wall shaped like a slide — three meters wide, a meter thick, 1.3 kilometers long — and 360,000 Phase Power drained away just like that.
"Should've made stairs and split it into thirds."
No idea what might happen out here, and I'd spent ten percent in a single go. Careless. Stairs, a third at a time, and I could have recovered TP on the way. This was the Phase World, so Phase Power would come back quickly — but I'd have to be more careful in reality.
The moment I set down, damp soil gave under my feet. I moved slowly, on my guard, and after about ten minutes of walking I had the island's overall shape. It was crudely formed like a car, and so large that even 4.5 kilometers of Spatial Perception only took in half of it.
The problem was that this wasteland had no Return Point. Not just no Return Point — no grass, no animals, no aberrants. Nothing at all. Literally an enormous clod of dirt.
Worrying. At this rate, was I really going to have to cross to the Great Island? There was supposed to be a Highest-Rank aberrant over there. Same tier as that Rogue Imugi bastard. Honestly, if you looked at class alone, that thing and I were the same grade now, so if it came to a fight I could fight. Still, if I could help it, I wanted to gather a little more Phase Power first.
I let out a long sigh and turned to head back to Basin Island — and felt a gaze.
This wasn't the first time I'd sensed a stare rushing in from outside my Spatial Perception, and tension locked into my body on its own. Pretending I'd felt nothing, I shaped the Space Wall into stairs and climbed slowly, searching for where it was coming from. The direction was... Cloud Island? I'd no sooner pinned it than I rose above the clouds, and in that instant the gaze on my skin vanished.
What had that been?
I slipped back down into the clouds, and the gaze returned at once, so I scrambled back out.
"Ah, seriously. Not knowing what it is makes it worse than those damned paparazzi."
Grumbling, I returned to Basin Island and started toward the island at four o'clock. Partway there, the six o'clock temple entered my Spatial Perception.
The winged woman was still in the exact same posture, not a twitch out of her, offering prayers to the idol.
Fifteen days without so much as being able to jerk off, and starving besides, and a wicked little urge rose up to tempt me. Sis was gone. The woman herself would never know. What did it matter if I stole a look at a naked body?
...Right?
I sneaked a look at the winged woman's naked form through Spatial Perception, and — oh, damn. A body so fine the praise slipped out of me on its own. Nine heads tall, the kind of glamour that only shows up in manga and anime. I had to wonder how a waist that narrow was holding up a chest with breasts bigger than watermelons. On size alone they were a good half again Franc's. She was forty centimeters taller, granted, but still.
I'd always preferred a firm figure — Franc, Hwayeon, Yeongeun, those golden-ratio builds — and thought anything past ample into that obscene extreme wasn't for me. This was enough to change a man's tastes.
Then I remembered what the winged woman had said to me.
"Said she could smell something foul in my soul..."
Right. A decent person would never pull a peeping stunt this filthy.
"...Should I just punish her?"
The moment I let that half-serious mutter out of my mouth, the winged woman flinched, lifted her head, and glanced left and right.
What was that? Had she felt my rotten little thought? Whoa. The feeling was strange beyond belief. I'd only thought about punishing her, and I'd brushed her instincts. Was she that sensitive, or were my thoughts far enough gone to make her start like that...
Anyway. One last sweep of those enormous watermelon breasts — big enough to clear a J-cup, swaying every time she moved — and I reached the four o'clock side of Basin Island and looked down at another wasteland island.
Here too the clouds had piled high, and the island couldn't be seen. Going down into the sea of clouds to look felt wrong, with that unsettling gaze still on me, so I made footholds of Space Wall and wandered over the clouds instead. This one was a little larger than the wasteland island at seven o'clock. And of course there was no Return Point, and not a single living thing.
"Ughhh. There's really no answer here."
Muttering, I glared discontentedly at the great cliff visible in the distance. The cliff of the eastern island, clouds wrapped about its waist, pressed on a person with as much weight as any jagged vertical face.
So I had to go there, did I? Where there were Highest Tier things, and Transcendent-grade, and maybe even a Phase-grade aberrant?
Nothing for it. If only to take the Great Island's shape into my eyes, I started building stairs and climbing high into the sky.
I ought to practice moving through the sky with Space Walls, too. Making them short and small would conserve TP better than making them wide and long. Once I got used to it, I might really raise walls no bigger than the soles of my feet and sprint across the sky. A flying delinquent, quite literally.
Stepping along the amber Space Wall, I climbed about a kilometer, and it grew warm enough to feel almost cozy. On Basin Island there'd been a slight chill. Strange. Feeling the warmth, I looked down past my feet, and through the amber, translucent wall the whole of Basin Island lay clear before my eyes.
A view to shrivel a man's liver, sure. But even if I fell, I could throw together something like a slide, or kick on Mana Mode - Acceleration, harden my body, and slam a broad Space Wall under my feet.
Which is to say, the railing I'd put along the edge of the Space Wall was absolutely not there because I was scared.
Holding that rail and climbing on and on, the ground of the eastern island — the Great Island — gradually came into view. Taken as a whole, it was flat country, terrain that stood in contrast to Basin Island. If Basin Island was hill land based on grassland, with conifer forest growing over it, the Great Island looked like a tropical savanna. Grass nearly the color of gold stretched from end to end, and here and there tall trees seemed to be growing.
After I'd reached more than two kilometers above the Great Island's surface, I took in its overall shape. At the center was a lake the size of a wasteland island, with trees clustered especially thick along the shore. The strange part was an island at the lake's heart, a little smaller than Cloud Island — and it wasn't just an island, but one that thrust up like a tower. And that pure-white thing at its peak... was that a temple too?
Even at a glance, something immensely strong had to be there.
"All right. I am not going anywhere near that lake."
I made the resolve firmly, and strained my eyes for any other temples, but as expected I couldn't see one. If Franc were here, she'd have parsed every last detail and told me. East of the lake there were two smaller lakes as well, not even a tenth the size of the big one, and they didn't seem worth much attention.
"First, I'll start the search from the point farthest from the lake."
