Sky Island (15)
Once I'd confirmed the shape of the Great Island, and before I actually crossed over to it, I started drilling—laying down a Wall of Space three meters wide and a meter thick, three hundred meters at a stretch, then wiping it away again.
I'd been at it for about ten minutes when I felt innumerable eyes on me. I looked toward the feeling, and from the direction of the Great Island's lake, pale shapes began rising in swarms.
......Hey. No. That's not—right?
Those white specks can't all be winged humans......
"Shit!"
I scowled at the blind volley of Light Bolts screaming my way, threw up a Spatial Barrier, forged an absurdly long road two meters wide leading away from the Great Island, and broke into a dead sprint.
They've got to be thirty kilometers off at least, and they still saw me?! How good are those eyes?!
I kept glancing back as I ran and tried to count them. A rough estimate blew past three hundred without even trying. They were too far to make out a shape, let alone how many wings each one had.
No way every last one of them is a two-pair High-Tier. Right?
I refreshed the Wall of Space path twice and fled all the way to the western tip of Basin Island. Only then did they stop spraying Light Bolts and turn back.
"Fuck. That scared the hell out of me."
They'd come from so far off that dodging hadn't been hard, but getting shot at with no way to answer left a bad taste.
I mean, of course I couldn't hit back. Fire on them, and what if a three-pair set I was guessing was Highest Tier came out—or a four-pair I was guessing was Transcendent-grade?
......Should I just charge in, sweep the whole lot, and bail? Or lob a mana cannon and blow them apart......
I shut off the Mana Mode - Acceleration I'd flicked on in the earlier panic and glared at the white specks descending in the distance, turning it over. No answer came.
For now, let's head back.
Throwing up long Walls of Space several times in a row had dropped my Phase Power to under half, so I rested a while and let it refill.
"Anyway. How the hell did they spot me?"
Twenty kilometers off, at the very least. There was no way they'd found me with whatever Phase Power sense an aberrant has.
Had some Highest-Rank Variant that might be sitting on that island said, There's a rotten-souled human over there. Seize him? Or were the winged humans' eyes just stupidly sharp, and they'd spotted me spying on them from the sky and opened fire......?
Both were plausible enough that I couldn't pick one. One of the two was almost certainly right.
I circulated Mana Sieve until I settled, then moved slowly back toward the Great Island. This time I dropped to roughly the same height as the island's ground. If the second theory was the right one and their eyesight really was that absurd, coming in again from the same high altitude would be idiotic.
I set spatial footholds at reasonable intervals, stepped across them, and replayed what had just happened.
All they'd done was fire Light Bolts from a distance. Hundreds of them dumping bolts like rain at once was insanely threatening, but the range was so extreme that the threat fell by more than half. And besides......
"It felt like warning fire. Like they were telling me not to come any closer. The chase looked half-hearted, too."
If they'd actually meant to harm me, they wouldn't have laid down a screen the way a battleship throws flak at incoming fighters. They'd have closed the distance, and then they'd have hammered me with light-lightning until I stopped moving.
......They weren't just unwilling to leave the protection of a Highest-Rank Variant, were they? I'm choosing to believe they weren't. If that were it, catching them would be impossible.
While I chewed on it, I reached the edge of the Great Island and set foot on solid ground. They didn't show themselves again.
I stayed at the island's rim for about an hour. The great host of winged humans never reappeared.
"So they really did spot me just because their eyes are that good?"
If that was all it was, fine, but...... Standing on the golden plain, I looked out at the faintly visible Tower Island and let out a long sigh.
Good thing I'd made my sister swear not to come in. A place where hundreds of light-attribute aberrants could open fire in unison—an ordinary raid team getting wiped to the last man wouldn't even be strange.
To clear a place like that, wouldn't a country have to mobilize every ability user it had?
Them swarming me doesn't scare me. What scares me is the Highest-Rank Variant or the Extreme-Rank Variant behind them. That's why I ran instead of hitting back.
Anyway, I still needed a Return Point. I set Spatial Perception turning at a calm, steady pace and started walking counterclockwise from the Great Island's edge.
The rough grass on the golden plain came up to my chest, and it made walking a genuine pain.
Pushing through the golden brush, I sorted the aberrants caught inside my 4.5-kilometer Spatial Perception. Pegasi and unicorns dominated, overwhelmingly. Most of them lived in herds—the majority Mid Grade, with the occasional Mid-High Grade mixed in.
When I'd looked down on the Great Island from the sky over the Floating Sky Islands, it had seemed like an ecosystem identical to a plain back in reality. Turns out aberrants were living in among it, here and there.
Well, obvious enough, maybe. Up through Mid-High Rank Variants they supposedly have to eat something to live, so they'd need animals to serve as meals. And with brush grown this thick, horse-types would have plenty to feed on.
I kept glancing warily toward the lake as I followed the rim, and bit by bit the Great Island's area came into rough focus.
"So... a little bigger than Jeju Island?"
Stupidly huge. Seriously.
Prrrrt.
And why is that unicorn brat coming this way? Shoo! Shoo! Get lost!
I widened my eyes and swung the unicorn horn my sister had named Baeka in a threatening arc. The moment it saw a horn of its own kind, those pure-white eyes went bloodshot, and it screamed—hee-hee-hee-hee-hing!—and charged.
"Ghk—you horse-faced—!"
I was being as careful as I possibly could, right where the distance to the lake was shortest, and of all times—!
The unicorn leveled its horn like a spear and came on at sports-car speed. I ground my teeth, triggered Mana Mode - Acceleration, slipped the horn aimed at my heart by the thickness of a sheet of paper, and clamped it under my arm.
"Hup!"
I put everything I had into a body throw and sent the thing flying.
Clean over the cliff.
Puh-hee-hee-hee-hing......!
I flipped the unicorn off as it vanished below the clouds, trailing that fading cry, then shot a glance toward the lake.
The winged humans didn't notice, did they?
Lucky the one that attacked had split off from its herd. If this had turned into a real commotion, I'd have had to run again.
I buried myself completely in the brush and scuttled along like a cockroach, rustle-rustle.
Where I was headed was a spur jutting out of the Great Island around the five o'clock position. It was the spot farthest from the lake, and the stretch of ground with the most area, so I'd picked it.
Be nice if a Return Point were somewhere around there......
Kwooooooong.
"Huh? A whale call?"
A resonance like something spreading through water began to sound from every direction. Unlike the slightly sharp cry I'd heard back on Basin Island, this one was heavy, and it didn't waver.
If my sister were here she'd already be nagging me to go look, but I'm not really a fan of fish. Wait—whales are mammals, aren't they? I ignored the whale song, focused on Spatial Perception, and kept moving low along the Great Island's outer edge in that same crouch.
Kwoooooooong......
"Yeah, yeah, I don't care. Getting home comes first. I've been holding out for fifteen days and I swear I'm about to grow stones! I miss Franc, and Hwayeon, and Yeongeun!!"
Kwoooooong......
"Can't hear you. Can't hear you."
Kwoooooooong......
......
Kwoooong......
......Ugh! If it were just a cry I'd ignore it, but every time I open my mouth it cries back. It really does feel like it's calling me!
At first it had seemed to roll in from every direction at once. Now I was pretty sure I could tell where it was coming from. I was heading southeast; if I bent my course a little and went due east, I had a feeling I'd see it.
Kwwoooooooong......
"......Ah, seriously!"
Fine! I'll take one look at the face that's calling me!!
I kicked on Mana Mode - Acceleration and just ran, drunk on the kind of speed Hwayeon and Yeongeun must have felt.
I was eight kilometers off the lake, and there were no pegasi or unicorns around here, so the brush had grown as tall as I was and hid me completely. Thanks to that, it wasn't many minutes before I reached the Great Island's eastern cliff.
A whale the color of the cloud sea was looking up at me with gentle eyes.
It was big.
Really big.
Genuinely, enormously big. It had its head up out of the cloud sea a little way off the cliff—body pure white, with stripes under the jaw that seemed to cover the whole of it.
The triangular head was close to the whales I knew. A blue whale, was it? The problem was that it ignored perspective. The thing was outside my Spatial Perception range, and yet it looked as clear as if it were right in front of me, and the ridge of its back, thrust out of the clouds, ran on until it met the end of the sky.
Is this thing insane? Going by bulk alone, it might be on par with the Supergiant Turtle......?
And there were wounds, all over that body......
"......You the one who called me?"
Kwoooong.
"So it is. Young human."
Talking after all. Not talking, exactly—meaning flowing straight into my head, the same as the Supergiant Turtle. The whale-song kwoong, kwoong in my ears and the meaning arriving in my head at the same time felt deeply strange.
"Why'd you call? I'm busy."
Kwoooooooong......
"Your heart, I see, is full of longing. I can tell that it is turned toward somewhere—yet there was no one but you I might ask for aid, and so, unavoidably, I called you."
An extremely kind, extremely polite whale.
"You read my thoughts?"
Kwoooooooong......
"Not thoughts—the heart. Though your ※※ may ※※, the heart is clear and pure, and it is trusting in that that I would ask your aid."
The whale had spoken two words I couldn't understand and couldn't put into speech.
Were the heart and the thoughts different things? Thinking about how people say the head and the heart run on separate tracks, maybe that was it.
But a request...... Hmm. I wanted to get home, and fast.
"What is it? If it's simple, I'll help."
Kwoooooooong......
"The favor I would ask of you is only this. Carry a single word to my mate, who should be beyond the wall, to the west."
"Your mate? You mean that gray whale body-slamming the little island out west?"
Kwoooong......
"......Is that so. She was doing such a thing......"
The whale closed those gentle-looking eyes and let out a sound colored, somehow, with sorrow.
Kwoooong.
"She would be the one."
"Then why make me do it? Just go tell her yourself. You said a wall, but I didn't see anything like a wall."
Kwoooooooong......
"Upon the ground where you stand, there is a being akin to myself. That being's influence cleaves this sea of clouds in two, and bars my mate and me from passing to one another. That is why......"
"Bars you? A wall? I didn't feel anything like that."
Kwoooooooong......
"The sky is theirs. You, too, can cross the sky, and so you are untouched by it......"
A being similar to this whale? Then was this whale Highest Tier too? ......I wanted to sidle closer and feel out its Phase Power with Spatial Perception.
Kwoooong......
"It has been too long since I have seen my mate. My heart has withered, and I can endure no more...... I beg you. Please......"
The cry came through so desperate it ached in the chest.
"How long has it been since you saw her?"
Kwoong. Kwoooong......
"The sun will have risen and set more than a hundred thousand times."
A hundred thousand? Divide a hundred thousand by 365 and...... Whoa?! Over 273 years?
If I couldn't see Franc, Hwayeon, and Yeongeun for that long...... I'd go insane. The moment I thought it, I couldn't bear not to help.
"Haah. I just have to go and pass it on?"
Kwoooong......?
"You will grant me aid?"
The enormous white whale sent a feeling of joy and tried to confirm it again. Tch. Getting home was going to be a little late.
"You've got a wife in the west you can't meet. If it were anything else I'd have refused, but since it's your wife, I'll help."
Kwoooong......!
"My thanks, young human!"
"Enough of that. My name's Seoha. Jung Seoha."
Kwoooooong.
"In the tongue of humans, I am called Album Cetus."
Huh? He's got a name in human language? Eh, whatever. Better to help fast and get home.
"So, what should I tell her?"
Kwoooong.
"Tell her this: let us meet again in the lower realm."
"That's all?"
Kwoooong.
"That will suffice. And the Transfer Origin you seek should appear if you go south from where you stand."
Transfer Origin? Does he mean a Return Point? Either way, a round trip out west from here is going to take a couple of hours, so I'd better make it quick.
Kwoooooong......
"Once you have delivered the message, return here before you go."
"Got it. Thing is, I haven't seen her these past few days, so I'm not sure I can deliver it right away."
Kwoooong.
"From within the clouds, call the name of my mate—Purus Balaena. Do so, and she will come to you."
I listened to a little more of the tale from the whale who called himself Album Cetus, then turned at once and ran for Basin Island.
This time I left the Great Island's ground entirely and ran a little below it, making Walls of Space into footholds. Crouching along and shoving through brush was too suffocating.
While I practiced laying the Wall of Space in small pieces only under my feet, I turned over what Album Cetus had told me—and once again I landed on the thought that those winged humans were bastards.
Album Cetus and Purus Balaena were what are called Dimension Whales. The two of them, with a single shared power, had made this sea of clouds—a dimensional barrier all their own—and wandered it together across vast ages.
Then one day a great island came into the sea of clouds along with winged humans, and they began using the sea of clouds as if it belonged to them.
The kind whale couple welcomed the ill-mannered visitors who had entered their dimensional clouds. The visitors had come in without a word, but the whales had felt in them the restless fear of something being pursued.
They should have been satisfied with that. Somewhere along the way, though, the winged humans even figured out how to move the sea of clouds, and started shifting it however they pleased.
At first the couple tried to seek a way to coexist, talking with the winged humans' leader. I'd have gotten angry. How kind could you be?
And to that kind couple, the winged bastards answered with sheer brazenness. They ambushed them without warning.
A single attack left Album Cetus and Purus Balaena badly wounded. They fled in haste into the sea of clouds, but the blows had come from different directions, so Album Cetus fled east and Purus Balaena fled west. As if that had been the point all along, the moment the couple was split, an incomprehensible wall of force stretched out from the Great Island and cut the sea of clouds in two—east and west.
I'd asked what the wall was. Album Cetus said he didn't know. Only that if you tried to approach, a counter-field equal to the force you applied sprang up and pushed you back.
I'd asked whether a body his size couldn't just smash it by ramming the island. The island lay inside the counter-field, so he couldn't. He'd tried to break it, of course, but the attacks reflected and only left him with grave wounds.
The scars on Album Cetus's body were from that.
On top of that, innocent little animals lived on the island. There had been a few chances to destroy it, but he couldn't bring himself to land a decisive blow...... Purus Balaena, animals or no animals, had been ramming Star Island and smashing the lot of it.
I told him his wife's temper must have given him some trouble, and I got back the feeling of a bitter smile.
I'd turned around after hearing only that much and started running the sky with Walls of Space under my feet. Listen any longer and the story looked like it would never end.
Anyway, I felt I'd done right to take the request. If I'd coldly refused a Dimension Whale that kind and gone home, I'd have slept badly.
I packed the thoughts away and put more of my focus into laying the Wall of Space.
At first I'd practiced making footholds ahead of myself and running across them. Then I decided that, once I got used to it, making the foothold at the exact spot my foot was about to land would be better, and I changed methods.
Trying it, the second way was the right answer.
Run on platforms I'd already laid and I kept checking the one under my feet, so my speed wouldn't climb past a certain point. Calculate the stride and make the foothold where the foot would come down, and once that turned familiar, the speed started to build.
At the start I hesitated along at a crawl, making big platforms and running over them. Little by little I shrank them and picked the pace up, and by the time I reached Basin Island I could make footholds fifty centimeters across, step on them, and run at fifty kilometers an hour.
The TP I spent making footholds fell far short of the Phase Power I recovered each second, so holding my Phase Power steady was easy, too.
With this, the weakness called aerial combat was gone completely. The three-dimensional maneuvering you see in some anime was still too much, but a little more practice and that would come as well.
Even without it, I was confident that in my current state I could overwhelm a High-Tier winged woman.
Along the way I found something interesting. I could only generate a Wall of Space inside my Spatial Perception range—but once I'd made one, it didn't vanish even after it left that range. It held.
Anyway. Practice included, I ran for about an hour, came in from the southeast, cut straight through Basin Island, and reached the northeast: the place where I had first seen Purus Balaena.
Run the sky with nothing in the way and this is how fast it gets.
"Whew. Without the Space Wall and Mana Mode, a run like this would've been a dream."
It came back to me then—cutting across the sky over Basin Island to shorten the distance, and the winged woman at the six o'clock temple flinching in surprise and looking my way.
Her startled face had been cuter than I expected. Thinking of her as one of the things that had split the whale couple, though, she started to look obnoxious. She'd also hurled abuse at me about a stench coming off my soul.
I reached the eleven o'clock point of Basin Island, ran down the slope, and entered the sea of clouds—and felt eyes on me again. Were these eyes Purus Balaena's?
"Purus Balaena! Album Cetus asked me to bring you a message, so I came!"
I shouted into the sea of clouds and held still, waiting. Whether she'd heard my voice or not, I felt something enormous rising directly beneath me—smaller than Album Cetus, but huge all the same.
......W-wait. At this rate she's going to body-slam the slope I'm standing on!
I spooked, scrambled up toward Basin Island, and then some—stomped a Wall of Space and shot into the sky. In that instant the rising momentum dropped off sharply, and at last one great ghost-whale, a whale smaller than Album Cetus, thrust only her head above the sea of clouds.
Purus Balaena was long and streamlined, and her head and back were covered in countless scars.
So many that you could barely see intact skin.
How hard has she been ramming things, to be scarred like that? So Cloud Island and Star Island are small because Purus Balaena smashed them to pieces. That tracks, right?
She looked like less than half of Album Cetus, and she was still insanely huge—probably as long as Star Island and Cloud Island put together. A body like that could smash them and have room to spare.
Head emerged, Purus Balaena looked at me with eyes in which sorrow, anger, and resignation were all mixed, and sent meaning into my head.
Kwoooong......
"A message from him, you say."
Her voice was a little thinner than Album Cetus's, and about an octave higher—soft and calm as a quiet sea, set against what she'd been doing. But anger she couldn't quite hide seemed stirred into it.
"Yeah. Album Cetus says to meet him in the lower realm."
......Kwoooong.
"......Is that so. Thank you for bringing it. Kind human."
She hesitated a moment, closed her eyes once and opened them, and offered her thanks.
Tears flowed from Purus Balaena's eyes. As if everything she had suffered until now had been washed out in them, those eyes had turned clear and transparent.
While I was still thinking that, Purus Balaena dove back down into the sea of clouds before I could get another word out.
"Stop!!"
Huh? When did she chase me all the way here?
The one winged woman left on Basin Island followed Purus Balaena's dive into the sea of clouds with her eyes, then turned on me a look that was flustered and furious.
"Wh-what is the meaning of this?! I believed you when you said that so long as we did not attack, you would stay quiet and leave! And yet you......!"
"Huh? All I did was pass on a message because Album Cetus asked me to. I didn't attack you. I was being quiet, wasn't I?"
"Absurd sophistry! Do you have any idea what you have done?!"
"Nope. Oh—I do know this much. Those whales are kinder than you lot."
"Y-you......!"
The winged woman shook with rage, the way a fanatic shakes at the sight of her god being insulted.
Right then I had Mana Sieve concentrated through my whole body, so Mana Vision was active in my eyes. Deeply angered by the calm reply, she flew in fast—and the instant her eyes met mine, she flinched.
She startled a second time at her own flinch, then reflexively thrust her staff toward me, wary.
"I'm warning you. Attack me, and I won't let it go."
I'd already decided the winged humans were the villains. If it came to a fight, I absolutely would not go easy.
I gave the warning low, and the winged woman's white face went bright red.
"Wh......at! Such a...... vile man!"
She trembled her wings with anger and twisted her brows. But Spatial Perception's warning light kept flickering on and off.
Weird. Judging by the tempers of the winged women at the eleven o'clock and two o'clock temples, she should have attacked already and then some.
The moment I saw her hesitating with confusion on her face, a hypothesis popped into my head.
Hmm. She flinched when she saw my eyes just now, didn't she? Is this one being affected by my Mana Vision, too?
......Hooh?
Good. She's not even human. No reason not to experiment as much as I want.
I concentrated Mana Vision hard into my eyes, concentrated it into my throat as well, met the winged woman's gaze, and shouted.
[Shut up!]
"?! "
Gaze locked on my eyes, blue light practically dripping from them, the winged woman began to shake in both arms hard enough to make her staff waver at the sound of the roar.
Watching her pupils tremble like a boat caught in rough waves, I smiled a triumphant little smile on the inside.