Freshwater Mermaid (1)

Three mermaids sat there, wasted nearly to the bone. So far gone they looked diseased, they hadn't even the strength to move at the sight of us — only the fish-halves of their bodies rested in the shallows as they stared, utterly spent.

I set Hwayeon on the ground and looked them over. All three were in a dire state. Life had left their faces; their cheeks were hollow, the skin flaking, the hair dry and brittle. Bodies that had been plump two months ago had shed flesh so drastically that breasts once full and rounded now hung slack, calling to mind the chests of old women. Ribs stood proud, and the skin of their bellies had nearly met the skin of their backs.

Their fish lower halves had begun to blanch like dead catch, scales peeling in patches to bare the pale flesh beneath. The smallest of the three was wretched beyond the rest — little more than bone, her heartbeat faint, her eyes still shut, cradled against the largest mermaid's chest as if she might die at any moment.

“Hello. It's been a while. You don't look like you've been faring well.”

Gape...

The largest, holding the smallest, looked up at me through clouded eyes and worked her mouth open, then shut. In that instant I saw how bone-dry the inside of it was, and the white coat furred over her tongue.

“I told you to flee. Was there nowhere you could go?”

Ga...pe.

Right. I'd sort the three by height — First, Second, and Third. They differed a little in looks, but they resembled one another enough to be sisters.

I watched the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠First Mermaid nod, slow and weak, then glanced aside. The Second lay on her side beside her, staring blankly up at me, and one of her eyes was clouded with cataract. Could swallowing volcanic ash really leave them this bad? They looked as if they'd caught every disease there was to catch.

All three had lost a fair amount of Phase Power. I set what I was sensing now against the day we'd first met.

Don't tell me they die if it falls below 500.

Franc and Hwayeon stood beside me, watching the mermaids with faintly furrowed brows. They were so pitiful that even being Aberrants didn't seem to stir any urge to treat them differently.

“Hwayeon. Give me three drink packs.”

Hwayeon looked them over once, let out a soft sigh, and drew three compressed drink packs from the backpack, handing them to me.

“Drink this first.”

The First Mermaid took the pack I offered and looked up at me as if to ask what it was. I tore the tip of one and let a little drip onto her palm. Her eyes opened a fraction. She took the pack from my hand and tried a sip.

“Blub?!”

Oh, she was bubbling. So the silent gaping had been for lack of moisture.

At once she tilted the pack to the mouth of the Third, limp in her arms, wetting it little by little. The Third's mouth began to move, taking the water in. After feeding her about half, the First turned and held the pack to the Second's lips. The Second raised a feeble hand, took it, and started to gulp.

At the sight of the First tending to the smaller ones before herself, Franc's expression visibly softened, and Hwayeon sighed again. The First tore open another pack and passed it to the Second, then opened the last and poured it once more into the Third's mouth. She herself had taken a single sip and given all the rest away.

Watching this, Hwayeon drew one more pack from the backpack and held it out to the First.

“You drink as well.”

Gratitude welled in the First's eyes. She took the pack from Hwayeon's hand, let the Second and Third finish one between them, and only then drank herself.

Miho stared down at the three without so much as blinking, as if the mermaids were some marvel — the look of a cat with a fish set before it. A little water had brightened their color, but left like this they were dead. A hundred percent.

From the First Mermaid's face, I couldn't tell whether she took me for a benefactor, but her favor toward me had clearly climbed. Then let's begin. I switched on the Certifier's video recording and spoke to her.

“Are those two your family?”

“Blub.”

“Younger sisters?”

“Blub-blub.”

She nodded. So they really were sisters.

“I'm looking for an individual willing to serve as a test subject for my ability.”

“Bloop?”

The First looked down at the Third, still barely conscious, and at the Second, who had drunk and then dropped off as if fainting, then tilted her head at my words as if to ask what on earth I was talking about. Seeing how sick she looked, and how she looked after her sisters, I was half tempted to just heal them and be done with it.

“You can understand me, can't you? Cooperate fully with my experiment, and I'll restore you and your sisters. I can use a recovery ability.”

As I spoke, I reached out, set a finger against the First Mermaid's chest, and triggered Healing Touch at the faintest strength.

From the point of contact, specks of blue light spread. The dull gray of her skin regained a hint of milky white, and her color improved, if only a little. So recovery worked on them.

“It isn't an experiment meant to hurt you. You might even grow stronger—”

“Blurgle!”

The First's eyes went round. She didn't even wait for me to finish — she touched her own chest and nodded hard. Then she held out the Third, still gathered in her arms, and looked up at me with a desperate face.

“I'll take that as cooperation.”

Their condition was bad enough that I considered stage three. I'd restored Hiarid in an instant even after my Wall of Space had torn away both her arms and wings, so that much ought to suffice. I released a stage-three Healing Wave.

A blue ripple spread, wrapped the three mermaids, and flowed away. With it, the wounds on the Third's fish-legs — the worst of them — closed. New flesh budded, and scales began to form. The tail fin that had gone white recovered its proper shape, and the face that had been blackening toward death returned to its original milky tone. The gauntness, though, remained.

The Second opened her eyes, looked at her own fish tail, and touched the scales with her hand, beginning to tear up. The cataract in her left eye had cleared as well.

“Blub? Blub-blub!”

“Glurgle!”

The First, still terribly thin, gathered the Second into her arms with tears in her eyes, the sickness gone from her sister's face. Soon the Third's eyes cracked open. She looked back and forth between her sisters and us, and when her gaze landed on me and Franc, her eyes went wide.

“Blurrrgle!”

And the three sisters threw their arms around one another and wept tears of joy. Then they bowed their heads over and over, faces full of gratitude, bubbling and blubbing — and I couldn't understand a word of it.

“Is there no way for us to talk? To our ears, everything you say sounds like nothing but bubbling.”

It took about as long as a cup of tea for the mermaids, locked together in the joy of having lived, to calm down. They kept bubbling, clearly trying to tell us something, but I couldn't make it out. When I asked out of sheer frustration, they looked troubled and glanced back and forth between the lake and us.

“Why the lake? Do you need water to talk?”

“Blub-blub.”

“Really? You can speak underwater?”

Watching the First Mermaid's reaction, Franc and Hwayeon murmured to each other.

“It seems they converse through vibrations in the water.”

“So it would seem. But that lake is thick with settled volcanic ash, and the water itself...”

“Which is surely why those mermaids have come out of it. Even so — mermaids in a lake. Why would they be in a place like this?”

“It is as vast as the sea. Might they not simply have been living here?”

Listening to them, I asked the First again.

“You can't go into that water, can you?”

She nodded.

“Then the only way we'll talk is if you nod or shake your head.”

“Ah, Seoha? It isn't a lake, but there was a great river a few days west of Mount Elephantros, was there not? Could these mermaids not live there?”

Only when Franc said it did I remember the river.

“Ah. I remember it too.”

“If we run at the same speed we used coming here, it should not take long.”

“Then let's take these ones and move.”

At our words the First's eyes went round. She pressed her hands together, squeezed her eyes shut, and took a posture much like prayer. At the same time the Phase Power inside her stirred. Fish scales gathered, the tail shrank, the fins slowly diminished — and the tail split in two, becoming a pair of legs wrapped here and there in scales.

“Oh...”

The First spread her newly formed legs wide, as if to show me — and in doing so, the mermaid's sex, veiled in seaweed-colored pubic hair the same shade as her hair, was laid bare right before my eyes!

Hwayeon moved at the same instant. She seized the mermaid by the ankles, snapped the legs shut, and flung her aside. Franc shot me a glare and jabbed my ribs with her elbow, poke after poke.

Soon the Second strained and groaned and, with great effort, formed legs of her own — though far more scales clung to them than to the First's, a fin still stuck at the pelvis, and her sex was entirely barred by scales. She couldn't make them into proper human legs the way the First had. The Third groaned, trying to do the same, and nothing moved at all.

The First rose unsteadily, practiced walking for a moment, then seized the Third's tail fin and began pouring strength into it. The Third strained with her, and at last something like human legs, thickly covered in scales, took shape. What was that? She could assist the movement of Phase Power too?

I approached the First, who looked oddly exhausted, and asked.

“Did you just put TP into the Third's legs?”

As expected, she didn't know a single one of our words — Aberrant, Phase Power, TP — so I took a moment and explained the ideas until she understood. She shook her head.

“Not TP?”

She nodded.

“...Not being able to talk is pretty frustrating.”

It felt a lot like the time before I could converse with Franc by lip-reading.

But if they can make legs like this, couldn't they have fled on foot? Do they simply die if they stray too far from water?

Anyway, I'd been wondering how to take them along, and we simply decided Hwayeon and I would split the three and carry them. Hwayeon would piggyback the First and hold the Third in her arms. I would sling the backpack in front and carry the Second on my back.

“I'll carry the bag!”

Seeing me take the backpack as well, Franc stepped forward, insisting she could manage at least that.

“Nnngh...!!”

The moment she took it, the weight toppled her backward. Pinned under the pack and flailing, she soon passed straight through it and stood, seized the straps, and strained with all her might — and the backpack didn't budge. The sight of her going red in the face was so cute I snorted a laugh, and Franc's expression crumpled as if she might cry.

The First and Third looked cowed by the chill coming off Hwayeon, and Hwayeon's own face wasn't much better. She clearly disliked carrying Aberrants on her back and in her arms. No — the look she gave the Second on my back was downright vicious.

“Bear with it a little.”

I went to Hwayeon, her face set hard, and squeezed her hand. Only then did her color ease. If I so much as accidentally held another woman, the earth might split and the sky crack open.

“...Let's hurry.”

We left the gray forest, dead beneath its blanket of ash, and hills spread before us like a gray carpet. Beyond them Mount Elephantros came into view, still ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠sending up thin threads of white smoke — the aftermath of the eruption, no doubt.

“A tremendous sight.”

As Hwayeon said, a mountain thousands of meters high had melted, gone black, and hardened into lava — a sight that made the throat swallow of its own accord. The relatively sharp peak was gone. About two-thirds of the summit had vanished, the center caved in, and smoke rose from the gap. The trees that had grown from the foot up to the mid-slope had all burned away, leaving only a landscape buried under black lava. It looked exactly like the scar of a meteor strike.

I set the Second down, stepped onto a Wall of Space, and leapt toward ten kilometers. Halfway up, a gale nearly knocked me off. I hastily threw out a wall dozens of meters across and tumbled over it, my heart halfway up my throat. Franc, every bit as startled, went white.

“I-I'll go and look! Seoha, please go down and wait!”

I shook my head.

“You can only see four kilometers out from the Soul Stone, can't you? I'll make the platform wide, like this, and go up. Don't worry.”

As if I'd show a weak face in front of my woman!

I really did need to practice moving while laying Walls of Space. More often.

Anyway, there were no clouds, so I climbed as high as I could. Where Franc pointed, sure enough, the river was visible.

“Head that way and we'll see Aberrants and such, won't we?”

“Yes. I did not bring food, thinking we would forage on site, so let us hurry.”

“Yeah. I'll get to taste Franc's electric grill again.”

“Hehe. You may look forward to it.”

Heh. If I may look forward to it, she must have been practicing. I brought seasonings too, so we'll be eating something a good deal tastier, won't we?

After confirming the river's bearing, I came back down, hoisted the mermaids onto our backs again, and set off.

Passing Mount Elephantros, I checked the subterranean lava caves. The amount of lava showed no particular difference from before the eruption. Every trace of the buildings, though, had vanished, and the passage Franc and I had followed down was blocked. The unidentified Peak-Rank Aberrant was nowhere to be seen either.

“Hmm... I can't see the Peak-Rank Aberrant that was in the lava caves underground.”

“Blub?!”

“You can't see it?”

“No. I can't sense its Phase Power.”

“Could the shock of the eruption have destroyed it?”

“Can a Peak-Rank Aberrant even die to a natural disaster?”

Ignoring the constant bubbling at my ear, I scanned the lava caves within my Spatial Perception once more. Nothing special showed.

“Nothing I can do about something that isn't there, so let's hurry. Evening's coming on, and we can't camp on a heap of ash, can we?”

“Right.”

“Yes!”

With a forty-two-kilogram backpack in front and an eighty-seven-kilogram mermaid girl on my back, my center of balance kept lurching. Running like that turned out to be decent practice for keeping my footing. By the time we left the stretch buried in ash, I'd grown used to running while holding my balance. At this rate, even if I switched on Mana Mode - Acceleration and sprinted all-out, I could lay Walls of Space and run without a mistake.

From then on, Aberrants kept entering the range of my Spatial Perception, and I was about to pick them off with steady Mana Bullets and kill the lot of them — when the Supergiant Turtle's words came back to me.

Tsk. I'll just have to drive them off.

“Glug?!”

Hm? The Second suddenly let out an urgent bubble, so I turned my head — and Miho had the Second Mermaid's finger in her mouth.

“Hey, hey. Miho, what are you doing?”

“Kyiing! Nom-nom, kyiing!!”

She growled and gnawed on the Second's index finger. I checked the Second's face: brows knit in pain, she couldn't do a thing about the fox biting her and was fidgeting in distress. The Second had been lightly fiddling with my hair for a while, and the finger Miho had bitten belonged to that same hand. She must not have liked the Second touching me.

From high in the sky the river had looked a little thicker than a thread, but seen with ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠my own eyes it was too vast to call a mere river. Its width looked a good three times that of the Han River.

“All right. Down.”

I let go of the hand supporting the Second's rear and shook myself, and with a guh-glug?! she fell off my back and landed hard on her backside. Hwayeon tossed the Third into the river as well. The First read the mood, quickly loosened her arms and legs, and dropped from Hwayeon's back on her own.

“First, shall we drive off every Aberrant in the area?”

“Drive them off, without killing them?”

Hwayeon spoke while watching the Second crawl furtively toward the First, and the Third climb out of the river to approach her.

“Yeah. I was going to kill them all, but the Supergiant Turtle asked me not to, so I'll drive them off. If they come closer, though, I'll kill every last one.”

The three sisters' eyes went round at that.

“How do you intend to drive them off?”

“If I set off a mana cannon round of about 5,000 TP roughly two hundred kilometers up, they'll all run, won't they? It's the equivalent of a nuclear bomb of several dozen megatons going off over their heads. Anything that doesn't flee, I'll take as asking to be killed.”

Back in the real world, I'd wondered what my mana cannon's power compared to and looked it up. Turned out that in 1952 they'd test-fired a fourteen-megaton bomb called Ivy Mike, and if you added up that bomb's entire zone of indirect effect, it came out close to the blast radius of mine.

Anyway, I tuned the shot to detonate past two hundred kilometers, fired it skyward, and at once raised a Wall of Space in a square around us. I was setting it off right overhead, and I couldn't have the shockwave hurting Franc or Hwayeon.

“Hey. Touch that and you die.”

“Bloop?”

The Third, curious about the amber wall, tottered toward the barrier I'd spread with room to spare, thin as she was, so I warned her. She still didn't seem to understand. I went over, took her hand, dragged her back, and pushed her toward the First. In that instant the mana cannon detonated.

Blinding light and a shockwave burst out together, but the Wall of Space ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠stopped every shock and tremor except the light. No — it seemed to block everything at a level that could inflict injury. Even so, from the three mermaids' perspective, it must have looked like the sky was falling. Just like the ones clinging to each other and shivering, I could feel the other Aberrants within my Spatial Perception taking fright and fleeing like mad.

“They're running like their tails are on fire.”

“Ah. Have they all fled?”

“Huh? But...”

Franc, who had been looking up at a sky where only a faint trace of the explosion remained, heard my mutter and laughed awkwardly.

“Our dinner must have all run off as well.”

“...Ah.”

Hwayeon snorted at my dumbstruck face, set the bag down beneath a riverside tree that looked to have lived for several decades at least, and came to my side to take my hand.

“I brought Calorie Mate, so we'll make do with that for dinner. First, though, we ought to deal with those ones, shouldn't we?”

The ones she meant had been startled by the blast, clung to one another, and collapsed into the brush, trembling. Noticing my gaze, the First finally calmed and soothed her two younger sisters. Right. I should settle those ones first.

Feeling Miho's fluffy tail tickling my neck, I approached the First. The three sisters looked up at me, thoroughly cowed — skinny, wasted girls staring at me as if I were something frightening. It was a little much.

Makes me look like the bad guy, doesn't it? I even cast recovery on them!

“Here, your two sisters should be able to live well enough. Now I'd like to try the test we agreed on.”

The Second and Third looked back and forth between me and the First as if to ask what that meant. The First nodded with a resolute face, hugged her two sisters tight, and blub-blubbed at them. As she did, she pointed along the river's current. She must have been telling them to follow that waterway and go.

No.

“Wait. I think I just realized something extremely unpleasant. First — are you thinking I'm about to run a test that will kill you?”

This? The look she was giving me was exactly That wasn't it?

“Want me to actually eat you?”

At the threat that wasn't quite a threat, the Second and Third clung to their elder sister in terror. The First, quick on the uptake, smiled faintly and nodded.

“Come here. First let's test underwater whether we can actually talk.”

The First rose unsteadily, shook off the two sisters clinging to her waist, walked into the water, and changed her legs back into a fish tail. The younger two hurried after her, returned to their true mermaid forms, and swam along the bank with delighted faces.

Are those two goldfish-brained...?

Hwayeon, who had followed behind me, had her hand near the hilt at her waist. If the situation turned strange, she meant to take their heads at once. Following the mermaid's gesture, I drew a deep breath and dove. The First's bright smile met me right in front of my eyes.

“Buh-glurgle.”

Ah. Wrong. Like this, I can't speak.

I surfaced, and Franc and Hwayeon, who had dived with me, stood as well, sweeping their wet hair back as they spoke.

“So they really do speak by vibrating the water. Now that we know conversation is possible, let us run the test in earnest.”

“Yeah. Come up to the bank. I'll tell you how we're going to do it.”