Day Seven: The Ghost Lady (1)
Cold sweat slicked my skin as I studied the woman before me with my own eyes, then ran Search over her. As expected, nothing registered. Not a single trace.
What the hell was this? I didn't recall a single record of anyone seeing a ghost during their first forced summoning into the Phase World. Then again, this place had never been ordinary. Down below, a giant woman and a colossal mole; up here, a ghost on the prowl. The balance was a complete fucking joke.
The ghost lady held both hands gathered neatly before her, hanging loose. Her pupils were a little faint, and yet there was an unmistakable air of refinement about her. Brows drawn together by the faintest sorrow, their tails drooping, a mournful smile resting at the corner of her mouth — by the look of her age, she seemed a good deal older than me.
I tried to recall the ghost-type aberrants of the Phase World. Those things attacked anything alive, ability user or aberrant or animal, without distinction. The attitude this ghost lady was showing me sat about as far from that aggression as you could get. No matter how I turned it over, I couldn't begin to guess what a ghost who had appeared out of nowhere, only to stand there in silence, actually wanted.
…But why was she naked?
Pretending not to look, I scanned the ghost lady's bare body. Her height was about the same as mine, five-foot-five or so. Her breasts were very large, yet they weren't sagging or mismatched — round as full moons, with small nipples and areolae that suited them, a pair so lovely they came close to perfect. Her waist was as narrow as my sister's. Narrow enough that I wondered how any organs fit inside it at all.
Below those breasts, the faint trace of her ribs gave way to a subtly cleft abdomen. Her pelvis, rounded and developed along a lovely line, displayed a perfect S-curve. She had set her left leg forward and crossed the right slightly behind it, as if trying to make her hips look smaller — but could something that pretty really be hidden just by posing?
Both hands were gathered over her lower belly. Long, slender fingers, hands flawlessly clean — they didn't look like the hands of someone raised in hardship. And beneath them, the alluring valley of a woman. A light dusting of hair over the pubic bone, the cleft below it, and from there long, straight legs stretching down on either side. Somehow it was a beautiful female body that felt familiar, as if I had seen it before. She was a translucent, gray-toned spirit, so I couldn't sense any texture, but the impression was of gazing at an exquisitely lewd and beautiful sculpture. Thanks to that, the fear, the tension, the terror — all of it blew clean away, and I could settle.
I lifted my gaze to the ghost lady's face… and the tails of her brows had risen just slightly, as if she were a little angry.
Erk. Had I stared too blatantly?
A different kind of cold sweat threatened to break, so I met her eyes and dipped my head in apology. Her expression returned to that faintly sorrowful one. Hmm. Honestly, the slightly angry look from a moment ago had been prettier… More importantly, why had she appeared in front of me?
She still wasn't speaking, and I felt no hostility, so I tried talking to her.
"Um… is something the matter?"
The moment I spoke, her brows lifted a fraction and the corners of her eyes fell, as if she were about to burst into tears. Had I said something wrong?! If a ghost cried, that would turn into a wailing keen… Ugh, please, spare me that. Flustered and baffled, I looked into her eyes — and she sent her gaze, hopeful, down toward my stomach.
What, she wants my guts?!
…No. That wasn't it. She seemed to be looking at the phase stone I'd tucked inside my shirt earlier, to keep it against my skin. So I opened the front of my shirt, drew the stone out, and showed it to her. She clasped both hands together as if in prayer and took a small half-step closer, her face pleading.
Which meant the lower belly her hands had been modestly covering, and the woman's cleft beneath it, were laid completely bare — and her breasts, pressed by her raised arms, looked incredibly lewd… Eek. Her brows went up again.
I hurriedly held out the hand gripping the phase stone.
"You want this?"
She shook her head.
"…? Then what?"
She glanced between me and the phase stone for a moment, then parted her lips and began to address me in the shape of her mouth alone.
Ee, oh, eh, ee, hee, oh, eh, um, ee?
Ee-oh-eh-ee-hee-oh-eh-um-ee?
Well, a ghost wasn't going to produce an actual voice. But I'd never learned lip-reading, so no matter how prettily she worked her mouth, I had no idea what she was saying. And besides — no matter how I looked at her, this ghost lady was not Korean.
I dropped to one knee on the ground (squatting would have looked pathetic…) and began scratching out the words she was mouthing, one by one, with a horn awl. At that her expression brightened, and she crouched prettily in front of me. Knees together, legs folded, perched lightly on the tips of her toes, both hands resting on her knees, her upper body inclined just slightly forward. A posture of such beauty that in all my nineteen years I had never seen its like — and my heart started pounding.
Let's skip the way her breasts settled, ever so slightly, under gravity. More to the point, were ghosts affected by gravity?
When I wrote the mouth-shapes she'd shown me onto the ground in Korean, she furrowed one brow delicately, looked at me, offered a single shape and stopped — then began repeating that same shape over and over. How could every expression, every gesture, overflow with that much grace? She must have been a staggering beauty when she was alive. Because I was staring holes through her face instead of watching her mouth, she put on a faintly sulky look, as if begging me to please look at her lips, and it was so cute I thought my heart might actually give out.
I clutched my chest and dropped my head, and the ghost lady braced a hand lightly on the ground and looked down at me with a worried face.
Was this ghost lady trying to kill me right now?
I'll have you know my immunity to women converges on zero percent! Show me a sight like that while you're naked and my heart can't take it!!
I wanted to ignore the irregular pounding and keep admiring her, but if I did she would either truly cry or truly get angry, so I watched her reactions and kept writing and erasing, working out what she meant to say. At last the letters on the ground resolved into something I could read.
…Home?
A foreigner after all. And more importantly—!
Ghk, why hadn't I studied English properly…! If I were any good at it, I could have written the whole alphabet out on the ground and actually talked to her. To think my chance to converse with a woman this pretty (a ghost) was slipping away — I could have cried from the regret.
The ghost lady realized I was bad at English, but she tilted her head slightly as if to say it was all right, and smiled softly, as though comforting me while I teared up. A ghost lady genuinely bad for the heart. On top of that, she seemed to be reading my tears differently than I was… No need to correct her, right?
Even so, the way she stood so modestly, moving in small, refined increments, didn't look uncomfortable in the least. The bearing of a young lady from a good family, practiced so long it had sunk into her body.
For a while I scrawled every word I knew onto the ground and had her choose among them. She smiled brightly, picked a few, I wrote those down, and we carried on a conversation that way. And so I learned a few things.
Her name was Flandre. She was British, and she had been twenty-seven at the time. When I wrote the numbers from one through nine, she tapped them in order — one, four, five — and pointed at herself. It seemed to mean she had entered this Phase World in the year 145. When I told her it was now the year 216, she wore a sorrowful expression for a long while.
And through several rounds of this, I learned that she had been the giant woman I'd met. I was stunned beyond words. A person turning into an aberrant? How did that even make sense? On top of that, she said she had known I'd been hiding in the tree beside the waterfall on the second day.
At the look on my face — my guts gone cold — the ghost lady added that she had not attacked humans. Which meant someone other than me had entered this Phase World. One more thing I couldn't understand, piled onto the rest.
Anyway, when I asked how many had come, she made a vague, hedging gesture, pointing at several numbers with a sad face. When I asked what had become of all of them, she set her finger on a single word among those written in the dirt and bowed her head.
The reason there had been no other aberrants below the cliff, she said, was that she herself had killed them all in revenge. Curious how vast the forest was, I asked, and she told me the woods beneath the cliff were wide enough that, at a giant's stride, you would have to walk ten days without rest to get clear of them.
So if I didn't relax too much, was it safe? No. No chance. Even if she had killed them all, thinking of the animals that absorbed Phase Power and mutated into aberrants, I couldn't believe there were none left. Above all, I never learned how often she had swept them clear — choosing the right words was too hard.
I had never resented my lacking English so bitterly. I'd wanted to ask how she had become an aberrant, but I didn't know enough words, and all I got was her troubled face. Calling it a conversation was generous. I had only inferred the gist from a handful of words, and the accuracy wasn't high. We couldn't manage anything more detailed, and I barely figured out what she wanted.
As a ghost, she wished to return to reality. And the only way was for her to enter the phase stone I carried, and go back together with me.
Judging by looks alone, she seemed like a young lady raised as the cherished jewel of some British noble house — and she had fallen into a Phase World like this, suffered every hardship, failed in the end to return to reality, turned into an aberrant, and died. Mid-conversation, what I had done to her corpse came back to me. I confessed the truth and apologized, and she only smiled quietly and shook her head.
She had lived more than sixty years as an aberrant, been killed at last by a colossal mole, and then had even her corpse defiled by me — and still she smiled, that gently, as if she understood all of it. A kindness I couldn't even imagine. Honestly, partway through, my delusions ran away with me and I wondered whether she might be an evil spirit gone mad, only playing the part of a kind, pretty woman. But her eyes were clear and clean past all excess. If something with eyes like those had become a wicked spirit, then being fooled by it would simply be unavoidable, wouldn't it?
So I nodded.
In truth, the guilt of having made an adult video of her was the biggest reason I accepted. Right in the middle of our talk, my explosive pervert's imagination had seized Search and image-converted every recording of the giant woman into this young lady.
Thank you, Search! Thank you!!
"Ahem."
Embarrassed, my ears burning, I fiddled with them a moment, then held the phase stone out before her. At that the ghost lady smiled radiantly through gathering tears, pressed her hands together, and bowed deeply to me. As she slowly approached the stone, the sun began to rise behind her, and I had the illusion of a halo spreading from her back. Naked as she was, she looked so sacred I couldn't meet her eyes.
She closed her eyes, laid both hands over mine where I gripped the phase stone, and then, shedding a soft gray light, seeped into it.
Clutching the phase stone she had entered, I muttered it while I watched the sun come up.
I hadn't noticed the time while we talked, and yet five hours had passed. Me — the one who used to flee, annoyed, if my sister talked even a little too long — and I had spent five hours conversing with a ghost lady through gestures, glances, and expressions. I could hardly believe it.
The phase stone she had entered had shrunk a little further, from about four inches across to just under three, so it nestled more neatly in my hand. The color was still watery overall, but the center had begun to take on gray. All I knew about phase stones was that they were absurdly expensive, so I had no idea whether this was a normal reaction.
I pocketed the changed stone for now and, to deal with breakfast, picked up the field-rat meat I'd flung aside, skinned it, and washed it. I gathered dry twigs and was getting a fire going when, at some point, the ghost lady was beside me, watching.
Wasn't she only supposed to come out at night?!
I stared at her with round, startled eyes, and noticing my gaze, she smiled brightly. What was that smile supposed to mean?
Anyway, she watched me build the fire crouched down with her arms wrapped around her knees… Excuse me? In that pose, your private parts are on display to the entire world. Her small, shell-like sex, filling both my eyes, got in the way of starting the fire — but if the interference was like this, I welcomed it all day!
Even as I kept stealing glances, she didn't notice, absorbed in the smoke rising from the shavings. When I got the fire blazing properly, her eyes curved softly and she clapped. I'd built it while side-eyeing her you-know-what, and now I was getting applause… A little abashed, I looked away, fed the flames into a proper campfire, and slowly roasted the meat. She cupped both cheeks in her palms and kept staring at the fire.
What was she thinking, looking at a campfire? Watching her gaze blankly at the roaring flames with a slightly loosened, peaceful expression, something in my chest ached. If I succeeded in escaping from here back to the real world, what would become of her? And before that — was she even a ghost? Could Search not detect ghosts?
I worried over it and nearly burned the meat in the process, but I managed to roast it decently enough. Just as I was about to eat, she gestured for me to wait, flew off beneath a certain tree, and pointed near the roots as if telling me to look. Wondering what it was — something of mine had already gone rigid at the sight of her naked body — I adjusted the front of my pants so she wouldn't notice, went where she indicated, and looked around.
Beneath a tree identical to the one where the squirrel couple had lived, a weed-like grass tinged red was growing. She mimed plucking it and putting it in her mouth. What was this? I analyzed its composition, and Detection informed me it was a plant that also existed below the cliff, though only in small numbers. Analysis was telling me it differed from ordinary weeds — but what kind of grass was it, that she wanted me to eat it?
I carefully dug up the red grass, not even a handful if I pulled it all, and chewed a little of the tip. Along with a spicy heat, I tasted savoriness.
There was a plant like this?!
I looked at her in surprise. She was standing with her waist tipped forward and her hands clasped behind her back, and she smiled brightly and nodded.
"Thank you."
When I said it with a smile of my own, she smiled radiantly too and walked back toward the campfire. But now that I thought about it — I'd been chattering in Korean for five hours, and she seemed to have understood every word. I'd have to ask when I had the time. If there was some other way to communicate, we could probably share a great deal more.
With the red grass's help, the field-rat meat came out tasting something like fried chicken, and I ate it happily. Once I'd finished cleaning up, she looked at me, pressed her palms together against her right cheek, and tilted her head. That was a gesture asking whether I wasn't going to sleep, right? Had she been worrying that we'd talked the whole night through? Perfect — a chance to ask what I'd been thinking about.
"You're asking if I'm not going to sleep?"
She nodded.
"Mm, before that — how do you understand what I'm saying? Flandre, you're British. Did you learn Korean?"
When I used her name so casually, she seemed a little shy, then pointed at the sky. I looked that way. Nothing there… Huh?
"You're saying we can talk because this is the Phase World?"
She nodded once, then shook her head once more. What? One yes and one no?
"We can converse because it's the Phase World, but it isn't language — we communicate by meaning?"
At that she smiled brightly, as if I'd gotten it right, and clapped softly. Good grief, whose daughter was this — cute enough to kill a man. Then again, being able to talk in the Phase World with no language barrier. That hadn't been in the Survival Studies textbook either?
Somehow I was starting to feel that what the book contained wasn't the whole of it. A human who had turned into an aberrant. A Peak-Rank aberrant appearing while I was undergoing my first survival trial. They said each person went to a single Phase World, but she had said this was a place many people had come and gone. Of course, the aberrant in question had been Franc after she mutated, and as for the worlds themselves, the books had only said one person to one place — nothing about another being assigned after the previous visitor died… Hmm.
Maybe a Phase World where someone had failed to survive and died kept drawing people in until someone else came along and succeeded. Anyway, answering a question I'd been asked was only polite.
"You asked earlier if I wasn't sleeping, right? I can't sleep, because of the ability I first awakened here in the Phase World."
Her eyes went round, and she looked at me with a worried face.
"I'm fine. Eight more days and it'll be the fifteenth, so I can hold out until then."
Probably.
I smiled, raised my right hand, and waved as if to say it was nothing. She came closer and tried to take my hand in both of hers. But her hands passed straight through, and she startled at them, shook her head, pointed at herself as if telling me to follow, and started off ahead.
Where was she trying to go? I watched for a moment, thinking how cute she was, and the woman walking ahead turned only her upper body and waved for me to hurry — and what caught my eye more than the waving hand were the swaying breasts and backside. A lewd little laugh rose in me all on its own.
"Just a moment. Let me grab a weapon first."
I called after her, remembering the wooden spear I'd left at the tree where I'd first hidden. The tip was probably a bit blunted, but I had the claw spear, so a little trimming ought to do it. When I moved to fetch it, she came running in little steps and fell in beside me.
Seeing her keep smiling, as if she couldn't help being glad to have someone to walk with, I thought how pretty she was — and felt a pang of pity along with it. To enter the Phase World as a human, turn into an aberrant, and have even that life come to an end. What a wretched fate. I was earnestly hoping that if she found peace she would go to heaven, and have the suffering of her life healed there, when it struck me that this pity was exactly the same feeling I got every time I thought of the giant woman.
A little self-loathing crept in, and I muttered it aloud.
"So I really am the type who thinks any woman's fine, aren't I."
She seemed to catch a bit of it, and leaned her upper body slightly forward to look up at me. How could I say a thing like that to a face that innocent? I shook my head as if it were nothing, kept my eyes to the front, and spoke as I walked.
"It's about a mile and a quarter this way."
Otherwise I was going to keep scanning Franc's whole body with my eyes — the cleft of her backside, those full breasts peeking into view even from behind, all of it! But could this young lady not wear clothes? Even if she could, I wasn't about to bring it up on purpose and surrender a view this good.
As I moved I closed my eyes briefly to run Detection, then opened them and walked while checking ahead and to either side. At that, Franc looked puzzled at first — but once she realized I was keeping watch on our surroundings…
That was a well done expression, wasn't it? The kind of look that said, if her body could touch me, she would have patted my head. I knew, because my sister sometimes wore that exact face while stroking my hair. Ahem. I felt oddly embarrassed and looked away. If I looked again, she'd probably be wearing a slightly mischievous expression, wouldn't she?