Asumpfre Sunken Ruins (1)
With Franc, Hwayeon, and me at the head, all 139 of us stepped into the Ability User Association hall at once, and startled gasps broke out from every corner of the place.
"Holy shit. That's the Grand Blue raid team?"
"Look at those uniforms. Sharp as hell. Bet they cost a fortune."
"Heard they commissioned them from some ultra-famous designer in Europe. They really do look incredible."
"Look over there. Isn't that the Grand Blue Master at the front?"
"Whoa, that's insane. I heard he's only eighteen, and he's already the head of thousands?"
"Should've been born with a silver spoon in my mouth."
"Bullshit. I heard the Grand Blue Master's parents just run some small ordinary clinic. Aren't yours a National Assembly member from the provinces?"
"Maybe I should just apply to be a Grand Blue supporter..."
"Give it up. I heard even Grand Blue supporters don't take anyone G-Class or below."
"The Grand Blue Master's mana cannon is seriously fucking broken, though. Does he really need to drag all of them along like that? Seems like he could slaughter everything himself."
"Dumbass. You need porters. You think an ability user like that is gonna do the scut work?"
"Hey. The Grand Blue Master can go in and out on his own whenever he wants without even coming to the Association. So why's he here?"
"Guess he can't bring other people in with him."
It was only eight in the morning, and already well over a hundred ability users had the hall staked out. Listening to every one of them stare at me and either envy me out loud or grumble through sigh-soaked complaints left an odd tickle in my chest.
Not long after we came in, Branch Director Kang Hyunwoo stepped off the elevator and met my eyes.
"You're here. I cleared the large hall on the eighth floor, so head up there."
"Yes."
Hwayeon and my sister took charge of the people, sending the supporter ability users with the heavy loads up first, and I watched Franc drift through the air calling, "Moving to the eighth floor~," before I turned to the branch director standing beside me.
Red at the tips of his hair, sharp-eyed, a serious and handsome young man — he covered his mouth for a moment in thought, then frowned at me and spoke.
"Has Altina Meldios contacted you at all?"
"No. Why, what's with her?"
"Said the restrictions were suffocating and she couldn't take it anymore. Told the IWO verbally she was resigning, and bolted. That was two hours after you came and went."
"Wow. That woman has no plan at all."
"That's what I'm saying!"
Maybe my words had poked the grievance he was sitting on. He barked it, caught the stares around him, and shriveled like something left out to dry, face crumpling, before he heaved a long sigh.
"So you thought Miss Altina would have come to me?"
"Thirty percent, maybe. She's not stupid. She probably figured contacting you right away would just get her caught."
"...If she gets in touch, I'll grab her and let you know."
He looked ready to burst from the frustration, so I said it out of pity, and he covered his face with one hand and let out a long, strained groan.
"The IWO's holding you responsible, then?"
He nodded, reluctant, face pinched tight. Life as branch director didn't look like it was treating him gently at all.
The large elevator ferried ability users three times, and more than half the group vanished from the hall. Watching our Grand Blue combat ability users board the fourth, I beckoned Miho and Hiarid over.
"Once I enter the Phase World, Miho and Hiarid will be waiting in Ha Cheolsu's room."
"You sure about that? I was too thrown last time to say anything, but if that bastard comes out a B-Class, even your pets might not be able to handle him."
"When you come out of the Phase World, the glare's so bad you can't make out your surroundings for a little while, right? So this time I've stationed Miho with her too, and ordered them to attack anything that comes close or appears nearby. No questions asked."
"...Hmm. A high-rank subspecies and a rare-attribute High-Tier Variant — the two of them ought to be enough, like you said. I'd already had every unit in the officetel cleared out just in case. If they show up, don't worry about it. Smash the whole place."
"I like that. Miho, Hiarid. You heard? He manipulates minds, so you especially, Miho — be careful."
When I warned the two of them, Miho swung her little fists in cute little whooshes and shouted.
"Anything that pops up out of nowhere, I kill it all! Right?!"
"No. I showed you the photo yesterday, right? You have to kill that one first."
"Oh, yeah! Kill the rat-faced one first!"
"Right. I don't think he'll pop back out anytime soon. He hasn't been in the Phase World that long. Even so, if he does come out, odds are he'll at least be confident in his own skill — or he might drag aberrants out with him using mind control."
Miho and Hiarid were listening quietly. I looked at them and spoke again.
"Ha Cheolsu will be expecting people waiting for him to come back, too. Even so, if he returns, there's a high chance he'll be cocky about his ability and off his guard. He's a Special Type. His physical ability is only a little better than an ordinary person's, so Hiarid, there's a good chance one strike from you kills him. On top of that, right after return the glare means he can't check his surroundings for a dozen seconds or so. That moment is the opening. The instant you catch any sign or hint of him bursting out, attack immediately — as fast as you can, with your strongest ability."
="Understood."=
"Miho. You listen to Hiarid, too. If something comes out while you're waiting, you can smash this entire building, so hit it with maximum firepower. Got it?"
"Yeah!"
"That bastard Ha Cheolsu can manipulate minds, so you can't give him a second to pull himself together. I'm repeating myself because it matters. Burn it into your heads."
"Yeah!"
="Yes."=
Unless he pulled the same peak-of-luck stunt as that Chinese lightning ability user and ran straight into a Crystal Eater and killed it, reaching B-Class would take an absurdly long time. Unlike my Mana Sieve, which sucks up every last drop of Phase Power from the aberrants I kill, a normal kill only grants twenty percent of the aberrant's total Phase Power.
And if he mind-controlled aberrants to fight in his place and they split that twenty percent between them, the growth would slow even further. So I was roughly figuring a hundred days for him to hit B-Class. Right now it hadn't even been twenty days since he went in, which was why I could still walk around like this. Once three or four months passed, I'd have to stay tense and start looking for some other means.
I looked at Miho and Hiarid. They gazed back at me, eyes sparkling. Honestly, Miho made me a little uneasy, but she was a high-rank subspecies, and beside her stood Hiarid, a High-Tier Variant with the light attribute.
So for now, I'd set the worry down.
"I'm counting on you."
="Set your worries aside. I will fulfill the Heavenly Lord's command without fail."=
I watched the two pets head off for the officetel, and when my turn finally came I boarded the elevator with Franc, Hwayeon, Sis, and the people who remained.
We entered all at once, the host supporter at the center, and the place we set our feet looked as if some gigantic hammer had smashed a mountain's peak flat.
The summit of a modest mountain, roughly four hundred meters high, had been sheared off into a plain about nine hundred meters across. Grass lay thick over it, and the slope leading down was packed with uneven dirt and gravel, so the going looked easy enough.
"Form up! Team leaders, headcount — make sure no one's missing!"
I was looking up at the blue sky when Hwayeon stepped forward and started forming ranks and checking numbers.
According to what she'd told me before entry, all kinds of aquatic animals lived around here, from mid-rank up through high-rank. The ones to watch were the crustaceans, things shaped like crabs or lobsters. Lobsters especially were pure scavengers — they attacked anything that moved. They were High Grade besides, and they showed up often, so caution was needed.
And the thing I had to catch had a snout like a moray, a body like a leech, and four fins like penguin wings stuck on as arms and legs.
...They called it a dinosaur. I wasn't sure it even counted.
"Suhan."
"Yes, Master."
Choi Soohan came running at my call, clad in full-body tights armor woven from wire finer than thread and infused with Phase Power. Over the tights she wore an ordinary T-shirt and cotton pants that hid the lines of her body, so at a glance she looked like a girl out on a picnic. She hadn't put on a bra to hold her chest, it seemed — her breasts swayed beneath the shirt. She skipped it on purpose, didn't she? Breasts grown out to a B-cup had given her a strangely overflowing confidence, and she wore the face of a devotee receiving her god. I looked at her and said:
"I'm going up to look around from the sky, so if Hwayeon or Sis comes looking for me, tell them I went to survey the terrain."
"I will."
Terrain first. I formed a Wall of Space beneath my feet and leapt into the sky, and the landscape opened around me bit by bit — and right in front of me, a lake huge enough to punch the breath out of my lungs began to fill my eyes.
Was that even a lake? I'd climbed three kilometers and still couldn't see the whole of it. They'd said the deepest point was two kilometers...
"That's not a lake. That's a sea. A sea."
Franc chimed in on the mutter.
"Truly. Might this not be on the scale of the Caspian Sea, the largest lake in the real world?"
"I heard the Caspian is bigger than Korea, but that lake doesn't look any smaller, does it?"
Since I was already up here, I confirmed where I'd jumped from, drew a deep breath, focused Mana Sieve to its limit, then kicked on Mana Mode — Acceleration and leapt to fifty kilometers above the ground. Only then did the full vista of the lake come into view.
...It really might be bigger than Korea.
Beyond the lake that held the Asumpfre Sunken Ruins, traces of two more lakes showed on the horizon, and at a glance they looked about the same size as the one in front of me.
A size with no answer to it. And we're clearing this in four days?
For now I turned on the Certifier, took several photos of what I could see, shaped the Wall of Space like a water slide, and shot back down to the ground like an arrow.
...Urp. Next time I'm just jumping straight down. Maybe it was the skyscraper-tall spiral slide I'd made — my eyes spun, my stomach rolled, my back burned and ached. I was bent at the waist, gasping, when Sis and Hwayeon came running in a hurry, and behind them Choi Soohan, four men, and one woman came sprinting up.
"Seoha?! Were you attacked?!"
"Seoha?!"
"No. He only went up to fifty kilometers and came down fast, so he's just a little dizzy."
I couldn't get an answer out, so Franc made the excuse for me.
Whew. Franc, nice.
At the words "fifty kilometers up," the four men wore faces that said as expected of the Master. No — stomach first.
"Of 139 total, zero missing. Raid Teams 1, 3, and 5, and Supporter Squads 1 and 2, are all ready to move."
Listening to Hwayeon's report, I settled my stomach quickly thanks to Mana Sieve, turned to her, and asked.
"Is the destination already set?"
"A walk of about three hours from our current position, in the ten o'clock direction, and we reach the previous encampment."
"Ten o'clock, huh..."
I still couldn't get used to Hwayeon using honorifics with me. Thinking that, I turned on the Certifier and spread the photo I'd taken from above across a large hologram window, and everyone stared at the image of the vast lake, startled.
"Ten o'clock would be around here. Definitely signs of trees cut and the place kept up."
"It seems the aberrants didn't tear it up out of spite after we left. Shall we move to that point?"
"Yeah. No aberrants within a 4.5-kilometer radius, so let's move now. I'll take the watch."
"Understood. I will lead each team's members and each squad to that point. Life Support Squads 1 and 2 in the center. Team 1 at the vanguard, Teams 3 and 5 at the rear, maintaining a triangular formation as we move."
At Hwayeon's order, five people repeated it briskly and scattered.
A man and a woman as a pair were the supporter squad leaders, and the three men looked to be the leaders of Teams 1, 3, and 5. All three team leaders were handsome — Physical Reinforcement types. Team 1's leader was early B-Class. The other two were upper C-Class, around Choi Soohan's level.
The men returned to their teams at her order, gathered their members, and snapped into formation. Each team took a vertex of the triangle, standing a hundred meters apart, and at the center sixty supporters from Squads 1 and 2 held a tight, compact formation.
"Move out!"
Once she'd confirmed the formation was set, Hwayeon's order sent all 139 of us moving.
Standing at the very front with Franc, Hwayeon, Sis, and Choi Soohan, we headed for the rim of the mountain basin, and Sis spoke.
"You said that photo was taken from fifty kilometers up, right? Cross-check the altitude against the distance, and the lake's size... Korea would fit inside, just barely."
"The shock is that it isn't one lake. There were traces of other lakes toward twelve o'clock and ten o'clock, too."
"An enormous group of lakes... There's a region like this in the real world."
Sis's head kept bobbing. She was searching the database in her head, this way and that. Leave her to it and she'd dig up the answer and tell me herself, so I turned my attention to the surroundings.
Listening to Sis and Hwayeon, I swept the terrain with Spatial Perception. Below the mountain it was a plain with gentle enough rises that walking wouldn't be hard, but the problem was a coniferous forest grown thick, five to eight meters high. One or two people slipping between the trees wouldn't look too difficult. A group pushing 140 was another matter.
Picking our way between trees where you couldn't see an inch ahead, covering well over ten kilometers, would fray every nerve and wear us out. We'd have to watch for aberrant ambushes on top of that, and the fatigue would pile up brutally.
Calling up the terrain I'd seen from the sky, lakes about a hundred meters wide sat at points along the route, and there was what you'd have to call a small river — though since the water just sat pooled, maybe that was a river-shaped lake too. There was one more of those. If it rained a little more in this state, or more water gathered, the ground would become wetland, and one step further it looked ready to turn to marsh.
We reached the rim of the basin and looked down the mountain, and the first thing to enter my eyes was the horizon. A terrifying size, sure enough.
A coniferous forest grew thick from the mountainside all the way to the lakeshore, and here and there were rivers or small ponds — no, a size like that would be a normal lake, wouldn't it? There were lakes, and pond-like things smaller than those, more than I could count. No different from what I'd seen in the sky.
I went down the gentle slope first, and the members followed, breathing out in awe at the horizon.
Then came the sighs, looking at the dense northern forest waiting at the mountain's foot. The supporters' were the worst. Thinking they'd have to force that forest under heavy loads, they let out despair-soaked breaths, and just hearing it made me feel sorry for them.
Without me, just getting through this forest to the destination would take a full day. And that was if they spent every minute purely on moving.
"Travel looks rough, so we'll have to cut a path with abilities."
"I was going to push through with the Wall of Space. Is there another way?"
I asked after catching Hwayeon's mutter, and the plan, it seemed, was to have the wind-attribute ability users fell every tree and the earth ability users overturn the ground, then walk over that. The column would inevitably stretch into one long straight line.
Sis let out a small sigh.
"Marching while we spin up detection abilities against aberrant ambushes and cut a path as we go — we'd end up fighting the ones that hit us now and then, right? Just thinking about it, it sounds like a march made of nothing but stress."
"I agree with Sis. So this time I'll cut the path as we go. Ordinary labor, I'd watch from the back, but if it's like Hwayeon says, everyone will burn through their Phase Power and collapse before we even reach the destination."
Hwayeon heard me, smiled softly, and nodded.
I stepped out front, drew the Heaven-Command Cloud Sword, and raised a Wall of Space ten meters high, a hundred meters wide, and three meters thick. Two hundred and forty thousand TP vanished in a single breath.
Even with the Heaven-Command Cloud Sword's effect, 240,000 TP...
Hold it about a second and the forest under the Wall of Space vanished completely, easy to walk — but move like this and fourteen uses over twenty-eight seconds carried us forty-two meters, and then I'd have to rest an hour and forty minutes.
"I can't go on like this. Forty-two meters, then an hour and forty of rest."
The raid members murmured at the enormous amber wall that had appeared before their eyes. I cut the width. Height and thickness stayed the same; drop the width to twenty meters and the cost fell to sixty thousand, and with the Heaven-Command Cloud Sword that became 48,000 TP — seventy-two uses, two hundred and sixteen meters.
I drove it straight through to a hundred meters in one push. Better than before. Still...
Franc, looking at the rectangular path cut through the forest, turned to me.
"There's no need to widen it all the way to twenty meters, is there? You have Spatial Perception, and I can fly as well, so let's narrow the width to five meters and move in two columns."
"Franc's right. No point making the path wide for nothing. If it's wide and easy, aberrants could come swarming through it."
"Alright."
We lined up two abreast and slowly cut a path with the Wall of Space, until a thought struck me and I drew a Mana Laser from my fingertips and chopped the trees ahead into pieces.
One cut at the base, one at the waist, and they toppled, the height dropping hard. I lowered the Wall of Space to half because of that. We had to dodge a scatter of wood chips, but the distance we could cover jumped — more than a kilometer in an hour.
Partway there, Spatial Perception picked up a delicious-looking sea-crab aberrant closing in, but I deliberately let it come. I warned that the sea crab was felling trees on its way toward us, and Hwayeon had Choi Soohan tell the party to take defensive positions.
Once the main body got the word, a wind-attribute ability user stepped forward and cut down the trees in the crab's path, the earth-attribute users buried the trunks, they cleared an open space and formed ranks, and snapped into combat stance. Right after, a sea crab five meters tall appeared, one claw the size of a large dump truck.
Wasn't this the delicious crab aberrant I'd eaten on the third run? That one had been Low Grade, though. This was Mid-High Grade.
Being a Mid-High Rank Variant, it stood over five meters, and a single leg was as thick as an adult's torso and more than five meters long. It had eight of those legs, and one claw in particular was bigger than the crab's own body. One of these and our entire raid team could eat their fill for a meal.
The Low-Rank Variant had just looked like an ordinary crab. Get up around mid-high, and the traits definitely changed.
The instant it showed itself, I leapt into the air and fired a Mana Laser, shearing the sea crab clean in two from top to bottom. The main body's members, weapons still cocked, stared up at me with blank faces.
Silence dropped over them for a moment. Then they burst into cheers at the sheer size of the sea-crab aberrant, and the supporters rushed in, butchered it on the spot, and hoisted the cuts like cargo.
Hearing how cheerful they all sounded, they knew it was delicious too.
"Everyone's looking forward to lunch."
"So they know the sea-crab aberrant tastes good. Anyway, the lake with the Asumpfre Sunken Ruins is a freshwater lake, isn't it? And there's a sea crab walking around."
"It is a freshwater lake. That isn't a sea crab. It's a creature called a thief crab."
"Huh?"
"The carapace is black and rectangular, and the front legs are red. Sea crabs usually have round shells."
"Hwayeon. Is it called a thief crab because it steals?"
Huh? I checked, and just as Hwayeon had said, the carapace was a rectangle. So the one I'd eaten before had been a thief crab too. Franc was asking Hwayeon with a fascinated look as well, when Sis cut in beside me.
"In Korea they live in the mountains, sneak into people's houses, and steal rice, so that's why they're called thief crabs. You usually find them in Korea and parts of Southeast Asia."
Before I knew it the thief crab was fully butchered and slung over the ability users' shoulders, and I started cutting the path again.
A Wall of Space three meters thick, five meters wide, and four meters high cost 6,000 TP, and at that rate we could cover 3.6 kilometers in two hours. About three kilometers left to the destination — two more hours of travel and we'd arrive.
"It'll be lunchtime when we get there. We'll set up the encampment right away, eat, and then head out to explore."
"Yeah."