Asumpfre Sunken Ruins (2)
We reached the outpost site we'd been aiming for, and a look around put the encampment about two kilometers back from the lakeshore. The clearing was wider than a full stadium—more than enough ground for a hundred and thirty-nine people to camp.
Grass stood chest-high everywhere. I was about to sweep the lot away with a Space Wall when the ability users who'd already dropped their packs stepped in and started turning the earth and packing it down themselves. Earth-attribute users overturned the ground in a blink and buried every blade of grass, and then the wind-attribute users bundled the air and pounded the soil flat, thud after thud.
Then the supporters made their entrance. They began pitching tents across the firmly tamped earth, while the physical enhancement users felled the surrounding trees to widen the clearing, trimmed the timber, and drove it into the ground to raise a palisade.
"Hey! More wood! Bring more wood!"
"Not enough over here either!"
"Oi! This side's still soft! Shore it up and pack it down!"
I watched the physical enhancement users noisily drive their roughly trimmed logs into the earth in two straight rows, then turned to Siha.
"Do we actually need a palisade?"
"A palisade isn't for keeping aberrants out of camp. It's to stop the camp's light from spilling out across the distance. And having a wall up gives people a sense of security, too."
"Ah. That tracks."
A cigarette's glow could be seen from fifteen hundred meters in the dead of night, wasn't that the line? A campfire, or the lights of ordinary life at a base, would show from even farther. Ten supporters put my tent up before anyone else's. Every tent was the same model from the Verification Corps days: pitch a pentagonal shell, then set a Spread Room inside it. I'd wondered what a Spread Room even was. Turned out to be that thing you inflate with air until it becomes a plush air mattress.
A tent roomy enough for five, handed to me alone. It felt like inefficiency taken to its peak, but I figured this too was a matter of dignity and let it go. Franc and Hwayeon would be sharing it with me anyway. Three people in a five-person tent—call it a privilege of the raid team's Master and Boss.
The moment the conference tent went up after that, the three team leaders, two squad leaders, Siha, Franc, Hwayeon, and I gathered to draw up a detailed schedule for the four days of work ahead.
"We will divide the three teams into six and have them stand watch in rotation. Those who remain will explore the Asumpfre Ruins once Master has cleared the aberrants in the lake. Today, all hands will establish the encampment and carry out the drainage. After lunch, we would ask Master to clear the lake's aberrants together with Franc."
The meeting ran under Hwayeon's lead. Siha handled the video record. Choi Soohan was in charge of quelling any grumbling inside the camp—word that she had become my butler had spread in an instant, and the members followed her orders quietly, without a hint of resistance. That was why.
My own task was to search inside and outside the lake for aberrants of High Grade and above, and take them. The lake was absurdly huge. I wasn't sure I could manage it.
The schedule through day four was finished. We took a ten-minute break, and the moment the meeting resumed, Siha raised her hand and asked to speak.
"The precise scale calculation is complete, and the lake's area has been determined. But that area is..."
During the break she had taken the lake photographs from me, opened a hologram window, and worked out the scale. The size that came out of her mouth defied imagination.
The red dot, she said, marked our encampment. The widest span ran from the northeastern tip to the southwestern tip, roughly four hundred kilometers. The narrowest stretch was the distance from where we were camped now across to the opposite shore—about a hundred kilometers.
"The lake holding the sunken ruins is a little smaller than our entire country. Korea's total area is a hundred thousand square kilometers. This place is about eighty thousand."
"......"
Siha had struck the whole conference tent mute in an instant, and even she wore a look that said she had never expected the lake to be anywhere near this large.
"A size that scarcely settles into a concept at all."
Team Leader Han Hyeonrang—a physical enhancement user only just inside B-Class, hair cut in a wolf cut—stared at the photograph hanging in the air and seemed to be wondering, same as the rest of us, whether we could really clear this in four days.
Hwayeon drew a semicircle inside the lake, centered on the encampment.
"The sunken ruins lie within a few kilometers of the shore nearest the camp. The point is preparing for aberrants that may attack during the excavation, but..."
"In that case, the area Master would have to take responsibility for is about seven hundred square kilometers. Large enough to swallow Seoul without trying."
While the people at the meeting murmured, I folded my arms and thought back to the view of the lake I had looked down on from the sky. With my ability I could cross about a hundred kilometers in ten minutes. If I moved in a zigzag, travel time would stretch by roughly one and a half. Siha could fight underwater back at the main camp, so couldn't I just scour the lake and kill every aberrant I laid eyes on? If I tried herding them by detonating Mana Shells underwater, though, the shock would wreck the sunken ruins.
"Range isn't the problem. Even seven hundred square kilometers is only about a twenty-kilometer radius, so I can cover it fine if I watch from the sky. Or I could do one clean sweep beforehand. The catch is, if I set off Mana Shells underwater, the blast will whip the current hard enough that the ruins might collapse or get buried. Is that still all right?"
"The items we expect to recover from the sunken ruins are artworks of unknown era and style, and weapons or armor that may or may not hold Phase Power. If the submerged buildings collapse, we would have to give up on the artworks..."
Calm as ever, Hwayeon was already turning toward abandoning the artworks. Artworks dug out of the Phase World go for serious money, don't they?! You can really give up on them that easily?!
"Ah, then herding with Mana Shells is out. Mana Bullets are area-erasers too, so the current would still get violent. Looks like the only way is to cut them down with Mana Riser as I see them and clear the place piece by piece. Clearing's going to take a long time, so if the survey starts tomorrow, I need to get moving right now."
I'd have nothing to do sitting around camp anyway.
"Is that what you intend?"
"Then I'll eat lunch, clear the area around the camp, and start on the aberrants in the lake. Assign a team to recover the corpses of the ones I kill. I'll kill everything I see, but the lake is so big I might miss some, so don't get lazy on watch."
"We will proceed as instructed. If a better plan comes up during the meeting, I will contact you at once."
I stepped out of the tent under the team leaders' admiring stares, and a thread of quiet talk drifted out from inside.
"Confidence worthy of the man who brought Japan to its knees. The air of someone stepping out for a stroll in his own front yard."
"He captured a B-Class alive back when he was still C-Class, so now that he himself is B-Class, a Mid-High Rank Variant or a High-Rank Variant must be nothing but an after-meal snack."
"But is his Phase Power all right? Acting alone seems a little..."
"Master's Phase Power recovery is far from ordinary, and Miss Franc is at his side, so there is no need to worry. More to the point, we ought to worry about ourselves before we worry about Master. Keeping pace with his clearing speed while we search and explore will be harder than you think."
I heard the team leaders suck in empty breaths and answer Hwayeon in short replies, then headed for the center of the encampment. There, the supporter women—on mess duty, by the look of it—had split an enormous crab shell into quarters, set the pieces over four braziers, and were stir-frying crab meat with all kinds of vegetables and rice. Crab-meat salad and crab-meat soup as well. A crab banquet, start to finish.
I sat in the place Choi Soohan and the team leaders who had followed me out had ready, inhaled the savory, spicy crab fried rice as if I were drinking it, and stood. Siha and Hwayeon, who had been eating with me, went round-eyed.
"You're done already? Eat a little more and rest before you go."
"No. If the survey starts tomorrow, I need to clear as many aberrants as I can now, or people are going to get hurt."
I said it with a glance at the underwater gear heaped in one corner of a tent. Siha and Hwayeon started to rise mid-meal, so I waved them back down.
"I'll handle the heavy work. You two eat slow and put those heads to use."
"Pfft. All right."
I drew the Celestial Cloud Sword from my waist and started walking up into the sky, laying Space Walls under my feet. Every team member and squad member stopped eating, stood, and saw me off. They could have just kept eating. I'd climbed slowly so I wouldn't kick up dust and ruin the meal, and instead that very caution had ruined it. The moment I was high enough not to raise dust, I kicked hard off a Space Wall and launched myself toward the lake.
First I scoured the ground around the camp with Space Walls, hunting through it like I was picking lice. Crustaceans a few meters long with no Phase Stone in them, I erased cleanly with small Mana Bullets. The ones that had stones, I flew in on, cut down with a Mana Laser, pulled the stones out, and erased what was left with Mana Bullets. I split open a sea-slater aberrant sparsely fuzzed with hairs like pubes, recovered a Mid-High Grade Phase Stone, and handed it to Franc. She lifted the bulging sack and said,
"Oh my. The Phase Stones have already come to a hundred and twenty thousand TP!"
"The lowest of them is Mid Grade, and Mid-High Grades are swarming, so yeah, the stones add up. Oh—there's a High Grade crayfish over there."
I sheared through a train-sized crayfish aberrant, its carapace like solid rock, with a Mana Riser like a gigantic blade, and a strange feeling washed over me. Not long ago I had been locked in a life-or-death struggle with the Elephantros alpha, a High-Rank Variant, and now I was swatting them like flies. If this were a game, I would have cursed it for trash balance. Everyone else was playing a TRPG with their eyes on fire, hurling dice, while I alone felt like I was on a single-player RPG—a third-cycle new game, and a hard one.
I scratched my head, picked up the lobster aberrant's corpse, and headed for the camp. It was High Grade. There had to be some part of it worth real money. It was heavy, given the size, but once I dropped Mana Mode and focused on physical enhancement, it wasn't more than I could lift. I dropped the corpse near the palisade. The members standing watch up on the wall flinched and looked my way. I waved, and launched myself back toward the lake.
The northeastern tip, where the lake began, was extremely narrow—narrow enough that Spatial Perception could only just cover it. Which is to say, nine kilometers wide. Push southwest, though, and it would of course grow wider and wider.
"Disgustingly huge. Seriously."
I spread a Space Wall in the sky, stood on it, and looked down, and a sigh came out of me. I was supposed to clear all of that, a place that looked like the sea? At the sight of me already sick of it, Franc laughed, clasped her hands behind her back, and—was she starting to show off, complete with an ahem? When she put her hands behind her, the full swell of her breasts, wrapped in that white dress, gave a bounce, and for one stupid second I thought she was about to demonstrate boob movement. A boobment.
Anyway, this was the first time I'd seen Franc show off. It wasn't an annoying kind. It was a cute kind, so I laughed and asked.
"What ability? I hope it's as impressive as that cute look of yours."
"Uu... I-it's nothing special. While you were in the Phase World with Lady Siha, I did a little research and practice of my own. And not long ago, that practice bore fruit!"
"Practice?"
I hadn't seen Franc doing anything like practice since we'd returned. Puzzled, I looked her over again with analysis, but nothing had changed on the inside. On the outside... a somehow more sensual air had been added to that fresh purity. Ahem. The TP in Franc's Soul Stone was still charged to the maximum, same as before.
"I don't see anything different. Did you grow your chest a bit? That bounce just now seemed more dynamic."
"I did not! Seoha, you really are..."
Franc covered her chest and snapped at me, sharp-voiced, then glared, so I snickered and asked again.
"What kind of ability? Something you learned new, or an evolution of one you already had?"
"For the fifteen days after we were parted, I kept thinking of how I might be of help to you. And I realized the only path was to become your eyes. Your attack, your defense, and your recovery are already so great that no ability user could even approach them."
"Mmm."
"So I took hints from Yeo Isu, the raid team's C-Class analyst, and from Boss Park Jiwoong, and I found I could reshape Spatial Perception into a form of analysis."
"...Huh?"
Ah, wait. By analysis, she didn't mean the Analysis ability I'd had in my first cycle and lost when I gained Mana Sieve. She meant visual analysis, the other method of Detection. I asked her that, and she nodded as if to say exactly.
"That's right."
"Whoa. So Spatial Perception disappeared and visual analysis appeared?"
"No. I can switch between the two and use them. There is a delay of about two seconds on the switch, however."
"If you use visual analysis from the air, every penalty of that ability vanishes. Whoa, that's no joke!"
It was basically a high-performance radar. She could move up to four kilometers from the Soul Stone pendant around my neck, and at a height of four kilometers nothing would block her line of sight unless it was one of the tallest mountains in the world. She'd hidden that until now and was only telling me? Franc was a sly one too.
In the conference tent I had put on a strong front, set on making this first raid—the exploration of the Asumpfre Sunken Ruins—a success no matter what. But once I actually thought about Franc and me having to clear a lake this vast by ourselves, the weight of it had started to press. I'd been telling myself I'd have to process aberrants without even sleeping. Now, at last, I could see a light.
"Franc!"
"Kyaa!"
I scooped her into a hug, swept aside the platinum hair that fit so neatly against me, and kissed her pretty forehead. Her face flushed deep red, and she looked immensely pleased.
"Training must have been hard. Thank you for working so hard for me. I love you."
"Uu... I-I love you too."
I asked how she had managed to switch over to visual analysis like flipping a switch, and she said she didn't really know herself. Only that she had followed Yeo Isu around for twenty-four hours, eyes wide with Spatial Perception every time the woman used her analysis ability, and at some point she had become able to switch as if throwing a switch.
"Your eyes are better than an eagle's. Maybe that had something to do with it?"
"Do you think so? In truth, even after I gained visual analysis, I thought it no great ability, since it cannot see through terrain. But I am glad it has come to help you at just the right time."
"No. If I handle detection inside ruins, dungeons, and buildings, and you handle it in the field, we're unbeatable."
"Hehe."
Looking at that cute laugh, I laughed too and spoke.
"Then watch for anything that avoids the places I'm clearing and runs off behind me."
"Please leave it to me!"
I carried Franc on my back, ran across Space Walls, and killed every aberrant that entered my Spatial Perception range by firing Mana Lasers. Each time I cleared a point, Franc used visual analysis to see through the water—she said she couldn't pierce high-density things like buildings or earth, but she could penetrate something transparent, like water, to a degree—found the aberrants, and told me where they were. Then I sprinted that way and cleaned them out. Thanks to that, I could clear the sea-like lake bit by bit, the way you gather dust into a dustpan.
As I ran hard across the water, I found that—unlike what Hwayeon had said about Mid-High Rank Variants appearing in large numbers—the variation was extremely wide, from Lowest Grade all the way to Mid-High Grade. It wasn't that aberrants existed as an invasive species disrupting the aquatic ecosystem. An ecosystem made of aberrants alone seemed to have taken shape. Anyway, as I swept back and forth, killing them one by one with Mana Lasers, they must have sensed that something was wrong. Franc reported that even the ones that had been hiding, or lying still on the bottom, had started fleeing in every direction.
A fish-tail of a bay. Bay is a word you use for the sea, but at this scale it might as well be one, so I decided to just call it a bay. At any rate, I made it all the way to where the bay ended in under thirty minutes, sprinting at full power while flicking Mana Mode acceleration on and off. The problem was everything from here on, where it only got wider.
Width alone, a hundred kilometers. How was I supposed to cover a span half the width of the Korean peninsula and still stop aberrants from slipping deeper into the bay?
"Mmm. At this rate, time... won't be enough. Franc, let's split the work."
"Split it? How?"
"You take the Soul Stone pendant and track aberrant positions from up in the sky. If, while you're moving around, something of Mid Grade or higher slips past my range and goes inward, drop two lightning bolts toward that spot. I'll run that way."
"Yes!"
Lightning dropped from the sky, rather than shot from the hand, had a range so long you could call it line of sight. If Franc, with her eagle eyes, was the one throwing it, she could send it not just several kilometers, but dozens. We set a simple signal and started clearing, and efficiency jumped so hard I was grateful all over again that she was here.
KRA-KOOOOOM!!
Two bolts fell to the left. I cut that way and sprinted flat out, and there was a Mid-High Rank Variant green squid, swimming leisurely back toward the direction I had come from. I immediately threw a Mana Bullet and erased it.
RUMBLE!
Another bolt fell to the right and I shot off like an arrow. It wasn't even me alone doing the catching—Franc was firing lightning in the gaps and killing the smaller ones of Mid Grade and below too—and still I was running myself ragged.
Ah. Declaring I'd clear every aberrant in a lake the size of South Korea had been too reckless. And I couldn't exactly start whining now that I couldn't do it.
I was going to die.
I'd been cleaning for another hour after that when three people flew in toward me—a wind-attribute user, a water-attribute user, and a physical enhancement user.
"Master. Is there anything we might assist with?"
I glanced up at Franc, orbiting like a satellite at lightning speed, handed over the sack of Mid-Low to Mid-High Phase Stones, and asked,
"Is the encampment finished?"
"Yes. Boss Yoo Hwayeon confirmed the clearing you and Miss Evans have done, and sent us for corpse recovery and support."
"Then you can see the aberrant corpses behind me, right? I'd like those recovered."
The wind-attribute woman looked back along the way I had come, saw the countless corpses floating on the lake, and her face said, Is this something a person can even do...? The water-attribute woman beside her drove an elbow hard into her side.
"Ack!"
"Understood. If there is anything else you would order..."
URURURUNG!
Sorry, but a bolt from Franc fell while he was still talking, so I sprinted that way at full power. When I arrived, a Mid-High blue crab was moving toward the bay. I dove straight in, started to split the crab in half, then stopped at a halfway cut—killed it, seized its claw, and leapt back to the surface. Only then did the three ability users, who had flown over in a rush, stare at the seven-meter blue crab floating on the water in my hand with expressions of disbelief and awe, and burst out.
"This is..."
"Whoa, a blue crab!"
"Looks Mid-High!"
"Take it. And I'll mark the spots where there are corpses of Mid Grade and above with arrow signs made of Space Walls, so check those as you recover the bodies."
"Understoo—"
KRA-KOOM!
Another bolt fell, and I ran off without even hearing the physical enhancement user out. Honestly, the byproducts worth money started at Mid-High, so anything of Mid Grade and below was better left to return to nature.
Word that I was running myself ragged exterminating aberrants must have reached the camp, because two wind users started following behind me as a communications net, and water-attribute users and physical enhancement users—ten each, twenty in all—formed teams and began tracking the amber arrow-shaped Space Walls, hauling in the Mid-High Rank Variant corpses I had left in a long line. I'd told them to take a Space Wall down once recovery there was done. Whenever I felt something strike a wall I'd set, I dismissed that arrow, kept moving, caught aberrants, made a new arrow, sprinted to wherever Franc dropped lightning, caught the aberrant there, and made another arrow. I repeated that until the sun went down.