Asumpfre Sunken Ruins (3)

Ah... I really blew this one.

Out where the lake truly opened up, a tongue of land jutted like a cape, and past it the water spread wide all over again. From the tip of that cape back to the near shore was only about a hundred kilometers, but beyond it lay a lake like an inland sea — a hundred and fifty kilometers across at the narrowest, more than two hundred and fifty on average, and three hundred and fifty where it was widest. Past this point, there was no sealing the approaches and wiping the Aberrants out clean.

Even now Franc was streaking back and forth across the sky without a moment's rest, and if they pushed any farther... She had covered everything up to here by flying herself ragged, but go beyond it and something was certain to slip through. On top of that, he had to start watching for the lake's boss-class Peak-Rank Variants, the ones Hwayeon had warned him about. A Peak-Rank Variant was not something he could drop with a flick of the hand the way he did a High Grade. Their energy fields ran stronger, and there was no telling whether they could strike at range, so he could not leave Franc flying out there alone.

They had arrived in the Phase World at eight in the morning, reached the outpost at noon, and started the cleanup at one. Five hours to get this far, and it was already six in the evening. What remained of the lake was at least three times the ground they had already cleared.

Any more than this was too much.

Watching the sun sink, he called off the sweep. The tally so far stood at thirty-two High-Rank, four hundred seventy-nine Mid-High, and Mid-Rank Variants past counting. That was already on par with a full subjugation, so the rest...

He turned it over for a moment, then decided.

While he had been clearing Aberrants, Spatial Perception had mapped the terrain under him. Just as Hwayeon had said, the sunken ruins spread in the shape of a gourd about eight kilometers off the shore nearest the outpost. The area was enormous — roughly half the sprawl of Incheon — but with Franc's visual analysis behind him, it was still a range he could cover. So rather than hunt down every Aberrant in the lake, he would hold that sector and take only the ones that came in.

He explained the change of plan, and the reason for it, to the wind-attribute user floating at his back, and told them to fly back and inform Hwayeon. They snapped a salute and shot off toward the outpost like an arrow.

Ready to head back himself, he waved up at Franc where she drifted high overhead and called her down.

"You called for me?"

The faint color the sunset laid across her face only made her lovelier, and Franc already looked like a goddess of the moon. Platinum hair falling to the backs of her knees burned red in the evening light above a face that was clear and beautiful, set on a figure far too voluptuous for that innocence, and under it all a nature that was kind and obedient. Taken together, it left him endlessly grateful that she was his.

He could not hold the greed back. When she drew close he caught her by the waist and kissed her, and Franc flushed, wound her arms around his neck, and answered him.

Males of the world — I am the victor.

"You've worked hard. We've piled up plenty of Aberrant corpses, and we've secured about six hundred thousand TP in Phase Stones, so let's head back."

"You will not be exterminating any more of them?"

"Sealing them off completely really is impossible. After dinner I'll track down just the High-Rank and Peak-Rank Variants and kill the lot of them, and starting tomorrow we'll patrol around the search zone and keep watch."

"Yes. I was thinking the same. If it opens any wider than this, the Aberrants will have gaps to flee through."

"Help me recover the corpses, then we'll go."

Recovery of the Aberrants he had killed was not finished yet, so he took off toward the arrows he had left hanging in the air, shaped from Walls of Space. From the second hour of the hunt, twenty-two people had been scrambling to haul the corpses in. Even so, they could not match the rate he killed them, and the arrows had stacked up little by little. Now that the hunt was over, those arrows packed the sky in every direction. Beneath them, about eight teams bounded across the water, carrying Aberrant corpses the way ants carry crumbs.

The moment he joined the work, Hwayeon sent everyone but the outpost sentries, and the recovery was over in no time. By the time the last corpse was in, the sun was down and the moon was up — around eight.

The members who had been at it from the start collapsed, utterly spent, into the rest area set up at the outpost. That was the physically hardy Physical Reinforcement users. The water-attribute and wind-attribute users lay sprawled like corpses, their faces gone blue. All they had done was solidify water under their feet to run, or fly a person or two at a time, but keep that up for eight hours and of course you drop — unless your Phase Power recovers at a monstrous rate, the way his did. Partway through, Hwayeon had said she wanted the Mid-Rank Variants brought in as well, and he had let her have her way. Those people were going to be creaking along until tomorrow.

"Whoa. How is the Master still perfectly fine?"

"Right? He wasn't just hauling, like us. He went and caught all of those... all of those Aberrants on top of it."

"How many did we move?"

"A bit over thirty High-Rank Variants, and about five hundred Mid-High Grade, I heard. The Mid Grade are piled up over there like a mountain."

"...There's a rumor that the Master's Phase Power is infinite. It might actually be true."

Watching him stroll the outpost as if nothing had happened, the ability users seemed to be looking at him with about twenty percent respect, thirty percent awe, and fifty percent fear. Under those complicated stares he glanced toward the eastern side of the camp, where a mountain of Aberrant corpses waiting to be dismantled rose a hundred-odd meters into the air.

That pile was what you got when you scraped up every last one of them — Hwayeon's hard line that if the Master was running himself ragged, the people under him had no business resting, and his sister's insistence that throwing Mid Grade corpses away was absurd. No wonder they were looking at him like he was a monster.

He was sitting in the rest area on the open ground at the center of the outpost, recovering alongside the recovery teams, when Hwayeon came over.

"I heard you intend to go out tonight and take the High-Rank and Peak-Rank Variants."

"Yeah. I took the width of the lake too lightly. Still, it feels like we've handled about a third of it, so tonight I'll kill off anything whose fight would throw a lot of collateral, and tomorrow I'll watch from overhead while we search the sunken ruins."

The moment the words a third left his mouth, groans fit for the dead in the underworld spilled from the ability users resting nearby. Hwayeon looked at them with open displeasure, then turned back to him.

"There is still a mountain of byproducts to dismantle. If thirty ability users keep resting like this, the schedule will slip. Would you use Healing Wave and take care of their fatigue?"

"Uwaaaah, Boss, please let us rest just a little looonger."

"We really ran for eight hours straight without a break..."

"Just kill us instead..."

At her words the collapsed ability users put on tearful faces and half-whined, and Hwayeon answered in a cold voice.

"If you want to rest in comfort, do it after you have matched even half of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠what the Master has done."

In that instant the grumbling vanished, and they staggered upright with the faces of the dying. Watching them lurch like zombies, he fired Healing Wave at stage two. A blue wave spread, washed over every one of them, and faded, and right after that they stared down at their own bodies in wonder and broke into a commotion.

"Whoa. So this is the Master's Healing Wave."

"That's insane. Even the mental fatigue feels like it's gone."

"Uwaaang~ I don't wanna do dismantling work~."

Hwayeon watched the women, still pouting, and the men, testing their limbs with fascinated looks, troop off toward the mountain of byproducts. Then she turned to him, smiled warmly, and kissed his cheek.

"You worked hard. You as well, Franc. The thunder that kept rolling down out of the sky — I could do nothing but marvel."

"Heh. Without Seoha, it would have been impossible. You have worked hard too, Hwayeon, setting the outpost in order."

He glanced around, confirmed that no one was paying them any mind, and reached for Hwayeon's backside while she traded pleasantries with Franc, savoring the soft give of it through her armored tights. She laughed under her breath and stroked his hair.

"I'll have dinner prepared, so eat, and rest. And... a night hunt is never something to take lightly."

"I'll be careful."

"If it comes to it, blow the lake away with a Mana Blast. The profit from the sunken ruins matters, but your safety matters most."

"Yeah."

At his answer she smiled with her eyes and went back to the mountain of byproducts.

...Huh?

Wait. Hold on a second.

Franc seemed to have caught something in his expression, but she sat quietly and watched him, unwilling to interrupt. He was grateful for that.

Fire a Mana Blast and the shockwave would heave the water hard. That surge could damage the drowned ruins, so he ought to hold off and use a Mana Cannon instead. Loose a Mana Cannon, which threw no shockwave, and only the water would vanish. The level would fall bit by bit, wouldn't it?

He opened a hologram window, pulled up the photograph of the lake he had taken that morning, and turned the idea over and over.

While clearing a third of the lake earlier, he had read the terrain. The deepest point of this bay was 1.6 kilometers, and the whole of it was built like a sea: continental shelf, continental slope, and abyssal plain. The sunken ruins sat on the shelf, under three hundred meters of water.

Erase the water with a Mana Cannon rather than a Mana Blast, and the level would keep dropping until he could walk the ruins on foot. Bring the water down and the fish-type Aberrants would all flee or end up stranded, so there would be no more ambushes to worry about, and the crustaceans would slow drastically once they were out of the water. Far easier to deal with.

Good. Instead of a Mana Blast, he would erase the water with a Mana Cannon and bring the level down.

The 5,000 TP Mana Cannon he had fired back when he was D-Class had carved a crater a kilometer across. He was B-Class now, and he could compress TP even further, so he ought to be able to erase far more than that. He was fairly sure a gap on the northwest side of the lake joined it to another. He would need to see whether water was coming in or going out before he started the work.

"Franc. I thought of a good method."

"What sort of method?"

"First, could you gather Hwayeon, my sister, and the team leaders and squad leaders? I'll be in the meeting tent."

"Yes!"

He stepped into the meeting tent, lit the lamp, and threw the photograph of the lake up large across the hologram window. He went into edit mode and started marking the location, the shape, and the depths of the sunken ruins onto the map, and eight men and women came crowding in.

"You called for us."

The moment they entered they saw the position of the ruins and the laid-out map of the lake, and they could not hide their surprise. Depths marked across the whole of it drew an even sharper curiosity out of them.

"I got a hint from something Hwayeon said earlier and thought of one thing. I wanted to hear what all of you think of it."

"An idea the Master came up with? Now I have to hear what kind of method it is."

Park Yoon-ho, leader of Team 3 and a C-Class Physical Reinforcement user, said it with an easy smile, and curiosity rose on every other face.

"It's simple. I use my ability to erase the water and lower the level until the sunken ruins are exposed. As you can see here, the ruins sit on something like ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a continental shelf. The water there is three hundred meters at the deepest."

"Ah! The Master's Wall of Space erases everything inside its range, doesn't it?! Put it underwater and it would draw in all the water and erase that too, so if it's as you say, we could lower the level easily. Then we could search the sunken ruins on foot, and attacks from aquatic Aberrants would vanish — aside from the crustaceans and the like...!"

...Huh? So I shouldn't use the Mana Cannon. I should just strike with the Wall of Space. That would do it.

Whew. If he had explained the plan to Franc beforehand, he would have made a fool of himself. His sister, with no idea she had just spared him the embarrassment and helped him besides, checked the depths he had marked by area, nodded hard, and built him up for how impressive it was.

"And even though it's a lake, it's structured like a sea — continental shelf, then continental slope, then something like an abyssal plain — so this plan fits even better. The sunken ruins are on the shelf, which means we only need to lower the water enough to expose the shelf!"

The team leaders and squad leaders, whose faces a moment ago had said lower the water level? This huge lake? Is that even possible?, brightened all at once as the reality of it sank in, and they started talking among themselves.

"Whoa. Then we don't even need underwater gear. We just gear up for a fight and survey the ruins?"

"Ama...zing. To think there's someone who can actually pull a method like this off."

"At this rate we could clear every unresolved underwater dungeon registered with the Ability User Association."

"You're right. It would be practically free. Call it impressive, or call it just like the Master."

"Isn't it? When I first heard President Yu and the First Boss were pushing the Master so hard, I was skeptical, but the more I learn, the more the Master turns out to be the real thing."

Heh. Heheheh. Yes. Praise me. Praise this magnificent self of mine! Puhahaha!

Watching the squad leaders and team leaders get worked up, he was grinning to himself when Hwayeon, who had been studying the map, nodded and spoke.

"If it is as the Clearance Director says, this is a method only the Master can use. Adopt it, and the time spent on the search will shrink, so a change of schedule will be unavoidable."

"Before that, like I said earlier, tonight I plan to go alone, find the Peak-Rank and High-Rank Variants in Lake Asumpfre, and kill them."

"What?! Then I— I'll go with you! A fight at night is dangerous!"

At the talk of going out to fight in the middle of the night, his sister's eyes went wide. She shot up from her seat and shouted as if there were no world in which she let him go alone.

"Can you fly, sis?"

"I can just go with a wind-attribute user..."

When he made it plain he meant to refuse, she put on a tearful face and appealed to the team leaders for support. So he turned a sharp look on them as well.

"Ahem."

"Mmm..."

Whether they had caught the refusal in his eyes or not, the team leaders cleared their throats and avoided his sister's gaze.

"You and Hwayeon guard the outpost. While I was clearing the lake today, a Mid-Rank Variant led Mid-Low Rank Variants in an attack on the camp, I heard."

While he had been busy clearing the lake, a crocodile more than twenty-five meters long — its lower jaw cleft in two, the snout branching into three — had led four smaller crocodiles and hit the outpost. He had swept the Mid-High Grades and High Grades around the camp, but tonight was the first night since they had set the place up. There was no telling what might come, and it would not do for his sister, the team's strongest fighter aside from him, to be gone.

He shook his head at her. She was gripping her sky staff, glaring at him, thoroughly displeased.

"I know you're impressive at dealing with Aberrants in all sorts of ways, but this time it'll be easier if it's just me and Franc."

"...Fine."

"In that case, would it not be better to do this by day rather than at night? I do not believe there is any need to plan a battle for when one can barely see."

The young woman with slightly tousled hair and a gentle face, leader of Squad 2, had spoken in a faintly husky voice. She was the leader of Support Team 2, wasn't she? He knew the face, but the name would not come, which probably meant they had never actually met.

"Jung Tae-ryung is right! The ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Master fighting alone at night — that's dangerous...!"

"Sis, be quiet. You're fine with everything else, but the moment it's about me you can't tell up from down."

Leave her be and she would drag the meeting out forever, so he scolded her, and she shut her mouth with her lips pushed out in a pout. The other team leaders and squad leaders laughed under their breath at that. He shrugged, then shook his head at the Support Team 2 leader they had called Jung Tae-ryung, turned on Mana Vision, and looked at the people in the tent one by one.

"With Mana Vision on, I can see the night as clearly as day, like looking through a scope. There's no limit on my field of view, so you don't need to worry. And Franc will be with me."

Jung Tae-ryung looked at his eyes, blue light flowing through them, nodded, and stepped back.

"Then there should be nothing to worry about."

His sister sent him a silent protest not to give up over something like that.

Oh, for real. I should start thinking about leaving my sister out of meetings.

"Then what remains is confirming the terrain on the far side of the lake. If Lake Asumpfre connects to the two lakes on this screen, we will need to block those waterways."

"Shall I select a search party and send them out?"

Han Hyeonrang, leader of Team 1, raised a hand to speak, and Hwayeon shut the idea down.

"It is late today, so tomorrow we will identify the points, and if necessary we will take an earth-attribute user along and block the channels."

From there, with his sister pushing her opinion hard, the meeting settled on simply resting tonight. First thing in the morning they would check the waterways leading to the other lakes, gauge the level, and dispatch an earth-attribute user to seal the channels off. After that the plan was to drive a Wall of Space down into the lake, drop the water drastically, see whether any Peak-Rank Variants were present, and then hunt the Aberrants.

He showed he wanted to refuse partway through, but they argued hard. A fight in the dead of night would leave the recovery teams — who did not have night eyes like his — stuck with a retrieval they could not manage, and lower-grade Aberrants might tear into the corpses overnight and ruin them after he had gone to the trouble of killing them. Every bit of it made sense, so...

So what, they just don't want me going out to fight at night?

When the meeting ended he stepped out of the tent, watched the ability users swarm the Aberrant corpses to break them down for byproducts, and let out a long sigh.

"Seriously..."

"Heh. Lady Siha is only that way because she worries for you, Seoha. Please do not be too angry."

"I know. I know, but my sister really does overprotect me."

He was still grumbling about the way she had acted when ten supporters started preparing dinner. They brought over the chopped corpses of Aberrants that looked like blue crabs, washed them clean, dropped the meat into a great pot already waiting, and set it to boil. So dinner was spicy crab soup?

...Except then the Physical Reinforcement users came hauling in Aberrants that looked like shore crabs, hermit crabs, and lobsters, and started cracking shells and picking out the meat.

Tonight was another all-crab spread. He was looking forward to it.

Everyone but the personnel on watch gathered to eat what the supporters had prepared. Close to a hundred and forty people in one place, laughing and talking over a meal — it had the feel of a training camp, and that was not bad. He had heard some raid teams were full of ability users so soaked in a chosen-people complex that they would not even eat with their supporters, and the mood there was rotten. Grand Blue had none of that scum. Thankfully.

When the meal was done, the members left the savory, spicy smell still hanging over the outpost and went back to dismantling byproducts off the mountain of corpses. On Choi Soohan's orders, Hwayeon and his sister were helping too, so he tried to join in — and Choi Soohan, supervising the work, came over with a straight face.

"This is not work for the Master to do."

And with that, she drove him off. The other members smiled and piled on.

"The Master has been working since morning, hasn't he? It's all right for you to rest."

Which was them begging him, please, not to steal their work.

I was only trying to help.

Hwayeon pushed at his back as well, telling him to rest, because if he stayed beside them the members would be too conscious of him and their pace would drop. He had no choice. He washed up at the showers and went back to his tent.

"Hmph. Feels like I'm being left out again."

"Oh, please don't say that. Everyone is only looking out for you, Seoha."

"Unwanted consideration is a kind of bullying too!"

He grabbed Franc and rolled across the mat with her in his arms, sweeping the ground around the outpost with Spatial Perception.

Three lines of palisade wrapped the camp in an irregular shape, and everything out to five hundred meters from the wall had been cleared into open ground. Here and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠there along the palisade they had built things that might have been towers, or ladders, or something in between. Looked like they meant to post sentries up there. They were not going to put him on watch anyway, so maybe he would wander the area until bedtime and clean up whatever Aberrants might be out there.

He told Franc to pass word to his sister and Hwayeon that he was going to deal with anything nearby, then leapt up into the darkened sky, turned Mana Vision on, and looked around.

Down below, his sister was shaking a clenched fist in his direction. She looked like she was pitching a fit over why he was not resting and was off to work again. He had known she would be like that, which was why he had sent Franc. A moment later Franc came to him wearing the look of someone who had taken the scolding in his place.

"She asks that you come down and rest, rather than this..."

"It's fine. If my sister says anything, tell her you passed it on and I just didn't listen."

"Hiiing."

He looked over a world made of black and gray and started walking the air as if he were out for a stroll. His sister, who had been glaring up at him, seemed to decide that was all it was. She turned her eyes away and went back to washing and sorting byproducts.

The instant she did, he pulled Franc into his arms, kicked off a Wall of Space, and shot like lightning past his sister's line of sight and over the forest.

Tell me not to, and I only want it more. I'm a contrary frog, through and through!