Episode 27: Day Eight — The Hideout (2)
"Keep the entrance narrow, and widen it as we dig inward. That should do it. I'll find some decently long branches, trim them, and lay them over the floor so the damp and the sap don't leave everything sticky. Watch closely — I'll show you what I can do."
Franc could have sat and watched. Instead she stood there while I scraped and hollowed the tree, and as the minutes passed her eyes grew wider and her mouth fell open. She clearly couldn't believe how fast I was carving. Fair enough. Beneath my feet, bark and sawdust piled up, spilled away, piled up again, and spilled away — ten times over. I'd already dug deep enough that, even if everything below my knees would stick out, there was room inside to lie down. If my palms hadn't gone numb and forced a rest, I might have finished the hole already.
Even with a cavity like this, the trunk was so thick that wind or storm shouldn't snap the tree. Analysis said so too. I'd more or less gotten the hang of the work. Keep at it like this, and I'd soon have space enough for two people to stretch out with room to spare.
Heh heh... just the two of us, a pretty girl and me, crammed into a tight little space.mkv
Ah, that was nice. Just thinking about it and I was already getting hard. A little disappointing, though. If only Franc weren't a ghost... Hmm. No. If she'd been alive, she wouldn't have spared someone like me a second glance. Then again, with a personality that kind, she wouldn't have ignored me either. She was so good-natured she looked like the type a rotten man would get his hooks into — and she'd suffer for it.
Inside the hole I kept stabbing with the claw spear, gouging wildly with the horn awl, then stabbing again. When I glanced back, Franc — squatting outside to watch — smiled brightly and waved. I grinned, waved back, switched my grip to the claw spear, and drove it into the trunk again and again. The claws were so sharp that sinking them into the wood felt like poking a stick into soft mud. Once they were in deep enough, I scraped with the horn awl and tore out the inner flesh. When I swept the piled sawdust and debris out of the hole, Franc clenched both fists and cheered me on, adorable as anything. A beauty like that, beaming and rooting for me — how was I supposed to not find the strength?
I ducked back into the hole, energetic, just about to start the last of the widening, when a sudden thought stopped my hands. I felt my mood dip, lowered my arm, then raised the horn awl again and went back to carving the trunk's inner flesh.
If this were the real world and I ran into a beauty like Franc, the gap between her face and mine was wide enough that I wouldn't even manage to speak. I'd have to flee on the spot. These days Phase Power had done a lot for my skin — the acne scars, like a bomb had gone off across my face, had mostly faded (I could tell just by touching it) — and the extra weight was coming off, and I was closing in on five foot seven. Even so, there's no escaping the face you were born with.
Franc, though, had a face so beautiful you'd believe she was a physical-enhancement ability user, and a flawless hourglass figure without an ounce of spare flesh. Breasts so large and full you'd need both hands to hold them. A slender waist. Hips neither too much nor too little, perfectly proportioned. A firm, round backside. Long, straight arms, and legs like a deer's. Truly... The description ran long, but Franc possessed a beauty that did not belong to humankind.
Before the new era began, the people called beautiful were demoted to ordinary once it started — that was how many stunning men and women had appeared. An age in which the old beauties would now be called merely fine-looking, because the standard had risen so high. And even among the beauties of this age, Franc was one who deserved the word ultra set before her name. So much so that simply receiving her gaze ought to feel like an honor beyond one's station. On top of that she had a frankly broken set of specs: kind, diligent, gentle, and mischievous, with a nature sincere enough to treat even a guy like me with real warmth.
Put bluntly, a hundred men out of a hundred would fall in love the moment they saw her, and even women would surrender to those superior looks and be moved by that character, until crowds gathered around her. She looked like the perfect daughter to end all perfect daughters. Enough that I found myself wondering whether she'd died here because she'd drawn a goddess's jealousy.
Listing those flawless virtues, I felt myself falling for her all over again. That was why I couldn't get my head on straight, why I kept stealing glances at her body, why I couldn't give up toying with her through the Phase Stone. This feeling — the longer I was with her, the less I wanted to let her go. Was this obsession? It left a bitter taste.
Franc, who wouldn't have dreamed I was thinking any of this, had at some point slipped into the widening burrow to watch. I stole glances at her as she moved among the rapidly piling sawdust, poking at it here and there, and kept widening the hollow. The crouch and the miserable tools had left my body stiff, but every time I caught a teasing glimpse of her chest, or her backside — the parts she only just let me see — strength surged hot through me. After several hours of labor, I succeeded in digging out space enough for two to lie side by side with room to spare.
For the height, I'd carved to my seated height of three and a half feet. Thinking it over, though, if I simply lay down, my back would grind against the wood, and I'd get poked by uneven sharp spots and stabbed full of splinters. So I fetched logs about as thick as my thigh — I wasn't even sure you could call them branches — split them into boards with the claw spear, and laid them over the floor.
Flooring: complete.
"...Still a bit rough, though."
I glanced at the wooden wall. Liquid was beading there, trickling down little by little. Ordinary sap is sticky, but the sap of this moisture tree was no thicker than water. It had been dripping onto my head, so I'd sloped the ceiling into a triangular pitch and let it run down the walls instead. What ran down flowed outside through a groove I'd cut in advance beneath the flooring. To have made it this far in only three hours — fast enough to make a woodpecker weep.
Franc sat at ease in the trunk-room I'd made, watching me. When the work ended, she tapped the floor lightly with one hand. An invitation to sit, it seemed. Feeling awkward, I swept a hand back through my hair, noticed I was covered head to toe in sawdust, and went outside to shake out my clothes and my head. I washed my hands in the running rain, shook the water from my hair, and came back in to sit. Aside from it being too dark to see Franc's naked body clearly, I could congratulate myself. It was well made. The wind couldn't be helped, but at least the rain wasn't driving in. The flooring was rough under my palm, but once I sat on it in thick uniform trousers, I could hardly tell.
When I sat where she indicated, she stroked my head as if to say I'd done well. I couldn't feel the touch itself, but her feelings came through, and the fatigue that had piled up seemed to lift away.
"This ought to hold us until the rain stops, right? We've got plenty of emergency rations and leaves, so meals won't be a problem either."
She nodded.
To give my exhausted body a rest, I flopped onto my back. I'd made the entrance three feet high and twenty inches wide, but angled it slightly so I could also see out toward the flood. Franc seemed to like that. She sat at a slant, bracing the floor with her left arm, and began looking out at the water. Watching her relaxed profile, my feelings tangled. I'd meant, to celebrate finishing the room, to use the Phase Stone and map out her erogenous zones... Forget it. Doing that in this mood would only feed the inferiority complex.
Listening to the rain pouring outside, I closed my eyes and, for the first time in a while, pushed Search to full and concentrated. I hadn't neglected keeping watch while it ran, but because I'd been focusing on Franc, I'd been leaning on Telescopic Vision more than Detection. I tried to call up everything since I'd awakened, and the incidents from the climb up the cliff through today.
I'd thought it yesterday, too. Before I met Franc, a terrifying volume of stray thoughts and delusions had been running through me — enough to drive a person out of their mind. And since I hadn't been sleeping at night, the symptoms seemed to be getting a little worse. People reset their body clock in sleep and delete unneeded memories from the brain, a kind of daily rollover. From the night of the fourth day until lunch on the eighth, I hadn't slept a wink, so what had happened four days ago felt like yesterday.
When I cracked my eyes open, Franc was sitting beside me, looking down. I didn't know since when. In the instant I opened them, her gaze held relief — and the moment she saw I was awake, it turned to disappointment. She'd thought I was asleep and felt easier, then realized I'd been awake the whole time. Was that the disappointment? Looking into her eyes, I grew curious all over again. Why did she care about me like this? Enough that it almost seemed she liked me.
Was it because I was the means of sending her back to reality? She had to know that even if I died here, someone else would come in after me. Couldn't she wait a little longer? Was it because her soul had taken root in the Phase Stone? Was she afraid that if another aberrant ate it, her existence would vanish?
I was turning those thoughts over while I looked into her eyes, and Franc's lips kept opening and closing, as if she were trying to say something. I blinked at that — and at the far edge of my Search range, now stretched to two hundred and sixty feet, something came bearing down. I flinched and shot upright. Leaving Franc, who startled and trembled, I squeezed my eyes shut. No mistake. From the east, something was overturning the earth and closing in at a terrifying speed. Its height... sixteen feet?!
I opened my eyes, switched on Telescopic Vision, and snapped my head east. Its identity drew itself in my mind. Th-that was... a tidal wave?! Comparing its height to the tree in that instant, fear hit me. The tree might fall. Tsunami footage from overseas came back — a wave of only seven or ten feet sweeping away houses and buildings. Could this tree withstand a wave that shoved houses aside?
I threw my arms and legs out against the wooden walls and braced, and shouted at Franc, who wore a startled look at my sudden movement, hands half-raised, not knowing what to do with them.
Franc is subject to gravity — she might get flung clear!
The moment she heard me, Franc threw herself onto my knees as if to flop across me — and, sure enough, passed straight through my body and ended up face-down on the floor. Then the sixteen-foot wave struck the base of the tree where we were hiding and roared past.
KWA-RURU. BOOM. RURURU. BOOM. RURU. KU-KUNG-RURURU. BOOM. KU-UNG. BOOM.
Between the wave's terrifying speed and the roar of that immense mass of water, a clamorous thudding and a vibration reached me, and my heart pounded until it hurt. The tree shuddered. It wasn't swaying back and forth in the current — the shakes were short and hard, as if something drifting down were slamming into the trunk. Wondering what it was, I closed my eyes and widened my Search range. Following the wave — a tsunami on dry land — rocks the size of my torso and broken trees were drifting in and body-slamming the trunk. That was the sound. The big ones were literally the size of a house!
Rocks that hit the smaller trees snapped them clean as they passed. Fallen trees were driven along until they caught on other trees and stopped, and the same scene was playing out in several places at once within my range. Feeling the tree tremble, then sway little by little in the current, I watched every cliff my sight could reach turn into a colossal Niagara. Cold sweat broke out, and a chill set in.
If I'd come up even two days later — no, even one — I would have been swept away by that inland tsunami and died. If I hadn't climbed and had stayed hidden in the crawl-hole under the cliff, I would have drowned in this very moment, when the wave poured down and rushed into the burrow. If I'd climbed the cliff yesterday, meeting Franc aside, I would have grumbled at the pouring rain, been caught by the inland tsunami, fallen back below the cliff, and died. Or been crushed and burst by a rock rolling in with the wave. And if I hadn't met Franc and been led this far, I'd be up in a relatively small tree, mad with the terror of it snapping, shaking like a lunatic.
As the shaking slowly stopped, and the tree held itself upright even against that madly rushing current, I felt a fresh gratitude toward it. Grateful enough to feel sorry for having bored a hole in its trunk. The water pressure still made it sway a little, but the crisis seemed to have passed. The vibration was dying away. I swallowed and ran Analysis. The tree was holding firm. The ground was solid, the roots reached deep underground, and they were thick and strong. It didn't look likely to tilt, or to be torn out by the roots.
"...Hoo."
As if she'd heard the sigh, Franc lifted her head slightly and looked up at me. At such close range, seeing her flustered eyes and those small, cute eyebrows that looked painted on, I wanted to protect her. I smiled, awkward as it must have looked, and told her it was safe now. But... she didn't seem startled by the wave. It looked more like she was flustered from looking at me.
"It's all right. The tree is sturdy, and there's no worry it'll be pushed over or uprooted by the water pressure. No matter what happens, I'll protect your Phase Stone, so don't worry."
As I spoke and slowly lowered my arms, Franc rose from where our bodies had overlapped, sat properly before me, clenched her fists, and set them on her knees. How to put it — it was a lot like seiza, that formal kneel the Japanese favor. But her eyes felt somehow unsettled. I wondered why, and even studying her expression I couldn't tell what she was thinking. The confused eyes soon turned clear and transparent, then began to shine. The emotion in them... a strong resolve? Reverent, and... hmm. There seemed to be one more feeling, but I couldn't name it. Having those pretty, sparkling eyes look straight at me made me glad, but I also felt a little pressure.
"Franc?"
When I called her name, she closed her eyes briefly, then opened them, spread both hands, set them together on the floor, bent forward, and lowered her waist until her forehead touched the backs of her hands. Why was she bowing to me? What did this mean? Flustered, I hesitated, then asked as she raised her head.
"F-Franc? What was that, all of a sudden?"
Sitting upright, Franc wore a natural, elegant smile I had never seen before, and gazed at me in silence for a long while. Her sudden behavior... I didn't understand it, so I set it aside for now. The sweat I'd worked up, and the cold sweat that had run over it, were cooling and leaching the heat from my body. A breeze was creeping in, too. It was colder than I'd expected. I'd already retrieved my shirt and uniform jacket and hung them on the throwing spear propped against one wall, but they weren't dry, so I couldn't put them on...
I rubbed my arms, goosebumped from the cold, then picked up the claw spear standing beside me and stepped out of the hole. At that, Franc blocked the entrance with her own body, as if to say going out was dangerous. She must have been afraid I'd fall and be swept into the land that had become one enormous waterfall. But somehow her movements had grown more assertive, and she'd lost any reluctance about baring her body completely. That threw me a little. She was a ghost, so I could have walked straight through her, but somehow that felt like something I shouldn't do. I pointed at the clothes that refused to dry and tried to persuade her.
"If I stay like this, the wind's going to keep stealing my body heat. I need to cut some leafy branches and block the entrance, at least, or I think I'll catch a cold."
At my words, Franc... made an expression I'd never seen. What was that thought — no, that emotion? Suddenly, the difficulty of reading her face felt like it had jumped to my older sister's level. Like looking at my sister, who answers "sure" with her mouth while her eyes say no. Under my gaze, Franc suddenly grew sullen and stepped aside. Wh-what. Why did she suddenly get all sulky?
Ugh... Ah, forget it. First, a simple windbreak.
Extremely careful not to plant a foot wrong on the rain-slick branches and slip, I started seeking out and cutting the leafiest branches I could find. Now and then a boulder came rolling, struck a tree, and passed on. Each time, I sensed it in advance with Search, clutched a trunk or a branch, and held on for dear life through the shake. If I fell, that muddy water raging through the wave — no, the tsunami — would sweep me away, and I wouldn't have a bone left to gather.
Krrrsh. Seeing the yellow-brown muddy water swirling beside the trunk sent a chill down my spine. I swallowed and muttered.
"Where is all this water even coming from?"
Was there a huge lake on the high ground nearby? Had it burst and poured out all at once? Keeping food in mind as well, I cut a great pile of fan-shaped branches — enough to cover my whole upper body and then some — and returned to the hole. I lashed them together, wedged them, twisted them into a screen, and set it at the entrance. The light was cut off, the inside grew quite dark, and the driving wind lessened a great deal, but wind still leaked through the leaves, so I took off my uniform jacket and hung it over the screen. That, at last, kept the wind and rain out for certain. Tailored back when I was fat, it had enough area to cover nearly the whole entrance. Convenient.
The downside was that the hole went completely dark — and thanks to that, I learned one fact. Franc glowed on her own.
I looked around the tree hollow, steeped in faint gray light, and turned my eyes to Franc. Miss Franc, mysteriously luminous, was seated in seiza beside the entrance, watching me with quiet eyes. An impossibly lovely ghost of a girl, kneeling like that and shedding gray light as she looked at me — the atmosphere was incredibly... something. If this were an RPG, she'd be the key NPC of the main story.
Wanting to shift the atmosphere that had come over her so suddenly, I spoke.
"I figured it'd get a little dark once I put the windbreak up, but thanks to the Franc lighting, it's just dim enough that it feels like sleep will come easy."
A bright smile.
...I'd expected a slightly sulky look. A completely different reaction came out, and it threw me. Seeing Franc gaze at me with an elegant smile softly held, I got the feeling that half-hearted, spiteful teasing wouldn't budge her at all. Hmm. A perverted desire began to stir — the desire to shatter that reverent bearing and that benevolent expression.
Then... gulp. Is that the only way?