Chapter 282: The Difference Between Danger and Threat (3)
"Got it? Watch for the shockwave the Grand Turtle fires from its mouth. The moment I give the signal, drop the strongest bolt of light you can muster on Ha Cheolsu."
=Yes.=
Even as I was explaining, the tremors and the flash from the Turtle Big Bang subsided. The branch chief let out a gasp that was half a sigh, staring at the Wall of Space — whole, without so much as a crack.
"Insane... You blocked the Grand Turtle's Big Bang without taking any damage..."
Not entirely without damage. A few of the inner layers I'd thrown up had shattered.
"I thought it only had disintegration and contact, and now there's absorption on top of that absurd durability. Ridiculous."
It sounded an awful lot like an insult. I shot him a glare, told Hiarid to get ready, and checked through Spatial Perception that the flash had died completely and that the Grand Turtle's shell had melted a little. Then I withdrew the Wall of Space.
Something thick came billowing out. Whether it was steam rising off the heat or smoke spreading as the shell melted, I couldn't tell.
I confirmed once more that Hiarid was preparing properly, ran a check on the Mana Sieve wrapped around my whole body, and launched myself at the Grand Turtle.
Its wide-area blast finished, the beast was cautiously poking its head out to survey the surroundings. Maybe its pride was stung that the attack had done nothing to anything around it. It let out a strange guuuuuh, craned its neck long, dragged its legs out from under the shell, and heaved that enormous body upright.
Kuhuu? Guuuuuu!!!
"Shut up!"
Whether it had spotted me coming in or was simply venting its rage, I barked at it and fired a sword-energy Mana Bullet. Unwilling to just take the hit, it launched a shockwave and swatted the bullet aside.
Its whole pattern seemed to be shockwaves, energy projectiles, and Big Bang — mild, or extra spicy. That was the menu.
If I wanted the plan to work, I first had to stop the thing from firing shockwaves.
I stared at that snout, shaped like a carnivorous bird's beak, and gripped the Cheonchongun Sword. Sword Energy Bullets barely got through hardness like that. Would the Wall of Space even work? The doubt could wait. Action came first.
A faint light flickered in its mouth — it was about to loose an energy round. I generated a rod of Wall of Space straight into the snout, and it twisted its head with a shriek.
"Keuuuok!!"
As expected, my Wall of Space still couldn't do much to a Calamity-rank variant. The pinning, though, was real. With the wall clamped in its mouth, its movements turned awkward.
Quantity over quality, then.
I stacked Wall after Wall of Space into its lower jaw without pause, and a string of sickening sounds followed — crack, crunch — bone breaking, flesh crumpling, the kind of noise that unsettles the mind.
Geuheoeeer!!
Pugeok! Pujijik!!
Then, with the sound of meat bursting, the Grand Turtle's entire lower jaw exploded. Chunks of crimson flesh and finely shattered bone rained onto the ground. From the vanished jaw, blood poured like a waterfall, and a half-torn tongue — dark brown, huge as a log — dangled and flopped.
Done. It wouldn't be firing that colorless disc of a shockwave from its snout anymore. Even if it tried, the accuracy would be shot to hell.
With any attack that might have reached Hiarid sealed off, I scanned around the Grand Turtle — thrashing, unable to collect itself through the pain of its pulverized jaw — and found Ha Cheolsu.
The beast's head-shaking sprayed blood in every direction, dyeing the low hills red, and wedged in a gap of the slightly melted shell, Ha Cheolsu was squirming.
=Jeeoong Seohaaaaagh!!!=
Veins webbed his face. His eyes bulged. Drool strung from his mouth, and his pupils jerked out of symmetry with each other, the whole of him engineered to provoke disgust.
The voice buzzing in my ears was no ordinary human voice. I tensed, concentrated the Mana Sieve through my body, and braced for mental manipulation just in case.
=Goddaaamn iiit... Faaather!! Lee Hyeryeeeong!!!! They're all, deaaad, huh? Aaaagh!!=
Had he come to? No. His thoughts still weren't clear. Judging by the spasms and the livid veins writhing across his face, he was a long way from recovering. At least one of the two Calamity-rank variants would have to die before any spare mental strength came back to him. Or maybe the shock of the Peak-rank and High-rank variants he'd been controlling dying off had jolted him into this.
On the flight to Hanam I'd kept a small Certifier hologram at the edge of my vision, and through it Yeongeun, Hwayeon, and my sister were feeding me the situation by text in real time. Under Grand Blue's lead, the country's top raid teams had gathered and were exterminating the aberrants scattered through the city. Sixty-nine in all. Seventeen left.
=Krrrrk... Whyyy am I... like thiiis... gurgle...=
What an irritating voice. I formed a Wall of Space around him in the shape of a graduated cylinder and began filling it, and he bounced off the walls and shot upward.
Just as planned. A Dark Matter Slime took no damage from anything but the light attribute, they said — and because of that, it seemed to be shoved along by the Wall of Space, which annihilated whatever it touched.
Kwoheoeeok!!
Thud! Thud-thud! Kuthung!
The moment Ha Cheolsu tore free of its body, the Grand Turtle went wild, shaking its head so hard the half-severed tongue flopped, roaring and thrashing like a mother whose young had been snatched right before her eyes.
Tuk.
It stopped dead, then poured a terrifying killing intent over me.
KWAANG!!
It leapt, trying to crush me flat.
Kwoheoeeo!!
The thing had launched itself several kilometers straight up on a standing jump, and now it came plummeting out of the sky like an artillery shell, killing intent streaming off it.
I'll wreck you in a minute, so wait your turn, you bastard!
Watching that mountain-sized body commit to a full-power body press sent a chill racing down my spine, but I clenched my teeth and threw myself clear of the impact. The branch chief and the wind-attribute user scrambled to flee as well.
KUKWAANG!!
The hill beneath the falling beast exploded under the press, and the shock rolled over the nearby paddies and farms like a tidal wave. I frowned as the little villages clustered near the mountain folded flat, as if an earthquake had hit them.
Damn it. The sirens had gone off. Everyone should have evacuated. No casualties, it seemed.
Pwaang! Bbeong! Pwaaaang!!
Having failed to flatten me, the Grand Turtle couldn't contain its temper. Killing intent streamed from its two pitch-black eyes as it began firing shockwaves from its burst snout in a fit of rage. The snout had been what aimed the blast and the shockwave. With the lower jaw gone, there was no way they'd fly true. All it managed was to detonate the blameless ground beneath its jaw, and in the process the shockwaves it fired tore its own wounds wider. Blood poured harder still.
Through all of it, Ha Cheolsu kept being driven higher inside the cylinder. He would soon reach a kilometer above the ground.
The thought had barely formed when he hit the altitude I'd planned. I immediately reshaped the Wall of Space into a bottle and dismissed the cylinder. The cylinder vanished, and Ha Cheolsu was slammed onto the bottom of the bottle. As expected, he didn't pass through. He only slid, like oil on glass.
Leave him like that, and the bolt of light coming through the bottle's mouth would hit and blow the Dark Matter Slime apart, and Ha Cheolsu would touch the Wall of Space and melt. The burst slime would pool back inside the wall.
I suddenly remembered the slime spitting something like saliva at my Spatial Barrier. Just in case, thicker. Five layers.
Kwoheoeeeok!!!
Kuthung, thud! Kuung!
I ignored the Grand Turtle stomping and shrieking at me, fired a single Mana Bullet into the sky, and detonated it. The signal I'd given Hiarid.
And then—
=O Lord of the Heavens!!=
Her clear, ringing voice reached me faintly from far off, and the heart of the storm clouds that had gathered before I knew it began to burn white-hot. Then the lightning made of light came stabbing down.
Tsspat!!
Less than the Grand Turtle's Big Bang, but in the instant a light bright enough to blot out the sun burst forth, a bolt as thick as a decent building passed through the mouth of the bottle and struck Ha Cheolsu dead-on.
Jjajajajak...!
=Gyaaaaaaaah!!!=
The moment the bolt hit, black liquid burst in every direction. I saw it with my thoughts accelerated. The Dark Matter Slime shattered into tiny grains, and the filthy clothes Ha Cheolsu wore evaporated in an instant. Lichtenberg figures — the branching brands a lightning strike sears into flesh — etched themselves over his whole body, then cooked red. His hair turned to ash. Ha Cheolsu became a lump of raw red meat.
Then a completely different Phase Power began to register from his body.
Ah. So the fourteen million had been the Dark Matter Slime's. With the slime that had wrapped him blown apart, Ha Cheolsu's own Phase Power became detectable.
Three and a half million. Exactly B-Class.
But the pattern was strange. Not Physical Reinforcement, not Elemental, not Healing, not Special — it looked like a four-dimensional axis rotated a hundred and eighty degrees and twisted onto itself. Was that what they called a Klein Bottle? So this was the Phase Power pattern of a mental manipulation user.
For the briefest moment my eyes met his. Light and heat had baked him, charred him black, laid the raw muscle bare — a horrific sight. Eyes bloodshot past bloodshot, the vessels burst until the whites were pure red. Irises spread as if they'd exploded, no longer looking human. Intellect and reason seemed gone, but instinct remembered me. A terrifying hatred poured my way.
"Jeong... Seoha. You..."
His lips moved for an instant, and before I knew it I had read them.
...I don't want to trade a single word with you.
Our eyes had met for barely half a second. Whatever he'd been about to say, he slipped — maybe off the Dark Matter Slime that had been holding him up — toppled backward, and fell onto the Wall of Space. Unable even to finish, the charred arm he'd been reaching toward me and all the rest of him were, quite literally, taken apart inside the wall.
The existence known as Ha Cheolsu was erased from the world.
My first murder, just as I'd expected. Watching him come apart in front of me, I felt not so much as a speck of anguish. Nor, on the other hand, did I feel triumphant, or relieved. Just the sense that I had done what had to be done.
Kwoeeeok!!!!
Kuang! Bang-bang! Kwaang!
I wasn't the only one who saw him vanish. The Grand Turtle had been watching as if witnessing his disappearance were its assigned duty, and it roared as if it might vomit blood, slamming its forelegs into the earth again and again. A horrific boom, like dozens of artillery shells detonating in succession. Every time those two forelegs — each as thick as a small building — struck, the ground around them heaved as if in an earthquake, and the houses and factories that had barely been standing nearby collapsed, throwing up clouds of dust.
In the meantime the Dark Matter Slime trickled down along the jar-shaped Wall of Space and began to gather into one mass.
Five layers had been the right call. Most of the fragments had pooled in the gap between the first and second bottles, and only a very few had gathered between the second and third. The force of the blast must have punched them through the wall as they blew apart. The remaining compartments, the third and the fourth, held not a trace, so it seemed safe to say no fragment of Dark Matter Slime had reached the ground.
First I laid one more layer over the whole of the bottle-shaped walls, then withdrew the five bottles. The slime that dropped with a wet patter squirmed and converged on a single point. Once it had all gathered, it took on the shape of Hwayeon's breasts — the ones I liked to play with now and then — and started to jiggle and slosh.
I shrank the Wall of Space into a round sphere so it couldn't slip off somewhere else. Its mobility seemed to be that of an ordinary slime. It simply pooled inside the wall and shook itself this way and that.
I checked. Fourteen million Phase Power. Exactly 14.22 million. What I'd seen hadn't been Ha Cheolsu's at all. It had been this Dark Matter Slime's.
Then it was time to kill the Grand Turtle—?!
"Huh?!"
From the spot where Ha Cheolsu had vanished, a dense 3.5 million Phase Power was spreading like fog. I startled. What? When an ability user dies, they release their Phase Power... they do.
Right. Of course. Myrdin had said as much — when an ability user dies, their Phase Power spreads. That humans were the greatest Phase Power generators of all.
Had he said Origin Power generators? Anyway, could I absorb this too? Same rank, same class of Phase Power, so the conditions ought to be met.
To test it, I dove into the fog of Phase Power and spun the Mana Sieve through my whole body at a furious rate. As if it had been waiting, the 3.5 million began stacking neatly inside me.
Killing an ability user — a person — and taking their Phase Power left me a little uneasy, but I shook the thought off. Call it the price for all the grief he'd put me through. Compensation. No. Compensatory Phase Power.
From the first meeting to the moment we met again, he'd been the worst. And still, at the very end, he'd managed to be of some use.
…
Come to think of it, a mental manipulation user's Phase Power hadn't been anything like a Möbius strip. It had been shaped like a Klein Bottle.
…………
I turned the hypothesis flickering through my head over and over, staring hard at the Dark Matter Slime, then felt a gaze from below and looked down. The Grand Turtle, which had been raging, had gone still. Its two black eyes were quietly fixed on me.
An enmity so pure it would have been childish to call it hatred, or rage.
Mental manipulation must have left it holding a blind affection for Ha Cheolsu. And perhaps it had realized it was going to die too — it didn't even look like it meant to attack.
Then I ought to give it what it wanted. This Grand Turtle had brought down the Ability Users' Association building and caused countless deaths anyway. I'd learned that five to ten layers or so could hurt a Calamity-rank variant, so killing something that wasn't even resisting would be easy.
I raised my hand, about to lay a Wall of Space over the whole of its body.
"Ch-Chairman! Wait! Stop!! Hold it!!!"
The branch chief, who had fled far off, came flying back with the wind user's help and stopped me with a desperate wave. Hiarid followed and drew up beside me, staring hard at the Grand Turtle, whose eyes held fury and hatred as it looked at me.
"Why? We don't know what the Grand Turtle might do. We should kill it quickly."
"That's why I'm telling you to wait! You were about to erase the entire thing just now, weren't you?! That's a Calamity-rank variant. Do you have any idea what the corpse might be worth?!"
"Wow. What a materialist."
"...!"
The moment I tossed it out as a joke, his face went scarlet, as if his blood pressure had spiked. Forcing the anger down into a stiff smile, he added a placating gesture and opened his mouth.
"Gangdong District has been completely destroyed. The Korean branch of the Ability Users' Association has an office in Busan too, so the organization will manage — but what about the people who lost their homes overnight? They'll need at least the cost of restoration, and of facilities for the displaced, if they're going to hold on to any hope of a life. Ah — o-of course, if you kill that thing, the corpse is yours, Chairman. But you're the master of the greatest raid team in Korea. You can give at least a little hope to the people who've lost their homes and everything they owned, can't you?"
"Ah... you're right."
I was quietly admitting I'd been shortsighted, and revising my assessment — the branch chief was a better man than I'd thought — when Hiarid called me.
=My Lord. That monster's condition is strange.=
"What?"
I examined the Grand Turtle with Spatial Perception. The 8.42 million Phase Power inside its body was rotating — quiet, but with terrifying force. Something cold ran down my spine. Even the shell was vibrating. Whatever it meant to use, self-detonation was the likely bet.
I glanced at the branch chief. He was waiting on my decision, clearly unaware of any of it.
=My Lord.=
"I know."
At her urging, I formed Walls of Space as square plates along the limbs and neck — the vibration now spreading to its head and all four legs — and stacked them tenfold, twentyfold. The beast began to cry, mournful and low.
Keuheoeeeer... Kwoeeeer...
To my ears it sounded like a wail steeped in grief. You took what was precious to me, and now you won't even let me detonate?
Brrrrrrt...
Where the walls overlapped, skin twisted and flesh warped, and a horrible sound rang out. The turtle, its lower jaw gone, let out a grotesque roar, slowed the accelerating spin of its Phase Power, and tried to heave its body free of the wall.
Hoo. That had been tense. Good thing it slowed the rotation on its own.
As it began to exert its strength, a tongue bigger than three or four houses put together dangled beneath the missing jaw as if it might tear off, and blood poured like a waterfall again, making a river of it.
Keoeeo...
Jjijijijik. Ttuduk. Tuduck... KWAJANG!!
The farther it leaned forward, trying to advance, the more the Wall of Space cracked with a sharp splintering — and in the end it shattered like a pane of glass.
The wall that had bound it converted straight into Phase Power and vanished into the air, but the Grand Turtle that had broken it was panting, plainly exhausted. The blood it had spilled from the missing jaw must have been a considerable burden. Well, the whole low mountainside was soaked, and a small river of blood had formed.
Even so, I couldn't let it go. I laid the Wall of Space again where I had before, and the Grand Turtle cried mournfully, as if in pain, twisting its huge bulk this way and that. It couldn't smash the wall the way it had a moment ago. Then, as if its strength had run out, it settled that massive body onto the earth, kicking up dust.
Kuuuuung...
It seemed to have no energy left. It only flailed its four legs, and even that paltry motion made the earth scream.
Geuheoeeo...
I studied its condition and asked the branch chief.
"Is the Grand Turtle usually this frail? It doesn't seem like a Calamity-rank variant."
I didn't mean it was weak, exactly. More that it didn't carry the tension I'd felt fighting the high-tier Flauvis on Sky Island.
He'd been looking at the Dark Matter Slime trapped in the Wall of Space. Hearing me, he turned with an expression that said, Have I ever seen a lunatic like this?
Lunatic?!
"...Haaaah. It's only weak by your standards. The shockwave that comes out of that thing's mouth — even a mid-to-high B-Class Physical Reinforcement user, armed to the teeth with every piece of gear they own, couldn't stay on their feet for two steps. And once the damage passes a certain point, it hides inside its shell and vibrates the shell with a Shockwave, detonating the whole of it at once. That's the Big Bang. Enough power to turn a radius of tens of kilometers to dust."
The first shockwave I'd taken had hurt, no question. Without Physical Reinforcement and the Mana Sieve's protection, I didn't know what would have become of me.
"Blocked that, did he. What a monster."
He muttered it while looking at me, then went on, watching the Grand Turtle where it lay collapsed, laboring to thrash its limbs.
"And that enormous frame, that shell, that thick hide — I couldn't even swear I'd scratch them if I threw an Elemental Cluster Bomb with everything I had. A body that size comes with stamina and durability as a bonus. When it's at a disadvantage, it escapes with a jump that doesn't deserve the word, and it attacks using that weight and that bulk."
"Just from the explanation, it sounds like ordinary B-Class users could never catch it..."
Tudududuk.
Kwoheoeeo...
Whether from the pressure of the Wall of Space or something else, the Grand Turtle's neck began to turn, slowly, pivoting from the point where the wall was laid. The body stayed as it was. Only the head rotated, like a wine cork. Watching it, a sour feeling crept over me. The kind of guilt you get tormenting a weak, innocent animal.
"Of course. Decades ago, when the United States tried to raid an imoogi, hundreds of people were vaporized, including three A-Class users. That incident was so famous it buried this one, but the Grand Turtle is a monster every bit the imoogi's equal. No — a Calamity-rank variant itself isn't a life-form anyone can even reach for, unless they have an ability as absurd as yours."
"Hm. Well..."
"And you'd do well to drop the idea that other Calamity-rank variants will be as easy as that Grand Turtle."
He drew a cigarette from inside his coat and lit it, and — complicated feelings or not — stared without blinking at the Grand Turtle, its neck twisting further and further under the Wall of Space.
"It might have fought something fiercely before it crossed into reality, and its stamina was already down. Or Ha Cheolsu's death, after he'd been manipulating its mind, might have dealt a heavy blow to its spirit, so it can't bring its full strength to bear."