Chapter 295: Dark Matter Slime (4)
"F-fuuuck! What the hell is that fucking lump of grease!!! You bastards! What are you doing?! Kill it! I said kill it!!!"
The fur-headed lifeform, unlike the other stupid Aberrants, was putting a clear will into its voice. It flushed that pasty face red, flailed its forelimbs, and screamed, and the Aberrants still left charged me without knowing what fear was.
What struck me as strange was that things which amounted to nothing but prey threw themselves at me on that furred lifeform's command. Ordinarily they were too busy running the moment they saw me.
The furred lifeform's Phase Power seemed to come to roughly a quarter of mine, but as a threat it didn't even measure up to a scrawny weakling, and it looked tasteless besides, so I ignored it and turned my attention to the Aberrants rushing me. Fur-headed lifeforms... how many were there? I think about forty, though every last one of them was a single mouthful, so I don't really know. Oh—his name was Ha Cheolsu, was it?
Having gorged myself for the first time in a long while at Ha Cheolsu's command, I was turning over what to do with the unappetizing-looking Ha Cheolsu when he fixed that ugly face on me and started hurling stones and branches.
"You're mine. Mine! You're mi—... kuh. Kkuhk...!"
I didn't understand. But the moment I looked at Ha Cheolsu's ugly face, I felt some unknowable emotion wind violently around my body. From that instant I was left with a feeling that thought of nothing but Ha Cheolsu, and thought of him hard—a feeling that wanted to do anything for him. Looking back now, it was a feeling that made no sense at all, but at the time I couldn't doubt it.
What? You're asking whether Ha Cheolsu showed any strange behavior? He did. It began the moment after I came to hold that strange emotion.
"Graaargh..."
In the very instant I came to harbor, toward that human, an emotion I myself could not understand, Ha Cheolsu seized the fur on his head, twisted all four limbs, spilled out a shriek, rolled his eyes back, and crumpled. From a maw that couldn't have torn off so much as a scrap of meat, something like white foam boiled and bubbled; his eyes went bloodshot, and he shook without mercy in every direction. I couldn't leave the spot. I only kept watching.
Ha Cheolsu, who had not so much as twitched while the sun rose and set three times, only lurched up onto two legs when the third sun climbed to the center of the sky.
"Gonna... go. Home, gonna... go. Home. Home? Home?? Home! Home.... Jung... Seoha? Lee Hyeryeong! Those dog... bitches!! Bitch... bitch. Bitch. Woman. Womaaan."
He swayed this way and that like walking rotten meat, and there was no telling when some strange utterance would spill out of him.
"I wanna fuck. A woman, I need a woman!! A woman? Lee... Hyeryeong! That filthy slut..."
"I wanna go home.... I wanna go back to reality! Rea-reality. Jung... Seoha...!! You fucking bastard..."
"I'm going back. Reality. Back to reality, return. Return? Re...turn.... Return Point? Where is it?"
"Jung Seoha, that dog of a bastard.... Son of a dog, son of a cunt, son of a cow, son of a horse, son of a bug..."
"What? What!! Shut the fuck up! What are you babbling! Can't you be quiet?! Shut up! I said shut up!! Graaaaaagh!!"
"Home, where's home. I want to go home. Home.... To get there, a Return Point. I have to find a Return Point!"
I followed behind Ha Cheolsu, catching and killing and killing and killing the Aberrants that lunged to slay him, and now and then standing guard at his side when a fit took him. Once a fit passed he would walk again—eating nothing, drinking nothing, only moving. That was when fear hit me all at once. If this kept on, Ha Cheolsu was going to die.
I worried over what to do, but the worry was brief. The moment a solution came to me, I covered his body with my own. That way I could take the attacks meant for him, and stretch out tentacles to put food and water into his mouth. I don't need such things, but I knew living creatures have to eat and drink if they're to live. And because his Phase Power and the smell of his body kept drawing Aberrants without end, I needed a means to stop that as well.
Once I had covered him, the Aberrants came less often, and even when they did attack, I was wrapped around him, so he took no harm at all and could wander about perfectly intact.
What? You're asking what the place where I met Ha Cheolsu looked like? There was a great deal of water. Half water, half land. The Aberrants? What they looked like... ah. Like that. Turtles? Turtles. Lizards. Crocodiles. Chameleons. Frogs. Snakes. They're called reptiles, you say. Yes. There was nothing around but things shaped like that.
A Supergiant Turtle...? I wouldn't know.
Yes. I'll go on.
Once I began protecting Ha Cheolsu that way, he started subjugating every last Aberrant that came into his sight.
"You, become my subordinate! You too! You too!! You toooo!!!"
"That brain-dead fuck Jung Seoha, that son of a bitch. Fucking bastard. I'll kill him. I'm going to kill him! Lee Hyeryeong too! Father too! I'll chop them fine, hack their guts to pieces, slit their throats, and feed them to the dogs. I'll catch every last one of that bastard's family too, rip their groins open, pull their innards out, stab their eyeballs, tear their muzzles off, cut out their tongues, rip their chests open, break their arms and legs, crush them, grind them, dig them out—kihihihik, heukehehek."
"Hungry. Food. Gimme food. Food. Food! Food!!!"
"Uwaaaaa...."
"Home.... I'm going home. Return Point. Where are youuuu. Come out right now or elseeeee."
"Keukeh-heuheuh—ggeukek,"
"My heeead huuurts. Hueeeeeng, uwaaaaaa-eueu."
The more Aberrants he subjugated, the more Ha Cheolsu behaved like a Lowest-Rank Variant with no reason left in it, and now and then he looked as though the breath were choking out of him for good. It seemed he would die at this rate, so every time he subjugated a new Aberrant I caught and killed the weakest of the pack, fed them to him, ate some myself, and kept the numbers steady.
After the sky had brightened and darkened some thirty times, we ran into that Obutomuso who lived nearby.
Who's Obutomuso, you ask? That one. The huge, enormous turtle that came out with me. In that place, that one and I were the strongest. Of course I was stronger. If we actually latched on, I could win! But that coward of a turtle ran far away the moment it saw me, so we never got to fight!
Oh, you call it a Grand Turtle?
Nearby, besides the Grand Turtle, there were three more beings with Phase Power close to mine, but two of them were afraid of me and never came out of the water, and one never came out of the ground. Even though I was stronger, unless the Grand Turtle attacked first there was nothing I could do about it either, so we went on ignoring one another.
The Grand Turtle and I had spent a long time living near each other that way. We were living that way when Ha Cheolsu, the moment he saw the Grand Turtle, ordered the Aberrants he'd been dragging around to attack it.
"Big. Big? Big!! Kill it! Kill them all!!!"
It simply never struck first; it was no gentle creature. It stomped the charging Aberrants flat underfoot at once. Five tramplings turned most of what Ha Cheolsu had collected into bloody pulp, and the Grand Turtle moved to attack Ha Cheolsu and me as well. I spread my body wide and stood in front of him, threatening that before it could touch Ha Cheolsu, its legs would melt first.
And then, wouldn't you know it, the cheap thing started firing shockwaves and energy projectiles from a distance? The result was nothing but a delicious energy source, but the process was an act of attack, and that put me in a bad mood. When I ate up every strike, the Grand Turtle began pouring its assault onto me rather than Ha Cheolsu. But I'm a body that gets around, you know. A Grand Turtle, of all things—latch onto it and it wouldn't even amount to a single meal!
I was protecting Ha Cheolsu perfectly, and so the Grand Turtle's attacks grew sloppier and sloppier. A stalemate did it no good at all, and its interest steadily waned. In the middle of that, an opportunity came. The shockwave burst the ground, and with it a chance to settle onto the Grand Turtle's shell.
What? Ha Cheolsu? Mmm—honestly, I'd forgotten about him just then. A chance had come to kill the Grand Turtle, a thorn in my eye for a long time. In the end, just as I'd hoped, I broke the shell down, slipped inside, and was savoring the chewy innards when the Grand Turtle suddenly sank down and spoke to me.
At that sound I understood by instinct. This one, too, had come to hold an inexplicable emotion toward Ha Cheolsu, just as I had. And Ha Cheolsu's condition had grown far more serious. I ordered the thirty Aberrants that had survived on the strength of their superior power to surround him, and I spoke with the Grand Turtle.
The Grand Turtle was holding its movements in check, as if the part I had eaten into still hurt, but Ha Cheolsu's condition was worse. His head bulged and rippled as though worms were crawling beneath the skin, gone mottled all over, and his two eyes rolled each on its own, like the eyeballs of something good at hiding. I was just as much at a loss over what to do with him, whose already strange face had grown uglier still.
Having drawn even the Grand Turtle in, Ha Cheolsu could no longer walk—could no longer move at all. He only breathed, and now and then called out, like a scream, the words Jung Seoha, Lee Hyeryeong, Father, packed with hate.
Even so, a goal was set. We set the unmoving, immobile Ha Cheolsu atop the Grand Turtle's shell and began wandering the area in search of this thing called a Return Point. Whenever the time came I killed an Aberrant, put the meat in his mouth, and broke down the waste he voided, and for a long while the Grand Turtle and I roamed, looking.
"Fatherrrrr!! Jung Seohaaaaa!!!!"
The Grand Turtle sank down where it stood again and slowly lifted its head, taking in the surroundings.
"Home.... Return...."
You're asking what a %\@^&#* is? It's what we call a place where Phase Power twists and tangles strangely in one spot. An odd thing that stirs an instinctive revulsion, so you don't want to go near it—something like that?
With Obutomuso and me, and twenty-nine Aberrants moving together, we were no longer attacked. Thanks to that we could search for the %\@^&#* with ease, and a few days later we found it.
The Return Point's working was pure chance. We were passing time without having found how to work it, all of us gathered in one place to rest, the Return Point at the center. It was time for Ha Cheolsu to eat something, but I couldn't be bothered to go hunting, so I killed a creature Obutomuso had stepped on once—barely alive, still twitching. I was hungry too.
I killed it and had just begun tearing flesh to put into Ha Cheolsu's mouth when Phase Power spread outward, the way it always did. And in that instant—
Back then it was a phenomenon I couldn't make sense of, so I drew the Aberrants in close around Ha Cheolsu, tense. By the time the brilliant light had gone, the scenery around us had changed completely. The moment it changed, Ha Cheolsu started screaming at the top of his lungs.
"Home, home. Home! Home! Home! Kill them all!!!"
A landscape changed without warning. Ha Cheolsu's naked hostility. Given their orders, the Aberrants immediately began smashing the great colorful masses nearby, the ones studded all over with square, transparent things. Smash those, and fur-headed things poured out from inside in droves.
At Ha Cheolsu's command the Grand Turtle stretched its neck long and began to stare fixedly at something of a height similar to its own.
Obutomuso, taking this for what Ha Cheolsu wanted, began shoving over with its body the long things packed with irritating things, things about as tall as itself. I, with the help of a swift, long one that was good at hiding, lifted Ha Cheolsu to the very top of Obutomuso's shell.
KUUUUU—!!
VWOOONG!! KUGUGUGUGU...
Obutomuso did not hesitate. It fired a shockwave and attacked the something that was especially threatening, and even more—more—more irritating. Which is to say, Master. Because Master possessed stronger Phase Power than anyone who was there.
Schlup. The thing that had spent all that while going boing, slosh, lap-lap, shiver finally went still, and Hiarid stopped translating with it. It was the part where the Grand Turtle and I clashed. Everything after that I already knew, so that was probably why.
This little bastard, though. It hadn't just turned around and called me threatening and irritating, had it? I stared hard at the thing jiggling along as if it were alive, then folded my arms and sank into thought.
While the thing was laying out its story, I caught onto one important fact. Aberrants were aware of Return Points, too.
This was only my guess, but I had a feeling the reason Aberrants showed up in reality was tied to exactly that. According to the slime, Aberrants found Return Points unsettling and kept their distance—but there had to be ones drawn to that very unease. Drawn in, they'd lay a hand on a Return Point and, call it chance, appear in reality. The same way I'd touched the Return Point at Stonehenge and slipped over into the medieval era.
I didn't believe every Return Point connected to reality, of course. But expand the field to an Earth-sized scale plus a world stretched across many times, and wouldn't the odds of an Aberrant crossing over be more than enough?
While I turned that over, the lovers who had heard the translation through to the end began talking among themselves.