Chapter 31: Day Nine, Crisis (3)
I jerked in surprise and groped at my chest on instinct, even though Detection was already telling me the Soul Stone pouch was perfectly fine. The pouch holding Franc's Soul Stone still hung around my neck without a problem, and the stone itself sat safely inside.
"Haaaaah."
The solid presence of the Soul Stone filling my palm drew a shaky sigh of relief out of me. That had taken ten years off my life.
"Franc?"
I called again. No answer. I ran Search over the Soul Stone and found nothing wrong with it — no cracks, no wounds — and yet... Had she withdrawn inside because the outside was too dangerous?
Impossible. Franc would never hide in the Soul Stone alone just because things got dangerous.
Then it struck me. Even the faint trickle of Phase Power that had been flowing from Franc's Soul Stone had cut off completely.
What...? It had been seeping out steadily enough to raise me by one an hour, and now it had stopped dead.
I couldn't make sense of it, and I had no idea what had caused it, and that left me uneasy — but I told myself that fine was fine enough. I still had the Soul Stone, and the Rogue Imugi wasn't about to hit me this very second.
Even if I'd been separated from Franc's spirit form, she could teleport right back to my side, couldn't she? So... so she'd be fine...
There really isn't anything wrong with Franc, is there?
Certain the Rogue Imugi would come tearing after me at any moment, I set about recovering my body however I could.
It wore the title of imugi — a dragon that had never finished becoming one — and on the outside it was nothing but snake. Even so, it had sensed the faint trace leaking from Franc's Soul Stone and come looking for me from God knows where. It wouldn't give up easily.
So first I needed to swim, and put as much distance between us as I could. And for that, I had to restore a body I'd driven past its limit until it wouldn't move at all.
I ground my teeth through an agony like a cramp amplified dozens of times over, groaning with every breath.
"Fuck. Get back to reality and see if I ever set foot in here again... No. I still have to take my revenge. I'll build my skill and my connections until I can run an imugi raid, and then I'll come back and beat that thing to death."
I folded the rage and hatred of my situation into pure vengeance and began rolling the Phase Power that had finally started answering my will, sending it this way and that through my body. It had dropped into the double digits — hardly a sparrow's tear left — but even so, it wandered through me at my command.
Watching Phase Power move as naturally as breathing, obedient to nothing but my will, I felt both moved and faintly absurd. Franc... Back where giant Franc and the giant mole had died, I'd tried so desperately to move Phase Power by will alone, and it had ignored me the way a beauty ignores a pig — wouldn't so much as look, wouldn't so much as listen... Better to count it as a blessing.
Maybe because I'd been swimming unconscious for so long, I glared down at skin that had swollen past plump and gone slack. My palms were wrinkled like the folds of a brain, and when I pinched the skin it stretched dangerously thin, as if every bit of elasticity had vanished.
I couldn't even feel it. That seemed bad. Keep swimming like this and it was going to do serious damage to my life...
...God damn it! Franc was nowhere in sight, I had no idea when that imugi bastard would come after me, and all I could see was water and the trees drowned beneath it!
Splash. Splash.
I slapped the surface in anger, and a sudden sting of tearing skin made me flinch. When I looked at my hand, the waterlogged skin of my palm had split open as if a knife had cut it.
"...Fuck..."
The wound gaped, red muscle showing through, and together with the sudden, solid realization that I was alone, fear and loneliness surged up in me.
I swallowed the tears trying to spill and hid them, then circulated what little Phase Power I had left — a rat's tail of it — through my whole body while I examined myself with Clairvoyance and Analysis.
Aside from the palm I'd just torn open throwing a fit by myself, there were surprisingly no torn or ruptured muscles. I don't even like swimming. I shouldn't have had swimming muscles. Strange. Since awakening, my stamina had recovered faster and my physical ability had improved well beyond my build, and circulating Phase Power seemed to strengthen both that recovery and that ability even further.
Maybe Phase Power was the way to recover the state I was in...
I rested a while with it circulating, and felt the pain in my lower back slowly subside. My legs had started to move again — enough, I thought, to swim. It was hard, but I braced against the log and began to paddle gently with both of them.
Swimming and controlling Phase Power for a short while, I picked up a few traits of how it was consumed. First, rotate it below a certain speed and there was no consumption at all. In that case physical ability barely rose. Analysis had told me that part, so it was probably right. Rotate it above a certain speed, and consumption would climb, and physical ability ought to climb with it. I couldn't test it now, with my Phase Power scraped empty, but back when I'd first figured out how to control it, spinning it five or six times faster had boosted not only my physical ability but my elemental resistance, and the consumption per minute had skyrocketed.
"And if I rotate Phase Power, it treats wounds and fatigue. It recovers them."
It seemed to amplify natural recovery dozens of times over, hundreds. That was why the back that had felt ready to snap, and the legs that had felt ready to burst, had recovered. Even the torn palm had closed visibly once I focused Phase Power on it. The catch was that focusing it that hard to heal a wound burned through even more.
Even so, it restored elasticity to skin that had drunk so much water it had wrinkled dangerously, so I split what little Phase Power I had left, calculated what regenerated every ten minutes, and did everything I could to improve my condition — recovering muscle, circulating a portion through my skin.
The more I circulated it, the more the swollen, stretched, waterlogged skin began, very slowly, to return to what it had been. I'd prioritized the skin, so my legs hurt like hell, but it was fine. Just a little longer. Once Phase Power recovered and the skin was back to normal, I could start on the fatigue in my legs.
What remained in my body was 6. Checking the surroundings with Telescopic Vision earlier, then spending Phase Power on treatment, had shaved it down a little in the meantime. I'd expected some kind of Phase Power withdrawal if it got too low — a splitting head, a pain in the chest, something like that — but there was nothing at all.
Oh. A minute passed, and my remaining Phase Power recovered by 4. Huh? 4?
Wasn't it supposed to rise by 1 a minute?
My current Phase Power was 465... Huh? Why had it gone up? It had been 458 before the imugi attacked me. Ah — it rose by 1 an hour, so had seven hours passed while I was out? No. Phase Power wasn't flowing from Franc's Soul Stone anymore, so it shouldn't have increased...
…??
Well. I didn't really understand, but for now I should treat the increase as 1 an hour... right? Hmm. If seven hours had passed, it ought to be around five in the afternoon, but when I looked up all I saw was storm cloud dumping rain, and it was so dark all around I couldn't tell what time it was. Without the rain clouds I could have guessed from the sun...
Anyway, I'd learned that remaining Phase Power recovered at 4.65 a minute. So in the Phase World, Phase Power fully recovered after a hundred minutes.
Thinking about Phase Power pulled my attention right back to Franc's Soul Stone. God, I was really worried about her. I wanted to take it out and feel it, make sure nothing was wrong, but my body was in such bad shape I was afraid I'd drop it in the water. I could dive and pick it up if I did — but dive in this condition and I'd drown and die...
...Maybe I should rest, refill the Phase Power that had hit rock bottom, recover my body, and then try calling Franc? I'd been controlling it nonstop, and apparently that burned a fair amount of energy. My stomach was growling up a storm, demanding food... Sounded like a good idea.
"But I don't see anywhere I can rest."
Literally, only parts of the trees stuck out of the water, and if I tried to climb one it would sway and sink right back under. Nothing for it. I'd have to keep swimming until a place to rest appeared. There were plenty of trees. Sooner or later I'd find one big enough.
I snatched a leafy branch from a moisture tree drifting past and started swimming while I stripped the leaves and ate them like a panda.
And I confirmed once again that while Search had been off, the map function had stopped with it. The moment I ran Search and checked my surroundings, the space between where I'd been just before I lost my grip and where I was now looked like two wave-patterns laid over each other with the middle omitted — ah! The moment I said it, no, the moment I thought it, the shape changed into a wave pattern.
An automatic update?
...Was Search seriously a computer function? Anyway, the gap had been skipped as a wave shape, and the place I'd been and the place I was now moved separately. At least the direction matched, so I could keep putting distance between myself and the cliff. That much was a relief.
Franc had said the forest was so vast that even at a giant's stride it would take ten days of walking without rest to reach its edge, so I could keep swimming. Keep moving and I'd pull away from the imugi too, and once the days passed and the fifteenth came, I'd go home. Two birds with one stone. Even so, once this rain stopped and the sun came out and the water warmed, the Rogue Imugi might come after me. I needed to get as far away as I could before then.
...The truth was, I still didn't understand. Why the Rogue Imugi hadn't come into the water after me. And why that bastard hadn't planted its lightning squarely on me when it called it down. Did that mean it couldn't drop its lightning where it meant to? But on TV they'd said the air itself had trembled, a great bell had rung, and a single bolt had shattered the raid team Archangel to pieces.
Maybe... No. Don't dwell on facts that aren't certain. I thought the lightning that fell with a bell's toll might be different from ordinary lightning, but that wasn't something I needed to worry about now. Still, there might be a rematch later. I shouldn't forget. I'd remember.
Anyway, thank God. If it had dropped that bell-tolling bolt back at the start, when I still couldn't control Phase Power, I'd have been dead, no two ways about it. Haaah. I'd lost count of how many times I'd survived by dumb luck like this. Should I be glad, or was I burning through a lifetime's worth of fortune right here...
The moment the bolt hit I'd been shaking with rage, and my hair had gone curly besides, but the comfort was that it hadn't been the worst. Getting scorched by the Rogue Imugi's lightning was what had let me control Phase Power. The disease and the cure, handed over in the same breath!
Anyway, my Detection range had grown to 104 meters, and Search targets — objects — seemed to max out at forty thousand now, and there were plenty of upsides. I was still worried about Franc.
Turning this and that over, I improved the wrinkled skin that looked most urgent first, then circulated Phase Power below my waist to raise my natural healing. After ten minutes of that, everything below my waist felt considerably easier. Once the pain clogging my thoughts had eased, I wondered about cutting the log and making a raft — and only then realized I'd left the claw spear behind. The spear-thrower, too, and the javelins I'd never once used.
The horn awl, at least, was still tied neatly at my waist, and with that I could probably manage a log canoe somehow... I looked around. Nothing but water. A few trees poking just their crowns above the surface. Making a raft in this situation was out of the question.
Tsk. It stung far worse than losing the wooden spear. But at least I still had the horn awl. And thankfully I was still wearing the whole school uniform.
I couldn't tell if it was lunch or dinner, but maybe because I had Phase Power running, hunger hit me hard and fast. I carefully undid part of my belt and tore off about two segments to eat, then stripped leaves from a moisture tree beside me that had only just poked its head up and stuffed them in my mouth.
Nngh... Controlling Phase Power burned a lot more calories than I'd thought.
For the next two hours I pushed my natural healing high enough that Phase Power never had a chance to accumulate, and the waist that had felt ready to snap and the leg muscles that had felt ready to tear were left with only a little soreness, while the skin that had been submerged regenerated completely.
"Hoo."
One worry down. I had no idea how much farther I'd have to swim, and nothing was more dangerous than staying in the water a long time without ever coming out.
Then again, Phase Power control was seriously the best. I had to wonder why a technique this good had never come to light. A while back, something had leaked from the ability-user community — the List of Essential Techniques Taught at the Ability User Alliance Technical Training Facility — and I didn't think anything like this had been in it.
Had I been the first to figure this out?
...No way. How many ability users were there in the world?
Shaaaaaa.
Another two hours had passed since I'd come to, and this damned rain still showed no sign of stopping. Fat drops struck the surface, the spray kept getting in my eyes, and my irritation climbed with it. This was the first time I'd learned that when rain poured like a downpour, everything went dark and you couldn't see what was right in front of you. And that once the sun went down on top of that, you just... became a blind man with his eyes open.
Pitch black all around, nothing but the sound of rain, and when I closed my eyes it felt like I was shut inside a round room 104 meters across, and somehow... I felt like I was about to develop every phobia there was — nyctophobia, aquaphobia — and my heart lurched.
...I needed to think about something else.
I'd learned that maintaining an optimal state while swimming consumed 3 Phase Power a minute, and the amount that went into regenerating skin was no joke. Of those 3, 2.5 went to the skin. But if I didn't use it, the skin would keep bloating, then soften until germs could get in easily, and even a small impact might tear it. I absolutely could not give up the Phase Power I was circulating through my skin. Since use was neck and neck with recovery, if the scraps left over recovered at most 9.9 an hour, did that mean I could circulate Phase Power through my legs for two minutes each hour and move that way?
…
All things considered, rather than filling Phase Power to the brim and holding myself at peak condition, it seemed better to keep a floor of 300 and put the rest to use. Which meant I ought to rest for an hour somewhere out of the water, get my Phase Power and my condition fully ready, and then move... The problem was that no such place existed.
If a taller tree showed up I could hang off it and rest, but the trees were only getting smaller, sinking completely underwater, and the gaps between them were widening. Was I coming out into plains? Th-then there was a chance aquatic Aberrants would come bursting out...
Ah, fuck!! I thought it, and it only got scarier!! This was exactly why I needed Franc!!
"Franc!! Fraaanc!!!"
A sudden fright seized me and I called for her desperately, but she didn't appear, and there was no response at all. I thought I might cry.
The rain kept pouring. It was pitch black in every direction, so my eyes showed me nothing, and I was swimming alone in a place that had turned into a sea, clinging to a single log. Delusion and imagination called up terror. The sound of rain striking the surface by my ear only fanned the unease higher. Imagination wearing the name of fear squirmed, and I was so scared and so anxious I thought I might go mad.
Of course I could detect 104 meters in every direction, so fear of the unknown should have been greatly redu— like hell! I didn't know what was beyond 104 meters, so it was even scarier!! A dread of the deep took hold, the certainty that some monstrous thing tens or hundreds of meters out was about to come rushing in from beyond Detection's reach at any moment, and breathing grew difficult.
"Hk— hah, khk, nnnrgh—"
Shaking, I clutched the pouch of Franc's Soul Stone hanging at my neck. If I stopped, fear might swallow me and I'd go insane, so I kept my legs moving and swam without rest.
Splish, splash, plunk...
Shaaaaaaaa...
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The only sounds were the rain, the slap of my own paddling, and the fear-soaked beat of my heart pounding in my ears.
Time flowed and flowed, and another three hours passed. The rain still hadn't stopped. As Franc had said, it would keep falling for at least five more days. The one mercy in the misfortune was that once the fear reached its limit, my head went cold instead, and I was able to shake it off — and while I'd been terrified, Phase Power had steadily improved my condition until my body was back at peak form. Phase Power itself was recovering steadily, too, and in greater amounts.
Using muscle and recovering it through natural regeneration in real time, over and over, muscle was forming, and the Phase Power consumed per minute was gradually dropping. Only by decimal places, but still... By tomorrow morning I might be able to recover 10.62 an hour.
Too little. When I had no use for it, the damn stuff had overflowed, and the moment I needed it, there was damnably little of it...
I'd swum 6 kilometers an hour for five hours without rest, so I'd covered 30 kilometers. Could I consider that enough to have shaken the imugi's pursuit?
"...Probably not."
Going by the usual ratio of a snake's girth to its length, the Rogue Imugi had to be well over 300 meters long. The records of an imugi's specs had put it around 350 meters, too. So if that rogue bastard set its mind on chasing me, 30 kilometers would close in the blink of an eye. ...Ah. I'd moved 30 kilometers after coming to, so together with the time I'd been unconscious, maybe 50. Still too short...
Since entering the Phase World, my whole body felt like waterlogged cotton, and my mind was sagging with it.
Grrrrrgle.
My stomach protested again, demanding I produce something to eat. I pulled the horn awl from the belt, undid it, and weakly tore off a mouthful. I'd already eaten from it three times in five hours. A day's emergency rations, gone in five hours.
...Should I cut back a little...
I checked the surroundings with Detection. There were no moisture trees sticking out of the water nearby... I dove and cut a somewhat larger branch from the moisture tree right beneath my feet. As I slowly stripped the leaves and ate them and started swimming again, sorrow came with the loneliness, and tears fell.
This was really hard.
Franc...
I paddled like a machine and swam on for eight hours.
Whether the sun had risen or not, the surroundings had brightened a little. The rainfall was the same, but the pitch-black curtain of rain had turned gray, and from that I realized day had broken. And waves had started to rise. Not surging as high as the sea, but the farther I got from the cliff, the higher the swell seemed to climb. The direction was toward me — toward the cliff. Even the weather wouldn't help. With a favorable wind I'd have pulled away from the cliff much faster.
As I'd thought yesterday, the terrain might be changing from forest to grassland. The number of trees had dropped noticeably. The depth had jumped from around eleven to thirteen meters to about seventeen, and I suspected that was why the waves were rising.
...While I swam, a loneliness and a fear that felt like they'd drive me mad rolled in periodically, like these goddamned waves. I pushed them back by calling up Search and Franc, and by thinking of the family waiting for me alone back in reality, and I endured eight hours that way — but whether Phase Power recovery depended on my mental state or not, the recovery had dropped so sharply that just keeping my body in peak condition was more than I could manage. Naturally I hadn't been able to spend a single point of Phase Power on movement. Even so, I'd covered another 43 kilometers in eight hours, and since coming to I'd swum close to 100.
A hundred kilometers. The distance from Tongyeong to Tsushima. Just how far did this damned flooded region stretch? Or should I be glad it was wide? The wider and deeper it was, the harder it would be for the Rogue Imugi to come after me.
No. Stop the gloomy thoughts.
I shook my head and swept the surroundings briefly with Telescopic Vision.
"...!"
Far off, I found a tree standing distinctly taller than the others, a good portion of it rising above the surface. My heart lurched. I'd only looked briefly, but I could see a place I could climb up and rest. Not enough to lie down comfortably, but enough to sit on a branch and lean my back against the trunk.
A-at last...
I kept my feet working without pause, meaning to eat breakfast once I reached that tree and could rest. After five minutes of hard swimming — thirteen hours after I'd come to — I was finally able to crawl out of the water. I wedged the log that had saved my life among the branches so it wouldn't drift away, then sat on a branch of the tree, which blocked the pouring rain a little, and leaned my back against the trunk. The tree swayed a bit, but it held me easily enough. I'd lost a fair amount of weight and gotten lighter.
But the branch sturdy enough to hold me wasn't very high above the surface, so everything below my calves stayed in the water. Nothing to be done.
Shaaaaaa...
I stared blankly at the pouring rain, and now even the tears wouldn't come. The time Analysis reported was thirteen hours and change, but it felt as if I'd swum three nights and four days without rest. There was no strength left in my body.
The tears came late after all. I wiped them with my sleeve, opened the Soul Stone pouch tied at my neck, and carefully drew out Franc's Soul Stone. The moment I set it on my palm, I felt a faint tingle. This was less electricity than a low-frequency current. Dad's hospital had a low-frequency physical therapy machine, so I knew the feeling. It was exactly what you felt when a weak current ran through muscle.
As I touched it gently and the stimulation continued, that Rogue Imugi bastard came to mind. Could a powerful bolt have affected the Soul Stone badly enough that Franc had hidden herself? Or had something gone wrong because lightning had fallen dozens of times...
I remembered Franc before I'd lost consciousness — crying, gripping both my hands, pressing on my chest — and the tears spilled again.
"Franc..."
This was hard.
I wanted to see Franc...
Breakfast ended with a mouthful of belt and dozens of leaves. I'd worried the tree might not be a moisture tree at all, but fortunately it was a well-grown one. I finished eating, kept Franc's Soul Stone clenched in my left hand, and called her without stopping while I waited for Phase Power to fill — but there was no response, and the tears came again.
I sniffled. I wiped my eyes with a wet sleeve and went to check how much Phase Power had recovered... and realized my maximum had barely risen at all.
"..."
I looked again. Still 473. It had gone up by 1 from when I'd checked thirteen hours ago. So Phase Power really wasn't flowing from the Soul Stone anymore.
I fiddled with Franc's Soul Stone and examined it with Search, but I couldn't find the reason for the sensation stimulating my hand, and my chest grew tight. Then I noticed one thing that had changed. At the center of the blue-green Soul Stone was a gray light that seemed to be Franc's soul, and near that gray light — faintly — electricity flickered and moved like lightning.
The moment I saw it, I was afraid her soul really had taken a shock. Was that why something had gone wrong with the Soul Stone? Why Phase Power no longer flowed from it?
And there was a fact I'd kept turning away from, because I didn't want to think about it. Maybe I'd been separated from Franc somewhere in the middle. The Soul Stone altered by the lightning, so she couldn't return — searching for me, growing fainter and fainter, until at last she vanished...
"No!!!!"
That didn't make sense!! If that were true, something would have changed in the Soul Stone!!
But twenty hours had passed since then. Franc's Soul Stone looked fine on the outside, but even using Analysis, I hadn't been able to learn a single thing.
"No!!!!"
It couldn't be!!
"It can't be... it can't...!"
The fear that I might never see Franc again tangled with the fear of being abandoned by the world, and unable to bear it, I finally broke, and began to sob out loud.