A Simple Plan, Nothing Special (1)
The lovers didn't stir until lunch was long behind them.
Hwayeon rose looking more disheveled than I had ever seen her. Franc and Yeongeun eyed her in puzzlement—she was the only one already in her pajamas—but the traces of last night still trickling between their thighs soon had them leaning on each other and vanishing into the bathroom.
"You're up?"
"......Yeah."
Hwayeon sat there listlessly in a cute pair of pajamas, sky-blue and printed with little white teddy bears, staring at me with a blank face. Then she squirmed her way under the covers and curled up like a caterpillar.
Cute. I'll grant her that......
"Don't dwell on it. Darky's an aberrant. I asked him earlier why he'd done that, and he said he could feel TP in the fluids."
I aimed the words at the lump where her head was, and the blanket wrapped around her twitched. I'd seen this somewhere before...... A strange déjà vu clung to me as I went on.
"Darky's a Dark Matter Slime. He's an aberrant, so being drawn to TP is instinct he can't help. Just think of it as Darky cleaning up for you. Simple as that."
I peeled the rolled blanket away layer by layer, like shucking a husk, and Hwayeon's face came clear, flushed beet-red with shame. She almost never let herself look this wrecked. I couldn't hold the grin back, and when I pressed a kiss to her forehead she shot me a sharp glare.
"I love you."
"......I love you too."
She answered as if she were only giving in.
Once I'd managed to soothe her, my thoughts turned to my sister. I'd spent the past week pouring my attention elsewhere under the pretext of persuading my lovers, but now that the purpose was met and I had room to breathe, my mind snapped straight back to her.
I reached out with Spatial Perception. She was with Yoo Chae-rin, meeting Aunt Hyeryeong, the three of them bent over documents and talking. Ever since that accidental kiss she had been dodging me, and by now I was ready to let things fall as they would. The harder I pushed, the more strangely tangled we became......
......That was nothing but self-hypnosis. The truth was that I had caught on to what she felt for me, so she avoided me, and I avoided her. It unsettled me.
I wasn't especially wise, and what I knew ran shallow, but I flattered myself that my instincts and my wits far outstripped those of ordinary people. My sense for others, in particular, had nothing to do with the Phase Power I was born with. It was one of the few natural gifts I'd picked up from my sister—a ghost when it came to reading a room—and I took a quiet pride in it. If even that sense failed me, if I could not read the reactions she had shown, the looks my lovers kept giving me, the atmosphere they had been keeping secret, then I deserved to plant my face in a saucer and drown.
I had first caught a faint whiff of those feelings after what happened at the ski resort, and the kiss had made me certain. But to speak of it was taboo, and the more attention I paid, the more I would be tearing down my own sanctuary with my own hands. So I was doing my best to look away. Genetically we were cousins, not full siblings, and still this country called it incest. Public opinion held it for an antisocial crime, one that would collapse the family system itself, the foundation of society. I didn't know when she had begun to see me as a man. Keep dragging it into the light, and both of us would only be miserable. My clever sister knew that. It was why she kept clear of me.
......Until she had sorted her heart out, keeping my distance was the right answer. I was thinking as much, watching Franc, Hwayeon, and Yeongeun eat the late lunch Choi Soohan had set out, when Yeongeun smiled and spoke.
"Hwayeon was the only one in pajamas earlier. So you've finished persuading her too?"
Hwayeon, who had been eating in silence, froze for an instant before her chopsticks moved again. I nodded.
"Yeah. My sister's on board too, so I mean to start the moment winter break begins."
"What's the plan? How many days are you thinking of going?"
"First I'm going to wreck the Rogue Imugi, then go in and out at roughly ten-day intervals. A full month feels a bit long."
The interval must have been shorter than they'd expected. Their faces brightened. They'd thought a month was too long as well.
"I'll only take Darky when I go after the Rogue Imugi, and leave him behind after that. Hwayeon, talk it over with my sister and look into how we can put Miho, Hiarid, and Darky to use."
"Hm. I have something to say about that."
Hwayeon quietly finished her green seaweed soup, set her spoon down, and looked at me.
"We intend to open raids on the Peak-Rank aberrants that have piled up in the blighted zones, beginning with the new year. Siha will be joining us for the raids. I mean to divide Miho and Darky among the targets as needed and bring those aberrants down. Will that be acceptable?"
"My sister too? Then do it that way. I trust you won't do anything dangerous."
"Of course. Intelligence Strategy and Tactical Planning have both returned their findings. Paired with Miho, and with Nuhodi in support, I can bring down even a Peak-Rank aberrant that has formed a Phase Stone. They are equally confident that Siha, under Darky's protection, can handle a Peak-Rank aberrant with ease. We will take no fewer than seven proven teams with us, so you need not concern yourself with safety."
Miho, who had her head pillowed on my thigh while she played a game, overheard us and went round-eyed.
"Can I go into the Phase World too?"
"Not by yourself. You stay with Hwayeon, always. And study up on the other kinds while you're at it."
"Okay! Yay!"
She was so delighted at the talk of entering the Phase World that it was almost suspicious, her seven tails swaying as she bounced and hopped about the room.
Franc watched her caper, then turned to me with a sulky face.
"What about me?"
"Huh? When we take down the Rogue Imugi, you're coming too. That thing did you wrong. You've got revenge to take, don't you?"
"Ah, of course! I suffered at its hands as well, so I ought to take my revenge on that thuggish imugi!"
Only then did her face brighten. Smiling radiantly, Franc set about clearing the finished table with Choi Soohan.
After Darky took on the form of a tiny fairy, he and Miho wandered everywhere together, and around the time Sophia began teaching him his letters I was still turning over a hint from something he had told me—how to strengthen Mana Bullet, and the unfinished work of teaching Space Wall to tell friend from foe.
"I never imagined Mana Bullet was a higher concept than Space Wall."
"It's a little unsettling that the first ability I ever made turned out to be the purest power I have. But it isn't hard to understand."
Back then I hadn't been thinking of mixing or twisting anything. I had simply been focused on using the Mana Sieve inside my body to forge a means of attack.
In a corner of the gym I watched Hwayeon drill spear forms that called a whirlwind to mind, working the Mana Sieve to gather TP at my fingertips as I spoke.
"You remember how shocked I was, seeing the branch director throw a basic elemental attack on the scale of hundreds of thousands."
"I do."
"Back then I figured that controlling more than ten times the output was hard, so of course a person would handle a smaller amount of TP, and I let it go. That was the mistake. Then I went and cooked up lesser versions—mana rounds, mana cannons—on some half-baked idea, and even made a Space Wall of the same grade......"
Franc, who had listened all the way through, let the tips of her brows droop.
"I was the one who brought that up first, so it isn't your fault, Seoha."
"No. If my control was immature, I should have trained. I got lazy, swollen with pride, and neglected it. That's on me."
I clenched my fist and opened it again as I said it. Franc looked at me with an expression caught between apology and pride, and smiled.
"Anyway. They do say the simplest thing is the best."
"Simple is best. Yes."
"Right. So the fastest way would be to find an ability user who's ahead in that field and just ask them, wouldn't it?"
At the talk of seeking someone out, Franc tilted her head, puzzled. Then an exclamation mark all but popped into being over her head, and she spoke.
"You're thinking of going to see Branch Director Kang Hyunwoo?"
"That's right."
A fire-attribute ability user who casually wielded clusters condensed from nearly four million TP. If anyone could untangle this worry of mine, it was the branch director.
I grinned, drew Franc in by the waist, and after two uses of Space Leaping we stood where the Association building in Gangdong District had been. What met my eyes was a landscape of steel-frame work spread across the whole district.
The wreckage had been swept clean. On the leveled ground, building frames were rising all at once, and the sight of so many construction vehicles and workers moving with such energy made it seem as if the aftermath of the generous helping of shit that bastard Ha Cheolsu had dumped on this place was finally scabbing over.
Even amid all that development, what seized the eye and burned with the strongest presence was the great memorial stele raised at the heart of Gangdong, and beside it the site where the Korean General Branch of the World Phase Ability User Association was being raised again.
The stele, carved in the likeness of a bird taking flight, bore the names of 27,433 dead. Bouquets and funeral wreaths crowded around it, and even now a few people were pausing to set down a chrysanthemum or two before they went on. Word had it the place was becoming a site that not only locals but, surprisingly, foreign tourists and travelers came to see.
I watched them a while, then looked at the stele again, and the characters cut into one corner made my brow crease.
......Was it because I had donated half the enormous profit from selling the corpse of the Calamity-rank Grand Turtle? The mayor of Seoul had come to me, saying he wanted to use part of that donation to commission a memorial stele and build a disaster memorial hall.
When I heard him out, I told him to go ahead.
The Ha Cheolsu terror incident of November 7 had killed more than twenty thousand people—the worst terrorist attack in all of Korean history, or anything resembling it. Raising a stele to mourn the dead, and building a memorial hall as a vow never to forget, was a good thing, and I had agreed. I had agreed!
So why had they carved my name on it!
When I heard they meant to include my name as a token of thanks, the embarrassment was so sharp I thought I would break out in hives, and I told them absolutely not to carve it. I told them not to put it there. And they put it there anyway.
"......?"
I was staring down in silence at Gangdong under construction, and Franc, pressed to my side, looked at me in puzzlement.
Fine. I'd just gouge out the spot where my name was carved. Take that away, and it would read as nothing more than a line of memorial text. You saw it now and then—names cut into stone, and on the monuments to the fallen at the war museums, those neat rectangular scars where a name had been chiseled out.
The thought ran long. The act did not. The moment the space before the stele emptied of people, I wiped out the three characters of my name in a clean rectangle. Anyone who noticed might wonder at the blank, but it was my name, and I was the one erasing it. Who was going to complain?
After that I swept all of Gangdong with Spatial Perception, and I couldn't feel the branch director's Phase Power. Had he gone to the Association building in Busan, or in Daejeon? I could call him on the Certifier and ask where he was...... No. That wouldn't do. Given the patterns he had shown me so far, if I called and asked his location, he would run to avoid me.
"The branch director isn't anywhere around here. He might have gone to the Korean branch in Busan or Daejeon."
"Then let's go back to the gym and ask Hwayeon."
"Ah! That'll do it."
I gathered Franc's slender, soft waist into my arms, and before the leap I looked down at Gangdong one last time.
If Phase Power filled the real world and Peak-Rank aberrants began to appear here as well, then incidents like this one—smaller in scale, perhaps—would break out all across the globe. I needed to kidnap Dr. Woo Mingu soon...... no, invite him, and develop thermal weapons that ran on Phase Power. The research institute would have to be finished first, of course.
We returned to the gym to find Hwayeon sitting on the floor with an electrolyte drink. I had come in behind her with Space Leaping, but she hadn't noticed us. Sweat was streaming off her as she drank the cold sports drink, and mischief got the better of me. I seized her shoulders and shouted.
"Rawr!"
Thud!
"Ghk—!"
Pain like a hole punched through my gut dropped me clutching my stomach, and Hwayeon and Franc caught me with horrified faces.
"Kya! Seoha!"
"S-Seoha?!"
So that was it. In the instant I had startled her, Hwayeon's spinning back elbow had driven into my stomach.
"Hwayeon! Wh-what do you think you're doing?!"
"A-a mistake! If someone suddenly appears from behind like that, anyone would......! Seoha, are you all right? Q-quickly, use Healing Wave!"
She looked ready to cry as she urged me to recover, and I forced the words out one at a time.
"Ugh...... hk...... If I'm going to startle you...... I'll have to...... be prepared to die......"
"I-I'm sorry."
Hwayeon didn't know what to do with her guilt. As I eased the pain with Healing Touch, Franc, who had been gently stroking my stomach, turned a glare on me and began to scold.
"Honestly. You could have appeared beside her. Why did you deliberately show up behind her? And startling her when her muscles were tensed from training—of course she countered!"
"I just expected a cute little kyaa!...... I truly didn't imagine an elbow was coming. Not even a little."
"Does that even make sense? If you leave your back open while you are unguarded, you counter at once, in the time it would take to scream. In a life-or-death moment against an aberrant, a scream is nothing but a gesture begging to be killed!"
She shot back with the tips of her brows raised, and a little anger must have been in it, because she started smacking my chest with her palm. Smack, smack.
"Ow, that hurts, you know? Could you at least make it a cute little pat?"
At my brazen reply she let out a small sigh, as if I were hopeless, crossed her arms, and spoke.
"So why did you come back? I thought the two of you had gone on a date."
"It wasn't a date. We went to see Branch Director Kang Hyunwoo."
At the word date, Franc flushed faintly and waved both hands. At the mention of the branch director, Hwayeon looked at her in puzzlement.
"The branch director, you say?"
"Yes. Seoha said he needed to train his fundamentals, so we went to Gangdong to ask the branch director for advice—he is the finest elemental ability user in Korea—but he wasn't there, so we came back."
"Gangdong is in the middle of construction. A branch director with duties to attend has no reason to be there. I heard he has temporarily established the general branch at the Association's Korean branch in Busan, together with the survivors of the old one."
I pushed myself up to sit, rubbing the stomach that had nearly been punched clean through, and asked.
"He went to Busan? I thought he might have gone to Daejeon, since it sits nearly at the center of the country. He went all the way to the southern tip?"
"Geographically, yes. But the Daejeon branch is already at the limit of what it can house, so they would have ruled it out. The Busan branch is the second largest built in Korea, and I heard it was made with ample space so it could link easily, by sea, with Association branches overseas."
"Then I should go to Busan. I'll be back."
"Go. And—from now on, refrain from approaching from behind without so much as a hint of presence."
She glared at me with the look of someone whose heart had nearly leapt out of her chest. I kissed her forehead and grinned.
"Next time I'll get ready first, and then I'll startle you."
Franc sighed as if I were beyond saving, and Hwayeon looked utterly dumbfounded.
Hwayeon took up Ispect and rose, as if to resume her training. Leaving her there, Franc and I used Space Leaping high into the sky.
Hm. Chaining Space Leaping might be better than running along Space Wall.
I glanced aside at where the house was going up. The work of laying the mansion's foundation had finished two months ago, and now a steel frame filled it without a gap, like a jungle gym, the outer form of the place taking shape. Around it, landscaping like a forest was being laid in, and on the advice of Grandpa Joohan the butler and Suhan they were also building small villas for the staff who would live and work there.
The bonus paid for every day cut from the deadline must have been doing its work. Who would look at that and believe construction had only been underway for two months? Hiring an earth-attribute ability user would have made it far faster, but the result would have come out that much cruder, so it was a pure, hundred-percent manual build. Even so, shoddy rush work wouldn't do. I had written a contract imposing a penalty of a hundred times the construction cost if any defective work came to light. They wouldn't be cutting corners.
"Let's practice Space Leaping on the way and chain it. One second to picture the place, one second to move—by the math, that's 202 kilometers a minute."
"Remarkable. Twelve thousand one hundred and twenty kilometers an hour? In theory you could circle the Earth in three and a half hours."
"Huh. Say it like that and it actually sounds pretty sick."
Grinning, I unfolded Space Leaping with Franc beside me. Busan was three hundred kilometers from here. A minute and a half would do it.
Not as a figure of speech. The world really would be one village.
......Or so I preened, in those foolish days.
"Huuerk—"
Franc was bent double, dry-heaving, and I scratched the back of my head, a little sheepish.
The first ten had been fine. Once the chain passed twenty, her face went a sickly blue-white and she started patting my back, telling me to stop. I stopped. Then the retching began. Honestly, my own stomach was churning. This seemed to be the aftereffect of chained Space Leaping—and we hadn't even been leaping every two seconds. I had been checking landmarks and direction, one leap every four or five. If I had truly fired them off every two seconds, Space Leaping sickness might have killed us.
"Ugh...... I feel as if I've been locked on a roller coaster for a solid hour without getting off......"
Washed-out and pale, gasping against my chest, she began to settle as I washed Healing Touch over her and stroked her head and her back.
"My stomach isn't great either. To think it had a flaw this fatal. Good thing we found out now, and not while we were facing the Blue Devil."
"When you put it that way, it's a small comfort......"
"Let's just take it slow. Like a walk."
"Yes. Please, do it that way...... urk."
I rubbed her back as she dry-heaved like a woman with morning sickness, and looked around.
So this was...... Daejeon? I had taken the bearing completely wrong. Keep on like this and we would fetch up at Geoje Island. I corrected course, and the two of us ran on across the sky, Space Wall set beneath our feet.