An Aberrant Appears (1)
The moment Hwayeon got home, she fled into the bathroom as if something were chasing her.
She'd clearly hit the limit of her embarrassment. Yelling at me not to come in was cute enough that I wanted to wash with her, but I had a feeling fists would start flying if I tried, so I let it go.
Once she came out I went in as if we were changing shifts, washed, and stepped into the living room to find lunch already underway.
My lovers sat in a ring around the table with Miho, Hiarid, and Darky, and the surface was buried under flat thin bread and a mountain of vegetables. Off to one side, Suhan had set a drip tray on a small cart of her own and was carving charcoal-grilled meat from a steel skewer some seventy centimeters long—slabs more than ten centimeters thick, stacked layer on layer—with a broad, long knife.
Sophia took the carved meat and, at a cart heaped with vegetables, sauces, and soft bread grilled round like little pancakes, rolled the lot up crepe-style and passed it out. She spread the bread at the bottom, piled on vegetable toppings and a generous heap of finely sliced meat, drizzled sauce without restraint, rolled it tight, and wrapped it in greaseproof paper. It looked ridiculously good.
"What is this? It's not a sandwich, and it looks strange."
"It's shawarma. They seem to have grilled beef," Franc said.
"They call it kebab, too," Hwayeon added.
Franc and Hwayeon, as if they'd had it before, lifted theirs in both hands and bit in from the top. I followed their lead, and beef crunched together with iceberg lettuce, tomato, onion, and leaf lettuce, the spicy sauce and the beef's own aroma flooding my mouth.
"This is incredible."
"Tastes amazing, yo!"
Darky accepted a kebab nearly as tall as he was and started taking little bites, and the way he did it was so human that it never stopped being strange to watch. He's a slime. He could just stretch his mouth and swallow the whole thing at once. The black, translucent thing—some thirty centimeters of human shape—opened his mouth like a person, and once the kebab was inside him it vanished as if erased, as if it had simply melted away within his body.
After stuffing myself on kebab for lunch, I called Sophia over and asked how far she'd gotten teaching Darky Hangul.
"I spoke with Mr. Darky to figure out how I ought to teach him, and strangely enough, he understood every word I said."
Hearing that, I remembered the explanation Altina Meldios had given me.
"Hmm. I thought a translation ability was just one thing, but looking at Darky, it seems to split into two kinds."
One method converted your own voice into Phase Power and delivered it straight into the other person's head. The other took in what they said through the ear and interpreted it inside the mind. Hiarid used both. Darky and Miho seemed to be using only the latter—receiving the other person's words and understanding them that way.
It was translation magic straight out of a comic or a novel. If Altina produced results, the language barrier might come down, at least among ability users, and the thought had me looking forward to it. Not just human to human. Conversations with aberrants, too.
Sophia nodded at my hypothesis and went on with her report.
"So teaching him Hangul moved along quickly! Just as you ordered, Master, I was careful that he could form accurate mouth shapes, and I taught him all 5,800 words commonly used in everyday conversation, plus the five word classes and the nine parts of speech! Right now I'm teaching him more specialized vocabulary!"
She puffed up with a look that all but said, I did well, didn't I? Praise me! and I nodded. Less than a week, and that much, taught to a Darky who was busy playing with Miho. She really did seem to have a knack for teaching.
"You worked hard. It's barely been a few days and you got that far. Looks like you've got a talent for education."
"Ehehe... thank you!"
"Darky. Come here."
I called him over to see just how far a conversation would actually get through. Miho was sprawled in the living room with her stuffed belly on display, and Darky had been lying on that swollen stomach, playing a game with her. The moment I called, he chucked the console and came trotting over.
"Gyak?!"
Whether by chance or not, the console he'd thrown flew straight into Miho's face and stamped a corner into the bridge of her nose. Hit square on the nose by the console's edge, she clutched her face and started rolling around.
"What are you doing, throwing a console at her face? Miho's hurting."
Darky, who'd been craning his neck up at me, turned at that to look at Miho, face-down and stamping her feet, and mouthed the words.
"She's fine. That's all an act."
"Oh. Your mouth shapes are precise. Easy to read by lip-reading."
"I worked hard! Praise. Now!"
"...Right. You learned it well, but that way of speaking needs fixing. Teach him that part a little more smoothly."
I'd kept it short and turned to Sophia as I said it, and what came back was absurd.
"Mmh. I taught him that on purpose, so he'd have cuteness and a flavor all Mr. Darky's own... You don't like it?"
On purpose?! Only after hearing me did Darky seem to realize his own manner of speech was strange. His face twisted, he shaped one hand into a hammer, and brought it down on the top of Sophia's foot.
Thud!
"Kyahk! Ah, ow, that hurts. These days it's trendy to talk short and end your sentences with those soft m and b sounds—kyaa!"
Thud, thud! Thud-thud-thud!
"You stupid?! Master said it's weird, didn't he?! You wanna get wrecked by me?!"
"Waaah! I'm sorryyy!"
Sophia, hopping on one foot to dodge him, decided this wasn't going to work and fled, and Darky vanished after her. Miho chased him in turn, nose-bridge red, face furious. A chain of rage.
From around the corner, somewhere in the back of the house, little screams and the sound of a scuffle drifted out, and Franc smiled.
"They seem to get along well."
"Yeah. I like the house noisy."
A quiet, still house wasn't bad either, but it was better when a place felt lived in. Hwayeon, sipping the herbal tea Suhan had brought her, let out a small laugh.
"It is thanks to you being the center of it, Seoha, but looking at that, I cannot help thinking a world where humans and aberrants coexist might not be wholly impossible."
"...Is that so?"
Franc didn't seem to think so, but perhaps she didn't want to spoil the mood by offering a contrary opinion. She simply drank her green tea in silence.
Hwayeon watched Sophia come walking out tearful, the top of one foot gone red, and Darky, his body stretched long in Miho's grip. She set the herbal tea down and asked me a question.
"Did meeting Branch Director Kang Hyunwoo help?"
"Yeah. Though I think it helped Franc more than it helped me."
Hwayeon turned to Franc with a puzzled look, and Franc answered with a faint smile.
"It was simply good luck. More to the point, I can use only the limited TP within my Soul Stone, so anything that spends TP in quantity is of no help to me."
"Even so, if you have grown stronger, it will help in some form later."
"Anyway, this afternoon I should experiment and practice up in the sky. Hwayeon, you heading off to train again?"
"No. I have work to see to this afternoon."
If she'd been going off to train, I'd been ready to torment her until she was blinking back tears and whining... Guess I'd just practice.
"Have a good day."
"Th-then, I'll see you later."
I gave her a good-luck kiss as she headed out to the office in her suit, and she went red and scrambled into the elevator in a fluster.
By now she ought to be used to a kiss, but that was Hwayeon, consistent as ever.
After seeing her off, Franc and I rose two kilometers above the ground, spread a Wall of Space, and sat on it, and all of downtown Seoul lay open at a glance. The one regret was that smog kept the Incheon side from coming clear. Looking down at the city, veiled as if in a thin fog, I turned over what the branch director had told me about will.
Will. The power of will. The power of thought? I focused on the feeling of condensing TP at my fingertips, and the Mana Sieve heaved and began gathering TP there.
No. This was just operating the Mana Sieve.
I stopped the Mana Sieve I'd been using at a near-unconscious level and strongly wished, again, for TP to gather at my fingertips. The Mana Sieve moved once more and gathered it anyway. Think about gathering it, and the Mana Sieve moved. Concentrate hard, and the Mana Sieve moved regardless. I gathered TP, released it, gathered it, released it, over and over, then turned to Franc, who'd been watching from the side.
"How did you figure it out so fast?"
"It was the same method by which I lift my body, or fly. The moment I realized that, I could do it at once."
"I see."
Utterly unhelpful. I raised a square Wall of Space ten meters ahead and flicked Mana Bullets at it.
How was I supposed to move this by will? Ask a question like that on the Certifier community, and I'd get a reply slapped on it like this.
Unable to get a grip on it, I kept flicking Mana Bullets, and the blue orbs flew off with the clear twang of a plucked zither string, vanishing without a sound against the Wall of Space.
Franc, who'd been watching, spoke.
"But, Seoha? If a Mana Bullet is a disintegration of a higher order than the Wall of Space, as Darky said, then it should not be the Wall absorbing the Mana Bullet like this. The Mana Bullet ought to be disintegrating the Wall, should it not?"
"And?"
"And yet, seeing the Wall of Space absorb the Mana Bullet now, I wondered whether that might not necessarily be so."
"Mm... I don't think so. I figure it comes from a difference in cohesion. A Wall of Space has persistence—it holds in one place—while a Mana Bullet, once it reaches a given point, bursts and spreads. So..."
...Spreads? Now that I thought about it, why did it spread when it burst?
Thinking back to the third time I'd practiced Mana Bullets on Mount Elephantros, I'd been able to decide by will whether a shockwave came with the burst. So why wasn't I doing that now?
Ting—fssh.
In that instant, the Mana Bullet I'd fired neither exploded nor was absorbed by the Wall of Space. It punched straight through the Wall and flew off into the distance!
"Oh my?"
"Huh? What?"
I hadn't set a distance, so it vanished from my sight and flew on without end, but Franc, watching, told me where it had burst.
"It burst at twenty-two kilometers. What did you do just now?"
"Huh? I just... fired it without thinking."
What had I done? When I fired it, all I'd done was think, by my own will, about whether there would be a shockwave...
Huh? A shockwave?
Something clicked. This time I had Franc take cover behind me, then raised a large Wall of Space past the five-kilometer mark. I condensed TP in my hand, set it spinning, and fired while strongly willing, in my head, that the Mana Bullet would not explode.
Vwooom.
Unlike the usual clear twang of a plucked string, a heavy vibrating drone rolled out, and a Mana Bullet veined with rippling black flew and erased the Wall of Space as if it were nothing.
"Did you succeed?!"
"Uh... it's not quite what the branch director meant, but the power's gone up, at least."
I felt oddly blank. This was how it got stronger? The Mana Bullet had been powerful all along, and I'd simply been using it wrong this whole time?
So my will had been strong from the start?
...Pfft.
Ahem. I wasn't about to laugh at myself. After everything I'd been through, my willpower might have—pfft!—gone up. Sure. That could happen.
Franc and I approached the Wall of Space, which now had a hole of a strange shape bored through its center.
The TP I'd just put into that Mana Bullet was 1,000. Ordinarily, a 1,000-TP Mana Bullet exploded across roughly a kilometer and erased everything around it, but the one I'd fired with its cohesion raised by will had erased only an irregular patch about the size of my head.
To test it again, I condensed 10,000 TP and fired, and this time a noticeable pocket of darkness spread out, carving an irregular hole about the size of my torso. The Mana Laser's range had dropped drastically, but its power had risen by a wide margin—enough to cut through a Wall of Space layered ten times over. The Mana Cannon, too, had its old range of several dozen kilometers reduced to the extreme, managing only an irregular hole a few hundred meters across, and yet it showed power enough to casually erase even a thirty-layer Wall of Space, the very construct that had severed the body of a Highest-Rank Variant.
A bit of knack, and the difference in power had become as vast as heaven and earth. A thrill ran through me at my own genius.
"Heh heh heh. My genius and my willpower are almost scary, aren't they?"
"They truly are!"
...Ahem. Show off like that and someone ought to knock you down a peg, but Franc took it without a grain of irony, utterly sincere, and the awkwardness doubled.
Embarrassed, I looked away, and Franc tucked my forearm between her beautiful breasts and spoke with a gentle smile.
"An ability perfect in offense and defense alike, and capable of support besides. Once you hold thorough knowledge of your own power and grow accustomed to that strength, Seoha... mm. I can hardly imagine what you would become."
"Yeah. I can't imagine it either."
Setting my ability aside, Franc, rejoicing so purely, was so dazzlingly beautiful that I wrapped an arm around her waist and gave her a light kiss, and her face flushed a soft red.
Which left only one thing: testing it on something High-Tier Variant or above.
The nearest High-Tier Variant was Hiarid, but... because of the feelings she'd shown me not long ago, using her as a test subject felt more than a little wrong.
Ugh...
The energy-field intensity of higher subspecies sat at a similar level anyway. Maybe I should just take some aberrant I could actually see, grow it, and run the test on that.
Late that night Yeongeun came home from work looking worn out, and the news she brought left me a little uneasy. It was the sort of news that made me think the situation Myrdin had spoken of—Phase Power filling reality until aberrants appeared in massive numbers—might arrive sooner than I'd expected.
In school, in a class called Otherworld Survival Studies, I'd learned that over two billion people had died in Phase World-related accidents across 216 years. And in fact, since I'd returned alive from the Phase World, there had been forced summons in August and again not long ago, and in Korea alone 121,277 people had been forcibly summoned.
More than eighty thousand had failed to return and been recorded as dead. This year's number of returnees was the lowest in fifty years, and according to the testimony of those who had made it back, the frequency of appearances by things other than Lowest-Rank Variants had increased.
Aberrants, growing stronger. Survival rates, falling.
And a Highest-Rank Variant, appeared in reality.
Yeongeun, too hungry to have managed dinner, had grilled pine mushrooms and spicy stir-fried udon set before her by Suhan, and she tied her still-damp hair into a ponytail, picked up her chopsticks, and started in on the late meal.
"Thanks. I'll eat well."
"Not at all."
I watched her slurp down the thick, plump noodles in a rush, and when she'd finished, I asked.
"So a marine creature judged to be a Highest-Rank Variant appeared in the Pacific, an American raid team tried to raid it, and they got wiped out?"
"Yeah. At first they thought it was a High-Tier Variant too. So they mobilized Granado Spata Raid Team 2 and part of the Pacific Seventh Fleet and tried a raid, but..."
"But?"
Yeongeun downed, in one go, the clear egg soup that had come with the stir-fried udon, wiped her mouth with a handkerchief, and said:
"The fleet was annihilated. The raiders, every one of them—MIA."
MIA. Missing in Action. Wasn't that the term for going missing in the middle of an operation? I didn't know how many of Team 2's people they'd sent, or how much of the Seventh Fleet's strength, but total annihilation, and every raider missing...
Granado Spata, the G.S. Raid Team, was America's number-one assault force on the world rankings. Their Team 2 might fall short of Team 1, but they were said to rival most upper-tier raid teams. And if part of the Pacific Seventh Fleet had backed them, a High-Tier Variant should have been something they could handle with strength to spare. So had a real Highest-Rank Variant actually shown up?
"How much force did they commit, for every last one of them to end up MIA? They did not underestimate it as a High-Tier Variant when they found it and send only a modest number of ability users, did they?"
"No. Taking into account that it was a sea monster, and that TP recovers slowly out here in reality, they sent most of Team 2's upper strength—ten B-Class ability users and about two hundred C-Class. Word is the Seventh Fleet also committed all kinds of electronic equipment, cruisers, destroyers, and, though it isn't confirmed, even a nuclear-powered attack submarine."
Gathered in the living room, listening together to what Yeongeun was telling us, what Myrdin had said kept circling in my head, and my thoughts grew complicated. I pushed it aside with a sigh and muttered.
"Force like that, and a High-Tier Variant would've been something they could steam and eat. So it really is Highest-Rank."
Hwayeon asked again, her face saying she still didn't understand.
"Even so, how could every one of them be MIA? A raid could not possibly have gone out without a single wind-attribute ability user."
"The type of aberrant they found this time is the problem."
"What type?"
"They say it's a flying-fish type."
At the mention of a flying fish, Hwayeon shut her mouth. A flying-fish aberrant wouldn't stop at skipping lightly across the surface of the water.
"What's a flying fish, huh?"
Darky, who'd climbed onto the living room table and been quietly listening, turned toward me and worked his mouth. At that, Miho preened and looked down her nose at him.
"Dummy. You don't even know a flying fish?"
"Oh, and you do?"
"Of course I do! A fish that grew wings, of all things, and skitters across the water—that's a flying fish!"
"Whoa. A game-junkie furball knowing what a flying fish is. I'm actually shook."
"What?! You're the only one here who doesn't know, you lump of water!"
The mouth-flapping, it seemed, was for my sake. Ordinary talk between aberrants happened some other way. But was that speech tic really never going to get fixed?
Small as Thumbelina—Yeongeun had said he looked like a ball-jointed doll—and Sophia had gone and taught a bizarre way of speaking to a Darky that tiny and cute. I glared at her, and she flinched and smoothed it over with an ehehe and a smile.