To Rage Trouble (4)
Blue light streamed in through the creature's head and down into its body, and I watched the changes with close attention. Its rank climbed in succession—from Lowest-Rank to Low-Rank, then on to Mid-Low—while its body swelled at an exponential rate, and the once-plain shell began to buckle and ridge like a rice paddy split open under a blazing sun. By the time it had grown to two meters, it shoved aside the rock it had been hiding beneath and showed itself at last, finally wearing something of an Aberrant's dignity.
A low, cavernous rumble rolled out of it. The terror pooled in those pitch-black eyes thinned, and a vicious gleam rose in its place. Now that it had reached Mid-Low Rank, confidence seemed to be taking root; it let out a savage vibration from its throat and started glaring down at me. Its Phase Power had jumped from 7 to 483—sixty-nine times what it had been. Had its confidence grown by the same measure? Mid-Low or not, the thing's mind clearly hadn't climbed out of reptile territory. If it possessed the intelligence to understand how it had grown, it wouldn't be acting like this.
I met the Desert Turtle Aberrant's threatening stare with Mana Vision laced with murderous intent, glaring back as if I meant to kill it. Faced with the killing intent and the blue light spilling from my eyes, it tucked its neck into its shell like a coward and quietly lowered its head. It was the sort that had twisted its skull now and then while taking in TP, showing flashes of defiance—but now that it had gone stiff as a log, the work had actually gotten easier.
I kept feeding it TP. Once the turtle became a Mid-Rank Aberrant, triangular horns began to sprout across its shell. At Mid-High Rank its bulk kept expanding until it was nearly the size of a house, and those horns grew out in grotesque, cactus-like spikes. Something like keratin appeared on the exposed skin of the legs and head that jutted from the shell. It looked as if the thing were armoring itself.
I couldn't tell whether this was a subspecies or just the ordinary kind, but Blue Stones kept forming and vanishing inside its body the way they did with Miho. That meant subspecies, didn't it.
"Its defenses appear exceedingly formidable."
"Yeah. That shell... it's getting to where it reminds me of a mountain of jagged rock. Attack it wrong and we'll be the ones who get hurt."
The nature of Aberrants made this frustrating. Until it actually moved its Phase Power in a fight, there was no way to know what type it was.
Whether drunk on the power surging through its body or not, the Desert Turtle Aberrant lifted its head and loosed a low roar. I leapt onto its skull and kept forcing TP in. If I took my time, injecting slowly and making it recognize that I was a dangerous existence, I judged I could suppress that violent temperament. I'd spent a full hour carefully pouring TP into it, and unlike the Aberrants I'd experimented on before, it wasn't thrashing in a frenzy. That had to mean I was right.
I carried the work on, feeding it TP across several dozen more minutes. The creature that had been converting my TP straight into Phase Power finally grew into a High-Rank subspecies. It had swollen to the size of a small building, and dense white spines had sprouted along legs that had once been blunt as hammers. Spines only by comparison to that bulk—in truth, each one was about the size of a person. Its overall color was still sand, so the lineage didn't seem to have shifted yet.
The instant it became a High-Rank subspecies, it began radiating an even more blatantly baleful presence than before, shaking its head in little furtive jerks. I cracked it across the skull and spoke.
"Hey. Don't get cocky."
Ah. Did I hit it too hard? I hadn't even put much strength into it, and the sight of its skull caved in with a thunderous boom startled me. The Phase Stone wrapped around my heart must have strengthened my body far beyond what I'd thought. Enough that a punch thrown with real feeling could beat a High-Rank Aberrant to death.
The dent looked dangerous. Leave it like that and a concussion or a brain hemorrhage would kill it before long, so I spread a Healing Wave, treated it, and went back to injecting TP. Whether from the blow or not, the turtle had gone docile. I looked down at it and drove the infusion harder, and once I'd made it a Peak-Rank subspecies, conspicuous changes began to unfold.
Amid the crack and snap and stretch of something giving way, the Desert Turtle—its color now a brown so pale it was nearly white—suddenly grew more than three times larger. Watching it shoot upward as if the years themselves were being fast-forwarded, physics be damned, Franc spoke in open astonishment.
"Oh my. It has grown enormous all at once. Crossing from High-Rank to Peak-Rank does seem to bring a marked change, just as one would expect."
"Yeah. And this one—I think it's picked up some new ability, too."
A rough measure put it at about forty-seven meters from the tip of its head to the base of its tail, and the highest point of the shell cleared forty-two. The shell had become nothing but sharp triangular horns, so vicious that a fall onto it would punch the body full of holes and kill you outright. The legs looked less thick and ponderous than a little thin, but in trade they bristled with spines like keen blades. A mere graze would leave you in slices of meat. Even the neck, which had looked relatively vulnerable, had gained defense, packed solid with hard masses of the same material as the shell.
The eyes had shifted from pitch black to a vivid blue, and every breath sent clear heat-haze gusting from nostrils narrow as the mouths of scabbards. A power tied to heat? Or was the temperature inside its body simply that high?
Watching it growl as if it could barely contain the power welling up inside, I hesitated a moment, then injected a little more TP. Leave it at the Peak-Rank subspecies minimum of 300,000 Phase Power and it might fall short and get taken down pathetically. Better to bring it up to 1,500,000.
I'd have liked to forge Blue Stones for it as well, so it could rampage to its heart's content. But if this thing were ever caught, Blue Stones found inside its body could come back to bite me. I meant to make Blue Stones and sell them from here on. If their existence came to light here, it would be exposed that I was the one who had dropped the Aberrant.
A bit weak, maybe. Even so, a subspecies was said to sit a full grade above the standard rank. It ought to rampage on the level of a Highest-Rank Variant.
I confirmed the Desert Turtle's Phase Power one last time and took my stand before its ugly mug, a Wall of Space raised between us. It glared at me with frenzy in its eyes. Even so, it was still hunched in on itself, and there was fear in it. Seeing that, I grew certain that taking the time to evolve it had been the right call.
"Right?"
"Yes. Seeing that it does not rush at you rashly, I believe its reason and intelligence have grown as well."
I stared a moment at the Desert Turtle and its gaze full of defiance, then clenched my fist. A Phase Stone had formed in my heart. I needed to check again just how much stronger that had made me. Throw something like a Mana Bullet and have it die or take serious harm, and I'd have a problem, so I couldn't test the power of Mana Bullet-type skills. I could still check how reinforced its body was, and how strong I was. On top of that, the thing seemed less aggressive than I'd expected. Its temperament needed a little provoking.
I kindled a mana aura and concentrated power in my right hand until it blazed a fierce blue, and the Desert Turtle, sensing the threat, began to move the Phase Power inside its body. Hm? This was an Elemental type. A faint red cast—the fire attribute, by the look of it. Strange, though. At around Peak-Rank it ought to be showing a clear, vivid red, and this muted red, closer to orange, was curious.
Regardless, I immediately used Mana Mode - Acceleration, kicked off the Wall of Space, and flew in to drive my fist into its face. With a sound like an artillery shell detonating, the keratin plating its face—the same stuff as the shell—burst apart at once. Its head snapped sideways, and the Desert Turtle roared in pain.
The blow had rattled its skull; it shook that enormous head this way and that. I caught Franc about the waist and leapt high through space.
"Why did you strike it?"
"I wanted to see how much power I could put out with Mana Mode - Acceleration running. If raw physical force alone can punch through a Peak-Rank subspecies turtle's defense, that's pretty damn strong, wouldn't you say?"
A furious roar tore out of it.
"And I needed to poke its temper a bit, stir up the viciousness. Oh!"
The turtle that had taken my punch to the face soon came to. Furious, heat rolling off it, it shrieked and spewed a heat-beam from its mouth that vaporized the rock mountains around it. A single laser bored through a barren hill and opened a round tunnel at its heart. I couldn't help but admire the sight. So that was why the Phase Power had looked something like orange. Definitely different from an Elemental ability user's elemental laser. Fire... mixed with wind?
Watching from on high as it sprayed lasers in every direction, Franc, held in my arms, murmured.
"Now that I think on it, this way may be the better."
"Hm?"
"When one enters the Phase World and comes back out, the Ability User Association retains a record of the passage, does it not? That would have left a trail by which to be tracked. But you have evolved an Aberrant already living here in the field, so that risk should be considerably reduced, should it not?"
"Ah. You're right. I hadn't thought of that."
Good thing I'd found this one right before going into the Phase World.
Watching the Desert Turtle roar, red energy streaming from its blue eyes, I smiled, thin and cold.
"Go on, then. Show them what you've got, Trumpet."
I headed east without a pause, scanning the forests in view and the stretches of rugged mountain where human feet were unlikely to have reached, in case more Aberrants were hiding there. With help from Franc's visual analysis, I combed some two thousand kilometers from Nevada to the mountain country of Kentucky. Unfortunately, I found no Aberrant fit to evolve.
My Spatial Perception reached 6.75 kilometers, and Franc's visual analysis thirty. Set against the sheer size of the United States, the ground we'd covered amounted to little more than a single thick marker line drawn across a sheet of printer paper. And yet I'd seen eighty-two Lowest-Rank Aberrants of every shape and kind. America's land was vast, and sure enough, Lowest-Rank and Low-Rank Aberrants were living here and there in uninhabited waste and deep in the mountains. Of course, measured against the total land area, eighty was a number as good as none.
Back home, though, you could almost say every Aberrant was found the instant it appeared, and the Ability User Association's special task force deployed right after to take it. America was another story. If those things kept surviving, and the density of Phase Power in reality kept rising, high-grade Aberrants really would start coming out in droves, just like in the Phase World—the way the Swordfin had, and the Blade Flyer I'd already put down. Even America, with its overwhelming military and its numbers of ability users, was in this state. Other countries with wide territories probably weren't any different. Before long, humanity wouldn't be making war on itself. It would have to start a war between humankind and Aberrants.
Anyway. All eighty-two of those Aberrants were things with absurdly high breeding rates, or birds that flew, moles that burrowed, fish that swam. I didn't see a single ordinary land animal. The sun had set long ago. To the naked eye there was only pitch dark and, here and there, small lights. Feeling a little worn, I checked the time and found it past eight in the evening.
"I do not see a suitable Aberrant."
"Yeah. There are a lot of mountains around here, so there might be one. Let's look a little longer."
Otherwise I'd go home, enter the Phase World, catch a single one, and come back out. Even if a trace remained, what were they going to do if I denied it?
I dropped altitude a little and went bounding along the Wall of Space, searching for Aberrants that held Phase Power, when Franc—arms around my neck, clinging to my back—tapped my shoulder and pointed.
"Seoha, Seoha. Over there, midway up that mountain—I can see a bear! A Lowest-Rank Aberrant, with a Phase Power of 3!"
"A bear? One of the ones that hibernates?"
"Not every bear hibernates!"
Hm? I'd always thought bears slept the winter through. Had I been wrong? Either way, a bear was strong, it was a land animal, and it didn't breed in a storm. It would do.
I raced toward the spot Franc had indicated, and just as she'd said, a black bear about my own height came into Spatial Perception range—its face buried in the belly of a deer-like animal even bigger than itself, chewing noisily on the entrails.
Midnight snacks are bad for you.
I landed behind it and watched the black bear sprawled there over its late meal, then muttered.
"Smaller than I thought."
Whether it had heard my voice or not, the black bear lifted its head mid-meal, looked back, startled hard, and toppled over backward, flailing. A completely different reaction from the Desert Turtle. And at that size, thrashing like that—it was kind of cute. Franc liked cute things, too... though Aberrants, it seemed, didn't count. Her expression was perfectly flat.
The black bear had flopped onto its back, all four legs windmilling, then flipped itself over, put on a thoroughly frightened face, and retreated step by cautious step toward a cave. So the cave back there was its den. It backed all the way to the end of a hollow that wasn't even particularly deep, and stared at me with eyes full of fear. I walked toward it, and the black bear froze stiff as a mouse before a snake.
This one, too, seemed to be taking me for an Aberrant of a higher order than itself, just like that turtle. When I'd first evolved Miho, the monkeys I'd seen—and the Aberrants I'd met on the Floating Sky Islands—had tried to keep their distance, but they hadn't felt afraid. The Desert Turtle earlier, and this black bear, were unmistakably afraid of me, terrified. I couldn't shake the thought that they were reading me as an Aberrant stronger than they were.
First, seize the initiative. And give it a little petting, so it wouldn't thrash when I injected the TP.
I concentrated Mana Sieve through my whole body, spun up Mana Mode - Acceleration, grabbed the scruff of its neck, and dragged it out of the bear cave. The black bear let out a shrill scream that didn't match its bulk and tried to brace with forelegs and hind legs so it wouldn't be hauled out. Useless. I dragged it outside and slammed it down hard once. It shrieked and thrashed even harder. I'd moderated my strength a little, but it still seemed fine.
I grabbed its hind legs, swung it, and slammed it down a few more times. Only then did it go limp and start groaning. Eyes rolled back, tongue lolling, drool dripping, I seized its snout, applied force, and flared Mana Vision hard as I glared at the black bear. Hurt, scared, and out of its mind, it leaked a few tears and trembled.
Franc wore a strange face, unable even to laugh at the sight of me tormenting the Black Bear Aberrant. I spoke to her as if making an excuse.
"If it resists, it'll be a pain."
"Pfft. Yes."
Excuse that wasn't quite an excuse made, I climbed onto the back of the creature lying prone and slack. It flinched in surprise, then squeezed its eyes shut—playing dead, maybe—and didn't so much as twitch. Well, if it stayed this quiet, that was convenient for me. I set a hand on its back in that state and began injecting TP, and Franc rose into the air and started searching something on her phone. I watched her as I slowly fed TP into the black bear's body.
The black bear that had taken my TP into itself was growing at a rate for which the word terrifying was no exaggeration. At Lowest-Rank, standing on two legs, it had been close to 2.2 meters. At Low-Rank it grew past four, and by the time it reached Mid-Low Rank it had shot up to ten.
"I-it has grown so very large..."
Franc, who had abandoned her search to watch the black bear sprouting upward, made a sickened face.
"Yeah. At this rate, if it becomes a Peak-Rank subspecies, it'll be even bigger than the Desert Turtle."
Picturing not King Kong but a King Bear latched onto the Empire State Building, I kept injecting TP. Before long it evolved into a Mid-Rank Aberrant and grew to a height of twenty meters. But only the bulk increased. Unlike the Desert Turtle, the body itself didn't change, and I felt a little let down. Was this thing really just gigantifying, and nothing else?
The black bear seemed to feel itself growing, its strength increasing; it growled and fidgeted with its forepaws. But it accurately recognized the gap between itself and me, sitting on its head, and it didn't rear up. Then, the instant it evolved into a High-Rank subspecies, its body grew to fifty meters—and as if it had been waiting, muscle began to swell hideously, like an athlete who had taken steroids and packed on mass. Arms and legs packed tight with muscle, distinct cords taking shape across a chest and belly that looked hard as stone. I was at a loss for words.
That dark-crimson mass of muscle Hwayeon had shown me once, the Mountain Gorilla Aberrant—was its name Fistmer? The muscle bulging on this thing was even more vicious than that. Visually, it was overwhelming. A physical strength no human could ever withstand. That was the feeling of it.
Confidence finally brimming over, the black bear slowly rose, letting out a threatening growl. Its Phase Power began to circulate as well. Looking at the pattern, this one was a Physical Reinforcement type.
"Heh. Muscles get puffed up and suddenly you're full of confidence?"
I raised a Wall of Space, landed in front of it, and said it. It seemed to catch that I was mocking it; a dark-crimson blaze rose in those black eyes. In that instant I kicked off the Wall of Space, flew up, concentrated mana aura in my fist, and blew its jaw away. The fifty-meter giant spun and tumbled down into the mountain valley. It snapped trees, kicked up dust, rolled, and wedged itself in the ravine, retching and staggering.
I was already in a foul mood, and this one had walked right into it.
Keeping Mana Mode - Acceleration up, I struck its face and sent it flying, kicked its foreleg—thick as a building—and broke it, and started pounding the thing down. The Black Bear Aberrant wore a look of pain so fierce its soul seemed ready to flee, all four limbs flailing. I punched the flailing forepaws away and beat it with relish. It covered its face with the foreleg that hadn't broken, squealing, hind legs thrashing—and that started to feel an awful lot like I did wrong, please don't hit me.
My anger easing somewhat, I stepped in to inject TP again, and the thing, tears and snot streaming, thrashed in an attempt to get away from me. Thrash like that and I couldn't make it a Peak-Rank subspecies. I'd have to knock it out first.
I kicked its chest and leapt into the air, then used the Wall of Space as a foothold, came down hard, and drove a stomp into its forehead. With the sound of a skull cracking, the creature's pitch-black eyes unfocused, and a body the size of a fair high-rise went slack with a heavy thud.
I looked over the unconscious black bear's torso with Spatial Perception. Bones were broken and cracked in several places, but there was no fatal wound that would threaten its life. Broken bones would heal quickly enough once I evolved it into a Peak-Rank subspecies. Aberrants recovered better than ability users.
I stepped across fur stiff as bamboo, stood atop the broken breastbone, and began injecting TP again. It twitched for a moment, but it didn't wake.