The Giant Swallowed Her Soul
For three days Franc and I pushed west, nearly a thousand kilometers, and by the time I had pocketed seventy-nine High Grade Blue Stones and three High-Tier Blue Stones, there wasn't a scrap of room left in the bag for another.
That ought to be enough for this fifth cycle. No need to grab any more. Still, though...
"We've come this far. You'd think the cliff would be in sight by now."
"You would think so. It did not feel as though we had come so very far, and yet I cannot see it at all."
The forest simply would not end. Franc and I sighed over it together. I had gone up into the sky to look, but the clouds hung low and thick, and reading the land with the naked eye was a problem.
And if I just Space Leaped across in a hurry, I would probably shoot right past the cliff without ever seeing it.
So we kept west without giving up, and every so often I climbed high, just beneath the cloud deck, to survey the ground — and all I ever saw was forest and flatland and grassland and low hills and flatland and forest again.
Then, from up in the sky, I found a river. An enormous one, more than several dozen meters across.
"This river... it's the one that feeds the waterfall I jumped from on the first day, isn't it? It has to be. Right?"
"It must be!"
Four days in the Phase World, and Darky was still so dazzled by everything that it couldn't spare a moment from swiveling around to gawk. I kept the slime in tow and followed the bank west.
We walked the wooded shore, where most of the leaves had already fallen and the trees stood bare, and the bright sun struck the water and stabbed at my eyes.
I watched the river glitter like a spill of jewels, then opened my mouth.
"I wonder if the terrain here matches reality too. Like the Asumpfre Sunken Ruins."
"Might there be such a place? I have never heard of anywhere in the real world where a great flood descends on a regular cycle."
"Could be a hidden realm somewhere nearby, and the water's just pouring out of it."
"Ah. That could well be."
If I thought of landmasses that fit the distance we had already traveled, I could narrow the places suited to our present position down to four.
Deep in the Eurasian continent, or Africa, or the Americas, or the heart of Australia.
Franc heard me out, tilted her head with a look that said that can't be right, and spoke.
"The African continent is desert, is it not? And Australia as well — setting aside the settlements along the coast, it is a land of red earth, is it not?"
"Right. But I picked this up while I was gathering all sorts of information, trying to pin down where Alastor's Terrible Dark Castle sits. Africa's desertification didn't really take hold until about three thousand years after the ice age ended, around the time the climate warmed and dried out. That would've been somewhere around 7000 BCE. After that the desert spread fast, and ancient Egypt rose."
"Hmm..."
"And the reason Australia's turning into wasteland like that is rabbits."
"...Rabbits? Those... the long-eared ones that go hop-hop?"
Franc set her index fingers up over her ears and bounced in little hops, miming a rabbit, and she was cute enough that it felt like a crime I was the only one seeing it...!
I kicked thought acceleration and physical reinforcement into gear, flicked the Certifier on quick as lightning, and saved the whole thing as video. Franc's face went scarlet, and she threw a fit demanding I delete the file.
If I were going to delete it, I wouldn't have filmed it!
She protested with her cheeks puffed full of air, red to the ears, and when I started the explanation over she pretended to listen, looking thoroughly put out.
"So listen! Four hundred and eighty million years ago, like they teach in school, the four continents were all jammed together into one, but mantle convection started splitting them about a hundred million years ago, and by around sixty million years ago they'd begun to take on the shapes and positions of the four continents we know. Even if the Phase World is some past or future version of reality, I figure we have to allow for the vegetation being a little different."
At the mention of sixty million years, Franc fixed me with a dubious eye and a sullen face, and glared. The look meant she thought I was teasing her again.
Watching her, I got the sense she had never been taught about the movement of the Earth's crust, but I didn't point it out. Korea's education system is stricter than most other countries', and Franc's birth and upbringing had hardly been ordinary either.
"I'm not teasing you. In Korea you learn all of this in high school geography. Anyway, they say back then there was barely an Atlantic, and the Pacific was absurdly wide. If I think about what the five Great Lakes looked like when I checked them in the Asumpfre Sunken Ruins, that was around the time the four continents had more or less taken shape. So I've been thinking — maybe the Phase World is the Earth of about sixty million years ago."
"And that is why you are keeping in mind the possibility that where we are now is Africa — that it might be the widest reach of the four continents?"
"Yeah. There can't be many places on Earth where a stretch of over a thousand kilometers can be nothing but plains, low hills, hardly any mountains, and open fields."
Franc let out a small sigh and looked up at the sky.
Her platinum hair swayed in the least stir of wind, like petals scattering. I watched it a moment, then turned my own eyes up through the tall trees toward the blue — and found a sky packed with cloud.
I was wondering what she was looking at when Franc quietly opened her mouth.
"Seoha. If... if the passage to the Phase World were sealed before you could kill the blue demons of the Dark Castle, what would you do?"
Hmm. I'd never really thought about it that way.
"Then I'd take it as the gods telling me not to take revenge, and give it up. What else can you do?"
Then a thought surfaced, and I shrank in on myself a little. If the passage closed, what would become of the people who were in the Phase World at the time? What if something like that happened in the future, and the people trapped in the past became the ancestors of humanity?
...I don't know. Dig too deep and it'll be time paradoxes and all the rest, and my head will start to hurt. I'll just drop it.
I know my reaction is lukewarm. I know it. A normal person, faced with the blue demons — the things that insist they are Meo Azitos — would stoke a violent rage and a violent hatred and try to tear them to shreds. That would be the normal shape of it.
Look at it another way, though. If not for those bastards, I never would have been born. I never would have met Franc, or Hwayeon, or Yeongeun, and the three of them would have lived lives nothing like the ones they have now.
Hwayeon and Yeongeun would still have been mother and daughter. Hwayeon would have become some other man's woman. Franc would not have remained in this world at all. She would have vanished.
Thinking of it that way, I did wonder, just a little, whether I ought to be grateful. But tracing the order of cause and effect looked like nothing but a headache, so I simply stopped.
Right after I learned my past, the rage was so fierce I felt I could chew every last one of them up and swallow them. Time passed. My head cooled. And I came to see that the anger I carried amounted to nothing more than a son's duty — the wish to avenge my mother. That was the whole of it.
So if the passage between this place and the Phase World gets sealed, there's nothing to be done, is there?
Better to spend that strength of mind on my lovers and my family than to rage at an impossible situation, chain myself to the work of forcing the impossible into the possible, hunt for a solution, and waste myself on it.
Franc must have been afraid that even if the passage closed, I would go searching for a way to kill the things called Meo Azitos. When she heard my answer, relief crossed her face.
"I was a little worried. I have seen so many people whose lives were ruined once the hunger for revenge took hold of them."
"My goal is to kill every one of the blue demons. But if I had to choose between revenge on the demons and the people I love, of course I'd choose the people I love."
I caught her hand and held it tight, and I did not waver. Only then did she smile — beautiful as a bud just coming into flower — and close her fingers around mine.
After that the aberrants grew fewer, and walking along at our leisure started to feel like a waste of time, so Franc and I spread a Wall of Space and ran, following the winding river.
Not all-out. Not the kind of running where you sprint, Space Leap, sprint, and Space Leap again. Just about as fast as a car on the road.
Another day passed like that, and the river was still heading west, and the cliff still had not appeared, and I was genuinely baffled.
Was my memory wrong? Were we running off in some completely stupid direction?
The unease had crept in far enough that I muttered without meaning to.
"This is weird. Did I really end up this far out? By now the cliff should've shown up."
"The river runs straight west, so if we follow it, the cliff will appear. Please do not rush."
"You think so?"
The shoulder of the rider suit was too smooth for Darky to sit on with any stability, so in the end it claimed the top of my head as its reserved seat. Sprawled over my crown like a cat gone limp, listening to us talk, it tapped my cheek and worked its mouth.
"Boss. That imugi we're goin' after — how strong's that bastard?"
How strong?
"Hard to say. When we first ran into him, I was only G Class, so there was no way to gauge how strong he really was. But he felt stronger than an imugi was supposed to be, going by the specs people had written down. Looked bigger than the records, too."
"How big was he?"
"Well. The records say a length of about 350 meters, and a body about 27 meters thick, but by feel he was bigger than that."
"Ain't gettin' it. Snake-lookin' bastards I met, even ones around my grade, were two hundred meters tops, I'm tellin' ya. A 350-meter Peak-tier snake? Don't think a thing like that can even show up."
At Darky's words Franc's face hardened a little. I stopped walking, lifted the slime draped over my head down, and spoke.
"That part's been nagging at me too. A thing that size on the move is a weight class you can't fail to notice, and yet I had no idea at all until he was already on us. And if I think back on what Franc told me, there was a time he came crawling for us from a very long way o—"
"Boss!!"
The instant Darky, still clutched in my hand, whipped its head around, thought acceleration kicked in. My sense of time slammed into a crawl — and in that same breath, something enormous came down on me.
Spatial Perception registering the huge thing, and the huge thing crashing over me, were near enough to call simultaneous.
Tss.
Something grazed the chest of the rider suit, the faintest scrape, and without thinking I grabbed Franc beside me and Space Leaped. That I came through it unwounded, I could only put down to heaven lending a hand.
What the hell was that? A cool wind raked across my chest. I looked down, and saw that the front of the rider suit had been torn clean away. The moment I understood, gooseflesh rose over my whole body.
The necklace that held Franc's Soul Stone was gone.
I whipped my head around toward the enormous thing that had struck, and the shock locked my body where I stood.
What met my eyes was...
"A giant. Franc?"
Ten meters tall. Stiff brown hair, hardened, hanging all the way down her back. Ash-gray skin that did not look alive.
A wound split her from the pit of the stomach all the way to the left flank, and from it spilled viscera, blackened, shriveled, dried solid.
A single enormous eye took up a third of the face. A scar cut the center of that face from the forehead down to the left of the mouth, and because of it one eyeball had burst and been crushed — already dried hard, fused in place.
The missing left arm. The marks of battle all over the body. This was giant Franc's. Except giant Franc had become a zombie, and she was moving.
And into that giant Franc's mouth, Franc's Soul Stone pendant was disappearing.
"...!!"
The moment the pendant vanished completely into giant Franc's mouth, the shock emptied my head — and what happened next hit hard enough to tear the soul out of me.
"Franc?!"
"S-Seoha..."
Franc's body was growing faint.
"Franc?! What — what's happening?! Franc!"
"R-run... flee..."
I reached for her as she faded, that desperate look on her face, but my hand passed straight through her body. The hand she reached out with passed through my cheek as well, without ever touching it.
Franc's form wiped itself from before my eyes, like a mirage.
Gone.
Franc had vanished right in front of me.
Why? Because of what? Why?
"Boss!!"
An impact hammered my left cheek. My head snapped right, and my mind jolted awake—
And then a sound like a scream torn from shredded vocal cords exploded from where giant Franc stood.
"Gaaah!!"
Something without form lashed my body. I went flying, crumpled like a balled-up sheet of paper, and a pain as if my whole body were being crushed closed over me while my consciousness frayed.
A buzz filled my ears, as if a fly had crawled inside, and the pale world spun and spun. My chest seized. My throat closed. I coughed, and blood burst out of me.
Once the blood was up, my breath opened a crack, and a thin thread of awareness came back. I lifted a hand. Something black and translucent was wrapped around my arm.
Thud-thud-thud. Crack. Tok.
Something was pounding my back, my arms, my legs, my whole body. It took me a second to understand that I was falling, snapping through branches on the way down.
"Boss!!!"
My gut churned. My chest was tight.
Impact hit my head, then my neck, then my back, one after another. Now blood was running from my nose as well.
"Boss!! Snap out of it!!!"
My head snapped sideways again. Only afterward did I realize something had struck my cheek.
"Dar... ky..."
"We gotta run!!!"
A small, cute girl's head had pushed out of my chest and was working its mouth with an angry face.
"Why..."
"Lady Franc said to run!! That zombie's evolvin'!!"
"Fr... anc?"
The instant I heard my precious lady's name, a rotation that began in the Phase Stone of my heart started to accelerate, spreading Phase Power through my whole body, gathering what had scattered, and accelerating all over again.
My blurred vision cleared. Wind sounded at my ears. My five senses came back to what they should be.
"Franc. Franc!!"
I shouted until my throat tore and lurched upright, and pain rose from everywhere and from nowhere at once.
"Khk."
It was the worst pain I had ever felt. Cold sweat poured off me. Spit ran from my mouth. I swept my body with Spatial Perception, fast, and found seven ribs, my left forearm, my right thigh, and my shin broken or cracked.
It felt like my skeleton had grown a good thirty extra bones.
I set off a Healing Wave at stage two to put myself back together, and looked around.
"Kgh."
Even after the Healing Wave, my whole body ached stiff, and my chest was still tight. More than that — what happened to Franc?!
I fired Healing Wave at stage one again to improve my condition and Space Leaped into the sky, but the leap unfolded far slower, and over a much shorter distance, than usual. Even so, it was enough to look down on the forest from above.
No. Not a forest. A blasted clearing, easily ten kilometers across. Where the woods had stood, there was nothing now but a barren circle of waste.
Everything living had been reduced to ash, and the clearing had become something like a desert. At its center stood a figure grown to eighty meters... eighty meters, was it? Kgh. My head was ringing so hard that Spatial Perception fought me.
How far was I from giant Franc right now... Darky, wrapped around my body, had formed only a small head up on my shoulder, and was working its mouth with a frantic look.
"Boss! We gotta run!"
"I'm not leaving Franc behind!!"
"Waaah!"
I was losing my mind. I had no idea what had even happened. Thinking was hard, but I forced my head to turn, and a fatigue and a heaviness like three sleepless nights filled my skull and got in the way of thought.
Something heavy pressed on my chest. I dragged in rough breaths and bit down on the tip of my tongue, and the pain seemed to clear my head a little.
I grimaced at the pain lingering there, at the taste of iron, and looked at giant Franc — at the one-eyed giant zombie that had been Franc's body.
She stood in that vacant way zombies have, both shoulders slumped, listing to one side. She looked as if she had grown to eighty meters.
The hand severed around mid-forearm was growing back, and the wound that had split her from sternum to flank was knitting shut. The viscera that had spilled from that gash — hardened, dried stuck — were flushing scarlet, coming alive again, and being drawn back into the body. As if she were reviving. As if time were rewinding, and a body that had died a livid blue were changing, little by little, into the body of a living thing.
Every wound left on giant Franc vanished, and the dead skin, webbed with livid veins, began to take on life.
And worse than any of that, a savage storm of blue Phase Power was howling around her body, terrible to see.
"Ah— ahhh. Transcendental. It's a Transcendental aberrant. Boss. We gotta run. We can't catch that."
"She's not an aberrant!! That's Franc! I'm not catching her!!"
I bellowed it at Darky's words, which had stabbed straight through my heart, and inside my skull it sounded like glass shattering, a building coming down, lightning striking. A pain like my brain splitting apart tore through me.
"Ghhk."
It felt as if my eyeballs might burst, but I forced my eyes open and set giant Franc in my sight again.
The corpse-gray skin was returning, little by little, to the color of living flesh, and the hair was changing from a dull brown to platinum.
I gasped for breath and set off Healing Wave at stage three once more, and only then did my head clear a little. The tightness in my chest, the ringing in my skull, both began to settle.
Breathing hard, I confirmed that Spatial Perception was working again and took stock. The distance I had been thrown — struck by something I had not even perceived — looked to be about eight kilometers.
No. Not an attack. An explosion of Phase Power? Not even that. The moment giant Franc's body swallowed the Soul Stone pendant, had Phase Power... burst out of her?
Why?
And something I could not name had reduced a space ten kilometers in diameter, centered on giant Franc, to dust.
The corpse of giant Franc, killed in that death-struggle with the giant mole, had become a zombie — and in that zombie state, had she ambushed me? Why? How?
"What happened. Franc...!!"
Fully revived, flaunting milk-white skin without a single wound, giant Franc howled — and I shouted at her with the feeling of vomiting blood.