Episode 35: Day ?, Phase World (4)
I learned something this time. Holding Phase Power under control for a long stretch burned through a considerable amount of it. So much for practicing wherever I felt like it.
And yet that morning I hadn't felt any of it being spent at all...
A realization bonus? In martial arts tales and fantasy novels, the moment of enlightenment always arrives with terrifying power, or energy that defies all reason. Had I just been through something like that? The thought left me strangely tickled.
Still, if I graded my own enlightenment, wouldn't it only rate as low-tier? All it had given me was a temporary rise in Phase Power recovery and a slight improvement to my abilities.
After fretting over it a moment, I looked up through the leaves at the sky. The sun had dropped completely and the moon was up, but the weather had stayed clear and cloudless all day, so even now the moonlight was bright enough to show everything around me.
What now. Should I set out even at this hour? The original purpose had been settled thanks to the Supergiant Turtle, so there didn't seem to be any need to swim for my life and flee.
Hmm. Eat dinner first, then think about it.
Every leaf within reach had already gone down at lunch, so I shifted to a branch thick with them and sturdy enough to bear my weight, plucked several moisture-heavy leaves, stacked them like a sandwich, and started biting in. Oh—like this, they actually had some chew.
I munched away and stole a glance at Franc, orbiting me like a satellite. For some reason she seemed to have taken a real interest in me. She trailed along behind, watching me move, think, and eat, and it didn't feel like someone killing time because she had nothing better to do. The way she acted, she was observing me...
Hnnn. Does Franc actually like me? Honestly, I didn't buy it. Ghost or not, even if I was helping her, she thought and moved like a person. There was no way she'd like an ugly guy like me. Becoming a ghost wouldn't swing her tastes a hundred and eighty degrees, either. Unless her standards were absurdly low... No. No way.
I finished dinner on leaves and my belt, then turned to face Franc, who had been watching me the whole time. How did she even think? She was a ghost. A spiritual body—no flesh, and no brain to do the thinking. So how did she act?
Most of the ghosts I knew couldn't manage complex thought. They were basically monsters that moved on simple emotion, or else they repeated some intense action left behind by a memory from life. Which was why I sometimes wondered if Franc might be a person whose body was still alive somewhere. Astral projection, that kind of thing. And becoming an Aberrant had just been her own misunderstanding.
Then a hypothesis sprang up in my mind, and I looked her over again, slowly. She was lying prone in the air, chin cupped in both hands, watching me—and Franc in the moonlight was, quite simply...
"...like an elemental."
—?
"A spirit of beauty, a spirit of moonlight, a spirit of lightning. Something like that, and it would make sense."
—?!
"You're too rational, and too pretty, to be a ghost. If you were an elemental, everything would fit perfectly."
—!
Huh? What was wrong with her? She suddenly covered her face with both hands and gave her body the faintest little twist, like she was dying of embarrassment.
"Hey. Did I just say that out loud?"
At my words Franc peeked out between her fingers and nodded.
...And so the night went on, with me embarrassed, and Franc embarrassed too.
Yeah. I really ought to rest tonight. If I kept swimming through the night as well, I might lose even more weight out here, and lose any more and I might actually start having trouble moving. On top of that, the log I'd been clinging to had been left out of the water, and it was slowly drying. If I waited until morning, maybe I could get a few more days out of it.
I told Franc what I was thinking. She smiled brightly and nodded, then pointed at herself, raised a hand above her brow, and looked around. She must have been saying she'd keep watch through the night, so I should train my Phase Power control.
"No. I can turn Search on and off now, you know? So I can actually sleep."
Joy mixed into her already bright expression, and she started buzzing around me. She'd been about to lead me to a hiding place where I could rest properly, worried I couldn't sleep, so the fact that I could sleep comfortably now seemed to delight her.
"So let's split it. I'll keep watch from now until two in the morning, and you take two until seven. How's that?"
She shook her head, pointed at her own body, mimed sleeping with a little snore, then pointed at herself again and crossed her arms into an X. With a body like this, she didn't need to sleep—was that what she meant?
"Don't lie. I saw you sleeping when we were in the tree room."
At the call-out Franc's face went ah!, and then she thought for a moment, put on a peculiar smile, and started creeping closer.
"If you pull the honey trap on me again, I'm not sleeping tonight either."
If she latched onto my arm and tried that beauty gambit again, I wouldn't win this time either. So I shut it down first. At my words, delivered with a hardened face, she froze and put on a sad expression. But I could tell it was fake! ...Even so, the effect was pretty intense. Intense enough that I wanted to give her whatever she asked for.
"Pretending to cry on purpose won't work."
Having endured the lethal temptation, I watched her face turn sulky—and then, as if something had occurred to her, she gestured with hands and feet as if to say she'd take the first watch.
"You're planning to put me to sleep first and then not wake me, aren't you?"
Franc stared at my face in disbelief, as if asking how I'd read every last one of her thoughts. That was the thing. Franc's thoughts showed all over her face. I wasn't about to tell her that, though.
"Come on, choose. Honestly, when I think about everything you did for me today, I want to let you rest by yourself. You know that?"
Franc made a face like uugh. Unable to think of a way to beat me, she drooped, came over, and sat at my side. Then she rested her head on my shoulder and simply stayed there.
...It felt like my heart was going to burst. In the middle of that, Franc glanced up, looked at my face, and wore an expression that said, this is fine, right?
"Yeah. Then I'll wake you in five hours. Sleep well."
I managed a smile, hesitated a moment, then turned my head and pressed a light kiss to her forehead. My heart thudded and skipped, terrified she'd turn away—but she accepted the kiss quietly, and then, as if embarrassment had caught up with her, covered her face with both hands. A swell of satisfaction rose in my chest. I-is this that couple thing?
Honestly, I didn't even know if Franc truly slept, or if sleeping did her any good. Her body was a spiritual form, after all. But having seen her sleep even once, I'd pushed ahead on the belief that making her sleep—even by force—was the right call. And seeing her close her eyes and drift off told me I'd been right. Proof enough: she was breathing in soft little sighs, sliding off into dreamland, when—huh? Wait. Wait, wait.
I was watching her chest rise and fall when light suddenly began to spill from her body, growing slowly brighter. It brightened and dimmed in time with that rise and fall, so it didn't seem like something was wrong with her spiritual body. Right?
I analyzed the Soul Stone, and Phase Power wasn't flowing out of it or vanishing. I carefully opened the mouth of the pouch and looked down at the stone—if I touched it, the stimulus might wake her—and the gray aura inside was brightening and darkening in the same rhythm. A little later, as if she'd fallen into a deeper sleep, she slipped straight through my body and settled into a lying posture on the branch. I decided it was just something that happened when Franc slept, shifted so I wouldn't overlap her spiritual form, and turned my attention back to the watch. With my eyes, of course, slowly admiring the sight of her asleep.
For four hours I kept that watch without neglecting it. Not by closing my eyes and controlling Phase Power in earnest, but by experimenting with them open—whether I could govern every last point of it inside my body and let none of it idle—while periodically turning on Telescopic Vision to sweep the water and every direction around me. I grew accustomed to it, but not so accustomed that the control made me lose track of time. Trying to spread Phase Power evenly while processing visual information simply drove the difficulty way up, and control became that much harder. That was all. If I adapted to the higher difficulty, my control would only get better, wouldn't it?
Once midnight had passed and it was about one in the morning, Franc's spiritual body began to grow brighter. Curious what this new phenomenon was, I watched closely. The light pouring off her grew so intense her outline blurred, then dimmed again, over and over, until it soon returned to its usual brightness. And then Franc's eyes opened, softly. Had that been the process of waking?
She blinked for a moment, noticed she was lying down, and a couple of question marks practically popped up beside her eyes before she flew over and sat at my side. Then she stared at me as if to say it was my turn now.
"There's still an hour left."
She checked the moon's position in the night sky, tilted her head as if she couldn't quite tell, and stared at me again. She'd woken early. Was she trying to make me sleep longer? I ought to talk with her about this and that for an hour before I slept. I decided to tell her about the phenomenon I'd seen, and opened my mouth.
"There's something I'm curious about. Were you asleep just now?"
At the sight of me striking up a conversation instead of going to sleep, she furrowed her brows briefly, thought for a moment, and nodded.
"About twenty minutes after you rested your head on my shoulder, light started slowly flowing out of your body."
The look she gave me—did it?—told me she hadn't been aware.
"And every time you breathed in and out, your body brightened and darkened, over and over, so I wondered if you knew what was happening."
Franc pressed her left hand to her cheek with an hmm~? look and sank into thought. And while she did, her breasts were pushed together by that left forearm, gathering into one place, while their splendor climbed over her right forearm—a sight I could marvel at any number of times and still find wanting.
"Right before you opened your eyes, you flared bright and then went back to normal. Nothing's wrong with your body, is it?"
At the word wrong, Franc sat up straight, set both hands on her knees, and closed her eyes. Did she have some ability to sense the state of her body, or the situation she was in? I'd assumed that before she became an Aberrant she'd been a Physical Reinforcement user, but maybe not. If she was sinking this deep into thought, she might have some sensing ability, or know a technique related to it.
As a rule, I'd heard, houses that produced famous ability users—or families with tradition and history behind them—passed down know-how related to the Phase World. If Franc really had been a knight of some British noble house, or a member of a distinguished family, as I thought, she might have learned a shared technique or ability handed down through the family. I was turning this over while she stayed lost in thought when another technique came to mind, one the Ability User Association supposedly sold to ability users of G-Class and above. I'd seen it on a blog run by an ability user. They called it a Phase Power operation technique, or something like that. Supposedly you could use it to diagnose the state of your Phase Power. Maybe that was what Franc was doing right now. And I wondered how different that operation technique was from the Phase Power control I'd come to understand.
After I'd waited about ten minutes, Franc opened her eyes prettily, shook her head, and wore an expression that said she didn't know. I gazed for a moment at Franc, like a single spray of magnolia in the moonlight, then spoke with all the earnestness I had.
As if she hadn't expected those words, Franc blinked once, smiled, brought her face close, and gave me a peck on the lips. A pleasant little tingle brushed across my mouth and passed. Ugh. Honestly, it felt insanely good—but she'd used a truly minuscule amount of Phase Power just to leave a trace of the kiss, and it felt wrong to make a fuss over that...
Seeing my complicated expression, Franc giggled, poked my cheek with her index finger, and rose into the sky. I rubbed my cheek at the ticklish sensation and followed her with my eyes. The thought struck me that her skill at handling electricity seemed likely to improve day by day.
...I needed to find a way to charge the Soul Stone with Phase Power, and soon. Could I put my own Phase Power into it? A method that let the Phase Power already in the air charge the stone naturally would be best.
Shaaaaa...
I opened my eyes to the sound of leaves brushing in the wind. The sky was still dark. Looking around, I saw the eastern sky beginning to pale.
...
Twelve days since I'd entered the Phase World, and this was the first time I'd slept of my own will? Something like dozing in the morning, then briefly falling asleep at midnight the next day, then sleeping in the afternoon the day after that, then closing my eyes for a bit in the evening... Ah, what was I even saying. Anyway, after sleeping—passing out—on a completely irregular schedule, it felt like I'd finally gotten a proper rest.
Still leaning against the tree, I stared blankly at the deep-blue night sky for a moment, and from the bottom of my vision a beautiful face, the kind that lifted my mood just to look at, slowly rose into view.
"Good morning."
Franc, wearing a faint smile as if asking whether I'd slept well, kissed my forehead. A feeling different again from the thrilling kiss of last night. This one was nothing but the faintest tickle, brushing past and gone. I had a feeling I was going to get addicted to this.
I turned Search on, tore off a huge pile of leaves, and filled my stomach solidly. My Phase Power was full as well, at its maximum of 477, and my body was in peak condition, not a stiff spot anywhere. I set it turning like a vortex through my control, within the limit where it wasn't consumed, and thanks to the two practice sessions yesterday, circulating Phase Power inside my body was no problem at all.
Maybe that was why. Before, I'd just been an ordinary person with a bit more natural recovery, who didn't tire easily and had a slight resistance to disease. Now strength surged and flexed through my body as if I'd become a Physical Reinforcement user. For now, with so little Phase Power, spreading it evenly was my limit. But if I had more... I found myself thinking I might gain a body as tough as theirs. Anyway, even if I looked as gaunt as someone who'd lived on nothing but water for months, inside I was in a more perfect state than anyone.
"Nnnghhh...! Hoo. I haven't felt this good in forever!"
I stretched long, then did a light stretch with a bright face, and Franc spun happily around me. She seemed to feel how full of energy I was, too. I checked her Soul Stone and the horn awl at my waist, then checked the log I'd been drying. After nearly a full day it wasn't perfect, but a good deal of the water had worked its way out. I nodded and dropped it. The log kicked up spray, sank for a moment, then bobbed back up, showing with its whole body that it had dried nicely.
"Well then. Shall we go?"
I said it with a grin, and Franc smiled and nodded too, going down ahead of me to where the log floated and waving. Watching her, I jumped from the branch.