Episode 350: Fifth Cycle (3)
Franc vanished before my eyes like smoke, and the giant Franc rose living in her place. I had watched the whole thing happen, and still I couldn't begin to grasp what I was looking at. Had she come back to life? For real? Franc hadn't disappeared? Unable to tell which way any of it was turning, I forced my sight sharp and looked the giant Franc over.
The first thing that caught my eye was her eyes.
Two of them. Eyes—there were two. Doe-soft and lovely, set above a straight, fine nose and lips like wild cherries. The single eye that had sat alone in the middle of her face, cyclops-like, had split into a pair, left and right. ...That isn't a one-eyed giant's face. It's Franc's face. Has Franc taken the body?
"Fra—!"
The instant I confirmed it, I lunged for her with her name already on my lips, and a chill raced up my spine. A bad feeling struck in the same breath. I threw myself skyward with Space Leaping, and the place where I had been standing was swallowed by a buckshot blast of sand packed with a terrifying quantity of TP.
KRRRRRUMBLE!
"...!"
All she had done was drive a hand into the earth and swing. The shards of soil that flew from it tore the forest behind me to pieces. The trees weren't merely felled—they were pulverized past any use as firewood. The sight went beyond a chill. It raised a shudder in me.
Driven by the sense of crisis, I pushed my thought acceleration to its limit and turned what Phase Power I had left into reinforcing my body. Once my mind had a little room to work, I looked at the giant Franc. She stood utterly naked, not a thread on her, and those fiercely blazing blue eyes were lifted straight at me.
Pure will. Not a single thought in it.
That's... wrath. I'm almost sure of it.
Why? Why?!
"Franc! It's me! Your husband!!"
KRAAAAAH—!!!
"Ghk—!"
As if answering my shout, the giant Franc unleashed a sharp, savage roar. Pain like an awl boring into my skull slammed through me, and I hastily raised a mana aura. Another blast of earthen shot came right on its heels.
Tens of thousands of grains of soil—hundreds of thousands—each one loaded with dreadful TP and flying as if to tear me apart. I Space Leaped clear of them. And I realized, with a strange detachment, that the fact Franc had attacked me hadn't struck me as hard as I would have expected.
I didn't understand why I felt that way. This was no time to dwell on it.
That colossal body, somewhere around a hundred meters tall, was identical to Franc's. It felt as if Franc herself were attacking me, and the tears threatened to come.
"Tsk."
I scrubbed roughly at the throbbing, stinging skin around my eyes with my sleeve and ground a metallic sound out between my teeth. The corpse of the giant Franc had become a zombie, rushed me, snatched the Soul Stone necklace, and swallowed it. Everything that had followed felt as if it had sprung from my own carelessness, and the regret came on so sharp it stung in my chest.
If I'd only kept my guard up, it never would have come to this...!
"Franc!"
The moment her body so much as twitched, she came at me like a shaft of light, making the two kilometers between us look like nothing. No—not flying. Leaping. Even with my thoughts accelerated, she closed in an instant. I leaped clear, this time to six kilometers up, and in that same heartbeat her flawless leg, not an ounce of spare flesh on it, sheared through the place I had been standing like a blade.
If I had still been there, my upper body and my lower body would have parted company.
BOOM!
Right after, the giant Franc twisted that impossible body as if mass itself were a lie, kicked off empty air, and came at me again.
A double jump... Her burst acceleration was beyond reason. Open only a half-measure of distance, and I would just keep eating her attacks.
I chained Space Leaps to put real distance between us, and the giant Franc's face twisted with rage.
KRAAAAAAAH—!!!!
"Ngh—!"
Even with the mana aura wrapped around me, the roar punched through the barrier and hammered my ears, my head. Still, thanks to the aura, I could endure it. She kicked off the air and chased me for every leap I made, then threw a fist the size of a small building straight at me. The monstrous TP packed into that fist rippled as if it were about to burst free.
The blow never had a chance to reach me. The instant I read the motion of the punch, I Space Leaped behind her and shouted.
"Franc! Please, snap out of it!!"
KAAAAAAAH—!!!!!!
KRAAANG!!
The giant Franc twisted again and lashed out with a crescent kick like lightning, but I was already gone.
I had examined Franc's body through Spatial Perception at all hours, until I could read what she meant to do from the shift of a muscle alone. Even so, it took thought acceleration and physical reinforcement pushed to their limits just to barely answer the giant Franc's speed. The relief lay in Space Leaping. At least I would not have to trade blows with her.
Holding onto that, I called to her with everything I had, begging her to come back to herself.
"Franc! Damn it!"
KRAAAAAAAAH—!!!!
For an hour I played tag with the giant Franc, gathering Mana Sieve in my throat and calling to her until the calling burned... and still, it seemed my voice never reached her. If anything, as time passed her anger toward me curdled into fury, her face twisting like a vengeful demon's. In the end I had no choice. I unleashed dozens of Space Leaps in a chain and fled far above the clouds, beyond any distance she could follow.
Every time the giant Franc stomped on empty air for a double jump, a triple jump, it sounded like a bomb going off—boom, boom. She leaped and flew through the void as she pleased. But a deliberate chain of Space Leaps was something even a Transcendent-grade giant Franc seemed hard-pressed to keep up with.
KRAAAAAH—!!
She tried to chase me anyway. The distance opened in a blink, and at last the giant Franc fixed me with a dreadful stare and dropped back beneath the clouds...
Platinum hair flashing as it streamed in the sunlight, and between the strands those blue eyes burning a vicious, livid blue—the image tore at my chest until breathing itself grew difficult.
Franc, trying to kill me... No. I wasn't even sure that thing was Franc anymore.
"What happened to you... Franc..."
I spread a Wall of Space, dropped onto it in a heavy heap, and seized my face in both hands as if I meant to claw it apart. For a moment the feeling surged so hard I could barely breathe. Then I thought of the family waiting for me to come back in the real world—Hwayeon, Yeongeun—and somehow, barely, I forced my chest to settle.
And while I did, I strained to work out how any of this had come to pass.
1. The giant Franc's corpse became a zombie.
2. The zombie giant Franc was after the Soul Stone.
3. The zombie giant Franc who ate the Soul Stone turned into a living giant Franc.
4. Franc disappeared.
5. She hates me.
Those five things were the facts.
...I don't know. My head was numb, and dragging one thought into the next took effort, like grinding a millstone full of lumps.
Why had Franc vanished? Why did the giant Franc hate me? How had the zombie giant Franc found me? Why had she swallowed the Soul Stone?
......
I took the time to settle my heart, then approached the giant Franc with care, trying to get a read on the situation. The moment I crossed into a certain range of hers, those jasper eyes flashed with rage and she stormed at me. However great the distance, from the instant I entered that range she locked onto me without pause, and the moment I crossed a certain line, she attacked.
Circling her and testing the edges, I worked it out. The range she could sense was roughly a hundred kilometers. Step inside it and she noticed me. Draw closer, and the rage showed. Cross within 6.7 kilometers and she attacked at once, without a moment's hesitation. Open the gap back out to fifty kilometers, and she broke off the chase.
And in the course of learning all that, one thing became certain. The giant Franc was, without question, a Transcendental aberrant.
Darky, still wrapped around my body, formed only a head atop my left shoulder, pulled a miserable face, and worked his mouth.
"Told ya, didn't I, Boss... Lady Franc, the one who was a giant zombie, she up and evolved from a Calamity aberrant to a Transcendental, just like that..."
"..."
Thinking the process through, I judged that the giant Franc's corpse had turned zombie after we left and wandered here and there.
Is it even a zombie? Remembering the speed at which she had been on me—before Spatial Perception even had time to register her—she wasn't some walking slab of meat. She was stronger than she had been in life. A ghoul, the higher form of the zombie. Wasn't she?
I turned over how she might have become a ghoul, and several assumptions surfaced. One of them: there had been nothing—no animal, no anything—to eat or defile the giant Franc's corpse. In the first cycle, when the giant Franc and the giant mole fought to the death, her roar would have killed every living animal and aberrant nearby, or driven them far away. And then the great flood had come.
The second had to do with the state of things at the time.
The Ability User Alliance had been paying attention to a handful of causes for undead rising out of aberrant corpses. Powerful lingering resentment. Accumulated Phase Power. Things of that nature. Putting together everything Franc had told me, the odds were high that forest had been packed full of the lingering resentment of the aberrants the giant Franc had slaughtered on a regular basis. And the giant mole she had taken down with her at the very end—mutual ruin—hadn't even been an aberrant, for all that it was a monster swollen to gigantic size, and what it carried inside was the energy of an evil-spirit body. The chance she had been influenced by that was high as well...
When the rainy season began, an inland tsunami had come sweeping in, and the giant Franc's corpse had drifted without a destination. I thought it possible she had become a ghoul at some spot where energy of a certain kind had gathered. And once she was a ghoul, wandering the forest without aim, she must have sensed the Soul Stone that held Franc's soul and come down on it like lightning.
...
I had thought I escaped a fatal wound thanks to my worthless sense for danger. But it struck me that the giant Franc's corpse had never been after me in the first place. It had been after the socket at my neck—the one holding Franc's Soul Stone.
Which stood to reason. Dead or not, it was Franc's flesh. And her soul had been with me. Could I really swear there was no such thing as a body drawn toward its soul?
Whatever the truth of that, it hardly mattered. What mattered was that I had no way of knowing whether the giant Franc in that state—no reason left in her—was my cute Franc, or an entirely different being.
The giant Franc who had eaten the Soul Stone, socket and all, had taken on a form you could fairly call returned to life. But the Soul Stone that had worked the miracle of reviving the zombie giant Franc—I let the giant's attacks slide past, I dodged, and I scoured the inside of her body with Spatial Perception, and I could not find Franc's Soul Stone anywhere within her.
The Soul Stone had vanished without a trace. Franc's spirit form was nowhere to be seen.
What I found instead was a gray-white energy gathered in the giant Franc's heart, and that energy was identical to Franc's essence, the one that had dwelt inside the Soul Stone. There wasn't a scrap of scientific basis for it. Not a damn thing. But my gut was certain.
So Franc's soul had not been extinguished. It was inside the giant Franc's body. In her heart.
...I believe it's there.
That energy lay quiet, as if asleep. Remembering how it had rippled as if ablaze when it rested in the Soul Stone in ordinary times, the chance it was sleeping seemed high.
Then all I had to do was wake it, didn't I? But how?
"...Darky. You noticed it, didn't you, when the ghoul giant Franc came down on us?"
"Yessir. Felt the presence of an aberrant around my own grade, I did."
From what I knew, an aberrant that became undead sat one tier above what it had been in life. The giant Franc had been a High-Tier Variant; dying and rising as a ghoul would have made her a Calamity aberrant. And swallowing the Soul Stone—that had to be what pushed her to Transcendental.
"The way she hit us the same instant you shouted, she's a pure Physical Reinforcement type. Fifteen kilometers in the blink of an eye."
"In my experience, a bastard with one power was always stronger than a bastard with two. Big Lady might be stronger 'cause she's only got the one, y'know."
I let Darky's guess roll past and chased another thought. Then the hundred-kilometer perception range I had mapped on the giant Franc might be the Phase Power detection range of a Transcendent-grade aberrant.
A hundred kilometers. That was no joke.
I couldn't say whether that range included the Minor Copy Spatial Perception Franc had learned, but one thing was clear enough. Step inside a hundred-kilometer radius of the giant Franc, and she would notice me. Every time. No exceptions.
After that I kept up the game of chase at regular intervals, Mana Sieve gathered in my throat, calling for Franc until I was desperate. The gray-white energy in the giant Franc's heart didn't so much as stir. If anything, she only grew angrier and came at me harder.
By the third day, merely entering the hundred-kilometer range was enough. She flew into a rage at once—ripping up trees and charging with them in hand, hurling clods of earth compressed hard as boulders from a distance, unleashing roars laced with TP—anything to catch me.
...And then it was the sixth day of chasing the giant Franc.
Today, too, I left the furious giant Franc behind and fled into the sky. She pursued me, let out a KRAAANG—!!! in a voice thick with anger, and once again punched through the clouds and fell back to the ground. After that I picked a spot with the range carefully in mind and watched her from above.
Whether she was taking the anger of losing me out on the trees, she smashed and trampled them in a spree of destruction, then walked over to the heap of splintered wood and flopped down on it spread-eagled, arms and legs thrown wide.
A full-grown woman, sleeping naked with her limbs flung out any which way. Thinking of that as my girlfriend left me in a complicated mood. Good thing there was no one nearby. If there had been—a man, or any male—I would have wrecked that bastard first.
She stood past a hundred meters, but her looks were no different from Franc's. Those doe-smooth legs, that waist bending and swaying supple as a willow wand, those E-cup breasts drawing a perfect arch, that innocent, pure, beautiful face...
...How am I supposed to wake Franc's soul, gathered in that heart?
I had called for six days, desperate, and the energy bound in the giant Franc's heart hadn't moved a hair. I racked my brain for any way to turn Franc back, and the lack of a single sharp option left me hollow with despair.
I sat on the amber Wall of Space and watched from afar as the giant Franc closed her eyes and breathed out in an even rhythm, and all at once I remembered something Franc had said when she told me of her past.
"...In ordinary times, I kept my reason, and I sought out aberrants and slew them, again and again. But there came moments when anger took me, and then it was as though I dreamed: the flesh slipped free of my will and, by instinct alone, sought aberrants and killed them without end. I would watch, dreaming once more, while the body moved and found them and slew them—and when the anger subsided, I reclaimed authority over the flesh. Such was the life I lived."
If the anger drains away, is there a chance she comes back to herself...?
And was she attacking me because of the Phase Stone in my heart—because she saw me as an aberrant?
I clutched my head and turned it over, searching for the right move, but no clear way to settle Franc's rage came to me. She flew into a fury and charged the moment she saw me. What was I supposed to do with that?
No. A few ideas had occurred to me. I just couldn't tell whether any of them was the right means.
The first was to use the fact that Franc hated aberrants—drive a herd of them to her and set them on her. The problem was that the giant Franc's Phase Power now stood at 68.76 million. A Transcendent-grade aberrant in name and in fact. Whether a giant Franc who had reached that grade would be satisfied killing mere rabble aberrants... I couldn't know.
The second was to fight her myself.
The goal wasn't to do something to the giant Franc. It was to let the anger out, so she could find her right mind again. To manage that, I would have to take her hits, or something like it—and the giant Franc's pattern was the fighting style of a power-type Physical Reinforcement ability user. Smash everything. Burst everything. Blow everything away.
Take even one blow, and I couldn't vouch for my own life. I had seen it while dodging her. Fists and feet packed full of TP had struck the earth a few times, and each impact detonated, gouging craters tens of meters across at random. If one of those landed on me, I would die. No question.
The problem was what came after. If I died by her hand, and if that turned out to be the answer—if Franc came back to herself because of it—I couldn't bear what would follow. When she woke and realized she had killed me with her own hands, there was a chance Franc would go mad. No. Not a chance. A reality with a very high probability of coming true. And then there were Hwayeon and Yeongeun, left behind. My parents. My sister...
So taking the fight for her was impossible too.
It wasn't that mind control hadn't occurred to me. When I had laid it on Darky, half my spare mental strength had vanished. Mind-control a Transcendental? Thinking of the conditions and the constraints on the ability, that was out of the question too. And even if I cast it, there was no guarantee Franc's soul—her mind—would wake.
Above all, I didn't want to use mind control on Franc. Forcing that filthy foreign thing, my mind control, into her clear and snow-white heart was something I absolutely refused.
I looked down from the Wall of Space at the giant Franc, small as a flea from up here, my face sunk in gloom. Darky, still wrapped around my body, poked his face out and worked his mouth.
"Boss. No way through like this. Even if we gotta leave a wound, we catch her and haul Lady Franc's mind up to the surface."
"How?"
"You've got that thing you're good at, don'tcha, Boss!"
...Sex?
The word had surfaced on its own. I closed my eyes and let out a sigh. Even if I tried, I wasn't even two meters tall, and Franc was past a hundred. I could probably just walk straight into the primordial chamber inside Franc's petals.
I frowned without answering, and Darky worked his mouth again.
"Shove TP in Lady Franc's mouth, I say! A shock like that, Lady Franc'll come to for sure! If not the mouth, then her genitals—or her anus!"
"Ah."
Would that method even work...?
No. In a situation like this, I had to try every attempt there was to try. There was even a saying that married couples settled their fights with sex!
"Let's try it."
I couldn't leave Franc like this and go somewhere else. I felt it with terrible certainty: lose her from my sight, and I would never find her again.
So I had to bring her reason back. I had to. At the very least, I had to make her stop hating me!