Giant Franc, Who Seems Like Franc and Isn't (1)
An hour after I had begun injecting a hundred TP a second, Giant Franc — roaring without pause, thrashing across the earth, wrecking everything around her, convulsing — finally crashed down onto the ground with a heavy boom. Whether she had simply worn herself out, or had at last caught on to the pleasure of the TP, I couldn't say.
Her rage at me burrowing into her ear had lasted only at the start. The more TP I poured in, the more that violent struggling lost its strength, little by little. Honestly, at first her reaction had been so fierce I was genuinely terrified her heart might burst and kill her on the spot. That alone should tell you everything.
"Ahh... haah."
The mad flailing had all but vanished. Now she lay flat, breasts the size of a house rising and falling, panting hard, as if every sense were locked on the TP I was still feeding her. When I looked at her face, it was hazy and blank. No anger there, no fury — so it seemed I had succeeded in calming her.
"Franc. Franc? Can you hear me?"
"Huuu... huuuu..."
Afraid a loud voice might set her off, I opened my mouth in a soft whisper before that white, opaque eardrum, but Giant Franc showed no reaction at all. I was about to call her again when she pushed herself up, staggered to her feet, tried to take a step, and toppled. In the end she gave up on moving and flopped onto her back in the middle of the ruined forest, both arms flung wide.
Hmm... I calmed her. Doesn't look like Franc's mind has actually woken, though.
"Haaa. Haaaaaa..."
I looked her over from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes. Sweat ran over her whole body, her skin was flushed red, and from her sex the slick poured in a flood — a flood in the most literal sense. I began carefully working my way out of her ear canal so as not to provoke that wild temper, and she turned her head a little, letting out a low rumble. Ready to Space Leap if she attacked before I was clear, I pulled myself the rest of the way out.
Even once I was fully free, Giant Franc made no move to strike. She simply lay slack, drawing slow, long breaths through her heated body. I hesitated a moment... then launched myself and landed on her collarbone. Her head lifted slightly, then dropped again. Watching that, I backed away, and what was under my feet grew softer and softer, more yielding. I turned and climbed Breast Mountain. At the summit stood a pink nipple, pretty in its shape and clean, rigidly erect.
I was still marveling at a nipple bigger than my whole body when Franc's head rose behind me again. She tucked her chin and looked down at me where I stood at the tip of her breast.
"...Franc."
"Huuuu."
Hearing my voice, Giant Franc simply tipped her head back and closed her eyes. It seemed she had finally understood I was not something that would harm her. Fair enough. For six days I hadn't attacked once — only dodged, and called her name. If some tiny unknown creature circled me for six days, calling out that desperately, I would at least hear it out.
Relieved there was no sign she meant to attack, I examined her heart through Spatial Perception, and that enormous body flinched and twitched. She didn't rise, and she didn't take a stance to strike, so I relaxed and scanned the inside of her thoroughly. There was no sign of Franc's mind rising to the surface of consciousness. Worse, the gray-white energy knotted at Giant Franc's heart remained perfectly still, without so much as a ripple, and that left me a little uneasy.
What if she never wakes, like this...
Darky, wrapped around my chest, surfaced from my solar plexus with only his upper body showing and asked.
"Looks like Lady Franc's instincts have decided you ain't an enemy, Boss."
"Yeah. That's a relief. But Franc's reason still hasn't come back..."
I was exhausted too, after six straight days of grappling. I had cut sleep and meals to the bone and spent the whole time playing a deadly game of tag with Giant Franc. I dropped down where I was. The surface rippled under me like a waterbed, and a strange feeling washed over me. Sitting on a woman's breast... had anyone in human history ever had an experience like this?
I sighed, leaning my back against the stiffly standing nipple, then pulled off my gloves and touched the areola. The texture was unique. Not scratchy, not exactly soft — it clung to the hand in layers, the kind of feel you could get addicted to if you kept at it.
"Boss. What're we gonna do now?"
"I don't know anymore either. I have no idea how to wake Franc's mind."
For an hour I had poured TP in from the place closest to her brain, and all it had done was excite her. Her mind had not returned to what it was. What was I supposed to try next? I was staring blankly, through Spatial Perception, at the gray-white energy knotted over her heart when Darky spoke again.
"How about givin' her a bit more TP?"
"...More?"
"Try injectin' it one more time from somewhere close to the heart, is what I'm sayin'."
"Mm... might as well."
This was definitely different from when Franc had been half-human, half-spirit. Her body had grown monstrously huge, she was an Aberrant on top of that, and her Phase Power sat at 68,760,000. If TP stirred the Phase Power inside her and the stimulation from that brought pleasure, wouldn't I need to inject at least a tenth of that? Hwayeon and Yeongeun's climaxes had varied in number and depth with the concentration of TP, after all.
I looked at Franc, head thrown all the way back, breathing slow, gone slack, then rode the breast-slide down into the valley between them. Meaning to inject a great deal more this time, I settled into the cleft between breasts nearly as tall as a three-story building. Giant Franc lifted her head to look at me again, but there was no anger in that gaze, and no wariness. It was like watching a small animal move around on her body.
A faint apple scent rose from the cleavage. I sat down in it, set my palm to her skin, and began to inject. Blue heat-haze flowed in beneath the skin where my hand touched, scattering a strange radiance. Giant Franc tipped her head back again, closed her eyes, pressed her thighs together, and began to squirm, letting heated moans spill out at the sensation moving through her.
"Hnn. Huuuaah. Ahh..."
It was the reaction of someone savoring a thick, intimate caress. Yeongeun used to respond like this when I spread TP over her body and massaged her while she was half-asleep. My TP entered Giant Franc and spread in every direction, and still the area steeped in it kept widening — but it would not sink past a certain point. All it did was stir the Phase Power clumped at the center of her body. I had hoped it would flow straight in near the heart and brush that gray-white energy... but there was nothing to be done.
As I kept injecting without pause, a flush rose over her snow-white skin, and sweat beaded on it again. Soon her hands lost their way and wandered. One slipped between her thighs. The other began roaming over the peak risen at the tip of a lush, swollen breast.
"Haaang."
Giant Franc writhed lewdly and let out a nasal moan. The wet, sticky sounds behind me — schlick, squelch — sharpened my hearing. She had never once shown me this, masturbating right in front of me for the first time, and somehow I felt as if my nose might start bleeding. I clenched down on it and kept pouring TP in without stopping.
And... even after injecting a thousand TP a second for a full hour, the gray-white energy knotted at her heart did not so much as stir. All she had done was climax several times from masturbation alone, making a pond of her own fluids.
"Hauuaang—!!"
Giant Franc cried out again in a high, thin voice, arching her waist like a bow, clamping her thighs tight, her knees trembling. Her lower belly, gathered in to protect the womb, twitched, and from a sex ripe past ripening the slick did not merely flow — it jetted, forming a river. An apple scent thicker even than Franc's usual filled the air in every direction, enough to make my head spin.
"...This method isn't it, I guess."
"Seems that way... I'm sorry!"
"Why are you apologizing?"
Darky, who had climbed onto my shoulder, seemed to think his advice had wasted energy and time. He made a pitiful face and hugged my neck. I gave him a wry smile and stroked his head, and Giant Franc — savoring the afterglow, maybe — panted and let out a long, satisfied moan. She had said she masturbated often back when she was a one-eyed giant, and the practiced languor of it made the truth sink in all over again. This really was Franc.
What I had injected here and there over six days, plus what I had done inside her ear, came to 360,000. What I had just poured in was 3,600,000. Giant Franc had originally held 68,760,000 Phase Power; add 3,960,000 and she now sat at 72,720,000, but Franc's mind still had not surfaced. The TP had stimulated something. Her sexual sensitivity, that is.
Even so, it had not been a complete waste of time. Giant Franc seemed to regard me as something familiar now. Set against that first hostile confrontation, it was considerable progress. The process, though, felt oddly like a young newlywed couple making up with sex after a fight... tch. And there was a reason for the stray thought.
"Huuuuh?"
"Darky. You catch what Giant Franc's saying right now?"
"Just sounds like breathin' to me."
"Right? I think so too."
I was sitting in her palm, meeting her eyes, which was why I asked. Fully out of the afterglow, Giant Franc had sat up, set me on her palm, and lifted me to eye level to look me over. Then, as if curiosity had struck, she raised a finger and started poking me. Tap, tap. A simple thought showed through it — how had this tiny thing managed to make her feel so good? I ignored the hand prodding at me, closed my eyes, and sank into thought.
Darky's clever scheme. Of those ideas, waking Franc's mind by feeding her TP for stimulation had ended in failure. What remained was my method: let her fight Aberrants and vent the anger... I glanced at her and met pretty beryl eyes fixed on me. The irritation and displeasure that had been so clear in them only hours ago — not a shred of anger remained. Judging by how completely her fury had drained after a few climaxes, the hypothesis that giving her something to take it out on would bring Franc's mind to the surface was wrong too.
Which meant only one option truly remained.
"Lightning..."
"Lightning?"
"Yeah. We hit Giant Franc with an oversized lightning strike. Franc's ability awakening started — presumably — from the Soul Stone changing after she took a baptism of lightning from the Rogue Imugi. So if she gets struck by that bastard's lightning, maybe the energy in her heart will react, and she'll wake."
Miho, Suhan, Sophia, Darky, and Hiarid all knew, roughly, how Franc and I had met. They knew why she had come to wield lightning. So Darky caught on at once, turned to me, and asked.
"So we're goin' to meet the Rogue?"
"Yeah. Whether we go to the Rogue Imugi or drag him over here, Giant Franc needs a lightning shower."
Letting her fight the Imugi one-on-one made me uneasy, but if I joined her and made it two against one, it might be doable. I didn't want Franc hurt. I really didn't. Leaving her like this was worse. ...But looking into those eyes — larger than I was, staring straight at me — I realized another, more fundamental problem had just appeared.
"How do I even get Giant Franc to where the Imugi is...?"
"Mmm!"
If I started walking first, maybe she would follow. Nothing to lose, I figured. I stood up from that enormous palm, laid down a Wall of Space, and walked out into the empty air. As I went I glanced back at her, and the reaction came at once.
"Huuu—?"
Was it my imagination that it sounded like where are you going? I stopped, turned, and beckoned her over. Giant Franc followed without any particular suspicion, her expression easy.
"That's a relief."
"A relief, yeah."
I watched her come striding on long, straight legs like a deer's, then set my own feet west again.
Three days now of traveling with Giant Franc, searching for the Rogue Imugi somewhere vaguely to the west. And thirteen days, already, since the fifth cycle had begun. Even so, progress toward finding the cliff from the first cycle was going nowhere. In three days we had not even covered a hundred kilometers. I couldn't range far ahead and leave her behind, so I hadn't been able to Search properly either — and Giant Franc had a problem of her own that kept the pace from being anything like fast.
Looking at the path we had taken, it fanned out from the point where I had started traveling with her. The reason we were not going in a straight line, but zigzagging, was this.
"Kraaaaa—!!"
Because even in the middle of walking along just fine, she would suddenly erupt in a roar and sprint off in some direction that was not west!
"Argh!!"
"Looks like she caught another Aberrant's presence!"
"I know!"
I triggered Physical Reinforcement and chased after her as she sprinted at full speed, smashing every tree a dozen meters tall and more. And at the place we arrived, without fail, there was an Aberrant.
"Kauuuuu—!!!"
As a rule, whatever she targeted froze at her roar, unable to move a muscle, and got stomped to death. Now and then an upper-rank Aberrant, or even a Peak-Rank one, would turn up and hold out against the roar to some degree. But maybe the gap in rank was simply too wide. Every one we had encountered so far had been smashed before it could even attempt an attack. Like now.
BWONG!!
An Aberrant with a wild boar's head and an elephant's body became scraps of meat and scattered into nothing under a full-force soccer kick from Giant Franc. I watched the pointless end of a life that had probably belonged to a Peak-Rank Aberrant, its whole body sheathed in iron armor, and laughed hollowly. She set her hands on her hips and snorted in satisfaction.
"Just how much does she hate Aberrants, running seventy-two kilometers to smash one..."
Frustrated, I muttered it while she stood with both arms spread, taking a rain of blood and flesh from the sky. Darky clung to my neck, shivering, and flapped his mouth.
"I-I hope Lady Franc doesn't hate me."
Wait. Giant Franc trying to kill me all that time — that wasn't because of this little guy, was it?
Hearing him tremble as he said it made me worry too. He had been stuck tight to my body the whole time, so maybe she thought of him as part of me. But if he ever came off, she might judge him an Aberrant and immediately...
"Darky. Don't leave my body."
"Eek! S-so that really is it?!"
"I don't know what 'that' is supposed to mean, but if you come off me, there's a good chance Giant Franc will take you for an enemy."
"Eeeek."
Terrified by my words, Darky immediately reshaped himself into a chest guard. Then he poked only his face out and flapped his mouth.
"I'll protect you like this until we get back, Boss!"
"Khuuu."
I started to say something to Giant Franc, who wore the expression of someone who had done what needed doing, then stopped. I wasn't even sure she understood me. The one small mercy, maybe, was that thanks to Spatial Perception I could at least be certain we were still moving west.
"...At this rate, I don't know if we'll ever find the Rogue Imugi."
And reality worried me too. The ten days I had said I would be back by had already passed, the situation showed no sign of improving, and if I took Giant Franc back to the real world in this state, Seoul might simply evaporate. More than anything, I did not want to show that goddess-like naked body to other men. The difference in size was dozens of times over, but that body was the same as Franc's. Putting it on display would be the same as showing Franc's body.
"Haa..."
The thought that if her consciousness stayed under too long she might never wake — or, at worst, that the consciousness itself might vanish — tightened my chest.
How am I supposed to live without Franc now...
Six days of grappling and three of living outdoors had caked her whole body in dust and Aberrant blood, and that beautiful platinum-blonde hair was soaked with sweat and dirt until she looked like she had been rolling in a mud pit. That she still looked pretty had to be the rose-colored glasses Franc had strapped over my eyes, screwed on tight.
"Huu?"
She came striding over with a satisfied face, saw me scowling, and tilted her head. It was exactly the way Franc tilted her head whenever something puzzled her, and my throat closed up again.
"Ahem. It's nothing."
I drew in a breath, shook my head, and started west once more—
"Kauuuu—!"
"Ah, come on!!"
She burst into a roar again and shot off northwest as if she were flying, and I chased after her in a hurry.
In an entirely different sense, I felt like I might cry.