The Giant Franc Who Is and Isn't Franc (2)
Krrrrrrrr...
"A cliff!! It's a cliff!!!"
Nothing like the cliff in my memory — and still, there was no mistaking it. This place joined up with the cliff from my first run. The seventy-meter wall in front of me hit me with a joy so fierce I thought I might come apart.
"We finally made it...!"
Huu?
I was kneeling on the Wall of Space, overcome, drinking in Darky's congratulations, when Giant Franc let out that vacant little sound. I looked up with eyes gone deep with feeling at a waterfall cliff broader and taller than the falls I'd once leapt from, a tremendous weight of water pouring down its face.
Day eighteen since I'd entered the Phase World on my fifth run. The eighth day of heading west with Giant Franc. We'd long since blown past the ten days I'd expected — the ten days I'd promised Hwayeon and Yeongeun I'd be back within.
Terrified she'd vanish on me somewhere, I hadn't slept properly the whole way. When drowsiness did take me, I slept buried in Franc's hair, or else I simply stayed up through the night. Meals were the energy bars Hwayeon had packed, and whenever a river showed itself I topped off the water. If Hwayeon hadn't prepared that custom bag, and Yeongeun those purification capsules, I'd have been in real trouble.
Every remaining hour I'd poured into leading Giant Franc west. She kept hunting Aberrants, zigzagging back and forth the whole time, and even so it had taken until this eighth day of traveling west together before I finally found the cliff. She'd been so fixated on Aberrants that I'd tried, once, to stand in her way when she went after one — and got launched like Batman driving the Batmobile straight into Superman.
Ghk. Seriously... I could cry.
While I stood there overcome, Giant Franc — who'd been watching me with a leisurely look — breathed out a hwoo and raised a finger to poke me, jab, jab. Unlike Franc, who always watched what I did and waited, this one prodded me the moment she got bored. That was one of the ways she wasn't Franc.
The face I'd been wearing, soaked in feeling, must have looked idiotic against an expression that calm. I let out a small sigh and leapt up the cliff. If this really was the cliff I'd been aiming for, then without a doubt a great mountain reaching for the sky would be waiting to the west.
I kicked off the Wall of Space and climbed to the crown of the forest, and there — beyond an immense sea of trees, far in the distance — a colossal mountain soared all the way into the sky. Distance had faded it, but it was unmistakably the mountain Franc had spoken of. With that, the first objective was done.
Hwayeon had set my account against a few other pieces of information and confirmed that an imugi lived on that immense peak. That would have been another world's timeframe, not the one of my Phase World — but that didn't make me think the Rogue Imugi wasn't there. The imugi had come crawling in from the west, after all. Head for that mountain, and I'd meet him.
Thoom.
What puzzled me was that Giant Franc, who'd come bounding lightly up behind me, was staring fixedly at that far-off mountain too. She didn't so much as twitch — the look of someone who'd found something. I looked at the mountain again myself, but nothing stood out. Of course it didn't.
"Let's go. That mountain's the destination."
Huuuu—!
Huh? That heavy exhale — she wasn't angry, was she? If she were angry, she'd already be rampaging.
For whatever reason, once that western mountain was in her sight, Giant Franc stopped going off to hunt and kill other Aberrants. Travel got much easier for it, and the distance we covered in a day grew — but in exchange, the moment an Aberrant entered her field of view she roared kauuuu—!!! and charged it down even angrier, pounding it into paste. She looked irritated at having her path interrupted. Some shift in her mood, I supposed.
Our course stopped fanning out and became a straight line driven hard forward, and thanks to that we covered three hundred kilometers in a single day. Bit by bit, the landscape began to change. What had felt like a dry winter forest grew steadily sodden, turning to marsh. The trees drooped into unpleasant shapes, their densely sprawling branches grotesque, and the ground was slick beneath them. Half-rotted leaves and the decaying carcasses of beasts I couldn't name gave off a stink.
We pushed on with Giant Franc a long while after that, until the would-be bog ran out and we came to a strange plain: earth half-dried and bleaching white as it hardened, broken by countless pools of water and a sparse scatter of conifers. So much water, and the ground was drying anyway. Trees growing while the earth went white was strange too. Or was strange even the word?
A wind brushed past me then. Thanks to my physical abilities it registered as a mild temperature, neither cold nor hot, but in truth it had to be a dry, stinging winter wind. Every breath I let out spread in a faint white mist, so I knew the cold was bitter — and yet the pools hadn't frozen in the slightest, which only sharpened how wrong the place felt.
Water had gathered everywhere, though calling them pools felt dishonest. The small ones weren't even ten meters across; the large ones ran wider than two kilometers. At that size they were lakes, not pools. Great and small, they covered seventy percent of the ground my Spatial Perception could detect. The span of that sense was 13.5 kilometers across, and seventy percent of a range like that was water. If I had to name the place, it was a lake district.
Our resident tomboy, Giant Franc, didn't so much as consider going around. She splashed straight into the lake and cut a line across it. However wide and deep the water, it only reached Franc's waist, so it hardly mattered — except I was worried something like parasites or poison might seep into her body, and I swept the whole lake with Spatial Perception.
Hm. Just clean water.
Maybe she sensed it too. She paused where the water came up to her waist, looked down at the clear surface, and began washing herself with great sloshing splashes. Fourteen days without a wash — yeah, she'd gotten pretty grimy.
...She planted both legs wide like a crab and washed her sex right out in the open, and my face went a little red. If this were Franc, she'd have been conscious of my eyes and washed herself prettily. This one didn't have me in her thoughts at all, sloshing around like a man. A real tomboy, through and through.
Darky broke down whatever grime stuck to my skin every time, so I didn't need to wash — but watching Giant Franc bathe with a pleased huuuu of breath made me want to anyway. For a moment I wondered if I ought to strip the backpack and the rider suit. The pack was fully waterproof, though, and Darky would break the moisture down, so I just jumped into the lake. Giant Franc glanced at me and lifted the corner of her mouth.
I think she grinned.
The two of us claimed a lake several kilometers across and splashed ourselves clean, and then Franc went to the shore, flopped down, and sank into a half-bath.
...Franc had liked half-baths too.
Submerged to her chest, body gone slack, she looked profoundly comfortable. I lay down between Giant Franc's enormous breasts, half-sunk in the water myself, and since I happened to be facing west I lifted my eyes to the great mountain I'd set as our goal. That insanely huge mountain was slowly growing larger... or so it only felt.
We'd walked three hundred kilometers, and there was still no sign of drawing closer. Impressive, in a bleak sort of way. Stranger still, up to about the mid-slope it was as if the mountain were transparent — nothing visible at all — while from the mid-slope to the peak it showed clear as day. What principle made it look like that? Some trick of atmospheric refraction?
Hwayeon had said it was a mountain twenty kilometers high. At that height — comparable to Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain on Mars — nonsense like this was probably to be expected. It was so vast my sense of perspective wouldn't settle, and staring hard enough made my eyes ache.
Soaking in the water pooled in the hollow between Franc's breasts, I started to feel waterlogged, so I rode the buoyancy up onto her breasts, floating there like islands. The moment I came out of the water, Darky swept over my body and stripped away every drop. No need to dig out a towel. Incredibly convenient.
I pulled two leftover pieces of energy bar from the bag, gave one to Darky, and ate the other. When I poured a drink from the pack's water tank, the slosh had gone shallow. Not much left. I glanced around, refilled the tank with the water pooled in Giant Franc's collarbone, and dropped in a purification capsule. White bubbles boiled up, cleansing it.
"Franc. Time to head out."
Huuuu—.
Preparations done, I called to her, and Giant Franc rose, shook the water from her body, and started walking again. She no longer waited for me to lead. She set off toward the western mountain on her own. Had she felt something from it?
Her back was damp and glistening, and between those taut buttocks and tightly drawn thighs I could see the cleft of her sex. A flicker of lust stirred — but I shook it off and followed after her.
Dusk was settling, and I'd meant to walk through the night again as usual, when Giant Franc suddenly stopped.
Hwooooo.
She exhaled and began looking around. Then she seized a tree that didn't even reach her waist, about midway up, and lifted — and with a wrenching crack the tree tore free, roots and all.
"...What are you doing?"
She didn't stop at one. Two trees, three, she kept ripping them out and tossing them into a pile, and as I watched, Darky — wrapped around me like a half-plate — poked just his head out and worked his mouth.
"Why all of a sudden? We've been walking this whole time without a rest."
When the uprooted trees had piled into something like a small hill, Giant Franc flopped down on top of them. With a boom, the trees under her body crunched, snapped, and burst apart. Something about size times ten meaning weight times a thousand? Either way, she didn't even seem to be putting any strength into it, and a bed of wood splinters was finished all the same.
Sprawled there, Giant Franc shifted with a huuu, then let the strength drain from her body and went slack. Hold on — we'd been making good time. Why this, all of a sudden? It wasn't that I had no guess. I just couldn't be sure of it.
I stood on the Wall of Space, looking down at Giant Franc with her eyes closed, and Darky formed an upper body out of my shoulder and worked his mouth.
"Weird how?"
"Ah. So from the cliff on, Giant Franc caught that gaze and tensed up? That's why she stopped running off to hunt Aberrants, and killed them even more irritably whenever one showed up in front of her?"
Only after hearing Darky out did her strange behavior since the cliff start to make sense.
I bounced my way down the Wall of Space and approached her. She cracked one eye, saw me, and shut it again.
"So Giant Franc's trying to recover her strength too, bracing for the fight to come..."
I came down light on a breast the size of a decent house, and the give of it was elastic enough to call up those bouncy things I'd ridden as a kid. A trampoline — was that the proper name? Honestly, I wanted to strip the suit off and feel this magnificent chest with my whole body.
But one lapse in caution had been enough. A poor substitute, maybe, but I drew down the zipper that ran from my side, across the chest, and up to the neck, and peeled away the suit's top — the chest of it already ruined. It was a one-piece, so the rest hung and dangled at my waist, which nagged a little. I flopped onto my back anyway, and through the thin T-shirt the warmth and softness of Giant Franc's breast came through. Like lying on a top-grade waterbed.
With my upper body bare, Darky had no choice but to shrink back down to Thumbelina size. He sat sprawled on my chest, trembling, terrified he might so much as touch Giant Franc's skin, and I spoke to him there.
"Darky."
"That gaze you said you were feeling. If it's the Rogue Imugi... no matter how I turn it over, he's not on your level, right?"
...The imugi Aberrant had first been discovered something like a hundred years ago, hadn't it? I'd heard the Aberrant grade chart was laid down a hundred and fifty years back, and I couldn't understand why the Ability Users' Alliance had set the imugi as their highest grade. If the Rogue Imugi was Phase-grade, then what grade was the Supergiant Turtle? Was I supposed to call that Divine Beast grade?
I remembered Langue Dran's eyes — pitch-black and starlit, like the night sky, with the feeling that they were staring straight at me. Maybe I ought to treat that one as beyond any grade at all...
"So that's why Giant Franc's tense, resting, trying to get her strength back."
I lay on the bed of her breast, but sleep wouldn't come. Staring blankly up at a night sky crowded with starlight, I felt every kind of thought start to rise — and in the end they all gathered to one conclusion. Whatever the case, it had already happened, and the only path left was to follow that single thread of hope and go find the Rogue Imugi. It was the only way I could think of to wake Franc's mind.
If the Rogue Imugi really was Phase-grade... then I'd thrash with everything I had. And if that wasn't enough, I'd die with Franc.
...
I closed my eyes, scanned the surroundings with Spatial Perception, and turned the Mana Sieve, letting the time pass — and the world around me began to pale with dawn.
I took out a fresh energy bar, put something in my stomach, got up, and put the suit back on. The hole torn open across the chest gaped, bleak and drafty. Darky went back to being a chest guard, but Giant Franc showed no sign of getting up.
I looked at that pretty face — as if a sculptor had poured his soul into carving it, every beauty the world had to offer cut into the features — and gave a little stamp of my foot.
Jiggle. Jiggle.
Every stamp sent my body bouncing on that elasticity, and the feeling was something else. I sprang up and down like it was a trampoline, then stretched my limbs and fell back, and the jolt that threw me up again was a high like a drug.
So this was why they said a woman's breasts were a man's amusement park!
I slid down the cleavage like a playground slide, climbed up the other side, hugged the softened pink nipple, and rolled around playing, and it felt like I'd found my inner child again.
If not now, when was I ever going to get to play with a nipple as tall as I am!
I was in the middle of wrestling that pink nipple when I felt a gaze and turned. Giant Franc was staring at me, quiet and steady.
"..."
Caught under that frank stare, I got awkward and played even harder, and Giant Franc folded both arms behind her head like a pillow and watched. I smacked the nipple, squeezed it, tormented it in earnest, and the soft thing gradually went stiff. Standing on top of it was the best part — the hardened nipple bobbed this way and that, and it was actually pretty fun—
Huuu.
When the sun had fully risen, Giant Franc sat up and swept a hand across her chest, as if to say the playing was over. A little disappointing, but I obediently spread a Wall of Space and stepped onto it, and she stood and stretched. A sharp crack — like bones giving way — rang in my ears.
Up on her toes, both arms stretched to the sky, shivering with the stretch, Giant Franc's body caught the sunlight out of the east in shades of light and shadow, and showed me with her whole figure what a beautiful S-curve was supposed to be.
A real pictorial spread, that.
After the stretch she began loosening up, rolling each shoulder and cracking her neck. It was exactly the stretching Franc sometimes did before sparring Yeongeun with weapons, and my chest went tight all over again — while on the other hand, the way Giant Franc's great breasts swayed as she stretched set my own heart swaying with them.
"You getting ready for a fight?"
Huhu—? Huuuu.
Still offering nothing but breath-sounds I couldn't parse, Giant Franc finished her stretching and, without waiting for me to take the lead, set off on her own in one direction. The imugi was probably waiting at the end of wherever she was headed.
...I needed to steady myself. No letting my guard down.