Chapter 356: Reunion with the Imugi (3)
With the Phase Power I'd secured by gorging on Blue Stones, I unleashed a Stage 3 Healing Wave, and Giant Franc's body began to regenerate all the faster for it. I watched tendon and muscle knit themselves back together, skin closing over the flesh as she returned to her proper form, and then I turned my eyes on the Rogue Imugi.
We had come within a breath of being wiped out, and hatred for the thing surged up savage and hot. It measured exactly 478 meters from end to end, 38 meters across at the thickest point of its trunk, and now it lay severed into eight pieces. The idiot had caught itself in its own final attack, it seemed; the cut faces were seared white and steaming. Every other section had gone still, but the piece still attached to the head twitched in intermittent spasms. Sparks crackled and spat without pause from the broken stump of its horn. Its blue eyes had rolled back, and a tongue forked three ways at the tip lolled from its mouth.
Not dead yet.
I'd lost my head when I brought the sword down, but even then I'd aimed as far from the head as I could, terrified Giant Franc might be caught in the strike. Thanks to that, the major organs — windpipe, lungs, heart, liver — had come through intact, which was probably why it still lived. The lightning had cauterized the cuts as well, and that must have stemmed the bleeding.
To secure the TP I needed to finish it, I hunted the Blue Stones scattered across the blackened earth with Spatial Perception and ate them where I found them. Drawing Phase Power in through the skin was slower. Swallow one, and it restored TP on its own. The moment a stone went down it burst like an egg yolk and liquefied on its way to my throat — not an unpleasant feeling — so I gulped them as fast as I picked them up. Nearly dying had left me with a headache like my brain turning to paste, but as the TP came back, Phase Power circulated through me and eased it little by little.
Khak...
"Franc?!"
I was still scavenging Blue Stones, TP climbed back to ten million, when a wet cough of blood sounded behind me. I spun in alarm. Giant Franc was bringing up a mouthful of black blood. I rushed over, scanned her insides with Spatial Perception, and let out a breath of relief. Nothing in her was wrong. Blood that had pooled in her lungs when the lightning dealt that near-fatal wound was simply forcing its way out.
By then, save for the hair on her body, Giant Franc had returned almost to her original state. She coughed hard once more, shuddered, and went limp. The sudden plunge in Phase Power, and the shock of having nearly died, seemed to have shaken mind and body both.
I examined her again, carefully, and found nothing amiss. The serious wounds had all regenerated. The regrettable part, if there was one, was that not a single hair remained. The long, abundant platinum blonde was gone without a trace, and so were those thick, pretty eyebrows, and the pubic hair that had been like a neatly trimmed lawn. She looked almost like a mannequin. They say a beautiful woman is beautiful in any form — but I was learning for the first time how beautiful the shape of a human head could be.
I stared at Giant Franc, lost in the sight of her, then startled and lifted a hand to gather what remained of Darky around my neck and shoulders into my palm. I had forgotten him. I carefully pressed the little that was left together, and he squirmed of his own sluggish accord until he coalesced into a single mass. Even so, there wasn't a handful of him, and my chest began to ache in a way that had nothing to do with Franc.
"Darky."
...
No response. I'd told him to run if it got dangerous — if he was about to take a lightning bolt he couldn't break down — and he'd ignored me and saved me instead. The little bastard never listens.
I held the shrunken Darky carefully, let out a short sigh, and looked for the Heaven-Gathering Cloud Sword. It didn't appear even to my Spatial Perception. The Rogue Imugi's attack must have vaporized it. Damn it. If even the shape had remained, the wardrobe with the repair function could have fixed it, but it was gone completely. My clothes had gone with it, and everything I carried, leaving me as naked as Giant Franc. No one was around to see, so maybe it didn't matter.
I found every Blue Stone I'd gathered and ate them. Phase Power recovered to thirty million, and I turned to put an end to the Rogue Imugi.
The hour of revenge has come... except...
Krrrrrr...
The air shuddered, and a vibration began to climb through the ground under my feet.
"What?"
I looked around. A labored hissing — shwik... shiik... — came from where the Imugi lay. I ignored it and scanned the surroundings, but the trees grew tall and dense, and I couldn't tell what was happening.
"An earthquake?"
Just as the shaking seemed to worsen, I kicked off a Wall of Space and leapt into the sky where ash-gray clouds were massing — and far to the west, an inland tsunami hundreds of meters high came into view, surging in at a terrifying speed.
"Fuck?!"
Run— no. Take the Rogue Imugi's head first—!
That won't work either. Even a Sword Energy Bullet had left nothing worse than a knife cut. Try to open its throat with a standard Mana Bullet Mk2 or a Mana Riser Mk2, and that inland tsunami would swallow me before I finished.
A wave of that size would be dangerous even for Giant Franc. She was unconscious. Dodge? With what?
Kill the Rogue Imugi, and I couldn't save her. Save her, and I couldn't kill the Rogue Imugi.
What's there to think about?! If I have to choose one of the two, of course it's Franc!!
I Space Leapt back to unconscious Giant Franc in a hurry, wrapped myself around a little finger thicker than my own torso, and leapt for the sky. In the same instant a march of destruction — mountain, hill, field, and forest, all of it swallowed whole — passed beneath my feet.
Hovering on repeated leaps in place, I watched the terrible inland tsunami sweep the region. The Rogue Imugi and its severed sections were caught in a surge roughly three hundred meters high and vanished east, beyond the range of my Spatial Perception, in a heartbeat. Every stretch of ground in sight drowned under rough waves. Nothing remained but black muddy water.
Even the air trembled under the force of it, and in an instant the world past the horizon was full of water. Watching that left my chest cold. Breathing hard, I looked down at Giant Franc, unconscious and limp.
Every leap while carrying her — over eighty meters tall — cost 31,220 TP. The problem was the aftermath of dying and coming back, if that's what it was: my head throbbed and ached, and my TP recovery had fallen off a cliff. Normally, in the Phase World, I recovered one percent a minute. Right now it had dropped to 0.2 percent, no more than about two thousand a second, and burning over thirty thousand TP on a single leap was dangerous.
I looked for somewhere that would keep us clear of a tsunami hundreds of meters high. East was out. The surge was roaring from west to east, so west, then? But the ground in every direction I could see was already a sea of water. A three-hundred-meter wave. Any ordinary mountain would be under by now.
Wasn't it supposed to work like this — the rainy season starts, water piles up and piles up, and then what has pooled on the peaks of the great mountains comes crashing down and drowns the land? The rainy season was still three months off. Where in the world had this much water come from?
Through the throbbing headache, anger and irritation at the Rogue Imugi crept up again. At least Franc was alive, and Darky too. That was something.
Hauling an eighty-meter Giant Franc through leap after leap burned too much TP, so I decided to find somewhere we could rest, and Space Leapt west.
This is insane. Why does it feel like the water keeps rising? I'm over land, and it feels like I'm traveling over the sea.
Krrrrum.
Thunder rolled from somewhere. The Rogue Imugi had been swept off in the inland tsunami and was gone, but the black clouds overhead had not gone with it. Now and then they dropped lightning and split the air. They were so thick, and hung at such a height, that it was as dark as a room with the curtains drawn at noon.
Twenty minutes of Space Leaping, and still nowhere I could set down and rest. In that time I'd spent twelve million TP and recovered only about 2.3 million. At that rate — 9.7 million gone every twenty minutes — I had less than an hour before my TP ran dry and I dropped with a splash into the torrent raging hundreds of meters below.
"Hah... hah..."
My head rang dull and blank. The back of my neck felt like a weight of dozens of kilograms hung from it, and my whole body sagged like cotton soaked through. Leaping without pause while sweeping the area with Spatial Perception, a fatigue that might knock me out was closing in. A sweet, bloody tang spread through my mouth, and my throat was so dry I could barely swallow spit. I wanted even a mouthful of water, but forget water — my bag had vaporized.
If I lost consciousness, Giant Franc and I were both dead. I spun Phase Power through the Mana Sieve, trying to force myself lucid, but the fatigue was stacking faster and faster. Spatial Perception picked up a gentle mountain three hundred meters high, and the water stood far above it. I couldn't land. Seeing the mountain fully submerged, irritation crawled through me.
"Damn it. Should I just blow a Maximum Mana Cannon..."
Punch out dozens of cavities hundreds of kilometers across, and all this water would drain into them. The level might fall. But Earth's radius is 6,300 kilometers. Carve cavities a tenth of that, and there was no telling what kind of cataclysm I'd set off. So I held it in.
Tormented by that lethal temptation, I made my ninth Space Leap — and a green island laid across the horizon, rising some twenty meters out of the water, came into view.
"Yes!"
Thinking we were saved, I leapt fast and barely reached the island, which, sure enough, was a mountain. It was shaped like a pyramid. The peak was a little sharp, but it rose about thirty meters above the water, and that was enough to rest on.
I calculated a Space Leap that would lay Giant Franc on the summit without the shock of a fall, then let go. Her enormous body snapped trees and crushed them flat as she settled onto the peak with a heavy thud. For an instant I thought her weight might smash the summit and dump us into the water, but the bedrock must have been solid. The mountain didn't collapse, and Franc's body came to rest on the earth.
The slope meant that, lying down, she was submerged to the thighs. The current was a little strong, but being under that far shouldn't sweep her away. Probably.
The moment I had a place to rest, a fatigue like fainting crashed over me. My head swam so badly that I jumped down onto Giant Franc's chest in a hurry, and the warm, soft skin of her breast clung to my bare feet. I collapsed where I landed. My whole naked body sank into her chest, and her gentle warmth seeped into me.
Haa... How good it would be to just let go and sleep like this...
"One more Healing Wave, before that..."
My arms and legs, which had carbonized and crumbled, and Giant Franc's whole body — skin melted, muscle burned away until organs and bone had shown — were not flesh-toned at all, but something faintly translucent and strange, as if regeneration had stopped halfway. I poured every remaining scrap of TP into a Stage 3 Healing Wave.
A wave of blue light poured from me and wrapped Giant Franc, and what little was left of Darky. The same blue current circled my own body and limbs. My cramped arms and legs tingled as if under a massage, and then a cool sensation spread through my arms, my legs, my body, my shoulders, my head. It felt as refreshing as one of Sophia's ultra-premium professional massages. I let out a sigh — and an overwhelming drowsiness came crashing in.
No. My eyelids...
I tried to hold my mind together against a sleep I had no power to refuse. I tried to lift a hand and pinch my cheek awake. My body wouldn't obey.
What is this... something's... wrong...
And just like that, I lost my grip.
A full moon hung alone in a pitch-black night sky. I was staring at it without a thought in my head when one fact struck me all at once.
A dream. Is this another dream about Mother?
Unlike a blue-white moon, or a pale yellow one, this was a warm yellow that wrapped the heart. I watched that mysterious full moon for a long time without so much as stirring, and neither boredom nor idle thought came. Then, at some moment, an arcane voice entered my head — a voice I could not sort into man or woman, old or young.
"A child beyond understanding."
Huh? Who?
For some reason the owner of the voice seemed to be indicating me. I flinched and tried to look around, but I couldn't move — not my body, not even my eyes. Then something felt wrong. I looked at the full moon more carefully. It had none of the crater marks or shading a moon ought to show. It was like... like...
"Baekcheong has taken a grudge into its heart."
An eye. It was an eye. What I had mistaken for a full moon was an eye.
Only then did the being that had covered the sky and turned the world to night resolve, faintly, out of the dark.
It wasn't the night sky! The dark was because a colossal serpent... a dragon? A dragon was blocking out the sky!
How could something like this exist — but I knew of something similar. And I could tell who the colossal presence before me was. The being Hiarid and Nuhodi had told me about. The Lord of the Great Sea. A divine existence known, by another name, as the Dragon King of the Vast Sea.
Long and vast enough to blot out with its body every ray of sunlight falling from the sky, the azure-dragon form brightened its single moon-like eye for some reason, and rammed a low, heavy speech into my head.
"Let the child take heed to guard his body."
The words rang through my skull, and in the same moment the world before my eyes went distant...
Shaaaaa...
Rain poured past my ears and drummed on my whole body, and I cracked my eyes open with a wince.
"Ah, they sting."
Raindrops struck my eyes the moment they opened. I frowned, rubbed them, and blinked my smarting pupils as I sat up into a dark gray world under a downpour.
My heart was beating irregularly. I pressed a hand hard to my chest, and the Lord of the Great Sea — its shape, its words — unfolded in my head as if playing back.
Baekcheong holds a grudge against me? Who's Baekcheong? Why did the Lord of the Great Sea show up in my dream?
Dazed, I narrowed my eyes at the black sky shedding rain. There was no trace of the colossal azure dragon anywhere.
...
Could Baekcheong be their name for the Rogue Imugi? Then that thing has some tie to the azure dragon, doesn't it? Same kind of serpent.
Chopping it to pieces ought to have earned me something ugly from that dragon — so why wasn't the Lord of the Great Sea showing me any hostility? It had even warned me to watch myself. That looked like goodwill.
Something's off...
When I recalled the Dragon King's words, a premonition surged over me like a tide. The Rogue Imugi — the one named Baekcheong — wasn't dead. As always, this damned hunch of mine was bound to be the truth.
Chop a snake to pieces and it ought to just die. No, it has to survive and make my life harder...
Then Darky and Giant Franc came back to me. Darky was clutched in my left hand. And Giant Franc?
Taking the torrential rain, I swept my hair back and turned. She was still lying on the mountainside, quietly unconscious. The great right breast I sat on rose slowly and sank slowly. She was breathing properly.
I ran Spatial Perception the length of her. Franc's naked body, without a single hair, was smooth and without a blemish. The wounds from that Rogue Imugi's attack seemed, fortunately, to have healed completely.
And I found that the gray-white energy in Giant Franc's heart was gone.
"..."
All at once it was as if the air around me had dropped a good three degrees. I was anxious enough for chills to run through me. There was nothing more I could do, and I thought I might cry.
I gave myself over to the heavy rain beating on my head and shoulders. What now. Slap her cheek and try to wake her?
I meant to act on it at once, but the difference in size made slapping her impossible. From Franc's side it would be no different from a needle prick. Instead I moved to her ear, charged my throat with Phase Power, and called her name over and over. Giant Franc didn't so much as stir.
To wake her I went into the ear canal and injected TP. I smeared TP over the enormous nipple. I went down between her legs, drew aside outer skin like a quilt, and even injected TP into a clitoris the size of a watermelon. She didn't wake. There wasn't so much as a physical response.
When I realized that even the apple scent I had always caught from that place on Franc was gone, the shock wasn't as great as I'd expected. It only felt as if a hole had been punched through one side of my chest.
A sudden tightness made me notice I hadn't been breathing. I let the breath out on purpose.
"Huuu... huhuh..."
Sitting on Giant Franc's rising and falling chest, looking at her face with its eyes closed, something warm mixed with the rain and ran down my cheek.
I don't know. Where did it go wrong? Should I simply never have come to the Phase World?
Franc laughing. Franc crying. Franc grieving. Franc glad. Franc mischievous as a child. Franc smiling with a mother's warmth.
The sorrowful smile I'd seen when I first met her, and the bright face she had shown me in all the time after, overlapped with that last sight — her hand reaching for me, telling me to run — and my vision went distant.
A moment later my sight cleared, and there was Giant Franc's face under the beating rain.
...
Taking the rain that struck my whole body, I stared blankly, for a long time, at the face of Giant Franc sleeping in peace.
The tears don't stop. They keep falling.