Episode 357: Reunion with the Imugi (4)
The rain was coming down in torrents, and it struck me that if I left giant Franc like this, the downpour might leach the warmth from her body and leave her with a cold.
…Would a Transcendental aberrant even catch a cold just because her physical balance had gone to pieces? I doubted it. Still. You never know.
I needed to stop the rain streaming down Franc's naked body. Focusing, I raised a Space Wall over giant Franc in the shape of an enormous umbrella. The rain struck a blue Space Wall and went sheeting down along it—
Huh?
"What the hell?"
The moment I saw that blue wall, a dumbfounded sound fell out of my mouth. A blue Space Wall? Where had the amber gone?
And why was the rain running along the Space Wall at all?
Baffled, I immediately formed a small Space Wall over my palm, and the same translucent wall appeared in that same color.
Did this thing just become the mk2?
Why now?
An evolution out of nowhere was a little absurd, but a change was hardly a bad thing.
I checked the TP cost of the Blue Space Wall I'd just used. It burned through vastly more Phase Power than the amber one ever had.
I crept a finger toward the blue wall and gave it a light tap. Solid. A hard resistance met my fingertip. Emboldened, I grabbed hold of it—and it didn't so much as budge, as if it had been nailed into empty air.
So nothing had really changed? No. The rain wasn't being erased anymore. It was running along the surface. That had to mean the anchoring force, or the binding force, had grown stronger.
Was that even useful?
More to the point, why had it changed all of a sudden?
Thinking it over, one moment stood out. The instant I'd lost my head watching giant Franc get hurt, condensed ten million TP into the Heaven-Gathering Cloud Sword, and let it fly.
When I fired that ten-million sword-energy bolt, something had drained straight out of my heart, and a colorless, transparent blade of sword energy had gone streaking off. Maybe some part of my unconscious had changed then.
Or maybe nearly dying to the Rogue Imugi's attack had changed something. There was precedent for that, after all.
…I didn't know. I could experiment and find out, but looking at giant Franc lying there limp, I had no will for it.
I sat down in a daze, watching the rain run off the blue Space Wall, then turned my attention to little Darky.
Darky, who had thrown his body in front of me, had been reduced to something like a wiggly worm candy. His Phase Power had dropped all the way to 100, and he squirmed on my palm exactly like those king-size gummy worms they sell as junk food at the stationery shops by the school gates.
The way he bent and twisted looked like the mindless, instinctive wriggling of some invertebrate. Nothing about him retained the dignity of the Calamity-rank aberrant he had been.
Pity welled up at the thought that he'd ended up like this trying to protect me. I lifted my hand and looked closer. His color had faded from black to something near gray, and he'd grown far more opaque than before—opaque enough that I could faintly see my palm through him.
If I poured TP into him and restored his Phase Power, would he go back to normal?
I'd been out for more than a hundred minutes, it seemed, because my own Phase Power was almost fully recovered. I decided to use the chance to put Darky back the way he was.
Afraid that dumping it all in at once might break something, I fed him TP carefully, bit by bit. Blue light flowed into that charcoal-gray, translucent, jelly-like body.
The moment TP entered him, Darky started rolling this way and that, thrashing as violently as an earthworm flung onto hot asphalt.
"Why can't you just hold still, you little brat."
I held the flailing, flopping Darky carefully so he wouldn't slip off my palm and kept pouring TP in. As his Phase Power climbed, that worm-jelly body swelled and spread, beginning to take on the shape of a slime.
Seeing that, I figured that if I just kept feeding him he'd return to normal, and a sigh of relief escaped me.
Hmm… But even as his Phase Power neared a million, no Blue Stone or Phase Stone formed inside his liquid body. His rank, it seemed, was still that of a Calamity-rank aberrant.
Well. A pro athlete doesn't lose every trophy and medal they've ever won just because they take a bad injury.
Darky's volume grew little by little with the TP, and the moment his body filled both my hands, two arms and two legs shot out of that squirming liquid mass.
I held my breath and watched those tiny hands flail until they seized my finger. The rest of him rippled, then began taking human shape.
"Darky!"
"A—uughhh…"
He wasn't the Thumbelina he'd been before. He couldn't hold a proper shape at all, just sprawled soft and slack across my hand, and I realized he still didn't have enough Phase Power to lock his body into form.
So I poured TP in a little faster. His charcoal-gray body drank in the color of my TP and shifted to a clear blue-gray, and he started jerking his shoulders and limbs like someone with a nervous tic. Every time he did, some part of the liquid stiffened, then loosened again.
The more I fed him without pause, the closer he drew to his old Phase Power of 14.22 million, and the more completely his eyes, nose, mouth, and body took shape.
When I restored him to 14.22 million, he fully regained his Thumbelina form.
I pushed him further, up to fifteen million, then stopped the flow. He was still ticking and giving little squirms, but the Thumbelina shape held.
I sighed, thinking that was something, at least—and then, all at once, his body collapsed with a wet splat and spread out like a jellyfish hauled out of the water.
Startled, I triggered Healing Touch in my hand and stroked him. Darky began to squirm again. Slowly his body compressed, returning to a cute Thumbelina shape even smaller than before—barely fifteen centimeters tall.
Why had he shrunk so much? His color had changed again, too, and grown deeper… I looked over Darky where he knelt with his knees drawn together, and the way he just sat there in silence made me a little worried.
"Darky. You okay?"
"Uweh. Thought I was a goner, Boss."
Darky scratched his head with an embarrassed look, tongue poking out, then let out a little hup, stood, and leapt up to hang from my neck.
The same old Darky. Relief washed over me.
Whether he knew I'd been worried or not, he climbed right up onto my shoulder with that shrunken body and said, as casual as anything:
"It was only a moment, but I thought I was gonna have to leave you, Boss. Scared me bad."
"I thought you were dying, too. Scared me just as bad."
"Hehe."
He wasn't just hanging off my shoulder like usual. He'd perched there outright, giggling. I picked him up and set him down, hesitated, then pushed through the awkwardness.
"…Thanks for protecting me."
"Uhihi. No way I'm watchin' Boss die before me!"
"Yeah. Thank you."
I couldn't help feeling sorry that the mental control was still on him.
I was the one who had slapped a loyalty compulsion on a creature intelligent enough to share emotions, just because I thought he'd be useful. I had no right to say it. Even so, my conscience hurt.
It was sad that I couldn't accept any of this in my heart, because the whole thing felt forced.
I cupped the giggling Darky's backside and gently stroked his head. He twisted this way and that, beside himself with joy, and my conscience stung even harder.
"How's your body? Your Phase Power dropped all the way to 100. Anything wrong? Memory, condition, anything off?"
"Mmm? Bond's a little loose, like when I stuff myself, but I'll be fine in a jiffy! Actually, when you poured TP into me, I thought I was gonna ascend on the spot!"
Fussing, overflowing with happiness, Darky hugged my finger and nuzzled it, then spoke as if he'd only just remembered.
"But everything from just a little while ago is fuzzy, so I dunno. I could only kinda tell I was right next to you, Boss."
"You still got smaller, though. Almost down by half, and your color changed."
"That's 'cause the bond loosened up. Body control's something I could always do!"
He glanced down at himself, then shrugged like a person.
"Color changing's actually pretty nice, I think. It's the same as your light, Boss!"
"…Right. Long as you're really fine, that's what matters."
At least Darky had come back. That was a real relief. I hung a smile on my mouth and patted his back, and he grinned too. Then he turned toward giant Franc.
"Is Madam Franc okay? All her hair's gone."
I didn't answer.
"Ah… sorry, Boss."
For a slime, he read a room faster than most people. He'd grasped the situation from my face in an instant. I patted Darky as his eyes drooped, and said:
"It's all right. Franc was burned so black you couldn't even recognize her. She was dying. But I restored her with Healing Wave, so she'll open her eyes soon."
Whether the one who opened them would be the Franc I knew was another question entirely…
I sighed inwardly, set Darky on my shoulder, and stood. I had no idea when giant Franc would wake, so first I needed a look at our surroundings.
I slid down giant Franc's chest, still marked with the tracks of runoff, and Darky quickly threw his arms around my neck. Of all things, he was in a female form as well, and the small, soft swells pressing into the nape of my neck were a bit much—but I didn't let it show.
Anyway, I walked down between giant Franc's breasts toward her stomach, and found water sloshing in the deep hollow of her navel.
The downpour must have run down her body and pooled there. There was enough to fill a large one-person tub. I leaned over the surface, and my reflection came back faint and ruined, every strand of hair shriveled into a mess.
"Yeek. I've gotten even uglier."
Even soaked, it was curly enough that once it dried I'd be sporting an afro. I heaved a sigh and stood, and a wind thick with damp swept over me along with the noisy patter of rain striking the water.
The lightning had burned every last one of my belongings, so I was stark naked, and the wind slipping between my thighs and grazing my dick felt strange.
I forced my attention elsewhere and looked at the rain spreading into a curtain of water along the blue Space Wall.
When was this rain going to stop?
Darky had been tilting his head and sneaking glances at Franc for a while now, but I didn't particularly feel like asking why.
I examined the area closely with Spatial Perception. The mountain we were on was the highest peak in a typical pyramid-shaped range—clusters of small mountains and a few large ones, the kind you see all over Korea.
And halfway up the submerged slope, animals that hadn't escaped the sudden flood hung dead from the branches.
I was already getting a little hungry. I ought to haul some of that up and roast it.
The current was still fast, and eddies were forming between the trees underwater. Swimming was out of the question. I'd have to use Space Leaping.
I set Darky, still clinging to my neck, down beside giant Franc's navel. He looked up at me with startled eyes.
"Boss?"
"I'm going to get food. Wait here a minute."
"If it's food, I'm comin' too!"
He rose onto his toes and stretched both hands up, asking to be held. I looked down and shook my head.
"You said your bond was loose. Until you're better, no tagging along on Space Leaps."
"Aww…"
I left the deflated Darky crouched there and leapt to a branch where a rabbit even bigger than a Flemish Giant hung caught. The moment I arrived, a terrifying current shoved me.
I hastily grabbed a nearby branch and held on, snapped the one the rabbit was snagged on, then seized a hind leg as the carcass tried to drift away.
It was big, but one of these… wouldn't be enough, would it?
I also grabbed a scaled deer whose horns, branching as handsomely as lightning, were caught between the limbs, its body wavering in the current. When I returned beside giant Franc's navel, Darky came running at once and hugged my leg.
I set him on my shoulder, slid down giant Franc's flank, and started preparing to butcher the rabbit and the scaled deer.
"To drain the blood… let's see."
Looking around giant Franc, I spotted plenty of fairly thick woody vines. I tore some free, bound the deer's hind legs, and hung it upside down from a branch that hadn't broken. Then I fired a Mana Laser at a very low output and cut its throat. Hot blood gushed out in a rush of steam. Hadn't been dead long, then.
"Whoa? Whatcha doin'?"
"Draining the blood. They say if you slit the throat and hang it upside down, all the blood inside just runs right out."
I didn't know why. I'd only seen in a comic that you were supposed to drain all the blood from a caught animal, and I was copying that.
I cut the vein running through the deer's ankle as well, and it felt as if the blood drained just a little faster.
Darky, as if he couldn't bear to waste what was falling, shifted into slime form and started sucking the scaled deer's blood in through his whole body.
Appetite meant he was healthy. I could take it that way, couldn't I?
Right. I should skin the deer and wrap the hide around my lower half. It would be stiff with all those scales, but better than wandering around naked. Every time the wind knifed between my legs while I walked around bare, it felt like some piece of my humanity was getting shaved away.
I examined the scaled deer carefully for a moment, then opened a Space Wall to cut off the front legs, which were nothing but bone.
"…Huh?"
It wasn't the blue Space Wall. The amber one had appeared. I didn't know what that meant, but the job came first.
I tossed the cleanly severed front legs to Darky. He latched onto them at once and started breaking both down, eating as he went.
I watched for a moment, then kicked Physical Reinforcement into gear and began carefully tearing the hide free by force, taking care not to ruin it.
And twenty minutes later.
Having worked at it hard, firing short bursts of Mana Laser along the way, I stared blankly at the result: a scaled hide smeared with fat, flesh, blood, and everything else. A complete mess.
If I'd slipped a Space Wall between hide and meat, I wouldn't have suffered, and the result would have been clean…
Too late for that. Blaming my own stupid head, I spread out the hide—big enough to cover my whole body and then some. A fishy blood-smell and the scent of raw meat hit my nose, but more than that…
"…Ah. How am I supposed to tan this?"
The method I'd used the first time around—singeing a wolf pup over a fire to tan the hide—would mean roasting this scaled deer skin all day. And right now anything that could serve as firewood was soaked, while outside the Space Wall umbrella the rain was still coming down hard. The humidity was brutal.
Impossible to start a fire, in other words. On top of that, back then I'd had an analysis ability to make it easy. Try it now and I'd just ruin the hide.
"Wearing it like this is a little nasty, though."
I was staring at the hide, yellow fat and scraps of meat caked all over it, wondering whether I ought to just carefully erase them with a Space Wall, when Darky—having finished both front legs and returned to Thumbelina form—looked up at me from my feet.
"Boss. How do you tan a hide?"
"Mm. You strip all the hair, fat, protein, and salt out of the hide."
"Then leave it to me!"
"Huh?"
Before I could stop him, Darky hopped onto the hide, reverted to slime form, and clung to the deer skin. He undulated across it, breaking down the fat, the flesh, and everything else stuck to the inner side.
"Hey. Your body okay?"
I asked out of worry, and Darky extended a single tentacle and drew a circle, as if to say no problem. I was still a little concerned and wondering whether to stop him when he spread his blue-gray body, swallowed the entire deer hide, and tapped the back of my hand with one tentacle, telling me to let go.
So I spread it flat and set it on the ground. Darky moved this way and that, breaking down only the hair, the yellowish fat, and the scraps of meat stuck to the surface.
"Whoa. That's impressive."
In less than a minute the fat, flesh, and hair were gone, leaving only a dark crimson hide. I couldn't help marveling.
If I put Darky's decomposition to good use, wouldn't it be useful across society? Breaking down waste, for instance.
When he finished and returned to Thumbelina form, he stood on the hide with his hands on his hips and shrugged as if to say, well? I set him on my shoulder and picked the hide up to feel it.
He'd even sucked out every last bit of moisture. The raw-hide smell was gone, it was soft as top-grade leather, and not a trace of grease remained. It looked like a hide a master craftsman had poured his heart into tanning.
Darky stood on my shoulder, wearing an ahem of a face.
"How's that?"
"Excellent. The feel of it, and none of that hide smell. Like top-grade leather."
"Uhihi."
What was I going to do with it? I thought for a moment, then folded the hide into loose waves, drew the Mana Laser, and punched holes where the layers overlapped.
The hide was big enough that I could have made a vest and pants out of it as it was, but I didn't know how to make clothes anyway.
I cut a strip from the bottom edge for a leather cord, threaded it through the holes, wrapped the hide around my waist, and tied it. Calling it a skirt was generous—it was crude—but at least I had a scrap of hide that covered my lower half.
"At least I can keep my pride as a civilized man."
I stroked Darky's head and praised him for a job well done, then gathered rain-soaked wood and asked if he could pull the moisture out of it.
"You bet I can!"
The wood Darky dried was, literally, bone-dry firewood. Which meant I could roast meat.
Watching the pile grow, I cut the big rabbit's throat, split its belly, skinned it, and scraped out the organs. I was about to erase them with a Space Wall—then gave them to Darky as a meal instead.
I went to the water to wash the blood soaked into the rabbit meat, but it was all muddy, full of leaves and bits of grass. Rinsing blood off in that didn't seem like a good idea.
Then the rain caught my eye, running along the Space Wall and forming a curtain of water.
I set a Space Wall beneath it… and this time it was the blue one. I climbed onto that wall and washed the blood from the rabbit meat in the rain running down it.
When I came back with the meat rinsed clean, Darky had dried not only the firewood I'd prepared but the surrounding wood and the wet ground as well, and was waiting.
"Good work."
His face was begging for praise. I smiled and stroked his head, and he grinned and reached out to be held. I gathered him into my arms, sat down, activated Physical Reinforcement, and rubbed wood against wood with overwhelming force. Fire sprang up in an instant.
I fed the fire and set the rabbit meat to roasting, then asked Darky to remove all the moisture clinging to giant Franc's body.
Before, I wouldn't have given an order like that. For some reason it came out naturally, and that felt awkward. Proof, maybe, that I'd come to trust him enough to ask it.
While Darky turned back into a slime and swept over Franc's body, breaking down the rainwater, I checked whether the blood had fully drained from the hanging deer, washed off what remained in the running rain, hung it up again, and returned to the fire.
The meat was too big to roast all at once, so I split it in two. By the time I was cooking it, Darky had finished what I'd asked and come back, and the two of us shared the rabbit and filled our stomachs.
The rabbit—big as a large dog—vanished in a flash. I was still hungry, so I roasted the scaled deer as well and ate all of that, and only then did the hunger fade.
"Those energy bars Yeongeun prepared really were something. Even one piece of those killed an empty stomach."
"Taste was still kinda meh, though…"
"Yeah… that it was."
Two hours passed while I filled my stomach and dealt with the meat, but giant Franc showed no sign of waking.
"Why isn't she waking up."
"How 'bout you smack-smack her awake?"
"Should I…"
I lay down inside giant Franc's pretty, straight navel and pulled the deer hide over me. No wind reached me, and thanks to her body heat it was warm and snug… A comfort deeper than any of those addictive massage chairs.
The sun must have been setting. The surroundings, already dim under storm clouds dumping rain, were growing darker still. Once the sun was fully down, a pitch-black darkness without a single point of light would roll in.
Should I do as Darky said and slap her cheeks until she woke?
"…Let's just wait a little longer."
Because I was lying with my head toward giant Franc's lower belly, I only had to lift my gaze a little to see Franc's sleeping face between those enormous twin peaks.
"Um, Boss."
"Yeah?"
Darky, stuck to the side of my face, spoke carefully, poking the spot over my cheekbone.
"So Giant Madam Franc was Spirit Madam Franc's body, wasn't she?"
What was he getting at? I told him yes, and Darky tilted his head as if he didn't understand.
"Then soul and flesh are joined, yeah? When we first met, the flesh was kinda rotten, but it got all better when she merged with Spirit Madam Franc, so hasn't she gone back to how she was?"
I had no answer for that.
"See, in soul-body dualism, the soul is held to be more sacred and higher than the flesh. Madam Franc existed as a spirit, and she merged with Giant Madam Franc, who existed as flesh, so hasn't Giant Madam Franc become the complete Madam Franc?"
No…
I was shocked. Darky knew reasoning on this level? Who had taught him? Don't tell me the little guy was smarter than me.
Hearing that short but powerfully persuasive argument, I started to think that maybe he was right.
Truth be told, I'd been quietly hoping that the gray-white energy in giant Franc's heart had vanished because Franc's mind had risen to the surface.
A guess that the shock of the lightning had unified soul and flesh.
On the other hand—I didn't even want to imagine it—there was also the thought that the Franc who had lived beside me might have been scoured away by Baekcheong's terrible lightning. That was why I was afraid to see her once she came to.
If it really was as Darky said, and soul and flesh had merged under soul-body dualism and she was only passing through an adjustment period, how good that would be. But how had a corpse of a body come back to life in the first place…
…Ah. Could it be that the Soul Stone, charged with over ten million TP, and the TP filling Franc's half-human, half-spirit body had collided with the dead flesh—and that dead body, once a Calamity-rank aberrant, had evolved into a Transcendental aberrant and come back to life?
Somehow, I had a feeling it would be all right to believe that.
I shot to my feet. The hollow of the navel sloshed, and Darky, seated at its rim, went tumbling in with a roll.
"…No. That's right. Yeah."
The sensation of cold, moisture-laden wind wrapping around me brought me back. I wrapped the deer hide around myself and sat down again.
"Huh? What's right?"
Darky shook his head and tried to crawl in between my thighs. I caught him by the waist and lifted him clear. I was naked under there. Where did he think he was going?
"Darky, I want to believe you're right. I want to believe giant Franc hasn't come to not because of the shock of nearly dying, but because Franc's mind and body are merging, and she's going through an adjustment period."
"Oh! Then—!"
"So we wait. If she's adjusting, better to wait until she wakes on her own than force her up."
"Yessir!!"
Desperately hoping this guess, this feeling, would prove true, I gazed for a long time at giant Franc's face, her eyes closed.