The Dragon God (1)
A night black as pitch came down. I sank into a thousand thoughts, never managed to sleep, and met the morning anyway — and the rain, too violent to deserve a tame word like falling, showed no sign of stopping.
By the time the world had gone gray, it had gone so far as to start throwing thunder and lightning.
...Rrrumble...
A flash, and the world lit for an instant. Then thunder rolled out like the growl of a beast.
The downpour had been lifting the water slowly, and by now it had climbed past the reclining giant Franc's thighs to lap, just barely, at the soft of her lower belly. Through the muddy water I could see her sex, wavering. She had been under so long that the skin looked to be blanching, starting to prune.
We couldn't stay like this. The rain was coming down so hard that in a few hours it would swallow her navel and keep rising, easily, all the way to her chest, and still have water to spare.
"I'd better look for somewhere else. The way the water's climbing, it'll be up to the peaks before long."
White light flickered across the world, and a faint roll of thunder followed from far off. Darky turned toward where the lightning had struck and worked his mouth in disgust.
"This weather's ridiculous, Boss. Rain came now and then where I used to live, but it never dumped like this. Not one time."
"Same back in reality. And they say this place floods like this every six months. I don't..."
I don't get it. Don't tell me this rain is the work of that full-moon-eyed azure dragon — the Lord of the Great Sea?
A story I'd heard from Hiarid on the Floating Sky Islands came back to me.
Among the things called the Four Divine Beasts, the Flauvis who worship the Master of the Sky had fought the lot who worship the Lord of the Great Sea — the Sabi tribe — blow for blow, and won. But their numbers had thinned so badly that they fled into the sky. That was what she'd said.
The Lord of the Great Sea would be an azure dragon, then, and between an azure dragon and Baekcheong there was the link of both being the same kind of serpent. And Baekcheong had been living around here.
Could this be the domain of one of the Four Divine Beasts — the Dragon King, the Lord of the Great Sea? So in that gap where I couldn't tell whether I'd fallen asleep or passed out, it showed up, ran its mouth at me, and vanished.
Don't tell me Baekcheong is the azure dragon's underling. Or its successor...
"Boss! The water! The water's coming up fast!"
"Ghk?!"
I'd let my mind wander, and before I knew it the water had climbed all the way up to me, sitting inside giant Franc's navel. Startled by the sudden surge, I shot to my feet, wrapped the deer hide around my waist, and snatched Darky up. North, south, east, west — water in every direction, and the rain coming down in sheets. I genuinely had no idea where to go.
Where do I even—
Krrrrumble.
"Urk?!"
"Oh no!?"
A sound like heaven and earth shaking rose from under my feet. An instant later I felt the ground beneath me slowly giving way. I startled, scrambled down, threw my arms around giant Franc's little finger, and cast Space Leaping up into the sky. The moment I saw what was unfolding below, a chill raced up my spine.
Whirlpools that had to be hundreds of meters across were forming here and there, and murky mud-water was spreading out around the mountain with no place you could point to as the source.
Krrggggg...
Another vibration of unknown origin rolled through, and a flicker of fear went through me — and then the mountain suddenly caved, and sank.
I checked with Spatial Perception to see what was happening. The torrent had been carving the mountain away from the mid-slope down. The balance had failed, the ground had eroded, and it was collapsing all at once. The sight of a mountain vanishing beneath a heaving surface was plenty enough to frighten. I swallowed hard, and Darky gave a little shiver and muttered.
"W-whoa. The island's disappearing, Boss."
"..."
It was a mountain, not an island, but I wasn't in any mood to correct him. In barely a few minutes, the place where a mountain close to four hundred meters high had stood was nothing but countless newborn whirlpools and a mass of muddy water. It had vanished from sight so fast it didn't feel real, so I checked with Spatial Perception — and that tall mountain was gone, roots and all.
If I'd been even a little later...
I wiped the cold sweat from my brow and cast Space Leaping in place, over and over, scanning what was around me.
Water. Water. Water. Nothing but water.
Rain still poured from the sky as if someone had punched a hole in it. Waves churned under my feet. Now and then thunder and lightning stitched the storm clouds. With nothing in all the world but water and pitch-black clouds, a bleakness came over me.
"At least my body's close to perfect. That's something."
No — maybe because I'd gotten a little scared, my Phase Power recovery was fluctuating, but it wasn't a real problem.
I turned the situation over in my head. Space Leaping's TP cost rose with the volume I carried, and taking giant Franc with me burned 31,220 a cast. That wasn't even maximum range. That was for a move of about three kilometers. Cover the full 6.75 kilometers in one leap and it wouldn't be thirty thousand. It would be close to a hundred thousand. Worse, I had to wait three or four seconds for TP to recover before each leap, and in that wait I fell, which meant climbing back the distance I'd dropped, so the waste of Phase Power turned savage by necessity. The path became a sawtooth, the distance shrank with it, and the most I could manage at a stretch was about 2.2 kilometers.
Efficient movement, then, was three kilometers.
Even so, more than thirty thousand Phase Power a cast looked crushing on the numbers alone — but my recovery had returned to normal. One percent a minute. 9,740 a second. Leap once every three seconds and each move only cost me about two thousand TP net, which meant 29,200 leaps. Twenty-four hours of travel. Leap once every four seconds and TP actually crept back up, and in the gaps I could even look for somewhere to rest.
Running the numbers like that settled me somehow, and my Phase Power recovery returned to its proper level.
Right.
"Let's find a place to rest."
"Yes, Boss. A tall, sturdy mountain would be best, if we can get one."
"Agreed."
Which meant the destination was that enormous mountain to the west, after all.
"Damn it."
Even the stream out of a showerhead wouldn't be this dense. I spat a curse at the godforsaken rain blotting out my sight.
"Boss..."
"I'm fine. Honestly, I'm really glad you're here, Darky."
Two hours of Space Leaping with giant Franc's enormous finger clutched in my arms. Raindrops the size of a baby's finger hammering my whole body were absurd enough, but two hours without a glimpse of land was more absurd still.
If I'd been moving alone through this black where day and night couldn't be told apart, rain in my face, my heart would have been hammering from the trauma. But I was trading idle talk with Darky and leaping with giant Franc in view, and that much I could bear.
"Where you lived was a lot like this area before the flood. That right?"
"Yep. Still, it wasn't the kind of place where lakes hundreds of meters across just sit clumped together. You wander around and the water comes up about to here?"
"From what you've said, you just drifted, no fixed home. Didn't you have a territory? Aberrants seem to pick a ground and live on it, and you were top-tier too, so you must've had one."
Darky, dangling from my neck, rubbed that pretty face against my throat as if he liked the warmth, and answered. Cute and dainty as Thumbelina to look at, and he talked like a man in his thirties. The gap was really...
"Nah. I never much cared for territory and all that, Boss. I just drifted wherever the mood took me. Thanks to that, I saw plenty of the types who'll turn touchy as a mother bear with cubs if you so much as step on their ground — but that imugi, Baekcheong, he was really something else."
"How so?"
I asked it while sweeping back the hair the rain kept slapping into a tangle.
"Usually, intruder or intruded-on, you come face to face and you probe each other while you stay on guard, Boss. But for whatever reason, that Baekcheong bastard just stared straight at Madam giant Franc and went right into a fight, didn't he? Get up to Transcendent-grade and one fight is guaranteed to cost you, and I truly never thought he'd mount her that brainless."
"Hey. 'Mount her'? Watch your mouth."
"Hup! S-sorry, Boss!"
I called him on the poor choice of words and looked around again.
The rain was coming down so hard it was disgusting. I couldn't see an inch ahead, but on Spatial Perception and memory I'd been moving west for an hour, and the mountain still hadn't entered my sight. It didn't make sense. From the cliff I'd used as my landmark the first time through to where I stood now was a thousand kilometers at the least, and then some. A thousand kilometers isn't a child's game. Move that far and the terrain ought to change — so why was the downpour still coming down, and a sea still spread under my feet?
And a mountain a thousand kilometers off shouldn't be visible no matter how tall it is. The earth isn't a flat plane.
What had that mountain looked like, across the three and a half days I'd spent covering those thousand kilometers?
...The same, the whole way. Hadn't it?
Huh?!
With my heart dropping, I called Darky and asked.
"Darky. Could you see the mountain from the cliff?"
"Which mountain, Boss?"
"What do you mean, which mountain. There was one insanely huge mountain in the direction we're going."
"...?"
Darky tilted his head, wearing a look that said he had no idea what I was talking about. Something really is wrong.
I'd figured that if I just kept west I'd reach the mountain, so I hadn't gone up above the storm clouds to check. I needed to look again from above them. I bent my course at a right angle, cast Space Leaping ten times, and climbed twenty kilometers straight up... and I was still beneath the clouds.
"Huh? What?"
Fifteen more leaps. Another thirty kilometers. And I still couldn't break through. The black clouds filling my eyes suddenly felt like some living thing, and a chill prickled over me. A wild fancy struck out of nowhere. My skin went to gooseflesh, and my heart pounded as if it meant to burst, strung tight between tension and fear.
"The storm clouds seem awfully high up, Boss. Do they usually sit this high?"
"No way. Ordinary clouds can't get above about thirteen kilometers, even in reality. Go any higher and the temperature and the air currents won't even let a cloud form..."
Darky's voice cut into my thoughts at just the right moment, and I sighed to myself. I raised a mana aura to shield my body and kept leaping upward, but even after I'd climbed to a hundred and fifty kilometers above the ground, I still couldn't punch through the storm clouds.
The funny part was that once I got this high, the air around me plunged, and what fell was no longer droplets but little lumps of ice. Calling them ice felt a bit generous. Halfway between ice and water, maybe. Touch my body and they melted from the heat and fell away as drops. But they kept coming, and they began to pile on my shoulders and my head.
I looked down at giant Franc and saw them — snow, if that was the word — gathering on her skin and starting to seed into crystals of ice.
Any higher and I'm done.
I swept a quick look around and dropped back to two kilometers above the ground. All around, though it was mostly west I was watching — and sure enough, whether you called them raindrops or snowdrops, whatever was pouring down blocked the view. I couldn't see a thing.
Whatever sorcery this was, it was enough to drive me out of my mind. I still had a course I'd been on, so I kept west, but unease was taking root in my chest.
"So you're saying you couldn't see anything like a mountain from the cliff."
"Nope. All I could see was a sea of trees running out to the end of the sky, Boss."
"...Then what the hell was the mountain I saw? And the distance we've covered by Space Leaping in just one hour has to be well over fifteen hundred kilometers, and for a flood this big to hit a place this wide, for rain to pour like this... it's wrong."
But Darky didn't seem to have anything either. He just wore a troubled look and clung to my neck.
I kept west, and I thought. A mountain Darky had never seen. A mountain Franc and I had. I didn't believe what the two of us had seen was any illusion. Franc had told me that when she became an Aberrant she'd gone all the way down to the mountain's foot, so the mountain existed. No question.
Then what did this mean?
I turned it over against everything I'd been through in the Phase World, and several hypotheses surfaced, but the ones I distrusted most were that bastard Baekcheong and the Dragon King.
The first to come up was that the Dragon King, the Lord of the Great Sea, was working some trick, and I was circling the same ground. The reason was what had happened when I met Langue Dran, the Supergiant Turtle. Before I met Langue Dran, a mist of water had hung on every side. And by the time I'd brushed past and the mist was gone, hours had flown.
Set that inexplicable thing beside this, and couldn't the Lord of the Great Sea raise phenomena just as impossible to understand? If this flood and this downpour were kin to Langue Dran's mist? They call him the Dragon King of the Vast Sea. Water, rain — he ought to be able to move those however he likes, shouldn't he?
But I couldn't confirm it. I wasn't even sure my meeting with the Dragon King of the Vast Sea had been dream or waking. By what means was I supposed to learn that this rain and this flood were his work?
The other hypothesis followed what that Dragon King had said to me. The Rogue Imugi — that bastard Baekcheong — wasn't dead. He was alive, nursing a grudge, calling the storm clouds down to dump wind and rain and raise a flood, pulling all this shit to kill me.
So that was what the Dragon King had meant. Guard yourself.
A colossal mountain that never appeared, no matter how far I went. Rain falling out of a sky without a top. A flood that would not end. And the Dragon King's words, on top of all of it...
"Son of a bitch."
The curse slipped out before I knew it.
Fine. If this doesn't work, I'll do exactly what I thought of yesterday!! Hundreds of subterranean caverns, thousands — hundreds of kilometers across, every one of them!! The water will all go pouring down there, and the land will show!! I'll make them a lake thousands of kilometers wide and hundreds deep!! Or I'll erase every drop of the water!!
I decided to hold off on a spree of large-scale destruction until the very last moment, and for now to move as far as I could.
Another two hours passed, and the enormous mountain I'd set as my goal still refused to come into view. Had I even moved? The scenery hadn't changed, and I was coming to doubt whether time was passing at all.
Twenty-one days since I'd entered the Phase World. No — I didn't know how long had passed after I collapsed on the summit, so it wasn't exact. Set aside the time I couldn't remember, and it was the twenty-first day. My arms and legs had charred pitch-black, and the Certifier had vanished with them, so I had no way to check the time. Worse — every photo I'd saved of my lovers, the embarrassing ones and the cute ones, every video, all of it was gone, and the loss of that stung like madness.
And the later I was, the more Hwayeon and Yeongeun's worry would stack itself into a mountain, and that gnawed at me too. Not that I could turn back like this, with giant Franc in tow. Standing in a place no different from the sea, taking this goddamn rain, I felt a fire climbing up out of my gut.
"...Bastard."
It felt like Baekcheong and the Dragon King were toying with me, and irritation and rage bubbled up from inside until the curses came on their own.
"Boss?"
I'd been moving in silence for two hours and then suddenly spat a curse, and Darky started watching my mood. Open my mouth without thinking and I was liable to snap at him on pure spinal reflex, so I swallowed a breath and spoke.
"The situation's just pissing me off, and I'm heated. I wasn't talking to you, Darky, so don't worry about it."
"Yes, Boss..."
"Haa."
I let out a stifled sigh, and I felt Darky — arms around my neck, hanging on my back — flinch.
Time passed again. Five hours since I'd started moving. I'd averaged fifteen hundred kilometers an hour, which put the total at seventy-five hundred kilometers — a distance that could punch clear through a continent, from Korea to the Mediterranean. But the downpour didn't let up, and the flood covering the land, far from dropping, kept rising.
"Heh. Heheh. Heheheheh."
"B-Boss?"
The irritation and the rage that felt ready to burst inside me grew lush, put out flowers, and set fruit, and what came out of me was a mad little laugh. I felt another minute of it would drop me with a rage-sickness, so I opened my mouth as if I were breathing fire.
"Hey. You know we've moved close to eight thousand kilometers in five hours? And you know what else? Twenty thousand kilometers is the distance from where I'm standing to the other side of the earth. In five hours we've gone a quarter of the way around the planet. We moved that far, and it's still raining here, and the land is still under a flood hundreds of meters deep — does that make any goddamn sense?!"
"B-Boss, please calm down!"
I wasn't even talking to Darky, but as I shouted the blood surged up and I grabbed for the back of my neck — and got Darky's little head instead. I let go of the startled head, ground my teeth, and roared.
"Fuck!! Something's wrong here!! Eight thousand kilometers, all of it flooded hundreds of meters deep — that's the whole earth underwater!! Fuck, is this a joke?!!"
I'm too pissed off and too irritated to take another second of this!!
"Aaaagh!! Goddamn it!!"
"B-Boooooss~!!!"
I ignored Darky's flailing attempts to stop me, clutched giant Franc's finger in one arm alone, and flung my free hand wide, hurling Mana Blasts in every direction.
"Fuck, blow it all apart!! Disappear!!! I'm the King of Destruction, wahahaha!!! Die! Die!! Diiie!!!!"
KA-BOOM. KRASH. KRRRGGGG...
Watching explosions burst on every side — hundreds of meters across at the small end, several kilometers at the large — I laughed like a man gone mad. I chained Space Leaping and shot to a hundred kilometers up in an instant, let go of giant Franc's finger, and threw Mana Blasts in every direction with both hands. The explosions doubled in a flash and turned heaven and earth over.
"Aaaaaagh~~!!!"
"Boss has lost it—!"
The Mana Blasts tore through the downpour and ripped the air to shreds, explosion after explosion, violently churning the cloud-hung sky and the sea of rain. The atmosphere itself began to heave, as if my overflowing temper were about to lay it up with a fever.
Rrrumble. KRAK!! KRA-KOOM!!!! Rrrrrumble...
As if the explosions had displeased it, thunder and lightning drew in close, the wind and rain began to lash harder still, and there were signs of the whole thing evolving into a storm. The waves grew rougher and higher, and whirlpools began to form, and the reason that had half run away from home came back.
While I'd been spraying mana rounds without a thought, giant Franc had sunk far enough to drop into the sea of rain, so I leapt to her chest, caught a nipple in my hand, and cast Space Leaping high into the sky again.
The sea was growing wilder. The pouring rain, caught in the whipping wind, began to shift from vertical to diagonal. Wind and rain hammered my whole body, and the wind screamed in my ears. I narrowed my eyes toward the direction it was coming from, and there a colossal hurricane was baring its teeth, taking shape.
"Heheheh. Now that's a storm with some style."
The only hurricanes I'd ever seen were on some hurricane-chaser program National Geographic had aired, but this — hauling the sea of rain up in a spiral, a pillar joining storm cloud to sea — was a sight thrilling enough to raise gooseflesh over every inch of me. It had to be tens of kilometers off at the least, and still that enormous hurricane of rain and wind filled both my eyes, and now it was starting to spit lightning besides. A sight more than enough to crack an unhinged grin across my face.
I began preparing Mana Blasts in both hands. A storm? Fuck that. Choke on it.
"Heheh. The legendary weapons never had anything to do with me, but I always did want Thunderstorm, just once."
"Boooooss... Please, come back to your senses."
I ignored Darky, whose eyes were brimming as if the tears were about to fall, and as I dropped toward the sea of rain together with giant Franc I condensed TP into both hands with everything I had. At the same time I drew in the Phase Power drifting through the air, sheathing the surface, making the Mana Blasts bigger. Bigger still.
"More! A little more!! I need an even bigger, even more beautiful Mana Blast!!! Ehehehehehk!!"
I laughed and laughed, taking the whipping wind and rain on my whole body while I compressed TP in both hands — when suddenly, from overhead, a voice descended, so thick with sagely power it seemed to prickle every last one of my brain cells.
Raindrops and wind were beating at my ears, and still the voice drove clear into my head. I lifted my face, expression blank.
"Huh?"
"Hoh?!"
Beyond the pitch-black storm clouds, a single full moon — the one I had seen in the dream — glimmered, faint.