The Search (3)
After testing for a while, I settled on a conclusion. Attack power aside, Franc's defense sat at roughly the same level as that bastard Baekcheong's. Later she asked me to try a Mana Cannon mk2 as well, but when I got genuinely angry and cocked the ends of my brows, she flinched and quietly turned her head away.
After that I compared the amber Space Wall with the blue, and the blue Space Wall was too ambiguous to slap an mk2 on. Deeply, stubbornly ambiguous.
"The blue Space Wall has the same effect as an ordinary wall."
"Right? It doesn't stack the way the amber one does, and it has no disintegration or attack ability either. Is the only upside that you can change its shape after you've made it?"
I formed blue Space Walls here and there and tried reshaping them, but I couldn't alter them with any real delicacy, and I found myself wondering where, exactly, the ability to mold one into something like the shape I wanted was supposed to pay off. If I could move them once they existed, they'd have made a fine means of mass transport—but the central axis meant they couldn't be moved. You could stand on a blue Space Wall. You could reshape it, to a degree, into a form you wanted. But it could not move, and it had no offensive power.
"Whoa~ Vague as hell! Unbelievably vague!!"
"It is remarkably solid, though. Might it not serve for restraint?"
Franc brought a bare hand down on a blue Space Wall I'd flattened into a plate, felt it over, tested her strength against it, and spoke with open admiration.
"Restraint?"
It sounded plausible enough, so I shaped one around her wrist like a shackle.
"Ah? Seoha—"
I'd formed the blue Space Wall overlapped onto her wrist. She startled, then began to put strength into her arm.
"...Nnngh!!"
"Ooh?"
Raw strength couldn't break the restraint. Only when she activated her Phase Power in earnest, brought her Phase Power control to bear, and strained until her face flushed red did the Space Wall finally crack with a sharp, splintering sound. This wasn't something I could write off as just a wall.
"The durability and hardness are insane."
If it took activating Phase Power and throwing everything she had at it, then its binding force had to be exceptional as well. Once Franc started straining, it cracked and began to crumble quickly—but that one was thin. Make it two or three times thicker, lay a Space Wall across every joint so she couldn't concentrate her force, and couldn't I restrain even Franc?
I sank into the thought for a moment, then found my eyes stolen, unbidden, by the mesmerizing beauty of a Transcendent-grade's Phase Power in motion. Only when the Space Wall cuffing her wrist crumbled and vanished like smoke did I drag my gaze back. As it shattered and her body, unable to bear the force, lurched and started to topple, I slammed separate blue Space Walls around both wrists. Grinning, I layered them in quick succession over her waist, pelvis, thighs, knees, and shins in the shape of the irons old prisoners used to wear, and Franc was left frozen mid-fall—bound in midair, unable to so much as twitch.
"Aah?!"
She tried again to break the walls by force, but this time, just as I'd expected, I'd given her no foundation on which to concentrate that force. Even Transcendent-grade Franc could do nothing.
"S-Seoha. Please release me."
...If I used this, couldn't I pull off restraint play on Hwayeon and Yeongeun too? They were Physical Reinforcement types, after all.
My chest fluttered at the wicked fantasy. I was grinning when, between the bound Franc's legs, a lewd bare mound—not a single hair—caught my eye.
"Heh heh."
"Eep?!"
Half in jest and half in earnest, I built a staircase of Space Wall and climbed it one step at a time. Before long Franc's enormous vulva filled my vision, and I had to wonder if I really did have a giant fetish. The closer I drew, the thicker that fresh apple scent grew. I couldn't understand how a bare hill without a single strand of hair, a plump mound with its lips pressed shut, could excite me this much. If I kept my mouth shut any longer I was genuinely going to do it, so I forced open lips that didn't want to move.
"I wonder what cave exploration would feel like...?"
Curiosity had filled Franc's eyes at what "cave exploration" might mean—until she realized where I was headed. She went pale, wriggling the fingers and toes she could still move and shaking her head from side to side.
"...Eek?!! Ah, no! You absolutely mustn't!!"
"Aww~ Really no? I really want to see the inside just once."
"Uu~! Absolutely not! Why would you try to do such a thing~!! I absolutely, absolutely, absolutely do not want that~!!"
Her body was already enlarged, so her voice was huge, and when she shouted on top of that my ears rang. Tease her any further and I'd have the aftermath to fear, so this was enough. This wasn't the kind of no that became a yes if you wheedled. It was a no that meant she truly hated the idea.
I withdrew the Space Walls. As the restraints came undone Franc collapsed backward, hastily clamping her thighs together and covering the sacred valley with both hands, glaring at me with wary eyes.
...It was the look one gives a genuine pervert, and somehow that excited me too.
While the squealing went on, time slipped neatly by. Outside the Space Wall hut it had grown darker still, yet the rain hadn't weakened at all and was still coming down in a terrifying volume. I watched the downpour beyond the translucent blue wall for a moment, checked my diminished Phase Power, and clicked my tongue.
"The blue Space Wall burns an absurd amount of TP."
"How much, exactly?"
"Just messing around a minute ago, I burned eight million TP. Feels like it costs a thousand times what an amber Space Wall does."
"...That is extraordinary. The amber one used one hundred TP per cubic meter, did it not?"
One cubic meter—a cube a meter on each side, made of blue Space Wall—would take a hundred thousand TP. A bigger cost than I'd expected. Better to save it for restraining Aberrants than to waste it on offense, and since I could reshape it to a reasonable degree, it fit the job perfectly.
By the time Franc and I had more or less finished taking stock of our abilities, a pitch-black darkness without a single point of light was rushing in. I should have cleared the storm clouds before nightfall. We'd played too long.
"Should've cleared the storm clouds before we started playing... That was a mistake."
Even as I spoke it darkened fast, and before long I could see nothing at all—eyes open, and still as good as shut. Within range of my Spatial Perception, the only living things I could sense were myself, Franc, and Darky. Franc seemed to be in the same state. Eyes closed, she didn't turn her head this way, and quietly opened her mouth.
"Would it not be better to rest tonight and begin tomorrow? This place disorders the sense of Spatial Perception, and should we be separated, I fear it would be dangerous."
"Hmm. Dangerous if we get split up, so let's not move anywhere else. We'll clear the storm clouds right above us first. All we have to do is take down the Space Wall we put up as a roof."
"Ah. That should do."
The moment I removed the blue Space Wall covering the roof, the downpour slammed straight in and water began rising fast inside the hut. In an instant it reached my thighs. Darky, who'd fled far off, came paddling over in a panic and clung to my leg. I scooped the slime up onto my shoulder, made a drain so the rising water could escape, then condensed fifty thousand TP into a Mana Cannon mk1.
"...How high do I need to fire this?"
"......"
Franc looked flustered, the face of someone who hadn't thought of that either, and seeing it left me just as stuck.
In this region, where the sense of distance was strangely warped, distance itself couldn't be trusted. When I'd erased the hurricane earlier, the terrifying wind had made it visible, so I'd just hurled shots that way—but now, with rain pouring down like someone upending buckets and nothing to see at all, detonating a blast that would clear only the clouds with any precision was impossible.
A Mana Bullet or Mana Cannon detonated by one of two triggers. The first was to fix the blast point by sight and fire. In that case, no matter what got in the way, it chewed straight through, passed on, and exploded in the rough vicinity of the arrival point. Apply Spatial Perception and it never missed inside that range. Step outside it and accuracy dropped quite a bit, but the blast radius could swallow the miss, and you could still detonate beyond Spatial Perception range. That had made it effective, so I'd mostly used this method.
The other was to fire it so it detonated on contact. Literally—it exploded when it touched something possessing a certain amount of "mass" or more.
The first method was useless here. I couldn't see what was right in front of my nose, let alone the clouds. Fire it the second way and it'd meet water an arm's length off and go bang. Raise the mass threshold—the specific gravity—for detonation, and it would punch through the rain and climb. The problem was it would punch through the clouds as well.
I crossed my arms in the rain and turned it over, but there was only one method. Climb by stacking Space Walls, the same way I'd closed in on the hurricane. If whatever this was wrecked one's sense of distance, then building walls slowly and climbing them ought to carry me above the rain clouds eventually. Then I'd just evaporate the lot.
Just then Franc, who'd been deep in thought, opened her eyes and spoke.
"Then let us try it this way."
"Oh? You thought of something?"
"When confusion strikes one's sense of distance and of space, one uses a method that sets that confusion aside. My height is about eighty meters, so if we climb by laying Space Wall footholds at intervals of my height, I believe we will at least avoid becoming confused about the distance."
Ha... How were Franc and I this perfectly of one mind?
"I knew it. Franc and I are definitely a match made in heaven."
"If we do that, at the very least— wha—?!"
"I was thinking of climbing by laying Space Walls step by step, too."
I grinned at her, arrived at the same idea I had. She opened her eyes round, worked her lips, then nodded, and the faint blush and smile that rose on her face were terribly pretty. She gave a small cough, cleared her throat, and opened her mouth again.
"So if I accompany you and we use my height as a measure, we should be able to climb by making steps of at least eighty meters each. Climb like that and we ought to set the rain clouds beneath our feet, and if we then erase the distant clouds bit by bit with Mana Bullets, I believe the situation will change."
"Got it. Then let's go together."
I climbed up onto Franc's shoulder... only the soft, smooth skin made it hard to stand straight. Once she started moving in earnest, I was going to roll right off. Was this why Darky was hanging off my neck—because keeping balance was this hard? Seeing I couldn't find my footing, Franc held out her hand. With no other choice I sat on her palm and set about laying the blue Space Walls for her to step on.
Giant Franc, eighty meters tall, had to weigh—at a rough guess—well past several dozen tons. I needed to test how much a blue Space Wall could bear. I reduced the thickness bit by bit from ten centimeters, and even at one centimeter it held her weight. It stayed intact when she stamped roughly. Genuinely tough. A disc about one centimeter thick and five meters across ought to do.
I erased the hut of Space Wall, and together with Franc I walked upward through the torrential rain toward the night sky. Raise a wall eighty meters up and she lightly kicked off and leapt; then I raised another, and she leapt again. All the while I sat on her palm, and she cupped both hands into a circle around me to keep the rain off. Feeling, in a small thing like that, that Franc was thinking of me—how could I not love her for it.
And when I had laid the Space Wall for the hundred and twenty-seventh time, we finally broke through the goddamn rain and could see a bright half-moon floating in the middle of the pitch-black night sky.
"Ah!"
"Hm."
And, beneath that half-moon, a colossal mountain rising sheer.
Franc and I stood for a while in the moonlight, silently regarding a mountain that truly looked as if it might pierce the sky. It certainly looked closer than the one I'd seen from the cliff, but it rose alone in the middle of a sea of storm clouds, with no landmark to take as a reference. My sense of distance was shot.
"Staring at it isn't going to make anything happen, so let's clear the storm clouds first."
"Ah, yes."
I lowered my gaze. The rain clouds lit by moonlight were a strange mix of white and black, like correction fluid spattered across black paper. I took hold of Franc and, as a test, Space Leaped to five kilometers up—and only then did I feel Spatial Perception's sense of distance return to normal. The actual distance to the storm clouds registered, precisely, as five kilometers.
I jumped down from her palm, spread a wide floor of blue Space Wall so she could sit comfortably and watch, then looked at her.
"Since our sense of distance is back to normal, wouldn't it be better to Space Leap toward that mountain? Get clear of the rain clouds' influence like this, and that might be the end of it."
"That is true, but... it only just occurred to me as well. If something is causing this phenomenon, is there not a strong chance Baekcheong is somewhere nearby?"
Seated in a chair and looking up at me, Franc carefully broached it, then gazed down past the translucent blue Space Wall at her feet and spoke again.
"I do not know whether this is some faculty for sensing an Aberrant's Phase Power, nor how far it reaches, but I can feel a faint Aberrant presence some distance off in that direction."
"You think that's Baekcheong?"
"That, I do not know. But I am certain I feel Phase Power. Beneath the clouds the sensation was too faint for me to be sure it was real, but now that we have risen above them, I feel it clearly."
"Hm. Darky, what about you?"
"Huh. No clue at all, boss."
I mulled over what she'd said, but quickly decided she was right. Better to deal with it so no trouble was left behind, then leave this place.
"All right. Let's get rid of the rain clouds and head for that Phase Power you sensed."
"Yes!"
Once that was settled, I grew curious how widely the rain clouds had spread. Franc and I Space Leaped up to seventy kilometers above the ground, and the whole region they covered came into view at a glance.
But this...
"...This is enough to blanket the whole country?"
"Wide, if one calls it wide—but set against the number and distance of your Space Leaps, Seoha, it is narrow beyond any comparison."
By my reckoning, the distance I'd traveled by Space Leap so far was eight thousand kilometers. The longest straight line across Korea, from Goseong County in Gangwon to Haenam County in South Jeolla, was only about five hundred. Put those side by side and this didn't make any sense. Inside that place, the sense of distance was definitely compressed to a hundredth. I didn't know why. I shook my head and came back down with Franc to ten kilometers above the ground, made her a place to sit again, and began condensing forty thousand TP at a time into Mana Cannon mk1, erasing the rain clouds spread five kilometers below.
Thoom. Kr-boom. Rrrumble...
Each time a Mana Cannon struck the rain clouds ten kilometers down and burst, a sound unlike an ordinary explosion spread faintly through the air. Listening to blasts that, in a way, sounded like a heartbeat, I erased the clouds in succession from the nearest, about five kilometers of span at a stroke. After thirty minutes of firing without rest, they began to thin noticeably. Their altitude was dropping as well—they'd sunk a full kilometer since I'd first thrown one. A little lower and they'd slip outside my Spatial Perception range.
And yet, for a while now, no matter how many Mana Cannons I threw, the clouds only grew thinner. They would not disappear.
"They seriously will not go away."
I let a little irritation show at rain clouds that kept thinning but refused to vanish, and Franc opened her mouth in a soft voice, as if to soothe me.
"As the storm clouds shrink, their altitude keeps falling, so what if we spread an amber Space Wall widely beneath them? Then any that touch the Wall ought to vanish on their own."
"Yeah, let's do that. Erase them one by one and I'd be throwing Mana Cannons until dawn."
At once I darted about with Space Leaps and laid extremely thin amber Space Walls across every stretch where rain clouds had formed. Just in case, I'd sandwiched the clouds in the middle, so whether they thickened and rose or thinned and sank, they would vanish.
They weren't disappearing as quickly as I'd thought.
I waited thirty minutes, sighed at the sea of rain clouds that hadn't diminished much, and spoke to Franc.
"Think we should rest until daybreak. They'll all be gone when we wake in the morning."
Franc nodded, agreeing that would be better.
Beneath a clear pour of moonlight and starlight, I made her a place to rest out of blue Space Wall, then made a place for myself. She was the type who slept lying quietly, so if I gathered her breasts together with a blue Space Wall like a corset and lay between them... heh heh.
"Honestly, now."
I swiftly formed a corset-shaped Space Wall over the comfortably reclining Franc's chest and gathered her breasts as tightly as I could, and a cleavage pleasing just to look at took shape. She sighed as if to complain, but I wasn't yielding on this. Wanting even one more second of it, I pushed myself in between the valley of her breasts, and a comfort no words could describe washed over me.
"Breasts really are the best..."
I said it with only my head poking out from between the soft, plump swells.
"It's not too tight, is it? Tell me if you're uncomfortable."
"I am fine. But, Seoha... you do not like my breasts more than you like me, do you?"
Huh? What was that supposed to mean? I looked up at her at the sudden remark, and she wore a mischievous smile, the tip of her tongue just peeking out.
"Franc is her breasts, and her breasts are Franc! Your breasts are like the red-bean filling in a fish-shaped pastry!"
"Wha—?! Are you saying my breasts are of greater worth than I am?!"
"It's not that I like you because of your breasts. I like them because they're yours!"
"......"
Franc wore a look that said she had no idea what I was talking about, and since I'd blurted it on pure spinal reflex, I wasn't sure what I'd said either. I giggled and squirmed at the coziness and apple scent felt through my whole body, and she pressed the upper curve of her breasts, telling me it tickled and to stay still.
Darky crept stealthily into the cleavage, curled up, and didn't budge. Looked like the little thing meant to rest like that. I was jealous. If I could live without breathing, I'd have done the same. With a pang of regret I drew in a deep breath of the apple scent of her body, let the strength leave me, and surrendered my mind to sleep.