Chapter 363: The Search (4)
Warm sunlight lay across my face. I opened my eyes, and a blue sky and a sun burning far too bright stabbed into them hard enough to hurt.
"......I don't even remember the last time I saw the sun."
"Have you awakened?"
I tipped my head back at Franc's voice overhead, and her smiling face came into view.
"Mmh......"
She couldn't move, bound in the Blue Space Wall I'd shaped into a corset. I withdrew the Space Wall at once, and the great breasts that had been confined all night burst free of that narrow restraint, swaying heavily from side to side.
"Hnnnngh~!"
At the sight of the breasts that had cradled me all night spilling apart, I sat up and stretched until something in my back popped. I couldn't remember the last time I'd slept that deeply, without so much as a dream.
"When did you wake up, Franc?"
I turned to ask, but she only smiled and didn't answer, and I figured she probably hadn't slept much. Come to think of it, I wouldn't have slept either with something pressing on my chest...... I'd been too selfish.
"Your chest was too tight to sleep, wasn't it? Sorry."
"What? No. I only woke a little while ago myself."
"Really?"
"Have I ever lied to you, Seoha?"
"You haven't."
So she hadn't lost sleep on my account. That was a relief.
The moment her cleavage spread, Darky had tumbled out and rolled all the way down near her navel. I pulled the deer-hide tunic back on, retrieved the little guy, and set him on his designated perch atop my shoulder, but he still couldn't pull himself together and only squirmed.
I wondered whether slimes slept too, but he was odd enough that I let it pass. I raised a Space Wall a short distance from Franc's body, leapt up onto it, and checked what had become of the storm clouds overnight.
Franc rose as well and looked down.
"The storm clouds are all gone. Good."
Holding that wall had been eating eighty percent of my TP, so once I confirmed the clouds had vanished entirely, I withdrew it.
I watched my TP creep back up, then used Space Leaping to drop with Franc near the water's surface. Seeing the waves rolling with the wind, she let out a small breath of wonder.
"What a truly terrifying quantity of water. I could believe this was the sea."
An exaggeration...... or was it? Days of rain and flooding had raised the water to an average of about four hundred meters. At that depth, calling it a sea wasn't unreasonable.
As a test of whether Spatial Perception's sense of distance had returned to normal, I hurled a Mana Cannon into the air and detonated it to check the range.
Kukung—!
Whatever had been scrambling my senses was gone. Distance registered with perfect clarity.
"Good. Everything that was throwing my senses off is gone. Shall we head for the place where you felt Phase Power?"
"Yes!"
The Phase Power Franc had detected was coming from the east, and only very faintly. Moving in the direction she indicated, I was startled to realize the distance was roughly a hundred kilometers.
"Whoa. Darky's detection range is fifteen kilometers, but Franc really is Transcendent-grade. Amazing. The best."
"Incredible, boss!"
"Hehe. Thank you, Seoha. And thank you, Darky."
But as expected, even a Transcendent-grade's detection wasn't much different from an ordinary aberrant's. All that registered was the presence of Phase Power, and only a rough sense of which direction it lay in.
She couldn't tell whether it was stronger or weaker than she was, or how much Phase Power it held. An aberrant's Phase Power detection and Spatial Perception, it seemed, ran on entirely separate tracks.
Running across the water toward that Phase Power, I asked Franc, who kept pace beside me with those long, lovely legs stretching out in stride.
"Getting used to treading empty air?"
"I have grown quite accustomed to it. Even so, I still could not rely on it for ordinary travel."
When we'd first set out toward the Phase Power she'd sensed, Franc had said she needed to learn aerial maneuvering. A few tests later, we'd pinned down exactly how the technique worked—and aside from letting you move in a chosen direction while airborne, it struck me as next to useless.
The method was simple enough. Once your body was aloft, you expelled TP from the soles of your feet and launched yourself on the recoil. But TP was closer to formless energy than to anything solid. How much recoil could expelling it possibly generate?
Every kick against empty air rang out with a bang or a thud, which made it utterly unusable whenever quiet movement was required. And when I calculated the TP bursting out with each one, it came to something like five hundred thousand a kick...... practically throwing it away.
Catching my thoughts, Franc stared at me as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing, then let out a long sigh.
"Haa. The Space Wall you possess is simply too unfair, so no other skill looks adequate to you. Aerial maneuvering does consume a great deal of TP, but at this level even elemental ability users—not merely physical reinforcement types—would wish to learn it, don't you think? Being able to change direction in midair is that appealing."
"Huh? Aerial movement is that good?"
"The higher an aberrant's rank, the greater the chance it will be enormous, yes?"
"Yeah."
"Those who face such large aberrants are physical reinforcement ability users who have prepared thoroughly. To draw an aberrant's attention cleanly while tanking, one needs an efficient means of evasion."
"Because taking the hits as they come is dangerous."
"Precisely. No matter how well equipped a melee tanker may be, allowing repeated attacks from a Peak-Rank aberrant or higher brings problems of armor durability, and the shock that accumulates in the body with each blow makes it dangerous. That is why, in training against aberrants, one is taught to restrain jumping to the utmost—and even then, to jump only when a change of direction is possible within a second at most."
She went on to explain that the situation-specific drills a tanker had to learn were far from few. The most dangerous aberrants to face, she said, were the ones that were huge, with long means of attack, multi-jointed, and split into many segments.
The sorts one commonly met: snakes, centipedes, long-tongued frogs, and the like. The point was that the movements used to evade an attack, and the environment in which one evaded it, mattered enormously.
"Besides, my body is large now, and hea...... heavy, isn't it? That must be why it consumes even more TP. If I could pass this technique on to Hwayeon or Yeongeun, their ability to carry a fight would rise by at least twofold."
"And that is why this skill, which makes aerial maneuvering possible, is remarkable."
She closed the explanation there and nodded, her face so earnestly serious it was almost unbearably cute.
Heh. Laugh now and Franc will sulk. Hold it in!!
"Hmm...... Hearing you put it that way, it really does seem like a technique that matters for survival."
"Doesn't it?"
I steadied my breathing so she wouldn't notice how close I'd come to laughing, and looked down at my feet.
Waves were breaking, but I could barely feel a current. The water had spread as far as it was going to spread, and now it simply sat pooled over a fixed stretch of land. At some four hundred meters, every land creature in the area had probably been wiped out.
Every six months a downpour would turn some region into a sea of water, but back then there had at least been places to flee—a mountain, a tall hill. In a flood this insane, everything would have died except the aberrants that could live in water.
Even now, Spatial Perception showed only one or two aquatic species: a thief-crab aberrant, a fish whose whole body shone with rainbow light. Not a single other living animal.
"How much farther?"
"If we go about half the distance we have already covered, we should arrive."
"All right. If you need to rest, say so. I'll spread a Space Wall."
"Yes!"
If this place differed from the sea in any way, it was the lack of salt on the wind.
Thanks to that, I reached our destination without the clammy feeling that comes from lingering too long on a windy shore, sunlight pouring from a cloudless sky—and found myself glancing around at a world that was nothing but water.
"This is the place, right?"
"Yes. I am certain it is somewhere around here."
I scoured the area with Spatial Perception after her answer, but Baekcheong was nowhere to be found. What I found instead was......
"Baekcheong's horn?"
One of the two horns giant Franc had shattered was driven upside down into the ground beneath the surface, shedding a faint light. It forked into two branches around the middle—a somewhat short, blunt horn—but even so it measured seven meters in all. Short only meant short beside Baekcheong's body. On its own, it was the scale of a three- or four-story building.
Franc, standing on the Space Wall, tilted her head and glanced around.
"There is a horn?"
"Yeah. It's down where the water's fairly deep. Can't you pin the location with Phase Power detection?"
"No. Now that we are close, I only know it is nearby. Direction, I cannot tell at all."
The number two back on Mount Elephantros had looked dead at the direction I was standing in. Coincidence, then? Either way, I told Franc to wait and Space Leaped to where Baekcheong's horn was buried.
"Whoa?! B-boss, somethin's givin' off some serious power!"
The instant I hit the water, Darky—still hanging from my neck—saw the seven-meter horn, shuddered, and stared. The ivory-white horn was giving off a faint auspicious aura, and no matter how I looked at it, there wasn't the slightest hint of anything wicked.
I seized Baekcheong's horn, thick enough that even three of me couldn't have wrapped our arms around it, raised a Blue Space Wall in front of Franc, and Space Leaped up onto it. She flinched in surprise.
"Heavens. Is this Baekcheong's horn?"
"Yeah. You feel some kind of power too? Darky said he felt something strong."
I tossed the horn down at her feet. It clattered, but it didn't make the noise objects ought to make when they strike each other. A Space Wall, even a blue one—maybe that was why. Franc reached down, took hold of the seven-meter horn, and turned it this way and that with that unbearably earnest look again.
Ah...... why is she so damn cute.
The hair coming in little by little suggested the follicles themselves were fine...... Should I try stroking her head with Healing Touch?
Unaware of what I was thinking, Franc put a little force into the horn in her hand, then opened her mouth with an admiring face.
"Power? I would sooner call this a relic bearing an auspicious aura than a source of power. If we worked it and made an item of it, it might become a formidable one."
"It's that significant? I don't feel a thing."
"There is no mistake. And it is exceedingly hard. I can scarcely believe I broke it."
"Hard to believe, but it's the truth. Anyway, if one horn is here, the other might be somewhere nearby too. You don't sense another one?"
Her detection range was a hundred kilometers, so I'd asked just in case. Franc tilted her head, looked around, and answered with a regretful face.
"There is nothing. Aside from the few aquatic Low-Rank Variants you found along the way, no Phase Power exists within a hundred-kilometer radius of this place."
Hrm. Then where the hell was this Baekcheong bastard hiding?
"Let's look around a little more. We'll need to find the body we cut apart, too."
These were the remains of a Transcendental aberrant, no less. I wasn't about to just leave them. Sweep the area with Space Leaping and I'd find them soon enough.
Horn gripped in her hand like a sword, Franc and I unfolded leap after leap and searched a world that held nothing but water. We pushed north-northeast, then south-southeast, zigzagging back and forth for a long while, and still found neither Baekcheong's severed body nor the other horn.
Partway through, I grew curious how wide the flooded region was and climbed high into the sky to look. An area of at least eight hundred kilometers seemed to be underwater. Search, refill TP, search again—by the time some seven hours had passed, I reached the region where I'd been forcibly summoned.
A cliff sunk beneath the water, and the faint trace of a river. And the riverside where I had first met Franc, back when she was a spirit.
"This is where you and I first met."
"......Ah?! You mean down below?"
She'd been watching me stop short in the middle of a Space Leap, curiosity plain on her face. At my words a look thick with memory came over her, and she gazed down at the water visible beneath the Blue Space Wall. Darky, hanging from my neck, stuck his head out at the story and looked down as well.
"A shame...... If it were not submerged, we might have stopped by."
Seeing her crouch and peer down at her feet with that regretful expression, I remembered that day too, and a chuckle slipped out before I could stop it.
"Hehe. Back then I was staring at your naked body like I'd lost my mind."
Even now, with her crouched, that plump cleft was in plain view—but I wasn't stealing glances like something in heat, the way I had then. If I held her and asked, she'd show me as much as I wanted.
While I was thinking it, Franc's face went red. She shot me a glare and pressed her thighs together.
"You looked that blatantly, and you call it stealing glances?"
"Urk."
Thighs pressed tight, both arms wrapped around her knees, she stared right back at me—and then, with no telling who started it, we both burst out laughing.
"Ah. Thinking about back then, my face is getting hot."
"Uuugh~. It's embarrassing."
Franc covered her face with both hands, then flapped her palms against her reddened cheeks to fan them. Her body had grown so large, and I was looking up from below; she could try to cover herself all she liked, but there was no hiding how clearly everything showed.
If I kept staring, blood was going to rush straight to my dick, so I shook my head, leapt up into the hollow just inside her collarbone, and spoke.
"Come on. Let's find that Baekcheong bastard. Keep searching east and we'll spot him eventually!"
"Ah...... Seoha? I think you will need to search for Baekcheong's severed body with Spatial Perception."
"Huh? Why?"
"The corpse of a Long-snouted Lean Wolf, caught on a tree underwater, is registering in my Spatial Perception just now. Phase Power detection does not reach the dead."
She said it with an apologetic face, as if she'd only just confirmed it. The moment I heard her, my head turned west on its own.
Right. It was dead. Of course it had become a hunk of meat, and all its Phase Power would have scattered. When my head turned west, Franc looked west with me, then drew her brows together and sighed.
"......Shall we go back?"
"......We should, shouldn't we?"
From the beginning...... from the beginning! Searching that vast stretch all over again, and more thoroughly this time—it was genuinely bleak.
Maybe my expression had been too obvious. Franc, catching how bleak I looked, opened her mouth, unable to hide the regret.
"I am sorry, Seoha. I should have confirmed it sooner...... I ought not to have trusted Phase Power detection alone. I should have checked with visual analysis as well, and it simply did not occur to me."
If her body were small, I would have set a finger to her lips and stopped her. I couldn't even do that. I shook my head and told her no.
"Don't say that. I didn't think of it either, and I wasn't paying any attention to Spatial Perception."
But she still looked truly sorry for the time we'd wasted, and was about to apologize again, so I cut her off.
"I said it's fine. Keep going and I'm exploring the cave."
"Urk. Yes."
At my threat that wasn't quite a threat, Franc scrunched her face, stuck the tip of her tongue out at me, and laughed.
Five hours of zigzagging Space Leaps—rest, then leap again. We were moving without a word, sweeping the water inch by inch with Spatial Perception, when Franc pointed to one side and shouted.
"Ah! I found it!!"
"Oh! ......Huh? This isn't far from where we found Baekcheong's horn."
I turned where she pointed. A section of Baekcheong's torso lay quietly in a reed bed swaying underwater like water-weed. Forty-two meters across and a hundred and twelve meters long—the thickest, longest piece of the body.
Franc scanned the surroundings again in detail with her thirty-kilometer visual analysis. Her face brightened, and she pointed to another side.
"Over there, I can see something like a tail!"
Of course. They'd been chopped apart and broken in one place. Even if the current had swept them, it was only natural they'd be clustered nearby.
I spread a Blue Space Wall, hauled the section of body I'd found underwater up onto it, and ran for the spot Franc had indicated.