The Search (5)
After I found the second severed piece of Baekcheong and kept combing the surroundings, even by the time I'd recovered the remaining five chunks cut from his body, the last horn — and the main body I presumed was still alive — were nowhere to be found.
Six of the seven pieces that carcass had been split into were accounted for. What I could not find was the Imugi horn steeped in Phase Power, nor roughly a third of the head that might as well have been Baekcheong himself. Which meant, just as I'd thought...
"How strange... Wherever has the other horn gone?"
Franc seemed more unsettled by the missing horn than by anything else. She kept turning, sweeping the surroundings, her brow drawn tight as if she were pushing her Phase Power sense as far as it would go — and her expression refused to ease.
That sense of hers reached nearly a hundred kilometers, and the ground we'd already covered by Space Leaping in daylight alone came to some five hundred square kilometers. If it wasn't inside that, I figured we simply weren't going to find it.
"The Lord of the Great Sea said it himself. Baekcheong bore a grudge. He was told to protect his body."
"...Does that mean Baekcheong took one of his own horns in his jaws and hid himself somewhere?"
"Think about how much ground we covered today. One of the horns still has Phase Power in it, and it's gone — so I'm sure he bit down on the thing and slipped off somewhere. Why he didn't take both with him, I couldn't tell you... Hmm."
I cut myself off halfway through, and Franc turned to look at me, curiosity kindling in both eyes.
"You said it yourself. The horns are like relics carrying an auspicious power. A dragon's supposed to command wind and rain with a yeouiju — that wish-granting orb — but that bastard Baekcheong's an Imugi, isn't he? An Imugi wouldn't have one of those, so maybe he used the horns as a medium instead, to raise floods and gather storms. And when the horn shattered, it kicked up weather nobody could make sense of, along with a spatial distortion that threw the senses out of joint."
"Ah. That may well be."
I looked over the six gathered pieces of Baekcheong's body, and the horn beside them.
"If it were up to me, I'd keep searching until I found him and beat the shit out of him. But we've already lost too much time."
We didn't have so much as a clue where he'd hidden. Hundreds of meters of water now covered thousands of kilometers of drowned land, and there was no way to resupply drinking water. Food we could manage — carve that flesh of his and eat it — but water, I had no idea how to get. The pitch-black mud under our feet wasn't something I could even think about drinking.
I'd considered pushing past the flooded zone to look for some... My mind kept yanking me one way and then the other, until at last I settled on stepping back out into reality and coming in again.
"It's as good as fact that Baekcheong survived and got himself clear. Hunting him without any preparation would be dangerous, then. A cornered rat bites the cat. So we put finding him off for now and head back. We'll set Hwayeon and Yeongeun's minds at ease, get our gear together, and come in again."
"If that is what you have decided, then let us do so."
There was one more problem. The six sections I'd chopped off Baekcheong — tens of meters across and hundreds of meters long. Piled up, those lengths of serpent were so immense that even Franc would have taken them for a hill.
I was still turning over what to do with his body, heaped like a mountain atop the broadly unfurled Blue Space Wall, when Darky started squirming with the face of someone who badly needed to piss.
"What's the matter with you?"
"Boss~ um... over there..."
He hemmed and hawed, and somehow it looked like he was eyeing Baekcheong's meat, so I cut a cube a meter on each side and tossed it over. He let out a gleeful heheheh, burrowed into the flesh, and started melting it down from the inside to eat. Watching that, I remembered Franc hadn't eaten a thing since she'd taken her giant form.
"Franc, you're not hungry?"
"I am not. Like Hiarid, I seem to be quite all right even if I do not eat."
"Which is another way of saying you'd be better off eating. Let's carve some of that meat and barbecue it."
Barbecue from a Transcendental Extreme-Rank Variant. Now that was living well. To make up for the meals we'd skipped, I hauled trees out of the water by the armful and called to Darky, still buried in the meat.
"Break the moisture out of this wood for me."
"Yessir!"
Darky shot out of the flesh and, in a flash, decomposed the water from the soaked timber, leaving it bone-dry. I spun up my Physical Reinforcement and started splitting and smashing the wood he'd dried. Then Franc's enormous hand came in. She seized the timber and rubbed her palms together once, and in a single second a heap of firewood had stacked itself up.
"...Damn, that's good."
With the firewood she'd made, I got a fire going in no time and started roasting Baekcheong's meat. She shifted the burning logs, built a bigger blaze of her own, and set to grilling as well. Thanks to the Blue Space Wall, we could get a proper camping mood going even in a place that might as well have been the middle of the sea, and I liked that more than a little. A feeling of no longer being bound to any one place, you could call it.
I ran a cut as thick as my forearm onto a stick the way you'd skewer meat for the fire. The snow-white flesh browned, and the fat seeping from it dripped into the campfire with a hiss, releasing an appetite-stirring smell I'd never encountered before. One whiff and thunder rolled through my gut. Franc, roasting a piece no bigger than her own palm, spoke.
"The aroma is even lovelier than 1++ grade Hoengseong hanwoo upon the grill — the finest of Korean beef."
"This is what snake meat smells like when you cook it? This is unreal. My stomach's twisting, telling me to get the meat in already."
"I have eaten snake before, but the smell was nothing like this. Perhaps because this is the flesh of an Imugi."
Calling it Imugi meat made me feel like I'd be in real trouble if I ate it on a whim. But even if it turned on me, I had Healing Wave. I'd be fine. The roasting smell had saliva threatening to run from my mouth, so I wiped the corner of my lips with the back of my hand and waited, impatient, for the meat to finish.
I was staring a hole through the flesh crackling over the campfire when Franc turned her eyes to Baekcheong's severed body and spoke.
"Seoha. I looked it over earlier. I should like to skin Baekcheong and make a simple garment of the hide. Would you help me cut it with the Wall of Space?"
"Sure. I'll cut it once we're done eating."
A single scale of his stood a little taller than I did, so cutting them to size and stitching them together would do. Shape it roughly like a cheongsam, slice the hide into long strips like thread, and sew it up... Heh heh heh. A cheongsam, and nothing under it...
I was designing the clothes Franc would wear in my head when she, having been studying the severed cross-section, turned to me with a curious face.
"And yet the cut is remarkably clean. A Transcendental Extreme-Rank Variant's defenses ought to have been extraordinarily high. How did you cut him?"
"Huh? Ah. Right — I never told you."
It was the special attack I'd thrown after losing my mind at the sight of Franc — clinging to Baekcheong's head to snap his horn — getting drenched in blood under the bastard's assault. My eyes had rolled back in that instant. I'd forced every last drop of TP into a sword-energy round that until then had condensed maybe a hundred thousand at most, compressing it all the way to ten million TP before I fired, and something colorless and transparent had split only Baekcheong's body with perfect precision, leaving the ground and the trees and the rest of nature untouched. When I told her, surprise flooded those pretty eyes of hers.
"At the time I felt something draw out of my heart in one long pull, but when I looked inside myself afterward, I couldn't find anything wrong. After that things got busy, and I stopped thinking about it."
"Colorless and transparent, invisible to the eye, undetectable even to Spatial Perception... Is that not the same thing the Lord of the Great Sea unfolded?"
This time it was my turn to be surprised.
"H-huh. Hearing it like that, yeah?"
But the Heavencloud Sword that had manifested that sword energy was gone, so I had no way to check. The loss of it — the sword that had cut my TP consumption by a full twenty percent — ached all over again.
"A technique that cleaves the torso of a Transcendental Extreme-Rank Variant in a single stroke... How dreadful. If you were to obtain another weapon, condense TP to ten million, and fire it, do you suppose the same effect would appear?"
"That... I don't know. Not long ago, when we almost got into a brawl with the States — when I erased Muscle Bear — I pushed TP into the Heavencloud Sword, remember?"
"Yes. I was quite startled to see a blue-black flame bloom along the blade."
"Back then I'd only condensed a hundred thousand TP, and I had a feeling that going any further would be dangerous. Maybe it felt dangerous because I still couldn't condense ten million TP cleanly, all the way through, without something going wrong."
Thinking back on that day, I bit into Baekcheong's meat — it looked done — and went on.
"You were pouring blood, hurt bad, and I was furious out of my mind. Maybe the anger burned off every stray thought, and that's why I managed to condense as much as ten million TP."
At that, a smile drew itself across Franc's face. Then the springy chew of the meat filling my mouth sent me into a daze — and a moment later, into disbelief. What the hell is this?
"When we return, we ought to obtain a sword and put it to the test."
"Yeah, we should. But this meat — the smell is to die for, and it doesn't taste like anything."
I chewed, swallowed, and took another bite, but all my nose did was nudge my tongue into the illusion of savor. A few chews later, nothing was left in my mouth but that springy texture.
"There is no taste at all?"
Franc wore a look of plain disbelief that meat giving off such a nutty, hunger-stirring aroma could taste of nothing.
"Reminds me of eating the fresh raw squid Dad likes, just as it is. With this, the sauce is probably going to matter more than the meat."
Even so, I liked the texture a great deal. I tore into the golden-brown meat and started making a few more skewers, and Franc tried a browned piece herself — then her brow twitched, just slightly. Yeah. I'd been just as thrown.
Then she sliced the raw meat into very thin sheets again, seared only the outside, tasted it, and held out what was left.
"Would you care to try this?"
"...Oh! What happened? The taste changed!"
"Heh heh. I suspect cooking it all the way through let every component that carries flavor run out. Beef is the same, is it not? Cook it too hard, for too long, and it feels like chewing rubber, with no taste remaining."
As if every aroma that had risen off the fire had turned into flavor, it was nutty and packed with savor, the taste welling up the more I chewed, until I thought I might lose myself in it. And so, for the first time in a long while, we gorged ourselves on Baekcheong's meat.
Franc ate a staggering amount. I ate a monstrous amount. Darky ate in silence — quiet, fast, and a great deal — and still, what the three of us put away didn't even show against what was left.
When the meal was done, under a sky just beginning to blush toward sunset, Franc and I set to paring the meat from Baekcheong and separating bone from hide. These were byproducts of nothing less than a Transcendental Extreme-Rank Variant. The flesh probably meant nothing beyond food, so we could throw all of it out; taking the scaled hide and the bones would be enough.
Once we took him apart, sure enough — an Imugi was still a snake at heart. The skeleton was no different from a serpent's: an extraordinarily long, massive, sturdy spine, with ribs packed tight along it. Whenever I drove a Wall of Space between scaled hide and meat to part them, Franc sorted the separated hide and bone and stacked them neat and high. After that I pared the meat from the bones piece by piece and cut what I'd carved into rough cubes, easy to pile, while she moved meat and bone without a pause.
Baekcheong's body had run as long as the stretch from the Gwanghwamun intersection to Admiral Yi Sun-sin's statue in the heart of Seoul, with an average girth of forty meters, so the scaled hide, the meat, and the bone coming off him truly made a mountain. The meat alone accounted for more than eighty percent of the bulk. Given the size of the thing, the cubed chunks had piled into heaps the size of actual houses, and a single block looked like it would fill a hundred people and still leave leftovers.
And yet, strange as it was, not a drop of blood ran out even as we worked through every part of the severed carcass.
"You know those shows where some bear of a guy hauls himself out to an empty jungle or a mountain or a grassland just to suffer on purpose? Snake blood runs red on those. Not a drop is coming out of Baekcheong's body."
"He may have lain in the water so long that the blood all drained away. Goodness, this grease."
Franc lifted a cut of meat four or five times her own size as if it weighed nothing and carried it over, then frowned faintly at the animal fat running down her chest and belly and swept it off with her hands. Because of that, her full breasts and the tight vertical lines of her abs began to gleam with grease. Sunset light struck her naked body where the oil had coated it, and she glittered — and the fat that had run down slipped through the cleft between her legs and trickled along her inner thighs, looking for all the world like her arousal spilling out of her. Obscene as hell.
Like she'd been slicked in clear lotion before a bout of lotion play, maybe? Sliding over that from above would feel incredible... I swallowed hard at her pink nipples, gleaming more appetizingly than usual, and Franc hunched her shoulders, then glanced around.
"I feel a rather wicked gaze upon me..."
Caught, I snapped my eyes away to the mountain of meat.
"Ah, but seriously, what are we supposed to do with all this? There's just no answer. None."
Franc turned to the meat piled like a mountain at my words and nodded.
"The meat alone would feed thousands for days."
"And it tastes good, so actually throwing it out feels like a waste... The subspace ability user in India — his name was Rawar, right? I should've gone to him and checked whether I could learn Subspace Storage."
"When we return, let us look into that as well."
The scaled hide we could fold up somehow and have Franc carry. The problem was the meat, the bones, and the few internal organs. The meat would mostly be for eating, so discarding it was one thing. Toss the organs to a research lab, though, and I could get findings on a Transcendental Extreme-Rank Variant in return — and the bones and hide were obviously premium material for weapons and armor. I couldn't just leave them behind.
They were byproducts I had to take one way or another, and I was fretting over how when Franc, looking well practiced, began parting ribs from the spine and asked me to separate all of Baekcheong's vertebrae and ribs as well.
"Now that the meat has all been pared away, the volume has dropped a great deal. If we gather the bones by kind, it will shrink further still, and we should be able to pack them in the hide and carry them off."
Oh. So that was the way. At her request I started breaking the joints where rib met spine with the Wall of Space — and the point was that I was breaking them, not disintegrating them. Whatever Baekcheong's bones were made of, even my amber Wall of Space wouldn't properly break them down, so — just as when I'd cut the Grand Turtle's neck — I had to stack the walls several times over before they finally snapped with a grinding crack.
Franc climbed along the spine and hammered the joints with her fists, and they cracked apart after only a few blows. By raw force alone, those punches seemed to outclass the amber Wall of Space.
But I could lay a Wall of Space down in several places at once!
Working the thin seams between spine and rib as best I could, I managed to pull two hundred twenty-six ribs from the roughly two hundred seventy-nine meters of Baekcheong's body we had. After the ribs came off the spine, I drove Walls of Space into the gaps between the vertebrae and sectioned the spine into thirty-meter lengths. Franc brought over a sheet of scaled hide and asked me to cut it narrow and long, like cord.
I cut it as she asked. She spread the largest, broadest sheet of scaled hide, bound the ribs in neat bundles of thirty with the hide-cords I kept cutting for her, and stacked the vertebrae in orderly piles as well.
"Whoa. The bulk just collapsed."
So the meat had been taking up an absurd share of the volume.
"You look pretty used to dressing a kill, Franc."
"When we conducted subjugation campaigns, I watched the dressing from beside the others and committed it to memory."
She said it while gathering the rib bundles in one place and the vertebrae in another, smiling bright — and how was anyone supposed to be that beautiful? After that she moved them one by one onto the longest, widest sheet of scaled hide, stacking the pieces of bone neat as a game of Tetris. She gauged the height and the volume, then picked up several chunks of meat and began setting them in the gaps.
She gathered the remaining scaled hide on top and wrapped the whole thing like a cloth bundle, tying the ends tight with the leftover cord, and what she finished was a pack shaped like an enormous dumpling. The problem was that the pack was the size of a small mountain.
I was wondering how we were meant to carry the thing when Franc simply hoisted a bundle dozens of times her own size onto her shoulder.
"It is not as heavy as I expected."
"...That's not heavy?"
I couldn't even guess what it weighed, and yet she shifted this way and that with it on her back as if it were nothing. There wasn't a trace of strain in the motion, so I knew she wasn't just being polite. It felt like watching an ant haul a piece of bread dozens of times its own body.