The Search (6)
Franc set the enormous bundle of snakeskin down, then shook out what was left of the hide after she'd cut the straps and spread it flat with a flap.
The scaled skin stripped from Baekcheong's body made a rectangle as wide as Franc was tall. She folded it in half and asked me to cut an X through the center.
I was curious what she was up to, but I did as she asked, drawing out Mana Laser mk2 and slicing along the lines she'd marked. Then I watched her shove her head through the opening and wrap the hide around herself, the same way I wore my deerskin tunic.
The hide she'd pulled on was absurdly long, hanging past her knees front and back. The whole effect was about as refined as some middle-aged soldier with a poncho thrown over his head.
“Huh!?”
I yelped at the sight of Franc flailing her arms and legs every which way. Only then did it hit me that she was making herself an incredibly crude set of clothes.
“I was going to make you something like a cheongsam…”
Every time she moved her arms, the hide flapped open and bared her naked body. She rolled the leather tight against herself and picked up two leftover strips of scaled hide.
“I know full well how skilled your hands are, Seoha, but I shall gladly take the kindness of the thought alone. Tailoring it would leave a great deal of hide ruined and unusable, and once we return to reality I shall have no further need of it. It would be a shame to waste a Transcendent-grade byproduct of an Imugi so carelessly.”
“Aaah! My dream of a no-panties cheongsam…!”
“…”
Franc shot a sidelong glare at my despair, then cinched the straps under her breasts and around her waist so the hide wrapped about her wouldn't slide free. She swung her arms this way and that, checking whether any bare skin showed, and nodded with a satisfied face.
“It fits well enough.”
It looked something like a sleeveless sack of a dress hanging past her knees, but with breasts that large, a waist that narrow, and hips so tasty—ahem, so magnificently developed, even that passed for fashion.
A face like hers completes any outfit. Literally.
Even so, the disappointment didn't fade, and I kept grumbling under my breath. Franc ignored me completely, double-checking the bundle as she spoke.
“The whole area is underwater, and we have no means of preserving the meat, so I fear we shall have no choice but to erase all of it.”
She was clearly ignoring me on purpose, and it put me in a pointless sulk. So I raised my voice, making sure she'd hear.
“Aaah, I want to see Franc in a cheongsam!”
“Even so, I have set aside several blocks of meat, so we ought to be able to share some with Father and Mother, and with the company executives as well. Ah—shall I pack a little more, just in case?”
Franc drew another sheet of scaled hide from the bundle and spread it on the ground, still pretending she hadn't heard a word. I shot to my feet and shouted again.
“No-panties cheongsam~!”
“…Good grief. Once we return, I shall do whatever you wish, Seoha. So please, stop your grumbling!”
“You mean it?!”
“Yes. Provided a cheongsam exists that is cut to a body of my size, that is!”
She tacked on a condition, but wasn't she selling my pervert power way too short? I'd find a way to have one made and get it on her, no matter what it took!
The moment I pictured Franc in a jet-black cheongsam with nothing underneath, every curve of her body laid shamelessly bare, her long platinum-blonde hair streaming behind her, I went hard on the spot.
I was grinning like a degenerate—ehehe—when Franc glanced my way, her brow twitching, then let out a soft snort of laughter and turned her gaze to the pile of Baekcheong's lean meat stacked off to one side, the portion we hadn't been able to pack.
Hmm. It wasn't a cheongsam, but it was still a no-panties dress… Admiring the view was just good manners, right?
So I slipped between the legs of Franc, who stood gazing at the mountain of meat, and tried to look up from below. She startled, dropped a hand to cover the space between her thighs, sidestepped, and pressed her legs together.
“Kyaa! What do you think you're doing!”
“Huh? Checking out the clam?”
The reaction was fiercer than I'd expected, and I backed off a few steps in mild surprise myself. At the words “checking out the clam,” Franc's face flushed hard. She composed herself, sat down, and opened her mouth with a stiffened expression.
“Seoha, truly. Even after I have grown this large, you still lust after my body?”
“So what if you've gotten bigger? Even if your body's grown, Franc is still Franc.”
I met that unreadable gaze head-on and told her it didn't matter. Franc's face softened, then crumpled into something hurt.
“…I have not grown a mere twenty or thirty centimeters. With a body like this I cannot even hold you, Seoha, and I have become an Aberrant besides. I thought… perhaps now you might come to hate me…”
“What? That's ridiculous! Hate Franc over something like that? Don't talk nonsense!”
I cut off the self-loathing in her voice and shouted, and Franc's expression grew complicated. Then she lifted the hem of her snakeskin tunic just a little, baring a dazzlingly white thigh.
She hadn't raised it far, but Franc had grown so large, and she wasn't far from me, that even that much brought her plump white thighs, her smooth lower belly, and the shut, ruler-straight slit instantly into view.
“Do you truly still wish to look, even like this? I am a giantess tens of meters tall.”
“Of course! Whatever form you take, Franc is Franc, and Franc's body, to me, is…”
I couldn't say why, but I felt the fear in her gaze. I clenched my fist and shouted.
“The one and only amusement park in the whole world!!”
At the words “amusement park,” Franc wore a look of pure disbelief, but only for a moment. Hearing that I still found her alluring even as a giant, she showed the faintest glimmer of tears. She seemed to care a great deal about having grown so large and become an Aberrant, but Franc was simply Franc. An obstacle of that degree was never going to stand in the way of my love.
“Franc is Franc. There's no way I'd hate you.”
When I said it once more, she lowered the raised hem of the leather tunic, covering her thighs, and gave me a beautiful smile brimming with tears.
“Huh? Why are you covering up?!”
“…Oh, come now!”
Franc was chiding me not to spoil the moment, but oh, come now, me too! If you start showing someone something and then stop, of course they'd get mad!
“If you start showing, you've got to show it all the way through! Who starts and then quits halfway!”
I carried on about how I never got tired of Franc nude, no matter how many times I saw her, declared I was opposed to her wearing a crude sack of a dress like that, and started throwing a fit about wanting naked Franc even more. Franc was one thing, but Darky, sprawled out beside us, shook his head with a look that said I was truly beyond saving.
For a while she bickered with me over showing and not showing, then pressed a hand to her forehead with the look of a rising headache. Her needless worries seemed to have flown clean off, so this was a good place to stop.
I grinned at her and turned to look over the staggering heap of lean meat.
“You packing more meat?”
I moved to grab a chunk and hoist it onto my own back, but Franc reached out a hand to stop me.
“We shall be moving at once, shall we not? You must cast Space Leaping, Seoha, so please do not take on any luggage. I have already packed everything that needs packing.”
Watching her roll the spread hide back up and tuck it into the bundle, I called out brightly.
“Got it. Then let's go!”
“Yes!”
I'd shouted with confidence, but the moment I actually tried to move, I started fretting over which way to go. I glanced at Franc, who slung the mountain of a bundle over her shoulder as if it weighed nothing, then looked back and forth between east and west.
Right—finding a Return Point came first, so…
East, there were definitely a few Return Points I knew of, but the odds were high they'd be underwater. West, there was that fucking huge mountain standing all alone, the one that had been nagging at me the whole time…
Franc, who had lifted the terrifying load without exerting any particular strength, watched me agonize over the direction, then turned her gaze west and spoke.
“The great mountain to the west is troubling in a great many ways, so let us go once our preparations are complete. For now, let us head to Mount Elephantros first.”
“Okay.”
And so the journey began.
I'd known the TP cost of Space Leaping rose as the volume being moved increased, but I hadn't expected it to scale exponentially.
“A full tank of TP and I can barely manage ten jumps. The consumption really is insane.”
My current total Phase Power, with everything under a thousand trimmed off and my Phase Stones added in, sat at 58.44 million. Moving my body alone had cost almost nothing, but leaping together with Franc and a bundle the size of a small mountain burned 5.8 million TP a jump.
Then again, maybe the real surprise was that Space Leaping worked at all alongside a volume that size. And 5.84 million TP… Feed TP into a Phase Stone through Mana Sieve and each point was worth a million won, so a single leap was 5.8 trillion won going up in smoke.
Think of it that way, and this ability was obscenely extravagant!
“So Space Leaping was not all-powerful after all.”
I'd spread a Blue Space Wall thin and wide so I could rest while the spent TP recovered, and Franc said it with a soft smile. Seated on the edge of the Space Wall, idly swinging both legs, she gazed at the pale moon in the night sky and began to hum.
We hadn't been able to make love since Franc became a giant, so I'd been living abstinent for nearly two weeks. At this rate I was going to grow a sarira—one of those little relic beads—out of nothing but celibacy.
What if I condensed my cock as hard as I could with Mana Sieve? Would just that part swell to an absurd size and actually fit Franc? Even if it grew, my blood pressure was low and I didn't have blood to spare. Pumping it all into an erection might crash my red-cell count and kill me of shock.
Her humming was thin and threaded with a little melody, pleasant to listen to. I let one worthless stray thought chase the next while I waited for my TP to fill.
Skipping sleep so we could move even a little faster, I repeated Space Leaping every hour and forty minutes, and around dawn we arrived once more at the cliff where I'd been forcibly summoned on my first run.
We'd doubled back to search again and only now returned. More pressing than that, I clicked my tongue as Spatial Perception showed me the water sitting a full five hundred meters above the cliff.
Judging by how the water kept getting deeper, the high ground was around that fucking huge mountain to the west, and from this area on the land sloped steadily down toward Mount Elephantros. When a flood came, all the water would drain and pool right here.
We passed the cliff, and another six hours later, around lunchtime, Spatial Perception found the small mountain that had taken us in on my second run—the one I'd named Breast Mountain, because it was shaped like a breast—sunken underwater.
“It's Breast Mountain.”
I was running low on TP besides, so I laid a thin, wide Blue Space Wall to refill as we went and set down on top of it.
This was where I'd learned to fire Mana Bullets during the fight between the Wind Raccoon and the mountain's master, the Silver White Wolf, then cleared out the Aberrants and crossed over through the Return Point.
Come to think of it, this was where history had been made between Franc and me. She must have been thinking the same thing—she stole a glance at me, her face reddening.
Franc set the enormous bundle down lightly and sat neatly at my side. When I looked back and forth between the ground beneath us and her face and grinned lewdly, she raised a hand to cover her face in embarrassment and pouted, saying nothing more.
Our first time had been a hardcore deep throat. Even thinking about it again, it was so absurd I could only laugh.
The great flat rock at the summit where that history had been made was the same—Breast Mountain showed no sign of damage from the tsunami that had swept the land. Once the water receded, it would go right back to what it had been.
“Ah—the Return Point exists underwater as well?”
At her words, her face still faintly flushed as she peered this way and that below our feet, I swept Spatial Perception over the spot where the Return Point had been, near the tree. Sure enough, a faint shimmer of light wavered underwater.
“Do you see it?”
“Yeah. I see it. So a Return Point can exist underwater.”
Nearly nine months had passed since we'd used it, so it stood to reason the Return Point would have regenerated. Franc straightened and closed her eyes.
What was she trying to do?
“…Ah. I had hoped I might find the Return Point with my Phase Power sense, but as expected, it will not work.”
Hearing her murmur in disappointment as she opened her eyes, I felt a little disappointed myself. If that had worked, finding Return Points would have been far easier.
“So it's an ability that senses only Phase Power. Literally.”
When the talk ended, Franc stared hard in the direction of the Return Point, and after that she fixed her gaze on me.
…That expression, and I could roughly guess what was coming. After looking at my face for a while, she opened her mouth carefully.
“There is no telling what may happen, so I do think it best that you return first, alone, Seoha—”
“Denied. You think I'd leave you alone when we don't know what might happen? No. Not a chance. Absolutely not. When we go back, we go back together. No exceptions.”
I cut her off before the words were out and refused her flat and final, and Franc's face filled with worry. That look wasn't going to work on me!
She must have caught on to what I was thinking, because what followed was an argument packed with every point she could use to persuade me.
“Seoha, please think. The place we entered the Phase World is our home, is it not? The fortieth floor of a forty-story building. If I appear there, my weight may bring the building down, and then people will be gravely hurt. Father and Mother might be caught in the accident. Lady Siha is an ability user as well, but she is an Elemental type, so she too might be badly injured.”
That much was true. But did she think I hadn't already prepared for exactly that?
If I backed down here, Franc would have to spend five days in the Phase World alone—lonely, forsaken.
Leave Franc, for whom decades as an Aberrant had turned solitude into a kind of trauma, and go back to reality by myself?
Like hell I'd quietly take that.
“We can't stop a collapse either way. So the instant we return, I'll cover the whole floor with a Blue Space Wall. Then I'll erase every crumbling fragment of the building with an amber Space Wall. That way we won't deal the building a major shock, and we can set down safe!”
When returning from the Phase World, if I kept my mind focused on Spatial Perception, I stayed aware right up to the moment the scenery changed. If anyone was inside the house, I could just lay another Blue Space Wall over them and be done with it.
Then even if something broke, it would only be our home, and no one would get hurt. The talk of my family being injured had made me flinch, but if things went as I expected, it would be fine.
Franc listened to my countermeasure and narrowed her eyes.
“If it is like that, then perhaps it would be all right…”
She nodded as she said it. Even so, she still couldn't clear the worry from her face.
In truth, more than any other reason, I simply hated the thought of parting from Franc. So we were going back together.
“I would not mind returning later myself…”
Argh, seriously!
“That's what I'm saying!! I don't want to leave Franc here alone!! Five days or not, I hate being apart from you! The building might take damage and become unlivable, but we can compensate the residents and tell them to live somewhere else while it's rebuilt! Even without all that—there's the Phase Stone that formed in my body, you've turned into a giant, there's that petty bastard calling himself the Lord of the Great Sea, and Baekcheong isn't even dead. You, alone, in a place like this? Absolutely not!”
“…”
Franc looked down at me, troubled and happy at once. But the worry still hadn't fully left her eyes, so I started racking my brain for something that would convince her completely.
Hmm… come to think of it, the Grand Turtle…
“Franc, do you remember what that place looked like after Ha Cheolsu came out with the Grand Turtle?”
“…? What I saw was after most of the building had already been demolished. I do not remember.”
Right, of course. Between the dust clouds rising as the building fell, the Peak-Rank Aberrants running wild, and the gas explosions bursting out, visibility had been badly choked…
The only one who'd grasped the whole of it was probably me, fighting the Grand Turtle with Spatial Perception.
“Ha Cheolsu burst out from inside the building, right? Together with an insanely huge turtle. But what I confirmed with Spatial Perception was the building smashed apart, like an explosion had gone off from the inside.”
As I spoke, I tapped the head of Darky, hanging from my neck. This guy might remember.
“Darky, you tell her too. What was it like when you came out into reality with the Grand Turtle?”
“The building, you mean, Boss?”
“The whole picture. How it felt when you left the Phase World, what it was like around you—explain all of it.”
“When I came out into reality, I was dead center in a room crammed full of your Space Wall, Boss. The building, way I remember it, just collapsed like something shoved it aside.”
His hair, made of liquid, rippled every time I touched it. Darky fiddled with his own head, wearing a thinking look, then gave another quick nod.
“Dead sure, Boss. We came out into reality just fine, but right after that one side of the building gave way and the rest came down in a chain.”
“So the building collapsed after you'd fully appeared in reality?”
“Yessir.”
So when they came out, they'd appeared at the place they'd entered, and then the building had collapsed under the Grand Turtle's bulk?
“Then, when one emerges from the Phase World into reality, one appears standing upon the floor of the place one entered, yet until one has fully emerged one's position remains fixed—and once one has emerged, one falls under the pull of gravity?”
Come to think of it, it had been the same when I re-entered after finishing the Floating Sky Islands.
“Yep.”
With Darky's confirmation, Franc finally let out a small sigh, the anxiety cleared from her face.
“The moment we get back to reality, I'll throw up a Blue Space Wall right away. You know its durability and strength as well as I do. It's more than enough to keep the building from collapsing under your weight.”
“Very well. Even so, some damage to the building will be unavoidable.”
“It's my building, so if it's getting smashed, I'm the one who'll smash it. We'll compensate the residents for whatever they lose and apologize. Anyway…”
I'd meant to switch on my Certifier and check the date and time back in reality, then remembered the thing was smashed. I'd wanted to avoid weekends and the lunch hour as a precaution, but there was no way to know the date.
The time seemed to be a little past lunch, at least.
Trusting me now, Franc rose with a calm look from which every worry had vanished, shouldered the bundle, and bounced it into place against her shoulder as she settled her stance.
Watching her, I thought it over. If I slipped, someone might get hurt, just as she'd said. The thought that it might be my family stiffened my body and set a faint tremor in my chest, but I drew a quiet, deep breath and let the tension go.
It's all right. I can do this. I've focused and read my surroundings on the way back to reality plenty of times, haven't I?
I looked at Franc, ready at last with the bundle of Baekcheong's bones on her back, leapt up onto the nape of her neck, and cast Space Leaping into the water where the Return Point waited.
Afraid our bulk might crush the Return Point or snuff it out, we'd appeared a little ways off, and we swam slowly toward it.
If there hadn't been the precedent of the Grand Turtle, I might have worried whether Franc's body was too large for us to return together at all.
It struck me anew how many gifts that bastard Ha Cheolsu had ended up leaving me, and I shook off every last scrap of ill feeling I'd still been holding toward him.
While I was at it, I ought to forget the guy completely and shake him off for good.