Chapter 369: A Temporary Return, and Putting Things in Order (4)
I gave it a moment, but the two of them didn't come straight in. They started circling the big canvas-covered house where we were, wary, as if they were casing the place.
Not coming in. What are they doing?
"Eep?!"
It didn't last. Unable to hold back, Miho shot through the doorless entrance, took one look at the gigantic Franc seated on a sofa wrought of Space Wall, and flung herself in terror into the arms of Hiarid, who had followed her in. She must have been badly startled—her seven tails had swollen up as if they'd exploded.
"...Franc?"
"Yeah."
Watching from where I lay in the valley between Franc's breasts, I found it oddly funny. A fox girl with her tail-fur standing stiff as a spooked cat's.
Hiarid's blank expression cracked, just for a moment, but she gathered herself at once, beat her wings, and rose in a slow circle to look Franc over from every angle. Left behind when Hiarid took off, Miho began examining Franc this way and that herself, something like reverence creeping over her face.
"Miho. Were you good? Did you listen to your sisters?"
"Uh-huh. I was good.... But Franc got so huge! So strong! Woooow~! Amaziiing!!"
"Th-thank you...?"
More interested in the enlarged Franc than in her own exploded, bristling tails, she shone with wonder and burst out.
"Can I climb up?!"
She didn't wait for an answer. She scrambled up Franc's leg in a rush, and in a flash she had reached the shoulder. Spotting me and Darky lying at ease in the cleft of Franc's breasts, her eyes blazed, and she dove.
"Boobs~!!"
"...Haa."
Franc let out a helpless little laugh at the fate of her chest, now reduced to a playground, and shook her head. Before anyone could stop her, Miho had landed on the breasts bared by the V-neck and was rolling across that generous expanse, giggling ehehehe—looking, if anything, happier than I was.
Topping up whatever she's short on, is she?
Lying on that breast of a bed, I watched Miho roll this way and that in pure bliss and set the next five days' work in order.
First, we'd secured byproducts from a Transcendental aberrant, so the groundwork for making armor was in place... and I still had to win over Dr. Woo Mingu, the right man to put in charge of the research institute. While I was at it, I ought to stop by the temporary lab and hear how far the research had come, and meet the ability user called Rawar to ask about Subspace Storage. If I could, I'd steal the subspace ability and learn it myself.
I was still lining the list up when Miho, who had been flailing around on Franc's chest, scrambled over on all fours, launched herself into my arms, and shoved a phone in my face.
"Master, Master! Look, look, look at this!"
"Huh? What's this... Pocket Monster Go?"
I drew her in—lately she'd been giving off a fresh scent, like young green shoots—and looked at the screen she held up. A green, map-like display filled it, with 3D characters moving across. Aside from the human figure I took for the player's avatar, the rest were pocket monsters I recognized at a glance.
Miho switched the screen over to the camera and turned the phone this way and that, but all that showed was the cleft of Franc's breasts, caught in the rear camera. Down at the bottom, a ball split red and white by a black band was bouncing along. So this was the mode where you spotted pocket monsters and caught them.
"It doesn't work here! Only in Sokcho!"
"Sokcho? Don't tell me that's where you went to play."
"Mm-hm. In our country it only works in Sokcho. So I got Hwayeon's permission and went to Sokcho with Hiarid!"
She giggled and showed off her list of caught pocket monsters, and when I stroked her head and told her she'd done well, her fox ears flapped, her tails swished, and she grinned wide enough to show her teeth.
The picture of fox-eared, seven-tailed Miho leading four-winged Hiarid around Sokcho, hunting pocket monsters in augmented reality, was profoundly unreal. Wondering what the people of Sokcho must have felt, seeing that, I couldn't help a snort of laughter.
Right. I need to check that, too.
"Hiarid, come here."
=Yes, Sky Lord.=
Hiarid, who had been drifting in lazy circles around Franc, beat her wings at my call and flew over. She hovered, hesitating over whether to land on Franc's chest, then received Franc's permission and settled carefully in front of me.
"What's the name of this Master of the Sky the Flavius worship? Those... Sabi clan types said they serve the Lord of the Great Sea, right? You know his name, or anything else?"
=Those beings are solely the Master of the Sky and the Lord of the Great Sea. Beyond the knowledge that they guard the four pillars that compose the world, I know nothing.=
"No separate word for them? The Supergiant Turtle went by Langue Dran."
=The one our people serve is solely the Master of the Sky. It is the same as the word God in the religions of humans—the word itself is what indicates Him. A word for the Master of the Earth, I am hearing for the first time.=
"...Well, names aren't what matter, so forget that. This is what matters. Do you know where the Master of the Sky's domain runs—from where to where?"
=The whole of the sky is His domain.=
"The whole sky? Nuhodi said each of them had their own domain."
=The sky belongs wholly to Him.=
"The Lord of the Great Sea was floating up in the sky too. So did the Lord of the Great Sea trespass on the Master of the Sky's domain?"
=...Pardon?=
"And the Master of the Sky just let that slide? Or does the Master of the Sky dive underwater sometimes, too?"
=Th-that is...=
Watching her grow more confused with every question, I figured this vein was tapped out. I'd expected her to have something useful, being a Peak-Rank aberrant and all.
She seemed to sense that I didn't find her much help. Her expression turned gloomy, and she said she had only ever been a guardian of the temple on the Floating Sky Islands—the finer points, she didn't know.
So she'd basically been parked in the grunt-slave slot at the world's shittiest company!
If I wanted to dig any further, I'd have to track down the Calamity-rank aberrant said to live on the largest of the Floating Sky Islands. But judging by how those things had sprayed light-element shells at anyone who so much as passed at a distance, a nice friendly little chat was... something I ought to give up on.
Ahh. The moment I heard Nuhodi's story, I'd taken it for my only lead—a scratch-off I was sure would hit. I scratched it, and out came a dud.
Petty irritation got the better of me. I caught the wing-feathers of Hiarid, kneeling there in front of me, and tugged, working my sulk out on her.
"A thing like the Master of the Sky can't be flying around all day, all three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. Isn't there some domain besides the sky?"
=Wh-when He requires rest, He takes His repose upon the land of Zalvatera.=
"And you call that an answer?"
She drooped, sneaking glances at my face, and gave her own wing a timid little pull. I caught her by the wrist—and she must have sensed my sulking was about to curdle into outright torment, because Franc, who until then had only listened in silence, cut in.
"Zalvatera—you mean that sky island where you met Seoha, don't you?"
=Yes.=
"That island—how did Zalvatera come to be? No, that was an odd way to ask. Where was the land that makes up Zalvatera drawn up from?"
At Franc's question I took my hand off the wing, and Hiarid answered with the relief of someone spared, dipping her head slightly toward Franc.
=The land of Zalvatera was drawn up from a portion of Orvinci... the land of the divine beasts.=
"Hiarid, you're a little slow on the uptake. That's not what Franc asked. She wants to know where that land originally was."
=Ah—that, I do not know. I am sorry.=
Hmm. Darky was pattering across the top of Franc's chest; they'd said they'd hardly ever left the region they lived in, so of course they wouldn't know. And Miho, chasing after them only to flop down on purpose and roll around cackling... I'd just leave her out of it.
Nothing for it. I'd have to search this out step by step.
"If even Hiarid doesn't know... using that feels like a waste."
Franc was only murmuring to herself, sunk in thought, but a voice of that size doesn't blur. It came through perfectly clear.
"That?"
"The conch Seoha obtained on Zalvatera. Album Cetus might be on the level of a divine beast himself, so he may know where Orvinci is. And if Orvinci is the land of the divine beasts, we might learn something about the Four Divine Beasts there as well."
"Ah. That tracks. If he's wandered the skies a long time, he might even know where the Meo Azitos are. Worth keeping in mind."
"Let's save that as a last resort. Spending his one-time aid on a mere question would be a shame."
"Fair enough."
Miho had been playing with Darky for a good long while on the northern hemisphere of Franc's chest, and at last she seemed to get hungry. She came over to where I lay in Franc's navel—deeply embarrassed to be using a belly button as a bed—and rubbed my stomach as she asked.
"Master. You hungry?"
"Is it that time already? Should I tell Sophia to bring food? Or we could just order in."
"Chicken! I want half sweet-and-spicy glazed and half plain fried!"
"This one wants the sweet-and-sour pork, Boss!"
Taking their orders, I asked Franc what she felt like eating.
"I'm quite all right. And I doubt there's anywhere that could prepare enough for me, besides."
"Don't worry about it. I'll just call every Chinese place around here and order twenty or thirty servings from each."
"Ah."
"Still, anything you have to mix, like jajangmyeon, would be a problem. Let's stick to noodle dishes—jjamppong, the spicy seafood kind, or broth noodles."
"Hehe. Yes. Then I'll have the jjamppong."
First I phoned Sophia and told her to fry up sweet-and-sour pork and chicken, then started ringing the Chinese restaurants.
Give them this address, and the first response was anger—quit messing around. Once I dropped the name of the Grand Blue raid team, they wavered, doubtful, and took the delivery orders anyway.
Ten places, twenty servings each: ten of those jjamppong, and the other ten split among five-spice braised pork, crispy garlic chicken, eight-treasure stir-fry, yusanseul, and the like. Two hundred servings in all. I waited about twenty minutes, and motorbikes from the restaurants began pulling up one after another.
"Eep! A-a giant!"
"It's all right. Just leave it here. Card's fine, yes?"
"S-save me, please! I-I don't even taste good!!"
"We're not going to eat you."
"Waaaaaah!"
"We're not attacking, so please don't run!"
"Somebody heeelp!"
"I said don't run!!"
Some dropped where they stood and shook the instant they saw the giant Franc. Some begged for their lives. Some ran. Every variety of panic—but with Miho's help we somehow caught the delivery men, calmed them down, and got the food in without incident.
"Ahahaha. The uncles were so funny~."
"Foolish humans... puhuhu."
"......"
Franc watched, wearing a profoundly awkward expression, as Miho giggled and ferried the food over on the wind.
While we were laying the two hundred servings of Chinese food out on a table of Blue Space Wall, Sophia and Suhan arrived as well, having fried thirty chickens and thirty servings of sweet-and-sour pork.
And the moment they saw Franc sitting beneath the orb of light my sister had set floating and left behind, they took an unconscious step back.
"...!"
"M-Madam Franc? Is that you?"
"Yes. Circumstances being what they were, this is how I ended up."
"I-I seeee."
Raiders, after all—their reaction was nothing like an ordinary person's. Then again, they came from a world where it couldn't have been the same.
At the mention of circumstances, the two of them recovered their composure quickly and, together with Miho, laid out the food they'd brought. With Suhan and Sophia joining us, we finished that strange dinner, and afterward I took a walk with Miho through the front garden, still in the middle of being landscaped.
If you could even call it a garden—ground enough, by simple arithmetic, to pack in a hundred and forty sports complexes edge to edge!
"Thinking about it, it's kind of a scam that a private person can own this much land."
"Uuung? Why? Can't have it?"
"There's a cap on how much residential land one person can own, as far as I know. Go over it, and you pay a levy on the excess."
"...??"
"Well, my sister probably sorted that out when she bought the place, so it shouldn't be a problem."
Come to think of it, all sorts of trouble had been piled onto this land... and it had been bought as a training ground for ability users. They'd said aberrants spawned here naturally, at irregular intervals, and I'd only seen it happen once.
That was no small part of why it had come cheap, and somehow I felt as if I'd come out ahead.
Midway through the walk, Miho's foxfire lighting the way, my sister arrived with a trailer and, with Miho's help, mounted dozens of industrial LED lights along the ceiling. For power she set down a portable Phase Power generator and hooked it up; once it was on, lighting a house big enough for Franc to stay in was simple enough.
She'd brought a projection screen meant for performances as well, and set that up in place of a television, so a bare minimum of civilized living had become possible. A small mercy, perhaps. Without a compact portable Phase Power generator capable of meeting a small building's demand, even this would have been out of reach.
After that, Aunt Hyeryeong showed up with a trailer camper she'd procured—and even at a glance it was an enormously large, lavish thing, trailer-sized in the fullest sense.
"Whoa?! I know this one! It's a camper!"
"Whoa, a house stuck on a car?"
Grrrrrnnn—with a low rumble like some great beast, the sleek giant trailer rolled in, and everyone went out to look. At the sight of a camper the size of an entire apartment building, Miho, thoroughly excited, scooped Darky up and dashed inside.
Franc, too, studied the camper's interior through the windows, eyes bright with curiosity.
"It's huge. How did you get one so fast? Even if you bought it, delivery would take time."
"It's a camping trailer the vice chairman of Suseong Group bought for his own pleasure. They say there are only two hotel-class luxury trailers like it in the whole country. He'd bought it and used it as decoration—never actually taken it out—and when he heard I was looking for a trailer and tried to give it to us as a gift, I paid the price and purchased it."
The vice chairman of Suseong... that man, then. I remembered last summer.
Back then I'd been busy stomping Japan flat, and the collusion with Suseong Group and NG Group had fizzled out unresolved. I'd wondered since how it all turned out.
Aunt Hyeryeong seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. She smiled and went on.
"After we secured an apology and reparations from Japan, the domestic conglomerates became extremely reluctant to cause any friction with us. Suseong and NG in particular kept proposing joint ventures on terms favorable to us, doing whatever they could to build goodwill with the Chairman. But after the kidnapping incident in the United States, they seem to have decided simply to lie flat—no approaches, no interference of any kind. If anything, when there's a field we're moving into, they've gone so far as to pull their subsidiaries out."
"Hmm. Considering human greed, I doubt they're just standing there staring."
"Even greed has its limits. Loiter in front of a walking giant, and you'll only be stepped on and killed, or offend him and get kicked to death."
Hearing Aunt Hyeryeong's comparison brought back the resolve I'd made after coming back alive from the Phase World.
Back then I'd sworn that, caught between giants, I would survive without being used. Somewhere along the way the giants had become dwarfs, and the dwarf I'd been had become a giant.
The moment I understood it, a tickle rose in my chest, and a laugh kept slipping out of me.
At the sight of me suddenly grinning to myself, Aunt Hyeryeong tilted her head in puzzlement, but she picked up where she had left off.
"NG keeps sending gestures meant to soften our impression of them. Watching that, I'd say they still think there's an angle left to work, but we have no intention of approaching them first. Grand Blue isn't wanting for anything, even without collaborating with NG. And Suseong and NG seem to be thinking of withdrawing from the Phase Power generation business."
"Withdrawing? Pulling out of the Phase Power energy market entirely?"
"Domestically, yes. Proof they didn't take the threat from our side as an empty one. Honestly, competing against a side that can supply unlimited volume is a massive loss in itself, so cutting their losses quickly is the sensible play."
With that she gave a small shrug, glancing over the trailer camper studded with transparent reinforced glass, and went on.
"When I met the vice chairman in person to take the camper, there still seemed to be some lingering attachment in his eyes. But his policy, as I said, looks to be keeping a suitable distance—and not even taking an interest in the crumbs that fall from our table."
"Mm. Having someone you don't want to see loitering in front of you is irritating enough on its own. It's nice that they're steering clear of their own accord."
I hated owing anything to people who left a bad taste, and this was Aunt Hyeryeong for you—she'd refused to take the trailer as a gift and paid what it was worth. Hadn't left them so much as a pretext to cozy up on. I told her she'd done well, and the corner of her mouth lifted in a crooked grin.
"Hehe. Have a look inside."
If the interior wasn't to our liking, it would need replacing or repairing, she said, and pushed me in by the back.
I climbed the steps and stepped inside, and warm air came out to meet us. The interior ran on an ocher base, finished in natural wood and genuine leather.
Not a young person's taste. It felt aimed at that delicate buffer between one's twenties and one's forties—fresh, and yet weighty, the two sitting well together.
A good four meters across and two and a half high, the trailer spent top-grade finishes on a generous interior, lavish enough to stand beside a five-star hotel. It was built on two levels. Downstairs there was a dining room, a theater room, a lounge for drinks, and a high-end bath; upstairs, the space was divided into two bedrooms, a dressing room, and a place to rest—living quarters enough that seven people could stay without trouble.
Windows lined both floors, and someone had worked some trick on the glass: a remote could dial its transparency up or down. I liked that. It meant no one outside could see in.
Miho and Darky tore around the interior in a frenzy, too busy sightseeing to stop, and Aunt Hyeryeong, looking with me, wore the face of someone who hadn't expected a hotel-class trailer camper to amount to quite this much.
"The interior alone must have cost a ridiculous amount."
"The vehicle by itself was two billion won, they said. Add the interior and it's a little over three billion. I'd thought it was expensive, but at this level, that kind of money makes sense."
Even granting we wouldn't use it once the mansion was finished, at this level it seemed worth taking out now and then, when we felt like getting away.
Watching Miho bounce up and down on the king-size bed, I asked.
"How do power and water work for the camper?"
"It uses a mid-sized energy panel. They say you could run the power at maximum for five years without strain. Water supply and wastewater treatment are both fully installed."
I hadn't thought she could get her hands on a camper of this caliber so quickly. Aunt Hyeryeong's knack for getting things done struck me all over again.
