Chapter 370: A Temporary Return, and Putting Affairs in Order (5)
By the time Hwayeon and Yeongeun got off work and came looking for me, the moon had already climbed high.
Night had fallen, and still the mansion site burned under floodlights, the crew buried in the last push of the work. Money really does fix everything. At the groundbreaking they had talked about finishing in mid-June; that date had then been shoved hard forward to March, and when I checked earlier in the day it had moved again — early to mid-February, they said. Early February meant the place would be done right as winter break ended, which pleased me enough that I played the open-handed lord and handed out bonus envelopes by way of encouragement.
Once my lovers had all washed up in the camper and gathered, I raised the idea of going to India to see the subspace ability user there, on the grounds that I wanted a subspace ability of my own.
"……You're going yourself, Seoha?" Hwayeon asked.
"Why wouldn't I?"
"Don't go — have her come to you. If you move in person, the Indian government might have a fit."
"What am I, a plague? A whole country throwing a fit over a simple visit."
I furrowed my brow at Yeongeun for saying something that stung, and Franc, wearing that soft smile of hers, added her own objection to my going to India in person.
"Seoha's renown has reached the point where even moving quietly is impossible. You may think you are going only to meet a single ability user, but the Indian government might whip itself into a nervous frenzy, spinning every speculation imaginable about your visit."
Franc, not you too……!
"Aren't the two of you laying it on a bit thick? I'm not some god of plagues, and I don't go around wrecking things indiscriminately the way that nickname of mine suggests."
"Whoa, whoa, calm down. Of course we know you wouldn't do anything like that. We know~ It's just that they won't see it that way. And besides…… ahem. Who's going to welcome a time bomb walking into their country?"
"Kah! You went and called me a bomb?!"
"Kyaaang~!"
I strung the smirking, insolent Yeongeun up in empty air on a thick Blue Space Wall.
I paused a moment, considering how to punish this impudent young lady, then spread her limbs wide with the Blue Space Wall until she lay exposed in the air, settled myself across her stomach, and spoke.
"So what am I supposed to do? This Rawar is B-Class too. Can I really just order her to come and go as I please?"
"One could not summon her as one summons a subordinate. But if a suitable reward were offered, I should think there is no reason she could not come."
"After she was mentioned in passing at the Asumpfre Sunken Ruins, I gathered what I could on her, and she doesn't seem to be treated particularly well in India. Given her situation now, coaxing her into a visit with a reasonably attractive offer shouldn't be difficult."
"Why? Someone with a subspace ability ought to be useful in all sorts of ways, no? Oh — is her subspace small, so she can't store much?"
"No. I heard her storage capacity, at her present B-Class, exceeds 0.1 cubic kilometers. The problem isn't the capacity. It's the method of storage."
Zero-point-one cubic kilometers…… so she stored by volume? That was 10,000,000 cubic meters, which put each side at roughly 470 meters. I was wondering whether some constraint on putting things in and taking them out had left her in a difficult position, when Yeongeun, groaning beneath me, turned her head toward Hwayeon and snapped.
"You could just say she isn't trusted or relied on because of her ability. Why make it so complicated?"
"Ah. They suspect she might steal, so they won't trust her with their goods?"
"Yes. Had she been the boss of a raid team, that much might not have been a problem, but the report described her as a born junior-soldier type — accustomed to taking orders, not to giving them. Because of that her communication is clumsy, and she often draws needless misunderstanding and suspicion."
I stroked the cheek and neck of Yeongeun, who had been reduced to my personal cushion and was still squirming, then slipped a hand between her legs and teased her there, and the groaning shifted into whimpers.
"So if we pay a suitable price to the raid team she belongs to, we could invite her without much difficulty……."
"There's no need to pay! Just send a polite invitation in Seoha's name…… ngh. An invitation is all it takes. If she refuses, we'll have a legitimate excuse to visit, and if she accepts, we won't have to go to her! Start handing out this and that every time you call someone, and all you'll do is set a tiresome precedent of having to prepare gifts whenever you invite anyone later!"
Her face had gone red as a ripe persimmon under my indecent caresses. As if Hwayeon's caution frustrated her, she clamped my wandering hand between her thighs and barked the words at her.
"……You're right. My thinking was shortsighted."
"Then I should text my sister and tell her to send Rawar an invitation."
While the thought was fresh, I sent my sister a short message explaining the situation and asking her to invite Rawar. Yeongeun kept squirming as I typed, so I smacked her springy thigh. She flinched and tried to curl in on herself, then turned her head to look at me and started pleading.
"Seohaaa. I was wrooong~ Forgive me just this once~!"
"I'm a time bomb, aren't I? I've exploded, so you can take responsibility for setting me off!"
I locked her waist between my legs entirely, reached down to knead her breasts, pinched her side, and tickled the nape of her neck. She flushed scarlet, twisting, gasping, spilling short, ragged breaths.
"Hnnngh! Kyahk!"
Whether it was the tickling or the embarrassment, the foxlike moans she let out as she wriggled were entertaining. Good thing she was a physical reinforcement type. An ordinary woman bearing a grown man's weight in this position would have found it no different from torture.
I undid the buttons of her blazer, pushed her bra up, and was amusing myself tickling those soft, resilient breasts and pinching her nipples when Hwayeon and Franc's conversation reached me.
"There is something I wished to ask. Franc, you obtained the body of a Transcendent-grade aberrant, did you not?"
"Yes."
"What does the body of a Transcendent-grade aberrant feel like? I mean nothing improper by it. I ask only because, if anyone could grasp the difference between an ability user and an aberrant, it would be you."
"Haah! Agh. I—I'm curious about that too~! They say the physical-reinforcement type among aberrants differs from human ability users by as little as one and a half times, and as much as three or four!"
Bound hand and foot to the Blue Space Wall in her dark blue suit, Yeongeun had been reduced by my toying to a disheveled state, pale breasts and provocative panties on display, sweat beading at her brow — and still she leaned into Hwayeon's question. Tormenting her while she couldn't move was fun, and exciting, but for the sake of the pleasure still to come, perhaps I ought to leave it here.
I climbed down off her, released the Space Wall that had held her, and caught her as she came free. She tucked herself into my arms, set her clothes to rights, and let out a sigh of relief.
"Hmm. I am not certain this is the right expression, but I think it is like the difference between cash and a credit card."
Cash and a credit card……? I was lost, but Hwayeon and Yeongeun wore the look of something having struck home.
"The difference is that big?"
"If a gap like that comes from a difference of that degree……."
"Indeed. Every divergence begins from a single point."
What? What are they talking about? Am I the only one who doesn't get it?
Was there some private bond, some shared understanding, among physical reinforcement ability users? Watching my lovers nod and talk while leaving me out, the frustration only thickened as the seconds passed.
"Don't ice me out. Explain it properly. What do you mean, the difference between cash and a card?"
Displeased at being shut out of whatever they were sharing, I hauled Hwayeon and Yeongeun in by the waist, and they smiled and soothed me.
"So that's what was bothering our Seoha? There, there~."
I was about ready to bite that finger clean off.
"Hehe. You can move Phase Power however you please, Seoha, so Franc's words don't land on you with the same weight."
"That is right. I chose cash and a card as a metaphor for convenience. An ability user's Phase Power remains activated at all times. That does not mean one may spend it as one wishes, whenever one wishes. One must draw, from that activated Phase Power, the force the moment requires, and so the might of a skill rests entirely upon the user's own capacity."
"Think what happens when you pay cash for something. First you have to know the price, then take that much out of your wallet and hand it over, yes? If the bills you have are large, you have to get change, and the more complicated the amount, the more kinds of coins. On top of that you have to check the change is right."
"A card, however, need only be handed over and returned."
"Wait. So an ability user has to calculate how much Phase Power to use — what to add, what to subtract, all of that — before they can spend it? And an aberrant's Phase Power just spends itself, as much as needed, the moment they attack?"
"Wow~ Our Seoha is just so good at summing things up~? That's ri— kyah!"
"You've been treating me like a little kid this whole time! I'll just—!"
I stared in disbelief at Yeongeun, all bright smiles as she tickled under my chin, then irritation flared and I hauled her in by the waist, bent her over my thigh, snatched her wrists, pinned them behind her, and bound them with the Blue Space Wall.
Restrained all over again, she startled and tried to kick, so I spun up my own physical reinforcement, folded her legs back and bound those too, then pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and stuffed it into her mouth.
"Mmphgk?! Mnuh-whuh-muh-huh!"
Arms, legs, and mouth all sealed, she made a miserable face and thrashed as if to demand why it was only her, so I spanked her rear as I answered.
"You've been teasing me this whole time, haven't you?!"
"Mmfhing! Haauung!"
Each time my palm came down it buried itself in the flesh of her ass, and a thick, crisp smack rang out. She shook her head as if to insist that wasn't it, but every time her rear was struck her brows knit and her vaginal muscles clenched — all of it plain through Spatial Perception.
"Your mouth says no, but your body's honest, isn't it? You perverted little lady!"
I put a snap in my wrist, dealt her a few crisp smacks, and lifted my head. Franc and Hwayeon, who had been wearing frankly envious expressions, flinched and belatedly got their faces under control.
"So you're saying just cutting out a few steps in how you use Phase Power makes that much of a difference? Then if Franc explains how to use it, could Hwayeon and Yeongeun get that much stronger too?"
"Even if Franc teaches them, there's the matter of the form Phase Power takes, and I don't imagine it will be as easy as it sounds. It might take a lifetime of effort. Even so, the effort is certainly worth making."
"If Hwayeon and Yeongeun wish it, I will teach them."
"Please."
"Hhuh!"
When Franc began to explain the movement of Phase Power, and the sensation of it moving, I untied Yeongeun. She too wiped the playfulness from her face and fixed on Franc's words with a serious look.
While that passing-on of technique was underway, Miho and Hiarid arrived with Suhan and Sophia, the two of them loaded down with an enormous amount of luggage. I had told them to pass along that we would be living in the trailer camper until the mansion was finished, and they had gone and brought every last thing required for living in a trailer. They had brought news of the mood inside Grand Blue as well.
"Lady Franc's photo is already making the rounds on the Grand Blue company intranet. And there's talk that Master's range of tastes is just enormous. Hehehe."
"What's wrong with my tastes."
"Well, a Miss Slime, a Miss Angel, a fox young lady, a spirit young lady, and now a giant young lady have all been added, haven't they? They say there's even a vote going on over which young lady gets inducted into Master's harem next."
Maybe it was the word harem, but the back of my head began to prickle……
"For the record, the one running the vote is Department Head Kim Pyochung."
"That man, I swear!"
Sophia — who might as well have emptied a refrigerator wholesale — set about filling the camper kitchen's high-end fridge with the ingredients she had hauled in. I was idly watching Suhan place the lovers' luggage here and there through the trailer when Miho called, and I climbed to the second-floor bedroom, where she launched into showing off the pouch-monsters she had captured that day.
I was humming along as she boasted of how hard they had been to catch and how rare they were, when Franc, still in the middle of passing on her technique, came over, tapped lightly on the trailer's roof, and spoke.
"Seoha, would you widen the living room a little? It is rather narrow for practicing technique."
"How much wider?"
"About three times what it is now should suffice, I think."
Three times still wasn't all that large, was it? I stole a glance at how much give the tent covering the place still had, and widened the room as far as it would go. Eight times, more or less? Wide was better than cramped.
My lovers, marveling at a floor a good eight times the living room I had originally made, shifted over and began their training. Hwayeon and Yeongeun stared at the movements Franc demonstrated without so much as blinking. Their focus was ferocious. I could allow it of Hwayeon, an active raid-team boss, but did Yeongeun really need to be that absorbed?
Something in the slightly rigid quality of those movements felt uncanny, so I switched on Mana Vision — and I could see the Phase Power that had been gathered in a single mass inside Franc's body spreading outward in every direction, following the gestures of her hands and the motion of her body.
"That is the end. Would you share your impressions?"
When the demonstration finished, Hwayeon and Yeongeun, cold sweat on their faces, traded words with tension written all over them.
"It was tremendous. Each time you moved, Franc, I felt something that set my body tingling. Had we been enemies, I would have locked up with tension and been unable to move at all."
"Is this what it feels like when a Transcendent-grade handles Phase Power? Back when I was E-Class and first saw a Peak-Rank aberrant, my whole body tingled as if lightning had struck me, but next to this that was nothing."
It couldn't have been otherwise. The Phase Power pouring off Franc had been wrapped around the two of them. I couldn't be sure, but if she had set her mind to it, Hwayeon and Yeongeun might have been squashed flat where they stood. She hadn't released Phase Power outside her body like that when she fought Baekcheong, though. Franc answered at once.
"I spread my Phase Power outside the body so that Hwayeon and Yeongeun might feel it more readily. In truth, releasing it beyond the body in this way consumes a great deal of TP. Best is to draw out only what is needed, when it is needed."
So that was it. Afterward, through an exchange thick with jargon I could barely follow, Hwayeon and Yeongeun tried to copy Franc's movements and bring the Phase Power inside their own bodies to heel.
The next morning I visited the aberrant-biology research team at the temporary institute for the first time in a while, and Dr. Altina greeted me while reading my mood like someone guilty of a crime.
Wondering why, I remembered I hadn't received a single research report since autumn. Dr. Dwight's phase-physics team had reported that their work on Blue Stones was finished and could be put to practical use whenever we liked, and Altina seemed cowed by the comparison, having produced no results of her own.
"How far has the research come?"
"Well…… with Miss Hiarid's help, we succeeded in recording the Phase Power patterns and movements of vocalization, but when it came to applying that and developing it into a technique…… I believe we failed."
If you failed, you failed. What's this 'I believe we failed'?
I stared at Altina as if to tell her to explain in more detail, and she took my hand and led me to her private laboratory. It was my second visit. Unlike last time, when the place had resembled a wastebasket of documents, it was immaculately organized, and only now did it look like a scholar's room. I figured my sister had chewed her out a bit that day. Clearly it had worked.
Dr. Altina went to the blackboard, sketched symbols having to do with some interaction, and began to explain.
"Humans have a specific region of the cerebral cortex that governs the production and comprehension of language. We call it the language center. The language center takes sounds heard from another person, understands them as meaningful language, searches out the corresponding words, decides the form of the sentence, builds the sentence, and converts it into sound."
"Yes. And?"
"It is responsible not only for what the ear hears, but for every domain tied to language — seeing with the eyes, touching with the hands. All we have managed to establish is that Miss Hiarid's speech has nothing whatsoever to do with this language center, nor with Wernicke's area or Broca's area. We have not been able to determine why such a thing is even possible……."
"Hmm. Then, Dr. Altina, do you believe it's impossible to analyze Hiarid's linguistic ability and turn it into a technique?"
"At the present level of phase science and physiology, I would have to answer yes."
They said Altina Meldios was a preeminent authority in the field of aberrant biology — enough that even the headquarters of the World Phase Ability User Association kept an eye on her. If someone of her standing said it was impossible, then it was.
"……."
I sat in the guest chair with my eyes closed, arms folded, a finger tapping, and Dr. Altina kept stealing glances at my face, her expression visibly sunken.
"You remember that the condition for letting you study Hiarid's ova was deciphering her linguistic ability?"
"Uuuh……."
Her face passed disappointment and arrived at despair. Looking at it through Spatial Perception, I could see the dark patches had crept all the way down her cheeks. Makeup covered them, but her skin was rough, and her hair — lustrous and flowing when I first saw her — was dry and brittle. Fatigue piled up to that degree meant she hadn't been loafing and researching halfheartedly.
I called up Healing Touch in my hand and swept it beneath her eyes and across her face. At my touch her eyes went round, color rushed into her cheeks, and she began to fluster. If nothing else, Healing Touch is ruthlessly effective on spots like these. When the dark circles of a shut-in, the dry rough skin, and the swollen lips on the verge of splitting all turned clean, Dr. Altina seemed to realize something. She looked at her cleared face in a hand mirror and marveled.
"The promise still stands. I'll wait until you've deciphered Hiarid's linguistic ability, Dr. Altina."
At the words that followed, the doctor's eyes flew open. Thinking she had been given another chance, her face brightened all at once, and she caught my hand in a voice full of hope and swore an oath.
"Ah — yes! I will certainly live up to your expectations, Chairman……!"
"Before that. Call it a substitute, if you like. There's something I need you to do, starting now."
"……Yes?"