The Western Mountain (2)
"Franc! Hold up!"
We were making for the western mountain when Spatial Perception snagged on a single trail, and I brought Franc to a halt the instant I caught it. She flinched at the shout. In that same breath I threw up a Blue Space Wall she could set down on, and she landed on it as if she had been waiting for exactly that.
I sprang from the hollow of her collarbone—my reserved seat by now—and stared hard at the long, narrow scar drawn through the water like a single stroke.
The trees that made a submerged forest of the bottom leaned, nearly all of them, at a slant toward the east. Only in one place did a handful of trunks bend the other way, broken toward the west. Someone might ask what that proved. Couldn't they have snapped that way by chance? But every tree inside the range of my Spatial Perception had been driven east by the torrent, and only those few, clustered in a single spot, bent unnaturally west. That broken section was precisely the shape you would get if the tip of Baekcheong's body had struck trees already leaning east and dragged on past them.
Set the trail against the body I had sensed through Spatial Perception, and the width and the depth matched that bulk so closely I could see how the mark had been made, as clearly as if I were watching a recording. Something had seized Baekcheong around the head and was hauling it through the water at speed. As the western mountain drew near and the water grew shallower, they couldn't hold their height. Their pace slackened, and the tip of Baekcheong's body began to scrape the bottom. Trees already canted east by the land-tsunami's current were struck by that hulking mass and snapped west, and when the impact traveled up through the torso, those somethings rose in a hurry so the body would no longer drag along the floor.
That was how the trail had been left.
"The trees bent westward point precisely at the western mountain."
Franc had been listening to my guess, and she must have found the trail I meant. She stared down into the water spread beneath her feet, then lifted her gaze to the mountain.
Why would some third party—creatures I couldn't identify—have taken a dying Baekcheong? I couldn't even guess whether they had killed it and carried the corpse, or dragged it off still alive. We were already bound for the western mountain, and a trail that had planted itself square in our path was pointing the same way. It nagged at me.
Either way, follow the mountain that trail was indicating, and we would see Baekcheong again.
"Let's drop the air-walking. From here we move as quietly as we can."
"If anything enters the range of my Phase Power detection, I will tell you at once."
"I'm counting on you."
"So what's my job, Boss?"
"For now, just sit tight. If a fight breaks out later, turn into a breastplate for me."
"Aye, sir."
No telling what was waiting up ahead. We would have to move with every sense on edge. After finding Baekcheong's trail I braced myself for a fight, and from then on we traveled by Space Leaping alone—one leap, ten seconds of rest, another leap—hoarding TP as best we could while we pressed toward the western mountain.
The mountain we had set as our destination swelled without limit the closer we came. My sense of distance went haywire. Ignore the ground, and the peak seemed right under my nose. Take the ground in with it, and I still couldn't see the mid-slope, let alone the foot.
"It's honestly enormous..."
"Yes. Even seeing it again, it is immense."
Before long the western mountain filled the view so completely that I had to turn my head left and right just to find the horizon and the sky. It was so vast it didn't look like a mountain at all, but like the earth itself surging up into the heavens—that cognitive dissonance, the sense of the land folding at a right angle.
By then the water had kept falling until it was no longer even fifty meters deep. Land and trees began poking their heads above the surface here and there, and without exception aberrants huddled together in those spots. In truth they were special stages where death matches were underway, but anyway. Whether it was the environment or something else, most of the living ones were Mid-High Rank Variants, with the occasional High-Rank Variant or Mid-Rank Variant among them, and of those, reptile types overwhelmingly dominated. Amphibians came next. Mammals were almost nowhere to be seen, and only a few birds remained.
If Baekcheong had passed anywhere near here, those things wouldn't be lounging around so intact. They looked far too at ease...
"I failed to notice while I was a giant, but there are a great many of the snake and lizard kinds. As I thought, this must be a place tied to the Dragon God, or to Baekcheong."
"Yeah... Ah. A Toxin Black Alligator."
I was turning over what might have dragged Baekcheong off, how it had passed through here, what the situation had been, when a peculiar alligator caught my eye. Thirteen meters long, black as a night sky from snout to tail, it had eyes of pure scarlet and yellow fluid oozing from the gaps between its scales. The ground around it was rotting black. I remembered the thing because, of all aberrants short of the Highest-Rank Variants, it boasted the most expensive bounty. The compound extracted from its venom sac was supposedly a treatment for cellular mutation, and absurdly pricey. Take down one of these and you matched what a decent small-to-mid-sized raid team made on a single deployment, or so I'd heard.
"...Let's take it."
My sister's nagging—bring back byproducts from anything that pays—came back to me, and I moved to bring the thing down. Franc must have remembered the same lecture. She chuckled behind me. For some reason my face went hot, and I found myself making excuses.
"It's not that money's the issue! We need to show that Grand Blue handles rare materials like that too!"
"Yes. You need not say it. I know."
The Toxin Black Alligator was a Peak-Rank Variant. I simply overlapped an amber Space Wall with its neck and parted head from body, and the bulk convulsed in fine spasms. Yellow fluid sprayed in every direction each time the headless black alligator twitched, and it looked a little too threatening, so I waited for the spasms to stop. Darky poked his little head out of my pocket, eyed the decapitated aberrant, and worked his lips in a small mutter.
"Knew it. Boss is the Reaper, yup."
"...What reaper."
"Heard the Western Reaper's all in black, and when he kills a target he takes the head off sideways, sir. Tool's different, but Boss is black too, and that one died with its neck cut, so Boss is the Reaper..."
"Shut up."
"Heh."
Darky's words called up the Reaper I had seen at the National Museum. I looked like that thing? Grumbling under my breath, I approached the Toxin Black Alligator once its convulsions had ceased.
On the patch of ground where it had been, not a single other aberrant remained. A few bone fragments lay scattered, and pools of blood had formed here and there. Looked like this one had eaten everything else. I'd heard the yellow fluid slicked over its hide was a hemolytic toxin. Safe to touch? I raised a mana aura to shield my hand, kicked Physical Reinforcement into gear, and readied a Healing Wave. Then I set a finger on a scale the yellow fluid hadn't touched and opened a portal into Subspace Storage.
The moment it went in I fired the Healing Wave and pulled out a towel to wipe my hand. Behind me, Franc was grinning the way you grin at a cute animal.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Because it is plain that Seoha cares for Lady Siha."
I didn't particularly feel like making excuses, so I just turned my head.
After that I hunted down anything that looked like it would pay, stacking the corpses neatly in Subspace Storage, and killed the ones carrying Phase Stones so I could claim those too. On a whim I tried shoving a living aberrant into the subspace, and something blocked it. It wouldn't go in.
KWOOOAAARGH!
The thing—some cross between a wild boar and an alligator—gaped its maw at me and roared. I sheared its neck off with a Mana Riser, tucked it into the subspace, and let out a sigh of regret. If living creatures could go in, I had meant to use the subspace as a means of transport. Shame. I looked through the portal at the aberrant corpses packed on the other side, then closed the entrance.
I had filled half of Subspace Storage with Peak-Rank Variant corpses. At this rate even my sister wouldn't scold me anymore for blowing through expensive weapons and armor. Beaming, Franc and I pressed on toward the western mountain, wary of our surroundings once more.
The snow line—the boundary between bare ground and the eternal snow—was just beginning to flicker into view. We couldn't have far left. The western mountain was truly vast. And a civilization existed there.
I couldn't see it with my own eyes, but Franc said a great many stone-built structures were visible along the mountain's foot. Pressing any closer seemed like a poor decision, so we hid ourselves in a nearby forest. If Baekcheong had come back to its senses, a straight approach would give us away at once through Phase Power detection.
"The forms call the architecture of the Maya to mind. Buildings made of nothing but stone. Stone cut and stacked, carvings marking something... I can see pyramid-shaped altars as well."
I turned my gaze the way Franc was looking and strained my eyes, but all that happened was Mana Vision flaring up out of nowhere. Nothing resolved into anything I could make out. The distance between us and the western mountain easily exceeded a hundred kilometers, and yet Franc had picked out buildings—her eyesight was astonishing. And the mountain itself had grown so huge that seeing its outline meant tilting my head back or turning it side to side. My jaw just hung open.
I let out a small sigh and checked the surrounding terrain once more. The land around the western mountain was rugged enough to be called a range without shame. Near where Franc and I were hiding, every valley held standing water, and the peaks jutted up like islands. The ground adjacent to the mountain itself was a comparatively flat, broad grassland. The elevation here must have been considerable. My ears felt faintly stuffed, and the trees looked like high-alpine growth—narrow leaves, long-developed roots. The forest had a slightly barren feel, yet the trees stood tall enough to hide Franc's prone body without difficulty.
And the decisive clue. I took in a trail where something thick and heavy had been dragged, pointing toward the western mountain. That trail was the proof that convinced me Baekcheong was there.
"How widely are the buildings spread?"
"They seem spread evenly across the whole of the mountain where the eternal snow does not reach. Some places are hidden by the trees and hard to see... That mountain is surely ruled by the race that built those structures."
"The place Nuhodi lived was built of stone mixed with wood. A city raised from stone alone..."
Franc closed her mouth and let a silence hang, then narrowed her eyes and spoke, looking at me where I stood on her forearm.
"It troubles me that no living creatures are moving about."
"The buildings don't feel abandoned, right?"
"Right."
"Then they're nocturnal. Obviously."
"Ah. Um."
I turned from Franc—she wore the look of someone who had just been struck with a hammer—and wondered what we ought to do now.
Right then, she said, the Phase Power signatures inside her detection range numbered over four hundred. I didn't know whether the edge of that range touched the mountain or fell short of it, but that was the count of creatures on the straight line between us and the western mountain ahead. They were still entering and leaving the range, so the number swung wildly, but roughly four hundred. A cautious look around via Space Leaping just now had shown most of them to be aberrants from Mid-High Grade to High Grade. Given that, the things living on that mountain had to be treated as Mid-Rank on average at the baseline, with a great many of them High-Rank Variants.
The masters of those buildings lived by hunting aberrants. That much was obvious. A civilized people wouldn't hunt them one-on-one. They would swarm a target, and might take prey of a higher grade that way—and while they hunted, even the weaker ones would consume Phase Power along with the rest and climb in rank. The result was a population holding a brutal average of Mid-Rank. The elephant-men who had lived on Mount Elephantros had mostly hunted Mid-Low Rank Variants, and in keeping with that, the weakest among the elephant-men themselves had been Mid-Low Rank Variants. That lent weight to the guess I was making now. The Flauvis of the Floating Sky Islands were the same. Set aside Hiarid's sisters, who had guarded the temple, and both the pegasi they worked and the ones that flew up to the main island had their weakest individuals at roughly the same grade as their prey. The things living on the western mountain ought to be read the same way.
"All right. We wait until night. We wait, confirm what kind of things live there, and if any come out to hunt after dark, we grab a few of them and dig the information out with mental manipulation."
"Ah. With Darky to interpret, we will be able to speak with them as well!"
"Nnngh?"
The little guy had been nodding off in my jacket pocket. Hearing his name, he poked a sleepy head out and looked at Franc. I pressed a finger down on that head and told him to just keep sleeping. He was sleeping a lot more than before, and that worried me a little. He'll be fine.
I switched on the Certifier and checked the clock set to Phase World time. Ten in the morning. It was winter, and the days were short. Figure about seven hours until sunset. Until then I would train Mana Sieve control and practice keeping watch on the surroundings through Spatial Perception.
A rustle, a creak, a heavy thud. Franc turned over as well, lay back looking at the sky, closed her eyes, and whispered.
"Then I shall practice Minimum."
"Minimum?"
"The esoteric art of miniaturization. Nuhodi told me that with esoteric arts as well, the stronger one's cognition, the more powerfully the effect manifests, and the longer it lasts. I am, after all, a little more accustomed to English than to Korean."
"Got it."
Her Korean was already at a native speaker's level, and yet... Lying at ease, Franc gathered both hands neatly over her stomach and began to mumble.
That's the concept of the esoteric art. A hundred and eight characters.
"Minimize."
⟨ Minimum ⟩
"Whoa?!"
After muttering for a long while, Franc spoke that single word in a voice that seemed to quiver up from her chest, and white light poured softly from every inch of her body. Then her body rippled, a sound like a toilet flushing rolled out, and she shrank—just a little. That had to be nearly a ten percent reduction.
"Phew..."
"That's incredible. You lost about eight meters!"
Her clothes hadn't shrunk to match, so she was half-buried in fabric that had stayed as it was, but the change itself startled me. Was sorcery really this tremendous? She seemed pleased that I was surprised. Franc smiled shyly and opened her mouth.
"Hehe... I am still unskilled, but if I keep practicing until I am used to it, I will be able to become small again, the way I was before."
"How long does it last right now?"
"...One minute."
"One minute?"
The words had barely left her before a glug and a slosh ran through her, and Franc snapped straight back to her original size. She lifted a hand to hide her face, embarrassed. I snorted a laugh and comforted her.
"Still, you succeeded, didn't you? Keep using it and the duration will stretch, and you'll shrink further. All that's left is to wait."
"Th-that is true, but..."
"Anyway, it looks like it burns a lot of TP. What vanished looks like about a fifth."
"Oh, you matched it exactly? A single use consumes roughly fourteen million TP."
The Phase Power consumption was outrageous. I made a face at the amount spent, but Franc paid it no mind and began chanting the incantation again. While she practiced Minimum, keeping her TP from dropping below a third, I raised a Space Wall in her place and kept surveying the surroundings.
Then lunchtime came, and Franc called to me where I stood watch, insisting we eat.
"This time, lunch is going to be a proper meal!"
"It's a hassle... Can't we just eat something quick?"
"No!"
I clicked my tongue at how firm she was, and from beside me she urged me to take out the cookware and the ingredients for fried rice. Seeing how eager she was, I had no choice. I did as told, brought out the cookware, trimmed the vegetables, and we ate vegetable fried rice. Honestly, if I had had to do it alone I wouldn't have bothered. But with Franc stuck to my side, teaching me each step... well. Once in a while, this sort of thing wasn't so bad.
I had made rather a lot. Darky and I split the fried rice, and Franc and I kept watch while trading this and that bit of idle nonsense. During the watch, red lizards, white alligators, vivid sky-blue snake aberrants and the like approached where we were, spotted Franc, and fled as if their tails would tear off. It happened several times. I chased every one of them down, killed them, and stuffed the corpses into the subspace.
One was a grotesque snake about seven meters long, with only two forelegs and a head shaped like a harpoon. I put it in the subspace and came back to find Franc—shrunk by about the size of her own head—waving to welcome me.
"Oh? You got even smaller?"
"This time I misspoke only once while reciting the incantation! If I can chant it smoothly and cleanly, without a single mistake, I believe I can shrink still further from here!"
I stroked the bridge of her nose and told the slightly excited Franc she had done well. She smiled shyly and rolled up her loose sleeves and trouser cuffs. Shrunk to seventy meters, she held that size for ten minutes before returning to normal.
"I will take the watch now, so please rest a little as well, Seoha. You will need to replenish your strength if we are to move at night."
"Suppose I should."
It was two in the afternoon. In three hours Franc's TP would fully recover, and the sun would be setting too. I would do as she said.