The Sabi Race (5)
Alkema had not gone far, forging through the snow, before she glanced back—and, finding that Franc and I had vanished, began scanning the white waste around her in a fluster. The high-tier subspecies padding at her heels, a Toxin Black Alligator, rasped out a Kshaaak! She jumped, then urged her Delaike on and plowed ahead once more. That Delaike had nerves of steel. A high-tier subspecies could bellow in its ear and the beast would not so much as flinch.
Of the three Toxin Black Alligators we had taken around Mt. Veltical, two had been Peak-Rank Variants—thirteen meters of reptile, yellow fluid seeping from the gaps in their scales and from every joint. Only this one had been a High-Rank Variant. The Peak-Rank pair could not be raised on my TP, so I had disposed of them. Far smaller at six meters, and leaking a paler yellow, this one alone had lucked into survival. When I evolved it into a high-tier subspecies its length stayed the same, but the pitch-black scales rose into angular plates like armor, and from every seam between them dripped a deep green fluid sharp enough to sting the nose.
I had laid a mental compulsion on it after the evolution and then, more or less, left it alone. Before I knew it, the thing had made itself something like second-in-command of the high-tier subspecies unit. And the commander? Franc, obviously.
Ever since we disappeared, whenever Alkema slowed, the Toxin Black Alligator started threatening her from behind—Kyaak! Kshiiik!—driving her to hurry. Unable to defy the vicious creature at her back, she wore a face on the verge of tears, soothing the Delaike and urging it on, leading all thirty-six of the high-tier subspecies up the mountain.
I was lying across Franc's thighs, watching through Spatial Perception as the alligator put her through the wringer. (Her cleavage was far too comfortable—I was going to fall asleep in it—so I had come back out.) Franc, who had been watching the summit, looked down at me as if something had just occurred to her, and her voice came, soundless.
"Have you settled on what you intend to do with those aberrants, once Baekcheong has been disposed of?"
"Not yet. They swear absolute loyalty to me, sure, but they're beasts, plain and simple. Take them out with me and I'm uneasy—afraid that animal nature of theirs will show itself. The black alligator at the head of the pack drips lethal venom straight out of its hide, which makes it worse. If it doesn't work out, well..."
I'll just have to kill them. What else is there?
"At this pace, though, they'll be up here before long."
"Yes. I had wondered whether that white lizard's pace might falter without Seoha and myself, but the black alligator is conducting matters admirably."
They were moving faster than when we had followed behind, and far more frightened. When it came to driving someone on, the stick really did beat the carrot. Not that I had ever handed out any carrots.
The ridge was a barren yellow-brown mountain of rock, not a blade of grass anywhere, though now and then a thread of water spilled from a crevice. Whenever the path brought a stream into view, Alkema and the others wet their throats and pressed on. By the time the elevation reached about thirteen kilometers, the snow that had lain in scattered patches was gone entirely. Clear of the eternal snow, we looked down on a sea of clouds, and it felt as though we had climbed back onto the Floating Sky Islands.
Around then, strangely shaped aberrants began to appear, one by one, inside the range of my Spatial Perception. The weakest were Mid-High Grade. Most were High Grade. Now and then a Superior showed itself.
As for the shape of them—how to put it. A body like several dark-brown maggots crudely stitched, end to end, into one long lumpen chain, with wings of bone and tentacle and membrane hung off it. Two pairs of arms like wooden skewers jutted from each side of the torso. Seen at night, they were hideous enough to stop an ordinary heart. No eyes. No nose. The mouth was a lamprey's sucker, bristling with countless sharp spines; get bitten by that, and not a drop of fluid would be left in you.
Mid-High Grade ones had scarlet bodies. High Grade ones were brown. Up to there, I could—if I bent over backwards a hundred times—squint and call them earthworms. The Superior grade was the worst of all. Dark brown, the skin wrinkled like a worm dried dead under a scorching sun, scabbing up like the bark of a dead tree and oozing pus in strings. The instinctive revulsion was enormous. Even Franc, unmoved by the most grotesque sights, furrowed her brow. That said everything.
Four to seven meters long, they seethed in the rock crevices like actual maggots, and one by one they began to squirm at the noise Alkema's group made climbing the broken ground. Waking to vibration rather than sound? Well, they had no eyes, nose, or ears, annelids that they were. Of course their senses would work differently.
Kiiigieeeesek...
A faint monstrous cry reached us, and then, from crevices all over the rocks, easily two hundred of the things took to the air, beating wings a demon might have owned. They watched Franc and me from a distance, hesitated, and then wheeled, shooting like arrows toward Alkema and the others crawling along the ground. Brainless-looking creatures, and yet they seemed to know on instinct that coming near Franc would get them smashed. Or was it me? I had been opening and closing my fist, killing intent rolling off me in a clear promise that I would not let them off if they came closer. Either way, they had apparently decided the comparatively easier mark—Alkema and the high-tier subspecies unit—was the better prey.
The foremost winged maggot gaped its maw to nearly twice the girth of its own body, meaning to swallow Alkema and the Delaike in a single bite.
Wind Blade
The green blade of wind she flung in the same instant sheared its wings, and it dropped. It slammed into a boulder and burst apart, thrashing out a revolting display of ruptured flesh, only to be devoured in a heartbeat by the high-tier subspecies that rushed in.
"Ugh. They're eating that."
Watching the pulped meat get sucked into the maw of Rubain—gold and primary colors grown vivid since the thing became a high-tier subspecies—turned my stomach. A moment later the battle proper was on: two hundred winged maggots against thirty-seven aberrants, the high-tier subspecies and Alkema together.
The maggots shrieked and came down in a savage dive—Kyaaaaaak! Kushaaak!—and the high-tier subspecies answered with venomous stingers, sprays of venom, and water-attribute rounds fired like bullets. Maggots struck by the poison could not even beat their wings. They convulsed, fell, and were eaten alive by the subspecies that had no ranged attacks of their own. The maggots' own strikes, by contrast, did not land nearly so well on the unit. There was the gap in grade, for one thing, and the thirty-six besides Alkema shifted their response according to ability type, while the winged maggots did nothing but charge in blind.
When the two hundred had dropped to a hundred and thirty in under five minutes, they seemed to decide this would not do. They flew back up the mountain, then returned with boulders several meters across clutched in those stick-like arms, and began dropping them on the high-tier subspecies.
"What. So they do have brains that can think?"
"So it would seem... and yet they look as though they live by instinct alone."
The amphibians lashed out long tongues and knocked the boulders off their paths. The reptiles—alligators, lizards, snakes—dodged at speed and answered with venom projectiles, or by launching glittering scales. Those that failed to get clear screamed and went bouncing away with the rocks, then scrambled back up the slope and threw themselves into the fight again. A several-ton boulder dropped from hundreds of meters up was more than even a high-tier subspecies could take unscathed. Where the stone struck, scales and hide shattered and split, raw red flesh showed through, and blood ran in strings.
Amid that melee, Alkema's work stood out sharply. Hauling heavy stone into the air had slowed the maggots, and the slowed ones became targets for her wind blades. The bodies resisted the blades well enough. The wings did not. Cut, and they fell—and not in a clean drop, either. They came down with the boulders. I'll spare you the rest.
Whether she was making up for a slow rate of fire with accuracy, the blades that left her hand once every five seconds lacked the power to end a life in a single stroke. They were more than enough, though, to ground a creature, or to lock its body rigid with pain so that it dropped. As if that were the whole of her aim, she did not panic. She knocked them out of the sky one by one, methodically. Before many minutes had passed, the winged maggots fled in a frantic scramble back the way they had come. Of the two hundred that had attacked, only about twenty made it back alive and whole.
Kyaooo~! Kishishishik!
While the high-tier subspecies roared their victory and fell on the scattered flesh as if it were a banquet, Alkema began bustling about as well. Curious what she was doing, I looked closer and found her gathering the Phase Stones that had fallen here and there. She even split the winged maggots open with wind to pull the stones out of their bodies.
Kushik!
A snake—vivid red, black spots studded all over its body—apparently did not care for that. It slid up beside her and rasped like metal, a yellow tongue flicking. Alkema flinched, pointed up at the two of us hanging in the sky, and shouted.
= "Th-this shall be offered to your master!"
...Shiiik.
The black-spotted red snake, which had been staring holes through her with bright yellow eyes, quietly turned its head and gulped down a winged maggot as big as its own body. A few that had been busily scavenging flesh hesitated at her cry, then sidled up and spat Phase Stones out of their maws with little thumps. They had been about to swallow the things on the sly, and her words had given them a scare.
Kiiiiieeeek...
I had been watching the banquet when the air of a second round began to gather. The maggots that had made it back alive were apparently dragging in mother, father, big sister, big brother, and the little siblings besides—a swarm easily three times the last, blackening the sky as it came on. The screams, the sort that would give you a nervous breakdown if you kept listening, came free of charge.
"An unpleasant sound."
"It's grating on me, too."
I was shuddering at a noise as nerve-scraping as fingernails dragged down a chalkboard when Alkema and the subspecies legion tensed and dropped into a combat stance of their own.
Kkeueeeeek! Kyererelek!! Kkyoeeeeeen!!
Things that hideous, and making sounds that irritating on top of it—I really could not stand this. I generated a mass of Mana Bullets, Mk1, and hurled them indiscriminately into the incoming swarm. Set to fly three or four times faster than the wind Alkema fired, and to detonate the instant they touched anything, the Mana Bullets began erasing the six hundred winged maggots in a flash.
Dudududung—dudududududu...! Kihek?! Kehehek! Kyaohu, kyahuk-kyahuk!
A few that lucked into survival amid all that flailed and tried to flee. Afraid they would only bring more, I erased their wings and their heads with an amber Wall of Space. They sprayed red blood and crashed into the rock mountain, reduced to chunks of meat. In the space of a breath or two I had annihilated nearly six hundred winged maggots, and Alkema and the high-tier subspecies unit stared up at me, dumbstruck.
When I met that gaze, the Toxin Black Alligator snapped out of it. It roared, jolting the others back to their senses, then glared at Alkema until the march started moving again.
Even after two assaults, the winged maggots kept appearing at twenty-minute intervals to come after Alkema's group. The ceaseless screaming finally blew my temper. I used Spatial Perception to find where they were hiding and fired Mana Bullets like a madman, raising enough hell to reshape the ridge itself. They say a madman only behaves once he meets someone madder. The winged maggots rose as one and fled to the far side of the mountain.
Kehu? Kyau, kkeuge!
"..."
Even as it fled, one of them turned its head and shrieked at me. The feeling I got was not that it was avoiding me out of fear. It was avoiding me because I was filthy. The rage that hit me was enough to snap my mind in half. The thought that I had been mocked by a single-celled invertebrate had me grinding my teeth, ready to chase them down and kill every last one—when Franc's large hand came carefully, caught hold of me, and guided me into her cleavage.
"Please, calm yourself. You have grown far too agitated. There now—draw a slow breath..."
"Hoo. Hooo."
I buried my face in skin of incomparable, intoxicating softness, mastering the anger, and took in what was happening around us. Alkema had the Delaike leaping between copper-red rocks, gathering the Phase Stones that had fallen. The high-tier subspecies, cowed by my rampage, glanced this way as they licked up chunks of the winged leeches' flesh and filled their bellies. Scared of what I had done, and yet wholly absorbed in stuffing themselves—it was so absurd, so ridiculous, that the anger rising in my chest evaporated all at once. How hungry did they have to be, to act like that? Come to think of it, I had not fed them anything since taming them.
Once they had gorged themselves and started loafing, the second-in-command Toxin Black Alligator barked a Kashishik!!, gathering the ones sprawled on their bellies and the ones wandering nearby, then growled at Alkema—who had collected every Phase Stone—to get moving.
= "W-we will depart."
Kshu!
Too full to want to move, the rainbow chameleon lay on its belly and grumbled kau, kauu at the alligator in open defiance. Curious what the Toxin Black Alligator would do about that, I watched with my own two eyes. It made no sound. It offered no threat, and it did not even shift its weight—it simply drew closer to the chameleon, slowly. The rainbow chameleon seemed to find the venom-plated thing's staring approach unpleasant. It wore an uneasy look, and then, the moment the alligator set itself as if to lunge, it startled and scrambled backward.
Having lost the contest of wills, the rainbow chameleon aberrant hid its discontent, rose quietly, and started walking. The others glanced at the Toxin Black Alligator and moved forward as well. That one was sharp. Hard to call it a low-intelligence aberrant.
"That one's not bad."
"You mean the black alligator?"
"Yeah."
Satisfied that everyone was on the move, the Toxin Black Alligator turned and returned to the rear of the formation. Perhaps because of the green fluid flowing over its scales, the other aberrants would not even step where it had walked, and nothing tried to come near it—as if a force field had been spread around its body.
"It finds work that needs doing without being told. Looks pretty useful."
During the maggot assault it had sprayed venom from a hole inside its maw and hit seven shots out of ten. Ordinary impacts it simply ignored—tough enough not to so much as budge when struck by a boulder the size of its own body. When a fight ended, it assessed the situation first, checked whether anyone was dead or hurt, and only then tore into the corpses. Even while eating, it never neglected to watch the surroundings. Once other high-tier subspecies, interested in what it was doing, started imitating the way it hurried Alkema along, it simply took the rearmost place in the formation and held it, as if guarding its comrades. The makings of a leader, visible even to my eye, which knows little of the art of handling people. That said it all.
"It certainly possesses a sense of fellowship, and an awareness of itself as leader of the pack."
"If it weren't for the venom flowing between those scales, I could have taken it along and used it as a guard dog for the mansion that's nearly finished... a guard gator."
"That would be difficult, I fear. Even aberrants that wield venom keep their distance from it."
"Right?"
A bit of a shame.
Fourteen hours after we had started up Mt. Veltical, the sun went down, and both Alkema and the high-tier subspecies slowed markedly. To the left was a sheer cliff. The right was nearly as steep, and even the so-called path had long stretches where you had to leap from rock to rock. One false step and you would fall tens of kilometers. The march slowed on its own. The path was about three meters wide—not especially narrow for a human—but plenty of the high-tier subspecies were close to three meters themselves now.
A great many aberrants are said to have night-sight, infravision, but even with an ability like that, a brutal stone mountain is nothing you can cross as if it were flat ground. Or was that only true of the high-tier subspecies? The Delaike and Alkema might have possessed ultravision, the ability above it—day or night, their movement hardly differed. By day they had poured sweat under the subspecies' urging. Now they proceeded at their leisure, waiting for the high-tier subspecies to catch up—ah.
Charrrruk. Kieeeee...
The red snake with the black spots finally lost its footing, tumbled down a slope of nearly seventy degrees, and vanished beyond the range of Spatial Perception in an instant. Watching a giant snake more than ten meters long get swallowed by the dark, the others seemed to take fright. Their movements grew even more cautious, and their pace slowed further.
Leaving it behind did not sit right, and hauling it along was a hassle. Even if I ended up killing them later, for now I felt I ought to take responsibility. Reluctantly, I decided we would rest until dawn, dropped to the front of the formation, and halted them.
= "L-Lord Seoha?!"
Addressed like that, it almost sounded like a Sabi name. The Toxin Black Alligator seemed to notice I had appeared in front; from the rear rank I could see it rearing up on its hind legs alone, looking this way.
"Rest here. Once it's light, we move again."
= "Y-yes!"
I launched myself down the mountain along the trail the fallen one had left, looking for it, and found it dead. Its luck had been spectacularly bad. It had been skewered on jagged rock as if on a spit, and then a boulder the size of a small building, come down with it, had burst its head. Ah—this one had not been a Physical Reinforcement type. Water-attribute, wasn't it?
The moon was hidden behind cloud, and the night was pitch-black, yet even so a murky, livid Phase Power welled from the spotted snake's corpse, shimmering before my eyes like heat haze. Whenever I see it, it looks like a wave of grief, mourning aberrants and ability users who have lost their lives. I shook off the needlessly sentimental mood. I started to stow the corpse in Subspace Storage, then simply seized it by the tail and leapt back up to where the subspecies were resting. Carry out the body of something I had evolved with my own ability, and if someone decided to study it, the nuisance that followed might not be small. Better to toss it to these things as feed.
I threw the one with its head and body burst open in places down among the high-tier subspecies. They brought their noses close, sniffed, watched my reaction, and slowly began to tear into it. Even while every other one of them ripped at the spotted snake's corpse, the Toxin Black Alligator only stared at the snake as it gradually disappeared.