Debuff (1)
By the time the tremors faded and the crushing pressure eased a little, I clawed my way out from between her breasts—and found pitch darkness on every side.
Spatial Perception was as good as dead. I held still, and from somewhere above my head came the sound of Franc swallowing, hard.
"Franc? You okay?"
"I... I am well. Are you hurt anywhere, Seoha?"
Her voice boomed and echoed in the narrow space, hitching just slightly, with a faint tremor that did not belong to her. I climbed up along her chest as I answered.
"I'm fine, thanks to you. But you're hurt, aren't you? I can hear the pain in your voice."
"I am all right. This flesh of mine is that of a Transcendent-grade Aberrant, is it not? I have taken some injury, but it is nothing of consequence."
A lie. Obviously. She was hiding it so I wouldn't worry. I didn't even need to see her face to know.
She was forcing a bright, unhurt voice, but standing there on her chest, I could tell. Every time she spoke, she trembled. Just a little.
I wanted to press her on how badly she was hurt, and then I let it go. What was I supposed to say to her, when she'd taken the blow to protect me? Phase Power wouldn't even stir. Forget skills—I couldn't properly use an ability at all.
The thought that Franc had been hurt in my place brought the regret flooding in first.
I should have been careful the moment that bad feeling hit. The thought that my carelessness had gotten her hurt again made me feel as if I were about to sink under the weight of it.
Damn it. Baekcheong, that snake-headed bastard, had been waiting for us from the start, meaning to bring the whole mountain down. If we hadn't come, he'd have regenerated and come at us again.
If I'd known, I would have grabbed him the second I laid eyes on him and Space Leaped straight to the Holy Land.
Follow that thought far enough, and a grudge started brewing against Amin-La, Lord of the Great Sea, as well.
Our contract had been simple. In exchange for healing Franc, I would not use Mana Bullet or Mana Cannon. Looking at the state of us now, it was starting to feel like a betrayal.
...This is just paranoia. Getting slapped in the east and taking it out on the west.
I forced down the thoughts boiling in my head and opened my mouth to thank her.
"Sorry. And thank you. You really are my guardian angel, Franc."
"Y-you exaggerate terribly, Seoha."
"No. How many times have I only made it out alive because of you?"
"Ah, um. More to the point—how is your body? Does your Phase Power still refuse to move?"
Even as I thanked her, flustered as she was, I tried to force the bare grain of Phase Power still stirring in me into a Healing Wave. Something inside caught on it, and the skill would not activate.
She was changing the subject out of embarrassment. I let her, and answered with exactly what I felt in my body.
"Yeah. Feels like a two-lane road after a pileup. Completely jammed."
"Haa. A comparison I understand all too readily."
Franc, letting a small groan slip with every word, worried me. So did Darky, who'd been staggering around like a roach that had eaten poison. I checked my pocket and found him curled up like a baby, groaning through some kind of fever.
He must have noticed me looking. A feeble "Uuugh" escaped him as he reached out, so I pulled him free and set him on my shoulder. He only lolled there, dazed and limp. He did not look well.
I looked around, but with Mana Vision out of reach there was nothing to see. Pitch-black and cramped, as if I'd closed my eyes in the dark.
We were completely buried. Franc was hurt, and Darky could barely move under Phase Power gone rigid. The oxygen wouldn't last long either. I had to find a way out before it ran out.
Fear tried to rear up alongside the bleak thoughts, so I forced my mind down onto the abilities I had and started weighing them, one by one.
Spatial Perception was passive, but it still fell inside the category of things that ran on Phase Power. I wasn't wholly unable to use it. The range had simply shrunk to a meter or two. Useless.
Space Leaping only moved me within the range of Spatial Perception. Even if I could leap in this state, getting out was impossible.
If I could unfold even a sliver of the amber Space Wall—not the blue—the soil and rock pressing in under their own weight would be pulverized against it, and air would come with them. Leave it standing, and I could carve out enough space to escape somehow. But sealed Phase Power would not permit so much as a speck of amber Space Wall.
...That damned snake bitch pulled some seal trick and froze my Phase Power solid. What if this lasts forever? And now that I think of it, the bitch is dead, and Phase Power still isn't spreading from her corpse.
Losing part of her body had cost her a great deal of Phase Power—she'd dropped by quite a lot—but she'd still had seventy million. Where had all of that gone?
"Did that snake bitch dump every bit of her Phase Power into the curse, to use as a medium...?"
Franc, who had kept quiet while I thought, answered at once.
"Now that you mention it, Baekcheong's Phase Power is not spreading at all."
"Right? Earlier it was gushing out like blood. That must have been all the Phase Power in her body. She spent it cursing us."
Damn her. Still screwing us over from beyond the grave.
No Space Leaping. No Mana Bullet, no Mana Cannon. I could take things out of Subspace Storage, but I couldn't put anything in, and none of my other abilities would help me escape.
What about Darky's decomposition?
"Darky. Think you can break down dirt and rock right now?"
"Uuugh... a-a little, I think I can, Boss..."
No good. The way he rasped it out in a dying voice, trembling, I had a feeling that pushing him would end badly.
A way. A way. Some way out of here...
I kept turning it over while working Phase Power through Mana Sieve, and bit by bit the amount I could actually move began to grow. Even so, it was a climb from a trace to a speck. Who knew how many days I'd have to wait before I could actually use an ability. The oxygen would run out, and Franc and I would suffocate long before then.
With this ant's tear of moving Phase Power, what I could do—what was even possible...
"The medieval era."
"Ah, um. The medieval era, you say?"
The groan that escaped the moment she opened her mouth, she swallowed by force, and asked as if nothing were wrong. My attention nearly snapped to her wounds. I held it down and answered.
"We're crossing over to the medieval era. To go from reality into the medieval period, you have to find a Return Point on the reality side—but I figured crossing from the Phase World into the medieval era would work a lot like crossing from reality into the Phase World."
"Ah—!"
I focused with everything I had, calling up Londinium as I had seen it in the medieval era, the battle of Londinium, that shocking conversation with Myrddin, and Camelot—a planned city you could hardly believe belonged to the Middle Ages—and wished, desperately, to cross over.
Please. Please, let it work.
And then a trace of TP seeped out of my body and began to soak into the space around me.
"It's working!"
But it didn't ready itself in an instant, the way it usually did. I'd have to keep concentrating until enough TP gathered to leap between worlds. Would the oxygen run out first, or would the TP gather and carry us across?
"Huu. Mm. Khh—"
The maddening slowness had my breathing ragged and my nerves fraying, when Franc lifted a hand, carefully stroked my back, and whispered.
"Be still... Quiet your heart, and gather your mind in calm."
Only then did I draw a deep breath and steady myself. She was right. Impatience would only raise the odds of a mistake. Focus.
How long I sat on Franc's chest, one hand resting over hers beside me, endlessly circulating Phase Power, I couldn't say. Just as my chest began to tighten and breathing grew hard, I felt a clear ripple around my body.
My eyes flew open. The TP that had flowed out around me was shedding a faint light.
"It's starting."
Then came the sensation of my body lifting, of being drawn away somewhere. The same feeling as crossing from reality into the Phase World began to take hold of my senses.
"Ah. Fuck."
Just as my vision brightened, in the instant before we appeared in the medieval era, one thing I had forgotten flashed through my mind.
"Aah?!"
Blue sky overhead. Beneath me, a white sea of snow-laden forest.
...I'd forgotten. Last time I returned, I'd come back in midair!!
We had appeared a good seven kilometers above the ground, and gravity took us at once. We began to fall through winter wind keen as a blade. Escaped being buried alive and suffocating—only to trade it for a death by falling.
I snapped my gaze around. The moment Franc's naked body, falling ahead of me in the sunlight, filled my eyes, the corner of my eye twitched.
"Franc!!!"
"I am all right! Find a way for you to live, Seoha!"
"All right, my ass!! Your left shoulder's shattered!! Your left leg, your pelvis—they're twisted all to hell!!!"
"Ugh."
I snapped at the nonsense, and Franc's face crumpled as if she might cry.
Badly hurt, and even while falling she was worried about me, telling me not to mind her.
Don't mind her? Was she serious? We were kilometers up. Transcendent-grade body or not, with Phase Power locked down, if she hit the ground like this the outcome was obvious.
The image of Franc dead from the fall flashed through my head, and my thoughts exploded.
What do I do? How? What move? With what? How?
Amid thoughts spinning at a furious clip, I unconsciously focused a thread of Phase Power, opened a Subspace Storage portal just wide enough for one hand, and shoved it in. The hand that came back out was clutching a fistful of Blue Stones.
I popped one into my mouth and swallowed. It turned to honey, slid down my throat, and restored my TP—only for that bastard Baekcheong's seal debuff to freeze it solid at once. Then—!
"Burst!!!"
"Eek?"
I poured every scrap of feeble Phase Power into the hand gripping the Blue Stone and crushed it with all my strength. With a wet squelch, like rotten fruit giving way, slick Phase Power spilled out. Move that with Mana Sieve, and—!
"Hraaah!!"
The ground was already rushing up. With a focus I might never manage twice in my life, I shaped a thin, enormous slide of blue Space Wall along the path of Franc's fall.
THOOM!!
"Kyaah! Agh...!!"
Franc struck the blue Space Wall screaming, and went sliding along the ramp, picking up speed as she went.
An ominous splitting sound, and cracks shot across the Space Wall like lightning—it could not hold the kinetic energy of that immense weight. Then, with the sound of a window shattering, the wall broke apart.
Too thin to bear the weight. Even so, I had managed to send her sliding about a third of the way, redirecting the kinetic energy and cutting her speed, so her enormous body met the earth along a long diagonal, crashed into the snow-laden winter forest, and tore a path across the ground.
A long, grinding roar followed her down. She plowed a deep furrow and buried herself in the earth, and I let out a breath of relief.
She wasn't dead. That was enough. Her body was a Physical Reinforcement type. Even without Phase Power reinforcing it, she had durability, and she had regeneration.
The problem was me.
"I used up all the TP."
"Huh?! Boss?!!"
The plan had been to follow her down the slide once she was on it. The Space Wall had shattered, and I was left in the middle of a fall that was going just splendidly.
The TP I'd had left just before the crossing had all gone into opening that subspace portal, and every bit of Phase Power spilled from the burst Blue Stone had gone into the slide she needed to reach the ground. I didn't have the TP to open another one.
"So this is how I die..."
Even as I fell, I turned my eyes to Franc, collapsed in the gouged earth with her legs pointed at the sky.
Her face was twisted—pain rising from her wounds, no doubt—but her legs were twitching, so she seemed all right. Thank god.
The wounds she'd taken protecting me had been aggravated, but she had regeneration. Given time, that would heal her.
A shame that the last look I'd get at Franc's face in this life was a grimace plastered in dirt and snow. What lay bare between her thighs, though, and the soft little fold of her stomach, cut that regret neatly in half. So. There was that.
Come to think of it, I'd become the lover of women far too good for me and checked off the bucket list, so as for regrets...
"Master!! Master, you fuck!! Don't you lose your mind!!"
In that instant a flyswatter of a palm started smacking my face over and over.
"Wh-what?!"
The sting brought tears to my eyes, and Darky's roar, sharp as a blade, jabbed into my skull.
"Throw me at the landing spot! Now!!"
"Why..."
"Shut up and hurry!!"
"Ah, damn it."
Darky getting angry at me—that was a first, I thought, as I grabbed him and hurled him with all my strength at the spot where I was about to hit, less than two hundred meters of ground left. He shifted his body like a fall-safety air mat and suddenly expanded, hugely.
The moment I saw the Darky-brand mattress—three stories tall, the size of a large swimming pool—I instinctively twisted to land back-first. His body stretched like a trampoline, out and out to its limit, and then the rebound launched me.
"Waaaaah?!!"
"Lady Franc! Catch 'im!"
"I know!!"
Wh-whoa?!
Flailing through the air, I turned my head and saw Franc flip herself over with her right arm, then kick off the ground with her right foot and launch herself toward me.
Her palm rushed closer, swelling huge in my vision. I squeezed my eyes shut. A soft impact wrapped my body, and Franc's cry reached my ear.
"I've got you!!"
A warm, soft hand caught me with careful gentleness, as if afraid I would break. The moment I was wedged between her hand and her chest, my body spun once. A faint weightlessness took me, and then a light impact arrived.
A thud, and the sense that the sky had spun once more—and the hand covering me opened, and blue sky filled my eyes.
For a moment I stared up at it to the pounding of my heart, then looked at Franc, breathing out in relief, and muttered like an idiot.
"W-we're alive. All of us. We're alive."
"Yes. We are alive."
Only once the relief of being alive washed over me did the cold sweat start pouring, my whole body shaking.
"Heh... heheh. Huhihi. Ah, I really thought I was dead that time."
"Me toooo. Haaah."
"...You told me to find a way to live. What were you going to do if I hadn't made you that slide, Franc?"
"...And what were you planning to do, Seoha, after you made that slide for me?"
"..."
"..."
Strangely, Franc's feelings seemed to draw close enough to touch. Awkward, I grinned, and she smiled back with her face gone red.
I sighed at the sight of her left side, bruised a deep blue-black and swollen nearly double. I begged and begged the Franc who was trying to move anyway to please just lie still, then set off toward where Darky had fallen, telling her I'd go find him.
I found him some seven minutes later, back in human form, toddling through a forest of bare branches under a blanket of white snow.
The moment I spotted him, he spotted me, and came running in a strangely unnatural way—then caught a root and went down face-first. I rushed over and scooped him up, and the feel of his body was off.
Soft and slack, like something just about to turn to water...
"Master. Ya ain't hurt nowhere, are ya?"
"..."
"...Master?"
I said nothing. I felt over his body, checking his condition, let out a small sigh, and cradled him against my chest before heading back to where Franc lay.
"Boss~."
"Master, peekaboo?"
"Bo-oss~!"
He kept trying to talk to me on the way back. I walked on, petting him in silence, and by the time we reached Franc he looked a little scared.
Under her gaze, I lifted him up so we were face to face.
The moment our eyes met, he covered his face with both hands and peeked at me through his fingers—cute enough that I sighed again, inwardly, and then smiled as I spoke.
"What was it our Darky said to me back there. 'Master, you fuck!!' Was that it?"
"E-ehehe."
"Told me to shut up, too, didn't you?"
"Uwaah. Th-that was—! You had that face like the whole world was over and you were about to give up, so I used it as shock therapy, all right!? You know how much I like you, Master~!"
"Pfft."
He looked horrified, desperately making excuses, fists pressed to his cheeks in a cute little pout—pwing, pwing—and I snorted a laugh and stroked his head.
"Who said you did anything wrong? You did good. This time, you saved me, Darky."
"Ehehe."
He was right. At the end, I really had given up on living, and I had never once thought Darky would be the one to pull me out of it.
With his Phase Power sealed, changing the shape of his body could have collapsed his very existence, and he had thrown himself in for me without a moment's hesitation. I was more grateful than I knew how to say.
The same went for Franc. Hiding inside Baekcheong's narrow maw as the mountain buried them, the impact of the fall had shattered her left shoulder, broken most of her left ribs, given her a compound fracture of the left pelvis, and twisted and wrenched her left leg.
On top of that, a two-kilometer bungee with no cord, and then a jump to catch me, had made the injuries even worse.
"Hnngh."
How much pain would it take to move a body with half its bones broken? And even then, she had thrown herself without thinking, just to catch me.
I had no way to support a forty-meter Franc. Watching her pour cold sweat as she struggled to lay herself flat, my chest ached.
"Haa..."
Once she finally lay straight, Franc let out a long, exhausted sigh. The sweat she had shed filled the air with the scent of apples, and blood rushed to my cock like I was one of Pavlov's dogs. I disgusted myself.
Revulsion churned in my gut—and Franc turned to me and smiled.
"If you look so defeated, my heart grieves as well. So please, smile, as you always do."
"Yeah..."
A beautiful giant, naked and white, lying in a field of white snow.
The wounds were severe, and yet that very sight stirred a man's instinct to protect, and his desire. All sorts of thoughts churned through my head. But what was I supposed to say to Franc, pale-faced and soaked in sweat?
All I could do was nod.