Debuff (7)
The Phase World unification theory Yeongeun had promised to look into had me curious too, so whenever I found a spare moment over the Lunar New Year I dug through the ability-user boards on the Certifier community. Not a single mention of it turned up. They were still burning their energy on keyboard wars over pointless nonsense, so I got out of there at once.
......The truth was, plenty of posts had caught my interest, and one title in particular had grabbed me so hard I'd wanted to open it. But Franc hates it when I loaf around in a dump like that, so I shut the Certifier down with a pang of regret.
A title like that gave off an ominous concentration of pure idiocy.
"You mustn't idle in a place where people of unsound mind gather. If you truly must know, send Yeongeun a message."
......So I did as Franc said and texted Yeongeun to ask how things stood. What came back were short replies made of words that had nothing whatsoever to do with the question.
My curiosity went entirely unsatisfied. In the end the holiday came and went without a single clear answer, and she must have had even more on her plate than I'd thought — even after Suhan and Sophia returned from leave, Yeongeun still couldn't clock out, buried under the work.
With the New Year over, the hour was drawing near for me to enter the Phase World with my sister.
Sophia and Suhan were busy packing for the move to the Shinchon-dong mansion, nearly finished. I watched them a moment, then turned to Franc, sitting neatly on the sofa.
"You still feeling rough?"
"Yes. The curse's side effects are lingering a little long."
Maybe it was the aftermath of using Mana Sieve to move Franc's Phase Power however I pleased, the method I'd used to break the curse. She and Darky both said their Phase Power felt alien in a way it never had before. For some reason, the power inside them felt less like a child of their own house and more like a child from someone else's.
"Ah — not that I have ever had a child!"
"I'll make sure you do, soon enough."
"......!!"
Franc's face had gone scarlet, as if something had detonated in it. I snickered and turned to Darky, spread flat across the table.
The little one seemed to be feeling it even more strongly than Franc. Ever since we'd come home, Darky had been listless, rolling this way and that across the living room floor — until Sophia and Suhan, in the middle of the packing, had kicked and stepped on that sprawl a few times. After that, Darky refused to come down from the table.
"Coming to the Phase World with us would be rough, huh?"
"If we went, we would only be a burden. Darky and I shall recuperate at home. Please go with Lady Siha — just the two of you."
"All right."
The thought of having to go alone with my sister put a certain pressure on my mind...... but if I let it get to me, that meant I'd lose.
I'd lose!!
......While I was at it, I ought to draw a map of the Phase World. I'd crammed a crash course in cartographic projection over the holiday for exactly that.
I went to the entryway and put my shoes on. Miho, who had been undoing the parcels Sophia had wrapped so carefully — curious, and getting in the way without meaning to — pricked up her fox ears and waved both hands wildly.
"Have a good trip, Master~!"
"Yeah. Miho, don't leave Franc and Darky's side. Watch over them."
"Okay!!!"
"Haaave a gooood trip~."
Darky, as if the entire world were too much trouble, stayed flopped out and merely twitched a finger. Sophia and Suhan saw me off with heartfelt care, and I took their farewell by opening a Space Leaping straight to my sister's office.
I appeared without a sound in front of the elevator, and there she was, giving instructions to a pretty woman I'd never seen before.
She wore a white uniform decorated and fashioned from Flauvis feathers, and the pale legs showing beneath the flared skirt hit my eyes so hard I yanked my gaze away.
That's my sister. That's my sister. That's my sister. That's my sister.
......Ah, damn it. Should I just run?
"You're here? This is the last of it, so wait a moment. You understand, yes? Proceed in order, and when you need help, ask General Affairs Director Lee Hyeryeong. I've already spoken with her, so she'll be able to assist you."
"Understood."
"Then I'll leave the rest to you, Chae-rin."
What?! That haughty career woman with the long, wavy brown hair was Yoo Chae-rin?!
Thin black horn-rimmed glasses, as if to insist this was what a career woman looked like — a white blouse, a black pencil skirt, coffee-colored stockings — that woman?! Nothing like our first meeting, when the baggy Association combat uniform had made her look plain, or the Grand Blue founding ceremony, when she'd looked rumpled in a suit that didn't fit. Her long hair, twisted up and pinned, was perfect, and the neat clothes laid bare a voluptuous figure, every curve of a feminine line on display. It was hard to believe she was the same person.
"......Auntie Chae-rin?"
Ah — a vein popped on her forehead. Yeah. That was Yoo Chae-rin.
"Just kidding. You changed so much from that soldier look, I almost didn't recognize you. You're beautiful, Chae-rin."
"......Thank you."
"I hear you've been a big help to my sister. I'll be counting on you from here on, too."
I grinned and held out my hand. Yoo Chae-rin stared at it, then carefully took it. She was a recovery-type, but maybe she couldn't feel the fatigue piled up inside her own body? Her Phase Power wasn't moving briskly — it looked a little sluggish, tired — so I pushed a Healing Touch into her through Mana Sieve.
"Hhk—?"
She flinched, and her legs gave out beneath her. I caught her around the waist in a hurry and spoke to Yoo Chae-rin, whose eyes had gone wide with shock.
"You've built up a fair amount of fatigue. That should have cleared all of it, so hang in there for the next five days."
"Nnh. Yes."
I left her there, face flushed and legs trembling, and at my sister's insistence took her hand and leaped to the byproduct disposal site. She wore a sulky look and jabbed me in the side.
"What did you do, to make Chae-rin look like that?"
"Huh? An application of Mana Sieve. I pushed a Healing Touch into her body to clear the fatigue."
"Something new you learned?"
"I said it's an application, not a new ability."
I followed the path she indicated, past what looked like a bunker entrance and down a long, narrow corridor into the underground, until a space opened up vast enough to hold five full stadiums put together. Lights packed the ceiling, brilliantly bright, and whether the climate control was running or not, the air was cold enough to be ideal for storing a corpse.
"Put Baekcheong's corpse out here."
"Here? Nobody's going to steal it?"
"Nobody but you could. The only entrance is the passage we came through — two and a half meters high, a meter and a half wide — and the security system is linked with Grand Blue. If anyone tries to break in, or to collapse the ground, an alarm goes straight to the Grand Blue Building and the standby team deploys at once. Miho gets dispatched at the same time."
Hoh. She'd prepared for this, all right. I listened, brought Baekcheong's corpse out, and my sister cried out in awe.
"Whoooa. It's enormous. So this is an Imugi — a Transcendental aberrant. But the other horn? Where is it?"
"No idea. It wasn't there even when I took the thing down."
"You couldn't find it?"
"We searched on a huge scale and still didn't see it. Mt. Veltical collapsed completely, so the search was hard to begin with."
"Still, your ability's back to what it was, so when we go this time, let's look again with Spatial Perception. Understood?"
"Yeah."
Before we left, I carved off a massive haul of Baekcheong's lean meat and stuffed it into Subspace Storage. I'd have my sister grill it for me later.
We moved to the temporary Phase World entry station set up beside the new Ability User Association building, which was still under construction. Entering with me would have been a free pass through entry verification, but I'd accepted my sister's view that, given her position, it was better to follow the rules.
While she registered at the desk, I sent Yeongeun a text.
The read receipt refused to appear.
"Hmm. Looks like she's going to check it late again."
"Who did you text?"
I'd shrunk the Certifier display to look at it, but my sister finished the entry procedure in no time and came back, peering over my shoulder at the hologram window. I'd sent it on the sly while she was distracted registering for Phase World entry, and she'd still caught it like a ghost. Lying and earning her suspicion would only mean a headache, so I answered honestly.
"Madam Yeongeun. I told her I was heading into the Phase World."
"Oh?"
Fortunately she let it pass. If I'd tried to talk around it, I'd have drawn the suspicion of the original ghost of intuition and taken a barrage of tiresome, awkward questions. Lucky me.
"Come on, come on. Let's get in there!"
"You're that happy about it?"
"Tell me about it. I became an ability user, and because of a certain someone I turned into a work-demon, wrestling numbers at the company. The stress has been piling up like mad, you know?"
......And why tack on "tell me about it"?
Whatever had her in such a good mood, my sister beamed as she cut through the ability users, heading for the fifth-floor entry room reserved for C-Class and above. Along the way I heard people who'd recognized me murmuring as they looked at the woman beside me — a new lover? My sister either didn't hear or was pretending not to. She showed no reaction at all, which left only me feeling awkward.
Maybe because it was a building ability users used, even a temporary one had a thoroughly upscale interior, trees and potted plants set along the corridors, the light bright enough to feel fresh. So why was my mood this gloomy......? The cause was probably the woman beside me, arm linked through mine, smiling brightly as she tugged me along.
Suddenly I remembered last night. Father had tried to stop her from going, then fallen silent under her gift of gab and her threats. While he went on about how the Phase World was dangerous, and dangerous again, and wouldn't it be better if she devoted herself to running the company here in reality, my sister had stared at the living room floor and kept her mouth shut. The moment he finished, she put on a rare angry face and hurled a dead-straight fastball.
Father and Mother both went pale.
A third-world country in Central or South America — what was she going to do in a place with security that bad? Even I, listening from the side, had been horrified. How must it have sounded to a father who loved her to death?
I was sighing inwardly when she kept tugging me by our linked arms, and I said, sullen,
"Quit pulling. I'm not running off."
Everyone's staring. Where in the world do a brother and sister walk around arm in arm? This is exactly why people are suspecting her of being my new lover!
"Hehe. Running from what? Oh — there it is. Room 502!"
My sister, looking oddly pleased, spotted the assigned room, yanked my arm, and pulled me into the entry waiting room.
It was a waiting room for a five-person party, furnished like a cozy tea room. The sofa was an ultra-luxury piece in natural fur, every kind of fruit sat on the table, and a massive new refrigerator could have passed for commercial equipment. The bathroom looked as if money had been plastered over every surface...... and it connected to a shower of a grade I had never once laid eyes on.
"Wow~ It's like a five-star hotel suite."
I watched her roam the waiting room as if she were searching it, giddy with excitement, then cleared my throat and called her in a stern voice.
"Sis. That's enough. Come over here and sit."
"Hm? Okay."
I waited until she sat on the sofa across from me, then spoke quietly.
"We're about to enter the Phase World. Before we do, I'm going to give you a few things to watch out for."
"Don't leave your side, don't wander off on my own, don't underestimate aberrants, and keep a proper watch?"
"......Yeah."
What? I'd only been about to tell her not to go too far from me. Seeing my face, my sister smiled like a cat, folded her arms so the soft swell of her breasts rose, and said, triumphant,
"Franc told me. As long as I don't get more than four kilometers away from you, you'll protect me no matter what. All this big sister has to do is trust her cute little brother, right?"
"Right......"
Ugh. Why does it feel like I'm getting wrapped around her finger from the very start?
I clicked my tongue and was running a last check for anything I'd missed before entry when my sister came swaying over and wrapped her arms around my waist.
"?!"
"All right. I'll attempt entry."
"Y-yeah."
The sudden contact — her br...... breasts pressed flush against me — had me flustered, and she closed her eyes and began to concentrate. An ordinary ability user really did take time to enter. Only after a long stretch of focus did ripples rise around us, the signs of entry beginning to show. I watched the scenery start to waver, then draw inward toward a single point, and a shudder of unease ran through me.
Ugh. I don't like this!
Just before the scenery changed completely, I slammed a Blue Space Wall down beneath our feet, and the moment we fully emerged into the Phase World I landed on top of it.
My sister had kept her eyes closed from the moment the scenery began to be sucked into a point. Only once we were in the Phase World and both her feet touched the wall did she open them.
"Oh — whoa?"
She let a cute little gasp slip at the endless white clouds spread out beneath her feet, crouched, and stared at them. There was nothing to see but clouds. What was so fascinating that she was gawking like that?
I turned a light three-sixty myself, checking for anything unusual. Fortunately there was no sign of the Floating Sky Islands or Zalvatera — nothing in view but blue sky, a brilliantly shining sun, and clouds. The wind was a little strong and she swayed, so I caught her by the shoulder.
Come to think of it, the time of day in the Phase World we'd entered was the same, but had the arrival point split between hers and mine? No. Last time I'd returned separately from the Floating Sky Islands through a Return Point, so the location must have shifted because of that.
"These clouds remind me of the Floating Sky Islands."
"Those clouds were special. They weren't ordinary clouds."
"No~! Ordinary clouds get lumpy from turbulence, and their shapes form however they please. If it's bad enough, they scatter completely. But the clouds of the Floating Sky Islands spread evenly, like a wool carpet, and they look soft — and the clouds under us right now feel similar."
"......Sorry. I think I underestimated what you know."
I'd figured clouds were just clouds and glanced past them, but hearing her out, she was definitely right. They weren't dynamic, like a heaving sea, but they looked soft enough to call wool to mind, and a little awe stirred in me — so this was what they meant by the grandeur of nature.
When I admitted it without a fight, she grinned, stood, and elbowed me in the side.
"If you jumped into those clouds, don't you think it'd be wonderfully warm and soft?"
So what. Oh — she wants to jump into the clouds? Then I'll give her exactly what she wants!
"All right."
"Huh? Kyaah!!"
I stepped up to my sister, whose face was asking what on earth I was talking about, slid my hands up under her arms, pulled her in, kicked off the Blue Space Wall, and dropped toward the sea of clouds.
"Yaaaaah! What are you doooing!!"
Her ears must have been stuffed from the air screaming past. She flailed all four limbs and shouted at the top of her lungs, panicked, and I ignored her and fell like a bullet. Before long we reached the clouds that had inspired that girlish notion of how soft they'd be —
"It's cold!"
Her scream drilled straight into my ear.
That was reality. Soft and fluffy, squishy and warm. No cloud like that existed in this world. The droplets making it up were coarser than I'd expected, and it must have been holding rain, because I felt her shiver in my arms. Still falling like that, we reached the cloud's lower layer, and I watched the color darken as it turned into a storm cloud.
Had it actually been a rain cloud?
Punching through took an instant. The moment we broke out the other side, I canceled the force of the fall with a Space Leaping, spread another Blue Space Wall, and landed on it.
"Ugh. I'm soaked......"
Drenched from passing through the rain-heavy cloud, my sister dripped water and glared at me with a face on the verge of tears. A laugh slipped out of me.
"You're laughing?! What are you going to do about this!"
"You saving that ability to boil soup with later?"
"Oh, right. I can handle water, too."
Smiling sheepishly, like an idiot who'd forgotten, she gathered the moisture with her water manipulation. While she did, I looked down. Sure enough, land and mountain alike were submerged. Everything had become sea. Mount Elephantros — gouged and melted, as if a meteor had struck it in the wake of the eruption — was barely poking its tip above the water.
The Sabi tribe that had held the Rite of the Water God had been wiped out, so maybe there wouldn't be any more floods...... No. They'd said that if the rite wasn't performed, the water-energy would build up and then burst even harder, hadn't they? For all I knew, that mass of water-energy might change the very nature of this region. I had a feeling this flood would hold for a long time. Or never recede at all.
Splat.
Something touched me around the small of my back and burst with a pop. I reached around and felt water streaming down.
"......What are you doing."
I was already clammy from a light wetting on the outside, and now the burst water was soaking through to my underwear. The worst. I turned with a growl, and there was my sister — not a drop of moisture on her, fluffy and dry — whistling with the face of a cute little rascal, as if she hadn't the faintest idea.
She'd thrown the water she'd gathered at me? The water plastered all over her face and body?
......Don't think about it.
I let out a long sigh and sorted through what I had to do. Go back to Mt. Veltical and see if anything was still alive. Check whether Baekcheong's horn had been hidden somewhere on the mountain. Then head south, follow the coastline, and confirm what continent we were actually on.
While I did nothing but sigh and sink into thought, my sister looked bored. She worked her hands, gathered the water off my body, and flung it behind her. Then, with a look that said her heart was racing, she caught my arm.
"What are we doing first? Searching Mt. Veltical? Or drawing the map?"
"Search Mt. Veltical for survivors, and look for Baekcheong's other horn while we're at it. After that, mapmaking, to confirm where we are."
"Okay! Then let's go~!"
Why was she this excited? Had the work really stressed her out that much?
It was a simple plan, but she beamed and hopped onto my back without a moment's hesitation. When I asked what she thought she was doing, she answered as if it were the most natural thing in the world — we were going by Space Leaping, weren't we?
"My Shadow Jump can't keep up with you, so it has to be like this!"
"Yeah, yeah......"
Somehow the thought crept up on me that the five days left to us were going to be mentally exhausting.