Just the Two of Us (1)
Ever since we had entered the Phase World, my sister had been in visibly high spirits.
Even piggybacking on me, she chattered on about the amusing goings-on at Grand Blue — the romantic escapades of a few of the staff, Boss Park Jiwoong's henpecked ways, the discovery that Aunt Hyeryeong was apparently a sadist (an angel by day, a devil by night?), and all the little stories of ability users on the same team locking eyes and turning into couples.
She was a first-rate storyteller, though, so even ordinary everyday tales somehow came out entertaining. I chimed in as I listened, and whenever she seemed thirsty I pulled a drink from Subspace Storage, all the while carrying on with Space Leaping.
Along the way I teased her when the string of leaps turned her stomach and left her dry-heaving. We watched oddly wave-shaped clouds drift past, and when she made a fuss over how magnificent the whirlpools looked — born where the current ran fierce between underwater mountains — I pressed a hand to her forehead and got my shin kicked for the trouble. Still, it kept the journey from getting dull.
But whenever she grew bored mid-transit, she would pester me to show her a run across a Space Wall, poke my cheeks, and toy with my hair, unable to sit still for even a moment. It wore on the nerves.
Fooling around like this wasn't like her.
I was a little worried about her state of mind, but I decided to take her at her word — that the stress of company life had left her slightly unhinged. Only in my head, of course.
“You just thought something rude, didn't you?!”
“Wha—?! No I didn't!”
Humming on my back, she pinched my side hard and yanked my cheek, interrogating me. Faced with an intuition sharp enough to make a ghost weep, I shuddered and denied it with everything I had.
I only thought it. How the hell did she notice?
“Ugh... Seoha. Hang on, stop for a second. Huek...”
“Again?”
“Urgh. My... my stomach... urp.”
I threw up a Blue Space Wall and set us down on it. She all but collapsed off my back and flopped face-down.
I had spaced the leaps out pretty generously this time, too. Keep Space Leaping long enough, though, and my sister — an attribute type, not a body-enhancement type — apparently couldn't hold out.
“Uwek. S-stop that. Bleh!”
“Just throw up. You'll feel better.”
I gave her back a firm pat. She flailed, trying to shove me off, then finally started heaving up half-digested food.
Once she had emptied her stomach, she conjured water with a face flushed red to the ears, washed herself, rinsed her mouth, and glared at me. The moment she was clean, she started pelting me with water orbs, furious.
“I told you not to! Why did you pat me!?”
“Your stomach feels better now, doesn't it?”
“But still!”
“But still, and yet still. Keep this up and we'll just keep pushing back the time we can start the search.”
I dodged the incoming orbs with thought acceleration and body enhancement, speaking as if she were being ridiculous. She clenched her fists and trembled — thoroughly worked up, by the look of it.
Let her stew. Checking how far we had come, I found we still had about five hundred kilometers to go to where Mt. Veltical had stood. At that distance, just running wouldn't take long.
I looked up. The clouds were darkening — more rain on the way — so I turned my back to her, dropped to one knee, and spoke.
“Come on. Get on.”
“......”
“I'm not leaping this time, just running, so hop on. We need to reach Mt. Veltical and start the search before the rain hits.”
“Ugh.”
Watching her hesitate now, face crumpling, I thought she really did come up with one thing after another.
In the end I went to her, scooped up my flinching, shrinking sister in a princess carry, and launched forward.
I matched my balance to hers so the ride would jostle as little as possible, moving in a light run, and she stretched both arms around my neck.
“Is this better?”
“Yeah...”
It hadn't been an empty question — her expression did ease. On top of that, I had the odd sense her temperature had risen... but something told me I shouldn't pay that any mind, so I told her to hold on tight and picked up speed.
An hour at pace, and Mt. Veltical drew close enough to see. My sister cried out in wonder, captivated by the earthen mountain's staggering height, and frantically snapped photos of the collapsed peak with her Certifier.
“It's so big~! Even from this high I have to look up at the summit!”
Watching her marvel at Mt. Veltical, collapsed now into a pyramid, I found myself wondering how she would react if she could see what it had originally looked like.
“Mt. Veltical used to stand nearly fifty kilometers high. What you're looking at is just what's left after it fell.”
“Ah, no wonder the surface is buried in dirt and rock. Are we starting the search right away?”
Huh? She's less surprised than I expected.
“Yeah. Though I'm not sure a search is even worth it, when they're obviously all dead.”
“A lot of them are probably still alive.”
“How would you know that?”
I gave her a puzzled look, and she pressed a finger lightly to her lips.
“Hmm~.”
Then she laid it out simply enough to follow.
“The biggest reason people buried in earth and sand die is respiratory failure. A sweeping landslide and the weight of the soil are frightening, sure, but it isn't weight concentrated on a single point — it's force sliding along a slope. An Aberrant could endure that much easily enough.”
“So?”
“The things that lived on that mountain were lizard-type Aberrants, right? Researchers who analyzed gecko Aberrant carcasses say most lizard Aberrants are built to hibernate.”
“So even buried in the earth, they could hold out in a state of suspended animation?”
“Probably.”
Then a fair number of the Sabi would still be alive.
“Wait.”
A sudden, important thought struck, and I hastily checked my mind-control capacity. The high-rank subspecies were still alive too?! How?!
Right before my last fight with Baekcheong, I had been using 80% of the total. Now it had dropped to 55%. Darky alone had accounted for about 30%, and dominating thirty-six high-rank subspecies plus a handful of the Sabi had used another 50% — so 25% was proof that roughly eighteen of them were still alive.
That half the high-rank subspecies had survived a collapse from that height was astonishing enough, but how they had done it interested me even more. And their survival in the worst of it lent weight to my sister's view that many of the Sabi would still be alive beneath the landslide.
But do I have any reason to rescue them? I didn't hold a bad impression of the Sabi, but I had never been given a good one either. If anything, thinking of what I had suffered because they tried to keep Baekcheong alive, I couldn't see them favorably at all. How badly I had been startled, nearly buried in that collapsing mountain. The memory still set my teeth on edge.
“Seoha.”
My expression must have soured, because she took my hand, gently stroking the back of it, and soothed me in a warm voice.
“It's all right if you don't save the Sabi. What happened to them is the result of them doing what they felt they had to, isn't it?”
“That's unexpected. I thought you'd say I ought to rescue them.”
“Why would I? Because of what they did, I nearly never saw my little brother again. If I had my way... hmm! Anyway, don't burden yourself. Do whatever you want.”
“Okay.”
With my sister taking my side, coaxing and soothing me, the anger that had snapped hot in my head cooled, and I could judge the situation with a clear head. She had probably said it so I wouldn't get swept up in emotion, make a reckless call, and regret it later.
So I...
I searched near the enormous jets of water geysering up from the sinkhole connected to the underground, and began digging out the half-dead high-rank subspecies one by one, starting with the worst wounded. Spatial Perception made their Phase Power easy to catch, so finding them wasn't hard — and it was their luck that they had been buried within range of it. In ordinary ground, being buried a kilometer or two would have killed them long ago from geothermal heat and pressure, but because they had been pinned under the soil spilled by Mt. Veltical's collapse, fortune had, quite literally, opened for them.
I dug them out one at a time, treated them, and lined them up, and my sister drew water with her ability and started washing the creatures caked in dirt and blood. The ones that had clawed their way back from death were on edge, and when an unfamiliar living thing approached they judged her an enemy and tried to attack. Naturally, I beat the shit out of the ones that went for my sister — after which they came to their senses, grasped the situation, and prostrated themselves, obeying her to the letter.
I cleared the soil with an amber Space Wall and pulled out the buried No. 17: a thing with the body and tail of a fish — a mullet — and the head and limbs of a toad stuck on. Its back had split, and it had been vomiting spine, flesh, and organs; once it recovered, it croaked happily and showed me affection.
“Go stand over there with your friends.”
Croooak.
I tapped the bridge of the four-meter creature's snout as it tried to nuzzle against me. It wiped its horizontally slit toad-eyes with its tongue and crawled off toward where the survivors had gathered.
“Not quite an amphibian... not quite a fish... I'm confused. So confused.”
Wearing a thoroughly baffled look as she manipulated the water to wash it, my sister fixed her expression and came over. She had been wearing a less-than-pleased face as she watched the Aberrants I was rescuing, and now she asked why.
“Why did you only put mind control on ones like these? Did you like reptiles?”
“Are you crazy? It's because these are the only ones around here. I don't particularly like slimy things either.”
Whether they had heard me or not, the high-rank subspecies looked dejected. I ordered them to protect my sister and moved toward the last one still buried.
Having started with the worst off, the first one I had saved — a frog speckled black on white — had two-thirds of its body completely crushed, guts burst out, barely clinging to breath. Ten minutes later, or if it hadn't been a body-enhancement type, that wound would have killed it. And I was starting to roughly understand how they had survived: most of the survivors were body-enhancement types. The dead were mostly attribute types, and the few attribute types that had lived were largely earth or wind, with a single water-attribute survivor among them.
Body-enhancement types, I figured, had used their superior physiques to lessen the impact of the fall by footing off rocks and mounds of earth. As for wind — it was almost strange they hadn't simply flown away. Earth and water, though, even I was curious how those had made it.
“Earth probably gathered soil in midair and made its own footholds, don't you think? Water... there's a case overseas where a water-attribute ability user survived a fall from two kilometers up. Skydiving, and the parachute failed, or something? They generated as much water as they could and concentrated it over their whole body to live through it. I bet that one did the same.”
“Huh. So that works too.”
“They nearly died, and they said if the person skydiving with them hadn't been a recovery-type, they would have.”
Listening to her, I moved on to the last of them, the fifteenth. My mind-control capacity accounted for eighteen or nineteen, but only fifteen were here — which meant about three had somehow avoided being buried and fled somewhere. How I was supposed to find those ones was another question.
Anyway, the fifteenth high-rank subspecies registered as completely unharmed: a seventeen-meter crocodile. Armor-like, knobby scales jutted from it — how to put it. It was Dok-ak, of course. Whether crocodiles hibernated or not, his biological activity was nearly nil, while his Phase Power alone churned away vigorously. I briefly considered what would happen if he went unrescued in that state, and the only road I could see was death. He would burn Phase Power to maintain his body, and once that ran out, well — he would die.
At any rate, I finished a rough check with Spatial Perception and hauled him up out of the ground. He twitched, opened his eyes, looked at me, and with his mouth shut blasted out a snort — kshung!
“Oh my. A Toxin Black Alligator... is that right? But the size, the scale pattern, and the color of the venom secretion are all different. He's a bit bigger, too.”
“Yeah. That's because I evolved him into a subspecies.”
“Ah, then you evolved all of those too... oh my?!”
Dok-ak glanced at my chattering sister for a moment, then turned his head toward me and spread his jaws wide — and there on his tongue lay Alkema, limp. With a look that plainly asked, I did good, right?, he stuck out his tongue and dropped her. One glance was enough to see she was poisoned by the venom in his saliva, on the verge of her last breath, so I fired off a Healing Wave first.
I had my doubts whether Healing Wave even worked on poison, but if she died, well — that was as far as her luck went. It wasn't her time yet, though. Alkema flinched, her body twitching, and a groan slipped out.
“=Ugh.=”
Coming to, she flew into a rage at the news that Mt. Veltical had collapsed in its entirety, insisting it was impossible.
“=The sacred mountain, collapsed?! You must not speak such blasphemy! To disparage the pillar that has upheld the world since the beginning of time — the holy ground of our people — is not right!=”
She stormed on, calling it a lie, saying such lies were wicked, and tried to scold me. From her expression, I could tell she truly didn't believe a word.
“She's a lizardman, and I can read her face...”
Leaving my sister to doubt her own identity over why she could read a lizard's emotions, I fixed Alkema — still trying to scold me — with a cold, dead-serious glare.
“What do I gain by lying to the likes of you? It may be a precious sanctuary to your people, but to me it's just a somewhat large mountain.”
“=U-uh?=”
“If your eyes are seated properly, look around. See what state it's in.”
“=...!!=”
I grabbed her arm and Space Leaped into the sky. Alkema panicked, her trembling eyes whipping around. Then she raised a wind, lifted herself higher, and began scanning in every direction.
“=Aaah. Aaaah... no, no, no, no!!=”
I followed her up and spread a Blue Space Wall, and the moment we set down Alkema collapsed in a heap, letting out a scream that choked the air, despairing, and despairing again. She didn't so much as twitch, only staring with clouded eyes at the earth buried under soil and sand. I sighed.
I didn't fail to understand how she felt, but even now her kin might be dying. Was this the time to despair?
At the sound of my sigh she jerked her head up and looked at me, resentment seeping into her eyes.
“=Why has it come to this? Like this? Why?=”
“This is all the doing of that Baekcheong you lot were so fond of. If you want to take it up with someone, take it up with the dead Baekcheong.”
“=I am saying it would not have come to this if you had not tried to kill Lord Baekcheong!!=”
Unbelievable. Was she actually saying that? I understood the rage of losing something precious, but she had no business turning a thoughtless reaction like that on me.
“Right now, what I'm hearing is that I should have just died quietly for Baekcheong. Think carefully, with that lacking head of yours, about who's standing in front of you before you run your mouth.”
“=Ah... ugh. Uuugh.=”
Angry as I was, I raised killing intent with the genuine thought that I wanted her dead, and the Mana Sieve moved of its own accord, pressing down on Alkema's spirit. Exposed to killing intent laced with TP, with no defense at all, she trembled like an aspen and slammed her head to the ground.
“I hadn't expected Dok-ak to keep you alive, but I was going to let it go, since I meant to save your people anyway... Seeing you react like this, I can already picture how the rest of them will react. Better not to save them at all.”
“=...!? Aah! He— Hebült!!=”
Unbelievable. The mountain had collapsed, and she'd been so fixated she hadn't spared a thought for her own people?
Alkema, startled out of her skin, crawled toward the edge of the Space Wall, so I quickly grabbed her tail and yanked her back.
“This is two kilometers above the ground. No matter how well you handle wind, fall in that state of mind and you won't come out intact, so how about you be careful?”
“=Lord Seoha! Please, please save us!!=”
Tail caught in my grip, she paid no attention to the warning and clung to my leg, begging desperately.
“=If it is you, Lord Seoha, you can save us, can you not?! I beg you! Please!!=”
“Even if I save your people, there's nothing in it for me...”
“=I will give it to you!=”
“Huh?”
“=I will give you all that I am, so please, help us...!=”
All that you are? And you're worth that much, are you? I was about to snap it at her... but seeing her bowed before me, every ugly feeling mixed together, her spirit broken, tears showing, I simply closed my mouth.
“You need another servant?”
“I need a dog to watch the house. I thought about taking Dok-ak back to reality and using him in place of a guard dog, but with the poison flowing over his skin, that probably won't work...”
“It will.”
“...What will?”
“The poison flowing over Dok-ak's skin is venom from the poison sacs inside him. It circulates through the blood vessels, filters impurities out of the body, and gets expelled through the skin, you know? He expels it once every twelve hours, and if you refine the secretion from that moment, it becomes a treatment for cellular mutation. It isn't flowing out constantly without a break.”
Uh, so...
“You mean if we wash him once every twelve hours, it's fine?”
“Yeah. The question is how the venom's composition changed after he evolved into a subspecies, and whether he still expels it once every twelve hours. Toss him to the research institute as a research subject and that'll sort itself out.”
“Then I can take Dok-ak and that one both, and stick her with looking after him.”
“Do that. An Aberrant guard dog... you really do think of things beyond imagination.”
I ignored the words that came from behind me.
Truthfully, I had been about to refuse. Even if I took Alkema on as a servant, I didn't see much use for her. Ah — of course, I had already decided to save the Sabi. But she had sworn obedience of her own accord, so even if she lacked the outstanding abilities of Hiarid, Miho, or Darky, I figured a use would turn up if I kept her around, and decided to accept.
Well. There were parts of her I didn't like, but the personality I had seen so far was agreeable enough in its own way.