Alone with My Sister (2)
After a brief word with Sis about what to do with Alkema, I set to work digging out the Sabi who had been buried alive.
I'd already gotten a sense of the scale earlier, when I pulled the high-tier subspecies free first and swept the ground with Spatial Perception. Just as Sis had predicted, a considerable number of Sabi lay under the earth. At the start I did all of it myself, from clearing soil with Space Wall down to hauling out the ones locked in suspended animation, and there wasn't a moment to rest. Alkema was half out of her mind, dancing from foot to foot, and no help at all.
Wild Aberrants kept turning up in between, slinking closer, but I left the fighting to Sis and Dok-ak's lot and treated digging the Sabi out as the first priority. Every one of them came up limp and unconscious. Only when a slack-bodied kinsman appeared before her eyes did Alkema finally come to herself. She went to the ones in suspended animation and—I couldn't tell what she did—started waking them with surprising ease.
Seeing that, I put any Sabi who woke in decent shape, with usable abilities, straight onto the dig. It was convenient enough. I only had to mark location and depth with simple shapes of Space Wall as a signal, and they dug the rest out somehow and hauled them free. As I kept at it, attribute-type warrior-class Sabi began coming up one by one, and earth-attribute Sabi kept multiplying as well, until the pace of the excavation picked up speed of its own.
By the first day of the rescue, so much ground had been torn open that the soil's hold must have loosened, and some of them started crawling out on their own. The ones we'd saved gathered, threw up lean-tos, dug burrows, and a refugee camp took shape. On the second day, bedraggled and injured Sabi began finding their own way in from somewhere out there. They came without end, in twos and threes, and it became clear that far more of them than I'd expected had managed to get clear when Mt. Veltical came down.
The three high-tier subspecies that had vanished turned up looking for me then, too. They really had gotten away.
Between my rapid TP recovery and the attribute-type warrior-class Sabi, I dug out more than thirty thousand of them in two days—and yet, strangely, only a single one of the priest class appeared. Even setting aside the five Baekcheong had eaten, there should have been seven, counting Ahumrek and Kalka-kum. I couldn't make sense of it, so I chalked it up to rotten luck and assumed the rest had been buried and died.
With thirty thousand of them gathered, incidents started piling up, and Alkema told me it was because no priest was keeping them in line. People say the three essentials of living are food, clothing, and shelter, but the Sabi—aside from the priest class—went naked even if they wore ornaments, so what they needed right then was food and a place to rest. They had neither, and only one priest to control them. A riot would not have been the least bit surprising.
Ruling thirty thousand Sabi called for three of the priest class. We had dug up exactly one. The one saving grace was that Alkema had been in training as a priestess candidate, and as the child of Ahumrek and Kalka-kum she was regarded as an ordinary priest. I heard as much from the sole priest we'd found, and threw her into keeping the Sabi in line as well.
The Sabi submit readily to rank, so once Alkema was added to that single priest the chaos eased a great deal—though with only two of them ruling, it still felt precarious. Fortunately the one priest was quite old, and knew how to handle a situation like this. The two of them rushed about in every direction, assigning work to the rescued Sabi, and that was enough to get the disorder somewhat under control, and along the way to start solving food and shelter at once. They set the ones who had recovered to building shelter from the rain, or sent them out hunting to secure food.
Nothing beats hard labor for shutting down useless thoughts. Even so, they were a sapient race, and temperament—personality, I suppose—varied from one to the next. Some were lazy and work-shy like people, others a little violent, and I could feel the mood turning ugly.
That night, while I'd paused the rescue to rest, Alkema came to me hollow-eyed, laced her fingers, dropped to her knees, and pleaded.
=If it is acceptable to you, Lord Seoha, I would ask that your guard be employed in keeping the peace. May I beg this of you?=
"It's not a guard. Just take them and use them."
=Pardon? Yes... yes.=
She looked a little thrown at how offhand I was with the high-tier subspecies, but she didn't argue further. She put the eighteen of them—who had been sitting idle—together with the Sabi already handling security, and the ugly mood vanished in short order.
Among the rescued were plenty with tails cut short or arms and legs torn away. Once I judged the rescue more or less finished, I gathered the wounded and started loosing Healing Wave to treat them. Sis had told me to.
"If you're helping them, it's better to do everything your abilities allow and clear the debt. I've been watching them for a few days. They're a race that doesn't forget a kindness."
"And if you're going to help, help hard. That way, if you ever need their help later, it'll go easily."
"I doubt I'll ever need help from these things."
"Then leave them."
"No. I'll do it."
Regrowing the severed arms, legs, and tails was all well and good, but the less-injured ones watching started calling me a hero and bowing their heads, and it looked an awful lot like they wanted treatment too. So I had no choice. I fired stage one Healing Wave every ten minutes until every last wounded one was restored.
Alkema, who had watched all of it from the side, shifted from obeying me because she had no choice to serving me as if she truly acknowledged me. Some of the Sabi who had already looked on me favorably grew friendlier still.
By the morning of the third day, I had been able to survey every place their city had stood.
"ម៉ាក់… ម៉ាក់។… ភ្ញាក់ពីគេង។ យំ……."
I was passing the last camp, where a great many listless Sabi had gathered to rest, when a little one not even a meter tall caught my eye, clinging to a large Sabi gone limp, eyes brimming, mumbling something I couldn't follow.
"What's it saying?"
=The one that child is holding appears to be its mother.=
"...She's dead."
=Yes...=
They hadn't been there when I did the area healing yesterday, and both of them were caked in dirt now. A mother and child, just pulled out by their own kind. Watching the little one clutch the big Sabi and wail left a gritty, sand-in-the-mouth feeling, and I turned my head away. I'm not some omnipotent being. Of course I can't save everyone. Even so, I couldn't help the way my mood sank.
I swept the ground carefully with Spatial Perception, and wherever I caught even a faint trace of Phase Power I marked the spot with an arrow of amber Space Wall. After one more full circuit, not a single living Sabi remained within its range.
"No more Sabi buried alive around here."
=Yes. They cannot match you, Lord Seoha, but our kin have kept at the rescue, so it would be so.=
Over the course of the work, Alkema's manner had grown steadily calmer, until the old light, innocent air was gone entirely. The way she carried herself now called her mother, Kalka-kum, to mind. Hardship and mental anguish do mature a person. That's the way of it.
...So why haven't I changed at all?
Sis had been on a forced march for three days as well. By day she controlled Dok-ak and seventeen high-tier subspecies while she hunted wild Aberrants too powerful for the Sabi to handle, and by night she moved with me, raising light-attribute sources to illuminate the rescue sites. By the time the third morning broke, her wing-feather uniform was caked in dirt, her hair was dry and frayed, and exhaustion hung off her. I raised a Blue Space Wall in the air, set a shelter on top of it, and shoved her inside.
"Whyyy? I'm fiiine."
"You don't look fine. Wash up and get some sleep."
She could have just rested, but she wouldn't go in, insisting on how she was supposed to loaf while I wore myself out on the rescue. I pointed out we were leaving after lunch, and asked whether she really thought she could keep up that tired. She said nothing, opened the shelter door, and went in.
With Sis resting, I leapt into the sky and looked over Mt. Veltical once more. The land that had been buried under that tremendous slide of earth was gouged hideously in every direction, and the stretches where I had erased soil across a wide area to pull the Sabi free had turned into something like open-pit mines. There were more than ten of those. I came back down and muttered as I walked toward the shelter.
"Living here's going to be hard now."
=Not necessarily. Even if the sacred mountain has fallen, this place is still our people's home.=
Alkema, who had been running herself ragged for the past three days, had followed me when I said I was making a last round of the camps, and she answered my mutter.
"Home or not, I'm not helping any further. I don't have the means left, anyway."
=For what you have already done, our people will be grateful to you, Lord Seoha.=
"Don't joke. I know full well a lot of them blame me for this happening."
The first ones I pulled out on day one, for instance, were warrior-class, and they must have been there when I spoke with Kalka-kum. The moment they saw me they came at me brimming with killing intent, saying the mountain fell because of me. I was irritated enough myself. I pushed Thought Acceleration and Body Reinforcement to the limit and beat them without mercy, short of killing them. No—if Sis and Alkema hadn't stopped me, I might actually have killed them.
After that, Alkema must have talked to the rescued ones first, because at least no one went on about Mt. Veltical in front of me anymore. I still kept the incident in mind.
=But it is also true that many of our kin hold gratitude toward you, Lord Seoha. In time, even those who bear you resentment will come to accept that you opened a path for them to live...=
She wasn't bad at reading a mood. She glanced at my profile and tried to soothe me, but that was a hard no. If my lovers praised me, sure, I'd feel better. This was not that.
"Enough. I'm not doing this for how you lot treat me. Once I leave, they're people I'll never see again anyway."
At the meaning of those cold words, Alkema's expression turned so forlorn that the white of her scales seemed to darken a little. Sis thinks we might need their help someday. I don't. See these sickening bastards again? I'll pass, thanks. Alkema meant to follow me, and if she left with me she would never see her kin again—but she had sworn to come even after I made that plain, so I felt no pity and no guilt.
Last of all I swept the sinkhole with Spatial Perception, the one pumping water up like a well. A tremendous volume was still pouring out of it, and the flooding and the river born there seemed to be spreading wider and wider. Nothing left for me to do at the camps.
"I'm going to go do my own work now. Tell them to handle the rest themselves."
=Then I shall make ready to depart, and return.=
Alkema laced her fingers and answered with deference.
"When you're done, come to the shelter."
=Yes.=
Just then a plump, flesh-toned gecko Sabi came running up in a fluster, saw us, and flailed both arms while gekking and gecko-geckoing.
"What's it saying?"
=Ah— it says Mother has returned, leading our kin!!=
Alkema's eyes grew wider with every word. She leapt off the Space Wall, called the wind, and shot off somewhere with the messenger Sabi.
Kalka-kum was alive? I considered chasing after them to see for myself, but I'd see her once before I left anyway. I'd ask a few things then and set out. With that thought, I headed for the shelter to pack.
I turned over where to go once I left this place. When I'd searched for Baekcheong's horn with Franc, heading south had felt a little warmer, which meant we were probably above the equator. Better to go south than climb into the cold north. I'd meant to head south from the start, so the plan didn't need to change, did it?
As for the trip itself... I wondered whether to bring the high-tier subspecies. Alkema would slow us down anyway. Maybe it was better to take all of them, as an escort for Sis. The ceiling on my mental-manipulation capacity kept creeping up little by little even while I did nothing with it, and I still had forty-five percent free. I had no particular use for it right now, and killing all seventeen—sparing Dok-ak—just to free up room sat wrong with me.
I walked on, turning the idle thoughts over, and the shelter came into view. Eighteen high-tier subspecies ringed the floating shelter, keeping the Sabi from approaching, and beyond them a few Sabi loitered, gawking at it. Their own dwellings and the shelter were entirely different kinds of structures, so it was mostly the producer and artisan castes showing curiosity about the building.
How did I know the ones gawking now were producers or artisans? At first I couldn't tell the Sabi castes apart at all, until Alkema, trailing beside me, explained that the fifth caste could adorn the head and the area under the eyes with one color, the fourth with two, the third with three, and the second with four. Robes, she said, could be worn only by the first caste—the priest class. Anyway, the ones looking now were painted in two or three colors. As I approached they parted left and right in a rush to make a path, and the high-tier subspecies lowered their heads with low rumbles, showing me reverence.
I reached the shelter, opened the door, and warm air wrapped around me. Was Sis asleep on the second floor? I went up, opened the living-room door, and there she was, collapsed on the fine leather sofa, sleeping without a guard up—
...
She had fallen asleep in nothing but a bath towel, and she must have turned over, because the towel had slipped halfway down. The nakedness it revealed stamped itself, whole, onto my retinas.
I turned around the instant I saw it. Why the hell was she sleeping there when there was a perfectly good bed?!
The chest I'd once thought of as her single flaw had grown past average, and it occurred to me that a beauty to topple kingdoms was a phrase that suited Sis and Sis alone. Her breasts were hidden by the bath towel, but the volume of them...
Gah! Gaaaah!! Begone, demon of lust!!
I had to turn my thoughts around. Change the subject. What had I been thinking about until just now? I tried to pick the thread back up and force that lethal image out of my eyes, but—
"Nnngh..."
—the moan Sis let slip in her sleep blew every bit of the effort away.
My heart thudded, and blood rushed to my face until it wasn't just hot, it stung. I spun Mana Sieve like a madman, trying to get my composure back, but every time I closed my eyes that image rose up, and I couldn't settle. Breasts no turn of phrase could describe drew a perfect arch that set off those dainty nipples, and abs that looked soft and yet were drawn tight, and at the end of her lower belly, there was—!
Ah, damn it.
That's Sis. That's my ugly sister. That's my ugly, witch of a sister. That's my ugly, witch of a sister whose greatest joy is tormenting her little brother...
Agh! Forget it!!
It's not like this is the first or second naked woman I've seen, so why am I acting like some virgin! I just have to roll her up in the towel and dump her in the room!!
All right. Going in.
I set my eyes and turned, and a full-body shot of Sis filled my vision—asleep, her form past art and into something lethal.
...Right. Too much.
I spun right back around the moment I'd turned. She must have shifted again when she moaned, because the bath towel had slid off entirely, and skin like thrown porcelain, translucent and milk-white— Aagh!
Cover my eyes. Just cover my eyes, blank out only the patch of Spatial Perception where Sis would be, walk over slowly, and wrap her in the towel. Or I could just leave her like that and walk out, couldn't I? Why was I insisting on looking after her?
Because she'll catch a cold like that, obviously! What if she sleeps that sloppily and some passing lizard sees Sis's pretty naked body?!
Ugh. I feel like my mind's about to split.
God. Why do you only hand trials like this to me, you bastard.
I pulled a towel from Subspace Storage, covered my eyes, turned slowly, and crept forward. My heart was hammering so hard the pulse grated in my ears. The whole range of Spatial Perception rose in my head as clear as a 3D image. Only the sofa where Sis lay was punched out, sunk in pitch dark, and I edged carefully toward that gap.
I drew close to that black space, crouched, and groped along the floor toward the sofa. After a moment the genuine leather met my fingertips. I waved a hand around, and sure enough, the towel that had slipped beneath the sofa came under my fingers.
"...Hoo."
I let out a small sigh, caught the end of the towel, and slowly lifted it to lay over Sis—
Soft.
"Eep...!"
S-something soft grazed my fingers and then touched them! What?! A breast?!
The instant something yielding met the fingers gripping the towel, I locked up stiff and strained my ears for her reaction. The sound of her breathing in and out, even. Her heartbeat, a little fast, but steady. And my own heart, pounding like it was about to burst.
I didn't move for dozens of seconds, listening, and only once I was sure she hadn't woken did I carefully draw the towel over her. I pulled until I felt it tug just a little, then turned it across her body and let go, and there was the soft rustle of cloth covering her.
Good. Done. I can move without looking. Now I just wrap the other side around her, dump her on the bed, and leave. After that I wait until she wakes, and we go.
Good. A perfect plan.
The moment I thought that and lowered the towel covering my eyes, I met Sis's eyes, dark as a night sky.
"......"
"......"
...I'm dead.