Alone with My Sister (3)

"N-Noona. This is— I mean. When I came in, you were...!"

I stammered the excuse at my sister, who lay on her side staring straight at me. She hardly seemed to hear it. She caught the towel covering her, rubbed at her eyes, and pushed herself upright, then looked at my flustered self as if I were a hopeless case.

"You were trying to cover me up, right?"

She said it as she rose from the sofa. The crumpled towel loosened with a soft rustle, and the line of her hip beside her lower belly slipped into view.

Where the right side of her lower abdomen—not a blemish on it, plump and brimming with spring—met a thigh like a work of art, the skin folded just slightly, and for a flash I caught something dark, like hair, set against all that white...!

"No?"

"...Huh?"

Ah. Aah! Damn it! Jung Seoha, you crazy bastard!

My face felt ready to catch fire, but I flailed both hands, scrambling for some way to bluff through it, and cried out.

"No— yes! That's right! No matter how warm it is inside the shelter, if you stay like that you'll catch a cold, so...!"

She was silent. Why— why is Noona's face turning red too?

I couldn't get the rest of the words out. I was staring blankly at that shy, flushed face when she shot me a sidelong glare, pushed her mouth into a small pout, and walked off toward the room, the color having crept, soft and unmistakable, all the way to her earlobes.

Her long straight hair, still damp, swayed with a wet gleam, and beneath the bath towel that barely covered her hips, the shapely line of her legs stood out in a way that tightened my chest.

More than that, though, her reaction had thrown me completely.

I'd thought that, on top of still seeing me as a little kid, she was so plain and unaffected about anything sexual that she felt a violent revulsion at the idea of me sleeping with Franc and Hwayeon. So the moment our eyes met, I'd braced myself, certain I was about to be beaten within an inch of my life. A reaction like that was the last thing I had expected.

I realized all at once that I was still crouched there. I started to stand—then discreetly adjusted the front of my pants, and sat down on the sofa.

Her warmth still lingered in the cushions. It left me with a feeling I couldn't quite place.

……

Ah. A verdict had just come down on the read I'd taken of her reaction—caught with that sense of mine for what people aren't saying—and my head was snarled past anything I could put a name to.

Thanks to an intellect that was nothing special, the information I'd just taken in was overloading my brain: a heaviness, as if the whole of it might melt.

Which was to say—Noona already...

She had been looking at me not as a younger brother, but as a man.

It is a statistically proven fact that siblings are so busy growling and tearing at one another that it would be no exaggeration to say the command kill each other is carved into their genes.

And to call that single sentence a thing ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠approaching universal truth, East and West alike, would not be an exaggerated expression in the slightest.

And yet, as if to laugh in the face of statistics like those, Noona had been busy looking after me and gathering me close from the time I was very small.

According to Mom and Dad, from the age of two—the first time she laid eyes on me—she refused to leave my side. Because of that, when I was little and someone asked which I liked better, Mom or Dad, the answer that ought to have come, "I like Mommy better!", would often enough come out instead as the completely off-base "I like Noona!"

Of course, when I gave them grief or did something wrong, she pointed out the fault as logically as Dad and scolded me as fiercely as Mom. But when I hadn't, she looked after me and watched over me so thoroughly you could have called her a sister who was like a mother.

A sister as lovely as a goddess, perfect in every way, who looked after me and only me. A beautiful sister who, whenever Mom and Dad were busy with work and I grew bored, took my hand and went out to play.

How could I not love a sister like that?

Of course, the feeling called loving is a word that broadly takes in both like and love. But until now, I had loved Noona in the sense of like.

The things Myrddin had said, the day he came to know my past, played through my head again.

I'd heard it in the middle of the chaos, and I'd taken the talk of one more woman at face value, assuming the person in question was Mom. But... that wasn't it.

The other one had been Noona.

At the same time, the cryptic thing Yeongeun had said back then came back to me as well.

And that wasn't all. The day I'd had that ridiculous chase with Noona on the hill behind the house, I'd been agonizing over her strange behavior when Yeongeun teased me and called me an idiot. When I pressed her on it, she'd said, "If everyone else knows and you're the only one who doesn't, that's what an idiot is."

While I was busy with the useless scheme of sensing something off about Noona, keeping my distance, and hoping she might naturally go back to how she'd been, Franc and Yeongeun had already been certain.

And when I thought back on how I'd just reacted to her... at this point, even I had no choice but to admit it.

I had been loving Noona in the sense of love, too.

It hurt, and yet I was glad... and being glad, it hurt all over again.

We weren't brother and sister by blood, but we were cousins all the same. In this country, just carrying feelings like these was enough to get you pointed at in the street...

I was writhing in that self-contradictory ache when Noona came out of the room, changed into a neatly laundered feather-wing uniform.

"What are you doing? Trying to make friends with the floor?"

"If I asked, I wonder if it would..."

The nonsense left my mouth on reflex, bypassing my brain entirely. Noona came over, laid a hand on my forehead, and murmured with a worried look.

"No fever."

The scent that rose off her as she drew close was familiar and longed-for at once, and my brain started scrambling all over again. I shoved her back and went for a personal attack.

"A grown woman, sprawled in the living room with nothing but a single bath towel on her bare body—have you no shame as a woman?"

"We're floating in midair, and you've walled off every direction with a blue Space Wall. Who exactly is going to peep?"

"Peeping isn't the problem! You get far too defenseless the second you're somewhere that puts you at ease!!"

"Oh, you startled me."

I'd barked it, and she answered with a light chop of her hand against my head, then smiled brightly and went on.

"I sat down for a minute after washing up and fell asleep before I knew it. I didn't do it on purpose."

Khhh~! Normally she'd have gone on about what a little runt I was and rained knuckle-raps down on my head! Every tiny action, every little motion, was feeding a faith that had already gone past certainty into blind conviction.

Unable to bear the situation, I hung my head—and beneath the white circle skirt, legs as pale and smooth as unblemished porcelain came into view. I'll just close my eyes.

I kept my head down and stayed quiet. Noona, wondering if I was angry, sat beside me, gently stroking my hair, and asked in a small voice.

"Are you mad?"

"What reason would I have to be mad."

I wasn't mad at Noona. I was mad at myself. How was I even supposed to begin telling Mom that I'd come to love Noona as a woman? If I told Dad, he might beat me to death.

"Back when we lived in the apartment, you got furious because the hidden-camera creep across the hall was peeping at me. You don't remember?"

There had been that, too. In the end it had closed with that family emigrating overseas. And for a while, it was all the building talked about.

I sighed at the stifled feeling and rubbed my face as if I were massaging it. Noona, who had no idea what I was feeling, let out a soft little laugh, mussed my hair into a bird's nest, then smoothed it back down and said,

"I'll be careful from now on. More importantly, what are you going to do now?"

"...The one you could call the head of the Sabi is back, they say. I'm thinking of meeting just that one and leaving. I searched for one of Baekcheong's horns while I was digging the buried Sabi out, and it didn't turn up, so there's no reason to stay here any longer."

"When you go, are you taking all those children too?"

"The high-rank subspecies? I can't just let them go, and I don't want to kill them, so I'll have to take them. Why?"

"Grand Blue's raid teams are up to seventeen now, so I thought it'd be nice to put one in each team as a mascot. What do you think?"

Had it grown that much already? Eighteen of them: one Dok-ak, three hybrids with two or more kinds mixed together, two frogs, three snakes, two crocodiles, three lizards, two iguanas, and two chameleons. If I assigned them one to a team... it wasn't a bad thought.

"They're all reptiles and amphibians. Doesn't it feel a little off, making mascots out of creatures like that? It'd be a problem if word got around that the chairman of Grand Blue is a reptile enthusiast."

"Don't worry about that part. I'm handling Grand Blue's image as well."

"Then do whatever you want."

The topic had moved on, and I could breathe a little easier. Like hell I could. Noona was sitting plastered right up against me, and I was in serious trouble if a thoroughly male biological response decided to kick in.

"Anyway, aren't you tired? I was going to head out soon, but if you nodded off like that, you must be exhausted. Wouldn't it be better to rest a little more before we go?"

And I'll take myself somewhere and hide.

"I only closed my eyes for a bit after washing up, so I'm fine. We can leave right away."

She planted a hand on her hip and shrugged, and I couldn't feel a lie in the look on her face.

Tch. Nothing for it.

She said she'd only closed her eyes for a moment, but it really had been no more than a moment. Far from the fatigue leaving her, it would only have piled higher from sleeping and waking. I took her hand and pushed a Healing Touch in through her body, clearing it away.

Noona flinched, a shiver running through her, as if the sensation flooding the inside of her body felt alien.

"Wh-what is this? Healing Touch? Ah, so this is what you did for Chaerin."

I watched her look down at her own body in wonder, my feelings a complicated knot, and then I realized one thing more.

Noona, who had seemed to be in a good mood ever since we entered the Phase World... was that because she thought of this as a date? Someone might call me a narcissistic pervert with an inflated ego for thinking it, but if I did, every one of her actions suddenly had an explanation.

I began to seriously agonize over whether I should bring up the subject currently wrecking the inside of my head, or leave it alone.

Honestly, even the fact that I was holding both Hwayeon and Yeongeun—if that got out, the looks I'd receive wouldn't be kind. Calling them unkind would be putting it nicely. I'd be pointed at as a complete degenerate, one hundred percent. The older the person, the stronger that tendency would be.

A mother-in-law and her daughter, sharing one man. Holding a mother-in-law and her daughter both.

If, on top of a situation like that, Noona and I came to love each other, and if that got out...

All at once I remembered the text of a judgment from some case I'd seen back in middle school. That incest became a crime only if one party reported it, and that simply doing it, in itself, was not a crime. Something along those lines.

When I was young I'd agonized for a long while over what difference that even made, but it wasn't the sort of thing I could ask anyone about, or take to a counselor, so I'd simply forgotten it. Why was it coming back now?

I'd heard that in the country next door, even marriage between cousins was allowed. If that was so, then off to the country next door... At that moment, small, soft fingers caught my cheek and began to tug, just slightly.

"What are you thinking about so hard that you can't even hear your own sister calling?"

"Huh? What?"

"Alkema's calling you from outside."

Her scent, pressed this close, her face drawn near, the fingers against my cheek—I was on the verge of coming undone.

My head had grown so tangled it felt ready to burst. I shot up from my seat and walked outside. First, get clear of this, cool my head, and think it through again after that.

"I offer my sincere gratitude for the rescue of my kin."

Kalka-kum, grimy with dirt and dust, had come with two priests and some three hundred Sabi in tow. Her robe was torn here and there, and through the gaps the scaled flesh beneath showed through.

She looked like she'd taken quite a beating when Mt. Veltical came down.

On top of that, a strangely piercing stench stabbed at my nose, and the inside of my head—which had been a pink, thoroughly scrambled wreck—filled up neat and clean with nothing but the smell.

"What is that smell?!"

Noona caught it, cried out in horror, and fled a good distance off. As a way of clearing the mind, the effect was outstanding.

Inside I was relieved, but I didn't let it show. I watched as three hundred Sabi, with Kalka-kum at their head, knelt in orderly ranks and clasped their hands, then opened my mouth.

"I did it to make myself feel better, so don't do that. And I don't see the white one. Did you get separated?"

"...Ahumrek set foot on the sacred road the day before the mountain collapsed. He was surely buried, and died."

Kalka-kum answered with her eyes closed, worn thin, her expression deeply pained.

So the white one was dead. He'd shielded Baekcheong from the very start, without rhyme or reason, and in the end he'd walked himself onto the road to the underworld.

At the news that her father was dead, Alkema's eyes clouded with grief, but Kalka-kum turned all her attention on me and sought my leave to ask a question.

"Go ahead."

"I would ask to be told, in full, of what transpired after you departed for the Holy Land."

"Why?"

"So that the same thing may not come to pass again, in days to come..."

Hearing that, I stared straight at Kalka-kum. She met my eyes and sent back a look that said there was no other meaning.

At first irritation shot up—I thought she meant to lay the collapse of Mt. Veltical at my feet—but those eyes didn't look like that.

So I skipped the journey to the Holy Land in a word or two, and told the story from the point where Baekcheong began devouring the Sabi. The face covered in scales the color of a dawn sky twisted like a fiend's.

"This... hhh..."

Hsss. Tch. Shuuuu.

"So Franc and I attacked Baekcheong together. Once the defeat grew obvious, it went mad, brought the mountain down, and borrowed the power of the Lord of the Great Sea to lay a curse on us. And Baekcheong paid for that with its life."

I simply left out the part where Baekcheong, taking them for traitors, had tried to drag them along as companions in death.

They'd just been through a disaster that killed half their race. Their minds would be reeling, and I didn't want to torment them with a story like that on top of it. Kalka-kum had been friendly toward me from the start, after all.

When the tale ended, Kalka-kum was trembling and breathing hard, her clasped hands gone white from the force of her grip.

Alkema, listening beside her, and the three of priest rank had sunk into gloom as well, their faces saying they had never dreamed Baekcheong would do something so vicious.

"I thank you for telling me."

"You're not angry about the part where it treated the lot of you like vermin?"

"Baekcheong was an exceedingly arrogant being. It always looked down upon us Sabi, and was wont to regard us as attendants."

The violent anger had passed, leaving an empty look, and as Kalka-kum gazed at the remains of Mt. Veltical—now turned into the source of a river—sorrow lay thick across her face.

"On that point I felt unease, and at gatherings of the kin I raised, more than once, the matter of keeping our distance from Baekcheong... and in the end, it has come to this."

I wondered how it felt to be a leader who had lost a husband, and half of an entire people, in a single instant.

That said, my honest feeling was that I had no wish to find out for myself.

I turned from Kalka-kum, who had gone quiet, stored the shelter away in subspace, beckoned Alkema over, and had her fit a saddle onto the back of a five-meter high-rank iguana subspecies.

We had to move regardless. If I carried Noona on my back or in my arms, she'd be uncomfortable too, and she wouldn't hold up under any more Space Leaping—so I'd have to make a mount of this sort.

The saddle had originally been meant to throw over a dylike. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I'd happened across two of them while rescuing the Sabi and, without thinking, tucked them into subspace. They ought to fit an ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠iguana of similar bulk.

The two iguanas, turned into mounts before they knew what had happened, flicked their tongues with displeased faces as they watched Alkema move to strap saddles onto their backs. But when I fixed them with a cold glare, they wilted, and permitted her to fit them.

While Alkema was saddling the high-rank iguana, Dok-ak—washed clean by Noona, the poison gone without a trace—came dragging his pitch-black bulk over and prowled around me, as if hoping I'd strap a saddle to his back as well.

"This one's too small to go on your back. Quit skulking around in the way and get over there."

Kuuuu...

A dylike's saddle didn't fit a body past fifteen meters, and yet Dok-ak was throwing a sulk anyway—bumping Alkema with his snout for no reason while she saddled the iguana, and hooking her feet with his tail.

Perhaps it pained her to watch her daughter being picked on by Dok-ak. Kalka-kum came up to me and spoke.

"Lord Seoha. If you should have need of it, I will present you with a ceremonial saddle."

"A ceremonial saddle?"

"Yes. It is a saddle for two, made specially for the rites. Should you set it upon the back of that Black Scourge Crocodile, a peaceful journey will be possible for you."

They call Dok-ak the Black Scourge Crocodile?

Everything they owned should have been lost when the city was buried in the landslide. How was she going to give me anything? So I thought—until Kalka-kum slipped a hand into the sleeve of her robe, drew out a leather pouch, and from it produced a miniature saddle, a little smaller than her palm.

She set it on the ground, then began to make a grotesque sound, something the ear could hear and words could not express, and the saddle started to grow.

"Oh my. Oh my?"

Oh. That's something. A secret art as well? Noona, who had been keeping her distance, came running at the sight and pressed right up against my side, watching the growing saddle with a face full of curiosity.

Wondering if it might be something I could learn, I tried sensing the Phase Power within Kalka-kum's body and without it, through Spatial Perception. I felt nothing. All I could see was her TP ticking down, little by little. So this fell under secret arts as well, it seemed.

Looking at it this way, secret arts seemed to hold something I couldn't perceive—like the miniaturization Franc had learned, Myrddin's spatial transit, Morgan le Fay's summoning, or Baekcheong's curse.

"Seoha. That isn't an ability, it's a secret art, right?"

"Yeah."

The saddle Kalka-kum had brought out looked like the wooden pavilions you might see in the countryside back home, only a little finer, built up for the rider's safety and ease.

On its outer walls, a pattern I took for the Lord of the Great Sea was carved in relief, and the inside was spacious—aside from a single bed at the pavilion's center, broad enough that ten people could sit at ease on the floor.

"Does it please you?"

"I like it. But you said it's for ceremonies. Is it all right to just give it to me?"

And if the Lord of the Great Sea threw a tantrum, then what? I didn't ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠say the rest aloud, but Kalka-kum nodded as if she understood, and opened her mouth with a blank face.

"It is for the rites, and nothing more. It is not an object used in the rite itself."

"If you say it's fine, I'll put it to good use."

"To return as much as we have received is the true intent of our people. Yet what we can offer you now is only a thing such as this, and I cannot help my shame. Should your circumstances allow in days to come, I ask that you visit us once more. At that time, we shall show gratitude and recompense equal to the grace we have received."

Noona's eyes sparkled a little too brightly at the talk of a debt repaid, which was somewhat ridiculous—but she was the one who kept house for our raid team, so I let it pass as that being the reason.

And a pavilion like this would let me travel in comfort with Noona. My mood lifted a little, and out of courtesy I answered that I would.