Franc's Story (2)
The rainy season ended only after six days of rain had poured down without mercy, and by then it had turned the forest beneath the cliff into a vast lake with no shore in sight. That each rainy season a great flood of water overflowed from the enormous mountain visible to the east, and periodically made a lake of the forest below the cliff — that, I learned only long afterward.
Yes. I even went all the way to the foot of that mountain, once.
What? No, no. Th-that isn't — that was... the meaning of the kiss on the cliff, back then, that was for Seoha... I mean, that is to say.
Eh? A d-dance? Ah, the dance, I learned it from the Second Madam... th-th-that. Yes! What? It looked like a courtship dance, you say...? Ugh!
P-please. No more mischievous questions.
...I was taught by the Second Madam that one offers such a thing with reverence and respect held in the heart. Seoha knew nothing of me at all, and yet simply understanding a mere ghost like me was not enough — he gave me so much, did he not? And so...
Eep! Honestly, Seoha, every chance you got you were secretly stealing looks at my n-naked body, weren't you!
I knew all of it, you know! Please don't play innocent! Even the way you deliberately tormented me with the Soul Stone, in the tree room! Moving your fingers that blatantly, how was I supposed to...
That's... how is that my fault?! ...B-because I'm pretty...? B-but I'm a ghost...
A-anyway, please stop that story!
Yeees? Uuugh. Using that favor here is cheating, isn't it...? Of course, I did say I would grant whatever you asked!
Haa... A-all right. I'll explain! Seoha, you really are...
Th-that kind of sensation was the first I had ever known, so... What? You want me to describe in detail what sort of sensation it was...? W-well, whenever Seoha's thumb moved, it was as if right here sparked and tingled, and m-my chest as well.
What? You say pointing with my finger isn't... clear enough? I-I mean, r-right here, my lower belly... Ah? Y-you want me to name it? In a word?
Th-that's... my w... my w-womb...
Eek!!
My womb, my womb! The small womb attached inside the vagina! The baby's room, where a baby grows and is born! When Seoha's fingers moved, my womb tingled and sparked! That deep, thrusting feeling turned everything inside my head white! My breasts were toyed with, and the feeling of a hand stroking down my waist was the feeling of all sensation leaving my lower body! My vision went black, and with the feeling of Seoha's hands toying with my body I lost my reason, and I felt as if I wanted to throw myself on Seoha and pin him beneath me!!
Are you satisfied now?!
…
I don't know. Hmph.
…
Honestly, Seoha takes the teasing too far sometimes.
Eep?! Stop! If you keep teasing me, I'll exercise my right to remain silent!
You must listen to the story quietly. Understood?
...How far had I gotten?
Ah — the downpour that struck when I had prepared neither food nor any means of keeping warm was a grave matter, but fortunately the leaves were of an edible kind, and so the problem of food could be resolved. Against the cold I wove leaves into a rain cape, to keep my temperature from falling, and for drink I caught the rain as it fell from the sky.
Enduring, at least, was no trouble. Six days had passed without any great incident, and so I suppose you could say I had come to look down, a little, on the Phase World.
The disaster began the day after the rains ended.
Aberrants began to appear, one and then two, and on the eighth day a number so great that I wondered where on earth they had been hiding surged up onto the cliff. At first I cut them down with a wooden spear I had made for the moment, but that soon reached its limit. I cast the broken spear aside, took up branches left in the downpour's wake, and began to swing them, but I was plainly at a disadvantage. Had I only had a sword familiar to my hand, it would never have come to such a pass — but the terms of forced summoning were impartial, drawing no distinction between man and woman, young and old.
Driven along as if shoved by Aberrants beyond counting, I fought the whole day through, and after that I stopped keeping count. When hunger came I tore the raw flesh from the Aberrants I had killed and ate, and when thirst came I caught their blood and drank as I fought, and at some point vigor welled up in me, and my stamina and my strength increased greatly.
Yes. I had awakened as a Physical Reinforcement type.
The state of fleeing, and snatching what fights I could, was reversed, and the gap widened until one might have called it a slaughter. But the number of Aberrants pressing in did not decrease, and my surroundings filled with them until flight itself was no longer possible. For two days after the awakening I fought without a moment's rest. Having become a Physical Reinforcement ability user, it was no difficult thing to break the bones of a Lowest-Rank Variant with my bare fists and tear its flesh away — but I could not withstand them coming on in numbers that overwhelmed that strength.
The bark armor that had taken blow after blow had long since lost its function and become scrap, and the clothes upon my body had been reduced to rags that could not even cover me. Wounded here and there, and bleeding besides, I had no strength left with which to endure. However much one may be a Physical Reinforcement type, so long as one is a living being, rest is a necessity. The Aberrants fought and devoured one another as well, but those that turned a particular hostility upon me and rushed me like a wave wore my strength down until I felt it fail, and in the end I could not hold my ground. I had no choice but to take refuge in a tree nearby.
Becoming a Physical Reinforcement ability user had raised my body's abilities far beyond the ordinary, but I could not be sure of forcing a way out through well over several hundred Aberrants in a state of utter exhaustion. It was a poor move, and one I had no choice but to make. Once I, who had been made a common enemy, fled up into the tree, the Aberrants gathered to kill me soon began to fight the Aberrants around them.
At the sight of several hundred and more — Buddy Chickens, No-Head Mantises, Big Rats, Skinny Wolves, Land Penguins, Tooth Bunnies, Sticky Bugs, and the rest — fighting as if there would be no tomorrow, I lost all words. There was no precedent for it, even in the instructional texts of the training center: more than a hundred Aberrants of differing kinds, swarming the place where I stood.
I did not have long to ponder the reason. Several of those that had gathered climbed the tree after me, and for a while I snapped thick branches into a makeshift club, beat them off, and stabbed them to death, and the battle among the Aberrants grew fiercer still. When dozens had died, the situation ran toward the worst.
...Yes. So very many Aberrants were dying that creatures which evolved began to appear.
From there the thick smell of blood spread in every direction. Aberrants that caught the blood-scent swarmed in; the swarming Aberrants fought one another; those that survived the fighting evolved; the evolved Aberrants fought the next to swarm in... In that continuing vicious cycle the corpses of Aberrants carpeted the earth until there was no room to set a foot, and that place, become a sea of blood until no ground remained that was not red, was a hellish landscape beyond my imagination.
Frightened by the sight, I climbed higher up the tree. If only I had jumped down and fled then...
The Aberrants forgot me, and for two days and two nights they fought among themselves, and killed, and ate, and evolved. Everywhere the eye could see, the corpses of Aberrants. Everything that flowed upon the ground, the blood of Aberrants. The living were Aberrants and the dead were Aberrants — Aberrants fighting, and Aberrants dying...
The blood that flowed became rivers, and became lakes, the blood one shed mingling into other blood. A place of madness, where there was nothing but to kill, to eat, and to die.
…
The thirteenth day since I was summoned to the Phase World. Even then, I had not escaped that place. If I moved even a little, Aberrants grown so strong that I, as I was then, could not even have contemplated facing them seemed certain to rush me.
On the sixth day of subsisting on water and leaves, the flow of the air changed. Aberrants evolving in the midst of the fighting began to be attacked first. When a Lowest-Rank Variant evolved into a Low-Rank Variant, every Lowest-Rank Variant nearby rushed that Low-Rank Variant. The Low-Rank Variant died then, or else killed, and killed, and killed again the things swarming upon it, until at last it died — and then the Lowest-Rank Variants nearby absorbed the Phase Power flowing from the Low-Rank Variant's corpse, and evolved. Then they killed and killed the Lowest-Rank Variants around them until they died, and the Aberrants around them evolved in turn...
That was occurring in many places at once, to the point I wondered whether every Aberrant in the forest had truly gathered there. I was staring blankly at the sight when, through a husky howl laced with Fear, I knew that a Silver Knight Wolf had appeared.
No — not a Silver White Wolf. Its higher species, the Silver Knight Wolf. It was an Aberrant that had appeared only once, near Winchester Cathedral in England, and because I had taken part then as rear support for the subjugation, I knew it the moment I heard the howl.
...Yes?
E-even if you ask me to say it cutely... a report has its rules, you see...
O-of course, this is not a situation in which I am giving a report... Uu.
...Underst— all right.
The Silver White Wolf is a Mid Grade Aberrant. The Silver Knight Wolf is a subspecies of the Silver White Wolf, and the Ability User Alliance regards subspecies and variants as a tier above the original strain.
The difference between a variant and a subspecies, you mean?
A subspecies, you might think of as a distinctive Aberrant that shares the same root but has branched away along another line. A variant, the researchers of my house determined, seems to be one species reborn as an entirely different species. When one considers that variants are rarer and more powerful than subspecies, it was truly a situation of the most extreme danger. In fact, my house classifies the Silver Knight Wolf as a High-Rank Variant.
You would not learn it even if you searched a Certifier. Information on variants and subspecies such as these is scarcely shared at all. The individuals that come into being are exceedingly few, and the chance of one appearing is as rare as winning the lottery. Even my house, with a hundred years of history, has identified fewer than ten kinds of variant, subspecies, and rare species combined, as I understand it.
Yes. I was terribly startled. Shameful as it is to admit, merely being exposed to that Fear was enough to make me faint for a moment. But set beside what followed, the appearance of the Silver Knight Wolf was no occasion for surprise.
As if in answer to the howl, a sinister energy began to rise from somewhere, and that energy was unfolding from the very trunk of the tree in which I hid. It was a moment of horror. The vitality around me gathered with sudden violence to a single point, and an Evil Ghost — a variant of the Wraith — appeared; and immediately after, scraps of flesh from the corpses squirmed and massed toward one point, and a Knight Crawl, a variant of the Ghoul, appeared.
The Evil Ghost that manifested beneath the tree had the form of the souls of Aberrants of differing shapes, stitched together like rags. The Knight Crawl had the shape of a great field rat, but its size surpassed four meters, and from its skin, here and there, the heads and legs of Aberrants protruded. It was a rotting form, organs spilling down. A sight of pure horror.
The Evil Ghost is a variant of the Ghost, and the Knight Crawl a subspecies of the Zombie Exceptor, and both are Aberrants rated High Grade. Even an ordinary high-tier variant or subspecies would be dangerous, but what made it graver still was that the Silver Knight Wolf, the Evil Ghost, and the Knight Crawl were all undead, holding the most extreme enmity toward any being that lived and bred.
The Knight Crawl and the Silver Knight Wolf, the instant they appeared, fell upon the living Aberrants fighting nearby. Being of the same undead kind, perhaps they preferred — rather than fight one another, evenly matched as they were in strength — to kill the living they hated. But the Evil Ghost, as if it had sensed me hiding in the tree, did not fall upon the Aberrants. It came toward me, slowly.
True to the saying that it hates the living, the Evil Ghost approached trailing white smoke steeped in vengeful resentment, and the moment I saw frost forming on the branches it brushed past, I understood that my life hung by a thread. The height was close to sixteen meters, but if I meant not to die, I had no choice but to jump. I was a Physical Reinforcement type. From a height like that, I thought, at least I would not die.
I moved to the side opposite the Evil Ghost's approach and leapt, and in the same instant the Evil Ghost loosed something toward me. I struck it aside with a wooden stick, but the stick snapped feebly, and it struck my right thigh. The thigh hit by that thing like white frost lost all sensation, and below the thigh I could not move well, but judging that to stop where I was would mean certain death, I spent all my strength in an attempt to flee... and before I knew it, the Silver Knight Wolf was beside me, and it bore me down.
I was badly startled. By reflex I seized the Silver Knight Wolf and rolled with it, thrusting my left arm into the mouth of the thing trying to tear into my head, meaning to stop it up. But the jaw-strength of a High-Rank Variant could not be stopped. The instant it bit down, everything from below the elbow was sheared clean away.
Between the foul stench of carrion pouring down from above and the massive body of the Silver Knight Wolf crushing me under it, I had not even the space in which to feel pain. With the thought that if I hesitated, the next moment I would surely die, and with the Second Madam's face wavering before my eyes, I stretched out my right foot with all the strength I had, meaning to kick the Silver Knight Wolf in the belly... but in that instant the Knight Crawl's rotten flesh crushed me and the Silver Knight Wolf together beneath it.
The Knight Crawl, vicious in its stench, rotten blood and pus streaming down it, was horrific beyond words. In another sense, it was fortune. The Silver Knight Wolf seemed to believe it had been attacked by the Knight Crawl, and so it turned its attention from me and began to fight the Knight Crawl. I had been pinned beneath two creatures of more than five meters' bulk, each of a weight that must have been several tons, but true to the sturdy flesh of a Physical Reinforcement type, I had only bruising over my whole body, and the scrapes of being dragged across the ground. So, in the gap while the Silver Knight Wolf and the Knight Crawl fought, I watched for a chance to flee.
The chance came quickly. The Evil Ghost was caught up in the fight between the Silver Knight Wolf and the Knight Crawl, and the clash spread into a battle of three. Seizing that opening, I rose with difficulty, and dragging the right foot that would not move well, I limped and ran without stopping, to be gone from that place. The Lowest-Rank Variants nearby had been killed by the subspecies and the variant Aberrants, or else had fled, and after that I was able to run far from that place without an Aberrant falling upon me.
All of it, without ever noticing the calamity still to come.
While I fled the high-tier subspecies and variants, my stamina gave out, and I hid myself in a deep burrow that opened at the center of a low hill. The situation did not improve. From the left thigh the Evil Ghost had struck, the cold did not fade. It ate its way along the blood vessels, consuming my lower body and rising slowly toward the heart, and the uncanny sensation that had begun in the left arm bitten by the Silver Knight Wolf was likewise traveling the vessels toward my heart.
Before long I realized my left eye could no longer see, and even the right eye's sight had failed, to the point that I could hardly make out what lay directly before me. That was when I understood. I had been infected by all three — the Knight Crawl, the Silver Knight Wolf, and the Evil Ghost.
The left arm, bitten by the Silver Knight Wolf. The thing's fluids, driven in through my wounds when the Knight Crawl crushed me. The thigh, struck by the Evil Ghost's energy...
I was afraid I would die just like this. And a horrific thirst made me feel as if I would die of it. I crawled with difficulty out of the burrow and made for a river flowing nearby, and the moment I saw myself reflected in the water at the bank I reached, I felt the hope of living go out.
The few scraps of clothing that remained clung as if fused to my skin, and the flesh laid bare was a horrific thing, muscle and skin separating and sloughing away like the skin of one exposed to radiation. Where the stark crimson muscle showed, ichor seeped; the scraped wounds were packed with pus; and from the wound of the left arm, pitch-black stalks climbed the blood vessels to cover my shoulder and the region of my left breast. From the left leg, pale clouded stalks had spread to cover my lower abdomen. Upon the water was reflected my own image — one that not even a world-ranked Healer could have saved.
The moment I blankly raised a hand to my head, the hair the Second Madam had admired and envied came away in clumps — worse, the scalp tore, and blood like pus ran down. My face, too, was swollen and sagging, as if I had taken leprosy. Was it the punishment for having made light of the Phase World? The looks the Second Madam had praised were nowhere to be found, and before a hideous ruin of a face, and wounds with no promise they would ever heal, I, who had forgotten even the pain and was staring blankly at the water...
I gave up, in the end, on returning alive.
The moment I realized that even if I went back, there would be no place for me in my house.
I had no choice but to abandon my life, and cast my body into the flowing river.
It's all right. It is all long past.
Hehe...
...After that, I do not remember well. What comes back to me, in scattered pieces, is only that the river washed the ichor and the pus away, and the skin that had been sloughing off, the river took as well, as if it were stealing it.
All at once I realized I had not died — that I had survived — and I came to myself. I was standing blankly in the forest then, and though I clearly remembered having thrown myself into the river, I could not understand why I stood not in the river, but at the forest's edge.
My left eye could not see at all, so I examined the state of my body with the right eye that remained, and my naked body came into view. In the wounds here and there, where the skin seemed to have peeled away, there were bright red muscle fibers that looked to have been exposed for a long time, and the gouged wounds and the sunken wounds, I could tell, were the places where pus had run. The left arm the Silver Knight Wolf had bitten off had grown back as well... but not a single layer of skin covered it. Muscle and bone and veins lay bare as they were.
The hair that had fallen to about the length of my back was a tangled mess, growing in sparse patches like a leper's, and even the color had changed, from platinum blonde to brown. And the muscles under my hands, hard as stones, that did not feel as if they were mine...
An ominous feeling came over me at how I had changed. Thinking that if I looked into the water I might confirm what I had become, I began to wander in search of the river. Whenever an Aberrant came into my eye, rage boiled up, and before I knew it I had torn the Aberrant to shreds and killed it — and I realized that my height had grown tremendously. A Skinny Wolf fit into a single hand.
The unease was such that I felt I might lose my mind. Frantically searching for the river and wandering the forest, I could tell that my physical abilities, too, had grown past anything I could understand, but in that moment I thought it did not matter what became of me. Yes... I had unconsciously realized that I was no longer human. But the shock does not seem to have been as great as one would think. Perhaps because I had already given up once, in the midst of despair. It must have been because I sensed that I could never return to reality, and that I could never see the Second Madam again.
And after I found a small pool, and looked at myself reflected in it... matters concerning the Second Madam never once rose in my mind again. I was only raging, blindly, at the Aberrants.
At first, I remember, I sank into a sense of nothingness, together with the hollow feeling of having become an Aberrant. Then my memory cut out once more... rather than cutting out, it was the feeling of dreaming. Reason was there, but the body moved according to instinct, and I could not lay a hand upon any of it.
By day I sought Aberrants and tore them to death; by night I closed my eyes and rested a little, and before long I was wandering again in search of Aberrants. That was the day. A life of roaming the forest, chewing whatever leafy branch I came upon, and when I found an Aberrant, catching it and chewing it down alive.
...In ordinary times I kept my reason, and repeated the seeking and the killing of Aberrants. But the moment anger took me, again as if dreaming, my body slipped free of my will and by instinct repeated seeking Aberrants out and killing them. Then I would watch, as if dreaming once more, while my body moved and hunted Aberrants down to kill, and when the anger sank, I would take back authority over my flesh. Such was the life.
I passed an uncountable span of time in that way, and then I came to realize that the forest through which I wandered was the forest beneath the cliff. Roaming it, I sometimes fought desperate battles with Aberrants whose grade I could not tell, and the wounds I took in fighting, if I killed the Aberrant and waited a little beside it, recovered quickly, along with an itch in the wound. There were cases that did not recover, but I did not trouble myself over them. Even left as they were, the wounds closed, in time, perfectly, of their own accord.
After some while of breaking trees into clubs and using them, I happened upon a tree that had died of a lightning strike — a tree turned so hard that even my strength had difficulty breaking it. Once I had, with difficulty, pulled the tree up and shaped it into a bludgeon, the times I was wounded grew far fewer. And when I could no longer tell how much time had passed, and my height had grown again, to about half the height of a modest tree —
I found a living person.
I do not know from when, but I had learned that if I moved following a sensation like something jabbing at my brain, I could find Aberrants, and so that day too I moved my body as the sensation commanded. The feeling was fainter than usual, and it took time to find the thing, but something that did not flee, sitting quietly up in a tree — I thought it a Buddy Chicken.
So, gripping my wooden club, I approached the place where the Buddy Chicken was hiding, when a stench strange and yet... familiar stirred my memory, and my reason woke, and a box that had been shut inside my head came open. It was the smell of sweat that had come off my fellow trainees in the days of the training center, and the stench of going unwashed, sharp enough to stab the nose. And suddenly there was the smell of urine as well...
Feeling my heart tremble, I reached out with care, and when I parted the leaves, it fell to the ground.
It was a person.
His appearance was that of one who had survived some number of days — filthy, old grime streaking off him — and seeing three long wounds upon his thigh and his back, as if he had suffered an Aberrant's attack, I judged that he had been struck by a Long-snouted Lean Wolf. He was an ordinary white man, no taller than about my knee. At the sight of him trembling from the shock of the fall, I froze in surprise, and the man froze in surprise as well — no. He was shaking, in a state just short of his soul fleeing his body in terror.
I looked at him a moment with a startled heart, and the instant I unconsciously let a sound escape me — ah — the man screamed, turned his back on me, and began to flee. I faltered, reaching out a hand as if to catch him, and began to say wait, but whether he could not hear my words, he went on running, screaming.
How long had it been since I had seen a person? Clutching a head gone dizzy from a heart startled and pounding, I chased after the man.
Yes... it was a mistake. If only I had stayed still in that place, that man would not have died.
The moment I began to follow, the man fled with a scream still greater, came to the cliff, and without a moment's hesitation threw himself from it.
…
Dozens of meters below, as I looked blankly down upon a sight like a red flower come into bloom, I felt something snap within my heart.
I... truly... Having become an Aberrant. I had caused a person to die.