Franc's Story (3)

To say it was not my fault... You truly are gentle, Seoha. Strong of heart, and so very keen of judgment...

I fear I could not manage the same.

You were kind enough to tell me it was not my doing, but it was. The man who fell from the cliff and died because of me left a great wound upon my heart.

The rainy season in that place came once every six months, and though several such seasons passed, the wound would not heal. For hundreds of days the blossoms of blood wavered before my eyes, and time and again I lost my reason and watched, as if dreaming, while my body slaughtered aberrants. Then, at some point, from deep in the forest atop the cliff, I sensed a presence that was not ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠unfamiliar.

At that sensation—nothing in the world so loathsome, so hateful—my body moved first, drawn like a bee to honey, deeper and deeper into the trees. And there...

I met it.

The Silver Knight Wolf. The one I suspected of being the very root of my mutation into an aberrant.

The place was thick with the aura of the dead, and the forest that had once boasted of its green freshness was twisted, as if screaming beneath the Silver Knight Wolf's presence. The ground had been blackened and corrupted by the energy of death until nothing living could remain upon it. There the beast lay crouched in arrogant ease, and turned upon me eyes so cold that no spark of life could be felt ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠in them.

A white wolf, like a moon afloat alone in the night sky. Perhaps because so long had passed since last we met, it had grown far larger than at our first encounter. A bulk that had once been no more than a horse's now rivaled my own frame, the frame of an aberrant giant, and the vast, mighty presence rolling off the creature was such that I could not lightly promise myself victory.

The Silver Knight Wolf did not seem to know me. It could not, however, fail to know the killing intent my body gave off. It settled into a fighting stance and fixed me with a glare, and I found that I, too, had come awake at some point—my club of lightning-struck wood gripped tight, my own killing intent drawn up.

For three days and three nights, in that forest which had become a wood of death, I fought the Silver Knight Wolf with resentment and hatred held in my heart.

The Silver Knight Wolf was a Physical Reinforcement type, the same as I. When I shattered its bones, it carved my flesh; when I crushed its muscle, it ran me through—again and again. In the instant I caught an opening and brought my weapon down to smash its skull, the beast unleashed a howl it had been saving, a howl steeped in Fear. Struck at such close range, I was briefly paralyzed, and it lunged in and sank its teeth into my throat.

I endured the agony of my neck about to tear under those fangs and that jaw, gathered the strength of my whole body into both hands, seized its muzzle, and slowly forced it open. It was not so much that I could not allow myself to die. In that moment, I think, nothing ruled me but rage. That must be why I could draw out a strength beyond my limit.

I wanted to tear the muzzle apart then and there, but that was beyond me. So I wrenched the beast aside with all my strength and threw myself onto its back, locked both legs about its waist as if to snap it in two, and wrapped both arms around that thick neck, squeezing with everything I had.

Unable to roar again with its throat choked shut, the Silver Knight Wolf rolled across the ground and rammed itself into ancient trees, thrashing desperately to throw me off. I was no less desperate. The harder I clenched the limbs wound about its neck and waist, the wilder it bucked, and the wilder it bucked, the deeper my arms sank into that thick neck. Then, from the thigh clamped around its waist, I felt it first—a wet, grinding crack. Something giving way.

The Silver Knight Wolf collapsed in a heap. Its hindquarters no longer moved; only the forelegs still thrashed. A moment later a grinding snap came from its neck as well, bone breaking, and the beast went still.

Neck and spine both broken, it could only gape its muzzle and pant, glaring up at me. Feeling some unnameable emotion boil up beneath that gaze, I retrieved my club and, without a shred of hesitation, brought it down upon its head.

For a while I simply stared, dazed, at the corpse of the Silver Knight Wolf, its skull smashed open and what had been inside spilled out. My vision swam terribly, and I was so tired I wanted to lie down and sleep that very instant, yet the emotion that had been tangling my thoughts would not allow it.

Looking back now, I believe the root of that feeling was vengeance, and the languor that came over me was what follows when vengeance is satisfied, even in part. Never once in my life had I resented another living thing, and so the self I was then could not recognize what it was that stirred my head and my chest. Even so, of this much I was certain. Something knotted inside me had loosened, if only a little.

A short while later, something burst from the Silver Knight Wolf's body and spread outward, wrapping my wounded flesh. A portion of it seeped into me. That it was Phase Power, I learned only afterward, once I had met you, Seoha.

Feeling the Silver Knight Wolf's Phase Power flow into my body, I simply lay back upon the ground. And I felt something condensing within my heart.

A Phase Stone.

I remained for several days where I had killed the Silver Knight Wolf, and with a reason grown somewhat calmer, I called up, one by one, the things I had been turning from. I reached a conclusion. I had become an aberrant because of the wounds dealt me by two variants and one subspecies, and because of something that had infected me through those wounds.

The thought that I had killed one of my three enemies loosened, if only slightly, the knot bound in my chest. And I swore an oath. I would find the remaining two as well, and I would kill them.

That I was able to slay so many aberrants across that vast forest, I owed to the rainy season. Once every six months it came, and in time with it the lowest-grade and low-grade aberrants were driven up onto the cliff; and after the rains ended, scarce food often set them to fighting one another. When that time came, I surrendered my flesh to instinct and beat to death every aberrant my senses could perceive.

Pardon? You mean that, aside from those four, I never met an aberrant before the rainy season arrived?

Hm... Perhaps, when I died, the roar I let out with Fear mingled into it frightened them all into flight. Or perhaps it was because of me. As the rainy season drew near I kept to the cliff's edge, so any aberrant that remembered as much would have fled far from it.

Yes. Then... I shall continue.

After I killed the Silver Knight Wolf and a Phase Stone formed in my heart, I grew stronger than before, and larger, and faster. Now and then I met aberrants that had grown to a size near my own, and still I could kill them without particular difficulty. Thinking on that, it seemed there was a great gulf in strength between an aberrant that possessed a Phase Stone and one that did not.

And after several more rainy seasons had passed, I was able to meet a person again.

It was a time when instinct moved my flesh, and before my reason could even surface I came face to face with her. Her eyes flew wide. She clutched at her chest, and then she collapsed and closed her eyes as if falling asleep, and never opened them again.

From her clothing, I would say she had been an ordinary housewife, just as my mother was. So in the instant she met me—an aberrant giant—the shock upon her heart must have stopped it, and thus she closed her eyes...

The death of the second person I met dealt a great blow to my reason. When reason stood at the fore, I no longer went seeking aberrants. More and more I simply sat in a daze, leaning against a tree. Perhaps in reaction, whenever instinct ruled my flesh I rampaged all the more savagely.

By the time some twenty rainy seasons had passed after that, I believe I was half mad.

...Pardon? How... how was I mad, you ask?

That... that is, when reason moved my body, the drained weakness and the sense of futility made even stirring a bother, and... because I felt as though I were sinking into a mire, I often... touched myself. As well.

Masturbation... oh, dear. That is to say, in the moment I did it, the weakness vanished, and the emptiness too, and for that instant alone I could surrender my reason to pleasure...

While I had my reason, touching myself... masturbating became a habit. I knew that the more I gave my reason over to simple pleasure, the longer grew the spans in which instinct moved my flesh. But by then I was of the mind that it no longer mattered what became of me.

In the midst of that, I met a person again. She was a Black woman, and the moment she saw me, she went mad.

Her eyes lost their focus. Spit spilled from the corner of her mouth, and she went hee-hee, hee-hee, reeling this way and that, until she sank down where she stood, wet and soiled herself, and did nothing but giggle.

...I left her there, and withdrew.

I thought that if she had gone mad, then death would be the kinder happiness. And I was one who lacked even the courage to grant her that death.

As I drew away from her, a fragment of forgotten memory rose. Among the ordinary knights sworn in alongside me there had been a kind older sister I was close with, and she, too—having succeeded in returning alive—had gone mad, just as that woman had.

For several years my senior received every manner of treatment at the hospital belonging to the House, but her madness showed no improvement. Nothing remained in her but an extreme violence, and in the end she was judged beyond treatment. After that... with her family's consent, she was quietly put to death. A mad Physical Reinforcement ability user who is not even of the Special type is no different from a bomb with the safety taken off.

...I am all right.

No. Please let me tell it. You must be curious as well, Seoha, and I... I wish to speak of everything.

Some time after I had withdrawn, the faint sense of the woman that my senses had been catching overlapped with something else, and soon it was gone. An aberrant must have killed her.

After that, whenever I had my reason I gave myself over to nothing but masturbation, like a monkey that had only just learned the act. I could not bear it otherwise. Even thinking had become a bother, and without something to fix upon, it was too hard to endure. And so what I chose was that. And when instinct came forth, I went seeking aberrants and carried out a slaughter like one gone mad.

Amid that repetition of a primitive life in the forest, the fourth person I met was a Black man.

By then instinct already moved my flesh for most of each day, but by good fortune I was holding to my reason when I found him. Even so, from what had come before, I believed that if I approached he too would die, and so I only watched from far off.

Taking wound upon wound, he managed with difficulty to bring down a single Skinny Wolf, and on that meat he endured for ten days. Then, on the eleventh day of my watching, he awakened, and became an ability user of the wind element. But perhaps he grew careless, having gained a power. While he flew through the sky he was spotted by a Mid-High Rank Variant—an Eagle Striker—and so he died.

I could have saved him. I did not. I sank down where I was, and wept without end.

I am a filthy thing. Unhappy in this wretched shape, and unwilling, filthy as I am, to see that man alone find happiness. No. I am not even human.

Writhing in self-contempt, I struck upon a selfish thought. If I went about killing every aberrant round about me, then perhaps the people summoned into the Phase World might stand a better chance of returning alive. And so, if I only worked harder at killing the aberrants of the forest and the cliff, that might serve as penance for those who had died because of me. Those with ability, or with luck, would return alive from the Phase World. Those without would bury their bones here.

And yet the fifth person I met also happened to catch sight of me, and fled in terror, and fell into the river, and died. Yes. The very river where you and I met, Seoha. They went under and never even rose to the surface, and were swept away, and dropped over the waterfall, and died.

...It was agony. But I consoled myself that they had simply been unlucky, and I decided that the proper course, whenever I sensed a person, was not to approach, not to spare them a thought, and only to go about catching aberrants. I held to that thought until I met you, Seoha, hidden up in the tree.

Ah—the Night Crawl I found between the third person and the fourth.

The Night Crawl, which had taken a Big Rat as its core, must have absorbed a great many living aberrants and animals, for its bulk had surpassed twenty meters. The moment it discovered me it spread a thin yellow miasma all around and spat corpse-poison without cease. But its base form was a Big Rat, and its limbs were small beside that bloated body, so its movements were slow, and slipping its attacks was not particularly difficult.

Draw near, however, and the yellow miasma wrapping the Night Crawl raised blisters upon the skin and rotted the flesh wherever it touched. So from a distance I tore trees from the earth and hurled them, and skewered the thing. With dozens of trunks driven through its torso, the Night Crawl vomited blood and fell to convulsing, and when I saw that the yellow miasma had ceased, I charged in as I was and beat it to death.

Perhaps because the wooden club was of lightning-struck wood, I had the distinct feeling it told especially well against the Night Crawl.

Not long after the fifth person died, I was able to find the Evil Ghost as well.

The Evil Ghost I met again was unchanged from the first time I had seen it. What was more, it seemed vulnerable to the club of lightning-struck wood. It could bring no particular power to bear against me, and only when its spirit-body was on the verge of being split apart and snuffed out beneath the club did it begin to flee.

It passed through the trees as it ran, and perhaps the sight of me overturning the forest in pursuit woke a sense of peril in it, for it possessed the body of a mole that had been hiding underground. The instant the Evil Ghost took hold, the mole swelled to a full meter in the blink of an eye, and with a burst of movement it dug down into the earth and was gone.

The refuge I had meant to guide you to, Seoha, was that place. The burrow was deep and wide, and for some reason the aberrants would not come near it. With time, too, the inner reaches of the earthen tunnel had collapsed entirely, so I thought it would be safe... Pardon?

You are saying they stayed away because of the trace of death-energy the Evil Ghost had left behind?

...Ah.

I am sorry! I only thought it safe, since no aberrant came near the place at all...!

Even if... even if there had been nowhere to go, in any case...

Even so...

...You truly are gentle, Seoha.

Ahem!

The mole the Evil Ghost had possessed—I called the creature Morg.

For a long time Morg fled my pursuit. For some reason it did not even register upon my senses, so tracking it was hard, and whenever I lost it in a fight I spent a great while finding the trail again. We fought hundreds of times, at the least. At first it would not even clash with me, fleeing the instant we met, but as time passed the exchanges of blows grew more frequent.

Its growth was startlingly steep. When a fight turned against it, it did not hesitate to run, and it would never fight in a place that put it at a disadvantage. That caution spun out the thread of its life.

In the course of this I came to know that Morg was not an aberrant, but an ordinary animal. To the eye it seemed a subspecies of Grand Mole, and yet the presence one invariably senses from an aberrant could not be felt from Morg at all. The reason... I do not know.

And so, through the passing of ten rainy seasons, Morg survived my pursuit to the very end, and grew until its bulk nearly matched my own. An ordinary animal, and yet it grew without cease. In five years it had become as large as I was. The claws upon its forepaws lengthened without end, and the teeth it kept hidden had turned terribly threatening.

After the Phase Stone formed in my heart, if I gathered my strength into a given place, my skin grew tough enough that the ordinary attacks of other aberrants could not so much as wound me. Morg's foreclaws, however, cut me like paper. And my height at the time had only come to be a little greater than a small tree, so...

Pardon? My height was eleven meters and thirty-seven centimeters?

You established a measure with your Search ability and gauged it exactly, you say?

Yes...

Ah, no! I look just as I did when I was human, now! I carry no complex about that large body. And besides, I was a one-eyed giant aberrant then...!

Nnh...

P-please do not laugh so...

...Even after that, my flesh went on fighting Morg without end. But by then my will to live had sunk to its lowest.

I had grown weary even of groping after the body's pleasure through masturbation, and so I yielded my body to instinct. A long time had already passed with me watching, from the far side of consciousness, as instinct fought Morg. I no longer wished to see people die. I thought that if I only killed Morg—the enemy that had made me an aberrant—then all of it would be over.

I did not know precisely how it would end. But if the mind dies, it is only the natural order that the body dies as well. With a spirit as weak as mine, I could no longer endure a life lived as an aberrant...

And before the rainy season came, I had a premonition that the matter with Morg would be decided. If time kept on, Morg would only grow stronger still, and then even my body, fully become an aberrant, would be unable to withstand it. Instinct recognized that as well.

From that day, the instinct that had pursued Morg without a single day's rest, hunting aberrants all the while, began to take rest, so that for a little while it might bring the body to its peak. While I watched in a daze as instinct rested, I felt it. A sensation faint, and yet intense. A sensation I could not understand, pricking at my brain.

At that feeling, as if it rang through the soul itself, I very nearly pressed instinct down and stepped to the fore of consciousness. Instinct, it seemed, judged the sensation and the scent drifting from a tree near the waterfall to be human, and passed them by with indifference, drawing on toward the falls that poured down from the cliff.

Yes. The person hidden in the tree was you, Seoha.

Even after seeing what I was—even after I had come within a mere few meters—you did not lose your reason. You held your breath, and you watched my movements as if you meant to see clear through them.

Haha...

It was the first time.

Of the more than twenty people I met, you were the first who was not afraid of me, even seeing the aberrant I had become. Aberrants themselves fled the moment they saw me, and yet you alone held fast to your reason. You were the first, Seoha.

I wanted to go to you that very instant and speak. But I was afraid. Afraid that if I spoke, the same thing would befall you as had befallen the more than ten who saw me, fell into panic, and died. And so I did not step forward. Instinct ignored you, and, to restore the body's condition, scooped up the mud settled at the foot of the falls and smeared it over me.

Pardon? Ah—I do not know the reason, but that mud had a considerable effect in restoring fatigue and in healing wounds. The riverbed atop the cliff had none, and the farther one went from the waterfall, the more I believe the effect dwindled.

Haa...

Perhaps my reason's awareness of you reached instinct in turn, for instinct gazed a moment at the tree where you hid, and then, to finish its rest, leapt the river.

And by chance, I found Morg.

For some reason the creature seemed not to have grasped where I was. And so instinct hid the body—true to the very word, instinctively... Ah? You have it exactly! How did you know?

Eh... You mean you read the wounds upon Morg's body with your Analysis ability, and inferred it from that?

How extraordinary...

Yes. Instinct caught the sign that Morg was near, and leapt without a sound, setting the body high in a tall tree. I killed even my breath, and killed even my presence, and waited to see from which way Morg would come. It never noticed me above, and was about to pass beneath.

Had it possessed eyes, I would have been found out. But Morg had grown with its eyes wasted away, and did not discover me, and the flesh that did not so much as stir slipped past even its organs of sense.

The opening was a leap, aimed at the waist.

The instant I dropped, Morg's whiskers caught the tremor in the air, and it tried to surge forward and slip away... but the fight that followed went just as you have said, Seoha.

From that battle I came away with a severed left wrist, three punctures through the abdomen, and a cut upon the thigh. Morg took a grave wound, its left hind leg crushed; it allowed a blow to the head and another to the waist, so that skull and spine were cracked; and half the claws of its right foreleg were broken.

Looking only at the moment, we had taken similar harm. Considered over the longer course, though, it was a fight in which I, whose flesh regenerated swiftly, might have held the advantage. The bleeding from the severed stump and the pierced wounds was too severe, however, and to go on fighting was impossible. With my strength greatly diminished by the loss of flesh, to continue would have ended in my defeat.

Instinct seemed to reach the same judgment. It resolved upon a brief withdrawal, and brought the fight to a close by falling slowly back.

Afterward, my instinct searched for the left hand that had been cut free and gone flying somewhere. Join the severed hand back on, and the regeneration would be swift. But the hand was not found. Time passed, and the next day I met Morg again, and battle broke out once more.

It was a moment I had not accounted for. But instinct sensed there could be no retreat, unleashed a savage roar, and charged in with the wooden club raised.

...?

Seoha? Why do you wear that expression? If something is amiss...

Yes. I shall go on.

At the savage roar—laden, that is, with Phase Power—the trees round about snapped and burst apart. Morg, as if it were nothing at all, came running on three legs.

In the first clash I offered up the left arm, already gone below the wrist, meaning to take Morg's sound left foreleg in exchange. Morg blocked with the right foreleg whose claws were broken, and tried to shear away my right arm.

The fight was not long. Amid that violent movement—snapping trees, toppling them, each of us hunting the other's weakness—my body caught upon a tree broken only halfway through, and I faltered for an instant. Morg drove its left foreleg in, sound claws aimed at my heart.

I could not let that gap-seeking strike pass by unharmed. To give flesh and take bone, I swung the club at the left foreleg it was bringing around. But I was deceived by Morg's feint, and the club broke only a single claw. Morg's attack, too, had its path shifted as the claw snapped, and it ran through my lower belly.

At the pain of my belly being churned, instinct unleashed the savage roar again, leapt back, and in the same motion tore the buried claw free and brought the club down toward Morg's head. Morg did not stay still. It kicked off upon a sound hind leg and raked its sound claws upward along a diagonal.

To receive that would have split my body in half and killed me, so I slowed the tempo of my own strike and twisted at the waist. Morg's claws, more than three meters long, slashed across my flank and went past. From the cut, severed lengths of organ spilled. Instinct paid it no mind. It charged the Morg thrown off balance by that single attack, and swung the club at its spine.

Morg, as if to show it would not fall so easily, kicked the ground with its hind legs and tried to slip away. But it had already come inside my reach. My club landed a heavy blow upon its abdomen.

The beast vomited blood and was flung beyond a tree taller than I. Instinct jumped after it and unleashed the savage roar once more.

My left hand was gone, and my waist was half severed. My strength in battle had plummeted. Morg, as if the blow taken to the abdomen were fatal, could not get its body up, and was vomiting blood from its mouth.

Coming down, I swung the club to crush the remaining left leg that still posed a threat. Morg was desperate as well, and swung at me with a stagger in the timing—the sound left foreleg together with the right, which had been reduced to a lump of meat.

I was unlucky.

I avoided the claws of the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠left foreleg, but I could not avoid the claws of the right, whipped about like a lash. A wound slashed diagonally across my face, and my eye burst. Instinct, unable now to see what lay ahead, swung the club like something mad and struck blindly at all around it.

Fortune was with me, it seems. The club connected with a thing I took for Morg, and I heard Morg scream. Judging by the shock ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠felt through the club and by the direction of it, I believe the beast took a heavy blow to its right hind leg and its spine.

My sight was sealed, but instinct began to fight Morg by feel alone. Relying on sense, I landed blow after blow, and Morg, too, resisted as if its life hung on it, and hacked my body to pieces. I felt the pain of arms and legs run through and slashed open, and a pain surged through my left chest as if a branding iron were being pressed to it. Instinct did not stop. It brought the club down, again and again.

Pardon? Yes. I believe it kept striking only the same place... Ah—vicious, you say? No! It was not I who was so, but my instinct... Pardon? You say my instinct was vicious?

......

I am not angry.

...We cast defense aside and traded blows with mindless brutality. I let out my roar twice, but I had spent an enormous store of strength in the fight with Morg, and its true power would not come. Even so, it seemed no small shock to Morg. A hacking, choking scream reached my ears.

At the thought that this was at last the end, instinct rejoiced. And so did I.

At the beast's cry of pain, instinct did not stop to weigh the cost. It jumped, and coming down, brought the club down upon the place from which Morg's cry had risen. The feeling of something hard shattering at the club's tip surged in together with the sensation of the beast's claw running through my heart.

I felt a strange sense of life draining out of my body, and of instinct fading as reason crept in to claim the flesh. My thoughts were clear, but strength would not enter me, and I fell slowly forward. The claw that had been piercing my heart moved with me, and through my insides spread a feeling I never wish to know again—lung and heart and stomach being sliced apart.

Then I felt something soft come against my face and my chest. I knew at once that it was Morg's fur, and from the flesh that did not so much as twitch, I knew that Morg had died first.

...What came to mind, in that moment, was you, Seoha.

I regretted it. If I had known it would end this way, I should at least have spoken to you.

And then something pierced my mind—my soul—and gooseflesh rose all over me. But that sensation soon grew faint, and with the feeling of something slipping out through the crown of my head, as if my very spirit were being drawn long and thin, my thoughts cut off.

That was the second death I experienced.