Episode 57: Franc's Story (5)

Franc's words would not leave me. She had no body, she had said, and so she could not accept me.

How much must it have cost her to say them? And still, all I had been able to think about was myself.

"Son?"

"What are you thinking so hard about that you've stopped eating?"

A sharp pinch at my waist snapped me back, and I looked around.

"...Huh?"

Somehow I was sitting at the breakfast table with my family, chopsticks in my hand. What was this?

"Aren't you going to eat?"

"Uh— no. I am."

Only then did I remember it. I had been sitting in a daze until Mom called me to breakfast, and I had shuffled out like a zombie.

Franc's face rose up in me — the way she had taken only my heart from the confession, and looked so happy for it. Her smile seemed etched into my eyes.

"What keeps running through that head of yours, that you stop mid-bite and only half-listen to a word anyone says?!"

A poke landed in my ribs. I turned, and there was my sister, worry tucked behind the anger on her face.

She must have sensed that something was off. Her tone was thoroughly irritated, but the way she looked me over said she was checking whether I was hurt somewhere.

"...Noona, have you ever been in love?"

"Huh?"

Damn it. Why had I opened my mouth in front of someone who read people like a ghost?

"Never mind. The food's getting cold. Let's eat."

Three little words, and already her eyes were shifting strangely, as if she had caught something else entirely. Ugh. I really couldn't say a thing around her.

I deliberately ignored that look, swept every side dish crowded in front of me into my mouth without leaving a scrap, thanked Mom for the meal, and got up first.

Later, after she had finished her own breakfast, my sister knocked and said she had something to tell me. I told her I wasn't in, and locked the door.

Locking it was useless. The wall between our rooms was a sliding door, so if she meant to come in, the lock meant nothing. But she had never once forced her way through when I locked it.

I turned Search on the next room. Rejected, she stood with her arms crossed, pacing, thoroughly ticked off.

I dropped onto the bed. Franc floated in the air above me, looking down with a worried face.

Lying there and looking up at her, I felt all over again that hers was a beauty that could stop the words in a person's mouth. Some artist once said a woman's body was a work of art, and looking at Franc's naked form, I understood him well enough. How beautiful a line could be — you only had to look at her to know.

I put a question to myself, inwardly.

What do I think of Franc?

Beautiful, kind, and cute. A lovely young lady who puts my heart at ease just by being beside me.

Do I like Franc?

Yes.

Do I love her?

Yes.

Enough that I'd die if she disappeared?

...It would hurt enough to kill me.

If Franc's heart ached, mine would ache too. I liked the sight of her happy, and the sight of her smiling. Her sadness was beautiful in its own way, but I still preferred her smile.

Franc couldn't lie. To me, who had told her I liked her, she would be even less able to. So when she said that because she had no body, I ought to find someone else to love — that, too, was her true heart.

I was still young. But I knew this one thing.

At the sudden words, Franc's pretty eyes went wide. She had been floating as if suspended in water, and now she looked a little flustered by the abrupt declaration.

"Seoha, that is..."

"Of course I think a physical relationship takes up a large share of love. But it isn't everything. There are all kinds of ways to love. Among them, a strange relationship like ours has to exist too."

Only then, as if she had realized I had been turning her own words over this whole time, a natural smile settled across Franc's eyes and mouth.

"I understand what you mean to say. But Seoha, you are still young, are you not?"

"I'm not young."

"..."

For a moment she seemed at a loss, and her mouth closed. Leave her like that and she would surely launch into a long speech to persuade me.

I caught her lips beginning to move, as if she were about to speak again.

First strike wins!

"Oh. I just thought of something good."

"Love is of the body and of the spirit... Pardon?"

"Phase Power is the energy of miracles. Miracle power. If I look, there ought to be a way for you to get a body."

Yeah. There definitely will be.

"It might be hard to find right away. But if I keep looking, steadily, it will be there."

"Seoha..."

"I've got a bit of a contrary streak. I'm not the type who obediently listens to other people. So just take it as it is. They say the one who falls in love first loses. You liked me first, so you're the one who has to eat the loss."

At the sheer unreasonable stubbornness of it, Franc's face said she couldn't tell whether to be dumbfounded or simply speechless.

"Right. Let's look. A way for you to have a body. We'll definitely find it."

This was a promise to myself. And if it still didn't exist? Then I would make it.

Franc looked troubled, as if she couldn't understand.

"But—"

"I don't care! I'm going to find it! If you try to talk me out of it any more, I'll just start kneading your Soul Stone!"

At the absurd threat, Franc answered with a beautiful ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠smile that seemed to rise from the deepest part of her chest.

"Yes. I shall take the loss. I shall take a great deal of it, so please do as you wish, Seoha, to your heart's content."

"Yeah. Just trust me."

I said it firmly, rubbing my palm over the corners of my mouth as they crept upward.

A little clumsy. But it was the best choice I could make.

It was already too late to sleep, and in the afternoon I was supposed to go with my sister to get a school uniform fitted, so until then I would practice Phase Power control.

Pouring every nerve into control alone was good. But I had learned that moving Phase Power while doing several things at once — multitasking — also helped the ability improve, so I focused my practice there. I watched my surroundings with Search, read the English dictionary I had gotten from Dad, and logged into the ability-user community on my Certifier to browse around.

In the middle of it, I found a post that pricked my curiosity. The date was four weeks ago.

An elf? And with no evidence at all, just a single line, I was supposed to believe it?

Plenty of people had thought the same. Under the post, comments demanding proof ran in a long string, and tucked between them the author had uploaded a single photograph.

So that was why the view count had exploded.

The background was an ordinary field of grass. And lying on it — dead, or unconscious, impossible to tell — was a green-haired woman a little short of Franc, but pretty enough in her own right. Woman? Was she even a woman? Wasn't that a man? After Choi Soohan, I had lost all faith in my eye for telling women apart.

Anyway, a fairly pretty person lay there with their eyes closed, still as a corpse. Franc, seated beside me, blinked at the photograph.

"The ears are long."

"A real elf?"

As if to strip out anything that could pin down a location, no clothes were visible, and the frame stopped at the collarbone. The ground was ordinary dirt. The grass looked pulled, torn up here and there.

It didn't seem human. I scrolled down to the comments, and to my surprise there were a great many saying they had figured as much. Not a single one called it a lie, or a fake.

Why were adults this immature? Perverts, people picking fights, and folks throwing "your mother" insults the way they did in games where you couldn't see anyone's face. Still, the comments at the end were a little helpful.

But Dr. Woo Mingu? Don't tell me they meant old Dr. Woo from the evaluation lab? I searched, and it was the same man. He was really famous. A great many research results, a great many papers.

"Becoming an ability user doesn't seem to improve a person's character any."

"No. But an elf... I can hardly believe it."

"Yeah. If it's an elf, it can handle spirits too, right?"

"Is that so?"

"In Korean fantasy novels, an elf who can't handle spirits gets treated as weird."

"Pfft."

We kept talking, and I scrolled down. A comment had been left saying they couldn't tell whether the elf was a man or a woman, and beneath it a single photograph had been attached—

Whoa. Fuck.

A stark, vivid photograph of pink female genitals. I startled and hurriedly scrolled past. What kind of pervert takes a picture like that? And was this an adult board? You could just upload something like this?

It was a photo of fingers — a man's, by the look of them — spreading the labia majora, which I could only assume belonged to that elf. For some reason Franc had gone quiet beside me, and I didn't have the courage to look her way.

Sit there in silence, though, and the mood would turn cold. I spoke first, awkward, as if getting ahead of it.

"Real perverts, the lot of them. Right?"

"...Haa. Seoha? That is not a matter of being a pervert. It is a matter of being a bad person. Even supposing the person in question had consented, to post a photograph like that in a public place..."

"R-right! It's rotten character, that's what it is!"

Listening to Franc, I felt horribly called out. Not because I had committed the crime of secretly filming someone and uploading it to the internet. Because I had been stealing looks at Franc's naked body, and that was why.

I scratched my head, laughed an awkward ha-ha, and tapped the author's ID to send a message.

And the ID was FallSexMachine? What kind of handle was that?

Franc, curious what I would send, was watching the draft. It was nothing much. The screen asked me to enter an ID to use, so I carelessly put in westsummer, the handle I used online, and for the password, 1234. Done. Send.

I searched the board by the author's ID, but the earlier posts were mostly idle chatter and photos of exposed women. Nothing worth using as a reference.

Was there no moderator, either? Skin photos, uploaded without a second thought. The more I read, the more displeased Franc seemed, so I closed the Certifier and asked her.

"Franc. Don't you want to go to Britain soon?"

"No. I am curious how the village and the house have changed, but it is only curiosity. You need not concern yourself."

"No, I mean... how do I put it. The person you called the Second Lady."

"Yes?"

"Counting by the year, she was born in 108, and it's 216 now, so she'd be a hundred and eight. If we're lucky, she might still be alive."

"Ah..."

"Ordinary people live to an average of ninety. Physical Reinforcement users live past a hundred and eighty, and other ability users to a hundred and twenty. So the odds she's alive are high."

Franc did not answer at once. She was quiet for a moment, then gave her head a small shake.

"It is all right. I would be glad if we could meet again, but if we cannot, I will think of that as fate as well."

"Huh. What kind of logic is that? The sooner we go, the higher the chance of meeting her, isn't it? What if we miss her by a hair?"

"She said that if it is a bond meant for reunion, we will meet even if we do not seek each other at once, and if there is no such bond, we will not meet even if we act at once — and so she called it fate."

"The Second Lady said that?"

"Yes. The Second Lady's name is Shinomiya Chise. You need not take a title like that upon your tongue."

"R-right."

Since the name had come up, I searched Shinomiya Chise on both the internet and the community. There was not so much as a related search term, let alone a post. The records of ability users dispatched as reparations for the wrongs Japan had committed might all have been deleted.

Should I try the Aldion raid team?

Hm. A few articles.

The headcount was huge, so why was the world ranking 975? Hwayeon-noona's Time River had 113... Ah! They had said Time River's total membership was over a thousand.

Had a few failed raids shrunk them? Not enough strong ability users, not enough members overall. The classic pattern of a raid team in decline. I had heard they increased their ability users by sowing seed among countless women, but it seemed to have been useless.

I stole a glance at Franc's face. She looked a little sad, but not as if she were in pain.

"His Lordship, too... he passed away in the midst of a raid."

Albert Meld Aldion. Biologically Franc's father, Viscount Aldion had died in the year 148 — three years after Franc was forcibly summoned to the Phase World — while raiding in the desert of the Phase World.

The thirty-six who lived had come out without a scratch. Anyone even slightly wounded, then, had died. That was how I had to read it.

The house's real fighting force had been annihilated. Of course the rest followed. And that grandson was the current head.

Since getting the Certifier, I had kept searching this and that, and one thing I had learned was this: there were tens of thousands of raid teams across the world, but to be recognized as a true raid team, you had to be inside the top thousand.

Nine hundred and seventy-fifth was hanging on by a thread. Outside the top thousand, a raid team was no different from a group of skilled ability users.

They had led a raid team for generations, and I thought that foundation was the only reason they had survived a disaster of that size at all.

In any case, the current head, Brandt Meld Aldion, was forty-two this year. He would have no acquaintance with Franc whatsoever. Which meant Franc and House Aldion were as good as unconnected.

Seeing the lonely look on her face, I felt a little sorry.

"Son! Come out for lunch!"

Already? Time flew.

I opened the door and came out, and met my sister coming from the bathroom, as if she had just washed her hands.

"You seem better now."

"Huh? Better from what?"

"Never mind, then."

I didn't think it would do much good, so I played ignorant. On an ordinary day she would have dug and dug. For some reason, she withdrew quietly.

I ate the lunch she had laid out so well, praised Mom's cooking, and we were drinking plum tea for dessert when my sister spoke.

"When do you want to go look at uniforms?"

"Want to head out now?"

"Then wait a bit. I'll change and come out. After I help you with the uniform, I should stop by school."

"Okay. Oh! Noona, make sure you wear your emergency ration belt. If I hadn't had that in the Phase World, I would have been in serious trouble. So until you turn thirty-six, don't take it off. Keep it on you always. Got it?"

The worried advice seemed to please her. She laughed brightly and pinched my cheeks, lightly, with both hands.

"Hehe. Worrying about your sister and everything. Our Seoha's grown up, hasn't he?"

"We're family. Of course I worry about you."

"Is that so? I'm training my body just in case, and I carry a simple survival kit, so don't worry too much."

"What? You liar. The day before yesterday, when you went to see Hwayeon-noona, you were in nothing but your underwear, with a plain dress and a cardigan thrown on."

In that instant her face went red, and she grabbed my cheeks and started pinching.

"Gyahk!?"

"Y-you — how did you know that?!"

"My abilidee! Ids 'cause a' Dedection! Dedection!"

"You little brat, so that's what you were using Detection for?! Where did you learn to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠pull something that rotten?!"

Eek—!

She pinched and twisted hard enough to bring tears to my eyes, and I only got free of her hands when both cheeks were as red as apples.

"Ugh. I got into the habit of checking my surroundings, so I saw it without meaning to. That's all."

Mom watched the commotion between us and laughed. Dad closed his book, took off his glasses, and admonished us.

"A habit formed in the Phase World cannot be helped. Even so, do not think the excuse that it cannot be helped will hold forever. Others — powerful ability users in particular — will not let the matter pass with those words."

My sister, face flushed and huffing, seemed to let a little of her anger go only after she heard Dad. She glared at me as I rubbed my red, swollen cheeks, and walked off to the kitchen.

"Krgh. I am practicing ability control whenever I have the time."

"Doing it is not enough. When you begin acting as a hunter, what will you do if a female ability user who notices your ability judges your Detection to be an attack?"

What do you mean, what will I do! Even if the sky split in two, she wouldn't know in her dreams that her body had been scanned!

Say that out loud and Dad would scold me, so I only answered that I understood — and got the sermon anyway.

"Only when you can move your ability at the moment you wish, and to the extent you wish, will you be acknowledged as a proper raider. So never neglect your training."

It was completely sound. I had nothing to say back. Ugh. My cheeks hurt.

They hurt so much that I circulated Phase Power to raise my natural healing, and Franc faced me, looking at my cheeks with a worried expression.

"Your cheeks have swollen badly. That must hurt..."

"It's fine. If I raise my natural healing with Phase Power, they'll go back to normal soon."

Franc brushed my cheek lightly, then looked toward my sister setting out side dishes in the kitchen, and smiled softly.

"Your sister truly dotes on you."

"Would you pinch and twist a cute little brother's cheek until it nearly split?"

"Wha— I did not mean it that way... And in the first place, that was your fault, was it not?"

Even Franc taking Noona's side left me oddly peevish. I kept grumbling and muttering, and Franc, with a wry smile, pressed a kiss to my cheek where the swelling had gone down a little.

"I truly do like seeing you and your sister get along."

Changing the subject. Hmph.