Episode 8: Day Two, The Giant (4)
I perched carefully on a branch, set my back to the trunk, and muttered.
"Whew. I could swear I've got more stamina than yesterday."
Aside from a heart that had only just started to pick up and a little sweat, I'd come up a good seven meters without trouble. That a body as short and thickset as mine had climbed a tree like this at all was proof the stamina was taking. Back in the real world, the shortest run left me wheezing, and I had to thrash on the pull-up bar just to scrape together three or four. Set against that, this was a long stride of progress.
"Heh heh heh. If the stamina keeps coming and the muscle keeps growing, I'll be glad. Even better if I turn out a physical enhancement ability user."
Grinning, I lifted the sharpened wooden staff in one hand, lowered it, and swung it this way and that. It felt lighter than yesterday. Only the second day, and if my body kept improving like this, I really might become a physical enhancement ability user.
Physical enhancement ability users made up half of all the Anomalous Ability Users in the world — common as anything — but common didn't mean the ability was bad. A sturdy body, a constitution that rarely fell ill thanks to being an ability user, recovery dozens of times an ordinary person's, and wound regeneration besides: so long as your head was screwed on straight, you could more than pull your weight in a raid. And above all, you got good-looking, so your popularity with women exploded. A physical enhancement type could even skip life as a raider hunting Aberrants and make a living as a celebrity. That's how far it went.
......All of which only mattered after I made it out of here alive.
The lifted mood sank again, and an itch crawled through my scalp. I scratched hard, and dried mud flaked off in clumps. Through the leaves, red light was slowly spreading across the blue sky. By rights, this was the hour I'd be home waiting for Mom and Dad to get off work, squabbling with my sister......
I sighed, raised both hands, and felt my cheeks. Rough, bumpy skin met my fingers, and naturally my sister came to mind.
Honestly, no amount of generosity could call my face handsome. The guys I knew had all been looking after their skin since middle school, but I'd found it far more fun to spend that time walking and spinning every wild fantasy I could about the Phase World and Aberrants, so I never paid mine any mind. Thanks to that, my face had ended up like the surface of the moon. It got so bad that Mom herself said it.
"Don't you worry, sweetheart. Mommy will get that skin of yours fixed later."
......To be honest, it only stopped at this level because my sister beat proper care into me. If it hadn't been for her, you couldn't even have called the thing a face.
Anyway, when I was little, having a sister who looked after me embarrassed me for no good reason, so I talked back and picked fights. The moment I didn't listen she resorted to hitting me, and I'd genuinely hated it, genuinely been sick of it...... Thinking it over now, though, if I latched onto her whining that I was hungry she'd kick me in the backside, sure, but she'd still make me something to eat. She never snatched my things by force. She remembered my birthday every year, and when she was in a good mood and I flattered her, she even handed over allowance without much fuss......
Maybe my sister was actually kind?
Hmm...... Come to think of it, I don't think anything bad ever came of listening to her.
She'd wheedled and hounded me into sitting the entrance exam for Euihan High School and getting in, but if I'd gone to some other school, by now I'd be running snack errands for the delinquents and getting bullied on top of it. And as far as I could see, her face was nothing but a smug little performance of prettiness — and yet irritating guys kept sidling up trying to get her number, Valentine's Day and White Day arrived buried under chocolate and snacks, and the handful of friends I'd had in middle school, the ones who'd actually seen her, had carried on about how jealous they were. Judging by all of that, her looks cleared average at the very least......
......I'd been thinking about physical enhancement. I had no idea how this had suddenly turned into a story about my sister.
In any case, from the moment you became a physical enhancement ability user, the body was said to draw in and absorb Phase Power on its own, strengthening and remaking everything from the skeleton on out — muscle, internal organs, all of it. A face monstrously ugly from birth was no problem. Even a face carved away by a grave wound didn't matter. While the body was being reconstructed, every wound, every poor constitution, every illness simply vanished.
In martial-arts terms, it was the same as a rebirth of flesh and bone. Physical ability climbed to absurd heights, of course, and you came out the other side a flower-pretty man or a flower-pretty woman. That kind of rebirth.
Scholars claimed that even after becoming a physical enhancement ability user, your height didn't change all that much — and then they'd say someone who had been 150 centimeters became 160. A person whose growth was already finished, simply growing ten centimeters, and that counted as not changing much......? I could not understand the way scientists thought.
Anyway. Rather than gaining an elemental ability or some special power late, in a predicament like this it might be better to become a physical enhancement ability user quickly, survive, and make it back.
How good it would be if I became one. Turn into a pretty boy, date girls left and right, do the kinds of things that feel good......
"So why does this damn head keep throbbing?"
I lifted my index fingers, pressed them into both temples, and muttered while I massaged.
It wasn't quite pain so much as a feeling of something pushing and tickling all over, and it grated on my nerves. Leave my mind empty and it would keep nagging me, so I forced open the bundle of memories I had about abilities.
At school we'd been taught that an ability user's power was a special ability gained when the constitution changed over a long stay in the Phase World. The teacher had explained that the first ability was generally decided by what you'd done and what you'd wished for most fiercely, and that afterward you picked up related abilities and techniques along the lineage of the power you'd awakened, branching outward the way a tree puts out limbs.
Say you dropped into a snowfield with nothing to protect you but one sturdy set of clothes. What would people think? Most of them, probably: Cold! I need fire! I want to block the wind! I need warmth! About that much.
Dwell on those thoughts hard enough while your whole body shakes like an aspen, and you adapt by gaining an ability tied to cold or wind — or you gain one tied to fire and resist the cold. That was the shape of it.
For people dropped into a broadleaf forest like this, where Aberrants were the only real threat, most of the crises that found them would be physical, bodily problems. That raised the odds of awakening as a physical enhancement type. The reverse was a place where the fight was mainly against yourself — an underground cave, a subterranean dungeon — and there, they said, you were highly likely to gain something elemental, or recovery, or a power in the mental or detection line.
And the techniques branching off those abilities came in all sorts. Major categories alone numbered three, and once you went down into the middle and minor classifications, it ran past the dozens, past the hundreds?
Of the abilities I knew, the ones treated with the most respect were nature-line abilities, and the power to work miracles through mental strength.
Call it nature and it sounded far too broad, but simply put, they were people who handled the elements.
Fire and wind. Water and earth.
A single gesture of the hand, and you bury a person or an Aberrant alive. You loose fire and burn them roaring. You fling wind and split them. You riddle the whole body with holes using water, or dig a pit, drop them in, and kill them by suffocation.
Somehow every example had landed on killing. Well — to survive in a world like this, you had to kill something. That would be why.
And then the miracles raised by mental power.
Psychic ability, in short. Lift an object with telekinesis, or strike it. Collapse matter by matching its natural frequency. Teleport. Float your own body. Look in on something a long way off.
Psychic or elemental, the kinds were many and the uses endless, but that didn't mean an ordinary physical enhancement ability user was weak. Rather, precisely because the body was strong, they brought monstrous power to bear in close combat.
Last of all, healing. Or recovery.
The ability to restore wounds taken under attack, or to cure disease and poison. Their physical attack power sat in the lowest class, but because they treated injuries, they were received with more respect than any other ability.
And since we were on the subject of abilities — I had something special too. One thing, different from other people, that you could almost call an ability.
Namely Brain Rotation and Brain Acceleration...... The names were a little embarrassing, coined back when I had a full-blown case of eighth-grade syndrome, but I'd never boasted about it in front of anyone and never revealed it, so it still hadn't been found out. Of course, if someone did catch on, I fully intended to shut them up one way or another!
Anyway, I'd learned by chance in middle school that I thought a little faster than other people. While everyone else counted from one to ten in their heads, I could pass twenty and push on toward thirty.
Even while talking to people I kept a daydream running, and in class I listened, took notes, and entertained stray thoughts all at once — a life I'd carried on for years, ever since elementary school. Somewhere along the way it had climbed to a level you could call a technique.
So no matter how serious the situation, my head always had room for everything from worthless fantasies, like an angel and a devil squabbling, all the way to the knack of sorting a situation out and grasping it.
If I hadn't even had a trick like this, wouldn't I have just panted along without a thought, gotten chased by that damn dog, tripped over something, and been eaten?
Ah, my head hurts again...... The throbbing and the pounding were putting me in a bad mood.
When I came back to myself, the world around me had already gone dim.
Not that it mattered. From here on, the only things left to do were doze lightly while keeping watch, or keep the idle thoughts going.
Grrgle.
Hungry, too......
I rubbed my stomach, feeling it pitch and demand a meal. The calories from the bit of leather belt I'd gnawed at lunch — one meal's worth — were surely already gone. Making a meal out of a single knuckle's length of belt struck me as badly short. The calories might have been enough, but with no sense of fullness, it didn't feel like I'd eaten.
I hesitated a moment, then set my eyes on the leaves in front of me. To spare the emergency-ration belt as well, what if I tore off only about half a knuckle and ate leaves for the rest? That ought to help me stretch the belt. Save food, and add some fullness besides.
......This was absolutely not because of the chemical taste and the nauseating fishy stink.
"Let's see......"
I reached out, plucked a single leaf, and looked it over. The only broadleaf trees I knew were maples and ginkgoes, but one glance was enough to tell this didn't grow in our world. It was shaped like a human hand: a square section like a palm, and five thin, long sections like fingers. And it wasn't paper-thin the way a ginkgo leaf is, but quietly thick, so when it came to actually eating the thing I felt reluctant.
"What kind of leaf is half as thick as my finger?"
I turned it this way and that, debating whether I should really eat it, but as usual the deciding didn't last.
"Huh. It doesn't taste like anything."
I bit only the very tip and started chewing little by little. Contrary to my expectation of bitterness, there was no taste and no smell at all. It was the same feeling as, bored out of my mind in class, tearing a corner off a printed handout and chewing on it.
The mouthfeel, though...... there was more of it than I'd thought. Somewhere between a crisp snap and a firm crunch.
Relieved that it barely tasted of anything, I tore off a bigger piece, and then startled at the moisture welling on my tongue. As a test I plucked a few more leaves and squeezed them hard, and water ran out the way it does when you wring a wet towel. I picked one aside and sucked it dry, and my mouth filled with moisture. I rolled it over my tongue and swallowed, and still there was no taste and no feeling at all.
"Did it end up shaped like this to store water? Holding the moisture, then dropping to the ground when the rain doesn't come, so the roots can take it in?"
I was glad. It seemed I wouldn't have to risk going all the way to the river just to drink. In the Phase World, moving around for long without an ability or a technique was suicide, so even a trip to secure drinking water had to keep the route as short as possible. In that sense, these water-heavy leaves were genuinely the best.
Even so, stunts like this were only possible because most of the plants and animals in the Phase World could be caught and eaten, or stripped and eaten, without much going wrong. In reality, this kind of behavior was a shortcut to suicide. A fine way to get a stomachache, suffer through dehydration, and die.
Anyway, the chew was decent enough that I nearly picked another leaf before I stopped myself.
"It might give me a stomachache, though...... better to watch how I feel, right?"
I swung my legs and counted to a thousand, but my stomach was fine. Reassured, I picked more leaves, munched on them, and then glared at the emergency-ration belt. Thinking of the calories, I ought to eat at least half a knuckle's worth......
After tearing off a little of the cowhide belt, I took off my uniform jacket as well, hitched it to the belt, and with my body and the trunk held together, lashed myself in and got ready to sleep. All through school I'd cursed, endlessly and under my breath, whoever had designed and made this ridiculously long belt. If I hadn't had it...... yeesh.
"Cough. Cough."
I shifted with a rustle, and the dried mud stuck to my hair and body flew up as dust. I waved a hand at it. Coating myself in the mud seemed to have been the right call, too. I hadn't sweated much, and the dry earth held in my body heat while still breathing well — cool and warm at once, surprisingly comfortable. The mud caked on thick, crumbling whenever I moved or touched it, nagged at me a little, but this much I had to bear if I meant to survive. So tomorrow I'd roll in the mud again.
I watched the last of the sunset die and the sky wash over into black, then closed my eyes.
Let tomorrow, too, please pass without incident.