Breast Mountain (2)
From the core of the blast out to five meters, everything had vanished without leaving so much as dust, and even Franc looked as if the sight had stolen the words from her. The shockwave that burst out with the explosion had done its own work: out to ten meters from the blast point, branches were bent, snapped, and left in a wreck.
"I used the exact same amount of TP as the wind raccoon, and yet..."
"That sound that kept bursting — was it a wind-attribute bullet of ten TP?"
"Yeah. The last one the raccoon set off was about thirty."
The wind raccoon's ten-TP wind bullets detonated the moment they struck anything of real mass in their path. The burst itself was only about a meter across, throwing out a hard gust whose force fell away the farther you stood from the center. What I had fired — an attribute... bullet? — punched clean through whatever stood in its way, and the instant it touched the leopard cat, a creature that possessed Phase Power, the point of impact seemed to refract. A five-meter radius simply ceased to exist. From five meters out to ten, as if that band were only the fringe of the blast, the trees were snapped, burst, and left in ruins.
"As expected... Seoha, you truly are the greatest ability user there is."
Seeing the result, Franc's eyes glittered dangerously. Or maybe dangerous was only my own impression of it.
"Might just be a difference in class. I'm E-Class, and the wind raccoon, if you measure it by class, is G Class."
"Is that so? But in my days as an ordinary knight, I had occasion to witness the attacks of attribute ability users a few times. They were surely E-Class or higher, and yet I do not recall any of them producing power on this scale."
"Yeah? How'd you know their classes?"
"Because every one of them belonged to an official raid team."
"Ah..."
The requirements for joining a raid team aren't strictly divided, but I'd heard that attribute types, generally classed as dealers, need to be at least the very top of E-Class before they qualify. Ability users who simply form a party and operate on their own start from F-Class. Detection types like me are the exception.
"Anyway. I've got real firepower now... Heh heh heh heh."
I looked up at the master of the mountain, lying prone on the summit with its eyes shut, given over entirely to healing its wounds. The thing hadn't spared a single glance, as if the blast I'd set off held no interest for it at all. What I felt instead were his wives, licking the male's wounds while they wondered what the commotion was, turning their attention this way.
At my wicked little laugh, Franc offered a faint, bitter smile, then carefully took my arm.
"You have grown truly strong..."
Joy ran across her face, but a shade of sorrow showed through her eyes.
"You think that just because I picked up an attribute-bullet ability, you won't be any help to me anymore?"
She flinched. I'd struck the mark; the dismay on her was plain.
"Th-that is..."
"Franc, you're an idiot."
"...Pardon?"
Flustered, she seemed not to know what face she ought to make. She only blinked, at a loss.
"A person can't live without air. You're more than air to me, Franc. And once I find a way to charge Phase Power into your Soul Stone, you'll be able to throw lightning as hard and as often as you want — and when that day comes, the only one I'll truly trust at my back is you. You couldn't even think that far? Idiot."
"Seoha..."
Genuine feeling flooded her face, and she rested her head against my shoulder. Her sense of inadequacy seemed to be deepening by the day. I'd have to keep making it just as clear how much I needed her. If those negative feelings swelled, there was no telling what harm they might do to the mind of a spirit like Franc. I wanted her to stay bright.
"That said, the master of the mountain is awfully bold, isn't it? Doesn't seem to care a whit about the explosion I set off. If anything, the Low-Rank Variants that ran from me and started fighting past the three-hundred-meter mark seem more on edge."
"Even in the animal world, where the strong devour the weak, a predator of the middle rank must watch both above and below."
"Oh? So you're saying I'm the one below?"
"No! Seoha, you are above!"
"Heh heh heh. Really?"
"Of course... Eek!?"
Without warning I lifted a finger and drew it in a slow, shivering glide from the nape of her neck down the groove of her spine to her tailbone. Franc's eyes flew wide. Her lower back snapped straight, and she shuddered.
"Aah! S-Seoha, honestly!"
I dodged the gaze of Franc — face red, cheeks puffed — put on an air of perfect innocence, and opened my mouth.
"Come to think of it, an aberrant's Phase Power just feels like a lump, so you can't tell the type until it actually uses an ability. A lot of it strikes me as similar to ability users, but the aberrant grade chart feels like something humans slapped together to fit their own standards."
Franc scratched at her own back with the back of her hand and let a small sound slip out.
"Mmm."
"Something nagging at you?"
"I was reminded of a paper I happened to see on a tablet the other day."
"What was it about?"
"It argued that it is not aberrants who resemble humans, but ability users who resemble aberrants."
"...That's suggestive."
"And if you are right, Seoha, then aberrants do not have a fixed form the way ability users do, yes? Phase Power that was clumped together, changing its shape — that is almost like..."
"Like me?"
As if sorry for having compared me to an aberrant, she let the corners of her eyes droop. I snorted a laugh, gathered Phase Power into my hand through the Mana Sieve, caught Franc by the waist where she floated in the air, drew her in, and held her against me.
"You don't have to apologize. Don't worry about it."
Where our skin met, a faint warmth came through, and with it a soft, yielding squish. The sensation seemed to fill some empty place inside me, and a smile rose on its own.
"Mmm~. I wonder why. Why'd I end up with an ability like this?"
"...Because Seoha is the protagonist?"
"Huh?"
"In the novels I used to read, a protagonist always received a special ability."
She turned her head as she said it, blushing, as if ashamed of her own thought. The sight was so lovely I wanted to plunder her lips, but that would be a problem just now. Even a kiss has to be timed if you want the affection gauge to actually climb. Instead I smiled, wicked, and said it.
"You've got such a terminal case of chuunibyou that I'm moved. Speaking as a senior who's already graduated from it."
"Ugh! I-it is not like that!"
"Oh, sure... First the trajectory theory, and now the novel-protagonist theory? Heh heh heh."
I laughed that sly laugh, and Franc whimpered a tearful little hiiing and pulled a miserable face. Teasing Franc really never gets old.
The fighting among the Low-Rank Variants, sparked by the clash between the mountain's master and the wind raccoon, grew fiercer and spread, until a hundred and some of them had gathered on the mid-slope of Breast Mountain and were locked in a true bloodbath. Watching them fight in moderation that morning and then withdraw, I'd thought they were keeping some unspoken rule. Seeing this, it seemed that had only been my mistake. Simple coincidence, most likely.
For the first hour or so I didn't relax. I watched, ready to answer the instant anything came my way. But an hour passed, and the fighting showed no sign of spreading toward me. The master of the mountain only watched the Low-Rank Variants' bloodbath with a blank face, so I decided to get on with what I actually needed to do. I had Spatial Perception. An ambush would be wasted on me.
I settled for keeping half an eye on things and, with Franc, moved to the highest branch of the thickest, largest tree nearby, the better to study the attribute type.
"The more strands of Phase Power I flick at once — those strands layered like growth rings — the farther it flies, and the wider the blast. Cut the number of strands, and both the distance and the blast shrink."
"And the more TP you condense, the greater the destructive power."
"At the same numbers, it seems to hit about three times as hard as the wind bullets the wind raccoon fired."
"But why do the attribute bullets you fire, Seoha, possess no attribute at all?"
"I'm curious about that too, but I figure it's best to chalk it up to the Mana Sieve."
Thinking about why there was no attribute, a few hypotheses surfaced, but they weren't important, so I shook them off at once.
"More than that — Phase Power and TP both sometimes look water-colored and sometimes look blue, and I have no idea what the standard is."
"Is it not the difference between focusing the Mana Sieve in your eyes and not?"
"That's not it. I've been seeing the water color since I first awakened. And the blue light that pours out when I focus through the Mana Sieve is something ordinary people can see too."
"Hmm... So only you can see the water color, and others can see the blue?"
"...Is that it? It's true they can only see it when I focus the Mana Sieve... Then why is the lump of TP that shoots out of my hand colorless and clear?"
"..."
Franc seemed to have no guess on that point either. She worried at it with her beautiful face faintly creased.
"No way to know without something to compare it to. Anyway, no attribute means it's non-attribute, right? If you figure it sits outside the interplay between attributes, this side's more versatile, so it's not a bad thing."
"That is true!"
We talked while I drilled the Mana Sieve's pattern-switching for hours on end, and the shift from physical reinforcement to attribute came down to ten seconds, while the change from attribute back to physical reinforcement came down to two.
"Ten seconds is quite a delay in combat of a high level..."
"Yeah. And fighting a physical-reinforcement aberrant up close as an attribute type is suicide. This is a problem."
To cut the delay any further, I'd have to practice like I was dying for at least ten days, and practice was out of the question in the situation I was in.
"Could you not use both abilities at once?"
...Huh?
At an idea that flipped the whole approach, I caught her by the shoulders and shouted.
"Explain that in more detail!"
"Kya?! I-I mean, since you can make all four types from a single Phase Power, rather than switching each time you have need of one, would it not be better to create a pattern that lets you use all four abilities at once?!"
"Oh... Hmm. It's a good idea, but is it even possible?"
"S-Seoha, you are already using two kinds of abilities at the same time, are you not?"
What was she talking about?
"Seoha, you are a detection ability user of the special type, are you not? You are using your detection ability even now, yes? And even so, you have used attribute abilities, and physical-reinforcement abilities. If two abilities can be used together, there is no law that says three cannot. That is why I raised it."
Hearing it laid out like that, she was right. Why waste time converting abilities at all? Fuse them into one and be done with it.
In the mood of a man who had just found eureka, I shouted at her.
"Franc, you're terrible!"
"What?!"
I couldn't help myself. Words a hundred and eighty degrees from my beaming face had startled her, and I threw my arms around her and pulled her in tight.
"Kyaa!"
"Why did you only think of that now!"
If I could just combine the two — physical reinforcement and firing attribute bullets — I wouldn't have to run from aberrants! Dodge on physical reinforcement and loose the Mana Sieve's powerful non-attribute bullets, and I could deal with every aberrant on Breast Mountain by myself! This is why they say two heads are better than one!
Trembling with the thrill of it, I ground my cheek wildly against Franc's where I held her, and kneaded her backside hard.
"Hiyah?!"
I let go of Franc, who let out an adorable shriek and squirmed in my arms, and started the experiment at once. Part of me wanted to keep working that soft, plump backside, but I had to try this now. Detection, physical reinforcement, and attribute — the complete form!
...And the moment I saw Franc, face flushed crimson and plainly sorry it was over, I was stained with the same regret myself.
Time passed. When seven in the evening came and the sun went down, the Low-Rank Variants' death struggle entered a lull as well. If that mountain-master bastard hadn't stepped in, the fighting probably wouldn't have stopped until every last one of them was dead. The whole affair had nearly wrapped up about an hour earlier — if not for a pack of aberrants that appeared from outside my detection range, drawn as if by the smell of blood and Phase Power.
The newcomers, some fifty of them, plunged into the death struggle the others were already waging, and the thing devolved into an absolute shitshow. More than a hundred gathered in one place and fought, and an enormous number of Low-Rank Variants died. With the dead numbering what they did, creatures began to appear that were evolving from low rank into Mid-Low Rank Variants. That was when the master of the mountain made its entrance.
Brazen as anything — the master and its females, who had been watching the bloodbath from the summit of Breast Mountain, the nipple of the peak itself, charged in the instant aberrants began evolving into Mid-Low Rank Variants.
KRAAAAAH—!!
Grrrrrr! Bark! Bark!
With a howl carrying only the faintest trace of Phase Power, the four leapt from the summit as if falling and, in the blink of an eye, slaughtered three leopard cats and two No-Head Mantises that were in the middle of evolving. It was a high schooler crashing a scuffle among grade-schoolers, and I clicked my tongue — while the master of the mountain and those three females of his held their heads rigidly high and looked down on the other aberrants with the arrogant gaze of the king of beasts. Cowed by that gaze, the Low-Rank Variants turned their eyes away.
Satisfied with the attitude, perhaps, the master and the other three took only the five aberrants they had killed in their mouths and returned to the summit. Once the Silver White Wolf family vanished, an awkwardness spread among the Low-Rank Variants. If I had to compare it, it was the unsettled air you get when little kids are shoving each other around and a high-school older brother suddenly shows up yelling, beats the ones who were fighting well, and drags them off.
Belatedly, a few bared their teeth and hissed at other aberrants nearby... but the real venom had already drained out of them, and the ones being threatened didn't even react. They licked their forepaws, or simply turned their heads. At that, the one that had hissed seemed sheepish too. It thumped the ground with its tail a couple of times... then quietly took a dead aberrant by the neck and slipped into the forest. That was the start. The rest began scattering in every direction with carcasses in their mouths, or devouring them where they stood. Perhaps because there were more dead than living, it never turned into a fight over food.
I turned Spatial Perception on the Silver White Wolf family, which had ended the bloodbath so simply and gone back up to the summit. Sure enough, all four had gained a certain amount of Phase Power. The master of the mountain, though, had seen a slight increase in the Phase Stone inside its body instead of Phase Power. The sight soured my mood. I'd stirred up the commotion, the Low-Rank Variants had done the fighting, and those damned wolves had walked off with the prize. I felt like the bear in the show.
"Above all, they didn't even wait for the Low-Rank Variants to finish evolving into mid-low. Backstabbing them while they were too dazed to think — filthy bastards, the lot of them."
At least back then, I was alone! I put my life on the line!
I was protesting inwardly, recalling the fifteenth day after I was summoned, when Franc agreed in a sharp voice.
"Indeed! Speechless beasts they may be, but that is far too base! They have the numbers and the strength, and yet, rather than fight with honor, a cowardly ambush!"
Franc was especially furious. To possess great power, barge into a fight among those weaker than themselves, and then — as if that were not enough — ambush enemies who were half defenseless: unforgivable, or so she felt. But as she herself said, those things were beasts and monsters. Wasn't it a bit much to hold them to a human standard? Still, I was a wise man who knew to take a woman's side when she was angry.
"Scum that underhanded — I'll be sure to punish them myself."
"Yes! If it is you, Seoha, you will be able to teach them a stinging lesson!"
She called it out with one eyebrow slightly raised, as if she believed in me. No... I wasn't going to teach them a lesson. I was going to kill them.
Anyway, I focused again on the trinity I was practicing: Spatial Perception, physical reinforcement, and attribute type. It was quite difficult. The direction was more or less set, but the fine control — that was the hard part.
Ting~ KWA-BOOM!
"Agh!"
A non-attribute bullet detonated not where I'd aimed but ten meters right in front of me, and a baptism of shattered stone and broken wood poured over my whole body. I hastily covered my head with both arms and ducked behind a tree, but the places I hadn't managed to shield ached.
"Seoha, are you all right?"
"Ugh, I'm fine. More than that, this is seriously hard."
The pain was nothing next to the humiliation. I'd wanted to show Franc only my good side, and look at me. The base of it was the Mana Sieve's Spatial Perception, but thanks to the pattern the Mana Sieve had altered, Spatial Perception worked at any time, for some reason, even without my deliberately activating it — so I set that aside. I'd confirmed early on that if I shaped the Phase Power's pattern into an irregular growth-ring form and spun it while holding that shape, I could use the physical-reinforcement effect and the attribute ability together. The problem was that ejection control in this state was a fucking nightmare. Like fitting a bullet onto a rubber band spinning at high speed and letting it fly.
I tidied the hair the blast pressure had wrecked, confirmed the rain of fragments had stopped, and came back out to the practice spot.
"Hoo..."
I formed several strands of Phase Power into the attribute type's growth-ring shape and set them spinning. Then I sent the Phase Power through my arm to my palm as if flicking it, and — fire!
Ting— KWAANG!
"Ghk!"
"Seoha?!"
The attribute bullet detonated right under my nose, and I flew backward like a rubber ball and slammed into a bush. My vision spun, my ears rang, and my whole body throbbed.
"Ghhhh..."
I couldn't even get up. I groaned in the bush, and Franc — her face on the verge of tears — spun in circles above the thicket like an angel. In any case, I'd succeeded as far as the firing stage. The launch itself worked, but with the spin of the physical-reinforcement attribute added on, the difficulty had climbed to a completely different order from firing while turning the attribute type alone. On top of that, whether from the added rotation or not, the power had jumped sharply. I was splitting TP down to units of 0.1 and firing it, and yet impacts comparable to spending ten TP kept detonating one after another. That was the proof.
A hundred times the power of firing the same amount of TP as a pure attribute type? The first time, not knowing a damn thing, I'd used ten TP and genuinely thought I was going to die. It seemed to have gone off roughly thirty meters out, but when I came to, I was wedged into a corner just like now, and I saw that the attribute bullet had gouged all the way to the spot where I'd been standing. I'd actually blacked out for a short while then. According to her, I'd gone limp and hadn't so much as twitched for ten seconds. Franc said she'd thought I was dead, and that her own heart had nearly stopped.
...Even though she doesn't have a heart.
Anyway, I didn't have the skill to divide TP any finer, so 0.1 was as low as I could go. If I could have reduced it further, I'd have taken it down to 0.001.
"Seoha! Come to your senses! Seohaaa~!"
"I-I'm fine. I'm alive."
I hauled myself up with difficulty, crawled out of the bush, and sat with my back against a nearby tree.
"Ow, ow..."
All I had on was a single pair of compression shorts, so my whole body was scratched and torn, a mess of small wounds. I sighed at the scrapes I'd earned crashing into the bush. This was rough. Firing was hard, and the Phase Power once launched was wildly unstable, prone to detonating however it pleased. I couldn't even get a read on how far it would fly. How was I supposed to stabilize this?
It hadn't been nothing but failure. Through a number of trials, I'd learned a few things. The irregular form of the attribute pattern wasn't strictly necessary. What mattered was the growth-ring shape. Because the method was to flick it and send it flying, it had only been irregular, like a stretched rubber band — so long as I could flick it, the pattern's shape didn't matter. I'd wondered whether shaping the Phase Power like a bullet being fired might work, but it seemed some basic frame was still required. Without the ring shape, I couldn't launch an attribute bullet at all.
I rested with my back to the tree, then flopped over onto my side and lay looking up at a sky going black. Franc descended from the air, lay down over me, and stroked my cheek.
"You have taken far too many wounds..."
"That's because I'm unskilled. If I were any good at controlling the Mana Sieve, and could divide Phase Power down to three decimal places, it would have been fine."
Anyway, the saying that you gain nothing without pain is true... Doesn't it fit me a little too well? But I didn't let it out of my mouth. Franc had suffered nothing but pain and gained nothing. She'd become an aberrant, lost her flesh, become a ghost, and then a spirit, so-called. Losing her body was practically the same as losing everything.
"...Maybe I should just try accelerating it absurdly fast."
"W-would that not be too dangerous? The more you accelerated, the stronger the power became."
"Ah, not that. When I launch it."
"Ah!"
"Maybe it's unstable because all I'm doing is flicking it out at some awkward halfway speed. What if, at the moment I flick it, I spin it faster and harder and send it flying? Wouldn't that work?"
"Hmm..."
Hearing me out, Franc took on a thoughtful look.
"There are certainly techniques that pursue stability through acceleration. You need only look at the principle by which a bicycle is driven. The way you spin Phase Power already uses centrifugal force and acceleration, so I can see the possibility."
"Good. Let's try it again."
"Yes!"
Right after the great bloodbath, the number of aberrants inside my detection range had dropped to five. Was it because the empty space had grown? As time passed after the fighting ended, the Low-Rank Variants began to creep back, and now there were twenty within my range. Just how many aberrants were there outside my detection range? Or, as their density thinned, had the territory allowed per head increased?
In any case, where the corpses of countless aberrants lay strewn, a great many nocturnal aberrants were locked in a tense standoff while throwing a corpse party. And I...
Ting— tuk-kak-kak-kak...! KUUUUUNG!!
The lump of TP flew on, piercing tree after tree, and detonated with a resonance that shuddered in the chest.
"Yes! It worked!"
"Waaah~! Congratulations~!"
Raising the spin and the acceleration in the instant I flicked it, and firing it all at once — that had been the answer after all!
Ting~~~! Tuk-kak, KUUNG!
"Urk."
"Ah! Focus! You must focus!"
"Yeah. Hoo... concentrating is sneakily exhausting, too."
Now, if I fired ten times, six went the distance I wanted, in the direction I wanted. Four had the flick timing slightly off and flew off somewhere else entirely. And while I practiced the launch, I realized one more use for Spatial Perception. By reading the space clearly and firing on pure feel, I could adjust things so the attribute bullet detonated quite accurately where I wanted it. In other words, with the sensation of looking down from a 3D quarter-view, I could set the impact point — a certainty that if I launched it like this, it would fly that far and strike such-and-such a spot.
If the laser sight and guide display my analysis ability gave me helped me fire along the trajectory I wanted, Spatial Perception helped me designate the point of detonation. I didn't know which was better. The former let me adjust the trajectory, so hitting the target wasn't a problem; the latter couldn't adjust the trajectory, but I could still name the impact point. In any case, a ranged attack with a kilometer of reach had an enormous advantage. The raw power was a bonus on top of it.
"But the slow rate of fire is a drawback."
"One shot every ten seconds is a bit much. Still, if I keep at it, I think I can cut the delay. And right now I'm only launching from the tip of my index finger, like a finger-gun, right? Once I'm used to it, I feel like I'll be able to fire with the other fingers too... and I'm curious how hard it would hit if I clumped the Phase Power into one mass and fired it from my palm."
After that I kept practicing, and once the success rate passed eighty percent, I began increasing the amount of TP little by little. The more TP I used, the longer the firing time grew. I was too scared to load much, but it felt like roughly a ten-percent increase for every ten TP.
"Ugh, my fingertip's tingling."
"It seems your flesh cannot withstand the ejection..."
"I'll need to train my fingers. Hmm. I should look into whether there's a method for that."
"Would it not be better to grow your physical-reinforcement ability than to train your fingers?"
"...You're right. If I circulate Phase Power through the Mana Sieve and reinforce my body... Hmm. When I first visited the Time River Building and saw a physical-reinforcement user training, I figured I was at about sixty percent by comparison. If my Phase Power increases, does the effect increase too?"
"As one's class rises, physical ability rises as well. So if you gain more Phase Power, Seoha, the Mana Sieve's efficiency should rise too, and you will grow stronger."
"Yeah? How much does a physical-reinforcement user's power actually go up?"
"When I had only just awakened my physical-reinforcement ability, I believe my physical ability rose about fivefold."
"Fivefold right after awakening — a superhuman, plain and simple. Then I wonder just how strong Hwayeon-noona is, being B-Class."
"I know a little of physical reinforcement. Taking an I-Class physical-reinforcement user as the measure, it is said that with each class one rises, physical ability improves by one and a half to two times. So for Miss Hwayeon, would her reinforcement not come to sixteen times an I-Class, at the most?"
"Huh? Not sixteen times an ordinary person?"
"Hehe. Were it so, she could not meet an aberrant's attack head-on with her body. The comparison, I am told, is drawn against other physical-reinforcement ability users."
"Ah. That makes sense too."
Waiting for the TP I'd spent to refill, I talked with Franc, and her breadth of knowledge was remarkable. A shame it seemed concentrated in a single field.
"And would it not help still more if you hardened your body, or made it flexible, through technique or some other ability? When I became an aberrant, I could concentrate force in a particular part and make it harder than steel, so if one looks, there may be such a method."
"Among physical-reinforcement abilities, I don't think I've seen anything like skin reinforcement — Stoneskin, or whatever you'd call it..."
"And you must not calculate aberrants and ability users by grade with simple arithmetic."
"Huh? Why?"
"From Mid Grade and above, aberrants grow far stronger than before. Once they reach High Grade, the gap widens still further. You ought to consider why an A-Class ability user can die if they hunt a High-Tier Variant alone and something goes wrong."
"By Phase Power numbers, A-Class is Transcendent-grade... But it takes five B-Classes together to bring down a High-Tier aberrant only on the level of a C-Class, and High Grade aberrants can live on Phase Power alone without eating anything. There must be something going on from High Grade up."
"A Highest Tier, like the Rogue Imugi... Thinking of something that size loosing lightning so freely still gives me chills..."
Perhaps remembering the imugi that had rained bolts down on us, Franc's color darkened a little.
"So even against a Mid Grade aberrant, caution — and caution again — and anything above that, you must be on your guard without fail. This is written in the manual of us ordinary knights as well."
"Got it. ...Even so, once I get stronger, I really will get my revenge on that Rogue Imugi. I swear it."
Franc couldn't bring herself to cheer me on. Her face said she wanted to stop me. But that bastard had come for Franc's Soul Stone. I'd nearly died too. I would never forgive it.
"Anyway. I've gotten a bit used to the trinity, and I've adapted to firing non-attribute bullets... Calling them non-attribute bullets, the sound of it is a little off. From now on, let's call them Mana Bullets."
"A Mana Bullet? A bullet of mana?"
"Yeah. Pretty chuuni, right? Heh heh."
"I like it!"
"..."
...Franc's chuunibyou wasn't getting dangerous, was it?