The Collapsed Road
Minjun woke just before dawn. The air inside the van was still damp and hot. The ventilation fan was spinning weakly, but the heat that had built up overnight would not bleed off so easily.
Jia lay sleeping beside him, the blanket kicked halfway down her body. Her T-shirt had ridden up, baring the narrow cut of her waist and the soft plane of her lower belly. Through the gap of her shorts, the tender skin of her inner thighs gleamed faintly in the dim pre-dawn light. The heavy contours of her enormous breasts pressed down beneath the fabric, swaying ever so slightly with each rise and fall of her breath.
Minjun watched her for a moment, then carefully shook her shoulder.
"Jia. Wake up. We need to get going."
Jia cracked her eyes open. She was awake, but sleep still clung to her voice.
"It's still dark, though. You sure?"
"If we leave now, we can rest the whole day. Collect the bounty, get the van serviced."
That was what he said out loud. Inside, he was thinking something else entirely.
Once they got home, he would be able to take Jia properly on their own bed. He had been curious about car sex for some time and had tried it more than once, but Jia shut that kind of thing down even when she was perfectly well. She was the sort of person who drew a razor-sharp line between work and the rest of her life. During a hunt she would not tolerate a single scrap of nonsense, and Minjun, for his part, treated her strictly as a partner while they were on the job. Car sex, outdoor sex — none of it had ever really come off. Faced with Jia's cold refusals, he had always pulled his hand back.
So privately, he wanted to get home even a little sooner. There, he could hold her as her husband.
Of course he never laid that desire out in the open. He only offered the reason that they needed to start the day a little earlier.
Jia hesitated a moment, then nodded.
"Alright. Let's go."
They lashed the cargo down inside the van so nothing would shift. When Minjun turned the engine over, a loud rumble shattered the silence of dawn. He took the wheel; Jia sat in the passenger seat and looked out the window. The sky was still dark. Only the eastern horizon was beginning to pale.
They moved slowly along the unpaved road. Once they cleared this abandoned village, a better stretch of road ought to appear. Minjun gripped the wheel tight and concentrated. The surface was so uneven the van body shook violently; without a vehicle capable of off-road work, it would have been wrecked in no time.
But Minjun had plenty of experience driving roads like this, and he had already traveled this route once on the way in. He handled the van with practiced ease as they pressed on.
Then it happened.
Threat Level: MAXIMUM
Powerful monster approaching
The monster alarm suddenly began to scream. The reading shot to its peak in an instant. Minjun's face went pale.
"What the hell is this reading?"
It was a warning of a powerful monster closing in. There had been no alert at all until now, and then the numbers had spiked without warning. Situations like this were extremely rare. He could not understand the cause.
At that moment, the road heaved. The ground split with a deafening roar, and the van listed hard to one side. Minjun wrenched the wheel, but it was already too late. One edge of the road sheared away, and the van slid off and tumbled down the drop.
A massive impact slammed through the cabin as the van rolled onto its side. The windshield shattered into a spray of fragments. Equipment scattered in every direction. Minjun struck his head and his consciousness wavered; Jia instinctively curled in on herself to absorb the shock.
"Jia! Are you okay?!"
Coming to a moment later, Minjun asked unsteadily. Jia was already kicking the side door open.
"Get out. Now."
The frame had twisted in the crash and the door would not move properly, so she forced it with a kick and leapt outside. Minjun crawled out after her with difficulty. In the dust-choked air, he staggered to his feet. The van lay completely on its side, wheels pointing at the sky. Smoke was rising from the engine.
And standing in front of them was an enormous shadow.
It was easily several times taller than a person — a four-legged beast-type monster. Its entire body was sheathed in black scales, and a single massive horn, shaped like a sharpened blade, jutted from its head. Blue lightning crackled and spat from the horn's tip. The discharge was so intense it ionized the air into plasma, throwing off a hard blue glow.
It was a Thunder Horn Beast — an A-Rank monster.
"An A-Rank monster… here of all places?!"
Minjun cried out in shock. The detector had not been broken. The reading had spiked like that because an A-Rank had actually appeared. An A-Rank showing up out of nowhere on the outskirts of an abandoned village was absurd.
The van's trunk had crumpled open, and the grenade launcher had been thrown clear when the vehicle overturned. Minjun snatched it up on instinct. Ignoring the tremor in his hands, he pulled the trigger.
Two Special Armor-Piercing Rounds fired in succession. But the Thunder Horn Beast merely tilted its horn and released a burst of lightning.
The rounds were swept up in blue lightning and detonated in mid-air, the blast washing all the way back to Minjun. The instant he was caught in that intense discharge, the grenade launcher in his hands exploded.
"Guh…!"
He could not keep his footing against the shock of the electricity and the explosion, and went down hard. His arms and legs prickled and would not move properly. His vision flashed white.
"Look out…!"
In that instant, Jia moved.
She already had her spear in hand. She was not wearing her black combat suit — there had not even been time to change. In her everyday clothes, a sleeveless tee and shorts, she closed her grip around the shaft.
But she did not look defenseless in the slightest. An overwhelming presence radiated from her slender five-foot-seven frame. Her enormous breasts, well beyond an H-cup, heaved heavily inside the T-shirt; her narrow waist and plump ass bounced with elastic force as she moved. Her long hair streamed in the wind. She was already drawing up her mana.
Jia held the spear in her left hand and reached out with her right, seizing Minjun's lightning-wreathed fingers. Then she pulled the current that had been burning through his body rapidly into her own.
"Kh!"
The electricity crackled as it transferred. Jia bit her lip, brows furrowed in pain, while Minjun screamed. He rolled on the ground and collapsed, but he had barely managed to keep his life.
Immediately the Thunder Horn Beast flashed its horn again and fired another bolt. Blue lightning streaked directly at Jia and Minjun.
Jia did not hesitate. She raised her spear at an angle and caught the strike the way a lightning rod catches the sky.
Tempest
Lightning poured down the spear blade. Jia did not dodge. Instead, she drank the electricity into her own body.
The blue current that entered through the spear swept through her from head to heel. The skin visible beneath her T-shirt glowed a pale blue for an instant. As the intense charge coursed through her, her everyday clothes tore to shreds and burned away.
Her enormous breasts, well beyond an H-cup, trembled and swayed as if answering the electricity. Through the torn fabric, her pink nipples showed faintly, and the curves of her narrow waist and plump ass were laid fully bare. Jia's lips parted. A low, ragged breath escaped her. Sweat and the heat of the lightning left her skin gleaming.
Minjun, collapsed in the dust, stared blankly at the sight.
So that's… Jia's power.
Jia was a wielder of Tempest, the ability to command wind and lightning. She could absorb even the Thunder Horn Beast's powerful bolts into her own body. No — he could already feel a power beyond that. Watching her simply drink the electricity in, Minjun once again felt the overwhelming extent of his wife's ability.
Jia righted her spear and gave him a brief order.
"Stay out of the way."
Her voice was as cold as always. But there was a steely resolve in it.
"Urgh…"
Following her instruction, Minjun crawled desperately across the ground, trying to get even a little outside the range of the attacks. After taking a lightning strike to the body, he could barely move at all.
Having blocked the blow, Jia charged straight at the Thunder Horn Beast, cutting through the lightning. With her everyday clothes almost completely burned away, her movements were no different from when she wore her combat suit. Her enormous breasts heaved violently. Her waist arched like a bow. Her plump ass bounced with elastic force. Her long hair streamed, tinted by the afterglow of the discharge.
Blue lightning chained and sparked from the spear blade she swung. As Jia's power collided with the Thunder Horn Beast's electricity, the air filled with a sound like rolling thunder.
Minjun could not watch the rest. The shock of the current that had wrapped his entire body and the exhaustion hit him all at once, and his consciousness faded fast. Collapsed in the dust, he passed out.
When consciousness returned, the first thing he felt was a rattling vibration.
Minjun slowly opened his eyes. His vision was blurry. He realized he was being carried. It was the camping cart — the small cart they had used to load cargo from the van — and he was lying half-reclined on it.
Jia was out in front, pulling the cart with him on it.
The everyday clothes she had been wearing were almost completely torn and burned away. She had covered only her chest and ass with scraps of cloth like towels, and was otherwise as good as naked. Her enormous breasts, well beyond an H-cup, pressed heavily and swayed beneath the rags; her narrow waist, plump ass, and springy thighs were fully exposed in the sunlight. Her sweat-slicked skin glistened, and with every step her breasts and ass swung hard. Her long hair, wet with sweat, clung to her back.
She held the spear in one hand and dragged the cart handle with the other.
The van was nowhere in sight. It had probably already been wrecked when the Thunder Horn Beast attacked and the vehicle overturned. Most of the equipment that had been inside had been abandoned. On the cart, she had managed to salvage only a few Magic Cores.
When Minjun moved, Jia looked back.
"You're awake. You okay?"
Her voice was still even. There was a slight note of concern for him in it. Fatigue clung to the words, but there was no wavering.
"The van?"
Minjun asked in a trembling voice. More than his own injuries, he was immediately worried about the van.
"Completely wrecked. It's unusable. We left most of the gear behind. I grabbed the Magic Cores, so we'll figure something out with those."
Jia explained it briefly, then looked forward again and pulled the cart. Her steps were heavy, but she did not stop.
Minjun looked up from the cart at the sky that had taken the place of a ceiling. The sun had already risen, beating down with fierce heat. His body ached. The aftereffects of the lightning still lingered.
"Shit…"
The thought of the van being wrecked made his head spin. It was utterly hopeless.
Seeing him sigh in despair, Jia spoke again.
"Don't worry about it. Just sleep. We're going to have to walk for a while."
Minjun could not answer. His lips were parched dry.
The van was wrecked, and they had lost most of their equipment. He had done nothing while he was unconscious. Jia had handled the Thunder Horn Beast alone, loaded him onto the cart, and was dragging him along.
I never knew I was this powerless.
A crushing sense of helplessness and frustration washed over him. Minjun put a hand on the cart's rail and looked at Jia's back.
She was walking in the sunlight, practically naked, pulling him along. The sight of her in nothing but sweat-soaked scraps of cloth was alluring, and yet the fact that his own wife looked like that felt wretched. And even so, the fact that lust had not completely vanished from his gaze as he watched her swaying enormous breasts and bouncing ass — that was even more wretched.
Minjun slowly closed his eyes. Leaving everything to Jia, he drifted back to sleep on the cart.
The scorching sunlight beat down on them both.