Fifteen at My Back
Having roughly fifteen people walking behind me made for a picture that felt genuinely awkward.
Not that I held any kind of lead position, so the freedom to glance back whenever I liked was something of a mercy.
Their eyes carried a keen, almost scholarly curiosity. They weren't marching in neat ranks the way a column would, but each of them still kept to a rough place in the formation as they walked.
People always say that whenever a few gather, there's bound to be at least one odd one among them. That saying didn't seem to apply here.
No one was issuing orders, and yet everyone was restraining themselves. Whether that came from training or from character, I couldn't tell.
Ah — of course, the other half of that proverb still held: if a group of people is together and nothing's going wrong, you should probably check whether you're the villain.
"Hhk — hahh. Hhh..."
Yujin walked at my side. Behind her, Hyebin and a woman whose name I didn't know walked abreast, trading short, clipped bits of chatter.
"What's that?"
"It'll be in the records. The one with two air sacs, right?"
"Holy crap. I want to take it."
"We'll grab it on the way back."
That sort of talk. It sounded less like a grim mission and more like a hiking party out for a mountain stroll.
"Hik — hhh. Hh...!"
"Tired?"
The soft voice at my side sent a prickle of gooseflesh across my damp skin. It might have been the sweat evaporating fast — but more likely it wasn't.
"Ah — n-nooo..."
We hadn't even left radio range yet. Sure enough, a faint crackle of transmission drifted up from the rear.
This was flat ground. Heavier packs than the first time we'd stepped outside, sure — but collapsing already was not an option.
"If you're tired, rest. Hmm."
"Ah — n-no. Hik — heuk..."
"Hey."
"Y-yes...?"
"...Never mind. Hmm! I guess I'd start losing steam too if I got tired. Hh."
I forced my gaze away from Yujin's crooked little smile. Ideally, we'd push all the way to the absolute edge of my stamina and drain as much of hers as possible. That might turn out to be the key.
And so — five kilometers.
When I ran my hand once along the last relay beacon laid out in every direction from the escape line as I walked past it —
"Whoa. This is straight-up mountain country."
Yujin muttered it under her breath. The chatter behind us had quieted a little since earlier, so whether everyone had caught that or not, I felt a small stir of restless movement at our backs.
Heads craning sideways to peer ahead. Short gasps of wonder at the landscape, at the terrain itself...
"Kinda makes sense someone got hurt, doesn't it? Ahh. Should we take a break?"
She wasn't talking to me. Yujin asked it looking back, and Hyebin and the unnamed woman checked the time, nodded, and the decision rippled rearward from there.
So far it was fine. No one was pitching tents — they just dropped onto the ground where they stood.
Of course, people were still scanning the dirt this way and that, and a few crouched rather than sat, looking faintly uneasy.
The woman who'd been walking beside Hyebin put a lens to the mountain terrain and took a photograph. Then she set her terminal on the ground and checked their bearing.
Everyone was like that. Bodies at rest — but every one of them still had something to do.
Another woman was drawing water from a machine-pack on her back and passing out tiny portions to the others.
If we'd been wearing sealed suits, the whole scene would have looked even more like a future expedition on an alien world. A similar movie flickered through my mind for a moment.
"..."
I wiped the sweat that was about to run down my chin and turned my head. Hyebin was there, wetting nothing more than her lips with the water.
Yujin was doing the same, so I took the water I'd been given and swallowed the barest sip through the straw they'd explained earlier.
No one had told me to — but everyone was drinking only a little.
I wanted to gulp it down in long, greedy pulls. I held myself back —
"Hey."
"Gulp... Ah — y-yes...?"
"Come here."
"Uh — ah..."
I undid the buckles running across my chest and between my thighs and walked over. She'd called me; what else was I supposed to do?
"Sit. Rest here. Hmm."
Hyebin patted the space in front of her as she said it.
"Ah — th-that's, um. Thaat..."
I couldn't tell if it was already starting. Easy mindset or not, this was still an alien planet where any kind of crisis could hit.
This didn't feel right.
...That was just an excuse. The real reason I hesitated was that I didn't want the others to see me like that —
"No — the spot you were about to sit on is slanted, dummy."
"Ah — uh..."
I turned to check the place I'd been aiming for. There was a broad rock, just as she'd said. The bag I'd set down was tilted at a ridiculous angle.
"You wanna die? Hmm? Of course later in the tent I'm gonna flip you over and fuck you like a dog —"
I clapped a hand over her mouth. The others were far too close.
I didn't trust these people. Kind ones like Dahyun existed, sure — but atmosphere was atmosphere.
When I'd been grabbed and dragged off, when Soyeon had raged at me without holding anything back, everyone else had just watched.
I didn't believe they stood by because they wanted to stand by.
The only reason I hadn't been passed around to every single person was, I figured, a simple lack of contact points.
With new faces whose behavior I couldn't predict...
This was the safest way.
Building new connections was something I'd rather pass on. A round trip with just the two of them was already more than enough.
And besides — these were the two who'd decided to protect me, for whatever that was worth —
Just those two.
That was the picture I wanted. If I turned into some convenient onahole passed around freely, wouldn't it be that much easier to throw me away?
"..."
So I met her eyes, and after a beat —
"Hiiik...?!"
Something slick brushed my hand and I yanked it back. Looking at the place my palm had covered, I found Hyebin smiling with her mouth slightly open and her tongue out.
"Sit. You rest when it's time to rest. And I'm only saying this once, so you'd better listen. I'll make you walk the rest of the way naked."
Faced with that chilling threat, I had no choice but to sink quietly to the ground.
"I like that idea."
If not for Yujin's single quiet comment as she watched us, I might have tried a little more resistance.
It went without saying that we had no precise fix on our destination.
The satellites ejected into orbit were almost certainly still circling up there...
But without the ability to receive their signals, we couldn't even pin down our own position properly — only rough, wide estimates.
So all we could do was walk blindly in the direction the signal had come from.
You could sneer at how pathetic future tech looked in a moment like this — but the tools meant for emergencies and distress situations have always been more useful the more primitive they are.
A quantum-foam-pair-annihilation permanent lighter might be convenient under ordinary circumstances. In a situation like this? Doubtful.
Even if you had one, you couldn't use it, wouldn't need it, couldn't maintain it, and wouldn't know what to do with it.
And the truly galling part was that a scenario where we could have reaped plenty of technical advantage — even without going that far — would have unfolded under normal conditions.
If I hadn't been jammed into this body, we could have at least picked up the occasional signal from a satellite swinging back around and gotten an extremely slow weather forecast. We wouldn't have needed to suffer through any of this in the first place.
Even chicken-rib tech was locked behind permissions we couldn't touch. The advanced systems had gone down with the main ship somewhere. Naturally, all that remained were the primitive tools.
Though even the "primitive" ones, measured against the world I'd come from, were still a step ahead.
Water was a perfect example. Harvesting moisture from the air had been possible in my world too — but here it was fully commercialized. Small enough to wear on your back, no less.
Having to run it through a second purification stage and drink through a filtered straw was a little disappointing... but considering that back home I would have been pouring sand into a stocking and filtering through that, this was an almost criminal waste of technology.
...I'd wandered a bit. Anyway — we were walking and resting again.
More precisely, we were waiting.
Someone had climbed to fairly high ground and was surveying the surroundings, apparently fixing the overall geography in their mind.
In that sense, wasn't this primitive after all? A group with the technology to suck moisture out of the air and make water, climbing a height just to find their way.
— Clatter...
Stones and gravel skittered down under the feet of the people who had been looking back and forth between their PDAs and the view ahead, now starting their descent.
"Ugh..."
I took a half-step back, but fine grit still peppered my shins.
"Get back here."
"Kehk—!"
It might have made my heart skip if it had been even a little kinder. I really wished she'd stop grabbing me by the scruff of my clothes and yanking...
"Why are you standing there? You like getting hit?"
"Ah — n-no. It's not that..."
"This is pure mountain country. Even if this were Earth, I wouldn't walk it. Getting lost is guaranteed, and if there's anything like snakes or venomous bugs to deal with..."
The woman who had climbed a fairly steep cliff — climbable, by the vague male method of estimation — shook her head as she spoke.
"So what do we do?"
People gathered one by one. Some stayed seated and kept resting, but their ears were open; they were watching us.
"Let's run some numbers. The Colony's position is here, so —"
"Is it even the Colony?"
"The shelter? Whatever. Home. Our home is here, and..."
At the suggestion of calculating, several people pulled out their PDAs and clustered around the woman. Yujin stepped in too, heads bent together, muttering as they studied one another's terminal screens.
"If I pin it on this peak, that's 4.2 km at a bearing of twelve degrees east."
"So around here, then. No, wait a second..."
"......"
Blank...
What was I supposed to do? Sitting still to enjoy the rest itself out of some sense of entitlement wasn't it.
Joining that huddle wouldn't help anything. Better to leave the spot free for one more useful person.
The most I could offer was availability — standing ready to jump the moment help was needed — but even that got shut down by Hyebin. She pulled me into her arms and left me sitting there like a doll, staring into space. My legs were comfortable, at least...
"What are you trying to do?"
"Ah — th-that's... uh, m-maybe pass out water or —"
"Don't bother. You'll break something if you touch it. Just rest."
Hyebin held me against her. At the same time, her hand pressed firmly, steadily, over my lower body through my pants — right against my crotch.
Utterly casual sexual harassment. Even a married couple with a healthy sex life wouldn't do it quite like this.
More than that — there wasn't a scrap of love in the touch...
It was the level of handling an expensive doll. A costly toy you could press in different places to see what reaction you got.
So.
"P-please stop..."
I murmured it quietly. Most people's first real encounter with sexuality, with some variation, comes through pressure, doesn't it?
Even through clothes — no, thinking about it, my sensitivity seemed higher than before.
"Whoa. Wait, are you about to come? Damn. The effect's incredible."
"Nnh...! W-wait a second...!"
I thrashed, but every human who ever held something in their arms and then let go had fallen out of a tree and died, so there was no getting free.
"Women really do know women's bodies best, huh. Makes sense — not many people masturbate with that part."
There was something I'd learned from the security team once. I'd been so distracted by the masculine thing right in front of me that I hadn't thought it through.
Intersex. Two sexes. Of course they had female genitalia as well.
So there had been a reason no one had ever made that particular request of me — the kind that might have been enjoyable for someone born male —
It was startling. Intersex culture treated that part as something shameful...!
It might look strange from the outside — but thinking it over, it wasn't entirely absurd.
Men have a hole too, don't they?
It wasn't quite the same, but either way it wasn't something you talked about out loud...
Well. By design, stimulating that place was also the most direct route.
And among male-female couples (I'd never dated, so I had no sense of the ratio), there was that terrifying genre where the woman took the male role...
I could only dare to guess it was something in a similar vein —
"Hyeik...?!"
Hyebin suddenly pressed down hard, focusing the pressure on a single point, and the sound slipped out of me. Loud enough that everyone glanced my way for a moment.
"Eheh...! Focus, okay? Ah. Right! If you can walk without showing it, I'll let it slide."
I hoped night wouldn't come. Once the tents went up and we were sealed in private, there was no telling what would be done to me.
But night had to come for a day to pass and the remaining distance to shrink, so my heart spun in circles.
I missed Dahyun.
If these hands had been hers, I might have played along with a little coquetry.
When the rest ended and I stood, my legs trembled a little more than they had before.