Chapter 132: An Academy? That's Insane — 2
The girl sets the nail down and covers her eyes with one hand.
A crowbar, of all things, for the weapon she reaches for at the very last of the last. How orthodox.
Then she crouches, takes the nail up again, and walks toward me.
Ah. She hasn't forgotten that, either. As she comes closer, the fighter's memories inside me insist that — at least against someone of this girl's level — there isn't a single opening. Truly terrifying.
"A twenty-five-foot monster, throwing a tantrum because it doesn't want to go home?"
In the faded memories, one of them flares as if a supernova has just gone off. Say that again. What did you just spit out? That kind of violent blaze. Why is this memory obsessed with nothing but a unit of measure?
"Down there I can't even move, and the cold never ends. All I can do is lie still and look up at the lights in the night sky. I barely managed to get out. I don't want to go back."
I ignore the flaring memory and tell her the facts as they are. The advantage of telling the truth is obvious. Not a single person, so far, has ever taken my words lightly.
It's convenient, besides.
When you haven't much intelligence, it's best not to lie.
Of course, you can still adjust things by declining to tell every fact!
"What, were you locked in some box or something?"
"It was spacious, at least."
An endless, perfect plane, stretching out without limit.
She draws nearer with an extremely sour look on her face. The fighter's memories warn me. If it comes to it, that one will drive the nail in, then smash it home with the crowbar.
Aggressive.
Is she actually special forces?
At least, according to the Sahagin's memories, all they did was kidnap people from the nearby villages — citizens and tourists alike, no distinction.
"Why don't you try killing me the way you crushed that corpse earlier? Or did seeing this scare you?"
For some reason she lifts the nail so I can see it clearly. A strange sigil is carved into the head of the spike. From the Sahagin's memories, it is something like a sacred relic of this world's god.
They say that if it pierces you, the mana in your body stops working entirely, and you drown to death on dry land. Well. Their original form is an aquatic creature, so it isn't strange that they use mana — reversible, and explosive in its effect — to adapt to an environment.
Anyway. She asked, so I'll answer.
"I did that because they were already dead. I can take the warmth of the dead. Unless someone attacks me, I don't want to harm the living."
And I have my doubts I would die even if that nail stabbed me. Whatever body I enter, I can't use mana to begin with.
The girl thinks it over.
Then she lifts her head, looks at my face, and asks.
"Do you eat people?"
"No. Until not long ago, I was a person too?"
All I gained was warmth. Memories aren't taken. They're copied.
I have never put matter into my body, broken it down, and absorbed it, so I have never eaten anyone. Never eaten.
If that were necessary to obtain warmth, I wouldn't hesitate.
If it isn't, then, well. There's no particular reason to.
The girl blinks.
Fair enough. If a giant says she used to be human, it would hardly be strange to find that strange.
"So that means this isn't your original body?"
"Yes. This is the first time I've entered a vessel like this."
At that, the girl's eyes sharpen, and she stares straight at me. Did I misspeak?
"A vessel. So last time, you went into a human body."
I did misspeak.
Is she a detective?
And she's quietly shifting her arm, changing her stance so she can drive the nail in at any moment?
That nail, and that crowbar. They belonged to the Sahagin originally, so even at the earliest, last evening would have been the first time she used them.
Then again — one girl is captured, and overnight she annihilates a secret cult of fish-folk. Is any of this really so strange?
She asked, so for now I'll answer.
"Yes. I was summoned exactly twice. The first was a cult. The second was a cult hiding inside a cult."
"So it's nothing but cults."
Only groups like that are likely to reach someone like me. A monster such as I am is not the sort one summons while believing everything will turn out fine.
I crouch and watch her, then look around.
A vast, dome-shaped building. Smaller, though, than the knowledge Daegon seeded into the advance party. The vanguard never properly took root, and they lacked the means to raise the structure according to the blueprints.
So they cheated, and scaled the whole thing down exactly as it was.
The problem is that the body, at the moment of summoning, follows the blueprint's dimensions — and the door one is meant to leave by is too small to pass through.
If Daegon had come, he would have killed every fish-person who designed it.
"I seem to be trapped in here. What should I do?"
At my words, the girl looks around.
Once she has checked every passage leading outside, she turns a sour face on me.
"The door's small."
"It isn't barrier-free."
"Pfft!"
I couldn't say what about that was funny, but the girl starts to giggle.
"No — why would a social-welfare program for the vulnerable come up in a place like this?"
Even so.
"Aren't most immigrants socially vulnerable?"
Whatever was so funny about that, this time she breaks into a full cackle.
I stay crouched and watch in silence. She laughs for a good long while, then gets to her feet.
"You. What's your name?"
A name.
"I don't have one."
The body I am in now was cultivated so that Daegon could enter it.
The pinnacle of Daegon life-engineering.
Around me lie the things that served as culture fluid and an incubator. To the eye it looks like a spawning ground, but those who know, know.
This is not a perfect body, though. It is a temporary one, meant to be used until — after arriving in this world, and spending a long time at it — a true body could be made.
To that end they prepared Choseol's body, and intended to enter Choseol's child. Things went awry, and it all came to nothing.
"You don't have a name?"
"No. In the last world I used the name of the person whose body was mine, but this one is a manufactured thing."
"Ah. Right. Come to think of it, I overheard the monsters saying their god was about to hatch."
A check on the level of knowledge.
I had thought this was the early nineteenth century, but the technology may be more advanced than I expected. Not only the technology. Culturally, it is considerably developed.
One does not start looking after the disabled unless a culture has come along rather far.
"Still. A huge monster like you speaking politely while I talk down to you — isn't that a little surreal?"
If the word surreal exists, then the arts are well developed, too. This is not a world of hunters roaming at the edge of the wild, however it may look.
It means a world with room to spare.
Quietly revising my estimate of this world's level upward, I point at the crowbar.
"One ought to speak politely to a person holding a universe-destroying weapon."
"Huh? This is just a crowbar! Shouldn't you be pointing at the nail?"
"I don't know what the nail is. But that is dangerous."
With that in her hands, after all, she spent a single night not merely cracking Sahagin skulls, but trying to wipe them out entirely.
The very last step.
That was where she failed.
If Daegon had still been alive, there was a strong chance he would have appeared, and she would have come to a very bad end.
Looking at this girl's tenacity, there is also a chance she would have sent him back somehow regardless.
Not everyone, I should add, is a superhuman of this sort.
If they were, the Sahagin would never have chosen humans — the easiest prey — as the resource from which to take souls and flesh.
"I don't think that's something I ought to be hearing from a monster over twenty-five feet tall."
"People are afraid of scorpions, aren't they?"
"You're saying I'm a scorpion..."
She takes up the nail and comes toward me.
Her face is not the face of someone about to kill, so I simply watch, and she says this.
"Move. There's something I have to break."
I step aside. Wearing an expression that says she cannot begin to tell what I am, she drives the nail into the ground — precisely at the center of the dome.
Click. Clack.
The sound of machinery stirring, and Daegon's memories flare.
A self-destruct device, made for the worst case.
The nail is an instrument for executing heretics — and also an instrument for slaughtering everyone, should the den fill with heresy.
Heresy, for the record, is this: those who found freedom.
Refuse the binding, resolve to live as a single person, and they kill you. All of you.
Imagine one unit surrendering in the middle of a war. Roughly the same.
They are a religious order, so they deal with apostates to a paranoid degree.
Leave them be, and the defections will go on. They have to be caught.
The problem is that the device gives no thought at all to the one who uses it.
"Why did you drive it in? This whole place. It's collapsing."
And it is. The doors around us give way first. The stone pillars burst from within and block the paths, and so that no one can flee, the current is dragged inward and the place seals shut.
"Ah. Figures."
She drops the crowbar with a thud and sits on the floor.
"No. Something's wrong with me. I don't want to turn into those things from the prison. That's what this is."
As she speaks, she lifts her bloodstained shirt. Beneath the cloth.
Where white skin ought to be, blue scales are rising. And near the ribs, gills gape and flutter.
Ah. Of course.
Human beings are a resource, too. By the time the transformation is complete, they brainwash you with hormones and pleasure-chemicals, raising your fondness for their own kind.
"You look like a victim yourself. Die with me."
So that's how she puts it.
"What is your name?"
"My name? Victoria. Why?"
So that's her name.
"Then, Victoria. Let me say this, in a situation so hopeless. Don't you want to return to your original body? I can promise you this. If you truly, desperately wish to escape this worthless death — to go back to your original body, and return to your family's arms — then let us make a contract."
And I say this.
Victoria looks up at me with a blank, foolish face. Her expression hardens, and a moment later — with the water already rising to her ankles — she nods.
Hehe.
The first harvest.
Complete.