[177] 3. Forest of the Profane (2)
The group looked around. Trees with long leaves blocked out the sky.
From above it might have seemed seamless, but light forced its way through the tiniest gaps and lit the world. Moss and mushrooms grew in the shade; the soil felt damp with moisture.
Still, it didn't feel like the world they had come from.
The secret that made time seem frozen was the size of the rocks.
You can judge a space's age by how its rocks are weathered. But here the stones were wildly inconsistent. There were small pebbles, but also countless boulders as large as houses. No one could have arranged that by hand.
"Maybe the material's different from where we lived. Like, it's so durable it doesn't erode over time."
Canis's suggestion made sense.
Ancient relics were often made of minerals absent from the original world. And "ancient" implied things predating recorded history. If this was something of heaven, then rocks that had withstood eons would be living proof.
"So this is heaven, then?"
"Let's check the Spirit Zone first."
At Amy's words everyone tested whether they could cast magic. The Spirit Zone was a domain of omnipotence, but there was an uneasy thought that the coordinates might be skewed in a physically disconnected world.
Fortunately, magic worked normally.
"So this is heaven, right? Well, we've seen enough—shall we go back?"
Everyone stared at Tess. She hadn't expected the attention; she gave an awkward smile and waved a hand.
"Ha ha—no, I was joking."
"No. I was actually seriously considering it," Rian said.
If Rian could joke like that, it was easy to guess how tense everyone else felt.
As if to prove it, Shirone's group hadn't moved a step from where they had arrived.
Shirone took a small, decisive step forward. "Let's move for now. We saw a city—whether we fell from the sky or the space bent, there's a city over there. We can walk toward it, right? At least that means civilization."
Where there's civilization, there's law. Whether those laws matched common sense was unknown, but it was more pragmatic than spending the night in a forest that might spit out anything.
"But how do we find the city? We don't have a direction."
"I can do that."
Amy's eyes reddened. Reading the information stored in her self-profile, she pointed toward where Rian stood and said, "By bearings, the city should be that way."
Amy's self-profile memory perfectly reconstructs a specific moment. Even after travelling astronomical distances, it still worked.
Her ability wasn't mathematical. Like a compass that points north regardless of space, she had a kind of internal magnet that could lock onto a center no matter the variables.
Following Amy, the party tried not to miss any sounds in the landscape. They heard insects and birds, but for some reason they couldn't see them.
Recognizing it was not something to ignore, they paused. Then came the sound of grass brushing from the forest.
Tess, sensitive to sound, drew her sabre and turned. Rian stood beside her, still with his hand on the greatsword's hilt.
"What is it, Tess?"
"I don't know. Sounds like someone's coming this way."
Amy asked tensely, "Are you sure it's someone? Not... something?"
Tess couldn't answer. The breathing sounded human-like, but she couldn't be certain.
There was no guarantee a person lived here at all.
With some monstrous thing possibly about to appear, the group's tension spiked.
Ssssss! Ssssss!
The rustling of foliage grew closer and faster. Tess was sure whatever it was was coming straight for them.
The mages slipped into the Spirit Zone, and Rian drew his greatsword and let it hang. Whatever it was, they'd strike the moment it emerged.
Rian waited, taking a deep breath—and frowned in puzzlement.
By the sound's frequency it should have arrived by now. But only the noise grew louder; the thing refused to show itself.
"Rian, you should fall back," Tess's voice trembled.
She could think of only one possibility: the sound was coming from much farther away than it seemed.
As Rian, still poised to raise his sword, took a step back—thud! thud!—the ground shook.
Something finally crashed through the undergrowth and revealed itself.
"What—what is that?"
Shirone looked up, tilting his head as far back as he could.
A giant.
Eight meters tall. Naked, but draped here and there with scraps of cloth.
Its beard reached its chest and its face was a map of hideous wrinkles. Yet its body was muscular and firm like a youth's.
Tess checked the groin for a weak spot as a strategic measure. Nothing. The face looked male and there was no chest, but there were no genitals either.
"Um… we've got a problem," Arin said. Tess, having left the giant's appraisal to Rian, turned and asked, "What is it? Worse than now?"
"I don't know what could be worse, but I've never seen anything like this."
Shirone turned to Arin. How did her psychic sight view the giant?
"I can't read its emotions. Whether it's angry, laughing, or sad—everything's scrambled."
Canis was the most shocked. The Harvester that had manifested behind him cocked its head and inspected the giant.
"Arin... can't read its emotions?"
That couldn't be. It should be impossible.
Arin's psychic perception levels the attributes of things into an equal phase. If something like the Magic Association's Sakiri could block emotions, you'd at least see that kind of blankness. For Arin to be unable to read the giant's feelings was plainly anomalous.
"Those who come to Purgatory... those who deny the gods..."
They couldn't understand the giant's words. There seemed to be no one to translate. The only person they could rely on was Arin.
But she shook her head again.
"I don't know. I can't decode it."
Not only her clairvoyance but even telepathy failed. Arin was effectively blind here. She couldn't read the giant's expression, so she borrowed Canis's senses.
"Canis, does that giant look hostile?"
"Seems like it."
Could Arin—specialized in mental sensing—even fail to detect aggression? They'd stepped into an unknown world trusting Arin's ability to nullify unfamiliar experiences. Without her, they were at a loss.
Arin—without Arin it would be impossible. Amy, thinking the same, left the final call to her.
"Arin, what should we do?"
"What do you mean, what should we do? Run, of course!"
Arin bolted, and Amy stood dazed.
Canis chased after her, and the others began to retreat.
Amy was the slowest to react. She glanced back at the giant. It was uprooting saplings nearly two meters tall and chasing them.
"Raaaargh!"
The giant's roar hit like an acoustic cannon. Amy, dizzy, launched herself late.
The root of the sapling the giant swung brushed her collar.
"It's so big it won't be able to keep up with us! We have to run first!"
"You should've said that sooner!"
Using Skima, Amy caught up to Arin and shouted. They'd narrowly avoided a strike; if they'd reacted a moment later, their backs would have been split.
"Sorry! I didn't expect this either!"
Arin didn't shirk responsibility.
Inside heaven, they were a team. As a non-combat mage, Arin's role was to judge an enemy's disposition and relay an objective analysis to the leader. With that function paralyzed, all she could do was apologize.
Bound by fate, no one blamed her. They only worried about what lay ahead.
Arin's mental talents were a tremendous asset. It was premature to declare them useless from a single giant, but the journey had begun on the wrong foot.
At the sound of the ground reverberating, Shirone looked back. Judging big things as slow had been a mistake. The giant had closed to striking distance.
Through Arin's mental channel Tess's voice reached him.
- Shirone, give orders. Can't we just teleport away?
- That's risky. We don't even know where we are. If we jump into something worse, we'd be annihilated there.
- But we can't keep running forever, right? Honestly, I can't even make out what's around us.
- ...True. Then we'll fight here. We should take down the giant first.
When Shirone chose combat, Rian and Tess pivoted and rushed the giant.
Amy and Canis took positions to Shirone's left and right, and Arin stayed at the very rear to support.
True to his role as vanguard knight, Rian struck first.
Fighting an eight-meter foe introduced many unpredictable variables. Attacks from above were hard to predict, and the only reliable targets tended to be below the knee.
Rian aimed for the Achilles.
As his greatsword swung, the giant brought down a tree trunk. The two weapons met in midair and the trunk split as if torn.
It wasn't a clean cut. The giant's strength was so great it shattered Rian's weapon.
The impact sent Rian flying three meters. He barely landed, but his legs skidded across the ground.
Feeling a cramp in his right arm, he grabbed the blade with his left hand and assumed a fighting stance.
The giant's strength was immense. More astonishing, though, was its speed.
"How is this possible? It defies physical laws."
A creature eight meters tall would need hundreds of times a human's muscle power just to support itself.
Standing upright would be remarkable; its combat movements rivaled those of a beast.
"Eradicate heresy...!"
The giant spat unintelligible words and hurled a severed sapling at Tess.
The one-meter sapling slammed into the ground and Tess used it as a springboard to leap.
Following through from the throw, the giant snapped its fist forward. Tess, midair, seemed to have no way to dodge.
At that moment her body flew forward as if ignoring inertia and landed on the giant's fist.
Some kind of external gravity field.
Rushing along the giant's forearm, she slashed its left eye with her sabre and dropped down. As the giant clapped a hand over the wounded eye and lifted its torso, she cried to the others.
"Now!"
Shirone fired the photon cannon. Considering the monster's size, this was no time to conserve mental power.
A blast of light, as heavy as a cannonball, struck the giant's abdomen dead-on.
Like someone taking a cannon blast to the chest, the giant's body contorted and both legs left the ground.
Seeing the giant pushed back was almost unbelievable. Canis, who had suffered a similar blow before, felt dizziness and grimaced.
Shirone's group thought it was over. But the giant's legs, which had been parallel to the ground, came down again and it planted its soles into the earth to steady itself.
Everyone was speechless.
The giant had taken the photon cannon and remained standing. That was a spell that had reached nearly 5,000 destructive power in the Chamber of Achievement and Sacrifice. For a creature of flesh and blood to withstand it was absurd.
"My god... how can it take that and still be fine?"
The giant's face was contorted; the wrinkles had become more pronounced and grotesquely terrifying.
At that moment Amy's fireball flew in from the flank and burned the giant's face.
Amy's judgment paid off. Fire was the enemy of cells. No matter the muscle, burning would finish it.
The beard caught and the giant clutched its face and staggered.
Seeing the giant's face in the flames sent a chill through them. Beneath the melting, dripping skin, new skin was regenerating.
Tess muttered in disbelief, "That's a Skima, right? How can a giant be a Skima?"