25. The Electric Eel of the Sea of Fire
Strangely—or rather, miraculously—we could swim.
In this sea of fire born from the burning rice fields, the laws of physics had clearly gone insane.
I didn't know why.
But there was definitely buoyancy.
Maybe the extreme heat of the flames sent air and steam surging upward, creating convection currents that acted like lift.
—it felt like being hoisted up, carried in the arms of the fire itself.Anyway, we could move—swimming through the burning sea.
The field was deep. Before the fire had spread, Oto and I had fallen so far we couldn't even see the bottom. Now we were rising back toward the surface.
Reaching the "surface" of the sea of fire—or the fireskin, maybe—wasn't easy.
Night had swallowed the sky; no sun was visible.
But the fire's brilliance was so intense, it was like being inside the sun.Defying Venus's gravity, I kept ascending.
This primordial, freshly ignited sea held no living creatures—yet.
That was a small mercy.
No one to interrupt us. Just the two of us—
Swimming, endlessly, through the flames.We moved together, like a three-legged race—
No, not with legs, nor with joined hands, but welded together, fused arm to arm—
A three-armed race for survival.
Desperate, frantic, we rose until at last, the fiery surface began to show above us."Almost there,"
I sent a telepathic pulse filled with hope.
Oto's reply came on the same wavelength, carrying that same fragile hope—
—or so I thought.
Halfway through, her signal cut off.
Someone had jammed it.The culprit—was Headless Girl.
Pushing aside Oto's voice, her telepathy poured mercilessly into my CPU."You two,"
she said, exasperated.
"Ever heard the saying, 'A fish can't see the water it swims in'?"
"Huh? No. And this isn't even water. We're not fish."
"Then how about, 'It's darkest under the lighthouse'?"The moment she said it, I glanced downward.
No—below.
Because I felt something massive rushing toward us at terrifying speed.A blinding light shot up from beneath.
Light and heat spiraled into a vortex, bleaching the world beyond white—
past whiteout, into what could only be called fireout.
In that near-unseeable chaos of light—
I saw it clearly.Something enormous.
Dull metallic light, twisting, coiling, writhing upward toward us."What… what the hell is that?!"
"The guardian of this rice field," said Headless Girl, with a hint of pride.
"This Venusian field is famous for producing top-grade memory chips. Naturally, it attracts pests—sparrows, locusts, grasshoppers, you name it. To fight back, the ancient engineers who once lived here as avatars poured their souls into creating that thing."It was already right beneath us.
Too vast to fit in my field of vision.
Like fifty massive rockets—
the kind ancient humans built to send their fragile bodies to the Moon or Mars—
fused into one colossal creature.Over a kilometer long, at least a hundred meters thick.
Even my visual sensors trembled trying to process the data.
Huge, elongated, glowing dully—it radiated an oppressive presence, vile and magnificent all at once."The Electric Eel of the Sea of Fire," said Headless Girl.But something about that bothered me.
"Was that its name from the start? This rice field only turned into a sea of fire just now."
"You really are an idiot."
She sighed deeply."Names change. It was the 'Electric Eel of the Memory Fields.' But look around—does this still look like a memory field to you?"
"…No."
"Exactly. You can't call it that anymore. Thanks to you two, it's a sea of fire now. So what do you call an electric eel that lives in a sea of fire?"
"…The Electric Eel of the Sea of Fire."
"See? You get it, you fool. Do I have to spell out everything for you? Honestly, you Martians…"I muted her telepathy before the rant could continue, and looked back down at the eel.Its eyes—three of them—were like spherical prisms.
They seemed translucent at first glance, but their surfaces shimmered with an oily iridescence.
Not the clean, beautiful rainbow of refraction—
but the grimy sheen of oil spilled from a car tank, spreading across wet asphalt in the rain.
Or perhaps more like the dull, insectoid glimmer of a fly's wings.Each of the three eyes tried to express an emotion—joy, sorrow, pleasure.
But one was missing. The fourth—anger—was nowhere to be seen.—Because the creature's very existence was anger itself.