Watering Trees, Crushed Dreams

"So perhaps it would be best if you removed those… things you've been keeping down there?"

"Huh?"

"I understand that after living with the Pirate Empress and enduring her attentions day after day, going without them feels more awkward than not…"

"Th-that's… um… the truth is, if I don't have these on, I've been getting really anxious lately…"

Perhaps it was all the time spent with the Pirate Empress amid the purge work and one crisis after another. Even though the Empress herself had vacated her post to rejoin her husband, Betelgeuse was still living in extremely intimate proximity to a set of replicas modeled after the Empress's hands.

"So… um… don't tell the others, okay?"

"…Understood, Commander."

Arpio, who had been at Betelgeuse's side from the day she first opened her eyes until now, caught a glimpse of the corruption that had taken root amid that brilliant intellect.

Ugh. Good heavens.

Or so the story goes — that she felt tears welling up from somewhere deep inside, unbidden.

And at that very moment, while Betelgeuse was essentially certifying to her own adjutant a full-throated Hnnngh, I'm the Empress's corrupted femaleeeeee♡—

What, exactly, was our eternal third-rank, our protagonist, the thoroughly complicated Icarus the Rank 3 doing?

At the same time, somewhere in a lounge inside Icarus's Astral Base.

"It's already been a full day since we started the base upgrade."

"That's right. You'll still need to wait forty-four more days before it's finished."

"Ominous number."

After enthusiastically blasting a mass block-beam at the gallery lunatics who'd been running wild with every insane stunt they could invent, I had already kicked off the base upgrade and finished every daily quest ages ago.

"But is it really okay to just give them water like this?"

"Apparently the rest of the nutrients are being fed to the roots through the equipment installed under the soil."

"Ooh."

—trickle, trickle, trickle…

Maybe it was because there was genuinely nothing left to do. At a leisurely pace, with Jessica and the other supers — Griyanaar and Nero — in tow, I was watering the Living Machine-Part Tree botanical garden we'd set up in a quiet corner of the base.

Honestly, none of us had ever thought we'd get to use these things without limit, right?

Under the noble pretext of having nothing better to do, I was enjoying a sudden little slice of farm life. And since these were Living Machine-Part Trees — structures that grew metal machine parts right on their branches — the water we gave them wasn't ordinary liquid either.

"Commander, plain water works fine, but if you're going to do it properly you should use water boiled with iron-fish in it."

"There's a thing like that?"

"Mm-hm. That's how the trees absorb iron properly."

"Th-th-that's right… i-if you just give them plain water, the p-part trees take l-longer to b-bear fruit…"

As Griyanaar and Nero explained — both of them in farmer's overalls and straw hats instead of their usual lab coats, spray bottles in hand — only water richly steeped in iron would do.

And regarding our delightful little farm life and watering routine, Jessica, who knew nothing about agriculture, had this to say:

"But isn't that just… rust water?"

"What."

"What."

"…Pardon?"

By comparing iron-rich water to "rust water," she managed to make Gri-Gri and Nero-Nero tremble with pure, concentrated rage.

At any rate, while I was leisurely watching the Living Machine-Part Trees grow nice and sturdy…

I suddenly wondered just how many of them we actually had, so I stopped watering and decided to ask Griyanaar.

"By the way, Griyanaar."

"What is it, Commander?"

"How many Living Machine-Part Trees do we have growing right now? Including the saplings."

"Hmm. About ten that you could call mature, and roughly thirty saplings?"

"A-and if you count the ones still in the sprout stage t-too… maybe around eighty in total…?"

"I see."

Hearing Griyanaar and Nero's answers come right back, I nodded and sank into private thought.

Hmm. These Living ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Machine-Part Trees… can you grow them without limit?

Each tree was supposed to boost repair and construction speed by one percent. Ten trees meant ten percent. A hundred trees meant a hundred percent — in other words, double the repair speed.

At that point, weren't these things even better than a vending machine loaded with perfect Solo-Snow recipes, or an all-purpose tentacle that could handle housework, combat, massages, and nighttime activities?

And if you just kept expanding them without a cap, couldn't you eventually push repair speed to ten times, even a hundred times the original rate? Space inside the base was surplus to requirements anyway — planting ten thousand or a hundred thousand of them would be no trouble at all.

But the very moment I was entertaining that delightful fantasy—

Hnnngh.

Watching the operations team crush the "Million Living Machine-Part Tree Army Theory" before it could even sprout, I felt a bitter little twist in my chest and ordered Griyanaar to grow no more than a hundred of them.

Of course, even that much still meant a maximum ten percent boost to repair speed, so I decided it was plenty and contented myself with that.

The other users figured the same thing — if the update had been forced through after people had already bought the items, it would have been a different story entirely.