Zero Drop Rate
One clean punch from Ariel had sent the feral hound flying. The monster, which had been tumbling head over heels in a spray of dust, let its tongue loll out and went still.
The moment I resigned myself to it all, every sense that had frozen over came rushing back.
"Haah... haah..."
Through the thick of her protective suit came Ariel's ragged gasps, as though her breath might give out at any moment.
"What on earth were you thinking—!"
"I..."
I swallowed my words at the sound of that scream — it rang out half like a plea.
Amid this brutal, choking sense of reality, the woman before my eyes was no longer just Ariel, a mere game character.
She was a real, living personality who merely happened to share the name. Not a scrap of data that could only ever spit out scripted lines.
"I'm sorry."
Had this been the game, a row of dialogue choices would have printed itself across my vision right about now. Nothing appeared.
Maybe the 'Leader' could have conjured some smooth line in a moment like this, but for a man as hopeless at essay questions as me, an apology was all I had to offer.
I was going to take the Power Stone and the batteries.
So I could help out, even a little.
But the words never made it past my lips; they just went on circling uselessly inside my head.
"Why won't you even give me time to sort out my own thoughts!"
One glance was enough to see how angry Ariel was.
She had been famous, even in the game, for never losing her temper.
Which was why players had affectionately called her the party's mom — and why, despite being the free Replica handed out at the very start, there had even been a few freaks who threw her into live combat purely as a labor of love.
And here was that same Ariel, angry in a way I'd never once seen.
"...Ariel."
"Don't say my name!"
At my quiet call she blew up at me all over again, refusing to so much as look in my direction.
"It would have been better if you'd never come back at all."
Because she'd assumed I'd died out there somewhere — was that it?
Watching Ariel bite down on her lip, rationing every word, I kept my silence, feeling like a boy being scolded by his parents.
Anything I said here would only pour oil on the fire.
"Do you have any idea what it felt like, waiting for the Leader all this time..."
She went on like that, swallowing down her bitterness as though reciting a litany of grievances.
The logs left in the Leader's Room had already shown me plenty of what they'd endured, so I kept my mouth pressed firmly shut.
And yet, as though she still knew perfectly well what her duty was, Ariel kept her body moving even through all of it.
"...This is..."
Her hands, busy inspecting the monster's carcass, froze for an instant.
Caught in her trembling eyes: the Power Stone, and the batteries.
As if she'd stumbled onto something she was never meant to see, Ariel quickly shook her head, then gathered the Power Stone and batteries in silence from the crumbling husks of the monsters and said, without inflection:
"...Let's go back."
I nodded slowly at her toneless words and fell in behind her.
The ore with its eerie, oil-slick sheen, the thin cylindrical batteries — watching her cradle even those meager first-stage resources like priceless treasure, I felt a dull bitterness settle somewhere in my chest.
And so, with the ruined surface at our backs—
I almost died just now, didn't I.
Replaying it, my whole body shuddered at how close it had been. If Ariel had arrived even a single second later, I would have died right there, without a shadow of doubt.
And yet, strangely enough, my heart felt nothing but calm. Had my emotions simply gone numb from how surreal it all was?
"..."
"..."
The ride down the manual elevator was long and short all at once. Beneath the clamor of grinding, interlocking gears, nothing passed between Ariel and me but an endless silence.
Back inside the underground city, our destination was the Leader's Room. In the game, once you launched an operation and logged back in after some time had passed, the Replicas you'd dispatched would return here and drop a few remarks about how it went.
But Ariel simply picked up the resources without a word and walked off somewhere.
The Ariel who used to report so brightly — "Operation results, Leader!" in that clear, cheerful voice — was gone now.
Would she even follow my orders from here on out? She looked utterly wrung out, and no human being with a shred of decency could have shamelessly handed her a mission in that state.
Just as the worries began piling one atop another—
"Please... don't try to do anything."
Ariel said it just before stepping out of the Leader's Room. Through the crack of the door, sorrow hung heavy in her eyes.
Don't do anything...?
Her words left me with a great deal to think about. It wasn't as though standing still would improve anything.
And yet I couldn't bring myself to say so. Because when you traced it all back, I was the one who'd caused it.
And so my first night in the underground city came and went.
I woke on a floor that was, oddly enough, warm — but no miracle met me, and no familiar bedroom ceiling came into view.
So it wasn't a dream after all.
Heart sinking, I pressed a palm to one part of my body, then another, and slowly pushed myself upright.
I'm hungry...
Yesterday had been shock after shock, and with all that tension I hadn't even registered my own empty stomach. Then again, in gacha games of this breed, the protagonist-type character is almost never shown eating outside of a special event. Come to think of it, what had the player character ever survived on?
Asking Ariel about it in my current situation would have been stepping on a landmine. So for the moment, I simply wandered out into the streets.
An underground city lit to the same dim brightness whether it was day or night.
...Huh?
At the far end of a street that had been pitch-black only yesterday, a small light had bloomed above a shopfront. The restaurant building — most definitely dead dark a day ago. And there, alongside that light, stood Ariel.
As I approached slowly, she turned her head at the sound of me.
"...Go ahead and eat."
"Ah — yeah."
Her gaze was as cold as ever, but weighed down by that curt instruction of hers, I planted myself in front of the restaurant all the same.
A mound of steamed white rice, and a hamburger steak drenched in sauce. How any of this was possible underground, I couldn't fathom — until I caught sight of the countless cans stacked in the back of the restaurant.
[ RICE ]
[ HAMBURGER STEAK ]
[ DUMPLINGS ]
[ CHICKEN ]
Even foods that had no business existing in cans sat there vacuum-sealed and on display inside the shop.
I'd half-wondered whether anything fit for human consumption had really survived in a world like this; only now did I finally breathe a little easier. Truly a setting that keeps cutting-edge technology in precisely the strangest of places.
"Well then... I'll be going."
Just like that — in the middle of me filling my hollow stomach — Ariel, evidently finding the moment just as awkward, excused herself first and began walking away from the restaurant.
Watching her go, I turned something over in my mind.
Replicas don't need meals.
Replica — literally, a copy. In any other game, they'd simply have been lumped in as heroes or characters. And true to the name, every one of them had inherited the memories and personality of someone who had died.
The Replicas knew it themselves, too — the story went that they fought to reclaim the surface, even in mechanical bodies. Tough as they were, though, everything the story had shown me said it wasn't that they couldn't eat. Each had a food she loved, a hobby she'd enjoyed back when she was alive — ordinary, whole personalities.
And those Replicas, clinging to nothing more than the belief that I would come back someday, had left their favorite foods untouched in that restaurant the entire time.
"Ah — Ariel!"
Once the thought landed, I couldn't just stand there and let it go.
The instant I called her name, Ariel stopped in her tracks — but she didn't turn around.
So the congealed resentment hadn't fully thawed yet.
But if I let this moment slip, I had a feeling the distance between us would never close again — two parallel lines, stretching on forever.
"Come here. Eat with me."
At the gesture beckoning her over, Ariel wavered for a moment. Then, as if she'd finally scraped together some excuse, she averted her eyes, worked her mouth, and murmured:
"I don't need to eat..."
"I know."
I cut her off before the words had even finished leaving her mouth.
"I just wanted to eat together. That's all."
Wavering at my firmness, Ariel still made her way back toward the restaurant.
She was, after all, the flagship face of Undercity itself — her favorite food was something I knew well enough.
"You liked fried chicken, right?"
"...Yes."
I put in an order for chicken with the robot on top of my own meal, then went back to eating, filling my starved stomach the rest of the way. Before long, Ariel's portion of chicken landed in her bowl, and I quietly watched her meal from the corner of my eye.
"...You've changed. A little."
"Huh?"
While I sat there watching over her food, Ariel murmured it between bites of chicken.
Ariel, telling me that I had changed some.
The 'Leader' she remembered must have been a more flighty, easygoing sort of person. After all, the dialogue options had always managed to slip in at least one gag that punctured the serious mood.
But now that every question in my life had turned into an essay prompt, I had no room left for witty comebacks.
"A few things happened."
"...Did they."
To my answer — vague enough to paper over everything — Ariel replied a beat late, as though a short delay had been wired into her. With Ariel, who had never been anything but bright and cheerful, looking this subdued, my own words came out slow and heavy too.
And still — what needed asking, I had to ask.
The moment she finished her meal—
"After I disappeared... what happened?"
I threw one short, blunt question at her.
Honestly, even judging the matter coldly, this was neither a roster nor a situation that should have collapsed just because I vanished.
"What do you mean...?"
"Because none of it makes sense to me."
I answered her puzzled echo with a bit more steel. I'd pushed the story all the way through its final released chapter, and neither Power Stones nor High-Efficiency Batteries were exactly rare drops. Even without me, the Leader, the remaining Replicas should have managed just fine — all they had to do was mine resources on a regular cycle.
"Even if the ones left behind had only gone up to the surface now and then and come back with a haul, it never should have gotten this—"
"Nothing dropped."
I was coldly replaying the situation in the immediate aftermath of my disappearance, voicing one theory after another — and mid-sentence, she cut me off.
"What?"
"After the Leader vanished, the Power Stones, the batteries... not one thing ever dropped properly from the monsters again."