The Room You Can't Leave Unless You □□
The moment they set foot inside the university, the question that mattered was who would guard Leyre. Everyone traded wary glances, each waiting for someone else to volunteer.
"I—I'll sit this one out..."
Hias withdrew early; she already had things she had brought along. The rest settled it fairly by drawing lots, and the fact that Leyre himself had made the lots was merely a bonus.
The maid chosen was none other than...
"Mm~ I didn't see this coming~"
Agrippa. Beaming, she slipped one arm around Leyre from behind and drew him into her embrace.
"Well~ everyone has to hunt down books, so splitting up to gather them is the sensible thing~ but who knew my luck would run this good~"
It meant hours in which Agrippa could have Leyre almost entirely to herself. The pretext of searching for books had been enough to tell the other maids to do their jobs properly, yet for the time being they were free to do as they pleased, and there was no maid on hand to scold them.
"Mmm... let's find the books first, all right?"
Content as he was in Agrippa's embrace, a sense of duty—he had to work first—kept Leyre from so much as touching her chest. Once he started, there was no telling when he would stop. He pulled away from her and began rummaging through the labs and classrooms scattered across the university buildings.
"What sort of books should we look for, baby master?"
"Anything to do with electrical engineering is fine. Oh, and just in case—if you see engineering books in general, engineering physics, electronics, that sort of thing, bag every one of them."
They had hauled a shopping cart all this way to carry the books. Honestly, there was no tool more convenient. The other maids had said they would look for hand trucks around the buildings, so he left that to them for now.
Leyre opened the door of the first professor's office. It creaked, and with the creak came a clicking electronic tone.
They were Scrapped Units.
"Agrippa. Did those maids used to work here?"
"They must have~ From the way they talk, it sounds like they worked as something like graduate students~"
"...How pitiful."
Graduate students, whose human rights and labor rights were brushed aside with nothing more than a token word to keep them quiet—and on top of that, maids, to whom human rights had never applied at all. How pitiful a case was that? They were maids whose fall into Scrapped Units made perfect sense. Smiling, Agrippa drew out a shovel.
"A shovel...? Where did you pull that from?"
"I had it stored on my back and took it out~ It folds, so it's easy to put away!"
"So the shovel you used for farming was a folding one."
"Yes~"
Agrippa showed him how it folded, then unfolded the shovel once more and lifted it high.
"Hup."
With a clang she dropped one Scrapped Unit, and the next that came at her met the same end.
"Rest in eternal peace~☆"
She swung the shovel sideways and sheared through its neck, then brought the blade down on the head of the last Scrapped Unit and forced it to shut down. In an instant the Scrapped Units inside the professor's office collapsed, twitched, and ceased to function.
"I'll drag the Scrapped Units outside for a moment~"
Agrippa hauled them to the middle of the school corridor and promptly set them alight.
"Wouldn't a fire at the university be dangerous?"
"It's all right~ I'll put it out myself."
The Scrapped Units went up in a rush of flame, and before long only blackened lumps of ash remained. Agrippa tapped them with the shovel and snuffed the fire out.
"Whew~ Having to hold a funeral every single time is exhausting."
"A funeral... Do maids believe in an afterlife, too?"
The question struck him all at once. The first time they had encountered Scrapped Units, Lucia had called it a funeral and burned the fallen ones. Wasn't a funeral an act performed out of regard for the next life—a wish that they might rest easy there? Thinking of it that way, Leyre found himself suddenly uncertain.
"Hmm... who can say?"
Agrippa wore an enigmatic smile. Neither yes nor no—an expression planted squarely in the middle.
"It's just... everyone does it because it feels like something we ought to do. And the word itself is only something we picked up by following our masters."
It felt like something they ought to do. From that, Leyre judged that even if it had not grown into a belief in an afterlife, something religious had taken shape. And no wonder. They had gone so far as to hold a rite to call humankind back; there was no reason the religious should be beyond them.
"Now then~ Master~? Let's keep looking for books~"
Agrippa wrapped one arm around him from behind and steered him into the professor's office as if herding him along.
"Ah, ah..."
Leyre let her. Agrippa's embrace felt nothing but good.
"If we just check this lab, that ought to do it..."
Engineering books were heaped high in the shopping cart. Coming here had been a jackpot—a good decision. Agrippa hummed through her nose as she pushed the cart, and Leyre let out a sigh of relief.
"A research lab ought to have plenty of something."
What they had gathered already would have been enough, but a lab was different. There might even be knowledge crystallized beyond anything a book could hold. Leyre opened the door and stepped inside.
"...?"
"Oh my."
Agrippa followed him in, unable to hide her dismay.
Nothing. Not a single thing. One enormous laboratory stood completely empty—no trace that anything had ever been there, no experimental results, nothing at all.
"How is this even possible...?"
The door locked. A siren began to wail.
Intruder detected. Sealing the entrance.
The sudden activation of the system startled Leyre and Agrippa. At the announcement that the entrance would be sealed, they lunged for the door.
"The door's locked?!"
It was. Agrippa brought the shovel and smashed at it, but—
"...It still won't open~?"
The door refused to budge. Worse, a shutter had dropped on the outside, and the place became a perfect sealed room. Shutters fell over the windows as well and locked them tight. Did any of this make sense? The power ought to have been dead for centuries...
Then, all at once, Agrippa spotted a sheet of paper on the floor and held it out to Leyre.
"Master~? Take a look at this."
Something was written there.
A message steeped in malice. Or else the curse of someone with a tremendous attachment to their own invention.
Leyre was angry enough to want to tear the paper to shreds, but he deliberately held back, so he could show it to the maids when they came to rescue the two of them later.
"...We just have to wait for the other maids, right?"
They would surely notice. If the pair were late long past the hour they had agreed to meet, the others would come looking. All they had to do was wait.
"Mm, that should do it. If we'd come alone it would have been a dangerous trap, but there are several of us~"
Beaming, Agrippa came up to Leyre, gathered him into her arms from behind, and dropped down onto the floor with a soft thump.
"Then... until they get here, shall we play with our baby master?"
"Oh."
"Last night... what we couldn't do, for lack of time... shall we pick it up... and go further?"
Leyre nodded hard.
"Hehe. Will you tell me exactly what you want, our baby master?"
"May I bury my face in Agrippa's chest?"
"Oh my~ Of course you may~ And while we do... the thing we couldn't, as well?"
Leyre nodded.
Agrippa nodded too.
Nod, nod.
"Ah, shit... what is this..."
Marx had failed at quitting after all. No—without her human, Leyre, at her side, she simply could not endure it.
"Why the hell is the door blocked off with a shutter..."
She kicked the door, bang after bang, giving her discontent somewhere to go, then took a long drag on her cigarette and stared up at the ceiling.
"Ha... look at me. Caught in a rat trap out of nowhere, and I don't even know which way is up. There looked to be a pile of inventions, so I came in—and it sets off a system that locks the door like this?"
Marx drove her foot into the door once more, hard.
"Un-fucking-believable... damn it..."
She whipped her head around toward the other maids. They had retreated a good distance, insisting that Marx was frightening.
"What the hell are you so scared of, huh?! Never seen a maid smoke before?!"
The maids nodded. Incredulous, Marx scratched at her head.
"Goddamn it. Use it in here and the inventions are gonna get scratched..."
If Leyre saw those inventions, he would certainly be pleased. He would praise her without end, saying that not only their supply of power but the uses they could put it to now had room to grow even further. She did not want to miss that praise. He would surely lavish her with tremendous praise, just as before—or if not that, then praise enough that she could cling to him for days the way Hias did, and he would not say a word against it.
Which meant she could not dare let the inventions take so much as a scratch. And yet she could not simply fail to get out, either.
"Haa..."
Marx blew out a long stream of cigarette smoke, tossed the butt to the floor, and ground it under her heel.
"Hey, maids. Move these inventions somewhere far from the door. Right now."
"W-what are you planning to do...?"
Marx drew a claymore from inside her coat and set it down in front of the door.
"What do you think? I'm blowing the door."
She produced grenades as well.
"What are you standing there for? Move them, now! These are things to hand to a human—they can't get so much as a scratch!"
The maids nodded and began shifting everything in brisk, orderly fashion. Once it was all moved, they retreated well clear.
"Good. Let's blow it."
The claymore flared with light.