For Those Who Waited So Long
"I never thought android maids would come with combat functions..."
Leyre forced his body into motion and made his way toward whatever the maids were staring at.
"What is all this, anyway? Scrapped Units? And what is that supposed to mean?"
Lucia stepped in front of him.
"They are maids who lost their purpose long ago and went mad because of it. They were meant to protect their master, and when they could not, their circuits malfunctioned and overloaded until they became something like zombies."
"Maids... turned into zombies?"
"Yes. They simply wander the streets without end, and the moment they find other maids, they attack. We believe that, too, is a malfunction. So we have judged that they must be scrapped, and we dispose of them whenever we find them."
Lucia studied the scrapped unit.
"Hias. The unit's condition?"
She addressed the maid holding a rifle — pink hair tied in a ponytail, a bright look on her face as she aimed at the thing.
"Big sister Lucia, that unit... I think it'll shut down soon even if we don't do anything."
"Why, Hias?"
"Its legs are smashed to pieces. Half its face is gone, too."
"...Then."
Lucia looked over the maids.
"Everyone, let us go down to the ground. And... prepare a funeral."
"A funeral...?"
Leyre tilted his head.
"You ought to see how we treat scrapped units, Master. Come with us."
"Ah, all right..."
Lucia offered a hand to support him, but Leyre waved it off. He had recovered enough strength to walk on his own, so he limped after the maids on legs that only just obeyed him.
"Master, you sure you don't need help?"
The sight must have been too painful to watch. Hias, the pink-haired maid from before, folded her arms and asked.
"I'm fine. I recover faster if I walk it off myself... but your name was definitely..."
"I'm Hias! I mostly work as a marksman. Other than that, I help big sister Lucia a lot."
"Hias... right. Mind standing a little farther back? This is really uncomfortable."
"Aww, no way~ It's my instinct, I can't help it. My old master said he liked maids who were perky and big on skinship, so this is just how I was made?"
"Ah, right..."
Leyre decided to stop arguing. If that was how she'd been made, what more was there to say?
With Hias's help he made his way down little by little, and at last, on the road at ground level, he saw with his own eyes a scrapped unit writhing there.
"...Poor soul."
Lucia murmured it like a prayer.
Leyre's breath caught at the sight of the thing. A torn maid uniform. An exposed mechanical frame. A face split with cracks. From its back, severed cables swayed like spilled entrails, and its eyes jittered without rest, as if madness had finished what time began.
Those ceaselessly shaking eyes found Leyre.
The unit smiled grotesquely. Its gaze locked still, and its mouth opened.
The voice cracked like a torn speaker.
Then more of them began bursting out from between the alleys. The maids snapped back into combat stances, and Lucia drew Leyre into her arms.
"Please be careful, Master."
"Ah, thanks..."
Cold sweat broke across Leyre's skin. What came off those things was worse than hostility — the despair of abandoned children.
"Those maids... is there really no way to fix them?"
Lucia answered quietly.
"They are already broken past the point of breaking. We call them scrapped for no other reason than this. They are ruined beyond repair. To borrow a human phrase, both mind and body are destroyed."
"Even so... those maids are still looking for humans."
"Yes... because at their core, they are maids."
KWAANG!!
A tremendous impact split the air, and a building wall came down. One maid, eaten through by madness, burst out of the rubble. Half her face had melted away.
She howled and charged straight at Leyre.
But in that instant — a flash. Lucia's sword cut the night. Blue light flared, and the scrapped unit's body was cleaved clean in two. Shards of iron and black oil spilled across the ground.
"To think it would come on so suddenly..."
Lucia muttered, then swept her eyes over the scrapped units still closing in and decided they had to be finished quickly.
From within her arms, Leyre blinked, stunned by what had just happened.
"Hias. The Master, for a moment."
"Okay~"
Lucia left him briefly with Hias, raised her sword, and cut the scrapped units down. She carved out only the places where their power units sat, and soon she had slaughtered every one that came at them.
"...Poor things."
Lucia gathered the severed parts and laid them back into the shape of android maids. Then she drew a lighter from her pocket.
"Let us all pray for these poor scrapped units."
She set them alight. Before long the fire roared up, and their bodies began to melt. The maids bowed their heads in a brief, silent prayer.
"..."
Watching it, Leyre sank into thought. Is this how they've been living all this time? It must have been a brutal life. That was the thought that settled on him.
"It has been a long time since I last cooked, so I cannot say whether it turned out properly. Please, eat well."
Lucia set a stew of vegetables and lamb before Leyre. He tasted it, decided he liked it, and nodded.
"It's good."
"Thank you, Master."
Eating slowly, Leyre looked around. A city in ruins. A collapsed spire. The holy fire burning. And the maids, all of them watching him.
He turned over everything that had happened. Maids weeping at a reunion after so long, begging to be allowed to serve, begging to be saved. And the maids whose longing had twisted until they became scrapped units — and the maids of this place, who had no choice but to cut down their own kind.
Remembering all of it, he gave voice to a single question.
"Why did you have to... live like that?"
"Like that, Master...?"
"Circling the holy fire, holding rituals, praying for humans to come back. And those scrapped units from before — why did they have to end up like that?"
Lucia was silent for a moment.
"...Because there were no humans."
Leyre did not grasp the meaning at once.
Lucia walked to the holy fire. Red light wavered over her silver hair.
"We were made for humans."
She said it very calmly.
"To set the table, to clean, to give pleasure, to ease loneliness."
"..."
"That was our happiness. Our reason for existing, and our meaning."
Happiness.
Leyre found it strange that an android would speak of happiness. Was it truly the same as a human's, or only what had been written into her? But Lucia's voice did not sound like a lie.
"Then one day, the humans vanished."
Lucia looked down at her own hands. The tips of her fingers were trembling, ever so slightly.
"At first, we waited."
"A day."
"A week."
"A year."
"A hundred years."
"And then, centuries."
A quiet thread of music drifted between the maids. Someone was drawing a bow across violin strings without quite meaning to. It was a terribly lonely note.
"But no one came back."
Lucia went on.
"So we made a ritual."
She looked at the holy fire.
"So that we would not forget."
A wind passed. The torches swayed.
"That humans had existed."
Leyre had no answer to that.
The maids who had survived in the ruins of a world after its end were not mere machines. They were memory. Beings who did not want to forget humanity.
Lucia turned slowly back to him. Her eyes were cold and beautiful, but a deep weariness had settled beneath them. Leyre could not begin to measure their sorrow, their waiting, their endurance, and so he could not answer. They had only waited, endlessly. They had only remembered. Humanity. Him.
And yet a question still remained.
"Master."
Lucia knelt, bringing her eyes level with his where he sat.
"What will you do from now on?"
Leyre faltered. He had only just opened his eyes in the cryogenic unit, and there had been no time to think about what he ought to do. He had been busy enough simply accepting what had happened, and this ruined world.
But the maids were watching him, expecting something.
Salvation.
As the last human left, as the one who would lead them, their eyes asked which way he meant to take them.
Leyre looked out over the ruined city. Far off, black smoke was rising. The world was completely finished. And yet, strangely, it did not feel like a world that had died all the way through. The maids were still alive and moving. The maids were what had been holding this world up.
Leyre let out a small breath.
"...I don't know."
It was an honest answer.
"I open my eyes and the world's already ended, and suddenly I'm the last human."
He laughed under his breath.
"Honestly, it still doesn't feel real."
The maids listened in silence. Leyre was quiet for a moment, then spoke again.
"But one thing I do know."
"...?"
He looked at Lucia.
"That the state you were all in was pretty serious."
A few of the maids tilted their heads. Even Lucia lost her words for a second. Leyre laughed like a sigh.
"Hundreds of years, claiming you were waiting for humans, dancing on the ruins and offering sacrifices. Does that even make sense?"
That was his question. A ritual so far from reality it was hard to believe they had made it before they lost their minds.
"..."
"As if anyone was actually going to come back because of that. Oh. I did come back, didn't I?"
In truth, the maids had thought it meaningless too. But it had been done on nothing but the feeling called hope, and the ritual had been born of that, so they had not wanted to deny it. They had only hypnotized themselves into believing it meant something. Only performed a rite that was meaningless and meaningful at once, so they would not go mad and become scrapped units. And so they had kept at it — a ritual that did not look sane.
"So there's one thing that occurred to me."
"What... would that be?"
"I think I need to save all of you first. More than this ruined world."
"Thank you, but... why?"
"Because waiting for humans all this time must have driven you at least a little out of your minds."
Lucia smiled, faintly.
"...Yes."
She admitted it quietly.
"We are badly broken."
The holy fire blazed. Ash scattered up into the night sky. And Leyre made up his mind.
"Let's start work tomorrow."
First, he would make these lonely maids live again.