015. Parts Replacement (1)
015. Parts Replacement (1)
For about three weeks after that, Laika diligently carried out her missions.
......Condensing it all into a single sentence like that hardly did justice to how much we struggled.
Military bases—especially small, easy targets like Krädel—tended to get saddled with all sorts of petty missions and requests.
For example, restoring pig pens that Legions had wrecked.
Or driving off an internet broadcaster trying to enter Trash Island.
Or finding a puppy that went missing in a Legion-infested area.
For the record, the above examples were not made up.
They were all missions we'd actually carried out over the past three weeks.
Even so, the most common work by far was Legion subjugation.
Specifically, we'd taken on 22 Legion-subjugation missions and brought down more than 80 F–D-rank Legions in the process.
We'd also taken down seven C-rank Legions.......
We'd even dealt with one B-rank—not subjugated it, exactly, but driven it off.
It was, without a doubt, a tremendous achievement.
Nevertheless, the greatest achievement lay elsewhere.
Namely, the fact that during those missions, Laika never once slipped out of control.
Even when enemies sprang out of nowhere, even when I occasionally got injured, Laika did not go berserk like she used to.
Her Rampage skill only activated when I gave permission, and even then the only major change was that she became more aggressive.
If anything, the real problem was carrying Laika back to base after Rampage ended and left her limp and unable to move.
Thanks to all that, our performance points accumulated steadily, and if we kept up the current pace, it looked like we would safely avoid her disposal.
Laika wasn't the only one who improved during those three weeks.
The base's financial situation improved alongside her.
That was thanks to the fairly substantial pay we received for the missions Laika carried out.
The total sum was 10 million won.
That money, of course, went not toward personal greed...... but was entirely reinvested into the base.
For instance, we neatly restored the outer perimeter wall, which had almost fallen apart.
We also purchased a brush cutter and mowed down the waist-high weeds that had overgrown all over the grounds.
We also fixed the printer Alicia had wanted repaired, and set up a communal microwave and refrigerator—secondhand though they were—in the residential block.......
......Ah, right. We had also placed a sofa on the rooftop.
So that Laika could take naps a little more comfortably.
The sofa never actually got used, though.
The sofa did nothing wrong. It was simply that Laika's nap location changed.
From the rooftop to my lap.
"Euhyeee——"
For the record, she hadn't exactly asked my permission before relocating.
It was simply that Laika unilaterally started enjoying naps on my lap.
Just as she was doing now.
Not that I particularly minded that in itself.
"Eunyaah— Euhihit—"
"What are you doing?"
"Huh......? What......? Laika's not really doing anything......?"
"No, you are."
To be precise, she was lying on her back on my lap—while I was working—with her belly exposed.
And while doing so, she was poking at my chin or chest with her fingertips for no reason whatsoever.
Exactly like a pet cat that had been raised since it was young, completely unbothered by playing on its owner's lap.
......No, seriously.
Looking at it this way, every single thing was a position or behavior you would expect from a cat.
The problem was that Laika wasn't cat-sized.
Laika was just an ordinary girl with a very small frame. Lying belly-up on someone else's lap created all kinds of problems.
Firstly, it was tremendously uncomfortable.
Even if she sat still, she was constantly in the way.
And she wouldn't even stay still. She kept shifting position.
As she did, her fidgeting feet would tap against my shoulder, sometimes even drifting near my mouth.
Her rolled-up T-shirt also left her soft, pale lower belly completely exposed——
Even more serious than that was her lower body.
In an effort to lie on this narrow surface, Laika had pulled her own knees up toward her chest.
That made her butt stick up, leaving her panties clearly visible beneath it and between her legs.
I wished she would do something about it.
My gaze kept drifting there, you see.
I'd learned better than to point it out.
Over the past few weeks, I'd learned that Laika was remarkably good at initiating embarrassing physical affection like this. She shamelessly rubbed up against me as though it were nothing, just like a cat.
Yet oddly, she became terribly embarrassed if I actually said out loud that she knew it was physical affection.
The thing that triggered her embarrassment was having it pointed out aloud.
She knew perfectly well that this position exposed her soft thighs and panties.
As long as I pretended not to notice, though, she could keep acting spoiled behind the mental defense of 'this doesn't count as physical affection.'
However, the moment I so much as said, "It's showing, you know?"
—Euheot......?!
From that moment on, Laika started thinking, 'This does count as physical affection,' and could no longer bear the embarrassment that came with it.
Not that I minded her getting embarrassed.
If anything, I wished she'd get a little more embarrassed. It was cute, and she became extremely well-behaved while she was flustered.
The problem was that if she got embarrassed like that, it affected her mission performance for about a day.
Well, it wasn't as though she became completely unable to work. She still followed my orders.
Everything just slowed down by about two beats, and she kept roughly five steps away from me at all times.
Then, whenever I was in danger, she'd dash over, help me, and dart away again...... that sort of thing.
Eventually, I even tried keeping her from climbing onto my lap at all.
In that case, she not only resisted fiercely, but when I forced her off, all of Laika's stats dropped by an entire rank.
Her stats would only recover after I apologized and let her back onto my lap, or after a full night had passed.
Why on earth did these bizarre phenomena keep happening?
My guess was that Laika had a desire to inconvenience me.
More precisely, she seemed to want to cause trouble and have even that accepted, so she could reassure herself: 'The Commander trusts me this much.'
That was why she climbed onto my lap despite the embarrassment and lost all will to fight if I forced her down.
I didn't particularly dislike this habit of Laika's, either. It was her way of checking how close we were.
The only thing that worried me was what might actually be lurking behind that affection.
If she simply enjoyed spending time with me, great.
But what if it was something more than that?
What if something far more insidious and sinister was at work?
'Come to think of it.......'
About three weeks ago.
Around the time we started running missions in earnest, the analyzer had once detected a 'status abnormality.'
None other than Dependency Syndrome.
The symptoms were roughly as follows.
[Status Abnormality]
- Dependency Syndrome
The subject displays a strong attachment to and sense of identification with the Commander, seeking to rely on them. Dependency Syndrome manifests in highly varied forms depending on the biodroid's personality, but generally shares the following characteristics.
1. The subject becomes extremely obedient to the Commander's words.
2. When the Commander is absent, or when rejected by the Commander, stress levels rise "drastically" more readily.
3. The subject thinks about the Commander to an excessive degree and prioritizes the Commander over themselves in all aspects of life.
4. If the condition becomes chronic, it cannot be cured.
Could it be that Laika was clinging to me because of this Dependency Syndrome?
......Well.
I'd suspected it several times before, but it still didn't seem likely.
More importantly, it wasn't even certain that Laika had ever developed Dependency Syndrome in the first place.
For one thing, Laika hadn't experienced anything that should have triggered it, and the detected status abnormality itself had vanished within a dozen or so minutes.
A genuine status abnormality wouldn't have disappeared that easily.
Laika's behavior also differed sharply from the typical symptoms of Dependency Syndrome.
For one thing, she wasn't obeying my orders at all.
While I was at it, maybe I should test that.
"Laika, how about getting down now?"
"Don't wannaaaa......."
"My knee hurts."
"Endure it just a bit....... You're supposed to be a Commander......."
See? She wasn't listening.
So my tentative conclusion was:
1. In the early hours of the day the abnormality was detected, Laika underwent some sort of emotional shift, and
2. The precision analyzer misread—or overinterpreted—that unusual psychological state as Dependency Syndrome.
That wasn't especially strange.
A precision analyzer wasn't infallible. It merely gathered data from various indicators and produced the most plausible answer; the result itself wasn't necessarily the truth.
Especially with psychological abnormalities like Dependency Syndrome, mistakes were frequent.
A biodroid's body might be mechanical, but her brain was that of an ordinary girl.
How could the heart of a girl—the most complex and changeable thing on Earth—be explained in a few lines of text?
The real question was what the analyzer had mistaken for Dependency Syndrome.
I dug up as much information as I could. The biosignal most likely to be mistaken for Dependency Syndrome was:
—Romantic Feelings
......Surely not.
Right. It couldn't possibly be that. Never mind that there was no reason for romantic feelings to develop in the first place; no girl would lie belly-up on the lap of someone she liked and go nya-nya, euhye-euhye.
The previous detection result had clearly been, quite literally, 'an error of unknown cause.'
Which meant the reason Laika was clinging to me like this was likewise impossible to identify.
Whatever it was, there seemed to be no major problem with Laika right now.
Given that, my judgment was to keep an eye on her and otherwise leave her alone rather than nagging her about every little thing.
Because, for Laika right now, avoiding disposal was the top priority.
Speaking of which, that reminded me.
Why was she loafing around this early?
"Laika, no mission today?"
"Mm-hmm~ I'm gonna laze around here all day~"
"Really? I feel like you took a day off yesterday, too."
"But~ there isn't a single mission I can take~"
......Really?
Laika said it as if it were nothing, but I couldn't hide my confusion.
Because lately we'd been spending more and more days sitting idle.
In the early days, we'd often run two or even three missions in a single day.
Was it simply my imagination?
Just in case, I looked over the information pages of the missions we had performed so far.
What I focused on most was the original posting date of each mission.
The result was surprising.
"What? These had all been sitting around for months."
"Old requests~?"
"The ones you and I did were all odd jobs that had piled up because nobody wanted to take them."
"Euh-eh...... Laika's been doing odd jobs this whole time......?"
Regrettably, that was the case.
"Then why hadn't anyone taken those requests?"
"Because the rewards were small compared to the effort."
On the other hand, we had no reason to turn something down just because the reward was small.
We were a special case: what we needed was not the reward money itself, but the points that were automatically provided simply for completing the mission.
Thanks to that, Laika and I had comfortably farmed our way to around 60 points by taking low-paying missions everyone else ignored.
The problem was that we couldn't farm the remaining 40 points the same way.
"There aren't any?"
"None."
The backlog of unfulfilled requests had finally run dry.
So to speak, we had exhausted the inventory.
"Then couldn't we just replenish the stock?"
"Well, if that happened, it would be fine."
As Laika said, if the depleted request inventory were immediately refilled, there would be no problem at all.
But new requests didn't come into Krädel very often.
Could we fill 40 points in one month with only the missions that sporadically came in?
I wasn't sure...... maybe the platinum-blonde woman beside me would know.
"Alicia, what's the cycle for new missions coming into Krädel?"
"On average, one 2-Star Mission is added every three days."
A 2-Star Mission was usually worth 2 points.
So even if we monopolized every mission from now on, earning the remaining 40 points would take 60 days.
That would put us past the deadline, no question.
"Why are there so few missions in the first place?"
"That's because there are almost no normal civilian facilities around here that would hire Krädel. At most, there are black-market dealers who collect scrap from Trash Island and smuggle it out."
"Euhmm~ This base really is a pain in every possible way~"
Laika agreed without the slightest sense of urgency.
Perhaps that nonchalance was contagious.
Alicia, too, asked in a thoroughly unhurried tone.
"If the situation is difficult because there are no missions in the vicinity, then wouldn't it suffice simply to expand the mission area?"
She had a point.
Only the missions within the base's jurisdiction had dried up. The front-line 'Battle Zone' would have more than enough.
The issue, if any, was the difficulty of those Battle Zone missions.
The missions in the Battle Zone were incomparably harder and more dangerous than Krädel's missions.
In fact, even Laika's stats—which let her bully everything on Trash Island—only barely cleared the minimum for the Battle Zone.
......No, could she even make the entry cut?
"......Commander, aren't you looking at Laika like she's suuuper pathetic right now~?"
"I was just measuring your combat power for a moment."
In order to judge whether it was all right to send you into the Battle Zone.
"Yeah? What did it come out to?"
Hard to say.
"Maybe around 10,000."
"Euhhehheh~"
"For reference, a perfect score is 10 million points. And the passing score is 1 million points."
"Uwehng......."
Laika went limp like liquid on my lap.
Her gesture seemed to protest that if she was going to fail anyway, couldn't I at least give her around 100,000 points?
But even that only gave me more reason to conclude, 'Yeah, sending her into the Battle Zone was impossible.'
Seriously, how was a weakling who completely deflated just because her commander said something unpleasant supposed to survive the Battle Zone?
As expected, the current Laika was a perfect fit for Trash Island, the sanctuary of cowards.
As I settled on that conclusion, Laika quietly pointed something out.
"But, Commander...... don't we kind of have no choice......? We have to get those 40 points somewhere......?"
Well, that was true enough.
I hadn't been about to say we should simply give up and do nothing.
More importantly, there was no need to.
Because I still had a secret plan for solving this problem.
I'd simply wanted to avoid using that secret plan if possible...... but at this point, I had no choice.
I had no choice but to go through with it.
"......Euh-eh."
As I steeled myself, Laika asked uneasily,
"Commander, you've got the face you make right before doing something huge...... what exactly are you planning? Laika might be a little scared......"
Well. It wasn't anything that dramatic.
If the problem was that Laika as she was now couldn't survive the Battle Zone, then she just had to become stronger than she was now.
In that sense, I looked down at Laika on my lap and said,
"You. It's about time we swapped out some parts."