038. Author (2)
038. Author (2)
"......What did you say?"
"I said I'm the author. Beyond the Cradle is a novel I wrote."
"But you said you worked for the Public Affairs Department."
"You can do side work while holding a job, can't you?"
Rinne grumbled.
"In the first place, I'm an artistic-creation type. I can write articles and PR copy just fine, but what I'm really meant for is novels and poetry. So, uh, I'd wanted to be a light-novel author for ages... I wrote in my spare time while working and submitted it to a publisher, and they said it was good and wanted to publish it..."
In the end, it got published.
So Rinne was the author of the Beyond the Cradle series.
At least, that was what Rinne said. But—
"......For real?"
"Why are you acting like you've been lied to your whole life?!"
Rinne, as if fed up, pulled out her PDA and showed me all sorts of evidence.
Nothing major, really. Publishing contracts, manuscript drafts, that sort of thing.
Those documents didn't really register with me. It wasn't that I hadn't believed Rinne's words in the first place.
It was just that, on the premise that Rinne's words were true, I simply thought it was seriously 'cringe.'
I mean, what I'm saying is—
"Last time, you talked as if you were just another reader like me, didn't you?"
And during that conversation, I was pretty sure she'd even praised Beyond the Cradle.
In other words, didn't that mean Rinne had pretended to be a reader and sung her own praises about something she wrote herself?
She'd pulled off something that embarrassing without batting an eye?
At my pressing question, Rinne's face turned bright red.
Then she burst out shouting.
"Th-there were circumstances......!"
"What circumstances?"
And more importantly, what did she mean by saying the Cradle of Silence actually existed?
At my successive questions, Rinne offered no real explanation for a while.
It wasn't that she had nothing to say.
If anything, it felt like she had so much to say that she needed time to sort it out.
Having finally finished organizing her thoughts, she turned the question back on me.
"How far did you get in the Beyond the Cradle series?"
"......I've only read up to volume 3 so far."
Meaning I hadn't read any further than what I'd read back in my cadet days.
I did have an excuse. I'd spent the last few days helping Rinne find an aptitude, with no time left to read.
As I was about to make that excuse, Rinne, as if she had no interest in the reason, asked again.
"Well, that's enough. By volume three, all the important setup was already there... Anyway, you remember what happens, right?"
I remembered.
"It's about a Commander protagonist traveling to a hive called the Cradle of Silence, right?"
The Cradle of Silence.
A hive located in a closed-down secret research lab, where a biodroid named 'Eve'—created in the earliest days of biodroid development—lay sleeping.
This Eve was said to emit a miraculous healing phase, capable of healing and granting salvation to all beings who approached.
However, the Cradle of Silence belonged to territory humanity had lost to the Legions, so humanity within the story couldn't access it.
The protagonist, Kang Min-hyuk, sought to reach the Cradle of Silence in order to heal his younger sister who suffered from an incurable illness, and he became a Commander for that purpose.
After that, girls (= heroines) with their own reasons to reach the Cradle of Silence joined the protagonist's unit one after another. The main plot of Beyond the Cradle was their journey toward the Cradle of Silence together.
......Of course, it was a novel.
In other words, it was fiction—not something that existed in the real world.
Well, as I'd said last time, the Beyond the Cradle series was unusually realistic even among similar 'Commander stories.'
The settings and plot developments were generally well researched and internally consistent.
But the hive that could be called the core of the work—the Cradle of Silence—didn't exist.
It was the author's pure creation.
Or so I had thought.
"......I didn't make it up."
Rinne spoke.
Rinne happened to come across information about a hive called the Cradle of Silence while gathering material for her novel.
As far as information went, it wasn't much. Just a few reports floating around the internet, not even classified.
Even those reports were extremely vague.
Beyond its name and location, Rinne had learned only two things.
One, that a very special biodroid named 'Eve' lay sleeping in the Cradle of Silence.
The other, that all beings who encountered that Eve received 'salvation.'
"......What does that mean? Salvation?"
"I don't know either. That's exactly all that was written."
There wasn't a single word on how they were saved.
Just that they received salvation.
Based on information that fragmentary and uncertain, Rinne filled in the gaps with her imagination, creating the healing phase and the rest of the setting herself.
Based on those ideas, she wrote volume one of Beyond the Cradle and submitted it to a light-novel publisher.
After that, Rinne obtained the military's permission for secondary employment and published Beyond the Cradle.
The novel was well received despite the light-novel genre's limited popularity, and the series enjoyed a successful run through fifteen volumes.
And that wasn't all. It ranked at the very top of sales charts on various online bookstores, and it was even exported overseas.
Contracts for webtoon and animation adaptations were also proceeding smoothly.
"......It was really taking off."
It happened just as she'd begun writing volume sixteen, the long-awaited finale.
Suddenly, an incident occurred.
"An incident?"
"Yeah."
Rinne spoke.
"Some readers set off to find the Cradle of Silence in person."
"But it's a hive."
"Yeah. Some of my readers were military biodroids or Commanders."
Ahead of the publication of the final volume of the Beyond the Cradle series, they had set off to find the real Cradle of Silence.
In search of the healing phase described in the novel.
And they truly reached the Cradle of Silence.
"They reached it, but......."
There was no healing phase or anything like that.
Nor was there the 'salvation' mentioned in the records, whose precise meaning couldn't be discerned.
Instead, what awaited the readers was something far more horrifying and dangerous.
The readers were set upon by that something, and ultimately went missing.
Only one reader barely made it back alive, and they refused to say anything about the incident, so no one even knew what had happened there.
In the end, the adventure inspired by Rinne's novel ended in a disaster so awful that even 'tragedy' felt inadequate.
......Of course, it didn't truly end there.
After that incident, the military tightened its control over information about the Cradle of Silence.
For instance, they expunged it from military maps so that no one could know about the Cradle of Silence except for a handful of Commanders with jurisdiction.
At the same time, a kind of security measure was taken against the novel that had sparked the incident.
"So when you said it went on hiatus, it wasn't actually a hiatus......."
"It's because the military banned its publication."
In other words, she had been forcibly retired.
But in order to cover up the incident, the exact reason for the hiatus couldn't be disclosed.
Readers were simply told it was 'on hiatus due to personal reasons.'
"There weren't any measures beyond that?"
"Not for the time being, no."
Before the incident, information about the Cradle of Silence hadn't been classified.
It was difficult to punish her just for weaving that into a novel.
Above all, the military had chosen to cover up the incident rather than resolve it.
As a result, Rinne was simply banned from writing until the Cradle of Silence was declassified, while she was allowed to keep working as a writer in the Public Affairs Department.
That was that, but.
"......I couldn't help thinking I absolutely couldn't go on like this."
This was Rinne, who had loved the Salvation Narrative so very much.
Her own readers had gone missing on the battlefield because of something she'd written.
At the same time, she had also dealt a staggering blow to the countless readers who had followed her all that time, by going on hiatus right before the ending.
She had absolutely no confidence that she could go on living as if nothing had happened.
She wanted to atone.
She wanted to convey the full story of the incident and the conclusion of the story to her readers.
There was only one way to make those things possible.
To personally assault the Cradle of Silence—the place the military was trying to cover up and abandon—and uncover the truth of the incident.
"So I asked the higher-ups to reassign me as a combat soldier."
At last, I could understand Rinne's situation.
Which meant I couldn't help but say this.
"You've done something reckless."
Even though she'd been formally procured by the military, she'd been procured as a writer, not a soldier.
There was no way simply changing her post would suddenly enable her to assault the Cradle of Silence.
More importantly, becoming a proper soldier was impossible for her in the first place.
"......You're right."
Rinne quietly admitted it.
"But I wanted to do it somehow. So......."
In the end, she came to a forward operating base.
Naturally, the frontline Commanders had no idea how to turn her into a soldier.
They couldn't even find a viable direction for her growth, so they either returned her or left her neglected.
By the time she'd fallen all the way to Krädel, Rinne had realized she was a clear-cut washout both as an author and as a soldier, and had begun shutting herself away in her room.
Even after I'd been posted to Krädel, it had been the same right up until the moment I'd exempted Laika from disposal.
She lived as a shut-in, convinced all Commanders were the same and none of them could fix her.
But then.
"......Because you said my novel was fun to read. Because you said you even understood why I'd gone on hiatus....... Because you said that somewhere out there, I was surely still trying to write again......."
Rinne's voice was trembling.
Even so, Rinne squeezed the words out.
"So I screwed up my courage too, and asked you to help me, but......."
As expected, it was no good.
There was no way to save her readers.
Having reached that conclusion, Rinne rose from her seat.
"I'm going back."
"Where?"
"Where do you think. The basement."
I started to stop her but gave up.
Because I didn't have any justification to keep holding her back.
There were no more skills left to test either.
Nor did I really have any other solution to suggest.
There was only one thing I could say.
"......Alright. Rest today and let's try again tomorrow."
Rinne didn't answer.
And the next day.
Just as I had expected, Rinne shut herself away in the basement again and stopped coming out.
***
Several more days passed.
Rinne still hadn't come out of the basement.
As if she'd gone back to before that night when we happened to run into each other in the residential block, she holed up in the basement and stopped coming out entirely.
I didn't go out of my way to try to drag Rinne out of the basement.
Leaving aside that she was hardly likely to cooperate, there was no point in dragging her out in the first place.
That was only natural, wasn't it? It wasn't like I'd come up with some brilliant solution.
If I blindly told her to try one more time, I'd only deepen the wound.
During those few days, I simply read Rinne's novel.
It wasn't that I had a clear sense of purpose behind it.
It was just that, at the moment, there was nothing else I could really do.
In that sense, who knew? Maybe some secret that could solve Rinne's problems was hidden within this novel.
Grasping at straws, I started again from volume one and tore through all fifteen volumes in just two days.
To cut to the chase, I didn't find any particular clue.
All I got out of it was this impression.
"......The writing itself is staggeringly good."
I'd felt it back when I read the first three volumes as a cadet, too: Rinne's prose was clean and easy to read.
And her writing only got better with each volume.
All in all, it was incredibly entertaining.
So Rinne's claim that she had no talent or aptitude whatsoever was wrong.
She possessed tremendous talent for writing.
She had simply aimed for the wrong target.
The problem was that none of that impressive writing talent seemed useful for her goal of clearing the Cradle of Silence.
......No, wait.
"Can't put it to use?"
Was it really entirely impossible?
No, more than that, hadn't I seen something like this somewhere?
I searched for information for a moment.
Not the military database—a civilian-compiled list of discontinued items put together by otaku.
And...... I found it.
Of course, that alone wasn't enough to recreate the product.
To create a module, I ultimately needed design blueprints, and all that remained were things like catalogs.
Someone like me, who only knew the manuals, couldn't reverse-engineer a module from that alone.
But I was pretty sure Krädel had someone who could reconstruct the design from such sketchy information and actually build it—
Just as that thought occurred to me, the PDA in my pocket vibrated.
A message had arrived.
[Sumire: Commander]
[Sumire: Could I see you for a moment?]
[Sumire: I want to go for a walk]
This was exactly what I'd been hoping for.