076. Sweet Commander (1)
076. Sweet Commander (1)
Telescope.
The materials were a "sensory-suppression" eyeball and a "telescopic-vision" eyeball.
In external appearance, it differed little from the artificial eyes fitted to biodroids.
From a manufacturing perspective, however, there was a significant difference between a Telescope and an ordinary prosthetic eye.
Ordinary artificial eyes, which connect to the visual cortex, could—like other components—be manufactured using only inorganic materials and superphase substances.
But Telescopes, which connected to the entire sensory nervous system, could not be built from those two materials alone.
It used both, but required an additional "base."
And that base—you may have guessed it—
"It's an actual human eyeball."
So it was said.
Let me clarify one point: simply using a human eyeball as a material was not that great a problem in itself.
Unlike ordinary organs, these eyeballs could be cultured in virtually any quantity.
The problem was what came next.
"Ah, let me correct myself. Not just any eyeball can serve as the base. It has to be one of the eyes currently in your body, Commander."
...What.
"What do you mean? You are saying you must gouge out my eye and use it as a material?"
"Precisely."
"...Do you really have to use one of the eyes in my body right now? What about culturing a new one from my genetic information?"
The answer was no. A newly cultured eye would not work.
Alicia answered firmly.
I couldn't make sense of it.
"Why? They are the same eyes."
"Genetically, that may be so. Superphasically, however, are they not different?"
That much I had heard.
The reason a Telescope required the user's own eye was phase compatibility.
Superphasically speaking, an eyeball cultured from my cells in a laboratory was not classified as my eye.
"However, to create a Telescope, it specifically requires either the user's own eye or the eye of the Commander with whom the user shares phase resonance."
"Yet the eye belonging to you, the user, does not exist in this world."
"That is correct."
Alicia had eyes, of course, but they were prosthetics.
They were not biological eyeballs sharing Alicia's brain and genetic information.
Even if we were to newly culture an eyeball based on Alicia's brain now, as mentioned, it would not be Alicia's eye superphasically.
At present, there was only one way to obtain an eye that could be processed into a Telescope.
Plucking out my perfectly good eyeball and using it as the base.
"...Wait, then how was the Telescope you used before made?"
"At the time of my production, an eyeball cultured to match my genetic information was synchronized and mounted."
"Can you not do that again this time?"
"In theory, it is possible."
Possible—but.
"The minimum duration for the synchronization process is three years. That, of course, was when I was a cultured brain. Now that I am mounted in a biodroid and my ego and existence are fully established, it would likely require around five years."
"...Huh."
Not a day or two.
Not two or three months.
Not even a year, being generous.
Five years.
"Yes. For reference, during that period, I would be unable to operate. I must remain in cold sleep until synchronization is complete. So, in that sense—will you put me to sleep?"
No, that was troublesome.
Honestly, I couldn't even guarantee I'd be alive in five years.
It was like buying an S-rank sniper bond that would not mature for another five years.
Above all, the person in question didn't seem likely to agree to it. The question just now was Alicia's way of being sarcastic.
So.
"I cannot permit the synchronization method."
"I see. Then I shall report to the command center tomorrow as usual."
"...I cannot permit that, either."
Because at this point, I couldn't exactly go to Eve and say, 'Alicia has decided to keep serving as operator, so get out.'
Even if I hired Eve as a janitor or something, knowing she was an S-rank sniper and assigning her nothing but paperwork would be too painful to stomach.
I couldn't stomach living with that kind of inefficiency.
So.
It really could not be helped.
Could not be helped, I mean.
I squeezed my eyes shut and declared.
"I'll give you one."
"...Pardon?"
"I'll pull out one of my eyes and give it to you. Use it to make the Telescope."
"Just to be clear, I have two eyes."
If sacrificing one let me put Alicia back in action, the exchange rate was absurdly favorable.
There was no need for that.
As I noted earlier, the technology to culture eyeballs already existed.
Therefore, surgery to remove a damaged eye and replace it with a cultured eye was also commonplace, and not particularly dangerous.
In other words, I would give Alicia one of my eyes as the raw material for her Telescope, then have a newly cultured eye implanted in its place.
It was basically a replacement arrangement.
Of course, the surgery itself would hurt.
I had said it was not dangerous, yet the possibility of the surgery going wrong nonetheless existed.
Also, the inconvenience during surgery and recovery would be substantial.
More than anything, the psychological hurdle to the very act of having a living eye plucked out was high.
But what could I do.
But that was a small price to pay for an S-rank sniper.
"...Is this something worth going that far for?"
"To me, it is."
An S-rank combat asset was not something you could easily come by.
And right now, I needed a sniper.
"You say you need a sniper?"
We still had to keep pushing north toward Whitehead Point.
And there had been results.
Following Ice Shell, I had advanced to the Cradle of Silence, forming a modest forward base.
It would be no exaggeration to say we were more than halfway there.
"The problem is what comes next."
If you went a little further north from the Cradle of Silence, the 'Great Canyon' appeared.
The Great Canyon was, literally, an incredibly vast canyon.
To describe it numerically: its average width was 4 kilometers, and its total length was approximately 140 kilometers.
It was truly no exaggeration to say it split the northern highlands of the Korean Peninsula from north to south.
And to add one more point.
"The northern ridge of the Great Canyon is riddled with trenches like a honeycomb."
Naturally, those trenches were packed full of long-range sniper-type Legions.
Those things would instantly shred any entity descending into the canyon to cross it.
Therefore, when an operation required entering north of the canyon, the norm was to detour west around the canyon to enter.
"...But I think that method is meaningless for us."
Because we were not trying to detour in, achieve an objective, and pull out.
We intended to form a forward base and advance in stages.
If we truly had to use the western detour, we would have to advance by capturing each hive along the way. It would probably take years.
Of course, if that was what had to be done, there was no choice but to do it.
Alicia could have broken that deadlock in a single shot.
Because she could counter-snipe the sniper Legions filling the canyon's ridge.
"There are actually cases where that method was used to break through."
In areas of relatively narrow width, such as the Canopus Corridor, entry via counter-sniping had often been carried out.
I, too, intended to cross the Great Canyon directly in that manner.
A sniper who could counter-snipe from beyond the enemy's effective range would change the entire operation.
...Of course, that was not all.
It was not just for me; it was for Alicia's sake, too.
"And what do you mean by that?"
"I simply want to help you. Even if you cannot say it, this kind of life must have been miserable and agonizing for you."
Just a few years ago, Alicia had been an S-rank combat soldier.
She, who had contributed more than most to humanity, was demoted to this place, Krädel, for the sole reason that she had lost her Telescope.
My dignity as a Commander had already hit rock bottom.
At this point, all I wanted was to keep living the way I had until now.
If, despite that, she had refused combat because she could not bring herself to tell her Commander, 'Give me your eyeball for my sake'—
Then that much sacrifice, as her Commander, I would willingly endure.
"So trust your Commander and leave it to me! Alicia!"
I said it with what I thought was a cool expression.
...I definitely said it making a cool face, even adding a thumbs-up.
Alicia's reaction was somewhere between lukewarm and displeased.
She sighed as if looking at a complete idiot.
"...Haaah."
Then she said:
"You seem to have some misunderstanding. It is an undeniable fact that my salary was cut and my welfare benefits eliminated. However, I am not particularly dissatisfied with my current life. If I had to say so, I have been living several times more happily than when I was active as an S-rank sniper."
...Huh?
"Above all, it is not that I wished to return to my sniper days but could not bring myself to ask because I felt sorry to ask the Commander to gouge out his eyeball. More than that—why were you even thinking that way? There is no way I would be concerned about the Commander's eye health, is there? To be frank, it is not my eyeball, after all."
"...Then?"
Whether it was my old life or the Telescope, this was getting ridiculous.
Alicia turned the question back on me.
"Commander, suppose your eyeball were processed into a Telescope and inserted into me. If I activated my sniping skill in that state and expanded my senses to the extreme, what do you think it would feel like from my perspective?"
"...Hmm?"
If the Telescope worked properly, would not the senses be suppressed, so there would be nothing special?
To my conveying such a view, Alicia shook her head.
"No. Even if it is said the Telescope suppresses senses, it only suppresses the extreme sensations that would cause death. The nerves still remain in a hypersensitive state."
"Really?"
But so what?
What would it feel like to activate a Telescope crafted from my eyeball in that situation?
To me, asking with my expression, Alicia did not answer for a moment.
Instead, she simply stared at me with an odd expression.
Looking back on it, that was, by Alicia's standards, an action of embarrassment.
At least, if any femininity remained within Alicia, it must have been.
Because the next moment, Alicia said this.
"It is comparable to having intercourse."
One second.
Two seconds.
Three seconds....
"What?"
I asked blankly.
To which Alicia answered with a faintly flushed face.
"I would feel as if I were having s-X."
"No, I did not ask again because I did not understand the meaning."
"Then why did you ask again? Did you wish to hear it twice?"
Ah, she seemed slightly angry this time.
To think I could now read all of these faint emotional expressions these days.
...It was not the time to be proud of that.
"What do you mean? S... No, you would feel that sort of sensation?"
"Literally what I said. From my perspective, that is the sensation I would experience."
"How do you know that?"
"It is stated in the Telescope operation manual and the research papers that formed its basis."
As she said this, Alicia took out her PDA and showed me the manual.
—In the event that a Telescope manufactured using the Commander's eyeball instead of the synchronized biodroid's own eyeball is mounted, upon activating a sniper skill, the sexual sympathetic nerves may be stimulated, carrying a risk of extreme sexual euphoria occurring....
—...The sympathetic nervous response caused by this appears similar or identical to that experienced during sexual intercourse with the Commander (whose eyeball became the base of the Telescope)....
—This pleasure response is simultaneously agonizing and highly addictive, leading some biodroids to refuse correction through tuning procedures....
And so on.
Alicia's claims were written there, down to the very last detail.
"Why on earth does that happen?"
"That is explained at the bottom of the paper as well. It says the eyeball and the genitalia occupy superphasically similar positions, so sensing an eyeball inserted inside the body can lead to sexual stimulation...."
I see.
It was quite a scientifically grounded phenomenon.
"...So, did you give up on manufacturing a Telescope because of that?"
"Hmm. Would it not be somewhat misleading to say I gave up because of that? As I told you, I had no intention of manufacturing a Telescope and returning to sniper duty in the first place."
Alicia added after a brief pause.
"Well, if the Commander were to provide an eyeball and I had a reason to refuse, that would primarily be it. The idea of having eyeball s-X with the Commander is utterly appalling, you see."
So that was it.
So that was the case.
When she had said the manufacturing process was unpleasant, she had mainly been talking about this.
I nodded in understanding, but only for a moment.
"Alicia, is there no way around it?"
I asked Alicia.
Despite such a problem, could she not mount a Telescope made from my eyeball?
Of course, Alicia's reaction was cold.
"Are you asking your subordinate soldier to have s-X with you right now? Boo, trash."
"You know that is not what I meant."
If actual sexual union were necessary to use the Telescope, in that case, even I would have given up.
Even if Alicia seemed that blunt, she was still a girl in the end; how could I demand an act for such a purpose?
But the current situation was clearly different from that.
Actual union was not taking place. It was merely that such an 'illusion' would be felt.
Therefore, there was no need to feel revulsion as if it were actual union.
What do you think! My logic!
"I do not wish to give my first experience to a man with that sort of irresponsible attitude."
My logic: demolished.
And a first experience, she said.
So she had never had a boyfriend all this time, either.
Well, with that personality, it would have been stranger if she did.
In any case, with no experience, it had become all the more difficult to persuade her.
She would hate just doing it normally, but to have her first experience like this—I would hate it too, if I were her.
...No, not that she is actually doing it.
Absolutely not.
The problem was that the other party perceived it as something equivalent to that.
The only thing I could do was to accommodate the other party's position and perception.
So.
"Fine. I'll make it happen."
"Pardon?"
"I am saying I will make you feel like accepting a Telescope made from my eyeball."
"In other words, you mean you will conquer me?"
One could say that.
"And how exactly do you intend to conquer me?"
Alicia asked, as if dumbfounded.
My answer was simple.
From now on, I would become a Sweet Commander.
"Isn't that what a Sweet Commander does?"
It was slang used at the Academy.
The meaning was simple. It referred to those girl-crazy Sweet Commanders who viewed their subordinate biodroids primarily as romantic or sexual targets and would willingly grovel if that was what it took to form a relationship with them.
Naturally, those Sweet Commanders were objects of contempt for most cadets.
I, too, had despised Sweet Commanders.
...No, honestly, I still did.
The sort of humans who would throw away even their pride as a Commander to sleep with their subordinates—I sincerely loathed them.
I loathed them, but.
This time, it could not be helped.
Unable to help it, I would become Alicia's Sweet Commander.
To get Alicia to accept my body—my eye—I would grant whatever she asked and become the pathetic man who volunteered to serve as her emotional dumping ground.
If I went that far, even someone as cold and deadpan as Alicia would surely allow the insertion—the Telescope, that is.
Whether because she appreciated the effort or simply pitied how pathetic I looked, I was certain she would allow it.
"...So, Alicia, what do you like? Is there anything you have always wanted to do? If it is you, Alicia, you can ask me for anything~?"
"I do not wish to have eyeball s-X with a man who needs such things explained to him one by one in words."
As expected, it was not going to be easy.
Becoming a Sweet Commander and receiving Alicia's permission to insert (the Telescope).