All I Wanted Was to Watch Nia's Streams Again
I hadn't meant to do it — but a few minutes after cleanly splitting the refrigerator mimic in half, I finally managed to drag my mind up out of the ocean of terror it had been drowning in.
That was genuinely dangerous. I got lucky.
Running into a monster in a place this dark, where I could barely see a step ahead of me… Honestly, if I'd still been stuck in my pathetic previous-life body, I would have frozen solid with fear and gotten eaten on the spot.
Thank you, survival instinct. And thank you, high-performance body.
Singing the praises of Nia's absurdly capable physique, I belatedly gathered up the loot scattered across the floor.
"Whoa… what is all this? Pizza, hamburgers… and there's fruit over here too."
The spoils were none other than the assorted foods the refrigerator mimic had been holding inside itself. Naturally, having come from a cold fridge, everything was thoroughly chilled and rock-hard — but the chance to obtain fresh data was so valuable I couldn't complain.
"…Though there's kind of a lot of it."
As I stuffed ingredients into my bag, a small worry settled over my face. The mimic had been carrying far more food than I'd expected.
If I put all of this in the bag, it'll just barely fit — but then I won't have room for anything else.
Food I could eat right away was extremely precious data. If I could fully analyze all of it, I'd be able to create meals with incredible efficiency — and maybe even turn mukbang or cooking streams into regular content.
But I'd only left home about two hours ago. Settling for this haul and heading back already felt a little disappointing.
CP doesn't just grow out of the ground. I need to conserve every bit of it right now.
The hassle of going back and forth was part of it, but the bigger issue was the flashlight's time limit. Navigating this lightless trash heap required a flashlight, no exceptions. If I went home and came back, that round trip alone would burn four hours of its lifespan — and creating a flashlight already cost a fair amount of CP.
…I'll leave this bag here for now and pick it up on the way back.
So I set the bag stuffed with ingredients down and decided to push a little deeper on foot. Even if hauling loot home from the Data Trash Heap was important, mapping the place itself was valuable enough to justify the risk.
With that settled, I left the full bag beneath the wall where I'd marked the way home, took the scissor blade that had saved my life, and shone the flashlight inward.
Maybe it was the bisected refrigerator mimic's corpse lying in the beam, but the darkness ahead looked absurdly eerie — like I'd wandered into a haunted house.
…Ugh, I really don't want to go. I just want to turn around and go home.
I was terrified. Filthily, thoroughly terrified. The thought that more of those things might be waiting in the dark made me want to scrap the whole expedition and leave.
Just a little farther. Let's go just a little farther.
The one real mercy was that I'd noticed something was out there before I fully let my guard down. If I'd been completely relaxed when that ambush hit? My brain would have short-circuited from pure shock, and I'd have become a monster's next meal. Looking at it that way, I really had been lucky.
But… I can't keep relying on luck forever. So let's dig up a little courage. Hope finds the ones who try.
Steeling myself, I gripped the scissor blade tight enough to react if something lunged from the side, kindled whatever faint courage I could find in my chest, and slowly pushed into the dark.
No matter how tensely I walked forward, though, all that met my eyes were endless mountains of scrap metal that looked more or less the same.
…How far have I come from home? Feels like I've covered more than ten kilometers.
I muttered that to myself and swept a look around, only to find the same backdrop with the pattern shifted just slightly — enough to make my eyes spin. If I hadn't marked the way back on the way in, I was certain I never would have found home again.
And then, while my eyes were screaming from the endlessly repeating scenery, something caught my attention.
Wait. There's something there. …Stairs?
Yes. Stairs. And not ones going up — a flight descending downward. The ground I stood on was flat, so these stairs almost certainly led underground.
Something new, something I hadn't seen anywhere else — my attention locked onto it at once.
Stairs here means… something's down there.
Looking closer, the flashlight's beam reached the bottom. Not that deep, then. But they were stairs — clean, rectangular stairs. The kind of shape that only existed because someone had deliberately built them. And given that this was the Data Trash Heap, where every kind of discarded data piled up… maybe there was some kind of management facility below.
I need to see what it looks like.
Decision made. Whatever else I might skip, I had no reason not to check what was down there.
The moment I committed to going down, though, an uneasy possibility shoved its way into my head. What if this, like the refrigerator mimic, was a trap meant to lure someone in?
…It wasn't a baseless fear. Walking down naively could mean a structure designed so I'd never climb back out. So I threw every scrap of nearby trash I could find down the stairs, testing for anything wrong. After several experiments confirmed that nothing happened, I set my foot on the first step with extreme care.
"Is it… okay?"
Fortunately, the stairs themselves weren't a mimic-style trap. Moving as quietly as I could, I descended to the bottom — and found an old iron door that looked like it connected somewhere.
Why does it have to be a battered, dented iron door? Would a normal wooden door or a glass door kill them?
Pointless venting. On a normal day I wouldn't have cared whether it was glass, wood, or iron. But constant stress and fear had left me raw, and every little detail was enough to spark pointless anger.
Grumbling inwardly, I clipped the still-lit flashlight to my shoulder and gripped the scissor blade's handle with both hands.
"Hup… like this, like this…?"
Standing well back from the door, I carefully turned the handle with the dull side of the blade. A thoroughly cowardly approach — but I wasn't embarrassed. I was a coward, so what?
…Doesn't seem locked.
Even turning the handle from this distance, the door opened. I'd been ready to smash the handle if it wouldn't budge, so it was a relief I didn't have to.
Creeeeak…
An unpleasant, unoiled screech stabbed at my ears. I had no bandwidth to care about the noise, though — because something beyond the opening door had already frozen my face in shock.
"Light…?"
That was why I was standing there looking so vacant. The instant the door opened, light spilled clearly through the gap — light that wasn't coming from my created flashlight. In the Data Trash Heap, that was a first.
Looks like… a building?
Carefully poking my head through, I could tell the interior was shaped like a corridor. Fluorescent lights glowed clearly overhead. The atmosphere was distinctly different from the trash heap I'd just been wading through.
Sniff… Unlike the trash heap, this place has a clear smell. Is that… oil?
The trash heap side had no scent at all. Strange. Anyway, no need for the flashlight here. I switched it off on my shoulder. It was doomed to shatter once its time limit ran out either way, and there was zero reason to keep it on in a lit space.
Let's head toward the brighter side first. That way looks… like a dead end.
After a brief hesitation at the fork, I went right. It looked relatively brighter, and the left felt like it would dead-end if I pushed farther. I glued myself to the right-hand wall, kept my footsteps silent, and held the scissor blade ready for anything that might jump out. It was the best I could do exploring an unknown place.
Compared to the trash heap it was much brighter, which eased my nerves a little — but the fear of unfamiliar ground didn't vanish. And after walking that endless corridor for who knew how long, trailing my hand along the dry-feeling walls and turning several corners, I finally left the hallway and came face-to-face with something familiar.
"Train tracks?"
What I found was a set of rails for a train. Ceiling overhead, gravel underfoot… the kind of track a subway would run on.
Was there really a train in this cyber world?
The serious thought had barely formed when a sound so bone-chilling it made my skin crawl hit my ears.
…Kiiiirrrrk!
"Hhk—!"
A sharp, bizarre noise rose from the far darkness — eerily similar to the sound the refrigerator mimic had made. The meaning hit me instantly, and without a second of hesitation I spun and threw myself around the corridor corner.
I made it just in time. Almost the moment I hid, thudding noises closed in from the tracks.
Kiiiirrrr! Kiiirk!
What burst out of the darkness along the inner rails was a monster with a presence so overwhelming it defied comparison. Vastly larger than the refrigerator mimic, radiating pure savagery. I clamped both hands over my mouth so a scream wouldn't slip out.
W-what the hell is that…!
The massive creature had a roughly insectoid shape with six legs. The tips of its two front legs ended in sharp blades, and the walls they casually scored and gouged made its monstrous strength visually obvious.
But the more shocking part was this: that thing — which felt like an absurdly powerful predator to me — was in the middle of fleeing from something in a full, frantic panic.
Kagagaga…
Then came the sound of metal grinding unpleasantly against metal. A noise that left my head ringing and blank. I was still staring, dazed, when one of the six-legged giant's limbs was torn clean off and it let out a scream of agony — and only then did I realize that was the sound of whatever it had been running from.
Ah.
Carefully peering around the corner, I saw it clearly with my own eyes: a roughly two-meter humanoid monster, methodically eating the thrashing six-legged creature alive.
Kagagagak!
And I understood — whether I wanted to or not — that the thing devouring the monster was overwhelming violence itself, something no amount of struggling could overcome. The will to live carved that fact deep into my skull.
I have to run.
Fear stole the freedom from my body. My arms hung like waterlogged cotton, refusing to obey. But I couldn't keep hiding here. I had to get out — now, immediately. When a weakling faced something it couldn't possibly resist, the only option left was flight.
Mercifully, that terrifying presence was too busy devouring its kill to notice me. Even as I slipped out of the corridor and shut the door behind me, it never seemed to register I was there.
Only after I'd somehow made it back from the Subway Station into the Data Trash Heap did I finally collapse to the ground, clutching my still-trembling shoulders and gasping for breath.
Damn it… why are there so many terrifying things in this place…
All I wanted was to watch Nia's streams again.
And nothing — absolutely nothing — was going right. I wanted to curl up on the floor and just sob.
Praying I would never meet that thing here, I sat on the cold ground and waited for the strength to return to my legs.