Not Cut Out for Fighting
Fighting someone really doesn't seem to suit me after all.
The Data Trash Heap was a brutal environment — installing anything and keeping it running was a nightmare. Every object with physical form would, given enough time, naturally lose its function and corrode away. That made trying to control devices through wired connections a particularly bad idea. Laying cable infrastructure ate up a fortune in CP to begin with, and the usual advantage of a wired circuit — install once, pay nothing but maintenance — was completely worthless here.
So if you wanted to run anything in this place, it was far easier to assume a hard time limit and operate on batteries. Even better if you could carefully balance the CP cost so the device's lifespan matched the battery's duration exactly.
"Hmm… this should do it."
Crack.
I jammed an incandescent bulb with a battery attached to its base into a gap between scrap metal piles. Then I pressed the crude button mounted underneath. Current flowed through the filament, and a pure white light tore the surrounding darkness open, revealing everything it touched.
Personally, I preferred LEDs over incandescent bulbs, but considering the circumstances, the simpler design won out every time. LEDs were more complex, brighter, and more energy-efficient — but the existence of a hard time limit made those advantages almost meaningless. In the end, I had no choice but to favor the cheaper, more intuitive option. Sometimes efficiency had to come before personal taste.
"That finishes this line, then?"
I stepped back and took a wide look around. The bulbs stood at regular intervals like streetlamps, each one pouring light into the dark. The Trash Heap, which had been so pitch-black it went past eerie and into genuinely terrifying, was now brightly lit — and the fear I'd been carrying around for so long felt like it had thinned just a little.
Maybe this was how rich people felt when they landscaped their estates. It had cost a fair amount of CP, but an investment like this was still worth it.
"What do you think, Noise? Pretty cool, right?"
"…? It's bright. You could probably see it from far away."
"Uh… yeah. That's a very Noise answer…"
I'd been feeling pretty proud of myself and wanted to share the moment, but all she gave me was a deflatingly practical reply. I'd thought this before — Noise was remarkably dry when it came to anything emotional. Maybe it was because, unlike me — a fake Virtual Lifeform carrying memories of a past life — she was virtual down to her very roots.
In that sense, it was a little disappointing that I couldn't share the quiet pride of a job well done.
That aside, someone unfamiliar with the situation might have had one question: why bother coming down into the Data Trash Heap just to jam light bulbs into scrap piles, knowing they'd vanish with time?
The short answer: this, too, was part of carving out my own territory in the Trash Heap. In a place with absolutely no light, illuminating the dark with bulbs was one of the easiest ways to mark how far my reach extended.
A single light in a pitch-black night can be seen from kilometers away.
So the lights let me see at a glance how much ground I'd secured — and at the same time, spot any approaching monsters, the so-called Virtual Beasts, from a distance. Getting ambushed by a Beast that had snuck up in darkness so thick you couldn't see your own hand was an experience I had no interest in repeating.
One concern remained: shining lights like this might also advertise my position to Beasts passing far away. But that was fine. According to Noise, my location was a corner of a corner even within the Abyss — a place with zero data useful for sustaining life, the digital equivalent of a wasteland or desert. Nothing would come this way without a good reason.
And the few Beasts I have run into were already half-destroyed, bodies falling apart.
Even counting Noise, I'd never encountered anything as dangerous as that terrifying Beast I'd seen at the Subway Station. I wasn't throwing myself into danger without any basis. Nope. Absolutely not.
"That about covers the west. There's a pit to the south, so if I finish lighting the east next…"
I was standing with my arms crossed, muttering at the empty air, when something completely unexpected happened.
A sharp snap — the sound of something breaking — and one of the bulbs installed far off on the opposite side began to flicker unsteadily.
But neither Noise nor I so much as flinched at the obvious anomaly. Things like this had been happening off and on ever since I'd decided to conquer the Trash Heap two weeks ago.
"…That."
"Yeah. We've got company."
I hadn't installed the bulbs just for light. When I jammed each one into the scrap, I'd also set tripwires along the floor and ceiling. If anyone other than Noise or me approached the light without knowing the wires were there, they'd step on a line and trigger the signal — exactly like the bulb flickering now.
"A Beast showed up. Noise, want to hide for a bit? I'll wrap this up quick."
"…Okay. Do your best, Nia."
Noise was an incredibly useful worker, but calling her combat-capable would have been a stretch. She was small to begin with, and she didn't have the enhanced physical abilities I'd gained after acquiring CP. On top of that, the thick hazard suit she wore forced her to waddle around like a penguin, so she just nodded without the slightest protest.
She was smart enough to look after herself. Curious, yes — but not the type to bet her own life on something stupid.
So what I needed to think about right now wasn't Noise. It was how to deal with the intruder that had wandered into my territory.
First, let's check its condition. Only one wire snapped, so it's probably not a large specimen.
I picked up the scissor blade I'd left lying on a nearby scrap pile and moved quietly toward the east, where the bulb was still flickering hard. As I drew closer to the light's insistent presence, I could make out something creaking and shifting in the dark.
…It's big. Medium-class — about the size of a car, roughly.
The first thought that hit me when I laid eyes on the Virtual Beast invading my territory was simply: big. Not tall — it only came up to about my knee, maybe fifty centimeters high. But front to back, it stretched a staggering eight meters or so. The shape was a little warped, but it called to mind a massive alligator.
The alligator-type Beast radiated a murderous presence, the kind that looked ready to crunch an ordinary person to pieces in a single bite.
Its condition, though… not great.
The silver lining was that the alligator Beast was in terrible shape. Of its four legs, one front and one rear were twisted like pretzels and useless. It was dragging itself along on its belly. Its face was gouged with an ugly wound that made me wonder if it could even see, and its tail was a ruin of exposed bone.
…Looks like it lost a fight and got shoved all the way out here. Leave it alone and it'll be dead soon enough.
A pitiful state — the kind where doing nothing at all would let it expire in short order. But after a moment's thought, I raised the scissor blade with a serious look in my eyes.
I'd learned one thing wandering the Abyss: to survive this harsh place, you had to give something up. Preserve the body, and you surrendered the mind — becoming a mindless beast. Preserve the mind, and you had to leave the body behind. So everything that still moved through the Abyss with a physical form had, in the end, lost its reason and become a Virtual Beast that swallowed data on pure instinct.
But that didn't mean they felt nothing — that they were empty idiots. They still longed to survive. They still felt pain. They still knew fear and sorrow.
Which was why I couldn't just leave a Beast thrashing in agony like this. Even if it was already doomed to die and vanish.
"Over here. You've been starving this whole time, haven't you?"
Grrrrrk…
I stepped forward, making my presence known, and spoke to the nearly dead Beast. Whether it heard my voice or not, the alligator-type turned its head toward me and dragged its broken body closer. But there was no threat in that movement — nothing that set my senses on edge. So I made my decision.
"…I'll send you off without any pain."
A clean finish, so it wouldn't have to suffer any longer. That was the best kindness I could offer a dying creature.
As if answering my will, the scissor blade — which had been lying dormant in black — suddenly erupted with a dazzling radiance, as though it had swallowed the sun itself.
The light wound itself around the blade as if accelerating, and the wind it kicked up tore through my hair. At the moment the radiance reached its peak, I slammed my foot into the ground and charged the Beast.
"Haaaah!"
Kaaaak!
Timed perfectly with my approach, the alligator-type Beast wrenched its jaws wide open. Every sharp tooth lining that maw radiated a murderous edge, ready to shred my skin to ribbons. But my slash — delivered through the scissor blade — sheared those teeth clean through from the front and split the alligator Beast neatly in two.
"…Hah. I still can't get used to this."
A perfect victory against an invader of my territory. But even if the thing had been a grotesque monster, the sensation of cleanly cutting something apart… wasn't nearly as pleasant as I'd expected.
"Still, a Beast that size should have some useful data on it, right?"
I forced my energy back up, gave the scissor blade a light swing, and walked toward the alligator Beast's corpse. Being alive in the Abyss meant carrying high-density data. That meant it almost certainly held something useful for me.
Thanks, alligator. I won't forget your sacrifice.
I murmured that to myself and offered a brief silent prayer for the Beast that had left this world.
Fighting someone really didn't seem to suit me after all. Even when it was necessary.