Protecting Polaris Was the Best Choice
Protecting Polaris had been, without question, one of the best decisions I had ever made.
Delics.
They were a kind of free space born when fragments of abandoned or decommissioned servers from the upper layers of the virtual world drifted down and settled into the Abyss.
If I had to put it another way—if the Data Trash Heap where I had made my home, the outer expanse of the Abyss itself, was something like outer space, then a Delic was a planet floating through it.
From the perspective of someone living in a house built on the Data Trash Heap, I probably ought to be grateful that Delics marked their boundaries with doors. Without them, I might have been wandering around one day and simply dropped into some bizarre pocket dimension without warning.
According to Noise—who had traded her own memories for knowledge of the Abyss in order to survive—Delics had no fixed standard size. They varied wildly. A small one might amount to nothing more than a handful of buildings crammed together. A large one could stretch on like the endless Sahara, a desert you could walk forever without finding an edge.
On top of that, each Delic ran on slightly different rules and permission structures. Available data types and even languages could differ from one to the next. Because of that, the Virtual Beasts and Spirits living in the Abyss tended to nest in whichever Delic suited them best—or gave them the greatest advantage.
It was only natural, the way a fish can only live in water because of the structure of its gills, or a winged bird prefers the high branches of a tree to stay clear of predators.
And wherever there was information that clear-cut, there were also conclusions you could draw from it.
"Ugh, it's so dark. I can't see a thing…"
Click.
Damp air clung to my skin the way it does right before rain, thick and clammy, and the whole place felt stifling. The door I had come through had shut behind me, plunging everything into blackness. I pulled the floodlight fixed to my shoulder free and swept it across the surroundings.
What unfolded in front of me was a natural cave: a low ceiling that would scrape the top of my head if I stretched up fully, and uneven rock faces tilted at wild angles, as if proudly advertising that no human hand had ever touched them.
"Haa, look how creepy this is. Feels like some weird cannibal tribe is about to jump out. And why is the path so steep?"
It was the kind of dark, gloomy cave that instantly called to mind some famous horror movie or survival game. If I had still been in my previous life's body instead of Nia's somewhat smaller frame, I wouldn't even have been able to straighten my back. The place looked that cramped and dangerous. One wrong step and you would go tumbling, cracking yourself open on some unforgiving rock—and that was no idle fantasy.
I'd honestly rather turn around and leave… Haah. No choice, I guess.
Even if my feet hesitated, I had no intention of spinning around and walking back out. Dark, damp, and cramped as it was—this was still the exploration site I had poured today's precious hours into finding.
"…Good thing I've got a map. Without it, I would've gotten lost for sure."
So I offered Polaris a silent round of thanks—and then another—and started down the strangely tilted path as calmly as I could manage.
Day one of Delic exploration, hunting for Ooparts.
The Sea Cave.
This was the third Delic Polaris had helped me find, after the subway where I had watched a Predator Species devour another Predator Species, and the forest where countless Virtual Beasts hibernated until data fell from the sky for them to eat.
The name was almost aggressively straightforward. The "sea" in Sea Cave meant exactly that—a cave near the ocean. No need to overthink it. Underwater caves were usually called submarine caves, so a Sea Cave specifically referred to one whose entrance opened to the outside world, accessible from land.
When people hear "sea cave," they usually picture a place that floods and drains with the tide, or somewhere something precious is hidden deep inside.
Mysterious, or brutal. In fiction, sea caves almost never strayed far from those two directions. Their structure often made them hard to approach—places the ocean itself came and went—so they were perfect for secret society hideouts or the lairs of hideous sea monsters.
But once you brought those preconceptions into the Abyss and its Delics, they tended to work overtime in the opposite direction. Those same traits produced something closer to a safe zone, if anything.
Most of what makes a Delic dangerous is Predator Species. A Sea Cave, where the environment itself makes it impossible for one to appear… for me, at least, that makes it an extremely safe place.
Noise had explained it with complete seriousness: even if a Virtual Beast here had the potential to become a Predator Species, it could never actually grow into one. The reason was simple. The three essential conditions for a Predator Species to emerge were completely absent.
Noise had laid them out. For a Predator Species to appear in a Delic, three things were required: a regular supply of data falling in that could be eaten; a form and scale comfortable enough to live in; and a close connection to other Delics.
The Sea Cave had no proper channels for data to flow through, was a cramped and miserable cave, and sat in isolation far from any other Delic. Under ordinary circumstances, a Predator Species simply could not appear here.
"Okay, I get it now… I really get it. This place is inconvenient. No—it's way too inconvenient!"
Forcing my way through this ridiculously narrow cave, I could feel exactly what Noise had been talking about. The Sea Cave was inconvenient. Painfully, absurdly inconvenient.
The path twisted and tilted so sharply that even jumping was nearly impossible. The floor was pitted in places, ready to swallow a leg whole. Seawater would suddenly burst up from nowhere. The only reason I was managing at all was that I had a completely superhuman physique and balance to match. An ordinary person would have rolled themselves straight out of this life several times over. The place was that brutal.
The one silver lining was that the path never narrowed enough to force me onto my hands and knees, and there were no sudden death traps flying out of the walls. When a rock blocked the way, I just snipped it apart with the Scissors Blade. Maybe I ought to count myself lucky that "inconvenient" was as bad as it got.
Well. That's just light complaining, really.
Even grinding my way through the Sea Cave like this, I didn't have any real grievances. The place was too tight to swing the Scissors Blade properly—but the payoff more than made up for it.
"Hah! …That's the third one. Not bad."
Crunch.
Something skewered on the tip of the Scissors Blade shuddered once, then went still. A forearm-sized bug that had been clinging to the ceiling. This was the virtual world, of course, so it was a Virtual Beast like everything else.
Which raised an obvious question. Why had the bug just sat there stuck to the ceiling and let itself die without even trying to dodge my blade?
The answer was simple.
"Heh~. Hardly anyone comes through here hunting Beasts, so… they're all just sitting ducks. Lucky me."
Environmental adaptation. The same way creatures living in freezing seas grow thick layers of fat, or deep-sea animals abandon mobility to conserve energy and simply wait for prey to wander close—most of the Virtual Beasts in this Sea Cave, where data that could serve as food was scarce, had evolved into the kind that just clung in place and waited for a meal to pass by.
If a nearby Delic had been feeding predators into this one, things might have been different. But the closest Delic was that nightmare subway where Predator Species ate Predator Species, so this place had ended up effectively sealed off. For creatures that had developed such glaring weaknesses, the arrival of a hunter who could actually think was the worst possible outcome.
From my perspective, though, it was fantastic. Stick a bug on the ceiling or wall, poke it with the Scissors Blade, done. Felt like picking fruit.
So the conclusion was this: the Sea Cave was a labyrinth that was genuinely hard to navigate—but with Polaris's map laying out the internal structure in detail, it was a golden field where you could stroll along and gather Ooparts the way you'd pick mushrooms off the trail.
And I would say it again. Choosing to protect Polaris was, among every decision I had made lately, one that more than earned the title of best choice. Thank you, Polaris.
"Hmm. Still, the environment being what it is, none of them are very big overall. At this size, instead of two… I'd need to grab about five or six to make it worthwhile…"
They looked like pill bugs, so I had roughly named them Abyss Roll-polies. Their yield wasn't great, which made sense given the environment. I decided to keep hunting a little past my original target for the day, and as I pushed forward along the map—
Something truly eye-catching entered my field of vision.
The moment I understood what I was looking at, my face went blank with shock.
"…Huh. A Rainbow Roll-poly?"
Not far away, a Roll-poly was shifting colors in real time, glittering like a certain brand of graphics card.
And it was racing up the wall at an absurd speed.