It's Common Sense That Rare-Looking Monsters Drop Rare Items
Haa, that was really close. Noise is like a little sister to me. If she ended up completely hating me… Ugh, I don't even want to imagine it.
Still, I could breathe a little easier. At this rate, as long as I didn't put my foot in my mouth too badly, things would be fine.
If we were going to assign blame, the first mistake had been mine — poking at a sensitive complex without even considering that Noise might be nearby.
But then a sudden question surfaced. Why was Noise wandering around out here at this hour, anyway?
Unlike me, who could zip around the Abyss without any protective gear at all, she could put her life at risk just by roaming outside carelessly…
Well, I didn't know. Better to just ask her directly. Spinning my wheels alone with wild theories wouldn't get me anywhere.
"Noise, do you have some kind of business outside? If it's something minor, you can always ask me."
"Ah. Uh, that's…"
A sidelong glance. Noise seemed to be having trouble answering — she averted her eyes and couldn't quite get the words out.
What was this? Had she been doing something she found hard to tell me about? I floated a question mark over my head and followed her gaze…
And there, at the end of it, a wooden pillar of a thoroughly familiar shape was lying around in the most unexpected place.
That's… construction material I set out on the stage for the building we're putting up. Why is it over there…? Ah!
That sensation of realizing something you hadn't known before rang through my head like a clear, bright chime.
I didn't let that feeling slip away. I snapped my gaze over to Noise in a hurry.
"…What."
"No, um… You're wearing a suit."
"Yeah. Without the suit, I can't go outside."
Right. Noise was currently dressed in the outdoor activity suit she always wore when she went out — a bulky, spacesuit-like outfit so thick her face didn't show at all.
While I'd been away, the only ones here had been Noise and Polaris. But Polaris was a tiny fairy no bigger than a palm. With her physical strength, there was no way she could move a wooden pillar.
Which meant the only causal explanation for that pillar rolling around over there was that Noise, in her suit, had moved it…
And once you got that far, you could see that figuring out why she'd set the pillar down there would resolve the whole incident.
Well, there was only one possibility. While I'd been out for a bit, she'd been trying to haul those construction materials over to the planned build site ahead of time.
In other words — that adorable Noise, who made anyone who looked at her want to protect her on pure instinct, had been lugging heavy wooden pillars around because she wanted to help me even a little!
There was no other explanation.
Her heart is way too kind…! That's our Noise!
Her kindness made the corners of my eyes feel a little damp all on their own.
Noise wasn't particularly gifted in physical ability, so she couldn't just hoist dozens of pillars at once the way I did. At best, she would have been grunting and straining to move two or three at a time.
And looking at the faint traces of wooden pillars left across the belly of her suit…
I could roughly feel how hard she'd been working this whole time. Was Noise a genuine angel?
"Noise, you little cutie!"
"Ugh… I-it's tight…"
"You helped with the work because you were thinking of me, right? Eheheh, did you want some praise? Hmm? Hmm?"
"Not really… that…"
Inside the suit, Noise whipped her head to the side with a prim little turn, as if to say she'd had no such thoughts at all.
But as a Noise specialist who'd spent quite a lot of time learning to read her psychology, I could tell exactly what she was thinking from a reaction like that alone.
Oh-ho, her true feelings had slipped out and she was completely embarrassed. She seemed to be trying hard to hide it, but… did she really think that would work on someone who already knew the situation? So cute!
…Eheheh. Watching Noise dodge my eyes so clumsily made me want to tease her a little. Just a small prank — that would be fine, right?
"Hmm, is that so? I was so grateful I was going to make some snacks centered around Noise's favorite chocolate today. Well, if you really don't feel that way…"
"Eh. Ah."
"I guess a healthy diet would be better than chocolate after all? You did say you didn't move the materials for my sake. If you're going to refuse that hard, I guess I have no choi—"
"…Uuu."
…Huh. What was this dampness? Even though I couldn't properly see inside that round helmet, I felt like I knew exactly what kind of face Noise was making right now.
This was bad. I-I hadn't meant for it to go like this.
"…S-sorry. Noise! It was my fault! I'll make you whatever you want to eat! So, p-please stop—"
"Knh, uuu…"
"I'm soooorryyy!!"
I'd wanted to tease her a little, sure, but I hadn't meant to make her cry. Seriously.
Apparently, after seeing nothing but her usual blunt, cool demeanor, I'd momentarily forgotten that Noise — who was only just starting to learn emotions — had a heart far more fragile and pure than I'd expected.
So I had no choice but to pull the Noise who seemed to be holding back tears into my arms and apologize from the bottom of my heart.
To become the kind of trash who makes a small, adorable child cry… I deserved to die…
"A hundred chocolates…"
"I'll give them to you! As many as you want to eat!"
"…Okay."
Fortunately, once I bowed my head first and offered unconditional surrender, her heart seemed to ease quickly.
Noise, whose voice had been growing wet, hugged me back and settled into my arms.
…The thick suit got in the way of feeling any real warmth, but even so, the small, compact presence I could still sense made me let out a sigh of pure relief.
Thank goodness I managed to dodge becoming human garbage, I thought.
After nearly making Noise cry with my mischievous teasing and hastily smoothing things over with the promise of a hundred chocolates…
I washed up together with Noise, who was a little dirty from hauling wooden pillars, and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, gathered everyone in the studio apartment.
Of course, "everyone" only meant three of us: me, dusted clean of dirt after a quick shower; Noise, free of her bulky suit and back in her usual light clothes; and Polaris, perched on a tomato nearly half her own size and beaming with a bright little smile.
Anyway, with the whole household assembled like that, I pulled the rainbow bean bug from my bag and spoke to Noise.
"Sorry to ask right away, Noise. Could you decrypt the data inside this for me?"
"Nothing to be sorry about, Nia. That's my job. …I just need to decrypt the data this beast is holding?"
"Yeah. For now, just that, as fast as you can."
A quick explanation here. When a Virtual Beast living in this cyber world devours data…
You could think of it as taking external data and making it part of its own body. That might make it easier to understand.
Up above might be different, but every being that lived in the Abyss had no choice, environmentally speaking, but to keep consuming that data without end.
Virtual Beasts had to keep eating something so they wouldn't lose themselves — the same way an animal keeps eating so it won't starve to death.
Anyway, in that process, the data a Virtual Beast consumed didn't become part of its body in its original form. It was encrypted into a shape similar to the individual creature and then hardened into a piece of its body…
Reversing that encrypted state and restoring it to its original form — that was what we literally called decryption.
To use another analogy: even if you got raw meat from a Virtual Beast's body, you still had to cook it before you could eat it. Something like that. Roughly that idea made it easy enough to grasp.
And Noise is a goddess of decryption. Overwhelming in both speed and accuracy.
I'd picked up enough from watching over her shoulder a few times that I wasn't completely incapable of decrypting things myself, but compared to a specialist, my level was embarrassing.
In terms of speed alone, I needed hours where Noise could finish in minutes — so handing it to her was far more efficient.
That was why I'd pulled the rainbow bean bug from my bag and asked her right away.
On top of that, my gut had insisted this was data I absolutely couldn't afford to miss — so I also wanted to avoid even the slightest error.
"Mmm… Mm… Hm?"
But was there something wrong with the bean bug's data?
She'd removed the carapace since it was in the way, and was hard at work decrypting the data from the bean bug split in half — when she suddenly tilted her head, as if she'd sensed something strange.
A reaction I'd never seen from her during decryption before. What on earth had happened?
Since watching alone wasn't enough to understand the situation, I spoke to her with a touch of worry in my voice.
"Is something wrong?"
"Ah… Yeah. Something's… weird."
Weird? What was? I blinked, not immediately grasping what she was trying to say — and then Noise came out with something rather shocking.
"This needs a separate access permission to reach the data."
It needed access permission. I had never expected an answer like that.