A Special Plan for a Lazy Hero
…
"Wh-what would it feel like… to become a robot… haah…"
She hadn't meant to, but a hot sigh slipped from Sonia's lips as she sank completely into the fiction video playing on her screen.
It was a story about emotions being wiped clean like a machine's, a control chip driven into the skull, and the victim being hacked until she became nothing more than a lewd slave robot.
Given the world she lived in, androids and maid robots were a common sight on the streets of Sky City.
It wasn't rare, either, to see humans who had undergone mechanization and been reduced to "humanoids" — beings ranked below both humans and androids — or cyborgs who had replaced their entire bodies with prosthetic frames.
Sonia herself was a pure human, limbs intact, who had never once received a body implant of any kind…
"Ah… well… there is one place…"
A stress-management VR device she'd rented from a small company affiliated with the Association. Using it required a neural implant procedure.
The technology of this era was astonishing — a simple neural interface could be built just by drinking or applying something, with no major surgery involved.
There had been several options — nipples, the nape of the neck, intimate areas — but Sonia had chosen the simplest and least conspicuous spot: her navel.
She still remembered it vividly, pouring that sticky nanomachine tablet with its strange, mercury-like sheen into her own belly button.
What had been nothing more than Sonia's navel until a few days ago was now permanently modified into a navel-type neural connection plug socket, capable of linking to external devices.
In a way, it was like having a CD player that only connected to her nerves grow onto her body.
If Sonia hadn't been using an internet ad-blocker, she would have been seeing advertisements for all sorts of amusing gadgets — things like "personality recreation data chips" that you simply slotted into the socket inside your navel to experience a whole new persona. Unfortunately, every last one of those ads had been blocked long ago.
New recommended videos appeared on Sonia's monitor. Robotization. Modification. Control… Videos packed with the very keywords that made her chest flutter were calling out to her.
Click. The mouse button pressed down, and her other fingers began slowly working their way between the fabric of her black panties, pressing into soft flesh.
"…eugh… hah… nngh…♡ N-next…!"
Sonia was a D-class hero who, despite the title, had never once properly carried out a patrol duty, let alone defeated a villain.
She scraped by on the occasional facility inspection request — a true blue-ocean niche — and it hadn't taken long for her to become a perfect dried-fish hero, sprawled out under the air conditioning, living on nothing but delivery food.
The fat paychecks from facility safety inspections, plus the lump sums that had come her way through various other channels, only fanned the flames of her laziness.
Roll… roll… And so began Sonia's perfect NEET lifestyle: falling asleep under a blanket in the cool wash of the air conditioner.
"Sonia. You home?"
"Luce? Coming out now!"
On a sweltering summer day, the one who came looking for Sonia — who had been rolled up like a chrysalis in her bedsheets with the air conditioning blasting — was her friend from another world, Luce.
Sonia threw on whatever clothes she'd left scattered around the living room and opened the front door.
As always, Luce stood there in that half-baked armor of hers — whether it had been modified to look like a skirt or had simply been designed that way from the start, Sonia could never tell — and the sight of her filled Sonia's golden eyes.
"If it's about those odds and ends you left with me last time, I haven't even started yet…"
"Nope! It's something else today!"
Vivid teal-green hair. And a chest that, while not quite matching Sonia's, Luce had proudly claimed she'd paid extra for when ordering custom breastplate padding.
Sonia had assumed this was about the dungeon loot she'd asked Luce to appraise before, but it seemed Luce had come for something else entirely.
"Uh… uh… um… Sonia…?"
"…? Sonia? What is it, Luce?"
The moment Luce stepped inside, she started looking around. Her gaze swept roughly over everything — the living room, Sonia's bedroom, the wardrobe, every corner of the apartment.
It's not dirty, exactly…
In order to operate as an adventurer in Sky City, Luce had been required to complete a basic common-sense education course.
The materials had included images labeled things like "Examples of Unsanitary Living Environments." Sonia's living room right now looked startlingly similar to one of those example photos.
"…? Why are you staring like that, Luce? It's weird…"
After the brief flurry of switching Associations and collecting back pay, the current Sonia was a perfect freeloader — lounging around in a thin blanket, idly browsing the internet.
Leftover delivery containers. Clothes tossed off and left wherever they landed. To Sonia, this was the most natural everyday scene in the world.
The basic common-sense education videos Sky City produced for adventurers freshly arrived from fantasy worlds. A textbook case of an unsanitary living environment — the kind of scene that only appeared in those training materials — was currently on full display in Sonia's living room.
Look closer, though, and there were a few differences from the horrific examples in the videos.
In the educational materials, the houses were so buried in junk that you couldn't even find a place to set your foot.
Sonia's apartment, by contrast, had neatly tied garbage bags piled into a small hill in one corner of the room. Things had clearly been sorted — she just hadn't completed the final, most important step of actually taking the trash out. It was a bizarre state of affairs.
The food waste, at least, had been carefully separated and sealed, so there wasn't a trace of any sour, unpleasant smell.
Plastic packaging containers stacked high enough to reach Luce's waist formed a precarious tower, proof that Sonia had ordered delivery for every single meal over the past week.
Even those had been rinsed clean of every drop of grease and stacked with care, looking almost ready to haul to a scrap dealer for a bit of pocket money.
After carefully surveying the nest of a hero who hadn't set a single foot outside since her last facility safety inspection a full week ago, the fantasy-world adventurer Luce reached a clear conclusion.
"You just couldn't be bothered, didn't you?! Sonia?!"
"Eek…! Don't yell all of a sudden, Luce… But… it's pretty tidy in its own way, right? Isn't it?"
"Ah… okay… okay, fine… I'll clean it up, I'll clean it… Haaah… It's my house, Luce, you're being so mean!"
"I'm doing this for your own good! That's what they taught us in common-sense class, remember? Combustible trash on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays! You're only supposed to keep one garbage bag in the house — they were very clear about that!"
"Well, yes, but… You don't need to go that far, Luce. I'm just going to throw them out the balcony window!"
Having brought it up first, Luce had offered to help carry everything down to the apartment complex dumpster. Sonia waved her off and flung open the heavy balcony window instead, then started picking up the garbage bags piled in the corner one by one.
The strength she put into it was worthy of a hero — nearly on par with Luce, a D-class adventurer who could take on man-sized goblins and giant spiders the size of large dogs bare-handed.
Sonia bound several bags together with packing tape into one enormous mass, then casually lifted it and hurled it with perfect accuracy toward the shared dumpster outside.
Whoooosh… Clang-rattle!
"Phew… See? Outside the blanket… outside the house is dangerous… Sometimes I wish there was an auto mode or something. Like a robot — just press a button and it cleans the room for you, handles all the annoying stuff on its own… Then again, I'd love to just buy a maid robot, but the maintenance fees would cost even more… Ah, what was it you wanted, Luce?"
Having finally disposed of every last bag under Luce's relentless pressure, Sonia dusted off her palms and spoke.
"…Heeeh…"
The moment she heard those words, a brilliant idea flashed through Luce's mind like lightning. As the leader of a D-class adventurer party, she turned Sonia's offhand remark over carefully.
Like a robot — just press a button and it cleans the room for you, handles all the annoying stuff even when you don't feel like it…
"Is that sooo… Sonya?"
"It's not that I haven't looked into it… Everything's just really expensive. Maid robots, humanoids, all of it… And more than anything, the maintenance capsule ports for upkeep are ridiculously pricey… Are you listening, Luce?"
That little monologue had slipped out because of a particularly depraved video Sonia had watched on Nebulix not long ago and been deeply moved by. She had no idea it had just handed Luce the decisive hint she needed to talk her into something. Already sliding back into cozy lounging mode, Sonia checked the air conditioner temperature and burrowed smoothly under her blanket.
Luce was a D-class adventurer operating in Sky City. Her party currently consisted of a rabbit beastman martial artist who seemed to have staked her entire life on cryptocurrency investments, and a gloomy young mage who, like every mage, hid most of her face behind a wide-brimmed hat.
Luce often dropped by just to spend time with Sonia for no particular reason — but today she had come as a "negotiator" with a specific purpose. Her party was, in truth, on the verge of collapse.
The rabbit martial artist had declared she was suspending party activities for a while, insisting she needed to pour every waking hour into analyzing stock and coin charts.
—Both stocks and crypto, every single graph matters, so I need to go look at better computers, Luce. Sorry, but I've got seminars stacked up after this… See you later! And if you're interested, don't forget to buy some Moonlight Coin, okay?!
Come to think of it, the mage — who'd gone off to the Sky City slave market to buy "materials" for her experiments with the money she'd earned — was starting to look like the most diligent and normal member of the group.
Unintentionally, Luce found herself forced back into solo adventuring for the time being. And naturally, the thought of Sonia as a temporary party member — or even a new permanent one — rose to the surface of her mind.
She'd meant to bring it up right away, but the mountain of garbage bags by the front door had sent the conversation careening off in a completely different direction.
…Maybe… Sonia's ridiculous laziness… isn't entirely a bad thing…?
That offhand mutter Sonia had let out like a sigh when asked to do something as bothersome as cleaning had become the decisive hint.
Luce kicked her brain into full gear, turning over every possible way to sweet-talk the busty blonde hero in front of her — to drag a Sonia who hadn't left her house in a week into a dangerously high-stakes dungeon.
It wasn't her house, but Luce settled herself quite comfortably into a chair at Sonia's living room table. Sonia slid a cola and a bag of potato chips across toward her — snacks that had been sitting closer to Luce's seat than the guest side, which suggested Sonia had originally taken them out for herself.
"Munch munch… How've you been lately…? So… last time… you said you went on some kind of investigation? Munch munch… Everything okay with the party…?"
"That last request where they drafted me for patrol duty was boring… I didn't do anything… and because I didn't do anything, it was just… whatever?"
Whether it was the work of some strange villain organization or some other special incident, attacks on women late at night had been happening frequently in Sky City of late.
The Adventurers' Guild had put out night patrol requests, but whether it had all been rumor or the perpetrators had simply gone to ground after hearing about the commissions, the jobs had ended without anything noteworthy happening.
"…The party's fine, right? Well, I'm sure you all manage somehow… It's your party, after all, Luce?"
"Uh… y-yeah… there is that, but… tch…"
The moment the party came up, Sonia — the one who'd asked first — cut the conversation short by declaring she trusted Luce's judgment.
Luce's plan to casually drop hints about the party's difficulties and naturally ask for help had already started grinding its gears from the very first step.
So for a while I'll probably have to run with pickup parties…
Pickup parties. This world's convenient system where simply thinking about forming a party made a holographic party title float above your head.
If all she wanted was to join a temporary group that cleared a single dungeon and disbanded immediately — without fussing over stats or equipment — there was no real need to drag this lazy, big-chested blonde hero along.
What Luce had in mind wasn't ordinary difficulty. Not the kind of place academy students or short-term hunter training course trainees went to — a dungeon one full rank higher.
With a pickup party, where accountability was murky at best, having Sonia along — someone who would reliably cover her when things got dangerous — was advantageous in every way.
I don't have to go right this second…
First priority was talking this lounging freeloader of a hero into it.