Hard Work Isn't for Me
For all this time, Karinne had done everything in her power to find the Titan of the Flood-Proof Safety Record.
Using the authority of the Kingdom, she had leveraged mana communication addresses to track down a place of residence. And after chasing lead after lead, the dwelling she had finally arrived at had held nothing but a desolate, empty field.
Who could have guessed that by pure chance, she would meet her savior in the Abyss?
She had resolved that the moment the girl woke, she would begin with words of thanks.
"U-uuuh… hck…"
Instead, the unexpected happened. The girl abruptly burst into tears.
"Are you, perhaps, the Flood-Proof—"
"I'm sorry… I'm so sorryyy…"
Notably, every time Karinne tried to say her name, the girl wept all the more bitterly. Was there some reason the name must not be spoken?
Flustered by the steadily mounting sobs, Karinne could do nothing but quietly offer a tissue.
Why?
She thought it, but did not say it aloud. She had mountains of questions she wanted to ask, but this was hardly the atmosphere for interrogation.
"I will wait outside. Excuse me."
In the end, she left the room with only a brief bow.
The click of the latch — she had even carefully closed the door behind her, leaving the girl alone until she could compose herself.
I don't understand it at all.
The royal palace annex, with its crimson carpet and glittering chandeliers. Walking slowly down the corridor, she rifled through her memories, searching for something she might have overlooked.
Did I make some mistake?
She simply could not fathom why the girl had burst into tears out of nowhere. Considering the power the girl possessed, it made no sense whatsoever — not from the standpoint of someone who had watched her emerge from the mist and rescue the entire knight order.
Such a formidable being — why?
There were the testimonies of the surviving knights, too. When they had been isolated in the fog, a horde of unidentifiable Titans had charged in and seized the attention of every single Watcher. Thanks to that, while there had been the gravely wounded, miraculously not a single life had been lost.
That, too, must have been the girl's doing.
Is there some circumstance forcing her to hide her identity?
She had certainly been fine right up until Karinne entered the room. The moment her name was spoken, however, she had suddenly begun to cry — as if she were deathly afraid of her identity coming to light.
Perhaps her abrupt vanishing right after the examination belonged to the same pattern.
I can't make sense of it.
Shaking her head as she gazed out the window, Karinne decided simply not to call her by name. If the Kingdom's benefactor preferred to keep it hidden, she could hardly commit such an rudeness against her.
And yet curiosity would not be denied, so she could only settle for roughly guessing who the girl might be.
At the very least, she's not from the Holy Theocracy.
She ruled out the Theocracy first. Those people saving the Kingdom's army was an impossibility. If they had possessed power like that in the first place, they would never have needed to keep the Kingdom in check so obsessively.
Not the Empire, either.
She supposed she could assume an Imperial agent who had come to steal the artifacts — but every one of the girl's confirmed machines was a first-generation, manually operated Titan. The Empire, running at the very pinnacle of mana engineering, would never touch relics of a bygone age.
Any nation at all would be strange.
There was a far greater mystery besides. While salvaging the broken Titans from the Abyss, they had learned something genuinely bizarre: the cockpits of all seven Titans other than the one the girl had piloted had been completely empty.
One showed at least traces of a human presence, but in the remaining six, nothing but a fine layer of undisturbed dust — as though no pilot had ever sat in them at all.
'These are not normal Titans.'
'Whoever built them, not a single part conforms to safety standards.'
'If an ordinary person tried channeling mana into one, their energy would be drained in a second and they'd end up a mummy. Not that there's even a mana intake port to begin with.'
The voices of the royal mechanics flashed through Karinne's mind. Every technician assigned to inspect the machines after the salvage had worn the same expression of sheer disbelief as they said it.
A Titan far outside every standard specification. A Titan that should have been impossible to operate in the first place. And yet the girl had handled them freely, annihilating over a hundred armored beasts.
Perhaps she doesn't belong to any nation.
She closed her eyes and thought in silence. The Kingdom's common sense. The Empire's technology. The Theocracy's doctrine. Viewed through human standards, the world offered no answer.
What about the Abyss?
She turned her speculation back toward the Abyss. The Abyss was no mere nest of monsters. Across its expanse were carved the traces of a hyper-civilization that even modern magiology could not decipher — and the ancient temple where the knight order had been isolated this time was one of them.
In the Abyss, anything is possible.
The tomb of a god. Fissures between dimensions. Fragments of other worlds. Even scholars could do no more than pile up competing hypotheses about the Abyss's origin, and the phenomena occurring within it were known as outright mysteries.
If powers existed there that could reverse time or leap across dimensions, one would simply have to accept it.
Then the girl's true identity is…
A flash of insight streaked through Karinne's mind. A wild leap of logic, perhaps — but if she assumed one thing, every puzzle piece snapped into place at once.
The ability to sleep so serenely amid that virulent fog. The grotesque appearance of Titans that seemed to mimic the Watchers. The doll-like, staccato movements that utterly disregarded every combat manual, and the motion of a tail no human possessed.
Above all — the only kind of being who could possess the uncanny power to pilot eight Titans single-handedly.
An inhabitant of the Abyss?
If the girl were something beyond human, every one of those questions resolved itself neatly. An ancient civilization's survivor who had crossed backward through time. Or an otherworldly visitor from beyond the veil of dimensions.
A transcendent being, by any human measure…
If so, then asking about the childlike face, the sudden tears, the reasons for concealing her identity — all of it lost its meaning. Appearance, emotion, name: every one of those was a concept that existed only beneath the common sense of humankind.
What on earth am I supposed to tell Her Majesty?
A low sigh escaped her. Karinne's head was already beginning to ache over how she was going to report this.
How long had she cried? It was only when the flood of sorrow finally began to ebb that Rosetta sensed something was off.
But still…
Sniffling, she looked down at the table.
Come to think of it, this is kind of weird.
The premium silk tissues — the woman had brought those before leaving. The lemon water with ice floating in it — the woman had brought that too, when she came back in later.
What's her angle?
As her reason slowly returned, she forced herself to think coldly. If her kidnapper were really some scam victim, then Rosetta deserved a slap across the face and would have had no right to complain. But no matter how she turned it over, the woman's manner of speech hadn't been mocking her at all. If anything, you'd call it polite to the point of being overwhelming.
Oh.
Amid all the confusion, of all things, a biological signal chose that exact moment to sound the alarm. She had drunk far too much coffee milk before bed.
I need the bathroom…
Which meant leaving the room. She climbed down from the bed and had just cracked the door open a peek when her shoulders flinched hard.
The blonde woman from before was standing sentinel right outside.
For some reason it felt like being caught red-handed at something, and she muttered in a voice that shrank in on itself.
"I-I was going to… the bathroom…"
"I will escort you."
Without a word of protest, the woman strode ahead. Trailing meekly behind her, Rosetta couldn't help but take in her surroundings.
Where even am I?
Far too lavish for a den of bandits. Marble and carpeting covered the floors, candelabras wrought from mana stone cast a soft glow along the walls, and even the full suits of plate armor standing sentry here and there each looked hideously expensive.
"Wh-where are we going…?"
At her trembling question, a courteous answer came back at once.
"The place blessed by the Lion King. The First Annex, where Her Majesty's shadow resides."
"The royal palace…?"
"How remiss of me — I am Karinne, Captain of the Royal Guard."
Rosetta's eyes went wide with shock.
Captain of the Royal Guard?
Memories from the Abyss flickered through her mind. Now that she thought about it, the Titans in the artifact chamber had borne the Kingdom's lion crest engraved on them. There had been Theocracy Titans mixed in too, so she'd just assumed they were all thugs…
Why were those guys there with them, anyway?
That question evaporated from her head in a single second. That wasn't what mattered right now.
Wait — am I under arrest?!
The Captain of the Royal Guard knew her old account name? That meant her entire past record had been scraped clean into the Kingdom's intelligence network. Her artifacts, her mana stone cores — all of them would be confiscated into the royal treasury, no doubt about it. And that wasn't all: fraud, illegal Titan modification, trespassing in a nationally controlled zone, artifact looting—
Goddammit…
How many years would she have to live behind bars once they tallied up every charge she couldn't even think of at the moment? Adding up all the sentences, ten years minimum, right? At that point, being kidnapped might honestly be the better deal.
Her legs had just started wobbling under the weight of those horrifying imagined sentences when—
"The restroom is that way, but there is something I would like to show you along the way."
"Yes…?"
Suddenly, Karinne pressed a switch beside the wall, and a security mechanism began slowly parting the bulkhead nearby.
Rrummmble—!
"…!"
As the enormous gate swung open, the interior was revealed.
It was a hangar orders of magnitude larger than even Marcus's place. And right in front of her, eight familiar Titans stood in perfect rank and file.
Yes — her Titans.
"Since their internal structure could not be analyzed, we salvaged them from the Abyss intact, exactly as they were."
"Ah… uhhh…"
Rosetta stared blankly ahead. So taking excellent care of your Titans had meant it quite literally.
"The repairs on the overloaded parts are complete. However, for some unknown reason, we were unable to reactivate them."
"Reactivate…?"
The failure to start them was only natural. Her machines were configured to run on her mana and nothing else.
Wait — then if I…
She actually let a thread of mana flow in to test it.
WHUMP—! Every Titan in her field of vision awoke at once and stamped the ground.
The impact reverberated through the hangar. Not just one — all eight of them, repaired flawlessly, without a single fault.
…!
In that instant, Karinne's eyes gleamed. With this, the theory that the girl could remotely pilot multiple Titans had hardened into certainty.
You actually fixed all of them?
Meanwhile, Rosetta was making her rounds among the Titans, checking each one's condition. The mana overloads were fully resolved, and even the damage from the battle had been polished clean away.
And that wasn't the end of it.
Even my artifacts are safe.
She dashed over and flung open the hatch of the porter Titan at the very back. Inside sat the mana cores Marcus had prepped for her, exactly as she'd left them. The crystal orb she'd been clutching to her chest right before falling asleep rested snugly on the sofa inside as well.
They're really giving everything back?
She was bewildered.
This isn't a scam… right?
This kind of treatment, for a criminal who'd done illegal modification, illegal Abyss entry, fraud, and artifact looting all in one package? Worst case, she could pilot every one of these Titans right now and smash her way out of the palace.
"Forgive my presumption, but I must make a request of you."
It was precisely then that Karinne spoke again, one palm resting over her breast in a gesture of salute — the utmost courtesy a Captain of the Royal Guard could offer.
"Would you — might I beg you to lend the Kingdom your strength?"