Reconnaissance (1)
Worried something might be waiting out there, I cracked the door open just wide enough for my head to squeeze through and peeked outside.
A long, straight corridor stretched away before me, its far end swallowed by darkness.
Dust lay thick across the floor, but at least nothing was broken — overall, it was a remarkably clean hallway. Wide enough that five people of average build could have walked it shoulder to shoulder without a problem.
"...It's like a hotel corridor?"
Aside from the complete absence of decoration, rooms lined up along the hallway looked exactly like a hotel's.
Let's search the nearest rooms first.
By luck, the room I'd woken up in sat at the very end of the corridor, which meant I could sweep it without wasting a single step.
Creeeak...
First room. Only about ten paces from where I'd started, I pulled the door open.
Unfortunately, this wasn't a real hotel — no beds or bedding of any kind were in sight. Instead, squatting in the middle of the room were a cluster of dark, grimy barrels.
Should I lift a lid and take a look inside?
"Ugh!"
The moment I raised the lid, a rising stench made me yank my head back.
Excrement!
Inside the barrel was, to put it crudely, a heaping mixture of shit and piss.
I don't even want to describe it further. Why would something like this be here... wait. Could it be? Did these come out of ME?
Unlike the nanny, I was an ordinary organic being — whatever went in had to come out, that was simply how it worked. I'd been making do with a shoddily improvised latrine all this time, but apparently this was how the nanny had handled the cleanup behind my back. She'd probably been sneaking in through the door while I slept, doing her rounds.
The moment I closed the lid again, some ventilation system humming away somewhere overhead slowly carried the foul smell off into nothing.
Next room.
Choosing a literal shit-room right out of the gate was a blunder, but plenty of rooms still remained.
...
Empty room.
Empty room.
Empty room.
But for all my optimism, nothing but hollow rooms followed. Occasionally I'd spot a scrap of unidentifiable metal or some useless piece of furniture, but nothing remotely distinctive — no noteworthy facilities at all. Maybe the nanny had already hauled off everything usable and put it to work.
"Seriously, where even IS this place? Why is this corridor so damn long... huh?"
Having made such a determined start and come away with not a single thing to show for it, I was getting a little antsy. My vigilance had loosened into a bare minimum as I trudged along the corridor when a familiar object caught my eye.
A map.
Painted across a huge placard was one of those facility layouts you'd find at any shopping mall, explaining the building's structure. But more important than the map itself was the language written on it — the first trace of written characters I'd seen in this place.
"...English?"
The alphabet sat there on the map, bold and unapologetic.
So this really is Earth, then. Sure, it could be a parallel Earth... but at minimum, this is somewhere that inherited a similar culture.
Thankfully, it seemed I hadn't tumbled into a straight-up fantasy world. I'd suspected as much ever since I saw the science-fiction term Enhanced Human.
"Which means this place is..."
My best guess? Some kind of abandoned research facility. The kind capable of producing gene-modified humans — from an era far beyond the one I'd died in.
Whoosh—
As if to prove me right, I blew a breath across the map and swept the dust away, and there it was: the name Arkon National Research Institute.
Whether for security reasons or not, the map gave no detailed description of the interior facilities. It served as nothing more than a signpost for people prone to getting lost — but for me, that was more than enough.
The institute consisted of twenty underground floors in total. I was currently on the fifth basement level, in a section that functioned as a warehouse district. No idea why cradles would be in a place like this... but I'd set that question aside for now.
Still... it's strangely easy for me to read English.
My TOEIC scores had been decent in my past life, but that was within the narrow vocabulary of test-prep textbooks. There was no way I should be parsing specialized technical terminology this smoothly.
And then there was...
Basement Floor 15 — [PHANTASM RESEARCH ZONE]
Phantasm?
Even counting my hazy past life, it was a word I'd never seen before. A stranger's word, one that stirred no flicker of déjà vu — and yet my brain translated it without the slightest hesitation. As if I were reading my own native script.
I shouldn't have any language-related talents, though... and Enhanced Human wouldn't include a linguistic component either.
So was automatic language translation a phenomenon that applied to everyone here? Like humanity before the Tower of Babel?
Well, does it matter? It's a phenomenon that works in my favor, so I'll take it. Anyway... this place is enormous. Building a research institute this size underground? That's future architecture for you.
I figured I'd covered roughly a hundred meters since first stepping through my door — which, according to the map, wasn't even a three-hundredth of this floor. In other words, this single level stretched nearly thirty kilometers in length alone. Measured by area, the scale was absurd. For someone who needed to escape this place, it was very bad news indeed.
Tsk. So the emergency stairs are a long way off, huh. Let's see... roughly... I'll have to walk about three kilometers.
I clicked my tongue, measuring the distance between my current spot and the emergency exit marker with my hand. It was lucky that my room sat in a corner, close to an exit. But even if I climbed all the way up to the first floor, would it actually connect to the surface? It had been ages since anyone maintained this place — anything could have gone wrong down here.
Rumble-rumble...
"Hm?!"
I was setting the gloomy outlook aside, mulling over my remaining food and water and estimating how long they'd last, when a sound of something collapsing echoed faintly out of the corridor's darkness. Like a towering stack of empty cans giving way and rolling across the floor.
I ratcheted my slackened tension back up and turned my eyes to the map, scanning for the nearest facility.
Cafeteria. One kilometer ahead.
...
Ta-da-dad!
"KRAAAAAAAAAAH—!"
"Hahk... huk...! You goddamn—!"
I ran until my lungs screamed, the monsters' shrieks hammering at my back. The pipe I'd been carrying as a makeshift weapon had long since been dropped, and the canteen that once held green juice was lost even earlier than that. The long-distance sprint — something I'd never experienced in that cramped little room — had my lungs pleading for mercy, and layer mortal terror on top of that, and my vision slowly began to blur.
How the hell did it come to this?!
My plan had been a light reconnaissance, nothing more. The reason it had collapsed into this godawful mess was, of course, the monsters currently chasing me down at full tilt. Drawn by some inexplicable noise, I'd gone to the cafeteria — and run straight into a staggering horde of them. I'd been hiding my presence, but they must have caught my scent, because they'd charged like lunatics and left me no choice but to bolt.
"Krraaaah—!"
Disgustingly large eyes and noses. Squat little bodies and wrinkled green skin — they brought to mind the goblins that show up in every fantasy novel. They didn't look all that strong, individually. But there were far too many to handle alone.
A hundred or so, maybe?
"Hahk... hahk..."
In my headlong flight I'd already lost my way. Instead of heading back toward the room I'd been living in, I'd looped around the cafeteria and squeezed out through a different passage. If the goblins chased me all the way there and laid siege outside my door, I'd have had no answer at all.
"Hup... hoo... Damn it. Dead end."
The corridor that had seemed to stretch on forever finally broke off. And waiting at its end was a heavy-looking metal door — a blast shutter, descending from above.
I should've noticed when the corridor started narrowing! No — no time for regrets.
My body odor was apparently so stimulating that, even at the junctions I'd crossed and re-crossed, the goblins never lost my trail — and their voices were closing in fast. I scrambled to the door and desperately tried to force it open.
A gap!
By some miracle, the shutter hadn't sealed completely. It hung just high enough off the ground for a hand to slip underneath.
Grrrrrrgh—!
I gritted my teeth and heaved the door upward, molars grinding against each other with a savage crunch. Terrible for dental health, no doubt, but that was the least of my concerns. I wrenched my poorly-leveraged stance into something workable and threw everything I had into it. My jaw went numb, and somewhere around my lower back came the ominous creak of straining bone. And just before the goblins' triumphant cackling could fill the air—
Screeeech.
"GRAAAH!"
Where there's a will, there's a way. Won over by my effort, the door rose — grudgingly — granting me the barest sliver of space. But I must have disturbed something, because it began sinking back down, slowly and inexorably. Without a moment's thought, I threw myself into a roll and squeezed through with an inch to spare.
KUUUUNG—!
Boom! Boom!
The instant I cleared it, the blast shutter slammed shut. The goblins, enraged at missing me by a hair's breadth, hammered on the door with a savagery I could hear through the metal — but the thick steel barrier didn't so much as tremble.
"Nearly died there..."
Only now did I let out the breath I'd been holding, carefully working my clothes free where they'd been pinched in the door.
But how am I supposed to open this thing again later...
There wasn't even a crack left now, was there? Ah, whatever. I flopped my exhausted body straight onto the floor. The cool touch of the metal felt wonderful as it drained the heat from me.
...
What... is this place?
The door guarding this room looked sturdier than anything I'd seen so far. It might well be some kind of important facility.
I rested only briefly before exploring the surroundings.
Some kind of control room?
Perhaps because the solid door had kept looters out, the interior was relatively tidy — though chairs and assorted junk lay scattered everywhere, bearing witness to how frantic things must have been in the final moments. Still, of all the spaces I'd seen so far, this one was in the best shape by far. And the most eye-catching thing of all was... a colossal monitor occupying one entire wall of the room.
I dug around hoping it might power on, but I couldn't even find anything resembling a mainframe, so I eventually gave up.
Roll-roll...
I righted one of the fallen chairs and lowered myself into it. The wheels squeaked in protest, but it moved when I pushed. I leaned back against the rest and propped my feet up on the desk that still remained.
So I'm trapped.
I'd escaped the goblins' clutches, but the situation was bleak. No matter how thoroughly I searched, the room yielded not a single weapon or scrap of food. Never mind the goblins that might be waiting outside — there was no way to reopen the sealed door, either.
But I still had one last hope.
Talent.
No way around it, then. Time to pick a new talent.
I'd been hoping to scrimp and save my points for something expensive, but given how things had turned out, there was nothing to be done. I opened my status window.
[$@$!!}
[daw@!#]
.
.
.
Countless talents unfurled before me in an endless scroll. My options came down to two: choose one 1,000-point talent, or select two 500-point talents.
...If I end up with some half-baked talent, that's going to be a headache, isn't it?
After agonizing over it, I picked one of the 1,000-point talents and spent the points.
Please, let it be something that can get me out of this situation...!
Click.
[$!#!!] ⟶ Inner Heart
The moment the points were paid, the garbled, unreadable script on the status window reassembled itself into proper characters — and in the same instant, a surging torrent of energy concentrated into my heart.
"Uhh... ughh... GYAAAAAAAAAH...!"
Nobody said anything about it HURTING!
At first it was a bearable ache in my chest. Then, as if mocking my composure, an unimaginable pain came crashing down on me.
"Nnnnngh...!"
It felt like a syringe plunging straight into my heart, injecting molten lava. A searing, scorching agony — as if I would burst into ash and vanish on the spot. I gasped for breath, and for a moment the dust-laced cold air cooling my heart offered relief — but then the next wave of pain rolled over me, and I half lost my mind to it.