Sion Industries
Catherine waved both arms in vigorous protest, cheeks puffing out slightly in visible displeasure at the whole situation.
"That's exactly why we should stay in a place like this! Even if enemies we can't possibly handle come pouring in, we'll be safe here. Besides, I have my own means of communication, so if it comes to that, I can call my father!"
"Ahh, so that's why..."
"I get the gist of what's going on, so that's enough. Hey, miss. When do you think the real fighting up [above] is going to start? You must've heard something."
"...Probably within a day or two. Haah... I only pray nothing goes wrong."
Catherine's face darkened, clearly worried about Henry, who had joined the full-scale battle against the cult.
But Kaya just waved a hand carelessly, as if it were nothing at all.
"Those fated to die die, and those fated to live live. Worry about your own neck instead, why don't you?"
"This place is safe. Actually, even my father said the odds of the cult coming to the ruins are very low—"
"No. I smell something... something very dangerous..."
Kaya murmured, licking her dry lips with her tongue.
She seemed utterly certain the cult would make its way here.
Normally, anyone spouting ominous words like that would have earned themselves a proper scolding, but I was sensing something similar to Kaya, so I kept my mouth shut.
My long-dormant instincts were prodding at one side of my brain, injecting a fresh dose of tension.
Still, with Kaya around, we could push through most dangers.
I forcibly shook off my unease and spoke up cheerfully.
"Lady Catherine, then let's say we hide in the Panic Room if intruders show up... Would it be all right if we spent our remaining time freely? I'd like to get a feel for the ruins' layout. Just in case."
"Oh, good idea. Hey, I've been wanting to poke around a ruin like this myself."
"Huh? Ah... yes. Of course. I'll assign you a basic security clearance, so you'll be able to use most of the facilities. Though the ruins are in defense mode, so a lot of areas will be blocked off..."
"We'll just look as far as we can go. Come on, everyone. Ah, Lady Kaya, will you...?"
"I'm good. I'll scout around on my own. Miss, why don't you come with me? Nothing good ever comes of being alone in a ruin like this."
"...I'm in your care, then."
When I casually took Noah and Lena by the shoulders and steered them off, Kaya, just as I'd predicted, made no move to follow me.
And so, after brief farewells, our party split in two and set off.
I hadn't asked for this free time without reason.
An opportunity this good wasn't one to pass up.
"So? Is there a facility related to it? The map went by too fast for me to get a proper look."
"There is. Though—were you planning this all along? I certainly wasn't bothered."
I had explained my simple little scheme to Noah, whose eyebrows rose upward in mild surprise.
"Well, you never know when a chance this good will come around again. Catherine gave us the okay, didn't she?"
"Hmm... I found it a rather presumptuous suggestion, if I'm being honest."
"If it worked out in the end, that's all that matters."
"Heheh... thank you. I didn't expect you to think of me that way."
"Oh, don't make it a thing."
Factory. And Golem.
Anyone could see this ruin was, without question, an android factory.
From the moment I'd heard those two keywords, I'd been drawing up a plan to repair and upgrade Noah's body.
The trick was figuring out how to explore the ruins without Catherine or Kaya catching on—but thanks to Kaya's convenient cover fire, things had gone remarkably smoothly, and I'd secured the best possible outcome.
The only catch was that Kaya, eager to examine my body as soon as possible, had ordered us back within three hours, so we had to move fast.
We rode on a spare [Disc] under our own direct control.
Whooosh—!
"Whoa! It's fast!"
"Hold on tight. Don't fall off for nothing."
"It doesn't even compare to the carriage!"
The disc carrying me, Noah, and Lena shot through the corridors at high speed.
Even with the throttle dialed down to a reasonable level, the pace was enough to give an ordinary person serious trouble behind the wheel.
Fortunately, we weren't ordinary people, and the factory's hallways were as generously wide as the facility itself was vast, so we had no real trouble.
Pressing close against the edge of the disc, Lena watched the scenery whip past in a blur, and I asked her:
"Lena, should I release the mana needles now?"
"No need. I've undone almost all of them myself. Give me a day or two and I'll be done... Can't I just keep practicing until the enemies show up?"
"Hmm, I suppose that works. It only counts if you undo them yourself, after all."
Unlike me, who had broken Kaya's Point-Strike in one stroke after a flash of enlightenment, Lena was having a harder time of it.
That said, escaping a seal didn't require as grand a revelation as mine had, and Lena had already resolved a good seventy to eighty percent of it.
Thanks to that, she could manage a modest degree of mana control, which was how she'd survived the treacherous journey to the ruins in the first place.
Ordinarily this training takes a year, and she's about to finish it in under three days... without resorting to my kind of shortcuts, no less. This girl's the real deal.
Her years of painful struggle to control her mana in the past must have accumulated into a kind of training experience.
Somehow it felt like she was sprouting up all on her own, without me having to lift a finger.
"By the way, where are we headed right now?"
"The factory map showed a section that looked useful. We're going there."
While this place had the classic look of a factory, its structure was somewhat unusual.
Perhaps because it had been designed from the ground up to sit underground, the building's overall shape resembled an inverted cone.
The main gate we'd first entered through sat at the very top of that cone—the widest point—which was where the mass-production android manufacturing lines had been installed.
"So that means... the further down we go, the more important the facilities get?"
"Right. I'd assumed the Count's ancestors had stripped the ruins clean, but it turns out quite a few things were left behind."
The assembly arms in the top-floor production zone, these transport discs... Seeing so many useful things still intact, the facility itself was probably in fairly decent shape.
Maybe anything too bulky had been impossible to haul out because the passages connecting the ruins to the sewers were simply too narrow?
These were relics far too valuable to smash.
Whoooosh...
The disc, piloted by Noah—who had memorized the entire map from a single pass—bounded confidently through the spiderweb tangle of corridors like a cat returning to its own territory.
At last it stopped in front of a small elevator.
The control panel mounted on its face glowed red, flinging a warning message our way.
[WARNING: This elevator is restricted to authorized senior personnel. Please use an alternative elevator.]
"So it says? Looks like the security clearance Catherine set up isn't enough."
"Hmm... that is a problem. We'll need this elevator to reach the lower levels."
"What's down there, anyway?"
"The VIP-exclusive android manufacturing facility."
Noah, stymied for a moment by this unexpected obstacle, reached a decision with lightning speed.
"I'll hack it."
"You can do stuff like that?"
"It's not my specialty, but... it's not impossible. I did handle part of the research institute's firewall, after all."
Click!
Noah abruptly detached the upper segment of her own pinky finger!
It was a sight that made Lena—and frankly me as well—recoil in horror, but Noah calmly drew a long, wiry cable out of the freshly severed (?) stump of her finger.
And thus we were granted a demonstration of future-era hacking technique.
...It began with brute simplicity.
Crack!
Noah jabbed the elevator's glowing red control panel with her staff, no warning at all.
The white staff split into a bundle of stems—thinner than a whip—worked its way into the gaps of the control box, and—
Clank! Thwang!
—forcibly pried the metal plate covering the panel's surface clean off.
The whip-tendrils of her staff must have disengaged the physical locking mechanism inside.
Either way, the control panel now stood with its circuitry fully exposed.
Barely had the metal plate hit the floor before the alarm blared out again.
[WARNING!!! Unauthorized acc-zzzzkkkt—]
A stern-voiced warning message strobed with a red intensity unlike anything before.
But before the voice could finish forming a proper sentence, Noah drove the cable from her pinky straight into the exposed circuit board—and—
[—zzzzkkkt············ Welcome, Senior Researcher.]
The menacing broadcast warning melted, in an instant, into a gentle chime.
The red light shifted to blue before we knew it, and the sound of the elevator whirring to life rose from below.
Reclaiming her cable, Noah spoke with the placid air of someone just back from a stroll.
"I assumed the executive elevators would be linked to the main server. As expected."
"Is hacking supposed to be over that fast...?"
"Ah, it seems a shortage of power has left most of the firewalls deactivated. On top of that, the temporary administrator is busy directing operations, so the majority of its functions were restricted."
Noah shrugged, as if to say, this much is child's play.
Impressive, that's what.
Vrrrrmmm...
The elevator descended slowly.
It was on the small side, presumably because only a handful of executives ever used it, but still large enough to accommodate the disc alongside us.
This level went down quite some depth as well, and each floor took a fair while to pass.
Our destination was Sublevel 3.
As we admired the optical illusion of the dark bedrock rushing upward past the transparent window, Noah spoke up out of the blue.
"While I was hacking, I skimmed through the records. This factory was an android facility operated under [Sion Industries]."
"Sion Industries...? Never heard of it."
"It was founded in 2091, so that's only natural. But that's not the important part. The issue is where this factory used to be located. Saxony, Germany."
"Hmm... Germany, huh. Quality should be solid... wait. Germany?"
"Yes. Germany."
"...That can't be right, can it?"
The [Arkon National Research Institute] we'd first emerged from had used English.
I couldn't recall it exactly, but I was fairly sure I'd been told it was a research lab on American soil...
"Correct. A research institute located in the southern United States."
"Then why is there a German factory here? This place can't be all that far from the institute."
"A few hundred kilometers at most. It's possible that the map of the present world has changed considerably from the one we knew."
"...No, no matter how much it changes, could it really change that much?"
Continental drift takes a very generous estimate of several hundred million years.
Working from the mythology entwined with the Arcana Heart, the time elapsed since Old Humanity's collapse came out to roughly three to four thousand years.
Nowhere near enough for Germany and America to tangle into one.
More likely they'd simply teleported the factory here.
Feasibility aside, that is.
"What I wouldn't give for a world map right now. Lena, have you ever seen one?"
"...I have no idea what you two are even talking about, but I don't just show my map to anybody."
"Not even a rough one?"
"Mmm... I don't really remember. Never had a reason to look... no, wait, why is it always you and Unni talking about stuff only you two know? I feel like I'm being left out."
Lena glared up at us, brimming with complaint.
Fair enough, I suppose. America, Germany... hardly anyone alive would know about any of that now.
Being made to listen to it all like a straw-stuffed dummy couldn't have felt great.
At the sight of her, Noah smiled lightly.
"I can't explain everything all the time, you know... but if you'd like, I could hold a lesson in ancient history every evening?"
"...Do it."
"Oh, how surprising. And here I thought you'd sworn off studying for life."
"Hmph. Not always."
What wind had blown this girl around—she who was always plotting her escape whenever lessons came up?
Noah's eyes had gone round at Lena's reply, too, as if she'd only been testing the waters.
Well, having the drive to grow is a good thing.
Ding~!
Apparently we'd arrived—the elevator doors slid open with a cheerful chime.
Before us stretched a corridor lined with lights that flickered on sparsely, here and there.
We had skipped a floor and reached Sublevel 3 (though by the factory's own reckoning, it would in truth lie dozens of meters beneath the earth).
Please, let something useful still be left down here.