The Hope They Left Behind (Premium)

by Sakon Kaidou

  “Meoww,” Grimalkin joined him. Despite having disappeared many times during the fight, he was back on Tom’s head as though nothing had happened.

  “Good job handling them,” I said. “That was an amazing battle.”

  “Well, there were lots of them. I had to give it all I haaad!” Tom replied before bending forwards a bit and sighing. “I’m realllly tired...”

  I had no doubt that he was telling the truth, but the way he was bending made it look like he was weighed down by the cat.

  “I’ll leave today’s exploration at that and go back to the inn,” he said. “Ah, it’s safe to explore the room now. There should be no more traps.”

  “Eh? Thank you,” I said, slightly confused.

  “Thank you,” Azurite joined in. “But shouldn’t you be exploring this place, as well?”

  I could see why she was asking that. All Tom had done here was take care of the monsters and traps. He hadn’t looked around for any magic items or anything like that. In fact, he wasn’t even retrieving the remains of the monsters he’d beaten.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I don’t need any of thaaat stuff. Do what you want with it.”

  “Meoww.”

  With those words as his last, Tom casually waved his hand and walked away.

  The moment he went behind the corner in the hallway, Nemesis muttered, “What was his purpose here, I wonder...?”

  I was curious about that, too, but my top priority right now was the investigation.

  We got off of Silver and started exploring the room. Nemesis went back to her human form.

  All the machine remains here made it a pain to get around, but this place was much like the room with the crystal.

  The most notable feature here was the large painting on one of the sides of the room. Although, it looked less like it was painted and more like it was burnt into the wall.

  That painting displayed countless people clashing with a horde of beasts, then another horde of beasts howling atop a place that looked like a castle.

  There was some writing under it, but unlike the text you’d find on signs and the like, it wasn’t getting auto-translated.

  It seems pretty important, though, I thought.

  “Can you read this?” I asked Azurite.

  “I can’t.”

  If a tian like her couldn’t read it, it meant that this wasn’t written in Infinite Dendrogram’s common, but some language they’d used in the pre-ancient civilization.

  In that case, all we could do was show it to Dr. Mario.

  “Do you have a camera?” I asked. “Polaroid or digital cams would be the best for this.”

  “I don’t know what ‘Polaroid’ and ‘digital cams’ are, but I have a magic camera that instantly develops the picture,” she said, as she reached into her inventory and took out an object much like a polaroid camera.

  Well, she sure came prepared. It’s clear she’s taking this investigation seriously.

  Azurite took a number of pictures and gave me one displaying everything on the wall, including a close-up of the unreadable text.

  “You’ll be showing this to the archeologist, I assume?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Is that bad?”

  “It isn’t... but I will want to hear the translation, as well.”

  “Of course,” I nodded as I took the photos.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that Dr. Mario was making Azurite uncomfortable. Yesterday, she’d said that it was strange for an archeologist to be in the area this early. However, he was the only archeologist we had access to, so we had to rely on him if we wanted to know about this text.

  “You don’t trust Dr. Mario?” I asked her.

  “This is not about trust. I’m merely uncomfortable about involving outsiders. If it was possible, I would make this investigation more confidential... but the kingdom currently has next to no people who know archeology.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. My teacher, the Arch Sage, was well-versed in many things, archeology included, but he passed away in the war. His apprentices, too, were lost either in the war or during Gloria’s attack.”

  “Ohh...”

  According to Liliana, the knight orders had suffered severely in the war, and it looked like the other major groups of the kingdom were no different.

  “These ruins are far larger than I anticipated, and there’s a lot of specialized language that’s a challenge to analyze,” said Azurite. “We need outside help to find out what this factory produces.”

  “What?” I raised an eyebrow. “But we already know what they make here.”

  “...Eh?”

  Azurite looked surprised, but it seemed plain to me that we already had enough info to make an educated guess about the nature of this place.

  Yesterday, someone had brought Dr. Mario a metal plate as tough as a magic item and an artificial diamond used for lasers.

  Additionally, despite presumably protecting this place for two millennia, the machine monsters were functioning without any problems to speak of.

  About half of the sentry guns here weren’t working, so it was odd that the monsters we’d fought had been running so smoothly.

  Which led me to believe that this place was...

  “It’s producing mechanical monsters,” I said. “These ruins are basically a weapon factory.”

  What we’d defeated weren’t guards from millennia ago, but newly-produced machines.

  “A weapon factory,” Azurite muttered as she put her hand on her forehead and began thinking.

  If used well, a weapon factory would surely be a powerful asset to the kingdom. Nothing would increase the country’s military strength as greatly as that.

  However, there was a problem...

  “Ray,” she spoke up. “Assuming this place is what you say it is and these machines are the products... there’s still one major question that remains unanswered.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  I knew exactly what she was getting at. It was the most notable thing about these mechanical monsters.

  “That doesn’t explain why they have unrelated names like ‘Teal Wolf’ and ‘Goblin Warrior,’ right?” I asked.

  “Exactly.”

  Normally, monsters had their names displayed above their heads. Golems and the like were no exception.

  However, these monsters here were different. There were only two models, but the names above their heads were many, varied, seemingly random, and had little to do with machines.

  The only explanation I had for this was the idea that producing these machines required using other monsters as material.

  The fact that fur had been sticking out of the machine I’d destroyed in the forest made it likely, but...

  “Monsters that are produced like that always end up having names different than their material,” said Nemesis.

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  Franklin’s creations were a good example of that.

  The base monsters had different names than the resulting ones. If this really was a factory that made mechanical monsters from other monsters, there was no reason for the names to stay the same. In fact, I would expect the two models to have their own names, which would be uniform across all units.

  Not to mention that, unlike these machines, produced monsters would become light and vanish just like any other monster.

  What the hell is this?

  “I must say,” Nemesis spoke up, “these look much like Hugo’s Magingear.”

  “Well, it was made by the lab coat bastard’s clan, but the tech was still Dryfe’s, and since Dryfe’s tech is based around analyzing the pre-ancient civilization’s tech, there’s a link there, so... ah!”

  A sudden realization made me cut my words short.

  Magingears.

  Pre-ancient civilization tech.

  Silver and replicas.

  Reactors and a lack of them.

  This factory and the mechanical monsters.

  T
hose keywords came to mind, and everything slotted into place.

  The conclusion I came to made me cover my mouth.

  “Ray? What’s wrong?” asked Nemesis.

  “You don’t look well,” commented Azurite.

  So it shows on my face, huh? Of course it does. The conclusion I came to is just that bad.

  I hadn’t felt this way since entering the basement in Gouz-Maise Gang’s hideout.

  ...Disgusting.

  “What did you realize?” asked Nemesis.

  “These aren’t monsters at all,” I replied.

  My words made her and Azurite tilt their heads in confusion.

  Ignoring that, I continued speaking the truth of these ruins. “These things... all the scrap here... is special equipment.”

  “Eh?” Azurite muttered as she looked at the only functioning piece of special equipment in this room: Silver.

  Nemesis closed her eyes. She was probably thinking about Magingears.

  “But what about the names above their heads?” Azurite asked.

  “They disappeared because the monsters equipping them died. All that’s left here is the equipment. There’s nothing more to it.”

  “So, we were attacked by armed monsters?”

  “No. If that was the case, completely different species like Goblin Warriors and Pashi Rabbits would never cooperate. Hell, Tom fought fifty-odd machines in this room. Did you see any infighting between them?”

  “...No.”

  Exactly.

  “Their cooperation when fighting Tom was flawless, like they were commanded by a single will.”

  That was the keyword here — “command.” The monsters inside meant nothing.

  “Ray, you don’t mean that...” Nemesis muttered and looked at the remains with an astonished expression.

  And so, I spoke what they really were: “These things are special equipment that take control of the user.”

  “?!” Azurite gasped in shock.

  I was fully confident I was right.

  Not every piece of equipment was good for the user.

  The Cursed Bloody Regeneration Armor that I’d uncursed and used before Monochrome’s destroying it was a prime example of that.

  “This is cursed special equipment... no... they were designed to be like this,” I muttered.

  “Wait. Ray, hold on!” Azurite raised her voice, still unable to fully process what I’d just told her. “Why would anyone make special equipment like that?”

  “My Silver is an original Prism Steed,” I said. “He has an engine that produces all the MP he needs to gallop around, so he doesn’t have to drain my MP.”

  Based on what Hugo had told me, the pre-ancient civilization’s machines made their own MP. Though Silver was an unofficial prototype or an experimental unit, he still had the engine for it. However, the same couldn’t be said for the replica Prism Steeds.

  “Replicas, by contrast, function by using the MP of those riding them. This is probably because of cost. They couldn’t fit all the mass-produced units with the MP engines.”

  Original Prism Steeds were amazing pieces of equipment, after all. If the creators could have, they surely would’ve made more than just five of them, and we’d have more of them in the world today. However, most of the ones around were replicas.

  “So what about these, then?” I asked.

  “...!” Azurite gasped again.

  “We’ve seen dozens of them so far, and they are now scrap on the floor. Do you think they’re luxury units with engines, or your common mass-produced models?”

  She was dead silent.

  “It’s pretty obvious that it’s the latter. And that’s why they need fuel... living creatures.”

  They were clearly great war machines. Not every unit had to be as luxurious as an original Prism Steed. Sometimes quantity produced way greater results than quality.

  The fact they could function just fine after taking in weak monsters like Pashi Rabbits and Teal Wolves showed they also had good MP efficiency, as well.

  The equipment took something that couldn’t be used in battle and turned it into something useful, and there was no arguing that it made them into excellent weapons.

  I’m gonna be sick.

  “Yesterday, when I ran into the first one of these, it was assaulting Shirley,” I said. “However, it didn’t try to kill her.”

  It’d fired at me the moment it saw me, but it had treated Shirley differently. It’d attacked the Master, but not the tian.

  “It was planning to take her back alive.”

  “Wait... are you saying that...?!” Azurite raised her voice, the panic in her tone all too apparent.

  I nodded and spoke the answer that made me so nauseous.

  “To these things, even people are just fuel.”

  Chapter Seven: Power and Will

  About a certain weapon

  Prism Persons.

  That was the name given to humanoid automata with superhuman abilities.

  They were one of the pinnacles of technology — so advanced that even the pre-ancient civilization thought they greatly surpassed the norms of their science.

  Many considered them to be the perfect fusion of magic engineering and magic biology, the apex of both form and function.

  They possessed humanoid frames of great beauty, intelligence to communicate with mankind, and they behaved like the most disciplined of people.

  Their battle prowess, too, was simply phenomenal. They matched Superior Jobs, and sometimes even surpassed them. A Prism Person known as “Diamond Slayer” was said to have defeated the Over Gladiator of their era without suffering a hint of damage.

  Prism Persons, much like Prism Steeds, were considered to be some of the greatest things the supreme artisan Flagman had created.

  Thus, it was only natural for people to consider mass-producing them.

  But of course, doing so meant removing a large number of the functions available to the originals. After all, mass-produced Prism Steeds had to drop their special functions and lose their highly-expensive reactors, making them use the riders’ magic instead.

  The Prism Persons were no different. Installing reactors in all of them was impractical, so they had to use other sources of magic. However, unlike Prism Steeds, which were designed to be mounts, Prism Persons were meant to be autonomous weapons. Turning them into mounts powered by the riders’ magic would go against their primary design concept.

  Besides discarding the reactors, the mass-produced units also didn’t inherit the humanoid, superhuman beauty of the originals, nor did they receive their unique powers.

  As a result, the blueprints depicted machines that used the people riding them as their source of magic, were humanoid in design — albeit rough and mechanical — and made up for their lack of special abilities with external weaponry.

  In a way, they were much like the Magingears that would come to be used in the Dryfe Imperium two millennia later.

  This made them completely unlike the original Prism Persons.

  Even Flagman himself was dissatisfied with the blueprints he’d drawn, and the Prism Person mass-production project was halted before a single unit was produced.

  That was the reason why, in the future, Dryfe’s technology salvaging operations would only result in tank and exoskeleton Magingears. Humanoid mechs would only be invented by Masters.

  Still, the invasion of the incarnations forced the ancient people to restart the project. Their fight for humanity’s survival needed all the firepower they could get.

  They had newer, more powerful weaponry, such as the Prism Dragons, but they were severely lacking in numbers.

  Their infantry divisions were annihilated by the inexhaustible Incarnation of Beasts, pressing them into developing a force that, unlike the mass-produced Prism Steeds, could fight on its own.

  Thus, they resumed the Prism Person mass-production project and began developing the first units.

  Flagman rushed back to their blueprints a
nd quickly began building the “Prism Soldier” auto-production plant.

  However, he quickly hit a wall.

  According to the blueprints, the mass-produced Prism People had to be controlled by trained Pilots.

  However, they had already lost too many soldiers to the incarnations, so they didn’t have enough people qualified to become Prism Soldier magic sources.

  This lack of personnel was something that not even a genius like Flagman could solve, so his solution came from another angle — a single thought, both simple and reasonable.

  It doesn’t have to be people, does it?

  The only reason why Prism Soldiers needed people was their lack of a reactor. They needed Pilots to provide them with magic, and that was all there was to it.

  In other words, as long as they had magic, even non-humanoids — monsters — were viable sources.

  If they were to capture them and give them no means of control, wild beasts and the like could be used as batteries that powered the machines while their programming did all the fighting.

  This realization was a light of hope for Flagman.

  But then he ran into another problem.

  Specifically, it was the matter of how the program would differentiate between sources of magic and the enemy.

  He had the option of leaving a few commanding officers or engineers to control it as they deemed appropriate, but it was likely that they would eventually die in the incarnations’ onslaught. For this system to operate smoothly, they had to make it completely automatic.

  Ideally, Flagman wanted to make it so that, as long as at least one plant was active, it would automatically mass-produce Prism Soldiers that would continuously fight the incarnations.

  However, mass-produced units weren’t capable of processing instructions that were too complex.

  Thus, Flagman solved this by using two simple settings.

  First, he recorded all the humanoid races living on the continent in his era and made it so the machines saw them as neither hostiles nor magic sources.

  The other setting made it so the machines would annihilate anything with a threat ranking of C or above, and use anything D or below as energy sources.

  “With this, we’ll have soldiers who automatically power themselves while fighting the incarnations and dangerous monsters. They will be mankind’s hope for all eternity,” Flagman muttered to himself as he finished the auto-production plant.