Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! Volume 6

by Funa

  And then the door shut.

  “There is something in there…”

  “And just what is it already?!” Mavis and Pauline chorused.

  They peeked behind the door as well.

  “Something’s there…”

  Indeed, beyond the door was what appeared to be a hallway, and in that hallway was…something.

  Something the size of a large dog, scuttling around on six legs…

  It was insectoid but not an insect. It had six legs and a black, lustrous carapace, but its greatest feature was not insectoid at all. On top of the torso that bore the legs, was a second, vertical, humanoid trunk and head that sprouted from it, with four arms of its own.

  It was grotesque.

  There was no other word for it. It was a grotesque, otherworldly form that blurred evolutionary lines.

  And it was walking the halls just beyond that door.

  After a brief silence, Reina finally spoke. “A scavenger.”

  “A scavenger?” Mavis repeated, intrigued.

  “They never taught us about them at the prep school, but I heard about this from the Crimson Lightning. They’re lifeforms that live outside of the bounds of nature—few have ever seen them.

  “They gather around the corpses of parties who have been wiped out and take things from their bodies—weapons, armor, equipment, money—anything made of metal. They never touch the bodies themselves, so no one knows what they eat or what they take the metal for. They’re mysterious creatures. Even if you try to follow them, they always seem to be heading off somewhere incredibly far away, so no one has ever managed to discover one of their lairs. Given the fact that they stay away from living humans and have never harmed anyone—and since there are so few eyewitnesses, the creatures rarely come up in conversation. Almost no one has heard about them. Obviously, I don’t have any firsthand proof that they even exist, but that thing behind the door looked a lot like what I heard about in those stories…”

  A bug-like creature that lived in caves underground. It was a common tale, which no one thought much of…except for Mile.

  I-It was metallic! It definitely looked metallic! And it’s been working all this time… That’s pretty metal. Wait! What am I saying?!

  “I see,” said Pauline, “Of course. If you lived deep underground in a ruin like this, no one would ever find your lair…”

  “Hang on. When you put it like that, it’s creepy. Anyway, she said that they aren’t interested in humans, so we should be fine.”

  Pauline’s words and Mavis’s reply entered Mile’s ears but did not register.

  Ruins. Insectoid robots. Collecting metal. Doing no harm to humans. That means…

  All the gears in Mile’s head spun furiously, clicking to a stop on a singular conclusion.

  They’re automatons in charge of maintenance or preservation…

  If that was true, there was only one further conclusion to draw.

  “These ruins are still being used…”

  “What did you just say?” Reina asked suspiciously.

  “It seems like these ruins are still being used.”

  “What?” The other three were perplexed.

  “Well, those scavengers. I’m wondering if they aren’t doing some maintenance, or rather, upkeep on these ruins…”

  “Oh, I see! That’s what they need the metal for!”

  Naturally, Mavis was on the ball when it came to things like this.

  In all matters of common sense, Reina was the one to ask. Mercantile affairs and money? Pauline. Combat, warfare, and logistics and supplies were Mavis’s area, and Mile covered anything beyond the realm of conventional wisdom. Together, they were an unstoppable encyclopedic force.

  “N-now just hold it right there! What’re you saying here? That those bug monsters are some kind of sentient rulers?!” Reina shouted, her eyes wide in shock. Obviously, that was not the case.

  “No, I mean, they aren’t rulers or anything… I think they’re merely doing as they were ordered to. Just as the people who lived here a long, long time ago ordered them to.”

  “W-wait a minute, Mile! Wouldn’t that mean that those creatures would have been alive this entire time?”

  Pauline’s skepticism was perfectly reasonable.

  “No. I actually don’t think that those are ‘life-forms’—not in the traditional sense. I think they’re… how to put it? More like golems. If they break, their comrades can fix them, or they might even just make new copies of them themselves… Anyway, that means that as long as they don’t all happen to be destroyed at once, they can repair themselves, reproduce, and keep on living indefinitely. That’s my thinking.”

  “Indefinitely,” as Mile said, implied not an invincible immortality but rather a ‘self-perpetuating’ existence.

  “………” The others were silent.

  “Well, there’s no use in us just standing around here. Let’s go forward,” said Mile.

  “B-but if we go forward, then…” Reina stammered, hesitant.

  If they continued into the passage, a scavenger might spot them. Even if the stories said that they would never harm humans, those were just hearsay. Plus, there was no guarantee that their apparent benevolence would extend to people who had just invaded their home—or that they had not been ordered to protect this place against any invaders “by any means necessary.”

  Furthermore, Reina had never heard any tales of humans fighting against the scavengers in the past. Was this because these battles themselves had never occurred? Or simply because no one had lived to tell the tale?

  How might such creatures fight? Did they have poison? Would they group together for a swarming strike? The risks of taking on an enemy that they had never encountered before and had not a single piece of information on, ran very high.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll put up an invisibility cloak and a sound barrier. That way they won’t detect us.”

  “Invihsuhbilitee cloke?” Reina repeated, utterly bewildered, a question mark practically floating above her head.

  “It’s something that’ll make sure the enemy can’t see us. It’s like the sound barrier but for light instead of noise.”

  “Mm-hmm…”

  Mile answered in such clear terms that Reina accepted her words without question, though there was still something a bit vexing about her explanation.

  To make a sound barrier, one simply had to erect a screen that would disrupt the vibrations moving through the air between yourself and an opponent. However, doing that with light would mean that, while your opponent would indeed be unable to see you, you would not be able to see your opponent, either. Light being unable to get through would also mean that it would be pitch black around you, and you would be frozen in place, unable to see your surroundings even as your opponent saw something like a pitch-black dome of darkness where you stood, making it easy to determine your hiding place.

  Furthermore, if you were somehow able to make it so that you could see outside of your dome, allowing the light and electromagnetic waves from the outside to get in without letting the light reflecting off you escape, the temperature on the inside would rise to untenable temperatures. It would be a greenhouse effect.

  If you then tried to vent the heat out, the scope of your external visibility would increase; opponents who could see infrared waves visually, as well as opponents with things like snakes’ pit organs, which can sense infrared waves, would easily be able to detect you.

  In addition, this could not be thought of as a simple matter of isolating their reflected light. Any light reflected from the scenery behind them would still have to pass through in order to give the illusion that they were not there. Figuring out how to clear all of those hurdles would be a problem far beyond the reach of the people of this world, who did not have a concept of the visible light spectrum, much less infrared waves, heat, and the other special properties of light.

  Was Reina able to accept Mile’s explanation so easily because she had no understandin
g of such matters and merely thought that it really would operate the same way as a sound barrier? Or was it because it was Mile, which always meant that there was no point in questioning her logic?

  On that note, it would be absurdly difficult for any normal person to enact a field of total invisibility using magic. Without sufficient scientific knowledge, forming and emitting the appropriate thought-pulse to overcome all of these factors—unconsciously, no less—would be an impossibility for the common man.

  In Mile’s case, though, all she had to think to herself was, “Invisibility cloak, activate! Make me invisible and deal with all the complications of that for me, please!” and the nanomachines would take care of the rest. By Mile’s reasoning, this was simply a normal use of magic as directed by her thoughts, though obviously, that was not the case.

  She had a nanomachine authorization level 5.

  Even if she was unable to conceptualize and emit the image of the appropriate concrete process for the nanomachines to actualize, as long as her words and the image of the result she wanted were fitting, she could count on the nanomachines to take care of all the necessary details at their own discretion.

  It was essentially the difference between filling out all of your income tax forms manually, and simply paying a tax advisor who would handle everything for you.

  “Now then, shall we?”

  With that, Mile activated her sound barrier and cloak and put her hand to the door.

  The Crimson Vow gently pushed open the door and stepped into the hallway. Seeing that there were no scavengers around, they shut the door, and then, after giving the place a careful look around, continued their investigation.

  “So, which way should we go?”

  Even before Mavis asked, Mile was already pondering this same question.

  After thinking for a short while, she pulled a single rusted sword from her inventory. It was something she had looted off of bandits they had wiped out some time ago. She placed it gently on the floor of the hallway and directed everyone to move a short distance away.

  About ten seconds later, a single scavenger approached from one side of the hallway. The moment it noticed the sword lying on the floor, it scurried over to collect it and then returned in the direction from which it came.

  “Looks like that’s the way!” said Mile.

  The other three nodded.

  Though Reina had initially reported that the scavengers were fairly quick, this one did not appear to be moving very quickly at all. It was quite possible that it could go faster if it put its mind to it, but its normal speed was clearly a fair bit slower than that. Moving quicker would expend more energy and cause more wear on its body; given that it did not appear exceptionally strapped for time, there was no need for it to push itself that far.

  Thus, the girls were able to follow the scavenger without overexerting themselves.

  “Oh,” Mile remarked. “Looks like it went in that room.”

  Indeed, as she had noted, the scavenger had just crossed the threshold of what appeared to be some sort of entrance.

  Naturally, this entrance had no door. Given the creature’s height and build, it would have been quite the chore for it to have to open and shut doors all the time. Of course, it could have employed an automatic door or something, but devices with a lot of moving parts were unlikely to withstand the test of time, and doors did not seem like they would be necessary for something like a scavenger.

  And so, the four crept through the entrance behind it.

  “Wh-what the heck is this…?”

  “………”

  This was the scene that unfolded before them: A swarm of scavengers, holding items that appeared to be tools in their hands, around a long line of work tables piled high with various objects.

  Reina, Mavis, and Pauline could not even conceive of what was happening before their eyes, but to Mile, this was how things appeared:

  “It’s a workshop…”

  As the word suggested, the operation was a small one—less a large-scale industrial plant than the sort of second-rate factory that might pop up in some backwater town. Of course, there were no conveyor belts or anything to aid the assembly line—just a number of scavengers facing the objects that were set upon the stationary tables, working away at something or other.

  “They’re…golems…”

  In fact, what lay upon those tables were the bodies of golems—rock golems and iron golems.

  The metallic golems might have actually been made of something like copper as opposed to iron, but they were called “iron golems” nonetheless. Rock golems could not compare to their strength. Even among the Crimson Vow, perhaps only Mile stood a chance of being able to cut through one.

  The saving grace for hunters was that golems never left their own territories, meaning that it was essentially unheard of for them to come into human settlements and attack. The only time golems ever laid a hand on humans was when humans went trespassing in their territories, and even this only happened when the invading hunters were after game or other materials from the land—or when they aimed to make the golems themselves their harvest and engaged with them in battle. In such cases, the percentage of hunters who were able to best an iron golem was incredibly low.

  “Wh-what could they be doing…?” Pauline whispered.

  “Repairs, I’d guess. Since you can’t really say that you’d ‘heal’ a golem,” Mavis replied.

  As the scavengers did not appear to be producing any new individuals, Mile was inclined to agree. If they had been continually producing brand-new golems for tens of thousands of years, golems would have spread across the entire planet like a pox. Given that this was not the case, and that the golems’ territories did not appear to be increasing, this was a sound judgment to make.

  “That’s it!”

  Mile was struck with an epiphany. Finally, she knew the reason why golems would suddenly cease to function with the destruction of their heads, which contained nothing more than auditory and visual sensors.

  More than likely, the golems relied on calculating their current surrounding circumstances to move, a calculation that would be based on information transmitted from an external source. If this were cut off, then they might end up attacking their own allies, or unintentionally harming their (probably long-gone) “masters,” so they would have been designed to cease functioning if all of their sensors were destroyed and to wait until someone could come to collect them—someone such as the scavengers.

  “And what conclusions are you coming to all by yourself over there, genius?” Reina said snidely. To be fair, this was neither the time nor the place for Mile to be giving any long-winded explanations.

  With that in mind, Mile ignored her and began using her surveillance magic, thinking that a modest operation like this could not be the only thing present in a facility built this deeply underground. There was little doubt that these ruins were made up of a variety of different, smaller operations, all combined into one greater institution.

  “An ancient industrial complex…”

  In her previous life, Mile had been rather fond of flipping through pamphlets about machinery. She was enamored of their aesthetics. Naturally, this interest extended to large-scale equipment as well.

  “Wh…?”

  There was nothing.

  What her magical scan found was that there was not a single other workshop in operation anywhere else in this facility.

  That said, she did get a number of pings from rooms that were buried in rock or dirt, the wreckage of machine-like constructions that had been crushed by fallen rubble, and other things of that ilk. Even the machine-like constructions retained not even the faintest resemblance to their original forms—they were nothing but heaps of rusted metal and dust.

  The ones that were buried could probably be excavated, given enough time. The reason that this had not happened thus far was that this was likely outside of the scavengers’ programmed responsibilities. Furthermore, they were machines t
hat belonged to the scavengers’ “masters,” so taking them apart to recycle the metal would probably be out of the question. Or perhaps it was merely that there were others who were meant to be in charge of the machines’ upkeep, and those units had already been destroyed…

  The scant number of scavengers that had lived on were left repairing themselves and their comrades in arms and using a meager amount of materials to create a few more of their number.

  For what? In anticipation of something?

  Had their masters ordered them to await “a day that would one day come?”

  Were those masters down in those buried rooms still, existing as mummified remains? Or had they made use of those stairs and that elevator to make their safe escape?

  The girls had no way of knowing what had occurred so very long ago.

  “Let’s go back. It doesn’t seem like there are any other facilities around here, and I want to leave these guys to their work.”

  “………”

  The three were silent.

  “All right. Let’s go then,” Reina replied, several seconds later. Mavis and Pauline nodded in agreement.

  If they were to destroy this place, then the number of golems in the region would slowly decrease, and eventually they would vanish altogether. This, of course, would probably be a boon to the humans. However, none of the girls could have mustered the strength to do such a thing.

  Did they all agree because the request had come from Mile, who so very rarely voiced her own desires? Or was it because they would feel guilty destroying ruins that had stood for so many long years? Or was there some other reason? Only each girl herself could know.

  The members of the Crimson Vow retraced their steps and returned to the inner portion of the cave.

  Because their return up the stairs was an upward climb, it required much more stamina than the first part of the journey, but at least it was far easier on their knees and backs. It was manageable as long as they took breaks along the way. The four of them were C-rank hunters, after all.

  They put the entrance wall back the way that they had found it, and once Mile confirmed that the demons would not be able to detect it, they slipped back around the corner, and she released a spell to nullify the effects of the sleeping drug.