"S-Soldiers, over here, quick... mmph!"
Quick on the uptake, Paul swiftly covered Victor's mouth, threw him straight to the floor, and pinned him so he couldn't run.
"If you scream to call the mechanical soldiers, I'll kill you on the spot. I don't need to explain further for you to know what I mean."
"Mmph. Mmph."
Seeing Victor nod violently while restrained, we uncovered his mouth.
"Puhah. How on earth did you get here so fast? The route is so complicated that there's no way anyone could get here easily, is there?"
"We have no reason to tell you that. And right now, you're the one in a position to answer our questions."
Under the gaze of the three people looking down at him, his usual composure was nowhere to be seen; he looked scared out of his wits already.
"C-Can't we settle this with a conversation instead of trying to frighten me? Like gentlemen."
"You're really going to say the word 'gentleman'? Cut the crap and just answer what we say."
"All right, I won't resist, so at least let me sit down."
We tied Victor's arms behind him and continued the interrogation.
"There's a door to the factory's core in this room, isn't there? Please open that door."
"Th-The core? Why would the way to such an important place be in my room?"
"Don't play dumb. We already know there's a passage in this room."
"There really isn't any secret passage in this room... Hiik!"
A knife stabbed menacingly into the armrest of the sofa where Victor had been seated.
Then Victor, thoroughly terrified, spoke hurriedly.
"I-I'll never tell, kill me if you're going to kill me! Either way, whether I'm killed by you bastards or by my master, my life's forfeit all the same, so do as you damn well please!"
I hadn't expected him to come out with such a go-ahead-and-try-it attitude.
"Can you really stand by what you just said? Believe it or not, I've cut plenty of human skin elsewhere, so I know where it hurts the most. Where shall I start? Shall I make it slow and painful, or do it properly from the start?"
"D-Do whatever you want! Dying at my master's hands is more painful and terrifying than anything else anyway!"
Despite Paul's threat, Victor held firm.
"Can't you do something with your ability, Mr. Enon?"
"The core's magic covers even this room, so it's hard to make out the finer flows. And I've never learned detection magic either."
"Then is breaking the walls of this room impossible too?"
"It's possible, but if we do, the place we need to get to could get blocked off, so it wouldn't be a good choice."
In the end, Edith, unable to stand watching any longer, walked up to Victor.
"Keep quiet and don't move."
"Wh-What are you going to do?"
"Just shut up."
"G-Get your hands off! What are you trying to do—"
Edith promptly began going through Victor's clothes.
"W-Wait. Stop it!"
"Judging by your reaction, you really did hide something? Oh?"
Soon, from the inner pocket of Victor's coat, Edith found a rod with a button on it.
"What could this be? A self-destruct device?"
"I doubt a coward like him has the guts to take his own life."
"Should we test it?"
"No! That's—"
Click.
Whirr.
"...We didn't even need to torture him."
A bookcase shook and rose upward, and soon the entrance to an elevator appeared beyond it.
"Let's tie the bastard up here and get up there fast."
We tied the dumbfounded Victor to the sofa and got into the elevator that had opened behind the bookcase.
As soon as the elevator's doors opened, the reinforced wall guarding the core appeared right in front of us.
We planted half of the tunnel-blasting bombs we'd been carrying on our bodies all over the reinforced wall.
The other half we saved for destroying the core.
"Everyone, get back."
When the preparations were done, we hid behind a spare alcove carved into the middle of the hallway.
"All right, I'm pressing it."
With that, Paul pressed the detonator in his hand.
KABOOM!
With the wind that came with the enormous blast, I covered the ears of Edith, who was in front of me, and held her steady.
It was a luxury I could afford, since with a doll's body, my eardrums weren't going to burst anyway.
But.
"Damn it, even that didn't get through?"
I saw Paul's face crumple as he checked where the bombs had gone off.
Half the wall was crumpled and wrecked, but it was nowhere near enough to get to the core.
"Let's use the rest of the bombs."
"But if we do that, how are we going to deal with the core?"
"Opening the core room's door comes first. We'll think about that problem after we've opened the way."
In the end, we re-planted the remaining half of the bombs and blew the reinforced wall again.
Since we'd already seen how powerful they were once, this time a properly big hole opened in the reinforced wall.
"So that's the core?"
"...It's much bigger than I thought. We have to deal with that now, right?"
When we stepped through the gap, a huge blue-and-white core stood in the middle of the room.
"You'd better not touch it carelessly. I can feel an enormous amount of magic surging inside it."
That was the driving force that sustained the lives of every being in the Iron Factory and ran every machine.
In my sight, a massive flow of magic surged violently through the core.
It was in a stable state, but if touched wrong, it might explode just like that.
Which was also the reason we'd come here.
"If we give the core a powerful shock, we can probably disable it outright. But then this whole area will be completely leveled too."
"Looks like there's no going back in one piece."
It was as Edith said.
Very few could survive the explosion the magic inside that core would cause.
All the more so for the likes of me or the two of them, unless we had powerful resistance or a barrier prepared.
That was exactly why the plan had been to use detonators to disable the core remotely, yet here we were.
"Then there's no choice but to destroy the core directly."
The look on Edith's face as she said it seemed resolute somehow, so I answered hurriedly.
"There's no need to jump to conclusions yet. There has to be a way somewhere."
But even I couldn't think of a suitable way.
'What do I do?'
It happened just as time was slipping by and our leeway was quickly vanishing.
[A quest has been issued.]
[Mission – Disable the core without destroying it.]
[Penalty on destruction – The life connection of every doll in the Iron Factory will be severed.]
[If you destroy the core, you obtain the achievement Kin Exterminator, and your kin will feel hostility when they face you.]
[If you do not destroy the core, you obtain the achievement Kin Savior, and your kin will feel affinity toward you.]
The appearance of a message, after not seeing one for a while, was always enough to surprise me.
First it asked me to save the city, and now it was warning me I'd take a penalty if I acted rashly.
'Kin Exterminator.'
It was one of the achievements you could see now and then in Akris.
Mostly on villains who opposed the protagonist character, the ones whose wickedness had reached its peak.
Those who held that achievement were always drifters, or joined the main villain's organization and did evil to their heart's content.
But I had no intention of becoming a villain, or of unjustly earning an achievement like a butcher's.
'Then what do I do?'
I had to disable this core somehow and bring down the Iron Factory to clear the quest.
Yet there was no other way than for someone to sacrifice themselves and destroy this core.
And yet if I destroyed the core, I'd be scorned by my kin.
[The Mana Core detects the enormous magic around it.]
[The Mana Core licks its lips at the enormous magic.]
Why was the thing, which had been so quiet, suddenly acting like this?
More importantly, did the Mana Core have some kind of ego?
[The Mana Core covets the enormous magic.]
No, the Mana Core really did seem to have an ego.
Its intelligence only went as far as expressing instinct, but it definitely had a will.
'Maybe I can disable the core with this Mana Core.'
There was no telling what would happen to my body if I absorbed all that magic, but....
For now, I couldn't think of any other suitable way.
"Everyone, get far away. No, get out of the factory, fast. I'll deal with the core."
"What are you talking about? Are you saying you're going to sacrifice yourself right now? You're not even from our town. So I'll do it instead."
"The two of you don't have the ability to disable the core anyway. I intend to absorb the magic in this core into my body."
At my method, Edith hesitated for a moment, but soon answered again.
"But if you absorb that much into your body, you won't be safe either, Mr. Enon. Your body will definitely overload and...."
"I know my body best. And my body is more special than even I know. So don't worry."
"Edith, let's trust Enon. There's nothing more we can do."
Paul backed my decision and pulled Edith by the arm.
"...All right. Don't you dare push yourself too hard. Please."
"I'll see you both downstairs."
The two gave me a small nod and left the core room.
Left alone in the core room, I slowly took a deep breath.
[The Mana Core, looking at the magic before it, eagerly awaits the fulfillment of its desire.]
Unlike me, tense as I was, my Mana Core was running wild with excitement.
I still didn't really know anything about my body.
And I'd go on learning a lot about my body from here on.
But I wasn't simply afraid.
Whatever power it held, it was my body, wholly mine.
I put both hands on the core.
Hummm—
In that instant, the film of my vision snapped.
And a pain I'd never felt before swept over my whole body.
The pain was so tremendous that I couldn't even let out a groan.
In the middle of it, when my vision cleared, a bluish space spread out all around me.
'The Mana World?'
I'd seen a similar space in the game too.
And that it was called the Mana World, too.
It seemed I'd entered the inside of the factory's core.
This space was a kind of mental world.
My consciousness had taken physical form right now.
'But why?'
It was hard to understand how merely absorbing the core's mana had led me into such a high-dimensional space.
Just then, a pure white sphere was floating in the center of the blue space.
'The core's nucleus.'
Beneath that nucleus, strands, some white like the sphere and some the opposite, black, ran down to the floor.
When I went closer and put my hand on the nucleus, I soon understood what those strands were.
'The ones connected to the dolls are the white lines; the other mechanical soldiers and the factory are the black lines.'
It had been managing the core connections of the dolls and the mechanical soldiers separately, each in a different way.
'If I'd absorbed all of the core's power, the dolls' lives would've ended right along with it.'
If I'd absorbed the core blindly, I'd have killed every doll too and lost the Kin Savior trait as well.
I had no idea why I'd ended up in here.
But what I had to do was set.
Snap.
Without hesitation, I tore the black strands off the nucleus.
***
"Keheok."
[The Mana Core is satisfied with an enormous sense of fullness.]
[The Mana Core is currently in an overcharged state.]
Just as the message said, I felt the area around my heart boiling like mad.
Whether from the pain or from the Mana Core raging violently, my mind had become even clearer.
"Mr. Enon!"
Paul and Edith ran over from far off and helped me up from where I'd collapsed.
If I'd touched the core wrong, the two of them would've been caught in the explosion too, and yet they'd stayed until the very end.
"Let's get out, quick. There's no telling when the building will collapse."
Building and maintaining the Iron Factory had also been that core's job.
It had borrowed the core's power when it was first built, so once the core stopped functioning, the building couldn't stay intact anymore either.
Still, the building wouldn't collapse right away, so we had some time.
As luck would have it, the way down was located on the building's strongest central axis, too.
"...Is he unconscious?"
"Dunno. When we got back, he was out cold, you know?"
"We could just leave him here...."
"Nope, we keep him alive and make him pay for his crimes for generations. Right?"
My gaze went to the unconscious Victor slung over Paul's shoulder.
As if he knew what future awaited him, the bastard's face was pale.
Supported by the two of them, I made my way out of the factory floor by floor.
"Your body's glowing like crazy. Seeing you like this, you're practically a real doll."
"You're really okay, right? What if the power suddenly bursts out of you or...."
"I'm controlling it as best I can, so it won't explode."
If we just got out like this without incident, I'd be able to deal with this overcharged state somehow.
It happened as we were retracing our steps, leaving behind the mechanical soldiers that had collapsed after losing their signal: something bustling came into view.
"Down there... those are the dolls you were talking about, right, Mr. Enon?"
Below the upper-level corridor we'd first passed through, countless dolls were fleeing in a hurry toward the entrance.
Luckily, nothing seemed to have gone wrong with the lines connecting the core to the dolls.
But they too had sensed that something had happened to the core, so they'd instinctively felt the danger and were attempting to escape.
"Let's get out too, quickly."
We moved quickly in the same direction the dolls were escaping.
But as we reached the entrance, it strangely grew quieter around us.
Until a moment ago, we'd been hearing the countless footsteps of the dolls, but at some point those footsteps had all stopped at once.
And that ominous feeling wasn't wrong.
- S-Save me, I want to live.
The overcharged state had my body in terrible shape, but I heard the voice clearly.
The same sensation as when I'd touched the doll's corpse before.
But this time, I heard the voice even without direct contact.
"Everyone keep your heads down and behave. Any bastards who don't, I kill first."
There was only one being here who could plunge hundreds of dolls into terror with a single word and make them beg for their lives.
"That person... wait, don't tell me that one's a doll just like you, Mr. Enon?"
"She's terrifying just to look at. Let's run for it while she's focused on something else."
Standing atop the corpses of the disabled mechanical soldiers, Gloren looked like someone no one could rashly touch.
[The Mana Core hides the trembling of your body.]
Kin Butcher. Gloren's trait was affecting every doll around, me included.
[The Mana Core breaks free of the Kin Butcher's influence.]
I managed to shake off that influence, but I couldn't take my eyes off the other dolls I could see.
[Trait, Kin Savior, is stirring.]
A message came up, as if to say my feelings weren't wrong.
It was as if it were saying I'd regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't save them now.
Of course, even this was surely the trait's influence, though.
'I just can't walk past this.'
I pulled away from the two people who'd been holding me up by both arms.
"Why are you stopping all of a sudden? Come on!"
"You two evacuate first. I still have something left to do."
"If you're thinking of taking that bastard on, forget it. We have no obligation to do that."
"I'm sorry. This is my business too."
I turned my back on the two and faced Gloren.
And before my eyes, a new message had come up.
[You have cleared the quest.]
[Mission- Help the Resistance restore peace to the city.]
[The quest-clear reward is issued.]
[You obtain the trait Mana Sovereign.]