“Whoooo——”
The bone-chilling wind kept slapping at Saito’s cheeks, and the scenery streaking past in front of his eyes drew an excited yell out of him.
With one slick drifting brake-stop, Saito flicked his hair and the tiny ice crystals off his face, and gave one extremely satisfied shout.
“Sweeeet!”
The person behind him, however, in all likelihood did not feel the same way.
“I…
I’m not ‘sweet’…
ugh——”
The Administrator clambered down off the snowmobile in a wobbly, swaying line, and dropped to her knees on the ground with a thump.
Could somebody please explain to her how on earth Saito had managed to make a snowmobile that didn’t even hit eighty kilometers an hour feel like a rocket.
If you still can’t quite grasp just how insane Saito’s driving had been just now, you can go look up a little game called Ski Safari.
“You ain’t deceased, right?”
Seeing the Administrator in such a sorry state, Saito hurriedly scooted over and helped her back up off the ground.
“Of course I’m fine — it’s just a snowmobile.”
The Administrator slapped Saito’s hand away with an air of forced composure — only, the way she was swaying back and forth made her look exactly like some slow-witted little penguin.
How cuuute~
It took her quite a long while before the Administrator finally got some of her wits back.
“From the look of it right now, the snowmobile should be just fine — but I do suggest you try to be a touch gentler with your driving from here on out.”
These snowmobiles were industrial vehicles produced by an Ursus military factory.
The model was already plenty old, but the performance and reliability really were nothing to scoff at.
Only, no matter how sturdy a thing was, it just couldn’t hold up against the kind of violent driving Saito had been dishing out — and if she didn’t properly drum the point into him, the Administrator was probably going to be looking at this poor thing in the recycling bin before too long.
“No problem.”
Saito gave a nod.
He’d just been a ‘teeny tiny bit’ overexcited a moment ago; in everyday matters, he was actually plenty mature and steady.
Though the Administrator was distinctly skeptical of Saito’s guarantee, she didn’t bother saying anything more about it.
After some more time had passed, once she’d raised the household tech level another notch or two and re-established contact with the Dijiang, they’d be able to fabricate all-terrain vehicles with much better performance.
Here’s hoping this snowmobile could hold out till then. Find the original chapter at g.com.
Looking at that snowmobile — which by all rights should still have had two intact bumpers, front and back — the Administrator prayed sincerely from the bottom of her heart.
…
…
The roar of an Originium engine went tearing across the Frozen Plains.
Several more days had passed since the Administrator had finished repairing the snowmobile.
In that span of time, aside from the fixed daily study sessions, Saito had been following the exploration plan the Administrator had laid down, and was working his way through the surrounding environment in a neat and orderly fashion.
Because most of the mining site had been wiped out by that sudden incident, Saito and company hadn’t managed to find anything like a map — any kind of means of pinpointing where they actually were.
And as the facts had proven, this stretch of Frozen Plains was far vaster than he had imagined, and the position they were stuck in was even more remote than the Administrator had anticipated.
“Forget about not catching even the shadow of one of those legendary mobile cities — there isn’t so much as a single village anywhere around here?”
Saito parked the snowmobile atop the crest of a hill and used the makeshift telescope the Administrator had cobbled together by hand to survey the surroundings.
One had to remember that, while the No.
7 Mining Site did have a patch of artificially cultivated farmland, the amount of food that little plot could produce was obviously nowhere near enough to sustain the entire population of the mining site.
By rights, they had to have had some other source of food.
Saito looked at the already-explored region displayed on the System Map.
He’d already wandered the whole fifty-kilometer radius around the mining site, and basically, apart from those two mining sites, he hadn’t turned up anything useful at all.
Thankfully, in recognition of Saito’s diligent map-exploring efforts, the system had still awarded him a bit of Industry Points, which had let him go ahead and unlock the mining machine the Administrator needed.
Put that way, it couldn’t really be called a completely fruitless haul, either.
“It’s about that time — I should be heading back today, too.”
Saito made one more sweep of the surroundings with the telescope, still without anything to show for it.
The sky was already gradually darkening — he had to hurry back home to prepare some food for the ‘penguin’ he was keeping there.
Who could possibly have guessed that that ‘omnipotent’ young lady had, after all, taken a tumble at the singular art of cooking.
You couldn’t really say that what the Administrator made was outright awful — only that, if it was up to Saito to pick, he had suddenly started to feel that Refined Originium didn’t actually seem all that hard to gnaw on by comparison.
Of course, there was another extremely important reason, which was that the girl would, very easily, get so wrapped up in being busy that she completely forgot to eat — and if Saito didn’t go and remind her, that young lady was perfectly capable of starving herself flat-out unconscious.
This only reinforced Saito’s original conviction even further: if he had simply left the Administrator on her own out on the icy plains, she most likely would not have lived to see the next day’s sunrise.
After tidying things up a bit, Saito mounted the snowmobile, ready to head back home.
Just as he was about to fire up the engine, from a stretch of woods not far off, there suddenly came a roar.
That roar struck the ear like a thunderclap, shaking the piled-up snow loose from the trees around it.
Even from Saito’s vantage point, he could feel the ground faintly trembling.
“That’s…
the roar of a Rend Beast?”
Saito furrowed his brow.
The Rend Beast was a kind of powerful wild creature found upon the icy plains, similar to the wild brown bears of his pre-crossover world, only quite a bit more savage than a bear.
At the very least, before Saito had learned Originium Arts, he wouldn’t have dared casually go provoking one of these big fellows.
But now — now it was probably worth heading over to take a look.
‘That Rend Beast’s roar very obviously sounds a bit off — irritable to an absurd degree.’
Saito reckoned the Rend Beast had most likely gotten into it with something.
With it now in an enraged state, if he hurried over right now, he might just be in time to ‘break up the brawl.’
After all, Rend Beast hide and flesh were both rare and excellent stuff as far as they were concerned — and whatever kind of creature was capable of going toe-to-toe with a Rend Beast probably wasn’t going to be any pushover either.
No sooner said than done — Saito, in his own right, was a fellow of extremely strong action-capability.
The spot where the roar had rung out wasn’t all that far from here.
Just to be safe, Saito hid the snowmobile in a clump of bushes; for himself, in his right hand he gripped a heavy crowbar of indeterminate material, while in the palm of his left he kept a few dark-orange pieces of Originium concealed.
Saito followed the trail of the sound the whole way, and very quickly arrived at the place that had just kicked up the commotion.
And the instant he laid eyes on that scene of devastation, Saito’s pupils contracted violently.
Several thick, sturdy trees had been ripped clean in half through the middle by the Rend Beast’s claws, crimson-red blood was splattered everywhere across the ground, and a faint drifting mist proved that the owner of that blood didn’t seem to have gotten very far.
But none of this was the reason he was so shocked.
What truly stunned Saito was that, in that clearing, he saw several broken-off arrow shafts, along with a ‘person’ lying collapsed in the snow like a ragdoll.
A great spread of bloodstain had dyed the snow around him crimson, and a vicious claw-mark ran straight across his entire abdomen.
Even someone with zero medical knowledge whatsoever would, in that moment, have been able to conclude with confidence that this person was very likely already dead.
Saito looked around.
The maddened Rend Beast seemed no longer to be in the area — only then did he slowly walk out into the open and approach the body.
____
👻🔥P- Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Arknights Endfield: Picked Up a Gugugaga
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