“Administrator — in your eyes, what kind of existence are the Infected?”
“Brothers and sisters who live alongside us on this very land, of course.”
The Administrator’s answer came firm and decisive, without a single shred of hesitation.
Even through that pitch-black mask of hers, Saito could see the expression she was wearing right now — those beautiful eyes of hers had to be written all over, in that moment, with the word ‘sincere.’
The answer hadn’t been outside Saito’s expectations — and maybe it was precisely because of that that this girl who had so suddenly shown up had been able to walk into his heart this quickly.
The gentle glow of the firelight danced across his face.
Saito drew his gaze back and fixed it on the stove in front of him — only, the slight curve at the corners of his mouth wasn’t something he was going to be able to smooth out anytime soon.
“Oh, right — what made you suddenly think to come out and meet me today, anyway?”
As he ladled out a bowl of richly-aromatic meat broth for the Administrator, Saito’s face was written all over with curiosity.
Oh, right — she’d very nearly forgotten about this whole thing.
The Administrator gave herself a smack on the forehead.
Ever since losing her memory, she’d been feeling like even her reflexes had gotten a bit slower.
“Heheh — I happen to have a piece of absolutely huge good news.”
The girl accepted the soup bowl Saito handed her, her upper body swaying gently back and forth from side to side.
When the Administrator was in a good mood, she’d unconsciously make this exact little motion — and from Saito’s observation, the happier she was, the bigger the sway tended to be.
The arc her body was tracing right at this moment had already reached the second-highest level he’d seen in the entire time the two of them had been living together.
The happiest he’d ever seen her had been the day Saito had come clean with her — the moment he’d said those four words: “I believe you.”
“So what exactly is this good news, then?”
For something to have the Administrator this delighted, Saito’s ears were already standing at full attention — his curiosity, clearly, was now thoroughly up.
The Administrator didn’t answer right away.
Having gone nearly a full day without food, she picked up the spoon beside her, scooped up a spoonful of broth, brought it to her lips and blew on it, and only once the rising steam had been mostly carried off did she finally bring it into her mouth.
Thanks to a few bottles of seasoning they’d found over in the mining site’s kitchen, this bowl of broth had at last started to taste like something — salty and savory, with the faint pungent kick of pepper.
It drew a thoroughly satisfied smile out of the Administrator, who had been gnawing on dried meat and dried fish for the better part of a month now.
And besides — now that they knew where Vannini’s village was, they wouldn’t have to keep enduring that sort of misery going forward.
Once the Administrator had eaten and drunk her fill, she finally turned her head and looked over at Saito, who was sitting beside her, staring at her wide-eyed and expectant.
Seeing the slightly awkward, impatient — yet helplessly-forced-to-wait-her-out — expression on his face, the Administrator put on a thoroughly self-satisfied little air.
Everything she’d just done had very obviously been her way of ‘getting back’ at Saito for coming home so late and leaving her shivering in the snow for so long.
“Okay, can you spill it now?”
The Administrator, for her part, didn’t bother dragging it out any further either.
She wiped the broth-stains from the corners of her mouth, then came right to the point.
“Why don’t you go take another look at the Industry Report?”
The Industry Report?
Brimming with confusion, Saito pulled up the system interface, found the Industry Report column under the Protocol Core’s location, and the instant he laid eyes on the topmost report — the one representing Originium Ore — he let out a startled cry on the spot.
“How — how much?!!”
“Three hundred and twenty-five units — per hour???”
Saito stared, dumbstruck, at the current Originium Ore output figure on the light-screen.
He rubbed his eyes, double- and triple-checking that he wasn’t hallucinating — but no matter how many times he ran through it, the light-screen still showed it in glaring, unmistakable letters.
[Originium Ore Production: 325/h]
One had to remember — back at that little mining site, the two of them, relying on the half-built refining line the Administrator had hand-cobbled together, had worked in shifts around the clock for over a week and barely managed to scrape together a measly 700 units of Refined Originium.
And it hadn’t just been because the efficiency of that half-line was abysmal — the sheer shortage of Originium Ore had also been a huge factor dragging their pace down.
Just yesterday, when Saito had looked at the production report, Originium Ore output had only barely scraped a thousand units per day — and now, in the space of a single day, the output had jumped a whole eightfold.
With this much Originium Ore — combined with the refining equipment in the Integrated Industries System, which utterly dwarfed that puny half-line of theirs — Saito didn’t even dare imagine how much Refined Originium they were going to be cranking out from this point onward.
“Whose mining site did you go rob, exactly?”
Saito’s head whipped around toward the Administrator beside him, the utterly dumbfounded look on his face plain to see.
Or — was it that the Administrator’s Originium Arts had already reached the point where she could conjure things out of thin air, hand-crafting Originium from nothing?
The Administrator stood with both hands planted on her hips, the look on her face the very picture of smug triumph.
“That one’s a long story — tomorrow, I’ll take you down into the mine tunnel and you’ll see for yourself.”
“Sure.”
…
…
The next morning, Saito and the Administrator went together deep into the mine tunnel.
“Look over there.”
The Administrator stretched out a finger and pointed, and Saito saw a narrow shaft strewn with broken rocks.
If his memory served him right, this place definitely hadn’t had a passage here before.
And the patch of pitch-black still showing on the System Map only further confirmed the thought.
“These past few days, I’ve been spending time flipping through every last one of the mining site’s engineering records — and that includes the No.
7 Mining Site’s planned future excavation routes. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
This area happened to be among them.”
The Administrator took the lead and walked on in.
Before they’d gone in very deep at all, Saito had already heard the low humming buzz of Electric-Drive Mining Machines in operation.
Soon enough, he arrived at the spot where the machines had been deployed — and what appeared before his eyes was, just as expected, a brand-new vein of Originium.
“I’ve directed most of the remaining power supply into deploying additional Electric-Drive Mining Machines — that’s why you’re seeing that absolutely absurd Originium Ore production rate.”
The Administrator glanced down at her own Protocol Synchronizer, double-checking the Originium Ore reserves in storage.
Once the reserves hit a certain threshold, she’d shut down a portion of the Electric-Drive Mining Machines first and swap them out for other production equipment.
At the current pace, give it about another week or so and they’d be there.
“But how on earth did you even get out here in the first place?”
Saito still couldn’t quite wrap his head around it.
This spot was extremely far from the original mine shafts, and the Administrator hadn’t deployed any large-scale equipment — how on earth had she dug all the way out here in the span of a single day?
The Administrator, for her part, looked over at Saito with a slightly complicated expression.
Was she really supposed to say that Saito himself had given her the inspiration — that she’d used Originium Arts to deliberately trigger the activation of the Originium components inside the surrounding minerals, set them off into small-scale disintegration and induced collapses, and eventually formed the tunnel in front of them this way?
“I suppose you could say it’s thanks to you…”
Even though, deep down, she very much did not want to legitimize this kind of ‘unorthodox heretical method,’ the Administrator ultimately couldn’t bring herself to make a choice that went against her conscience.
With a gloomy expression, she explained the specific means she’d used to pull it off — and gave Saito her acknowledgment.
Looking at the increasingly impossible-to-suppress excitement on Saito’s face beside her, the Administrator was getting more and more of a sense that she might have just committed some sort of massive blunder.
Only — at this point, it seemed there wasn’t going to be any chance left to walk it back.
“Saito…”
“Hm?
What is it?”
“If anyone ever asks who taught you your Originium Arts in the future — please, for the love of all that is good, do not give them my name!”
“?”
____
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