A few minutes later, Saito and the black-haired girl were sitting face-to-face on one side of the campfire.
“Just what, exactly, are you?”
The girl’s words came across as slightly lacking in manners, but the tone in which they were delivered was utterly sincere.
At this moment, she was still relying on the ore beside her to sustain her Originium Arts.
As difficult as it was to believe, the facts had proven it — this creature in front of her, whose outward features resembled those of an adult male Aegir, was the very Protocol Originium she had lost.
Or rather — the Protocol Originium was, at the very least, inside his body.
“My name is Saito, age 19, currently residing in another mine not far next door, unmarried.
Every day, I have to scavenge for trash until 8 PM before I can go home.
I don’t smoke; the booze I find is too high-proof for me to choke down.
I sleep whenever it feels right at night, get up whenever it feels right in the morning.
Before bed I always suck on a couple of stone-bugs, then drill twenty minutes of freestyle combat, and I’m out cold the instant I hit the bed.
One straight sleep till dawn — I absolutely refuse to let fatigue or stress carry over into the next day.
Doctors all say I’m perfectly normal.”
“And by the way — the doctor is me.”
Saito proudly thumped his own chest, putting his physical strength and mental fortitude on full display.
By this point, his urge to vent had practically overflowed — God only knew how he’d gotten through these past two months.
“…”
Faced with Saito’s machine-gun spray of words, the sheer torrent of information caused the black-haired girl’s only-just-rebooted brain to seize up a little.
At this point Saito caught on as well — he seemed to have gotten just a touch too eager.
“Sorry about that — it really has been way, way too long since I last laid eyes on another living human, so I’m a little…
overexcited.
I didn’t scare you, did I?”
“…No.”
A barefaced lie!
She had, in fact, just been thoroughly startled.
But!
That wasn’t important.
What was important was the question she had just asked: exactly what was this person in front of her, and was there still any chance of getting her Protocol Originium back?
By all appearances at the moment, he didn’t seem to bear her any ill intent — he just possibly had a few screws loose in his head.
The girl had apparently entirely forgotten that she herself currently also qualified as one of the screws-loose-in-the-head crowd.
“Saito, do you happen to know where this place is?”
Seeing the girl in front of him seemingly lower her guard bit by bit, the expression on Saito’s face relaxed quite considerably as well.
He’d genuinely been a little worried that this fellow human he’d finally managed to find might end up scared off by him.
Although this whole land was just as foreign to him too.
Only through the exploration he’d done over these past few days had he managed to scrape together some highly fragmented understanding of this world.
“This place ought to be the northeastern part of the Ursus Empire’s Frozen Plains.
As for the precise location, I have no idea — I haven’t come across anything resembling a map yet.”
Ursus Empire…
Just as the girl had thought — sure enough, this was Terra.
Another world beyond Talos II, and likewise the other homeland of theirs.
“What about the current time?”
“No idea.”
“Where is Rhodes Island at present?”
“What island?”
…
…
After more than ten minutes of one-sided questioning, the girl had confirmed one fact: this person in front of her probably knew even less about this world than she did, an amnesiac herself.
He was even missing huge chunks of basic common knowledge about this world.
‘You’ve had it rough too, huh.’
After hearing about his circumstances, the girl felt, for a brief moment, a faint pang of fellow-sufferer sympathy welling up in her chest.
But that sentiment was quickly shoved to the back of her mind — the most important thing for her right now was still figuring out a way to get the Protocol Originium back.
She’d just tried it a moment ago: the instant she came into physical contact with Saito, her casting ability had recovered a substantial chunk in an instant.
She could now confirm one hundred percent that the Protocol Originium was inside his body.
And so she opened her mouth and asked:
“Do you know what Originium is?”
Saito went still for a moment, then said almost reflexively:
“You mean…
like, gacha-pull currency?”
“?”
“Ahem.
Ahem.”
Looking at that pitch-black mask in front of him — although he had no idea by what mechanism — Saito had absolutely read the two characters for ‘confusion’ off her face.
He cleared his throat lightly a couple of times, then fished a finger-sized orange-yellow stone out of his coat pocket.
“Are you talking about this?”
“That’s the one.”
The girl nodded slowly.
This unremarkable little stone was Originium — the lifeline this world depended on to survive, the cornerstone of civilization’s development, and on top of that, it bore an even more important mission besides.
Only — that latter part she still hadn’t yet recovered from memory.
That said, in the understanding of the overwhelming majority of Terrans, Originium was nothing more than an exceptionally efficient energy-bearing mineral, and the medium through which Originium Arts were unleashed.
And of course — also the prime culprit responsible for Oripathy.
The particular piece in Saito’s hand was Originium that had been extracted and refined — purer than the Originium ore she’d just been using.
But over here with Saito, Originium clearly had a few rather unconventional ‘uses.’
He cradled the few crystal-clear stones in his palms as if they were precious treasures, and said in a tone full of feeling:
“If it weren’t for these stones, I’d probably have died ages ago.”
There it was — his Originium Arts were perhaps the key.
As long as she could gain intel on his Originium Arts, she might just be able to find…
a way…
to retrieve…
the Protocol Originium…???
Just as the girl was contemplating her next move, Saito — sitting across from her — abruptly performed an action that would have been enough to wring a piercing shriek out of every single native of Terra.
Right there in front of her, sitting across the campfire, Saito had just suddenly tossed that black crystal — the one giving off an amber glow — straight into his mouth, immediately followed by a crisp series of crunch-crunch sounds.
And, sure enough — she did exactly that.
“Y-y-y-you you you — what did you just do?!!!!”
The black-haired girl lunged forward, gripped Saito by both shoulders, and shook him back and forth, attempting to use her Originium Arts to make this guy hack up the piece of Originium he’d just swallowed.
But the very instant she activated her Originium Arts, she abruptly realized — that piece of Originium, the moment it had entered Saito’s body, had been instantly converted into Originium Energy and absorbed into his physical frame.
“This…
how is this even possible…”
The reason Oripathy was treated as a flood-and-fierce-beast-tier menace that every person on the planet steered clear of came down to one fundamental fact: once infected with the affliction, Originium would gradually fuse with the body’s cellular tissue.
The Originium would become a part of your body — from then on it could only be suppressed, never eradicated.
And once it reached a certain threshold, with one pop — you’d explode.
But in Saito’s case, she couldn’t detect a single sign of Originium fusing with cellular tissue.
The pieces of Originium he’d swallowed down into his stomach were just like a cup of water poured into a pond — blending straight into his body, becoming the energy that drove this physical frame of his.
In other words — this fellow named Saito was, at his essence, no different from one big-sized piece of Originium.
‘Just what, exactly, are you?’
The girl could feel a certain thing known as her worldview gradually collapsing.
The person in front of her was absolutely not any known race on Terra.
If she had to put it into words, he sounded more like the product of some kind of experiment…?
Wait!
Combined with his unfamiliarity with this world, and his situation being so similar to her own…
A bold conjecture suddenly took shape in the girl’s mind.