The first things I saw after opening the iron door were the enormous cylindrical tanks lined up in rows on both sides.
The blue liquid inside them bubbled furiously.
Floating in that blue solution were specimens of mice, bats, enormous cockroaches, and other creatures so grotesquely twisted that it was difficult to tell what they had originally looked like.
They were disgustingly revolting, so I lowered my gaze slightly. Beneath them were smaller containers holding ordinary-sized bats, cockroaches, mice, centipedes, mantises, and other creatures.
[Looks like centipede and mantis mutants will be added to Filth Park soon.]
Anyway, as for where this place was—
【Garbage Research Hall】
That was its name.
I tightened the cloth wrapped around my mouth and trudged farther into the research hall.
“If this…… becomes like this…… Hmm…… then back to this one again…….”
In one corner of the research hall, crouched in front of an enormous alchemy workbench, was the eccentric Scientist I had seen earlier at Junk Crossroads, with the hair at his temples sticking up like horns.
He gulped down liquid that had flowed out of one of the tanks while carefully sticking several syringes into a heart the size of a watermelon.
‘Looks like he’s making some other idiotic thing again.’
I sighed and approached him from behind.
“Hey, want to talk?”
“?”
He removed his round safety goggles, pushed them onto his forehead, and turned around.
A dark bluish tint covered the skin of his face. Bulging veins stood out all over it, along with nearly as many knife scars.
His right pupil was also noticeably paler than the other.
In other words, he was one-eyed.
“Well, well? Who do we have here? Isn’t this Mr. Akkun, the man with one foot in every camp, just like me?”
He studied my face with his one good eye and gave me an unpleasant grin.
Several of his teeth were still missing.
“Long time no see.”
“Forget long time no see. What did you just say? My hearing hasn’t been so good lately.”
“I want to make a deal with you people.”
“Oh my, if the illustrious Mr. Akkun himself wants to make a deal, then naturally we should assist you with all our hearts and souls…… You think I’d say that?”
He spread both arms and legs wide like a flying squirrel, raised the index finger and thumb of each hand, and unmistakably pointed straight between his legs.
“Suck this, you fucking quack~!”
“Hmm.”
As expected, this would not be easy.
In that case, I had no choice.
“Fine. I’ll do it.”
“Huh? Seriously? Brother, you swing that way?”
“Shut up and stay still. I’ll do such an incredible job you’ll never forget it.”
I pulled a wooden grater from my Inventory and wrapped my other hand in coils of red mana.
“W-What the hell are you doing?!”
“Didn’t you ask me to treat you like laundry?”
“When did I ever say that?!”
“Tsk, stay still. I’ll wring you out until you burst, you bastard.”
As I strode toward him, he desperately backed away until he slammed his hand down on a dangling crimson stone in the middle of the workbench.
“EMERGEEEEENCY!”
CLUNK-
Immediately afterward, the ceiling split open to either side, and three humans came tumbling down like ripe fruit.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
They crashed onto the stone floor without any sort of safety mechanism and writhed all over in pain.
“Goddammit, I’m going to break my back! Why the hell did you wake me up?! What happened?!”
“What is it, what is it?! An intruder? Where? Here? Over here? Is it here? Over there? I can’t see! Somebody give me some eye drops!”
“Could everyone please be quiet…… My head has been pounding this whole time…… I said shut up. Please. You’re too loud…….”
Three men had fallen from the ceiling.
Their appearances were every bit as bizarre as the man standing before me.
For starters, all of them had strangely colored skin, with swollen veins bulging from various parts of their bodies.
But that was nothing.
Their true grotesqueness began after that.
One had three arms and a thick tail.
Another had eight legs, each covered in suction cups.
Another had several ears growing all over his body, with bat-like wings attached to his shoulders.
Whenever they had to go outside, they wore things like masks or enormous cloaks to hide their grotesque appearances, but this Garbage Research Hall was their base.
Just as most people wore nothing but underwear at home—or sometimes not even that—it was only natural for them to show their true appearances here.
Their ugliness was simply something I had to endure.
‘It doesn’t even look that disgusting anymore.’
I had visited them a few times before, so perhaps that was only natural.
Anyway, the residents of Mekal Town had a collective name for the mutant Scientists before me.
“The Know-It-All Alliance.”
[The first mutants banished from the Scrap-Metal Tower, and a band of quacks consumed by rage and madness.]
Apparently, they had all once been renowned scholars.
I did not know whether that part was true.
But there was one thing I knew for certain.
[One of the four major powers of Mekal Town.]
If it was these idiots, they should know about Mana Stones.
After all, roughly thirty percent of the Players active in Mekal Town sold every Mana Stone they obtained to these guys.
* * *
“That definitely is our specialty…… What does everyone think?”
After I explained the situation, the scholar with three arms spoke.
CRACK, CRACK.
He loosened his stiff tail with the sound of snapping bones.
“What do you mean, what do we think? Do you seriously have to ask? You want us to go along with what this fucking quack Akkun says?”
The horn-haired scholar I had first encountered snapped furiously and pointed a finger at my face.
I wanted to break that finger, but understanding the direction of the conversation came first.
The three-armed scholar glanced at me before continuing.
“I’m not saying we should help Akkun, you idiot. I’m saying we should help Cain. You all know who he is.”
“Of course we do. He’s that damned Scrap Merchant lordling!”
“You know one thing and miss the other. That damned Scrap Merchant fled the Scrap-Metal Tower half a year ago and tried to kill the Scrap Lord. Have you already forgotten?”
“Of course I remember! But what does that change? It doesn’t change the fact that he killed a lot of people and stood by doing nothing while we were turning into monsters.”
“I agree. Absolutely agree. Think about it, would you? We can’t even meet our beloved families. We can’t write them letters either, because we’re terrified they might come looking for us in this garbage dump. Do you have any idea how miserable this life is?!”
The scholar with octopus legs supported the horned man.
“We decided to consider ourselves dead from the day we were expelled from that tower. At the center of that tragedy were the Scrap Lord and the Scrap Merchants. And now you want us to help a Scrap Merchant? There should be a limit to insanity.”
The conversation was moving in the exact opposite direction from what I wanted.
The conflict between the Know-It-All Alliance and the Scrap Merchants ran far deeper than I had expected.
At that moment, the many-eared scholar stroked his beard.
The ear growing on the back of his hand flapped as he did.
“That is precisely why I’m saying we should help Cain. We ought to give that Scrap Lord bastard a good beating.”
The horned man clicked his tongue, while the octopus-legged one shook his head from side to side again and again.
“I won’t do it. I can’t. Forget it.”
“I can’t do it either. Never, never, never, absolutely never.”
“Then are you planning to keep living miserably like this?”
“When the hell have we ever lived miserably?! Can’t you see this? Can’t you see what we’re preparing? Can you seriously not see it?!”
TINK! TINK! TINK!
The octopus-legged scholar stretched out all eight legs and struck the surrounding tanks.
The mutants submerged inside twitched and convulsed.
“Why do you think we’re doing all this?! We’re researching this because we want to kill that fucking Scrap Lord!”
“Exactly! And now you want us to accept someone else’s help? What would that make everything we’ve worked for until now?! What about all the time we’ve spent?!”
“Sorry to interrupt, but are you seriously saying you refuse to help just because your feelings are hurt?”
When I cut in, the octopus-legged man and the horned man both turned toward me.
Their gazes looked as though they wanted to stab me to death on the spot.
“And what if we are?”
“Then forget it. Why would I work with idiots who are so trapped in the past that they can’t move forward?”
I had expected a stronger reaction when I insulted the intellect they took such pride in, but their response was weaker than anticipated.
So I continued provoking them.
“I heard you used to be famous scholars. Guess those were just rumors. Cain is smarter than you.”
“You think we’re doing this because of something as petty as our ‘feelings’?”
“Then why?”
“Let’s say we help that fugitive and turn him into a perfect mutant. How do you think the Scrap Lord will react?”
The horned man’s heated tone suddenly cooled.
“He’ll mobilize every Scrap Merchant he has, tear our base apart, and try to kill us, won’t he? Want another reason? Cain started a rebellion half a year ago. Under the System’s control, he started the exact same rebellion again three months ago. And he is still alive. What do you think that means? We cannot rule out the possibility that Cain is one of the Scrap Lord’s agents. And most importantly…….”
“Let’s not talk about that.”
The many-eared scholar cut the horned man off.
The horned man clicked his tongue.
“Tsk.”
“Anyway…… listen carefully, you quack. Even without Cain, we can create a perfect mutant. That day is almost here. Before long, we’ll be able to hit the Scrap Lord where it hurts. And now you want us to introduce a variable called Cain? Why should we take that kind of risk?”
“You know the mutants you created are wandering around Filth Park, right?”
The horned man twisted his lips.
“I just came back from dealing with those mutants. They were pathetic.”
“……Those are failures.”
“More like degraded versions than failures.”
TINK. TINK.
I tapped the tank containing a mutant.
“How different can these possibly be from the mutants in Filth Park? At best, they’ll be a little stronger, absorb mana a little better, and have slightly thicker skin. Isn’t that about it?”
Not only the horned man, but the other three scholars’ expressions gradually stiffened.
“You aren’t going to see any spectacular changes from here on either. You, this place, and the mutants inside these tanks are already trapped within the System’s ‘setting.’ You know that yourselves, don’t you?”
“Are you fucking blind? We added new mutants.”
“Because the System allowed you to go that far. Let me ask the opposite question. Can you make any progress beyond that? And even if you can, do you seriously think you’ll be allowed to release that monstrosity into a place crawling with Players?”
They could not.
Not until the Administration and the System permitted it.
Amuse was a world that valued Player convenience more highly than NPC accomplishments.
“What good is increasing the number of species going to do?”
“Stop running your mouth and get to the point.”
“You can’t succeed with these.”
BANG!
The horned man grabbed both of my shoulders and slammed me into one of the tanks.
DRIP, DRIP.
Thick blue solution leaked through the cracks in the tank and seeped into my clothes, especially around the shoulders.
“Do not look down on us. You have no idea what this research is worth…….”
“You look down on me too, don’t you? You do not know the value of my potions at all.”
“That’s because your potions were fucking useless!”
“They work perfectly well on humans. Of course, perhaps not on people who have ‘mutated’ like you.”
A human who had accepted a Mana Stone.
A mutant.
Another name for such a being was a Demonized Human.
Such beings came to think more like monsters than humans.
It was not something that could be controlled.
It was instinct……
No.
It was closer to their very nature.
In other words, it could not be helped that the Know-It-All Alliance saw me as a quack, just as I saw them as quacks.
Even while breathing the same air in the same place, we lived in different worlds.
That had unquestionably been true.
‘Until I met Cain.’
At least, it had been true until then.
By meeting that stupid bastard, I had discovered the one path capable of connecting my world with that of the Know-It-All Alliance.
“Do you not want to bring down the Scrap Lord? Cain wants the exact same thing. There is no harm in working together.”
I grabbed the hands pressing down on my shoulders and slowly pulled them away.
It was not because I had overpowered him.
The horned man had loosened his grip.
“……And if we accept Cain and end up getting wiped out, how exactly do you intend to take responsibility? Will you apologize with your life?”
“Why would I take responsibility? If that happens, just betray Cain.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I told you Cain has a lot of Mana Stones. From a rough count, it looked like more than a hundred. You can just take them all.”
“……He still has Mana Stones left?”
“Yeah.”
“This is the first I’m hearing about that.”
“Oh, really? Sorry. Cain had quite a lot of Mana Stones stored away.”
“Why are you only saying that now?”
“I thought I already told you. My mistake.”
[Living behind a mask every day has certainly made you shameless.]
Grid praised me for once.
‘You’re the one who kept telling me to do this.’
They were always saying that a good card should be held back until the proper moment.
So I tried exactly that.
And it certainly worked.
By deliberately hiding the Mana Stones and sounding them out first, I had been able to see the true faces of the Know-It-All Alliance in exhaustive detail.
Still, I had not completely seized control yet.
Before they could arbitrarily establish the framework of the deal, I hurriedly continued.
“If Cain looks like he’s going to betray you, swallow up all those Mana Stones. Use them to make mutants that are stronger, tougher, bigger, and faster than what you have now. Then you might genuinely be able to bring down the Scrap-Metal Tower without Cain’s help.”
“……Then, hold on. Give us some time to think—”
“—was what I considered for a moment, but on second thought, I should probably forget the whole thing. Great scholars who even call Mekal Town’s finest Apothecary a quack would never allow themselves to be tempted by something as trivial as Mana Stones.”
The horned man’s face froze.
I could no longer sense anger from him.
“Oh, right. Come to think of it, you people aren’t the ‘only’ Mana Stone experts, are you?”
I shoved aside the dazed horned man and swept a finger through the air.
A red line formed along the path of my fingertip.
I grabbed that red line and waved it from side to side, and the flow of the air seemed to change ever so slightly.
In reality, nothing had changed at all.
But that was how it felt to me.
It was a sensation bordering on certainty.
“The Red Wire guys handled Mana Stones too, didn’t they?”
Red Wire.
Architects who had fallen into mutation.
They were likewise one of Mekal Town’s four major powers, as well as bitter enemies of the Know-It-All Alliance.
They also purchased Mana Stones from Players.
They used them to create magic-engineering equipment.
“Well then, this quack will be on his way~ Keep working hard on your stagnant research until the day the Red Wire bastards take control of the Scrap-Metal Tower.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait just a moment?”
“Why are you in such a hurry? Let’s at least have a cup of tea.”
Octopus-like legs and a thick tail wrapped around my ankle and waist.
“Sir, why don’t we discuss this a little more?”
The many-eared scholar’s wing spread out and blocked my path.
“……You should have mentioned the Mana Stones first.”
The horned man held my arm with his head lowered.
Was he apologizing?
Was he hiding his pathetic expression?
Or perhaps both?
Whatever the reason, it was a good reaction for me.
But after the way they were suddenly acting friendly—
“What are you doing? Our conversation is over.”
I had already achieved my objective.
I had learned what the Know-It-All Alliance thought of Cain, and I had uncovered their plans.
I had confirmed that opinions within the Alliance were divided.
And through that, I had also learned which members might be willing to help Cain and me.
That alone was more than enough of a harvest.
I flicked the safety goggles resting on the horned man’s forehead with one finger.
“Sorry for troubling you. The Main Quest will be starting soon, so feel free to watch. There won’t be a place for you in it.”
I squeezed myself into the wide-open sewer pipe.
Perhaps because I had drawn such a clear line with my words, they neither grabbed me nor followed me into the pipe.
And so I managed to leave the Garbage Research Hall without incident.
‘Should I head back for now?’
Leaving Cain alone made me uneasy.
I had a feeling he was doing something stupid while I was gone.
Of course, I had no intention of continuing to look after him like a babysitter.
The Know-It-All Alliance would probably contact me soon enough.
I only needed to keep an eye on Cain until then.
With that, I began retracing the route I had come through.
At that moment—
“……?”
Inside the dark, cramped sewer pipe.
CLANK, CLANK, CLANK—
Someone was approaching.
No.
CLACK, CLACK, CLACK, CLACK, CLACK, CLACK—
There was more than one.