ShangriLa Frontier Chapter 605: Getting Swallowed Whole By the Giant White Whale Part 1
Saiga-0: 「I am really, really, TRULY sorry about that!」
Sanraku: 「Oh, no! No, not at all! Please, don’t worry about it! I don’t mind! I don’t mind at all! I just happened to play throughout the entire night today, so I can understand that not everyone is able to log in at an hour as late as that.」
Saiga-0: 「I wasn’t able to persuade my Sister this time around, but from now on I promise that I will be able to play together with you during the night as well!」
Sanraku: 「Well, as I said before, I really wouldn’t mind if you were unable to do that, Rei-san! But then, on the other hand, I cannot really stop you from doing that, either, so let’s just say that I look forward to our cooperation together whenever you have the time.」
Saiga-0: 「I promise, I am going to catch up to you in no time!」
Sanraku: 「Huh? Say what now?」
Saiga-0: 「I said, I am going to catch up to you! In no time at all!」
Sanraku: 「Ahh, y-yeah, right. Okay, you do that, Rei-san. Godspeed to you!」
* * *
Alright, now that we are officially back inside of the Leviathan, we can get this show on the road any minute now! And even though that declaration of Rei-san’s was still quite terrifying to see and it caused me to tremble in fear for a moment out there, right about now we were standing together with Survivor at the start of the second layer, looking at the path in front of us. Actually, I was still tremble right now, but I have no idea if it was in awe or still out of fear.
「HEY THERE! IT’S BEEN A WHILE SINCE WE HAVE LAST SEEN ONE ANOTHER, HUH? MAN, SCHOOL CAN REALLY TAKE UP A WHOLE BUNCH OF YOUR TIME, DOESN’T IT?」
「Yeah, about that…… It’s been more about being beaten into a pulp by some nasty oversized Music Box rather than being on my merry way to school.」
「HUH? MUSIC PLAYER? WHAT MUSIC PLAYER?」
「That is actually why I am here in the first place: to check this place out in search for clues regarding that music player. So you’d better brace yourself, because I’m not getting out of here until I actually find whatever information that I am looking for at the current moment! And mark my words, before the morning sun manages to rise up tomorrow morning, I will have this entire place conquered! Every single last one bit!」
After I said that, the woman avatar upon which the Brave Fish’s character was designed stood silent for a moment or two, which was especially weird and impressive if you take into account that it’s specialty is a high speed communication with everyone who comes in here. And then, right after that……
「–––––– WELL, WELL, WELL. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT? THAT WAS A PRETTY BOLD STATEMENT, IF I DO SAY SO MYSELF. BUT, IT SOUNDS REALLY INTERESTING. AMUSING, EVEN.」
The avatar possessing the AI character smiled in a warmly and widely. And that smile…… It was not your usual, AI-generated smile. It was a smile in which a whole bunch of different emotions managed to mix together: amusement, shock, surprise, expectation. I have never seen something quite like this before in my career as a gamer.
However, even if that lovely smile was something that seemed to be rather exceptional, it managed to come back to its usual neutral expression in a matter of seconds. And after that, it was business as usual with this AI guide. It simply started to give us the detailed explanation of the area in which we were currently standing. So without paying that almost any attention at all, we started to walk forward just like that. But after a short while I felt that Survivor started to poke my shoulder with his finger in a really annoying way.
「What? What do you want?」
「Say, what was that just now? Did you happened to use some sort of a magic trick, or something like that? It was the first time for me seeing the Brave Fish to react to someone in such blatantly favorable way.」
「Yeah, and here I was wondering if you were going to ask me something utterly idiotic. I was really hoping that it would not be the case here, but lo and behold, I was utterly disappointed once again.」
I strongly believe that even if someone happens to be an idiot, there is no need to just open your mouth right away and confirm that for everyone present to hear. Sometimes knowing to when to keep your mouth shut is the best possible solution.
「Usually in Dating Sims, when you try to forcefully approach a heroine and score some affection points with her, it turns out really badly. It takes time to change the affection levels of the heroine towards oneself, and we are talking about a whole lot of time in here. But you seem to manage to do that without much of an effort, and in such a short time, no less! How did you manage to do that!?」
「Hmm, I don’t know? And honestly, I do not care in the slightest. Maybe she’s like that towards every visitor that she did not see in a long while? Have you considered that possibility? Oh, by the way, are we the first visitors today?」
「UMM, EXCUSE ME? AND NO, I DO NOT THINK THAT THERE ARE OTHER HUMANS IN HERE AT THE CURRENT MOMENT.」
「Great. That is exactly what I wanted to hear here.」
The second shell “Education” was, in a sense, a facility designed specifically for the purpose of obtaining the source of proteins for the members of the crew even in the middle of the cold void of space. And you could clearly see it in every possible corner of this place, from left to right and from the top all the way to the bottom.
It seems that the whole premise of this floor was supposed to be a “meat farm” where you would have a specified number of animals put into, and then you would clone them infinitely in order to always have a fresh supply of meat. But somewhere alongside the road something must have gone seriously wrong with the cloning device, because at some point the cloned cows and pigs started to turn out more and more “monster-like”, until this entire floor ended up infested with monsters. So in a sense, here we have the perfect example of the gene engineering and clone therapy gone horribly wrong, turning out to be not quite the way its creators intended it to be. ……No, they might have looked like monsters or reproduced animals, but truth to be told, they were nothing more but a “meat”. The AI-controlled bones, brains, internal organs and all of that. But it was just that, there was no shred of intelligence or individuality behind them.
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