Rescue Fantasy (24)
"How did you manage to connect the comms?"
I asked Licorice, who wore an active camouflage cloak. She would have immediately realized that a jamming device had been installed. Losing communications would make that the number one probable cause.
"Did you forget I modified your communicator last time? I planted an amplification chip in there just for situations like this."
Licorice said that while she couldn't completely avoid the effects of the jamming device, she configured it so that the closer the distance, the more it could break through the interference.
"How did you know we were here?"
"Lee Hyun-woo's bracelet."
"My bracelet?"
"I planted a tracking chip in there. I came by following that."
"......"
When did she even do that? Unlike the communicator, I'd never handed over my bracelet. When I looked at Licorice with a 'surely not' expression, she just shrugged, saying it had been quite a while.
"Don't get any weird ideas. I tend to keep track of where my clients are. It only transmits your location, and there are no other surveillance functions."
Celestia glanced at my bracelet.
"Hyun-woo, what kind of life have you been living?"
"I have no idea, either."
I really had nothing to say. I guess I'd been living under the gaze of Big Brother all along.
Anyway, I'd never even left Titan until now, and the residential area was covered by CCTV so there weren't any blind spots for security reasons, so I hadn't really minded. It was just a little bewildering.
「( ･o˙ )」
I deliberately ignored Carry making a surprised face next to me and quickly pulled myself together to continue questioning.
"Setting that aside, how did you get in here? And from where?"
"From above."
Licorice pointed at the ceiling. There was a neatly punched hole high above. You needed to really focus to see it.
"When your signal suddenly cut off right after you entered the Heaven central sector, I rushed over. The shuttle repairs just finished too, so the timing worked out."
"That was dangerous, though."
"I had no choice, even if it was risky. You have to take risks to get anything."
Licorice fluttered the edge of her cloak, saying the active camouflage cloak saved her. It was, indeed, the perfect suit for infiltration.
'Licorice didn't go through the Nexus.'
She said she came straight to the central hydroponics hub by tracking the signal, without stopping by the medical sector. Which meant she had no knowledge of that bizarre presence in the Nexus.
Just moments ago, I'd assumed that presence was Whiteout, but my judgment had shifted. The presence I'd felt, even indirectly, was incomparable in intensity to Whiteout.
I'd thought Whiteout and that being were the same only because Whiteout made me believe so.
"What was it I said while on the way here?"
"You told us to prepare defenses in case the pureblood supremacists attacked the town. That's why I left behind the Alpha series. We can restock them on-site anyway."
That was true.
"How is Kyle doing?"
"How do you think? He's on the edge of collapse from overwork. Like I said, I didn't come here for nothing. There aren't many who can move right now besides me. Especially not anyone skilled enough to move around this kind of place."
That was also undeniable. It had been true even before I left town. About twelve hours had passed, but I doubted much had changed.
I sniffed. There was a faint, unfamiliar scent clinging to her. It smelled a bit different from what I'd picked up from the pureblood supremacists.
"...... You smell. There's a scent on you."
"Scent? Oh, maybe it's because of the decontamination procedure? Some ghouls were passing nearby, so I hid under the cloak and, suddenly, they sprayed sterilizing gas. Ugh, look at this. I shook myself off as best as I could, but it was a powdered type, so I still reek."
Licorice frowned and brushed off her shoulder with her hand. White dust fell off. Now that I looked closer, even the ends of her hair had white powder on them.
'But it's not a disinfectant scent.'
It was closer to the smell of ash.
I kept questioning her, and every answer was the truth. There wasn't a single lie.
Yet, what was this sense of discomfort I kept feeling? Licorice seemed to notice my unease and narrowed her eyes, her lips jutting out a bit.
"What's with you? Why do I feel like you keep doubting me?"
"... It's not suspicion—"
"It is suspicion. Is it so strange for me to be here?"
"......"
"You think coming here was easy? Just deciding to come here was already tough."
Licorice made a rough face, but underneath it, I saw how hurt she was. It was the kind of emotion only someone close to her—like me—could recognize.
I immediately felt I was in the wrong. Her next words made me feel even more sorry.
"Normally, I'd be stuck in town just like you say. You never know when the pureblood supremacists will attack. But just waiting for you was eating away at me."
Licorice mumbled that she had come here to help me. Celestia and Carry looked unsettled by the sudden heavy atmosphere.
Eventually, I apologized. The feelings she expressed weren't fake; a monster copying her couldn't have recreated that.
"... Sorry for constantly doubting you."
I explained that I'd had a hard time in the Heaven central sector, meeting a special variant that could manipulate minds.
When I told of meeting and fighting a bud called Whiteout, Licorice nodded, understanding.
As I was about to apologize again, she stepped closer, took my hand, and drew it to her cheek.
"Look at me, Lee Hyun-woo. I'm human. Do I look like a monster to you?"
Everything I saw, touched, and felt was vivid and real. Her ruby-like eyes reflected me. I really had been overreacting, so I had nothing left to say—just shook my head weakly.
Licorice seemed satisfied with just my answer, a smile curving her lips.
"I guess I'm not cut out for swearing, but want me to curse out the pureblood supremacists anyway? 'Those lunatic cultists! Sons of bitches! All the hell I'm going through is because of them!'"
She claimed swearing didn't suit her, but her angry tone and sharp pronunciation were perfect. I told her that was enough, grabbing her arm. Licorice stopped as if she'd been waiting for me to say so.
"So, will you tell me what happened now? Oh, and we're heading to the control room, right? I'm guessing you plan to shut down the east tower's water lines to get rid of the fog."
"Yes. The fog is making it hard to get our bearings. We can figure out the layout, but the supply containers don't show up on the map, so it's tedious but we have to go."
When Celestia agreed, Licorice fell into thought for a moment, then spun around after glancing at her surroundings—claiming she knew a shortcut to the control room.
She moved with such ease; it was as if she knew every detail of the central hub's structure. We turned sharply around the corner with her. A long trail of red handprints marked the wall.
At least the lights worked. If they'd been flickering, the place would have been much creepier. Not that it wasn't already, but still.
"Now, tell me. What did you go through?"
"When I came here—..."
I recounted what had happened in sequence, just conveying the main flow. We lacked the time and right atmosphere for detail.
The bizarre entity in the Nexus, the clone cultivation room in the medical sector;
Whiteout's appearance and the presence of a black entity presumed to be its counterpart;
The horrific truth behind the blue crystal;
And the necessary precondition for the next phase of the security protocol—overloading the solar furnace.
Licorice listened seriously, taking in the broad strokes. She asked if there was anything else important to add, but I shook my head. To say more would require too much time for now.
"So all that happened, huh..."
"We need to hurry and escape. We don't know what effects the blue crystal ore might have."
If we were already affected—or, more likely, we were—I insisted that we should at least try to move somewhere less affected. Celestia agreed.
It was too graphic to dismiss as the ravings of a madman, the part describing how crystals formed within the body. All the variants had cores made from clusterings of blue crystal ore, which was a piece of evidence.
Blue crystal wasn't the endless promise we'd seen when discovering the mineral, nor was it the new energy source that would open the future. It could in fact be the byproduct of mutation that consumed humanity.
Right now, only humans were known specimens, but the same might apply to other living creatures. Unlike Enceladus, it was fortunate there were no native organisms on Titan.
I'd heard that there were giant, whale-like beings on Enceladus. The very idea of them mutating under pureblood supremacist influence made my head spin. Killing a moving mountain wouldn't be easy by any conventional means.
Before long, we had to go silent even though we hadn't finished talking—because we'd arrived at the central hub control room.
'That was easy.'
While I stayed on high alert, nothing demanded we use force. Occasionally, the facility would shake due to overload, but nothing made us freeze in fear.
〈Hydroponics Room—Central Hub〉
「Energy supply unstable. Some weakened facility sections have shut down. To resume normal operation, reconnect the energy cables.」
"Guess it's my turn now."
Licorice stepped forward, saying to leave this part to her. Celestia could have forced the issue by using her authority to seize control, but Licorice was the expert, so I left it to her.
Standing before the panel, she began to operate it. The entire facility powered down for a moment, then came back online. A booming vibration echoed along the floor. Maybe it startled some ghouls somewhere, as inhuman howls echoed in response.
Celestia, standing a bit away and observing the control deck, suddenly tilted her head in puzzlement. When I asked what was wrong, she hesitated, then shook her head.
Maintaining silence, I stayed alert for any variant that might approach. Then Licorice spoke.
"Continuing what I said earlier, there have been suspicions about blue crystal ore for a long time. I already knew it reacts to blood. More precisely, it responds to the blood of living creatures."
"What?"
I could hardly believe my ears. It was hard to accept that she had already known the truth about the blue crystal ore.
Ignoring me, Licorice kept operating the panel as she explained.
"Every corporation rushed to analyze blue crystal ore. If you want to hide from the government, it can be done. It's not simple, but if we're talking about megacorporations, it's more or less possible. They use any means they can."
"... What do you mean? No, how did you know it reacts to blood? If that's true, why wasn't it made public?"
"I told you. They used any means necessary. When the age of exploration opened, new minerals like these started to surface. In its raw state, it was a hazardous material that no one paid attention to at first, but soon the world was flipped by the newly revealed data."
The massive energy contained in blue crystal ore. It didn't just violate the laws of physics but outright denied them, so corporations saw the future in blue crystal ore.
They knew its waves were harmful to humans, but they didn't give up and kept searching for ways to harness it.
They abducted people from somewhere and used them as experimental subjects to see how much a human could endure, grinding up people to figure out how to refine it.
And then, another piece of information emerged: blue crystal reacted to blood. Not just human blood, but any blood from living creatures; if it touched, for example, actual blood, you'd see the crystal turn red.
I had seen blue crystal turning red myself, not inside the mine, but outside of it.
While transporting rocks containing blue crystal ore, there was an accident where a worker was injured. The sharp crystal had pierced part of his suit.
At the time, I noticed the crystal turning red and just thought it was because blood had gotten on it. That was as far as my thinking went, but the corporations, who had seen it decades before me, thought ahead—in the direction of profit.
"That's when the corporations guessed: we could artificially produce blue crystal, couldn't we? That must have been when the brakes came off."
"..."
"And it was maybe a blessing in disguise? Despite countless experiments, they still failed. They realized it wasn't enough to just use one or two people to achieve effects similar to the mined blue crystal source. They noticed it responded to blood, but couldn't figure out why; and even when it did, nothing special happened. It was as if some function was locked."
There were conspiracy theories that the research stopped because the efficiency was just too poor, said Licorice. She paused her fingers on the panel, glancing at Celestia through the hologram window.
Just for a moment, her gaze turned cold, and Celestia flinched.
"Myosotis must have known too. It just never became public knowledge."
"... I didn't know."
"That's possible. Myosotis collapsed overnight. With power that broad, their reach must've been huge. Cleaning it up perfectly would've been nearly impossible."
"But my parents would never—!"
"Can you be sure? People even fool themselves. Even those involved directly don't know; there's no way everyone close to them would. Even if they're your parents. You must've suspected, too—that Myosotis wasn't just the benevolent company everyone admired."
"..."
Celestia bit her lip. It looked like Licorice's words struck a nerve. I wondered how Licorice could know that. But I didn't ask now. It wasn't the time, nor did we have the leisure to get into it.
"... But how could this never have been exposed until now? It's so weird—a mineral that reacts to blood?"
"I told you. It was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Everything I'm telling you is highly classified. It's not like there were zero would-be whistleblowers, but an individual is helpless in the face of corporations once they decide to use it. It's even more so if, behind those corporations, stand pureblood supremacist groups."
All the whistleblowers met 'accidents,' whether by chance or not, and died. I was at a loss for words. The influx of information was overwhelming.
"That's..."
"When complacency and ignorance combine, nothing can stop the flood. Greed devours all resistance. This situation is the byproduct of sin. We're just paying the price."
If the pureblood supremacist organizations had been dealt with early, or if blue crystal had been banned, our current prosperity wouldn't exist.
But on the other hand, that's all it is. Since this disaster didn't just hit Titan but has clearly happened elsewhere in space, all the prosperity we built dissolved into nothing.
No matter how sturdy you pile it up, sand is still just sand. The solidity on the surface is an illusion. A castle built from sand cannot withstand the waves.
"But there's nothing we can do. Without blue crystal, we can't keep moving. So what choice do we have? No matter how unsettling, we have to use it. Who knows how it will end, but it's the only way right now."
Celestia and I, thinking such tangled thoughts, couldn't find words for a while.
"Alright. I'm done. Let's go. Now that the stagnant air is circulating, the fog will almost be gone by the time we get there."
As Licorice tapped the panel one last time, a notification sounded that some facility systems had recovered. The east tower, visible from the control room, was still clouded in mist. But as the fans started up, the fog began to dissipate.
Beyond the gradually clearing fog, we could see the interior had changed entirely. It looked just like a lush forest.