Hoo, hoo... Right. Calm down. Calm.
Kromer may have been all over Sinclair in the past, but right now she was just a crazy bitch, so it had nothing to do with me.
Wait, more importantly... are we outside?
Before I knew it, we had escaped the memory shown by the Golden Bough and returned to the mountain piled high with corpses.
In front of us, the Inquisitors stood as if to block our way.
By the way, a mountain full of corpses is seriously vile.
Who even thinks up something like this...?
"Ugh... the ground under my feet is all sticky..."
"Please endure it. I can't exactly carry Ms. Rodion during battle."
"You would if it wasn't during battle?"
"Th..."
Clang!
Honestly, carrying around a woman who looked to be around 180 centimeters tall wasn't easy.
Still, I couldn't exactly refuse, could I?
"Yes, I'll do it."
"Oh... really? That's unexpected. I'll be counting on you from now on!"
Thud!
...Ah, maybe I should've refused, even if it meant dying once.
What a pointless feeling.
"Hey, you there! Stop chatting and focus on the fight!"
Maybe Otis was annoyed that Rodion and I were chatting so casually in the middle of battle.
She, who had been watching us quietly, snapped at us sharply.
We could afford a little slacking off. There weren't even that many enemies right in front of us.
No, wait. If we got careless and took a hit, would that be a disaster?
In any case, I couldn't think of a proper rebuttal to Otis's perfectly reasonable point, so I decided to focus on the fight.
I wasn't going to be much help anyway, but there was no harm in finishing it a little faster.
*
Once again inside the memory, Sinclair's family was seated around a single dining table, all in human form, sharing a peaceful meal.
[Our family had a rule that we had to eat breakfast together every morning.]
[A warm time when the whole family gathered around the table, shared stories, and exchanged encouragement or jokes.]
[I liked that time. And that rule was endlessly gentle and mild to me.]
[It was my world—so natural to me, so unchanging it could never be different.]
[That world only began to feel slightly off when,]
When Sinclair's monologue reached that point,
[the day even my older sister had prosthetic-body surgery and took her place at the table.]
The landscape of the memory changed from four people eating together to three prosthetic bodies watching Sinclair finish his meal.
They weren't even prosthetic bodies with much attention paid to appearance, and the fact that prosthetic bodies with round, square, and triangular iron faces were staring blankly at him here...
It was easy to imagine how deeply that must have wounded a teenage boy's heart.
[From the moment my father's head changed into something unfamiliar made of tin, assorted wires, and circuits, my world began to change little by little.]
[Family meals were no longer a warm, bright world. They had become an uncomfortable experience that made everyone speak less.]
...That's honestly more unsettling than I expected.
Prosthetic bodies that don't resemble people at all are already a matter of strong preference, but when they just stare at me without saying a word, even I—who's seen all kinds of prosthetics—feel a primal aversion rising up.
[Ah... I had begun to feel an innate impurity in prosthetic bodies.]
That... really... happens?
"'Disgusting...'"
I heard the voice in Sinclair's heart as he sat at the table.
Disgusting... huh.
Could Sinclair also have been no different from those people in N Corp?
I know he isn't like that now, but had he committed such a sin in the past?
I'm starting to feel a little afraid to look.
And regardless of my feelings, the memory continued slowly onward.
[I couldn't bring myself to accept that the body had to be replaced with something other than bone and flesh.]
[Why do we use prosthetic bodies?]
[When I carefully asked the reason, the answer I got was brief.]
[It was that the human body was outdated.]
[If you don't eat, you get hungry; if you don't sleep, you get tired; if you're injured, you have to wait to recover.]
[All of that is endlessly inefficient.]
[So as time passes, the proportion of people using prosthetic bodies will increase, and in the end, the normalization of prosthetic bodies is inevitable.]
Is that really true?
A fundamental question came to mind.
Would most people in the City welcome replacing their bodies with prosthetics?
...No, no matter how I looked at it, the answer that came to mind was nothing but "no."
Prosthetic bodies are convenient and useful, sure, but their limits are obvious.
In fact, if you look at the strongest people at the top of the City, there are almost no full-body prosthetics among them.
The difference in ceiling is obvious. Maybe the ceiling could rise even higher as time goes on, but human-enhancement technology would advance too, so it's a meaningless assumption.
There are claims that the executioners who handle most of the City's work, the "Claws," are full-body prosthetics, but even that isn't confirmed information.
In the end, the idea that prosthetics would swallow up most of the City is close to impossible.
Of course, it's still undeniably a useful and valuable technology.
[Inside,]
[I thought, 'If that's how it is, wouldn't it be better to simply be weeded out?']
[...Though I couldn't logically refute that statement.]
With Sinclair's eerie words in the memory ending there, my vision shifted again.
The space rippled, and the place we arrived at was a school.
Sinclair was in the middle of a conversation with Kromer.
Kromer wasn't wearing the mad smile she had shown when speaking to us, but a smile that could be seen anywhere, one within the bounds of normalcy, as she talked to Sinclair.
But the words coming out of her mouth were like the whispering of a devil.
"Sinclair, you don't actually like getting prosthetic-body surgery, do you?"
[I nodded quietly.]
"But if you told your parents honestly, they'd be upset."
"You resent being unable to do anything about it, don't you?"
[I nodded again.]
"Should I help you? So you can live freely without taking something like that."
...
"H-how?"
"I'll tell you next time."
"Instead..."
After drawing out her words for a moment, Kromer left behind a meaningful line.
"Just as I'll relieve your resentment, you'll have to fulfill mine too."
And then consciousness flickers again.
*
Battle, memory, battle, memory.
Why is the structure like this, seriously...
Even when it seems manageable, this feeling of the flow being cut off makes my temper rise.
Couldn't they just bundle it all together one by one, please?
Squelch.
Even while I was getting absorbed in Sinclair and Kromer's past, waking up in a godforsaken place like this made me feel filthy.
"Ugh..."
The smell of rotting corpses was just a bonus.
If at least our bodies felt a little less strained, I wouldn't even complain, but we were in a position where we had to reach the top of this mountain of corpses.
As we gritted our teeth, beat down the swarming enemies, and climbed over corpses, the disgust doubled.
I'm absolutely going to kill that bitch Kromer...
Even if I can't kill her, I'll make sure to drive a spear clean into her forehead right before she dies.
"Aaaaaah!!!"
Clang!!
While I was burning with a desire for revenge against Kromer and barely deflecting enemy attacks, Sinclair's fierce strike crushed the enemy in front of us outright.
Is this the last of this wave?
If so, then again...
*
Yeah, now they don't even bother warning me. What am I expecting, anyway.
[One day, a transfer student named "Damian" came to the neighboring class.]
Damian... who's that supposed to be?
The unfamiliar name raised a question, but even so, I could easily guess he was one of the key figures in this memory.
Aside from himself, the only person Sinclair properly named in this memory was Kromer.
Of course, it was a little unsettling that this was a name I'd never once heard from Sinclair, but whatever.
Even if I knew, it probably wouldn't have changed anything.
[The transfer student was always surrounded by people,]
[but I felt like he actually didn't like anyone at all.]
He sounds suspicious already. What kind of person is he?
[To my eyes, Damian seemed as though he were floating, buoyed by the air.]
...So teenagers can see people floating, huh. Even for a Singularity, that's hard to do with just your bare body... no, maybe not.
[Likewise, he didn't seem to have much interest in me either.]
[At first, that was how it was.]
At first? What's that supposed to mean?
I tried to work my brain to resolve the question, but the memory's scenery moved on without giving me the chance.
From Sinclair's monologue, which had only shown blackness, to Sinclair himself goofing off during a class period.
[That day was an utterly boring engineering class.]
[My eyes kept drifting away from the blackboard, and before I knew it, they were already turned toward the window.]
Outside the window Sinclair was looking at, there was a peculiar figure standing there—someone who looked obviously different from the others.
[Beyond that window, I could see him taking a walk.]
Black hair, deep blue eyes, and skin so pale it didn't seem human.
It was easy to tell that the "he" Sinclair was referring to was Damian.
...But do people go for walks during class these days?
I can feel a generation gap I can't quite keep up with.
[As always, he was surrounded by friends and wearing a faint smile,]
[but even that smile was a strange one, different from his peers—mature, yet lonely.]
[Then he quietly brushed his hair back in the sunlight.]
"Huh?"
Wait, something on the forehead of the person who looked like Damian...
[For an instant, something mysterious and red seemed to sparkle on his forehead.]
The shimmering thing that had appeared for a moment vanished quickly.
[Had I seen it wrong? Maybe the sunlight had simply been too intense for an instant.]
[And then.]
[I felt as if our eyes had met.]
"..."
What is that meaningful smile?
It's making my body reject it on a physiological level...
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