Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
It’s noisy.
I’m dizzy, and it feels suffocating.
I don’t know why my body is shaking so much.
“Deep!”
“Ah, ugh.”
It hurts.
My whole body aches. Especially the parts where the belt is fastened and digging in.
If I hadn’t been wearing it, I’d have smashed my head into the inside of the core and died by now.
“Ailee, I’m awake. You can stop shaking me now.”
“Ah, okay!”
Ailee immediately climbed into the passenger seat and disconnected from her chassis.
I pressed the communications button that had been ringing for a while, too.
The generator began making the sound of running normally again.
“I didn’t know when you’d wake up, so I was charging the generator battery in low-power mode!”
“Good job. Thank you.”
“Mm!”
Good judgment.
But the remaining battery charge hadn’t increased by all that much.
“How long was I unconscious?”
“I think it’s been about two minutes now?”
Two minutes.
If they came in to destroy the laboratory, that was enough time to smash everything they needed to. If they had another objective, it was nowhere near enough.
For now, I couldn’t hear anything nearby. The problem was that I couldn’t see anything on the screen.
“Ailee, turn on the sensors, please.”
“They are on?”
“Ah.”
So we’re trapped inside the snow.
“You can tell up from down and left from right, can’t you?”
“Mm. We have a gyroscope!”
“Then let’s ignite the thrusters all over the body with the fuel output set to minimum.”
“Huh? Ah, I get what you mean!”
I understood why Blue Skull had told me to close it, but I couldn’t just stay buried in the snow and become Blue Skull.
Once the thrusters across the entire body ignited, the snow melted and we gradually sank downward.
More firepower didn’t necessarily mean snow would melt faster, so minimum output was enough.
It didn’t even feel like a minute had passed before the body touched the floor.
I immediately used the arms and legs to push through the snow and get outside.
“This place is…”
“I think we’re inside the laboratory?”
The screen was still crackling.
The impact had damaged the sensors.
My memories after being swallowed by the snow were hazy.
I’d heard a series of explosions, and my body, swept up by the snow, had kept jolting around before I hit my head and passed out.
Right before I blacked out, I heard a huge explosion.
“They punched a hole straight down into the laboratory from above.”
They blew the lid off. The Allied Forces aren’t normal either.
I looked up.
The hole was fairly deep.
They must have caused an avalanche, gathered all the abandoned traps buried in the snow into one place, driven in a bunch of stakes, and detonated them all at once.
Then the snow poured down, and they probably used that snow like a slide to come down.
It seemed I’d fallen to the floor along with that collapsing snow.
If I’d slammed straight into the floor, I would have died.
“How lucky…”
“Hm?”
“No, it’s nothing. Ailee, do we have communications?”
“No. Maybe there’s jamming inside the laboratory, but I’m not picking up any signal at all?”
Come to think of it, the communications signal had been ringing nonstop ever since I woke up.
That must have been the signal Ailee was sending outward.
No wonder nobody answered when I pressed the button.
“If there’s jamming, this is going to be a bit difficult.”
“Mm. I have no idea where Lucia is either!”
Jamming, huh. Since it’s a secret facility, that’s only natural.
Even the Korean military, which everyone knows the inside of, forbids filming. How much more so for a laboratory belonging to the Count Luna family?
“Should we go inside?”
“Mm, should we?”
The piled-up snow was too high.
The marks from the Titans’ dragged feet had made it smooth, and since it was snow, it was impossible to grab onto it and climb.
On top of that, we didn’t know the structure of the laboratory.
We didn’t know where the entrance was, so we couldn’t head that way either.
And behind us was blocked by snow and debris.
The only direction we could go was forward.
***
“There must be northern soldiers inside the laboratory too, right?”
“Common sense says there would be.”
There was no need to think about it.
We’d only walked a short distance forward when we saw the northern soldiers’ mass-produced Titans.
Or rather, what had been Titans.
“You said two minutes had passed.”
“Now it’s been about ten minutes!”
Judging by the wreckage, there were roughly two squads.
What was astonishing even then was that there wasn’t a single trace of red liquid nearby.
They had only shot the limbs, sensors, and thrusters, wrecking them completely.
Not a single Titan had its hatch open.
We didn’t have the leeway to look after them right away, so we passed them by for now.
Either the intruder was so confident in their skill that they were arrogant.
“They must have a belief that they don’t kill people.”
Or they were mad enough to hold their convictions above their life even on a battlefield.
Thinking back to the conversation with the White Reaper earlier, they weren’t an arrogant person.
Then that meant they were a mad person for whom convictions mattered.
“This makes me want to go even less.”
“I guess so. And this place feels kind of creepy.”
An arrogant person would be better than a mad one.
And this place looked chilling.
All the walls were painted white, dreary and unpleasant.
They were excessively smooth, so they didn’t absorb light but reflected it away.
Honestly, it felt like I’d walked into the Backrooms or something.
It felt like my very genes were rejecting it.
My hands kept stiffening.
Even when I forced them forward, I could feel them trying to run away.
“Deep, are you feeling a little anxious too?”
“You too, Ailee?”
We stopped in front of a dark room.
Come to think of it, there had been one strange thing since earlier.
“This place is wide enough for Titans to walk around in. Isn’t that really weird?”
“It is weird.”
The moment we stepped into the dark room, the lights came on.
Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.
“Ailee?”
“I’ll clear them quickly!”
So many alerts appeared at once that I couldn’t even see ahead.
Cores.
They were cores.
Dozens, hundreds of alerts appeared and disappeared, as many as the number of cores.
Unless you looked closely, you wouldn’t be able to tell.
If I hadn’t had spatial perception, I wouldn’t have known.
Each core looked slightly different.
Every single one looked as though it had been made for something different.
“Seeing it like this, it’s like…”
A communal graveyard.
I was about to say it, but swallowed the words.
There were four passages behind the cores.
Likewise, the passages were quite wide and deep, so we could travel through them even while riding Ailee.
“I’ll go from the right.”
“Why?”
“No particular reason.”
There were traces of something having gone into the left.
Given the circumstances, it was the White Reaper and the Allied Forces.
My hands had been trembling nonstop for a while now.
If we met them in this state, I felt like I wouldn’t be able to respond properly.
“Really? Well, fine! Let’s go right!”
We slowly moved into the right passage.
There wasn’t a single light.
Along both walls of the passage, white mass-produced Titans were hanging from the ceiling.
They looked like butchered slabs of meat.
They didn’t seem unfinished in particular.
Their cores, abnormally exposed, hung connected to the ceiling.
Two, four, six, eight, ten.
There were so many that counting them was meaningless.
This place didn’t look like a Titan production factory, so I had no idea why they were here.
Beep.
The moment the passage ended, an alert came on.
Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.
“Ailee, Ailee! Turn off the signals!”
There was no answer.
I hurriedly reached out and turned off all the signals.
“…Biological signals?”
Only then could I see ahead.
“What is this?”
Glass tubes.
They were glass tubes.
One person in each glass tube, submerged in red liquid.
Creeeak.
Ailee’s foot slowly moved backward.
“Deep, let’s, I, let’s get out of here. Okay? W-we should, look somewhere else first, not here.”
Hyperventilation.
I know it well because I’ve experienced it myself.
Ailee was hyperventilating.
“Should, should we do that?”
So was I.
Even if you weren’t an idiot, you could tell.
That distinctive red liquid, and the people inside it—once you saw them, you couldn’t fail to understand.
What the true nature of artificial intelligence was.
Beep.
“Ugh!”
Beep-beep-beep.
A red ray swept across Ailee’s entire body.
The sensors had already been damaged by the impact.
Maybe there was a problem with the image sensors, because the noise on the screen grew even stronger.
Woooong.
A clear voice came from the speaker.
“TB12 confirmed.”
TB12? Was it talking about Ailee?
“TB13 confirmed.”
My hands froze.
“Experimental subjects confirmed to be outside. Activating security system.”
What is TB13?
What the hell is TB13?
Gurgle.
The people in several of the glass tubes were suddenly sucked downward.
The red liquid drained downward silently, without even making air bubbles, and the glass tubes emptied.
“Urk.”
I felt like I was going to throw up.
I clamped a hand over my mouth and forced my breath down.
Thud!
From behind us in the passage we’d come through, there came the sound of something falling.
Thud!
Thud!
Thud!
“Deep, Deep…”
“Ailee!”
The moment I grabbed the sticks, Ailee’s feet, which had been backing away, stopped.
“We’re getting out of here! If you can’t move, Ailee, it’s okay not to move! But you can’t freeze up!”
“I got it, I got it, but…”
We have to run.
This place is no good.
I moved the sticks and turned around.
When I blasted the thrusters, several of the glass tubes behind us couldn’t withstand the shock and cracked.
With a creaking sound, the red liquid slowly began to leak out.
It felt like I could smell that disgusting vitamin scent from before.
I’d made a mistake.
Not a mistake on the level of choosing wrong between the whip blade and the heat blade.
From the start, I should have moved by following the White Reaper.
Hyperventilation.
I’m not scared.
My body is instinctively afraid.
My body and mind are reacting separately.
The White Reaper said it.
That we didn’t know what was in the Luna family’s laboratory.
Now I knew.
“I propose the following to TB12 and TB13.”
This was a place for researching artificial intelligence.
The term artificial intelligence wasn’t wrong.
“Immediately descend from the Titan and return to your previous research location through handover.”
Artificial.
Something made by humans for a certain purpose.
In a broad sense, it could be used for living people as much as anything else.
I’d never seen it actually used for living people.
Not until now.
Clank.
Clank.
Clank.
I heard the sound of white mass-produced Titans approaching through the darkness of the corridor.
It wasn’t the sound of a single-digit number of Titans.
At least ten units.
If all the Titans in the passage had begun moving…
No.
“Fuck off.”
I ignited the thrusters.