After Sati had been kicking me for quite some time.
As the atmosphere grew noticeably lighter, I rubbed my throbbing shin and cautiously asked her a question.
"...Feeling a little better now?"
"Hmph."
But instead of giving me a proper answer, Sati merely made a sulky little sound through her nose and sharply turned her head away.
That's definitely going to bruise.
Even as I kept rubbing my shin through the lingering pain, I swallowed back any complaint, certain it was going to bruise.
Still, rather than offering empty pleasantries, I decided to tell Sati honestly what I was thinking.
"It's true that Manu is capable, but that doesn't mean I think you're useless or anything."
When I said that with a small smile, Sati narrowed her eyes and glared at me as though she couldn't believe it.
"Then why do you keep keeping your distance from me?"
"Keeping my distance?"
She immediately demanded to know why I was keeping my distance, and I widened my eyes as if this were the first I had heard of it.
I thought she was the one who'd put up the distance first.
"You keep refusing to call me by my name. You only call me 'you.'"
"Huh?"
As I blinked at her in bafflement, Sati brought up the fact that I never called her by name.
I let out a startled little sound myself.
"That's because you told me not to call you by your name, didn't you?"
"What?"
The moment I explained why, Sati froze in brief surprise.
She looked utterly dumbfounded, like she had no idea when she'd ever said such a thing.
I could still vividly see her shouting herself hoarse, "Don't call my name!"
"You know, when we ran into each other again in the storage room."
"...Ah."
Perhaps she finally remembered what she had said. Sati let out a brief sigh, staring at the blank ceiling.
Then her expression changed in an instant. Shaking her head in disbelief, she spoke.
"W-Wait... You've been worrying about that this entire time?"
"Of course I have. It was pretty shocking."
How could I not worry about it?
Sati had been cold, but she'd also quietly looked after the player. Then she got that angry and snapped at me not to call her name.
I'd been seriously intimidated at the time, and after that I'd occasionally avoided bringing it up because I thought it might make her uncomfortable.
"So the reason you haven't called me by my name all this time was...?"
"Yeah. That's why."
I nodded matter-of-factly at Sati's suspicious repeat question.
Unlike my assumption that the ban on saying her name was still in effect, apparently she had revoked it in her heart at some point without me realizing.
"Since when was I allowed to call you by your name?"
"...Ugh, I don't know! Idiot."
When I casually asked when exactly the martial law on her name had been lifted, Sati recoiled in disgust, suddenly burst out in anger, and stomped off toward her maintenance room.
"Sati, get some good rest today!"
"Shut up!"
I called her by name as she wanted and told her to rest, but Sati shouted back and walked even faster.
Either way, I was relieved she seemed to have recovered some of her spirits.
The problem was that it was still only around lunchtime.
It feels like nighttime, judging by the mood.
I hadn't been someone who went out often to begin with, but they said people only realize something's value after it's gone.
Being trapped in this pitch-black underground day after day, I'd lately found myself missing crisp air and warm morning sunlight for no reason.
Of course, if I went up to the surface, I'd be greeted by fresh toxic gas and overly friendly monsters.
In the end, I left that longing in a corner of my heart and returned to the Leader's room, taking a seat.
[Sati] [♡4]
It went up by two whole points.
With nothing else to do, I checked the Affection panel and found that Sati's Affection had risen by a full two levels.
Taking her to the cafeteria and talking with her earlier must have been a more significant positive factor than I'd thought.
I was tired of looking through the recorded world-setting logs, too.
The same painfully predictable records: a researcher's journal about discovering an enormous energy resource, along with the records of experiments conducted on it.
They were clichés so obvious they were boring, but since that was all there was to read, I'd already gone through them three times.
There were a few kinds of books on the shelf as well, but they were tedious, pointless books that explained the existing game systems in ways fifty times more difficult to understand, adjusted to fit the world setting.
There wasn't a single way to pass the time.
Sleeping and eating were about the only things I could do.
Honestly, even the time spent sending them on operations and waiting was agonizing.
I just didn't complain because I knew the other Replicas had it much harder than I did.
That was why, even when I wasn't sleepy, it had become routine for me to put on an eye mask and lie down in my sleeping bag.
Tap, tap, tap.
Huh?
Then, in the middle of that languid afternoon, a sudden knock sounded.
I had just seen Sati, so was it Ariel this time?
I pushed my eye mask up to my forehead, got to my feet, and called briefly to whoever was waiting outside.
"You can come in."
The moment I finished speaking, the door opened with a click.
Standing outside was someone with short red hair and listless green eyes.
It wasn't Ariel or Sati. It was Manu.
"O-Oh? What's going on?"
The unexpected visit from the third possible candidate.
I had naturally assumed it would be Ariel or Sati, so her unexpected appearance made me stammer without realizing it.
But after throwing open the door and entering the room, Manu didn't say a word.
If she had come here because she had something to say, I wished she would just come out with it. Instead, she only stared blankly at me.
The uncomfortable silence showed no sign of ending.
Unable to bear it any longer, I spoke first.
"Um, you're getting enough supplies, right?"
"...Yeah."
A short answer came back to my concerned question.
Naturally, the conversation went no further after that.
"So, could I ask... why you came here?"
I looked at Manu with an awkward expression and asked after the conversation died again.
Then she began staring at me without a word.
Her gaze, fixed so intently on my face, made me uncomfortable. I looked back at her for a few seconds before discreetly averting my eyes.
If quiet Manu had come all the way to my room herself, she must have had something she wanted to say.
"So you really forgot everything."
Then, with those few sudden words, Manu turned away as though she had given up and left the room without a trace of emotion.
Forgot? Forgot what?
Those words felt meaningful in more ways than one.
Even after Manu left, they continued to bother me, so I selected Manu in the Affection panel and checked her information.
Fortunately, the logs of the events I had seen were still there.
To find out what Manu meant by saying I had forgotten, I began reading carefully from her Affection 0 event.
----------------------------
"If you're lonely, wait here anytime."
"Anytime?"
"Yeah, anytime."
----------------------------
Then I found it: a section from the Affection 8 event.
Ah, this is it.
The instant I saw that cheesy line, I knew it in my heart.
Even if it was dialogue assigned by the game, had I really delivered lines like that to the female characters with this face of mine?
Just imagining it made my stomach turn.
Putting aside my nausea, I finally understood why Manu had been sitting alone in the cafeteria late at night.
She hadn't been there to eat. Because of that event dialogue, she had been quietly waiting for me there.
Affection events gave out premium currency for pulls once you finished them, so there were plenty I had casually skipped through.
Even if it had been a story that made an impression on me, how long had it been since I last played Under City?
From their perspective, I might seem like garbage, but players had their own circumstances too.
As I paced through the corridor, repeatedly sweeping my eyes over the area near the cafeteria...
There was Manu, lingering nearby rather than sitting in the cafeteria, as though this would be the last time.
It was late at night, as always—Manu's active hours.
"Come here."
"Ah..."
I strode toward the cafeteria, grabbed the arm of the Manu who had been wandering nearby, and pulled her toward it.
A Replica was surely much stronger than a human like me, but Manu let herself be pulled along obediently without a word.
Even though I knew what she wanted, I voiced what I wanted to say instead of giving her the answer she sought.
"You're hard to understand!"
"Huh."
Manu was startled by my outburst instead of comforting words.
Of course, I was the one who should have been sorry for forgetting the Affection dialogue, but I had my grievances too.
"It's hard to tell how you feel when you're so quiet and never show anything on the outside! If you're lonely, can't you at least say that you're lonely?!"
As I poured out my feelings about how difficult Manu was to deal with as her manager, she widened her eyes in surprise.
"I-I did my best to express it..."
Overwhelmed by my momentum, Manu began to explain that she had tried her best to express her loneliness, but...
"Look, men are creatures who are fundamentally slow to realize things if you don't tell them properly, okay?!"
I shouted as though pouring out the basic traits of the male species, saying that wasn't nearly enough.
"I wish I had some kind of perfect memory device in my head, like in a comic, you know? So I'd never forget anything for the rest of my life after hearing it once! So even after years had passed, I could remember what food each of the hundreds of you liked, and what facilities you liked too!"
Along with that, I lamented with a self-deprecating note that human brains unfortunately weren't that good.
But after pouring out all my feelings like that, I suddenly calmed down, like a candle that had burned itself out.
"...Sorry. I was the one in the wrong."
"N-No... Yeah, that must have been hard for you."
When I abruptly changed my attitude and apologized, even quiet Manu hesitated before beginning to comfort me.
I had come out to comfort her, only to be comforted in return.
Realizing that my emotions had been swinging wildly, a thought suddenly came to mind.
Do I maybe have some kind of mental illness?
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