The Mutated Stray Dog was sent flying by a single punch from Ariel.
Rolling over and over as it kicked up clouds of dust, the monster lolled out its tongue and stopped moving.
All the senses that had frozen along with my resignation came rushing back.
"Haa, haa..."
Through her thick protective suit, I could hear Ariel gasping as though she could barely breathe.
"What on earth were you thinking?!"
"I..."
Her desperate, pleading cry made me swallow my words.
In the face of this suffocating reality, the woman before me was no longer merely Ariel, a game character.
She was a real person who simply shared that name.
Not a fragment of data that could only recite predetermined lines.
"I’m sorry."
If this were a game, dialogue choices would have appeared before me right now, but nothing like that happened.
If I were the Leader, maybe I could have left her with some impressive line. But I was terrible at open-ended questions, and all I could offer was an apology.
I was trying to bring back Power Stones and High-Efficiency Batteries.
I wanted to help, even a little.
The words I wanted to say never left my mouth. They only circled uselessly through my head.
"Why won’t you even give me time to sort out my thoughts on my own?!"
Even at a glance, Ariel was furious.
Ariel, who had been famous for never getting angry even in the game.
That was why players saw her as a motherly character, and why there had even been weirdos who deployed her in actual combat as their favorite despite her being the Replica given out at the start.
And now she was angry enough to look like that.
"...Ariel."
"Don’t say my name!"
When I quietly called her name, she snapped at me and refused even to look my way.
"It would have been better if you had never come back."
Did she mean she had thought I had died somewhere?
Ariel held back her words and bit her lip. I stayed still, feeling like a child being scolded by his parents.
This was probably one of those situations where anything I said would only make things worse.
"Do you have any idea how we felt while waiting for you, Leader...?"
Even afterward, Ariel continued swallowing down her resentment as though pouring out a grievance.
I had understood enough of what they had gone through from the records left in the Leader’s room, so I kept my mouth firmly shut.
Still, as if she knew what she had to do, Ariel kept moving despite everything.
"...This is."
Ariel’s hand paused as she examined the monster’s corpse.
Reflected in her trembling eyes were a Power Stone and a High-Efficiency Battery.
As though she had seen something she should not have, Ariel soon shook her head. She silently collected the Power Stones and High-Efficiency Batteries from the crumbling monster corpses before speaking indifferently.
"...Let’s go back."
I slowly nodded at Ariel’s flat words and followed after her.
Strangely colored ore and slim cylindrical batteries.
Watching Ariel clutch even the meager resources from the first stage so carefully left a bitter taste in my mouth.
And so, we turned our backs on the ruined surface.
‘I almost died just now.’
Thinking back on that terrifying moment made my body tremble slightly.
If Ariel had arrived even a second later, I would have died there without a doubt.
And yet, strangely enough, my mind was calm.
Had the sheer unreality of the situation numbed my emotions?
"..."
"..."
During the long yet brief ride down in the manual elevator, only a drawn-out silence passed between Ariel and me amid the loud grinding of interlocking gears.
After returning to Under City, we headed for the Leader’s room.
Back in the game, when I started an operation and logged in again after some time had passed, the Replicas I had dispatched would return here and leave a few comments about the results.
But Ariel merely gathered up the resources and walked somewhere without a word.
The Ariel who used to cheerfully report in her clear voice, "Here are the operation results, Leader!" was gone.
Would she even listen to my orders from now on?
I could not, in good conscience, give operational orders to someone who looked so utterly exhausted.
As countless conflicts tangled in my mind—
"Please, don’t try to do anything."
Ariel said it just before leaving the Leader’s room.
Through the narrow gap in the door, sorrow lingered in her eyes.
‘Don’t do anything...’
Her words gave me a lot to think about.
Things would not get better if I just sat still.
But I could not bring myself to say that aloud.
After all, I was the one who had caused this.
And so, my first night in Under City passed.
I opened my eyes on the strangely warm floor, but no miracle occurred in which I found the familiar ceiling of my room above me.
‘So it really isn’t a dream.’
My heart sinking, I felt over various parts of my body before slowly sitting up.
‘I’m hungry...’
Yesterday, so many sudden things had happened in a row, and maybe because of the tension, I had even forgotten I was hungry.
But in this kind of gacha game, it was rare for a protagonist-type character to be depicted eating outside of special events.
Come to think of it, what had the protagonist even lived on?
I felt too self-conscious to ask Ariel in the current situation.
For the moment, I simply went outside and started wandering the streets.
Under City had roughly the same brightness whether it was day or night.
‘...Huh?’
Yet in one corner of that underground city, where the street had been completely dark just yesterday, a small light had appeared in a shop.
It was a restaurant building that had definitely been completely dark yesterday.
For some reason, Ariel was there amid the bright light.
As I slowly approached, Ariel turned her head toward me at the sound of my footsteps.
"...Eat."
"Ah, okay."
Her gaze was still as cold as ever, but despite feeling burdened by Ariel’s brief instruction, I stood in front of the restaurant.
A mound of white rice and a hamburger steak soaked in sauce.
I wondered how something like this was possible underground, but then I saw the countless cans lining the back of the restaurant.
Their labels read [Rice], [Hamburger Steak], [Dumplings], [Chicken], and so on.
Even foods that seemed impossible to have come in cans were all sealed away and displayed inside the shop.
I had wondered whether anything edible was even properly left in a setting like this, but now I finally felt a little relieved.
For such a strange setting, its technology was remarkably advanced in odd places.
"Then, I’ll be going."
While I was filling my empty stomach—
Perhaps Ariel found this situation just as uncomfortable, because she moved first and began walking away from the restaurant.
I watched Ariel retreat and thought briefly.
‘Replicas didn’t need to eat.’
Replica—literally, a copy.
In another game, they would have simply been called heroes or characters.
True to the name Replica, they were all beings who had inherited someone else’s memories and personality.
The Replicas themselves knew that, and the story was that they fought to reclaim the surface, even if only with mechanical bodies.
But as resilient as those Replicas were, judging by the story so far, it was not as though they could not eat.
They were ordinary people with favorite foods of their own, and hobbies they had enjoyed while they were alive.
Those Replicas had left their favorite foods untouched in this restaurant all this time, believing that I would someday return.
"Ah, Ariel!"
Once I thought of that, I could not just remain seated.
The moment I called her name, Ariel stopped walking, but she did not turn around.
The resentment still knotted inside her probably had not yet fully faded.
But if I let this chance go, it felt as though this relationship would keep running parallel forever, never drawing closer.
"Come here. Let’s eat together."
Ariel hesitated for a moment at my beckoning hand.
Then, perhaps having thought up a suitable excuse, she avoided my eyes, worked her lips, and muttered softly.
"I don’t need to eat."
"I know."
I cut her off before she could finish, stating it shortly and firmly.
"I just want to eat with you."
Though she still hesitated at my resolute attitude, Ariel came back toward the restaurant.
Since she was practically the face of Under City, I at least knew what food Ariel liked.
"You liked chicken, didn’t you?"
"...Yes."
I ordered chicken from the robot in addition to my own meal, then continued eating to fill my starving stomach.
Before long, Ariel’s chicken was set on the table, and I silently watched her meal from the corner of my eye.
"...You’ve changed a little."
"Hm?"
As I waited for Ariel to eat, she muttered that quietly while eating her chicken.
Ariel was saying that I had changed a little.
Perhaps the Leader she remembered had been a more frivolous, carefree sort of person.
After all, each set of dialogue choices always had at least one joke-like line that broke the serious mood.
But now that everything had become an open-ended question, I had no room to come up with clever answers like that.
"Some things happened."
"...Is that so."
At my vague answer, Ariel responded a moment later, as though there were a brief delay.
Seeing Ariel, who had always been cheerful, so deeply subdued made it hard for me to speak as well.
Still, there were things I had to ask.
The moment Ariel finished her meal—
"What happened after I disappeared?"
I asked Ariel one short, direct question.
Honestly, even judging the situation coldly, the remaining members and their circumstances should not have been so dire that my disappearance alone would cause a problem.
"Why do you..."
"Because I can’t understand what happened."
I answered Ariel’s question somewhat firmly.
I had cleared all the story that had been released, and Power Stones and High-Efficiency Batteries were not particularly rare resources.
Even without me, things should have been fine if the remaining Replicas had gone to the surface and gathered resources regularly.
"If the people who remained had just occasionally returned from the surface with resources, it shouldn’t have gotten this bad..."
"They didn’t appear."
As I coolly considered the situation immediately after my disappearance and offered one opinion after another, Ariel cut me off.
"What?"
"After the Leader disappeared, neither Power Stones nor High-Efficiency Batteries... nothing properly dropped from the monsters anymore."
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