176

I dug a hole.

I dug forward and forward in a straight line, not downward.

Breaking the wall ended more smoothly than I expected.

Next came the work of crushing the bedrock, and I was truly struggling with that.

If I drove my fist in at full power, there was a risk of cave-in, but if I held back too much, I couldn’t even shave it.

It was troublesome that the required force also changed depending on the shape and such.

Only now did I keenly realize that mining with my fists as a complete amateur had been quite the impossible demand.

Even so, the only reason I was making progress, little by little, was largely thanks to this body’s specs.

It was an attempt I had succeeded at once before, but the difference this time was that there were no metal fragments on this side that I could use for mining.

The difficulty of breaking through the bedrock and advancing shot up, and though I searched the surroundings once, the material on the inside meant to keep me from getting out and the outside of it were different.

“Damn it. If only I had something I could drive into this bedrock that won’t break no matter how hard I punch…”

I grew irritated at the connection work that barely advanced.

To calm down, I took a deep breath and pulled out my watch to check the time.

Unbelievably, it seemed I had been working straight for eight hours.

I turned my back on the misshapen hole, deciding I should rest once.

“…I should eat and rehydrate too. No—if I just sleep once and cool my head, maybe I’ll come up with a good idea.”

I put on my pack and returned to the surface.

It had gotten completely dark outside, and hunting from now felt a bit of a hassle, but I still managed to secure one wild boar.

After finishing the butchery I had grown fully used to, I lit the dry branches I’d gathered in a makeshift stove with a fire burning at my fingertips.

I set up an iron plate, greased it, then started grilling thinly sliced meat.

“Ah, I need to refill water too.”

I muttered as I noticed how little drinking water I had left.

In silence, I cut the meat, then grilled it and carried it to my mouth.

At that moment, I glanced at the hatchet I’d been using in place of a kitchen knife.

As if something had snagged in my mind, I kept staring at the blade in my hand.

“There it is.”

I didn’t even know why I’d forgotten.

I already had such a perfectly suitable tool.

Realizing that, I continued eating the remaining meat.

I finished cleaning up after the meal quickly, and as if I’d had more than enough rest, I headed underground; the moment I reached the front of the gate, what I pulled from my pack was a long box.

Yes—the Spirit Sword.

I couldn’t hold it in my hands, but if it was this sword that even my full strength couldn’t destroy, then it was perfect for the situation right now.

I had already confirmed that it was harmless as long as I didn’t touch it directly, so first I used the case to pinch the hilt and set the tip against the bedrock.

Then I kicked it.

And then—how strange—its blade sank deep into the bedrock, all the way to around the middle.

Cracks spread around it, and when I drove my fist into those spots, I was able to excavate as if it peeled off cleanly with a solid pop.

I sent silent applause to the Spirit Sword at the deeply satisfying result.

The Spirit Sword lying on the cold floor was surely displeased, but for someone who had been made to drink bitter gall by it time and again, it was a treatment that soothed my resentment.

And so I rammed the Spirit Sword into the bedrock over and over.

I couldn’t help but think, what am I even doing to an inanimate object, but as for this sword, I had plenty of feelings of my own.

I became able to dig forward smoothly, and just when I was getting into the groove, there was an incident like part of the ceiling collapsing, but I safely reached the outer wall on the other side.

It had taken a great deal of time, but thanks to that, I was proud to say I’d made a tunnel that felt good enough for coming and going in the future.

Just to be safe, I also stabbed the Spirit Sword into the outer wall and carried out the destruction carefully.

And though the low ceiling was a drawback, it was the long-awaited breakthrough.

It was still pitch-dark inside, but this time I had light magic… or so I wanted to say, but my mana was depleted from keeping it on the whole time.

If I meant to explore inside, light magic was necessary.

Even if it was a low-consumption spell, if I kept using it, I’d run out of mana.

Recognizing the impatience in my own heart, I decided to rest once.

I should challenge what came next in perfect condition so I wouldn’t miss anything.

I suppressed my rushing feelings, praised myself for being able to judge that with a cool head, then returned to the front of the gate, closed my eyes, and lay down.

Before the fatigue from overusing mana, lying down and taking it easy was best.

And when I realized I had fallen asleep, a sigh naturally escaped me at how I still couldn’t grasp this body’s fatigue state.

(Not feeling fatigue, not feeling hunger—those aren’t only advantages.)

Because it made it difficult to accurately grasp my condition, maybe the intended operation was to measure it with something specialized and manage it strictly based on data?

In the end, if I thought of myself as a weapon, perhaps the setting was that even solo operation required maintenance and such.

Leaving the analysis aside, I confirmed my mana had recovered sufficiently and moved to the far side of the tunnel.

When I used light magic to look inside, I recalled what I had seen even in the dark and spoke out: “Ah, yeah. This is what it was like.”

I increased the number of lights and looked around the now-brighter facility interior.

For now, I would search every place that seemed likely to have documents, and remembering there had been a guide board somewhere, I decided to look for that first using my memory.

And the guide board I found was so thoroughly useless that the key parts were rubbed out and unreadable.

“Ah—right, that’s how it was.”

I was sure I had confirmed this was underground because I had somehow succeeded in reading that guide board.

As the memories returned, I also remembered having held a stack of papers like documents.

And then, relying on my uncertain memory that “it was that way,” I started wandering unsteadily.

Amid the scattered mess in a room I found, what I picked up was a handwritten memo that was extremely hard to read.

It wasn’t that the letters were faded; it was simply illegible because the handwriting was awful, and I tried to decipher it anyway.

As a result, I learned that the person who wrote it had apparently been jotting down the color of a female coworker’s underwear.

There were even impressions about that day’s color written down, and furious at the wasted time, I tore the memo cleanly in half without hesitation.

The next paper I picked up had something like a lunch menu written on it, and the oddly detailed review suggested an obsessive attention to food.

“Next, cosmetics. Next, health goods. Next, hair-growth tonic!”

The moment I voiced my question—what is this—I understood the cause.

From the papers stuck to the board I found, it seemed this place had been a nap room.

At the same time, it seemed people had been writing personal recommendations on paper and slapping them up at random.

I came up with a reason I could accept: it was probably part of casual information exchange.

If so, what had the underwear-memo person been thinking, bringing something like that into this room?

Shuddering at the unimaginable internal circumstances of a research facility, I left the room.

I judged they probably wouldn’t do something as tasteless as bringing work into the break area.

Once it was brighter, I could clearly see how ruined the facility interior was, and I could tell how it must have looked back then.

They must have fled in a hurry—bundles of papers were scattered even into the corridor.

Some looked like I had stepped on them and ruined them, but as I gathered them and checked them one by one, words that seemed like research content suddenly appeared.

“Is this… data, right?”

Some parts were unreadable, but it was unmistakably the words “genetically enhanced soldier.”

I couldn’t decipher what the following numbers meant, but at the very least I could assume it was some kind of data measured from a test subject.

However, there were too many items and the crucial parts were missing, so I didn’t know what the data was for.

The information I got from what I could read suggested they had been taking documents out in consideration of cases where the data disk couldn’t be used, but they must have been in such a rush that, as you could see, it had been scattered on the floor.

In other words, there was a strong possibility that important data had also been kept on paper.

The problem was if it had been taken out… and yet it was more likely that it wasn’t left here at all.

Praying there were copies, I resumed searching.

Just in case, I tried fiddling with the machinery, but with no power there was no response.

The data disks probably weren’t intact either, but I secured them anyway.

And as a bonus, an adult magazine the researchers had apparently brought in… but it seemed the owner had rather special tastes, so I let it go.

As I rummaged around and found rooms, trashing them like an RPG hero, I discovered something unexpected.

“For the sake of my homeland, huh…”

A woman who seemed to be a researcher in a framed photo, and beside her a man flexing his biceps.

I didn’t know their relationship, but my eyes caught a well-preserved photo like that.

(It’s only natural that there would be people who became researchers purely for the sake of the nation, if you think about it…)

Come to think of it, there really had been nothing but strange researchers, I thought with a wry smile as I placed my hand on the desk that seemed to belong to her in the photo.

A single document right beside my hand— I brought my face close as if leaping at the letters I saw there.

“…Found it!”

There, clearly written, were the words “Type: Goliath.”

At last, I had found what I was looking for.

And its condition wasn’t bad at all.

I reached to pick it up, but it seemed to be stored under a transparent, hard sheet, and I struggled a little to pull it out—but I was grateful the neat writing was fully readable.

I thought it might be dirty, but that seemed to be the sheet; when I took it in hand, the paper was in good condition.

I read through the single document that began with “Type: Goliath.”

After finishing the first sheet containing information I already knew, my hand wandered as it searched for the second page.

“…Where’s the rest?”

It was a notice that the search would resume.