After walking along the coast for a while, we arrived at the port.
Judging from Victoria’s gaze repeatedly turning towards the mountain peak, it seems she was figuring out the port’s location and her own position by looking at the terrain.
The port was quite chaotic.
Burnt-out buildings and debris remained, along with traces of blood splattered on the buildings.
But soldiers in heavy armor were cleaning up the area.
Brass skeletons with gears turning here and there. And exhaust ports occasionally emitting a blue-glowing mist. The heavy armor isn’t just armor, but an exoskeleton that enhances strength.
It incorporates the technology Victoria is learning at school.
Perhaps that’s why Victoria’s gaze doesn’t leave them.
Since I’m holding Victoria’s hand, I also watch the soldiers with her. Seeing them easily lift parts of half-burnt collapsed buildings, they’re like small cranes. As people in heavy armor clear away heavy objects, people wearing uniforms instead of armor go inside to search.
Occasionally, there were soldiers coming out of houses carrying something.
Sometimes it’s a Sahaggin corpse, sometimes a human corpse.
The Sahaggin corpses are thrown into a pit on the outskirts of the port, while human corpses are laid out in the middle of the square and covered with white cloth. Looking around, it seems they’re laid out for identification.
I can see older people wailing after confirming the faces of the corpses covered with white cloth.
I wondered why they needed to cover the corpses with cloth if they were going to check the faces, but then I realized as I saw bugs swarming around.
It would be unpleasant if you tried to check a face and found it crawling with bugs.
Victoria, however, doesn’t give this a single glance, absorbed in admiring the heavy armor.
After enjoying the view of the heavy armor while walking around the town, Victoria, with an awkward smile, pulled me somewhere.
Accommodation.
It’s a cheap lodging closer to a hostel than a hotel.
It’s two stories high with a long corridor, and doors leading to rooms open onto the corridor.
I entered a room with Victoria, opening the mud-stained doorknob.
In faded man’s memories, it’s structured like those lodgings standing alone in the middle of the wilderness in American movies. Of course, the man in the faded memory saw the interior in a zombie game, not a movie.
Except for the lack of a TV, the interior of the lodging isn’t different from that memory.
If there’s a characteristic, it’s that surprisingly, washing and toilet facilities are in each room.
As technology advances, washing spaces move inside first, followed by toilets.
By the standards of faded man’s memories, it hasn’t been long since toilets entered such cheap places.
For a civilization shining with brass light, technology is surprisingly advanced.
And it means that it’s widely spread even to ordinary people.
The open door and footprints stuck to the floor catch my eye first.
Looking at the footprints, they only took Victoria without touching anything else.
Victoria boldly entered the room, looked around, and let out a sigh of relief. Then she started stuffing her belongings into a travel bag.
“You two! What are you doing there! You’re not thieves who came to steal other people’s things in this situation, are you?”
Just then, I heard someone shouting from outside the door. When I turned my head, an old man was shouting loudly outside the door, holding a cane.
“Are you the owner? I’m just taking my luggage.”
But Victoria calmly answered without caring. And regardless of whether the old man was watching or not, she quickly packed her things into the bag.
Bang!
Victoria closed the quite thick travel bag with a loud noise and walked out carrying it.
“You are, surely, the child who disappeared last night…”
The expression of the man looking at Victoria in surprise is filled with bewilderment and doubt. It’s subtly different from the expression you’d see when someone thought dead reappears. Rather, there’s an unusually large amount of anxiety.
It’s the expression of someone who did something bad and is afraid of being caught.
But seeming not to notice this, Victoria just walked out the door.
Thud!
And she roughly put down the bag in front of the old man.
“A lot has happened. It’s very difficult, but because the ship comes at noon, I have to go catch it. Fortunately, the monsters didn’t touch my things. Since I’m leaving before noon, I don’t have to pay extra fees, right?”
As if overwhelmed by Victoria’s momentum, the old man nodded with a skeptical expression. Then he saw me in the room and shouted in surprise.
“No, who is that child! Didn’t you sleep alone? Then you should pay extra fees!”
“This child is one I rescued when I was kidnapped.”
When Victoria answered calmly, the old man immediately closed his mouth. His face is full of dissatisfaction and suspicion.
It doesn’t seem like he was just trying to find fault over mere costs.
But Victoria handed over the key that was near the entrance by pushing it against the old man’s chest, then looked at me.
“Let’s go.”
“Alright.”
I followed Victoria out.
Then, after discovering contempt and disgust in Victoria’s expression and confirming it was directed at the old man.
When we were far enough from the lodging, I asked Victoria a question.
“You’re not going to condemn him?”
“You’re quite perceptive too.”
Victoria said as she walked briskly carrying the bag.
“I don’t know how deeply he’s involved. I can’t tell if he just opened the door in exchange for survival, or if he originally handed someone over like that, or if there was some kind of contract.”
The leather shoes, stiff with dried blood, stepped into a puddle.
Splash
There’s anger in it.
She knew the old man had made some deal with the Sahaggin.
“But the ship is right in front of us, so there’s no time to judge rights and wrongs. If we miss it, we’ll have to sit all day without getting a cabin.”
It can’t be helped since a large population moves at the start of vacation. According to Victoria’s memory, if you don’t buy tickets 2-3 weeks in advance, prices rise sharply and good seats are gone.
“And now there’s no one for that old man to deal with, right? It shouldn’t be a big problem to just leave him be.”
It’s no joke when a schoolgirl turned Sahaggin slaughterer with an iron crowbar says this.
I nodded.
“By the way, what should I call you?”
I explained that I don’t have a name. But it’s difficult to address someone without a name to call them by. There’s a simple solution for this.
“Please give me one.”
“You’re asking someone else to give you a name?”
Even if you look at me like that in disbelief.
“A name is just a symbol. Think of it as giving me a nickname, and please give me any suitable one.”
“Give me, give me a little time.”
Victoria, making an expression as if facing too big a problem, decided to postpone the issue.
I nodded.
Anyway, a name isn’t that important.
More importantly, compared to Choseol, I’m so short that even a short distance requires a lot of walking.
Will this body be tall? I hope it will be. It was more comfortable when I was Choseol than when I was Rebecca.
While thinking like that, Victoria and I arrived at the port.
In front of us is a ship with huge wheels and springs attached.
It’s the battleship in the Sahaggin’s memory. Instead of cannons, there were mechanical devices that shot beams attached to the sides, and when hit by those, not only Sahaggin but even biological weapons literally vaporized.
“Insane…”
Victoria, having apparently forgotten about giving me a name, looks up at the battleship with a dazed expression. From her perspective, her gaze is fixed on where the springs and mechanical devices are densely gathered.
Victoria likes learning what she studies.
Bwoooong!
“Ah! The ship! Hey, hurry!”
When a small ship some distance from the big ship blew its horn, Victoria hugged her bag and ran with all her might, with an expression like a late office worker.
I chased after her hard and barely made it to the front of the ship.
“Ticket please.”
Victoria, panting, took out her ticket, but when the crew member pointed at me and asked for a ticket, she shouted in surprise.
“Can’t you let one child go?”
“Not possible.”
An argument broke out with the person taking tickets.
Well, the ticket is for one person, so it can’t be helped.
I thought we might part ways here, but after a long argument, a few coins slipped into the pocket of the man issuing tickets, and all problems were magically solved.
And I was able to board the ship.
“Phew. Fortunately, he was a flexible person.”
“You call bribery flexibility.”
“Don’t learn this kind of thing.”
Treating me like a child, Victoria took me onto the ship.
The ship was bigger than I thought.
No, strictly speaking, this ship is quite large too.
But because the battleship next to it was so huge, this one felt small.
Victoria, who quickly recovered from exhaustion, went inside holding the ticket. And after checking the cabin number on the ticket, she soon arrived at a small private room.
Victoria entered, threw her luggage inside, and lay down on the small bed. And she couldn’t get up.
“Haaah, I’m dying. Really. Sorry. I’m going to sleep. I’m really exhausted.”
And as the sound of departure with a loud noise was heard, she buried her head in the bed and started taking deep breaths. It means she was that tired.
She went berserk in the Sahaggin city from nightfall until dawn.
At first, she either hid when Sahaggin were around or lured them somewhere to quietly assassinate them by smashing their heads with the iron crowbar.
After obtaining the special weapon, she went around massacring without avoiding them.
Victoria probably didn’t know, but there’s a reason why they didn’t actively hunt her.
Because the expressions of the fish-men were like looking at their own kind.
She wasn’t one of them yet, but they were looking at her as if she would soon become one.
The fact that Victoria was a young girl was also significant.
If such a strong creature became one of them, their offspring would likely be excellent too.
With various intentions intertwined, this fortunate schoolgirl who slaughtered them all finally finished off all the Sahaggin.
Although she almost failed at the end.
She saved her life because of the misfortune that I was summoned.
In short, it means that all the sleep and fatigue she had put off until now rushed in, and she entered deep sleep.
I undressed Victoria appropriately, changed her into pajamas from inside the bag, and sat beside her until she woke up.