"I just... don't want to watch the past happen again right in front of me."
"What past?"
Groy had gone quiet for a long while before finally squeezing out that one sentence, and it instantly piqued Geno's curiosity.
But after that, Groy sank back into silence.
What was he thinking about now?
His thoughts drifted back to a night more than ten years ago.
The moon that night had been just as pale, bright, and eerie as it was now.
He hadn't yet been fitted with a voice module or an autonomous-movement module back then. But with his logic core already installed, Groy had a consciousness of his own.
That night, when Khors piloted him out to Pioneer's Memorial Plaza, he felt for the first time an emotion so complex that no carefully written code could have calculated it.
The scene was still vivid in his memory, even though he'd had no eyes then and had seen it only through the pilot vital-signs monitoring system.
'Groy, please. You have to seal this monster away here. Whatever happens, don't let it... get out. Cough, cough!'
Khors had been shot several times. The killer had vanished without a trace, leaving behind only a battlefield of wreckage and a man Groy had judged to be already dead.
His life was a candle guttering in the wind. Yet to keep that Sacrifice suppressed, Khors clung stubbornly to his last breath and steered Groy to seal it inside the monument.
That stubborn resolve made Groy's logic core start to heat up, though he still didn't understand what the change meant or why it was happening.
Then came a monologue from Khors.
'What a shame. I'll never see Koleda's sweet little face again.'
There was a trace of reluctance and longing in Khors's voice, but more than that, there was resolve for what he was about to do.
'I wasn't a good father. I wasn't there to watch you grow up. But Koleda, I want you to remember this.'
In Groy's recording, Khors's eyes began to glaze over.
'Your old man... will always love you.'
And with that, the memory ended. From that moment on, Groy entered dormancy to conserve energy, waiting for the people of Belobog Heavy Industries to arrive.
That wait lasted more than ten years.
Yet in all those years, his logic core never stopped running. It kept computing, trying to work out where this strange emotion came from and what it even was.
Sadly, he still had no answer by the time Koleda and the others rescued him.
After he woke, living alongside Koleda and Grace, Groy seemed to grasp something. But the feeling was like a wisp of cloud, visible yet impossible to hold, and it left him confused all the same.
And whenever he saw that little girl with the red hair and a face seven-tenths like Khors's, for some reason he always thought of Khors.
Then there was the young woman whose temperament was so much like Khors's. He didn't always understand why her emotions ran so high, but watching the two of them, his doubts didn't seem to matter so much anymore.
So when Koleda asked him to mount firepower weapons, he went against the base code of his logic core, the rule that construction machinery must never be fitted with weaponry.
Even so, he agreed to her request.
The sight of that tiny girl's excitement was still stored in his database.
And now, watching Geno risk himself to save Greta and the other machines, a strange tremor stirred in him again.
The look on Geno's face when he led the calamity beast away had been identical to Khors's back then.
Why had he done it? For Koleda's sake too?
Groy arrived at a negative answer.
But then why did they look so alike?
Groy posed the question.
He couldn't figure it out. But this time Groy had decided he would no longer be a bystander who could do nothing. He didn't want to see the scene of Khors's death again.
And so he acted.
"That's all of it. I can't comprehend this emotion through my calculations, and I can't comprehend why I took that action either."
Faced with Groy's confusion, Geno smiled.
"I don't get it either. But I know it's definitely not a bad thing."
As he spoke, Geno patted Groy's casing. He wasn't certain yet, but a guess had already formed in his mind.
Still, this wasn't the time for that. They hadn't dealt with their problem yet.
Thinking of that, Geno turned around. The calamity beast was still regrowing its head, yet it hadn't given up chasing him. His own head throbbed, as if he were feeling the explosive pain the beast had suffered earlier.
Wait. Not "as if." It really hurt!
"Ow ow ow! What's going on?!"
"Bro, you finally picked up."
A familiar voice rang out in Geno's mind. Who else could it be but Little Geno?
But why was Little Geno suddenly contacting him now?
"No time for chatter. I'm patching you through to Yanagi Tsukishiro. She has important intel for you."
Important intel?
Before Geno could ask, a harsh burst of busy-signal static rang out. Then Little Geno's lazy drawl turned into Yanagi Tsukishiro's distinctive voice, brimming with that wifely charm.
"This is Tsukishiro. Geno, can you hear me?"
"Loud and clear, Miss Tsukishiro. What can I do for you? I'm kind of in the middle of a life-or-death sprint here."
Geno still had the presence of mind to joke, even with that headless thing right behind him, refusing to let up.
"We know your situation, so I'll keep this short. I've obtained important intel about that monster."
"Oh?"
Hearing that, Geno's expression turned serious.
Then Yanagi Tsukishiro went on. "That monster appears to be a fragment of an Ethereal once slain by Tailless, the treasured blade handed down in the Hoshimi family. The way it exists now depends heavily on the very Tailless that imprisons it. The way to deal with it is to take Tailless out of its body. Once it loses its source, it will gradually dissipate."
Geno raised an eyebrow at that. Pull a sword out of that monster's body?
Wasn't that a little on the hard side?
He couldn't even get close to the thing. But then he suddenly remembered that when its head had blown apart earlier, he thought he'd glimpsed something…
Something like a blade!?
He whipped his head around and, with his 24K Ether Sight, stared wide-eyed at the calamity beast, its head already half regrown.
Lodged inside its skull, wasn't that Tailless?
____
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