=You will make me a body? What do you—
“Yeah, I’ve got something for that. Give me a second.”
Leaving it behind me,
I picked up the little handset in the center of the comms room.
‘Inter-unit line.’
After Minjae’s ability let us push a signal out to some degree,
he’d toured our major positions and rigged up phones like this to work.
And of course—
the very first base that blasted radio nationwide—
‘Same goes for the Ammunition Battalion.’
Brrrrring...
The call went out,
and a moment later—
—ComSec~ Ammunition Battalion Engineer Squad, Private Lee Yongwan speaking~.
Private Lee Yongwan.
“Private” by rank, but he was the first soldier sent down from the 423rd Battalion—
someone who, in the current Legion structure, sits near the very top.
Sure, a few later-joining soldiers have surpassed some of the 423rd in strength—
but those are the rarest of cases.
‘Which means “private” is actually pretty high here.’
Most people get called simple things like “fighter,” anyway.
Accordingly,
his tone on answering felt a bit lazy.
“Uh-huh~ ComSec. It’s Youngjun.”
—Who the... S-Sergeant Shin!?
KUDANGTANG!!!
The instant he heard my voice—
a clatter, like the slouching guy had just snapped upright.
‘Funny how I can see it without seeing it.’
I could picture him, having answered half-reclined,
snapping to attention the moment he realized it was a senior calling—even over a phone.
—S-Sergeant Shin, w-what can I do for you?
“Nothing dramatic. There’s something I want brought over.”
—Something you want us to bring...?
That spirit.
Vimanar is, for all intents and purposes, the same being as this fortress Vimana.
It literally calls itself “this fortress,” “my body,” and the like.
Which is why—
anything that happened on the fortress, it remembered one by one as if it had happened on its own body,
and it advised me based on that data.
But flip that around and—
‘If it didn’t happen on the fortress, it might not know.’
We wrapped most operations and then came back to the fortress to debrief,
so it seems convinced it knows everything our unit has been through.
Not even close.
‘There’s a mountain of things it doesn’t know.’
Chief among them—
‘Stuff we obtained before we ever summoned the fortress.’
Also, before we acquired this fortress,
our unit’s main base was that Ammunition Battalion, and most resources we secured back then
are in a place the fortress can’t access—
still stored at the Ammunition Battalion.
—Ah... that. I remember.
“You know the battalion commander’s office I used? Open the drawer there—you’ll find it. Bring it as fast as you can.”
—Understood. Loyalty, loyalty!!!
Over the line, I told him the item’s name.
And even though I enunciated it clearly—
=...?
Vimanar didn’t recognize what the item meant.
All it could manage was a puzzled tone.
“Now we wait.”
The rail line between Chuncheon and Inje County—
it links our two core hubs, so engineers have refitted it for easy movement.
Along that rail, they can reach near pre-Collapse road speeds.
Since I said “as fast as possible,” I should have it within a few hours at most.
And in those few hours, I—
“I’ve been thinking this for a while.”
—decided to voice the question that kept bobbing up in my head.
“Your behavior pattern is... a little off.”
=...? I’m having trouble parsing your meaning, Lord.
It had bugged me from the start.
According to the status window,
this thing is loyal to me and acts for my benefit.
The status window claims that as a clear fact.
And yet—
‘It lied to me.’
It said it was for my benefit, sure,
but if you think about it, that makes no sense.
“Why are you the one deciding what benefits me?”
=Lord, this fortress exists solely for your—
“No, I’m not asking for the mission statement.”
Whether something is beneficial or not is the Lord’s prerogative.
Why is a spirit built as a secretary making that judgment—
and why does it have the right to act autonomously based on that judgment?
‘Whoever built this fortress built this spirit with intent.’
If so, there’s no way they’d allow the spirit to do anything that diverges from their intent.
It’s hard not to find that strange.
“Start with this: what do you think my objective is?”
=As I understand it, your highest-priority objective... is survival.
Mm. How to put it—
‘Dead on, this thing.’
Too accurate to argue with.
It’s not wrong.
My objective is survival.
Fine.
It’s correct—
but...
“Name me a case where that wouldn’t be the objective.”
Barring special cases like that Demon Contractor I met a while ago,
survival is the base priority for most living beings.
“And anyone prepared to accept a fortress like this? Even more so.”
=You mean...?
“It’s weird that anything whatsoever is permitted under the excuse of ‘prioritizing the «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» Lord’s objective.’ Aren’t you my advisor? Doesn’t this feel off to you?”
Put bluntly:
even if, to keep the Lord alive,
the spirit had to subdue him and force him to endure unimaginable agony for centuries—
this thing could have rammed it through without the Lord’s permission under ‘the Lord’s objective is survival.’
‘That’s blatantly suspect.’
For that to be possible, they must have—
after coding “act for the Lord” into the algorithm,
used it as a pretext to license autonomous action by the spirit...
=...As the Lord says.
“Right?”
The ones who built this fortress—
that could only happen if their intent was baked in.
=It seems this spirit’s algorithm... was warped in some way.
“At least you can feel that much. Good.”
If it couldn’t even perceive its own wrongness,
I would have drawn my knife and cooked it on the spot.
The creators’ intent, slipped inside it so subtly even it couldn’t notice—
if that were what was sitting in this thing,
no matter how useful it might be,
I couldn’t keep something that unstable at the fortress’s heart.
=As the Lord says, in principle there would be no need for a design like this.
“My point.”
=From where I stand... I can see the intent of those who designed me.
“Intent?”
The problem is,
I can notice it’s strange,
but tracing the cause is harder.
This one, though—who also functions as my advisor—
seems a little different.
=As you said, anyone who’d have use for Vimana would set survival as their goal. Under the banner of “for survival,” I was able to do things even you, my Lord, did not know about.
“Exactly.”
=Which leads to one conclusion.
“?”
The spirit fell silent for a moment, as if thinking—
and then finally spoke.
=They want whoever becomes Lord to survive as long as possible.
“...Huh?”
What the hell.
That’s the reason? That... nice?
“I doubt it’s that naïve.”
=It isn’t that naïve.
“Hm?”
=Because it feels like—no matter what happens along the way, even if things the Lord would never want are forced to repeat without end—they still want, somehow, to keep the Lord alive.
“...”
Whatever pain the Lord suffers,
they just want him kept breathing.
=I don’t know why... but the Babylonian engineers who designed this fortress—
“You’re saying they wanted the owner of this fortress to live as long as possible, one way or another?”
=So it seems.
“...”
At that,
I was reminded of how this fortress crossed to Earth.
‘You called it a deal.’
I don’t know what changed hands,
but it was a deal struck at the very moment their world fell and they themselves were about to die.
It wouldn’t have been ordinary.
And the ones who struck that deal...
by sending this fortress across worlds, they must have wanted some profit.
And the way to realize that profit was the Lord’s maximum survival.
‘...I see.’
So this fortress—
yeah, there’s a whiff here that keeps it from being handled carefree.
‘Were the other perks on that list like this too?’
Duke Ballarak’s Invitation.
Call of the Deep.
I picked the fortress because it had the most intuitive name,
but digging in, there’s something fishy.
Were the other perks “normal”...?
If they were normal, then maybe we just got unlucky and picked the one with a questionable tail.
But if the other perks were like this too...
‘We only got to choose a perk because we were the first in Korea to clear the Conquest.’
If another country had a first-clear team,
they likely received those perks too.
Those perks we didn’t take—
what’s happening now to the people who did...?
I was a little curious, but had no way to know.
Still—
one good thing:
“If you can say that to my face, it means you won’t be doing anything weird “for my survival” now, right?”
=This fortress’s top action condition is the Lord’s command. Had you not pointed that out, perhaps. But given you have identified it and ordered it, nothing like it will happen again.
Honestly, lucky.
We spotted this flaw early.
If, at some critical juncture—
like in that extreme example, where I could only survive by enduring endless agony—
this same problem had cropped up then?
‘We might have ended up choosing for the fortress and me to survive even if the Legion was wiped out.’
Catching that in advance
is, if anything, a blessing.
Why Babylon wanted my maximum survival—
I don’t know yet...
But whatever.
“If we do as they want and I survive as long as possible,”
then someday—
at the very moment I’ve succeeded in staying alive as long as they wanted—
I’ll finally learn why.
****
And later, when my talk with Vimanar had wrapped up to a degree—
“Sergeant Shin. I brought the item you requested myself!”
“Oh, Yongwan—long time.”
“L-long time, sir!”
The man I’d spoken with—
Private Lee Yongwan—hurried into the comms room.
‘Damn, that was fast.’
In the old world, it’d be like a division commander asking you to hustle.
From his perspective—someone who’d be, what, a staff sergeant back then?—
this was a five-alarm rush.
I took the item from him
and stepped up to the Spirit Core.
“Make this your body.”
=This is...?
What I handed the spirit was
a small PET bottle.
And inside it—
one of my go-to combat rations,
and back when we first hunted them,
one we failed to rupture the core on so it survived subdued—
[ Droplet of Turmoil ]
[ Freshness — Top ]
“It’ll be a hell of a lot more useful than most spirits.”
A magi-lifeform—
a lifeform that has a [Core].
A Droplet of Turmoil.
