WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Cyberpunk Chivalry ◈
Chapter 30: EP.1 The Butterfly Dream 3
──────
Ash raced toward the altar like a streak of light.
He advanced by stepping on, cutting down, and crushing the Sentinel walkers swarming toward him, heading for the altar that rose above them.
At last, he reached Akina.
He grabbed her convulsing shoulders, but the girl only let out screams of pain, her strange golden eyes shining.
"What in the world...!"
Someone answered his mutter.
It was Ifrit.
She smashed the head of an approaching Sentinel walker and shouted.
"It's the Echo Effect! Damn it!"
"...Echo?"
Using that as a keyword, Ash hurriedly searched his internal database.
[DATA SEARCH: ECHO EFFECT]
[SEARCHING. . .]
[NOT RESULT FOUND]
'...What? Nothing?'
Not a single piece of information about the Echo Effect came up, as though it had been filtered out.
The data card Akina had given him held a truly enormous amount of information. Yet there wasn't a single entry?
He felt an odd sense that something was wrong.
But this was no time to lose himself in thought. Ash hurriedly questioned Ifrit, who seemed to know something.
"What exactly is this phenomenon?"
"You want an explanation? Now?"
Ifrit snapped at him, but after looking at Ash, she clicked her tongue.
She continued while punching through another Sentinel's armor with Dragon's Breath.
"It sometimes happens when you go too deep into a Nexus Port. The flood of data eats away at you completely, until you lose yourself. That's probably the best way to put it."
"...What? Lose yourself...?"
"You've never heard of it? Didn't the kid tell you? Outside threats aren't the only danger to a technomancer. The Deep Dive itself is a risk!"
He hadn't known.
This was the first he had heard of it.
"Aaaaaaah!"
Even now, Akina was tearing at her hair and screaming.
After standing motionless and watching her for a while, Ash reached toward the cable connecting the back of her neck to the Nexus Port.
Jack O'Lantern and Ifrit shouted at the same time.
"Hey! Are you crazy?"
"Bro! You can't pull the cable out now! She'll lose her mind completely!"
Ash's hand stopped in midair.
Feeling something surge inside him, he shouted.
"Then what am I to do? Simply stand here and watch?"
At his cry, Ifrit roughly ran a hand through her hair.
"Pray. That the kid... gets through it on her own. That she doesn't lose herself."
There was nothing they could do.
Not powerful swordsmanship, not an idol's firepower, not any amount of knowledge.
Nothing could save the girl who had fallen into the depths of cyberspace.
She had to overcome this herself.
That fact filled Ash with overwhelming despair.
'...'
He understood now.
Why Akina had been so tense.
Why there had been fear in her eyes as she looked at the Nexus.
But when she had passed on all the knowledge of this world through the data card, why had she left out everything about the Echo Effect?
Perhaps she had wanted to hide this very danger.
Afraid he would try to stop her from exploring.
Knowing Ash's personality, he certainly might have.
A gamble in which she could lose herself.
For Ash, whose experience of society was limited to an agrarian world, it was a risk he could never even have imagined.
"I'll see you later."
He remembered Akina saying that with a brave face.
The memory tore through his main core.
So he gently embraced Akina, who was still spilling fragments of incomprehensible data as though speaking in tongues.
His steel body could offer her no warmth. Even so, he held the girl with all his heart.
Then he whispered softly in her ear.
"Young lady. No, Akina."
It was an order.
"Come back. Is there not something you must do? Your long-held wish for revenge. Why would you forget all of that?"
And at the same time, it was a plea.
"You must come back. I shall be here the whole time."
Had he imagined it?
For a moment, her golden eyes seemed to turn toward Ash.
* * *
Akina Greenwood.
Now, the world she saw was made entirely of green grids.
An infinite space where she could not tell up from down, or one direction from another.
It was an endless sea of information.
The grid beneath her feet stretched into the distance like an endless horizon. Above her, countless streams of data wound through space like the Milky Way across a night sky.
Winds made of zeros and ones brushed past her ears, giving off sharp mechanical sounds.
The girl was alone in that space.
A vast panorama of information, both wondrous and terrifying.
That was cyberspace.
A place where the girl's "consciousness" felt like nothing more than a speck of dust.
At some point, her very sense of "I" began to fade.
It felt as though everything was breaking down, coming apart, and seeping into that green sea.
Just as the being called Akina Greenwood was about to fade into the depths, it happened.
Rooooar...!
Suddenly, the world shook.
The green grids that had been flowing so calmly all flashed at once and began to move violently.
The flat grid lines twisted and curved at random, forming a three-dimensional space.
As though paint had been poured into them, the lines began spilling out colors of their own. Red as vivid as blood, gray as thick as ash, and gold that blazed like fire mixed in a dizzying swirl.
Some became scorched stone. Others became polished wood.
The smell of burning wood and the metallic scent of blood.
Cries, screams, and even the sound of something exploding.
Everything was so completely real that calling it mere data felt inadequate.
And so the multilayered data matrix of green grids became a burning temple.
"Priestess! Pull yourself together!"
Someone grabbed the girl's shoulders and shouted.
When she turned to look, she was no longer Akina.
She was a woman in splendid silk robes, with a striking pair of horns rising from her head.
"...Uh, your name was... Ryu? Right?"
But rather than answer her, the man focused on what he had to say. Or perhaps that was simply how it had been recorded.
"The humans have rebelled!"
Humans?
But I'm human.
My name is Akina Greenwood.
I was born and raised in Sanctum...
Yet regardless of her wishes, someone else's data poured into her like a waterfall.
Humans.
Creatures like livestock, made through genetic editing to perform simple labor.
Those things had rebelled?
The arrogance of a noble bloodline swept over her thoughts in an instant.
"...Yes. Humans."
As it did, the slightly hazy scene grew ever clearer.
"Humans! Those lowly, ungrateful creatures have finally dared!"
"Priestess, you must hurry! Before they reach the main sanctuary!"
His shout brought Akina back to reality. No.
It brought something from the past back to reality.
"Understood! But where is my... my bodyguard?"
"Fighting the humans! He should be at the main sanctuary soon..."
Booom!
At that moment, something bright flew from the far end of the corridor and smashed through one wall.
Stone fragments and dust flew everywhere.
A group emerged through the spreading cloud of dust.
They were humans, all wearing robes marked with the same emblem.
"Damn it...! They've already made it this far!"
The priestess gritted her teeth.
The holy sanctuary was being defiled by these lowly creatures who did not know their place.
Look at those ungrateful beings, daring to threaten their creator. Their very existence was blasphemy.
"Go! I'll hold them here! Hurry!"
Ryu activated a shielding field around his entire body and charged at the humans.
Where was her bodyguard, and what was he doing at such a desperate moment?
The image of a man flashed through the priestess's mind.
A large swordsman whose entire body was made of machinery.
Someone she had assembled herself, who had been with her ever since.
Mr. □□.
"...Mister?"
It happened just then.
"...kina."
An unfamiliar voice came from somewhere.
But something was strange.
"...Come back."
It was certainly an unfamiliar voice. Yet hearing it made her feel as though her troubled heart was quickly settling.
"Is there not something you must do? Your long-held wish for revenge..."
Revenge.
That one word lodged in her mind.
Yes, I have to take revenge.
On everything that made me this way.
But on whom?
The humans in front of me? Or Sanctum?
But what is Sanctum?
"Aaargh!"
Her thoughts did not last long.
Ryu, who had charged out so boldly, fell, spraying blood through his shattered shielding field.
"Ryu!"
He died there.
Yet somehow, she felt as though she had seen this before.
Grief surged inside her.
Anger boiled up as well.
Even that grief and anger felt old and worn.
As though she had experienced them hundreds, thousands of times before.
Fragments of memory swirled.
Ryu, now a cold corpse.
The priestess, her face twisted with fear and rage.
Is that my memory?
Then am I the priestess?
Who is Akina Greenwood, then?
The two sets of memories collided violently, throwing her consciousness into confusion. A green grid appeared over the burning temple. Glitches broke out, and parts of the world began to collapse.
Then humans gathered around the confused priestess. No, around Akina. Their frames had broken into pieces, leaving their forms almost unrecognizable.
They all opened their mouths at once.
"You could rightly be called a genius, young lady."
"I have no affiliation. I am a wandering swordsman."
"Pull harder."
"Young lady. You have come?"
A familiar voice.
Yet it was an electronic sound, twisted into something grotesque.
It was Ash's voice.
"Are you all right?"
"Run! Hurry!"
"Did you not ask me for help?"
One human reached out. A sharp knife was held in his hand.
"Do not worry."
The blade stabbed into the priestess's thigh.
"Aaaaaaaaaah!!"
The girl screamed in pain.
"I shall be by your side."
The human beside him pierced the priestess's body with a short spear.
"You must come back. I shall be here the whole time."
"Aaah, aaaaaaah!!"
Surrounded by shapeless things and being slashed apart, the priestess felt at her own body and face as she screamed.
Cyberspace collapsed.
Akina, who was within it, collapsed as well.
Through it all, the words the girl remembered Ash saying continued to flow.
Like an echo.
* * *
"...Young lady?"
At the moment Ash and Akina's eyes met, the blue haze wrapped around her entire body turned gold. Then it spread outward in great concentric circles.
Thoom!
A powerful shock wave swept over everything on the altar.
Ash and the other Pathfinders were thrown backward by the overwhelming wave of energy. Even the Sentinels surrounding the altar were knocked down.
It was an electromagnetic pulse, much like an EMP shock.
Ash had been closest and taken a direct hit. For a while, he could barely think through the system messages appearing across his optical sensors.
[VISUAL SYSTEM ERROR]
[AUDIO INPUT SYSTEM. . .]
[ERROR]
[NEURAL MATRIX HAS NOT. . .]
[. . .]
Amid the waterfall of warning messages, Ash slowly raised his head.
Akina was no longer in his arms.
She stood tall at the center of the altar.
On her own two feet.
"Young lady...!"
There were no convulsions or screams.
There was no Levitation to indicate a Deep Dive, nor any sign of the haze that had caused the shock wave moments before.
There was only one thing.
As she stared blankly into space, her eyes were still golden.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
