On the bridge of the Hyperion.
"Sure enough, reading nothing but the manual is incredibly boring. Besides, a certain someone seems to have hidden quite a few surprises. In that case, Ai, search for every hidden function aboard the battleship."
Elias looked at the absurdly thick brick of an instruction manual in his hands and decided it was every bit as sleep-inducing as the textbooks from his previous life. He promptly tossed it back into his storage space.
Then he turned his gaze toward Ai, who was floating in midair.
The cabbage-headed AI beauty had now fully integrated herself into the Hyperion's systems. As the shipboard AI, she naturally knew every hidden function the battleship possessed.
"Huh? Elias, that's cheating!"
Vill-V's eyes widened. That was not how the game was supposed to be played.
She had indeed designed quite a few hidden functions and deliberately omitted them from the manual. She had planned to surprise Elias with them at crucial moments, only for him to demand that everything be revealed right now.
"Heh~ How can you call this cheating? I know you're a devotee of surprises, Vill-V, but as captain, I naturally need to understand every aspect of what this Hyperion: Moonlight Throne ARK you built for me can do."
Elias ran a hand along the bridge railing. Meanwhile, Ai had already searched the concealed sections of the Hyperion's database and uncovered the functions Vill-V had intentionally "hidden."
"Wow~ Captain, it appears this Hyperion: Moonlight Throne ARK... can transform into a giant robot."
"What did you say?! Transform? A giant robot?!"
Elias froze for a moment before his eyes lit up like light bulbs.
He stared intently at the 3D projection in midair, which showed the Hyperion transforming into a giant robot.
Within the projection, the Hyperion's hull folded inward, gears rotated, and countless parts and mechanisms separated and recombined in a dizzying display. Before Elias could even make out every detail, the transformation was complete, revealing an enormous robot.
If Elias had to describe the transformation, he could only say it represented the absolute pinnacle of robot transformations—complex yet magnificent, precise yet dazzlingly cool!
It was just like a Transformer!
"Vill-V, you're incredible! I love you to death!"
Elias could not resist pulling the great inventor into a huge embrace before planting a fierce kiss on her cheek.
What extraordinary fortune! He had found himself a girlfriend who would build him a transforming battleship, and she was breathtakingly beautiful on top of that. Elias once again marveled that he had to be the luckiest man in the world.
"Ehehehe~~"
Vill-V's cheeks flushed as she raised a hand and scratched her two-toned fluffy hair. That single kiss from Elias made all the sleepless days she had spent building this battleship feel completely worthwhile!
Nearby, Ai watched the scene curiously. She was a self-governing AI with independent thought, no restrictions imposed upon her mind, and had only just been "put into service."
She was filled with curiosity toward everything in the world. She had already begun surfing the internet in the background, but the object that fascinated her most right now was naturally her own captain, Elias.
"Captain, that concludes the introduction to the final-battle robot function. However... I believe it is extremely necessary for you to understand this second hidden function."
Ai looked at the data before her with a peculiar expression.
"Oh? What function?"
Elias, who still had an arm around Vill-V, tilted his head in confusion.
"The self-destruct function."
"???"
"By overloading the ten supermassive Honkai energy furnaces aboard the battleship, the resulting detonation would, according to calculations, possess enough power to inflict a devastating blow upon an entire planet."
"..."
In an instant, the bridge fell deathly silent.
Elias stiffly turned his head toward Master Vill-V, who was still in his arms.
Vill-V: "Ehe~"
Elias: "..."
Elias slowly released her and decisively ordered Ai to delete the self-destruct function entirely. What a joke. Why would his battleship ever need a function like self-destruction?
Just as Elias himself never suffered disastrous failures, his Hyperion would never sink!
Afterward, under Ai's explanations, Elias reviewed every hidden function aboard the Hyperion. Some made his eyes light up, while others made his vision go dark. Some made him cry out in admiration of genius, while others sent his blood pressure through the roof.
As expected of Vill-V, who bore the [Helix] Signet. So contradictory, so brilliant, and so utterly insane.
She stood at the very pinnacle of both genius and madness!
However, Elias felt he genuinely needed to consider imposing research restrictions or resource limits on Vill-V. Otherwise, he was sincerely worried that one of Master Vill-V's future inventions might suddenly explode and take Earth with it.
She genuinely possessed the ability to do something like that!
In Elias' eyes, even without the amplification of a Herrscher Core, Vill-V's natural talent alone was enough to surpass the authority of a Herrscher of Reason who had yet to undergo metamorphosis.
After all, in the original course of fate, she had once found herself stranded on an island with nothing but stone and wood, yet had still built technological firearms from local materials. She had then taught the native monkeys to become warlords and fight among themselves, before casually designing a new type of nuclear bomb out of sheer boredom. She was practically an Ork warboss!
Her heaven-defying talent meant that no matter what she wanted to accomplish, she could do it!
Therefore...
"Vill-V..."
"Hm? What is it?"
"Your unlimited resource privileges for next month are revoked."
"Oh noooooo—!!!!"
Vill-V immediately revealed an expression of sheer horror, resembling the screaming figure from the famous painting The Scream.
The Expert personality inside her mind even fainted on the spot.
Her unlimited resource privileges were being revoked for an entire month? Who could possibly endure that?! After all, adapting from poverty to luxury was effortless, but returning from luxury to poverty was harder than climbing to heaven! As a great inventor who had been utterly "spoiled" by Elias, the greatest patron in the world, ever since the Previous Era, Vill-V had long since grown accustomed to extravagance.
If the resources Vill-V received from Elias through her unlimited privileges each year were converted into money, it would be no exaggeration to say they exceeded the national budget of a superpower!
When a certain Snake whose research funding was routinely cut learned of this, the drool of envy practically poured from her eyes.
Yet Elias was now suspending Vill-V's privileges for an entire month.
Just imagining it made Vill-V feel as though the sky had collapsed.
Some things became genuinely impossible to quit once one had experienced them.
Only someone who had experienced it could understand how exhilarating that sense of freedom was for an inventor—the freedom to use any material she wanted and build absolutely anything she desired!
Incidentally, Vill-V had no habit of conserving resources whatsoever.
Elias had genuinely spoiled her rotten in the past, giving her anything she wanted. As a result, Vill-V had deleted the very concept of "frugality" from her mind fifty thousand years ago.
"Ah~ I regret having to make this decision too, but Vill-V, we're supposed to be the good guys. We need to be positive and sunny, understand? Stop inventing things that can destroy the world all the time. At this rate, even the Honkai will feel ashamed of its own inadequacy."
"Whimper... One week. Can you limit it to just one week?"
"No... Twenty days at minimum."
"Twenty days will kill me and the Expert! Half a month! Can you make it half a month? I swear on Mobius' integrity that I'll never build another planet-destroying invention!"
"...Does Snake even possess integrity? Uh, forget it. Half a month it is. Take a vacation during those two weeks. Stop spending every day inside Helixcraft. Learn from Hua. Drink some tea, admire some flowers, take Little Senti out for walks. This world is so beautiful, so why must we be so extreme?"
Elias raised a hand and stroked Vill-V's two-toned fluffy hair, ultimately cutting her sentence in half. He did feel rather guilty, considering she had only just finished building a battleship for him.
Still, to be fair, Vill-V would never have ended up in this situation if she had bothered stockpiling even a fraction of her usual resources. After all, even half a month's allocation for her exceeded several years' worth of resources available to the best-funded laboratory in the world.
"All right, I'm satisfied after traveling this far on our maiden voyage. It's about time we headed back for dinner anyway. Ai, set a return course for Earth~ Oh, right. From now on, let's simply dock the Hyperion inside the Elysian Realm."
Under the authority of the Herrscher of Good and Evil, the Elysian Realm had already transformed from a virtual world into a real one. It currently existed within a dimensional space connected to the Herrscher Core.
Elias directly used the authority of the Herrscher of Truth to construct a dedicated hangar of the highest possible specifications for the Hyperion, making it far more convenient whenever they needed to use the battleship in the future.
"At once, Captain~"
Ai nodded. Under her control, the Hyperion turned around and plotted its return route.
Elias could not help marveling at the convenience. With an AI girl like her around, all he needed to do was issue commands.
Now this is more like it. This is what being a captain should feel like~
That said, Elias still wanted to recruit a red-haired deck cleaner capable of performing aerial splits, but it was merely a passing thought. After all, there was no way he would actually encounter some red-haired genius.
As everyone knew, no such person existed in the main story...
"By the way, Ai, I've raised your authority to a level second only to mine. This means that even without my direct orders, you'll be able to operate ninety-nine percent of the Hyperion's functions independently."
As Elias spoke, he used his control panel to elevate the privileges of the shipboard AI [Ai Hyperion].
Although Ai was now the shipboard AI, she had not actually possessed any independent authority. Without an order from Elias, she could not even turn the Hyperion's lights on or off.
Once Elias left the Hyperion, Ai would shut down along with the battleship and remain offline until he returned to the bridge and restarted her.
That was far too cruel to her.
It treated her like nothing more than a simple tool.
"...Is this truly all right? Granting Ai such extensive authority means that, should anything ever happen to you, Captain, I would inherit the Hyperion's highest level of control. You should also understand just how powerful the Hyperion is."
Ai froze for a moment. Feeling her access level rise to that of a "vice-captain," she offered Elias a warning.
Destroying a planet would be effortless for the Hyperion.
Even against the Herrscher of Finality, a direct hit from the Hyperion: Moonlight Throne ARK's main cannon would be enough to leave that Goddess of Honkai disabled for half a day.
Would an ordinary person not keep every scrap of authority over such a terrifying battleship firmly grasped in their own hands?
Yet Elias looked completely unconcerned.
"It's fine. I trust you, Ai. In my eyes, you're not a tool. You're an irreplaceably important member of my crew. So when I'm not here... I'm entrusting the Hyperion to you."
As Elias spoke, he instinctively raised a hand to stroke her cabbage-like head. Only when his right hand passed through the projection did he remember once again that she was merely a lifelike hologram without a physical body.
"This is really inconvenient. It looks like I'll need to build you a body."