Andrew watched as Hoshimi Miyabi, with Kairu in tow, vanished into a spatial rift. Kairu, who had been silently following alongside them, had clearly sensed something.
But since she didn't understand this new world, she ultimately chose to leave with Hoshimi Miyabi without saying a word.
Quietly grateful that she hadn't pressed for more details, Andrew finally turned to face Wise. The easy, teasing smile he'd worn to keep Hoshimi Miyabi from noticing anything faded from his expression.
He furrowed his brow slightly, regarding Wise with total seriousness, and asked in a grave tone:
"Alright, Wise. Can you be straight with me now about exactly what kind of trouble you two have run into?"
"And another thing—I've been connected to the H.D.D System this whole time, and Belle still hasn't shown up? Something's definitely wrong."
"That's... kind of a long story."
Hearing Andrew cut straight to the heart of the matter, and realizing just how much had happened in what felt like no time at all, a wry smile crossed Wise's face.
But with time in short supply, he didn't waste a moment on side explanations, instead getting straight to the point and laying things out:
"Belle and I are in Waifei Peninsula right now. To evade Huijing Meike's pursuit, I'm currently relocating toward Qiulongwei together with Senior Brother Pan and the Obol Squad."
"But the biggest problem right now is that Belle and her companions are still trapped inside the Lemnian Hollow and haven't made it out. And I currently can't reach them."
At that, Andrew's frown deepened instantly.
Worried, he pressed immediately: "Can't reach them? Don't tell me she's run into some kind of danger?"
Wise shook his head, his tone reassuring:
"Relax. Belle did run into an Ethereal attack right before we lost contact, but with the armor you gave her protecting her, an Ethereal of that strength shouldn't pose much danger."
"Given their skill level, even if they can't win the fight, retreating safely won't be a problem."
With that, a hint of a teasing smile crept onto Wise's face as he added:
"The ones you should really be worried about are the companions who went into the Hollow with her—after all, they don't have soft armor that can tank a Level 3 Ethereal's attack without a scratch."
"Of course, that's assuming they don't run into any other dangers."
Unfortunately, Andrew wasn't buying Wise's reassurances or jokes.
Sharp enough to catch the contradiction, Andrew immediately pressed Wise further:
"Then why can I still stay connected here, while Belle can't?"
At Andrew's question, Wise's expression turned a bit helpless.
He explained: "That's because the equipment at the RandomPlay Video Rental Shop has always stayed connected to Hollow Zero. But the detection equipment for the Lemnian Hollow here in Waifei Peninsula—we only set that up after we arrived, at Suibian Temple."
"Before we left, to make sure we could stay connected after relocating—and to keep anyone on the other side from noticing and exploiting the H.D.D System—I pulled out all the key core equipment and took it with us."
"Once I get to Qiulongwei and set it all back up, I'll be able to reconnect to Belle's H.D.D System."
At Wise's words, Andrew's eyes widened slightly in surprise. He asked, startled:
"You don't even have the equipment to directly connect to the H.D.D System right now? Then how have you been calculating new routes for Miyabi?"
Wise waved a hand, explaining reassuringly:
"Relax, I wouldn't feed anyone fake Carrot over something like this."
"Since I only brought the basic equipment, my connection with Eous right now amounts to little more than a video call. The one actually calculating the Hollow data is Fairy."
Saying this, Wise sounded a little relieved as he went on:
"If we hadn't already set Fairy to continuously search for Eous's signal around the clock, I might genuinely have had to wait until I got back to the fully-equipped Suibian Temple to receive anything at all."
"And by then, everything Belle and the others fought so hard to track down would've gone to waste."
"This Fairy..." Based on what Wise had described, Andrew tilted his head slightly, puzzled, then asked:
"Judging by the level of intelligence and capability she's shown so far, she can't just be some ordinary smart-home assistant, can she?"
"Affirmative."
Before Wise could even respond—
Hearing herself mentioned, Fairy—who'd had to stay silent to avoid revealing herself in front of Hoshimi Miyabi—piped up again, jumping straight in to answer Andrew's question.
"I am a Type-III Master-Sequence Integrated General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence, development codename: Fairy. 'AI Housekeeper' is merely my cover identity for public use."
Only two characters shorter, yet the concept behind it was worlds apart. If 'AI Housekeeper' was, at best, a smart-home gadget's glorified autocomplete—something on the level of Baidu's Xiaodu—then drop those two characters, and you were already looking at something on par with DeepSeek, at the very least.
Especially given how she'd performed so far—her functionality and intelligence level could leave those other AIs in the dust.
So Andrew asked: "Then what exactly can you do? Being just an AI alone wouldn't be enough to calculate a complete set of Carrot, would it?"
"Affirmative."
It seemed the 'companion' status Belle had set up for Andrew was doing its job—Fairy was holding absolutely nothing back from him.
"I have unrestricted access to over 80% of all smart devices across the entire city."
"And with my assistance, accumulative Hollow data collection is no longer necessary. Real-time analysis of Hollow evacuation routes is now possible."
"In fact, this core function has already been verified during a previous commission."
"Hssh..."
Fairy hadn't listed many features, but each one packed a serious punch.
Never mind anything else—unrestricted access to over 80% of the city's smart devices alone was an absolutely terrifying capability, not to mention her ability to analyze Hollow route conditions in real time.
The siblings' H.D.D System had already been ridiculous enough on its own. Now add Fairy on top of that...
As a Hunter, Andrew knew better than anyone just how powerful full-map vision could be. And New Eridu was, after all, a bona fide modern metropolis.
Controlling over 80% of its smart devices would be more than enough for someone to become the absolute, undisputed king lurking in New Eridu's shadows.
After all, there were people out there planning to conquer the world with nothing more than a five-second time stop.
Just manipulating a single traffic accident, if done right, could make a person vanish from a modern city without a trace—and her ability to gather covert information was simply unmatched.
Thank goodness it was Belle and Wise who'd ended up with Fairy—otherwise, the consequences didn't bear thinking about.
Having explained everything as fast as he could, Wise immediately moved on to giving instructions:
"Anyway, I need you to leave Hollow Zero right now, following the route Fairy plans out, and get to Waifei Peninsula within two hours."
"That's a pretty long distance—can you make it in time, Andrew?"
Though Wise always had complete confidence in Andrew's strength, when he thought about how it had taken him nearly twelve hours by car just to get from Sixth Street to Chenghui Plain, he couldn't help asking to make sure.
Andrew simply had Fairy pull up the straight-line distance from Hollow Zero to Wise's location, then nodded firmly:
"Of course. Have you forgotten who you're talking to?"
If this had been before he got back to the Astral Outpost, Andrew might have needed to hesitate a little. But now that he had the Flying Swallow...
...this kind of distance was no longer an issue at all.
With the Flying Swallow, even crossing all of New Eridu from end to end would take Andrew no more than an hour or two.
"Excellent!"
Hearing Andrew's assurance, Wise was overjoyed. He immediately gave the order:
"Fairy! Plan the fastest route out of Hollow Zero for Andrew, right now!"
But Fairy didn't act on Wise's order right away. Instead, a string of warnings instantly popped up:
"Warning!"
"Within Hollow Zero, if high-risk Ethereal movement is not filtered out, and no manual verification is applied, planning a route using shortest-distance as the sole search criterion will raise the probability of encountering a Level 4 Ethereal to 37.9%."
"The probability of encountering a high-risk Level 5 Ethereal rises to 21.6%, and Level 6 Ethereal to 6.7%. While this route is guaranteed to be the theoretical fastest path out of Hollow Zero, its danger level is 673.83% higher than a normal route."
"The current decision qualifies as an extremely high-risk decision. There is a significant probability that high-risk Ethereals will render the planned route impassable. Please confirm whether you wish to proceed."
At Fairy's high-risk warning, Andrew just laughed. "Thanks for the heads-up, Fairy."
"But that's exactly what I want. No need to worry about any Ethereals along the way—there's no way they could slow me down."
Before Fairy could pop up a second warning, Andrew had already charged down the path Eous indicated.
What happened next immediately proved Andrew hadn't been exaggerating, and it also showed Fairy exactly why her master's file, at the very end of the original Ethereal threat-level rankings, carried a special note—
None of the above tiers apply to Andrew.
That had been true even before he had the Kushala Daora Armor as a treasure tool—let alone now that he actually had one.
When facing an Ethereal blocking his path, the brief pause it took to adjust his punching stance and strike angle—all in pursuit of a single one-punch kill—simply vanished in the face of the Storm Hammer, which could be summoned with just a wave of his hand.
This alone pushed Andrew's speed up another whole level.
Though he hadn't kept exact count along the way, according to Fairy's records, at least five or six Level 4 and even Level 5 Ethereals had been brushed past like this.
Or rather, Andrew was crushing through them so fast that even Fairy couldn't keep up with logging exactly which Ethereals had been steamrolled.
The Level 5s were easy enough to distinguish, since Ethereals of that tier required Andrew to pause for just a moment and throw a single punch to shatter their Ether core.
But as for the Level 4s and below...
The speed at which Andrew steamrolled through them was virtually identical every time, to the point that Fairy couldn't even scan their corresponding Ether energy levels in time.
"Is... is this even right???"
She'd calculated the theoretical optimal advance speed based on publicly available Void Hunter combat footage from New Eridu's network—and yet his actual breakthrough speed still outpaced her planned advance speed by several tiers.
This man—whom the No. 2 Assistant had flagged as a Golden Finger in the newly refilled data file—wasn't he just a little too far off the charts?
And most importantly—
Spatial shifts inside Hollows changed in the blink of an eye, and the same went for the rifts.
In the route plan she'd provided earlier, she'd only prepared a contingency for him moving slower than the planned pace—she hadn't accounted for him going faster!
Was she supposed to have him just wait at the originally designated spot for a rift to appear?
No, absolutely not!
Making him wait in place would mean this wasn't even the fastest plan she'd promised in the first place!
On the honor of a Type-III Master-Sequence Integrated General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence and her master's Chief Assistant, she absolutely could not let him waste even half a second waiting on the road!!!
RandomPlay Video Rental Shop
The H.D.D System, which had merely been running at high power until now, was instantly pushed to the very brink of overload.
Amid the strained hum of servers on the verge of collapse, a constantly updating new route simultaneously took shape inside Eous's mind, guiding Andrew forward every step of the way.
Meanwhile, in an unnoticed corner of the video shop, the numbers on the siblings' electricity meter, which had been slowly ticking along, suddenly began spinning like mad.
Needless to say—
Judging by how things were going, the siblings' electric bill next month was bound to be absolutely insane.
Waifei Peninsula, Lemnian Hollow
Inside a cell in the old factory district behind the hill
Wise's judgment hadn't actually been wrong—the two of them really had managed to escape safely from the Miasmic Fiend's clutches.
But right on its heels, they'd run into a new danger.
"...Can you hear me..."
"...Belle, can you hear my voice clearly...?"
"Mmh..."
"I did exactly what Belle told me and got the healing potion down her throat..."
A cool, familiar medicinal taste slid down her throat, and amid the soft, anxious calls of her name, Belle's vision slowly returned from the darkness.
The girl's voice was soft and a little timid, but every word of it was thick with worry for Belle's condition.
Worried that calling too loudly might startle Belle, who'd only just woken up, and afraid of drawing the departed guards back, she thoughtfully kept her voice down as she called out to her.
Just hearing that voice alone was enough to convince anyone this girl was an absolute sweetheart, through and through.
But even with all that thoughtfulness, an undertone of barely-contained urgency still crept into her voice.
A pair of rabbit ears twitched twice atop her head.
After being knocked unconscious by a blow from the rifle butt of one of Ferox's thugs, Belle finally stirred back to consciousness, giving her still-hazy head an involuntary shake.
The voice that had sounded like it was drifting near and far while her mind was foggy grew clear at last.
"Ngh..."
The dull ache where her forehead had taken the blow was already fading as she swallowed the potion, but the lingering traces of pain still drew an involuntary, quiet hiss from her.
The update program The Mayor had provided had given her the ability to enter Hollows, but the danger that came with it followed just as closely, like a shadow.
Belle had assumed that once she went into a Hollow, the first thing to hurt her would be an Ethereal. She never expected it would be humans instead.
She'd let her guard down.
In all these years, aside from the time she'd stubbed her shin on a table while running around the house, this was the worst injury Belle had ever suffered.
Mm... maybe the ache from that first night, not long ago, counted too?
No, no—why had her train of thought suddenly veered off into that territory?
Was it really because she hadn't seen Andrew in so long that she'd started missing him?
Now fully awake, Belle grimaced as she took in the rundown cell around her, her thoughts scattering in every direction from everything that had happened.
____
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