Back in the real world, Kongou stared at the piece of hardware before her.
It was a data-storage device she had created herself, and it was now completely filled with the content she had downloaded.
The amount she could download depended entirely on how much data the device could handle. This time, the entire download had finished in roughly the span of a single human breath.
During the process, she had distinctly felt something being transmitted out of her Mental Model's core. It resembled data, yet it was fundamentally different from any form of data she understood.
Only after it was loaded into the device did it transform into data compatible with the hardware.
Every last bit of storage space had been filled.
If she manufactured another device with greater capacity and downloaded the content again, it would still take the same amount of time—and the larger device would likewise be filled to capacity.
Kongou understood why.
It was a matter of resolution.
Given sufficiently advanced hardware, a single image could be magnified a million times and still remain perfectly clear.
"Since it came out of my Mental Model in the first place, I might as well read it directly."
The system itself was already embedded within her core. There was no reason to worry about the videos it transmitted containing a virus or anything similar. Running additional security checks would be pointless.
Kongou immediately began reading all the data at once, rapidly absorbing everything that person had broadcast since his livestream began.
Read!
Kongou's body jerked as though she had been electrocuted, and she doubled over. Streams of data raced through her crimson eyes.
What was this?
Thunderous explosions filled her ears—the deafening roar of weapons.
Everywhere she looked, storms of metal projectiles tore the charging targets apart.
Amid the metallic tempest, high-energy lasers pierced organic bodies and scorched flesh until the smell of it filled the air.
Her sense of smell registered everything with terrifying clarity: the stench of gunpowder, something resembling machine oil, and the coppery odor of blood spilling from shredded chunks of flesh.
Some of the blood smelled freshly spilled. The rest carried the foul reek of decay.
The fresh blood came from those still alive or only recently killed. The rotten stench belonged to corpses that should have remained dead, yet had been corrupted and transformed by some unnatural power into grotesque abominations.
Her perspective abruptly shifted.
She was attacking monsters created from reanimated human remains.
No—that wasn't quite right.
She wasn't the one attacking. Instead, she was experiencing everything as though she had merged with the person in the recording, sharing his body and perspective.
It felt as though she were fighting alongside him—no, as though she had become him.
She quickly understood what those resurrected, mutated corpses were. Creatures known as daemons had possessed their bodies.
The battle soon moved from the depths below to the upper levels.
Other monsters infested the impossibly vast mechanical city as well. Creatures known as Tyranids. He fought those deadly beings too.
Then an enormous fortress fell from the sky.
Heaven and earth seemed ready to shatter beneath the impact.
Caught within that cataclysm, "he" was like a tiny boat struggling through monstrous waves in the middle of a raging ocean, desperately trying to escape before the tide swallowed him whole.
He had barely survived when he plunged headfirst into an endless Tyranid swarm and was forced to fight again.
He battled those monsters with nothing but his flesh-and-blood body.
The human companions fighting at his side were replaced in wave after wave—not because they retreated, but because they kept dying in battle against the Tyranids.
Only now did Kongou understand why the xenos monsters Kain had encountered during his recent broadcast hadn't seemed particularly dangerous to him.
There had been many of them, certainly, but compared to this battlefield, their numbers were pitiful.
The Tyranids were a true living flood. Their innumerable bodies blanketed the ground, forming a churning ocean of insects.
When the battle on that planet finally ended, the experiences Kongou was reading entered a new stage.
He encountered an Ork warship, discovered a mechanical planet, and then watched that planet close around the enemy's satellite fortress like an iron maiden and crush it between its metallic jaws.
Kain himself was nearly killed by one of the enemy's powerful leaders.
Their clash lasted only an instant. If he had made even the slightest mistake—if any of those metal rods had struck a more vital area—he would have died on the spot.
Experiencing that brush with death from his perspective, almost completely merged with his senses, made Kongou feel as though her own life were hanging by a thread. Thousands of indescribable emotions trembled through her core.
Was she afraid of death?
No.
She wasn't afraid of dying herself.
She was afraid that "he" might die.
Was she actually worried about this human?
Wait. This was—
The data appeared to support an even more immersive mode, allowing her to truly place herself within his experiences.
Then she would do exactly that.
Not long after escaping the crisis involving the Orks, Kain was given barely any time to breathe before encountering yet another enemy.
At first, he believed the so-called T'au were his enemies. In reality, however, the Necrons were the true threat.
They were the most terrifying opponents he had encountered so far. They could move through space at will, appearing without warning to launch unpredictable ambushes.
Then an even more horrifying enemy appeared—a dreadful machine capable of freely moving between another dimension and physical reality.
Kongou was stunned by what Kain did to destroy it.
He deceived the monster into believing that his heart was his critical weakness, convincing it that if the organ were completely destroyed, he would be unable to regenerate.
To lure the creature into tearing out his heart and thereby give himself a chance to kill the metallic monster, Kain shoved a spherical metal bomb directly into his own chest.
The sheer agony almost stopped Kongou from breathing.
Her entire body seemed to shriek in pain. Every system wailed in protest, and even Kongou herself screamed.
This was what it meant to watch his broadcast through a fully immersive experience.
Whatever injury he suffered, she felt the same pain.
Even as a warship of the Fleet of Fog, she had never experienced agony like this. It hurt so much that she wanted to shut down her Mental Model entirely.
No.
She couldn't shut it down.
She refused to believe that she was incapable of enduring something a mere human had survived.
Then an even more violent wave of agony erupted through her.
The pain was so overwhelming that her consciousness seemed to stop for an instant.
When she recovered, she understood what had happened.
The monster had taken the bait and ripped out his heart.
She truly hadn't been able to endure the ultimate agony of having her heart torn from her chest. Her consciousness had shut down for nearly ten milliseconds.
Then Kongou noticed that the sensory synchronization had changed.
She had originally set the experience to one hundred percent, but it had now been reduced by half.
Her Mental Model's core programs had automatically lowered the setting to prevent her from suffering a complete system collapse.
In other words, her willpower was fundamentally inferior to this man's.
Of course, that conclusion relied upon the assumption that these images were real—that the members of the Superdimensional Channel truly came from different worlds.
If this wasn't the result of a virus invading her systems, then Kongou had genuinely failed to endure what the man named Kain had experienced.
"Lady Kongou! Lady Kongou, what happened to you?"
The panicked voice left Kongou briefly disoriented, but she stopped reading the data.
She had returned to reality.
Only then did she realize that she was lying on the deck.
Her entire body was curled into a ball, as though she had suffered a catastrophic malfunction. Her posture resembled that of a human writhing from a terrible illness.
The person calling out to her was the deputy flagship of her fleet—Hiei.
Kongou had no idea when Hiei had arrived. She had clearly become so immersed in Kain's experiences that she'd completely forgotten the world around her.
"Lady Kongou, what exactly happened? Was it caused by the device in your hand?"
"Don't touch it!"
Kongou instinctively slapped away Hiei's hand as she reached toward the cube-shaped device clutched tightly in her grasp. It was only five centimeters across.
At first glance, her reaction might have seemed like concern that Hiei could also be infected.
Yet it felt more as though the device were precious to her and she didn't want anyone else touching it.
The moment that thought surfaced, Kongou froze.
She couldn't understand what it meant.
(End of Chapter)
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