The Wakagawa Upper Mountain Range is a stretch of mountains in the interior of the New Frontier continent. The snowcapped peaks feed several water sources year-round that together form the Wakagawa.
The slopes are relatively gentle, but avalanches are not uncommon, and there have been reported incidents of Actanoids falling into crevasses — cracks in the ground sealed over by snow — and sustaining damage.
Chihaya is carefully advancing her Allrounder through the mountains. The further she gets from the Wakagawa Garage base, the worse the connection gets. No unintended behavior so far, but the anxiety of lag and packet loss is a constant presence.
As the mountain climbs, the variety of trees thins out. Heights are inconsistent, but with almost no undergrowth, visibility is good.
What little undergrowth there is seems to have been trampled by animals — most of it lying flat.
Factoring in the possibility of nearby wildlife, Chihaya raises her assault rifle and pays closer attention than before to all her monitors.
“oh r-right. I need to start the resource exploration app”
She boots up the resource-identification app on her computer — the one that can spot resources in the monitor footage — and gets it overlaid on the monitor display. Her computer doesn’t have the specs to run it on all the monitors at once, so it’s just the main monitor.
That way she won’t miss any Secondi Apples.
Chihaya is looking around when something moves in the rear camera and she spins around in a hurry.
“……um?”
Unremarkable snow-covered ground. A few sparse trees. Snow slides off a branch in a heavy clump as the wind moves it.
Nothing moving. She wonders if she imagined it — the branch snow, maybe — but it doesn’t feel like that was dramatic enough to explain what she saw.
It was a little too off to just chalk it up to her imagination.
“……hmm? huh? wait?”
The Actanoid’s neck lets out an ominous grinding sound. Must have moved along with Chihaya tilting her head.
But as if in response to that grinding — something small and black pokes its head up out of the snow.
A small black blob attached to a white stick, sticking up out of the snow. Like a periscope, and it seems to be looking this way.
Silence takes over. Chihaya stares at the little round something about ten-odd meters ahead, and suddenly thinks of a crab.
That black crab-eye look.
“——oh!”
She recognizes it and immediately swings the assault rifle muzzle toward the black eye.
Whether it sensed it had been made by her sudden movement, the owner of the black eyes emerges from the snow.
At first glance it looks like a scorpion. But its countless legs are flat and oar-shaped, resembling the Anomalocaris of the Cambrian period. Named for those fern-frond legs and its overall appearance, it’s a New Frontier creature called the Fernleg Scorpion.
A carnivore reaching two meters in body length — with tail included, some individuals exceed five meters. Its exoskeleton is extremely hard and thick.
Chihaya’s Allrounder opens fire with the assault rifle. The spray of bullets kicks up snow and connects with the Fernleg Scorpion.
“it’s — not working!”
Not a scratch. Worse, she couldn’t even make it flinch.
The Fernleg Scorpion starts gliding across the snow on those oar-shaped legs. Like someone skiing, it closes the ten-odd meters between them.
Chihaya gives up on shooting it down and takes off running toward the mountain summit.
The gentle slope still gives the Fernleg Scorpion decent speed going uphill. But it’s still better than going downhill where gravity would give it momentum.
Running at full speed through the snow, she watches the pursuing Fernleg Scorpion through the rear camera at the base of the neck.
The Fernleg Scorpion is driving its claw-like front limbs into the snow and using them as ski poles to push itself forward.
If she could destroy even one of those claws, it should lose speed.
“c-can I make the shot?”
Chihaya moves the Allrounder’s arm, angling the assault rifle muzzle backward over the shoulder. On a human body this would wreck the arm and shoulder, and the recoil would send them face-forward into the snow — but on an Actanoid it might be possible.
Still, it takes nerve to try with a loaner Allrounder. There’s no way the repair costs are getting waived on this job.
She weighs it up — but getting caught and wrecked like this would be worse.
“here goes——!”
Full auto and yet the burst is short, restrained. The Allrounder’s sound pickup catches the gunfire at close range and the speaker right in front of Chihaya vibrates hard enough to rattle, a deafening blast.
“so LOUD!”
Chihaya complains involuntarily and checks the rear camera. The Fernleg Scorpion is punching through the cloud of kicked-up snow and still coming.
Hard to say whether any of it landed, but it doesn’t appear to have done much.
She lets out a sigh — trying to hit anything with that absurd shooting posture was never realistic anyway.
Chihaya checks ahead.
The Allrounder’s weight is sinking its feet deep into the snow, but there’s still distance between her and the Fernleg Scorpion. If she can find somewhere to hide, she might be able to wait it out.
But what she finds instead is something else.
“Secondi Apple!”
The target item for this job is growing on a small shrub. The resource exploration app is helpfully highlighting it in a red box.
She tears one off one-handed with her right arm as she runs past and tosses it into the backpack on her back. The request said three, any size — but out of consideration for conservation she can’t exactly break off whole branches.
It seems to be a grove, because there are more Secondi Apples growing nearby. She scoops them into the backpack one after another as she passes, and once she’s collected all three she checks the rear camera.
“it’s, so persistent……”
The Fernleg Scorpion is still after the Allrounder.
Either very hungry, or it just has an instinct to chase moving things.
She spots a section where the trees are packed close together and slides the Allrounder through the gap.
The wide-bodied Fernleg Scorpion slams into a tree trunk with a loud thunk and stops. Even so it reaches both clawed arms toward the Allrounder, snapping them open and closed, trying to drag it out.
“y-you don’t want to eat me, I’m not even tasty. I’m metal……”
Chihaya mutters at the Fernleg Scorpion filling her main monitor.