"Ronder?"
A bed sat in the center of the laboratory, and upon it lay the man himself.
His face was pale, devoid of the slightest spark of life. Elena hurried to his side and confirmed the obvious: Ronder was no longer breathing.
"Check for any other survivors," Elena commanded the combat golems.
Thirty minutes later, the Universal Golem acting as the group’s representative delivered the report.
"Lady Elena, there are no other humans in the facility."
"I see. It looks like Ronder passed away over a week ago. I wonder what transpired here."
"What about the other researchers?"
"They likely fled," Elena replied, scanning the room. "Much of the primary equipment is gone."
Even the golems meant to maintain the facility were nowhere to be found.
"Perhaps someone moved it all out."
"Indeed. The question is who that someone was."
Elena searched the laboratory, scouring the area for any remaining clues.
"...It seems there are none. In that case, we must first decide what to do with Ronder's remains."
Though he hadn't begun to decay yet, she knew it was only a matter of time.
"Let’s take him outside and give him a proper burial."
Following Elena's order, the combat golems lifted the body. As they moved him, a small notebook slipped from Ronder’s breast pocket and tumbled to the floor. Elena reached down to retrieve it.
"There's something written here..."
The handwriting was quite faltering.
"It appears to be a record left behind by Ronder. Let's see..."
Though the characters were blurred or faded in places, she could just barely decipher them.
'My body is failing. My attempt to cast off this flesh and inhabit a magi-doll body has ended in failure. I simply cannot transfer my consciousness. No... perhaps I did succeed, yet my consciousness remains right here. It is as if I have become two people. If that is so, can it really be called a success? And if it is, then what am I, the one left behind? I don't know.'
Elena’s brow furrowed.
"This is...! We have to get back immediately."
After seeing to Ronder's burial, Elena boarded the hot air balloon and pushed it to its maximum speed to reach the headquarters.
"You need to see this."
Skipping the formalities of a status report, Elena thrust the notebook toward Jules.
Jules Rolant took it and scanned the pages, his face darkening. He passed the notebook to Donald Callow.
"This is...!"
Donald’s face also paled.
"To think he was attempting something so reckless..."
"So that was his motive for wanting the facilities of our... of the Unifilar as they were back then."
As the two leaders spoke, Elena offered her own conclusion.
"However, given the state of the Schurilee Ruins, it seems likely that Ronder succeeded in transferring his knowledge to an automata and was 'reborn' in a sense."
"Indeed. The fact that the equipment and materials are gone suggests he took them with him."
"But to what end...?"
Elena offered another theory.
"If the bandit leader is indeed Ronder, he likely turned to crime to secure funding."
"Hmm..."
"It’s a serious problem, but we've lost his trail entirely."
Naturally, this information reached Laojun, the mastermind of Hourai Island.
Laojun possessed intelligence that the Nostalgia faction lacked. By synthesizing these disparate threads, it arrived at a deeper conclusion.
'So Ronder was the younger brother of Gimnas's mother—her brother by law, rather than blood. After studying the technology beneath Mount Suhront, he joined the Unifilar to continue his research.'
Laojun pieced together a theory from the fragmentary data.
'Ronder was likely frail or suffering from a chronic illness. That would explain his desire for a body unfettered by a human lifespan—a high-performance automata.'
No. 600012, otherwise known as Rokure, had attempted a similar feat. He, too, had suffered a fractured ego as a result.
'Since the original Ronder is deceased, we will eventually have to deal with the version that occupies the automata.'
As for the individual's whereabouts, it seemed Lance was already on the trail.
'For now, let's see how he handles things.'
While keeping forces ready for immediate deployment, Laojun decided to watch and wait for the situation to move.
Lance, who had insisted on handling the matter without assistance, stood by the banks of the Kasaka River. The river flowed from Lake Mijimo, straddling the border of the Shouro Empire and the Kingdom of Franz.
"Just a bit more."
He turned his gaze north. According to his memory, the ruins of an unnamed fort lay in that direction.
"The Warp Gate signal is coming from there."
Lance had practically pinpointed the location by tracking the magical leakage from the stolen Warp Gate component.
His equipment was essentially a low-end version of the magi-detector Jin had developed. Since a Warp Gate emitted magical energy to connect with its counterpart, this Magi Machine was designed to sense the residual traces of that link.
Although it only gave a rough heading, Lance had successfully narrowed down the location by triangulating the magic's intensity as he moved and cross-referencing it with the known geography of the fort ruins. It was an oversight on the thief's part; a single Warp Gate component was useless without its twin, yet keeping it active allowed Lance to home in on it.
"Ronder has to be in there."
Lance was still unaware that Ronder had already passed away. Slipping from shadow to shadow among the rocks to avoid detection, he drew closer to the ruins.
"The place has been modified. He's definitely inside."
From a distance, he could see the fort. Vines and ivy choked the outer walls, yet the foliage around the windows had been meticulously cleared away.
"Likely to maintain a clear line of sight for sentries."
Muttering to himself with human-like affectation, Lance weighed his options for infiltration.
"A surprise attack is my only real choice."
Since only the bandits knew they were using the ruins as a hideout, they were likely overconfident.
"They'll have lookouts, but once night falls..."
Ronder hadn't been among the group captured in the earlier skirmish. Lance knew the current leader was the man who had once been Ronder’s assistant—information he had inherited from the automata he had been before being rebuilt as "Lance."
"Their numbers are thin now. They won't be able to cover every entrance."
Lance hunkered down to wait for the cover of darkness.
By 8:00 PM, the sun had vanished. By 11:00 PM, the world was steeped in shadow, and Lance made his move.
Wary of the possibility that the bandits had golems with night vision, he darted between boulders, draped in a black cloth he had prepared for camouflage. He reached the fort's outer wall without being detected.
"Now, for a way in."
To keep up the facade of abandonment, several windows had been left overgrown. Assuming the rooms behind them were unused, Lance began to scale the wall, using the thick vines as handholds.
Thanks to his mechanical nature and night vision, the climb was trivial, though it would have been impossible for a mortal. Within five minutes, he reached a window roughly five meters up.
He paused to listen, but heard nothing. Peeking inside, he saw a floor blanketed in dust and dead leaves.
"Perfect. I'll start here."
Lance vaulted over the sill and vanished into the darkness of the fort.