11 The Night Before the Final Battle 4

"The Second Fleet branch of BW Corporation has confessed. It seems Harold had concealed a significant amount of technology."

A data disc handed over.

Shirley took it, her expression troubled.

"Um, Sister Frederica?"

"What is it, Shirley?"

An older woman with hair the same golden hue as her own.

Though she was likely past forty and nearing fifty—her appearance, rather, seemed younger than Shirley's, almost childlike.

Frederica Byron.

Self-proclaimed eternal fourteen, appearance resembling early teens.

A woman rumored to possess the technology of eternal life.

Why she, usually stationed in the First Fleet, was now in the Third Fleet...

"I'd like to ask you to... let go of my hand..."

"Goodness, just a little longer."

Fingers traced the back of Shirley's hand gripping the disc.

There was little discomfort in the act itself—only a tingling sensation—but Shirley, eager to see the data, wanted to be released.

Playing like this made them seem almost like a close-knit parent and child.

Just yesterday they had been called sisters… Shirley had been deeply shocked by that.

The next day, she had lain in bed all day during this incredibly busy period.

As for Frederica’s visit to the Third Fleet, it was ostensibly to report on Shirley’s request to the Second Fleet branch office, which she had initiated at her family’s request.

The malfunction of the Overlight during the recent battle with the colossal species.

It was highly likely to have been artificially induced.

In addition, it was now known that the unidentified unit installed on Chi’s Raven was a miniaturized version of the Overlight device.

The Second Fleet had historically possessed greater industrial capacity than the other fleets, yet these technologies should have been disseminated across all fleets originally.

Yet neither the other fleets nor even the Second Fleet itself had grasped these technologies.

Thus, Sharon had requested an inspection from the Second Fleet branch via the First Fleet’s family estate.

And then, one after another—secreted technologies emerged.

Sharon stood frozen, staring at the information she had finally liberated, displayed on her virtual interface.

“What is this…”

“Apparently, Harold’s been reading the Yūmika Notes.”

“Um… that’s the great-great-great-grandmother’s, right?”

“Yes, that great-great-grandmother. How many generations back? Too tedious to count—anyway… a diary from someone who lived during the founding era of the migration fleets.”

Sharon recalled then.

She’d mentioned hearing rumors about it eight years ago or so…

“This isn’t just hearsay—you’re actually seeing it!”

“Technically, it’s a manuscript, but… I’d say the general content is clear enough.”

Shirley tilted her head, watching Frederica dismissively roll her eyes.

“Um, Sister Frederica?”

“What?”

“Your tone just made it sound like you already understand the contents.”

“Indeed. I saw it myself.”

“Really!? You actually saw it!? I heard it was strictly confidential!”

“Oh, come now, Shirley. If it’s hidden, doesn’t that mean someone can read it?”

At the very least, the Byron family’s secrecy implied a high-level security system built around their accumulated technology.

Yet this woman spoke of bypassing it so casually.

“After all… if there’s a mystery, wouldn’t you want to solve it?”

"Not the reading—it was the breach of security that was the goal all along…"

"Breaking into the Third Fleet’s Central Database was quite enjoyable, wasn’t it?"

The eldest daughter of the Byron family.

She was an expert in information and physical security.

Yet more than that, she derived an abnormal thrill from breaking through them.

Had she been aiding Harold—her intelligence-gathering capabilities would have pinpointed Mio’s location in an instant.

"Still, I’ve tampered with it myself now. I can’t break it myself anymore."

So she claimed: security that even its creator can solve is second-rate.

Only security that even the creator cannot crack is truly elite.

"Um, well… could I ask… what was written there…?"

"Hmm… what should I do? It’s such a cute request from dear Shirley. I’d love to tell you. But it’s supposed to be a secret, you know."

Frederica, her youthful features adorned with a smug, twitching smile.

The effort to breach security is a thing of the past.

She became enthralled by a life born some thirty years ago—exact numbers preserved for the sake of her dignity—long before.

Byron’s lineage is a breed of perverts obsessed with machinery.

Yet, when they find someone else to love, they become slightly more tolerable.

In Frederica’s case, that someone was Shirley.

Thus, Shirley is the most dependable elder sister.

Though she was the youngest, all her siblings had always doted on her—yet Frederica was exceptional.

“Please, Frederica-sama!”

“Can’t help it. Just a little, though?”

She is so easily swayed that simply asking in this manner grants nearly any request.

“Let’s just limit this to the matter at hand. Harold probably found the passage on temporal displacement intriguing.”

“Sorry, but I don’t understand what you’re talking about…”

"There’s a record from Yumika-obasan, saying a temporal jump was performed about 150 years ago."

"Uh, wasn’t that written after she’d gone senile?"

Frederica smiled faintly at her younger sister’s blunt remark, yet answered without reply, instead throwing out another question.

"Type Zero. You’ve heard of that, right?"

"Uh… yes. The prototype that served as the design foundation for Type One Harmonious, correct?"

"Exactly! Correct answer! A flower for you! The Type Zero apparently had a temporal jump function."

"…So casually…"

"Fact is fact. What else can you do? You know as well as I do that even Shirley can’t deny that no machine like that could’ve been built at that technological level back then."

Even from the fragmented data alone, it surpasses any current model—more accurately, its combat capability rivals that of a battleship.

The estimated maximum output is ten thousand lammy, equivalent to that of a super-sized unit.

When I mentioned it before, I claimed it was a classified threat, akin to assassination-level secrecy—but in truth, while classified, it holds no strategic importance.

Sharon herself, upon hearing of its existence, refused to believe it.

She even suspected I was exaggerating.

"Type Zero itself—perhaps it originated from a distant future, or from another planet where they were fighting ASID... origins are unknown, but one thing is certain: it was not created by human technology of that era."

"It could perform temporal leaps... well, for now, we'll assume that's the case. Where is it now?"

"Who knows? I said it vanished somewhere 150 years ago and hasn't been seen since. Maybe... it's been circling endlessly all this time."

Could Type 0 have returned to that time when it was taken by past humanity and used to escape the home planet? Where did this infinite loop even begin?

Who knows?

The woman, more interested in breaching security than solving puzzles, answers with disinterest.

This could be called a Byronic trait.

She remains utterly indifferent to anything that does not capture her attention.

"Well. I only saw it once, and honestly, I didn’t find it all that fascinating—didn’t really spark any curiosity."

"That’s clear from your tone."

"But Harold was different… he must have found a way to realize the technology described there."

"...That’s not ordinary."

"Even rotten, he was a genius."

Only the result was recorded in Yūshikō’s notebook.

For example, the outcome of time leap—simply that it had been achieved.

The theory for it likely existed only in her mind—or perhaps even she did not know it.

At any rate, it was not recorded. It was an extension of the diary, after all. There was no way around it.

But Harold was different.

Having seen it, having realized it was achievable, he worked backward to derive the theory.

A genius, one might call him.

“But I couldn’t understand the motive. I suppose I can grasp challenging something that seems possible… but…”

Frederica said this was too elaborate.

“Actually, the first time leap experiment was conducted on a much smaller scale. It ended in failure, as it turned out.”

“…The motive, you say.”

As Frederica noted, confronting achievable difficulties was the Benten family’s nature. But Harold was different from the usual Benten.

“…Now that you mention it, what exactly is Harold’s interest, anyway?”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, really. Unlike the other brothers and sisters, Harold’s got a fairly conventional sensibility. Isn’t that uncharacteristic of Byron?”

“Huh? Really? The last time I saw him, he looked at me like I was a lump of meat. He sees humans as nothing more than protein masses, that one.”

“Then what did you do, Frederica-sama?”

Sharon mutters, pausing to think.

Harold’s motive. Even if understood, it wouldn’t contribute to the next phase of the operation—but it remained unsettling.