The words lower-class citizen and slave churned inside my head until the confusion pushed past my breaking point. Consud by panic, I scread to be sent ho and hurled every curse I could muster at the aliens who had abducted . Since it all ca out in Japanese, Sario apparently couldn't understand any of it.
When the screaming wore out and I finally cald down, I noticed Sario watching with the look of soone who'd seen this exact spectacle many tis before.
「Is there really no way to go back?」
「Crying and shcreaming won't bring you back. Reshisht, and they'll kill you.」
At the word killed, I swallowed hard.
「Try touching the back of your neck. You'll shee how real thish ish.」
I reached behind my neck and ran my fingers over it, discovering a lump where sothing had been embedded beneath the skin. I turned my eyes to Sario. I had no idea how old this dog-person was. Older than ? Or younger?
「What is this?」
「A disciplinary terminal. If the pershon holding the controller presshesh the shwitch, agonishing pain tearsh through your entire body. At itsh worsht, you die.」
「Who holds this controller?」
「The unit commander holdsh it.」
The one called the unit commander was Varubo - apparently, the commanding officer of the mobile reconnaissance unit.
「Co on, let'sh head to the training room.」
Sario led to a training room located in a section without artificial gravity. Since he'd called it a training room, I'd expected rows of exercise machines lined up inside, but it turned out to be a long corridor.
The corridor was fitted with obstacles - poles, hoops, and the like.
「Strange corridor, isn't it.」
「The trainingish to go back and forth through the corridor while avoiding the obshtaclesh.」
It didn't look particularly difficult.
「Jusht sho you know, the corridor ish in zero gravity. Until you get ushed to it, I think it'll be tough.」
The instant I took a single step forward, my body floated off the floor. Sa sensation as in the cargo hold. That was when I recalled what I knew about astronauts. In zero gravity, blood circulation and other bodily functions are affected, supposedly causing facial puffiness and nasal congestion. Yet I felt none of that.
When I checked with Sario, he explained that the injected internal adjustnt nanomachines were automatically compensating. While we were talking, my head bumped against the ceiling.
「All right, training shtartsh now!」
I pressed my hands against the ceiling and pushed my body forward. The force set in motion, but I couldn't control my course the way I wanted. By the ti I'd flailed my way back and forth through the corridor, I was utterly spent. At fifty-five, my stamina ran dry in no ti flat, leaving unable to move.
「Haa, haa……I can't get the hang of this.」
「That'sh becaushe you're not thinking before you act. Move on the premishe that there'sh no gravity.」
Easy for him to say. I was made to go back and forth through the corridor roughly fifty tis. By the end I was a wrung-out rag, but I'd managed to grasp sothing resembling the knack for moving in zero gravity.
Training continued for days after that, until I could move freely and fluidly in zero gravity. During that ti, I noticed sothing. My body appeared to be growing younger.
I asked Sario whether sothing had been done to my body.
「Three typesh of nanomachinesh were injected into your body: antibody immunity nanomachinesh, language elent nanomachinesh, and internal adjushtnt nanomachinesh.」
According to Sario, the antibody immunity nanomachines and the internal adjustnt nanomachines were functioning together to slightly revitalize my body. Since no longevity treatnt had been perford, it wasn't that I had actually grown younger, apparently.
For the record, the antibody immunity nanomachines enhanced immune function and protected the body from standard bacteria and viruses. The internal adjustnt nanomachines, anwhile, were designed to support health in living environnts that differed from planetary surfaces, such as zero gravity.
After the zero-gravity training concluded, hand-to-hand combat training against robots began. The robots were shaped like pig-people - Orcs - standing roughly two ters tall.
Whether in zero gravity or under normal gravity, they moved with startling agility, attacking with thick arms and legs. Those limbs were fitted with sothing resembling gloves and greaves, designed so their strikes wouldn't be lethal.
Even so, their blows hurt enough to bring tears to my eyes, leaving dark bruises behind. When I dug in my heels and refused to continue, Varubo - the commanding officer who had been monitoring us - erged.
He stood roughly a hundred and forty centiters tall, with green skin, an ugly face, and long ears. He looked exactly like a goblin straight out of a fantasy ani. The futuristic space suit he wore, however, created a staggering sense of disconnect.
「Sario, what'z goin' on. Can't even train one louzy recruit?」
That gravelly voice and its accent - I rembered them.
「I'm terribly sorry, sir.」
Sario, fear plain on his face, bowed over and over as he apologized. Watching him, anger surged up inside toward this small alien. I fixed the Goblin with a glare full of defiance.
「You - what'z that look? Zeemz ya won't underztand yer zituation till ya feel zo pain, huh.」
The Goblin bared his teeth and moved to operate sothing in his hand.
「Pleashe wait. Banatsū shtill doesn't undershtand anything. Pleashe, let it go jusht thish once.」
Sario pleaded desperately.
The Goblin's face twisted with displeasure as he glared at .
「Make zure ya train'im right.」
With that, the Goblin stalked off. Seeing the disgruntled look still plastered across my face, Sario let out a sigh.
「You don't undershtand, do you. Jusht now, that disciplinary terminal wash almosht activated on you. You could've died.」
Sario told that a lower-class citizen had once died of cardiac arrest when the disciplinary terminal was triggered.
It wasn't a lie - it was the truth. The takeaway was clear, I must not defy that Goblin. From that point on, I stopped voicing complaints and threw myself into the training.
My fifty-five-year-old body, however, hit its limits almost imdiately, wracked by terrible muscle pain. For several days, I couldn't even walk properly.
After more than ten days, I could finally manage the training well enough, but there was one thing I simply could not endure. The food. It was vile - absolutely, unrelentingly vile. It ca in tubes resembling toothpaste, had almost no flavor whatsoever, and carried a faint stench like an open sewer.
「Sario, is there anything else to eat besides this stuff?」
Sario and his fellow Kūshī tribes people were a race that lived on the fourth planet of Korado, he told . They'd had the bad luck of being captured by space pirates and sold off here. He was eighteen years old - young. Despite the age gap between us, we'd managed to build sothing like a friendship.
For the record, standard ti was nearly identical to Earth's. A day was divided into twenty-four hours, and a year consisted of three hundred and sixty days. Not much different from Earth, it seed.
「Nope. All lower-classh citizensh eat thish.」
These preserved food tubes were called the complete food of space. Apparently they ca in several varieties, but all of them reportedly contained every nutrient and calorie needed for survival across most races.
「The Kūshī Tribe has spaceships, right?」
「We do, but sho what?」
「If you and the others were kidnapped, wouldn't a search party have been sent out looking for you?」
「They probably shearched for a while, but once they found out we'd been captured by Goblin piratesh, I think they pulled out.」
「Your own people were captured by pirates, and they just - why?」
「Becaushe the Goblin race hash built the Gonuva Empire, which controlsh three shtar shystemsh. Defy them, and your own shtar shystem getsh invaded and absorbed into the empire.」
The Kūshī Tribe was apparently classified as one of the weakest among spacefaring races. Even so, the idea that Goblins had built an interstellar empire was hard to believe.
「By the way, what exactly am I being trained for?」
Sario let out a sigh.
「You're ashking that queshtion now of all tish. Well, fine - thish shupply ship'sh deshtination ish the Gorugona Shtar Shystem. A shtar shystem where the blockade wash reshently lifted. In that shtar shystem, we'll be fighting the Orc Tribe.」
The Goblin race and the Orc Tribe had apparently noticed almost simultaneously that the Gorugona Star System had been liberated, and were now at war to claim it as territory. The blockade, incidentally, had been maintained by one of the Tenjin Race subspecies. What even were the Tenjin Race?
「The enemy ishn't jusht the Orcsh. There are monshtersh in that shtar shystem too.」
「Monsters?」
The mont I heard the word monsters, the keyword Tenjin Race was shoved to the back of my mind. Sario explained what monsters were. They were abominations inhabiting planetary surfaces and outer space alike - biological weapons called『Seigairyū』or simply monsters, creatures that had escaped into space and onto planets and gone feral.
「Biological weapons? Who created sothing like that?」
「The Aurebusu Tenjin Race. One of three racesh boashting the mosht powerful forcesh and mosht advanced shivilizationsh in thish region of shpace.」
Among the races called the Tenjin Race, there were three: the Aurebusu Tenjin Race, who had pushed bioengineering to its absolute extre; the Mōru Tenjin Race, who had pushed chanical civilization to its absolute extre; and the Rikageru Tenjin Race, who had pushed ntal civilization to its absolute extre.
Compared to these Tenjin Race, the Goblin Empire was apparently nothing more than a『booger』of an existence. That raised the question of what to make of the Kūshī Tribe, cowering before such a Goblin Empire - but thinking about how humanity on Earth lagged behind even the Kūshī only made sad.
For the record, it wasn't that Goblins were more intelligent than humans from Earth. The Goblin race was simply an ancient species that had made contact with a spacefaring civilization in the distant past, been taught its knowledge, and used that to expand into space.
Which ant the Goblin race had no track record of original invention whatsoever. They simply ripped off what other civilized races had created and slapped it onto their own civilization.
「There'sh even a professhion dedicated to hunting thoshe monshtersh, you know.」
That profession was called 『Toryū Ryōhei』 and apparently it was sothing akin to the adventurers found in fantasy novels. The core concept felt the sa - slaying monsters and recovering valuable materials. The difference was that the targets weren't limited to monsters on the ground, they included those lurking in outer space as well.
「So what kind of creatures are these monsters, exactly?」
「The weakesht monsther in outer shpace ish the Uchū Kurione, and even that rangesh from one ter to over ten tersh in body length.」
The blood drained from my face when I heard that.
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