“I can see you are awake, so you can stop pretending not to be.”

Leo cast a short glance straight back at the girl’s face, only to find out she had already closed her eyes back up and was now adorably trying to squeeze them way too hard for her act to ever work.

‘I wonder if we can already talk, or if the previous translations were just lucky…’

The technology behind the translation ability of the nanites… Was something Leo didn’t even dare to think about.

Smarter than him tried to uncover the secrets behind the near-infinitely complex patterns compounded by all kinds of artificial intelligence. Smarter men than Leo tried to figure those patterns out only to fail, forever separating humans from the ability to fully understand the ins and outs of any given tech.

But none of that mattered. The translation worked, as proved in Leo’s adventure in the last rift world. That didn’t mean Leo knew how it worked or what were its precise rules. He could only guess that simple, primitive messages were far easier to translate as they were more directly rooted in a being’s very nature.

Just like a handshake evolved from the gesture of showcasing the lack of weapon in one’s hand while a kiss became a sign of intimacy as it brought the most vital parts of one’s body directly to its counterpart of one’s partner, signifying the trust those two had in each other.

Just like a cat or dog showing up their unprotected and fragile bellies, there was a set of basic shouts, expressions, and ticks that in most given contexts, would pretty much mean the same.

(“I’m sorry”)

Leo’s face twitched when he somewhat understood the short sentence.

And now that the girl spoke in her natural, soft voice as opposed to screaming out at her subordinates or staying silent so as to not invoke his over-the-top response during combat…

Now that her soft, soothing voice fell upon Leo’s ears, his body…

‘Shit, no!’

Leo nearly lost control and allowed his body to jerk up.

‘I know what this is!’

Despite going through it for the very first time, Leo recognized the symptoms of the combat mental affliction. A natural, physical, and mental response of the body and mind to the trauma of the fight and the possibility of air hanging in the air.

It was a simple, primal instinct. A response ingrained so deeply into Leo’s human DNA, it took not only two close shaves with death but even then, some more time for it to finally kick in.

And now that it did, this strange girl’s voice suddenly grew all the sweeter, her face appeared to round up in Leo’s eyes, all of its imperfections removing themselves while her expression started to gain pure traits of innocence.

(“But I don’t” understand what “you” said.)

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Leo raised his eyes back to the girl, staring at her for a short moment before looking back down and heaving a short sigh.

‘Figures.’

Even with a total of three full doses of nanites, out of which one syringe worth of them likely exhausted all their energy or sacrificed it all on the altar of Leo’s reckless actions, the speed of the translation software cracking the whole language from just literally a few worlds?

That wasn’t real.

Sure, the constraints of the rules that made Earth operate the way it did would relax the further down the well one went…

But how was Leo to know how far his dive took him? How was he to measure the distance down the probability well he fell in the dimension where the very aspect of space made absolutely no sense?

Still. No matter how opaque Leo’s inborn common sense would turn, some rudimentary rules often still applied. Especially if those rules had to do with the technology directly off the earth’s markets!

In the end, though, even with the translation soft operating a bit closer to the bounds Leo would expect it to, he could still understand the likely meaning of the girl’s words.

‘It’s quite tragic how this soft hardly takes any context into consideration,’ Leo thought, baffled at how this tech could be so advanced it went beyond human understanding and yet lack the vital features humans possessed for thousands upon thousands of years.

“Stay still.”

While there was a way for Leo to tell whether or not his translations worked from… well, just hearing them, there was no way for him to tell whether or not his words accurately reached the other side.

The strangely numbing sensation on his tongue, when the nanites made it move a bit differently, was now long gone.

‘Maybe it’s the result of overdosing on the nanites?’ Leo thought, raising up on his feet while keeping his rifle in the firm hold of both of his hands.

The girl didn’t move, following Leo’s order, whether she actually got it or not.

‘That spot was only good for as long as they were all asleep,’ Leo thought, coldly moving over to another spot that he had long since taken notice of.

Contrary to the cozy hiding place Leo nestled himself in before, his new position was a lot worse.

With his back to a small boulder, he had both of his sides open. What was even worse, he now sat right across the path of the blowing air, putting him upwind in the denser half of the forest.

The several corpses of all sorts of beasts scattered across the area proved just how dangerous it could get if the front of the woodlands was left unchecked.

“Those monsters,” Leo raised his hand to the prey he felled from within his former safe spot. “Harvest them.”

The girl rose up to her knees, carefully observing Leo’s every move and listening in with full attention to every word he said.

But deep down at the bottom of her eyes, beyond the cloud of intense curiosity and fear, Leo saw confusion.

‘Well, I guess we will have to get to that later,’ Leo held back a sigh while using his left hand to massage the side of his head. ‘For now, though…’

Leo raised his face and looked across the clearing right into the girl’s eyes.

“Speak,” he ordered, reaching out with his hand to point at the girl before opening up his palm as if he wanted to slap someone across their face with great dignity… Only to point the flat of his hand at the girl before moving his thumb up and down.

“Speak,” Leo repeated while making the ‘talk to the hand’ gesture, hoping to better get the meaning across.

‘If I want to deal with them, we need to be able to talk. And for that, she needs to start talking first.’

It wasn’t a matter of pride.

There was simply no point for Leo to tear his throat out speaking the entire book in a single line, for it wouldn’t provide even an iota of information for the swarm of nanites permeating his blood. Only when those strangers would feed Leo’s nanites with more and more worlds, the miraculous translation software could work its magic.

(“Me…? And… Speak?”)

Once again, Leo couldn’t grasp the intricate meaning visible only to the native users of the language. But to a degree, he actually managed to figure the girl’s words out.

“Good,” Leo praised the girl while lowering his eyelids a bit. He then fixed the rifle on his knees before bringing his left hand up and pointing his thumb at his own chest. “I am Leo.”

Leo’s hand then streaked forward only to point at the girl again.

“And you are?”