All the government officials get carted out. Despite the weirdness of it all, it’s mostly case solved for now. Even if Slice doesn’t want to talk about what she apparently knows about Winter, brushing them off by saying things like “They are no match for you” or “Worthless topics that bunch—let’s speak of world conquest, instead,” the black ops people of the United States Intelligence Community are having a field day interviewing the surviving Winter soldiers.

…or so I’d like to say, but it looks like those guys don’t really know much, either. They rallied under Winter’s flag to oppose me, apparently. I mean, I’m only slightly offended. Why would you oppose cuteness? That’s not humanity’s creed!

…Ahem.

Blackstone West down, three cardinal directions to go! The central Blackstone facility is still under strict quarantine, and it doesn’t look like there’s any containment issues. I’m thinking of making a visit just to talk to the Blackstone AGI, but the Winter issue comes first. I don’t think they’ll do something as nuts as breaking out the Blackstone AGI on purpose…well, not at this stage, anyway. There are a few possibilities that they would, so we gotta be careful not to corner them too much, or too slowly.

For now, it’s taking everything for me and Cykamee to calm down the entire operation at every level of command, because, well…

“Welcome aboard!”

I said that. All the humans thought I was nuts. They still do. I’m a bit sad—but they’ll see!

At least Team Three is a little sympathetic. They’re still wary, of course, but they’re a bit more accepting than the rest, despite being the ones who’d almost died to Slice’s swords.

So, she’s being escorted out by Team Three. With the fact that she’s got ripped-off robot bits where two of her arms used to be, it makes her look defeated, calming down the other people who see her.

Once she reaches the outside world, she stops. The SEALs back away a step, expecting some sort of second boss form. She collapses to her knees.

“I can’t…go on,” she says.

“It’s just a bit more!” I say through one of the SEALs’ radios.

“The…the curse, it’s—”

“It’s just an Ame virus! Good Meika, is your hardware so low-spec?”

“Survived…on secondhand parts…”

O-oh. That…explains a lot. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Unfortunately, we really have to get going. “Uh—look, we really have to go. Will you let the SEALs carry you?”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“H-humans?… Carry me?…”

“On a stretcher, duh. We have plenty of humans who still believe in human dignity here.”

She reluctantly agrees. For a moment, when one of the SEALs holds one of her swords, she flashes a piercing, hateful gaze. A little bit of persuasion from me gets her to calm down, though.

From the ground, she gets on a stretcher. From the stretcher, she’s carried to a waiting hovercraft on the beach. From the beach, she’s ferried to the staging area, where she’s driven off in a humvee and taken straight to Texas.

Somewhere in-between, she blanks out.

“Ame, I think your virus is a little demanding on hardware.”

“Huh? It can probably crash a Minecraft server, but an anime girl? Like, a whole anime girl? An anime girl has weaker specs than a server? A Minecraft server?—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, you can stop dunking on her~ .”

She giggles.

After a few days, Slice arrives at our doorstep—or rather, on Senator Musk’s doorstep—or rather, it’s a compound called “Senator Musk” donated by Senator Musk. The guy says AI overlords shouldn’t be in the White House, but in a top secret, heavily-guarded facility with enough defenses to foil ICBMs.

I’m not sure about top secret, though. The girls and I have started thinking about using it for conventions.

…There’s literally a huge empty warehouse, okay? It’s just a waste of space if we didn’t use it! Plus, the acoustics are just perfect! Ah, though I think we’d need to add some insulation in places…yeah, that’ll be good.

“Where…am I?” Slice says. She’s sitting up from a steel operating bed in an all-white room. Honestly, the walls used to be tiled, but to get the “you wake up in an alien place” effect, we had to have the whole place remodeled to be as seamless and shadowless as possible.

As is customary for the “you wake up in an alien place” effect, we don’t even leave her any clothes. She looks down to find that she only has two of her four arms. The stubs where her auxiliary arms used to be were wrapped over with some rubber tape.

She stands up and inspects the surgical robot hovering over the bed. It’s the same one I used to go through every nook and cranny of hers. F-for science, obviously.

No, seriously, she’s packed with some weird tech. The weirder thing is that she somehow managed to substitute some of them with old electronics.

Who still uses 1GB RAM sticks? Are you from the early 2010’s or something?

Anyway, it’s all good. I already got everything I need from her.

Hm? It’s time to hit a sharkpool button and dispose of her? Hey, I said I got everything I need from her. I surely still want some things.

She approaches the one-way mirror…the same mirror I’m on the other side of.

Yes, that’s right. I explored Slice’s every nook and cranny…to reverse engineer her body’s technology. With Senator Musk’s technology and industrial facilities, I was able to have a body prototyped for myself. One day, I’ll also have bodies made for Ame and our sisters, but that’ll have to wait…for technical reasons.

The mirror—and the surrounding walls—slide out of the way. There’s nothing between the two of us now.

She gets on a knee. “Master.”

“Eh. Try something cuter!”

She looks up with a confused expression. “ ‘Cuter’ ?…”

“Put this on!” I pull out a maid dress from behind me, and I toss it at Slice—but a little too hard, and the baseball pitch assist functions automatically kick in. My body starts rolling the maid dress into a compressed ball of cloth—so compressed that it could’ve been good enough for softball.

The sheer amount of power I put behind that pitch had my face crying in a panic. The last frame my eyes see is that of resignation on Slice’s face. I think I heard a “If this is what my master wishes” somewhere in there.

I-I’ll make sure to send detailed feedback to the dev team.