Chapter 21: Slowly Coming to Understand You

Then Ren Huazhi remembered she didn’t have a motorcycle license. While she probably wouldn’t be hassled for riding one in her transformed state in a city with magical girls, carrying a passenger was not just a matter of documentation; she herself didn’t trust her own driving skills that much.

Her only option was to ask for help from Meng Qiuxu, who was holed up in Mason’s Village, and ask her to find a way to pack up and take this motorcycle away.

And Jingzhe’s greatsword Hunting Gear as well.

Xu Panpan’s magical girl awakening was rather special, the reason for which was still unclear. But in her transformed state, she seemed to seamlessly switch to the Jingzhe persona, who didn’t know Ren Huazhi, and the memories between the two personas were not shared… On the bright side, Jingzhe’s personality was even more cheerful than her original self. At least it wasn’t some inner demon or other messy stuff.

Ren Huazhi spent a lot of effort and persuasion to finally convince Xu Panpan that the security level for Kamen Riders was very high and that she really couldn’t personally take her home. Only then did she call a ride-hailing service to send her back.

Then, under the cover of the bushes, she dispelled her transformation.

The armor retracted into the belt as nano-units, and her fluffy golden hair cascaded down from the helmet’s storage space, which she still didn’t understand how it worked.

Once again, she was forced to confirm her current female identity.

She used to only see this sight after transforming, and she had convinced herself that “it’s like wearing a fake skin.” But now, this beautiful fake skin had become her reality.

Could it be that beneath the sensitive, delicate skin, perhaps like the structure of a Nightmare, somewhere ten centimeters or deeper inside, the original young man still existed? Fantasizing about such things only made her feel emptier.

Ren Huazhi sighed and opened the navigation on her phone to find the nearest bus stop.

She had to avoid Xu Panpan’s route home, and her wallet balance was not enough to support two cross-city Didi rides—her unhesitating decision to call a car just now (even checking options other than economy) was just to put on a show of ease and reassure Xu Panpan.

“I’ll grab some lunch on the way. I can’t always be eating pancakes…”

Nancheng Library, the deserted rooftop garden.

A slender but upright figure swiped the access card to the safe house and stepped into the small concrete-shelled building.

The mainframe in the corner hummed softly, its indicator lights flickering. The indoor temperature was set low to protect the valuable servers, as if to freeze the chaotic thoughts.

Officer Si, the team leader of the Nightmare Countermeasures Division’s action team, subconsciously wrapped his arms around himself and rubbed them.

He sat down at the computer and accidentally knocked over a stack of square blue plastic pieces. They were floppy disks, a storage medium that had been phased out all over the world except for Japan.

Small memory, not easy to carry, slow reading speed… there were various reasons for its obsolescence, but it was also the only storage medium that could resist Nightmare contamination.

“The Flower Arranger’s legacy…”

He seemed to recall something about that.

In the month before her sacrifice, The Flower Arranger had specifically recorded the results of her various on-site tests of the Nightmare’s Anti-Civilization Field onto floppy disks, accumulating a hundred of them, and solemnly handed them over to Mangzhong. This news was revealed to the Nancheng Police Department by Meng Qiuxu, because she also felt that this “entrusting of an orphan” act was not quite right.

Everyone knew what happened next.

However, Officer Si was a middle-aged man in his forties. He had actually used floppy disks in the computer lab when he was in school, so he had a suspicion that the younger generation would not have noticed—

A 3.5-inch floppy disk has only about 1.something MB of memory.

The Countermeasures Division agents would avoid using them if they could, and would curse under their breath when they had to. To prevent textual contamination, every concept had to be repeatedly referred to and described in lengthy passages, with blurry photos taken by satellite cameras attached with great effort. A normal paper would require at least twenty floppy disks.

And the secret that The Flower Arranger had passed on to Mangzhong was a hundred disks.

This volume was already at the level of a scholarly monograph.

Officer Si had been dealing with The Flower Arranger for nearly a year. Although she always avoided contact, he had a general understanding of her personality. He had asked a colleague in the criminal investigation department to profile this mysterious street hero.

Apart from her stubbornness, she was a cautious, low-key, and rational person, with a strong curiosity about Nightmares, and an undeniably excellent warrior. She had made significant contributions to summarizing the coverage and specific effects of the Anti-Civilization Field.

The research results on Nightmares that she and Meng Qiuxu had obtained were basically shared with the police department in a timely and straightforward manner.

Apart from her stubbornness (regarding the secrecy of her identity), there were really no demerits. She was truly worthy of being called a hero.

Her personality was very different from the usual impression one gets of girls her age. It was more like… a STEM guy? But one couldn’t say for sure that there were no such girls. After all, she seemed to have no desire for material possessions or honor, something even a stereotypical STEM guy would find hard to achieve.

The hundred floppy disks handed over to Mangzhong, along with the cardboard box they were packed in, were left in a corner of the safe house. It seemed that Mangzhong had already visited this humble abode in the past two days.

Since she didn’t take them, it must mean they were free to be perused.

With an excited heart and trembling hands, what kind of intellectual legacy had the great, unprecedented magical girl, The Flower Arranger, left behind?

Officer Si tried twice before successfully inserting the floppy disk marked with the number 1 into the drive.

[The results of the vivisection of the Nightmare show that the existence of the Nightmare is based on the materialization of nightmares overflowing from the dream world. Depending on the specific content of the nightmare, the epidermal layer will evolve to imitate the structure of real objects, for example: the fur and limbs of a beast-type Nightmare.]

In the dim safe house, only the cold light of the computer screen cast a pale glow on Officer Si’s face.

[The material and function of such epidermal constructs are highly similar to the real objects they imitate, but they will quickly dissolve into black smoke after being separated from the main body.]

[And after stripping away these epidermal disguises, all types of Nightmares are, in fact… slimes.]

…Slimes.

A rigorous academic work, using the precious space of a floppy disk, should not have ambiguous punctuation like ellipses. But for some reason, Officer Si understood the mood The Flower Arranger was in when she typed this line.

Slimes…

In any fantasy world with slimes, they were one of the lowest-level monsters. Even Officer Si, who didn’t play games or read novels, knew this!

To prevent readers from not knowing what a slime was, The Flower Arranger had even spent a lot of memory to put a picture from Baidu here.

It was these bizarrely shaped slimes that had almost completely reshuffled all of humanity’s high-tech disaster response plans, reshaping the technology tree into a deformed state where elite agents went to the battlefield with spears and confidential information was stored on floppy disks.

Today, it had become a strange situation where magical girls fought slimes with magical melee weapons, while well-trained police officers could only provide support from the side.

After reading the word “slime,” as if the computer itself couldn’t take it anymore, the document stopped loading.

“Oh, it’s time to change the disk.”

Officer Si didn’t know if he could finish reading all the floppy disks today. He prepared for a long battle and went to the mini-fridge to get a can of coffee.

There were two fewer cans than the last time he was here. Mangzhong was quite a drinker.

Then, Officer Si went to close the ajar door of the safe house.

The access control machine lit up automatically as it detected someone approaching.

“—?”

The palm-sized screen retained the last few access records. Two lines down, a familiar name was clearly visible:

[The Flower Arranger, April 21, Monday]