The Hungry Fortress Wants to Build a Battleship in Another World – World of Sandbox-Chapter 26Vol 3. : The Voice of Reason

In the end, one hour after Tefen had left, each AI gradually began to exit Isolation Mode.

Ringo had assessed the possibility as nearly zero, but to be cautious of potential viral contamination, each unit was isolated on the local network and subjected to a full cleansing and comprehensive scan one by one.

With defensive capabilities at their lowest level, various aircraft were dispatched from Fortress No. 2 to compensate for the power deficit.

It was projected that at least two days would be needed to restore them to full combat readiness.

“Well, I guess you could call the timing of the runway’s completion a silver lining, in a way.”

“Yes-affirmative, Commander Ma’am. In a few hours, aircraft produced by The Tree will arrive. At the same time, construction on the oil refinery plant will begin. It is scheduled to begin operations in forty hours.”

The large oil tanker was currently being outfitted inside The Tree’s large-scale construction dock. It too was expected to be completed within a few days.

The oil refinery plant had a large unit prepared at Fortress No. 2, with the majority of refining operations planned to take place there.

Simultaneously, extraction of the lava ore deposit and construction of resource refinement plants and multiple large-scale general-purpose industrial printer units were underway. A mass-production plant was also under construction.

Once they secured a stable supply of oil, large-scale machine production would be fully possible.

“The crude oil extraction plant is coming along steadily too, for now. It may just be a makeshift facility with low processing capacity, but being able to produce our own oil really lifts the mood!”

The paving work at Oil Port was using asphalt produced on-site. Since they were able to carry out construction without depleting their reserve materials, Commander Eve was in an excellent mood.

And in the end, since they hadn’t ended up clashing with the <Serqet>, the construction of the plant had proceeded with almost no impact.

While they couldn’t afford to let their guard down, for now, they could breathe a sigh of relief.

The sisters, worn out from their first large-scale operation, had also fully recovered after a night's rest. Commander Eve had thought it might be traumatizing for them, but they seemed to have processed it without lingering effects.

“Through this experience, all of us AIs—myself included—have grown significantly. We’re still analyzing exactly what happened, but our ability to respond has definitely leveled up.”

“Right... Maybe we should have the system do some research into fantasy fiction from the library. Even if it’s not an exact match, we might improve our analytical approach to magic.”

“Yes-affirmative, Commander Ma’am. It may be worth deploying a dedicated AI for fantasy technology analysis and proposal. When non-scientific phenomena are observed, standard AIs—myself included—tend to default to scientific bias due to design. Fortunately, combat was avoided this time, so the damage was limited. But we did end up in a critical situation. Even if the ideas seem absurd, having an AI capable of offering some form of hypothesis seems necessary.”

Ringo did have contingency protocols, but magical thinking was inherently hard to produce. Attempting to analyze or predict events that violated the laws of physics would elevate the stress levels on the Brain Units.

That was an inevitable issue, given that their foundational knowledge was scientific and technological in nature.

It was thought that the problem would eventually resolve itself once magical knowledge was accumulated, but that line of analysis had made very little progress.

“Okay. Let’s do that. Use stories as textbooks for the education phase. Once it’s developed enough, we’ll teach it scientific knowledge. If it manages to integrate both, it might become a good advisor. If not, we’ll start over.”

“Yes-affirmative, Commander Ma’am. In that case, instead of using a Brain Unit, let us utilize a Neural Network Emulator based on photonic circuits. Once its success is confirmed, we can transfer it into a Brain Unit, so there’s no waste.”

“...Ah, right. I’d almost forgotten that thing existed. With The Core’s processing power, it should be more than capable. In my memory, it had a reputation for being too low-performing to justify the cost, but that was back in the game era.”

“Yes-affirmative, Commander Ma’am. If you compare just the costs, the Brain Units are superior. But since they’re pseudo-organic brains, disposing of them lightly feels somewhat distasteful.”

At Ringo’s explanation, Commander Eve nodded in agreement.

Brain Units were essentially one-of-a-kind. They couldn’t be copied, nor backed up.

They were highly capable as AIs but also possessed what could be called “personality,” and weren’t something to be discarded just because they were unusable.

No, back in the game era, they’d been dismantled without hesitation—but that had been under the limitation of game mechanics, when their performance didn’t even match that of a basic mobile device.

Now that this was reality, it made perfect sense that Ringo was reluctant to commit fratricide.

“If the Neural Network Emulator fails, will you scrap it?”

“The probability of failure is low, but in the unlikely event of an issue, it will be archived and stored in an unused corner of the memory space.”

“I see.”

So even the emulator’s output would still be regarded as a form of personality.

For AIs, freezing and storing such data wasn’t something to be avoided.

That said, based on Ringo’s tone, it didn’t seem like she was expecting failure. She’d likely manufactured multiple Brain Units before, and considered the chances of failing to raise one to be quite low.

“Well, I doubt I’ll be of much use this time. I’ll leave the education to you.”

“Yes-affirmative, Commander Ma’am. Leave it to me.”

With the decision made that a new voice of reason would be brought online, Commander Eve turned her attention to reviewing the results of this operation.

She had assumed they were going in with overwhelming force, yet the result was a complete defeat. A literal wipeout.

Fortunately, it looked like their strength would be ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) restored in about two more days, but they’d been thoroughly baptized by the inexplicable fantasy nature of this world.

Compared to this, the encounters with Rain Kroin and the burrowing Worms now seemed like nothing more than a tutorial.

As for the cause of the defeat, it was likely due to placing too much emphasis on frontal power.

Because the enemy had brought numbers, most of the multi-legged tanks had been deployed at close range—and that had been a critical mistake.

Had they been spread out, focusing on long-range bombardment tactics, they might’ve avoided this failure. The bombers, too, should’ve been kept further back in reserve.

And what they lacked was surface-to-surface missiles.

To be honest, they’d assumed artillery and bombers would be enough and hadn’t prepared any missiles at all.

They had avoided them due to low firepower per cost ratio—but given the circumstances, missiles would now have to be included in future strategies.

The issue was... GPS guidance wasn’t possible.

“By the way, Tefen ended up leaving, but what about after that?”

“We’ve limited ourselves to long-range observation, but as before, it seems to be hunting while moving. No particularly unusual behavior has been noted.”

“I see. So I guess it didn’t exactly retreat, but at least acknowledged our presence... As long as it isn’t hostile, that’s fine. If it starts getting close again, we’ll just have to come up with a new countermeasure.”

“Yes-affirmative, Commander Ma’am.”

The AI cleansing of the multi-legged tanks was complete, and the combat capabilities at Oil Port and the drill plant had returned to standard levels.

From here, they would begin expanding their defensive strength further.

Since the presence of large-scale threatening organisms in the area had been confirmed, they decided to deploy fixed artillery platforms equipped with multi-stage electromagnetic coilguns of large caliber. These versatile cannons could fire not only standard shells but also large bombs and missiles.

However, their operation required a tremendous amount of power, so fusion reactors would need to be built alongside them.

Additionally, to improve responsiveness, several vertical missile launchers would be installed.

These were designed to strike before the target could even register the launch. Supersonic missiles exceeding Mach 4 in terminal speed were prepared. If fired in succession, even monsters with defensive membranes should be overwhelmed.

Defensive membranes were extremely resistant to instantaneous pressure like explosions and could nullify them almost completely.

However, they had a weakness: repeated continuous pressure, or blunt-force impacts from heavy masses, caused their integrity to rapidly degrade.

The surefire tactic, then, would be to nullify the membrane with continuous bombardment from multiple cannons or suppress it with heavy weapon strikes—then hammer in the shells.

The problem was, with so few samples, there just wasn’t enough data to study thoroughly.