"Trail rations?"
For a moment, Miyabi couldn't quite grasp what Andrew was getting at with that particular request.
They were just heading out on a trip. Why would they need to buy food?
Facing Miyabi's mildly puzzled expression, Andrew took a moment to explain.
"You have to understand — the round trip is likely to take at least ten days, maybe more. And out there, it's nothing like being inside New Eridu. There are no supermarkets. No convenience stores. Nothing of the sort, anywhere."
"No supermarkets... and no convenience stores?" Miyabi turned the idea over carefully. "Something like the Hollows? Or the Outer Ring?"
Andrew thought about it for a moment, then reached for the closest comparison he could find.
"Think of it as an inconceivably enormous Hollow — except instead of being empty, it's absolutely teeming with living creatures. Countless species, all of them surviving out there on their own terms. Humanity occupies only the tiniest sliver of that world."
"Mm."
Human beings cannot conceive of what they have never witnessed.
For Miyabi — who had spent her entire life moving through New Eridu and its surrounding areas — the raw, untamed natural ecology of the Monster Hunter world was simply beyond her imagination. A blank space where a picture should have been.
But that was also Miyabi's single greatest strength as a person.
When someone she trusted made an arrangement, she didn't necessarily need to understand it. She was perfectly content to act first and make sense of it later.
So she gave a small, decisive nod and asked with full sincerity:
"Understood. Do you have any specific recommendations?"
"Recommendations?"
Did this really require recommendations?
Still, faced with the earnestness of Miyabi's question, Andrew answered with equal seriousness.
"Any kind of food works, as long as it's something you actually like. Beyond that, try to go for as much variety as possible — drinks, snacks, fruit, bread, sweets, anything and everything. The more types the better."
As he said it, Andrew pulled out the military-issue card he'd only just received yesterday and held it out to her.
"Don't worry about the price. More is more."
Naturally, the reason Andrew was asking Miyabi to prepare all of this had nothing to do with sustaining themselves on the road.
His purpose was simple — and entirely genuine.
Variety. Good food. Something worth looking forward to.
After all, when it came to Andrew's appetite, no amount of supermarket food was going to come close to filling him up on its own. Whatever they bought couldn't realistically function as trail rations for someone with his metabolism.
But that didn't mean he wanted to spend the entire trip eating nothing but meat.
Out in the field, during a hunt, your available ingredients basically came down to one thing: whatever you killed. And the cooking methods that came with that were equally limited — pan-seared, or grilled. That was the list. Braised meat, slow-cooked anything, anything requiring actual preparation — all of it fell firmly into the category of 'luxury that the field doesn't allow.'
Back in the New World and the Forbidden Lands, Andrew had always made a point of carving out time during travel to throw together something new and different — just to break the monotony before the smell of roasted meat became something he actively dreaded. Keeping that up over the course of a long expedition had always been an exhausting exercise in creativity and willpower.
But this time was different.
This time, he was departing from New Eridu — a modern city in every sense of the word.
And when it came to long-shelf-life, portable, ready-to-eat food? A modern city didn't just outclass the Monster Hunter world. It absolutely annihilated it.
Take what Andrew had mentioned as examples. Crackers, bread, packaged snacks — things that could sit untouched for a year or more and still be perfectly edible. In the New World or the Forbidden Lands, your options were roasted meat or the portable field rations that came in those little bags, and even those only lasted a month at best. In a rainforest environment, you'd be lucky to get half that.
Compared side by side, New Eridu's modern convenience food was in a completely different league. There was simply no contest.
And that wasn't even touching on the crown jewel of modern industrial civilization.
Instant noodles.
Convenient. Calorie-dense. And shelf-stable for an impressively long time.
Did Miyabi truly understand the legendary status of instant noodles? Did she grasp their worth?
For some reason Andrew couldn't quite explain, the moment he mentioned that she should pick things she personally liked, Miyabi's eyes had lit up with sudden, unmistakable brightness. And the moment he followed it up with "more is more" — she reached down, picked up Wuwei, and was already heading toward the workshop door before he'd finished the sentence.
She looked for all the world like someone who had immediately, definitively decided what she was going to buy.
As for entrusting the shopping to Miyabi — well.
Given how composed and level-headed she'd been every time something serious had come up, a small errand like picking out field provisions was hardly going to give her any trouble. And as a bonus, it would give her a chance to get some proper time moving around in her new armor before they actually needed it out there.
Two birds, one stone.
As they say — a person cannot conceive of what they have never witnessed.
Under that quiet, inexplicable trust he felt in her, Andrew watched Miyabi disappear through the workshop door with a calm, unhurried sense of ease.
But then — for some reason he couldn't identify — a sudden, sourceless chill crawled up the back of his neck the moment she was out of sight.
Fortunately, it came and went in an instant. Andrew shook his head at the inexplicable sensation and promptly shoved it to the very back of his mind, turning his full attention back to the forge.
—Ellen's Weapon—
With a clear plan already in his head, Andrew picked up his materials and got to work, slowly translating the design living in his imagination into something real and physical.
His first instinct, when he'd thought about a scissors-type weapon, had been to forge something like the enormous tailor's shears from that anime — the ones that stood a full person's height, easily — like a gigantic pair of craft scissors sharpened to a killing edge.
Impressive lethality, sure. But it had absolutely nothing in common with the curved blade Ellen had actually asked for. Once sharpened, a massive pair of craft scissors would look far more like two uniquely shaped longswords bound together than anything remotely resembling a glaive.
That wouldn't do at all.
So after a moment's thought, Andrew landed on a different variety of scissors altogether.
Pruning shears.
Long-handled by design, they were already halfway there. With a few targeted modifications, they could fulfill exactly what Ellen had described — and as a bonus, they could solve the shark motif problem in the same stroke.
With a concrete design direction in hand, what came next was simply the work of bringing it to life.
Unlike the armor he'd made for Miyabi — where Gore Magala materials had served as the primary body — for Ellen's weapon, Andrew chose Nineveh's materials as the structural foundation.
It wasn't only because the Gore Magala materials were running low. Weight was the other half of the equation.
Ellen's capacity to wield something heavy had a ceiling. Which meant the Gore Magala materials needed to be reserved for the single most critical part of the weapon.
Good steel belongs at the cutting edge.
And in this case, that edge was the blade — or more precisely, only one of the two blades that made up the shears: the half that would be sharpened into the curved cutting edge, the side meant to function as the glaive.
In Andrew's estimation, that allocation represented the optimal solution for guaranteeing the weapon's overall integrity without exceeding what Ellen could carry.
The dense carapace yielded steadily under Andrew's hands as he worked — ground down, shaped, refined — gradually taking on the form he'd envisioned.
One advantage of crafting a weapon at a normal, human-scale size was that it was considerably less wasteful with materials. Even the diminished scraps remaining were more than sufficient to bring his design to completion.
For the Gore Magala portion of the blade, Andrew had no intention of simply grinding down a solid piece of carapace into a cutting edge and calling it done.
Under his hands and his design, a compact Switch Axe blade — Gore Magala-grade — took shape with surprising speed. This blade was, structurally, the axe-form component of the Switch Axe's transformation.
And the transformation joint slot that had originally been designed to arm the Switch Axe's shift mechanism? Andrew repurposed it entirely — turning it into the articulating joint that would allow the scissors to open and close.
To ensure the shears could actually shear — to meet Ellen's requirement that they function as a genuine cutting instrument in their scissors configuration — Andrew reworked the original axe-blade profile accordingly, flattening the inner face of the blade to create a flush mating surface where it would meet the opposite blade.
As for the other half of the shears — the second blade — while the Nineveh materials used for it were already more than structurally adequate on their own, Andrew had absolutely no intention of slapping together a sloppy blade and calling it a day.
After a careful survey of the available Nineveh materials, he settled on his choice: one of the Ethereal tissue segments that had floated behind Nineveh's body in combat — the sections that had housed a secondary core.
This particular piece had served double duty for Nineveh in life: offensive weapon and armor for the secondary core simultaneously. To fulfill both roles at once, the material's structural density was extraordinary — robust, rigid, and utterly reliable. Pairing it with the Gore Magala blade to form a matched set of shear edges was, if anything, more fitting than Andrew had dared hope.
And as it turned out — just as Andrew had anticipated.
The moment the two blades were finished, before he'd even fitted the handles or fully assembled the mechanism, the compatibility between them announced itself without prompting. A sensation unmistakably similar to the natural resonance between a Rathalos and a Rathian — as though these two pieces had always been meant to find each other.
To be more precise about it.
The combined result of the two wasn't a simple one plus one equals two. It was something beyond that — something that made you feel the arithmetic itself was too small a framework for what was happening.
Could you call it anything other than the bond between parent and child — in the most literal, physical sense?
The compatibility between the Nineveh materials — utterly remade by the Frenzy Virus — and the Gore Magala materials was measurably stronger than anything Andrew had observed between his previous Rathalos and Rathian hauls. Not by a small margin, either.
With the most critical component — the blades — sorted, the handles were a comparatively straightforward matter. They simply needed to be solid.
Andrew selected a section of chest carapace, cut it, and ground it down into two robust grips — one for each side.
To ensure smooth Ether flow through the assembly and maximize the binding strength between the two blades, he replaced every connecting joint with Odogaron bone from his remaining stock.
Those bones — mutated and evolved through their adaptation to Ether energy — were about as close to a perfect conductor for Ether flow as anything Andrew had ever worked with.
Under the binding of the bone joints, the two blades locked together with a solidity that felt final. Settled. Right.
And with that, cradled in Andrew's hands, a pair of shears measuring a full one and a half meters in total length — marginally taller than Ellen's current height — came into existence.
A little big for now, admittedly. But Ellen was only in her first year of middle school.
Give it a year or two. She'd keep growing, and what was slightly oversized today would fit perfectly then — unless she just... stopped growing entirely from this point forward.
But that was hardly going to happen.
It wasn't like she was the legendary shipgirl Saratoga or something.
In its closed configuration, the weapon looked nothing like scissors. The two parallel grips were the only visible hint — without those, you'd never guess what you were looking at.
The aesthetics were striking in their own way: the deep charcoal-black of the Gore Magala materials set against the stark, bleached white of Nineveh's Ethereal tissue, the razor-sharp aggression of the Gore Magala's visual language colliding head-on with the smooth, almost clinical cleanliness of Nineveh's. The resulting clash of visual languages was — genuinely a little uncanny.
But that extreme contrast was precisely what gave it a strange, asymmetric beauty all its own.
And the color scheme — dark grey and white — was, coincidentally, a near-perfect match for a shark's coloring. It held together as a cohesive whole.
All in all — probably done.
As long as you ignored the faint dark-violet luminescence bleeding from the Gore Magala portion of the blade, there was actually something vaguely shark-like about it.
More or less.
The only potential issue...
...was that it looked, on the surface, like exactly the sort of weapon a villain would carry. Not exactly the kind of thing that said "trustworthy person."
Then again, Victoria Housekeeping Co. handled its commissions primarily through high society's private networks — which meant the whole operation was already remarkably discreet by nature.
So a weapon that looked a little morally ambiguous probably wouldn't get in the way of Ellen making good friends in everyday life.
Probably.
Andrew looked down at the finished shears in his hands and gave a slow, satisfied nod.
Every time he worked with Ethereal materials, he could feel himself leveling up as a smith. Each piece he finished left something behind in his hands that the previous one hadn't.
And this pair of shears, right now, in this moment.
Aside from the fact that they were too small for him to use himself — Andrew felt, with quiet certainty, that this was the finest weapon he had ever designed.
The reduced scale had cut down on the quantity of materials used across the board, yes. But the sheer structural integrity of the Nineveh and Gore Magala materials had more than compensated for every gram of that reduction. They covered for the gap completely.
With both of those materials working in concert —
Ellen's custom shears had come out marginally stronger than the dual blades he'd once forged for Anby.
Just a hair over, but over.
He set the finished weapon on the rack and sent Von Lycaon a message to come collect it.
Outside, the sky had deepened into the amber and rose of early evening — the setting sun marking the hour without ambiguity.
Having spent the day in the workshop, Andrew had only just reached for his phone when — right on cue, in the very next second — Knock-Knock delivered a message from Belle:
「My brother is asking for it again today: Andrew, you there?? We've got a result!! Get over here get over here get over here!!!"
Every word of it was brimming with the giddy, barely-contained triumph of someone who had finally, finally found what they'd been looking for.
Reading it, Andrew felt a bolt of energy shoot through him.
His eyes lit up.
He grabbed his phone and typed back without a moment's delay:
[MeowscularAreCutestInTheWorld: Got it! On my way right now!]
He immediately set down the gear he'd been organizing — the equipment he and Miyabi would need for field operations — and made straight for the Random Play Video Store.
The moment he yanked the studio door open —
In the dimly lit room, the glowing screens of the H.D.D System threw cold light over two faces that told a story no words were needed for.
Beneath the tangle of disheveled hair, Wise and Belle both looked hollow. Dark circles carved deep beneath their eyes. Skin drained of color, pale as paper.
One look was all it took. They'd been grinding without pause since yesterday at noon, right through to this moment. Not a minute of actual rest between them.
As for the rotating sleep schedule Belle had promised him — it had clearly been discarded at some point during the night, quietly and without ceremony.
The side table told the rest of the story. The dozen-plus Energy Drink bottles Andrew had left behind had been reduced to a graveyard of empty glass, scattered and piled haphazardly under the table in a small, precarious mountain.
In their place, the table was now covered in stack after stack of printed intelligence reports — page after page of data, compiled and cross-referenced. The sheer volume of it spoke louder than any boast about how relentlessly the two of them had pushed themselves.
But the more pages in that pile, the more clearly it proved just how much those two siblings had given to this.
Forty-eight hours of high-intensity work, start to finish, since the Nineveh interception. No breaks. No real sleep.
No matter what Belle said — no matter how many times she insisted she was fine — Andrew couldn't stop the worry from rising up in his chest, steady and persistent as a tide.
____
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