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ArabicArknights: The Prophet of Penguin Logistics — Chapter 27
Chapter 27: A Boring Journey
He had assured everyone that there would be absolutely no problems with this arrangement. Yet, a mere three hours into the journey, Lynn discovered a fatal flaw in his calculations.
He had forgotten something crucial. For a habitual shut-in, spending extended periods away from the comfort of home meant overlooking the basic necessities of travel. It was an unavoidable loophole in his logic, a disastrous oversight that threatened to ruin the entire trip before it even truly began.
Lynn had forgotten to bring any form of entertainment.
Unlike Croissant, who was currently slumped sideways in the passenger seat looking as though she could happily sleep for twenty-four hours straight, and unlike Texas, who could maintain perfect stoic silence just by listening to the stereo, Lynn was entirely out of his element. For the first three hours, he had maintained a mild interest in the shifting scenery beyond the window. But as the clock ticked on and the desolate wasteland outside dissolved into an endless, monotonous blur of gray and brown, any romanticized notions he harbored about long-distance travel completely evaporated.
The view was dull. The low, vibrating roar of the engine was numbing. The dreary music looping on the car stereo had long overstayed its welcome, blending with the rhythmic snoring of his Forte companion in the front. Even with the ventilation running at full blast, the air inside the compartment had grown heavy, tainted by the faint, inescapable smell of engine grease and old upholstery. The atmosphere was suffocatingly drowsy.
He wanted to sleep, but his body refused to cooperate. Every time his eyelids began to droop, the heavy transport vehicle would hit a rut in the road, sending a violent shudder through the chassis that jolted him wide awake.
Ultimately, he was reduced to sitting rigidly in the back seat, staring blankly at the passing wasteland. He felt his mind and body slowly detaching from reality, drifting toward a seemingly unreachable destination on this endlessly tiresome highway. Without a book, a game, or even a decent signal to distract him, the sheer weight of the boredom was agonizing. He felt as though his very spirit was being slowly drained away, leaving behind an empty husk.
To make matters worse, there was the music. Exusiai was humming along to the stereo, a melody that might have sounded incredibly beautiful to anyone else. But to Lynn, whose tastes had been ruthlessly filtered by the massive, hyper-competitive music market of seven billion people in his original world, it was just painfully average. It was not that the song was inherently bad, but hearing it loop for the dozenth time was pure psychological torture.
Lynn had no idea how Texas managed to endure such brain-numbing repetition with a perfectly straight face. What terrified him even more was the realization that he was the only one suffering. Everyone else seemed perfectly content. Exusiai was happily shuffling a deck of cards next to him while bobbing her head to the beat, and Texas was tapping her fingers lightly against the steering wheel. The feeling of utter isolation began to gnaw at him.
‘What is going on?’Lynn thought, staring at the ceiling.’Why am I the only one who can’t enjoy this? Is my social battery really this pathetic?’
Slumping deeper into the upholstery, Lynn turned his gaze back to the flashing remnants of abandoned villages and jagged rock formations outside. He deliberately arranged his features into a mask of deep loneliness and sorrow. He looked exactly like a tragic protagonist burdened with a dark past, silently waiting for someone—anyone—to take the bait and strike up a conversation.
Up in the driver’s seat, Texas caught sight of Lynn’s feigned melancholy in the rearview mirror. Having spent enough days around him to thoroughly understand his dramatic tendencies, she subtly pursed her lips. She glanced over at Exusiai, whose eyes were occasionally drifting toward the back seat in concern.
Casually snapping off a piece of chocolate and tossing it into her mouth to keep herself sharp, Texas spoke in a slow, measured drawl.
“Exusiai…”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t mind him.”
“Ahaha, sorry, Seer.” Exusiai chuckled awkwardly, waving a hand at the visibly eager Lynn. “Sometimes bullets jam, you know? It’s fine, it’s fine. It’ll only take three days to get to Chernobog. If the roads stay clear, we might even have time to buy some nice souvenirs to bring back. So just bear with it a little longer.”
“Three days…” Lynn groaned, letting his head loll against the window. “My goodness, is the infrastructure out here really that garbage?”
“It’s not the roads,” Exusiai explained cheerfully. “It’s just that we have to detour around several areas heavily polluted by Catastrophe remnants. It takes time to clear the inspection zones and handle the safe routes. If we could just drive straight through, it would only take about ten hours. We’ve already covered a third of the distance for today. In about two more hours, we’ll hit the first checkpoint and we can finally stretch our legs.”
“Ah… in other words, two more hours of absolute torment.” Lynn sighed heavily, his eyes darting toward the front seat. “Why is Croissant sleeping so soundly? Should we wake her up?”
“You really can’t stand to see other people happy, can you?” Exusiai laughed, shaking her head. “You’re way too twisted.”
“It’s not that I want her to suffer,” Lynn argued, shifting uncomfortably. “I just genuinely feel itchy all over. I need something to happen.”
Staring blankly at the roof of the car, Lynn suddenly let out a dry laugh, a wave of nostalgia hitting him as he remembered the endless arguments he used to have with idiotic netizens back in his original world.
“You know, back in my world, there were always these annoying critics online,” Lynn rambled, gesturing vaguely with his hands. “They’d complain, ‘This plot isn’t logical, that character makes no sense, the story shouldn’t develop like this.’And then someone else would always pop up and say,’If a beautiful girl falls from the sky right now, it’d be a masterpiece.’Or,’If someone suddenly dies, it’d be a masterpiece.’ Honestly, if we got a plot twist like that right now, it would be an absolute masterpi—whoa!”
Before Lynn could finish his careless sentence, Texas slammed her foot down on the brakes.
The heavy transport vehicle shrieked as the tires locked up, the massive chassis lurching violently forward under the sudden inertia. Caught completely off guard in the middle of his bragging, Lynn was thrown out of his seat, his face smashing directly into the headrest in front of him.
“Texas! What are you doing?!”
Rubbing his stinging nose, Lynn tasted copper. He had very nearly bitten his own tongue off.
“Are you trying to murder me? At least give a warning before you brake like that so I can brace myself! I think my tongue is bleeding.”
“…The masterpiece you wanted,” Texas said, her voice completely flat. “It’s here.”
“What?”
“A beautiful girl falling from the sky. Dead people. The masterpiece you asked for is right outside.”
Texas stared through the windshield, her expression unreadable as she looked at Lynn through the rearview mirror, treating him as though he were a walking natural disaster.
“There is the corpse of an Infected blocking the road ahead. It looks like she was killed by Originium Arts. We need to call the highway police and wait for backup. It seems our first checkpoint is going to be very lively.”
“…Ah?” Lynn froze, the pain in his nose momentarily forgotten.
“Seer, sometimes it really is better if you just keep your mouth shut,” Croissant muttered. She had woken up during the violent stop and was now staring at the tragic scene illuminated by their headlights, shaking her head in helpless disbelief.
Beside Lynn, Exusiai was doing the exact same thing, looking at him with a mixture of awe and exasperation at his terrifying ability to jinx reality.
Pushed aside by Exusiai leaning over to get a better look, Lynn found a gap between the front seats and peered through the windshield.
Lying directly across the center of the asphalt was a massive, jagged crystal of black ice. Sealed perfectly within the center of the freezing block was a young woman. She was undeniably beautiful, but her face was contorted in a silent scream of agony. Dark, jagged Originium crystals had erupted across her hands and thighs, tearing through her skin before the ice had frozen her in place. It was a sight that was simultaneously stunning and horrifyingly eerie.
Almost at the exact moment Lynn laid eyes on the frozen girl, the car’s internal dashboard lit up in flashing red. The Originium radiation alarm began to shriek, filling the cabin with a piercing, mechanical wail that warned them all of the lethal danger radiating from the beautiful ice sculpture blocking their path.