Navigation

Duncan had great confidence in his memory—he happened to remember what the stone A'gou had thrown looked like, and now he was certain that the stone in Alice's hand was the very one A'gou had thrown.

A'gou quickly realized what had happened as well. It stared at the stone in the puppet's hand in shock. "...What a coincidence? It landed in your hand!?"

"No," Alice immediately shook her head, looking as though it were the most natural thing in the world. "I picked it up."

"You... picked it up?" Shirley wore the expression of someone who had seen a ghost, her eyes fixed on the puppet. "How did you pick it up? According to what A'gou just said, shouldn't that thing have landed in some random place in the Abyssal Deep Sea?"

Alice immediately began thinking, seemingly trying to figure out how to explain a process she herself could not explain. Then she spoke while gesturing, "When we were talking about where things that fell from here might end up, I got curious about where that stone was, and then I found it. Then I picked it up... That's all..."

As Alice spoke, she casually made a motion as if picking something out of thin air, as though it were perfectly ordinary—but Shirley did not understand her explanation, and neither did the dog.

Yet Duncan, standing nearby, suddenly furrowed his brow as something occurred to him—

Alice's abnormal behavior when they crossed that frozen Starry Sky... LH-03, the Navigation Host!

His expression shifted slightly. He immediately bent down, picked up another pebble from nearby, showed it to Alice, and forcefully hurled it into the vast darkness beyond the floating island.

Just like before, the pebble vanished from everyone's sight the instant it flew several meters beyond the floating island's boundaries.