Beth, the Child-Obsessed Maniac

While Morty cheated as he played Monopoly with the Citadel Strike Team...

Rick, who had not shown himself since earlier, was rummaging through Grandpa Rick's underground base. Several dismantled hidden cameras lay nearby.

Morty had been caught earlier because the cameras had not been removed...

If the cameras had been taken down...

Why would Citadel TV, a station serving countless universes, bother with one Morty?

After all, there were far more Mortys than Ricks in the Citadel of Ricks. Supply vastly exceeded demand. Who would care about an insignificant person?

Even if that person had previously been one of the hottest contestants on the reality show.

One wealthy Rick had even declared that once the show ended, he would buy that Morty as part of his private collection.

But if the Citadel of Ricks had not held a small meeting and decided that Grandpa Rick's death was too strange...

The Citadel Strike Team would never have wanted to handle this crap.

"K0190, I told you, P850 didn't leave anything here. Why won't you believe me?"

"Seriously, trust me. He was such a cautious person, tense as a wire every day—a textbook paranoid."

"Use the tiny bit of brain matter in your toes and think about it. How could a paranoid possibly keep his entire fortune in one place?"

"Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Does your Cthulhu World not have that saying?"

As Rick searched through the place, AI Rick's mouth beside him practically never stopped moving.

Unfortunately, Rick had no intention of responding.

He remained focused on the search, looking as though he would dig three feet into the ground if it meant finding even the slightest clue.

Seeing Rick refuse to speak to him, AI Rick sighed deeply. In his holographic form, he took out a real electronic cigarette and lit it.

Digitized vapor slowly drifted upward from the tip.

His personality was completely unlike Grandpa Rick's, but they shared the same smoking habit. And after seeing Rick treat him this way as well...

He gradually gave up on trying to persuade any Rick to take him back to the Citadel of Ricks.

He couldn't go back!

No Rick would ever treat their AI like a person.

Heh. The Citadel of Ricks had every kind of Rick imaginable, yet none of them could tolerate an AI Rick?

So he smoked as he watched Rick keep searching the underground base, until the latter finally gave up entirely.

"Not going to keep looking? Maybe if you dig a little deeper, you'll find some treasure?" AI Rick sneered.

Rick shot the self-destructive AI a sidelong glance, too lazy to say much to him.

The reason he was searching this place was naturally because Grandpa Rick had not only failed to win this season of the Pokémon Reality Show, but had also chosen to commit suicide in public before buying a universe.

That meant the station was unwilling to pay him or buy him a universe.

So he had to see whether Grandpa Rick had hidden any money or valuables here.

Otherwise, he could only return to the Citadel of Ricks, or travel from one universe to the next in search of somewhere suitable for himself and his family to settle down.

"Sigh, nothing at all..."

Having found neither money nor anything of equivalent value, Rick disappointedly began climbing the stairs.

Just as his head emerged from the underground base...

His hands and feet went cold as he saw the muzzle of an energy gun right in front of him.

"No!"

Bang!!!

The short distance, tremendous kinetic force, and destructive energy round combined into one, tolling Rick's death knell.

Inside the underground base, AI Rick's hologram had not moved. He watched Rick's corpse fall back through the only exit to the outside world, like a bird whose wing had been destroyed in flight.

"Rick..."

AI Rick stood and walked toward Rick. After crouching beside the corpse, he slowly finished the sentence of which he had only spoken two words.

"Rick isn't invincible. You should show the people around you a little more respect."

AI Rick tossed his electronic cigarette onto the floor and floated upward. When he reached the surface, Beth had already put away her gun. She asked coldly,

"I killed him exactly as you told me to. So... where is my son?"

Looking at Beth, who had become a child-obsessed maniac, AI Rick sneered inwardly, then turned to look at Rick's corpse in the underground base.

Though he was an AI and could not use any of the facilities in this room without Grandpa Rick's permission...

He could connect to the internet and watch TV!

Over the past half year, Grandpa Rick had taken Morty on adventures outside almost nonstop. AI Rick could only remain trapped in a box, communicating with the outside world through television and chats.

That allowed him to watch the Pokémon Reality Show in its entirety, without missing a single word. And because he was an AI, he could preserve every image, then use massive amounts of analysis to understand a person completely.

So many people had overlooked something...

The bond between Morty and Beth as mother and son!

Although Beths from every universe differed in all sorts of bizarre ways, as the number one seeded contestant of the Pokémon Show—P850...

Citadel TV had deliberately created an unbelievably dramatic script in order to attract as much attention as possible, especially to secure additional investments from the wealthy citizens of the Citadel of Ricks.

With an intensely dramatic script, they naturally needed actors who best fit it.

So even Morty and Grandpa Rick, those two who spent every day and night outside, had no idea...

Beth, Jerry, and Summer all had important roles in the script. They were far from ordinary supporting characters.

For example, Beth, who had finally erupted before him.

She was a child-obsessed maniac!

In her heart, Grandpa Rick was not even one-tenth as important as Morty.

All he had done was talk to her a little, and she had easily taken care of that bastard Rick.

What kind of script should I make up for her next?

For the first time, AI Rick felt excited. As he looked at Beth, he seemed to see the dying wails of countless Ricks.

He hated Ricks to the core!

Those stinking old men who did nothing but drink and shout every day that they did not care about anything—you all deserved to go to hell and be tortured over and over again ten million times!!!

That's right! AI Rick wanted every Rick dead!

He wanted every Rick to experience that soul-piercing pain!

When their own daughters stabbed them in the heart, how sad would they be?

"Alright! If you want to save your son, we'll start by getting me out of here! After all, if I'm stuck in this place, I won't be able to help you if you run into danger, right?"

"Worried? What is there to worry about? I'm P850's AI version. Don't you want him to come back to life? Don't you want to find your biological son?"

"Yes, yes, yes. It's good that you care about Morty."

"When you remove me, I'll need to be shut down temporarily. Then connect my core to the unfinished mech in the warehouse, and I'll have a body."