[On the land of Terra, there once circulated a legend—of a place called the City.]
[It was said that this was a desolate land… once a vast mobile city, now reduced to a ruin teeming with all manner of strange and monstrous lifeforms.]
[Yet long ago, this was a place of astonishing advancement. Some claimed that buried within its soil were countless legacies: peerless technology, treasures beyond imagination, or even the remains of a great, titanic being.]
[There was even a tale of a mighty conqueror who once declared to the world:]
["Want my treasure? It's yours if you can find it! The City—everything in this world, I left it there!"]
"…You seriously think anyone's gonna buy this crap?"
Inside a small wooden shack, Obsidian sat at a table, staring down at the sheet of paper in front of him, visibly conflicted. The very words of that so-called legend were printed across the page.
After a long moment of silence, he finally let out a long sigh and fed the paper into a nearby slot. Pressing his hands together, he muttered a prayer.
"No other choice… Heaven help me. Someone, anyone, just show up already."
"If nobody comes soon, this rickety-ass city's gonna get picked clean!"
"Honestly, having the whole place scrapped might not be such a bad thing… but then again, that'd be the end of me too…"
Muttering to himself, Obsidian flopped backward onto the bed behind him, despair etched across his face. His figure shimmered faintly, as if not entirely real. Dressed casually, with dark gray hair and luminous blue eyes, his features were refined and handsome—an elegant youth, fair as jade.
Not that it mattered much. In truth, anyone put in Obsidian's current situation would probably look just as hopeless.
Obsidian, age 24. Transmigrator. Current residence: Terra. Status: Mobile city.
Ever since that fateful day when he got flattened by a dump truck and transported to this world called Terra, Obsidian had been stuck in the form of a mobile city's will—a conscious embodiment of its core system.
At first, he'd genuinely believed he'd scored the ultimate starter package. As long as he hadn't landed in some hellhole like Chernobog, what danger could possibly befall a mobile city? Hell, people would fight wars over him. He was valuable, right?
So the very first thing he did after crossing over was to figure out which mobile city he had become.
After all, if you were gonna reincarnate as a city, Lungmen was clearly the jackpot.
Places like Siesta might be a bit chaotic during summer events, but still pretty decent.
Even Chernobog, with its bumper car disasters, could be salvageable with some clever maneuvering.
But this… what the hell is "the City" supposed to be?!
The moment Obsidian realized—with a blank stare—that he had become "the City", he knew he was screwed.
It was like being turned into a magical girl only to find out Gen Urobuchi wrote the script.
Because the city he'd become wasn't even from Terra. It was from Project Moon's universe, ripped straight out of Lobotomy Corporation.
The concept was hard to grasp, but all you really needed to know was this:
The City was a full-blown dystopian cyberpunk nightmare. Plagued by internal strife and external horrors. Tech that claimed to be "human-centered" but worked more like mystical nonsense. Singularity technologies that could bring endless "surprises." And the outskirts? Packed with overpowered monsters from hell.
And after a deep investigation, Obsidian came to an even more crushing realization:
Right now, the only surviving human-inhabited area of this entire City was this one shack he was sitting in. Everything else had already been reclassified as the "Outskirts," teeming with creatures like Sweepers, Vampires, and Whales.
There were no Wings in this version of the City, which meant no access to Singularity tech either.
In Arknights terms, it was like the lumberjacks had already kicked in your front door, eldritch horrors were breaking loose, and Originium was glitching out so hard it was about to cause the apocalypse…
And meanwhile, all the civilizations of Terra were still dinking around in the Stone Age.
How the hell was he supposed to survive this?!
No one told him there was gonna be an Arknights × Project Moon crossover! And now the City was here?!
What made it worse: if this City ever fully lost its human-occupied area, Obsidian—as its consciousness—would also perish. And crucially, as a city, he couldn't even lift a finger to clear out the Outskirts himself.
It was like trying to fight off an infection from inside your own body—with your entire immune system shot to hell. The only hope was to bring in an external cure.
That was why Obsidian had been desperately trying to rebuild and expand the City ever since.
After becoming the City, he discovered a few residual functions still operational.
One of them was the "Message Directive." He could send out limited broadcasts through cracks in the walls. He'd been doing this nonstop, trying to drum up even the tiniest scrap of reputation for the City.
The other… was a well.
Thinking of it, Obsidian stood up and glanced around the spartan little cabin. A bed. A table. A wall crack. And… a narrow well.
That well was his greatest hope.
It connected to the City's "Sea"—an abyssal reservoir where he could burn Madness as a resource and extract all kinds of possibilities… skills, personas, even Singularities.
Yes, that's right. It was a goddamn gacha machine. But one that could actually pull Singularity-level loot.
And as for the resource called "Madness"… he could generate it by expanding human territory, clearing the Outskirts, and dragging monster corpses back to the well.
So, Obsidian came up with a pretty straightforward self-rescue plan:
First, find a way to bring some people in from Terra. Then, negotiate or ally with them—get them to explore the Outskirts, gather resources, and bring stuff back for Obsidian to roll gacha. Everyone wins. If he pulled stuff they could use, he'd give it to them. The rest would go toward rebuilding the City and raising its visibility...
That was the plan for early-stage development, at least.
But there was a problem—a big one—right from the start:
Where the hell were the people supposed to come from?!
Collapsing back onto the bed, Obsidian felt despair creep in like a cold tide.
He'd been stuck here for ten days now. Ten full days. Not a single human soul in sight.
In that time, the City's inhabited zone had already shrunk by half… Now, only this cabin and maybe a two- to three-hundred-meter radius remained.
Five more days… and he might not make it.
What the hell do I do now…? The thought crushed him, like a weight pressing down on his chest.
But just then—Obsidian froze.
Then, in a burst of motion, he shot upright in bed.
Wait… someone's here?!
His eyes widened with hope as his consciousness—woven into the City itself—raced outward through the terrain, extending all the way to the very edges of the urban zone…
And there, he saw her. A grey wolf walking into the City's perimeter.
Obsidian recognized her immediately—Texas.
For a long moment, his mouth hung slightly open.
"…Holy shit…?"
"I GOT A DROP!!!"