He totally lost it. It was almost a mercy, though, that half of his embarrassment was just from the indignity of it all. Look, he understood that carrying gear on their backs made piggybacks out of the question, but come on…! And he totally wasn’t going to acknowledge Desire’s wondering if Declan might not have chosen this path on purpose.

The view at the top was definitely awe-inspiring, though. It was hard for Aoba to say if it was more so than any of the vistas on Earth, given the crowded cityscape that had been all he’d known for most of his life, but that didn’t mean he dismissed it to any degree. He set Ren down and the Allmate trotted off a ways, undoubtedly capturing a new photo of the scenery with every glance around that he took.

“You know,” Aoba began, still at the Guardian’s side, “as different as everything looks, sometimes it doesn’t really feel like an alien planet to me. It could just be a side of Earth that I’ve never seen before and I wouldn’t know any better, since I never really saw anything but crowded buildings back home.”