SANABI Story 2 · A Stopped Train and a Copied Hero

This is an original narrative commentary following the events of the main game. It adds no new events or invented dialogue. This installment follows developments in Mago’s commercial district and the characters’ responses. It contains spoilers.

1. The Uneasy Silence of Intact Streets

The easiest route to the highest level was the commercial district’s vertical transit train. But from the entrance onward, the General’s body exceeded this city’s specifications. In one area, an interception system attacked with heat beams whenever it detected mechanical output above a set level. Mari and Mufin could pass, while the General with his chain arm could not cross the same way.

He attached himself to a crane on the freight line. Entering the immense city became a matter of choosing narrow gaps to slip through. In a place where strength made him more vulnerable, his long experience had to guide him even through moments when he must avoid using force. Beside him, Mari read the systems. Their different methods each opened paths the other did not possess.

The commercial district differed from the lower reaches. Goods and facilities were too intact. It was a landscape hard to explain unless only the people had been erased. The General distrusted that orderly silence. The traces of confusion that ought to remain after a large-scale disaster were absent. Mari did not dwell on the landscape as long as his questions did.

First, the chain arm needed repairs. When they found the black market Song had mentioned, nearby merchandise captured Mari’s attention. The General obtained parts and serviced his equipment. Even a path of revenge included time to repair broken components. In the same place, one person prepared for combat while the other briefly grew excited, remembering a work she loved.

As they came outside, an advertisement for a memory-manipulation specialist caught his eye. The video showed a family birthday party. It reminded him of the birthday his daughter had prepared for him. In this city even someone’s happy memory looked like a commodity, but the scene revived within him could not be treated so lightly.

His daughter’s wish to make him happy, the time she spent preparing a celebration however clumsily, touched his wound. His moving body was briefly caught inside a memory. Beneath the firm purpose of finding Sanabi, the small moments shared with her remained. Remembering them brought sorrow, yet also showed that he was a person formed by more than revenge alone.

With the merchandise in hand, Mari was imitating a favorite scene. The General told her to put the toy down so they could leave, but she explained that it was a real hacking tool sold in the guise of merchandise. An action that first seemed like fandom delaying their journey would later become life-saving preparation. The General could not yet know the difference.

2. The Hero the Girl Had Admired

The street’s peacekeeping force was destroying Workers. Combat robots attacking labor robots. The devices meant to maintain the city were erasing other devices within it. Breaking through them, the General encountered Justice in a walking suit.

Mari’s response was the opposite of his wariness. She had met the outlaw hero she had admired since childhood. Unable to hide her enthusiasm as a fan, she approached and even took a photograph. In this dangerous city she could still rejoice at seeing something she loved. The General found her reaction hard to trust. What struck him first was that this person alone was wandering unharmed through a place without visible people.

Justice offered no adequate explanation. He disappeared after saying he was watching them. Mari defended him, saying he probably was not a bad person, but the General judged the suit’s cloaking function unsuitable for someone merely playing a personal hero. He questioned the meaning of that equipment in this city, rather than Mari’s taste.

They looked at the same person and read different things. For Mari, he represented a childhood admiration; for the General, military technology and an unexplained purpose. It seemed as though the General continually denied the things Mari liked, but neither was merely trying to hurt the other. One clung to memories, while the other calculated the conditions for survival.

3. Why the Train Would Not Move

Even at the station, the train would not run. An iron door closed while Mari went to the central control room. Peacekeeping combat robots appeared in the space where the General remained alone. He had to face enemies firing missiles from behind shields. The transport that should open a path had become a trap deploying weapons.

When a heavily armored battery appeared, even the General judged that force alone could not break it. He told Mari to find a way. She remembered the hacking tool she had obtained at the black market. What he had considered a toy moments earlier became the key to breaking the defenses. Receiving it, he plugged it into the train and disabled the battery.

But a huge peacekeeping robot then caught him. Mari and Mufin brought a walking suit and broke through the door. Mufin prepared to attack, but the enemy easily destroyed the suit. The rescuers immediately became targets. Flung away, the General recovered and tore out the robot’s reactor. Once again he protected Mari at the last moment, but when the battle ended his body collapsed first.

When he woke after collapsing, Mari told him that internal explosives had destroyed every train engine. The train had been prepared to render itself unusable when required, rather than being hastily wrecked by someone. The suspicion that destruction throughout the city belonged to a single plan grew stronger.

Yet the question troubling him most still concerned Mari. Why did she help him to this extent? A survivor ought to seek a chance to leave, but she returned, rescued him, and tried to climb alongside him. Before explaining her purpose, she held out a harmonica. Her unexpected question was whether he knew how to play.

The General said he did not. What he offered was his resolve to die here, rather than music. After making Sanabi pay for taking everything from him, he meant to meet his own end in the city. Mari explained that her father had died because of Mago Group, and that she had investigated to learn why. The death and loss in those words were real, but they did not explain her entire purpose.

One person could not speak of his dead daughter and had left only revenge in her place; the other spoke of her dead father while concealing the most important fact. The harmonica remained between them. It seemed unnecessary to the General as he was now, but Mari could not readily give up the little instrument.

4. One Face Killing Another of the Same

With the train blocked, they searched for a flying vehicle. Damaged cars remained in the garage of Mago’s transportation safety agency. As Mari approached one that looked intact, a slash cut through its body. After the General saved her, the attacker revealed himself. It was Justice.

The person whose appearance had delighted her as a fan now stood in a position to kill her. The General sent Mari outside and asked why. Instead of an answer, the garage conveyor started moving, throwing flying vehicles outside. Before their eyes, the second route to the highest level was vanishing too.

Fighting Justice, the General had Mari stop the conveyor. He read the suit’s repeated cloaking and attacks and weakened its power. When his opponent could no longer hide, the end seemed in sight. Then another Justice appeared and stabbed the Justice he had been fighting.

The sight contradicted the belief in a single hero. Enemies with the same appearance emerged in succession. When one unit fell, another fulfilling the same role took its place. The General fought through the confusion and ended the battle. When he broke the door by throwing the shattered walking suit and came outside, Mari first asked whether he had killed Justice.

What the General had discovered was more disturbing. These Justices were troops mass-produced by Mago through personality copying. Beings that moved like humans were repeatedly manufactured as a corporation’s private soldiers. The very possibility elevated the city’s crimes to another level. Digitizing a personality was forbidden technology for which even research could bring the ultimate punishment.

The image of Mari’s cherished hero had become a weapon’s shape for someone else. This did not establish that every instance of the hero she liked had been false. The verified fact was that the units encountered here in the city had been created in this way. Holding on to that distinction did not lessen Mari’s shock. A person’s appearance and personality could be stolen and turned into a tool shaped to obey orders. The General did not yet know that this would touch his own story too.

5. Hesitation Before the Last Route

The flying vehicles were gone as well. The remaining route to the highest level passed through Mago Electronics’ central factory. To the General, it was almost a matter of choosing the next obstacle; to Mari, it was a place she could not easily enter. She knew the factory’s frightening rumors and feared what would happen inside.

The General counted the time. They had to ascend before the city’s nuclear fission reactor was destroyed. He could not afford to linger over Mari’s hesitation. Yet her frightened appearance reminded him of his daughter. The hacker before him constantly spoke too much and insisted on her own way, but even trembling before danger, she stayed beside him.

They had kept each other alive until now. Their companionship continued when Mufin could not lift him and he had to let go, when the suit was broken at the train station, and when he collapsed. This did not erase Mari’s hidden purpose, but it had unmistakably made it impossible for him to see her solely as a mission objective.

At the factory door, their steps briefly fell out of alignment. One had to travel toward an ending, while the other had to recover something before reaching it. The harmonica Mari kept offering and the unanswered questions entered the enormous factory’s darkness with them, their reasons still unrevealed.

Sources and Scope of Verification

Focusing on established events in the original main game, we compared the official introduction, developer interview, publicly available gameplay screenshots, and character and plot materials. The atmosphere and descriptions of emotion interpret the characters’ actions and dialogue. The early manipulated memories, actual past, present events, and different ending branches are distinguished; uncertain motives and subsequent events are not added as facts. Illustrations are AI reconstructions based on actual game scenes and designs verified through searches, rather than official images or exact cutscene copies. Codex directly wrote and compared the Korean text and 13 translations; Gemini was not used. Sources checked: October 9, 2026.

Official SANABI Steam page — introduction, supported languages, and purchase

Public SANABI main-game playthrough — view the events and scenes

Wonder Potion developer interview — family story and direction
https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/english/240719a_en

Mago’s commercial district cross-checked against gameplay screenshots
https://general-store.tistory.com/111

SANABI plot cross-check — research records, family past, and both endings
https://m.namu.moe/w/%EC%82%B0%EB%82%98%EB%B9%84/%EC%A4%84%EA%B1%B0%EB%A6%AC

Cross-check of Mari Gold’s actions and background
https://sanabi.fandom.com/wiki/Mari_Gold

Cross-check of the General and Worker 17287’s background
https://sanabi.fandom.com/wiki/Protagonist