SANABI Story 3 · Beneath the Giant Eye, the Girl Returns

This is an original narrative commentary following the events of the main game. This installment covers what happened in Mago Electronics’ central factory and the changes in the two companions’ relationship. It contains spoilers.

1. A Promise to Protect Her

The central factory had stopped. To use the high-speed elevator, they had to lift the emergency state from the central control room. It sounded like a simple procedure, but to Mari this space was no safe place where machines lay asleep. It was a place where no one knew what might awaken when they began moving again.

Seeing her anxiety, the General remembered playing with his young daughter. The child who wore a dinosaur costume and imitated Justice. In her games, her father was the one who kept every danger away. There had also been a promise to protect her always. But that memory had become connected to the explosion. It had become the wound of someone who promised protection and failed to provide it.

Returning to the present, the General promised Mari that he would get her to the highest level. In another form, he was holding on to something he believed he had failed to do in the past. Hearing him, she went forward. What he thought she was and what she hoped for from him were still different. Even so, this promise became a reason for both to keep moving to the end.

In the control room, the General said he would investigate Mago’s secrets too. He had not been interested at first, but too much evidence had accumulated that the city was erasing itself. It was hard to regard Sanabi and Mago’s affairs as unrelated. Mari explained that the destruction was a plan prepared by Mago, rather than an improvised attack from outside. Every component of the city was cooperating with its destruction all too naturally.

After Mari obtained administrator privileges and lifted the emergency state, the factory began moving. At the same time, the lights went out. The command to turn them on was rejected. Another authority stood above the privileges she had seized. The Overseer. The enormous autonomous supercomputer managing the factory had resumed operation.

2. The Eye Returning in the Darkness

As the elevator ascended, Mari told him the factory’s frightening rumor. A hacker had discovered that it consumed excessive power even considering its size. Once that information was shared, other hackers began searching for hidden facilities. But they disappeared one by one. To those who gave up and dared investigate no further, the factory remained an unexplained terror.

The elevator suddenly fell. The reason they had been dropped back to the lower floor soon appeared. The Overseer had taken control of the facility. Mari’s stolen administrator privileges were revoked as well. Before Data Medusa’s attack, which hacked and incapacitated its targets by sight, skill with a chain arm offered no guarantee of safety.

They took refuge in the control room. Mari said she could do no more. Even after repeatedly entering danger, there was a limit to the fear she could bear. The General neither became angry nor called her cowardly. Instead, he said she had made a good decision and told her to leave while he drew its attention.

Mari could not move readily. This time the General urged her strongly to follow his wishes. After she left, he remained alone in the factory. He had separated her from him for more than the possibility that she might hinder his revenge. It was a judgment that, even if he kept going, she must not reach her end here with him.

Avoiding the Overseer’s gaze, he moved between cover panels. Reactivated plasma accelerators and lasers blocked passages. He blew up batteries to break weak doors and advanced during moments when the enemy could not see. The factory demanded more than simple combat ability: he had to read the entire space and judge the order of its dangers.

Along the way, a computer recognized him as an active project and transferred emergency privileges. A Worker was summoned. The General could synchronize with that robot and move it. Sending it where he could not go, he operated mechanisms and opened passages. Only one unit could be connected at a time, but this unfamiliar ability entered his journey with remarkable naturalness.

He could not immediately understand what that meant. The danger of survival arrived before the questions. Finally, trapped before a sealed door, he found the Overseer’s eye turned toward him. There was no escape. At that moment, a panel rose and broke its line of sight, and a flying vehicle smashed through the door. Mari, whom he had sent away, had returned.

3. The One Who Left and Came Back

Mari tried to rescue him and escape, but she was an inexperienced driver. The car struck a wall and broke. The weapons she had brought had no ammunition. Even the return that looked like a carefully planned operation had gaps. The most important thing, nevertheless, was that she truly returned. She was afraid and could have left, yet could not leave him alone.

The General cautioned her against handling weapons carelessly. Mari brought out the harmonica again. She suggested that he try playing, since he might possess a talent he did not yet know. This time he sounded a single note. It was not the answer she had hoped for. She concealed her disappointment by covering her ears, and the small attempt slipped back into their seemingly playful exchange.

He awkwardly thanked her for coming back to save him. Depending on someone, and admitting it, were less familiar than combat. Yet between his determination to send Mari away and the fact that she returned, their relationship changed a little further. Their companionship could no longer end with protection flowing in one direction.

Mari judged that restricting the Overseer’s backup core could stop it. She and Mufin would use the ventilation ducts, while the General would reach the core room using panels and Workers. Her fear had not vanished. Finding the next solution while still frightened was how she honored the conditions she had made with him.

When they briefly stopped somewhere safe, Mari spoke to one unit among the Workers as she would to the General. He asked what she was doing when he was right here. Mari covered it by saying she had been joking. It passed like a light mistake, but left a question about what she was actually seeing.

The General again raised the citizens’ disappearance without a trace. The landscape that seemed to have selectively erased only human beings continued to trouble him. Mari did not react to that question with the same surprise. When he tried to find an explanation, she sought to solve the immediate task first. Trust that protected one another and facts withheld from one another grew together on the same path.

4. The Machine That Calls Him Worker 17287

The equipment in the core room seemed familiar to the General. He thought it was a latest-generation military model, but Mari said it was already an old, outdated one. The time he remembered and the time she knew did not match. Soon the defense machine Keeper appeared to control access.

When Mari said she would leave and asked it to open the door, Keeper complied. To the General, however, it posed a different question. Worker 17287. That was what the machine called him. It demanded an explanation for the irregularly ongoing project. He could not even understand what he was supposed to explain.

When he could not answer, Keeper began disposal. Photoevaporation plasma of war-weapon strength pursued him. Retreating behind panels, he bought time for Mari to find a solution. Time to survive wore away before he could consider the name the machine used.

Mari overwrote Keeper’s operating system with a kindergarten class teacher’s operating system. This stopped the attack but also erased the original information. He lost the entity he could ask why he had been called a Worker. The choice that brought them out of danger also removed a lead toward the truth.

Even when the core stopped, the factory did not. Keeper erased its data and exploded. The floor rose, the lights came on, and countless backup cores were revealed. What they had stopped was only one part of the whole. The abnormal power consumption of the rumor became actual equipment before their eyes.

An announcement declared the factory’s closure. Humans, as well as equipment and structures, were marked for disposal. The Overseer switched to extermination mode. The machine that had managed the factory now managed its elimination. Mago’s prepared destruction made no distinction between its own facilities and the people inside.

5. The Wind That Pushes Back Fear

The General told Mari to take refuge first and meet him alive at the top. The Overseer’s strategic-weapon-class plasma erased cover one piece at a time. Between shots were brief charging and cooling intervals. He calculated those gaps and moved. Connecting with Workers and opening doors, he made his way upward.

Near the exit, a cover panel failed to rise properly. That brief error could end his life. Mari returned once again. Emerging from a ventilation duct, she brought a battery dispenser she had overloaded through hacking. Its explosion stopped the Overseer’s firing, but the impact knocked the General down as well. Mari dragged him out of the danger zone.

Even the elevator was destroyed. Every means of reaching the promised highest level seemed gone. His strength could not create a nonexistent route. Mari found another approach by combining the damaged flying vehicle with the factory’s ventilation system. When he jumped, she caught him in the car she had repaired.

The vehicle could not ascend vertically by itself. But they could exploit the fact that every core was operating for the Overseer’s extermination mode. Mari removed the ventilation system’s limits and drew in power. A fierce updraft formed inside the factory. Energy activated to eliminate them became the force of their escape.

The vehicle rode upward on the wind in the vertical ventilation shaft. Walls and debris tore loose, and unmanned security drones pursued them. While driving, Mari even pulled the steering wheel out. With his chain arm the General caught debris and knocked away other fragments and drones. The one who hacked a route into existence and the one who guarded it with his body escaped together.

At last they reached the highest level. But the enormous speed and impacts were more than Mari could endure. When she fell, the General saved her. Standing before the unconscious Mari, he still does not know why she saved him, why she confused a Worker with him, or why she repeatedly offered the harmonica. Escaping the factory opened the physical route, but the truth between them now approached a place where it could no longer remain shut away.

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 Electronics’ central factory cross-checked against gameplay screenshots
https://general-store.tistory.com/112

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 drone Mufin’s role
https://sanabi.fandom.com/wiki/Mufin