86—EIGHTY-SIX, Vol. 4
Annette smiled, tears in her eyes.
You don’t even remember, you dummy. You’re nothing like you were before. But this part of you…the way you’re always so kind to me it hurts… This part hasn’t changed. And that makes me feel just a little bit…lonely.
“…You’re right.”
When Shin reported back that Annette had been safely rescued, he heard the relief in Lena’s voice and couldn’t help but feel that not abandoning Annette had been the right decision. A few seconds later, another pair of footsteps rushed over toward them. Turning in the direction of the new person, Raiden placed a hand on his hip.
“You’re late, Jaeger. We already told you there’s no need for caution right now.”
“I understand your reasoning, but…still, I learned in training to always be cautious…”
He couldn’t track the enemy if he was dead, so being cautious was the right decision, but…
“I’m glad you guys came to rescue me, but why this lineup? Or rather…”
Annette regarded them with half-lidded eyes after she’d been helped up to her feet and left with nothing to do.
“Don’t tell me you guys came over like this.”
“There was no path big enough for the Juggernauts to pass through,” explained Shin, gesturing toward the service route behind them.
It was a cramped corridor full of twists and turns, wide enough to allow only one person to pass through.
“Frederica saw that your situation was a race against time, so we took the shortest path available. If Juggernauts couldn’t pass through, the same should apply for the Legion, leaving passage only for people and self-propelled mines, and we can handle those with rifles… We weren’t sure we’d make it in time, though.”
“…I see. I guess you’d need men to handle the heavy lifting, even if it was just for carrying my corpse back…”
She sighed despondently for some reason and then gestured back with the same demeanor.
“Well, while you’re here, have a look back here.”
She’d gestured toward several cylinders they hadn’t quite noticed until she’d pointed them out. They glowed white and had multiple spheres floating inside them. Upon closer inspection, Shin realized what they were.
“Human…?”
They were transparent, like some kind of mineral crystal, but were similar to human craniums. The reason it was hard to say for sure was because they lacked that certain vividness organic tissue had. The eyeballs and muscle tissue had been removed. The bone structuring the skulls seemed to be made of blue metallic ore, while the cartilage appeared to be made of ruby. The brain matter looked like peridot.
The white light rendered them transparent as they floated in the cylinders like elaborate works of art. Judging from their sizes, the heads came from men, women, and children, and there were several of each type. Empty eye sockets stared out from neighboring cylinders.
Raiden, who stood next to Shin, squinted at the sight. Perhaps Dustin was imagining how these heads ended up in this state, because they could hear him swallow nervously.
“Transparent specimens. The Legion used drugs to render the biological tissue transparent and dye it over. I’m not sure what they did to dye the nervous system, though.”
“…Were those originally human corpses?”
“You say it like it’s nothing… But yes, that’s right. These are real human heads. Probably Republic citizens that were rounded up during the large-scale offensive.”
Sounding nauseated, Dustin added, “I’m surprised you’re taking this so well.”
“I’m used to seeing severed heads. This case is actually more palatable than most, since they’ve been severed cleanly.”
“I know it’s not your fault, but being used to corpses is still a little much… And I’m talking about the first lieutenant over there, too. Second Lieutenant Jaeger’s reaction was actually pretty normal, so maybe you should take a page out of his book.”
Even as she said that, she returned her attention to the severed heads of her compatriots.
“This is probably some kind of guide for how to cut open stolen heads and remove their brains. It tells them all the steps involved, like where and how to cut, so they can produce intelligent Legion—what you guys call Black Sheep and Shepherds.”
As they turned their gazes to her, Annette shrugged.
“I read the report you submitted to the Federacy military regarding the Legion, and Lena calls them that, too.”
The technical officer of the Republic’s former research division then looked at Shin out of the corner of her eye.
“You’re lucky the people at the Transport Division wouldn’t do their jobs properly. If they had, you might’ve been decorating my lab just like the people in these cylinders.”
“…What are you talking about?”
“Undertaker, the possessed Processor who breaks his Handlers. The ghost stories people tell on the battlefield are one thing, but once people started offing themselves, I got requests to investigate you… What a missed opportunity. If they’d brought you over, I’d have picked your brain open and gotten a real good look.”
Dustin’s eyes widened, and Raiden cocked an eyebrow, but Shin didn’t seem fazed.
“I doubt someone who doesn’t reek of blood could do that.”
“That’s—”
Annette tried to say something in protest…but eventually dropped her shoulders and smiled weakly, looking exhausted.
“That’s right… I don’t have the guts to do something like that, much less a reason.”
She didn’t mean just the atrocity of dissecting a live person but also the act of boasting about her own faults, trying to make herself out to be more terrible than she truly was.
“…Anyway, that’s what this is. A guide for producing Shepherds… Except…”
She tapped the farthest cylinder, which looked to be the final phase in whatever this was.
“…this one here is bothering me. Its hippocampus is totally
destroyed
… The Shepherds use undamaged brains, right? So why do you suppose they’d intentionally damage part of the brain?”
“Looks like they didn’t think we’d get this far in. There isn’t a single unit on patrol.”
The fifth level’s central main hall. In the middle of a place so dyed over with white it was maddening, Shiden smirked from inside Cyclops’s cockpit. The entirety of this space—its ceiling, walls, and floor—was covered with small white tiles. It was translucent white darkness, as hazy as fresh snow. This place should have been part of the station, too, so if the interior had remained unchanged this entire time, then…the Republic must have reeeally coveted the color white, to put it mildly. And if that was the case, they shouldn’t have accepted immigrants to begin with.
The massive shadow lurking in the depths of the room didn’t answer them. Silver tubes piled over one another, writhing like the organs or blood vessels of some unknown creature. Its trunk had a thin metal plate over it that seemed to be breathing somehow. It had what looked like eight thin legs, which were so disproportionate to its weight that Shiden wondered why they were even there, and finally a composite sensor that looked like a moth’s feelers and an optical sensor that looked like an insect’s eyes.
This was the Admiral…or rather, its control module.
Its blue optical sensor swerved sluggishly. Its abdomen was probably connected to the reactor farther underground. It was buried inside the white tiles and was probably incapable of moving. From the way it looked, it was an easy target.
“…Well, I doubt this’ll go smoothly.”
White lines of light ran across the hall’s floor. Arbitrarily and then horizontally. A grid of light hit the corner of the floor twenty centimeters away.
“Knew it…!”
She braced herself—but as it turned out, it was only a beam of light. Only her Juggernaut’s leg was touching the beam, but it wasn’t taking any kind of damage. Lattices of light began covering the floor, as if to expose the coordinates to something—
Shiden’s breath caught in her throat as she looked up. At that same moment, Cyclops’s enhanced sensors blared out an alarm that rattled her eardrums. Enemy proximity alert. Its location was—immediately above her!
As she looked up, the optical sensors followed suit, and after a brief lag, the image of the ceiling appeared on her optical screen. There were luminous points dotting the transparent ceiling tiles, and the moment she noticed them, Shiden shouted out instinctively:
“Mika, Rena, jump to the sides! Alto, don’t move!”
And just as she gave the warning, several sharp blue beams of light pierced the hall’s airspace from top to bottom. As everyone’s units performed evasive maneuvers in response to the warning, a ray of light grazed over Alto’s unit, which lay facedown with its legs retracted, and another ray passed by Mika’s unit horizontally. A moment later, the fuselage of Rena’s unit, which had failed to evade in time, was skewered from directly above.
“Rena?!”
The Juggernaut crumpled silently without so much as a scream from within as the ray of light pierced through the cockpit. This thin ray of condensed light pierced through the 88 mm turret’s barrel laid over the cockpit without so much as a sound. The spears of light that had scraped and pierced the Juggernauts were absorbed by the half-transparent floor tiles, and then they dispersed and disappeared.
“Were those…lasers…?!”
“Looks like it.”
She swiftly replied to Shana’s—her vice captain’s—cry. After all, they’d entered the internment camps when they were seven years old or so, and they’d only just recently started attending something kind of like school—the special officer academy. They didn’t have the knowledge to accurately analyze the situation, though the Reaper and his werewolf of a vice captain apparently had gotten some education, annoyingly enough. They might have gotten a better handle on the situation.
Curling her lips bitterly, she kept her eyes open. She couldn’t see it directly, but the radar screen showed her the enemy’s positions scattering. A blue luminous point lit up in the ceiling. She issued a warning to the Juggernaut standing directly below it, which jumped back a moment before another laser pierced where it had once stood at what was quite literally the speed of light.
The laser skimmed the pile driver of her right leg, which burst in a shower of flames and black smoke. As Cyclops retreated while leaving a trail of smoke behind her, Shiden narrowed her eyes.
So that’s what’s going on.
“Those lines on the floor are coordinates, and when you step on them, the lasers fire in that direction… This whole room’s a Legion. It can’t follow us with its eyes to attack us when we’re in its belly.”
It was probably faster for the lasers to receive their coordinates directly via data link rather than rely on optical sensors to handle them individually. She could feel Shana furrow her brow.
“The grids are so narrow, it’s impossible for a Juggernaut to avoid stepping on them.”
“Yeah, but even if we step on them, it doesn’t look like it can fire at all of us at once. It’s not equipped to fire at twenty-four units simultaneously.”
It fired multiple lasers per target, rather than one for each, to ensure it hit, meaning it could attack only a few targets at once. In which case…
“My Cyclops has a grasp on how many firing units there are and where they’re situated… If we’re gonna use that interval to shoot at it, we’ll have to open fire either just after or a second before we hear the alert.”
Only the Juggernauts that were being fired at would have to take evasive maneuvers, while all other remaining units fired. As with all modern weapons, the laser units moved after they shot, but they had to stop moving for a moment before firing. That would be the Juggernauts’ window to gun them down.
“Cyclops to all units… Retaliate after the enemy’s next barrage. On my command—”
The proximity alert blared again. Shiden’s eyes were drawn to the radar screen, where blips appeared around her unit’s position, except there was nothing in her coplanar field of vision. The number of laser units on the ceiling above them increased abruptly. It likely took time for the defense system to kick in completely, or perhaps the consciousness of the dead person incorporated into the Admiral had an unfavorable disposition when it came to operating the laser units.
As they looked up in astonishment, blue lights lit up at once through the half-transparent tiles, as if to mock these girls’ efforts.
“…Jaeger, let Professor Penrose ride in your rig. Move to the center of the back row and avoid combat as much as you can. Rito, hold on just a bit longer. We’ll head your way once we entrust the professor to our succeeding unit.”
“Roger that, Cap’n, but come over ASAP!”
It seemed Jaeger and Rito were engaging the defensive unit several hundred meters away from the Weisel. Cutting out Rito’s near scream, Shin brought Undertaker to its feet. While the self-propelled mines were brittle, Undertaker wasn’t armed with machine guns, so Shin couldn’t fight them efficiently. Theo’s vanguard platoon and Raiden’s covering-fire platoon took the front, advancing while engaging the mixture of self-propelled mines and humans by alternating between their laser sights and machine guns.
Letting out hoarse shouts, the silhouettes of what were likely humans retreated, going the opposite direction from the Spearhead squadron. The armored infantry who were following them hadn’t caught up yet, but they would likely take whatever human found them under their protection. Doing so was likely why they were lagging behind in the first place.
Suddenly, Lena’s voice cut into the Resonance.
“Captain Nouzen, I’m sorry to interrupt in the middle of battle.”
“Colonel… What is it?”
When she told him about what was happening on the other side of the battlefield, he furrowed his brow. That sounded difficult, for sure… No. The Brísingamen squadron was in the fifth level’s central block, while the Spearhead squadron was advancing toward the eastern end of the fourth level. There was no direct path leading there, but in terms of direct distance, they were just a few kilometers away. It was actually close, as combat distance went.
“Dammit…!”
As she continued sending warnings to her allies who were in the enemy’s sights, Shiden gritted her teeth. She grasped the position of all the laser units—which Lena had dubbed the Biene (the Fire Extension type) upon receiving the report about them. Shiden knew who would likely be aimed at next, too.
But there were too many of them. Her consort units that had the time to fire couldn’t keep up with the Biene’s cycles of high-speed movement and shooting, and she couldn’t predict where they would stop to shoot next. Taking out even a scant few of them was the most they could manage so far.
“…Shiden. Do you want the Thunderbolt squadron to join up with you?”
“Cut the bullshit, Yuuto! The second you all get here, you’ll be in their sights. Forget it. Just secure our path of retreat.”
Shiden herself wanted to retreat and regroup for the time being, but it seemed the Biene were configured to prioritize shooting near the entrance first. Two or three of her squad mates had attempted to head there, and it resulted only in their being killed by an intricate grid of lasers… A nasty setup. The spears of light didn’t give them a moment to breathe, rushing them down and, at times, mowing them down.
Her squad mates were evading to the best of their abilities, but their breathing was growing ragged due to overexertion. Cases where they fumbled their maneuvers, resulting in their piles and machine guns getting blown away, were becoming more frequent. It was only a matter of time until another person took a direct hit. Was their only choice to shoot down the ceiling and take out the enemy while burying themselves alive…?
It was then that a cold voice interrupted her troubling thoughts.
“—All units, switch ammunition to high-explosive rounds.”
Shiden’s odd eyes widened.
That voice.
“Nouzen…?!”
“I’ll take over relaying the targets. You prioritize ordering them to dodge… I can determine the Legion’s positions, but I can’t see which Juggernauts are being aimed at.”
Shiden was dumbfounded for a moment before breaking into her trademark grin. He was in the middle of battle himself, and still…
“…You’re somethin’ else, you know that, Li’l Reaper?”
Shaking her head, she looked up to the ceiling. The blips of the Biene were still filling up her radar screen. Shin couldn’t see the Juggernauts’ movements… He couldn’t tell who was going to be firing at the enemy. In which case…
“Just give us their coordinates. No one here’ll confuse our voices. All units! Li’l Reaper’s gonna be our oracle for today and tell us where to shoot. Whoever’s closest to where he calls out—doesn’t matter who—shoot on his order!”
It was an outrageous command, but no one put up an argument. Hearing a click of the tongue on the other side of the Resonance, which was as jumbled with the ghosts’ moans as always, filled her with a strange sensation.
“—Distance 22. That’s the last one, Shiden.”
“Yeah, I got it covered—Alto, fire!”
The final shot, a buckshot bombardment, bore into the gouged white ceiling. A small, spiderlike Legion fell from the ceiling between the debris, the oscillation device in its stomach emitting a blue glow. After watching it take a barrage of machine-gun fire and fall silent after rolling over on the floor, Shiden pushed Cyclops’s control stick forward.
Breaking into a jog as if it had been kicked into action, Cyclops charged at the Admiral’s massive butterfly-like compound eyes. Even without any means to defend itself, the noncombatant Legion unit still raised its head gravely, as if to greet its tiny opponent. Her Resonance with Shin allowed Shiden to hear the Legion’s voice.
“All hail the Empire! Heil dem Reich!”
The high voice, likely a woman’s, emerged from the Legion’s rear top section. Being commander units, the Shepherds continually repeated the laments of people who had once died.
Juggernauts weren’t good at firing at extreme angles of elevation. This Legion was a dozen meters tall, and shooting directly at the top of it was difficult, but…
“Shiden!”
Picking up on the problem, Shana maneuvered her Juggernaut into a crouch. The moment Cyclops hopped on its turret’s back, it released its limiters and forced its four legs into a full-strength leap. By adding the leg strength of the Juggernaut it was riding on to its own, Cyclops reached a height well beyond its specs’ capabilities.
It drove an anchor into the dome-shaped ceiling, then reeled it back at full force and clung to the surface. Kicking against the ceiling, which had now become its floor, it dived down diagonally—its muzzle aimed toward the wailing voice. Its sights were fixed on its target’s rear, in the gap between its wings.
“Heil dem Reich!”
“Shut the hell up and stay dead for once.”
Shiden pulled the trigger.
The 88 mm APFSDS whistled out of her turret and pierced the Admiral’s back directly. Like a spear descending from the heavens, as if to deliver judgment for the Admiral’s earlier action, the APFSDS skewered it. Even unarmored, it had a gigantic frame. The depleted uranium shell traveled through the Admiral’s interior structure, eventually losing its kinetic energy and bouncing back from its failed attempt to pierce through the frame of its chest.
It ricocheted around its insides, tearing its internal structure apart all the while, reducing the Liquid Micromachines to dust with its unique immolating flames. The long-dead ghost cried out in agony, its screams echoing in their ears. The Admiral’s head sank heavily to the floor, and Shiden scoffed as she landed next to it.
“Your Majesty, the Admiral’s down. Right, Nouzen?”
“Yeah… Looks that way.”
“…What’s that half-hearted response for?!”
“You can figure that out on your own, can’t you? Don’t ask pointless questions.”
Lena smiled at the sound of them bickering again the moment things calmed down. Annette had been rescued, and the Admiral had been destroyed. Their completing one of their objectives seemed to have given them the leisure to squabble.
“Good work, Captain Nouzen and Second Lieutenant Iida. Proceed to eliminate the Weisel next. Captain Nouzen, leave Major Penrose with the armored infantry.”
“Roger.”
“And once we get rid of the Weisel, all that’s left is clearing out the remaining enemies… Lady-Killer, I know they’re still skulking around, but how many of them are left?”
“…Do you really want to know?”
“Ah, no, forget it. That’s all I needed to hear.”
Shiden sounded absolutely fed up. Lena chuckled.
“Just a little more until we accomplish our objectives. Keep up the good work.”
The great amounts of sediment and concrete covering their position did nothing to prevent the communication through the Eintagsfliege resting their wings within it.
Communications concluded, and immediately, orders were issued to all subordinates down in the darkness.
At that moment, a voice bubbled up from the depths of the fallen capital, from the depths where the sun could not reach—as if to curse, as if to praise, a sorrowful scream burst forth like a newborn’s cry.
“Ugh…!”
The Legion’s cries suddenly intensified in volume, forcing Shin to crouch and cover his ears. It was a meaningless gesture, since it wasn’t physical noise to begin with, but he couldn’t help doing so. Countless cries, wails, and moans of anguish and misery swelled up, like blades tearing into his very thoughts and burning his mind incessantly.
His head felt as if it might split in two. His sanity was being wrenched apart. One person’s mind could not hope to withstand this unrelenting onslaught of the tortured wails of the damned. The sensory overload made all other sensations peter out. As his field of vision constricted and his consciousness was bleached in the color of blood, he cast one final thought into the abyss—and soon that, too, cut out entirely.
It can’t be.
“Whoa!”
Shiden covered her ears with her hands, unable to process the bloodcurdling vortex of screams drowning her mind. Even with her synchronization rate set to the absolute minimum, the storm of voices still raged in her ears. Instinctively cutting off her Resonance with Shin, she gritted her teeth as she tried to calm her agitated consciousness. The team captains exchanged nervous, terrified words over the Resonance.
What…was that…?
After a moment of bewilderment, Shiden shook her head.
Get ahold of yourself. There’s no time to question it. Something definitely happened.
She tried to reconnect to Shin, but she couldn’t Resonate. He’d either removed the RAID Device or passed out from the strain… Or—and she really didn’t want to consider it—maybe whatever just happened had straight-up killed him.
If something happened to the unit captain, Shin, his vice captain, Raiden, would have to take over for him. He likely wouldn’t have the wherewithal to explain the situation. In that case—
“Yo, Theo! What happened?! Did those hunks of scrap metal attack us again?!”
She swiftly changed her Sensory Resonance target to Theo. Each of the Spearhead squadron’s Processors had Resonated with the other squads’ captains and vice captains… Probably the kind of conduct one would expect from the elite of the elite who had served in the first ward’s first defensive unit, Spearhead, two years ago. Their thinking was rapid, and they concluded who they should share information with right now.
“All captains, this is a proxy message! …First, that Legion voice just now wasn’t an attack! Shin is unresponsive, so assume defensive positions until we assess the situation!”
It seemed Theo hadn’t quite caught up to the situation yet, either. Perhaps noticing that, he took a moment to breathe and then continued in a more restrained tone:
“Also, this is just speculation, but…I think I recognize what kind of voices those were.”
Theo grimaced as he said that. He’d remembered it from his time in the Eighty-Sixth Sector’s first ward’s first defensive unit two years ago, during the final battle. At the start of their death march known as the Special Reconnaissance mission.
After fighting by Shin’s side for nearly three years, he’d thought he’d gotten used to it, but even at the lowest synchronization rate, he couldn’t help but tremble in terror when he heard that scream overflowing with murderous intent.
There was still no response from Shin.
“A Shepherd—if several of them were to cry out at the same time, that’s what they’d sound like.”
Shiden butted in, sounding suspicious.
“Wait just a sec. I thought the Shepherds were limited in number. There were only a hundred or so in the Republic’s territories… And what we just heard wasn’t only one or two of them. Don’t fuck around—it’s like you’re saying every Legion in here is a Shepherd.”
“Yeah, that’s probably what it means.”
But how is that even…?
“…No way.”
She felt something cold rush down her spine. Her radar screen was full of blips. Cyclops picked up the approaching hostiles one after another. The Legion surged up from below, with the bloodcurdling roar emanating from the bottom of the earth at their back.
It couldn’t be.
“You’re saying
these are all Shepherds
…?!”
The Legion’s central processors were modeled after a large mammal’s central nervous system and coded with an unchangeable life span set by the Empire, which had created them. Fifty thousand hours for every version—roughly six years. Once that time lapsed, the structures of their central processors would collapse, and they would cease to function—a fail-safe introduced by the Empire just in case the Legion went berserk.
Once the Empire fell, the Legion could no longer receive further version updates. But spurred by their original orders to fight, the Legion needed to find a substitute for their central processors. And fortunately, an alternative was readily available. An impressively developed neural network, remarkable even among large mammals.
The human brain.
But the Legion could meet humankind only on the battlefield, and corpses without damage to their craniums were few and far between. The Republic, which neglected to collect its corpses and even sent out small squadrons on death marches every so often, was the battlefield that yielded the most brains to plunder—in fact, the majority of the Black Sheep and Shepherds across the continent had been seized in the anti-Republic campaign. But that was a relative figure.
The majority of the raids had been carried out during
that
suppression operation. They hadn’t fought. They hadn’t committed suicide, either. They’d never bothered recovering or killing those dragged away by the Tausendfüßler. The easiest of hunting grounds, where prey only ran about powerlessly.
The eighty-five administrative Sectors of the Republic of San Magnolia.
They may have cast their minority, the Eighty-Six, out into the Eighty-Sixth Sector, but they were still an advanced nation with the population and territory to match that of the continent’s west. And so the civilians the Legion had pillaged away were, indeed…
…ten million in number.
“…But why would the number of Shepherds increase so suddenly?”
Lena moaned, supporting her body, which was on the verge of falling over, as she prodded at the console. Reports streamed in from all squadrons under her command in rapid succession. The behavioral patterns of Legion that had already been encountered had suddenly changed. They’d started predicting the directions units would go in and luring them in with unusual formations, cornering Federacy soldiers and experienced Eighty-Six alike with ease.
Shepherds. Legion commander units that preserved the intelligence they’d had in life. They were always challenging foes, but never had they appeared in large groups like this, as if they were rank-and-file troops.
No, why or how their number had increased wasn’t even the issue. The question was: Why bring them in
now
? Why use them as a defensive force and introduce them to the battle only after the Admiral had been destroyed and half the facility had been suppressed?
“…!”
A new fear overtook Lena as her eyes widened with understanding. She lifted her head.
“Vanadis HQ to all units!”
“—n, Shin! Yo!”
Shin finally came to his senses upon hearing his name and having his shoulders shaken violently.
His crimson eyes, which had been staring blankly into space until now, came back into focus.
“Raiden…”
“Welcome back.”
Raiden sighed in relief. They were both inside Undertaker’s cockpit, its canopy having been forcibly opened. Undertaker and Wehrwolf were pushed against a thick concrete wall, with the rest of their squad’s units forming a strong defensive perimeter around them by arranging their Juggernauts in semicircles.
Theo, Anju, and Kurena were in the outermost circle, locked in vicious combat. It was a do-or-die defensive formation that wouldn’t allow a single Legion or self-propelled mine to pass through. At their backs were Shin, who was incapacitated, and Raiden, who’d disembarked from Wehrwolf to check in on him.
The Legion’s front lines were composed entirely of Shepherds. Their howling thundered in Shin’s ears at this short distance, and their numbers were rising still. Those that stood at the back of the line of battle bolted upright suddenly, and just as he thought the voices of the dead seemed to have stopped emanating from them, a howl with the voice of a different person from the one possessing the front lines boomed into his mind before they pressed forward, as if craving the chance to do battle.
The same scene was apparently taking place in many locations across the underground facility. The distant voices of the Black Sheep, which had been an indistinguishable cluster before, were being replaced with the voices of Shepherds. Shin had to banish the obvious question of
why
from his mind.
“…How long was I out?”
“Less than ten minutes. We dragged Undertaker over here and formed the defensive formation, and I got your canopy open just now… I was gonna drag you back to Wehrwolf if you didn’t wake up.”
Raiden winced at the idea of something so unpleasant.
“You…look like shit. Can you move?”
Shin heaved a long sigh. He’d gotten used to this. The unending screams were still threatening to split his mind in half, and the voice of Raiden, who was right in front of him, felt way more distant than they did… But he could move.
“…Yeah.”
“Then try to follow us until we can break out of here… We got orders to retreat.”
Such an unexpected statement made Shin look back at him dubiously.
Retreat? At this point in the operation? When the Weisel hadn’t been destroyed yet?
“Retreat…?”
“Allow me to briefly explain the situation, Captain Nouzen.”
She’d finally managed to Resonate with Shin again, but the piercing wails of ghosts that bore down on her like a sharp blade even when Resonated at the lowest possible synchronization rate—and most of all Shin’s own pained, labored breathing—filled her with anxiety.
“The details are still unclear, but multiple Shepherds appeared among the enemy’s forces… This has forced us to suspend our advance and focus on defense or retreat.”
“…I think the simple explanation is that all the Legion here downloaded the Shepherds’ neural networks or whatever. The total number of voices you can hear isn’t changing, but the number of Shepherds is growing, right?”
Lena shook her head as Annette cut into their conversation.
“We can leave analysis for later—the introduction of these reinforcements only occurred after the Admiral, which should have been an important defensive target for the Legion, was destroyed. This mass of Shepherds was introduced when they were more of a confidential secret than the Admiral itself. Which means…”
“Maintaining secrecy—right?”
“Yes. They’re intending to wipe out the invading force for that reason.”
For the Legion, hiding the existence of this mass of Shepherds was more important than the Admiral—more important than this production base. This stimulation of theirs was conducted by the Eintagsfliege, which meant it was likely some kind of data. It was theorized that what they’d gained was the Shepherds’ neural networks, but there were other possibilities as well. Being able to confirm which one was true would have been preferable, but it was too late for that now.
“We’ve destroyed our first objective, the Admiral. The Weisel can’t move now. We’ve concluded that you’ve completed the mission and are to retreat from the hot zone immediately… Get out of there as soon as you can.”
Cutting her Resonance with Shin, Lena whispered to Annette.
“But, Annette, how is this possible?”
Pulling the outrageous stunt of a download in the middle of battle was beside the point; those were the enemy’s circumstances. But how had the Shepherds multiplied? Only one Shepherd could be produced from each dead human. They may have captured many Republic civilians during the large-scale offensive, but would they use them up like disposable pawns in this kind of battle?
“I think what I found earlier, the Legion’s guide for removing brains, is the answer.”
Annette’s voice was bitter. She was currently riding in Dustin’s Juggernaut and spoke quietly so he wouldn’t hear her.
“That was actually something that always bothered me ever since I read Captain Nouzen’s report. If the Shepherds’ central processors— If undamaged neural networks are so precious to the Legion, why don’t they turn all the Legion into Shepherds?”
Lena had heard about it before. The total sum of Shepherds in all the Republic’s past fronts put together was a mere hundred or so. That was the extent of the undamaged brains the Legion had managed to collect. But if they didn’t use actual brains and instead used mere copies of their networks, it didn’t stand to reason. They could give multiple units a copy of the same neural network, and yet they didn’t. They could replicate Black Sheep using damaged neural networks, but not undamaged ones.
“All the brain samples I saw earlier had their hippocampi destroyed. I think therein lies the answer… Could you stay sane if your exact replica was standing right in front of you, Lena? They probably couldn’t replicate them because they still had their memories from when they were alive.”
Identity. That one trait possessed by all humans made them impossibly different from the soulless killing machines the Weisel churned out like the black smoke erupting from its chimneys.
“So that means…”
“Yeah, things are gonna be different from now on. The Shepherds are going to start multiplying like never before. All the Legion produced from now on—including the Black Sheep—are going to be intelligent.”
This had likely started after the Republic’s fall, when the Legion got their hands on more humans than ever before. Undamaged human brains stopped being a rare commodity for them, allowing them to freely test ways to hack human brains so that they could remove the foreign element called individuality in a way that didn’t eliminate their value as central processors.
Even if the Legion were capable of autonomous battle in a way that no other country could replicate, their original cognitive capabilities were far inferior to those of humans. But from now on, that sole weakness would be no more. The strong, unflinching Legion, which knew no fatigue, would soon acquire intelligence equal to that of humans, down to their rank-and-file soldiers… They would become capable of executing complex operations, just like humankind.
The implications of that made Lena shudder, and that was likely why Annette didn’t say any more. This wasn’t something the Processors needed to hear in the middle of a battle. The proud Eighty-Six would likely continue fighting in spite of that knowledge, though.
But in all likelihood, humankind…would lose to the Legion after all.
“…And that’s the gist of it. Follow us until we break out of here. And don’t go into combat. Stay in the back row with Jaeger and be good.”
Shin grimaced when Raiden, who’d boarded Wehrwolf, told him that.
“I’m not sure that’s an option.”
He realized being treated like a burden was unavoidable…but given the situation…
“There’s a world of difference between a Black Sheep’s combat capabilities and a Shepherd’s. I can’t stay out of this when the enemy’s strength is effectively increasing.”
“…You serious?”
“I won’t do anything reckless… I don’t intend to die here.”
Six months ago, and maybe even before that, he’d been wandering the battlefield in search of a place to die, without even realizing it. But things were different now.
“……”
After roughly combing through his short hair with his fingers, Raiden sighed deeply.
“…The second things get too dicey, we’re knocking you out and dragging you away. Got it? That’s my right and responsibility as vice captain. Any complaints?”
“None. But you should probably save statements like that for the day you’re actually able to knock me out.”
Raiden didn’t laugh at Shin’s forced attempt at a jab, but he did scoff at it. Even as Shin was holding back a sense of vertigo that threatened to overcome him at any moment, he suddenly remembered something. Something Frederica had told him once… A mere six months ago, in fact.
You should rely on those walking by your side for support.
“…Thanks. I’ll leave command to you.”
There was a pause, and this time, Shin felt Raiden smirk back at him.
“Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t listen to your orders right now as it is. The way you look, I can only see you screwing something up.”
“Theo! We’re retreating! Make us a way out!”
“Roger. Uh…”
As he scoured the thick lines of the Legion in search of an opening he could exploit, his eyes stopped on a certain point. A group of self-propelled mines were heading in the opposite direction, paying no attention to the Juggernauts.
“The fuck…?”
The self-propelled mines clung to the pillar supporting the ceiling one after another and self-destructed. It was an act of annihilation that was utterly meaningless in the face of taking out the Spearhead squadron.
No…
Shivers ran up his spine the moment he realized what they were doing.
They’re planning to bring the whole place down on us.
“Tch. Anju, Dustin! Fire all your explosive shells at the corridor on the right! Open a way out—now!”
Anju’s Snow Witch responded immediately, as did Dustin’s Sagittarius a moment later, releasing all the explosive projectiles they had in the direction he’d instructed them to. The Legion units in that direction were blown away, sprayed with fragments, opening a path in the enemy’s offensive line.
“All units, after me! Shin, don’t lag behind!”
Confirming out of the corner of his eye that Undertaker rose to its feet and Wehrwolf took its position in the back of the formation, Laughing Fox took off down the opened path. He pushed aside the self-propelled mines rushing to get in his way with his muzzle and blew them away with short-range machine-gun fire. Ameise tried to rush them from their flank, only to be crushed by Gunslinger’s pile drivers. Covering for Snow Witch, which didn’t have the time to reload, Wehrwolf unleashed machine-gun fire left and right.
Behind them, the self-propelled mines were still clinging to the pillar and self-destructing. Since they were mostly antipersonnel weapons, the intensity of the individual explosions wasn’t all that impressive. A single antipersonnel mine couldn’t even penetrate a Juggernaut’s armor. But through repeated blasts, the reinforced concrete pillar was gradually being whittled down.
Shaking off the Grauwolf types in pursuit of them, they dived into the tunnels. There were no enemies inside. Right after Wehrwolf tumbled into the tunnel, the pillar crumbled and finally broke. The other pillars bent under the additional strain, and the ceiling caved in with nothing to support it.
The battlefield they’d been on just a moment ago was buried under a massive shower of sediment, rendering even the Eighty-Six speechless.
“So. Even the self-propelled mines are intelligent at this point.”
Lena nodded bitterly. She’d received similar reports from other squadrons. Multiple parts of the underground facility had caved in as a result of bombing, with self-propelled mines ignoring the Juggernauts in front of them and going after support pillars.
The Legion, which weren’t as intelligent as humans, couldn’t understand the causality of this act… Or rather, couldn’t
until now
. It seemed the self-propelled mines had come to realize that by toppling a minimal number of pillars, they could bury the battlefield altogether, which served as horrific proof of their intelligence.
The self-propelled mines themselves, which were disposable even for the Legion, had become that intelligent.
“But conversely, that means we can read their actions… If the self-propelled mines’ purpose is to destroy the facility, they’ll have to deploy the necessary numbers to the necessary positions to do so. If we destroy their forward path, they won’t be able to sabotage us any further. What this means is that the self-propelled mines would head to destroy the facilities farthest from them.”
The Legion attacked in seemingly endless waves, but they did have a point of origin. If their corridors were to be buried by sediment, they wouldn’t be able to cross through to the space on the other side.
“If we can just come up with the order they’ll do it in, you should be able to escape. And guessing at their order isn’t too difficult.”
Looking up at the holo-screen gave her a clear view of where each of the squadrons was positioned. The Brísingamen squadron was on the fifth and lowest level. Spearhead, which had been deployed to find Annette, was at the eastern tip of the fourth level. She had to make sure that even they, far as they were from the exit, returned safely.
“Captain Nouzen, I realize this is a difficult request, but search for the enemies’ movements again. If we can just tell where the Legion—where the self-propelled mines—are gathering, we should be able to calculate how to deploy our forces from now on.”
“Roger.”
Shortly after this somewhat pained response, a few points lit up on her map. He’d probably decided that using the barely online data link would be quicker than relaying the information orally. After applying corrections to a few points that seemed to be off on the vertical axis, she looked over the whole image and nodded.
“At present, we conclude that our objective of destroying the Legion’s production facility has been successfully completed. All engaging squadrons are to begin their retreat from the hot zone immediately.”
She then took a deep breath.
“Second Lieutenant Michihi, set out and deploy the Lycaon squadron around the center of the first and second levels. The Nordlicht squadron is to lend three of its platoons to the Lycaon squadron.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“So only half of us will be defending HQ… No, we’ll make do somehow.”
She sent in her reserve forces and some of the defense unit so they could maintain an escape route for the squadrons inside. They would have to find a way out in the meantime.
“All units deployed in the facility—we will now begin navigating the retreat path and procedure. Obey my commands…without error and without delay.”
Traversing the pitch-black darkness, the four-legged headless skeletons, those mechanical knights in metallic armor, faithfully followed the orders from the voice like a silver bell.
“Thunderbolt squadron, cling to the central bypass between the fourth and fifth levels. Brísingamen squadron, report upon passing through… The Claymore squadron is to deploy in its current position. Maintain the position in question until the Spearhead squadron passes through.”
“Roger. But the remaining ammunition for both of our main armaments and our machine guns is down to twenty percent. We can’t fight for long.”
“Roger that… We’re running low on ammo, too, so hurry back, Cap’n!”
While they had prioritized the destruction of the Admiral and the Weisel, the Legion had advanced in all directions. According to Shin’s report, part of the Legion’s remaining forces were retreating to the Legion’s territories from each level’s northern block. They left behind the strategically inferior self-propelled mines, the Black Sheep that hadn’t had their central processors changed, and damaged units that needed to be repaired as their guards while moving all their other forces to the central blocks first.
“Brísingamen squadron has secured the fourth-level central block.”
The most basic strategy when it came to marching through enemy territory was alternating advance. Multiple units moved in an alternating fashion, with those who were stopped holding the line to cover for those ahead of them. This held true during retreat, as well. A unit would hold the line until the forces ahead of them finished moving and then covered for them in turn, keeping the enemy in check with heavy fire.
“Thunderbolt squadron has linked up with Brísingamen squadron. Spearhead squadron, hold your position until the Claymore squadron reaches the third level.”
Damage reports were pouring in. Machine-gun ammunition depleted to zero. Light damage to armor. Slight damage to one rig. Medium damage to another. Troops injured—troops dying. As the squadrons and the armored infantry attached to them were being chipped away, they made their way to the surface. The transition from engaging to retreating came with great difficulty.
“Lycaon squadron, we’ve confirmed the presence of Grauwolf types that purged their armor to reduce their overall width. This increases the number of paths they could take, so do be careful.”
“Roger that…! I’m not sure we can handle many more of them, though…”
“Quit your whining, princess! It’s just a little bit more! Show us you got what it takes to survive!”
It was like a game of chess taking place in total darkness, with each side chipping away at the other’s pawns.
Shepherds had an intelligence comparable to that of humans, so at times, they could predict people’s decisions and devise countermeasures.
“Raiden, stay where you are! There’s an enemy ahead!”
Just as Raiden was about to take a turn at an intersection, Shin’s warning prompted him to force Wehrwolf to emergency brake. Looking down the intersection’s turn, he saw a small tunnel with a Löwe’s massive form hidden inside. It lay in wait, its turret aimed directly at them, and with the tunnels being as narrow as they were, there was no way of crossing without getting in its line of fire. Defeating it would be challenging in and of itself.
“Lena! We need a change in route—”
“It’s fine. Let’s keep moving.”
Just as someone interrupted Raiden, a Juggernaut slipped by Wehrwolf’s side, one that insisted on not exchanging its sniper cannon even in these cramped conditions. With a Personal Mark of a rifle with a scope attached to it.
“Kurena?!”
“We have to hurry back, right? I’m worried about Shin, too… If it can’t move, it’ll be easy enough…”
Gunslinger casually jumped into the intersection. The Löwe reacted, its turret trembling, but before it could shoot, Gunslinger fired from a prone position. Flying in a trajectory that intersected with the Tank type’s 120 mm cannon, the 88 mm APFSDS rushed ahead, accurately connecting with the needlelike gap in its front armor, which was meant to enable the turret’s movement.
It was the sole structural weakness in the Löwe’s bulky frontal defenses. Needless to say, it wasn’t a weakness one could easily aim at in a battlefield where both aggressors moved rapidly and aimed their turrets at each other.
“…to hit it.”
Gunslinger turned around calmly as the Löwe burst spectacularly into flames behind her and broke down.
“Continue advancing at current speed for fifteen seconds, then take a left at the next corner.”
The instructions led them to some kind of vast, warehouse-like space. There wasn’t a single source of light to illuminate the pitch blackness. At one corner of the elongated warehouse, which seemed to go on forever, groups of
something
wrapped in cloth were tightly packed together in a pile.
The moment Raiden realized what they were, he instinctively shouted:
“Frederica! Close your ‘eyes’!”
“Aaah…?!”
The warning came too late. The sound of the small girl’s screech filled the Resonance, followed by her anguished coughs and violent vomiting.
Filling the large space, piled up to the ceiling, were deformed human skeletons stained and discolored by necrotic liquid. They numbered not in the hundreds or thousands, but roughly in the tens of thousands… A number that exceeded even the amount of people who’d died in the operation to eliminate the Morpho during the large-scale offensive lay before them, piled up like garbage after it had been processed. In all likelihood, the Legion saw them as one and the same.
The skeletons at the bottom of the pile had been crushed by the weight of those above them, becoming a jumbled mess of corpse debris blended together. There wasn’t so much as a hint of dignity to them. Raiden averted his gaze from the corpses at the edges, which seemed to be relatively newer, as they were only partially discolored and mostly maintained their original forms.
Raiden finally realized why the Legion had built this base here, even with the dregs of the newly weakened Republic being a prime target for elimination. They wanted to process these new corpses as quickly as possible. There were simply too many of them—so many that they couldn’t waste time bringing them all back to the rear.
The only consolation was that these people likely weren’t conscious when they were dissected. Raiden shook his head, trying to shoo away the thoughts clinging to his mind. A human’s physical strength couldn’t even fight off a self-propelled mine, the lightest of the combatant Legion types. The Legion had no reason to suppress their “ingredients” by knocking them unconscious in the event of a struggle. Nor did they have any need to show pity.
Capturing the enemy alive on a battlefield where each side sought the death of the other wasn’t simple. That meant most of the corpses here were captured Alba, who’d willingly forfeited the means to fight. But even still, thinking of the atrocities that had taken place here, far below the earth, for over six months…left a nasty taste in Raiden’s mouth.
The ground the Juggernauts trod was oddly sticky for reasons they preferred not to think about. At the top of the mountain of bodies, at what was essentially its peak, was a skeletal corpse dressed in a familiar desert-camouflage uniform. A decomposed corpse they didn’t recognize, clad in a dress. A new corpse, lying around. Corpses. Corpses. So many corpses—
As he ran between them, Raiden was overcome by an odd sense of despair. Death—and the Legion that delivered it—knew true equality. The Republic oppressors and the oppressed Eighty-Six were all the same to the Legion. They were the enemy—resources to be harvested. There was no room for distinction. No room for discrimination.
The concept humankind couldn’t achieve despite pursuing it for thousands of years—equality—had been achieved by the mindless killing machines known as the Legion…in a manner that was all too ironic for humanity.
The old woman who’d raised Raiden had once told him that humankind believed itself to be a unique presence made in the image of God. And if that was true, then humanity was, despite all the effort put into making it, a useless, failed product.
“…It’s all pointless…”
What was pointless? And why was it so? Even Raiden didn’t know as he whispered to himself so quietly it wasn’t even audible through the Para-RAID.
“…So we gotta do this before it’s too late, huh?”
The iron door to the warehouse flew open, probably because of the vibrations from the battle. Sitting inside Cyclops’s cockpit, Shiden sighed as she looked around the now-exposed warehouse.
So that’s why humans were suddenly mixed into the battlefield.
Lying on the warehouse floor were humanoid figures blackened with grime and filth. Their glass-bead-like silver eyes faintly reflected the dim light. They weren’t self-propelled mines, but humans. A group of Alba survivors captured during the large-scale offensive, it seemed. They were alive, and if given proper medical treatment, they would probably survive.
But that would be the extent of it.
The eyes staring into space were, as expected, completely void of consciousness or reasoning. They were the eyes of one who had already succumbed to insanity.
Human sanity could be surprisingly fragile. If one were to simply deprive another of sunlight, proper food, their freedom, and their dignity, leaving cold, hunger, and fear in their stead, any strong-willed person would eventually snap.
…She felt no pity for them.
They were the sort of people who let countless Eighty-Six die, and they had met with a similar fate. Looking around, she saw no others like her here—not a single person without silver hair and eyes. Unlike the white pigs, Eighty-Six captives could have been captured on the battlefield but could have managed to kill themselves rather than be taken alive. Or maybe they’d simply lost to the white pigs’ numbers and been dissected first.
“…Hmph.”
Calling up her armament-selection screen, she loaded her weapon with a projectile that had high antipersonnel firepower. Tracing her gaze, the arm-mounted 88 mm smoothbore gun swiveled oddly and locked its sights. A target mark signifying a lock rolled over, and Shiden applied force to the trigger.
“…I’ll pass.”
Mumbling to herself, she moved her finger away. The Reginleif’s gun camera’s footage was compressed and preserved by the mission recorder, and this wasn’t the Eighty-Sixth Sector, where it went unchecked, so the Processors were required to submit it at the end of each mission.
And while she didn’t feel an ounce of obligation toward it, she was currently one of the Federacy military’s dogs. She would have to abstain from any acts that might disturb her precious owners’ overinflated sense of pity and justice. The Federacy was all the same as the Republic in that once it grew tired of them, given an excuse to do so, it would dispose of the Eighty-Six at any time.
“…What do we do, Shiden?”
“Nothin’ we can do. They’re beyond saving.”
Shiden answered Shana’s apathetic question with a snort. The reason the Legion didn’t use these humans wasn’t because they didn’t have enough time to remove their brains. It was likely because they were far too broken to be of use to them as Shepherds. Going to the trouble of bringing them back and trying to rehabilitate them would be a fruitless endeavor that
wouldn’t do anyone any good
.
She turned around, her eyes lingering on the remains of a human skeleton that appeared half-eaten, scattered by the entrance. The skeleton’s skull was missing from the eyes up. The Legion had a disposal site somewhere else to dump what was left after they took what they wanted, so whoever was thrown in here was likely meant for some other purpose. Imagining it made Shiden sick.
It didn’t just
look
half-eaten.
“…Let’s go,” Shiden spat over her shoulder as she turned her back on the fate of the white pigs.
By the time the Spearhead squadron reached the third level’s central hall, they felt as exhausted as if they’d spent the whole day running around. The pained breaths streaming in between the ghosts’ wails through the Sensory Resonance made Shin grimace.
The strain on Shin was exceptional. Theo had taken over as vanguard, and they’d somehow managed to successfully withstand combat, but Shin’s breathing was quickly becoming more and more labored.
We’ve gotta hurry and get to the second level fast…
Once they regrouped with the Lycaon squadron—once they had more rigs on their side—the Spearhead squadron would feel confident enough to leave the area even if a total idiot gave them the order to do so. The more distance they put between themselves and the retreating Shepherds, the better.
But contrary to Raiden’s hopes, his borrowed senses picked up wailing voices approaching them. Even the Juggernaut’s relatively narrow proximity sensors detected moving bodies coming toward them. From all of the hall’s exits, from behind every cover possible, they appeared. The angular silhouettes of self-propelled mines, Ameise, and Grauwolf types—a mixed group of Shepherds and Black Sheep that had stayed behind.
The angular, metallic silhouette of a Grauwolf standing at the forefront suddenly emanated the familiar scream of a girl.
“I don’t want to die.”
“Kaie…!”
That voice.
The voice shriveled up and faded—only to be replaced and utterly drowned out by an unknown, thundering voice.
Black Sheep, which were created from brains that had decayed with the passage of time since their death, didn’t retain their original personalities. But even so, Raiden and his comrades couldn’t help but feel deeply when faced with Black Sheep that possessed the voices of their dead comrades in their final hours. They would gun them down in battle with the hopes of setting them free, even if they were only copies. Kaie was that precious of a friend to them.
And that very same Kaie was right before their eyes.
“I don’t want to die.”
“I don’t want to die.”
Even as the “Kaies” were fighting, they vanished, one after another. They were overwritten by the neural network of some deceased soul they didn’t know, and they faded away without a trace. That, too, was a sort of release, but the coldness of sending her out to fight and then erasing her when she was no longer needed… Even if she were to fight here, she would be destroyed and wiped out without a trace. Even after death, she wouldn’t be free from the fate awaiting all Eighty-Six, to die as they had lived… And that was all too infuriating.
“Shit…!”
Swearing, Raiden trampled the Grauwolf opposing him. That
thing
wasn’t Kaie anymore. That thing that, despite how tortured its mechanical scream was, likely lacked any will or words wasn’t her.
At that moment, a heavy crashing noise rumbled through the area. The destructive sound of ten-ton units clashing against one another at high speed. A Juggernaut was blown back, directly taking a Grauwolf’s ramming attack. At the flank of its armor was the Personal Mark of a headless skeleton bearing a shovel.
“Shin?!”
The moment Shin realized what was happening, it was already too late. The high-frequency blade he swung down failed to stop the “Kaie” before his eyes from rushing him, and he tried to take a slight step to the right to avoid it. The blade cut into the left side of “Kaie’s” mass but did nothing to slow down its tackle. It drove all its weight and momentum against Undertaker’s cockpit block.
“Nng…!”
Even Shin, with his borderline superhuman reflexes, couldn’t avoid the tackle. Taking the full brunt of the blow, Undertaker was blown backward. If this had been the Republic’s walking coffin, whose cockpit was connected loosely, the attack would have unhinged the frame and cut the whole thing—the Processor included—in half. The Reginleif was sturdier than that, though, and was only thrown back.
As he soared through the air, he saw a circular structure surrounded by decorated, arabesque silvery glass behind him: the main shaft, meant to funnel sunlight into the lower levels.
“Oh no…!”
The rig’s positioning in the air was too poor for him to fire a wire anchor. The earsplitting noise of him crashing into the reinforced glass sounded like a shout of a creature in its death throes. The white shadow of the falling Feldreß disappeared into the darkness.
The two of them fell, intertwined, into the main shaft connecting the third and fourth levels. For whatever reason, it had the length of several floors. There were six spiral staircases running along the outer circumference, and countless metallic walkways intersected along the decorative glass, coming together in what looked like the spiral structure of DNA.
As Undertaker fell down, facing up, Shin felt as if he were falling into a bottomless abyss.
“Tch…!”
He swung Undertaker’s front legs forward, kicking the Grauwolf away, and used that momentum to turn over. He then landed on one of the walkways, smashing through the glass. Of course, it wasn’t built to support the weight of a Juggernaut’s ten tons landing on it at crashing speed. The screech of a wire shooting off ripped through the sound of the glass shattering as the walkway collapsed.
With most of its falling velocity curbed, Undertaker hopped onto an adjacent walkway. Repeating this action a few more times, Shin avoided the mezzanine floor and landed at the bottom of the shaft.
The blue light filling the space wavered as if they were underwater. It was a wide hall, covered by Prussian-blue surface tiles. Some of the broken walkways stuck out diagonally, and the shards of the glass broken by the straight, taut wire glistened. A tower of intersecting, clicking flywheels stood tall in the middle, reminiscent of the inner mechanisms of a clock tower—a device likely meant to store electricity.
At the base of the tower were jumbled-up human skeletons and the remains of mechanical butterflies that looked like intersected shadows. The blue glow of a quasi-nerve crystal shone from between some of the corpses; some of them probably belonged to Handlers or Processors.
Feeling a faint discomfort on his neck, where the RAID Device was, Shin cast his gaze at the metallic shadow standing still a distance away. That was all he could manage.
“What are you trying to do…Kaie?”
“Kaie” didn’t move.
He’d managed to catch sight of “Kaie” running down the wall after he’d kicked it away. One of its blades had snapped, likely driven into the wall to slow its fall. It hadn’t taken so much damage that it couldn’t move, yet it stood still, its optical sensor fixed on Undertaker. Regardless of the fact that it clearly perceived the presence of a Juggernaut, a hostile element, it remained unmoving.
“I don’t want to die.”
“What were you trying to show me by bringing me here?”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Kaie” gave no answer. Black Sheep lacked human intelligence. They didn’t have the memories or personalities they’d had in life. Shin’s ability didn’t allow him to communicate with the Legion, not even the Shepherds, who maintained the memories and personalities they’d had in life. There could be no communication with them.
“I don’t want to die.”
“Kaie” squatted, preparing to pounce on him like a predator…
…when not even a moment later, it was split cleanly in two by something that came falling from straight above.
It was the worst possible report she could have gotten.
“Captain Nouzen is—?!”
“Yeah. The Para-RAID is still connected, and I can hear what sounds like fighting, so he ain’t dead or incapacitated, but it sounds like he’s struggling so much, he’s not gonna come back.”
“……”
Lena bit hard into her flower-petal lips. The self-propelled mines’ demolishing of the facility was ongoing, and the fighting with the Legion was still raging on as well. In the middle of all that, Undertaker was isolated. And based on the number of enemies where he’d presumably fallen, the situation seemed to be just about hopeless for him.
“We…can’t afford to stage a rescue in this situation.”
“Pathetic, ain’t it?”
The Spearhead squadron had its hands full stopping the Legion heading for the shaft. If she ordered forces to search for Shin, there would undoubtedly be casualties among those left to defend against the Legion. And on top of that, while it was preferable to a treadmill model, a surface weapon like the Reginleif was bad at attacking anything directly below it.
“Then our only choice is to wait for the captain to return on his own…”
Even as she said that, a cold thought crossed her mind. The Spearhead squadron was currently at the third level’s central block. The Claymore squadron was en route, climbing the staircase leading to the third level. The Brísingamen and Thunderbolt squadrons were in the fourth level’s central block, and each squadron had armored infantry attached to it.
If they were to wait for Shin to return, each squadron would have to tighten its defenses in its position around the shaft. The Legion didn’t hesitate to sacrifice their comrades if need be, and they would topple the shaft even if their friendly units were inside. So the squadrons had to defend the shaft until the fighting inside it had concluded in some form. And while saying they would defend a comrade no matter what sounded nice on paper, it would mean delaying four squadrons from escaping a combat zone that was under risk of collapse. Conversely, abandoning Shin would enable all her forces to return to the surface safely.
That fact rendered Lena speechless.
The situation wasn’t pressing enough to force her into those kinds of decisions just yet. But what if the Legion’s numbers exceeded predictions? What if the rate of casualties in her squadrons were to go over permissible values? It was true enough that in terms of pure fighting power, Shin was of the highest value among the Processors. As a single unit, he had the highest combat potential, with seven years of experience fighting the Legion under his belt, and most of all, he had the rare, singular ability to trace the Legion’s voices from afar.
But did he carry enough value to justify countless sacrifices? Was it even right to quantify the value of one’s life with their combat potential? This was a question Lena had grappled with countless times before as she served as a Handler commanding the Eighty-Six from within the safety of the walls and eventually came to be known as the Bloodstained Queen.
She had been forced to make this choice time and again. But as soon as Shin was thrown into the equation, her resolve was shakier than ever before.
If the need arises, will I be able to make the same decision again? Will I be able to calmly declare that I’m abandoning him, like I’ve abandoned countless Processors before?
Sensing Lena’s hesitance, Raiden’s voice grew colder.
“…Lena. Just letting you know, we ain’t retreating until we get him back.”
That served only to solidify her resolve.
“Of course. I will never, ever needlessly command my forces to leave a subordinate to die… But if it becomes necessary, follow my orders. Absolutely.”
If the situation requires me to abandon Shin… If I deem it necessary, I’ll make that call. I will order Shin’s death. And I won’t have anyone else do it. Only me.
“I am your commander… I can’t save one soldier’s life at the cost of losing countless others.”
It was natural for Processors, who stood side by side and faced life and death on the battlefield together, to never forsake a comrade. It was because they shared that sense of trust that they could stand together on the precipice of life and death.
But Lena was a commander. She stayed behind, where it was safe, commanding from above to guarantee the best possible outcome and never fighting directly. It was because she was able to make calls that ensured the survival of the unit—by making the heartless decisions a comrade never could—that she had the right to command subordinates.
Never standing on the battlefield, never fighting anyone. This was the way of fighting she’d decided on for herself. And that was the way of fighting Shin acknowledged.
She could sense Raiden’s brow furrowing.
“Are you really doing this aga—?”
But Shiden interrupted.
“Don’t you worry, Raiden. Our queen never once fucked up and got someone killed for no reason.”
There wasn’t so much as a hint of a smile, not a touch of mirth in her tone. She’d delivered that statement with the utmost sincerity.
“Some of us did die, and there were even times when I asked myself if this crazy woman was really trying to kill us, but no one ever died in vain… If nothing else, I could tell she was always desperately trying to minimize casualties as much as possible. Wasn’t that why you and the Li’l Reaper followed the orders of some rando inside the walls two years ago? Someone you’d never even seen before?”
Raiden fell silent for a moment.
“Yeah… I guess.”
“That’s what I thought. So tighten up.”
Lena was silent as she closed her eyes.
“Thank you very much, Second Lieutenant Iida, First Lieutenant Shuga.”