86—EIGHTY-SIX, Vol. 4
Come find me.
It had nothing in the way of vocal cords, so it had no voice with which to speak, but just the movements of its lips silently formed each word. Its eyes were unfocused and inhuman, with both the irises and the whites colored silver. And yet they were human shaped.
The standoff came across as extremely long to Shin, but it took only several seconds. The feminine face then suddenly melted away, and the entirety of the Liquid Micromachines scattered away soundlessly, turning into specks of light that blew away like balsam-flower seeds dispersing in the wind. The particles paused in midflight for a moment and changed shape again, taking the form of a flock of silver butterflies, small enough to sit in the palm of one’s hand.
They flapped their thin, brittle, paperlike wings, which were too long to belong to actual butterflies. The silver wings rode the wind and soared, whirling in an upward helix pattern, like a galaxy’s spiral arm, across the main shaft’s aperture before flying off and disappearing.
“What…?”
It got away.
He realized that when his ability once again picked up the wailing of the High-Mobility type from afar, mixing in with the retreating Legion.
It abandoned its ruined unit and disassembled its central processor to escape…?
The thought of it made it all oddly click into place. If one were to take things far enough, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say the Legion’s actual form was the Liquid Micromachines making up its central processors. Being liquid, they could change their shapes into anything—like human neural networks, which were radically different from their original central processors. His brother, who had been turned into a Dinosauria, had transformed the Liquid Micromachines into countless extending human hands.
A system—a program—is fundamentally an aggregation of countless modules, so separating and reassembling them shouldn’t have been impossible. However, taking out a human brain, picking it apart, putting it back together, and returning it to where it had been wasn’t an idea a human mind would ever conceive.
Not a human mind, hmm…?
An artificial intelligence meant for combat likely didn’t see it as madness. Shin thought he could finally understand Lena’s anxieties a bit. The Legion constantly learned and improved themselves in order to increase their combat abilities and efficiency. The Shepherds had human intelligence, but at times they exhibited illogical behavior because of the memories they’d had of being human, like Rei and Kiriya had.
But the mass-produced Shepherds, which had their memories removed, lacked that tendency. And the High-Mobility type, which had an intelligence based on a human brain—but not any specific one—lacked any memories to begin with. If the end result of cutting away those memories…was that entirely inhuman, efficient, specialized-for-combat High-Mobility type… And if Shin were to keep on forgetting the wishes he’d been entrusted with and become the same kind of war machine as the Legion…
As Frederica had once said, three things make a man: the homeland he was born into, the blood running through his veins, and the bonds he forms. And Shin had never once thought to internalize what she’d said. He had never wished to reclaim the things he’d lost to the fires of war. But perhaps the ones that found their way back to him…the ones that reached out to him… Maybe caring for those connections would be the right thing to do.
That was what Shin thought.
It was when he thought to tell Lena that the battle was over that he realized his RAID Device had fallen off and slipped away at some point. Returning to Undertaker, he rifled through the cockpit, searching inside until he found it and reconnected to the Resonance.
“—Shin! Are you all right?!”
“Somehow.”
“Thank God…!”
Lena let out a sigh filled with relief. Frederica was saying something in the background, but her high-pitched voice grated a bit on his ears at that moment. Shin spoke, contorting his face from the constant cacophony reaching his ears.
“Lena, I have a favor to ask.”
“What is it?”
Apparently, she could tell how bad he was feeling from his tone. Hearing her silver-bell-like voice fill with tension made Shin feel all the more pathetic.
“Could you send someone over to pick me up…? I’m not injured, but I can’t move.”
The Legion had probably retreated already, judging by how the wails of the Shepherds were moving farther away. Which should have made Shin feel a bit better, but having all the tension drain from his body only made him feel even worse. White noise assaulted his senses, and the stronger the sensation became, the harder it was to stay on his feet.
As he leaned back against Undertaker’s armor, he could sense Lena smile in relief.
“Yes. If that’s all, I’ll have someone right over—”
Before she could even finish, he heard a familiar prattling and the sound of loud footsteps approaching him. It came from two different points. From a rectangle that served as an exit to the same floor and from an aperture higher up in the shaft appeared two Juggernauts, covered with dust. Both their canopies swung open at roughly the same time, and two familiar faces peeked out of them.
“Yo. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you
this
fucked up,” Raiden said, standing at the top of the shaft. His unit was also in pretty bad condition, with both of its machine guns lost.
“I heard you needed someone to give you a ride, Li’l Reaper? Who do you want a piggyback ride from—the werewolf or the cyclops princess?”
Shiden gave a toothy smirk, flashing her canines, as she rested her chin against the edge of her armor.
Somewhere in the foggy recesses of Shin’s mind, he thought both options sounded pretty lousy.