Bölüm

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Sheltering a former empress who was nothing but a puppet ruler and had no land of her own was nothing but trouble with no benefit to be had. Even a large country like the United Kingdom didn’t want to oppose the biggest superpower in the continent, and getting involved in the millennia-old rivalries of the old Imperial nobles seemed like a terribly unappealing idea.

However.

“Right now, I might not feel the same way anymore.”

The Empire’s bloodline of eagles, the ones capable of shutting down all Legion units—right now, this member of the United Kingdom royalty was looking at one possible key for ending the hardship all the human nations were facing.

Frederica didn’t budge, though.

“Surely, the Idinarohk’s most prized gem would know better than to act hastily before all the conditions are in place?”

Vika scoffed at her. At least she understood that much.

“Who else knows? Milizé…probably doesn’t. Does Nouzen know?”

“…He does.”

Vika considered slipping a caterpillar down Shin’s back. This wasn’t information Shin could recklessly spread around, and it wasn’t his place to share other people’s personal circumstances with others. His sincerity was praiseworthy in that regard, but…it still ticked Vika off.

“Then I just have to keep cooperating with them. It’s true that I don’t have many cards to play.”

Having Frederica, who was capable of giving the order, wasn’t enough. They also needed to find the location of the command base capable of transmitting the order and seize it. Now that he was trapped in the Federacy and unable to return to his homeland, with only one regiment under his command, Vika lacked the means to help find or seize that place. He had to cooperate with Shin, the Strike Package, and the Federacy army.

And also with Shin’s legal guardian, the Federacy’s interim president—Ernst.

Frederica nodded. House Adel-Adler’s flame-colored eyes gazedinto the house of unicorns’ Imperial violet ones. Driven from their thrones though they might be, they would not discard the pride of royalty.

“Take care more than ever before,” she said. “So that we may protect the others.”

Like Ishmael had said, when the Fisara peered out from over the dam arch, the Leuca let out a high-pitched cry and swam back up the channel toward the Kadunan floodway. The Fisara followed it, leaving the dam, and traveled toward the floodway—its massive form passing over the wrecked dam gate and inadvertently completely breaking it this time—and at long last, the two leviathans united in the autumn colors of the Kadunan floodway.

After all the trouble it took to make it happen, Shin wasn’t very touched by their reunion. The other Processors and armored infantry reacted just as tiredly, honestly wishing the two creatures would hurry up and go away in peace. Fido alone gently approached the two of them on the riverbank and gave a few friendly beeps. The leviathans didn’t even acknowledge it.

“Pi…” It sounded slightly hurt.

Seeing Fido drop its shoulders (the back of its frame) dejectedly, Shin couldn’t help but feel like this indifference stood to reason. If a connection had formed between these two different species over such a short period of time, it would have bruised the pride of Ishmael’s Open Sea clans, who’d spent a millennium fighting those creatures.

And indeed, as Ishmael looked at Fido’s saddened behavior with exasperated eyes, the Fisara seemed to notice him out of the corner of its vision and, this time, turned around. It lowered its long neck as low as it could and glared straight at Ishmael. It was terribly clear that if this hadn’t been land—if this wasn’t humankind’s territory—it would have fired its heat ray without question.

“…What? Do you remember me, you bastard?”

Perhaps it recognized the distinctive tattoo of the Open Sea clans. His light hair, faded by sea and sun. The permanent salty fragrance that clung to him mixed with the scent of its nemesis.

And a smile spread over Ishmael’s face, too, a savage and somehow intimate smirk.

“What? Don’t stare at me like that, you bastard. I’ll tear you a new one, kid.”

Shin couldn’t tell if he was happy or angry at the creature. Maybe it was both. The Leuca kept traveling north up the Kadunan floodway, indifferent to them. The Fisara followed it, its long neck bent as it continued glaring at Ishmael.

Once the two leviathans passed through the floodway, the command officers all instantly shouted orders at the surrounding units, forbidding them from touching the creatures.

Ernst received word that the second northern front’s deserters had been disposed of and the remaining nuclear fuel recovered. He exhaled in relief—the crisis in the second northern front had been averted.

Despite that, somewhere in his heart, Ernst felt a twinge of regret.

—Sir, you speak of protecting people’s ideals, but you don’t actually care one bit about that, do you?

“…True,” he whispered to himself in the empty office of the president’s residence. “I don’t care one bit about anything—after all, I have nothing left to fear for.”

He had nothing that was truly precious to him anymore. All the things he feared to lose, that he felt driven to protect, were already gone. Not even the idealsshebelieved in but which hadn’t come to pass—the way humanity should act.

But he kept protecting those ideals because they were what she had believed in. A world of kindness and justice, where no one had to be abandoned and everyone could be saved. And if this ideal was to be tarnished, then he wished, from the bottom of his heart, that everything would burn—people, countries, the whole world.

But even that didn’t matter to him anymore.

“Because she’s already gone.”

The 4th Armored Division retreated from the Hiyano River and regrouped with Rito’s unit, which was protecting their path back. Accordingly, the 3rd Armored Division, which had encroached into the territories to the far north, also began its retreat. Once the rear guard evacuated far enough, the Recannac dam’s charges were detonated.

With a rumble, the thin concrete dam arch collapsed, unleashing the blocked waters of the Recannac River to their original flow. After that, the adjacent Niioka dam and Niusei dam had their charges detonated once the squadrons passed by and the retreat of the units that kept control of the area was confirmed.

As those units retreated, like a thread being reeled back, the twenty-two dams heading up the Kadunan floodway were destroyed. Lastly, the Roginia dam, which held up the water at the top of the Roginia River’s stream, was blown up, and at the same time, the floodgates of the old Tataswa floodway and the new floodway were closed.

With this, all the waters of the Hiyano overflowed to the drenched riverbed of the Roginia defensive line, flooding the Womisam basin. The great Roginia River’s mire, which impeded the progress of the Legion, was now restored before the second northern front for the first time in over a century.

With the youngling in tow, the Fisara passed through the river mouth located in what the humans called the seaport of Zinori to reach the northern seas. Hostile metallic presences watched it from afar, but since they did not attack, it paid them no heed. Its attention was fixed off the coast, where the rest of the leviathan’s school was singing.

The youngling Leuca sank its body into the cold water, sucking the liquid between its long, trailing overcoat-like membrane and its armor scales before spraying it in a jet to swiftly approach the school. The Fisara followed it, sinking underwater and swimming back to the school, to its home in the familiar, frozen waters of the clear northern sea.

Within the depths of the lapis-lazuli waters, a memory crossed the Fisara’s mind. It thought of the group of bipedal creatures it had seen in the pond where it collected the youngling. As they murdered each other, it had heard something unfamiliar, barely audible—the cry of an individual which the leviathan could pick up. What could it have been?

In one of the Federacy’s many training bases, one silver-haired, silver-eyed First Lieutenant Henry Knot arrived to become a volunteer soldier. He was a former Republic soldier—in other words, a Republic citizen.

He was praised for his devoted service—quite unusual for a Republic soldier—and allowed to maintain his company-officer rank. When he was called into the first reserve, the other Federacy soldiers training with him kept him at a distance, but given what the Republic did to the Eighty-Six, it was only natural, so he didn’t let it bother him too much.

People would talk behind his back sometimes, but he faced no harassment, which gave him the impression the Federacy army was well-ordered and disciplined.

So when one of his colleagues beckoned him over to the phone booth in their common room, Henry simply pointed at himself, baffled. Soldiers were authorized to make private calls from the booth, but Henry never used it. When he’d volunteered to become a soldier, he’d bid his father a lengthy farewell, so Henry saw no need to talk to him after just a month.

But despite that, his colleague spoke clearly.

“Yes, First Lieutenant. First Lieutenant Henry Knot. There’s a call for you from your brother.”

“Huh?!”

When Henry hurried over, he saw the soldier’s expression was different from usual. The man looked awkward, like he felt that he was doing something wrong to Henry.

“Is your brother an Eighty-Six?”

Henry twitched and stiffened where he stood. Was he being accusedof abandoning his family? His stepmother, and his little brother. It was true—he did abandon Claude.

“…Yes.”

“I see. That, hmm…must have been hard on you.”

Those words weren’t what he expected. Henry looked up at the tall soldier in surprise. He was a young reserve soldier, perhaps a year or two older than Henry.

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“The internment camps must have started around the time you were seventeen, right? At that age, you think you can do anything, when there’s actually so much you can’t. So it…must have been hard.”

“…”

“So don’t avoid your kid brother because you can’t look him in the eye. If he called you, it means he wants to talk. Don’t take that chance away from him.”

“…Thank you.”

Indeed, Henry had once denied him that chance, so Claude must have been mad. And despite being angry with him, Claude was giving him another chance to talk. In that case…

“…Henry?”

“Claude?”

Claude’s voice sounded like he was trying to gauge the distance between them, but back when he thought Henry was just his unit’s Handler, he used to speak to him in a very unreserved tone. The fact that he started acting like this once he learned he was speaking to his brother was a stark reminder of the time they spent apart and the break in their relationship.

—Big Bro.

Claude would probably never call him that ever again.

“I heard you’re almost done with your training phase, so…I figured I’d reach out before it ends…”

“Oh… Thanks.”

Once he was stationed on the front line, he probably wouldn’t be able to take phone calls as easily as he could now.

“So what are you up to?” Henry asked, trying to keep his voice calm.

The fact that Claude called him meant he was back at his home base.

“Mm… I’m at a moon viewing.”

“Moon viewing?”

“There’s a festival like that somewhere. Shin… Well, my operations commander did something like that two years ago in the Eighty-Sixth Sector, and he decided to hold one again. You put up weird grass decorations and eat this weird candy.”

Henry glanced out the window across the room from the booth and gazed at the moon. The same moon Claude was looking up at now.

“Really…? That sounds fun.”

Since it was apparently essential for a moon viewing, they pulled out long leaves from around the Rüstkammer base’s maneuvering grounds. Sitting in the dining hall, where many such leaves were tied together and hung up as decoration, Shin connected with Lena via the Para-RAID. She was still at the medical facility, but she was looking up at the moon, too.

They made something similar to mooncakes under Michihi’s instructions. Shin mentioned offering up dumplings, and she responded they were made by kneading flour and boiling it. The Orienta members also brought up something about steamed potatoes, but they couldn’t decide on whether that meant potatoes or sweet potatoes, so they made both.

They probably got some…if not all the traditions wrong, but they just winged it based on feeling.

Two years ago, in the Eighty-Sixth Sector, Kujo suggested they have a moon viewing and mentioned something about a rabbit on the moon. Remembering this, Raiden cut apples into rabbit shapes, which, for some reason, turned one of the tables into an apple-rabbit-cutting class.

The supply team complained that just boiling potatoes wasn’t enough, so they put butter on them and made them into tarts. Having received a butter-fried one, Shin stuck his fork into it, noticed it was cut into a crescent, and looked up at the moon, which was in the same shape in the sky.

What they were talking about, sadly, wasn’t quite as poetic—theevents of the upheaval in the second northern front. Not a fun topic, to be sure, but Lena wanted to hear about the contents of the operation. She was baffled by the recklessness of making nuclear weapons, grimaced upon hearing about the Hail Mary Regiment’s rash actions, and became speechless when she heard they used a dirty bomb. When he told her renegades tried to get a leviathan involved in the battle, she held her head before finally managing to say this:

“Hmm… It sounds like you had a hard time of it…”

“The operation itself wasn’t that bad.”

Albeit, all the things surrounding the operation ended up being a huge mess. After biting down on a buttered potato and swallowing a piece of it, Shin carried on.

“There were some good things… We were able to confirm in this operation that the Tausendfüßler are configured to decontaminate areas on top of collecting downed units and shell fragments. The effects of the dirty bomb they detonated should be minimal.”

“That’s… Well, at least that’s a relief.”

“Yeah… And, hmm, there’s something I realized.”

“Hmm? What?”

“The ringleader of the Hail Mary Regiment—she was the one who triggered the incident, but when her troops’ demands escalated, and when she tried to meet their expectations, the situation spiraled out of control.”

Shin had heard Ninha’s testimony. The ringleader was from a line of knights who served as a single city’s governors, and the soldiers from that town saw her as their lord and princess. She herself probably took pride in being a worthy leader to her people, in being a just-hearted princess, and her attempts to conduct herself as such were what landed her in so terrible a situation.

“The people who serve under someone can’t just obey. They have to support those above them. Because if they don’t, those they serve under will be driven to strive further and further until they’re crushed under the pressure. So it made me think if we…”

If we Eighty-Six, serving under our queen—

“…might be placing a burden on you, Lena.”

The dining-hall supervisor, having heard about the moon viewing, taught Lena how to make sweet potatoes. Those were circular like a full moon, in contrast to the moon she was looking up at now. While eating one as an after-dinner dessert with the rest of the recuperating soldiers, Lena was baffled by Shin’s words.

Shin, you, of all people, would say that? The eastern front’s headless reaper? You’re not just a king—you’re like a god of salvation.

“You have nothing to worry about. You don’t just follow me; you support me as well. You don’t simply expect things of me; you believe in me, too.”

Your Majesty.That title had respect and trust to it, but no worship or coercion.

“Besides, not having you rely on me at all hurts. You know that already. Or do you want me to start crying again?”

She felt Shin crack a sardonic smile, recalling their quarrel in the United Kingdom.

“…Yes, you’re right.”

“Right?” Lena said, unaware of the proud, fulfilled smile playing over her lips. “Don’t worry, you all support me plenty enough as it is. If anything, I’d prefer it if you acted more spoiled around me, Shin. Like earlier, when you had a severe ‘me deficiency.’”

“Oh. Can I take that as a verbal promise?”Shin replied jokingly.

He sounded like a mischievous child, as if asking Lena whether she was sure she wanted to make that promise.

But then he changed his tone and spoke earnestly and honestly, with a sincere if slightly impatient heat to his voice.

“I don’t have enough of you, Lena. I want to see you soon. To have you by my side.”

Lena giggled. She already had enough rest, having been given the time she needed to work through the feelings of emptiness and guilt that filled her mind. She was free from that inescapable maze of concern and anxiety. She had cleared enough space in her heart to want to talk to herboyfriend on the other side of the Resonance about her dreams for the future or her fun plans for the next day.