Bölüm

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“It wasn’t that hard for me. Not before, and not now.”

He didn’t have the same issues as Claude—who, back in the Eighty-Sixth Sector, had to grapple with his own despicable Alba blood, and with his anger toward his brother and his father, who deserted him and his mother, but whom he nevertheless still loved. Tohru was an Aventura, making it easy to recognize him as an Eighty-Six, and his parents and grandfather were killed in the Republic, so he could unconditionally hate the Republic for what they did to him.

“The fact you can talk like that is why I’m saying this,” Claude told him, his moon-white eyes fixed on Tohru.

“Mm?”

“We’re not just throwing things away. We’re not just setting out buckets to handle a leaky roof. We weren’t before, and we aren’t now.”

We’re not losing. It’s not that we can’t win. We’re not being dragged around the same place over and over.

Tohru smirked at him. “Cut it out with the sympathy.”

Claude growled at him in annoyance.

“I didn’t mean it like that, moron.”

The scout platoon Mele was placed in charge of was short on people. They had only twenty members, significantly lower than standard.

“Lots of people are getting sick, huh? Winter’s right around the corner; wonder if they all caught colds.”

The forest was terribly silent before dawn, with the birds asleep and the nocturnal animals returning to their dens. Mele heard Otto rambling as they walked side by side. Even though the Hail Mary Regiment’s princess gave the order to move out, everyone was down with some kind of illness and couldn’t move. Pathetic. How could they disobey the princess?

The platoon members piped in to comment.

“Are you sure what they have is a cold?”

“They don’t have fevers, but they’re throwing up and have weird swellings all over their bodies.”

“I saw the production team from Sul village when I went to pick up the nuclear weapon, and they looked really bad. Their hair was falling out, and they had bruises everywhere. Some of them were coughing up blood.”

“Shut up,” Mele stopped them, annoyed. “Focus on searching. It should be around here, along the river.”

“I mean, yeah, Mele, but the river is pretty wide,” Otto replied with a frown.

He was the one who’d suggested they find the baby leviathan in the first place, but he looked quite bored already and was using the muzzle of his assault rifle to kick away the fallen leaves at their feet.

“We don’t have enough people to look around this big of a river. It’d be faster to start searching once everyone gets better.”

“Well… I mean, Lady Ninha—”

Just then, one of the members at the edge of their row called out loudly.

“Oh… Hey! Isn’t that it?!”

He pointed ahead into the blue darkness before dawn, past the trees of the cold, deep forest. The morning mist typical of this season didn’t extend to the high elevation of the Shihano mountains. Cast in blue darkness and decorated by countless fallen leaves was a vast, terrifyingly clear, and bottomless lake. Its waters reflected the faint glow of the dark, starlit sky, and atop its rippling surface, they saw what they were looking for.

A snow-white, glasswork creature covered in a delicate veil, swimming with its head held high.

Patrolling in the skies twenty thousand meters up, the Rabe detected multiple heat signatures moving under the cover of the moonless dawn and morning mist. Those signatures corresponded to Vánagandrs and armored infantrymen.

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It seemed they were moving past the second northern front’s defensive position, the Roginia line. At the same time, countless rockets and howitzers were fired from behind the Neikuwa hills to shield their progress. Preparation fire. The opening artillery shots launched before an armored unit’s advance, meant to destroy enemy units and fortifications and clear a way.

The metallic raven also spotted a small unit moving through the woods in the Shihano mountains’ peaks.

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Standing within the dreamlike shower of green leaves in the blue, glittering interstice between the heavenly sphere and the water’s surface was the majestic sight of the leviathan youngling. Mele froze up, staring at it. It was like a mermaid princess from a legend. A pure-white silhouette, covered in a modest veil and a long trailing dress. The soft light of the stars twinkled against its scales as it floated on the water’s surface like a meticulously detailed glasswork statue.

“…It’s so pretty…”

Such a beautiful creature must be a good, correct thing. This fair being would surely save them and their princess. Feeling drawn to it, Mele approached the creature and reached his hand out to it, tilting his head as he looked up at the mermaid princess. But then far below its veil—the spot Mele had mistaken for its head—three eyes suddenly swerved to look at him.

“…?!”

Diamond-shaped pupils with a metallic luster, unlike those of any human or terrestrial animal. A gaze, stranger than anything Mele had ever felt, pierced him, making every hair on his body stand on end. The creature was wary of his hand, now half raised and frozen in place.

The Leuca parted its jaws, revealing lines of sharp, angular teeth similar to those of a shark or a crocodile, and baring the dark depths of its gullet, which was as eerie as the corpse of a deep-sea fish.

It took one deep breath of crisp autumn air, and then—

“Giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”

The man-eating mermaid, native to the open seas, let out an ear-piercing screech to intimidate the mammals approaching it.

The Leuca released its howl. Had it been a mature specimen, the cry’s bubble pulse would have been capable of rupturing armored plates. Its loud screech echoed through the Shihano mountains at dawn. Startled by the unfamiliar roar, birds took off from the treetops and flew off into the sky. Unfortunate squirrels that had climbed up the nearby trees fainted at the sound and fell to the ground. The howl traveled up the Kadunan floodway, reaching the Fisara now swimming up the stream of one of the dammed rivers.

The Fisara raised its head, turning its long neck in the direction of the youngling’s cry. From the sound, it could grasp the youngling’s rough location and position, as well as the state of danger it was in.

“……………………!”

It roared back in response, trying to warn its still-unseen enemy. And then the Fisara began to swim back along the gentle river current in search of its youngling.

The recon unit sent out ahead of the advance force heard the two howls and forwarded them to division HQ, which analyzed the sounds and communicated their findings to the different divisions.