86 - Volume 10 - Chapter 1.3

4

Five years ago, the war with the autonomous combat drones known as the Legion broke out. And when it did, Alice, and those like her, ceased to be human.

* * *

Their homeland, the Republic of San Magnolia, was mainly populated by silver-eyed, silver-haired Alba. Apparently, that was the reasoning behind it. Alice didn’t really understand. Either way, Alice and her sort were driven out of the safety of the eighty-five administrative Sectors and their fortress walls. Exiled from that paradise made only for Alba—for humans.

And they were cast out into the nonexistent Eighty-Sixth Sector. They were forced to live in internment camps and on the battlefield as pigs in human form—as Eighty-Six.

Benevolence being one of its national policies, the Republic didn’t see fit to send its civilians out onto the field of battle. And despite that, they failed to develop a drone that could match the Legion’s power. Their national defense and their ideals clashed, but they soon found an all-too-simple solution.

The Eighty-Six didn’t count as human, and any piloted machine they were inside wasn’t considered a manned unit, but a drone.

And so, the manned combat drone, the Juggernaut, was born. The Eighty-Six were loaded onto them as “Processors.” The Juggernaut was lauded by the Republic as a cutting-edge, humanitarian weapon that created a battlefield of zero casualties. And even now, Alice and her fellow Eighty-Six put their lives on the line every day to fight the Legion.

The Eighty-Six, Processors and otherwise, were all fairly young. Over the first few years of fighting, most of the adult Eighty-Six had passed away, leaving only children.

Alice looked around her unit of child soldiers. Being seventeen years old, she was among the oldest here. They were in the eastern front’s frontline base, separated by a hundred kilometers and antipersonnel, anti-tank minefields from the Gran Mur’s fortress walls. Within their barracks, a building faded by exposure to the sunlight and rain, they gathered inside a meeting room adjacent to the hangar.

“Good work today, everyone… As unfortunate as it is, I can’t say we got through today without any losses, but you all put up a hell of a fight.”

Long, straight black hair. Dark, oblique eyes. Alice stood in the meeting room, her battle-tempered figure filling out her camouflage uniform. She was a Processor in her third year of service. A sky-blue scarf was tied around her neck, accentuating her effortless beauty.

She set her gaze on a corner of the room, curling her pale, unadorned lips.

“…Shinei Nouzen. You, of all people, sleeping during my briefing? You’ve got some nerve.”

At her scolding, a small figure who was nodding off on a pipe chair in the back of the room jolted upright. He gazed up at her with his distinctive bloodred eyes in a youthful gesture that fit his young age. His hair was an even darker shade of black than Alice’s, contrasting the fair, marble-like features of his face. She looked down at his neck, her eyes resting on the unpleasant sight of bandages sticking out from under his collar.

“I’m sorry.”

His voice was a bit high-pitched. It hadn’t deepened yet. Its tone completely sapped her of any intent she might have had to scold him any longer, which only made her sarcastic smile widen. Something about him reminded her of a family member—someone whose voice would forever remain high-pitched and unbroken.

“Well, that’s fine. Today was your first battle, so you must be tired… We’re all just drone parts in the end. Pigs like us can imitate the glorious Republic soldiers however much we want, but it’d be little more than a farce.”

Being a drone, the Juggernaut showed little regard for its inhuman Processors. Its cockpit was cramped. Its Bakelite seat was so uncomfortable and hard that it almost felt like an affront to ergonomics. And the thin aluminum plates that served as its excuse for armor did little to spare its pilots from the residual heat of the power packs or the intense vibrations of its four legs.

Humans could adapt to just about anything, but riding the Juggernauts for the first few times was extremely taxing on the fledglings, with their underdeveloped, prepubescent bodies. Combat maneuvers made their limbs ache, rendering many of the children incapable of fighting any longer, which consequently ended with them being disposed of. And all this was exacerbated by the absurd intensity of the battles they were forced to march into.

“Well, I’m sure plenty of us are about ready to pass out, so today’s briefing ends here… Nouzen, you’re free to go to sleep; just make sure you get back to your room first.”

Alice’s lighthearted banter allowed the surviving squad mates to let out their first chuckle in quite some time. Some of the fledglings who’d been forced to watch their friends die still had slightly stiff expressions, but they did curl their lips up a bit.

But even among them, she saw the red-eyed boy keep his head lowered, without so much as a ripple of emotion in his expression. This concerned her.

“Can I ask you something, Alice? Captain?”

Though the base was mostly occupied by teenage boys and girls, the Juggernaut maintenance crews were the exception to that rule. Most of them were over twenty years old. Many of them were former soldiers who remained on the battlefield or injured Eighty-Six who were relegated to maintenance work instead. Unlike the Processors, who were by and large expendable and replaceable, professional maintenance knowledge was seen as essential and valuable. And so even Eighty-Six who couldn’t keep on fighting weren’t quite so easily disposed of.

“About this rig. The one riding it was a squirt on his first battle, right? Can I ask what kind of stunts the little kid pulled to mess up the suspension system this badly after just one fight?”

Guren, the chief of maintenance, asked this of Alice with a sour expression as he rested his hands against a standby Juggernaut. He was a red-haired young man, seven years her elder.

He’d served for three years as a mechanic for the thirty-fifth ward’s first defensive unit. He knew how savage the fighting could be here, and if he was making that expression, the unit must really have been in poor condition.

“Was it that bad?”

“The actuator’s in shambles. No point in even fixing it; we’ll have to switch the whole thing out,” he said, and then he directed his blue eyes at her, as if pressing her for an answer to his question.

“Well, believe it or not, he went head-to-head with a Löwe,” she said.

Guren’s mouth fell open.

“…Seriously?”

“Yep. And he brought it down all on his own. His engine malfunctioned after that, so we had to cover for him, though… But it was his first battle. A fledgling—and such a small one at that. Gives me the creeps.”

Her exasperation was natural. Most fledglings on their first battle were lucky if they didn’t end up shooting a comrade by mistake. And with the Eighty-Sixth Sector’s high mortality rate, most of them were likely to lose their lunches in the best-case scenario and their lives in the worst. Just coming back alive was a job well done for the fledglings.

The performance gap between the average Legion unit and the Juggernaut was simply that vast. The Giadian Empire had been a technological giant and a military superpower, and they’d built the Legion while outfitting them with the most advanced technology and combat ferocity they could muster. By comparison, the Juggernaut was a faulty piece of junk.

Its firepower was poor, its armor was feeble, and its limited mobility didn’t allow it to even jump properly. Its build was beyond reckless; it was a weapon meant to bury the expendable Eighty-Six, with its only merit being its ability to shoot at all.

Even fighting the lightweight Grauwolf types was a challenge for the Juggernaut. So facing off against a Löwe, the central unit and symbol of the Legion’s offensive strength, was absurd… Even Alice, who was becoming a veteran, wasn’t sure if she could reliably do that.

“I’ll admit I was wrong about that one. Most kids like him don’t usually live long, but…”

She had been seeing more and more of those kinds of kids coming in among the fledglings. Kids who seemed to be missing something vital. Who seemed to have killed their emotions and developed an indifference to everything around them. Children who avoided interaction.

Such children were the first to die in the Eighty-Sixth Sector. They failed to get their comrades to cover for them and seemed to have a disregard for their own survival. In most cases, they didn’t survive their first battle. And even if they survived the first one…they didn’t return from the second.

Alice couldn’t blame them for becoming that way, of course. When the war started, and she was sent to the internment camps with the rest of the Eighty-Six, Alice had been thirteen years old. She had some understanding of the world around her and had developed her own sense of self by that point.

But kids like Shin had only been seven or eight years old at the time. They had guns suddenly forced against their heads and were marched into internment camps that were surrounded by minefields and barbed wire, where they were forced to live like livestock. Within two years, they lost their parents, grandparents, and siblings… No child could endure so much and come out mentally unscathed.

Shin had it worse, though. He clearly had noble Imperial blood running through his veins—linking him to the same Empire that had created the Legion in the first place. People like him were blamed for the war and hated in the internment camps. It was the kind of bloodline that was bound to attract severe discrimination.

The Eighty-Six were subjected to discrimination, but they weren’t necessarily innocent victims. The world always had a way of being coldest to the outnumbered and the weak.

“…So that kid, Shin, was it?” Guren snorted. “You should look after him.”

That comment made Alice blink in a bewildered fashion.

“Well…I’m his squad captain, so of course I will. But why?”

Guren looked away from her, fixing his gaze on the Juggernaut in front of him.

“I can’t exactly see it that clearly, but…I think he’s scared of the older kids. Kids about your age. They’re all taller, and their voices are deeper…”

“…?”

Apparently, Guren had the supernatural ability to “see” people’s emotions. He supposedly inherited it from his red-haired father’s bloodline, and it manifested rather faintly in him. But his ability to read others’ feelings had been a boon to Alice in the past. She wasn’t going to doubt him now.

“But thankfully, you’re a woman. It doesn’t look like he’s afraid of you yet. So I figured I should tell you.”

“Well, did…did some men do something to him in the camp’s training facility? Did they…beat him or something?”

Any concept of public order had long since crumbled away inside the internment camps, and all the Republic soldiers who interacted with the Eighty-Six—be it in the training facilities, during transportation, or when commanding them in battle—were total scum, to put it mildly.

“Well, I didn’t see anything like that, so I don’t know, but…I bet there’s a story behind what happened to his neck. There’s an emotion coiled around his throat…like a collar, or a chain, choking him beneath those bandages.”

“…”

All Processors had RAID Devices set into the back of their necks for the Para-RAID. It was indispensable for surviving in the Eighty-Sixth Sector, but the way the Republic implanted them was pretty rough and painful.

The quasi-nerve crystal was embedded under the skin, but there were rare cases where Processors took damage to their spines, resulting in paralysis. These Processors were removed, of course. And the whole procedure was done without anesthetic or any disinfectant, so the wound left in the wake of that accident wouldn’t always necessarily heal.

Alice had always assumed Shin wore the bandages around his neck because the wound from the implant hadn’t healed yet, but apparently, that wasn’t the case…?

“…Understood. I’ll watch out for him.”