86 - Volume 10 - Chapter 1.4

3

The next day, Alice immediately found herself in a concerning situation with regards to the boy.

“—took my eyes off him for two seconds, and he ran off somewhere. Hell, who knows, maybe Nouzen walked off on his own…”

When Shin’s squad captain came to her after patrol, telling her with a pale face that Shin’s Juggernaut had gone missing, Alice shook her head in an attempt to stave off the incoming migraine.

Thanks to the Legion’s powerful jamming units, the Eintagsfliege, both radar and radio transmissions were completely ineffective. And to avoid any surprise attacks, the Processors had to continually patrol the combat area. Sometimes, they’d run into Legion advance units, which could escalate into full-blown battles. This made these patrols into stressful routine work for all the squadrons.

And in the middle of one such nerve-racking patrol, the youngest fledgling in the squadron had gone missing.

“…Roger that. I’ll have my platoon look for him. Have the rest of the platoons keep up their patrol.”

Thankfully, she found the little troublemaker before long.

“—Nouzen.”

Upon hearing her voice, Shin, who was standing still over a pile of snow-covered wreckage, turned to look at her.

The Republic’s military had been wiped out by the Legion within the first two weeks of the war, forcing the Republic’s citizens to abandon the vast majority of their territory and shut themselves off behind fortress walls. As such, the city ruins that made up the battlefields of the Eighty-Sixth sector were devoid of any human presence…

…with the exception of the inhuman Eighty-Six.

Alice made her Juggernaut kneel, and then she walked over to him with a bitter smile. Why did she ever think he was mature and docile? Looking at him now, it was clear he was quite a rambunctious boy.

“I was wondering what came over you when you disappeared in the middle of patrol… You never know where the Legion might be lying in wait. Don’t go off on your own again.”

Even a Löwe, with its fifty-tonne weight, could move around without making a sound. There were cases of Processors failing to notice Legion that had snuck up on them until they were face-to-face with the mechanical monstrosities.

“And walking around the battlefield outside your unit… You’d be dead in a heartbeat if a self-propelled mine found you.”

“I’m sorry… But there aren’t any Legion in the area right now.”

Alice paused, staring at the boy in confusion. He sounded oddly confident about that. Shin climbed down from the small mountain of rubble and reinforced concrete. He approached her, his footsteps muffled despite the hard soles of his combat boots. The barrel of a 7.62 mm assault rifle was strapped onto his shoulder, the gun clearly too large in proportion to his small physique.

“So what were you doing here?” Alice asked.

When she found him, he was squatting down on the mound of concrete, seemingly looking for something. Once he heard her question, his bloodred eyes seemed to sink a bit.

“…I wanted to look for something of Teito’s.”

His answer rendered Alice momentarily speechless.

“His corpse is probably gone, so I looked for a piece of his unit… At least, that’s what I thought I should do.”

Shin turned his gaze to the city ruins’ main street, but aside from the burn marks that lingered on the asphalt, there was nothing left. Not Teito’s ruined Juggernaut nor the Löwe that Shin took down. Not even the three lightweight units his consorts later destroyed. Not so much as a fragment remained of any of them.

“…The Legion have specialized units that collect wreckage… The Tausendfüßler. They can clean away the remains of a battle that size in less than a night.”

They took everything they could find without discrimination. Be it friend or foe. The ruins of destroyed units, shell fragments, vehicles, and aircraft in abandoned military bases. They greedily collected it all and carried it to the underbelly of the Weisel nestled deep within the Legion’s territories. The Weisel themselves were giant, autonomous factories that devoured that wreckage and used them to build more Legion, which they rolled out as quickly as the black smoke rising from their exhaust pipes.

All to destroy their designated enemy: any and all humans who weren’t part of the empire that created them.

The Republic’s frontline bases actually had autonomous units that performed much the same role. These bases had small production and automatic plants, making them self-sufficient even on the battlefield. Of course, the lofty humans refused to leave the safety of their walls, meaning they needed some kind of automatic feeding system to feed the Eighty-Six.

So for all Alice knew, Teito’s unit might already be in their base’s recycling furnace…but she didn’t tell him that. Telling someone their Juggernaut used spare parts from the wreckage of a dead friend’s unit could give them the feeling they were cannibalizing their comrades. And that was a brutal truth Shin did not need to face… At least, not yet.

Either way, Alice smiled at him. She really had misjudged this kid. His expressions and emotions might be dim. He did appear detached from what went on around him, and the way he seemed to avoid looking her in the eye spoke to his tendency to avoid personal interaction.

But he wasn’t completely indifferent to those around him. Quite the contrary, in fact.

“…You’re sweet. You wanted something to remember him by, didn’t you?”

Had he found himself on an unforgiving battlefield, where death lurked around every corner, for this reason alone? But Shin gently shook his head.

“I wanted to warn him, but I couldn’t.”

A faint trace of emotion flickered behind his bloodred eyes. Self-condemnation…?

“It was the first time a Legion unit was that close to me, so I didn’t think they’d move that fast. But I could tell it was close by. So I could have warned him…and because I wasn’t careful, he—”

Alice reached out to the boy, plopping her hand on his head. Alice was tall, and Shin was still small. The height gap between them was quite significant. With his words cut off, Shin stiffened in surprise and looked up at her. Alice looked back at him and said:

“Anyone who needs other people to warn them in these kinds of situations is as good as dead.”

Those words were grim and cold. She continued, gazing into the boy’s crimson eyes as he slowly widened them.

“This is the kind of battlefield we’re in. If you don’t try to protect yourself, you’ll die eventually. And we won’t always be there to babysit people who can’t do that.”

The Juggernaut’s firepower was feeble, and its primary strategy involved multiple units working in tandem to fire at the enemy’s flank and rear, where their armor was at its thinnest. Comrades had to work together to survive in this battlefield. But in the end, it was each person’s responsibility to protect their own life.

There were times when one was stranded in the middle of battle. When one’s consort units couldn’t offer any support. And when one’s squad mates were all…wiped out. Cases like that happened all the time. And people who needed others to cover for them didn’t usually survive in those sorts of situations. And the responsibility for their deaths didn’t lie with those who couldn’t protect them.

“So don’t let what happened to Teito weigh on you. It’s not your fault… If anything, I think he was happy to have a friend like you by his side at the very end.”

“…”

“So remember him… That’s the biggest tribute you can make for him.”

And the one and only tribute one can make for another on this battlefield.

“…I will.”

“If anyone’s at fault for what happened, it’s me, the captain… I’m sorry.”

Shin shook his head gently once more. Alice smiled at seeing his curt gesture and patted his black hair again. He was a kind boy after all. Too kind for this ruthless world. But it only took a moment for Shin to look up at her with displeasure… Apparently, he wasn’t too happy about being treated like a child.

Alice let go of him, and he walked a few steps away before turning his eyes to her again.

“Captain Araish—”

“Call me Alice. My rank doesn’t mean anything anyway.”

For the sake of clarifying the chain of command, Processors were uniformly allotted ranks. But since they weren’t treated any better or paid salaries accordingly, the ranks were nominal at best.

“…Why are you here, Captain?”

Calling an older person by their first name was a bridge too far for him, it seemed.

“Oh, same reason as you… I thought Teito might have left something behind, so I came to see if there’s anything to pick up.”

Her real reason was that she’d come to look for a little prankster who’d up and disappeared in the middle of patrol—but she left that unsaid.

Shin cocked his head. Alice herself had just said that the Tausendfüßler collected pieces of the Juggernaut’s wreckage. He probably didn’t understand why she’d come here for Teito’s things if she knew that.

“Right, I didn’t tell you fledglings about that yet… Well, I’ll explain when we return to base. You left your partner over there. Get in and let’s head back.”

Shin’s Juggernaut was crouched behind some rubble, looking terribly abandoned.

“These are the grave markers for the ones who died yesterday. Teito Kurusu, Atori Laishi, Nana Ouka, and Amala Kii.”

Before her squad mates—whose number had dwindled to fourteen following the previous day’s casualties—Alice held up something for the group to see. Small metal shards, only a few centimeters in size, with each of their names carved onto them. Splintered pieces they happened to find, which had the name etched into them with a nail. Rather crude, as grave markers go.

The Republic citizens inside the walls would likely break out laughing at this comical excuse for a grave marker. But none of the boys and girls in this room laughed. Fourteen pairs of eyes, each with their own unique shade, gazed sincerely and gravely at these metal fragments.

They were the sole salvation one could hope for in the battlefield they’d been imprisoned in.

“We Eighty-Six don’t get graves. Our names have been struck out of every record, and we won’t leave any corpses behind anyway. So these are our grave markers. We etch the names of those who died, and someday, our names will go down like this, too… This is proof that we existed.”

Even if these small fragments of proof will simply rust away somewhere on the battlefield, with no one to mourn or even see them. Even if the wind and the sand will one day wear them down until they’re gone, nowhere to be found.

“Let’s make a promise, everyone. We’ll carve the names of those who died on their units’ fragments and have the ones who survive carry them. That way, the ones who survive until the very end can bring everyone else along with them to their final destination.”

In a battlefield such as the Eighty-Sixth Sector, which had been dominated by the Legion, a fragment of one’s Juggernaut or a piece of metal or wood was the most one could hope for.

“Let’s remember the comrades who fought alongside us. If even for just a moment.”

Alice had spent three years fighting in the Eighty-Sixth Sector, where a Processor’s yearly survival rate was less than 0.1 percent. And everyone who’d fought with her during that time was gone by now.

Everyone in this unit would likely leave her behind, too.

She gazed into the clear, crimson eyes looking up at her from the pipe chair in the corner of the back row and smiled.

He was just like her younger brother, who’d died from disease in the internment camp. Had he still been alive, he’d likely be as old as him. But he’d never gotten to that age.

“I’ll take all of you with me when the time comes. So you…have nothing to fear.”