86 - Volume 10 - Chapter 1.6

1

After a while, his complexion returned to normal, and he’d regained his usual, calm demeanor. Alice took this chance to ask:

“Think you can eat something? It’s almost time for dinner.”

Even the barracks for the subhuman Eighty-Six had some basic facilities. After all, the Republic saw the Processors as no more than parts of a drone, so letting them waste away before they were of use in battle would be counterproductive.

Their dining hall had what could perhaps be described as the world’s most pathetic kitchen, but it did have minimal infrastructure. The prefabricated barracks’ aged dining hall probably had a crack somewhere, because a cold breeze always blew through it, making the place a bit chilly.

As Alice led Shin through the rectangular entrance to the dining hall, Guren, who was standing in the kitchen, looked their way. He glanced at Alice, blinking his blue eyes doubtfully, and then he turned his gaze to Shin and cocked an eyebrow. Alice wasn’t sure what he was surprised about at first, but then she realized. The scarf.

“I see the munchkin came to. That’s good.”

“Yes. I’m sorry if I made you worry, Chief Mechanic.”

“You better. Nouzen, for the love of God, would you stop abusing your Juggernaut like that? The parts that got blown off are one thing, but your suspension system’s rattling again.”

“…I’m sorry.” Shin seemed to recoil from his words at first, but he managed that reply.

Seeing this, Alice realized something. Apparently, he was bad with older people. Like other child soldiers in their later teens or members of the maintenance crew in their early twenties, like Guren. She did notice she’d never seen him approach or talk to older squad members unless they talked to him first.

Male Processors had a higher survival rate thanks to their stamina, and girls like Alice, who survived well beyond their life expectancy, were rare. Maybe that was why he looked so isolated here. The other fledgling boys his age had all died weeks ago.

Guren, who’d pointed this out from the very beginning, shrugged at Shin’s reactions, showing he didn’t particularly mind.

“So, Chef. What’s for dinner?” Alice asked him jokingly, eyeing the apron he wore over his coverall.

“Well, Princess, today’s luxury cuisine will include a stew of our proud homeland’s delectable synthesized rations, with a side of stirred synthesized rations. Please anticipate a meal of a truly otherworldly flavor.”

As Guren spoke, he lifted an aluminum plate that had four blocks of what looked like clay resting on them. This was the synthesized food made every day by the base’s attached production plant. In contrast to Guren’s embellished description, the only food the Eighty-Six were provided were bland-looking bricks of sustenance, and they only came in one variety.

As Shin listened to their jovial exchange, he smiled a bit. It was a truly small smile, and one that didn’t come across in his voice, but it was enough to make Alice widen her eyes in surprise.

She couldn’t recall ever seeing him smile before. Maybe he finally relaxed a little, for the first time this month.

The only natural thing served in this kitchen was a pot of tea, made by boiling grass growing in the area in place of tea leaves. They both accepted mugs of tea and found empty seats by the long table. Since the synthesized food they got doubled as combat rations, it didn’t need to be cooked, and there was no real need for the Processors to eat it at a set time or in a group.

But unless one was extremely misanthropic, most Processors preferred eating three meals a day with their friends. And since the synthesized rations they got didn’t even look like food, they did prefer to try to “cook” it into something that at least looked edible, if only for decency’s sake.

The Eighty-Six were regarded as subhuman livestock, and so the Republic didn’t think they required anything as cultured as cooking. The fodder they’d get would only be good for the pragmatic purpose of providing them with the nutrients needed to work. But if they were to obediently accept the Republic’s will like that, the Eighty-Six really would become nothing more than weapon components.

And so as meaningless as it may pragmatically be, Guren sliced their food up into more presentable shapes and arranged the plates with cutlery. That was his modest form of resistance. The most they could really do in their pathetic excuse of a kitchen was boil water, but they did try to serve tea and coffee substitutes and make an effort to somehow spruce up their meals.

As part of that effort, Guren poured some kind of brown sauce onto the synthesized food blocks. That was new. It gave off a sweet scent, and Shin dipped his fork into it once or twice before carrying it to his lips. He then chewed…and stiffened awkwardly.

“…Well, he can try to improve the taste all he wants, but goop’s still goop,” Alice said with a lukewarm smile.

Yes. This synthesized food didn’t just look bad; it also tasted like sludge. After five years in the internment camps and the battlefield, the Eighty-Six had grown begrudgingly used to this flavor. And yet the fact that one could still, after all these years, be flabbergasted all over again by how bad it tasted was impressive in its own way.

It tasted like…nothing. Like something that didn’t even remotely register as food. Owing to its shape, most people described it as tasting like plastic explosives. And maybe that was accurate. It was somehow this miraculous harmony of both the taste of plastic and the flavor of explosives. A vile, gag-inducing sort of harmony.

Incidentally, real plastic explosives are apparently mildly sweet, but they’re toxic and lethal when consumed. Alice was grateful to not be acquainted with any idiots foolhardy or desperate enough to actually taste them.

“…”

Shin chewed on the nonfood in his mouth with an odd, dubious expression and then managed to gulp it down with some tea before finally giving his opinion.

“…It tasting bad is nothing new, but… Hmm, today’s seasoning is especially…”

Alice also carried a bit of it to her lips and fell silent for a moment.

“…I think I see. The sauce goes with it so well that it actually makes it worse. What kind of flavoring is this anyway? I don’t know this seasoning.”

“Soy sauce and sugar!” someone called out from the kitchen, prompting Alice to wince.

“More strange stuff…? How does it taste?”

Shin cocked his head curiously. It was truly a childish gesture, a reminder that he really was a boy in his early teens.

“Speaking of, where do these seasonings come from? The production plants only make synthesized food, and I don’t think the air transports deliver them, either…”

Alice blinked for a moment. Didn’t she tell him already?

“Oh… I guess we haven’t gone there since you joined… Actually, near the edge of the Sector, there are some abandoned city ruins. So we get it from the storerooms of the shops and houses there.”

“…?”

He didn’t seem to understand and instead tilted his head the other way.

“When they evacuated the civilians after the war started, it was done in haste. There’s a lot of things they left behind. And in city ruins, you can find all sorts of canned, lasting groceries.”

Seeing him raise his head in surprise, Alice couldn’t help but smile. That flavorless goop must be really bad if it got even this indifferent boy to ask for something else.

“But we don’t get to go foraging there that often… I’m sure you understand by now, but patrol duties in the Eighty-Sixth Sector take up the whole day.”

The Legion had a way of avoiding radar detection, so the Eighty-Six had to spend their days patrolling to avoid any surprise attacks.

“So eventually, we’ll have to teach you how to hunt and cut animals, too… But that’s how we have this whatever sauce.”

In addition to wild rabbits, deer, and boars, the Eighty-Sixth Sector had feral chickens, pigs, and cows that had escaped farms. Birds and rabbits were relatively easy to catch, but all the Eighty-Six and the maintenance crew had to pitch in when it came to hunting and skinning bigger game. Thinking back to those occasions, Alice curled her lips up into a bittersweet smile.

“…I wish I could have had the other fledglings taste it, too… All people at the camps have is synthesized food, right?”

Since the internment camps were covered in minefields and barbed wire, even wild animals couldn’t sneak inside, and all the edible plants had been depleted during the early days of the internment. Children like Shin, who’d been in the camps since they were young, might have no memories of eating a decent meal.

Shin couldn’t directly answer Alice’s words of regret. Instead, he looked around the relatively quiet dining hall and its many empty seats and whispered:

“…There’s a lot less of us now.”

“Yeah.”

They’d lost two more in today’s battle, reducing their original squad of twenty-four Processors to a mere twelve. They’d gotten to the point where their squad would either need more people or a reorganization.

“That’s inevitable. The fighting in this ward is pretty savage.”

Combat with the Legion was never easy, but the battles in some sectors were more relentless than others. The Thirty-Fifth Sector was one such battlefield. But Alice bit her lip as soon as she said that. She had just treated those deaths like everyday occurrences… How could she say something like that?

“…No, that’s not true. It wasn’t inevitable.”

People dying is never inevitable. Kids who were Alice’s age fighting and dying gruesome deaths couldn’t be inevitable. How could anyone say it was?

“Captain?”

“Sorry. It’s not inevitable. They all survived this far, and each and every one of them was a world in their own right. Losing those lives can’t be inevitable.”

Even if thinking that they were might make it easier to survive in this battlefield. Maybe becoming so worn down and desensitized to the point of complete numbness would be a blessing. But even so…

“They were your friends. People you never wanted to lose… I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be…” Shin shook his head slowly, and then he looked up at her, like he’d decided on something. “Captain… If you could predict when the Skorpion types are there…”

Surprised by the sudden change in topic, Alice stared back at him blankly as Shin continued speaking desperately.

“If you could predict the raids… If you could tell what the Legion are going to do, would that make it so the rest of the unit doesn’t have to die…?”

Alice blinked in surprise a few times before cracking a cynical smile.

“If we could somehow do that, maybe.”

But if they could do that, Alice and honestly any of the other Eighty-Six who’d come before them would have done so a long time ago. Shin looked like he was about to vehemently say something else, but she held up a hand to stop him.

“…Mm. Sorry, but I got a transmission from Command. Tell me about it some other time.”

Shin still seemed keen on saying something else, but he nodded and stepped down.

“…Yes.”

Alice cut off their conversation and left the dining hall quickly because the other person had activated the Para-RAID one-sidedly. She didn’t want Shin to hear her exchange with them. She didn’t want him to hear her cold voice.

“…Took you long enough to respond, sow.”

“Apologies, Handler One. It was crowded in there.”

The overbearing voice on the other side of the Resonance was their commanding officer, a Republic soldier, tucked safely away inside the walls.

The Para-RAID was a communications device that used the collective unconscious to transmit one’s senses and speech. Obstacles like distance, physical impediments, and electromagnetic interference were powerless in the face of this groundbreaking technology.

“Crowded? It sounded to me like you were toying around with a cute little puppy. A bit too small to drag into bed, though, don’t you think? Or were you thinking of breaking him in early?”

“You’re trash,” Alice spat out.

The officer cackled pleasantly. Teasing a dog from a distance where it couldn’t bite you was probably the best pastime he could ask for.

“Talking down to me when I’m kind enough to give you an update? Bold… There’s signs of a Legion advance group on the move. They’ll probably launch another attack soon, so wipe them out as soon as you detect them.”

A chill overcame Alice as she retorted:

“…Wait. What about the Processor reinforcements I requested? Our number of combatants is down to less than half. A force our size can’t—”

“Stop acting spoiled, you sow. Your numbers are only dwindling because you couldn’t hope to efficiently take down the Legion even if your worthless lives depend on it. Do you really expect human beings to waste their time on inferior stains like you?”

Alice nearly dared him to actually try to lead them for once and see what would really happen, but she managed to stop herself. After leaving all the combat to the Eighty-Six and shutting themselves off behind the walls, the Republic had absolutely no intent of fighting this war. And despite it being his duty and job, this Handler wouldn’t bother actually commanding them in battle.

It’d be for the best if he didn’t Resonate to begin with. Hearing a Handler laugh as they watched her friends die like it were some kind of action movie was a humiliation Alice had already experienced before. And if she could help it, she’d rather not go through that again. Not ever.

“Your answer, sow.”

“—Roger that, sir.”