86 - Volume 10 - Chapter 3.1

CHAPTER 3

FRAGMENTAL NEOTENY: VARLET

1

The steel tidal wave washed over both the earthen road beneath and the concrete highway above him.

He was deep in the contested zones, at a multilevel crossing of an abandoned expressway. There were Ameise keeping watch from the surface, while the sturdy expressway, which was made as an emergency military express road, was teeming with Grauwolf and Löwe.

The lightweight Grauwolf could traverse the soil with relative ease, but the Löwe had a combat weight of fifty tonnes, and so it struggled to move through the bog. With the Eintagsfliege blanketing the skies and the Stier usurping air superiority from their enemies, the Legion could traverse the land without fear of bombardment from above.

And that was precisely what made this place a perfect site for an ambush.

“4th Platoon, open fire.”

At Shin’s order, the cannons of the four other Juggernauts in his platoon roared. They were hidden directly beneath the expressway, between the piers that supported it and the expressway itself. They’d climbed up with their wire anchors and squatted their units down as far as they could. The Juggernaut, being a small Feldreß, could just barely hide in that space.

With concentrated fire, they noisily collapsed the pillars in front of them. They caved in, catching all the Legion on and around the road in the collapse. Even a reinforced concrete road made for military transports couldn’t withstand concentrated fire from tank turrets.

The Legion lines in the center of the road were all knocked down. It was impossible for their optical sensors to see through the dense concrete of the road, but even the Juggernaut’s feeble audio sensors could detect through the thick obstruction that the enemy was divided into three forces.

An Ameise swiveled its optical sensor skyward, only to be crushed by the rubble and the weight of the falling Löwe. The Legion’s established tactic was to deploy the Eintagsfliege to block off humankind’s radar and launch one-sided attacks. Because of this, they assumed the chances of them being detected and ambushed while on the march were exceedingly low.

Having to fall several dozen meters knocked even the central processors of the Löwe into a state of confusion, making the large units freeze up in shock at the unexpected development. As they did, Shin ordered the second wave of fire. The shells bored into the relatively thin top of their turrets.

With that, they eliminated the troublesome Löwe that had crashed down. This left…

“4th platoon, follow me. Captain, eliminate the Legion left above us.”

“…Roger that.”

“Stop ordering people around, 4th Platoon Captain.”

The Legion couldn’t tap into the Para-RAID communications, but the Eighty-Six were still obligated to use Personal Names or code call signs during communications. This included the Handler’s call sign of Handler One and was done so their given names wouldn’t leak in or out of the Gran Mur.

Shin and his 4th Platoon’s units descended to the surface using their wires. The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th Platoons also jumped down from the expressway and attacked the Legion, using the dust of the collapsing rubble as their cover.

“Haunted freak.”

Even through the tumultuous noise of the battle, everyone in the squadron could hear this whisper reach them from the Resonance. Shin didn’t regard it as he approached a Grauwolf. The mechanical menace had finally recovered from the shock of falling down. As it tried to turn around, Shin’s Juggernaut slid across the mud, skidding into the enemy’s flank and firing the machine guns on its grappling arms.

The lightweight Grauwolf boasted great offensive power, but its defense was nowhere near as high as the Löwe’s. Still, unlike the Juggernaut, machine-gun fire couldn’t penetrate its frontal armor, so one had to attack from the flank.

As the Grauwolf crumpled lifelessly to the ground, Shin sprinted away and rushed the next one. The impact of the fall had rattled their central processors, and they couldn’t move in tandem to stop the ambush.

But even with the enemy side being so confused, the Juggernaut’s performance couldn’t match the Legion’s. And so it was Shin’s role to create these situations and keep up the momentum. He plunged into the heart of the surviving Grauwolf unit, tearing into their lines. Without even looking at his radar, he could tell his squad members were deployed behind him, splitting the Legion up and individually taking them out.

His right machine gun ran out of bullets. A warning that the same was about to happen to his left one popped up in his holo-window. Shin clicked his tongue and switched his armament selection to his 57 mm cannon. Its recoil was intense, and it wasn’t useful in melee combat. But the fact that ranged weapons could run out of ammo was a painful blow.

The Juggernauts were built to be light, and as such, the amount of machine-gun and cannon ammo they could carry was limited. Of course, this meant that running out of ammo in the middle of battle was a predictable problem, and so the squadrons were accompanied by supply drones. But their AI wasn’t advanced, and they couldn’t follow them to such frantic battles.

If only I had some melee armaments.

That pained thought crossed his mind between engagements. Melee weapons were anachronistic. They’d been driven into extinction by firearms, which required less training and had greater range. Modern warfare was governed by cannons, which could fire kilometers ahead, and so the use of melee weapons was seen as suicidal.

But they did have one advantage firearms lacked. Melee weapons never ran out of ammo. They could keep cutting into the enemy, slashing at them until they broke or shattered. So having that as an option would make things just a little bit easier.

It seemed the platoons above them were struggling to dispose of the Legion on the remains of the expressway. The Legion had perhaps sent a request for support, because the Legion force patrolling on the left side changed course to help them. They moved among the buildings so they wouldn’t be caught by the radar, but Shin had predicted this ahead of time. He had the remaining 6th Platoon lie in cover in their direct path.

But then Shin realized: The 6th Platoon he’d set there to intercept them weren’t in their positions. And looking up, he could definitely hear the members of the 6th Platoon speaking from the hectic fighting above them.

“Nosferatu, a Legion detachment changed course and is heading our way. We can still hit them from the flank. Have the 6th Platoon return to their posi—”

“I told you to stop ordering people around, Delta Leader. I’m the captain of this squadron, and I decided we need to prioritize taking out the main force. Besides…who can trust anything you say? Haunted freak.”

Shin grimaced at those words. This captain was two years his senior and refused to listen to a younger soldier’s words… No. Shin’s age wasn’t the reason he hated him so much… And as if to make a show of that, the squad captain continued his irritated spiel. He spat out the words with utter disdain in his voice.

“And stop Resonating with us. It’s jarring having you on the transmissions, you mon—”

But the next moment, the captain’s voice cut off. His Sensory Resonance shut down. And a moment later, Shin heard the heavy metallic thud of something being struck, and then the roar of a Löwe’s 120 mm turret.

A cannon shell had been fired at an initial velocity of 1,600 meters per second, far quicker than the speed of sound. And so the sound of the shell impacting its target reached him before the roar of the cannon did.

That sound was the prelude to the entire operation falling apart.

Fighting a Löwe alone wasn’t impossible for Shin, but fighting them one-on-one without any support from his comrades was difficult. Using the ruined Juggernauts of his comrades as bait, he shot a Löwe from behind and sunk it.

Standing in front of the Löwe’s remains, Shin let out a sigh. As smoke and sediment continued to rise from the battlefield, he disembarked his unit, walking through it undefended.

There were no friends or foes left alive. Both the combat drones left behind by a fallen country and the weapons piloted by those who were stripped of their humanity and deemed subhuman had fought each other to the death, leaving behind only smoldering city ruins.

It’d happened again. All his squad mates had died, and he was the sole survivor.

Now that he was alone, he couldn’t recall how long he’d spent fighting. His mind had already learned the hard way that stopping for even a second could get you killed, and so it spared no resources on pondering such pointless sentimentality. Only once the fighting ended did he have time for the sorrow to set in.

He looked to his Juggernaut and shook his head. Its machine-gun and tank-turret ammunition reserves were empty, and its energy-pack reserves were too small.

He’d warned them, but no one listened. No one believed him. He was used to others speaking poorly of him, calling him a possessed grim reaper who beckoned death and the enemy to his comrades. Every squadron he’d been in since he was drafted, every single one, had been wiped out, and he was always the only one to survive.

He had to get used to it. To the death of his friends. To being the only one left alive. To being blamed and told that this was all his fault.

But for some reason, that day, he felt awfully tired. An inexplicable sense of emptiness crept up his legs and bound him. An absurd, nonexistent weight pressed down on him, and he could only stand still.

What was the point of surviving? In the end, what awaited him was the same as always—a warrior’s death on the battlefield…

But even so, he couldn’t die yet. So he dragged his heavy feet over to his Juggernaut, which had been remaining on standby, when…

“…Mm?”

…he spotted something amid the rubble a short distance away. A toppled-over Scavenger…