86 - Volume 10 - Chapter 4.3

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When they died, the Eighty-Six didn’t get any gravestones or leave their names anywhere. This meant Personal Marks were incredibly pointless. At least, that’s how Shin saw it, but people did want to decorate themselves that way. They probably knew this was a meaningless symbol since there would be no one to see or remember them, but they did so anyway.

The city ruins were covered by a layer of snow that had fallen the previous day. In one corner of it was a cathedral with a broken spire. In front of it, Shin found a battered Juggernaut. As he looked down at the Personal Mark emblazoned upon its crushed armor, a thought crossed his mind.

This wasn’t one of his unit’s Juggernauts. Its armor was tattered and ruined from being buried under the snow and exposed to the sun and rain. Within the cockpit’s cheap Bakelite seat was a skeletal corpse covered in a discolored field uniform.

Its skull was nowhere to be seen. There was no silver dog tag dangling from its broken cervical vertebrae, which meant this was an Eighty-Six. Of course, Shin already knew this was an Eighty-Six’s body. He also knew whose body it was.

“…”

The Juggernaut’s half-faded Personal Mark was that of a headless skeleton shouldering a sword. Like a ghost wandering the battlefield even after death, in search of its missing head.

Some oddly cold part of Shin’s mind noted that it almost felt like some kind of ironic prank being played on him.

Shin didn’t know what he’d had in mind when he drew this Personal Mark on his unit. Maybe this really was his idea of an ironic sting directed at him, but Shin had to doubt if he’d even cared enough to do that.

But even so, at the very end, he’d called for him.

Shin.

Hearing that voice linger in his ears, Shin squinted. He soundlessly stepped down from the broken Juggernaut leg he was standing on. He knew there was nothing left here, but he felt like he should at least bury him… No. He wanted to bury him. Even if he couldn’t dig him a grave, he wanted to return him to the soil. And then…

He unconsciously reached out, touching the Personal Mark. He’d promised Alice and his first squadron’s members that he’d carry all those who’d died with him. He would remember them all and carry them until he reached his final destination.

And while he wasn’t one of them, he felt like he should take him, too.

The Juggernaut’s armor was made of flimsy aluminum alloy. It was said that an aircraft’s exterior, which was likewise made from flimsy aluminum, could be cut with a military knife. In which case, once he’d used the knife to remove some of it off, he could use his assault rifle’s bayonet to cut it off, and—

“Pi.”

“…Oh, it’s you.”

Apparently, it’d come looking for him. Upon seeing this old Scavenger—Fido—draw close, Shin put the knife away and stood up. They’d gotten split up during the previous day’s battle, but apparently, it’d found him one way or another.

It approached him with noisy, cluttered steps as Shin looked across the snowy street, where his Juggernaut was sitting, and said:

“Sorry, my Juggernaut’s out of energy. Resupply it. It’s out of ammo, too.”

“Pi.”

The fighting had ended the previous day, but they were still in the contested zones. Being stuck in a situation where he couldn’t fight was a situation he wanted to escape as soon as possible.

“And when you’re done—” Shin was about to give more orders, but then he blinked in surprise as he realized something.

Scavengers were garbage-collecting units meant to gather the ruins of Legion and Juggernauts after battle. And they had burners and cutters for slicing metals so they could round up large pieces of wreckage.

Most Scavengers simply cut them into pieces and carried them back to recycling reactors, but this oddly smart, old-model one might just be capable of…

“Fido. Can you cut this off? I just want to take this bit back with me,” Shin asked, poking his thumb in the direction of the Personal Mark.

He’d promised Alice he’d etch the dead’s names on shards of their units. But the truth was those were hard to come by after battles, so he usually made do with scraps of wood or metal he found.

But maybe, if Fido could cut off pieces of their armor for him…

“Pi!” Fido flashed its optical sensor.

“Go ahead, then.”

“Pi.”

There were no Legion nearby, and the animals wouldn’t take any interest in such a dried corpse. It was winter; the herbivores were feeble from lack of food and served as easy prey for carnivores. A skeleton that had lost all its flesh had no value to a hungry predator.

First, Shin had Fido resupply his unit. He stomped through the snow under the broken Juggernaut, followed by his faithful Scavenger. Fido cut off the optical mark easily enough, but burying the body took longer than he expected. Digging up the frozen soil with his bayonet was quite difficult.

In the end, Fido couldn’t stand to see him toil any longer (or so it seemed) and helped him out, and the two of them covered up the hole with a small, unimpressive mound. The snow had finished falling last night, and the sky was clear, but the wind was still chillingly cold.

Shin leaned against Fido’s container, which it had positioned so as to protect him from the wind. He sipped on some hot water he’d made from boiling some snow as he took a break, and then he got to his feet as the sun set early into the winter sky.

“Pi.”

After confirming that Shin had gotten enough rest, Fido got to its feet.

“Yeah, let’s get moving,” Shin said, gazing into its round optical sensor.

Even though it was only a handful of bleached bones, he didn’t have the stamina or strength of will to get back in the swing of things after digging a grave, but…

“It’ll be trouble if we don’t get back before sundown… If we find any fragments of the captain’s and the rest of the squad’s rigs, we should bring them back, too.”