86 - Volume 10 - Chapter 5.4

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That said, Fido was the one that handled removing the metallic fragments from the Juggernauts, and Shin simply accepted them. This meant Saiki had nothing to actually do there.

If the corpses were left, he could at least bury them (Saiki had brought a shovel in his Juggernaut to that end), but sadly, those had already been taken away by the Legion, along with most of the Juggernauts’ wreckage.

The Legion employed the Tausendfüßler, a unit that prowled the battlefield for supplies and wreckage they could recycle. They were large, metallic centipedes capable of crushing an unarmed human, and they worked with enough efficiency and diligence to clean out this battlefield in the space of a single night.

He thought to at least gather some flowers for them, but this deep forest didn’t have any presentable flowers for him to collect. So Saiki went about the nearby woods in search of flowers, only for his eyes to settle on something else.

Soft, fragile creatures fluttering their white wings under the gentle spring sunlight, dancing in the gentle breeze.

Butterflies.

“…And…here.”

Cupping his palms, he swiftly caught one, before coming to. Turning around, he found Shin staring at him. There was a hint of exasperation to his expressionless eyes.

Hmm.

Caught in an awkward position, Saiki tried to feign calmness.

“You wanna catch one, too?” he asked with fake composure.

“No,” Shin refused in an oddly childish manner, but then he realized how he sounded and averted his gaze. “You’re strange.”

“I wouldn’t mind if we were in the middle of battle, but hearing a kid like you say it ticks me off a little. Don’t go around calling people strange, would you?”

It almost felt like Shin was blind to how strange he himself was. With that said, Saiki opened his hand, releasing the butterfly. It fluttered upward, over the treetops. Crossing through the verdant canopy of the trees, it vanished into the blue spring sky.

“Didn’t you want it?” Shin asked, watching it fly off.

“Mm, well, you know.”

The small, white butterfly had disappeared into the sky and was already out of view. But even so, Saiki narrowed his eyes, as if trying to trace its flight.

“It might be one of them.”

Maybe it was one of the comrades who’d died the previous day.

“…?”

Ever so slightly, Shin’s expressionless face contorted dubiously. Saiki shrugged.

“They say butterflies stand for the souls of the dead. They’re blue because that’s the color of heaven. Have you ever heard that?”

Even with no one to teach it, all cultures, all people seemed to regard butterflies as a symbol of the afterlife.

“No… Do you believe in that?”

In God? And the afterlife?

There was a hint of distaste to Shin’s voice, making it clear he didn’t buy any of that. Smiling at the irony of a reaper not believing in heaven or hell, Saiki shook his head.

“I don’t really believe in heaven. If heaven exists after all the stuff we’ve seen, I’d be kind of annoyed. But the butterflies…”

The idea of them being the souls of the dead…

“…I guess I do believe in that.”

He naturally turned his gaze to the sky. The azure, almost-moist spring sky. People considered blue to be the color of heaven because they thought that beyond that blue expanse, at the bottom of that blue ocean he couldn’t even fathom, was a world of the dead.

“How were the kids in your internment camps? The ones who were smaller than you. The ones who were babies or toddlers when you first got sent there.”

Shin fell silent for a moment, seemingly thinking back to something. His silence lingered, as if he was suppressing the emotion that memory spurred up.

“They died.”

“Figures. It was the same in my camp, too. They all died.”

The internment camps were a difficult environment to live in. The Eighty-Six were thrown there and subjected to stress from heartless jeering and violence. These children’s guardians—their parents, siblings, and the other adults who were with them—were all sent out to fight on the battlefield or died from the forced labor. And on top of that, there was no medical treatment to speak of. As a result, infant mortality was incredibly high.

Toddlers and babies always die easily. It’s only in the modern day and with the development of medicine that most infants survive and grow to adulthood. But the internment camps lacked the grace of such medical treatment, and so most babies passed away in their first winter.

“Back in my camp, they all caught some kind of disease and died. No one could treat them, and they were afraid that it might spread to the adults… So all the little ones were locked up in an abandoned barracks on the outskirts of the camp.”

“…”

“Those babies, they…”

He could remember it. A silent barracks, devoid of the sound of weeping and moaning. And on its farthest wall…

“They drew butterflies on the walls. Everywhere their hands could reach, they just scribbled butterflies.”

In muddy, sandy colors. The internment camps were nothing but cattle sheds located outside the walls, and so there were no crayons for the children to doodle with. But Saiki could somehow imagine, perhaps hallucinate, those missing colors. The vibrant, dazzling shades of many butterflies drawn by countless infants. The color of their one, final dream.

“I mean, how would they know about butterflies? They were only infants, toddlers at best. No one could have taught them that. Yet they still drew butterflies.”

Perhaps unaware that butterflies symbolized souls…maybe they just saw a dream of themselves as butterflies, soaring away from this hell.

Seeing this convinced Saiki that butterflies must have been the souls of the deceased. When a person died, they became a butterfly. And so his long-dead conscripted parents, his elder brother and sister, and all their dead comrades…

“And us, too.”

He’d once heard of blue butterflies. They would live in the Republic’s land, albeit not in the turf of the Eighty-Sixth Sector. Somewhere in this world were beautiful butterflies that shone with a dazzling blue glow. Creatures that were the incarnations of the dead, clad in the colors of the afterlife.

But Saiki will likely never see them. Not even when he dies.

“I was sure I’d only be a butterfly. That even when I die, I’d only ever become one of those. With feeble wings and a fragile body, toyed with by the wind and battered by the rain. A butterfly that would probably fall before it could get far from my body.”

He might never see the beautiful world those children dreamed of. And still…

“But now it’s different. This place is different, because we have you.”

This place had a Reaper who would take those dead souls who could only become feeble butterflies, then bring them to where their wings couldn’t carry them. Farther than Saiki and his comrades could go if they’d died on their own. Shin could take them to places they’d never otherwise see.

At the edge of the forest, deep in the eastern contested zones, red flowers bloomed along the border against the Legion’s territories. And Shin could surely take them even beyond that crimson sight…

Shin returned his Juggernaut to its spot in the base’s hangar, but he stayed inside his canopy, breathing out a small sigh. Through his active optical screen, he could see Saiki disembark from his own Juggernaut and walk off with his usual light steps. He was shouldering an absurdly large shovel, which he’d stuffed into the cramped cockpit.

…Looking at him made Shin feel strange.

He’d kept away from people both so they wouldn’t close that distance and so he wouldn’t close it himself. But being with Saiki made him feel like he might be crossing that boundary without realizing it. Before he knew it, he wished to reach out to him, too.

But even if he did, everyone always left him behind.

“Handler One to First Platoon. Undertaker, do you read me?”

“Undertaker to Handler One. What’s up?”

Shin replied to the voice of a young, somewhat timid man speaking to him through the wireless. Most of the Handlers inside the walls wouldn’t Resonate with Shin through the Para-RAID. This one was especially cowardly and would only contact Shin by radio when he really had to.

As he waited for the Handler to speak up, Shin recalled that on paper, they were supposed to be in the middle of a patrol right now. Of course, they hadn’t gone on patrols for some time now, since it wasn’t necessary.

“I have the details for your next mission. We discovered a Legion advance position being built deep in the contested zones, adjacent to the Legion territories. The First Platoon is to mobilize all its forces and destroy the enemy.”

Shin raised an eyebrow. To push their front lines ahead and expand their territory, the Legion would construct these advance positions to form a foothold. Once they’d finished building it, they’d of course launch an attack. A large enough attack to break through the Eighty-Six.

As such, beating them to the punch and attacking before the position is complete—before they’re prepared to strike—is the correct course of action for the Republic and their defensive army, the Eighty-Six. However…

“Just the first platoon? Will we be receiving support from the second—or any other forces?”

The Legion were aware they could be attacked before their advance position was complete. They had units to guard allies and intercept enemies deployed around the point the Handler had designated. There were roughly two battalions. And while there weren’t any Löwe or Dinosauria there, there would definitely be Stier—anti-tank artillery types. A single squadron of Juggernauts would struggle to handle this alone.

“No… Command has decided that won’t be necessary.”

Shin heaved a deep sigh. It sounded like the Handler was cowering on the other side of the line, but Shin didn’t care. He had no reason to care. Facing two battalions of Legion with a squadron of less than twenty-four Juggernauts. This was, in other words—

“You’re telling us to go to our deaths. Is that it, Handler One?”