86 - Volume 11 - Chapter 5

START OF THE LEGION WAR

When the Empyre made its dekleration of war and the Leejun attacked, Father and Uncle Karlstahl went to the battelfeeld.

Would Father come home tonight?

Would Uncle Karlstahl be with him?

Standing in her large estate’s spacious entrance hall, little Lena stood with her favorite dolly, awaiting her father’s return.

“Claude. Do everything your mother and brother tell you, okay? Henry, take care of your mother and Claude.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah, Dad. I’ll handle it.”

Claude waved at his father, seeing him off as he left to the battelfeeld. His other hand was clasping his mother’s hand, and his brother stood at his side, also waving good-bye to their father.

The front was falling back with blistering speed. They sent in more and more soldiers, but there was no stopping the advance of the Empire’s autonomous combat drones—the Legion.

“The 1st Armored Division has been wiped out. Those Legion things, they’re monsters…!”

“We can’t get in touch with the infantry detachment that went out to cover for us—they probably got wiped out. The surviving troops are all Colorata, but they fought bravely for our country.”

Hearing his comrade say those words between his teeth, Karlstahl had a thought cross his mind.

Aah. Do you not realize it, Václav?

Colorata.

You’ve already classified them as different from the Alba.

His parents and big brother weren’t watching anything but the news. Left without his favorite cartoons, Shin was displeased. His beloved big brother wouldn’t play with him as much, either. But what made him even more anxious were the severe expressions they wore when they watched the news.

He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he could tell it was something bad.

“There was an evacuashion notiss to places near the border. That means, hmm… It’s dangerous here, so we have to run. We need to pack, so take only what’s important. A change of clothes and only one toy. The one you like most. Okay, Theo?”

“Okay.”

“Tohru, we’ll be leaving. Say good-bye to the sea and the ship.”

“I will, Grandpa.”

Leaning out of the bus meant for evacuating the border areas, Tohru waved at the familiar sights of the sea and his grandfather’s ship. Thinking, all the while, that he’d probably be back in a day or two.

There were lots of that poster plastered around town. Every day, there was more of them. Her father told her they were for re-crewting soldiers.

As she walked through the streets, with her father holding her hand, Anju pondered that there was more of them than there were the other day.

The news reports only reflected a worsening state of the war. Having had his after-breakfast coffee, Aldrecht whispered to himself when he made sure his daughter wasn’t listening.

“The Republic military’s taking one loss after another.”

And his wife replied, with a shaking voice.

“What’s going to happen to us next…? To this country…?”

The fires of war were still distant from the secondary capital, Charité, and its satellite cities, but the Kukumila household was already packing to prepare. As she stood by her sister, who helped their parents pull out their travel trunk and fill it up, Kurena felt like they were going out on a trip. She ran around, dancing, dressed in her prettiest one-piece dress and favorite hat.

The school dorms only had one television in the dining hall. As Raiden anxiously watched the news broadcast that kept playing on it, the old woman running the school stood behind him. Raiden didn’t really know what the news was talking about, but he could tell something bad was happening, and he looked up at the old woman uneasily.

Were his parents, who lived rather far from here, still all right? What about his friends?

“Nan…”

Her wrinkled hands rested on his shoulders. Hands larger than his own, the hands of an adult.

“Don’t worry. Your home, your mother and father, are safe.”

The voice of the lady giving the news was getting grimmer. It became angrier and more provoked, like it was looking for someone to blame for the situation.

Watching it every day, Shiden got carried away by its arguments. Who’s at fault? What’s at fault? She didn’t really know why, but the answer was clear.

“The Empyre’s guilty, that’s who!” Shiden said innocently.

“Yeah! The Empyre’s at fault!” Her little sister mimicked her simplemindedly.

The front lines were continuing to retreat. Refugee trucks arrived at the town Kaie and her family lived in. When the refugees got off the truck, their neighbors eyed them with hostility one wouldn’t expect them to direct at their countrymen. Like they were nuisances. Outsiders.

The eyes of people who were starved for someone to thrust all their anxiety and fear onto—and had just found them.

Traitors.

The rock that smashed their porch’s light had that word scribbled onto it. Someone who learned that House Penrose were former Imperial nobles—descendants of the enemy—likely threw it.

Cowering behind the door, Annette watched on as her father cleaned up the glass with a severe expression on his face.

A mound was piled up before Karlstahl. It was made up of corpses of their army’s soldiers, staked together like sandbags. They weren’t even delivered enough body bags to go around, and it wouldn’t be long before they would have to discard the remains of their fallen soldiers.

One surviving soldier, lying as still and powerless as one of the corpses, whispered flatly.

“Why us…?”

Why is it only us?

All those corpses were of argent-haired, silver-eyed Alba. This wasn’t to say the Colorata weren’t dying, but the ratio of Colorata to Alba in the overall population was too lopsided, so there were more dead Alba. But in terms of their relative populations, there was no real difference in the percent of dead Alba to dead Colorata.

But the only corpses one could see on this mound were those of Alba. And no matter what battlefield one went to, the corpses were always those of Alba and not Colorata.

The soldier whispered. Flatly, but feverishly.

It’s their fault. They don’t die in battle. They kill us and probably laugh all the while. Descendants of the Empire. Scions of the tyrants. Them—those who are not one of us.

“…Those damn Colorata.”

It was oddly loud outside. His mother shifted the curtain, peering outside, and then turned around, her face pale.

“Dustin… You can’t look outside today. No matter what,” she told him.

Soldiers in the same uniform as his father’s forced their way into his home for some reason, pinning Claude and his mother to the floor. Claude’s father, who’d returned home gravely injured, watched on, fighting back tears that fell from his red eyes.

“Henry!” Claude reached out desperately.

The pair of eyes he was looking at—his brother’s silvery eyes, just like Claude’s—averted their gaze.

Upon returning from the battlefield, Karlstahl was ordered to guard convoys of the Colorata. Between those missions, Karlstahl found himself standing stock-still in the military’s headquarters, staring up at a statue of Saint Magnolia.

She who led the revolution three hundred years ago, only to be thrown into prison by the Republic’s citizens, where she died.

Because she wasn’t a commoner.

She’d innocently fought against discrimination, nobly won, but then wasn’t even counted among the commoners when she did. They saw her as one of the evil, vulgar oppressors—for no reason other than her being a princess of the hated royal house.

Yes. In the end, to the citizens, Saint Magnolia was nothing more than an outsider who was not one of them.