86 - Volume 12 - Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

GRANT OUR WISHES, HAIL MARY

A dozen or so rivers once flowed south of the Roginia River and were eventually unified to form the new Tataswa floodway. Its width reached three hundred kilometers at its widest point, and vast volumes of water ran through it.

This made it sufficient, if a bit cramped, for that creature.

It crossed the waters—littered with fallen leaves from the trees on the western and eastern banks, which, along with their delicate ripples, formed a fair twill-brocade pattern along the surface—and raised its head.

It had a long neck and a triangular head akin to a dragon’s, a crown-like horn decorating its peak. The ruler of the northern seas—a leviathan.

It gazed about the shores of the lake, indifferent to the humans swarming there. It turned its dragon-like head, its three peacock-colored eyes casting about.

The armored company pursuing the Hail Mary Regiment took in this sovereign’s unexpected appearance with stunned eyes. It stood seventy meters tall, which was small for leviathans of its race. But compared with the tiny humans, it was a giant, its appearance striking terror and despair into the hearts of all who saw it.

The remnants of the Hail Mary Regiment, who had been backed into a corner, froze up as their despair won over their fear. Several members of the armored company, who’d repressed their righteous anger and bloodlust through their well-trained strength of will and were awaiting the order to fire, failed to hide their panic at the sight of this creature.

They each pulled the trigger, and the staccato of heavy-machine-gun fire filled the area. Bullets powerful enough to tear a human in half stabbed into the leviathan’s transparent scales, only to be effortlessly deflected by the armored scales beneath them. This sovereign of the seas was capable of fighting supercarriers and high-speed cruisers with their forty-cm depth charge cannons. Mere 12.7 mm rounds were effectively useless against it.

But this was enough to make the creature realize they meant it harm.

The leviathan turned its three eyes to the armored company and parted its gigantic mouth. The next moment, a beam of blue flame swept through and burned the Vánagandrs. The heat ray effortlessly penetrated their turrets and fuselage, their binding ceramic, and the heavy metal that formed their composite armor. It detonated the shells inside the turret, making each of the Vánagandrs burst into flame one by one.

A company of sixteen units, wiped out in one sweeping attack.

The leviathan looked down on the burning metallic vehicles emotionlessly for a moment. Once it saw no one else was moving, it sank back into the brocade-like waters of the new Tataswa floodway.

The only ones left behind were the petrified survivors of the Hail Mary Regiment. After a considerable pause, they finally let out their held breaths.

“It…saved us…?” Noele whispered to herself, dumbfounded.

Her subjects reacted to her words.

“It saved us…?”

“It protected us. That monster, it protected us!”

It was the only way they could interpret what had happened. That large, terrifying creature appeared just as they were cornered. And it saved them by punishing only the Federacy army soldiers who pursued them, like it had come to rescue them.

“It saved us. It did it because we’re not wrong, because we’re right—that’s why it protected us…!”

Mele watched the water the leviathan disappeared into, dumbstruck. The majesty of the dragon tyrant of the deep blue left a shocking impression on his heart that was akin to divine revelation. That terrifying, otherworldly, gigantic creature. That monster arrived…to save the princess.

In that case, the monster wasn’t simply there to protect them. That dragon was a sword, a weapon for the princess—it was divine will, divine might.

“—Based on the footage we have, the leviathan that appeared is a Fisara, a smaller breed of Musukura.”

As commander of the Open Sea clans, Ishmael was naturally called in to explain the situation. The officers stood in the large meeting room of the second northern front’s integrated headquarters, with Ishmael standing calmly before them. As the fleet commander’s “son,” he’d spent his whole life grappling with the raging seas and leviathans. To him, Imperial nobles weren’t daunting in the slightest.

“Every year, ice floes drift to the Fleet Countries’ shores from the northern sea. Once in a while, leviathan younglings—mostly of the smaller Monokera species or the medium-sized Leuca—wander onto the ice floes and drift with them. When that happens, fleets of leviathans that usually wouldn’t approach our waters swim over in search of their young. It probably appeared in the Federacy through the Zinori port and then swam up the Hiyano River.”

The Hiyano River flowed from west to east along the northern part of the Womisam basin, and then it meandered north and connected with the Empire’s only northern military seaport of Zinori. The port bordered the Fleet Countries’ territorial waters, so a leviathan entering Zinori and swimming upstream along the Hiyano River wasn’t impossible.

“But those things have a sense of territory, too, so they wouldn’t attack humans on their own turf unless provoked. It’ll return home once it finds its youngling, so we can probably just keep an eye on it from a distance until it does.”

“It’s looking for its young…” One field officer leaned forward. “Can’t we use that to our advantage? If we capture the youngling, we could have its parent attack the Legion. Or we could raise the youngling and train it to obey orders.”

Ishmael fell silent for a long moment.

“…Don’t you think we’d have done that by now if it was possible?”

In the eleven years of the Legion War, and even before that.

“If it was possible, we’d have used it against the Empire or the United Kingdom… We’ve tried, but it never worked. That’s why the Fleet Countries were vassals to the Empire and United Kingdom for centuries.”

“…True enough,” the staff officer said and went quiet.

“Right? Besides, even if it is a young one, it’s still a leviathan. Even the younglings of smaller breeds like the Monokera are much larger and stronger than humans. They have sawlike organs capable of cutting through metal plates. And a Musukura youngling would be way too much to handle. The moment anyone approached it, they’d be burnt to a crisp… And to begin with…”

Ishmael cracked a strained smile. The Open Sea clans failed to hunt down the leviathans, but the United Kingdom’s Dragon Fang Mountain and the Alliance’s holy Mount Wyrmnest did derive their name from another creature.

“…The earth wyrms of the land were driven to extinction, weren’t they? And just like we can’t use radars or fighter planes anymore, neither wyrms nor leviathans are as menacing when they’re outside their natural territory.”

In other words, they weren’t adapted to fighting the Legion, the true rulers of land warfare.

The same news reached the Strike Package, who were preparing for an advance operation near the new Tataswa floodway. During one of the scheduled meetings held between the commanders of the Federacy, Alliance, and United Kingdom to ensure there was no friction among the different countries’ soldiers, Vika’s representative, Zashya, said this:

“If that is the case, there might be no need to actively hunt it down, since the leviathan and Legion could end up attacking each other. The Legion don’t distinguish between people and animals, and if the Legion were to attack the Fisara, it would retaliate.”

Just like how the Fisara’s heat ray was able to melt the Vánagandrs, it could just as easily destroy Löwe. And on the other hand, even a leviathan’s thick armor scales couldn’t withstand a direct hit from tank shells capable of penetrating sixty-centimeter-thick iron plates.

“I’m not sure about that…,” Olivia said, frowning. “Would the Legion really recognize the Fisara as a threat? They do indiscriminately attack any warm-blooded creature that exceeds a certain size regardless of if they’re human or animal, but a leviathan is fifty meters tall. It might actually be too large.”

The Legion were made to be weapons for massacre. Their targets were typically enemy soldiers—in other words, humans. They shouldn’t feel driven to kill animals. Still, since they were inflexible machines, the accuracy of their distinction abilities was deliberately lowered so that whenever they were unsure if they were faced with a human or an animal, they would default to simply killing the target. That said, when faced with a clearly nonhuman animal, with a distinctly different heat signature and size, it would stand to reason they wouldn’t recognize it as a target.

“As far as I know, the Legion only kill wolves and wild goats. I’ve never heard of them killing cats or rabbits. So the opposite should probably be true, too. They wouldn’t attack an animal that’s too big to be human.”

Grethe asked them to wait and turned on her RAID Device. After a short exchange, she turned off the Resonance.

“…I asked Captain Nouzen and a few of the others, and they said that while they’ve seen the Legion kill wolves, sheep, and pigs, they did not appear to kill large animals like horses or cows.”

Much like supplies in cities, abandoned livestock remained around battlefields and were often seen near the Republic’s Eighty-Sixth Sector. So the Eighty-Six were familiar with how the Legion reacted to them.

“But…as a matter of fact, when we fought them in the Fleet Countries…,” Zashya started saying, but then she stopped herself. “No. It was the leviathan that initiated the attack in the Mirage Spire. And neither the Morpho nor the Noctiluca ever engaged it in combat. Which means…”

Grethe nodded. She had come to the same conclusion. Just as she’d expected, things weren’t going to be that easy.

“The leviathan only counterattacks when provoked on land, and the Legion don’t seem to attack large animals. We can’t expect them to fight each other and make the Strike Package’s battle any easier.”

After ordering the Ameise and Rabe to carefully investigate the situation in the northern front, the commander unit made its decision.

<<Firefly to all units. The use of the dirty bomb is deemed to be the action of a renegade enemy unit acting on its own.>>

This wasn’t some tactic of the northern front army, but an accident of sorts caused by deserting soldiers. And the nuclear fuel the renegade unit possessed could be utilized based on the commander unit’s knowledge from before it died. The commander unit considered taking it from them and putting it to use—but their protection prohibited them from both creating and employing nuclear weapons, which included dirty bombs.

That meant the renegade unit lost any potential value it might have had, and since the Legion were resistant to radiation, they became nothing but another target for elimination. However, for the northern front’s army, the renegade unit was a threat. Since the army was human and susceptible to the radiation, they had to go to the trouble of hunting them down, taking them into custody, and recovering the nuclear fuel.

This meant that the renegade unit effectively bought the Legion time to prepare.

<<Recommencing offensive operations. Apply pressure to the northern front, search for the unit possessing the dirty bomb, and interrupt any enemy reconnaissance operations into Legion territory. Warning: Strike Package presence in the second northern front has been confirmed.>>

That was the second boon the renegade unit granted the Legion. Their intelligence told them the Strike Package was poised to take part in an operation to seize a production plant in the western front, but the renegade unit had exposed their presence in the second northern front instead. They were to secretly take part in an advance operation here, but they’d been drawn out early, exposing the Federacy’s attempt at deception.

No Face’s unit had made preparations to intercept the Strike Package, but thankfully, the same was possible here in the second northern front, where they were able to force the Federacy into an advance operation and set a trap accordingly.

<<The unit under Grilse One’s command is to remain in shutdown mode. Attempt to capture the Strike Package and high-priority target Báleygr.>>

The Hail Mary Regiment may have destroyed the armored unit pursuing them, but they couldn’t go back to the warehouses they’d hid in previously, since their position had been exposed. And so the surviving members sneaked through the forest, avoiding search parties, and arrived at the ruins of a village that still had some intact stone buildings.

SNEENIKEIT—the name of the village was just barely visible on the faded signpost, the letters eroded from exposure to the elements.

When Noele and her unit members finally stopped to rest in the assembly hall, the sole structure with an intact roof, she was unable to contain her excitement. The only survivors were a single company made up of Noele’s subjects and Ninha’s subordinates, and the only nuclear weapon they had left was that held by the main force.

But the leviathan defeated their foes and saved them. It acknowledged their justice.

She wasn’t wrong. She still wasn’t. She didn’t have to give in to the terrifying thought that she’d made a mistake.

Mele returned after hiding the truck carrying the nuclear weapon in a warehouse at the edge of town. As he approached her, unable to contain his own excitement, Noele felt herself freeze up. They’d spent over a day fighting the Federacy’s pursuit, covered in mud and sweat, and she had no hot water to wash off with. She was now painfully conscious of this fact. But moreover, when she thought they were done for and Mele stepped up to protect her, she nearly blurted out her feelings for him. He didn’t realize, did he?

Noele was a noble’s daughter, and Mele was a serf. There was a class difference between them. So she resolved to never tell him, to forever keep the secret of her fleeting, sweet first love for him locked away in her heart.

“Mele, er…,” Noele stammered, her hands fidgeting.

“You’re amazing, Princess!” Mele said, grasping her palms, still ignorant of her feelings. “It saved us. God saved us, because you were right all along!”

His eyes were full of complete trust and genuine worship. Those blue eyes looked straight at her, from nearly point-blank range, with something akin to passion. Noele did everything she could to restrain her discomposure, feeling all the while like she was on cloud nine.

“—Yes!”

Mele acknowledges me. He believes in me! I’m so happy, so happy, so happy…!

And she wanted to answer his trust.

“We’ll continue the operation,” she said excitedly. “We’ll take the nuclear weapon, too. Next time, it’ll work—”

“Right, the leviathan is on our side!” Kiahi cut in. “We can have it help us kill the Legion, too!”

“Huh?” Noele was dumbstruck by his unexpected words.

I want to use the nuclear weapon… The flame of our hometown that made me and everyone else I love happy… The leviathan proved I was right, so the nuclear weapon should work, too…!

But Mele nodded firmly in agreement.

“You’re right. God chose the Princess. We can have the leviathan beat the Legion for us!”

“This dragon god is more suitable than a stupid bucket.” Rilé nodded a few times in agreement. “It’d be easier to let it fight our battles for us.”

“And when I get near that nuclear stuff, I get the taste of metal in my mouth,” Milha said, grimacing. “And it’s not like I licked anything… It’s creepy.”

“What?! That’s scary!” Yono cowered like always.

“Don’t worry, the leviathan won’t make you feel like that. Right, Princess?!” Otto laughed it off in his usual carefree manner.

They all directed smiles as bright and frank as a clear summer sky at Noele, who began by silently watching the others, then gradually started to feel that maybe they were right.

Yes, perhaps it really was for the best. The leviathan was like some kind of God that had swooped in to save them, so maybe relying on it would be a good idea.

Mele repeated it feverishly, with that same look of trust and worship.

“That’s right, the princess was chosen by God! That leviathan is the princess’s sword!”

I was chosen. Yes, I—I was right the whole time. So I have to be confident. I shouldn’t doubt or worry or think too hard about anything.

Noele tried to tell herself that, but she couldn’t shake off her anxiety. She felt like she should choose the nuclear weapons in the end, because she was more familiar with them. Or rather…she didn’t know anything about the leviathan, except that it saved them.

Could they really rely on something they didn’t understand?

Everything—the stupid renegades getting their mission postponed, seeing the Federacy’s predicament, losing part of the operation area because of the dirty bomb’s radiation, the appearance of a leviathan, and the Hail Mary Regiment getting away.

It had all finally gotten to Shin. He was at his limit.

He sat in the shared office they’d sectioned off in the barracks, leaning his back against a sofa tiredly. Seeing Shin look up at the ceiling, completely still, Raiden told him:

“Well, you know, you tried your hardest.”

“…I can’t take this anymore,” Shin grumbled like a child.

“You want some coffee? I can go brew a fresh pot,” Raiden said, a sardonic smile on his lips.

“I wanna see Lena…” Shin kept going, his voice listless.

“Whoa…”

Shin was so dispirited, he was actually voicing his wants in front of other people. He really had it bad.

“You’re suffering from severe Lena deficiency, aren’t you, Shin?” Anju asked with a strained smile.

“On top of Lena not being here, it’s one idiotic development after another. I can see how you’d run out of batteries… Can’t blame ya. You’re allowed to be down for the count today.”

Shin tried to keep up appearances, be it maintaining the unit’s morale, preventing Lena from worrying, or simply not damaging her good name. But with things this absurd, he could only keep his cool for so long. Raiden was fed up with the situation, too.

But then Kurena asked with a curious tilt of her head:

“Why not use the Para-RAID to Resonate with Lena, then? Maybe talking to her a little will cheer you up.”

“Hey, Kurena, cut that out,” Raiden scolded her.

“Is this your idea of payback, Kurena?” Anju asked.

“Huh?”

“He doesn’t want Lena to see him when he’s at his lowest.” Raiden glared at her. “He’s been staying cool around her until now. Keep his masculine dignity in mind, would ya?”

“…If you care so much about my pride, could you at least not talk about it right in front of me?” Shin said grumpily.

“Shin, that’s on you for sulking in the common room,” Anju noted.

“I see, I see.” Kurena nodded a few times in understanding. “I’ll Resonate with her, then!”

“Huh?” Shin jumped off the sofa in surprise.

“Kurena, what?!” Anju stared at her in shock.

But Kurena ignored them and turned on the RAID Device. Honestly, what she was doing wasn’t allowed, and for all they knew, Lena didn’t have her RAID Device on to begin with.

“—Ah, Lena.”

But as it turned out, Lena did have it on, because the Resonance connected. Lena replied, her surprised voice like a silver bell. Behind her, Kurena could hear TP, whom Lena had taken along to the medical facility.

“Kurena? Is something the matter?”

“Yeah, actually, Shin is suffering from severe Lena deficiency right now.”

“Eh?”

“Hey, Kurena!” Raiden called out.

But Kurena ignored him and tossed the RAID Device over to Shin with an unconcerned expression. Despite having frozen up in surprise, Shin somehow caught the silver ring.

“…You’ll regret this, Kurena,” he said grimly.

“Not my problem. This is just payback.”

Yes, payback. She was allowed a little payback. The guy who turned her down was moping around and thinking about another girl right in front of her. So she was allowed a little bit of payback against her bully of a big brother.

There was no helping the fact that the Para-RAID was connected or that Kurena had spilled the beans to Lena, so Shin put on the RAID Device as he left the office and walked to the adjacent room. Watching him leave, Kurena proudly puffed up her conspicuous chest.

“I wish he’d pay more attention to me, you know.”

She may have decided to drop out of the running, but she still liked him.

“You’ve gotten strong, Kurena,” Raiden said, looking terrified.

“I can’t stay his baby sister forever, you know!”

“Big Brother looked a bit pitiful back there, so having you act stronger balances things out,” Anju said.

“Right?! He’s pitiful!”

She spoke loudly, despite knowing that the wall they’d used to section the living room off from the office was thin and that Shin could probably hear her. In fact, Raiden suspected she was saying it with that in mind. He couldn’t help but sympathize with Shin. He wished Theo would come back already, because he had a feeling the girls were getting out of hand.

Anju and Kurena’s chuckling filled the room like the chiming of bells.

“Actually, this brings back memories of the Eighty-Sixth Sector.”

“Yes, Lena was far away, and we only heard her voice while we were relaxing, just like that.”

But then Anju’s sky-blue eyes wavered in sweet, pained reminiscence. The fate they’d accepted and even, on some level, wished for, was now far away. The comrades they’d fought with for so long, the people who were always by their side, were now gone.

“We’ve changed a lot since then… I never would have imagined Shin would feel comfortable acting depressed in front of us. And you too, Kurena. Back then, I never would have imagined you’d Resonate with Lena.”

Kurena blinked a few times. “You’re right, come to think of it.”

She chuckled. She felt a wave of nostalgia, mixed with a hint of regret and sadness, but also pride.

“Yeah. I can’t stay a baby sister forever, either.”

She couldn’t let the scars of her childhood haunt her forever. She couldn’t keep being afraid to walk forward toward an unknowable future.

They then heard the doorknob click. They turned around, expecting to find Shin, but it was Frederica.

“I could hear you from outside. Did something happen?”

It wasn’t that Anju didn’t want to tell her, but she felt it was inappropriate to explain to Frederica memories that she didn’t share with them.

“Yes, well, let’s just say Kurena’s maturing,” she replied with a chuckle.

“Yeah, that. And Shin being worn out for once.”

Raiden expected Frederica to complain about their answers, but instead…

“…So Shinei, too, is weary,” she whispered with a heavy expression.

Raiden took a deep breath and asked her a question. His smile waned as he looked straight into the small girl’s eyes.

“What about you? Is anything wrong? You look like something’s been on your mind since the last operation… What happened?”

Frederica trembled. She tried to restrain her surging emotions, but she couldn’t hold them back, and large tears began running down her smooth cheeks. The walls were thin…so she couldn’t quite say the words she wanted, for fear of others hearing her.

“Forgive me. For being unable to join you on your last operation. Unable to fight alongside you.”

She’d forced all the sacrifices onto Raiden and the others—and that one-eyed general. And in the meantime, she’d simply sat back, safe and sound.

Raiden cracked a bitter smile. “…That’s what you’re beating yourself up over?”

“No, it is not. I am a Mascot, and yet—”

The empress of this country, and yet—

“I must remain on the defensive. I can do nothing. I’ve done nothing.”

“…I see.”

Raiden didn’t deny it or say she was wrong. Neither did Kurena or Anju, who listened to her in silence. They could tell she was hurting, because being powerless hurt.

“You know you don’t have to be impatient, but you can’t help feeling it anyway, right?” Anju asked.

“…Aye.”

“But that doesn’t mean you should push yourself,” Kurena said.

“Ugh…”

“Stop trying to carry so many burdens all the time. You’re already a Mascot.”

Already an empress.

“If you tried to carry any more weight, we’d lose our place, you know?”

“…Are you…” Frederica hiccuped in between her tears. “Are you telling me to forsake you…?”

Raiden frowned, and Frederica continued, sobbing.

“Viktor told me something. He said that if I lack the power to protect you, I’d be better off forsaking you than trying to protect you for naught.”

“That idiot…”

“Am I not allowed to wish to help you if I’m powerless to do so…?”

Raiden scratched his head, his expression sour. Did that stupid prince have to be so harsh to a kid?

If she was pretending to be a saint and reaching out to save people, even though she lacked the power and resolve to help them, and if she was going to play the victim after failing to become a savior and abandoning the ones she wished to help, she would indeed have been better off never trying at all, but…

“Wanting to save someone isn’t a bad thing. He just meant you shouldn’t try to do things you’re not capable of or take responsibility for things you don’t need to shoulder. That idiot, Vika, he…”

In all likelihood, he didn’t mean anything that admirable, but. “I mean, he’s a prince. He has to save everyone and take responsibility for all those he fails to save. That’s a weight he can carry because he’s a prince and he’s prepared, but it’s not easy. I think he was just trying to tell you to not try to carry it, too.”

“…”

“I know that admitting you’re powerless is hard and painful in its own way, but…don’t force yourself to do things you can’t.”

Otherwise, her attempt to escape her own powerlessness would just lead her to take up responsibilities too heavy for her to bear.

Frederica finally nodded.

“…Yes.”

“And if he said it the way you described it, he went too far, so don’t be afraid to talk back to him. Want me to speak to him for you?”

“N-no, no need for that! I am no child!” Frederica shook her small head.

She then thought over Raiden’s words and nodded again.

“He did speak out of turn, but I will answer him with my own words. I’ve no need of your meddling overprotectiveness, Big Brother.”

“Oh-ho.” Raiden hummed, impressed and amused.

“However, hmm.” Her upturned crimson eyes glanced toward him.

It was the unconscious, natural gesture of a younger sister fawning on her older brother.

“I would be allowed to get back at him by putting a caterpillar plush in his boot, yes?”

“…”

Raiden wasn’t sure if it was her conscience that led her to suggest a plush rather than a real caterpillar, because the bugs were out of season, or simply because she was too afraid to touch one.

“…So long as you won’t cry when he dissects the plush, go ahead.”

Due to the thin partitions in the barracks module, Shin could hear Frederica’s conversation with Raiden and the others from the adjacent room.

Spare her some attention.

Apparently, there was no need for that anymore. As he listened to Lena share all sorts of interesting things that happened to her in the medical facility, Shin took a deep breath of relief.

“…That girl.”

The suburban medical center Yuuto was in was used by civilians as well, meaning the entrance wasn’t as restricted as a military hospital’s. As they gazed down through the large window in the lounge overlooking the front yard, which civilians living nearby used in place of a park, Amari muttered something, her dark-brown eyes narrowing grimly.

“That’s the girl who took away the kid who came to visit us.”

Yuuto walked over and glanced in the same direction. The front yard was surrounded by well-groomed trees, and standing under their leafless branches was a girl with long, flowing beige-colored hair, appearing lost in thought.

“The kid said she was an Eighty-Six, too. She was adopted into the same house and was his big sister now, so she came to pick him up.”

“…What is she doing here?”

Eighty-Six who hadn’t enlisted were rounded up and reexamined by the military. A few of them had supposedly run off and were currently missing, so that girl was likely one of them… But if so, why come to this medical center, where the army might catch her? Needless to say, neither Yuuto nor Amari knew her.

“Say, Yuuto…,” Amari whispered suddenly. “Do you think the Federacy military really just wants to take them under protection?”

“…Yeah.”

Honestly, Yuuto didn’t think the military was all that trustworthy. He might have believed them before the large-scale offensive, but not with the way they were conducting themselves now. To begin with, the Strike Package always had a propaganda aspect to it, established to buy sympathy from civilians and foreign countries. Many in the military saw the Eighty-Six only as very skilled hunting dogs. But now they weren’t even trying to hide it anymore—just like that military police officer.

Soon, the Federacy military would no longer bother hiding its blemishes. It would be in no state to maintain even a facade of composure or humanitarianism.

“I’ll go ask her what she wants…,” said Yuuto. “We can call the military police later, right?”

“Want me to go?”

“No.”

Amari had only recently healed. Besides, Yuuto was a battalion commander, and she was his subordinate. And more than anything, she was a younger girl. Amari would likely get mad if he told her that to her face, but the fact still remained. He didn’t want her to have to brave any dangers if he could avoid it.

“I’ll go.”

When Theo went to the PX to get lunch, he found Annette sunken into one of the cheap-looking table sets. One corner of the PX was a food court with several Federacy fast-food chains. He spotted her lying face down on a table absent of any food, and having seen her, he couldn’t leave her alone.

“What is it, Annette? Too hungry to move?” Theo asked jokingly, but Annette ignored him.

She simply kept her face buried in the table and grumbled:

“You can just call me a traitor and be done with it.”

“Huh? Why?” Theo asked, honestly baffled.

Annette rested a cheek against the table and answered, despite her posture making it hard to talk.

“The Republic betrayed you again, and I’m one of those Republic traitors.”

“We never believed in the Republic, so it can’t betray us, and even if what it did was betrayal, that doesn’t make you a traitor. You just did— What do you call it? Exposure? Indictment? Yeah, indictment.”

Either way, it was a legitimate thing to do. He didn’t know the rules of the Republic military, which Annette was a part of, but she did the right, ethical thing.

“…It’s too late for an indictment.”

For the children who had been turned into wiretaps, this came ten years too late.

“I should have realized it sooner, much sooner… Research into the Para-RAID had only just begun when I joined the army, but there must have been some army documents, something involving the Para-RAID, some old records. If I’d looked at that, I’d have figured it out…!”

Maybe she could have saved them before things got to this point.

“…I see.”

She might have been able to do it, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. And since she couldn’t…

“So…won’t you? Won’t you call me a traitor?”

In place of those young children who weren’t allowed to blame anyone.

Theo grimaced.

“Like hell I will. I mean, I know I say some awful things in the heat of the moment, but I do regret them and learn from my mistakes, you know.”

From the strength of his tone, Annette could tell there must have been some history she wasn’t aware of, but she didn’t think asking about it would do either of them any good.

“Right… Sorry.”

“But I do get it. Sometimes, being the one getting blamed feels easier.”

He wasn’t going to fault anyone here, he didn’t want to say these kinds of things, and to begin with, they weren’t close enough for her to ask something like this of him. But then again, he didn’t feel comfortable just pushing her away altogether. Theo paused for thought, and after failing to come up with the right response, he said this instead:

“Remember that fried-bread stand you told me about back in the hospital? I tried it, and it really was good. The minced meat, the onions and the pepper, that fragrance they put on it, and those weird spices… It all seriously came together.”

“…Right.”

“And you know, the café chain over there, they have a delicious nuts-and-chocolate tart.”

With her face still pressed against the table, she raised one eye to wordlessly glance at him through her bangs. A bit daunted by this, Theo carried on.

“Wanna have some? For now, just dedicate today to eating something tasty.”

“…”

“You can have some of their coffee with it, too. The kind with lots of cream and caramel sauce. They can draw something on the paper cup too, like a dog or a cat.”

Annette finally smiled.

“You’re on.”

The girl introduced herself to Yuuto as Citri Oki.

“—On paper, I’m called Citri Myora now. But my stepfather says I don’t have to force myself to use it and that I can call myself by my old name if I want.”

She was originally from the United Kingdom, a Taaffe from their territories. She had long, flax-colored hair and faint-purple eyes. Her face was pretty, like a doll’s, and the classy, long one-piece dress she wore suited her. Her hair was fixed with a light-purple ribbon that matched her eyes.

And that just made the hard, filthy boots she was wearing stand out.

The look wasn’t too unnatural, given the low temperatures of late autumn, and after living on the battlefield for so long, it didn’t much bother Yuuto. Nor would he notice the sweet scent of solidified oil unique to a girl who hadn’t groomed herself in days.

Citri did seem to mind, though, because she sat on the other side of the bench from him. Or maybe she felt awkward next to Yuuto, a fellow Eighty-Six like her, who—unlike her—had fought on the battlefield.

“I didn’t enlist, and you all are recovering in the hospital so I thought my visiting you might just be a bother, but…there’s something I had to ask.”

“The Republic officers who had you gather intelligence on the Federacy army are already in custody. You don’t need to get information out of us anymore.”

Citri tightly gripped her hands, which rested on her lap. Her hands were different from those of any girl in the Strike Package. They were the frail, dainty hands of a girl who never had to grip a gun or a control stick, who never had to fight. For Eighty-Six around Yuuto’s age, that was almost unimaginable.

“Yes, I know. My little sister…Kaniha got arrested for it.”

That must have been the young Eighty-Six wiretap girl whom Amari had mentioned.

“And I think that’s for the best. Kaniha got adopted to the Myora family like me, but she’s different from us…and I knew the Republic was having her help them, too.”

“…Different from you?” Yuuto replied carefully, despite his suspicion.

“I realize this is going to be a bother for you,” Citri said, cutting him off.

Her violet eyes were fixed on her hands, which were clenching the fabric of her skirt, as she intentionally tried not to look at him.

“But we don’t have time—you enlisted, so I’m sure you know. Please tell me.”

Yuuto contemplated this in silence for a moment. Even if Citri hadn’t been wiretapped, he couldn’t leak information about the Strike Package to her. Since he was a Federacy soldier, many of the things he was privy to were considered classified.

However…the words she’d used—different, us.

“It depends on what you’re asking.”

If she—if they were different from those who’d been wiretapped, if they were something the Federacy army wasn’t aware of, he needed to get her to tell him. And to do that, he’d need to comply with her request first.

“Thank you… You see,” Citri said, with a look that appeared relieved and, at the same time, terribly cornered.

We don’t have time. Her eyes seemed to back up her words.

“You see…”

Shiden received a cartoon that explained nuclear power, likely sent by Lieutenant Colonel Mialona. She played it in the barracks’ common room instantly. Other curious Processors gathered around. Since there was effectively an entire battalion of people who wanted to watch it, they ended up playing the film several times for a few different groups.

The cartoon was well-made and was intended to be comprehensible even for children who didn’t go to school, like the Eighty-Six. It did help them understand most of the basics they wanted to know. However…

“Sorry, Cap’n, but watching that film only confused me more.”

Rito said this as he approached the table with a tray of savory tomato soup full of salted meat and pickles. Seated at the long dining hall table were the Spearhead squadron and Frederica, along with Marcel, who joined them for lunch that day.

Taking the fork out of his mouth, Marcel said, “If it wasn’t covered in the cartoon, I don’t know about it either. I’m from the special officer academy, too, but honestly, I feel like I’m only just figuring it out. Do you know more about it, Nouzen?”

“Depends on the question… You should probably go to Lieutenant Colonel Mialona for anything more in-depth.”

“Oh, I don’t mean anything like that. I’m not asking about what the cartoon explained,” Rito said, his expression conflicted. “We’re taking classes, but we’re not exactly caught up on our studies, right? And yet, even I can tell that nuclear weapons aren’t something you can make that easily.”

“…Yeah.”

“So why doesn’t the Hail Mary Regiment know that, too? And Lieutenant Colonel Mialona said they blew one up earlier and it didn’t work, right? Then why didn’t they realize they made it wrong and surrender?”

Rito had a point. Shin, Raiden, Kurena, Anju, Claude, and Tohru all exchanged looks.

“You’re right, it’s strange that they didn’t look into how to actually make nuclear weapons,” said Claude. “Like, would you try to cook a dish you’ve never prepared before without checking the recipe?”

“Claude,” said Tohru. “You’re practically asking me to bring up how you did just that and thought it would work out only to screw it all up.”

“Shut up.”

“Maybe they just didn’t have a recipe…? But they could have asked Lieutenant Colonel Mialona…”

“As for why they didn’t surrender, that’s because desertion is a serious crime, so even if they submit peacefully, they could still get the maximum punishment.” Shin explained.

“That might be true, Shin, but isn’t that all the more reason to look into how to make a nuclear weapon before they started?” Anju pointed out. “I mean, if they failed, they’d absolutely get sentenced to death for it.”

The baffled child soldiers fell into contemplative silence, unable to come up with an answer.

…The Eighty-Six could be cruel without even meaning to sometimes.

Zashya, who was dining at a table a bit farther away from them with the rest of her regiment, cracked a bitter smile. It was natural the Eighty-Six would fail to understand, since their king was a born leader with the makings of a true ruler. A man with the strength and resolve to live on his own and function as king even if no one followed him.

And that lone king didn’t understand the fainthearted weakness of sheep. He didn’t need to have sheep obey him, and for that reason, he never needed to understand how they thought, or realize the cruelty of that lack of understanding.

Even the heir and princess of a major governor couldn’t normally gain an audience with someone like him.

Lieutenant Colonel Mialona and her brother, Brigadier General Mialona, didn’t miss the opportunity to invite Viktor Idinarohk, fifth prince of the United Kingdom of Roa Gracia, to a dinner meeting, to which he replied he would be honored to attend.

Once the officers serving them had managed to nervously return to the wall without tripping over themselves, Brigadier General Mialona spoke up.

“The serfs of my domain have brought shame to me.”

Prince Viktor smiled elegantly. As a member of the royal family of the United Kingdom, which still maintained an autocratic monarchy, he directed a cold gaze at the Empire citizens who’d driven their ruler from the throne in the revolution.

“Indeed. The people wished for this freedom, and yet… I suppose this is the outcome of their wishing for something they themselves were too oblivious to understand.”

Freedom and equality. Words with a beautiful ring to them—and an unimaginable weight. Responsibilities they could have left in the hands of their lords and governors just as their ancestors had done, had they not wished for revolution.

“Yes, it is quite shameful… However.” Brigadier General Mialona nodded and carried on.

In exchange for ruling over the sheep, for ordering them and being followed. In exchange for taking away their people’s knowledge and freedom to choose, he, as a ruler, had to learn everything he would possibly need to make all their choices for them.

For the sheep, their rulers, who took on the burden of studying and making choices, were also their protectors. Someone they only needed to follow, who promised them a simple life without pressures or the hard work of education.

Brigadier General Mialona spoke, as a descendant of one of the Empire’s old rulers, to a member of the United Kingdom’s house of unicorns, which still took advantage of the sheep’s slothful desire for peace and quiet.

“I do believe that those who forced onto those oblivious sheep a burden they didn’t understand and thus weren’t prepared to carry, bear a modicum of guilt in all this.”

After a moment’s thought, Marcel spoke:

“Ah… Actually, I think I might know something about that.”

He dropped his eyes to his plate of soup and spoke half in contemplation.

“Not having to think is easy. Reflecting on your actions is a pain. Thinking that all you have to do is follow orders is much easier, and if anything happens, you don’t have to reflect on what you did. You just followed orders, so you can shift all the blame onto someone else…”

In fact, you could even shift the blame for things you weren’t ordered to do onto someone else, Marcel thought bitterly.

People who refused to carry the burden of failing to protect others. People who couldn’t handle the absurdities that befell them.

…Just like me. There was a time when I failed to carry that burden, and I don’t want to become like that again. Have I become the kind of person I hoped? He accepted the hatred I threw at him for no reason and survived in spite of it, only to say it didn’t bother him. Even if I can’t become like him, I wanted to become someone who could at least carry his own pain and fears.

“So…how do I put it…?”

Shin said nothing, sensing the regret in Marcel’s words. Marcel knew by now that Shin had his own share of regrets and doubts, moments of weakness and error, so he didn’t feel quite as wretched about it anymore. Shin simply kept them hidden and bottled up. He never let it show, never said he was in pain or asked for help. Marcel knew this now.

After chewing this over for a moment, Rito nodded.

“Hmm, so you’re saying that the Hail Mary Regiment is like that, too? Their commander—Second Lieutenant Rohi, was it? They’re just following her blindly and aren’t thinking on their own at all? And that’s why they won’t study or learn from their mistakes, or even realize they’ve done something wrong. You’re saying they’re all like that?”

“Probably,” said Marcel. “Though in that case, I have to wonder why Second Lieutenant Rohi isn’t thinking or learning from her mistakes, even though she’s their commander.”

Frederica furrowed her brow and grumbled unpleasantly.

“Perhaps—that Noele Rohi girl is the kind that doesn’t think or learn, either.”

“Huh?”

“What?”

“’Tis the only conclusion. She does not face up to her mistakes and doesn’t even realize her critical lack of knowledge. She conducts herself as a ruler, but she lacks the qualities to serve as one. She does not even realize such qualities exist.”

She didn’t learn, didn’t think. She simply gave orders like a ruler, while possessing neither the disposition nor the resolve to uphold a leader’s responsibilities.

“Oh! I remember now, Princess!”

The Hail Mary Regiment had by then been reduced to below two hundred members, not even enough for a fully staffed company of infantry. As such, they conducted all matters except for sentry duty—even dining and briefings—in the same room.

They used the village’s assembly hall as their barracks. Noele was there now, attempting to maintain some semblance of elegance as she ate a ration of soup with a plastic spoon, when Otto suddenly got to his feet and walked over to her.

“Princess, I just remembered! When I was little, my grandma told me something her grandma had told her! When a baby leviathan swims up the Roginia River, its parent leaves the sea to chase after it!”

As Noele sat baffled by this contextless story about baby leviathans, Ninha Lekaf frowned over a serf disturbing a knight’s meal. Otto was too excited to notice this.

“So we just have to find the baby!” he continued. “If we do that, it’ll return the favor and help us again!”

“Hmm…”

This was probably Otto’s attempt at an explanation, but since he already knew what he was thinking, he left out too many words for Noele to immediately understand him. So the leviathan was searching for its baby, and they needed to help it, or rather, its baby. And in thanks for their help, the parent leviathan would help them in turn. In other words…

Just as Noele had managed to put it all together in her mind, Otto leaned forward impatiently.

“So what I’m saying is, if we find the baby, the leviathan will destroy the Legion for us!”

“Huh?”

Noelle was baffled by this leap in logic, but the surrounding serfs all got excited at once.

“Way to go, Otto!”

“Good on you for remembering that!”

“Eh-heh-heh! I admit I’ve got a pretty good memory.”

“So we just need to find the baby leviathan! Princess! Let’s go look for it right away!”

“We’re a little short on hands, but…if it’s swimming up the river, it’s in the water, right? If we split up, we’ll find it in no time!”

“H-huh? But, er…” As the serfs drew closer, Noele trailed off evasively.

If the baby leviathan was in or near the water, they’d have to search the Hiyano River, which flowed into the sea, and the Kadunan floodway and new Tataswa floodway which flowed into the Hiyano. Even if they could narrow down the area to those, the two floodways alone spanned sixty kilometers from north to south, including territory seized by the Legion. And the Hiyano River’s entire river basin was behind enemy lines.

How were they going to search there?

But since she wasn’t the one who caused this enthusiasm, she had no idea how to silence it. And her people were so full of excitement and hope; she didn’t want to crush it. If she told them it wasn’t possible after they’d followed her all the way here, they would grow disillusioned with her. That scared her, and she couldn’t bring herself to say anything.

After looking around, she spotted Mele a short distance away from Kiahi and the others. He smiled at her.

“…Don’t worry, Princess. I know we’ll be fine so long as we’re with you,” he said.

That single sentence filled her with courage. Mele and the serfs were all counting on her. How could she, the noble leading them, not believe in her own people?

Noele got to her feet resolutely. Her face was full of confidence and conviction as she puffed up her chest.

“Yes, of course! Let’s begin the search. This time, we will save the northern front!”

“Yeah, let’s save the northern front! All of us, together!”

“We’ll burn away the Legion and all the Federacy soldiers who would get in our way! We’ll take revenge for our friends!”

At their beloved princess’s declaration, the assembly hall filled with excited revelry. They celebrated like they’d already found the baby leviathan and opened up new rations and bottles of alcohol.

“Yeah. The leviathan sided with us because we’re right. The Federacy army incurred divine punishment. They were wrong, so we’ve gotta take them out!”

“And despite being wrong all along, they kept making fools of us. We need to get back at them! The loud sergeants and the bigheaded battalion commander and the useless nobles, all of them should die!”

“Yeah!”

As Otto and Rilé started talking big, Kiahi nodded, his spirits high. Honestly, it felt good. They had a way of beating the Legion, and they’d get to give the Federacy army, which treated them like filth, their just deserts. They, who had been unfairly judged incapable and scorned for it, would finally reach their rightful place—they would be heroes.

“No, we’ll be more than just that,” Kiahi said. “If this goes well, maybe we can save not just the Federacy, but the whole continent! After all, we have God on our side.”

If we can do that, I…

“We’re the chosen ones. National heroes. Saviors!”

Mele’s and Otto’s eyes widened in disbelief, like it took a moment for their thoughts to fully process what he said.

“Saviors… Us…?”

“Amazing…”

As the realization sank in, they were overcome with excitement and joy. The two’s amber- and chestnut-colored eyes widened even further.

“Wow! We’re gonna be saviors! Wow!”

“They’ll make statues of us! Movies about us!”

“Yeah. The president and even the king of Roa Gracia will thank us.”

They’d kneel before them with tears of gratitude. All humankind would grovel at their feet in thanks. That daydream intoxicated Kiahi much more than the booze in his hands did.

“Are you sure, though? I don’t know much about leviathans… It’s all kind of scary.”

Yono was huddled in the dining hall’s corner, frightened by her friends’ enthusiasm.

“I mean, I don’t really know much about nuclear weapons, either, and it looks like those were really dangerous. So I’m scared of the leviathans, too…”

The group’s scaredy-cat little sister was cowering like always. But to Mele, it came across like she was spoiling their fun. Milha felt the same way and spoke up, not even trying to mask his annoyance.

“What, Yono, you want to stop us?”

Yono instantly jolted and made herself as small as possible. Milha looked down on her with explicit contempt.

“It saved us, so I think we can bother it. Or what, you want to get in our way? Are you going to betray us and get punished like those Vánagandrs did?”

“No!” Yono said, her eyes opening wide. “I’m not a traitor…! The Federacy is wrong, and things can’t stay this way. I think so, too. So I won’t stop you. I won’t betray everyone!”

“Hmm…” Milha scoffed at her, but it seemed his temper had gone down.

After Yono shook her head, sending her braids flying back and forth, Milha stopped bullying her.

Mele, in the meantime, realized something thanks to Yono’s words.

…Right. So that’s what this was about.

“…No. Yono’s right.”

Yono and Milha both turned to look at Mele, surprised.

“What are you talking about, Mele?”

“Things we don’t understand frighten us… Ever since the beginning of the Federacy, we’ve been facing stuff like that. We couldn’t figure out why things were turning out the way they were, or why we were being told what we were told.”

There was so much they didn’t understand. The danger of the nuclear power that had made their town so happy. Their town’s collapse into poverty. The Legion, which arrived out of the blue. Study courses, textbooks. Freedom, rights. All of it was terrible.

“Not knowing is scary, and scary things are mistakes. For the last ten years, the Federacy has been making mistakes. Yono and us, we all realized it ten years ago… No, even earlier than that.”

No one else had, not ten years ago and probably not now. Only their group had been wise enough to notice.

“You two, and me, and everyone else, we’ve always been right. That’s why—”

Yono’s face lit up in a smile. Milha nodded proudly. And after nodding back, Mele said firmly:

“That’s why everything’s going to work out. I know it.”

“This is all pointless…”

Like Noele, Ninha was a regional knight of the Shemno province. She was in the same year as her in the officer academy and was likewise subjected to having to “skip a year” to graduate. Noele, in her naivete, believed the army’s excuse that they’d graduated early because they were “talented enough that they didn’t require the established education period.”

After leaving the assembly hall, the two female officers went to the dilapidated one-room house they’d designated as their command post and sat across from each other inside. They both had a Cairn’s chocolate-colored hair and eyes, but their hair texture and styles were different. Noele’s hair was fine, soft, and tied into two pigtails, while Ninha’s straight, coarse hair was done up into a sidetail.

“How are we supposed to find the baby leviathan?” Ninha began. “Is there even a baby leviathan around here to begin with? How are we going to protect it if we do find it? And is the leviathan really going to side with us again? How are we going to tell it to fight the Legion? I can’t answer a single one of those questions, and I can’t act based on speculation.”

“Yes, but…,” Noele muttered.

She had considered those problems, too, and when they were pointed out to her directly, she could only reply in the tiniest of voices:

“…the nuclear weapon didn’t work, so…we need something to replace it.”

“We should have turned back the moment the nuclear weapon didn’t go off the way you said it would. Again, we don’t know if the leviathan can fill in for it…”

“…”

“No matter how you look at it, this is pointless. It isn’t going to work.”

Ninha…may be right, but…if we admit that this was all for nothing, if we give up…

“The serfs are there for the sake of their governors, so let them take the blame for the crimes of desertion and treason—anyone will do. We can blame everything on one of the serfs and say we were forced to join in. If we do that, we can still turn back.”

The crimes of desertion and plotting treason—those were Noele’s crimes. To pin them on one of her people…

“—We can’t do that!” Noele said, flaring up at her.

Using their own serfs as a scapegoat? Unthinkable. And if she gave up now, none of them would be saved. If she gave up, everyone else would die. So she couldn’t surrender. If there was any hope of turning this around, no matter how small and distant it might be, they had to reach out and grasp it. Because so long as they didn’t give up, they had a chance to reach that hope.

“If the leviathan can defeat the Legion, if the leviathan can keep us all safe, then we can’t give up. I… I’m going to save everyone.”

Ninha could only heave a soft sigh.

Shin woke up with a start to find himself in his dark room in the barracks. Momentarily struggling to understand the situation, Shin turned on his narrow bed… He couldn’t remember when he came back to his room.

“Was I asleep?”

It was a forced state of sleep, induced to ease the strain of his Esper ability. He took off the wrinkled blanket and held a hand to his groggy head. He had cases where he was overcome by intense drowsiness and slept for half a day, but this was the first time he woke up without any memory of becoming tired or getting in bed.

He’d gotten used to the wailings of the Legion, even that of the Sheepdogs, but being this close to the battlefield did increase the strain. What’s more, their home base, Rüstkammer, went from being far from the battlefield to just a few dozen kilometers away from the fighting. He thought he’d gotten enough rest, but apparently, he hadn’t fully recovered.

His roommate Raiden’s bed was currently unoccupied, so apparently, it wasn’t bedtime. There was a light meal and a bottle of water sitting on the room’s desk along with a note. The handwriting was Raiden’s. Apparently, he’d taken over Shin’s duties for the day. After skimming through the note, Shin opened the bottle and took a sip of water.

As he did, he focused his consciousness on the Legion’s voices, mostly out of habit. His mind was trained for combat, a trait fostered in the Eighty-Sixth Sector and on the Federacy’s battlegrounds, and it spurred him to prioritize confirming the enemy’s movements.

That was when he noticed something.

“…Mm.”

On the other side of the familiar wailing and howling of the clockwork ghosts…he could just barely make out an unfamiliar, feeble cry in the distance. A moaning…

A pitiful whimpering. It sounded like the singing of the sovereign of seas, which he had heard once before.

“Oh, Captain. Feeling better now?”

After checking the time and seeing it was still too soon for dinner, Shin had gratefully eaten the light meal left in his room, changed into his uniform, and gone outside, where he ran into Grethe.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“It’s no problem. If you start feeling unwell, don’t hesitate to report it. As brigade commander, my job is to ensure my subordinates aren’t under unnecessary strain. You haven’t been able to keep up with your training to control your ability, right?”

With the tides of the war swinging against the Federacy, Joschka was stationed in the western front headquarters, and Shin’s other relatives from the Maika clan were busy at their own stations. They no longer had time to spare for Shin.

Grethe cracked a mischievous smile.

“We still have a few spare Cicadas. Maybe they can reduce the strain. Why don’t we ask the prince about it?”

“No way. I refuse.”

“I’m joking. Besides, he already said it probably won’t help with your powers.”

“—To begin with, the biggest obstacle is how you’re going to get Nouzen to put the Cicada on.”

Through the noble sacrifice of the United Kingdom’s fifth prince, of course, Grethe thought.

“But the strain Nouzen is feeling isn’t his ability in and of itself, but the fact that he’s constantly exposed to the Legion’s voices. If you have a broken radio you can’t switch off and it keeps transmitting at high volume, augmenting its reception isn’t going to fix the problem.”

“…That’s what he said, anyway.”

“You actually asked him about it…?!” Shin moaned, shuddering at the mental image.

It was times like this when Grethe’s poker face was truly terrifying.

Shin changed the subject before she could tell him anything else he’d be better off not knowing. He was going to report this to her anyway, so it didn’t count as running away. Probably.

“More importantly…I can hear something. I think it’s the leviathan. The youngling. As far as I can tell, it’s closer than we think.”

Of all places, it was in the Strike Package’s operation area in the Kadunan floodway. The youngling had swum up the Hiyano River, the source of the Kadunan and new Tataswa floodways. Apparently, it had wound up in the Kadunan floodway after leaving the Hiyano.

“Captain… Your ability is evolving in strange ways,” she said, dubious. “First, you can hear the Legion’s voices, and now you can hear leviathans?”

“I’m not sure if it’s evolving… The leviathans are probably just the same as the Legion.”

An army of ghosts, forsaken by something that no longer existed. Though, as the leviathans were even stranger than the Legion, Shin was unable to understand them, and had no way of knowing what exactly they’d been forsaken by.

“Well, anyway… I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this, but if you see the leviathan, don’t try to attack it. And don’t even think of trying to recover it. Ideally, avoid involving it in combat altogether. That said…”

Shin glanced at Grethe.

“That said…?” he repeated.

“…someone from the Hail Mary Regiment finally surrendered. The situation is shifting.”

“I’m Second Lieutenant Ninha Lekaf, vice commander of the Hail Mary Regiment—I’m sure even small fries like you have at least read the memos.”

Despite being a traitor, the female officer who surrendered herself acted quite inappropriately, holding her nose high in pride. The soldiers on patrol were a little daunted by her behavior. She had the arrogance of the ruling class and felt no reservations about calling other people small fries to their faces.

“Lead me to your commander. I will supply you information about the Hail Mary Regiment. In exchange, I have a condition.”

“Lady Ninha ran away?”

“…Yes.” Noele hung her head, her face as dark as the night sky outside the broken window.

Mele couldn’t believe it. Lady Ninha was Princess Noele’s classmate from the officer academy and had even called her a best friend. But more than anything, how could someone betray the princess?

“Her gun, uniform, and all her things are gone, and none of her subordinates know where she is. I don’t know either, of course. So…as much as it pains me to say it, I have to assume she fled.”

Noele bit her dry, chapped lips. After two weeks of living on the run, her hair, skin, and nails were unkempt. Seeing this pained Mele.

“Of course, Ninha knows about this place. If she is taken captive and tortured, it’s only a matter of time before she divulges our position… We have to move before they come for us.”

Her chocolate-colored eyes, with their unique smoky appearance, clouded over in sorrowful resolve.

“We must use—no, save the leviathan. If we find the youngling, the leviathan should come to us. And since it chose us… Yes, this must be a trial. If we find the youngling, the leviathan will surely help us. And the second northern front will be saved… Mele.”

As she told him of her delusional prediction, too unrealistic to even be called wishful thinking, Noele leaned forward. This was deeply dishonest of her, considering the lives of two hundred of her subordinates rested on her shoulders.

But Noele had no recourse but to believe. And even now, Mele wasn’t going to question her.

“Mele, I place you in command of the scout unit. I want you to be the one to find the youngling.”

Mele’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Me?”

After all, he was nothing but the child of a serf family. A rank-and-file soldier. He couldn’t possibly do something as difficult as tackling the leviathan’s trial.

“Sir Rex or Lady Chilm— No, even Kiahi or Rilé…”

“Rex and Chilm aren’t coming back. Kiahi has his hands full transporting the nuclear weapon. My main unit will stand out, and we’re slow… You’re the only one who can do this. You’re the only one I can count on.”

As she said this, Noele’s gaze fixed onto him. It was like she was clinging to him for help. She seemed lost, her chocolate-colored eyes on the verge of tears. Even Mele, for all his misgivings, had to steel himself. Yes. It was a serf’s job to obey the princess’s words. And he’d sworn to do just that.

“Of course, Princess Noele.”

He would finally fulfill the vow he’d made when he was little—that someday, he would fight alongside his princess.

“I will find it for you… I will be of use to you, Princess.”

Ninha told them of the Hail Mary Regiment’s hiding place, how many “nuclear weapons” they had left, how many people they were working with, as well as their current actions. After the dirty bombs’ failure, they gave up on using them and instead decided to have the Fisara destroy the Legion.

From the information Ninha provided, the renegade unit’s movements seemed so haphazard that the second northern front’s generals were baffled beyond all belief. The renegades’ use of dirty bombs and the Fisara were all within the scope of the generals’ predictions, and yet…

“We’ve gathered supporting evidence to back up her information. Let’s move out.”

As the commander issued this order, the generals all nodded. Most of them were Cairns native to this land, and their smoky eyes glinted.

“With this, we should be able to suppress those fools and retrieve the nuclear fuel. Give the Strike Package the order. We will move forward with the second northern front’s original mission of restoring the defensive river by destroying the dams.”

Suddenly, the second northern front’s chief of staff spoke up, as if she’d just remembered something.

“What about the condition Ninha Lekaf mentioned?”

She asked this as a question, but she already knew the answer. The commander replied curtly and without much thought.

“Oh… Let her have it. We can afford to grant her that much.”

It was early morning when Lieutenant Colonel Mialona started the briefing.

“—The Lady Bluebird Regiment will begin the operation to suppress the remnants of the Hail Mary Regiment.”

The regiment members looking up at her didn’t so much as stir—proof of their experience and level of organization. Projected at the corner of the holo-screen was the unit’s emblem, a ladybug with a blue carapace.

They lost one company in the encounter with the Fisara, but seasoned soldiers like them weren’t going to be rattled by an aquatic lizard that had wandered into a battlefield where it didn’t belong, even if it was a dragon sovereign. And they certainly weren’t going to let a bunch of stupid bumpkin roosters and hens who put their homeland and comrades in danger scare them, either.

“Our operation will take place in the contested area, the Sneenikeit region located on the eastern shore of the new Tataswa floodway. The Hail Mary survivors are currently hiding in the ruins of the village there. The enemy has just short of two hundred surviving infantrymen. As before, we will suppress them using only armored units. The accompanying armored infantry are to form a perimeter and close off the area.”

Their dependable allies, the armored infantrymen, couldn’t join them on this operation. The nuclear fuel the Hail Mary Regiment stole had dangerously irradiated the area. They couldn’t risk detonating it.

Lieutenant Colonel Mialona continued, the emblem of a lovely ladybird behind her. She told them of the ultramarine-blue jewel brought in ancient times from across the sea. Its beauty and rarity led to the color’s use in images of the holy mother and heaven itself. It was the unblemished, awe-inspiring pure blue of a bird soaring through the sky.

It was the blue of the flame House Mialona used to light up the dark northern winters. The azure flame of nuclear fire that had been disgraced and now threatened to burn and pollute their homeland. If its dignity was tarnished, she needed to restore its honor with her own two hands.

“As such, the engineers and Strike Package will simultaneously launch the operation to seize the Kadunan floodway. You are all to keep up with them and not allow those fools to get in our guests’ way. Keep the combat area locked up like a cage.”

“The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Armored Divisions’ operation area is a sixty-kilometer range along the Shihano mountains and the Kadunan floodway, starting in the contested area and moving into the Legion territories. We are to eliminate all hostiles within the area until the engineers escorting us are done detonating and dismantling all the dams.”

Shin turned to face the others in the briefing room. The map of the combat area projected on the holo-screen highlighted the twenty-two dams of the Kadunan floodway. By destroying the dams, they would turn the Womisam basin into a wetland trap and restore the Roginia line’s river, which would impede the Legion’s invasion. This was the Strike Package’s current mission.

“In addition to the combat engineers, each armored division will be escorted by three armored infantry regiments and three recon battalions made up of the Fleet Countries’ volunteer troops. In addition, it is estimated that there are two leviathans swimming in the Kadunan floodway at present. A youngling of unidentified breed and a Fisara. If either of them is discovered, you are to observe only and abstain from making any kind of contact with it. Do not fire at it, aim at it, or do anything that might be considered an offensive action. I believe fighting in their general area won’t be a problem, but…”

Shin trailed off and grimaced. Battles were always a foggy affair. No army, no matter how well trained, could fully remove all uncertainty. He’d checked with Ishmael before the briefing about what actions might provoke a counterattack from the leviathans, but the man had only grimaced, just as Shin was doing now, and said:

“‘They’re wild animals. We can never know how one might react. So if at all possible, avoid approaching them altogether.’”

“We will be embarking on a sweep-up operation for the renegade unit while the Strike Package’s main force deploys for the dam-destruction operation. To serve as a decoy for both of these, the 4th Armored Division and all Alkonost units are to strike at the Legion territories.”

While Shin and the first three armored divisions deployed to destroy the dams, Suiu’s 4th Armored Division was given a different task. They would be placed under Vika’s command for the duration of this operation. To be more exact, the 4th Armored Division and the United Kingdom military dispatch battalion were temporarily joined to form a strike force, with Vika as its supreme authority.

The operation map displayed on the screen showed neither the Shihano mountains to the western edge of the front nor the current defensive position along the Roginia line, to the south. Instead, it showed the river region running west to east in the north of the Womisam basin.

“The operation area will be the old defensive line, the southern bank of the Hiyano River. While splitting up our forces is ill-advised, there are times one must rely on schemes to get by.”

During the advance operation, the second northern front’s main force would keep the Legion on the front lines in check and offer covering fire for the advance unit, as it had in past operations. Ishmael and the Fleet Countries’ Free Corps were also given orders. They would join the Strike Package on the dam-destruction operation as a recon unit. In a deeply forested area, where visibility was limited, they would serve as the advance force’s eyes.

Since they would move ahead of the rest of the force and be the first to make contact with the enemy, the mortality rate for this role was exceedingly high, and yet it was a task that required skilled troops.

“This was the promise we made to convince the Federacy to shelter our entire nation… But they sure don’t think twice about using us. Guess they’re not too different from the Empire that way.”

Ishmael spat these words as he walked through the empty halls of the barracks, the last to leave the briefing room. The barracks consisted of old, prefabricated buildings, but were not markedly worse than those given to the Federacy soldiers. The food and equipment were likewise of similar quality.

But when it came to the Fleet Countries’ treatment at times like these, the former Imperial generals’ coldhearted, cold-blooded attitude was clear. They took advantage of their weakened position—having lost their country, and with nowhere else to turn—and treated their lives as the cheapest currency.

The second wave of Fleet Countries soldiers currently in training might be different, but the volunteers fighting right now were simple infantrymen. The month since they’d arrived was not sufficient to complete the training for armored exoskeletons, so if they were going to join the Federacy on the merit of their ready firepower, they would have no choice but to risk life and limb. On top of all that, being sent out as a recon unit meant their casualty rate would be even higher.

“—Shit.”

The corridor was empty. He didn’t have to worry about his subordinates overhearing. So he let his anger get the better of him, spat out curses, and slammed his fist against the thin, battered prefab wall.

“Whoa!”

The thud of his punch, which felt weak and silly in the face of his anger, was silenced by a small screech. Ishmael turned around in a hurry.

“S-sorry, little lady! Did I startle you?”

Standing there with her already large eyes open even wider was the Strike Package’s Mascot. Frederica was her name. Despite her small size, she had a great deal of resolve. He’d seen it when she participated on the operation aboard the supercarrier.

She shook her head and approached him with brisk steps. Her clear, crimson eyes peered at him carefully.

“…Are you all right?”

Her gaze, full of wisdom beyond her years, showed surprising concern for his fist. Ishmael faced her with a guilty smile.

“Aye, I’m fine… Sorry for showing you something that pitiful.”

A grown adult, failing to restrain himself and becoming emotional.

“You are not pitiful at all. You are a capable commander, a captain, and an older brother respected by all.”

“…Thank you.”

Her words were frank and without any pretense, which made Ishmael feel all the more pathetic. He didn’t consider himself the kind of man who deserved such praise. Especially not from someone with such a frank, direct gaze. The words he’d tried to bottle up slipped out.

“Since I already made a disgrace of myself, would you mind if I complained a bit, little lady?”

“Not at all.”

“It’s tough, having to live with the shame. I wanted to save them, if I could… But I couldn’t, and I wish someone would punish me for it.”

They’d scuttled the Stella Maris. And when they evacuated, they had to abandon the model of the leviathan skeleton with it. Now, Ishmael was the only one left to pass down word of the glorious exploits of the Open Sea fleet.

He was the captain of the supercarrier and the next commander of the fleet, meaning that for the crew and their families, he was the next chief of the Open Sea clans. A political candidate, graced with combat experience and the finest education the fleet and the clans could provide. This made him valuable personnel for the Federacy, since he could lead the Fleet Countries’ refugees and organize the volunteer soldiers. The Federacy army returned the right and responsibility to command the volunteer soldiers to him, while Ishmael was allowed to voice his opinion and negotiate their orders.

He couldn’t afford to die—he had to make sure that the memory of the Open Sea fleet was passed down and that his comrades weren’t forced to accept unreasonable orders.

No matter who in the clans died, which of his subordinates perished, how many of his comrades might fall, he alone had to go on, carrying the shame of survival—to keep living, bearing that sin.

Frederica shook her head in denial. For some reason, she pursed her pale, pink lips tightly.

“You are not pathetic… That is also a legitimate way to fight.”

“…Tohru.”

Claude turned around, his moon-colored eyes contorting bitterly. He was in the hangar of the 1st Armored Division’s 1st Battalion in the division base. Claude’s Bandersnatch stood beside Tohru’s Jabberwock as the noise of the units launching in order filled the space.

“Sorry you have to keep worrying about me all the time.”

It’d been two months since the second large-scale offensive, and a month since the fall of the Republic. After thinking about it for a moment, Tohru shook his head.

“Hmm. Well, don’t let it bother you. I know your brother was the only thing on your mind.”

The brother he hadn’t recognized—whom he’d thought he’d left to die. As a result, he’d had to shoulder pain he was better off not carrying with regard to the fall of the Republic. Indeed, the timing his brother chose to reveal his survival couldn’t have been worse. It was only natural that Claude would lose his temper. With that thought in mind, Tohru laughed.

“It wasn’t that hard for me. Not before, and not now.”

He didn’t have the same issues as Claude—who, back in the Eighty-Sixth Sector, had to grapple with his own despicable Alba blood, and with his anger toward his brother and his father, who deserted him and his mother, but whom he nevertheless still loved. Tohru was an Aventura, making it easy to recognize him as an Eighty-Six, and his parents and grandfather were killed in the Republic, so he could unconditionally hate the Republic for what they did to him.

“The fact you can talk like that is why I’m saying this,” Claude told him, his moon-white eyes fixed on Tohru.

“Mm?”

“We’re not just throwing things away. We’re not just setting out buckets to handle a leaky roof. We weren’t before, and we aren’t now.”

We’re not losing. It’s not that we can’t win. We’re not being dragged around the same place over and over.

Tohru smirked at him. “Cut it out with the sympathy.”

Claude growled at him in annoyance.

“I didn’t mean it like that, moron.”

The scout platoon Mele was placed in charge of was short on people. They had only twenty members, significantly lower than standard.

“Lots of people are getting sick, huh? Winter’s right around the corner; wonder if they all caught colds.”

The forest was terribly silent before dawn, with the birds asleep and the nocturnal animals returning to their dens. Mele heard Otto rambling as they walked side by side. Even though the Hail Mary Regiment’s princess gave the order to move out, everyone was down with some kind of illness and couldn’t move. Pathetic. How could they disobey the princess?

The platoon members piped in to comment.

“Are you sure what they have is a cold?”

“They don’t have fevers, but they’re throwing up and have weird swellings all over their bodies.”

“I saw the production team from Sul village when I went to pick up the nuclear weapon, and they looked really bad. Their hair was falling out, and they had bruises everywhere. Some of them were coughing up blood.”

“Shut up,” Mele stopped them, annoyed. “Focus on searching. It should be around here, along the river.”

“I mean, yeah, Mele, but the river is pretty wide,” Otto replied with a frown.

He was the one who’d suggested they find the baby leviathan in the first place, but he looked quite bored already and was using the muzzle of his assault rifle to kick away the fallen leaves at their feet.

“We don’t have enough people to look around this big of a river. It’d be faster to start searching once everyone gets better.”

“Well… I mean, Lady Ninha—”

Just then, one of the members at the edge of their row called out loudly.

“Oh… Hey! Isn’t that it?!”

He pointed ahead into the blue darkness before dawn, past the trees of the cold, deep forest. The morning mist typical of this season didn’t extend to the high elevation of the Shihano mountains. Cast in blue darkness and decorated by countless fallen leaves was a vast, terrifyingly clear, and bottomless lake. Its waters reflected the faint glow of the dark, starlit sky, and atop its rippling surface, they saw what they were looking for.

A snow-white, glasswork creature covered in a delicate veil, swimming with its head held high.

Patrolling in the skies twenty thousand meters up, the Rabe detected multiple heat signatures moving under the cover of the moonless dawn and morning mist. Those signatures corresponded to Vánagandrs and armored infantrymen.

<<Dragonfly One to Firefly.>> <<Second northern front military confirmed on the move.>>

It seemed they were moving past the second northern front’s defensive position, the Roginia line. At the same time, countless rockets and howitzers were fired from behind the Neikuwa hills to shield their progress. Preparation fire. The opening artillery shots launched before an armored unit’s advance, meant to destroy enemy units and fortifications and clear a way.

The metallic raven also spotted a small unit moving through the woods in the Shihano mountains’ peaks.

<<Based on the scouts’ route, their objective is in the Shihano mountains, near the area designated by the humans as the Kadunan floodway.>> <<Dragonfly One to Firefly—expedition of operation schedule advised.>>

Standing within the dreamlike shower of green leaves in the blue, glittering interstice between the heavenly sphere and the water’s surface was the majestic sight of the leviathan youngling. Mele froze up, staring at it. It was like a mermaid princess from a legend. A pure-white silhouette, covered in a modest veil and a long trailing dress. The soft light of the stars twinkled against its scales as it floated on the water’s surface like a meticulously detailed glasswork statue.

“…It’s so pretty…”

Such a beautiful creature must be a good, correct thing. This fair being would surely save them and their princess. Feeling drawn to it, Mele approached the creature and reached his hand out to it, tilting his head as he looked up at the mermaid princess. But then far below its veil—the spot Mele had mistaken for its head—three eyes suddenly swerved to look at him.

“…?!”

Diamond-shaped pupils with a metallic luster, unlike those of any human or terrestrial animal. A gaze, stranger than anything Mele had ever felt, pierced him, making every hair on his body stand on end. The creature was wary of his hand, now half raised and frozen in place.

The Leuca parted its jaws, revealing lines of sharp, angular teeth similar to those of a shark or a crocodile, and baring the dark depths of its gullet, which was as eerie as the corpse of a deep-sea fish.

It took one deep breath of crisp autumn air, and then—

“Giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”

The man-eating mermaid, native to the open seas, let out an ear-piercing screech to intimidate the mammals approaching it.

The Leuca released its howl. Had it been a mature specimen, the cry’s bubble pulse would have been capable of rupturing armored plates. Its loud screech echoed through the Shihano mountains at dawn. Startled by the unfamiliar roar, birds took off from the treetops and flew off into the sky. Unfortunate squirrels that had climbed up the nearby trees fainted at the sound and fell to the ground. The howl traveled up the Kadunan floodway, reaching the Fisara now swimming up the stream of one of the dammed rivers.

The Fisara raised its head, turning its long neck in the direction of the youngling’s cry. From the sound, it could grasp the youngling’s rough location and position, as well as the state of danger it was in.

“……………………!”

It roared back in response, trying to warn its still-unseen enemy. And then the Fisara began to swim back along the gentle river current in search of its youngling.

The recon unit sent out ahead of the advance force heard the two howls and forwarded them to division HQ, which analyzed the sounds and communicated their findings to the different divisions.

“…Tch. Roger that.”

Much like how its bases were made from standardized shelter modules, the Federacy military used dedicated trailers coupled together for its frontline command posts to enable swift construction, dismantling, and movement. Also, in order to smooth operations, the three tactical commanders aside from Lena had access to their armored command vehicles, while Vika and Zashya had their command-configuration Barushka Matushkas.

The command post, surrounded by steel and bluish-white shadows, was manned by the brigade commander Grethe, as well as the Strike Package’s commanders, staff officers, and control personnel.

Marcel, who sat in one part of it, inside a control trailer with one of its flank panels deployed, nodded in acknowledgment. Glancing to the side, he confirmed the same information had reached his superior officers and switched his Para-RAID target.

The division HQ’s command post had a communication network in place, so information was shared almost instantaneously. However, the combat units on the front lines outside the command post were obstructed by Eintagsfliege jamming, meaning they didn’t receive information as quickly.

“Læraðr HQ to Undertaker. Positions of Waltraute Two (leviathan youngling) and Waltraute One (Fisara) confirmed. Waltraute Two is one kilometer east of the Karakuna dam. Waltraute One is upstream of the Karakuna dam, at a spot twelve kilometers away. It’s proceeding east along the Karakuna River to recover Waltraute Two.”

At the end of autumn, the treetops at the peaks of the Shihano mountains were colored a burning red, and even in the darkness before dawn, the place was relatively bright. The Spearhead squadron, led by Undertaker, sped through a magnificent grove of maple trees. As they raced under their canopy, starlight shone through the red foliage above them in a crimson glow, the same color as the leaves carpeting the ground beneath.

The maple leaves in this area edged past red and crimson, and had a somewhat violet hue. The starlight against the crimson-purple leaves looked like something out of a dream as it cast uneven patterns along their path. Their current route looked up to the Kadunan floodway; they were traversing a forest road that hadn’t seen human traffic in ages.

The Lady Bluebird Regiment, who were going about their operation in tandem, broke off at the forest zone near the bottom of the mountain and made their way to the other artificial river, the new Tataswa floodway.

Though relieved that the radioactive matter hadn’t affected them, Shin narrowed his eyes grimly all the same.

“Do we have an estimated time for when Waltraute One will reach the dam?”

Marcel fell silent for a moment.

“It’s 0530. Almost exactly the same time you’re set to arrive.”

<<Fisara is confirmed to be in motion. It is estimated to cross paths with enemy advance force. Psyche Twelve is to restrain and lead the Fisara away, provoking it into attacking the advance unit.>>

Of course, the Legion were also aware of the Leuca’s screech and the Fisara’s movements. Having readjusted their unit’s operation plan, the commander unit spoke, its mechanical voice traveling across the battlefield.

<<Psyche One, acknowledged.>> <<There is a matter of concern, however.>> <<Termite Five has yet to retreat.>>

A large unit they’d deployed to the operation area hadn’t evacuated and remained there. The commander unit paused for thought. The unit in question was a type with exceedingly slow movement speed. Now that the schedule of their operation against the second northern front had been moved up, it likely wouldn’t be able to retreat in time.

<<Firefly to Psyche Twelve. Termite Five is to remain on standby at Point Karakuna. It is to be placed under Psyche Twelve’s command and will join the attack on the enemy advance force.>>

<<Acknowledged.>>

It was neither the howling of a wolf nor the cry of a bird or a deer. Neither was it the calling of the Legion, with their silent footsteps. It was a more intense cry than anything he had ever heard, but somehow, the young soldier was able to maintain his composure and peer outside their pillbox’s eyelet to inspect what was happening. He heard the constant roaring of large volumes of water from the nearby dam, and the echoing of the screeching from earlier.

What in the world was that? Did some kind of fairy-tale dragon drop out of the sky? Some burning star or the blue steed of the gods? He looked around the pillbox, and thankfully, nothing was out of the ordinary—

No. From the corner of the cascading waters of the dam gate, he caught sight of a group of metallic forms blending into the trees. They were moving along the trail used for the dam’s construction, now mostly faded. Feeling something was off, he turned back to the trees, and then all his hair stood on end.

—The company commander never mentioned anything like that!

It was clear from a single glance—this thing was dangerous. Unlike the terrifying but harmless howl from afar, this was a much greater, more immediate threat to this pillbox and its inhabitants.

Some time ago, they were given manuals for handling enemies like these—but just remembering that was painful. Those raised in the territories’ villages never learned to read and write, and though he had since learned, he and his friend had trouble with long texts; they had to have their company commander explain them to them. Their usually stern sergeant would write them down for them in simpler terms, so they could check them whenever they needed, but that sergeant was gone now. He died a month ago, on the night burning stars fell from the heavens.

Before he knew it, a small child came over and peered up at him. The soldier hurriedly wiped his tears away. If he was surprised, such a small child must have been even more frightened.

“Don’t worry. The monster that made that howl won’t come here. Go back and hide inside with everyone else.”

He had to prepare for battle like always. And he had to check with everyone to make sure they remembered how to handle that Legion he’d seen just a moment ago. Without realizing it, his finger tightened on the grip of the assault rifle he hadn’t let go of for this entire month.

These are the terms for my surrender, Ninha asserted, and the Lady Bluebird Regiment agreed to let her join them without too much fuss. Of course, she wasn’t allowed to carry a weapon. As she sat in the corner of the infantry combat car, which was packed with armored infantry and reeked of dirt and blood, Ninha whispered to herself.

“Just you wait, Noele. I’ll be sure to give you what you truly want.”

The starting point of the Kadunan floodway, the dam that held back the flow of the Roginia River, was under the control of the second northern front. But seizing all the dams north of the Roginia dam was the Strike Package’s role. The 4th Battalion, which had Saki serving as acting battalion commander; Mitsuda’s 5th Battalion, Rito’s 2nd Battalion, and Kunoe’s 6th Battalion were all charged with securing their way back.

Seizing the seven dams on their way to their destination fell to Michihi’s 3rd Battalion and Locan’s 7th Battalion. This left only five squadrons from the 1st Battalion, starting with the Scythe squadron.

Shin’s unit was to seize the 1st Armored Division’s final target, the Karakuna dam. His unit was made up of three squadrons: Spearhead and Nordlicht, in addition to the Brísingamen squadron.

“Læraðr HQ, the 1st Battalion’s team one has arrived at the Karakuna dam.”

The Legion likely knew their destination, but the soldiers still tried to pass through spots with thick foliage and dense treetops so as to avoid the Rabe’s watchful eye. With that foliage as their cover, Shin brought Undertaker and the units following him to a halt. Farther north were Siri’s 2nd Armored Division and Canaan’s 3rd Armored Division, but they had to stay behind while Shin’s group entered the woods.

All the units hid in the shadow of the foliage as they peered at their target, the Karakuna dam, on the other side of the trees. The Karakuna River flowed between two mountains, but it was blocked by a concrete fortification. From the dry side of the river, the dam stood several dozen meters tall, but the thin arch-shaped structure was built so as to dig into the two mountains’ slopes, filling the canyon with water.

The dam’s gate was carved into the mountains’ ridges to redirect the flow of the water north of the basin and was on the other side of the dam. There were five catwalks set up, running side by side for construction and maintenance. On the other side of this towering structure, along the northern and southern slopes to either side of the dam, they could see them.

—They’re here.

Shin could hear the wailing of countless Legion. And since these were woods, where it was easy to lie in ambush, there were probably more of them in shutdown mode so as to fool him.

“If the Hail Mary Regiment didn’t cause all this pointless trouble, maybe the fighting would have been a bit easier,” Raiden scoffed.

Originally, the plan was to conceal the Strike Package’s presence in the area until the operation started. If that had succeeded, the Legion likely wouldn’t have hidden enemies for the explicit purpose of fooling Shin’s ability. They wouldn’t have been careless regardless, but the fact remained that the Legion had taken measures to react specifically to his presence.

“No point saying that now. The enemy’s on the move on the other side of the dam. I’ll confirm what type they are.”

“That’s a lake on the other side, right? It looks like a pretty big type…”

A shadow descended on them. It seemed almost surreal, looming over the near-vertical arch dam, faint light shining over it. It rose from within the reservoir on the other side of the dam, its large body surpassing the structure’s highest point. Hanging from its long neck was a hook, a pair of what looked like pliers, and a pair of wings.

It was the metallic sheen of the Legion, but it was unlike any Legion he’d ever seen before—like the skeleton of some sort of winged beast. As the agonized cries of the dead boomed from it, it faced them from the other side of the arch dam.