CHAPTER 2

ALL QUIET ON THE SKELETAL FRONT

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE DAYS TILL I END MY SERVICE! FUCKIN’ GLORY TO THE SPEARHEAD SQUADRON!

In the back of the weatherworn barracks’ hangar, a countdown message was scrawled in big letters with colored chalk on a blackboard someone had picked up. Raising his eyes from the clipboard in his hands, Shin’s gaze was met with this celebratory sentence. There would have been 119 days left, to be exact. Kujo had jotted this message down the day he joined the squadron and updated it every morning.

But Kujo’d died ten days ago.

Glancing briefly at the interrupted countdown message, Shin eventually shifted his attention back to the maintenance report on the clipboard he was holding. He’d been walking down the hangar lined with Juggernauts on standby, making his way to his own unit, which had just finished being serviced.

He had a Pyrope’s bloodred eyes and an Onyx’s jet-black hair. These two traits came from his noble, mixed, half-Aquila, half-Rubela blood and set him apart from the other Eighty-Six, who generally fell under the category of Colorata.

His calm expression, unbefitting his age, gave his handsome features a certain cold quality, and his slender build and pale features were characteristic of the old Empire’s nobility.

Despite serving on the eastern front, which consisted mostly of forests, prairies, and strips of wetland, he wore a desert-camouflage uniform with shades of sandy brown and gray, which he’d gotten from the Republic’s unsold stocks. There were no officers to rebuke him for it, so he kept his collar loose, with a sky-blue scarf wrapped around his neck peeping out of it.

The sound of machinery and the maintenance crew’s shouts echoed loudly through the operating hangar, mixing with the cheers of a few of his comrades playing two-on-two basketball in the plaza in front of the hangar and a guitar strumming out a jingle from an old cartoon. Fellow squad member Kino, seated in his own unit’s cockpit with its canopy open and reading a porno magazine, noticed Shin passing by and raised his hand in greeting.

Despite it being the front lines, on days without sorties, the base’s personnel tended to become rather bored. Usually, they were required to patrol the contested zones every day, but they never did, as there was no need. Still, on paper and according to the reports they submitted to the Handlers, they should currently be in the middle of patrol.

Some of them who felt like going for a walk were out in the ruins of nearby cities, scavenging for materials. Everyone else was doing their chores (cooking, laundry, cleaning, or tending to the fields and the chickens at the back of the base) or otherwise just passing the time however they pleased.

The sound of rugged military boots approached him, and a thick voice shook the hangar with a roar that would make even a tank stop in its tracks.

“Shin! Shinei Nouzen! Ya fucked it all up again, ya little shit!”

Kino jumped out of the cockpit and scurried into the shadows like a startled cockroach while Shin patiently waited for the voice’s owner to approach him.

“What’s up?”

“Don’t you ‘What’s up?’ me, Undertaker! Fuckin’ hell!”

The person who closed in on Shin like a crazed hellhound was a fifty-something-year-old member of the maintenance crew. His hair was a grizzled graying-ash color, and he wore sunglasses and oil-stained work clothes. It was Lev Aldrecht, the Spearhead squadron’s maintenance division captain. Shin, who was about to turn sixteen this year, was considered a veteran among the soldiers on the battlefield, but Aldrecht went straight beyond veteran and into senior territory, being a survivor who’d served in the war nine years ago.

“Why d’ya gotta wreck your unit every friggin’ time ya sortie?! The actuator and damper are rattlin’ all over the place! I keep tellin’ ya the suspension unit’s weak, so why d’ya keep pushin’ it like that?!”

“I’m sorry.”

“You think yer apology’s gonna fix this?! I ain’t telling you to apologize—I’m telling you to change yer ways! That crazy fightin’ style of yours is gonna get ya killed one day! We’re outta spare parts, so I can’t fix yer rig until we restock!”

“My spare?”

“Ah, yeah, the spare. We do have a spare, don’t we? Gotta have one when the captain keeps trashing his rig left and right. Ya come to us for repairs three times more than any other Processor. D’ya think yer some kind of prince or somethin’?! Huh?!”

“The Republic abolished the class system in the revolution three hundred years ago.”

“Son, I have half a mind to beat the piss outta you right now… Considerin’ how fast ya trash your units, unless we getcha three rigs to ride in, there’s no way we can keep up with repairs. When ya consider the amount of time till we get restocked compared to how often you guys sortie, there’s no way we can keep up! Whaddaya expect me to do, pray real hard so yer rig doesn’t break? Or maybe pray to the scrap-metal fairies to collect yer bits and pieces, huh?!”

“Didn’t Fido retrieve Kujo’s unit?”

Aldrecht fell silent at Shin’s matter-of-fact tone.

“Well, yeah, I could take the parts I need from Kujo’s rig…but I’d rather avoid cannibalizin’ other units. I mean, are ya okay with that? I’d be puttin’ parts from a unit that got someone killed in yer rig.”

Shin tilted his head and knocked on his Juggernaut’s—Undertaker’s—armor with the back of his hand. Beneath the canopy was his Personal Mark, a headless skeleton carrying a shovel.

Aldrecht smirked bitterly.

“Yeah, too late for that, I suppose… Ain’t that right, Undertaker?”

Nodding pensively, the aged mechanic looked at the spring fields spreading out beyond the open shutters. A cloudless sky stretched out overhead, its azure hues seeming as if they would consume any- and everything. The fields of blue cornflowers and the greenery of new leaves blanketed the plains with a mesmerizingly beautiful mosaic. This served as the grave marker for the skeletons of millions of Eighty-Six who’d died on the battlefield.

The Eighty-Six weren’t buried in graves. There could be no graves when there were no casualties. Even collecting their remains was forbidden. Pigs masquerading as humans were denied the right to rest in peace, or even the right to mourn their dead comrades. This was the world their motherland fabricated nine years ago, the facade they maintained even now.

“I hear Kujo got blown to bits.”

“Yeah.”

A self-propelled mine—a badly made antipersonnel weapon consisting of a fuselage filled with explosives, with rod-shaped limbs and a spherical head, undetectable from afar by the naked eye. One had latched onto Kujo, who’d mistaken it for an injured soldier. It had been a nighttime battle, a mission to rescue another unit.

“That’s good. Means he passed on.”

“Probably.”

Shin believed not in heaven or hell, but in someplace else that wasn’t here. Somewhere they could go back to. Aldrecht laughed deeply.

“Kujo was lucky that in the end he got to be in the same unit as you… And so are they.”

They could hear voices cheering excitedly outside as the ball rattled the torn net. The guitar’s off-tune chorus echoed all the way back to the fields behind the barracks. Aldrecht knew this was a sight you couldn’t find in any other squadron.

Sortie after sortie. Daily patrols in anticipation of a Legion attack. Suspense and fear gradually wore down the Processors’ nerves as they lost more and more comrades with every passing battle. In such an extreme situation, where living to see the next morning was the best one could do, they didn’t even have the luxury to consider amusement or a humane lifestyle. But that wasn’t true for this squadron. Even if they did have to go on the offensive, they never had to worry about a surprise attack.

“…It’s thanks to you they can live like this, Shin.”

“But I still give you guys three times the amount of repair work compared to a normal Processor.”

Aldrecht chuckled loudly. Shin gazed back into the pair of eyes looking at him bitterly from behind the sunglasses and shrugged.

“I swear, you little shit… Thought I finally got you to crack a joke, and that’s what you come up with.”

“I really do feel sorry, even if I can’t act on that apology.”

“Ya damn idiot. Makin’ sure you kids come back alive is the maintenance team’s job. Long as we can make sure that happens, we don’t give a rat’s ass about what happens to the units, and we’ll do whatever we gotta do to get ’em back in workin’ order.”

Having said that in one go, Aldrecht turned to look the other way. He was apparently embarrassed.

“Oh, right. I heard yer Handler got changed again. What’s the new one like?”

There was a pause.

“…Yeah.”

“The hell d’ya mean by ‘Yeah,’ ya blockhead?”

Shin had changed Handlers so often that telling them apart was difficult, and Processors weren’t supposed to be that aware of their Handler’s existence to begin with. That was just how much they neglected their jobs. And once enough Eintagsfliege got deployed, the radar and data transmissions stopped functioning, so it became impossible to maintain command from a distant base. That was why Processors didn’t rely on Handlers and didn’t really care much if they were present or not.

In the end, a Handler’s job boiled down to monitoring the Processors. Thanks to the collar known as the Para-RAID, no matter the place or time, they could always know every word that came out of a Processor’s mouth. The only job expected of the Handlers was to serve as a suppressant that kept the Eighty-Six’s rebellious intentions in check.

Shin opened his mouth to speak, recalling the few exchanges he’d had with her this week. The first thing that came to mind was…

“My paperwork’s increased. I guess I’ll have to start faking my patrol reports every day now.”

“…Yer probably the only one with balls big enough to keep sendin’ the same report ya fabricated five years ago every time just because they don’t actually read ’em, Shin.”

He didn’t even bother changing the date or location, and since he hadn’t gone on patrol since, the content was all random nonsense. Shin was honestly surprised no one had noticed after all this time.

‘It seems you accidently sent me the wrong file…’

When she’d gently pointed that out with her voice like a clear silver bell, Shin couldn’t help but sigh a bit. She had laughed calmly, saying he “could be surprisingly careless sometimes” in a tone filled with friendliness and genuine goodwill.

“She Resonated the day she got appointed and said she wanted to continue these exchanges, so she’ll be syncing up with us daily. Unusual for a Republic soldier.”

“So she’s a decent person, huh? …Must be hard to live like that. Poor thing.”

Shin was in total agreement, which was why he chose to say nothing. Justice and ideals carried no weight in this world, no matter how much you tried to will them into reality—

“…Hmm.”

Shin suddenly shifted his gaze off into the distance, beyond the spring fields, as if he’d just heard something call for him.

“Ta-daa! This is what they really mean by ‘the godforsaken pigs who live outside the Gran Mule’!”

“That’s in bad taste, Haruto.”

They were in the barracks’ kitchen. Theo, whose hobby was drawing, cut down his squad mate’s joke as he kept watch over a boiling pot of berry jam while jotting something down in his sketchbook. He had a Jade’s golden hair and emerald eyes and, despite turning sixteen this year, had a small, slender stature. Having dropped a large boar’s carcass at the back garden’s side entrance, Haruto, who was a Rubis, lowered his hands, which he spread out jokingly, and scratched his head. He’d gone hunting in the nearby forest, even though it wasn’t his turn today.

“Yeah, can’t get the punch line down right. You were supposed to laugh just now.”

“It made me nauseous instead, to be frank. But still, I gotta hand it to ya…”

Putting his sketchbook aside, Theo fixed his gaze on the game Haruto had brought. He’d likely hauled it in with his Juggernaut, but carrying such a monstrously large boar all on his own had probably still required a lot of effort.

“Amazing. That’s one hell of a catch.”

Haruto laughed happily, pleased with the compliment.

“Isn’t it, though?! We’re having barbecue tonight, after all! Where did Raiden wander off to? And Anju, too. I gotta trade cooking duties today.”

“Yeah, out of everyone, Shin’s in charge of that today. Raiden’s in ‘town,’ gathering materials, and Anju’s got laundry duty today. The rest of the girls went with her.”

Haruto’s gaze suddenly fixed on Theo.

“Wait. When did that happen?”

“I think right after breakfast?”

“And it’s almost noon now.”

“That’s right.”

“……”

Even if they had to do the whole base’s laundry, it wouldn’t take six of them all morning to get it all done. And their washhouse was on the riverbank. Plus, today was a hot, clear spring day. Haruto suddenly became excited.

“It means they’re bathing! The riverbank is heaven on earth right now, you know?!”

“I should probably tell you this before they really do send you to heaven, but they’re all armed!”

Haruto stiffened in place. Theo sighed, stirring the pot with a bamboo ladle. Seeing the pot had finally boiled down, he put out the fire. Just as he placed the lid, he felt the Para-RAID activate. When he first enlisted, a RAID Device had been implanted in the back of his neck, along with an ear-cuff-shaped data tag that listed other targets he could Resonate with. Then came the rush of illusory heat that signified the activation of these two devices. Theo pressed his finger against the ear cuff and switched on the signal transmission.

“Activate. Ah.”

Theo’s Jade eyes became colder when he realized who had just contacted him. He exchanged glances with Haruto, whose smile disappeared the moment he pressed his own ear cuff, and spoke to the person who’d Resonated with them.

“Shin… What happened?”

The squadron did their laundry on the banks of a river that was always bustling with water despite its small size. It was near that river’s banks that the female squadron members were playing in the water, frolicking and splashing with one another.

“What are you doing, Kaie? Don’t just stand there—come in already!”

Seeing her friend loitering a short distance away and fidgeting, Kurena stopped the game of tag and called to her. She had short-bobbed, chestnut-colored Agate hair and catlike Topaz eyes. She’d removed the top of her field uniform and tied it around her waist, exposing her olive-drab tank top—and the curvy figure beneath it—to the sun, but since everyone else was wearing the same outfit, she didn’t feel embarrassed.

“N-nah, I just… Y’know, I just thought this outfit was sorta embarrassing…”

Despite her boyish mannerisms, Kaie, the black-haired, black-eyed, petite Orienta, was unmistakably still a girl. She seemed quite bothered by the way her wet tank top clung to her skin, her face crimson. Her ponytail, long enough to look like it could fit on the back of a knight’s helmet, clung to her skin and entwined all the way down her neck and into her cleavage. It was, admittedly, a rather alluring sight.

“I mean… Is it really okay…? Playing around in the water without calling the others— Appfuu!”

Anju, who had been rinsing her long silvery-blue hair until now, scooped up water with both hands and splashed it at Kaie. She hadn’t taken off her uniform top but had unzipped it all the way down below her navel. A rather daring display, given her modest nature. As her hair color suggested, she had thick Adularia blood, but her pale-blue Celesta eyes were inherited from her great-grandmother’s grandmother. This alone would mark her as an Eighty-Six by the Republic, which placed utmost importance on purity of blood.

“Lighten up, Kaie. It’s fine; we finished the laundry already.”

The other girls joined in as well.

“I mean, Shin knew about this when he gave us the okay to come here, didn’t he?”

“Oh yeah. He said today was gonna be hotter than usual, and then he actually smiled a bit, which was unusual.”

“It’s times like this that that stone-faced captain of ours can actually be pretty cool.”

She then swiftly turned her gaze to Kurena and smiled apologetically.

“Ah, sorry for not catching on, Kurena… Both you and Shin don’t have any duties right now, so we should have probably thought of some excuse to leave you two alone.”

“Wh-wh-wh-what are you saying?! I-it’s not like that at all!”

“I don’t get what you see in him. You can never tell what’s going through his head.”

“I keep telling you, I don’t see anything in him. It’s not like that!”

“By the way, what do you think about him, Kaie?”

“Who, Shin? He’s pretty cute. I’m totally into the ‘silent and stoic’ thing he’s got goin’ on.”

“Wh-what the—? Kaie?!”

Kaie had to stifle a laugh at Kurena’s panicked expression. She was too obvious.

“Right, right, I get it. If none of you have your sights on him, maybe I can go in for the kill tonight. It’s an eastern tradition, you know… A girl sneaks into a guy’s room in the dead of night and…”

“K-Kaie?! I—I, uh, don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel anything for Shin, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea! You should stick to those, uh, you know, yamato nadeshiko etiquettes and stuff! So I mean, you get it, right…?”

The girls all smirked, watching Kurena become increasingly flustered by the second.

“““““Kurena, you’re so cute!!!”””””

Realizing she’d been baited, Kurena cried out in frustration.

“You bullies!”

“Ah, there’s the Kurena pout!”

The thicket next to them rustled, and suddenly, their squad mate Daiya popped out of it. Daiya had blond hair and blue eyes, as was typical of the Sapphira.

He was also, incidentally, a boy.

“““““Kyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”””””

“Gyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Being bombarded by both the powerful ultrasonic weapon all women were blessed with at birth and a barrage of every possible solid object within arm’s reach, Daiya retreated to the relative safety of the other side of the thicket.

“Hey, what the hell?! Who just threw their gun at me?! Those things are loaded! Are you out of your damn minds?!”

“““““Kyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”””””

“Gyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Taking a clear hit from the girls’ second wave of carpet-bombing, Daiya fell completely silent. The other girls gave Anju a backward glance while fixing their disheveled clothes as she approached Daiya.

“So what did you come here for, Daiya?”

“It’d heal my broken bones if you’d ask Are you okay? in a cute voice right about now, Anju.”

“Oh my, are you okay, Daiya, darling.”

“Oh, God, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’ll never ask for that again—just please stop talking in monotone with that expressionless look on your face. I’m gonna cry.”

Having zipped her uniform all the way up to its fastener, Kaie looked up, confirming the other girls had fixed their outfits as well.

“You can come out now, Daiya. What happened?”

“Oh, right. The thing is, I started working as a messenger today.”

Apparently, he had a message for them. Kurena pouted, still hugging the top of her uniform with her arms to cover her curvy figure.

“You could have just used the Para-RAID. Why come all the way here for that?”

“I mean, syncing into a bunch of girls gossiping would be awkward for everyone, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t want me to sync in and catch you saying something like Hey girls, I wuv Shin! would you?”

“Wh-wh-wh-wh-wha—?!”

Hearing Daiya imitate her in a sickeningly cute tone she would never actually use, Kurena went red all the way up to her ears. Meanwhile, all the other girls (except for Kaie) began chattering.

“Can’t say I agree with what you did, but that judgment is more or less accurate.”

“I mean, we’d think it was hilarious, but poor Kurena would probably bury herself alive.”

“That’s pretty much what happened, isn’t it?”

“Wait—I’ve got it. We should trick her into saying it next time and have Shin sync in while she does. That’ll be a spectacle!”

“Kurena’s reaction would be the only interesting part about it. Shin wouldn’t even move a muscle, with that iron mask of a face.”

“I—I never said that! Cut that out!”

“““““Kurena, you’re so cute!!!”””””

“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, you bullies!!!”

At the sound of everyone present (Daiya included) doting on her, Kurena screamed in desperation.

Her shoulders still shaking as she laughed, Kaie looked over at Daiya.

“No, but really, what’s the message?”

Daiya’s expression went blank at the question.

“Yeah. It’s from Shin.”

At those words, the girls’ expressions tensed immediately.

Man shall not live on bread alone.

These words had been spoken by some patronizing messiah thousands of years ago, but Raiden thought there might be some wisdom in them after all. Life needed things like candy or coffee—or even less tangible things like games and music—to truly feel fulfilling. The Republic’s white pigs who threw them into this hell didn’t feel the need to give their livestock anything more than the bare minimum of food to keep them alive. If you took that sentence and examined it from another perspective, it meant that, quality of life aside, people could not live without food to eat.

“All righty then, Fido. Here’s a little test for you.”

They frequented the ruins of some nameless city when scavenging for preserved foods, overgrown vegetables, livestock that had gone feral, or abandoned commodities. In a square littered with rubble, the squadron’s vice captain, Raiden, took a can of synthesized rations they’d received from the base’s production plant and placed it on the concrete next to a piece of preserved bread he’d found in the city hall’s emergency storage.

He wore an unkempt field uniform over his sinewy limbs, and his reddish-black hair, evidence of his pureblood Eisen heritage, was trimmed short, while his expression and features had a wild, sharp aspect to them.

He was facing a familiar Scavenger. This clumsy drone, which accompanied Juggernauts on the battlefield and supplied them with replacement energy packs and ammunition, had a square, angular body and ran on four legs. Fido leaned over, its lens-based optical sensor fixedly observing the objects set in front of it.

“Which one’s trash and which one’s food?”

“Pi.”

Fido immediately extended a crane arm and flicked the synthetic ration away. Watching the white lump roll away, Raiden took a bite from the bread. Even a damn drone can tell this synthetic glob is trash. What were the white pigs thinking, trying to pass this off as food?

Internment camps and bases all had production plants and automated factories attached to them, so they could produce all the commodities they would need on their own. Adjustment of the production rates and power were all provided from the other side via underground cables.

It was a needlessly elaborate, large-scale feeding system, which meant the Republic spared no expense so long as it meant they didn’t have to actually have contact with their so-called pigs. The food and goods produced by the factory were truly the bare essentials, and despite being called food, the rations they got every day looked like plastic explosives for some reason. And it went without saying that they tasted like crap.

So if they wanted to eat anything remotely decent, they had to scour ruins left behind nine years ago, like this one, for food and provisions. Thankfully, this squadron didn’t have to worry about doing patrols, meaning they had ample time and energy packs to hunt through these ruins, with the Juggernauts handling the heavy lifting.

“All right, Fido, today’s provision objective is anything that’s not like that garbage. Gather as much food as you find and haul it back home.”

“Pi.”

Fido loudly imitated Raiden, who rose from his squat, and began gathering whatever useful items it could find. From pieces of Juggernaut wreckage to fragments of used shells, it picked up anything that could be recycled and used again and loaded it into a container that it would later haul back to base. That was one of the jobs the Scavengers were made to do.

Incidentally, Scavenger was not the true designation for these machines but rather the nickname they were given. After all, they would pick parts off crushed Juggernauts—and even other Scavengers that fell in combat—and scour the battlefields for scrap even when there weren’t any engagements going on. None of the Processors referred to them by their official name, choosing more blatantly to call them Scavengers—cannibalizing waste pickers. They were both trusty companions who saved them from having to worry about running out of ammo or energy and, at the same time, mechanical vultures that greedily devoured the remains of their fallen brethren.

Fido was a Scavenger that had been following and obeying Shin for around five years now. It was apparently part of one of Shin’s old units—and one of the only two survivors of a battle that wiped everyone else out, the other survivor being Shin. Shin apparently hauled Fido, the only machine that wasn’t completely destroyed, back to base, and they’d been together ever since.

It was unthinkable that a waste-gathering machine would have the capacity to feel something as complicated as gratitude, even if it did have some penchant for autonomous learning. But Fido appeared to have designated Shin as the target of highest priority when it came to restocking and followed him no matter how many times Shin changed units, always remaining at his side on every sortie. It was the kind of loyalty one couldn’t expect out of other, less accommodating Scavengers.

Judging by its model number, Fido was from early in the war, when Scavengers had only just been introduced to the battlefield. Having been in operation for as long as it had, Fido had likely learned a great deal more than its brethren had. And seeing it follow him around loyally as it did, Shin decided to name it Fido. The kind of name one might give a dog, like Whitey or Lucky… The guy definitely had a few screws loose.

“Pi.”

“Hmm?”

Raiden turned to find Fido, which had been following in his footsteps, suddenly at a halt. Tracing the gaze of its optical sensor, Raiden spotted a discolored, crumbling skeletal corpse resting beneath a large tree that grew in a flower bed lying in the shadow of the wreckage.

“…Oh.”

Realizing that was why the Scavenger had called him, Raiden approached the corpse. Its uniform was crumbling, and the assault rifle it held in its hands had turned red from rust. The fact that a dog tag was dangling from the body’s collarbone made it clear it wasn’t an Eighty-Six. This was probably a soldier of the Republic Armed Forces who had died nine years ago.

Fido, staying a short distance behind Raiden, beeped at him again. It was the inquisitive beep that asked whether it should bring something back. For times without combat, Shin had taught Fido to prioritize the collection of the belongings of those who fell in battle, since the white pigs had deliberately forbidden the retrieval of their corpses.

Raiden shook his head.

“Nah, it’s okay… This guy’s already got a damn good grave.”

Raiden knew this tree. It was a sakura: a cherry blossom tree. It was common in the continent’s east, its flowers flourishing brilliantly during the spring. Earlier this spring, the whole base had visited the sakura trees on the main road here at Kaie’s suggestion. The sight of the fluttering petals reflected in the pale moonlight in the dead of night was so beautiful, it evoked the image of the afterlife.

There was no point in burying this soldier in the cold, dark earth when he had his own pillow of cherry blossoms from which to look up at the sakura tree. This might be the corpse of an Alba, but it was still the remains of a soldier who’d died on the battlefield. Treating him like a pig wouldn’t feel right.

After offering a silent prayer for the departed soul, Raiden raised his head. An illusory heat tingled from his ear cuff.

“Hunting party, do you read?”

“Theo? What is it?”

The voice was clear, as if he’d been standing right next to him. The Resonance was aimed at everyone exploring the ruins, but Raiden answered on the group’s behalf.

“Change of forecast. There’s a shower coming.”

Raiden’s eyes narrowed grimly. As he looked up in the direction of the Legion’s territory, even his keen eyes could just barely make out the subtle shade of a few silvery sparkles that had begun spreading out in the sky. A swarm of flying Legion, the shape and size of butterflies, that absorbed and deflected electromagnetic waves and rays of visible light—the Eintagsfliege. They were the cornerstone of the Legion offensive, spreading out before an attack to confuse and jam radars and communications, masking the full brunt of the enemy force.

“When?”

“About two hours from now. Apparently, the force closest to us regrouped with another that was behind them. They’re probably restocking. They should advance on us as soon as they’re finished.”

While close, the Legion were still out of sight, and at this point, no radar would be able to detect the enemy forces. And yet, Theo—or rather, the person whose words he was relaying—described the situation as if he were seeing it with his own eyes.

“Roger that. We’ll be back soon. —Chise, Kuroto. You heard that, right? Regroup at the entrance to route twelve.”

“Roger.”

“There’s no Shepherd this time, either, so they’ll probably just try to brute force us. It depends on their route, of course, but if we ambush them near point 304, we should be able to mop them up in one go.”

Theo spoke with discernible traces of a smile. Raiden made his way to his unit, which was waiting for him a short distance from there, giving orders to the rest of the hunting party all the while. His lips also curled into a ferocious smile.

“So it’s just a bunch of Sheep. It’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel.”

It would by no means be an easy fight, but Sheep that only followed simple tactics were far, far easier to defeat than an army led by a Shepherd. Knowing ahead of time that there were no terribly dangerous enemies coming was a huge relief. Seriously, our Reaper really is— But that was where Raiden’s thoughts ground to a halt. The boy grimaced.

How did the red-eyed Reaper feel about this, really, as he wandered the battlefield in search of his lost head?

By the time Raiden and the rest of the hunting party returned to base, the other seventeen units were already set to launch. Theo waited in front of his own unit near the hangar’s entrance, greeting them with a smile like a mischievous cat.

“You’re laaaate, Raiden. I almost thought you stepped on a land mine on the way here.”

“Shut it—I’m not late. And don’t joke about mines. It’s still too soon.”

“Ah… Sorry.”

Kujo had gotten blown up by a self-propelled mine. In the two months since this squadron was formed, he was the third casualty. The rate at which Processors died was exceptionally high. One hundred thousand enlisted yearly, but within a year, less than a thousand remained.

They were still better off than their parents, who had to throw themselves headfirst into the fight. It’s said that back during the days when the only strategy they had was to charge at the Legion with archaic rocket launchers or explosives in hand, each squadron would lose half its troops within a day. Compared to that, this squadron’s losses were not as devastating, but they were still on the front lines. There wasn’t a single battle without losses. Death was the only thing that came equally—and suddenly—to all.

“We’re all here, right? At attention.”

Called by that quiet yet surprisingly clear voice, everyone straightened their backs. Before anyone knew it, silently and solemnly as the midnight moon, Shin stood in front of the first ward’s map, scribbling important notes onto an operation map in a transparent file. His features were as pale as ever, and he wore his iconic camouflage clothes and the rank insignia on his shoulders that marked him as a captain. That blue scarf, which he wore even now, was only one reason for his ominous alias, as if the Reaper were trying to cover the spot where his head once rested…

“I’ll explain the situation.”

The faces of all in attendance were reflected in the cold red eyes of this squad captain, who bore the name Reaper.

Finishing that concise but extremely clear briefing—that detailed everything from the enemy’s numbers, to their routes, down to the tactics they should employ—the Processors all boarded their Juggernauts. They were all child soldiers from their mid to late teens, the youth still obvious in their features and physiques.

Inserting the last few parts they needed into the canopy, twenty-one armored weapon systems awakened from their brief slumber: the Piloted Autonomous Unmanned Polypedal Armored Weapons, M1A4 Juggernauts. Four long, jointed legs. A small, organic-looking torso, reminiscent of a chrysalis, its armor colored whitish brown like the color of old bones. It was equipped with a grappling sub-arm, a heavy machine gun, a set of a wire and an anchor, and an arm-mounted 57 mm smoothbore gun.

Its overall silhouette resembled that of a prowling spider, but the two grappling arms and its brandished main battery were reminiscent of a scorpion’s tail and pincers. The Eighty-Six’s closest companion, as well as their final resting place.

Having chosen the shadows of a crumbling church in the city ruins as his hiding spot for the ambush, Shin opened his eyes within his Juggernaut’s cramped cockpit. They designated the main street as the kill zone and deployed each platoon’s units in such a way that their lines of fire wouldn’t intersect.

Shin’s first platoon and Kaie’s fourth platoon served as vanguard and suppressing fire, respectively, and were spread out along the main street’s left and right sides. Daiya’s fifth platoon handled explosive munitions, and Kurena’s sixth platoon handled sniping, blocking the street’s edge with their Juggernauts.

Even without looking at the optical screens, Shin could sense the enemy force’s size and formation. A Juggernaut’s cockpit was similar to a jet fighter’s, filled with a multitude of switches, LCD screens, and two control sticks to the left and right. The biggest difference was that instead of a bulletproof glass windshield, the Juggernaut’s cockpit was enclosed by an armored canopy, so the pilot couldn’t see outside the unit. To compensate for that, the cockpit was equipped with three screens and a holo-window that provided all sorts of data, but those did little to elevate the cockpit’s dark, claustrophobic feel.

The enemy unit employed a textbook diamond formation, as they had expected—a typical offensive formation, with the scouting party taking the rear while the other four parties each formed a vertex. Though the Legion had them outnumbered and outmatched in terms of performance, their tactics were simple and easy to predict.

Numerical superiority losing to strategic maneuvering was an elementary concept…but that logic didn’t hold up so easily against this enemy. This was an army with a size that did the name Legion justice. And yet, this was business as usual for the Processors. Situations like these, where a small force had to beat the odds and defeat an overwhelmingly larger army, situations that would be seen as reckless and futile from the very beginning, were the kinds of battles the Eighty-Six regularly fought through.

Suddenly, a passage from the Bible someone had read to him in the past surfaced from the depths of his memory. Someone. The last time he’d seen and heard that person was painted over in his memories, so he couldn’t quite remember. All he remembered were the words:

—And He asked him, What is your name?

Hearing what Shin whispered through the Para-RAID, which caught even the slightest of noises, Raiden sat up in his cockpit, having thrown his legs over the console earlier. Since he was hiding in the rubble, his main screen was dyed over by the concrete’s gray, and his radar screen was set to passive. Since it wasn’t in his mother tongue, the Republic’s language, he didn’t understand what Shin had said. Dicit ei Legio nomen mihi—

That was all he could make out.

Theo spoke up with an irritated tone.

“Shin, did you just quote the Bible? That’s creepy, dude. And that’s, like, the worst possible quote you could have picked, too.”

“What did he say?”

“The messiah, like, asked the devil or a demon for his name, and the answer he got was ‘I am Legion, for we are many.’”

Raiden fell silent. Definitely the wrong thing to say in this situation.

It was then that someone else synced into the Para-RAID.

“Handler One to all units. I’m sorry for being late—I got delayed.”

A lovely voice, ringing like a silver bell, reached his ears through the Sensory Resonance. It was the new Handler who got assigned to them after the old one quit because he feared the Reaper. Judging from the voice, it was a girl roughly their age.

“The enemy forces are approaching. We should intercept them at point 208—”

“Undertaker to Handler One. We have the enemy’s position confirmed. We’ve already deployed at point 204.”

Shin responded plainly, and Raiden could hear a gulp on the other side of the Resonance.

“That was fast… Good job, Undertaker.”

The Handler seemed genuinely impressed with Shin, but Raiden wasn’t surprised. Shin and the rest of this squadron’s Processors all had Personal Names. A Personal Name was a sort of title given to veterans. Most Processors used call signs that were a combination of their platoon’s name and a number during operations. Only veterans who had survived for a year through the horrors of the battlefield and conquered that 0.01 survival rate received that title.

They were those who had the talent and character the majority of Processors lacked, and most importantly of all, they possessed the devil’s luck that allowed them to survive and refine those qualities. The monsters blessed by the devil or the Reaper. The kind of people who never died or even seemed capable of doing so. Those who had returned from death’s door time and time again, overcoming impossible odds without batting an eye, only ever sparing a passing glance for their myriad fallen comrades.

A Personal Name symbolized the respect and awe the other Processors felt for these veterans. The minimal respect they could offer to the heroes who reached the peaks others never could—and awe for those demons of war who could fight while stepping over the remains of both their comrades and their foes. All members of the Spearhead squadron were distinguished Name Bearers with four to six years of combat experience, making them the most seasoned and experienced of all Processors. They would do fine, even without this little princess to command them from her castle.

But at the same time, Raiden was a little impressed. Point 208 would be the optimal spot to station in if they were detected by the Legion. She’d specified that point despite being appointed to their squadron for only a week. It seemed there was more to this young lady than her good nature.

A warning alarm blared. Their legs’ oscillation sensors detected something. A holo-window popped up and zoomed in. Ahead lay a light slope at the end of the main street lined from the sides by wreckage. A black silhouette suddenly covered the sunlight streaming down from the slope’s peak, and the next moment, their view was filled with the color of steel.

They’re here.

Their radar screens suddenly filled with red blips indicating hostile units. An army of mechanical demons marched toward them, threatening to paint over the ruins’ gray with their color. The Legion marched in an orderly line, leaving gaps of fifty to one hundred meters between one another. The lightest units, the Scout-type Ameise, moved with a silence that betrayed their weight of over ten tons, the overlapping noise of their movement, like bones rubbing against one another, coalescing into what sounded like the rustling of leaves.

It was an otherworldly, awe-inspiring sight.

The complex sensors on the bottom of their torsos and the 7.56 mm antipersonnel machine guns on their shoulders swerved to and fro as they marched along, scuttling on their three pairs of legs. The Ameise had an angular form, reminiscent of a carnivorous fish.

Carrying a 57 mm anti-tank multiple-rocket launcher on its back, with light reflecting menacingly off the high-frequency blades protruding from its front legs, the Dragoon-type Grauwolf had the ferocious appearance of a six-legged shark.

With their fifty-ton tank frames carried on eight jointed legs, the Tank-type Löwe advanced proudly, their oppressive 120 mm smoothbore turrets gazing ahead.

The Electronic Disruption types—the Eintagsfliege that were deployed in the sky—cast a long shadow over the battlefield as their clouds blotted out the sun. They showered the ground with silver scalelike particles that resembled powdered snow, which regenerated the micromachines that served as both the Legion’s lifeblood and their nervous system.

The Ameise platoon entered the kill zone. It drew near the first platoon that lay in ambush and passed them by without noticing. Led by their vanguard, the rest of the units passed them one by one, until eventually the Löwe, who stood at the rear, had entered the encirclement—

And that was that. They had entered the cage.

“Open fire.”

At Shin’s order, all units fixed their sights on the targets they’d been appointed and pulled the trigger.

The fourth platoon began gunning down the vanguard, while the first platoon bombarded the back line. The Ameise’s relatively frail armor and the Löwe’s lightly guarded rears were shot clean through, and the units collapsed, still and unmoving. The other Juggernauts opened fire, piercing through the Legion’s remaining forces, which immediately shifted to battle positions.

Explosions and thunderous blasts rocked the battlefield.

Pieces of scrap metal and silver micromachine blood sprayed into the air, with black flames consuming the background. And at that moment, twenty-one Juggernauts withdrew from their positions. Some left their covers and continued firing; others ran from cover to cover, unloading bullets from the flanks and rear onto the Legion that attempted to shoot down their escorts. By the time that ended, the first Juggernauts had already taken cover and begun shooting at the flanks of other Legion.