This was an odd question, Shin pondered. The capital’s position was set so it was surrounded by production territories, with combat territories on the outer circumference of that circle. In other words, the capital of Sankt Jeder was as far from the battlefield as could be. But he checked just like he was asked and confirmed there were no Legion there.
To be exact, he did spot a few, but they were incredibly far and hard to hear, and their voices were weak to begin with, plus they were up in the sky. So those were probably Eintagsfliege riding the wind or some such. Since the Eintagsfliege were lightweight and the flapping of their wings was weak, it wasn’t unheard of for that to happen.
As he took off the RAID Device, wondering why Joschka would ask him that, he passed by the lounge and heard Guren’s voice.
“…Whoa, not again.”
“It’s creepy, isn’t it? It’s been happening over and over, but no one’s declaring who did it or why.”
Having tuned in to the news by coincidence, Guren and Touka talked over what they saw. Listening in to a snippet of the broadcast, Shin came to a realization.
“…So this is what he meant.”
Joschka had been asking him about this. Explosions had gone off in the capital area and an adjacent central territory. At this point, they were being regarded as terrorist bombings; there’d been ten incidents since the first one in Garenike City, but the culprit behind them hadn’t been discovered yet.
Joschka’s concern that a self-propelled mine had entered under the cover of the Eintagsfliege’s optical camouflage and sneaked as far as the capital made sense, then. It wasn’t entirely impossible, but so long as he was on the western front, Shin would have surely sensed it, so that couldn’t be the case. What’s more, even someone who’d never seen a self-propelled mine would be able to tell it wasn’t a human being. And if it was a self-propelled mine, the incident wouldn’t have been reported as a terrorist bombing—it would have been reported as an attack by the constructs.
But that thought made Shin frown. It wasn’t a self-propelled mine, but this was exactly why…
“…I imagine the people around the capital must be anxious.”
Relative to a terrorist attack, there were few casualties. But that was just to say that some did die, and the thought of oneself or one’s family getting caught meant that fact offered little peace of mind. Since the attacks were sporadic in both time and place, it was impossible to know what the bombers were after and therefore impossible to avoid them.
I just hope we figure out what this is soon, Shin thought as he walked away.
✦ ✦ ✦
The serial terrorist bombings were an unpleasant affair for those investigating them, too. They were completely inconsistent in terms of time, place, and how many people were around, like a series of explosions with no rhyme or reason to them. These were seemingly random bombings with no demands made or a single word of announcement. No recognized anti-government movements or other organizations to speak of claimed responsibility for them. There was no guessing at what the motives or objectives of the bombers even were.
The only thing the incidents had in common was that both eyewitness testimonies and roadside security-camera footage revealed that the culprits of these bombings were all girls in their late teens. And—
“Again, there are reactions of an explosive, but nothing else.”
No cord or fuse that would be attached to a bomb, no radio receiver or timer device. No ball bearings or nails that would normally be included in an antipersonnel bomb. Nothing of the sort was discovered at any of the scenes.
Because of this, there were very few direct victims of these incidents relative to a bombing. Only those directly adjacent to the detonation got caught up in the blast, and the people who tried to run and ended up trampled were larger in number. In some cases, the only one who died was the bomber herself. They must have had explosives strapped all over their bodies, because they were blown to bits like they exploded from the inside out.
And when more precise security footage and eyewitness testimonies came in, the investigators became all the more confused.
“…The bomber said, ‘Run’?”
The bomber then blew up immediately after, but a nearby stall owner said he definitely heard her say that. Camera footage of another bomber showed her clearly avoiding populated places and going into an alley, where she then blew up. The girl was very unsteady on her feet, and as soon as she made the corner, her feet stopped near a stray cat, and she exploded.
This was, indeed, the most baffling part of it all. They went as far as to detonate explosives in the middle of a city, only to seek to avoid victims, with an unexpectedly low death toll that could only be explained by them trying to minimize how many got hurt. One girl blew up while hiding in an abandoned house, and one of them went so far as to blow up in the middle of a field with no one in sight.
But then an investigator peered at the face of the girl in one paused video.
“This girl… I’ve seen her somewhere before.”
His colleagues immediately looked up, curious, as he gazed pensively at the footage, his brows knit as he traced back his memory. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, so this wasn’t someone he knew personally, but—
“It was recent… Right, it was a wanted-person directive. Yeah, one the army shared with us…”
And upon remembering it, he nodded. Even back then, he’d thought there was something strange about the girls.
“She was one of the Eighty-Six who ran away when they were rounding up the wiretaps.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Amari instantly delivered the report like Yuuto asked, but the unpleasant MP wrote it off as a lie and ignored her pleas, instead focusing on Yuuto’s “desertion.” He kept questioning her about where he was headed and what for, but if she’d have said he was heading “back home” to the Republic, he wouldn’t have believed her. And if he wasn’t going to believe a thing she was saying, she preferred to say nothing at all.
This apparently marked her as an accomplice, and she was restricted from leaving the recovery facility. This pushed back her return to Rüstkammer, and Amari had no choice but to simply loiter in the lounge with energy to spare.
She noticed a shadow cast in from the entrance to the lounge. Raising her eyes with her head resting on the table, she spotted that same unpleasant MP. He looked around and, upon spotting her, walked over with swift steps.
“…What? I already told you everything,” Amari said, her expression sour.
The MP replied with a stiff expression. Standing next to him was an unfamiliar older soldier who was, based on his rank insignia, his superior officer.
“True. I didn’t listen to you. I said I’d pass your report along, and I didn’t. Forgive me… Please tell us everything one more time. Everything you know, everything you’ve heard.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“…I guess the Federacy isn’t a monolith after all.”
As they watched the news on the bombings, which had become a constant on TV, Annette said this to Theo as they had tea together, which they’d started doing more often. Theo turned his jade eyes to her. His colleagues eyed them coldly just the same, but their relationship wasn’t anything noteworthy.
Annette raised a slender brow and looked up at the food court’s large TV.
“They really mention a lot of different suspicious groups. ‘The noble liberation front’ this, ‘the purification church’ that… And yeah, the liberation front makes sense; it’s a group calling for the independence of territories the Empire occupied, but…”
“Yeah…” Theo heard things like this about the Federacy, or rather, the Empire. “They were on bad terms back when the Empire existed.”
The rivalries in the Federacy became more pronounced once one enrolled in the military. There was prejudice between former nobility and the civilians, the Onyxes and the Pyropes, and prejudice toward the Vargus, which Bernholdt had told him about.
And in the United Kingdom, there was the division between the vassals and the serfs, and within the vassals, there was antagonism between the Iola and the Taaffe. And even within the Eighty-Six, there was prejudice toward those with Alba or Imperial noble blood. Things had likely been similar within the Empire.
One’s language, culture, social class, or the racial features they were born with. People were scorned and cast out for the most minor details.
“Kurena tells me they sent a military unit just out of rivalry with Shin’s grandfather. If the army’s top brass are still like this, it’s probably the same all over the Federacy… Ah.”
Theo trailed off and turned around, realizing that the footsteps he’d been hearing in the background were approaching their table. A noncommissioned officer with a military police armband approached with a group of officers. They nodded at Theo and turned their eyes to Annette, who looked taken aback.
“Pardon us… You’re Major Henrietta Penrose, yes?”