Since the Morpho had metallic legs in place of wheels, it technically could leave the rail. Its massive weight couldn’t be supported by most ground foundation, sinking into the earth, and even if that didn’t happen, it couldn’t hope to travel as fast as it did on the tracks, but it was still possible. And so Nidhogg found a firm, paved military road it could slowly, gingerly move on.
It walked slowly, like an insect creeping along, but mere infantry knew better than to approach the gigantic dragon. As they ran in terror, trying to gain distance from it, it aimed its long-range radar at them, making their body fluids boil from the powerful radar waves for a spot of amusement as it waited for the faulty enemy railgun to shoot.
Come at me. I’ve come all the way here, to where I can’t move. Shoot me. This time, I’ll shoot back before you can land a hit on me.
Of course, its grudge couldn’t reach the other railgun, and yet—a reaction on its antiair radar. High-speed projectiles detected.
—There!
With almost childlike glee, Nidhogg turned the bearing of its elongated barrel. Reverse-calculating the projectiles’ trajectory, it started on identifying the Kampf Pfau’s position. It ignored any rounds that were on course to miss it by a wide margin and spread out its heat-disposal wings. Its consciousness, which remained clotted with the hatred it had died with, was submerged with the madness that came with accepting its instincts as a murder machine. It finished identifying the firing position. Its barrel trembled, adjusting its sights as it prepared to counterattack—
But then…
A tank shell fired at it from an entirely unexpected direction, striking it and rattling its sensors and mechanical thoughts.
✦ ✦ ✦
His reticle followed his line of sight, intersecting with the Morpho’s frame as Shin squeezed the trigger. His APFSDS shell hit it directly, causing its reactive armor to explode, covering the Morpho in black smoke.
Peering at him coldly, Shin spat out, “Idiot.”
Pursuing a routed, defeated army to deliver blows to its exposed back was the most efficient way of inflicting losses, but doing so also disturbed the Legion’s own ranks, and charging straight ahead without losing speed meant one’s vigilance of their surroundings was lower. And to begin with, not all infantry units had fled, with some of them still fighting.
And in the midst of a battlefield where it was hard to tell friend from foe apart, a slow, dull railroad artillery appeared. Blinded by victory, it carelessly moved in, even getting off the rail tracks that would have allowed it to flee to safety. And it allowed itself this arrogance despite facing the Eighty-Six, who’d been conditioned to fight the menacing Legion in defective aluminum coffins.
And being one of them, the Morpho knew this. But joining the army of mechanical ghosts, it’d grown arrogant and drunk with power, neglecting the vigilance the battlefield demanded. Despite all that, it still had the mindset of a disposable Juggernaut, a disposable Processor. It failed to grasp the Morpho’s importance and value as a tactical weapon, complacently convincing itself it was worthless.
If so, then you’re not the ghost of an Eighty-Six anymore. You’re only basking in idle despair at the place where you were taken, not trying to go anywhere or be capable of anything—just another powerless, unsightly fool.
“Engaging the enemy. Colonel Grethe, you can tell them the Kampf Pfau doesn’t need to distract it or keep it at bay anymore… As expected, this idiot was waiting for it to shoot so it can fire back.”
Grethe frowned from the other side of the Resonance. “I’m going to have to ask you to relax, Captain. That kind of pointless report isn’t called for.”
“Roger,” Shin replied, but her words went in one ear and out the other.
His style was melee combat using close-range armaments—atypical for an armored weapon, it required extreme concentration. By now, Shin’s thoughts were fixed solely on the enemy unit before his eyes.
✦ ✦ ✦
Radar waves fundamentally traveled in a straight line, meaning their detection range narrowed on the surface over the horizon. And if one hid in the shadows of any hills, valleys, houses, or trenches, it was possible to evade Nidhogg’s narrow detection range altogether.
Only once it was hit head-on with a tank shell did Nidhogg realize that armored weapons were approaching it. At that point, the enemy unit was already within two thousand meters of it, within the range of a tank shell. Conversely, the Morpho’s prided long-range, elongated barrel, with its range of four hundred kilometers, meant that Nidhogg’s enemies were too close to effectively aim at.
They were rapidly traversing those two thousand meters, too. These weren’t the usual metal-black units with the Federacy flag. They had armor the color of polished bone, and a tank turret on their backs extending like a scorpion’s tail. They crawled on four legs, like skeletons creeping in search of their lost heads.
—Juggernauts?!
No. Its database search called up another name—Reginleif. The Federacy’s unique high-mobility combat Feldreß. Nidhogg understood this, but the emotion that gripped it didn’t go away. The Juggernaut. The same kind of unit it once used alongside its comrades, back in the Eighty-Sixth Sector.
The feeling of being attacked by fellow Eighty-Six, the illusion of being blamed by its comrades, made the ghost of a child soldier now known as Nidhogg shudder.
No. No, they aren’t my comrades. My friends, my whole squadron got turned into Legion with me. They all feel the same way. So they wouldn’t— My friends wouldn’t blame me!
I…
I did nothing wrong. I just wanted to get back at them, at the white pigs!
But its scream reached no one. The headless skeletons mercilessly rained cannon fire on it, which had become every bit the monster it was named after.
Guided projectiles rained self-forging fragments on it, and tank shells pierced into it from its flank. High explosives rammed into it, and machine-gun fire swept over it. The Liquid Micromachines that formed its barrel, the scales of its explosive reactive armor, and its six antiair autocannons were all rapidly reduced to nothing.
Despite being unable to properly align its line of fire on them from this range, it still tried to move its barrel. Rather than aim at them, it tried to escape their line of fire or perhaps splash the liquid metal that was charged with propelling the shells in its barrels. Its 800 mm railgun was fearsome and unmatched, but once it couldn’t shoot, it was effectively useless. It could only stand there as the Reginleifs bombarded it with tank shells from three directions, each one of them an accusation of its sins.
Stop it. No more. Help me!
But no one—not even the red-eyed Reaper—could hear its screams.
✦ ✦ ✦
The slow missiles had initially only been fired to serve as a decoy. The Morpho’s antiair autocannons swerved to shoot and intercept the missiles as they flew through the air, a trail of flame left behind. But as the guns’ sights and the Morpho’s attention as a whole moved up, Undertaker and the other Reginleifs loaded with tank turrets fired at it from both flanks. This destroyed all six of the autocannons at once.
On his own, Undertaker would struggle to silence all the antiair autocannons, but fighting in a team with several units operating in tandem, they were able to eliminate the autocannons with ease.
Following that, the missiles overhead dropped their cluster bombs, and the 88 mm projectiles rained down on the Morpho after a delay. This intentionally triggered the explosive reactive armor, scattering explosions, flashes, waves of heat, and loud sound that blinded the Morpho’s sensors.
In the meanwhile, Shin and his platoon’s three units, along with Raiden’s 2nd Platoon, split up into three and approached it.
“Artillery configuration units, half of you leave your ammo as is, and the other half, exchange your ammo to incendiary bombs.”
Armed with explosive projectiles, artillery units were to counter the railgun’s fire, while the incendiary bombs were to counter the electric wires it would soon likely deploy for melee combat. With high explosives hitting every time it tried to align its sights, the Morpho was unable to stop Shin’s approach. The back of the unit trembled, and as expected, its radiation-expelling wings unfurled. It took aim at Undertaker and his companion units, swinging its countless metallic whips down like bolts of lightning.
“—Incendiary bombs, fire.”
But then hellfire struck them, sending them limp and inert to the ground. The battle with the first Morpho, Kiriya Nouzen, already taught Shin that the close-range wires were weak to high temperatures.
With units drawing on it and all its means of attack lost, the Morpho began swinging its turret around with movements that seemed almost desperate. As it moved, it dragged the inert wires on the ground, trying to horizontally sweep at an approaching Reginleif—and purged all the wires halfway through the motions. The momentum of the swing sent the wires flying like countless arrows. The sweeping trajectory of that silvery torrent made the Reginleifs brake where they stood and duck to dodge it.
“Whoa!”
“That was close!”
But Shin alone was able to just barely slip through the torrent and continue his charge.