“Impossible! There are too many of them!”
The voice came from somewhere within headquarters, three days after Keita’s arrival in Kyushu. They had just finished their final checks on deployment and weapons, and everything was in place, ready to engage the oncoming wave of monsters.
Since demons had been summoned during World War II, humanity had never developed a surveillance network using satellites—something Keita had taken for granted during his previous life. Instead, monitoring relied heavily on radar from ground-based towers and patrol ships.
And the ratio of boats to towers was about one to nine.
Ideally, the military would have liked to set up proper patrols using multiple ships and trained spotters, but there was a major problem standing in the way. If monsters attacked at sea, the crews would almost certainly be killed after just one or two missions. That risk made it hard to justify sending too many manned patrol ships.
Instead, they placed disposable radar units at key locations and relied on tracking which ones were destroyed, and the ETA and direction of any monster incursions.
The downside to this method was that they couldn’t pinpoint exactly where or when the monsters would land—or how many of them there would be.
Because of that, forces only started moving to intercept once a radar unit was knocked out, heading toward the assumed landing site. They had to finish deploying and preparing for battle before the enemy arrived. It was only then that they finally got a sense of the actual enemy numbers, so it was taken as a given that the monster head count would come in late.
What was more, the detection range of the large-scale radar towers used to scan from land was about three hundred kilometers. That wide net also contributed to miscounts.
It took monsters close to a full day to swim from the mainland, and the military always assumed a decent number of them would drown en route, with expected survival rates calculated based on past encounters.
Naturally, if the sea was calm, fewer would drown, meaning it wasn’t unusual to end up with more monsters than expected making it to shore.
All of this went to say that an experienced commander wouldn’t normally raise their voice just because there were more monsters than initially predicted.
But this wasn’t a normal situation.
“How can there be so many of them?! What’s going on out there?!” Colonel Yuhei Shibano, commanding the interception force, shouted as he stared at the monstrous horde now visible to the naked eye.
He’d understood, of course, that the numbers would fluctuate. That was simply part of the job.
What he couldn’t wrap his head around, however, was that the numbers hadn’t only gone up slightly—they’d exploded. More than that, they had grown even since radar last picked them up.
“I get it if the numbers drop! But why the hell are they going up?!”
The initial radar scans had estimated fifteen large, sixty-two medium, and just under two hundred small monsters—a total of about three hundred.
Even that was the largest force the Second Division had ever seen.
As such, Shibano had already called for reinforcements from nearby units, recalled soldiers who’d been scheduled for leave, and even mobilized prototype weapons that had originally been intended to remain in testing.
He’d scraped together everything he could.
The resulting interception force included twenty standard-type mechs, forty beast types, and around a hundred gunners—troops specialized in using mech artillery.
In terms of conventional forces, they had four hundred tanks and a combined four thousand infantry and artillery troops, which amounted to 50 percent of the Second Division’s total strength. Practically all their mech pilots had been deployed.
That might have seemed like a small number of mechs, but the truth was, that branch of the military was extremely hard to scale up.
Thanks to the Second Savior Project, Japan had boosted its supply of magicite crystals and mech-compatible soldiers—but even so, enrollment at the military academy that Keita attended hovered at around one hundred new students each year.
The Second Savior Project had started fifty years ago, and the First Counteroffensive, which had occurred once a critical mass of personnel had been trained, had only been launched thirty years ago. One hundred soldiers per year for thirty years amounted to three thousand potential pilots. Of those, only about 30 percent were compatible with standard- or beast-type mechs—so roughly nine hundred pilots. The other twenty-one hundred became gunners.
Of course, there were some noncommissioned officers who had never gone to the military academy but still had high magicite compatibility ratings, so the number of pilots and gunners had risen slightly over time. But even with that, the yearly increase never exceeded thirty people. That was the harsh reality.
The pilots and gunners were distributed across the nine divisions, making for around one hundred pilots and two hundred thirty gunners per division.
The Second Division, tasked with defending Kyushu and the Chugoku region, had been allocated more manpower than most. Still, many of the newer pilots had been prioritized for the expeditionary forces—the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Divisions. Factor in retirees, injuries, and combat losses, and the actual number currently deployed in the Second Division was just seventy mech pilots and one hundred and thirty gunners.
All of that was to say that deploying sixty pilots and a hundred gunners for this mission was essentially scraping the bottom of the barrel. That was the largest force they could muster without compromising their ability to respond if more monsters landed somewhere else.
Even so, a force this large would still have a tough time going up against fifteen large-class and sixty-two medium-class enemies.
We can probably win…but not without taking heavy losses among the pilots and gunners.
It wasn’t just Shibano who’d come to that conclusion, but the Second Division’s entire command staff.
Yet as the monsters started coming ashore, all the officers—especially Shibano—were hit with the crushing realization that they had grossly miscalculated.
According to the spotters equipped with long-distance binoculars, the forces coming ashore were far greater than expected. There were ten large, one hundred and thirty-three medium, and over five hundred small enemies.
“How?!”
The number of large-class monsters had gone down, that was true—but everything else had nearly doubled.
It was an unprecedented catastrophe.
“How the hell did we miss this?!”
A swarm of over a hundred medium-class monsters? That kind of thing only ever happened to the Fourth and Fifth Divisions operating on the mainland—and even then, only very rarely. In the event of such a disaster, their forces usually worked alongside local ones. A horde of this scale wasn’t the kind of thing a single division should be dealing with on its own.
And now reports were coming in that several of the large monsters were thirty-meter class—the biggest they got.
“There definitely weren’t this many when we scanned them with radar. And it wasn’t just one radar, either. Multiple radars from multiple angles confirmed the count. There’s no way it should be this wrong. And these thirty-meter ones… I’ve never seen them before. And suddenly, we’re up against more than one? There’s no doubt about it. Demons or demonkin are behind this!”
Shibano desperately tried to make sense of it. If the radar systems weren’t malfunctioning, the most logical conclusion was that demons or demonkin had used some kind of interference to throw off their readings.
But his guess was off the mark.
The real answer was much simpler. The additional medium and small types weren’t some elaborate deception; they just hadn’t been counted because they were riding on top of the large monsters or clustered so closely behind them that the radars mistook the whole mass for a single creature.
As for the sudden appearance of the thirty-meter large-class monsters, that wasn’t some new tactic. Normally, enormous beasts like those used up too much energy while swimming and drowned before they could reach shore. This time, however, the monsters had swum in a coordinated way that conserved their strength, allowing even the largest among them to survive the journey.
“Colonel!”
“Tch!”
Whatever the reason, there were monsters in front of them, and that meant Shibano had to make a choice.
Fight or retreat.
What do I do? What can I do?!
Colonel Shibano, commander of the interception force, was faced with a stark decision.