Chapter 68

SUB.16 The HsB-07. An updated version of the Academy City supersonic bomber fielded during World War III now shot through the skies above Baggage City. Its pilot, Ryuuichi Rokudou, was mostly in a state of cryofreeze in order to protect his body from the enormous g-forces. He used neither his fingers to operate the giant machine nor his mouth to communicate his intent to allies. There were plenty of ways to get information directly from the brain itself—the blood distribution in the organ, the secretion rates of various chemical substances, the flow of electric signals, and sonar measurement of what brain regions were active. While each individual method was unreliable, combining multiple improved things. They’d started to use the technology not only in weapons control but also on a trial basis for espionage and searching. “Francisca Three to all units. We attack the airport on our next turn. Francisca One, Francisca Two, target the elevated roads. Our first job is to take out every long path the enemy could potentially use to launch fighters.” Dozens of the mantis-like Five Overs had already dispersed, and the Anti–Academy City Science Guardians’ unmanned weaponry stood no chance against them. But the Five Overs had a weakness: They were designed specifically to go after surface targets. While they could fly, it was only in the capacity of an attack helicopter—mowing down surface enemies from the air. They weren’t made for dogfighting multipurpose combat jets flying at supersonic speeds. The voices of Rokudou’s colleagues continued to reach his ears—or at least, that was how he perceived them. “Are those unarmed morons risking their lives to protect the unmanned weapons? They’re crazy. Can’t those toys shoot air-to-surface missiles out of the sky?” “If chemical weapons were loaded into the warheads, then even if they did get shot down, the inside would spray all over everyone… They’re overreacting now that they know the weakness. I highly doubt the Guardians will be able to come up with an effective countermeasure to the Five Overs—not when this is their first time seeing them.” As they bantered, communicating quicker than mouths could produce sounds and ears could perceive them, they zoomed through the air at seven thousand kilometers per hour straight over their assigned targets. They less dropped bombs and more placed them in the air. All in all, they placed 120 precision-guided bombs over the runways at even intervals, almost like streetlights lining them. Then gravity took hold of the blunt instruments, which used their tail fins to adjust their direction before dropping toward the vital parts of the airport with seven-millimeter precision. Frozen in place as he was, Rokudou didn’t have the ability to turn around to look. Instead, he watched the destruction on a window displayed on the edge of his consciousness. “Runways one through nine, all taxiways, and all radar facilities destroyed. Surface-to-air missile installations one through thirty-two, anti-air machine guns one through twenty, and antiaircraft guns one through seventeen destroyed. Airport has ceased to function.” An impressed whistle came back. “Approximately forty-eight straight roads over thirteen meters wide have been destroyed. Imma turn around and get the other fifty-two.” “Confirmed five tunnels that could be used as runways. I’ll blow up the entrances to bury them.” Their results were just what the armchair theories had predicted. Academy City’s supersonic bombers had been designed with high enough specs to charge onto front lines without any fighter escort. Neither counterattacks from the surface nor enemy jets were a match for the bombers’ overwhelming speed and mobility. The biggest thing Academy City had to worry about on this mission was their bombers experiencing mechanical trouble due to improper maintenance; the Guardians stood no chance against them. Sure, the Guardians had all the unmanned weapons Academy City had given them on their side. Those, however, were mere borrowed goods. And for a city whose pace of scientific and technological innovation was staggeringly swift, even those weapons were now just old, outdated models. A victory without any wounds. A conclusion in accordance with the theories. The winners of World War III, their weapons crowned with the descriptor hard science, intimated at beautiful equations within barbaric combat. Using their theories, they crushed even the idea of enemies launching counterattacks. At least, that was how it should have been. However. “What…what is that?” Suddenly, the radar lit up with multiple points of light. There was no stealth at play here. Rokudou checked for more details using the camera on the bomber’s underside, then saw what looked like large missiles being launched from the surface in the distance. “No… Those aren’t missiles. They’re changing shape!” Wha-shoo! Whatever it was, it moved. And not in a gentle projectile arc like normal planes would have. It was like a bolt of lightning but horizontal instead of vertical. And as soon as it passed by a towering skyscraper, the top of the huge structure was sliced through diagonally, as though by some sort of paranormal phenomenon. Before the massive chunk of matter could fall to the ground, Rokudou’s thoughts exploded into white noise. His extreme tension and fear had damaged his connection to the machine. The reason was simple. Because whatever those things were, one had gotten very close to the HsB-07, which could itself pull off sharp maneuvers at seven thousand kilometers per hour. “This is insane! What the hell is it?! Sure ain’t one of the drones we gave ’em!” As it approached, Rokudou finally got a close look at the object. It reminded him of an attack jet made of complex surfaces, kind of like early stealth planes. But he only thought that because he was so knowledgeable about aircraft. Another person might have seen it as a javelin with an enormous tip or a jewel cut extremely precisely. But anyone who looked at it would have seen one feature in particular. It was a wireframe. No—the machine was made out of multiple wireframes, all interconnected. This wasn’t normal non–Academy City technology, and Rokudou was already an expert in that. And yet this enemy was incomprehensible to him. Then all around the object, unnatural orange letters emerged. We, too, love the latest technology. But it wasn’t just one sentence. Those letters all vanished, and then another set appeared. It isn’t your right alone. “Bastard! Francisca One, Francisca Two, lure it in, then shake it off. You two cross over and ‘place’ bombs in the air! And then we blow it—” Rokudou found himself cut off before finishing. On his camera, he saw the moment the transformed wireframe cluster collided with Francisca One, and the bomber began to plummet toward the white city. Francisca Two seemed to have barely avoided getting tangled up in it, but the slender wires still sliced the ends off his bomber, rendering it unflyable. They had no way of knowing this, but their enemy was a Soul Arm called Loki’s Net. Loki was a trickster god, always using off-the-wall ideas, breaking taboos, and wielding his silver tongue to evade the laws of the gods, find the way out of labyrinths, and defy fate. He had personally created this restraint for himself—the idea that he was uncatchable—after thinking about what someone would need to really catch him. And a genuine dvergr who had survived to the present day had imbued the Soul Arm with more modern capabilities. For a magical fishing net that could block off even the loopholes of theories and fate, mere speed was no issue. Rokudou desperately flung his machine into an evasive maneuver, but he was deathly aware that he was being whittled down little by little. The other parts of the wireframes, now finished taking down his allies, converged instead on Francisca Three, too. “Francisca Three to AWACS! Deploy Francisca Four through Nine—they’re near the Baggage City outskirts, and they have onboard ABL. Use their ballistic missile-tracking lasers and see if the light can trick these trump cards of theirs into chasing after them!” He gave the command, but it was too late. Either he wasn’t able to aim at the thunderbolt-like enemy aircraft because of the way it was moving, or he was in the middle of finding a position to get out of their range—whatever the case, Rokudou realized those wasted seconds would prove fatal. “AWACS to Francisca Three! Eject! Your engine’s about to blow!” “Do these bastards look like gentlemen? They’ll use their sharp nets to cut me and my parachute to pieces!” His altitude rapidly dropped. He wasn’t even flying anymore, really—just falling gradually. Rokudou turned the nose in a wildly different direction, setting it on a course straight for the place the wireframe planes had originally been launched from. …A waste processing plant? he thought. Wait, someone’s on the roof. It was one of their priority targets. Standing next to the building’s huge smokestack was a silver-haired girl with dark skin. A girl whose outfit, consisting only of a pair of overalls and glasses, had no place being in the Arctic Circle. She smiled calmly, staring directly at Rokudou. She knew the supersonic bomber was coming after her. But she raised a slender finger in front of her, then curled it, provoking him. “That bitch… She must be with Gremlin, our top priority!” Ignoring the pieces of his bomber flying off, Rokudou went full throttle, charging straight at the roof of the waste processing plant. Several orange sparks exploded on his camera. And then the camera, too, was sheared away, leaving only gray noise on his display. The plane kept getting thinner and thinner, like a pencil shaved down by a pocketknife, but Rokudou wasn’t thinking anymore. He only kept the target in the middle of his vision. And then… Atop the roof of the waste processing plant, Marianne Sringeneier stuck a hand into her overalls and pulled out a golden tool. They were tongs—metal implements for handling things like heated blades inside furnaces. Perhaps easier to envision would be a pair of giant pliers. She gave the two grips a light swing as though they were nunchaku, then, in front of the enemy, closed them. The tips clamped down on a small thirteen-centimeter fragment of sharp aircraft material. That was all that remained of Rokudou’s last-ditch effort. Shhhhh. The fragment was evaporating the raging blizzard around her. She glanced at it, then whistled. “That was a close one. I almost grabbed it with my bare hands, but this thing must be over a thousand degrees Celsius because of the friction.” Marianne started sticking the aircraft material shard, metal tongs and all, into the snow piled up on the roof to rapidly cool them off. A blacksmith by trade, she was well accustomed to the act. Once the sharp fragment’s temperature was sufficiently lowered, she plucked it out of the tongs with her fingers. “Pretty easy, though. That Soul Arm is classified as supplementary, the kind that diverts a curse using a puppet—all it can do is block off escape routes. Though I did add on that fun little extra effect to make it match the opponent’s speed.” Still, there was no harm in going that extra mile if it meant she could wipe out their airpower. She was focusing on that first, instead of the Five Overs rampaging through the city, in order to prevent any extra Kiharas from being dropped on them. “A reckless attack, indeed!” She gave the sharp fragment a little kiss on the side, then stowed it in her overalls as a souvenir. Then she snapped her fingers, and several more Loki’s Nets launched into the sky. But there came a tremendous whooom, and a flash of light exploded overhead, interrupting her big display of attitude. A laser weapon on an aircraft, incredibly far away—well outside Baggage City—had just fried one of the Loki’s Nets. The brilliant white flash was like the light from welding, leaving nothing but fragments that were glowing orange with heat. “Oh, crap! I knew I’d have to get creative!” Marianne frantically evacuated inside, then ordered the rest of the surviving Loki’s Nets to continue obliterating Academy City’s air forces. And so the off-the-rails conflict calmly expanded, even in an environment unfit for human survival.