In one place, there was a girl sitting unmoving next to the corpse of her Promoter. When Rentaro pulled her arm to try to get her to a safe place, he was met with resistance.
“Stop,” said the girl. “If I leave this man’s side, I’ll be hit a lot.”
The words were an account of the kind of treatment she had received from her Promoter when he was still alive. No matter how many times Rentaro told her that her Promoter had died, the girl wouldn’t believe it, and Rentaro left to rescue someone else. When he passed by that area again, a large number of Gastrea had swarmed over, devouring something greedily with their backs turned to him, looking like they were fighting over something in front of them. They seemed to notice Rentaro, but they showed no sign of coming to attack him. They must have really liked whatever they were eating there.
In another place, there was a Promoter who was turning into a Gastrea. He was aiming his gun so that he could at least die as a human, but an Initiator with her dyed hair in buns stood in his way, imploring him with tears in her eyes. “Shun, it’s not too late. So don’t kill yourself!”
The next instant, the transformation was complete, and the girl’s head was plucked off by the Gastrea behind her. Her body fell, spinning like a top.
The smoke made Rentaro’s eyes sting. His breathing became shallow. His face was probably black with soot and mud. The effective temperature was around a blistering 50 degrees Celsius. Rentaro ripped off his necktie at the battlefield’s heat.
He had gotten separated from Enju without realizing it. When he looked around to see where he should go next, he saw a flame of fire approaching an abandoned cottage right next to him. The flames of the burning civil officer tents called to each other and merged. When they did, they transformed into an intense swirl of flame that reached over 2,100 degrees Celsius. The roar made by the surge of crimson was like the bellowing laugh of the devil.
If he remembered correctly, this building held gasoline—
The instant he saw the tongues of flame stretch to reach the drums, the blood in his entire body froze. The next moment, there was a burst of flame, and his body was hammered with the wind from the blast as it was thrown into the air. Rentaro was thrown almost twenty meters back, and his body was pushed into the ground. He rolled a few times with the momentum until he finally stopped.
There was damage to his inner ears. As his world turned, he spit out the gritty sand and put his hand on the ground, pushing up his hurting body. From his scorched uniform came the stink of burning synthetic fibers. His clothes were ripped all over the place, and there were dark red spots of coagulated blood. He breathed in too much thin air and dizziness hit him like a tank. Ringing reverberated deep in his ears. Feeling strange, he put his hands over his ears and realized that he could no longer hear. Damage to his eardrums…
Rentaro stood, dazed, looking across the battlefield that had lost its sound.
Black smoke rose from the civil officer’s base at the front lines, which was red with flames. Ashes danced in the air. The remaining officers were shouting desperately with their mouths wide open, trying to turn the tide in their favor, but their situation just kept getting worse. There was an Initiator with her arm around a Promoter without a head. She was looking desperately for a medic. A reptilian Gastrea threw an Initiator’s body high into the sky, then, when it caught her in its mouth, it and another Gastrea ripped the body clean in half.
There was an Initiator who must have gotten separated from her
Promoter. She had white skin and wore a white dress, and in the middle of the scorching battlefield, she covered her face with both hands, crying. At her feet, there were pieces of bodies mixed together that came all the way up to her ankles. The organs of the dead went flying, and opened-up craniums had brains showing as they rolled around covered in mud.
It was hell.
That was the only way to describe the scene unfolding before him.
“What are you doing, Rentaro?” Suddenly, he felt strong pressure on his head. Enju’s voice and the sounds of the battlefield returned to his ears. “It’s coming this way! Get down.”
“What do you mean by
it
?” Before he could even finish those words, it suddenly happened.
Far off in the distance, beyond the curtain of fire, he thought he saw a brief flash, and something that looked like a beam of light mowed down an area right above where Rentaro was, moving at the speed of light. The next instant, everything that was in that silver path had been cut, and with a strange sound, ten or so civil officers were split in two, their bodies dancing in the air.
Chills went down his spine. Standing up reflexively and looking behind him, Rentaro could see those silver paths cutting through, with frantic screams one after another.
Spears of Light
—Those three words appeared inside his head.
“No way…” Rentaro took a step back in shock.
The anti-Gastrea tactics they had developed in these past ten years had been made on the assumption that Gastrea did not use projectile weapons. That assumption was crumbling from its base. This was probably the thing that had shot down the Tomahawk missiles fired by the aegis cruiser the other day and brought down the helicopter and fighter aircraft.
His instinct told him that they could not win. They were all going to be killed. Rentaro himself, Enju, Kisara, Tina, and all their other adjuvant members would be killed for no good reason.
At that moment, a long roar echoed across the battlefield. This roar reached from one end of the forty districts to the other. The roar that
sounded like distant thunder was not a war cry or a shriek, but a scream of agony.
All the Gastrea froze at once and turned their heads toward the roar. After a brief moment, the sound disappeared from the battlefield.
Rentaro also followed their gazes, looking in the same direction. He saw an enormous silhouette that looked like a small mountain twisting its body in agony. It was obviously tens of times bigger than the other Gastrea.
Rentaro knew instinctively that that was Aldebaran.
On the heels of that thought, the Gastrea moved as one. Caterpillar Gastrea crawled along the ground, and insect and bird Gastrea all hung in the air around the enormous one, using their own bodies as a wall to retreat.
Because of the Gastrea flying like a defensive mosquito swarm around Aldebaran, even if Rentaro strained his eyes, he could not see what the Gastrea in the middle looked like. However, the hoarse scream he heard for a moment and the excessively large silhouette were more than enough to send shivers up and down his body.
Finally, all the Gastrea had left the battlefield, and all that was left were the living and the dead.
“Have we been…saved?” The small Promoter next to him muttered this quietly, but it echoed in Rentaro’s ears for a long time.
The next day, a black rain poured down on Tokyo Area. The torrential rains drenched Rentaro’s whole body and dripped from the bottom of his chin. He thought about the temperature being 15 degrees Celsius in July and found it hard to believe how cold it was.
However, that was only to be expected. When Rentaro raised his face, he saw a dark, lead-colored sky.
The day before, the enormous Varanium structure, the Monolith, had collapsed. The seriousness of the effects had become clear after a night passed. On the news Rentaro watched in the morning, he learned that when the Monolith collapsed, a large amount of ash from the Monolith had drifted up into the stratosphere and formed a thick
cloud. It blocked the sun and looked like it would remain in the sky above Tokyo Area for three days.
The sound of the Monolith’s collapse had been heard even at the edge of Tokyo, and the vibrations from the collapse were felt all across Japan, reaching even Hakata and Hokkaido Areas. The shock wave from the collapse went halfway around the world and was even seen at the weather observatory at Pike’s Peak in Colorado, USA. On a global scale, there was a 0.3 hectopascal rise in atmospheric pressure measured. Based on recent weather observation models, the ashes and sand from the bleached Monolith were carried north by the westerlies and were expected to fall as far north as Hokkaido.
Even the black rain that drenched Rentaro’s body right now was apparently from the ash and sand from the Monolith’s collapse that had been dissolved by the rain and were now falling back down. From the announcement made by the government, there was nothing harmful in it, but he could not tell if that was the truth or not. At the very least, he did not try to whet his thirst with it.
Even more serious was that for the next three days, the sun would not peek out onto the surface of the earth. There was already a gloomy, defeated mood spreading through the civil officer troops who had survived the hell from last night. If at least the weather changed for the better, their moods could be changed so too, thanks to the secretion of serotonin in their brains, but…
The bottoms of their boots were filled with mud, and it felt very uncomfortable.
Rentaro lifted his head and looked around him. The surrounding area was a wide, vast plain, and Promoters were spread out. There was a mountain nearby of raised ground with one side covered with debris, telling the story of how intense the battle had been between the Gastrea and the self-defense force.
Rentaro was walking where the infantry division of the SDF had made camp.
He was sandwiched between body bags for some reason. This morning, only the Promoters were gathered under the pretext of searching for survivors and rescuing those in the base camp.
Everyone had noticed that it was just a pretext to conceal the real reason they were here.
The SDF facilities they were visiting were destroyed, and its officials were mainly lying around in a state where they did not need rescuing. The fact that the Aldebaran army had flooded the civil officer rear guard meant that the fate of the self-defense force that had been the front guard had already been decided, but it was still a shock to see it with his own eyes. They had been completely wiped out by Aldebaran first, after all.
They could not come to an agreement with the Gastrea or take prisoners of war, so once they started fighting, it inevitably became a war of extermination. Thanks to that, there wasn’t really anyone in need of rescue. It was reasonable to assume that most of those who were not here had become Gastrea themselves.
Apparently, the goal given to Rentaro and the other Promoters was to retrieve the corpses before they rotted and spread serious infectious diseases, as well as to send them back to their bereaved families. Rentaro thanked them silently as he tried to gather as many of the parts of the corpses as he could and put them into the body bags one by one. Nevertheless, part of his brain was still stuck on asking why this had happened.
There had been two battles in Kanto already. In the First Kanto Battle, the self-defense force suffered a defeat. In the Second Kanto Battle, the self-defense force had won. During the Second Kanto Battle, the SDF had come up with a strategy to force the Gastrea out and keep them out, so they were confident that they would be able to win the third battle as well. It was hard to believe that they had been defeated so easily this time.
Just what was the difference between the last battle and this one? If they could not determine the cause of the self-defense force’s defeat, there was no way they’d find the clues needed to help them defeat the Gastrea. Moved by instinct that was close to conviction, Rentaro walked around the remains of the battlefield in search of his clue.
Before long, he came across one strange thing after another. A tank was split completely in two. From the sharp cut on it, he thought that it was probably from the Spear of Light. There were also those that had fallen into holes and couldn’t move. Taking a quick look around, he saw that there were self-propelled guns and missile silos that were also in the same situation.
This was probably the work of the Model Mole—the mole Gastrea that Rentaro had also encountered. They dug tunnels until they were right under the weapons of the main force and then scraped away at the dirt to make a hole, inducing the ceiling of the tunnel to cave in. No matter how good the tank treads were on bad roads, they did not appear to be able to get out of deep pitfalls.
Rentaro’s feelings had surpassed fear and had turned into admiration for their superb strategy. With their sniping, the moles had even brought down the general, Hidehiko Gado, in front of Rentaro’s very eyes.
No matter how Rentaro looked at it, they were being led way too well. They were like a single colony of insects. How in the world were they sharing information?
Just then, he felt a prickle in his mind.
That’s right, I had thought about this possibility before.
If he remembered correctly, that time, he thought they looked like a school of fish that gathered together to look like one giant fish. Suddenly, in the back of his mind, this image overlapped with the image of Aldebaran retreating with its subordinates circling around it like a swarm of mosquitos.
A lightbulb flashed in his head and Rentaro involuntarily raised his voice.
Could that be what it was?
If that was the case, then Aldebaran’s real ability was—
“Man, this is terrible.” There was a splash, and Rentaro turned his head to see Tamaki Katagiri standing with a grim look on his face. His dark blond hair had gotten darker after being in the black rain, and his face, under his sunglasses, was somber.
Rentaro made a sound of agreement and turned to Tamaki. “Speaking of which, I haven’t thanked you for your help yet.”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“With Kisara.”
Tamaki seemed to understand and looked around them, saying, “Sure.”
Rentaro followed Tamaki’s gaze and saw all the Promoters moving slowly, putting the corpses in the body bags. As a Promoter, Kisara should have also been called for this work, but after talking to the higher-ups about it, he convinced Kisara not to go, saying it wasn’t something a girl should be doing.