86—EIGHTY-SIX, Vol. 04: Under Pressure by Asato Asato and Shirabii

Author:Asato Asato and Shirabii [Asato Asato and Shirabii]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yen On
Published: 2020-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

Annette’s gaze fell on a crouching, dehydrated corpse sitting inside a cramped storage space hidden between the wall panels. It was dressed in the Republic military’s deep-blue uniform, and the quasi-nerve crystal on its neck glimmered blue. It was probably one of the Republic’s Handlers.

Annette had no experience in performing autopsies, but from the looks of how dry the body was, this person had not died recently, and based on the fact that it wasn’t decayed, either, it had probably died during the cold, arid winter. Probably around the time the recon unit was near this building.

“So you were the one who kept connecting and disconnecting…”

It was simple, really. This person had tried Resonating with the recon unit while they were still alive, but on the verge of death. Physical distance didn’t matter to the Para-RAID, and Republic soldiers didn’t have Federacy soldiers registered as Resonance targets. But there were no known accounts of someone trying to Resonate while on the verge of death, either.

The human brain was even more of a black box than the RAID Device. According to theory, when people died, their consciousnesses sank into the collective unconscious and disappeared. There was the possibility that the moment that happened, those connected to them through Sensory Resonance would feel some kind of reaction. Not that she had any intention of testing this theory. Annette collected her thoughts as she looked down at the corpse.

The reason the recon unit hadn’t found this Republic soldier’s corpse was because they’d been on the lookout for the Legion and not humans. The Úlfhéðnar—the reinforced exoskeleton used by the armored infantry—had sensory capabilities inferior to the Ameise’s, and considering that this corpse, at the time, had been dying and unmoving, with most of its body heat lost and its pulse faint, detecting it would have been that much harder. Annette finding it had been mostly coincidence.

…I’ve always been bad at hide-and-seek.

Annette bit her lip as that thought suddenly crossed her mind.

Bad at hiding…and seeking.

Or rather, Shin used to be so good at it. Whenever she hid, he found her right away, and when it was his turn to hide, she could never find him. Games always lasted that much longer when Annette was It. And still, hide-and-seek was one game she often played with him.

Found you, Rita!

Because she loved seeing that smiling face when he found her, no matter where she hid.

The sudden reminiscence made tears well up in her eyes. She glared at the corpse in front of her to shoo the feeling away. It was then she realized.

“…How?”

How has this person only been dead for a few months?

The Legion’s large-scale offensive had happened almost a year ago, late last summer. She would never forget how on the night of the Republic’s founding festival, the Gran Mur had collapsed, and within just one week of that, Liberté et Égalité had fallen.

At that point, the northern secondary capital, Charité, had been brought to ruin. The Legion didn’t take prisoners and couldn’t tell soldiers apart from civilians.

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