Black Bullet - Volume 4 - Chapter 4.1

CHAPTER 04

DOGS OF WAR

1

After getting proper treatment of his wound at the first-aid station that operated out of the school nurse’s office, Rentaro could finally relax. When he was freed from being in constant fear for his life, the first things to attack him were lethargy and a sense of emptiness. The effects of the excessive amount of adrenaline wore off, and the sharp pain returned to his abdomen. But the deep emotions he felt at surviving passed, and he was soon filled with a different kind of nervousness.

He was reminded to stay in bed for at least a day after this, but he didn’t have the time for that. He was now the leader of this worn-out group that could barely be called a troop, even if it hadn’t quite sunk in yet.

Thanking Sumire, he left the nurse’s office and walked alone along the nighttime street. Now that he had become the commander, there were a ton of things he had to do. However, there was one thing he had to check, even if it meant putting aside everything else.

Rentaro headed toward some facilities a little ways away from the school that were connected to the former first-aid station. When he told the person at the entrance why he was there, he was led through to a large hall. The room was spacious and dimly lit, and he occasionally heard sobbing.

Laid out in an orderly fashion were five rows of black body bags.

He thought they looked just like the rows of tuna at the wholesale fish market. He looked on with a strangely cold feeling, thinking that this would be his fate, too, if he died.

The health-care center had turned into a storage area for the bodies of civil officers and their support personnel who had died in action. The corpses should have been promptly sent back to the bereaved families, but after Aldebaran’s second attack, the personnel who would have transported them got cold feet, and the spirits of those who defended their country were now sleeping together in a huddle with no one to care for them.

Because of the ashes from the Monolith covering the sky, temperatures had dropped dramatically, but it was actually still summer. That meant that the phenomenon called rigor mortis set in immediately after death, and it was hard to avoid the sour smell that filled the air and hit Rentaro’s nose. The sound of shoes echoed shrilly on the linoleum floor, and the sound of the power generator in the room next door made the air vibrate slightly.

Finally, the person on duty led him to where he needed to go, and then Rentaro stood in front of a single corpse. When the person on duty checked the tab, he bowed once and left. Rentaro watched him go, then got on his knees and quietly unzipped the body bag.

Rentaro was greeted with muddy, wet eyes and a half-opened mouth. Compassion won over fear, and Rentaro looked at him face-to-face for a while. The man had lost both arms and legs, and Rentaro could see cruel cracks in his bright red exoskeleton, splattered with blood redder than red.

“I…didn’t hate you, Gado.” From what Rentaro had heard, Aldebaran’s second attack had been aiming for the commander, Gado, from the start. The enemy troops used an extremely primitive form of organization with Aldebaran as the head, but in terms of base instincts, humans had not changed that much, either. The civil officer troops lacked even a standardized set of indispensable equipment for modern-day warfare, and they hadn’t had time for training, either, so it could be said that they had no choice but to fight with a primitive form of organization.

The advantage was that the chain of command was simple, so it did not take long for orders to reach the soldiers at the end. The disadvantage was obvious—all the power was concentrated on the general, so if the general was out of commission, then the organization would simply collapse and everything would fall apart.

Apparently, Gado’s squad was lured in and surrounded, and at the end of a hard, desperate fight, they were pulverized.

The civil officer troops didn’t fall apart at that, but only because each and every civil officer was firmly aware of the fact that they were Tokyo Area’s last stronghold.

Rentaro had a silent conversation with Gado. Even with all that had happened, Gado had an IP rank of 275. Rentaro could not imagine how much of a handicap the man had fighting with just one leg, but if Gado had been healthy, he would not have fallen behind even if he had been outnumbered.

Old or young, male or female, smart or foolish, good or bad—death did not discriminate. This world was fair to the point of being cruel. Nagamasa Gado had banished Rentaro Satomi and then had been forced into an inescapable situation. But Gado’s actions had all been based on a certain kind of logic, and part of that was that he was constantly making decisions in an almost heartless manner. He had cast Rentaro away mechanically based on his own logic. However, that man had also met his fate by the same reckoning.

This was not the ending Rentaro had wanted. He had wanted to surprise this man by showing that he could come back alive from a mission he wasn’t supposed to survive.

Rentaro turned his head to look at the rows of neatly lined up body bags. Their current combat power was a little over sixty civil officers who were up against one thousand, eight hundred Gastrea. They would not get any reinforcements. They had also run out of missiles and fighter aircraft. All of Tokyo Area was worn out, and it didn’t matter what tactics they used—they were already facing certain defeat.

Aldebaran would come. It would definitely come one more time. Rentaro’s intuition, which had already surpassed rhyme or reason, told him that he would not be able to avoid a final decisive battle against that thing.

The nihilist Sumire had often told him that there was no meaning to life, and that everything they did was just dancing on their graves. If that was the case, then was it complete coincidence that he was not already lined up alongside the rows of dead? Would the future change if he took command in Gado’s place?

Rentaro shook his head silently. No, it was the same. Nothing would change.

It was then that he noticed that Gado’s cloak had been taken off and folded. It wasn’t like they were distributing mementos, but he thought to take something back with him, so he took that and turned around.

Suddenly, he stopped, noticing that someone was walking toward him from the front. He immediately realized that it was Gado’s Initiator. Asaka Mibu, whose hands were covered in mud from picking golden-rayed lilies, hung her head dejectedly, walking with heavy steps. It seemed she had managed to survive, but she looked so dazed—like she had dropped her soul somewhere—that it was hard to say whether she could be described with the word unharmed.

When Asaka noticed Rentaro, she bowed and headed toward Gado’s side. When Rentaro started walking again, he suddenly heard sobs coming from behind him and stopped.

Rentaro’s hand tightened into a fist. He ran without looking back.

I’m not fit to be the commander.