novelraw Chapter 23
Chapter 23
Chapter 23
“Ah, you’re awake?”
The first face Jin Crow saw when he opened his eyes was none other than an unfamiliar male officer wearing a navy-blue uniform.
‘Rank: First Lieutenant. Navy-blue uniform. An ordinary officer from the Federal Army.’
After instinctively grasping the situation, he belatedly realized that he was lying on a bed in the infirmary and propped his upper body up.
At that, the first lieutenant standing in front of him opened his mouth.
“You were unconscious for two days, Instructor.”
“Who are you?”
It was neither a contextless nor a rude question.
After all, he was an officer Jin Crow had never encountered even once aboard the ship.
As if he had expected that reaction, the man cleared his throat with a brief ‘Ahem’ and spoke.
“I am First Lieutenant Antonio, of the Federal Army’s 17th Fleet.”
“Ah, I see.”
Jin Crow nodded and accepted it.
Then it made sense that he had never seen him before.
The Federal Army’s 17th Fleet was none other than the fleet stationed at Atla Colony, which had been their intended destination.
“Then this place is…….”
And once his thoughts reached that point, he could sufficiently infer the overall situation.
As expected.
Antonio nodded and began briefing him concisely on the current state of affairs.
“Most of the Red Hand remnants who carried out the boarding assault inside the ship were killed on the spot or committed suicide, but we managed to capture some. However, the damage to the transport ship was so severe that everyone evacuated to our fleet’s vessels for now.”
It had been an assault that occurred in hyperspace.
Naturally, the contamination of the rear hangar—where their assault ship had forcibly broken through—was beyond imagination, and the internal damage to the vessel from the fighting that erupted throughout was far from minor.
“Then has the ship been abandoned?”
“They are probably in the process of recovering the Mother AI.”
Recovering the Mother AI was effectively the same as scuttling the ship.
Rather than towing an internally rotted vessel wholesale, it was far more cost-effective to detach only the main system and rebuild anew afterward.
Still, a small doubt arose.
No matter how severe the damage to the hangar side was, it shouldn’t have been enough to warrant abandoning the entire ship.
“Ah, about that.”
Had he read Jin Crow’s doubt?
Antonio immediately added,
“Major Obia nearly blew the bridge apart…….”
“Then abandoning it is the right call.”
Major Obia Timist. Merely hearing her name was enough for Jin Crow to accept it. Absentmindedly, he slipped a hand into his chest.
Of course, there was no way his fingertips would find a cigarette while he was wearing a patient gown, and just as he awkwardly tried to lower his hand again—
Antonio, as if he had been waiting for that very moment, took out a cigarette and politely handed it to him.
Chiik, sss-.
When Jin Crow took it into his mouth, Antonio even lit it for him.
……Excessively polite, and overly courteous.
Just as Jin Crow was about to knit his brows at the sense of incongruity, Antonio rolled his eyes and cautiously opened his mouth.
“By the way…… congratulations.”
“……?”
“Liberto. Didn’t you execute that infamous wanted criminal?”
For a brief moment, Jin Crow mulled over what he had just heard.
But only briefly. Soon, realizing the weight carried by a second-grade wanted criminal, Jin Crow understood why First Lieutenant Antonio—someone from a different unit whom he had just met—was treating him with such deference.
‘The 17th Fleet was the one that clashed with the Red Hand the most.’
Most likely, there was at least one personal grudge involved.
Or perhaps it was simply a small token of gratitude for killing an enemy they would have had to face someday.
Either way, thinking it was more than enough payment for a cigarette, Jin Crow relaxed somewhat and smoked—when a voice broke the stillness along with the sound of the infirmary door opening.
“Instructorrr~!”
“……Haa.”
Along with the cigarette smoke, he couldn’t help but let out a sigh.
“Salute!”
“At ease!”
“Yes!”
On the other hand, First Lieutenant Antonio alternated his gaze between the two with a sparkling expression, as if witnessing two heroes, before quickly making an ‘Oh, right’ face.
“I’ll take my leave now. Please enjoy your time.”
In his own way, it was probably meant as consideration, but to Jin Crow it looked like a deserter abandoning him and fleeing.
Through the haze of cigarette smoke, Obia entered the infirmary, then trotted over with her characteristic goofy grin and plopped down beside him.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“It’s just simple fatigue.”
“For fatigue, that’s a pretty long nap, isn’t it?”
Glancing at her playful expression, Jin Crow took a drag from the half-burnt cigarette, then spat out curtly,
“……Yes. Well.”
Did his attitude displease her?
Or had she simply gotten the urge to play another prank?
Obia exaggeratedly puckered her lips, then made her crimson eyes flash as she let her characteristic mischievous smile spread.
“But it must’ve been pretty severe fatigue, right? You were lying down for almost three days.”
“Obia Timist.”
“Yes?”
He turned his head to look at her.
As always, her face wore a scatterbrained smile, but to Jin Crow—who had already adapted to her to some extent—it was nothing more than an absurd mask.
Swiish-.
Rising from the bed, he took out the portable ashtray he always carried and stubbed out the cigarette, rubbing it into the neatly hung uniform jacket on the wall.
“Don’t probe me. You felt it too, didn’t you.”
Then, taking out his favored black clove cigarette and placing it between his lips, he added,
“The drug they injected. It was on a different level from ordinary stimulants. Even if only for an instant, it was enough to break through a hardened rank.”
“……What are you talking about?”
“Haa.”
This was why conversations with Obia were exhausting.
If one side wasn’t direct, the dialogue would inevitably just spin in parallel lines.
Tedious.
Because of that, he spoke even more bluntly.
To the point that he unconsciously discarded even the formalities he had previously tacked on out of habit.
“No matter how recklessly you run wild, you wouldn’t go so far as to push a ship to the brink of disposal without justification. The Red Hand’s special-duty officers who rushed the bridge—didn’t you drive them all while they were half out of their minds?”
“…….”
Instead of answering right away, Obia slowly lifted the corners of her lips even more brightly than before and gazed at him intently.
However, her eyes had sunk endlessly cold, making it seem she had been struck right at the core.
‘A Quad Gear special-duty officer failing to handle a few Triple Gear superhumans and blowing up the entire bridge? That’s ridiculous.’
If it had been a fight between Dual Gear and Triple Gear, it would have been understandable.
But the instantaneous firepower difference between Triple Gear and Quad Gear was not simply one rank higher—it was an overwhelming gap.
Yet the fact that she had failed to regulate her power was proof in itself that it had been that grueling a battle.
“I’ll give you one warning, Major.”
“…….”
“I don’t care what kind of twisted personality you have, or what kind of past you carry. But I’d like us to keep our respective lines.”
He gnawed on the half-burnt cigarette with his teeth and added while irritably undoing the buttons of his patient gown with restless fingers,
“Are you planning to stay, Major?”
“As if, Instructor.”
Obia Timist immediately broke into a gentle smile, added nothing further, and walked straight out of the infirmary.
And the moment he heard the sound of her footsteps disappearing down the corridor, Jin Crow once again reached into the inside of his uniform.
‘There it is.’
Soon, feeling the texture of a syringe rolling beneath a hip flask, he narrowed his brows.
‘Pentacle.’
He knew what this drug was.
It was one of the few combat stimulants that worked on superhumans, mentioned several times before.
In particular, among the depictions in the story, the only drug injected into the nape with a syringe had been Pentacle.
Still, the questions remained: Pentacle’s source, and how the Red Hand had obtained it.
……And one more thing.
‘What exactly was I back then?’
Coldly speaking, the fight with Liberto had been his overwhelming defeat.
No matter how much his body remembered swordsmanship, no matter how many hundreds of times he had cut down Creatures in the simulation room, once he faced a real special-duty officer with actual combat experience, he could only be helplessly overwhelmed.
Because of that, in the end, he had even lost consciousness.
‘But when I came to again, my body was already moving on its own.’
At first, he thought it was a flash of memories, or perhaps a delusion.
But as even the pain was transmitted to him, and his consciousness gradually sharpened, he realized that fighting Liberto was reality.
The problem, however, was that it wasn’t his own will.
In the end, there was only one conclusion he could reach.
“……This is driving me insane.”
It seemed Jin Crow’s past had been far more flamboyant than he had thought.
Space Colony(Space Colony).
A kind of space island constructed by installing a rotating structure at a Lagrange point between two celestial bodies, where gravity is canceled out and has no effect.
“Hey! Go to Hangar No. 145 and check the external armor!”
“Where is the second lieutenant?”
“Go check Hangar No. 121.”
In the past, it had been designed as a countermeasure for a growing population, or as a structure for space colonization, but after the war with the Empire, the concepts of supply depot and garrison were added.
As a result, the scale of the platforms and hangars where ships came and went was comparable to that of a major metropolis, so confusion was only natural.
“Move it, move it!”
“When is the carbine alloy decking arriving?”
“I’ll check!”
However, the current congestion of Atla Colony was on a level incomparable to normal times.
Naturally so.
All instructors from the Central, Eastern, Western, and Northern divisions who had been heading for Atla Colony had been attacked by the Red Hand during hyperspace jumps.
A truly unprecedented situation.
Because of that, the 17th Fleet stationed at Atla Colony immediately reinforced defenses in nearby areas while moving relentlessly, like hunting rats, to prepare for any possible unrest within Atla Colony.
-Capture and detain every suspicious individual. I’ll take responsibility.
Even the orders 내려 from above were quite extreme.
After all, no matter the scale, it was an artificially constructed structure.
The moment it suffered a large-scale terrorist attack, not only the stationed soldiers but also countless innocent civilians would all die.
And the high command would never be free from that responsibility.
“Wow, everyone’s busy.”
“It’s self-inflicted.”
Meanwhile, at that moment, on the platform.
Amid the bustling soldiers, a man in a black uniform let out a soft chuckle and murmured quietly, while behind him, a sharp-faced woman followed, leading two Military Police officers.
“What do you mean self-inflicted again? Everyone’s having a hard time as it is. Philia is far too rigid.”
“……I’ll correct it.”
“There you go talking about correcting it again.”
Their personalities were truly polar opposites.
At that moment, a soldier in a navy-blue uniform approached them and raised a salute.
“Salute! First Lieutenant Lee Hana of the 17th Fleet. Instructor Hughes from the Eastern Special Service Academy, correct? And Military Police Captain Philia?”
Seeing how stiff and obviously nervous she looked, Hughes responded with a kindly smile.
“Ah, First Lieutenant Lee Hana, nice to meet you.”
“N-nice to meet you!”
“Maintain proper decorum, Lieutenant.”
Of course, unlike him, Philia still wore a cold expression, as if she didn’t find the lieutenant particularly likable.
“I’m sorry. Philia’s usually not very flexible. Then have all the other instructors arrived as well? I heard we weren’t the only ones who were hit. Surely……?”
“N-no. Fortunately, I’ve heard that all the other instructors also exited hyperspace safely and are currently en route to Atla Colony.”
“Is that so? They’re all pretty hard to kill. Unnecessarily so.”
“Pardon?”
For a moment, it was a remark that made one doubt their own ears.