novelraw Chapter 32
Chapter 32
Chapter 32
“Damn it……. cough!”
Beneath the collapsed concrete.
With a low curse, a man with dark brown hair lifted his head.
“Ugh…….”
Considering he had been buried under a building made of rebar, reinforced concrete, and various alloy materials, he looked fairly intact.
Of course, his shoulder jerked painfully, but to a superhuman, this level of injury was nothing more than a scrape.
Kugugugung…….
More importantly, right now, such minor wounds were not the issue.
“Are you okay?”
“Ugh, my head hurts. Don’t talk to me for a bit…….”
“You’re pretty short with your words?”
“Ah, seriously. Is that really important right now?!”
Soon after, John lifted his head as well, covered in dust.
Like Miller, he had no obvious major injuries, but perhaps because he had overexerted himself, John repeatedly raked his hair with a haggard expression.
It was an unusually irritable demeanor for him.
“……Hoo.”
Silence followed.
It was only natural.
Putting aside their own injuries, it was obvious without even looking what must have happened to the two military police who were still unable to escape the debris.
‘This is damn irritating.’
Miller bit down hard on his lip.
Just because his usual personality was rotten didn’t mean his emotions were dried up as well.
“This isn’t the time to get sentimental. Stay alert.”
But as John spoke, having regained his composure along with his senses, it was clear the attack was not over yet.
Whirik, tak-.
With his characteristic hand movements, John gripped his special-issue kukri-type dagger in a reverse grip and stared straight ahead.
At the same time, Miller nodded and pulled two spare silver revolvers from his coat.
‘Damn it. I should’ve stocked up earlier.’
He had no spare enhanced rounds.
Normally, he always carried more than enough, but when they had been ambushed by the Red Hand in subspace, he had expended nearly all of them.
Of course, Atla Colony also had enhanced rounds for special-duty officers.
However, Miller’s failure to apply for resupply out of sheer laziness had come back to bite him.
Naturally, there was no way John hadn’t noticed that.
John shot Miller an incredulous look and asked back,
“A gunman not having bullets—does that make any sense? If we make it out alive, I’ll be writing this up properly in a report.”
“……Tch.”
For once, Miller had nothing to say.
Among regular soldiers, firearms were still the mainstay weapons, but for special-duty officers, guns were weapons whose disadvantages overwhelmingly outweighed their advantages.
Especially because ammunition was a consumable.
However, their conversation could not continue any longer.
“…….”
“……You’ve got a long lifeline. Pointlessly so.”
As the dust raised by the collapsing building settled, Defense Force special-duty officers surrounded the two atop the rubble, their expressions hardened.
No, in truth, they had probably been surrounded from the start.
It was just that the enemy side had also taken considerable damage and had paused briefly to catch their breath.
‘Twelve rounds left.’
Miller looked at the special-duty officers gripping their weapons as if determined to finish this once and for all, then asked John at the front in a low voice.
“How long can we hold out?”
“……At most, 30 minutes.”
“Hoo, damn it.”
At this point, it was impossible not to feel regret.
If only they hadn’t been ambushed while sleeping, or if they had just had enough enhanced rounds, they could have easily dealt with small fry like these.
‘The others wouldn’t have died either.’
His mouth tasted bitter.
He usually tried to rein in his temper.
But after not only being ambushed out of nowhere, but also running into far too many unpleasant bastards, he hadn’t realized his short fuse would flare up this badly.
“Kill them!”
At that, the Defense Force special-duty officers charged at the two in unison. John bit down hard on his lip, spun the kukri held in his reverse grip in a wide arc, and brushed aside the staff thrust toward him from the front.
Then, ramming his knee into the solar plexus of the one who had tried to push past him toward Miller, he let out a breath.
“Uaaaargh!”
Miller, too, had no intention of going down quietly. He leveled the muzzles of his two specially manufactured revolvers at the approaching enemies.
‘Cripple one of their limbs first, then make up the rest with my body!’
Just as that thought crossed his mind and he was about to pull the trigger—
Kwa-gwagwagwagwagwagwang!
With a sudden explosive roar, the hull of Atla Colony shook violently for an instant.
It was only a moment, but gravity warped, and they halted their attacks mid-strike and simultaneously looked up at the colony’s sky.
‘What is it?’
‘An asteroid?’
Though they were hostile to one another, the thoughts that flashed through their minds in that instant were not all that different.
In a way, it was only natural.
Small asteroids or space debris colliding with a colony was not all that rare.
However, their expectations were soon shattered by an utterly tragic and utterly unbelievable sight—one that was scarcely possible to accept.
-Kyaaaaaaaaah!
A roar that echoed throughout the entire colony.
An instinctive chill surged through them.
Miller and John could not immediately identify what it was, but the Defense Force special-duty officers were different.
“……H-how could this be.”
“Grrrk.”
“A, aah…….”
They lamented, ground their teeth, and despaired.
They all shared one thing in common.
They knew far too well what this chaos meant, and what the beast’s roar signified.
And before long, its true form revealed itself.
Kwaddeudeudeuk!
The colony’s ceiling crumpled, and sharp spikes, or protrusion-like things, began to surge into the colony’s interior.
Those that had simply plunged straight down twisted grotesquely along the artificial gravity permeating the colony, and soon fell so fast that even from afar, the sound of wind could be heard.
“W-what is it?”
Caught up in the rapidly unfolding situation, they stared blankly at the sky, forgetting that an enemy stood right in front of them.
“……!”
However, their attention was only stolen for a moment. Soon, they rediscovered each other and snapped out of their daze.
“Yih!”
“We’ll end it quickly!”
The ones who grew impatient were the Defense Force special-duty officers.
As if determined to finish things as fast as possible, they scattered psionic energy with the resolve to let parts of their Gears collapse if necessary. Feeling the pressure even in that brief instant, Miller steeled himself to pour out every remaining bullet and aimed both revolvers at them.
However, at that very moment.
「Charge : Treason against the state」
「Verdict : Summary execution」
「Method : Impaled」
A youthful voice, utterly unsuited to a battlefield, brushed past their ears.
And yet, for some reason—
At that instant, his instinctive senses were screaming at him to run.
“Get out of the way!”
One of the Defense Force special-duty officers standing at the very rear shouted, but her vocal cords were soon silenced.
No, it was not just her.
Kwajijik!
Piercing through the ground, seven long awls erupted upward.
Those things, like elongated skewers, pierced straight through the bodies of the Defense Force special-duty officers before they even had a chance to evade.
“Guhk!”
“A, aaaaaargh!”
Suspended in midair in grotesquely twisted forms, they looked past the surging pain and their dimming vision at a single being approaching them.
“Haaahm.”
Her steps were languid and sluggish.
What slowly slid into their pupils along the skewers was a young girl with long hair shimmering with an oneiric blue light, walking forward while yawning.
“I’m sleepy, Dido.”
“Please endure it just a little longer, Major.”
A young girl in a black military uniform, rubbing her sleepy eyes as she walked between the skewered corpses, followed by a line of military police behind her.
Watching that scene—something that seemed like it could only appear in an implausible dream—John collapsed to the ground as if all strength had left him. Only then did Miller also finally relax, muttering quietly.
“Executioner Judith. ……Good thing I didn’t act up.”
The monster of the Northern Special Service Academy, known only through rumors, truly was something else.
That impression did not last long.
Naturally so.
-Kiiiiiiiii!
-Kyarrk—kyaaaaaah!
“So what the hell is that now. Fuck.”
There was still a lot left to deal with.
They said disasters always arrived without warning.
And the residents of Atla Colony were realizing exactly what those words meant, with painful clarity.
“Uaaaaaaah!”
“S-someone save me!”
Hundreds of corrosive spikes that had punched through the colony’s thick outer wall fell, by cruel coincidence, straight into the residential districts’ urban areas.
Kwakwagwang!
The massive things bored through buildings and slammed into the ground, beginning to corrode the surrounding area.
And as if escorting those spikes, countless grotesquely shaped monsters that followed in their wake began slaughtering the nearby humans.
-Kyaaaaaaah!
-Kkigik, kkigigik!
“C, Creatures!”
“Run!”
Even if the Federal Army did not immediately recognize them, the residents of Atla Colony and the Defense Force instantly grasped the nature of those things and began screaming in despair and terror.
“A, aah…….”
If it had been a sudden declaration of war by the Empire, or a colonial rebellion of some sort, perhaps the shock would have been less severe.
But who were they?
They were the residents of Rermal Planet, whose entire world had been taken away by Creatures—beings that even now some politicians dismissed as an exaggerated threat.
“I-it’s over. It’s all over!”
“Hihi, hihihihi!”
The fear of facing those things again was more than enough to swallow the civilians in the city in an instant.
〔As of this moment, all defensive systems of the colony are set to maximum. Civilians in the residential districts, proceed to the shelters in each sector…….〕
Naturally, the colony’s internal security systems activated, and the outer walls were immediately covered in a single solid layer of carbine alloy.
The problem, however, was that far too many corrosive spikes had already entrenched themselves inside the colony, and that the situation had devolved into utter chaos due to fighting between the Federal Army—having noticed the Defense Force’s coup—and elements of the Defense Force that had not participated in the incident.
“W-what should we do?”
“Lieutenant Colonel! Orders!”
“We can’t get through to Captain Satra!”
With things having turned out this way, the most flustered were the coup forces themselves.
The Defense Force troops remaining inside the colony numbered around 100,000.
However, having detained en masse the officers and NCOs who opposed Satra’s ‘cause,’ the command structure had collapsed, leaving less than thirty percent of that force actually operable.
To make matters worse, all special-duty officers and elite units had been deployed to render the Federal Army temporarily incapacitated, making the situation even more precarious.
“Damn it.”
For a brief moment, the thought even crossed his mind—had Captain Satra anticipated this as well?
But he soon shook his head.
Surely not. There was no way.
She had said it herself.
That rather than being abandoned by the Federal government and becoming refugees, they should side with the Red Hand for the sake of the residents of Rermal Planet.
As proof, the recorder she had distributed to the officers just before the operation contained Lieutenant General Regchap’s voice, calmly talking about factions and referring to Jin Crow, and even calling them and the planet’s residents ‘spoils.’
‘……No matter what, we have to stop it.’
The hesitation was fleeting, and the resolve firm.
Though lower in rank, it was an order he could give because he genuinely followed Major General Sahim.
“As of this moment, all hostile actions against the Federal Army are prohibited. And wipe out those goddamn beasts as fast as possible!”
“B-but.”
The aide who received the order muttered with a worried look.
Regardless of the situation, joining forces with the Federal Army could make things difficult later, after the Creatures were dealt with—that calculation lingered in his mind.
But the lieutenant colonel who gave the order bared his teeth and shouted.
“Hey, you bastards! Is that really what matters right now? Go and save people!”
It was a shout filled with pent-up rage.
Meanwhile, at that time.
“Cough! Cough!”
Underground in the ruined city.
Beneath a massive sinkhole created when a corrosive spike collapsed an entire building with a subterranean level.
A man spat out a blood-mixed cough.
“Guhk! Cough!”
A pale face drained of all color.
Tattered leather gloves.
A mouth stained red, as if he had already coughed up blood several times.
Eyes that looked as though they might close at any moment.
Swoosh-.
After collecting his shattered body like that for a long while, he finally rose to his feet, stared down at the ruins beneath where he had been sitting, and muttered softly.
“An alcoholic would be better off than this, cough!, I suppose.”
Caught beneath his gaze were the remains of the building that had collapsed into the sinkhole.
And…….
-Ki, kiiih…….
Dozens of Creatures, their entire bodies torn apart, trembling as if their breaths might cease at any moment.