“Control, why is the control—”
The comms came through.
Wasn’t Levan dead?
Ailey slowly toppled backward.
“Ailey!”
“Stop calling her when she’s not going to answer you!”
A metallic clatter sounded from beyond the comms.
He grabbed the core armor and opened it at the same time as the hatch.
A gun barrel.
Bang!
The moment I jerked my head aside, a hole was punched through the seat.
“Fuck!”
That clattering earlier had been him pulling out a gun, the crazy bastard.
I covered Ailey’s core with the Titan’s palm.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
A few more gunshots rang out, then stopped.
I pretended to move my hand away, then stopped just before doing so.
Clang!
I knew it.
I moved the hand away again.
Levan looked up at me, gasping for breath.
“Kill me.”
His voice and the comms overlapped, ringing out twice.
Making eye contact with someone while still inside a Titan.
What a strange thing.
“Get down.”
Cough.
Maybe it was because I’d smoked before getting into the Titan, or maybe it was because I’d been moving with the hatch torn off and caught the cold wind.
I spat out phlegm and looked at Levan again.
“What?”
“I said get down.”
I wanted to kill Levan, but I had no intention of doing it.
It wasn’t for reasons like not wanting to become the same kind of person, or the dignity of human life, or anything like that.
Killing Levan wouldn’t make me the same kind of person as him.
Levan’s eyes widened, and then he dropped the gun in his hand to the floor.
“Fine.”
Then he unfastened his buckle and leapt out of the core.
He didn’t seem to have a shred of pride.
After landing by rolling through the snowfield, Levan ran along the outer perimeter.
There were two reasons I spared him.
I didn’t want to get blood on the core where Ailey was.
And I didn’t want to kill a person.
I know myself well.
I could predict how much I’d suffer mentally after killing someone once.
If I killed without making eye contact, maybe that would be one thing, but just now, I had met his eyes.
Shooting a Titan and shooting the person inside a Titan are completely different things.
Leaving an enemy alive.
On a battlefield, it’s the most selfish thing you can do.
I know that.
Even so, I’m not ready to kill a person yet.
I stripped off the core armor with my dagger and removed the core containing Ailey from inside.
The thrusters were overheated, all the armaments were done for, and the generator was in emergency cooling after an overload.
I had to return to the meeting point.
Even from a distance, I could tell the Allied Forces were being pushed back.
It was a fight that had been decided from the moment they deployed the drilling machine on the northern front.
No, victory and defeat had been decided from the moment the Allied Forces’ operation was confirmed.
The Empire had chosen to wipe them out, and the Allied Forces had chosen to retreat.
The Alliance was not wiped out.
They had merely lost with the minimum possible casualties.
***
They said the battle changed starting with Simon’s signal.
After the vanguard that came in first through the drilling machine, the enemy’s main force set out.
This time, it wasn’t only mass-produced machines; Titans from the renowned Dis Pater family were visible as well.
As soon as Simon confirmed the main force, he gave the signal, and the Allied Forces detonated all the bombs they had prepared at once.
An avalanche.
Every mass-produced Titan in the Allied Forces had equipment like skis attached to its feet.
The moment the avalanche began, they were able to accelerate and get out of the area.
By contrast, the Empire, which had never expected them to abandon the base so cleanly and come out as if they were all prepared to die, lost quite a few Titans to the avalanche.
“Casualties?”
“More than twenty. Some were buried in the avalanche, so it’s hard to confirm.”
That didn’t mean the Allied Forces’ losses were small.
Even if more than forty imperial soldiers had been swept away by the avalanche, proportionally, the Allied Forces had taken a far greater loss.
Even if you were caught in an avalanche, you could survive as long as you were still inside a Titan.
The problem was escaping from the snow.
After being swept away by an avalanche, the equipment would obviously be damaged, and it would be close to a miracle if the generator and thrusters were still intact.
If both of those were broken, there was no way to get out.
There was no way to send a signal either.
And thanks to the weight of the Titan, you would end up buried much deeper under the snow than expected.
Then you die.
Simon, who had been scratching his head roughly, gestured toward me.
“You found your way here pretty well. How did you avoid the avalanche?”
“I went around entirely outside the defensive wall. Maybe the Luna Count’s family was too distracted by the avalanche, but they weren’t paying attention beyond the wall.”
“Well done. You didn’t see any more of our kids on the way?”
“…No.”
“Yeah, got it.”
The Allied Forces had possessed multiple bases from the beginning.
From the outset, they had kept all their forces from gathering in one place, taking into account the possibility that a single base could be annihilated.
Of course, Simon said even he had never seen a mop-up operation on this scale.
The vanguard alone had consisted of around twenty Titans.
Considering the main force that arrived afterward, the total scale was far beyond sixty.
They were trying to kill the Allied Forces off for certain.
If we had tried to hold out and fight instead, we would have been annihilated.
“Then what about confirmed deaths?”
“I don’t know. All the Titans shot down on the battlefield earlier were caught up in the avalanche. Everyone has some water and food, so they’ll barely last a week. We need to get them out before then.”
I saw a familiar name on the tablet Simon was holding.
Locke.
TB10.
Honestly, I couldn’t say we were very close.
I’m extremely slow to get close to other people, so it was hard to call someone I’d known for only a month a friend.
Even so, he was one of the Allied soldiers whose face I remembered.
I remembered how Locke was shot down.
He had faced the drilling machine and fired the mounted cannon.
Then he was hit by Levan’s shell and fell below the defensive wall.
I hadn’t seen him after that.
He might have escaped after the firefight, or his ski equipment and hovering equipment might have been damaged after he fell.
If either one of them was broken and he got hit by the avalanche on top of that, there was a high chance the thrusters were damaged too.
I should have killed Levan after all.
Given Levan’s personality, it was unlikely he’d consider being spared a debt.
If anything, he would probably become the greatest threat to the people around me from now on.
Why did I let him live and go?
That vermin bastard.
“TB12’s core is…”
“It’s Ailey.”
“We’ve handed Ailey’s core over to our hangar. We’ll need time to organize things before we can use this hangar.”
They would need it.
There was no telling when another mop-up operation might happen.
Before then, the Allied Forces’ Titans needed to be repaired first.
In truth, Ailey wasn’t all that important to them.
Their goal was to liberate artificial intelligences, but even that was only possible once they had secured a minimum means of defense.
“I know.”
“And we’ll start work as soon as possible, but even if we take her out, the chance your girlfriend regains consciousness is low.”
“What?”
She’s not my girlfriend.
But that wasn’t the important part.
“What do you mean?”
“Why are you looking at me like you want to kill me? I’m doing my best here too.”
Ah, right.
This wasn’t Simon’s fault.
Once again, my thoughts had shown all over my face.
When I dragged my hands down over my face, Simon’s expression relaxed too.
“First, I only checked the concentration of stimulants inside the core. Among ourselves, we call it a TB14-level concentration. If you’re exposed to a concentration that high, you don’t recover naturally.”
TB14.
I had been TB13, and I ended up stuttering because of brain damage.
It had taken almost a full year just to heal naturally.
Naturally, TB14 would have side effects far worse than what I experienced.
“Please keep going.”
“To begin with, an artificial intelligence inside a core is maintained by forcibly waking the mind through electrical stimulation. So when the generator dies completely and the emergency power is all used up, it negatively affects the artificial intelligence’s memories.”
“Those rumors about memory loss…”
“It’s usually not to that extent. If the time spent as a core AI was short, genuine memory loss can happen. We know because we confirmed the phenomenon by chance ourselves.”
So that was why Ailey had lost her memories.
So.
Then.
“If we keep giving Ailey electrical signals…”
“That’s only possible by continuously injecting a high concentration of painkillers inside the core. It’s practically torture. You still want us to do it?”
Fuck.
“No. Please, absolutely do not.”
“We weren’t planning to.”
Simon turned the pad toward me.
“There is one method. Administering a suitable amount of inhibitors to match the stimulant concentration.”
Inhibitors.
I had never been injected with them, so I didn’t remember them well.
I think they were drugs that had the opposite effect of stimulants.
If anything, they felt like drugs that made the personality surface more strongly.
“Inhibitors aren’t drugs that simply enlarge the personality.”
“They aren’t?”
An image of a brain appeared on the pad Simon was holding.
“Look carefully. Basically, a person’s personality is handled by the frontal lobe, right?”
“I won’t understand even if I look and listen.”
“Ah, can’t you just listen for a bit?”
Simon tapped the brain diagram.
“Erasing the personality is effectively no different from killing the brain. In the end, it’s no different from killing off the frontal lobe. Then you need to suppress this toxic substance to some degree for the person to stay alive, don’t you?”
He kept saying frontal lobe, frontal lobe, but honestly, I didn’t really know what that was.
He probably meant the front part of the brain.
Still, there was one thing I understood.
It suppressed the effects of the toxic substance to some extent.
“So inhibitors were originally made to suppress the effects of stimulants?”
“You do understand. What do you mean, you won’t?”
Simon nodded with a satisfied expression.
“But there’s a problem.”
“What is it?”
“We’re short on inhibitors too.”
If they were short, that meant they normally used them.
“Why do you use them?”
“Because we need to use them for people who were artificial intelligences to regain consciousness.”
Thinking about it for a moment, that was only natural.
The Northern Allied Forces’ main activities were seizing Titans on the northern front, seizing cores from inside research labs, and liberating artificial intelligences.
That was why they were called the Liberation Army.
“When we were ambushed earlier, most of our inhibitors were lost. We’re at the point where we have to scrape together everything left and put it into our own cores. What we had stored at this base was only the bare minimum.”
It seemed they used the core fluid inside the core as is, but increased the stimulant concentration in the fluid.
The Allied Forces probably didn’t have the capacity to make separate core fluid, so it was efficient.
But.
“You don’t even have enough to give Ailey?”
“You need way more of this than you’d think. If your goal were to put your girlfriend back into a core, we could just use a moderate amount, but that’s not your goal, is it?”
It wasn’t.
My goal was for Ailey to come out of the core.
“Then what about Ailey?”
“Thankfully, the Luna Count’s family aren’t the only ones who know how to make inhibitors. If they were, we’d have a hard time securing a supply too.”
The image on the pad changed into a map.
Simon zoomed in on one region.
“The South.”
The South.
The starting point of Titan technology, and the place where another Liberation Army existed.
“The Southern Liberation Army can make inhibitors. Go south.”
It was the only solution.