Maybe this job was more dangerous than she’d thought — Chihaya was nervous.
Out again today to survey her assigned area, she checked the shared first-day loss rate and involuntarily stopped the Allrounder and looked around.
Loss rate: just over twenty percent. And that’s only the survey team — not counting the mobile response units handling wildlife encounters, or New World Tree Housing running command behind the scenes.
Makibishi Plants and surprise wildlife attacks were apparently taking out a lot of units with moderate damage, and warnings were being circulated.
The breakdown of damaged units skewed heavily toward loaner Allrounders — narrow field of vision, low processing specs. Cyclones with their wide field of view and video analysis, and Conductors using drones, apparently sailed through day one with ease.
“really could use some reconnaissance”
She regrets not borrowing a Cyclone, but wishing for what she doesn’t have won’t change anything.
Chihaya uses a stick to strike Makibishi Plants she finds, triggering the root-burrs and clearing them out.
It’s like walking through a minefield.
She’s being much more cautious than the day before, which means the work is crawling along.
Gunfire in the distance, occasionally — wildlife encounters, probably.
At some point, Chihaya’s Allrounder has settled into a rotation between the armor-piercing handgun, the survey camera, and the Makibishi-clearing stick.
Just as she’s starting to find her rhythm, an enraged shout erupts from the shared voice chat.
“——DIE, POLLEN!”
The force of it makes Chihaya recoil involuntarily — the Allrounder reads her movement and also recoils, tipping its head back to look at the sky.
Countless somethings are drifting through the distant air.
She picks up the camera and zooms in to get a look.
“……flowers?”
White and yellow flowers, spinning like propellers as they drift on the wind. From each one, fine particles scatter outward, staining the sky a yellowish haze like fog or a curtain.
She recognizes what she’s looking at, sets down the camera, and immediately runs the Allrounder upwind toward the Korogeiwa Garage.
There’s a plant in the New Frontier called the Forenborn.
Discovered by an Actor who suffers from hay fever, it blooms spinning, propeller-like flowers that scatter pollen as they fall. The countless flower-propellers currently drifting through the air are exactly that.
This Forenborn — the Actor who first discovered it, in a fit of spite, nearly named it Shineya Kafun (“Die, Pollen”), but was frantically talked out of it by everyone around them, and the plant received its current official name.
Even so, the vast majority of Actors still call it Shineya Kafun to this day. With hatred and deep personal grudges.——
“All Actanoids in the affected area, please evacuate immediately. Air-cooled Actanoids will experience filter clogging from the pollen and thermal runaway. Actors operating Allrounders and Bands especially — please prioritize evacuation now.”
Okuma’s voice comes through with unusual urgency.
This is why Actors hate the Forenborn.
The scattered pollen is the natural enemy of air-cooled Actanoids — and the more powerful the unit, the worse the thermal runaway. High-performance means high heat output, which means the filter clog hits harder.
To make it worse, the drifting flowers can also cause signal interference, introducing lag to Actanoid operation.
Between these two particularly nasty traits, a lot of Actors have lived through losing control of their unit. Hence the Shineya Kafun name in the field.
The Actor who’d shouted almost certainly has a unit that’s already uncontrollable. The ones working nearby probably too.
Chihaya was supposed to be well clear of the area, but even she’s getting signal interference — her monitor footage is breaking up.
“——wait, it’s, lagging, it’s lagging!”
Teary-eyed, Chihaya cries out.
With severe lag from the interference, the Allrounder’s controls are misbehaving.
It should be running — but packet loss means the movement command doesn’t arrive, and it freezes in an odd mid-stride position. Then, languid as a sloth, it raises its right foot.
She tries to step right to avoid a tree ahead — the foot comes down in the wrong place. She tries to lift the right foot again to correct it and it barely responds.
If wildlife showed up right now there’d be nothing she could do.
The monitor distortion hides a tree trunk until the Allrounder’s shoulder walks into it and staggers. The balance correction kicks in automatically and plants the feet.
But trying to settle into the posture Chihaya is currently holding — data not getting through because of the interference — the Allrounder freezes in what amounts to a yoga pose.
“why……”
Making big movements means a high risk of falls and accidents if the data can’t keep up, so Chihaya shuffles carefully in small steps out of the interference zone. Slow and steady.
Once the signal is coming through normally again, she opens up the Allrounder’s speed.
Running toward the Korogeiwa Garage, she checks the rear camera to see how the pollen is doing.
The Shineya Kafun scattering pollen on this scale shows no sign of stopping. The shared voice chat is chaos, and distress signals scroll upward across the system screen in a steady stream.
There’s nothing Chihaya’s Allrounder can do about any of it.
She decides today’s work is done, sends a message to the supervising Actor saying she’s heading back early, and points the Allrounder toward the Korogeiwa Garage.
That’s when, through the speaker still carrying faint interference noise, she thinks she hears a gunshot mixed into the static.
No way to tell which direction — and nothing looks different around her.
“……a f-fight?”
Maybe an air-cooled unit that’s barely still operational in these conditions got attacked by wildlife.
Before she gets caught up in it, Chihaya weaves through the trees at full speed and makes it back to the Korogeiwa Garage.