Chihaya was unspooling the wire she’d fixed to the trees.
“th-that was terrifying……”
Her voice is still shaking.
She’d predicted the enemy unit would have to come down from the air. There was also a chance it would retreat once the drones were destroyed — if she could avoid a fight, that would have been fine by her.
But she’d taken out insurance for the case where the enemy unit came down specifically to destroy the Allrounder.
That insurance was the wire she’d strung everywhere.
This wire — attached to trees, but almost none of it actually anchored down. Partly because she simply hadn’t had time to anchor it, but there was another reason.
To limit where the enemy unit could land.
The wire sent flying by the hydrogen cylinder explosion had snagged on branches throughout the trees, ready to tangle any descending unit.
The enemy would know wire was strung from the drone footage — but the positions of wire thrown by the explosion couldn’t be confirmed through the rising cloud of snow and debris.
Which meant the enemy unit would naturally be pushed toward wherever the wire was thinnest. If she’d set that direction in advance, Chihaya’s Allrounder could have the enemy unit in front of it.
That said, there was no guarantee the enemy would think that far ahead — so Chihaya had placed the wire-sparse gap in the direction of the Unison Human-Machine Technology base. Even if there were no enemy unit, she could have sprinted straight through and dropped in on the base.
As it turned out, finding the enemy unit right in front of her with a gun already raised was a surprise — but the Fernleg Scorpion corpse she’d been holding as backup had kept the Allrounder from being destroyed.
She uses the unspooled wire to secure the wreckage of the enemy unit, whose name she still doesn’t know.
The wreckage is full of holes. She hadn’t known how tough an Order-series Actanoid would be, so she’d been thorough. There’d been a chance the thruster fuel would ignite and explode — but that was still better than her own unit being destroyed.
“that should do it”
She contacts the Unison Human-Machine Technology base to say she’s bringing in the enemy wreckage, and gets a quick reply.
“let’s see? the black box? should be intact I think”
She has no idea how an Order-series Actanoid is even structured.
For now, if she brings it to the base, the professionals can take it apart and figure it out.
When Chihaya brings the wreckage in, assessment begins immediately.
She’s sent a message asking her to be present, so she observes the disassembly and assessment while recording video footage.
The results come out at dawn.
“……five million?”
Not bad for a single destroyed unit.
About the same as the combined sale of the almost-intact Rannoid-series Conductor and the destroyed Leaf Sprinter.
But apparently if it had been captured in better condition, the valuation wouldn’t have gone below twenty million. On top of that, the hydrogen cylinder delivery job is marked failed. They’ll cover expenses, but the cylinder itself — the actual job item — has been completely blown to nothing.
When she’s told that the cylinder’s damages have already been offset, there’s only one answer Chihaya can give.
“I’ll sell it……”
The large deposit is something, but the actual job is a failure. Worse — the record of a single Allrounder taking down an Order-series Actanoid is now sitting on her account.
Which means the job board is going to weight combat jobs even more heavily than before.
Winning the battle, losing the war.
“why……”
The Allrounder trudges away from the base as dawn breaks around it.
She climbs to the summit of the Wakagawa Upper Mountain Range, takes a few photos, then descends in the opposite direction from the base toward the photography location.
On the way down, her phone chimes to announce a transfer from Unison Human-Machine Technology.
Without noticing exactly when it happened, her savings have crossed ten million yen. Just looking at the number is enough to feel good. A sum that makes you feel like you’ve got life figured out — but the way she’s earning it is the problem.
“I just want to earn money more peacefully, but all I keep doing is selling Actanoids I’ve wrecked in fights……”
Practically indistinguishable from banditry at this point.
Murmuring how did it come to this, she advances the Allrounder.
And then — she arrives at the photography location, Yumiwa Genkyo.
“wow……”
The gloom she’d been carrying lifts in an instant. A breathtaking view.
A long chain of unusual rocks, each one worn into arching shapes by erosion — a natural landscape that somehow evokes the ruins of giants. Multiple streams of brilliant blue run through the beds that must have carved those stones, filling the air with a calm, sacred stillness. Trees grown free and full, blooming in beautiful shades of pink, as if embodying the peaceful time that had flowed through this place.
“beautiful……. I’d love to retire somewhere like this”
Done with fighting, she decided, and raised the camera toward the view.