Part 7[edit]
The ice knife shattered before Lessar’s eyes.
The countless sparkling shards of ice struck Caliche’s upper body almost like a shotgun blast.
Caliche’s body was blown a few meters away while blood sprayed about.
“Well, I guess that about settles this.”
Lessar looked around the area and it seemed Caliche’s comrades were mostly collapsed and unable to move due to the green lightning attacks. It would have been a problem if one of them was faking it, but it did not seem that any of them had had the strength to spare needed to calculate out that far.
Lessar walked over as if dragging her exhausted body along and picked up her steel glove. She then turned toward Caliche who was collapsed face down on the ground.
Paying no heed to the woman’s bleeding, Lessar forcibly flipped her face up.
She crouched down and stared at the woman’s face.
“Even if you remain silent, I have ways of ‘looking inside’, so there’s no point in being stubborn.”
“…”
“Why did you kill the higher ups of the shopping mall and take over their plan? Do you have the detonation code for the nuke?”
“Our spiritual items…” Caliche moved her b.l.o.o.d.y lips, but she was not responding to Lessar’s questions. “From the number and details of our spiritual items, you realized that we had people in hiding providing logistical support in addition to the direct battle unit…”
“What…?”
“If you knew that much, why didn’t you realize it? Why didn’t you realize that leaving the ones who specialize in spiritual work and construction was much more dangerous than letting the battle unit remain active?”
Lessar’s breath caught in her throat.
At almost the exact same time, a giant ma.s.s of constructions broke through the wall of the large business facility and into the parking lot.
“Chehh…”
Lessar slowly stood up from her crouching position as she saw the giant silhouette through the dust that had been blown into the air.
What she saw was difficult to describe.
It was something like giant wheels. They were basically made of a white stone like marble and the outer edge that contacted the ground was reinforced with a gold-colored metal.
The small ones had a radius of 3 meters and the large ones had a radius of 15 meters.
The wheels were not simple ones. Instead, they were made of different sized wheels on top of each other like the gear of a mountain bike.
The large and small wheels fit into each other like gears connecting them together like a giant snake.
While making creaking noises, the giant wheel snake slowly bent its large form. It was as if it were setting its aim on Lessar.
If that giant form came at her, she would be crushed thinner than a piece of paper.
“Oh, come on, really? It feels like Telesma has been forcibly gathered together.”
“We originally set that up as insurance.” Without getting up, Caliche moved just her head to look over and smile at Lessar. “We would use it if the shopping mall decided not to give us our reward. The situation got out of hand and we lost our chance to use it, but it looks like it has come in handy after all.”
The giant form that appeared through the curtain of dust was easily over 70 meters long. It was likely a weapon designed to crush things with its weight.
Even though the shopping mall was huge, it did not have the s.p.a.ce needed to hide a weapon that large. Either a magic circle to call it in from afar had been cleverly hidden or only the necessary things had been gathered so that the other parts could be gathered together automatically.
The weapon could likely cause quite a bit of damage just by freely running around and making random U-turns, but Caliche would not have called it in for just that.
It was best to a.s.sume it had some kind of magical power added in.
“Don’t tell me that thing’s for sale too,” Lessar said sarcastically, but Caliche did not respond.
When she did open her mouth to speak, it was on a completely different subject.
“It isn’t us.”
“?”
“We have no interest in oranges or nuclear materials. …Code EIC is a purely scientific product. However, the science side is not enough to investigate how it affects the human mind. For that reason, they contacted us in secret asking us to observe the people’s minds from the occult point of view. We were signed onto the project as just one of many sensors.”
“…”
“In exchange, we were going to use Code EIC’s improvements on the human mind from a group psychology point of view for ourselves, but that promise was broken. To repay them for that, we killed the higher ups and then tried to get our hands on Code EIC once more.”
Caliche was speaking as if she was not even looking at Lessar who stood before her.
It was possible that her consciousness was fading due to her blood loss.
It was true that Code EIC could be quite useful from a religious point of view. Using uncertain information such as rumors and urban legends, one could isolate a single group and freely regulate the merits of people within that community. One could create a headquarters, a leader, or a natural enemy just as one wanted.
It was the same as raising or lowering the values of products.
Some people within the community would appear to be bright and s.h.i.+ning and others would appear stagnant, dark, and fallen into the shadows.
In truth, the goal Code EIC had been created for could be called a financial religion.
Just by changing out what was at the center of it all completely changed the community.
And it could be changed to be like the world that Lessar and Caliche lived in.
“But it isn’t us,” Caliche said with an odd firmness to her voice despite her condition. “Someone is continuing the plan and detonating the Solntse, but it isn’t us.”
“What…?”
Lessar turned her attention more to Caliche than to the giant weapon made of a great number of wheels. The woman was merely smiling. She would likely not say anything more even if Lessar pressed her for more information. In fact, doing so could even lead the woman to finally dying of blood loss where she would just continue smiling as a corpse.
And most importantly, the giant enemy that had appeared from the shopping mall was not going to let her take her time questioning the woman.
“Not good, not good.”
While using her magical communications to order an additional bombardment from Bayloupe, Lessar held out her steel glove.
“This is not time to be worrying about stopping a nuclear explosion that doesn’t especially concern me.”