Editing City Series:Volume6d Chapter3 (section)

===Part 2===

Several large boxy blue shapes floated in the sky as the sun set.

Several similar shapes rested on the field below.

The shapes were all aerial ships measuring more than 100 yards long.

A flagpole bearing the Union Jack was set up alongside the gray runway crossing the center of the field.

The field was surrounded by forest. This was Bassingbourn’s secondary airfield located in southeast UK.

The setting sun shined on the sky, the ships, the field, the runway, the flag, and the forest.

All of the ships were on standby.

The crews remained in their assigned barracks and the maintenance crews surrounded the ships performing inspections.

But one ship in that vast field was very different from the rest.

The small aerial aircraft carrier was located at one corner of the field. It only carried a large two-hull transport ship and six large spare fuel tanks.

Between the tanks and the two-hull transport ship, a few dozen crewmembers sat in deep thought while directing their eyes straight head.

Their eyes were all on a very large person on the west end of the deck.

The gray-haired man with two prosthetic arms was Pale Horse. Corelle sat directly in front of him.

“And?” she asked him. “What’s this about Hazel not having the power of the Messiah?”

Pale nodded. His downturned face was unusually hard-set for him.

He glanced over at the others before answering.

“The Allies didn’t believe it, but it’s a major secret that could influence the survival of the world itself. I won’t say it again.” He took a breath. “To put it simply, a Live explosion at Germania on August 23, 1943 will turn back time by a thousand years.”

No one knew how to respond to that. A few said “huh?” before falling silent.

Pale ignored them all and continued.

“Hazel, Berger, and the Sylphide will be closely involved in that explosion, so they alone will be carried back to that point a millennium ago as the keys to reconstructing the world.”

Corelle held out a hand to stop Pale there.

“W-wait just a second. Then this Lehrer who you went to see last year…?”

“Like I said earlier, Lehrer is Hazel after using Sylphide to wake up in modern times again. She is a Buster and she used that power to save the world, but…”

“Wait another second. What are you talking about? You’re skipping way too much here.”

Pale clicked his tongue.

“This is going to get long,” he prefaced. “You know Geheimnis Agency Commander Lowenzahn Naylor, right? The issue here is the Ober Beweisen for her Neue Erde heart and the same for Hazel’s Messiah.”

Pale saw everyone frowning as he continued.

“You see, Neue Erde’s Ober Beweisen has nothing to do with prophecy.”

“Huh? But she’s a Sofort Leser. How else does she prophesy?”

“I can’t tell you that. I’m sure the Geheimnis Agency has some other method. Lehrer said as much. So forget that for now.” Pale raised one sharp-nailed finger. “Neue Erde’s Ober Beweisen is a booster for a specific Live reactor. With a side effect, I might add. Connect Neue Erde to that Live reactor and Neue Erde’s owner’s lifeforce is borrowed to boost its output several times over.”

“Which Live reactor are we talking about here?”

“You’ve seen the aerial photos of that big-ass cross in Germania, haven’t you?”

No one nodded, but no one shook their heads either.

More tension filled their faces and they maintained their silence.

Pale raised a second finger as if to take advantage of that silence.

“Next. On August 23, 1943, the Allies will bomb Germania, but Germania is protected by the barrier created by Tristan. The Vaterlands around the world are a problem too, so the Allies have an idea.”

Corelle continued for him.

“Gather up all of the anxiety Lives in the world, send them back into Tristan, and have it destroy itself.”

“Exactly, Corelle. Do that and Germany as well as most of the nearby Eastern Europe countries will be so ruled by anxiety they can never again recover.”

“So Neue Erde’s owner will use its Ober Beweisen to fight back? To try and stop the world’s anxiety the Allies are forcing onto them?”

Pale kept his right hand’s two fingers raised and scratched his head with his left hand.

“Correct,” he said quietly. “The Geheimnis Agency Commander feels the need to sacrifice herself to the machine in order to save Germany from the anxiety.”

“Continue.”

“Sure,” said Pale. “But that heroic Ober Beweisen has a side effect.”

He raised a third finger.

“Neue Erde wasn’t actually made just to boost the reactor like that. That boosted power is in fact only the means necessary to extract certain Lives from the ley lines.”

“What Lives are those?”

“This world’s Spacetime Lives.”

It took everyone a few seconds to grasp what he had said.

He sighed after seeing them all nod.

“I’m sure you’ve all heard of it as an Ober Geheimnis. The basic timeline of the world exists as Lives, forming one of the basic pillars supporting the entire world. It has only been contacted a few times before. We aren’t talking about anything as insignificant as the Lives behind a land, a country, or the planet. Everything in the world is carried by the Spacetime Lives and they can be extracted through the ley lines, since those are the greatest form of Lives we can control.”

His shoulders drooped, but then he looked up to view them all and raised a fourth finger.

“But the anxiety will be even more powerful. According to Lehrer, it happens late at night on August 23, 1943, in the middle of the bombing of Germania.”

He took a breath.

“Neue Erde attempts to fight back by extracting the Spacetime Lives with its Ober Beweisen, but it loses control and the Lives pressurized within Tristan grow too powerful and they explode. Both the anxiety Lives and the Spacetime Lives do.”

“Wait.” Corelle held out a hand to stop Pale. “That makes no sense. If the Spacetime Lives explode too…”

“Yes, the world’s timeline would be destroyed. The past and the future would both explode and disappear together. That would mean ruin. The world would be destroyed.”

“But…but we’re still here. So the timeline couldn’t have been destroyed.”

Pale raised a fifth finger in front of Corelle’s eyes with a hint of a smile on his lips.

“That’s where the Messiah comes in. I said Lehrer ended up a thousand years in the past, didn’t I? That’s because she saved the world from ruin.”

He looked up into the sky. Everyone else followed suit. The setting sun shined on a new giant aerial warship slowly traveling east. It produced a deep roar as it pushed the wind out of the way.

Someone muttered “that’s the flagship” while viewing that 300yd ship.

After waiting for the flagship to pass, they lowered their gazes. There was no longer any skepticism in their eyes.

Pale had lowered his gaze along with theirs.

He had also lowered his right hand with the five raised fingers.

“Now, then,” he said. “I’ll tell you how Lehrer saved the world. And why Hazel can’t do the same.” He pointed at his right eye with his metal finger. “The Messiah eye’s Ober Beweisen grant’s its owner the ability to fully perceive Lives of even the highest level. That includes the anxiety Lives and the Spacetime Lives.”

And…

“A Buster has the power to destroy Lives. Lehrer used her Ober Beweisen to perceive the anxiety and explosion Lives and destroyed them just before Tristan detonated, but she couldn’t do it quite so cleanly.”

“So she was forced to destroy 1000 years’ worth of Spacetime Lives too?”

“I think so, yes. She and the other people at the center of the spacetime explosion were sent to the past. The Panzerpolis Project isn’t actually meant to defend Berlin. It’s a project using the Geheimnis Agency Commander and the Messiah to protect history and the world by making sure that same loop plays out every single time.” Pale nodded, straightened his back, and put on a more carefree expression. “But unlike Lehrer, our Hazel is a Tuner. That means she can’t destroy the anxiety Lives. She can’t save the world by destroying it. That was decided that night back in Cologne.”

He smiled bitterly and chuckled.

“The Geheimnis Agency Commander intends to complete the loop and avoid ruin so the world can try again. M. Schrier and I intend to save the world without relying on the loop. There must be some way of doing it.”

He looked to the others and said one last thing.

“So what will the rest of you do?”