Editing City Series:Volume6a Chapter6 (section)

===Part 7===

Hazel suddenly found herself lying on the floor.

She no longer saw the sky in front of her. Only a ceiling with metal pipes running every which way.

…''Where am I?

She could see it when she blinked now, so this vision actually belonged to her.

But she could not move her eyes. Her body was tense and frozen up. She had been shown that high-speed battle as a participant, but she had failed to do anything at all.

As the crushing speed and attacks had pressed her back against the floor, she had only been able to pull her clothes in around her and curl up. Her one form of resistance was to not look away from what was happening.

Her breathing was heavy, she could feel beads of sweat dripping down her skin, and her wide eyes stared only at the ceiling.

…''It’s like I’m about to cry.

That thought strengthened the emotion, so she closed her eyes once more.

She actually found darkness there. No one was stealing away the actual image seen by her eyes.

“…”

She focused on her right hand. She used her sense of touch to determine what her hand was touching and how it was moving.

She grabbed her fallen clothes from the floor, pulled them up to cover her shoulders, and clutched them tight.

She could feel her left hand as well. She used the clothing in that hand to cover her stomach.

Her left thigh lifted her knee to cover her body and her right leg bent as if to tangle with that.

It was similar to the pose of someone bracing themselves against an opponent’s approach and pressing their back against the wall to prevent anything from attacking them from behind.

Sweat dripped from her cheek and she breathed a deep sigh of relief at that sensation.

She knew her face was still stiff, but she let a self-deprecating smile reach her lips.

…''This is what that prosthetic eye does, isn’t it?

A tear fell from her left eye and dripped to her ear while she lay on the floor.

Her right eye, the Messiah, shed no tears.

She accepted that fact and then slowly sat up.

She found herself in a small cockpit with 4-yard sides. She was surrounded by windows on three sides and the final side was a wall covered in an instrument panel and metal pipes. A pilot’s seat was located in front of the front window on the right and a navigator’s seat was located on the left.

It was somewhat reminiscent of a ship’s pilothouse.

“I really am inside the Sylphide,” she said after seeing nothing but blue outside the window.

The Sylphide had flown upwards after destroying the twin-fuselage ship. The end of the battle had freed her vision, so time was flowing normally for her now.

She wiped away the tears on her left cheek.

She stood up with her shirt held to her chest and placed a hand on the back of the pilot’s seat in front of her. Then doubt hit her.

…''Who’s flying this thing?

Her question was immediately answered. She looked and saw both the pilot’s seat and navigator’s seat were empty. The yoke and the Kunst Eye control sphere were not moving. Even the counterforce had been deactivated.

She gulped after realizing the craft was unmanned.

“That ridiculous V-0 weapon they were talking about in the newspaper flies automatically, doesn’t it?”

…''Does the Sylphide work the same?

There was no one here to answer her questions. Because she was alone.

She sighed at that realization. Then she wiped away her tears again and looked out ahead.

A deep blue filled the sky and she could see a vast expanse of land down below.

“––––––!?”

That land looked like a massive blue-tinged arc and, even from this low an altitude, she could make out the shape of Europe depicted in the maps of her textbooks. She could see the darkness of the night far off to the west, but she could also see the specks of lights indicating cities in that shadowy region.

She clutched her clothing all the tighter.

She could not stop the tears.

“Ah…”

The vast land below her was home to both humans and Heidengeists.

She slowly moved while viewing that. She silently put on her shirt and brushed back her hair. After that bare minimum of grooming, she sat in the navigator’s seat with her legs together.

She checked the control panel in front of her and understood some of what it was telling her.

The altitude gauge’s needle had already reached the maximum reading, but the gravity gauge told her she was still within the earth’s gravitational field. The power gauge’s needle was also at the maximum.

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She could not feel any weight bearing down on her from the acceleration, so the craft had to be using some kind of high-level inertial control.

“What does it hope to accomplish with all this acceleration? It isn’t hoping to reach space like the Kaizerburg did, is it?”

She suddenly realized there were two things sitting on top of the control panel.

The first was a woman’s bracelet placed around the base of a broken stick switch. The stick portion of the switch had broken off somehow and the bracelet was barely hanging onto the base. It looked like it could fall off at any time.

The second was some kind of paper stuck in the gap between the window and the control panel.

…''That’s a photo.

She pulled it out and it was indeed a piece of a larger photo. It had likely shown a few different people, but the left side had been torn away and it only showed a single young man in the center.

She did not recognize him. He wore glasses, he had brown hair, and his build was best described as scrawny.

She did recognize the black cedar woods behind him.

“Tempelhof Airbase?”

The scene in the black-and-white photo did not show the barrier walls and siren towers that had been built when the airport was converted for military use. The young man stood in front of an airplane that seemed to be his.

…''If this is before Tempelhof was fully converted into an airbase, this has to be at least 4 years ago.

She nodded at her own thought and looked down.

She saw a certain color on the otherwise gray metal floor.

A dark red liquid had dripped onto the floor and dried there.

Those were bloodstains. She noticed more near the stick switch with the bracelet.

“?”

She looked back to the floor and followed the bloodstains with her eyes. They created something like a dotted-line trail that weaved unsteadily across the floor until it reached the bulkhead on the port wall.

She looked back over to read the label for the switch with the bracelet.

“Control Mode – Schreiben Device.”

She gasped at that. She brought her face to the glass in front of her and viewed the reflection of her right eye which was stained a deep red. Then she flipped over the photo in her hand.

A man’s name was written there.

“!?”

After a few seconds, she flipped the photo back over.

“Sylphide, Marsch Gant’s will is flying you, isn’t it?”

She placed her hand on the control panel.

She recalled what she knew about the Kaiserburg on which the Sylphide was based.

“Two years ago, the Kaiserburg fought a number of battles and evolved itself so it could reach outer space. The warship’s engine used a spirit stone that fell from space, so it carried a will telling it to return to space.” She took a breath and nodded. “Is that was this is, Sylphide? You were woken by Marsch Gant, but you can’t fight your destiny. You wish to fly to space, so you sought the missing component you needed to evolve and…”

She trailed off and sank deeper into the navigator’s seat. She breathed out through her nose and shut her eyes.

Suddenly, her seat began to move.

“!?”

The width of the seat automatically adjusted to fit the body type of the person sitting in it. That feature was used in the air force’s latest models, but something about this movement seemed odd to her.

The width adjustment went back and forth several times like it was unsure if it really wanted to support her and was afraid of being touched. It reminded her of how a cat would pull back its paw when it was touched.

She found the hesitation kind of irritating, so…

“You don’t have to do that if you don’t-”

But she stopped when she remembered adjusting the seat of a fighter was used to increase safety and stability for the person seated there. And Sylphide had decided to do so based on its own will.

It could not have been more obvious who that was for.

She opened her mouth and started to say something, but she thought better of it. Her raised eyebrows hesitated for a moment before lowering as she sighed. She roughly pressed her body against the seat, grabbed the moving armrests, and let the seat support her.

“Look, this is the most comfortable position for me.”

The sound of air being released from below the seat almost seemed like a response.

Then the seat settled on a shape.

But that was not all. To the right of the emergency cryopreservation controls on the control panel, the communicator needle began to move. Instead of a military frequency, it stopped on a civilian one. She could listen to the radio at the flip of a switch.

…''Is that supposed to be a favor?

“Sylphide, this Marsch man who woke you up is pretty bad at putting people in a good mood, isn’t he?”

She stood up. She was wearing a shirt now, but still no underwear.

…''Since I’m not cold, the air in here must be heated.

She recalled it had been that way since she woke up and then slapped her cheeks.

“I don’t know what this all means. Am I a part of you, or are you a part of me?”

She smiled bitterly and put on the clothing that had fallen to the floor.

She had been so scared just a few minutes ago, but now she had calmed down some.

When she realized that, her bitter smile was replaced by her usual expression. There was no longer any tension on her face.

She could see the scene outside moving by at a dizzying speed. The massive blue-tinged arc was gradually expanding. They had begun to descend. She could see their speed growing even though she felt none of it inside here. The Sylphide was accelerating as fast as it could during its descent as well.

“Are you disappointed you can’t get to space?” she asked while sitting back in the navigator’s seat.

That would mean the Sylphide had not evolved enough yet.

A thought occurred to her and she spoke it aloud while tightening the seat’s four-point belt.

“Sylphide, why don’t you run away? What were you created to do?”

Her vision accelerated as if to swallow up her questions.