Editing City Series:Volume5b Chapter15 (section)

===Beretta’s Journal===

I am writing while I lie in bed after stripping down and applying compresses to my body.

After seeing and hearing so much, the exhaustion hit me all at once. Or maybe those herbs the villagers brought us shouldn’t have been put in the bath. (Rosetta said her butt itched after leaving the bath, so she went to ask Rose Francisca about it, didn’t she?)

On my way back through the mountain pass today, a large silhouette flew by in the sky. I thought it might be a German fighter, but it was a black dragon. I’d never seen one before and it had to have been about 200 yards long. It was huge.

They say it never descends to the mountain pass or the surrounding area. The wind blowing through the rock walls on either side of the pass apparently makes a sound that people can’t hear, but the black dragon can’t stand it.

The mayor told me the shrine at the peak above the table of rock is made to create the same sound as the wind blows through it, so it divides the black dragon’s mountains from Herlde.

Back before the shrine was built, the black dragon apparently waited in the pass where the wind was weaker and ate the people who came through. You can see the occasional giant claw marks in the pass’s rock walls. There’s even the remains of a carriage slammed into the rock wall partway up that’s just rotting away while embedded in the rock. It’s pretty scary.

Now, the mayor showed me that Heavy Barrel again today.

Viewing that Barrel that predates my time by 90 years really made me feel like I’ve become someone from this era. When I first arrived in France, I would try to pull my phone from my bag and panic when it wasn’t there, but I don’t do that anymore.

The secondary seat on Sourire’s back was not originally there; it was added later on. Its gun is a turretless sextuple divine spell cannon. It’s attached to the secondary seat, but the Write Bringer is the one who controls it and it can fire six homing Kugels at once. That may be meant to function as anti-air fire.

The secondary seat is apparently meant for a commander. It has a display panel and radar linked with the Barrel’s sight devices, but it also has a smoke grenade launcher and a Live speaking tube that carries one’s voice to the Write Bringer. It looks like something was connected to the foot space, but whatever it was has been removed. My guess is it was a memory device to temporarily store what the Write Bringer wrote. The secondary seat has an inertial control chair installed to keep the occupant stable while the Barrel moves, but that chair is quite large.

It’s a female Heavy Barrel, so that means there was a skilled female Knight Striker in the French military back then. I wonder who it was. An ace capable of fighting off a dragon should be famous, yet I’ve never heard anything about her.

And as I observed that Barrel, I realized it has two extra Phlogiston Tanks at the hips and it has very powerful moonlight countermeasure emblems engraved into it. Spirit engines were extremely vulnerable to moonlight back then, but that Sourire had several metal panels thinly engraved with countermeasure emblems plastered all over its systems to prevent it from losing control. That means it was probably meant to be used primarily at night. As for the extra tanks, didn’t the mayor say it had run out of fuel after using its Over Emblem too much?

An Over Emblem does not use much fuel if it is activated for each part individually, but when all the parts are activated at once for a full activation, the different parts’ functions support each other and strengthen the overall image, increasing the power output more than tenfold. However, it also increases the fuel consumption more than tenfold.

A Heavy Barrel can normally run for 300 hours off of the Phlogiston ether fluid made from a fingertip-sized spirit stone.

How powerful an Over Emblem had they activated and for how long to need two extra tanks and to drain those tanks? When the Over Emblem is activated, the Barrel is programmed to require great willpower and focus from the Write Bringer so their thoughts won’t be disturbed and the Over Emblem won’t fail. If their will is disturbed, their writing will grow vague and that can alter the Over Emblem supported by that. In the worst case, it can transform into something else entirely.

You occasionally hear about the Barrel’s own Lives being disturbed to the point that it becomes a monster known as a Live Break. And when the Barrel has transformed into a god using its Over Emblem, Live Breaking will turn it into a demon.

That’s why the Over Emblem will not activate unless the Barrel can detect strong enough willpower and emotions to trigger it. Knight Strikers like me find pride in that necessity of emotion and in our refusal to use resentment or sorrow as that emotion.

But regardless, I don’t know who this incredibly-powerful female Knight Striker is.

So is that Heavy Barrel the strongest one from the Attesor Project? But even if it is a little weird in some ways, it’s still a normal Barrel.

Like I wrote before, I want to see the other research Barrels that must have been prepared in Bourgogne in addition to Sourire. It would be neat to compare them.

So what is with that Barrel? Would M. Schrier have had some flash of insight if he had seen it? It’s too bad he wasn’t shown it, but that just means figuring it out is my job.

Still, I’ve seen a major connection here. It’s almost certain that it fought off the black dragon using its Over Emblem. That’s why it was almost entirely unscathed.

Sourire’s Over Emblem is less like Grazie’s Ange and more like the later Joie’s Tout Ange. It’s a high-speed mobility and attack-focused Over Emblem called Haute Ange. It comes from the Aerial Age where they tried to get Heavy Barrels to fly.

This village contains so many mysteries. Before I left the mayor’s place, he told me about the French troops that had visited during the previous war. He said he did not know where they went, but it was somewhere deep in the mountains and they had driven there in trucks.

I’ve kind of figured out where they were working: that giant table of rock. There must be a road leading there from somewhere.

It’s cut off from the outside world, but you can just barely reach it by truck if you start in this village.

Checking that will be simple. I only have to climb up to the shrine on a sunny morning and look down from there. There’s a tall forest on that table, but if they built space for a road and building, there should be some artificiality in the arrangement of the trees.

Before long, I’m going to have to go mountain climbing instead of fishing. I’m really making the most of this vacation, huh?

I will soon reach the end of this journey by figuring out what it means to be the strongest.

Speaking of strongest, I don’t actually know what that Heinz Berge is up to during this time period. He moves around between battlefields after Normandy, but he just seems to disappear after arriving in Nevers in early July.

He doesn’t reappear until July 30. He hurries from Nevers to Paris by rail and accidently arrives just in time for the Resistance uprising in Paris on August 1.

Even the German military records for that month only say he was “on standby in Nevers”. No one’s going to ask any further questions when they have that answer there, but it still bothers me.

If you climb the mountain pass from Nevers, it takes about four days to reach Herlde.

Could he be pursuing the Attesor Project too?

I don’t really know. It feels a little awkward in the nude, but I’m going to read through some documents and then get to sleep.