Editing The Unexplored Summon Blood Sign:Volume8 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 3===

Let us step back to shortly before the crash landing.

Kyousuke had no further need for War Criminal who was also aboard the Toy Dream OP-01 space station. After stuffing him and his vessel in an emergency pod, he produced a sound much like a dry branch snapping.

“???”

Olivia tilted her head outside the pod.

“Onii-chan, what did you just do?”

“Nothing. It’s fine.”

Kyousuke answered the small girl while making sure she could not see inside as he closed the escape pod door to contain a liquid floating like red rubies in the zero-g space.

''Now that he had settled an old conflict,'' they finally had to face the war.

Yes, the Silver Resource War was marching onward even without the mastermind behind it. The snowball had already started rolling down the hill.

Their objective had changed.

They had to stop the war itself.

Kyousuke pulled an Incense Grenade the size of a hair spray can from the rolled-up hood on the back of his hoodie.

Double blonde braided Olivia tilted her head.

“Huh? The one you keep there instead of your pocket is your final spare, isn’t it? So are you out after this?”

“To be honest, far too much has happened today.”

Even though he had calculated out the proper reentry angle, the giant space station was dyed orange as it was scorched by the atmosphere. Parts were peeled up and blown away from the extremities as the surface temperature reached around 3000 degrees at the highest. That was an incredible temperature since the melting point of iron was around 1600 degrees.

Locating the enemy was not that difficult.

An army division included around 10,000 people. With more than one division-class forces on the scene, their locations were immediately obvious when viewed from above. Approaching them on the flat surface would have been difficult, but they would never expect the vanguard to fall right on top of their heads.

A dull metallic sound came from Kyousuke’s hand.

It was a makeshift Incense Grenade launcher made by attaching a grip and other parts to a sliced-off piece of copper pipe with liquid fuel injected inside. It was blatantly handmade, but it provided enough force and it was using rocket fuel. The real hurdle had been preventing the explosive force from rupturing the pipe from within.

Kyousuke sat with his back pressed to the wall, stuffed the one remaining metal can inside the front of the barrel like he was placing a lid on it, and filled the chamber with the amount of liquid fuel he had measured out with a tube.

“Olivia, come here.”

“Right.”

Olivia approached, so he casually held her close just as there was a change to their apparent weight. They were tugged forward, their speed only continued to accelerate, and it never seemed to stop. Unlike when an apple fell to the ground, objects falling from orbit did not fall along a straight vertical line. It was better to think of them as spiraling as they were swallowed up by the earth’s gravity, so the angle of their fall would gradually shift from horizontal to vertical. So as Kyousuke and Olivia rode that intense roller coaster, the direction and magnitude of their ''apparent gravity'' was changing from one moment to the next.

They had already reached approximately 4 Gs, which was at the level of an actual roller coaster.

By the end, it surpassed 9.5 Gs, so the floor and the concept of up and down became meaningless. That was why Kyousuke had pressed his back against the wall and held small Olivia in place. He would have liked to have seatbelts or lap bars, but they were not enjoying a safe attraction here. They were approaching the battlefield on a space station that would fall apart on its own. Strapping themselves in for the duration would only mean committing suicide with the station.

“Nbh, ngweh.”

“You don’t have to hold back, Olivia. The contents of your stomach are being tugged on too, so nothing will come out no matter how much you gag.”

“Onii-…urp…I need to lecture you…later…!!”

<…Ni…sama…>

Some static crackled in the back of their minds.

The scorching atmosphere meant nothing. She could hitch a ride even at reentry speed.

Olivia went entirely pale.

“Th-th-that isn’t normal…”

“Hm, looks like I was right that she goes berserk in response to me being in danger. The enemy we seek is at Toy Dream OP-01’s destination.”

After they passed the obvious thermosphere, the sound of a giant file scraping at the outer walls only seemed to grow louder. The atmospheric pressure was growing and the density of impurities like air and dust was increasing. The slight sense of deceleration as something pushed up at them may have been the air friction applying the brakes.

The space station’s angle was changing as it drew a gentle curve in its fall.

The obstacle that Kyousuke and Olivia believed to be a wall had to be facing upwards like a ceiling when viewed from the surface.

“On your mark.”

Kyousuke spoke below his breath while holding Olivia’s small body.

He was as accurate as the hands of the clock attached to an accurate time bomb.

“10, 9, 8, 7, 6…”

The launcher made from a thick sliced copper pipe was aimed straight ahead.

In terms of earth’s gravity, it was aimed straight down toward the surface.

“…5, 4, 3, 2, 1.”

Something large passed right by the space station. No, it was Kyousuke and Olivia who passed right by the transport plane or bomber.

That caused them to shake side to side more than before, but Kyousuke did not bat an eye.

He spoke with his finger on the trigger.

“Zero. Let the battle begin.”

A cross-shaped crack ran through the “wall” in front of them.

Just as the orange-burnt anti-radiation aerospace material was stripped away by the wind pressure, Kyousuke aimed at the center of it all and fired his projectile.

It all happened in an instant. It was like quickly passing your palm horizontally through a candle’s flame. He acted too quickly for the heat to reach them. It looked like a reckless action at first, but it was actually the safest option.

The space station resembled a giant fireball and it did not actually crash into the surface.

The giant structure broke apart in midair and scattered, as if the entire thing was peeled apart from a single point. Thanks to that, the earth was spared an ice age.

After stripping away their grand raiment, Kyousuke and Olivia were pulled down by a different force.

The Incense Grenade had detonated after being fired toward the ground ahead of the station.

(There’s a division of 10,000 to the north and one to the west. The supply line, intel management, logistical support, and reserve forces probably amount to another 5000.)

Kyousuke and Olivia swiftly flew to the center of the Artificial Sacred Ground.

This direct descent should have been impossible for a human being with no space suit or parachute.

The golden land created by the dawn’s light and the mist crawling across the surface was blown away in an instant. The bared battlefield had finally shown itself.

(This is the frontline base for attacking the Ilijinika Tunnel Shelter to the north. Good, it’s all going according to plan. This is a 3.2 margin of error in landing coordinates, but that’s within acceptable bounds.)

Overall, it was about 5km in each direction.

The vast plain’s stability could not even be broken by the irregular flow of the rivers produced by the snow thawing on the tall mountains, but two field runways for giant transport planes intersected at a right angle and a 2km vehicle maintenance base was set up at the inner angle. A control tower and hangars for working on the transport planes themselves and unloading cargo were constructed on the outer edge of the runways.

Kyousuke and Olivia had descended to the vehicle maintenance base on the inner angle.

Kyousuke first placed his feet on a thin fragment travelling at a similar speed to establish the Artificial Sacred Ground around him. Then he fired a White Thorn to surround himself with a protective circle before landing on the ground. The station’s fragment shattered and a new Artificial Sacred Ground appeared on the surface. Olivia’s small feminine body had transformed into a thick slime.

There were four observation towers, a barracks, a communication command center, and a roofed maintenance bay larger than a school gym. Alice (with) Rabbit ignored all of them and instead focused on the vehicle management space filled with countless tanks, armored trucks, mobile rocket launchers, and more.

They were all deadly industrial products waiting impatiently for the cruise missiles and bombers to finish the preparations.

It was not flesh-and-blood humans who were operating those steel weapons. The soldiers wore Quad Motors Repliglass Snapping Turtles and the short and round armor completely eliminated any hint of a human silhouette.

Those military facility suppression devices could shrug off a point-blank barrage from a 30mm machinegun and, in addition to using firearms, used the two special machine arms on the shoulders to tear off a tank’s hatch or a shelter’s door – and the occasional leaked video of those being used against flesh-and-blood enemy soldiers or terrorists raised humanitarian concerns. Those demonic weapons perfectly fused the nimbleness of infantry with the toughness of tanks.

After the space station broke apart in midair, a single glass shard from the solar panels or a single screw had become a deadly weapon. Those would not be lethal to the American soldiers covered in thick Repliglass, but it would have normally required heading below a roof to protect themselves.

However, no one did that.

And not because they trusted too much in the Snapping Turtles the military had issued them.

They could not take their eyes off of the grim reaper descending upon them without warning.

They did not know what ''it'' was, but they knew something bad would happen if they took their eyes off of ''it''. The modern battlefield was like a video game in how it was ruled by the internet and mass-produced machines, but that baseless jinx eerily permeated and spread among them all.

And.

Kyousuke continued to calmly observe the industrial products lined up around him.

''He could see why they were known as the world’s most powerful army.

''And that meant he need not worry about killing them even if he used a Material against them.

(Okay.)

He was surrounded by the afterimages of the White Thorns that continued to ricochet wildly around him. The red light of the Petals was mixed in among them.

Meanwhile, his eyes had already picked out the most important parts of the scene around him.

(If they want to pry open the gate to Ilijinika and Kingdom F as a whole, generally scorching the mountainside with rockets and missiles would be meaningless. Bunker busters dropped from bombers would be equally useless. Then that roofed maintenance bay must contain a landmark weapon specially made for breaking into something like that. That would be the top priority.)

His enemy was the world’s most powerful army and more than 25 thousand had been sent in for the first wave of the Silver Resource War.

And Shiroyama Kyousuke reigned at the center of the great fortress containing half that force.

“Now, then.”

With the protective circle and Material, it did not matter how many guns and missiles were aimed at them.

Kyousuke gave a fierce smile while holding the best position for acquiring as many Petals as he wanted when he wanted.

“You’ve done nothing wrong, but it’s time you took a nap.”