User:Démiurge

Chapitre 5 : Pour répondre (Pragmatisme)

And so,

the puppet fled to the sky the chick so desired,

to that cramped, dark world.

Yes…

A sky for the puppet to be safe from hurt, to smile from the heart.

A place where no one would trample them, no one hurt them,

no force compel them, no need to change.

A new world where they could fly.

 

That day,

The chick knew well enough it likely would never be.

The chick implored the puppet, who vowed to fight:

No sky is worth seeing you hurt.

So the puppet, too, fled to that same cage.

Until we find a way to create that sky,

so thought the puppet in the stifling world.

Thought and only thought…

Doubtful and wavering, finding nothing sought,

the puppet still thought about that promise:

 

That day,

in a new land, gazing at the heavens above,

seeing the baby bird spread its wings and smile,

the empty puppet—the sky—Sora—

Partie 1

…A stage filled with the echoing eruption of the Holy Forge…the waste disposal site.

A giant silver humanoid machine took heavy steps through the subterranean ruins buried in metal refuse. Tears welled in Veig’s fiery eyes as he muttered desolately with his life’s first worry.

“… Have I, of all people, really done something so very wrong…?”

He recalled the two souls he’d smashed after an unexpected struggle—the soul of that weirdly tough little weed with the excellent tits, and the soul of that incomprehensibly toxic viper who had cracked his sword for the first time. Gloomily swaying, wobbling ahead, he thought:

…What in the blazes have I done…?

Veig could remember being thanked, but never being blamed. Yet all he felt now was a mysterious sense of guilt etched into his soul too deeply to deny. Now here he stood, in front of the fallen metal mass, the machine lying on the ground with its limbs totaled.

“…Ho… I did say I’d be late, but to take a nap, you’ve got gumption, have ya?”

Veig looked keenly down at the broken frame. Through the comm system, he accused its pilots of playing dead.

In this game, attacks caused no direct damage to the opposing machine. Therefore, any damage must have occurred through rite failure or misfiring—or been self-inflicted. And truthfully, it was both. Veig’s intuition told him. He lifted the broken body and howled.

“Hey, I’m talkin’ to you!! Your opponent is me. Don’t roll over and die. Have ya no sense?!”

Indeed…Sora and Shiro never did stand a chance against Veig in a battle of spirit arms. So it was inevitable they would lose. Still, though—

“Ya aren’t plannin’ to just clam up without sayin’ a word about your soul, are ya?!”

Yes—they’d stood up to Veig with an unthinkable storm of bullets. But it carried none of their soul—the barrage was all too brittle. All it did was reject Veig’s attack and say No to his soul…

It spoke nothing. It admitted nothing. Their soul had only rejected his and remained steadfast. Veig ground his teeth. If they could do this much, then why?

He pulled up the wrecked frame as if by its collar and raged:

“When are ya gonna answer my question?!”

And he did at last get an answer.

«…Right now, I will. I’ll give you your answer, I will.»

… A voice murmured across the line.

“Whuh?!”

The wreck suddenly retaliated by blowing up, unleashing a mad torrent of soul. It answered him with powerful imagery that momentarily robbed him of his consciousness.

……

It was at the bottom of a small hole, dark and cramped. Veig knew the girl who wept, looking up at the sky alone. He knew her well…the flightless girl, who more than anyone admired the birds that flew so high.

A paradoxical girl, she knew she could not fly and yet looked up to the sky… Wept though she’d given up… The world interrogated her with unanswerable questions—why she fled, why she didn’t try—and then asked her why she cried…and despised her for it. Left her in this dump…unwanted…

The lone girl…swinging her hammer through tears…… He—

……

Veig tried to reach out…but blam—the explosion shook the cave and stirred him from his reverie. As soon as he took a look around, maybe sooner, he guessed what was going on. He grinned and howled with wild anticipation.

“What a joke… Ya never had anyone in there from the beginning? It was remote-controlled…?!”

Now that you mention it, there was no rule that said you had to pilot the machine…was there? If they controlled it from a cockpit outside the frame, they could chuck it around without compunction.

But even if it was remote-controlled, they had to be connected to their spirit arms. Which meant that blowing up their own frame so carelessly would have repercussions. And indeed, the ground shook with a chain reaction of explosions one after another throughout the waste disposal site.

Generated spirits drew lines of light as if flowing through circuits etched into the stage. The circuit of light would converge—to show it:

The real unit—!

Eager to see where the real cockpit lay, Veig followed the spirit light to its destination. It turned out to be at the center of the quaking stage, so far away that his zoom function was just barely sufficient to make it out. At the top of an especially tall plant, his eyes found their target—and they opened wide. It appeared to be a girl he knew well, standing on the seat of an opened cockpit.

«You ask why I ran from this bloody world, do you…? …It’s a foolish question, it is.»

But it was a girl he didn’t know who murmured to him. Her eyes, blazing with unquenchable fire, looked far down—down at his machine. The girl with a hammer-shaped piece of junk in her hand spoke as if laying down a declaration of war. From her heart, she spoke her soul…not objective fact, but her feelings:

«It’s because—I despise that world, I do.»

Partie 2

Til’s voice, resolute, was yet like her limbs…jittery. She couldn’t help but tremble, because of what she saw down there from the open cockpit—Veig standing there in the venue that still quaked from the blasts—and because of the sparkling hammer in her right hand. Regardless—

“Don’t worry. We’ll blast off with you. We promised, didn’t we?”

“…Brother…always…keeps, his promises… Trust us, okay?”

—Sora’s and Shiro’s voices intoned from the seat in front of her, joyful but firm. And Til felt them holding her left hand tight. She broke into a smile to realize her trembling had somehow stopped…and she continued with her eyes fixed straight ahead on Veig’s machine, all the way through to the man inside.

“…I hate this country. I hate Hardenfell, I do.”

She reaffirmed her feelings—her belief. This arrogant world told her not to run. This

oppressive world told her not to be ashamed. Til looked up at its tireless way of life and sneered at it.

“I love the sky, I do… In this country…the sky is closed off, it is.”

The cave’s ceiling reminded her; lost and confused, she’d ended up in this dump before she knew it, and the world asked her, Why did you run? Now, Til knew the feeling of a hand in hers. Now, she knew another world—that of those two. Now, she could say it:

Ah…there never was a place for me here.

—Screw this place—!!

So—!

“I also hate the chieftain of this country. I hate you, I do…!”

The hammer sparkled ever brighter as Til’s words spilled out uncontrollably, with the pain that burned her up. What came back was a lonely, sorrowful chuckle. Til ground her teeth.

…She’d known—no, she’d had a hunch—that he’d say that. What he was saying. As if it was everything—

“I hate that…how everything’s just as you expected… I hate iiit!!”

Her voice impulsively swelled with the pain that only grew:

“I hate how you act like you’re so great, I do! I hate even more that you actually are, I do!!”

The dam had burst, and her feelings could no longer be contained.

“I hate how you advertise yourself as a genius, I do! I hate how I can’t argue because you actually are a genius, I do!! I hate how you look down on me, I do! I hate so much that it’s only natural because you’re above me, I do!! I hate how you’re so hairy!! You shaved too much, you say?! So what? Are you trying to rub it in? I wish you’d go to hell, I do!! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you—U-Uncle, you’re a pervert!! I hate you very, very, veeery much, I do!!”

«Whoa!! Come on, stop already or I’m really gonna cry! Goddamn!»

The momentum had flushed out everything Til wanted to say. Inattentive to the tearful begging over the comm system, Til caught her breath. As the shaking of the stage and the sparkling of her hammer and her pain all grew in speed, she wiped her tears. With a sharp, firm voice, she mulled over her words carefully and gave her answer:

“I hate you. That’s why I run. If that’s not enough for you to understand—”

Then in the spirit of the game:

“—I’ll sock it to you like this—and then I think you will understand, I do.”

Yes—seeing behind her eyelids the place the feeling of those two had taken her as they held her left hand, that black sky with a white bird, Til laid down the gauntlet sonorously.

“I fled to win—to honor my promise, I did.”

…A tactical withdrawal was made when one had a chance of victory… She had been just lost, but now it would be redefined—no. Each time another explosion went off, the spirits converged into her hammer, and it was that pain.

And now it had been redefined—!!

That pain had turned her conviction into that of the past. Til savagely swung her hammer as she—

—bellowed forth her soul with the stirring of a power beyond all normal conception throughout the venue.

“I fled for the sake of this day, when I’d surpass you, I diiid!!”

Partie 3

It was a power that all feared instinctively. The memories sleeping deep in their blood awakened. An outrageous power of a whole different rank, a whole different status, a whole different order of magnitude—quite literally a different level. The future brought on in the next few moments by this power beyond reason didn’t take someone like Veig to foresee. It was a strike from the heavens that sneered at every one of heaven’s gifts crawling atop the earth, judging them likewise of null value. No one could mistake that power. It was

a Heavenly Smite……

“Hey, whoaaa! I thought the Flügel wasn’t—hey, isn’t that against the rules?!”

From his machine—his cockpit—Veig screeched, blanching. Someone who wasn’t in the game—with magic that wasn’t even a seal rite!! His one eye searched in a panic for the Flügel, but in the next moment—

—he realized that the center of the crawling power…was Til’s hammer. And his one eye was opened by the roar over the comm system and the unheard-of shock that followed… Yes:

«Ultra-large-scale spirit-arm expansion—connect all!! Ariiiise!!!»

Til’s face wrenched in agony as she brought down the hammer. There was a flash as it bore through the cockpit…and through the plant below. With that, there came a moment of silence to the blast-stricken venue. And then…

“—?!!”

…a vertical oscillation unlike anything that had gone before tossed them. A heavy shock came from behind Veig. He dodged instinctively on the spot, but from the mass of metal that had only grazed him flowed a tempestuous soul.

……

A girl who wanted to imagine things that could not be imagined. A girl who wanted to fly though by no effort could she fly. Saying she could do nothing, she chased the bird in the sky for which there was nothing to do…

They said she was just running. They mocked that it was impossible. Her soul…

«I…knew it! …I knew it!! Better than anyone, I did…!!»

The transmission helped Veig crawl back to reality. But another—no, ten more—no, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand—innumerable storms of metal whipped through the stage and assaulted his unit like squalls.

Just scraps, they hadn’t much in the way of force or even speed. But every time the fierce soul contained in them scratched by his frame, it left residue. As Til’s voice, wheezing in agony, continued to come through, it pounded at Veig’s will, hard, so hard—

«So…you wanted me to live like you…? Fa-kew!!»

To live like them. Like a Dwarf. Without giving up. Without going astray or tiring. To try to overcome natural gifts. To live without shame or retreat. Indeed… Putting themselves on pedestals, though they couldn’t overcome Veig!! Looking as if they understood, talking as if they knew!! They’d called her rubbish, and then!! They’d all said it. They’d basically said this…

—Everyone else is doing it, so you should, too.

—You can dream you’ll be rewarded. Just do it—

—just shut up and do your work!!—

«I don’t like a world that tells me what to do… I hate it, I do!!»

I’ll never give in…

I’ll overcome the chieftain and destroy those dictates—!!

I’ll use measuring instruments and Elven theory. I’ll use anything to find a different way!

I’ll show him… So she thought…

«But…no matter what I did…I just…couldn’t find anything!!»

Just piling up failures. Bathed in error, lost, confused, making one mistake after another. At last surrendering to a false resignation, as paradoxical as ever. Unable to say anything in return… At some point…she came to think she’d forgotten those feelings, and just wandered, pathetically.

«…But—hee-hee… Now I know what to say—I do…»

Weeping, sobbing, yet the two souls grinned. At last Veig realized the true nature of the maelstrom of metal pounding his unit. And for the first time in his life, he said, It couldn’t be—he doubted his own intuition.

“……Hey… Ho. I must be hallucinating, ain’t I?”

He saw the whirlwind of metal converging. Not the ground shaking, but the stage moving. Not the metal flying, but just gathering. The parts, the catalysts were joining and coupling and assembling. The majestic waste disposal site was rising as one. The stage itself was wakening—and standing up. That was his impression. It was confirmed by Til’s announcement to everyone watching in Hardenfell, I’ll tell you, and the thing that towered before his eyes—a thing inconceivably gargantuan.

«You forge ahead without shame…as you will—but I, too…will do as I will, I will!!»

She’d led a life of shame—failing, contradicting herself, getting lost without end. Today, this moment, was what it had all been for, and for that she was proud. She trumpeted to all the world that had rejected her, just as they were taught:

«Shut up!! Your stupid world can eat shit, it can!! Pft!»

Having asserted her freedom to rebel, the girl crumpled. The siblings embraced her and kept her from falling. Veig gaped at last.

It wasn’t from finally observing the giant object towering over him. It was the girl held by the siblings in the now-empty cockpit at the top…the girl weeping tears of heartfelt joy that she was not alone—a girl beyond his knowledge, who looked down at a bird from heights beyond its knowledge…with a dazzling smile…beyond all knowledge.

«…Uncle, did you…ever imagine…this…?»

She asked him whether this was a sight that effort and sensibility could get to—and that moment, a torrent of violence descended upon Veig’s unit…

Partie 4

Neither Veig nor any of the Dwarves watching through all of Hardenfell had ever imagined it, most likely. However, aside from Dwarves…the three who were watching at Til’s hideout did not seem all that surprised. Their eyes still on the monitor, they spoke admiringly…

“…Wow… A city can walk, can it…? Oh, is that also a spirit arm?”

“To be more precise, it is a spirit-arm expansion connected to her hammer, on which she engraved my one-percent Heavenly Smite.”

“Observation: Height 9,700 meters. Length 74,200 meters. Cannon count 982. Definition: High-maneuver fortress class. Evidence of brilliance of Master. Excessive. Zero maturity. This unit loves that part of him, too… Blush.”

Steph knew those siblings… She’d imagined they’d do something unimaginable. No, she’d known it. So she watched the screen with a sense of resignation, as a shadow desperately ran from the storm falling from the mountain of steel…

Références

Revenir au Chapitre 4

Retourner au Sommaire

Passer à l' Épilogue