New Weapon - Part 1
Once final exams ended, the school’s atmosphere split cleanly into two distinct groups. One was the relaxed, languid mood typical of regular high schools or universities nearing the end of a semester. The other was the suffocating, oppressive air exhaled by a horde of zombies shuffling around campus with dark circles etched deep under their exhausted eyes. The former were usually called regular cadets. The latter were called either mechanics or third-years.
They were cadets, yet not quite cadets. They were already fully functioning members of society. The mechanics had barely finished their exams before they were thrown into frantic repairs of Aindiums damaged during practicals, all while a massive mountain of end-of-term assignments still loomed over them. The third-years were treated essentially as active soldiers and were constantly being called out for external dispatches. The pilots in particular barely spent any time on campus. To them, summer vacation was nothing more than a pie in the sky.
A third-year mechanic? More like a half-corpse, really. If you compared it to university life, it was like juggling final exams, a graduation thesis, a graduation project, and an internship all at once. And on top of that, they still had to undergo military training.
And unfortunately, I—who was neither a mechanic nor a third-year—would soon look just like them. All because of the massive pile of work I had brought with me.
I headed to the clubroom, feeling like I might float away after doing well on my finals, only to find three human-shaped lumps sprawled across the sofa. They looked more like corpses than people.
“Ughhh—”
The one making a sound that no living human should produce was my roommate, Neria. Kirié, sitting beside her, and Marius across from them didn’t look much better. In the original anime, the mechanics had suffered quite a bit, but I didn’t remember them being this wrecked. Oh, right. This was a military academy. Studying while handling real combat in the rear was probably far more brutal.
Kirié, being one of the top students in the mechanics division and receiving special consideration from the division chief, looked relatively okay. But as first-years, both Neria and Marius were stuck with all the menial chores and maintenance work without mercy.
Without a word, I walked behind Neria and Kirié and began massaging their shoulders. I made a mental note to buy Marius a fatigue recovery potion later—he was staring at us with envious eyes.
“Ugh… thanks… Luna.”
When I patted her shoulder, Neria thanked me in a broken, zombie-like voice.
Kirié, arms crossed, quietly muttered while receiving my massage in silence.
“Your technique lacks refinement.”
I had been holding back so I wouldn’t hurt her… I glared at the back of Kirié’s head and squeezed my hands with real force.
“Eek!”
Startled by the sudden pain, Kirié hunched her shoulders and let out an oddly cute squeak. She whipped her head around to glare at me, but perhaps remembering what she had just said, she kept her mouth shut.
“You mechanics really do suffer all the time, don’t you?”
“Right? Pilots have no idea how hard we work.”
Pilots and operators took many afternoon classes together, but mechanics received their theoretical lessons in completely separate facilities. As a result, we rarely saw each other outside of morning classes. Most mechanics lived in single rooms, stuck together in their own cliques, and joined maintenance-related clubs, so they had little interaction with other specialties. That was exactly why treating them even a little kindly made them warm up to you so quickly.
Last time I sent fatigue recovery potions to the mechanics division through Marius, the response had been overwhelmingly positive. When Kirié had asked me with a dead-serious face, “Are you planning to run for student council president?” I had frantically waved my hands and denied it.
There were many reasons I had been building rapport with the CT Club’s mechanics up until now, but the matter I was about to bring up accounted for a very large portion of those reasons.
It pained me to push these people—who had only just finished their final assignments—back into the abyss of more work. But what could I do? I was the one in a hurry.
“Um, Senior Kirié.”
“Hmm?”
Her voice came out languid and dreamy, relaxed by the moderate pressure of my fingers on her shoulders. I leaned close to her ear and whispered.
“Would you be interested in taking on a personal commission?”
“A commish…?”
Kirié, who had been about to drift off following her two exhausted juniors, blinked twice before her eyes snapped wide open. She jerked her head around.
“What? A commission?”
“Yes. I can pay in any form you want.”
“…Do you not see what state we’re in right now?”
Kirié pointed at her own bloodshot eyes. I kept massaging her with a mechanical smile.
“It’s fine. People don’t die that easily.”
“You little— So you really are a pilot after all. A cold-blooded monster with neither blood nor tears.”
Kirié muttered in a voice that suggested she could trust no one in this world, then buried herself deeper into the sofa and held out her hand.
“Estimate.”
“Here you go.”
I handed her the estimate sheet I had already prepared after handling several personal commissions before. Kirié stared at it for a long time before asking in a suspicious tone.
“What the hell is this? Monster dismantling?”
“Yes.”
“……”
She looked at me with an expression that said she had seen every kind of lunatic there was, then tossed the estimate onto the table and closed her eyes.
“Talk to me again when I’m actually conscious.”
“Understood.”
In the meantime, maybe I should buy her favorite shortcake.
With summer vacation right around the corner, the members of our CT Club had gathered in an empty lot a short distance from the school. It was reserved exclusively for the CT Club. We had even conducted the flight test for the Black Fairy here. It wasn’t used often, but the mechanics sometimes turned it into a field maintenance station.
“Luna! What the hell is this?!”
Kirié screamed the moment she saw that her precious field maintenance station was now completely filled with the corpse of a gigantic monster.
“Wow. They even packaged everything nicely.”
I was personally impressed by how efficiently the kingdom’s monster handling department had done their job. Everything had been possible thanks to the royal family’s support. They had taken only the head as a symbolic trophy and left me the rest—from the torso all the way to the tail. The parts had been cut into manageable sizes, neatly packaged, and delivered just the day before.
I had no idea how they had sliced it all up. There must have been metal and rock mixed in that wouldn’t have cut so cleanly. It really was the expertise of a professional monster processing team. Telling them I didn’t need the inner side of the hide had been a stroke of genius. If that had been included too, we probably wouldn’t have been able to get through the entrance.
While I and the other CT Club members were marveling at the sight, the mechanics had completely lost their minds. Even Neria, who always clung to me and relied on me, was shooting me a stinging glare. Kirié started marching toward me as if she were about to grab me by the collar.
“Luna, you—!”
“Just a moment, please.”
I raised my hand to stop her advance.
“Did you really think I would dump this entire monster onto our mechanics? I’m going to hire outside help. However, this requires very careful work, so I need the assistance of Senior Kirié, Neria, and Marius.”
What I wanted to ask the CT Club mechanics to do was to standardize and manualize the extraction process for Ellydium.
“So in other words, you want us to create a manual for extracting a specific metal from a standard sample ingot, right?”
“Yes. I believe Senior Kirié can do it?”
“Of course.”
Kirié puffed out her chest with confidence.
“So, what metal are we extracting?”
“Ellydium!”
“…Sorry. I must have misheard. What metal?”
“I said Ellydium?”
I saw the other CT Club members, who had been listening, jump in surprise. Rendel already knew, so he simply nodded quietly, but everyone else’s reactions varied wildly.
“Ellydium? You mean the metal that was mostly used to build the Stairway to Heaven?”
“Must be. Look at how shocked Kirié is.”
As Ran and Carson whispered to each other, the other pilots and operators joined in, launching into a heated discussion.
“Is it really actual Ellydium?”
“Luna said it is.”
“It probably is. Even my normal sword couldn’t cut through it, so I had to use a new technique.”
Rendel’s words dramatically raised the credibility within the group. Or maybe my words just normally lacked credibility to begin with.
“So. What are you planning to do with the extracted Ellydium?”
Muri asked the sharp question.
“I was going to ask for a weapon to be made with it.”
“For who?”
“Well, for Senior Kirié, Neria, and Marius, of course.”
At my answer, Kirié—who had been staring at the Earthworm shell pile with a serious expression—exploded.
“Luna. Are you seriously going to keep giving us only impossible tasks?”
“I’m sorry. But the most talented mechanics I know are all right here.”
“Uh… well, that’s true, I suppose.”
As expected, Kirié was weak to flattery.
I still didn’t quite understand why people on the message boards kept calling me a fox, but Kirié and the other mechanics were already sparkling with excitement at the new challenge. Good. It looked like things were going smoothly.
Once Kirié finished extracting the Ellydium and creating the manual, I could use the money Line had sent me recently to hire workers and process all of this material. According to the rumors I had been hearing and the letter from Line, the civil war in Karmanu was currently favoring her side—my older sister Line. I didn’t know how long that advantage would last, but at least for now she seemed to have enough breathing room to send me money. I wanted to finish everything by the weekend after next, when summer vacation officially began. The more money I had, the more workers I could hire, so it was a relief.
But as always, my plans were shattered almost immediately.
“Luna. It looks like we’re going to have to finish this job by ourselves.”
“Pardon?”
It was because of Kirié’s thunderbolt-like declaration after she had spent the entire weekend focused on extracting Ellydium.