The White Sniper (2)
The next morning.
The Western Front was a little noisier than usual.
Soldiers whispered among themselves, each trading a different rumor, while the officers kept their voices low and watched someone carefully out of the corners of their eyes.
And most decisively, there were more soldiers in the trenches than usual.
I was checking over the equipment with Sergeant Misty in the observation post billet.
This strange body of mine never slept properly; I had woken before dawn, and the racket outside had made going back to sleep impossible. The dark circles under my eyes had grown denser for it.
Charm point plus one.
Nice…
"Looks like someone's coming."
"It's a Star."
"…Pardon?"
"Don't make your dislike so obvious. It's not the infamous Annihilation Star, nor the Hollow Star who used to be our superior."
Hmm. If it was neither the Annihilation Star nor the Hollow Star, then who?
The problem was that I knew far too few of the Stars' names. All eleven of the Imperial Stars were apparently famous, and I alone was left in the dark; it felt like being the odd one out.
Screech.
At that moment the sound of tires locking up reached us from near the billet. Military vehicle, no question.
I unfurled D Magic so faintly that even Sergeant Misty would not notice. A little trick I had picked up living alongside her.
A tall man in a gas mask stepped down from the car. His face was completely hidden; a heavy coat, gloves, and cloth covered him from head to toe. Not a single patch of skin showed.
"Wahahat!"
He laughed with that peculiar sound of his, and the already strange laugh, reverberating from inside the gas mask, only grew stranger.
"So this is the Western Front! What a magnificent stench! Mud and blood and gunpowder! Even the sweat of terrified soldiers!"
The voice was so loud it carried without any need for detection magic.
Sergeant Misty answered the question forming in my head and named the Star for me.
"It's the Heavenly Blast Star. Major Ernst Krüger…"
One of the eleven Imperial Stars, the Heavenly Blast Star Ernst Krüger.
Magic that dropped explosives from the sky…
Ah, so that was him. The eccentric mage Sergeant Müller had once talked about in the truck.
Still, why is it that every single Star looks like something other than a normal human…?
Wait. Why did the presence feel like it was drawing closer to our billet?
Ominous.
Far too ominous!
Every time I sensed something this ominous, something bad had always followed…!
.
.
.
Soft scrape.
The billet door swung open without warning.
"Oh! So you were the mage who scanned me without so much as a by-your-leave!"
The lenses of his gas mask fixed on me. I could feel the gaze behind them.
"You're that White Sniper?"
"…Yes."
"Wahahat! Small! You're tiny! They mistook a child like this for a Star? Those Federation bastards really are a pack of idiots!"
"…Pardon?"
"Ah, no, just talking to myself!"
I looked at the Heavenly Blast Star with a blank expression.
Calling a beautiful girl "small" could count as a compliment depending on the situation and one's tastes, but hearing it from a lunatic like him brought me no joy whatsoever.
The gas mask hid his face, so I could not even see his expression… and I doubted it would have been a pleasant one anyway…
This one was off the toy list.
Clink-clank.
Major Krüger strode back and forth across the billet floor; every time he moved, metal clattered inside his coat.
"Well, sorry for the interruption! I'll be on my way!"
He vanished like a gust of wind.
Boom!
Artillery thundered in the distance.
"Wahahat! Perfect! A battlefield's got to be loud to taste right!"
…He had clearly left the billet, so why was his voice still that loud?
After the Heavenly Blast Star left the billet, I snuck a glance at Misty's face.
Misty opened her mouth. My ominous premonition had, of course, been spot-on.
"Corporal Chloe Winterland. Explain what Major Ernst Krüger just said."
"……."
"You used magic without my permission. Against a major, no less."
"I'm sorry."
"Why did you do it?"
"Because I was curious. There is no excuse. I will accept punishment."
"…There will be no punishment. I'll overlook it."
Fortunately Sergeant Misty seemed completely taken in by my little-girl act; she let the unauthorized magic slide without any penalty at all.
Yay.
Adults who expected childlike behavior from this body really were easy to handle.
Wait. Being able to reverse-detect my D Magic means he has the same D Magic aptitude. But that man's own magic is dropping explosives from the sky…
It did not make sense. How exactly did one develop a unique magic of one's own?
I had assumed it was tied to aptitude, but maybe it wasn't?
I wanted one too, you know.
Was it impossible for me after all?
That was a little sad.
The moment the Heavenly Blast Star arrived at the Western Front, the nature of the war shifted seriously for the worse.
If the war I had known until then had been a landscape balanced somewhere between hell and reality, the war after his arrival tipped the scales heavily toward hell.
Have you ever heard an explosion without first hearing the shell coming in?
Even knowing it was friendly fire, it was terrifying beyond measure…!
I'm going to die…
Boom!
The shock rode the earthen walls and slammed into my body.
Every so often a few brave Federation soldiers managed to snatch the Heavenly Blast Star's explosives out of the air before they detonated and hurl them back; those bombs then exploded near our own trenches.
Sandbags were shredded to rags, dirt and splinters of wood rained from the ceiling, and the trench turned into pure chaos in an instant.
Whiiine…
The next instant the enemy's return fire began.
Boom!
Another explosion roared, and the shockwave hammered my body.
Eeeee—
My ears went numb. A high ringing filled them. When I looked around, the soldier who had been standing right beside me moments earlier no longer had a lower half.
No screams reached me; only corpses with their mouths still open filled the trench.
"Wahahat!"
The Heavenly Blast Star's laughter carried from far away. That man's voice cut cleanly through the barrage.
I still did not understand how it was possible.
Was his volume simply insane? Then he should have become a singer instead of coming to the front.
Ha. All I could do was sigh.
With every spectator who might have watched me gone from the vicinity, staying in this trench any longer was meaningless.
Sergeant Misty had been demoted to a position too ambiguous to count as an audience; what remained was Sergeant Müller.
I wanted to punch my past self for deciding that coming to the front-line trenches would bring me more attention.
I could never meet new people often enough, and even when I did, the moment I tried to build any rapport they promptly died.
Useless.
Locking a child alone in a room with no toys—what heartless, rotten adults.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
A string of explosions rolled from the Federation trenches.
The Heavenly Blast Star's magic treated the entire sky as his gun barrel; the munitions fell vertically over the target.
And the one who answered him was none other than a Federation Star—the Construction Star.
From the Federation positions came the ceaseless sound of construction that never slept, twenty-four hours a day.
Rumble, grind-grind-grind—the sounds of terrain shifting and being carved away.
When dawn broke, the trenches that had collapsed the day before stood as clean fortresses. Drainage ditches and communication trenches, all of it perfect.
In a single night.
A literal miracle.
"…Is that the Construction Star's magic?"
"Yes."
"……."
"Our duty does not change."
Sergeant Misty spoke calmly, yet she herself had not taken her eyes from the observation scope.
Hmm. Our duty hadn't changed. That much was true.
But the one actually concentrating on the work right now seemed to be me. You were the one who couldn't focus.
Because of me? Or the Heavenly Blast Star? The Construction Star? What was the reason? Won't you just tell me already?
Anyway, how long…
The Heavenly Blast Star erased a trench, the Construction Star raised a new fortress; he shattered the ground, and the shattered ground became solid bedrock again…
Who would be the first to break that infinite loop?
Whichever side ran out of mana first? But both of them were being supplied with mana powder and processed mana stones.
In other words, the side whose supplies ran dry first would lose.
Sss, haah…
While I sucked on my inhaler and sank into thought, hundreds of black dots appeared in the sky.
Right after came the Heavenly Blast Star's laughter.
"If they're going to build fortresses! Then I'll just make the blasts bigger! Wahahat!"
The sky turned black.
Black hail fell upon the Federation positions.
Eeeee—
Sound vanished.
Earth and mud and people mixed together and shot into the sky, then fell again a moment later.
Only the laughter and the words of the man in the gas mask continued without pause.
"Collapse! Collapse! Collapse! Even if you rebuild it, I'll tear it down again!"
Crazy bastard…
The Construction Star who had to face a psychopath like that had to be a psychopath of no small caliber himself.
Every last Star was a psychopath.
And I am normal!
I must not end up like that.
They were excellent reverse role models.