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Section 1
## Prologue
The Scorpio combat unit reported its situation and received this reply from Truecore Shell Command: “Personnel have already been dispatched to reinforce other units, so no forces remain. Your unit will have to continue the fight on its own.”
A response that cold.
“How can this be…”
The male pilot in the cockpit of the space fighter Nightwalker *Sanktirpa* murmured.
“What are those people at Truecore Shell thinking? We reported it plain as day: ‘Hostile presence confirmed at the spaceport.’”
“They’re planning to abandon us. They figure losing won’t cost them anything.”
The transmission from his wingman, *Torinikdoda*, came through as if none of it mattered.
“We may be Nightwalkers, but this unit is still just a scrap team thrown together from light *Twilight*-class machines. There’s no way they’d send real frontline fighters to back us up.”
“B-but—we’ve already lost *Tadartorus*. That terrible traitor, *Vertomyenst*, beat us! And even so—”
“Calm down, *Sanktirpa*.”
The rebuke came from their leader, Rakishi Ea.
“This was clear from the start—this operation was issued on the premise that the enemy was already here.”
“Mm—” *Sanktirpa* quieted a little. Then another voice joined in.
“This is the outermost reach of the solar system, closer to the Starwell than to the Sun, and it doesn’t fall within the human alliance’s sphere of influence. As long as we’re here…”
## 1. The World Is the Stars
1
The horoscope widget on her phone read: “Aries today: outlook poor across the board. Act with caution and keep a cool head. Impulse buying is best avoided.”
(Wow. What is this…)
Hinata Mari’s mood soured. She had come out to shop, and only after she had already reached the busy district did she see the message. A rare little flutter of anticipation was doused with a bucket of cold water.
(Ugh… what am I supposed to do…)
She sat blankly on a bench in the plaza in front of the station and sighed. Rumi, who was supposed to have come with her, had just sent a text: “Sorry, I can’t go with you today.”
She could simply turn around and go home, but that felt like giving up. And on a Sunday that came along so seldom.
She hadn’t even decided what she wanted to buy. Nothing nearby was holding a big sale. She couldn’t find a single thing she particularly wanted to do. Even if she told herself she would just wander—
(It did say not to shop on impulse…)
Mari was not the sort of person who put much faith in horoscopes, but under the circumstances she couldn’t muster the spirit to defy one on purpose.
There is no more pointless outing than window-shopping when impulse buying is forbidden. Shopping is fun precisely because you keep wondering, “Should I buy it?” Even if she got angry enough to go looking in earnest for something so good she would want to break the horoscope and buy it anyway, she wouldn’t be able to enjoy it. It was hopeless.
(Sigh. I really don’t have an ounce of energy…)
She was glancing around with the most bored gaze imaginable when—
“Hm?” Mari’s eyes…
## 2. The Stars Are a Lie
1
An had no such thing as “parents.” She was a synthetic human, created by science.
Humanity, on the verge of realizing its dream of going into space, had launched the Ultimate Space Defense Concept under the banner of “responding to unknown crises that may exist in the cosmos.” As one part of that plan, a space fighter was designed to carry every weapon that could be conceived and to possess mobility pushed to the absolute limit. In its development, two proposals were studied in depth.
The first: given the enormous information-processing demands of three-dimensional combat at predictable faster-than-light speeds, all control of a fully unmanned craft would be handed to artificial intelligence—the “optimal mechanization” proposal.
The other: those who go into space will always, in the end, be human, so the key to any such defense system cannot do without human will—the “crewed” proposal.
From the outset, optimal mechanization was favored because it was easier on a technical level. But the foundations of the faster-than-light fighter had only just been completed, still hazy and unfinished, and beneath that overwhelming power no one had thought of the question—
“If something goes wrong, who is going to take responsibility?”
In the old century, the use of nuclear weapons rested with the highest official of the government that controlled them, or with someone of equivalent rank. Only those people could hold the switch. And they could foresee what kind of damage an explosion would cause. But a faster-than-light fighter?
Because, at the moment the decision is made to use that weapon, there is absolutely no…
## 3. The Lie Is the Enemy
1
“Ah, Takanashi!”
On her way to school, Hinata Mari spotted the classmate she had gone to the cake shop with the day before, Sunday, and called out. At the sound of her voice, An turned.
“Ah, Mari! Um… how do you say good morning again… right, it’s ‘good morning,’ isn’t it?”
Saying something characteristically baffling, An waved at Mari.
“Thank you for yesterday.”
She ran over to Mari and thanked her out of nowhere.
“Huh? Oh, you mean taking you to Raphael? That was nothing.”
Mari had taken her to a cake shop she hadn’t known existed.
“No. I’m thanking you because you saved my life.”
“That’s a bit much—” Mari laughed.
Then An’s face turned a little lonely. Before Mari even had time to feel that something was wrong, An was smiling warmly again.
“Anyway, I really am grateful.”
“Then shall we go to that shop together again sometime?”
“Yes, yes. We’ll make Gongfen treat us.”
The two girls burst out laughing.
During class, Mari couldn’t quite let it go, and kept stealing glances at An.
She had expected An to be staring out the window in a daze. Instead, An was either watching the teacher’s face the whole time or not looking at the blackboard at all, writing intently in her notebook.
“Takanashi, come solve this one.”
“It looks really hard—where did you learn that?”
And An showed neither displeasure nor any urge to curry favor. She simply talked with her classmates as if it were the most natural thing…
## 4. The Enemy Is a Void
1
The multi-beam volley Rakishi Ea fired from long range, converging on a single point, struck *Vertomyenst* square in the chest where it floated in space, punched through its reactive armor, and smashed it apart.
The place he aimed at was the same point his wingmen had struck again and again in previous engagements and failed—kept attacking even though they knew they could not break through. Aiming at that already weakened spot, Rakishi Ea committed to a shot as fine as threading a needle.
Of course, he could never have done it alone. *Torinikdoda*’s information-warfare attack, sealing the enemy’s movements from within and creating the opening, had stripped *Vertomyenst* of its chance to reconnect with the core. Only then did Rakishi Ea have his moment to strike.
(But our losses are terrible too…)
Rakishi Ea turned his attention to the space behind him.
There floated *Torinikdoda*, its core already destroyed, its functions stopped. A craft that has lost control will drift like that, endlessly, forever, into the distance.
The Scorpio combat unit had once fielded four Nightwalkers. Now only he remained. What was supposed to have been a simple reconnaissance mission had exacted a sacrifice far too great.
But this would be over soon.
With the hollow one crushed, all that remained was to destroy the spaceport, now utterly defenseless.
Rakishi Ea spread his weapon-arms for the bombardment and, at combat speed, swept across the outermost edge of the solar system…
## 5. The Void Is a Person
1
“An—!”
Sangju Leo, who had stepped out of the fictional world for a moment, saw An pierced through the chest and falling from the tower, and rushed back in.
But that instant too late was fatal.
A hole had opened in An’s chest, wide enough to see straight through to the other side. Lungs and heart were destroyed. Blood poured from the edges of the wound, scattering through the night as her body fell from the tower toward the ground.
A terrible sound—*crash*—echoed through the world.
By the time Gongfen ran up, there was nothing left but scraps of flesh flung in every direction.
“Ah, God—”
He collapsed, crushed, beside what remained of An. Even if this was an illusory world, to be reduced to flesh torn into pieces like this—what that meant for the real An, inside *Vertomyenst* out in space—was beyond imagining.
“H-how did this happen—it’s, it’s all my fault…”
Despair and helplessness bore down on him. What kind of aide was he? In the end, far from helping An, his own powerlessness had as good as killed her.
Above Gongfen’s head, Rakishi Ea—who had taken the form of a radio tower—was showing his true shape.
From a lattice of complicated steel, he reformed into a Nightwalker of still more complicated aspect.
With a snap, he spread weapon-arms like those of an enormous bat and flew into the night sky. In this world there was no longer anyone who could stop him.
To protect the one and only human…
## 6. The Person Is the World
On a street under the setting sun, students on their way home from school mixed with office workers and clerks finished for the day, a noisy press of people.
The plaza in front of the station was especially lively. Couples meeting by arrangement, high-schoolers already worked up before they had even set out for wherever they were going, voices bright and pleasing. Men in suits loosened a whole day’s tension and strolled at ease, thinking, “Where should I go to unwind?”
In that crowded flow there was one man, sitting on a bench as if the strength had gone out of him. His age fell somewhere between boy and young man. Had he not looked so haggard, his features would have been called strikingly attractive. If someone said he was a model, people would have believed it easily. As he was now, he was exhausted, without any of that polished shine.
His gloomy eyes rested on the asphalt. The look in them was vacant, as if nothing entered them at all.
No one noticed him. Everyone had their own business and passed in front of him full of confidence. He let them cross his line of sight and only sat there, blank.
But a voice spoke to him.
“Excuse me—could I ask you something?”
At the sound he lifted his head. A woman stood before him. She wore a loose, plain T-shirt and jeans. Her hair was tied in a casual knot at the back of her head, and she wore glasses. The whole look was hard to call especially neat—a little dowdy, a little unpolished.
“—”
He looked up at her with a dazed expression.
……
## Afterword: Dancing Like the Wind, Blinking Like the Stars
My eyesight is very poor, and yet I have the habit of living without much use for things like glasses, wandering through a blur of scenery. Without them I can see nothing. The stars in the night sky are completely invisible. The moon looks like two or three moons stacked on top of one another. And so, the moment I put the glasses on, points of light appear one by one in the dark sky, and it feels rather wonderful. Of course those points of light were shining before I put the glasses on; the glasses did not give birth to them. From my point of view, though, I always have the feeling that stars are something that arrives together with the glasses. It isn’t that what could not be seen becomes visible. It is more as if the glasses themselves give off light, and what I am seeing only happens to look like stars. In any case, it is of course an illusion—but how should I put it? The state of mind in which one looks up at the night sky is sometimes worry, sometimes doubt over what is right and what is wrong. Feelings arise that I would not quite call foolish.
So, here, let me change the subject entirely. I asked a technician, “What was the most effective weapon of the Second World War?” The answer I got was a slightly unexpected one: “Radar.” To a layman like me it seemed strange that what mattered more was not a weapon that strikes directly, but a detection device that can tell you where the enemy is. And yet, they say, it was precisely because of that gap in technological progress…