Chapter IV: Shepherds
A weighty silence followed Shinrei's formal introduction of Lena to the Shepherds.
Unquestionably, his words were for the human girl's own benefit. The Shepherds had seen her through his sight all this time; they knew exactly who she was, and they would surely also know his estimation of her. In commending her out loud, she realized he meant to make clear to her that she would be treated with respect.
Because her countrymen were responsible for so much of what these souls had suffered—and even if they were on some level a part of him, they still had the freedom of will to resent her by association.
With a lump rising in her throat, Lena opened the door of the truck and slid out. Removed from the mechanical exoskeleton the vehicle provided, she was dwarfed by the lethal figures encircling her, but she had no regard for that. She took a few deliberate steps forward to stand facing the Shepherds… and she sank to one knee, bowing her head under the weight of grief and inherited guilt she felt.
"I'm so sorry."
Her voice was little more than a whisper, but she suspected they all still heard her clearly. She struggled for a more eloquent way to express her sorrow for their fate and her shame for her people's crimes; yet the emotions refused to be confined by mere words, leaving her silent as tears streamed down her cheeks.
"Come on, Handler One. Raise your head… and let us see a smile for the first time since we died."
The voice carried the same metallic distortion as Shinrei's, but Lena still recognized it: Snow Witch. She looked up to see a Löwe with an equally familiar unit mark on its flank moving closer. Its steps were oddly tentative, almost as if it was wary of frightening her.
"You did everything you could for us. Probably even more than you realize—so don't feel bad. We're just glad we have the chance to thank you in person, even if it's not exactly face to face."
At the granting of that grace, Lena's heart welled up with a bittersweet relief so profound that she almost laughed. She did manage to smile through her tears, rising to face the Shepherds earnestly and without any trace of fear. There was still no guarantee that she wouldn't be hated by others among them, but hearing such acceptance from one of the last members of Spearhead Squadron was enough to bolster her confidence.
"I thought I'd lost all of you," she said softly. "I'm… I'm happy you're still here—even like this."
One of Shinrei's fellow Dinosauria approached, although like Snow Witch, it halted at a respectful distance that kept Lena beyond the reach of its massive legs. She took note of its unit mark: Wehrwolf. Deep and powerful as his voice had always been over the Para-RAID, it at least seemed fitting that his new shell was one of such size and strength.
"You're still an idiot, you know," that well-remembered voice chided her, although his tone was a bit more gentle than the words might have suggested. "No one in their right mind would have come into Legion territory alone and unarmed. If you hadn't guessed correctly that something had changed, you'd be dead now yourself—if not a part of the Legion as it was."
"I don't mind being an idiot if that's what it took to find you," Lena retorted, smiling shamelessly. "I knew I was right… and this moment was worth the risk."
"Well, nobody can say you don't have guts." A relenting pause. "…It's good to finally put a face to our Handler's voice."
"But it doesn't even make sense that you came after us." Gunslinger's voice. As Shinrei had mentioned that morning, the vivacious girl's host unit was an Ameise. "Why would you risk everything just to find out what had happened to us? Don't you have a life of your own to live back inside the Gran Mur?"
"Nope. I really don't. And even if I did, it wouldn't matter compared to this." Lena grinned and shrugged. "I'm here to help you—no matter what it takes."
Another Ameise edged closer, somehow exuding both nervousness and eagerness. When he spoke—perhaps out of turn, but no one seemed inclined to reproach him—his painfully young-sounding voice carried a distinctive trace of a drawl. Lena quickly realized that voice did not belong to a member of Spearhead… which meant that like Rei, he was an earlier Shepherd who had fully experienced the Legion's soul-imprisonment.
"I… I'd like to thank you personally, ma'am. For the time you saved Cap'n Nouzen's life. If you hadn't done that, he wouldn't have gone on to become the Legion's will. And if that hadn't happened to him, then… then the rest of us would still…"
He faltered into silence, a visible shudder passing through his steel frame, and Lena was stunned by the realization of exactly what he was trying to say.
In the end, it was Shin's assimilation that freed these souls from a tortured existence as murder machines. Had he died earlier while battling his equally enslaved and maddened brother, the Legion would most likely still be what it once was, and the Shepherds would have remained bound in that unliving hell. Lena's actions that day had only delayed Shin's death; yet in so doing, she had unwittingly set up the domino effect that resulted in Legionfall. The liberation of the Shepherds' minds, the end of the Legion's bloodshed, and the chance to save the surviving Eighty-Six… It all would never have happened if her intervention had not extended Shin's life just enough.
Her chest tightened and her face flamed red, but by some valiant effort, she managed not to burst into tears.
While Lena was processing that epiphany, Shinrei had placed himself beside the Ameise. Evidently some silent communication passed between them, because the too-young Shepherd squared his armored body and seemed to shake off whatever horrors of Legion servitude he was recalling.
"This is Rito Oriya. Personal name Milan." Shin's voice led the introduction. "He once served with Raiden and I at our previous post, before we were transferred to Spearhead."
That statement captured Lena's full attention, quashing the personal emotions she had briefly indulged herself to wallow in. She looked back and forth between the two machines, wide-eyed. "You knew him before?"
"Yes. But we never knew what happened to former squadmates after being reassigned… so finding him again like this was a shock." There was a remarkable softness in Shinrei's words. "The Legion got him only a few weeks after we last saw him."
"We had a lot more casualties after the Cap'n left. I was just one of 'em." Rito's voice still quivered, but now it carried an underlying toneless chill of resolve, as if he was forcing himself to face the nightmare he had endured. "I can remember everything I did since then. Everything the Legion made me do… I killed other Eighty-Six who were the same as I used to be. If it was anybody but the Cap'n who'd become the Legion's will, I don't think I could stand those memories… but I'm still here because he's the one who wants me to survive."
Stretching out a limb that could have crushed the smaller unit, Shinrei tapped Milan very lightly on the carapace. It resembled nothing so much as a consoling pat on the back. Although it seemed a rather odd gesture for beings who no longer had a sense of touch, Milan visibly appeared to perk up when the contact produced a soft ringing of metal on metal. Lena wondered then if the Shepherds had adopted the sound of their touch as a psychological substitute for the sensation of it.
"White Knight has a similar story to tell," Shinrei observed solemnly. "Except that he wasn't an Eighty-Six. His home country was the Federal Republic of Giad."
Lena gave a start. "Wait, what? The Federal Republic of—"
"The Federacy was born from a revolution against the Giadian Empire before it fell. They continued to resist the Legion ever since—and they're not the only surviving country beyond the borders of Legion territory. We've already been in contact with several of them. It took time and effort, but at this point they've accepted that control of the Legion has been seized by human forces, and it will no longer pose any threat to them."
Something cold and heavy seemed to splash into the bottom of Lena's gut. A hundred ramifications of that news rushed through her mind; but in the end, her concern for the Shepherds outweighed even thoughts of what it meant for her own murderous country.
"Did you tell them… about yourselves?"
"Only the President of the Federacy, and that only due to some… unique circumstances. It would have been too difficult for the other countries' leaders to believe the truth this quickly. For now, the official story is that the Legion was subjugated through a special operation carried out by the Republic.—Specifically, by the Eighty-Six." A somber pause. "I said nothing about the Republic's crimes against humanity… but they already knew."
A heavy breath escaped Lena, and she squeezed her eyes shut.
So there was still a world beyond the walls of the Gran Mur and the wilderness of Legion territory… and somehow it was fully aware of San Magnolia's shame. The countless deaths already caused, to say nothing of the plotted future genocide of all the Eighty-Six, had been for naught. Wiping out the ones who remained could only compound the Republic's atrocities, not conceal them. The country would not be destroyed by the Legion after all—but it had already destroyed itself in the eyes of its neighbors, and was in imminent danger of making its own fate even worse.
Oh, Uncle Jérôme… what would you do if you knew? Would you still stand idly by, or would you finally act to prevent a slaughter that won't even save the Republic's pride now?
One deep breath, and then another. Lena opened her eyes… and accepted it. With its head raised too high in arrogance and cruelty, her nation had stumbled and now would fall; but only then could it rise one day to stand again. Even if it took generations, someday it would unlearn its prejudice and hate.
Until then, those who refused to change still had a very large and convenient wall to hide behind. It would be their choice if they wanted to dig in within the Gran Mur and wither away, rather than rejoining the world—and Lena had no time to waste on pity for them.
"It was inevitable," she sighed, looking up ruefully at Shinrei. "But in the end, I believe it's also for the best. What matters now is saving the Eighty-Six—before the Republic finds this out and decides to do anything desperate."
"I know you're eager to hear our plans, but you traveled hard today," Shinrei responded. "Before we do anything else, you should rest a while—and eat something. I'm sure you must still have supplies for your return trip in the truck."
Suddenly made to realize just how hungry she was after a day without stopping to eat, Lena flushed scarlet. "Well… maybe? But I feel like it might be kind of awkward, when all of you… can't."
Gunslinger chuckled. "Don't worry about it. This might sound weird, but it's actually kind of hard to miss food when you don't have a stomach or tastebuds or all of that stuff anymore." Her voice grew surprisingly gentle. "And really… that's okay, the way we are. We still have what matters."
What happened next was not what Lena might have expected. Snow Witch extended a forelimb and flicked Gunslinger's side, a gesture that may have been either affectionate or teasing; and in reaction, the smaller Ameise skittered sideways to face the Löwe, like a feisty little dog staring down an unimpressed larger one in some old animation Lena had seen as a child. The interaction was bizarrely almost… cute.
…And then Snow Witch reared up on her hindmost legs and bodily pounced on Gunslinger, loudly clashing armor plates and tangling a dozen limbs in a spontaneous wrestling match that had other Shepherds scrambling out of the way.
"Waugh…! No fair, Anju, you're bigger than me!"
As the two multi-ton machines rolled and skidded across the steel deck like a pair of playful kittens, Lena could only stare, earning a low chuckle from Wehrwolf.
"I guess you didn't imagine you'd see anything like that here."
"…Not exactly." Lena shook her head in bemusement, turning away from the tussle to look up at the Vice Captain's enormous host unit. "After everything you've been through, I thought…"
"What? That we'd all just be sitting around wallowing in self-pity?" A faint sigh. "I honestly thought you knew us better than that by now, Handler."
Chastened by that stinging use of her old title, Lena winced and dropped her gaze. "I'm sorry."
"Listen. Whether we were Eighty-Six or part of another country's volunteer army against the Legion, all of us here spent years watching family and friends go to their deaths. Compared to the lives of everyone we cared about, our own flesh and blood was a small thing. We learned to live with every loss this world could throw at us a long time ago. And this?" Wehrwolf's gun barrels tipped down slightly, managing to indicate the entirety of his monstrous metal form. "Our bodies and our human lives were the last things left that could be taken from us… and now they have been. The worst has happened, yet somehow we're still here—and having nothing left to lose means nothing is left to hurt. At least in a sense, we're free of everything that ever held us back. So why shouldn't we still be who we are, and move forward as best we can?"
The words wrenched Lena's heart, but in some way, they also lightened it. She smiled up at Wehrwolf through brimming eyes.
"I'm glad. I'm glad that in spite of everything, you can still be yourselves, and still want to go on living—even the way you are now."
"Calling it 'living' is kind of a stretch," remarked one of the two Dinosauria aside from Shinrei and Wehrwolf, in a male voice that sounded somewhat older. "By every clinical definition, we are dead—but we're far from gone. …I'm Urs Lautens. Unit designation Mjolnir. I was a squadron commander for the Alliance of Wald before the Legion got me—and I didn't make it through four years of being its puppet just to give up once my mind was my own again. It used me to take so many lives…" His voice trembled faintly before growing even stronger. "But if I didn't try to do something meaningful with myself now, then I wouldn't be able to look those souls in the eye someday, when I join them on the other side."
In the face of such mental fortitude that could defy years of Legion torment and undeserved guilt, Lena could only marvel.
"I can't tell you how much I admire you. All of you—for being so strong in spirit." She glanced around at the assembled Shepherds before turning gravely to Shinrei. "But I know not everyone here is okay. You mentioned twice that Laughing Fox is still having a hard time adjusting. Is he here now?"
"Nah, he's off sulking in his room," Gunslinger butted in before Shinrei could answer, struggling to crawl out from beneath Snow Witch's fifty-ton weight that had her pinned. "He wasn't crazy about the idea of company."
"His room?" Lena queried.
"He prefers to spend most of his time alone in another of the unused storage bays," Shinrei offered. "Since he still finds our collective consciousness overwhelming, I've let him remain disconnected from it for the most part. In that state, he has no contact with any other mind but my own."
"That boy needs an attitude adjustment," Mjolnir interjected. "In the end, it doesn't really matter what we are—so long as we know what we're fighting for."
Vaguely unsettled by that inference, Lena looked to Shinrei with greater urgency. "Can I see him?"
"I'm not sure it would be very pleasant for you. Like Kurena said, Theo didn't exactly welcome your visit. He did have some resentment for you as our Handler in the past, and under his current emotional stress…"
"I still want to. I'd feel that I failed him if I didn't try to understand what he's going through."
"You're the one who admitted you aren't our Handler anymore."
"Not as a Handler." Lena smiled. "As a friend."
She could almost feel the warmth in Shinrei's response. "Alright then—but leave the truck here. It'll be quicker if I carry you."
There was beat of silence before silver-blue eyes widened enormously.
"…Carry me…?"
The prospect of being carried proved to be more straightforward and less embarrassing than Lena had imagined. Shinrei merely formed an oversized pair of liquid-metal hands and melded them together, creating a platform underneath his turret that provided a secure perch for her. Once she was settled upon it, he ferried her out of the storage bay and down the corridor. Even at a steady measured stride that would not jostle his passenger, his powerful legs covered several minutes' worth of human walking distance in a fraction of the time.
Somewhat brighter light than before shone through the doorway they halted at. Lena could faintly hear a scrape and clatter of metallic movement from beyond.
"I'm coming in," Shinrei announced out loud, although Lena highly doubted it was necessary.
"I'd rather you didn't," came a grumbling but resigned answer.
Lena winced. She remembered that voice very well. Even if the voices of every member of Spearhead had not been recorded irrevocably on her heart, she could never have forgotten the one that screamed at her in rage and heartache on the night she first lost a Processor… a life under her command.
Shinrei summarily ignored the objection, and strode through the doorway. The huge metal room beyond it was a storage bay, identical to the one they had left… at least in construction.
Where it differed was in the almost dizzying mess of black markings that covered its steel plates: on the walls, the deck, and even parts of the ceiling. Lines and streaks and blotches of some unidentified substance wove across nearly every surface, blurring and tangling into what seemed a haphazard jumble—at first glance.
Slowly Lena slid off the perch Shinrei had made for her, stepping forward into the mass of scrawled chaos. After a long moment of staring around her in pure bewilderment, and then peering deeply in an effort to discern some pattern, she began to find it here and there. The crisscrossed lines and messy splotches did in fact form distinct shapes, drawn in a hauntingly familiar style but now more uncannily flawless. They just overlapped each other so severely that in many places, only a machine would have been able to discern where one image ended and another began.
A smiling young woman. A small child. A scruffy dog. A cluster of flowers. A church steeple.
Legion units. A man's face contorted in fear. A graphically headless corpse sagging out of the wreckage of a Juggernaut.
These images were memories, and Lena realized with a rising sick feeling that they did not even belong to the soul who had drawn them—in a struggle for some kind of outlet to purge the trauma of them from his mind.
Her gaze turned to the solitary figure that occupied the bay. A Grauwolf, but it seemed to be slightly modified: disarmed, she realized with a pang, wondering if that had been necessary to keep the soul within from harming itself. Like Shinrei, it was equipped with liquid-metal appendages, which at that moment were outstretched and fervently at work on no less than five separate sketches at once. She didn't need to see the unit mark on its flank to know that this was Laughing Fox.
"Theo," Shinrei said firmly.
The movement of the hands abruptly stopped. They slowly withdrew out of sight, and with a palpable grudgingness, Laughing Fox turned towards his commander and their human guest.
"Um… hello," Lena blurted awkwardly. "I'm glad to finally meet you, Theo—"
"I'm not Theo."
The Grauwolf snarled those words with a venom that made Lena flinch. For only a moment, she wondered if she had made a terrible error in identifying him; but no, she did recognize that voice too well. And besides…
"But you're wearing the Laughing Fox mark on your side," she attempted earnestly.
"Oh, I may have been given the name of Laughing Fox, but I'm not Theoto Rikka—and I never was."
The machine stepped a few paces closer, and for the first time since Shinrei found her that morning, Lena felt a burgeoning sliver of fear toward one of the steel-imprisoned souls who were Legion no longer.
"Please don't do this, Theo," Shinrei sighed, shifting a little closer to Lena—possibly for moral support rather than protection. She understood that if he needed to, he had the power to stop Laughing Fox in his tracks without moving a centimeter. All the same, it was enough to unnerve her just a little more.
"She came all this way to find out the truth, didn't she?" Laughing Fox snapped back. "Then I'll tell her like it is, because you won't. We're not survivors of Spearhead Squadron. Those fools died in the middle of nowhere weeks ago—and we're not their earthbound souls or some shit like that. We're only machines that were programmed with their memories. It doesn't matter how much the others want to pretend… There's nothing inside us that was ever human at all."
This was something like the nebulous self-doubt Shinrei had first expressed to Lena; but coming from Laughing Fox, it was much more intense, a tirade savage and raw with inner pain that twisted the heart in her chest. She impulsively shook her head at him, her fists tightening in defiance.
"I don't believe that, Theo."
"Oh really. And what do you know? Have you felt how it is to be what we are?" His voice trembled with increasingly directionless anger. "Do you know what it's like to glitch out when you try to remember sensations your body physically can't feel? Have you ever known for a fact that parts of what you were supposed to be were missing? Have you ever had all those empty places stuffed full of pieces of other people instead?"
As Lena winced and blinked, trying to process a response to the outburst, Shinrei quietly offered an explanation. "Unlike the others, Theo's brain suffered some damage from the shrapnel of the self-propelled mine that killed him. It resulted in a partial loss of his memories, which is why he feels incomplete. Before being freed from Legion control, his suppressed psyche tried to fill in the blanks with fragments of other Shepherds' memories instead; but as you can see, that only caused him more trauma after he regained self-awareness. This wasn't uncommon among the Shepherds… but of those who experienced that kind of damage, he's the only one remaining."
"Not by choice," Laughing Fox bristled at his commander. "You're the one keeping me here to suffer like this. I asked you to let me go… but you wouldn't. For what, Shin? For your pride? For the pride of the pile of corpses that used to be Spearhead Squadron?"
The fact that he addressed Shin alone was surprising: in a sense, it seemed to give the lie to his insistence that he believed they were not the souls of Spearhead. Yet that detail was secondary by far to the shocking revelation that he had wanted the Reaper to give him release.
"Don't say that. No matter how much you're hurting now, you can't give up like that!" Lena gasped, taking a few steps forward. It put her within range of a crushing blow from a steel limb if he was so inclined, but now she was too afraid for Laughing Fox—for Theo—to consider any risk to herself. For that matter, Shinrei must also have been certain of his subordinate's lack of ill intent, because he refrained from coming between them; instead he allowed Lena to face the Grauwolf, staring up with desperate eyes to where she thought his optic lenses must be. "Even if some of your memories are gone, you're still you, Theo. You've got to believe that. You can't just throw away what you still have!"
"Just stop it. I have nothing that's really mine, because I never did in the first place—because I'm only some half-assed broken copy of the person I remember being! Stop trying to lie to me when you don't even know the truth yourself—"
The abrupt sound of a soft metallic ringing interrupted him. Awkwardly cutting off his words, Laughing Fox stood very still—and watched with unmistakable bemusement as Lena's fist pounded slowly and steadily on the armor of his right forelimb.
"…Really?" he muttered in consternation.
"I think you're the one who's lost sight of the truth." Lena stopped smacking her fist against his leg, raising her head to let him see her tear-streaked face. "I'm human. I can still feel things you may not be able to in that body… and I feel you. I feel your presence and your pain just as much now as I did that night when you screamed at me over the Para-RAID. Would it hurt me this much to hear something that was just a machine say these things? …You're still in there, Theo. You're all still here."
After a long moment, Laughing Fox carefully shifted his posture, to all appearances looking up at Shinrei's much more massive figure.
"So, is she angling for that whole psychic gig of yours now?"
Shinrei physically sagged. Perhaps it was relief that the tension appeared to be defused… but on the other hand, it might have just been sheer exasperation at the both of them.
"She's not wrong, Theo. Any human being can sense when they're not alone. Having only our own distorted perceptions of ourselves since Legionfall… we never considered that someone who knew us before might have a clearer perspective."
"I'm still not sold," the smaller Shepherd deflected flatly. Then his frame tipped slightly forward, as if to look down at Lena again. "And you're still a damn idiot, and I still want to end myself—but I already promised him I'd wait for that until the Eighty-Six are safe. So I guess you've got that long to convince me, Handler One."
Lena sniffled and smiled, not at all minding that she had just been called an idiot for the second time in the last hour. "I'll do it, too. Just you wait."
"Then if that's settled for the moment…" Shinrei sighed. "Theo, please join the rest of us in Bay One, so Captain Milizé won't worry about you being alone here. I won't connect you," he clarified, presumably registering an incoming protest from Laughing Fox. "I'm only requesting your physical presence for the evening. We have a lot to discuss with the Captain."
"Oh, fine. …Since that business is going to be on the table, I'll sit in on your stupid welcome party."
"Thank you, Theo," said Lena—deliberately reinforcing his human name to him once again.
He simulated a sullen huff. "Look, I'm not doing it for you. I'm only doing it because we need inside help to stop your fellow pigs from wiping out the Eighty-Six."
"Then you do still care about the things that mattered to you when you were human."
"It's only a dead Eighty-Six's memories that make it matter to the machine I am," he grumbled. "If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't care about anything I wasn't programmed to."
"…You know, you really haven't changed as much as you think."
"What's that supposed to mean?"