Chapter 40
What is a “love letter”?
This letter — which looked like the author of “Nemi House” had simply copied the Korean military’s “heart letter” and changed only one word — could be used as a wildcard in military life.
The royal household had set up a system that pretended to care on the surface in order to prevent public opinion from turning against the border-guarding Arcons and to avert the possibility of riots.
Even though they never actually lifted those contract magic bindings, they kept insisting we give them “honest opinions.” In doing so they seemed satisfied with seeing themselves as open-minded.
In front of the company commander’s office there was something called the “love letter box” — basically a tin can crudely attached to the wall — and if you dropped a note in it describing hardships of service or things you wanted improved, that note would supposedly be forwarded all the way up to the battalion commander….
That was the official explanation. In reality, the letters were cut off at the company commander’s level.
Still, even so, a well-written love letter could exert a lot of power.
[Off with the Crown Prince’s head.]
Of course, if someone wrote that kind of thing as a “love letter,” the perpetrator would be tracked down and hauled off to the brig by any means.
[Recently Corporal Gagne keeps dumping his laundry on the floor and telling us to wash it again. If it’s even a little noisy when he sleeps, he chews everyone out the next morning as collective responsibility. Please help.]
Letters like that didn’t have much effect.
The company commander would try to cover up incidents as much as possible, so Gagne wouldn’t get severely punished, and the details I wrote would be used to deduce who the culprit was.
The types of letters that did work were the ones like this:
[I want to go on a shooting spree.]
If a letter like that showed up!
The company would be torn apart! The battalion would be torn apart! The fallout would ripple upward!
The company commander might find the letter and cut it off at his level, but if it reached higher…. Exposing an injustice would become a feather in someone’s cap. The higher-ups would flip the whole unit inside out to create results for themselves.
Besides, “shooting spree” — if it wasn’t prevented in advance, it could lead to a major incident and, ultimately, reach the ears of the royal household.
“How terrible….”
Just imagining it made me tremble; I shook my head.
A letter of that sort would devastate the unit almost as thoroughly as a visit from the Crown Prince….
Anyway, I planned to use this love-letter system. Of course, if I wrote it poorly and it got traced back to me, my head would roll, but at that moment I was willing to gamble.
After all, Gagne wouldn’t be punished….
“If done well, it should help to strip them of their power.”
A little later, I carefully wrote on a scrap torn from the supplies ledger.
To be precise, I wrote only the consonants with my left hand. Karon would write the vowels with his left hand.
“All right….”
After writing all the consonants, I motioned to Karon, who was standing guard. He hurried over and took the pen and paper from my hand.
While Karon wrote the vowels, I kept watch. Nobody could ever catch us doing this.
No matter how I thought about it, this was a ridiculous method….
‘But there’s no equally certain solution.’
Finally Karon finished and brought the paper to me. I folded it carefully several times.
“Okay — now let’s go drop the letter.”
Fortunately the corridor outside the company commander’s office was empty.
I signaled to Karon; he ran quietly to check the opposite hallway for anyone coming.
While he kept watch, I slipped the paper into the love-letter box with shaking hands.
And the moment the paper finally fell into the box—
“Go!”
I mouthed the words quietly and, with Karon, I dashed down the corridor.
“Huff, huff…. Ah, my heart almost stopped. Karon, just tell everyone we were having a conversation at this time, okay?”
Since the whole platoon had been in the company for maintenance duty today, no one would be singled out. Not to mention the steps we’d taken to disguise our handwriting.
“Y-yes…! But what if they ask what we were talking about?”
“Don’t know — say we were gossiping about the senior NCO.”
“Y-yes…?”
“Ah, that won’t do. Say we were talking about what’s on the menu today.”
“Understood!”
“All right, whatever happens, this is an absolute secret.”
After swearing with Karon to keep it secret, I made sure to deal with the pen we’d used. I scrubbed my hands hard in case there was ink smell on them.
Good — cleanup was perfect.
Now all that remained was to wait for the bomb to go off….
Bang bang—.
The company commander tapped the love-letter box lightly as he left his office. It was like a habit.
“…What’s this?”
But he realized the sound coming from the box was different than usual.
It was the sound the box made when it contained something.
‘Could someone have really written a love letter?’
Startled by this rare occurrence, he drew the key he had and hastily opened the box. His heart began to pound.
When the box opened, he found a single sheet of paper folded many times.
“I-it’s probably nothing….”
Yes, it would most likely be nothing.
Usually what ended up in the love-letter box was, at worst, complaints about the border defense troops or requests for improved rations.
The company commander, tense, unfolded the paper and saw handwriting so crooked that it was obvious someone had used their left hand.
“Gah…!”
When he read the contents, he stopped breathing in shock.
『I’ve decided to cross the border because of Corporal Gagne’s harassment.』
Then, bracing himself, he shouted.
“E-emergency~!”
He yelled at a sergeant who came running in, his face flushed.
“Call all the platoon leaders! Emergency, emergency!! I am deeply disappointed in you all!!”
A short time later, the Alpha platoon leader looked as pale as death.
“The company commander is extremely disappointed in Alpha Platoon.”
“Yes, yes…. It’s understandable….”
Elliot and Taro, summoned as officers in charge of Alpha platoon, looked equally bloodless.
“H-How could this happen….”
Elliot re-read the words on the paper, but nothing changed. Upon seeing them he realized.
‘This is a real lunatic…!’
Not “I’m deserting,” but “I’m crossing the border” — the twist in direction was scarier because no one had expected it…!
“M-my last month and this happens….”
He had one month left before discharge. He reacted extremely sensitively about his own safety. People said to avoid even falling leaves in your final days of service — so what did it mean to plan to cross the border?
If someone actually did cross the border, the letter-writer alone might die, but if word of such an incident reached the higher-ups, the battalion — and maybe the whole division — would be thoroughly investigated and shaken down.
‘W-what should we even call this?’
It felt inadequate to call it desertion.
‘Deserting the army? Or….’
Elliot recalled that beyond the border lay the northern part of the Adolb Empire.
‘Defection to the enemy?’
They had to solve this problem by any means before a real defection occurred.
Meanwhile, Taro, with dark circles under his eyes, swayed and braced himself against the wall as if dizzy.
‘Is this unit cursed with bad luck?’
After being assigned to the 18th Company and suffering through the “Crown Prince assault incident,” he had poured all his energy into the unit, and his strength had yet to recover.
Since then he’d been like a ghost, sleeping in the officers’ quarters for platoon leaders. And now yet another huge incident had occurred.
Surely the 18th Company was utterly jinxed.
“We’ll solve this some way.”
The platoon leader standing before the company commander spoke with a determined voice, and Elliot and Taro nodded grimly.
“Yes, we’ll handle it.”
With exchanged looks, they left the company commander’s office.
Their faces glinted with resolve as they went off to find the troops.
‘I will definitely get out of here safely.’
‘I’ll deal with whoever disturbed my sleep.’
An emergency alert had been issued in our platoon.
Separate from Gagne being beaten and made to reflect by the seniors, the senior corporals all wore serious expressions.
“Who on earth wrote it?”
“I’m scared — it looks like it was written sincerely….”
They discussed seriously, but it seemed they couldn’t identify the owner of the love letter.
“It looks like the only way is to compare handwriting. Anyone we suspect?”
“It’s clearly written with the left hand; that makes it hard.”
“In that case, what if we have everyone write the same sentence with their left hand?”
“That’s basically an obvious search. No.”
“XX, then is there really no way….”
Leon, Brave, Plato, and Zara eventually gave up on finding the author from the handwriting.
The three from the 78th intake who were staring seriously at the paper shook their heads as well.
“Winter, you don’t know either?”
“No, I don’t.”
“If even Winter doesn’t know, then really no one knows….”
Plato murmured, rubbing his forehead, and Zara glanced our way and said,
“Recently anyone who’s been directly scolded by Gagne…? Milfy messed up hierarchy protocol and got chewed out not long ago; Blair and Topio messed up during maintenance and got chewed out; or it could be another trainee…. In any case, the range is too broad to narrow down.”
“That’s not the point.”
Taro, who had been silently watching the senior corporals’ conversation, spoke with a face drained of energy.
“What we can do now is… make sure the juniors don’t think about doing something like this.”
“Right, man. If someone actually crosses the border and dies, the whole unit will be turned inside out.”
Elliot, his face white, looked at Gagne and said.
At that moment, the person I’d been carefully cultivating for weeks stepped in.
“Don’t worry. From now on we’ll manage them properly.”
Altair, with a silky expression, put his hands on the shoulders of Winter and Yuri standing on either side of him.
