Armor Frame Battle (4)
A horrific notice of murder.
No—call it a brazen statement of intent. Either way, it had already spread through the entire Kaidal System. Zack, having heard it, stared at the spectator stands on his monitor and shook his head.
"What a dumbass statement."
"Why's that, mew?"
"Look. Every last one of them's wearing the same dumbass face."
When Zack pointed at the monitor, Yass looked at the crowd as well. Every mouth hung open. All they could do was blink.
"Got it, mew."
Yass agreed with the assessment. He respected Laurent, but even he couldn't call a statement like that cool.
At that same moment, Laurent stood face to face with Becky, reporter for GBN.
"Um... Sir Laurent?"
"What troubles you, maiden?"
"Murder is forbidden in Armor Frame Battle, though..."
Becky was badly rattled. Laurent's declaration of war went far beyond simple showmanship.
Only moments ago she had felt killing intent that was utterly sincere. The first she had ever felt in her life, it left her with a chill no words could quite capture.
This can't go on!
She tried to stop him. She had no idea what grudge he held against Houssein, but leaving Laurent as he was seemed like a terrible idea.
"There are times when a knight must render his verdict."
"But—!"
"Close your mouth, maiden. No one can stop me."
Nothing went as she hoped. Laurent refused to be persuaded and left her not an inch of ground.
"Haa..."
This was no situation a mere reporter could handle. Laurent was truly impossible.
In the end Becky turned around. She meant to follow the judgment of the superior who had watched the whole thing, but...
One of the staff raised a panel, signaling her to carry on. The higher-ups at GBN were slaves to the ratings.
"Are you insane? The mood out here is no joke!"
She killed her mic and protested, but the higher-ups didn't so much as pretend to listen. All she got in return was an unreasonable demand.
The letters on the panel were merciless, and the staffer holding it could only smile bitterly.
I'm going to lose my mind...
Becky turned her head. Creaking like a broken machine, she took in Laurent's resolute face.
"S-so how are you going to kill him?"
"I shall grant him an honorable beheading."
He was not joking. The Laurent she saw was not a man who joked—nor a man sincerely devoted to fan service.
The lunatic act wasn't an act. He was just a lunatic??
Past that indifferent gaze, she could see what he really was.
With the commentators' declaration, GBN's warship fired its catapult. Laurent's Jing rode the launch and began to punch through the atmosphere of Planet Diras.
Houssein's Lightning was no different. Shot from another ship, it fell toward the surface with a railgun ejected right behind it.
"Well then. Let's see what this so-called saint can actually do."
Houssein sent his will through the Psi Connector. The Lightning stretched out an arm and caught the railgun falling beside it.
"Let's do this right, partner."
The Lightning soon reached the surface of Diras. A deep canyon, jagged peaks, and thick glaciers filled his view.
A heavy thud ran through the cockpit—the railgun locking onto the shoulder.
It was a massive weapon, but Diras's low gravity eased the burden it laid on the Lightning.
"Haha! Nice! This is the stuff!"
Houssein was satisfied. An environment like Diras was the finest battlefield there was. Nothing pleased a heavy sniper frame more than low gravity and complicated cover.
The warm sea beneath the glacier was useless to him, but even that wasn't bad. Seawater that now and then erupted through rifts in the ice had a beauty of its own.
"Let's go!"
He launched the Lightning and set out to find an opponent who had come down somewhere else entirely.
While the Lightning advanced by the book, slipping from cover to cover, Laurent was gliding over the glacier as if in flight. Rebuilt as a high-mobility type, the Jing boasted a mobility nothing like before.
"It is like riding a steed."
Laurent was satisfied—satisfied, more precisely, with the Jing as it was now. He no longer had to ride a slow fatso. The Jing had become a nimble fatso.
Sir Laurent the knight goes forth, mew!
He goes forth astride a pig, mew!
And then he met a foe, mew!
And the pig ran away, mew!
Yass recited it with feeling. There was no mistaking whom the poem was about.
"Cease! Recite no poetry!"
"Why, mew?"
"We are in the midst of battle!"
"And why's that matter, mew?"
Laurent glared at one corner of the omnidirectional display. There sat Yass, face pure and innocent.
"Poet. Learn to tell time from place."
"Why, mew?"
Wrong.
Dead wrong.
The Yass of this moment could not be reasoned with. Poet-mode Yass was demonstrating, in full, exactly what the Gang race's infamous Four Nothings were.
"Hey. Read the room."
Unable to watch any longer, Zack tried to shut him down, but...
"Why, mew?"
Even Yass's sense of tact had become a Nothing. For Laurent, it was nothing short of a disaster.
"Yass, this is the Round of Eight. There's prize money on the match. If Laurent doesn't win, there won't be any Churu for you to eat."
"Chu—Churu!"
Yass wavered. The change was impossible to miss.
"But poetry is a grave matter, mew! You mustn't pick and choose the time and place, mew!"
"When a person talks to you, at least pretend to listen! Your home training is a complete disaster! Don't you even have a mother?!"
"I don't, mew."
"...Ah. Sorry."
Zack declared defeat. He had asked after someone's mother and hadn't even gotten his stake back, and now the only one left was Laurent.
"Poet."
"Why, mew?"
"Write your poem after I am victorious."
"Th-that couldn't mean...?"
"It does. I shall entrust the triumphal ode to you."
"Mrrrow!"
The triumphal ode. A poem that some emperor of the Galactic Empire, several generations past, had published to commemorate victory after a grand expedition. Thereafter the Empire made it tradition to issue a triumphal ode whenever it won a war of any real scale.
More than a hundred years had passed, but Yass knew the anecdotes well. It was a glory no poet could fail to know.
"Understood, mew! I'll stake my feline life and write a triumphal ode, mew!"
"Mm. See that you strive!"
"Big Bro! What an honor, mew!"
Laurent smiled the smile of a gamble that had paid off. A line tossed out on a whim, and the troublesome cat was dealt with.
"Nice one, Laurent! Now let's focus on the fight and nothing else!"
"......"
"What's wrong?"
"I would prefer it if you shut your mouth as well."
"Don't talk nonsense. I'm supposed to support you."
Zack was dead serious about backseat piloting.
A flat basin of ice. That was as good a description as any for where the Jing had entered.
While the boosters sprayed plasma gas, the frame's massive bulk slid across the glacier at high speed. Heat from the exhaust vaporized the surface, stitching a long, winding line behind it.
A light blinked on the radar—there, then gone, then there again. Unclear information. Untrustworthy. That was his judgment.
In modern tactics, trusting a radar was the same as trusting a con man. Between the harsh environment of space and the advance of jamming and stealth, radar was a thing that only occasionally did its job.
The warning tone sounded, and he found the enemy. The optical sensors had done what the radar could not. Senses sharpened by his Chivalry trait caught the hostility drawing near as well.
"Laurent! Enemy! Use the cover!"
Zack, late to spot it, offered sound advice. Against the Lightning, a long-range sniper frame, closing in behind cover was the orthodox approach.
"I refuse."
"No—why?"
"It is not knightly."
Laurent rejected orthodoxy and did not so much as glance at the cover jutting up across the basin. Using it would have meant deliberately taking the long way around a distance he could cross in a straight line.
Style alone. For that, and nothing else.
"I said use the cover! One shot from that railgun and you're bound for the afterlife!"
"A knight does not hide."
"Ha. Knew it."
Zack dragged one hand down his face and, with the other, seized a pill bottle. Blood pressure medicine.
While he swallowed a dose and tried to settle a pressure that had shot sky-high, the cause of the spike looked up at the enemy with a confident smile.
"Hahaha! You do well enough!"
Houssein's Lightning had already seized the high ground and opened fire.
The first shot split the air with a thunderous roar, and the battlefield became a composition to make the skin crawl. Again and again the Lightning fired, and again and again the Jing slipped the round by a hair.
The commentators shot to their feet and shouted. Fists clenched and shaking—they were well and truly worked up.
At that same moment—
"So you want me to shoot, is that it? You're the one who wagged your tail first."
Houssein meant to snipe the lit-up Jing in earnest. He had seen Laurent's earlier matches and thought he understood, but he had not expected the man to turn his external lights on even in front of him.
"I'll give you this. You're a man."
Smiling, he sent his will through the Psi Connector. Power rose along the rails and accelerated the round.
The cockpit shuddered, and the shell took flight. Trailing a tail of blue plasma, it buried itself deep in the thick glacier.
The commentator's voice rang out, and just as he said, the Jing—having slipped the Lightning's attack—threw every booster to full and broke into an all-out sprint.
The broadcast desk rattled. The two commentators sat and stood without rest, unable to hide their excitement at a match unfolding on a knife's edge.
The Jing closed in a zigzag. By Laurent's will it had not used the cover, and yet somewhere in the rush it had slipped into a blind spot the Lightning could not snipe.
"Sorry. I'm not interested in men."
Houssein fell back. The Jing would soon climb the heights, and then the two Armor Frames would be fighting up close. Close combat—especially close combat with a male pilot—was not to his taste.
Laurent glared at the retreating Lightning. A tactical withdrawal, perhaps, but to him it was flight.
"A cowardly wretch."
"A smart wretch, more like."
"Silence!"
He rebuked Zack and drove the Jing onward. The boosters were already at maximum output, but the distance to the Lightning refused to close.
"Is this the limit?"
"The Jing's a frame that came out more than ten years ago. It's a miracle it moves even this well."
"No! It can do more! Take heart, Jing!"
"Don't abuse the elderly. That's a crime."
Zack's advice ended as kibitzing. The man meant to hear it would not accept it, and so advice became nothing but backseat noise.
"So what are you going to do now? You even got a plan?"
"A knight does not trouble himself with worries."
Laurent worried. He said he would not, and then he worried anyway.
Terrain both complex and steeply uneven. Gravity that was low, but gravity all the same. And the Lightning's sniping, which he could not afford to ignore. Fly high, and he would lose the advantage of the ground; gravity would sap his mobility; and he would become a very easy target. All of it narrowed his choices. Then there was only one path.
"I shall climb the mountain ahead."
"Lights on, climbing a mountain—suicide isn't a hobby of yours, is it?"
"Simply watch."
Laurent sent his will, and the Jing took a reinforced crystal tomahawk in one hand. As a throwing weapon, it was the only ranged armament he currently possessed.
"Won't use a gun because it's cowardly, and yet..."
"An axe is not a gun. A fact anyone who can read already knows."
"Big Bro's amazing, mew! This Yass learned something today, mew!"
When Yass suddenly cut in, Zack rummaged something out.
"Here. Eat this or something."
"Oh! Thanks for the Churu, mew! I take back thinking you were a mannerless human, mew!"
Beyond the comms, the mood was cheerful and noisy. Laurent climbed the heights with a smile on his face.
In that time, the Lightning that had come down off the high ground had drawn far away.
"A fine view. Wouldn't you say?"
The Jing gripped the tomahawk tight.