Your Name
The moment Yuna's voice rang through the cockpit, the two remaining pirates surrounding me couldn't hide their panic.
"Wh-what the hell? That mecha—!"
"That's an Icarus mark! Don't tell me… the Silver Witch?!"
"Forget it—take out that scrap heap first and get out of here!"
They hurriedly swung their guns back toward me.
But it was already too late.
Fweeeeee—! KRA-KOOM! KRA-KOOM!
Two streaks of blue laser fire punched clean through the cockpits of the remaining pirate mechas. Neither of them even had time to scream before they erupted into fireballs.
I could only stare, dumbfounded, at how quickly it had all ended.
This was the combined might of Silvera—the pinnacle of Icarus's cutting-edge technology—and its ace pilot, Yuna.
Silence settled over the containment chamber.
Still on guard, I slowly descended and watched Silvera land nearby.
Suspicion rose ahead of gratitude.
Why now, of all times? Right when I've just gotten my hands on the graviton damper?
"Things have quieted down. How's your condition?"
I glanced at the warning lights still flickering inside my cockpit and answered.
"Thanks to you, I'm alive. I owe you one, Yuna."
Keeping my emotions as tightly reined as I could, I asked,
"But… how did you even know to come here?"
"I tracked the unusual energy signature your machine was putting out," she replied, as vaguely as I'd expected. "The last signal cut out in this danger zone. I judged it an abnormal threat and came to check. You got lucky."
Lucky, she says?
I snorted inwardly.
She claimed she'd tracked my mecha's energy signature, but that couldn't be the whole story. She had to have some other purpose.
Had she already known about the graviton damper? Had she waited until I secured it before showing herself?
Suspicions chained one after another through my mind.
"Fine. Understood. This isn't the place for a detailed conversation. Let's get out of here first and finish talking at Terminus."
Continuing to face her down in this wreck of a machine would have been pure stupidity.
Silence stretched over the comm for a moment after my proposal.
"Terminus?"
Her voice returned a beat later, a faint note of surprise in it.
"That place I've only heard rumors about? Very well. Let's do that."
She accepted my suggestion more readily than I'd expected.
I double-checked that the graviton damper secured inside the Bugbear was firmly locked down, then ran a minimal flight-systems diagnostic.
With Yuna's Silvera taking the lead, we slipped out of Titan's Grave.
The return trip across the Grey Wasteland felt entirely different from the way in. Having the formidable Silvera as an escort brought a measure of psychological relief—but her presence was a burden at the same time.
We barely exchanged a word during the flight. Nothing but taut tension hung between the two machines.
Once we'd landed at Terminus Station and climbed down from our cockpits, I spoke to her.
"There's a decent café nearby. We can talk there."
The place we headed for was a relatively clean-looking café near the central concourse.
The moment we stepped inside, every mercenary and merchant in the room locked their eyes on us—especially on Yuna.
Her form-fitting silver-white pilot suit and almost unreal beauty clashed violently with the atmosphere of the station.
"Isn't that Yuna from Icarus?"
"Good god, what's the Silver Witch doing here?"
"And who's the guy next to her?"
Whispers rose from every direction.
Yuna ignored the stares as if they didn't exist and took a seat. For a moment she gazed out the window at the chaotic sprawl of Terminus Station with something like genuine curiosity.
"The rumors about a free mercenary sanctuary weren't exaggerated after all."
Real surprise colored her voice.
"It's almost amazing a station can keep running in this kind of disorder."
She either hadn't known Terminus existed, or at the very least had never set foot here before.
I sat across from her and folded my arms, waiting until her observations ran their course before cutting straight to the point.
"Yeah, it exists. Satisfied?"
I looked straight into her silver eyes.
"How about you be honest with me now? What's the real reason you tracked me all the way into those dangerous ruins?"
Yuna cleared her throat.
"F-first… I'd like to know your name."
My name?
It hit me then that I'd never actually told her.
There was a reason she'd only ever called me "Driller" or "Cog 7."
"Kang Jinwoo."
"Kang Jinwoo?"
"Yeah."
Hearing my name, she nodded as if she'd just received a useful piece of intel—then promptly averted her gaze.
Honestly, it was starting to get frustrating. I still couldn't tell whether she'd come to Titan's Grave on a commission or specifically to find me.
"Say something already."
I broke the awkward silence. Ever since asking my name, she'd done nothing but sip her coffee without a word.
"Ah… r-right."
At my prodding she looked up, startled. She gave an embarrassed little cough and straightened her posture.
"Why did I come? Well…"
She glanced out the window, then back at me. Something complicated flickered in those silver eyes.
"To be honest… I don't really know why I'm here either."
My eyes went wide. What was that supposed to mean?
She continued, as if trying to understand her own actions.
"A few days ago, at the Chronos base, I handed you a chip with my contact information. I assumed you'd get in touch right away. I was certain you wouldn't refuse the offer. But there was no word."
Her voice roughened slightly.
"I felt strangely uneasy. The longer it went on, the more restless I became, and I started worrying about you. Whether something had happened to you at Chronos, or whether you'd run into some other kind of trouble—those thoughts wouldn't leave my head."
I was left speechless by the confession.
"Then I confirmed that the last signal from your machine had headed into this Grey Wasteland—a known danger zone. And in that moment—"
Yuna laid a hand over her chest.
"—before I knew it, I was already climbing into Silvera and flying here. I knew it was dangerous, but all I could think was that I had to check."
She looked at me again. There was no excuse or deception in her eyes—only genuine, bewildered sincerity.
"So in the end, I came looking for you myself. Because I wanted to make sure you were all right."
Her sudden confession left me completely at a loss for words.
So the interest she'd shown me hadn't been purely about my skills or the graviton damper?
Or was even this some kind of advanced psychological play? But her expression and voice felt far too honest. If anything, she looked like she didn't understand the situation herself.
She drew a steadying breath, then asked a different question—perhaps the one that had been gnawing at her most amid all the confusion.
"Is it that you don't want to join our company? Is that why you've been avoiding contact?"
A thread of anxiety seemed to run through her voice.
Her unexpected candor threw me for a second, but I collected myself and answered. If she was being honest, the least I could do was match her.
"It's not that I don't want to, exactly…"
I chose my words carefully.
"Working under someone else, inside a fixed framework—it just doesn't suit me. Same story at Chronos. I simply want to move freely."
I uncrossed my arms and settled into a more comfortable posture.
"And the reason I didn't contact you…"
I met her eyes.
"…was because I wanted to come to Terminus first and build some kind of foundation under my own feet. I'd just escaped Chronos. The last thing I wanted was to throw myself on your company's mercy with zero preparation."
Yuna nodded as if listening carefully.
"At the very least, I wanted to get a feel for what Terminus was like and get my machine properly repaired before I reached out."
When I finished, Yuna gave another silent nod and reached for the coffee cup on the table.
Then, just as she was about to take a sip, her entire body went rigid.
Her silver eyes trembled violently—and her pale face and the nape of her neck flushed tomato-red in an instant.
…Huh?
Had I said something wrong? Or had she suddenly taken ill? The thought had barely formed when—
"Pffft—!"
With a spectacular spray, she spat the mouthful of coffee straight across the table. Coughing violently, she clapped a hand over her mouth in total panic.
When Kang Jinwoo's calm explanation ended, Yuna nodded without a word.
What he'd said made sense. An independent mindset that accepted risk in order to build its own foundation. He was nothing like the opportunistic mercenaries she usually dealt with. She could understand his position.
Yes—perhaps his way was the right one.
Now that she had a grasp of the situation, she told herself, it was time to return to the main subject and clearly lay out Icarus's offer.
She reached naturally for the cold coffee cup on the table, intending to wet her throat before speaking again.
That was the exact moment.
The words she had poured out to him only minutes earlier detonated inside her skull like a delayed bomb.
—I felt strangely uneasy.
—I started worrying about you.
—Before I knew it, I was already climbing into Silvera and flying here.
—All I could think was that I had to check.
—Because I wanted to make sure you were all right.
She realized what she had said.
To a nameless mercenary she'd met only a few days ago, she had confessed her anxiety, her worry—even the reason for her impulsive actions—in exhaustive, humiliating detail. And those reasons were emotional and completely irrational, standing in stark contrast to the logical explanation he had just given her.
Idiot.
The cold self-awareness hit, and a fierce heat surged into her face.
Unprofessional. Foolish. She had lost control.
And above all else, it was mortifying. The fact that she had casually said those things to a man made her skin crawl.
As a result, the woman who had been about to take a sip of coffee froze mid-breath—
"Pffft—! Cough! Cough!"
—and sprayed the cold coffee across the table in a spectacular mess. Brown liquid soaked the tabletop and part of her white suit. Coughing and utterly flustered, she hurriedly covered her mouth with her hand.
She wanted to vanish from the spot that very second.
She snatched a napkin from the table and frantically wiped at her mouth and the surface, but her trembling hands only smeared the coffee stains further. She couldn't bring herself to lift her head; she kept it bowed, only the tips of her burning ears visible.
How much time passed, she couldn't say.
It was Kang Jinwoo across the table who finally broke the hellish silence.
"You all right? Coffee go down the wrong way?"
His voice was surprisingly calm.
"So—is Icarus's offer still on the table?"
The question yanked her back to reality. She could not afford to make any more of a fool of herself here.
She desperately forced the coughing to stop and managed to raise her head—though she still couldn't quite meet his eyes.
"…No problem."
Her voice was stiff.
"The offer stands. Once you've decided, contact me through that chip."
She couldn't remain seated a second longer.
"Wait, I still have things I want to as—"
Acting as if she hadn't heard the rest of Kang Jinwoo's sentence, she shot to her feet like someone fleeing the scene.
"The Silver Witch just stormed out—what happened?"
"Ah, youth. Even a cold-blooded witch goes soft in the face of love."
Pointedly ignoring the mercenaries' wild speculation, Kang Jinwoo followed after her.
He still had a mountain of questions left to ask.