Starving to Death
I'm going to starve like this.
As a battlesuit, I naturally had no need for meals or sleep. Even during my two-hour daily shutdown, I never woke mid-cycle or dreamed. Pouring bone broth into the suit for the sake of playacting a meal only got it absorbed and gone. I was a long way from the humans who got tossed around by every emotion and craving.
But that didn't mean every basic drive had been castrated out of me. If it had, I'd have been a machine in truth. One single thirst remained, branded into instinct as clear as day: the hunger for power.
It wasn't the one-dimensional urge of a man-eating monster — chew up a human, fill the belly. It felt closer to every rung of the human hierarchy of needs, from physiological survival all the way to self-actualization, fused into a single drive.
A problem that cut straight to survival. Priority over everything else was non-negotiable. If I'd had a stomach, it would have been growling as loud as the water running in the shower.
Hungry.
I'm going to starve like this.
The energy that had cleared fifty percent during the expedition was nowhere to be found — just a red light blinking like a phone battery too dead to even turn the camera on. Even the moist inner lining that clung to skin for efficient fluid absorption had gone dry and brittle.
Of course it had. Fighting the mutant, the phase-disintegration beam alone had burned through a full twenty percent of my power. I'd kept the radar spinning nonstop to identify the military and lure them in, and at the end I'd hauled an entire spacecraft back the way we'd come. The hole punched through the suit meant I was manufacturing oxygen at double the usual rate. Throw in autonomous mode on top of that, and power had bled out of me like interest on a house bought with a variable-rate loan.
When is she coming out.
I waited for Sera — who still refused to charge me — with mounting anxiety. Part of me wanted to tell her to skip the shower and just give me the sweat, whatever she had, but I held it in. All this effort, and she didn't even appreciate it. Maybe she was just an irresponsible owner.
— Knock knock.
Just as the ugly thoughts were starting to surface, someone rapped on the door. I heaved my ton-heavy body upright to greet the visitor — and what do you know, it was Ilena, the one who barely ever left the basement.
Seeing her still wearing that welding mask even aboard ship, even though we were in the same boat now, suddenly made Sera look like a fairy by comparison.
"Why'd you give the AI your own name?"
No greeting. Just that blunt, out-of-nowhere delivery, same as always. Apparently she needed to pick a fight before she could get to the point.
"What do you mean?"
"Jin. You said that was your name."
Ah. That.
Ilena still didn't know that the suit's AI and the Crown Guard she was talking to were both me.
"Not exactly a pressing issue. Is that why you came?"
"No. I need to fix Jin, so hand him over."
That was a pressing issue.
"As I said, I—"
"Who said I wanted to see your face? Follow me."
Ilena spun on her heel without waiting for an answer and walked out. I hesitated a moment, glancing toward the bathroom where Sera was still washing — but this was exactly why I'd been pretending to be two people. Sticking to her side constantly would defeat the whole point.
Outside, the safety boots clacking along the curved corridor vanished around a bend. Even without the radar up, tracking her wasn't hard. That sweet body scent mixed with machine oil was dissolving into the air and advertising her position for free. To me it was the most comforting smell in the world — but it might also make her easy for mutants to find. I followed, debating whether I should mention it later.
Past roughly ten minutes of sealed cabins stripped bare of every stick of furniture and fixture, she finally stopped. The end of a passage: a square floor plate with a lattice of bars across it.
"Cargo elevator. Connects to the basement, so if anything needs fixing from now on, load it on here and send it down."
"Your workshop's down there?"
"Yeah. So just send Jin. Not you."
Fair enough — that way she could take the suit without ever seeing me. The elevator already held a pile of junk: a broken oven, a snapped stun baton still smeared with mutant blood. Ilena climbed straight on, apparently too lazy to take the stairs. Then her mask blocked her view and her shin cracked into a steel pipe on the floor.
"Ghk— hyaat…!?"
The thought wow, that had to hurt and the act of catching her body mid-hop before she lost her balance happened at the same time. That was one of my advantages. Her tears and blood were both extremely tempting, but right now keeping her unhurt came first. Looking at the mountain of scrap, hauling all of it up from the basement alone must have been exhausting.
"W-what are you doing?! Why did you get on?!"
"You told me to."
"Ugh— w-when did I— I said the suit, not you—!"
"I am Jin."
Ilena shoved me off and planted her feet back on the floor, but the space was so cramped and packed with hazardous junk that her resistance didn't amount to much. I folded myself in somehow, hit the switch on the rectangular panel, and the fence closed as the elevator started down.
"What do you think you're doing, just deciding on your own?"
"Helping you move the load. Looked heavy."
"Wow~ I never even asked, so thanks a ton. But aren't you talking a little casually? Weren't you that Sera woman's superior?"
"You wouldn't know, but I'm not actually that old."
Ilena's workshop sat beneath the Class-5 cabins. No uniform white interior — just exposed pipes and ducts across the ceiling, every kind of scrap scattered through the mess, and one powered suit hanging there with nothing left but the upper body. I'd never seen one in person before. Looking at it, Sera's panic made perfect sense. Compared to my own form, it was a crude, heavy weapon that looked generations behind.
"Is me being here really that much of a problem?"
"Are you kidding? I can't repair anything with someone inside the suit."
She had a point. Riding the elevator back up and coming down again would have fixed it. But the moment I moved to step into the now-empty elevator, Ilena blocked my path.
"Forget it. Just go stand over there."
"You said you can't repair it."
"Yeah, I can't. You turned Jin into absolute scrap — how am I supposed to fix that in a day? Today I'm just checking the core, so it's fine."
Ilena gestured, and a chain slowly descended from the rail mounted on the ceiling. Having a special motion-sensing setup in a workshop like this was strange.
"Supernatural ability?"
"Yeah."
She said it like it was nothing. Watching her hook the chain's grapple onto the chassis by hand, I figured that was about the limit of a Level 1.
— Ziiing!
The chain reeled in and hoisted me up like a cat caught under the armpits. It felt vaguely humiliating, but Ilena paid it zero attention as she cracked open the rear of the suit. If she could repair the damage to the core, it would take an enormous weight off my shoulders. I couldn't see what she was doing, but I could hear her working fast.
"Hrm…"
After a stretch of quiet deliberation, she opened the hanging suit the same way. Another small "hrm," a few seconds — then a soft click, and a status window bloomed in front of my eyes.
<Status Ailment: Discharge Limit Exceeded> has been cleared.
You will no longer enter forced shutdown.
For real? It was that easy to fix?
Ilena's muttering reached my startled ears.
"Just as I thought…"
"Did you fix it?"
"Calling it fixed would be a stretch, but it's a stopgap."
She walked into view holding two finger-sized batteries, blackened and burnt. Her bare face was still beautiful — but her expression wasn't bright.
"Jin… meaning your suit has the ability to force-compat parts even when they don't match the specs. So it can run on the plutonium cells normally used in powered suits."
"So we're good, then?"
"No. There's a performance gap compared to whatever was originally in the core. Output stability is worse, too — if it takes another hard hit, these two I just put in will definitely fail."
In other words, overloading the core and swapping in fresh batteries forever wasn't an option. The ones she'd pulled had come from the single remaining suit, so there was no way to get more for now. She looked frustrated that she couldn't even tell where the original cells had been made, or what from.
"Got it for now. I'll be more careful going forward."
"Please do."
Either way, clearing that constant status ailment was a weight off my chest. I told her I'd send just the suit next time and started to leave — then Ilena stopped me.
"Hey."
"Yeah?"
"These… can I keep them?"
From my perspective they were basically tonsil stones. But watching her clutch those two reeking, burnt batteries like treasure, I couldn't bring myself to say it out loud.
Off the elevator, I saw the power truly on the brink of empty and picked up my pace. I hadn't gotten a chance to absorb any mana from Ilena — at this rate I might actually starve to death.
Wait… what if Sera isn't in the room either?
A sudden spike of anxiety: I'd left without a word earlier. She might have gone looking for me. But thank every star — the cabin lights were on.
Sera was always careful in her judgments. Finding someone trustworthy in a single day was impossible. And if a Crown Guard went around asking people where the other one was because they didn't even know each other's location, the impression that would leave… she'd thought that through.
"Khooo…"
So she'd trusted I'd come back, and kept herself ready to bolt at a moment's notice if anything went wrong. Finding her collapsed right by the entrance — shoes still on, wet hair not even dried — made something in my chest ache for no good reason.
She was normally a light sleeper, but in my arms she seemed to feel safe enough that lifting her didn't wake her. I laid her on the bed and opened the suit right there. The Life-Conditioning System was running; all I had to do was nothing. With zero power draw I was literally a lump of metal. I could wait as long as it took for her to wake.
"Mmngh…"
That didn't make the thirst go away, though. My gaze kept drifting sideways on pure instinct. Those white, slender fingers twisted into the long sleeves of her uniform. The collarbone showing between the top buttons. The hips that snagged every single time she climbed into the suit and forced her to fix her skirt. The curved chest that seemed determined to test the stretch limit of the Empire's masterpiece reinforced fiber.
The clothing center had only had two sets of underwear that fit her, she'd said. Her facial expressions barely changed — but her body made one hell of a statement. She herself was so conservative she didn't even seem fully aware of it.
I was mid-sigh of relief that the survivor left on the ship hadn't been some potbellied middle-aged guy when Sera drew a deep breath and opened her eyes.
"Hwaah… Jin?"
Those beautifully trembling eyelids curved with relief. Just the lift of her mouth corners had enough force to wipe out every man's hostility toward the military, Yurdin or otherwise.
"You vanished without warning. I was worried."
I'd gone down with Ilena to help and never had a chance to say anything. I waved a mechanical arm in greeting. She could have slept longer, but she rubbed her eyes, sat up on the edge of the bed — and then stared straight at me and dropped this out of nowhere:
"Are you… asleep right now?"
I was not. Ordinarily this would have been shutdown time, but I'd already overcome the limits of a frail flesh body. I just didn't have the energy to talk, so I was sitting still. A mechanical arm was enough for communication, wasn't it?
"…"
Her ash-gray irises, tinged with red, blinked rapidly. The white hand resting on her thigh slowly gathered wrinkles in the blanket, then climbed to her chest.
Tok. Tok.
Unfastening her uniform buttons. She'd opened her eyes, so maybe she was going to wash again? She didn't usually, but there was a shower here.
If she likes it, she can wash twice a day!
But when Sera stood, she didn't head for the bathroom. She came toward me.