Kabukicho Free-for-All — 4
"Bullshit!"
The ivory mecha trained both of its rifles squarely on Ichika.
In the dim, washed-out feed of her night-vision display, the girl was staring straight back at her. And then, the moment she locked eyes with that girl—
Kohane had no choice but to flinch at the sound that suddenly blared to life.
The mecha's hostility alarm—a system that hadn't made so much as a peep when the police tried to hold the line—was shrieking its head off.
Wing!
Wing!
Wing!
A warning rendered in nothing but dry, mechanical tones.
The cockpit flashed red.
— Probability of effective hit: below 5% —
— Immediate withdrawal from engagement zone strongly advised —
— Recommended course: lay down suppressive fire and retreat —
S-sure, this is my first time fighting in a mecha, but are these numbers even remotely normal?!
Kohane felt her hands and feet go cold, but she had to get past the girl standing in her way, so she aimed at the ground and squeezed the firing trigger.
Kwoooong.
The instant Kohane's pinky tightened around the trigger, a colossal report erupted with enough recoil to rock the cockpit itself.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
In time with the massive detonations, muzzle flashes flickered through the darkness, strobing the black curtain of night.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
The flashes briefly illuminated the space within, and the smoke of burning powder gradually swallowed it whole. Yet there, hazily visible between the drifting plumes, the girl's silhouette refused to vanish.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Firepower that would blow an ordinary human's entire body apart with a single hit.
Dozens of large-caliber rounds devastated everything around her, gouging craters and leaving behind an enormous cloud of dust.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Tick—
Tick—
Having emptied its magazines in seconds, the mecha fell silent with a hollow, exhausted click.
Kohane slammed the reload button, her eyes never leaving the spot where the girl had stood.
Gulp.
T-that should've done it, right? Better yet, she ran away.
Because Kohane had unloaded everything right from the start, she told herself the enemy must have backed off. But her hands and feet were still trembling, and her slender throat kept working around dry swallows.
Some primal instinct whispered that if she failed to pin that girl down here, she'd be finished on the spot. Her fingers had gone white where they clamped both triggers—yet she absolutely would not let go.
Not for an instant.
Riding a five-meter war machine and frozen stiff as a terrified little rat—Kohane couldn't help feeling pathetic about herself.
It's just ONE time making eye contact, and this is the state I'm in…?!
Clunk.
Clunk.
Reload complete, the mecha returned to full combat readiness, its muzzles still pointed forward.
"……"
The alarm seemed to be screaming at her: run, run NOW.
Which was exactly why she'd burned through her entire magazine in a panicked spray.
Wing!
Wing!
Wing!
The cockpit's red warning lights kept strobing.
"……"
That should be enough.
The mecha's alert system was still wailing, but.
After turning the place into this much of a wasteland, the girl surely would have fled.
Kohane prayed with everything she had that it was so.
Wing!
Wing!
Wing!
Contrary to her prayers, the mecha's alert system kept right on howling.
"……"
Gradually, the dust began to settle.
There was nothing inside it.
Silence returned, and within that great black curtain, only the mecha remained.
Wing!
Wing!
Wing!
She waited, motionless, and nothing happened.
Kohane muttered, sneaking in a wish along with her words.
"D-did I get her?"
For the first time in her life, Kohane piloted the mecha's weapons with hands shaking from equal parts adrenaline and liberation, nudging the control sticks to sweep the surroundings.
Giiiiriiing.
With the whine of servo motors at every joint, the mecha pivoted smoothly in place—and after scrutinizing every corner of the monitor feed, Kohane confirmed it was empty.
"Phew."
A sigh of relief.
Cold sweat trickling down her forehead.
Kohane wiggled her tiny feet and switched the mecha back to standard mode.
Okay, I wasted some bullets, but I can recharge them slowly off starlight, so…
They'd been meant to blast that eyesore of a Kabukicho to pieces alongside her friends, but.
The mecha had plenty of other armaments. It would be fine.
"Nyuhut. W-wait, that's it? That was nothing! I knew I was total—"
"Done shooting?"
Right beside her.
Not through the mecha's cameras.
A voice carried from beyond the wall.
The girl was right there.
Brilliant green eyes glowing in the darkness—Ichika turned her head toward the monocular night-vision rig, one hand gripping a protrusion on the mecha's hull, and gazed serenely up at the cockpit.
"Hyait?!"
Kohane thought, distantly, that if she hadn't been strapped into a mecha, she probably would have wet herself right then and there. But there was no stopping the scream that tore out of her.
"UWAAAAAAAAAH?!"
Kohane stomped both pedals to the floor and, on pure instinct, fired up the boosters.
The sudden surge in output sent the ivory mecha's joints glowing white-hot.
Heat that could be felt even from within the cockpit.
Steam venting from the overworked engine's coolers.
Psshhh—ing!
Vrrrrmmm—
The twin boosters mounted on the ivory mecha's back pack roared to life, vomiting blue flame.
KWAAAAAAA.
Buoyed by the boosters on both shoulders and the back pack, the previously sluggish machine's movements snapped sharp and agile.
She's too close—I can't use the rifles!
Kohane mashed the close-combat mode button on the control stick while simultaneously flooring the accelerator.
The mecha lifted slightly off the ground, juking this way and that to shake Ichika loose—and in the same motion, deployed the blades stowed in both arm compartments.
Edges gleaming with ivory light.
An immense vibration from the high-output energy that made the ears ring.
Shreeeeng!
Even with a blade tearing toward her, Ichika broke into a fond smile.
A fight, after all, was never meant to be an exchange of projectiles—it demanded blows traded up close and personal, did it not?
"Ha, should've known you'd start like this."
"G-get away from me!"
A colossal blade came charging in.
Heat prickled her skin.
Ichika twisted her body, slipping aside the huge blade that flailed at her like someone clumsily swatting at a fly clinging to a wall.
But the follow-up combo came relentless.
"Whoops."
With a limp little sound, Ichika watched the attacks come, then hopped lightly off the hull to evade.
Vreeeeeeeing!
Vrrrrrrmmm—
The red mono-eye traced the dark like a long ribbon, leaving a scarlet afterimage in its wake.
A ten-meter mecha, twin lethal blades in hand, bearing down on a slight, delicate girl.
The tableau had all the visual punch of something out of a sci-fi horror film—
but in this moment, the roles of prey and predator were reversed.
Ichika watched the mecha close in.
She concentrated on the center of her body and drew in a deep, deep breath.
"Hooo—"
The Innate Art of the Magical Girl of [Freedom]
Green energy wound up Ichika's body, spiraling into a vortex that seized dominion over the entire surrounding domain.
Within the shrouded darkness—
where the red mono-eye came charging, a green storm was born.
She became the storm itself, and rose to meet the mecha's assault.
Fragments of paving stones strewn along the roadside.
Shards of a barricade crushed beneath the mecha's treads.
Craters carved into the earth by the wild barrage of gunfire.
All of it whispered information to her.
And all of it mapped the single optimal route to victory.
The momentum was ferocious, but the enemy was riddled with openings.
Among them glimmered the key to victory: a single counter. One single moment of suppleness, enough to break the momentum of that threatening iron giant.
Yu-neung-je-gang — softness overcomes hardness.
What is yielding can subdue what is strong.
The iron giant's momentum was overwhelming.
It was like a great spearhead.
Driven straight at Ichika, a shape of pure destruction, hurled forward by the will of whoever gripped the haft far behind it.
A shape of destruction no human body could hope to block.
Every step shattered the stone-paved ground.
The air itself was cleaved by the furiously burning blades.
KWAAAAAAAA—
This was a realm glimpsed only by the rarest of geniuses after enlightenment—
and what faced it was the brute violence of unreasonable mass. Yet the artistry within it was utterly nonexistent; just a straight line of raw force.
And so, I simply move forward.
In the gap of consciousness where a single instant stretched like a full minute—
Ichika relaxed her hands within it, extending one toward the heavens and the other toward the earth.
What she traced was the Taegeuk—the Supreme Ultimate.
Between heaven above and earth below stood the human being.
It was the most primordial embodiment of the Taegeuk her master had once taught her.
Hardness and softness always coexist—and the greater the hardness, the more vulnerable it becomes to the softness hidden beneath.
Behind Ichika's closed eyes, that thing was no longer a threatening iron giant.
It was a battered training dummy that knew no technique beyond the straight thrust.
A wooden man—and before she knew it, the wooden man had closed the distance completely and came barreling down upon her.
Vreeeeing!
Shuuuuuuuk!
"THIS ENDS IT!!"
The wooden man's blade shrieked down.
A simple thrust.
Simple, strength with no enlightenment behind it at all.
And just before that strength arrived—
a gap as fine as thread.
Ichika twisted, letting the flat of the wooden man's descending blade slide harmlessly past.
Within the mystery of the Taegeuk, the wooden man's blade twisted—
and in the same breath, every ounce of force it had deployed followed suit and began to twist with it.
Stripped of all its momentum inside the Taegeuk, the mecha could not even overcome its own power and toppled.
KRAKK-KRRK!
Skeeee!
KRRD-DUDUK!
Crushed and collapsing as though swept up in a whirlpool.
Through the gaps that existed between the mecha's own strikes—
by catching the force spewing from its frame, twisting it, and channeling it all in one breath into its joints—
one of the mecha's arms blew clean off.
Losing its balance entirely, the machine crashed down with a roar, carried by the very momentum it had charged forward with.
KUGUGUGUNG!
KRRD-DDDUDUK!
KRAKKEN!
"UWAAAAH?! Are you KIDDING me?! Barehanded?!"
KABOOM!
KUM!
KUM!
Pssshhiiing——
Seconds before her posture collapsed into a full ground tumble, Kohane stomped the pedals with every ounce of leg strength she had and wrestled the wild, bucking control sticks with the desperation of someone hurling her tiny body into the void.
Thanks to Kohane's frantic piloting, the mecha rolled across the ground a few times before snapping back into a stable stance—but the toll was far too great to ignore.
"Hoo, hoo, ugh… my precious mecha…"
Nothing like its proud, magnificent bearing at the start—one single exchange had left an entire arm reduced to scrap, and now it wallowed in the street's dust, an utter mess.
Joints everywhere had been wrecked by the sweep of Ichika's counter, and the emergency lights urging her to abandon cockpit flashed in a relentless, panicked rhythm.
I-if this keeps up I can't show Nanami the mecha… to get Nanami out of there, I need to…
Kohane muttered to herself for a moment, then shook herself together and growled.
"I don't use this because I want to KILL people, but you leave me no choice!"
"Says the girl who emptied her whole magazine a minute ago."
Ignoring Ichika's retort, Kohane smashed her fist down on the switch that had sat sealed under a sturdy protective glass pane in the center of the control console.
KRAK—!
Vrrrrmm!
Clunk!
The cannon barrel that had loomed imposingly behind the mecha's back—
finally slid free of the back pack, rose over one shoulder, and locked into place.
A hidden trump card, hoarded all this time for use as the festival's final fireworks display.
In the darkness, it caught the glow of the mecha's mono-eye and threw it back, radiating pure menace.
"Behold! The ultimate weapon of Super-Awesome Mecha Number One! I now deploy Super-Awesome Cannon Number One!"
Kohane squeezed out her thin voice and issued her warning.
"If this hits you, even a magical girl as strong as you will genuinely DIE! I suggest you move aside!"
Ichika answered with a helpless little laugh.
"You and our leader should go into the naming business together."
"What kind of nonsense is that?! Did my words sound like a JOKE to you?!"
The mechanical chime announced readiness.
Kohane bit down hard on her lower lip.
This was all she had left.
"…Don't come crying to me about it later!"
Clunk!
KWAAAANG!
Light burst forth, and the cannon round landed mere meters ahead.
A blinding flash.
A deafening roar.
Devastation.
Inside the curtain steeped in darkness, there was nothing but light.
Then the shockwave and tremors came surging in.
Even as she felt the mecha shudder under the blast-wave of a cannon detonated at a range of barely fifty meters, Kohane desperately stared into the monitor, scanning for any sign of the outcome.
Please… please…!
It's about time this ended.
Kohane had not steeled her resolve alongside her friends just to be tripped up in a place like this.
She was supposed to blast that eyesore of a Kabukicho to smithereens—
and be acknowledged by the noble Magical Girl of [Commencement] as a proud magical girl in her own right, so the world would know that they had existed.
The settling smoke.
Green eyes.
Their gazes met.
"AAAAAAHH!! PLEASE!!! MAKE IT STOP!!!"
Kohane wailed and activated every weapon the mecha had left.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat
Pshoosh! Pshoosh!
Clunk— KWAAANG!
Endless explosions bloomed.
Endless thunder rolled.
But through the powder smoke and rolling clouds of dust, glimpses of Ichika flickered for an instant at a time—and with each glimmer, she advanced another single step.
Before she knew it, those green eyes were right in front of her.
Kohane wept and wrestled the control sticks, but it was useless.
Ichika touched down lightly atop the ivory hull, charged her fist with green energy, and began hammering down blow after blow.
The green storm, packed into her fists, traced dozens of trajectories at once and slowly, methodically, crushed the mecha apart.
WHAM!
KRAKK!
KUUNG!
Every impact rocked the cockpit, and the mecha crumpled a little more each time.
The frame was now too shattered to answer the controls at all.
KWAANG!
TEONG!
KRAKKEN!
Vibration.
Warning klaxons.
Screens bleeding red.
The evacuation broadcast blaring on loop.
And in the middle of it all, Kohane could do nothing but scream.
"AAH!! S-s-top it!! STOP!!"
WHAM!
WHAM!
Her whole body lurched with the shock that punched through the dented plating.
The second blow sent a creaking shudder through the mecha's frame.
"GET OFF!!"
She tried prying Ichika loose with the mecha's one remaining hand—
but Ichika brushed it aside with a light step, and then, lifting one leg high overhead, readied her final strike.
Green energy soaked into the foot torn straight up toward the sky—
and as it came slamming down toward the earth, thunder roared from the point of impact.
"Let's see that pretty little face of yours!"
KWAAAAAAANG!
One single, vertically-driven stamping strike, and at last the steel plating guarding the cockpit buckled inward.
Kohane, frozen in terror with both hands clamped around the control sticks.
Ichika, standing tall in a pose of unshakable confidence.
Their eyes finally, truly met.
"Heek?!"
"Whoa, look at this—it's a whole little gremlin."
The girl was even more diminutive than she'd imagined, and Ichika let out a wry chuckle before reaching out, seizing the girl by her collar, and hauling her up out of the wreck.
"Let…! Let GO…!"
Kohane kicked at Ichika with slipper-clad feet, thrashing against the grip on her baggy gown—but Ichika didn't budge an inch.
"Hold still, you little—!"
POW!
"……"
A thunderclap of righteous justice landed square on the girl's proudly jutting forehead, and the kicking legs that had fought on so stubbornly went limp, hanging still.
Dragged along by the collar like a sack of laundry, the unconscious girl in one hand, Ichika walked leisurely out through the curtain of darkness.
"Oh, nice. Good job on the barrier."
It had been a far fiercer battle than she'd expected—
and inwardly, Ichika had been worried all along about collateral damage to the people passing by outside. That none of the fighting had spilled past the curtain was a genuine mercy.
"Leader! This zone's done!"
"……"
"Leader?"
"……"
"Guess she's busy."
Shuffle, shuffle.
Girl dangling limply from one hand—
Ichika trudged off toward the building where her leader had issued her orders.