Testing Your Combat Power
<Special Titan Knight Selection Exam — Hosted by the Royal Academy>
From early morning, the central plaza of the capital was packed shoulder to shoulder.
A dense crush of humanity with not an inch of ground left to stand on. In every corner of every alley, nervous hopefuls shadow-boxed at thin air, while the street vendors fleeced the suckers pouring in from across the kingdom with a festival of daylight robbery.
Of course, the loudest commotion of all was on the Titan Knight board of the Mana-Net.
An unprecedented flood of applicants had turned out. But the vast majority were eliminated before the exam had even properly begun.
Ninety percent of the candidates were weeded out from the very start. Even those cut numbered in the hundreds, and most of them dropped out soon after — they had barely learned to take their first steps, and the applicants who could actually swing a sword properly were vanishingly rare.
"Uwaaaaaagh!"
CRASH—!
The massive hunk of iron slammed into the arena floor, kicking up a haze of dust, and from within the cloud a low, mechanical-tinged voice rang out.
"That will be all."
One strike. These were novices who could barely walk, after all. The repair costs came out of the national budget, so rather than needlessly scarring the Titans, it was far more efficient to simply knock them over.
"Medical team. Extract the examinee."
"Yes, ma'am!"
The moment the examiner's words fell, the standby medics sprang out with their stretchers. The hatch hissed open, and the examinee — foaming at the mouth, unconscious from mana overload — was hastily carried out. Fainting from mana overload. A scene that had already repeated dozens of times today alone.
That both sides were using identical models and yet the bout was this one-sided came down to a single reason: Royal Guard Captain Karinne herself was presiding as examiner.
"Wow... I couldn't see her trajectory at all just now..."
"Of course you couldn't. That's Lady Karinne."
"But if she destroys everyone like that, will we even get any passers?"
At the edge of the arena, the cadets assigned as assistants muttered anxiously among themselves. Would this end in the unprecedented result of zero successful applicants?
Karinne was well aware of that concern, of course. Even as she felled every challenger in a single blow, she continued her cold, meticulous evaluation.
Not bad.
How quickly they had reacted. Whether they had seen through her feint. Her sharp eyes were sifting the applicants' potential flawlessly through those minute differences. More to the point, hundreds of candidates were still lined up outside. To evaluate them all by day's end, she could not afford to spend more than a minute on any one of them.
"Next, enter."
Once the arena was cleared, Karinne called for the next applicant, and a fresh set of footsteps began to echo out from the colosseum gate. Thud. Thud.
Hm?
Karinne's eyes narrowed ever so slightly. The gait was neither sluggish nor anxiously hurried. From the sound alone, she could tell these were the steps of someone well accustomed to piloting a Titan.
Did they bring a personal Titan?
The moment the machine emerged through the gate, an odd note entered her gaze. Roughly a fifth of the applicants dragged personal Titans in with them, so that alone was nothing remarkable.
But the shape of the Titan before her strayed entirely off the beaten path.
What model is that?
Mismatched, asymmetric armor. Pointless-looking protrusions jutting out here and there. Efficiency, aesthetics — it had spared nothing, looking as though a heap of scrap metal had been welded together at random.
A tail...?
Most eye-catching of all was the huge metal appendage affixed to the machine's hindquarters. Judging by the way it dragged along the ground as it walked, it seemed to exist purely for flair. No nation, nor even the Abyss, had ever produced a Titan of that configuration.
Which left only one conclusion.
A custom build, then.
It happened from time to time. People short on funds, or stubbornly devoted to their own personal philosophy of piloting, who heavily modified their Titans. But the results were never good. Controlling the mana required to construct a Titan by one's own power was all but impossible. And bolting a tail on top of that would obviously wreck the machine's center of gravity to boot.
"Examinee, might I suggest renting a standard-issue Titan instead?"
So she offered the suggestion again. It would be a shame to fail an applicant showing rare sprouts of talent over nothing more than their machine's performance.
"There is no disadvantage to your evaluation for renting one."
"Ah... I, um..."
But then —
"I... can't... use anything else..."
Karinne's eyes narrowed. Cross swords with enough strong opponents and you could read a great deal from voice alone.
No confidence.
That tremble was the voice of someone long broken by countless defeats. Even modulated through a Titan's speaker, the true nature carried in a voice could not be hidden.
I misjudged, then.
This was no jewel the Kingdom had been searching for. Sweeping aside her flicker of disappointment, Karinne raised her blade before her.
"Understood. Let us begin."
Intending to end it in one strike, just as with all the rest, she drew up her mana and leapt.
First Strike.
WHOOM—!
The multi-ton frame blurred. Twice in an instant it twisted its center of gravity, a lightning-fast arc of a sword slash tearing through the air. The very technique that had felled every examinee who had stepped into this arena without surviving a single exchange!
She was certain this blow would suffice —
It missed?
WHOOM—! For the first time today, the sword slash cut through empty air.
The examinee had lightly evaded an attack that even second-year cadets couldn't properly parry. That alone already cleared the bar for passing.
Second Strike.
But the assault did not end at one. SCREEEECH! A colossal steel foot gouged the dirt. The instant her opponent dodged, her follow-up strike reflexively bent its trajectory to hunt them down. In a heartbeat, the Titan's greatsword was at the nose of the enemy machine.
A lightning rush no ordinary person could even perceive!
And yet —
They dodged this too?
Wheeeeeng—! Once again, the massive greatsword carved through nothing.
...! At the same moment, the mouths of the observing assistant cadets fell open. How could anyone evade an attack they couldn't even properly see? To anyone who didn't understand the mechanics of conditional macros and preset commands, it could only look like sorcery.
In that case...
Of course, Karinne's offense was far from over. Her opponent's reaction speed was excellent, but their movement efficiency was poor. She would exploit that gap in efficiency to press an overwhelming offensive!
"Haaah!"
A battle cry burst out through the Titan's speakers. For an instant, it felt as though light itself had exploded.
Her opponent's center of gravity was already completely broken from the two prior evasions.
Got them.
Certain Flash!
This attack absolutely could not be blocked. The watching cadets — and Karinne herself — were certain that this time, at last, the blow had landed.
And in that very instant —
CLANG—!
"...!"
A razor-sharp shriek of tearing metal echoed through the colosseum, and everyone but one person sucked in a breath.
The tail...
The tip of the blade stopped a mere fifty centimeters short of its target. The long thing trailing from the scrap Titan's hindquarters. ZZZT-ZZT-ZZT— a thick whip crackling with sparks at every joint had abruptly seized the sword. Right between the grooves of the tail's segments.
...It could move that?
For a moment, she couldn't comprehend it. No human in this world was born with a tail. There was no way to synchronize one's nerves with it, so of course it should be impossible to control.
Don't tell me...
The thought arrived belatedly. Come to think of it, her opponent's movements had felt unnatural from the very beginning — less like muscles moving of their own accord, and more like a puppet suspended on strings, stiff and jerky.
Manual control?
But even that made no sense. Could an old-generation Titan really keep pace with the combat tempo of a synchronizing Titan? Even granting that it could — wouldn't someone with that talent display something far more monstrous in a synchronizing Titan? There was no reason to stubbornly insist on manual control alone, so every hypothesis collapsed into contradiction.
CLANG—! KLANG!
The exchanges continued afterward in much the same pattern. Karinne pressed her relentless offensive without a single moment's pause —
"......!"
But she could not land a hit. Even the Royal Guard Captain, veteran of countless battlefields, had never witnessed movements this bizarre. Wasn't this a total repudiation of every textbook on biomechanics and martial technique?
She wanted to carry the duel on further — not as examiner, but as a knight —
Ah, the time.
She belatedly checked the timer on her panel. Ten minutes already. The allotted time for ten examinees had slipped away.
I should stop here.
Granted, if she committed her full strength she might land a telling blow. But nothing could be more foolish than pushing her offensive too hard and injuring an examinee. This was a selection exam, not a duel.
"That will be all."
Karine drew back her massive greatsword and stepped away — and the scrap Titan, after a beat, came to a halt in its tracks as well.
Still not even scratched, I see.
She could not help but be astonished. It had absorbed that entire offensive without taking so much as a single hit? Perhaps... it was a faint possibility, but... even had she gone all out, the shape of this bout might not have changed.
"The exam is over."
"R-right..."
Still that cowering voice. Now that she knew the examinee's true skill, the disparity felt all the more jarring. Who on earth sat behind that unseen cockpit?
"Would you open the cockpit for me?"