The Fame of the Red Gareld
The civil war in the Giranlek Empire was more than enough to draw the eyes of every neighboring power.
Once they knew how badly the fighting had weakened the empire, they would know exactly where to drive the knife. For now, they contented themselves with gathering intelligence. No one was foolish enough to move troops and risk becoming the common enemy that forced the two warring sides to join hands.
As the reports piled up, a clear picture emerged: overall, the rebels held the advantage. In a few theaters the loyalists still had the upper hand, but everywhere else the rebel forces were either winning outright or dictating the pace of the war.
Then came a piece of intelligence so absurd that half the analysts who received it double-checked their sources.
A single mecha had turned an entire battlefield by itself.
Not an A-class. Not an S-class. A B-class.
It had charged alone into the enemy formation, punched through a rain of anti-air fire, and targeted the CIC sections of capital ships whose shields had already failed—crippling two warships in the process. With one mecha rampaging inside their lines and their own mecha units being driven back, the enemy had been forced into an emergency retreat, taking heavy losses as they fled.
True, it was the mecha corps that ultimately compelled the fleet to withdraw—but the butterfly that set the whole chain in motion had been a red Gareld, refitted in the Giranlek style.
Naturally, countless factions launched intelligence operations to learn everything they could about the pilot of that red Gareld: Jincheon.
They learned almost nothing. The man had dropped out of another world entirely, and he moved from system to system using the warp drive of an ancient Calsorn transport, leaving no trail anyone could follow. The usable information was vanishingly thin.
"Hmm."
A young man whose entire body had been biometrically enhanced far beyond any commoner—yet who still wore a monocle—closed the report that had arrived on his bio device. Everything below that point he had already heard.
"The Empress Dowager played a harsher hand than expected. But that same harshness gave the defeated troops the will to fight again. And after they took a victory from Count Deon on top of it, they will have recovered into proper regulars with their morale restored."
He sat across from a broad-featured man dressed in spotless, extravagant platinum-hued finery, in what was clearly a private office. The monocled man reported that Jincheon's public humiliation of the knights at the consolation gathering had been a calculated act—meant to replace despair with rage so the broken soldiers could stand and fight.
"The Empress Dowager… Her political instincts were always lacking, but as a commander her talent was exceptional. That aside—does this fellow have no brains? Taking the abuse that should have fallen on her is a fine way to get discarded the moment he's no longer useful."
The man in the luxurious clothes regarded Jincheon with open suspicion: a man who had swallowed every curse, who had casually accepted a filthy role that could never be acknowledged in public.
"Or he may be cleverer than he looks. If the Empress Dowager's influence grows, he stands to receive a proper fief."
"So he's gone all-in on her. If they rise or fall together, that kind of devotion starts to make sense."
The finely dressed man—Rebel Emperor Harcon Galdorn—nodded as if the monocled man's reasoning held water. In private, he had ordered that Count Sherdon Millsaden need not stand on ceremony. Now he turned to him.
"So. What do we do about the Galantid System?"
"The strategy for Galantid is simple. Our forces make maximum use of the defensive installations, draw continuous resupply from the planet, and simply hold. The enemy, meanwhile, must assault both space and ground simultaneously."
Count Sherdon stated the obvious, then added the real point.
"Both sides' strategies are transparent. In the end we have no choice but to trust the skill of the defenders—or I go there myself, assess the situation, and draft a plan on the spot."
"Can't be helped. Without you, holes open in the grand strategy. I will not spare you for the sake of a single star system."
Galdorn would rather lose an entire system than have Count Sherdon leave the capital and the command baton they shared. It was Sherdon's strategy that had already inflicted heavy losses on the enemy and allowed them to invade hostile systems from a position of numerical superiority. When reinforcement requests poured in from every direction, judging where to throw their weight for maximum strategic gain was Sherdon's role.
"But this Terran, Jincheon—did he truly perform as the reports claim? I still can't believe a B-class mecha, not even an A or S, racked up a record like that."
"I checked the combat logs of the surviving ships just in case. I find it hard to believe myself, but he dominated that battlefield alone."
"What's harder to believe is that someone with that kind of skill was a complete unknown."
In a world drowning in information, most facts were easy to obtain—but what every nation truly cared about were mechas and their pilots. An outstanding mecha and an outstanding pilot could tip a war overnight.
The Calsorn Empire had left the galaxy's diplomacy in ruins. Dozens of states crowded the void. Some formed leagues against common enemies or for mutual safety; the rest lived in a free-for-all of eat-or-be-eaten.
"Do you think he's a foreign spy?"
"Common sense says so… but even the Dragonian Empire wouldn't waste a pilot of that caliber on mere espionage."
Galdorn tilted his head, still unable to make the pieces fit.
"Shall we attempt to recruit him?"
"Would the Empress Dowager cold-shoulder a pilot like that? And after a victory that large, his nose will be in the air. Any offer from our side would bounce right off."
The best moment to turn Jincheon would be when the loyalists' defeat looked inevitable.
"We have a war to win first, so we'll give it everything we have. Personally, though, I hope he survives to the end so we can bring him over. A war needs strategists like you—but it also needs exceptional pilots."
"He's still only one pilot."
"A pilot who dominated an entire battlefield by himself."
"……."
Seeing Count Sherdon's brow furrow, Galdorn chuckled, rose, and fetched a bottle of wine and two glasses from somewhere in the room.
Pop. The cork came free. Wine poured in a soft, liquid ribbon.
"Red wine from Mount Zeldorein. The bouquet here is truly outstanding."
"Neither too rough nor too soft—a bright, clean finish that goes down like nothing else. The absolute best."
Galdorn filled the glasses himself, lifted his own, and lightly touched it to Sherdon's. He savored the taste, then swirled the remainder and watched the dark red waves roll against the glass.
"But fertile land that can produce a flavor like this exists beyond this galaxy in countless places."
Until that moment he had projected the image of a broad, hearty man. Now the expression drained from his face, and the bearing of a king settled over him.
"This galaxy is in a state of perpetual war. Some fall. Others rise and take their place among the great powers."
Count Sherdon said nothing. He simply listened to Galdorn's half-musing monologue.
"Dozens of systems away from us, a rising empire called Zabalcan is devouring its neighbors and growing at a terrifying rate. If that growth continues, our borders will touch in twenty years."
As they had discussed before, Zabalcan was a latecomer compared to the older empires. It had only become a military powerhouse because it had lucked into intact Calsorn military facilities. Had it grown by ordinary means, some mid-sized state would have crushed it without effort.
"To survive in this galaxy you either join a federation and paste on a fake smile for the news feeds while chanting 'we're happier together,' or you trample every neighbor and become a colossal empire yourself. Our Giranlek Empire is stuck in the middle—neither one nor the other."
Giranlek was a nation of tradition, holding more than a dozen star systems, and was treated as a great power in its own right. In the early days it had needed fiefs for its nobles, so it had swallowed nearby systems at speed, terraforming and settling new worlds. Once it held enough territory, its expansion had stopped as if someone had thrown a switch.
"If we were a weak state, we could bow our heads to a stronger one and live. That, too, is a way to survive. But this empire has strength and potential—and refuses to use either."
Galdorn drained the rest of his wine. The blank face twisted into something sharp and irritable.
"My brother had a gift for preserving the empire. Expanding it, however, filled him with dread. He would cite the hostility of neighboring states, diplomatic complications, and a dozen other excuses."
Crack!
Galdorn's hand closed. The wine glass shattered. Glass shards should have torn his palm open; the bio-enhanced skin showed only faint scrapes.
"While we still have strength and potential—that is precisely when the empire must expand. The civil war will cost us, yes. But better that than to sit and rot in the status quo. Once we recover from the war's damage and raise the army again—"
He lifted the bottle and drank straight from the neck, rough and unrefined. There was nothing noble about the gesture. It suited him perfectly.
"—Phew! The supreme commander of my armies will be you."
"That is why I serve you."
To Count Sherdon, the thought of his genius rotting in peacetime was more terrifying than death. He snatched the bottle Galdorn set down and drank from it the same way.
"Hah. We'll postpone the next drinking session until we can use the specialty products of a newly conquered planet as our side dishes."
"Hahahaha! Done! I'll look forward to that day!"
One man who meant to grow an empire. One man who meant to unleash his military genius. Bound by mutual need, sovereign and strategist steeled their resolve for victory.
They were about to part on that high note and return to their respective duties when—
"Hm?"
"What is it?"
An urgent report arrived on Galdorn's bio device and ruined the cinematic timing of their farewell.
"A volunteer has come forward."
"What kind of volunteer… ah."
A "volunteer" important enough to reach Galdorn's personal bio device could mean only one thing.
"At last—someone willing to be 'transplanted' into Grancion?"
Grancion.
A relic-class mecha excavated from Galdorn's own domain, estimated at high A-class. The careful wording was necessary because of the machine's peculiar nature.
Grancion moved with human-like fluidity through self-repairing artificial muscle. Its armor was a special metal of unknown composition, and its design defied reverse-engineering. Had they fielded it from the opening of the war, half the conflict would already have been decided. Unfortunately, the machine had no cockpit for a human pilot. Nor was it controlled by artificial intelligence.
Years of exhaustive research had finally revealed the truth: the pilot's brain had to be transplanted into the frame and the machine piloted by brainwaves alone. Further years of work had produced a method—barely—to perform that transplant.
Building a conventional cockpit was impossible. Grancion's technology could not be reverse-engineered, so there was no way to carve out space for a cockpit without destroying the machine's performance. Since it had been designed from the start for pure brainwave control, every cubic centimeter that a cockpit would have occupied was already packed with other systems.
"Who is it? Who is willing to abandon their own body?"
"Levin Poltein. Knight rank. Motive listed as… hatred toward Jincheon."
As Count Sherdon had said, any pilot who took this machine would surrender their flesh forever and live out the rest of their existence through Grancion. One might think they could simply stuff any warm body into it and use the result as a weapon—but there was no way to restrain or control that person's mind. A forced transplant would produce a rampaging monster and hand the enemy a devastating new asset.
They had therefore been forced to tell every candidate the full truth: you will abandon your body for life, and you will never return to human form. Faced with that cost—the permanent loss of every human sensation and pleasure, a life lived as a machine—not a single volunteer had stepped forward. And because Grancion could not even be powered on, no one knew its true performance.
"Tch. It seems he and I were never destined to meet."
If Poltein was prepared to be transplanted into Grancion out of hatred for Jincheon, then one of the two—Poltein or Jincheon—would have to be discarded. Between a Jincheon they might never obtain and a Poltein who would become immediate, overwhelming combat power, the choice was obvious.
"We still don't know the full extent of Grancion's strength, but if the technology is reverse-engineering-proof, it will be a major asset. I'll put out the orders at once—"
"No. I'll handle this myself."
Sherdon was already overloaded as chief strategist; Galdorn would not dump this on him as well. He personally arranged for the technicians who would perform the transplant and summoned Poltein to the capital. A faintly troubled look crossed his face.
Soldiers who lost limbs in war received mechanical replacements all the time. Transferring an entire body into a mecha, however, struck him as an act of almost unspeakable cruelty—not as a ruler, but as a human being.
"I will never forget you."
For now the man was volunteering in a frenzy of vengeance. What would become of him once Jincheon was dead? Galdorn wondered whether words like these would be any comfort at all.
Having shattered an enemy relief force larger than their own, the Empress Dowager's troops turned toward the Galantid System with their spirits soaring.
Exactly as Count Sherdon and the Empress Dowager had predicted, the defeated soldiers who had tasted a great victory recovered their morale and returned to the discipline of a proper regular army.
"……."
"……."
And so the reinvigorated knights came face to face, aboard the Rastold, with the very man who had insulted them to their faces: Jincheon.
Eirin, who wanted even the slightest contact with Jincheon's cock, had invented every possible excuse to get him aboard the Rastold. Jincheon, who had been more than happy to enjoy the flagship's lavish facilities, had agreed—and while wandering the decks half on holiday, he had run straight into them.
Heliane and Calsira, knowing what Jincheon had done, moved to head off any possible violence—
"Huh? Sister, I don't really sense any anger from them."
"You're right. Their eyes are calm."
—but the knights felt no rage toward him at all.
"You have our thanks."
"You figured it out. How boring."
The knight who had once seized Jincheon by the collar bowed his head in gratitude. Jincheon grumbled, looking faintly disappointed that they had seen through the act.
"Once we had room to breathe, everything started looking strange. The guards who vanished and reappeared at the perfect moment. Your sudden, open insults. The Empress Dowager's measures afterward—all of it."
They had understood. The entire performance had been designed to replace the weight of defeat with anger, so that they could fight again.
"My problem is that I'm too emotional. I can't really curse someone I barely know. If you'd annoyed me even a little, or actually hurt me, I'd have torn into you so hard you'd never open your mouth again."
"Hahahahaha!"
The knights roared with laughter, taking it for a joke.
That wasn't a joke.
They're looking at him like a man who played the villain for their sake.
The two women, who knew Jincheon's true nature, silently shook their heads at the knights' complete misunderstanding.
"Your speech is rough, yet you serve the imperial house more devotedly than any noble. You saved the Empress Dowager and awakened the rest of us. We are truly grateful."
One by one the knights offered their thanks and went about their business.
"Good. At least I don't have to wonder when friendly fire is coming."
"Ugh. The problem with me is that I'm too honest and fair-minded. I just can't bring myself to give a hard time to people who never did me any harm."
"……."
"……."
"Hm? Why the faces?"
"…It's nothing."
"…It's nothing at all."
The women who knew exactly what Jincheon was made of carefully ignored the monologue they had no idea how to begin rebutting.