Emergency Situation Red
"……."
"……."
Everyone wore the same blank, slack-jawed expression, unable to make sense of what they were looking at.
The one who finally broke that awkward silence was the massive knight whose face Jincheon had just stepped on after knocking him flat.
Paaang!
"Ptoo."
The knight pinched one nostril, blew out a stream of blood, spat the dirt from his mouth, and stalked toward Jincheon.
"Hey."
"Hm? Don't believe we've met. Name's Jincheon."
"What?"
"I'm introducing myself because we've never met. Is that a problem?"
For a moment the giant knight couldn't process what he was hearing. This was the same bastard who had tripped him, ground a boot into his face, and walked off like it was nothing—and now he was claiming they'd never met?
Then the realization hit: the man didn't even consider him worth remembering. Rage twisted the knight's features.
Buuuuung!
"Kenen!"
"Stop!"
The massive knight called Kenen swung a fist at Jincheon—but Heliane and Calsira simply eased back a step, already braced for what was about to happen.
Jincheon, still lounging with one leg crossed over the other in pure arrogance, caught the incoming punch on the back of a rotating hand and flicked it upward as lightly as swatting a fly.
Huuuung!
"Huh?"
Kenen's vision flipped. Suddenly he was sailing through open air, and panic flooded him.
Gravity. Space. Planet. Impossible. Wait. How. Am I flying.
His own body had just violated every basic law of physics he knew. The ground rushed up at terrifying speed; instinct took over and he rolled into a breakfall.
Kwaaang!
"Ghk!"
The fall technique saved him the worst of the impact, but when he looked up and realized he'd been launched ten or twenty paces, his face went slack with pure idiocy.
"Looks like you never saw my card. Consider this your one free pass. There won't be another."
Jincheon flicked a digital business card from his Bio Device straight to Kenen. The moment the knight read it, the same stunned, disbelieving look that had already spread through the other knights settled on his face.
"What the hell kind of joke is this?!"
"Joke? I'm completely serious."
Jincheon swept that same arrogant gaze across every man staring at him, one by one.
"I'm so strong that if I fought bare-handed, the entire population of this planet could pile on me and still lose."
For reference, the planet's population was two and a half billion.
"At first I was thrilled to have become that strong. But after a while, when no one could touch me, it got boring. Fighting in a mecha is the only way I can hold myself back and have a fair fight. That's the only answer I've got."
Any sane person would have been too embarrassed to finish lines that middle-school-delusion-level monologue. But for Jincheon these were simply ongoing facts of life, and not a flicker of shame crossed his face.
"So if you don't like me, settle it in mechas. Don't throw punches like just now and get your ass handed to you for free."
When he finished, the knights' reaction was exactly what you'd expect from people still living in reality.
"…What is this retard even saying."
"I heard some planets have a parasite that drills holes in your brain. Looks like he visited one."
"So the guy who saved Her Majesty the Dowager turns out to be a complete lunatic."
The rest of the knights started chiming in with the same brand of pure disbelief.
"How can a sparrow hope to grasp the lofty will of a phoenix?"
The Calsorn Empire had once seeded the galaxy with great fire-breathing birds; on Terra they had been called phoenixes and woven into myth. In the old days they were worshipped as divine birds, and even after the truth came out the name still carried a favorable weight.
Jincheon cast himself as the phoenix and the knights as sparrows, neatly reframing every sneer aimed at him as the pettiness of narrow-minded men.
"This bastard's really asking for it."
"Looks like he went hard on the bio-mods, but we're no pushovers either."
"Bio-mods? You people need that kind of crap just to call yourselves strong? How truly pitiful."
"Ah, fuck!"
They tried to set a rough, warning tone, but Jincheon only shook his head with genuine pity in his eyes and voice. That sincerity—the fact that he wasn't mocking them so much as sincerely mourning their existence—only made them angrier.
"Haa. This is going to be a pain."
"Excuse me. Forget them—could you just show us the way?"
"Ah—yes?"
The soldier who'd been guiding Jincheon's party found himself gently shoved aside by Calsira and steered back toward their original destination.
"Hey! Who the hell do you think you are, just walking off?"
One of the knights blocked their path with a hard glare. Guilt by association: they were with Jincheon, so they got the same treatment.
"Haa. No choice, then. I didn't want it to come to this, but someone has to teach you your place."
Jincheon rose from his chair as if he'd been waiting for exactly this moment.
"You're not seriously suggesting a brawl out here in broad daylight, in public?"
"Fine. Follow me."
Even in wartime, the sad male instinct to settle rank and pecking order seemed to work the same everywhere.
=How pitiful. He was aiming for this from the start.=
-Our position sits below nobility and above commoners. So he plans to lock in the hierarchy with a fight first.-
They had earned enough merit for noble titles and then refused them, declaring they would win even greater glory first. On top of that, word had spread that a B-class mecha had dominated an entire battlefield, and rumors whispered that Eirin—now Jincheon's woman—was quietly shielding him. The result was exactly the ambiguous status Heliane had described: less than nobility, more than commoners.
Jincheon had been handing out his card, picking fights on purpose, and using the resulting hierarchy to make sure no one caused trouble later.
=But when we first met the Dowager's party, he never handed out cards. Why was that?=
-Didn't you ask her?-
=We were already in the worst possible situation. I was too tense to think that far. What about you, Unnie?=
-I asked later. She said the Dowager's party back then had no room to over-interpret a card like that.-
=Ah.=
The knights here had all reacted with "What kind of joke is this?" right up until Jincheon insisted the card was real. But for the Dowager's forces—hunted by enemies, out of supplies, out of options—a card like that could have been taken far too seriously. Especially the part about switching sides if they lost.
"I once heard a line from a friend that fits you lot perfectly."
By then they had followed the knights into the training hall. Jincheon raised his middle finger at the circle of eyes locked on him.
"You're not even worth the one page it'd take to write you off, you idiots."
Having received the report from the surface, Eirin decided to rest—partly to let her body adjust to gravity after just coming down from orbit.
Whether someone had briefed the staff in advance or not, the room assigned to her was pleasantly clean, even allowing for the fact that they were technically in enemy territory.
"Unnie."
"Hm? What is it?"
Beatrix, who had insisted on staying at Eirin's side as her personal guard the entire time, finally asked the question once they were alone.
"What do you think of that Terran—Jincheon?"
"!!"
Her little sister suddenly probing the nature of her relationship with Jincheon sent a jolt through Eirin's chest, as if her heart had dropped straight through the floor. But a supreme commander learned early never to show emotion easily; she kept her poker face intact.
"Unexpected top-tier combat power. Unthinkable when we first met him, but… why do you ask?"
"There's talk among the crew that you're playing favorites with that Terran. This deployment included."
Every other unit had been given a balanced mix of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. Theirs alone consisted of a single battleship and Jincheon's party. The arrangement had planted a quiet anxiety: that Eirin was leaning too hard on one man's strength.
They knew Jincheon was powerful. But in the end he was another species—a Terran who knew nothing of noble honor or dignity, arrogant by nature, and now wrapped in Eirin's favoritism. The fear of what he might do next was seeping through the crew of the Rastold Silverion.
For the record, nations built on aristocracy and monarchy tend to despise democracies most of all, sneering that they "know neither honor nor dignity."
"It isn't favoritism. I'm using him efficiently."
"But there's no contingency if he betrays us. Hypothetically—if someone dangled an irresistible sum of money, a title, a whole planet in front of him?"
If there were safeguards against betrayal, calling it efficient use would be fair. Without them, the crew called it favoritism. And now that the rebels had also learned Jincheon's value, the chance he might jump for a dazzling enough offer was far from zero.
He would never betray us…
The entire reason he had helped them was to claim her as his woman. As long as she herself never turned, he had no reason to abandon the loyalists. Of course she couldn't explain any of that—so to everyone else it could only look like favoritism.
"Don't worry. He… will never betray us, no matter the circumstances. I would stake my life on that oath."
She had nearly said "His Lordship" without thinking, smoothed it over, and offered a small smile.
"Haa. I don't get it. I still don't understand why you trust that Terran so much."
"Do you dislike him?"
"Yeah. I hate him. A lot. The way he talks gets under my skin, and that arrogant strut just because he's skilled—I hate all of it."
From the very first time Jincheon had spoken to her in that deliberately provocative tone, Beatrix had been unable to see him in a good light. No matter how hard she tried, the lack of proper courtesy toward nobility, the insolent speech, the lounging attitude, the open scandal of walking around with women on his arms—from one to a hundred, there was not a single thing she liked about him.
Eirin gave a bitter little smile inside at how fiercely her sister rejected him. Deciding that no argument would get through, she offered the strongest defense she could.
"People reveal their true selves in moments of crisis."
She reached out and gently brushed the cheek of the sister who wore a face so like her own.
"You, the crew of the Rastold Silverion who followed me, and Jincheon as well—all of you fought toward a common goal when everything was falling apart. That's why I can trust him the same way I trust all of you."
"That was then… Haa……. I don't know."
Believing that someone who helped you once in a crisis would keep offering loyalty forever was the kind of thinking children did. Hearing her beloved older sister say it out loud was enough to make anyone feel trapped. Even a noble who understood honor would have trouble letting go of suspicion—and this was a Terran who didn't even know what honor was.
"It's been so long since we had a chance to talk as sisters. Let's drop the heavy subjects."
"…Okay."
After that the two sisters talked lightly and happily until night began to settle in.
Wiiing! Wiiing! Wiiing!
"!!"
"!!"
They had been about to end the conversation and turn in for the night when crimson emergency lights flared and a piercing alarm tore through the air.
EMERGENCY SITUATION RED! EMERGENCY SITUATION RED!
ALL COMBAT PERSONNEL TO YOUR STATIONS!
I REPEAT — EMERGENCY SITUATION RED!
Emergency Situation Red.
The alert that triggered when radar painted an enemy force of significant scale. In other words: an attack.
"Unnie!"
"Right!"
The sisters bolted outside and raced for the parking lot behind the building. The base was enormous; running all the way to the battleship would take thirty or forty minutes, so they needed a vehicle.
Beatrix dropped into the pilot's seat of a magnetic-levitation car, settled her sister in the passenger seat, fired the engine, and floored it toward the warship.
"Enemy scale!?"
The base commander had contacted her Bio Device. Eirin demanded the numbers at once—and the report that came back made both her eyes go wide.
"What? That doesn't match the enemy strength we've been fighting!"
"Ah—it appears the enemy has abandoned several bases and thrown everything at us!"
"So they mean to capture me and reverse the entire momentum of the war. At any cost?"
Abandoning their own bases to come here spoke of a ferocious will to take Eirin.
"Fortunate. The enemy is behaving exactly as expected. A little earlier than planned, but still."
"Unnie?"
Even as she felt that will pressing in, Eirin smiled—and in that same moment,
Puhwaaaak!
Two Garelds, led by the crimson one, streaked over their heads toward the battlefield.
"The red Gareld……. Jincheon?"
"I told you earlier, didn't I? People reveal their true selves in moments of crisis."
Eirin watched the man who had launched first to shield her, and a soft smile touched her lips.
"Hurry! Looked at the other way—if we break them here, our side gains an absolute advantage!"
"Right!"
Kwaaaaaaaaa—!
Beatrix stomped the accelerator hard enough to tip the mag-lev car's nose forward. She still had no idea how Jincheon's party had gotten airborne first, but she prayed they would hold out even a little longer.