The Culvest
This ambush had been a desperate gambit, one that accepted every strategic disadvantage from the outset.
Strategy be damned — the entire plan existed for one purpose alone: to take the Empress Dowager.
And because the forces supporting her party were overwhelmingly thinner than those at any other front, from the enemy's perspective it was as good as a lure dangling right before their eyes, begging to be bitten.
Capture the Empress Dowager — or, if circumstances turned ugly, simply kill her — and the one who succeeded would become the war's foremost hero overnight.
Eirin had engineered the situation precisely so that greed would take root.
"Still, the commander of this planet seems either impatient or shortsighted. I fully expected them to strike during our rest cycle, yet they came the moment night fell."
The instant combat began, Eirin had transmitted encrypted dispatches to the other units, informing them that her force was under attack by the enemy's main army. Now she murmured the observation under her breath as she surveyed the battlefield's aftermath.
Thanks to that warning, the surrounding allied forces had seized the enemy's bases and facilities, redrawing the front lines decisively in their favor.
The retreating enemy, harried by allies who had already occupied their installations, had been half annihilated before they finally surrendered.
"…Haa. So you had everything figured out from the start?"
Beatrix let out a long sigh at her sister, who had only now chosen to reveal the truth.
For the record, the reason Jincheon had so casually thrashed the men who came at him was rooted in this same plan.
"Then why am I only hearing about it now?"
"Because the moment you learned of it, you would have dragged me away by force, insisting it was too dangerous."
"Of course I would! How could anyone green-light a scheme this reckless!?"
"To be honest, even I was startled when the enemy attacked earlier than expected."
Originally, they had intended to use the rest period to plant mines and similar traps in secret, keeping the enemy from realizing that the ambush itself had been anticipated.
That the enemy would charge in so aggressively had been outside even Eirin's calculations, and she had been thoroughly surprised.
Under ordinary circumstances she would never have taken such a gamble — but she had trusted in Jincheon, her unbeatable trump card, and that trust alone had made a reckless, half-baked wager possible.
And that trump card had once again fulfilled his role to perfection, performing so spectacularly that even their own allies regarded him with awe.
If I tell her that, though, she'll only get angrier.
Her little sister had disliked Jincheon from the very beginning. Learning that the final card Eirin had staked everything on was him would send Beatrix into a fury.
So Eirin framed his exploits as an unexpected windfall, and told her that simply holding the line would have been enough.
"The plan was that once we held out, the allies who had seized the enemy bases would strike from the rear. We did drive them off thanks to Jincheon — but the entire premise rested on you holding your ground."
"Huuu……. Next time you have a plan like this, tell me it exists."
"There won't be any more schemes this dangerous, so don't worry."
It was true that the most critical piece of the plan had been Beatrix's role — protecting the Rastold Silverion from being sunk. Knowing her sister had trusted her enough to execute the plan on that basis did improve her mood somewhat. But another matter still grated on her nerves.
Jincheon's new moniker — the Red Reaper — had thrust his existence into the spotlight.
"The Red Reaper, is it? A little old-fashioned for modern tastes, but it's intuitive. Not bad, right?"
"Well, everyone was riding high on the moment. They would have thought anything sounded cool."
"Heh heh heh. Whoever first called him that is probably holding his breath right now, praying no one ever finds out it was him."
Wherever one wandered, the knights' conversations all circled back to Jincheon.
"So there really are beings in this universe living in a world completely different from ours."
"I heard he pulled off something similar out in space, too."
"And with that kind of background, he's still strong enough to drop all of us in a single hit? Shit. The bastard really has it all."
"But is he actually a Terran? Looking at the Draconians, the ones with the lowest dragon aptitude aren't that different from us."
"Come on — one look at the eyes and you know. Don't try to mental-gymnastic your way out of this."
"Honestly, a special operative sent from Terra would sound more plausible."
"If Terra had a pilot like that, would they ship him off as a special agent? They'd use him as their own ace."
"I'm just saying. Just saying."
The knights of this base, who had recognized a skill they could not even touch with their fingertips and who had each been knocked cold by a single blow, had long since abandoned whatever resentment they first felt.
He was a mercenary for now — but if he wished it, he could ascend to the nobility this very day.
If he kept performing at this level, a countship did not seem out of reach.
Among the talk, some remarks cut Beatrix deeper still, for they confirmed that her own judgment of him had been precisely correct.
"But that Zabalcan woman is incredible too, isn't she?"
"No kidding. She was almost as outstanding as the crimson Gareld."
"Zabalcan information control is so tight that outside of what's publicly known and what the Anti-Zabalcan Alliance has leaked, it's nearly impossible to learn anything."
"Still, unlike ordinary Zabalcan humans, she isn't arrogant at all. She's almost cute, right?"
"They say any Zabalcan with a proper head on their shoulders ends up defecting. She's probably one of those."
The two who had shone brightest in this war were Jincheon and Calsira.
Where Jincheon assaulted the enemy with violent, unrestrained brilliance, Calsira conveyed a restrained elegance — the sense of using only exactly as much force as each moment required.
Such a waste. With skill like that, they could have shared far more honorable, far greater work with us.
Beatrix felt a twinge of bitterness toward the women who, no matter how sincerely she wished otherwise, refused to love a man like Jincheon and come over to their side.
With the enemy's carefully laid trump card ending as a reckless overreach and leaving them heavily damaged, this was the perfect moment to drive the front forward.
The soldiers who had been forced into fierce combat during their rest cycle were granted a full day's leave, while those ready for immediate deployment were assembled and preparations for the advance began.
In the same stroke, a simplified ceremony conferred the rank of Senior Knight — Captain — upon Jincheon and his party for their contributions in space and in this victory, formally declaring that they were no longer mere mercenaries but members of the Giranlek Empire.
Leaving Heliane behind to undergo repairs, Jincheon joined the reorganized allied forces and began the advance.
Having targeted the gaps the planetary defense force had created from the very beginning, the ground army — reinforced by Eirin's units — seized the planet's sphere of influence in a matter of moments.
After roughly a week, all that remained was a mountain range on the outer perimeter, ringed with wide-area shields and defensive installations, and within it the enemy's command headquarters, built upon ground leveled into a plain.
Destroy or occupy that headquarters, and even if the planetary defense force refused to surrender, further resistance would become impossible.
But of course the enemy, too, had braced for a last stand, throwing everything they had — and everything they did not — into the defense.
Faced with fortifications so solid that a thoughtless assault would only invite catastrophic losses, Eirin gathered her officers and the most skilled pilots for a strategy conference.
"From this point on, extreme caution is required."
An intelligence officer who had been compiling data on the planet joined the headquarters-assault briefing and began laying out information across the main screen.
"This is intelligence transmitted by an operative who penetrated the interior."
Linked to the officer's Bio Device, the main screen displayed photographs and footage that the operative had clearly risked discovery to capture.
"This unit is a Culvest XXU-02 — a stronghold-defense mecha of the ancient Calsorn Empire."
It was a mecha whose lower body ran on endless tracks like a tank, and whose bulk was several times that of a standard machine.
Enormous circular shields were mounted on both shoulders; three massive gun barrels rose from its back; and both arms bore what looked like openable ports.
"Emboldened by Her Majesty the Empress Dowager's successful lure of the enemy, one of our units managed to exploit a gap and strike the enemy headquarters. These are the black boxes recovered after that unit's defeat."
The screen switched to footage from the allied perspective, showing the large-scale battle for the enemy headquarters.
"The lasers… bent?"
"Guided lasers?"
Among those present at the conference, the pilots' faces went pale with disbelief at the mention of guided lasers.
And the problem had only just begun.
The screen changed again. The black-box footage shifted to the CIC of an assault cruiser.
"……."
"……."
When the footage cut out, every face in the room had gone grim.
Minds were already spinning, struggling to work out how on earth they were supposed to deal with this.
At the intelligence officer's briefing, Eirin frowned and asked a question.
"Strange. I was not aware that our empire possessed a mecha of this kind."
"That is… it was excavated several months before the rebellion broke out, but under information control—"
"Enough. I understand what you mean to say."
Galdorn had clearly concealed its existence in preparation for this very day.
Eirin had never imagined such a mecha existed, and her head was already aching — but one way or another, the Culvest had to be dealt with, or the planet could never be fully secured.
Abandon the effort now, and it would keep pouring fire into space, forcing continual losses on the allied fleet.
Had an allied unit reached this far earlier, they might have prepared other measures in advance — but the enemy, too, had maintained airtight information control as a contingency, and only brought the machine out once the situation turned critical.
Just as I trusted in Jincheon… the enemy had something they trusted in as well.
Where she had possessed Jincheon — the joker who could force even a reckless gambit to succeed — the enemy had possessed the ultimate shield, a machine that would never allow their headquarters to fall, no matter the circumstances.
"……."
A heavy silence stretched on. No one could bring themselves to speak.
Then someone raised a hand, claimed the floor — and a familiar voice cut through the room.
"Let's watch the laser sequence again."
Jincheon, the only person present who showed not the slightest trace of tension, requested the very footage that would fill any ordinary pilot with nothing but despair.