The Red Reaper's Solo Charge
"Commander! The Red Reaper is charging straight for the heart of the fleet! Projected course is our flagship!"
When Dolche heard that Jincheon — who had just casually swatted aside his mercenaries — was coming alone, he wore an expression of pure disbelief for the first time since the war began.
"The Red Reaper? There were at most a platoon's worth of them."
"That's… the rest of his squad is hitting the fleet's flanks, creating diversions."
"…So he's alone?"
"Yes, sir……."
Dolche set the battle situation aside for a moment and simply cooled his head. His common sense could not keep pace with what was happening.
But no matter how he turned it over, the fact that the Red Reaper was charging them solo could only mean one thing.
"He's treating us like a pack of overnumbered pirates."
Pirates — skill levels all over the place, no discipline, and the first to scatter like a rabble the moment things got dangerous. The Red Reaper was pulling this stunt because he ranked them no higher than that.
Or else it was pure arrogance — the confidence that he could handle the likes of them by himself.
Either way, it amounted to the same insult.
Dolche had always run his fleet with rock-solid composure, but that did not mean he was without feeling. Being dismissed this thoroughly, even a man like him could not help but burn with rage.
"…It's been a while. A long while since some bastard dared to treat the Resily Mercenary Group like a joke."
Dolche ground his sharp tusks together, but he did not let emotion dictate his response.
"Relay this to all allied units. The Red Reaper is making a solo charge on the flagship."
That alone would tell them everything they needed to know.
Then, for the first time, he issued a command laced with raw feeling.
"Some wet-behind-the-ears brat who got lucky with a bit of talent and thinks he owns the galaxy has reached our flagship — that alone is a disgrace to the Seventh Fleet! Never forget that we were appointed by the White Snow Dragon Emperor herself!"
Dolche's fury — the fury of a man who revered Resily and had sworn her his absolute loyalty — carried intact to every mercenary under his command. And so Jincheon, still charging toward the flagship, found himself slamming headlong into the full wrath of the Resily mercenaries.
"Kill him!"
"We've confirmed his projected course! Nearby pilots, move to support!"
Word that the Red Reaper was making a solo charge on the Resily flagship — and Dolche's rage-soaked orders that came with it — sent the mercenaries swarming in to stop Jincheon.
"Hah. Heh. Ha."
Jincheon, already punching through the enemy fleet toward the dreadnought-class vessels at its core, casually slipped every attack screaming in from a full three hundred and sixty degrees.
"Hahahahaha! Best reaction I've gotten all day! This is how you make a rampage fun!"
The fiercer the resistance, the hotter Jincheon's blood burned. He danced thrusters by hair's-breadth margins around incoming lasers and answered with his rail cannon.
KOOOM! KRAAANG!
The rail cannon on his shoulder punched straight through the cockpit of the mecha dead ahead. The moment the frontal pressure thinned, Jincheon charged into the gap.
"Hyaaaaah—!"
A mecha came screaming in from his flank at blistering speed and carved a laser sword across Gareld's side. But Jincheon had already read the strike through his battle sense. He dumped thrusters, spun in place, and twisted clear in a motion so acrobatic it looked like a circus act.
PAKAAANG!
As the mercenary shot past, Jincheon put a laser shotgun blast square into his back.
KWAANG!
A weapon forged by the Calsorn Empire itself — no ordinary heavy armor could tank the combined bite of a chainsaw and a shotgun. The enemy mecha detonated.
Pikikikiking!
Lasers poured in from every direction the instant the wreckage bloomed. Jincheon mixed thrusters and engine output, flung his limbs out at wild angles, and never once took a hit.
"Goddamn it! What the hell is that bastard!?"
"Shut up and shoot!"
Watching the Red Reaper dodge lasers from every angle as if he already knew where each one would come from only made the mercenaries grit their teeth harder and pour on more fire.
"Hooooooooooyeah~~~! I'm a dog! I'm the mad dog of this whole damn sector!!"
Laser rifle in one hand, shotgun in the other, Jincheon fired without the targeting system, without even looking — reading every enemy movement through pure battle sense alone. The problem was that for all the casual, almost lazy way he seemed to be shooting, every single round found its mark. Mechas exploded. Cockpits were punched through. Pilots died.
But the mercenary fleet alone fielded twelve hundred mechas. No matter how many Jincheon blew apart, more kept pouring out of the woodwork.
"Yeah! That's more like it! This is how a fight is supposed to taste!"
Jincheon strolled through the thickening storm of enemy fire as if he were out for a walk, steadily stacking damage on everything that came near him.
"Tch. Getting a little crowded."
If the enemy managed to fully encircle him, even Jincheon would run out of answers. He dumped rail cannon and rifle fire downward and dove hard.
KWA-KWANG!
"Had my fun — time to get to work!"
Leaving the exploding mercenary mechas in his wake, Jincheon dropped and tested a cruiser-class ship with his shotgun.
Shields… none.
Confirmed. He slid under the ship's belly and emptied every remaining shell of the shotgun straight up into its underside. The Calsorn-made twin laser shotgun punched through the hull and found something it very much should not have found. The cruiser's captain screamed in panic.
"Th-this is bad! The supply power packs have been hit!"
KWAAAAANG!!
The power packs stored in the cargo bay took a full load of laser scattershot, went critical, and blew the ship's underside wide open. It wasn't enough to sink the cruiser outright — but the mercenaries chasing Jincheon got caught in the blast. Some died. The rest had their mechas wrecked beyond any hope of recovery.
Jincheon seized the opening and tore through the gaps between ships at full speed, a single red brushstroke of paint drawn in a continuous line across the void.
"We lost him!"
"After him!"
"H-holy hell, that speed……!"
The mercenaries tried to give chase, but the distance to the red Gareld only yawned wider by the second, and they could only stare in stunned disbelief. Their employers' intel had warned them the Red Reaper was fast — but watching a recording and watching the real thing were entirely different experiences. The way he chained hard dives and hard climbs through the fleet — maneuvers that would have blacked out or red-outed any ordinary pilot ten times over — was a stunt no one else alive could even attempt.
"He's going for the flagship! Get to the flagship!"
"Right! Chasing him is just asking to get toyed with on pure speed!"
Resily's doctrine held that once a fleet's flagship was threatened, any further engagement only piled on more losses — better to fall back and regroup. Word of that vulnerability had drawn countless enemies to the Resily flagship over the years, all of them hunting for a retreat. Ace-pilot strike teams. Ambush units. Traps of every kind.
And yet the Resily Mercenary Group had never once lost a flagship. Every pilot was a veteran forged from raw skill and hard experience, and every fleet commander stood at the absolute peak of their craft. On top of that, every flagship carried an Honor Guard whose sole purpose was to keep it alive.
"That bastard is clearly targeting the flagship! Honor Guard — defensive formation!"
Dolche ordered the Honor Guard into position against Jincheon's approach. Every one of them was an ace-class pilot, each flying a B-class mecha customized to their personal specifications, and they had held the flagship through every crisis thrown at it.
Hmm. Everyone's piled up around the flagship.
Jincheon had been weaving through the fleet toward the flagship, but the moment he saw the mercenaries he'd shaken off and the Honor Guard's formidable presence massing around it, he judged a direct assault unwise. A main-battery-grade weapon would have been perfect for clearing the board in one sweep — but the strongest weapon he currently carried was the Anti-Ship Sword.
Fine. I've got other options.
He smashed a few mechas caught between the ships, then swung hard toward the outer edge of the formation.
"If you want to turtle your main base, then I'll go take the expansions."
He drew the Anti-Ship Sword, locked into a thrusting stance, and charged a suitably positioned cruiser.
Pachichichik!
The cruiser's built-in shield generator threw up a barrier — and Gareld, every ounce of speed poured into a single thrust, tore straight through it.
"Hrrrngh!"
KWAJIJIK!
He drove the Anti-Ship Sword — mecha and all — into the densest concentration of life signs, the place he judged to be the CIC.
PU-PUNG!
For the finishing touch, he fired the rail cannon straight down the hole he'd just punched. He felt the life signs snuff out, then peeled off in a new direction.
"That's one."
A nearby destroyer opened up with flak in a desperate attempt to stop him, but Jincheon simply locked into another thrusting stance and drove straight for its CIC.
KUDDEUK!
He confirmed the penetration, wrenched the Anti-Ship Sword free — and spacesuited bodies came tumbling out through the hole into the vacuum. He saw no particular reason to finish them off. In the span of a breath he had gutted a cruiser and a destroyer, and he was already banking toward the next ship.
"The Red Reaper is attacking the allied fleet!"
"All ships — engage with flak batteries and nearby escort mechas! Intercept the Red Reaper!"
Dolche issued the textbook response, even as he knew better than anyone how absurd the order sounded. This was the Red Reaper — the same pilot who had slipped dozens, hundreds of mechas by hair's-breadth margins without taking a scratch. And now they were supposed to stop him with flak and escort mechas?
If that level of response had been enough, hundreds of mechas would never have been swarming the flagship in the first place.
Even so, Dolche wasn't particularly worried. The Red Reaper's only real means of sinking a capital ship was that Anti-Ship Sword. A warship was the backbone of any space war — fortress, stronghold, and main force all in one. If a few stabs from a big sword were enough to sink one, it would never have earned the name "warship" to begin with.
Then the damage reports started coming in, and Dolche learned that the Red Reaper was a monster who operated well beyond the bounds of common sense.
"Allied cruisers — three silent! Destroyers — five silent! Battleship — one silent! No response to our hails!"
"What!?"
How long had the Red Reaper even been hitting the ships? How was that kind of damage even possible? And if the damage were that severe, there should have been explosions —
"Reports say the Red Reaper is striking CICs with perfect precision! Every ship hit has had its CIC destroyed — command structure completely collapsed!"
"What kind of nonsense is that!? How do you hit a CIC with perfect precision!?"
Maybe if these were standardized national warships with uniform CIC placements — but the Resily Mercenary Group's fleet was a patchwork of vessels captured from half a dozen nations and heavily modified. CIC locations were all over the map. And he was hitting them accurately?
Dolche exploded at the operator, but the operator was only reporting the facts.
"Additional report — two more battleships silent!"
"Lost contacts among allied mechas along the Red Reaper's flight path! Total allied mechas destroyed by the Red Reaper so far: seventy-nine!"
"Allied lines are buckling under enemy firepower!"
Seventy-nine mechas destroyed. Capital ships functionally sunk by precision CIC strikes alone. The reports kept flooding the operators' stations — and the truly horrifying part was that every last bit of this damage was being inflicted by a single mecha.
What is this? Am I… dreaming a nightmare right now……?
He had heard of the Red Reaper's exploits, but he had dismissed them as the kind of record you only built against people who had never truly tasted war. And yet here was the Seventh Fleet of the Resily Mercenary Group — the strongest mercenary force in the galaxy — being run ragged by an ace pilot who had only just started making a name for himself.
By a single mecha.
For a moment, the face of the White Snow Dragon Emperor — the sovereign he revered above all else — flashed through Dolche's mind.
I will not report any further disgrace to my lord!
"Send every mecha massed at the flagship back to their original positions! Companies Twenty-Five, Thirty-One, and Thirty-Nine — arm with guided munitions and pursue the Red Reaper. Nothing else matters. Hunt him and only him!"
He scattered the mechas back to their posts to shore up allied firepower, and assigned three full companies the sole mission of running Jincheon down.
"But if we do that, the Red Reaper could come back for the flagship—"
"I don't care! That's what the Honor Guard is for! I will not drag the Dragon Emperor's name through the mud any further!"
Trusting in the Honor Guard's strength, Dolche turned his eyes back to the wider battle. Without the supporting fire of those hundreds of mechas, the allied line was on the verge of collapse. The Red Reaper tearing through the interior was a threat — but war was ultimately decided by armies, not by a handful of special operatives. And once three companies armed with guided weapons locked onto him, the bastard would be caught soon enough. With that conviction, Dolche threw himself back into turning the battle in their favor.