Closing In on the Flagship
"Hah!"
With a grinding screech of tearing metal, Jincheon carved the Anti-Ship Sword straight through to the vicinity of the battleship's CIC. He fired the rail cannon, watched the lives aboard snuff out, then pulled back to open the distance.
Killing intent. Something's closing fast.
Among the murderous auras locked on him, one was rushing in at terrifying speed. Jincheon snapped his head toward its source and spotted dozens of mecha diving from above, plummeting straight at him. He casually flipped the Anti-Ship Sword behind him.
A mechanical arm shot out, snagged the massive blade, and locked it back into its mount with a solid clack.
Sword secured, Jincheon opened fire with the laser rifle and rail cannon hanging at his waist.
The rail cannon clicked empty.
"Shit! Already dry?!"
He had burned through every remaining rail-cannon round while shredding enemy mecha and ships. Until now the fighting had always ended—or nearly ended—right as the ammo ran low. Firing on pure habit had finally bitten him.
Left with only the laser rifle and laser shotgun for ranged work, he laid down suppressing fire on the pursuers and widened the gap again.
Power packs are almost gone too. Time to head back for resupply.
He decided to finish this batch of enemies first, then rearm.
The moment Gareld drifted into the anti-aircraft arcs, flak erupted from every direction. Jincheon dodged purely by combat sense, eyes never leaving the hunters streaking after him.
Their loadout's different. Let's thin the numbers first.
He tracked them with the laser rifle while weaving through the flak.
Now!
A thick beam lanced out. The lead pilot shouted a warning and the pursuit formation split left and right—too late for the slowest. The laser punched clean through his chassis and the mecha detonated.
"Damn it! Is that bastard even human?!"
"We're in range! Shut up and floor it!"
Under Dolche's order the hunters pressed in, stunned that the red reaper was dodging flak on thrusters alone while still lining up shots on them. They had faced countless aces across every battlefield, yet never a monster like this. Other top pilots excelled by wringing every ounce of performance from their machines. The red reaper was different—the pilot himself was the special weapon, and the mecha was merely the tool that let him use it.
Even so, dodging flak forced Jincheon to let the straight-charging pursuit unit close to their preferred range.
"Lock-on!"
"Lock complete!"
Weapons systems painted Gareld.
"Fire!"
Railguns and multi-launch missiles screamed toward him. Jincheon cut a sharp L-shaped dive beneath a destroyer-class hull, but the smart rounds and guided missiles curved after him.
Smart guns and homing missiles. Annoying.
The old him would have been chased all over the sky. The current him—better armed, battle-hardened—found it merely irritating. He stowed the laser rifle, drew the twin laser swords he had brought in case the chainsaw proved useless, and melted the smart rounds with raw heat. Head-mounted vulcans shredded the missiles.
Gareld's thrusters could not quite match his own reflexes, so he simply opened the distance, batting aside smart rounds with the laser blades while gliding through the chaos as if on a stroll.
"C-Commander! He's—he's cutting the bullets with laser swords!"
"…"
"Commander?"
"J-Just keep shooting! Thirty-First, Thirty-Ninth—take the flanks while we hold the front!"
"Roger!"
"Damn it! He's batting bullets out of the air! And this guy was a nobody until now?!"
The flanking company commanders accepted the plan even as their minds reeled. A red reaper who casually swatted incoming fire and never once let a hit land was something beyond their understanding of combat.
They spread left and right, accelerating hard, certain that no one could parry smart-gun fire from three directions at once.
"You think I'm just going to sit there and take it?"
Jincheon had already read their movements with combat sense. He poured on speed and began weaving between the capital ships.
Naturally the Resily mercenary fleet answered with fresh walls of flak, trying to box Gareld in.
"Hup!"
For the first time the usually unflappable expression on Jincheon's face hardened. He drew every sense to its absolute peak. Suddenly he could feel not only the trajectories of the flak but the exact dead zones between the enemy's fields of awareness—the blind spots in human perception itself, rendered crystal-clear by his combat sense.
Gareld slipped into the thinnest recognition cone. The gunners on the anti-aircraft mounts reacted a full beat late. By then he had already knifed between the hulls and was far beyond their reach.
"We can't catch him!"
"He's too fast!"
"Damn it! This is our own fleet! He's under our flak net and we still can't pin him down!!"
The mercenaries seethed. They were the ones who usually tore through battlefields; they never got torn through. Now an unknown pilot who had been nameless before this war was running rings around them. They looked exactly like the green rookies who froze in awe of an ace and got shot down for it.
Jincheon, meanwhile, had his own quiet frustration.
I've shaken them this hard and they still won't break focus on the larger battle.
Normally this style of fighting would draw the enemy into a panicked swarm he could then carve apart while hitting strategic targets. These opponents had reeled, then recovered their composure and resumed pouring fire into the allied fleet.
The ones who clustered around the flagship have already returned to their original stations.
Should he keep carving through the fleet and whittle the numbers? The rail cannon was empty and the power packs were dwindling.
While his mind churned, friendly IFF signatures suddenly appeared inside the jamming-narrowed radar envelope. He turned and saw his women already deep inside the enemy formation, tearing into mecha and ships alike.
Tch. Dodging and weaving must have pushed me this far out.
Thanks to the martial arts he had taught them, their reflexes, senses, and stamina had all leapt far beyond ordinary limits. They were already racking up dozens of mecha kills and smashing nearby hulls with impressive efficiency.
"Ah? Jincheon?"
"What are you doing over here?"
"Jincheon—ngh!"
Beatrix still lacked the leisure to chat mid-fight. She spotted him, started to ask why he had come, then had to twist aside from an enemy strike and answer with a lance-gun blast of her own.
"I've got a pursuit unit on my tail! Cover me!"
Dragging hunters all the way to the enemy flagship looked impossible. Better to link up, erase the pursuit, then move.
"They're all packing guided weapons—watch yourselves!"
"Got it!"
"Those bastards, right?!"
Calsira spotted the hunters streaking between the ships and thrust both arms forward. Multi-launch missile ports on her legs and machine guns on her arms opened up in a storm of fire. The enemies jinked and rolled, but to Calsira their evasive patterns looked like desperate invitations to be hit.
The instant the timing she wanted appeared, she fired the beam cannon.
Three mecha that had the misfortune to line up while dodging were skewered by the beam and detonated in sequence.
"Hyaaah!"
Heliane charged straight through Calsira's fire lane, Berserker Package thrusters screaming. High-output lasers built into the back of her right hand and the machine gun on her left arm shredded the enemy line as she tore it apart.
"Sister! Right side!"
While Heliane's short-range rampage opened gaps, Calsira's beam cannon swept through them, blowing arms and torsos apart.
"Calsira!"
Beatrix intercepted a shot aimed at Calsira with her shield, then answered with the lance gun and scored the kill.
"Thanks!"
Heliane the assault spearhead. Calsira the sniper who never missed inside her range. Beatrix the overwatch who covered every weakness. It was their first time fighting as a true team, yet their roles meshed so perfectly they looked like veterans who had flown together for years.
"My turn to be it!"
Jincheon, who until now had been forced to run from the guided weapons, slammed into the fight. The hunters fought desperately, but their numbers melted in moments.
"Fall back!"
"Those women are strong too!"
"Damn it! Damn it! Damn iiiit!"
With Heliane's group added to the mix, the pursuit unit was shredded almost instantly. They retreated swallowing the bitter knowledge that yet more nameless aces had just humiliated them.
Their growth has blown past every estimate I made.
The enhancement parts had boosted Gareld, true, but Heliane and Calsira's personal skill had risen even higher. Martial arts had given them senses no cybernetic or biological enhancement could match, and they had fully converted that gift into piloting genius.
He had attacked the flagship alone earlier because he doubted they could survive the flak net. At this level, that worry was gone.
"Heliane! Calsira! We're hitting the enemy flagship! Can you keep up?"
"The flagship? Of course!"
"We've fought worse battlefields than this."
Both answered lightly, without a trace of tension.
"Hey! Why didn't you call me?!"
Beatrix exploded at being left out.
"Mmm… the interception fire's going to be brutal. You sure?"
"You don't become captain of the Imperial Guard with ordinary ace-level skill!"
"Fine. I'll take point—stay on my tail."
Telling her to go back would only make her angrier. Jincheon led the way, threading toward the thinnest concentration of killing intent and carving anti-aircraft mounts apart with the chainsaw as he went. After all the chaos he had sown and the mecha he had already culled, holes had opened in the enemy formation. Even so, a staggering volume of flak still poured toward his women. They rode through it on pilot-suit toughness and martial-arts-honed bodies, taking only light damage as they followed.
Their approach was, of course, reported straight to Dolche.
"Report! The red reaper has linked with his squad and is charging the flagship!"
"Hmph. Getting desperate has made him stupid, red reaper. I'll grant you your skill. But can your squadmates punch through our fire net?"
Dolche acknowledged the red reaper's ability; he did not extend the same credit to the rest. Reports said they were skilled, yet only a handful of true geniuses in any generation could force a path through a net like this.
"Red reaper's squad—damage light! All of them have reached one hundred twenty kilometers from the flagship!"
"!!"
Dolche had no idea who he was facing.
Heliane, who had never lost her fighting spirit even in the darkest resistance days. Calsira, for whom turning around hopeless battlefields and coming home alive had become routine. Beatrix, who had claimed the captaincy of the Imperial Guard by pure skill in a unit where mediocrity never even got a foot in the door. Each of them already possessed talent and experience; martial arts had then elevated their piloting to an entirely different plane.
"All household guard units—listen! They are seriously going for the flagship!"
The only thing he truly understood was that four mecha intended to destroy the Resily mercenary flagship. The two fleets' mecha forces had just slammed into close-quarters melee, chain detonations blooming everywhere. This should have been the perfect moment for Dolche's command genius to shine—
"Red reaper squad at thirty kilometers!"
"Household guard engaging!"
—yet the moment Jincheon's squad opened the fight right beside the flagship, a portion of Dolche's attention was inevitably dragged toward them, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.