The Nightmare Returns
"What? Retreat?"
"That is correct. With our fleet commander dead, our fleet will be withdrawing. We will settle the penalty fee separately."
"What kind of bullshit is that? If the fleet commander croaked, you just appoint a deputy!"
"It is an internal rule of the mercenary group."
Count Sherdon Millsgaden, who had assumed overall command in place of the rebel emperor Galdoorn, reacted with pure fury to the Resily Mercenary Group's withdrawal.
No matter the strategy or tactics involved, the side with greater numbers held an immutable advantage. That was an unchanging truth of war.
After speaking with the mercenary group's representative, Millsgaden stared at the man with an expression of utter disbelief.
"You couldn't even stop a handful of enemy mechas, so your fleet commander personally climbed into a mecha to counterattack and got himself killed? I may not have the most battlefield experience, but this is the first time I've ever seen a farce like this. You'd take first place on a comedy show without even trying."
"……."
The Resily representative absorbed Millsgaden's naked mockery in silence. He knew that anything he said here would only make things worse.
"The strongest mercenary group in the galaxy? Even bullshit has standards, and yours is top-tier."
"…Do not insult the Resily Mercenary Group."
"Insult? That's just the truth! I have no interest in wasting time with idiots, so get lost! The moment this war is over, I'll personally expose you for what you really are!"
"Kh……!"
The representative felt rage boil up under the relentless scorn and condemnation, but reality had unfolded exactly as Millsgaden described, leaving him with no rebuttal.
If you faced the Red Reaper yourself, you wouldn't be spouting that garbage.
Originally, as an apology to his employer, he had intended to transmit the video data showing just how monstrous the Red Reaper's performance had been. The publicly known information was already impressive enough, but the 7th Fleet—having fought the Red Reaper firsthand—had felt with their own bodies that the man was several times more of a monster than the rumors suggested.
He had been prepared to endure insults directed at the 7th Fleet. But when the condemnation expanded to the entire Resily Mercenary Group, the representative's temper snapped. He cut the video transmission and terminated the call.
"Hoo. Deploy the left formation. Keep them from hitting our flanks."
"Yes, sir!"
Having cooled his emotions, Millsgaden issued orders and filled the gaps left by the Resily Mercenary Group's departure. Fortunately, the mercenaries had inflicted a reasonable amount of damage on the loyalists, so the rebels still held a slight numerical edge.
"Hey. Cool that head of yours."
At that moment, Galdoorn—who had been receiving separate reports in the emperor's private quarters—appeared in the CIC. He set a cold water bottle on the overheated Millsgaden's head, forcing him to cool down.
"Your Majesty."
"Ah, don't mind me. Command remains with Count Millsgaden."
When Millsgaden started to protest, Galdoorn reminded him in a voice far too casual for an emperor that the authority to command was still his.
"The Resily Mercenary Group pulling out was unexpected, but looked at another way, isn't it fortunate?"
"……?"
"Now no one can dismiss your victory as something you owed to outside help."
"Heh."
Millsgaden let out a low chuckle at Galdoorn's words.
The power gap between enemy and ally was razor-thin, with the rebels slightly ahead. On the other hand, the enemy's morale had surged from driving off the mercenaries. Just as Galdoorn said, winning under these conditions would mean a victory attributable solely to Millsgaden's intellect.
His overheated mind cooled rapidly, and he turned his attention back to the tactical display.
That one throws quite the tantrum when things don't go his way.
Especially when the setback came from external forces rather than his own choices.
Having come to the CIC to cool Millsgaden's temper after hearing of the Resily withdrawal, Galdoorn watched the count's command unfold.
"Enemy mecha units approaching!"
"Launch our mecha forces as well."
"Yes, sir!"
As the loyalist fleet drew close enough, they sortied their mecha units for close-quarters combat. Millsgaden, responding in kind, studied the tactical display and rapidly calculated his next moves.
"Order CS-1 to lead a company and charge the right flank."
"RW-23, fall back and draw the enemy in."
"Reserve unit QZ-52—pour every bit of firepower into these coordinates."
"Have Sir Poltein advance to the far left and deal with the ones charging in."
With the fleet-to-fleet gunnery exchange already underway and requiring little attention, he focused entirely on the mecha units' movements, issuing precise, granular instructions.
The tactical display showed only rough information, but inside Millsgaden's mind, the battlefield was reconstructing itself in furious detail—he could see exactly how every engagement was unfolding on the ground.
Meanwhile, the fleet commanders on the rebel side received one piece of bad news after another.
"The right flank is exposed to enemy fire!"
"Three companies annihilated!"
"Our formation has collapsed!"
"The Nightmare of Galantid is shredding the right-flank charge!"
"Kh……!"
The fleet commander—not on Eirin's level, but still possessed of considerable experience and a brain enhanced through biological modification—could not understand why his mecha forces were being dismantled so thoroughly.
If this were a strategy simulation game, the situation would look like this: one side was grouping units by company and issuing attack-move orders to designated zones, fighting purely through strategic positioning. The other side was matching those strategies while simultaneously micro-managing individual units, seizing tactical superiority one engagement at a time.
It wasn't that the loyalists were too incompetent to do the same. Mecha combat shifted so rapidly in real time that mecha-level tactics were normally handled by the commander-pilots leading each squadron. Millsgaden, simultaneously running fleet operations and mecha combat, was a commander who had already left the ordinary mold far behind.
Meanwhile, Jincheon's group had returned to the Rastold Silverion and was undergoing resupply and emergency repairs.
Sluuurp—
"Pwahhh~ I'm alive again~ This one drink is what makes life worth living~"
"Pfft. You sound like an old man."
"So what? Everyone's got a little old man living inside them, right?"
Calsira, having drained a vacuum pack of fast-absorbing ion beverage through a straw, was resting until the resupply finished. The process itself would be quick, but she knew that fighting alongside reliable comrades produced far better results than fighting alone—so she waited for the repairs on Jincheon's mecha, which was in the worst condition of the group.
"That aside, the enemy was quite skilled. To think he could inflict that much damage on Jincheon."
"Right? But that thing where the unit glowed green and suddenly accelerated—I've never seen anything like it. Do you know what it was?"
"No. I have no idea either."
Heliane was curious about the technique Dolche had used to destroy Jincheon's head unit.
"That's probably why Jincheon brought that thing back."
In one corner of the Rastold sat the wreckage of the Cabiod, its torso destroyed. The rest of the frame was still usable, and more importantly, Jincheon wanted to examine the identity of the bizarre system that had given him such a hard fight.
While Heliane and Calsira completed their resupply and emergency repairs, Jincheon returned his spare laser sword, equipped the one he'd taken from Dolche, and waited for the transport to deliver a replacement head.
"Jincheon!"
"Hm? Beatrix? What's going on?"
But the situation refused to give him any rest.
"The rebel offensive is causing serious casualties on our side!"
"What? Why?"
"It's like they can read every single move we make! And the Nightmare of Galantid has shown himself!"
"The Nightmare of Galantid, huh……."
The Nightmare of Galantid. That was the epithet of Levin Poltein—the man who had once driven Jincheon and Beatrix into a desperate corner. He had earned the name by inflicting heavy losses on the loyalists in the Galantid System.
"I already had a debt to settle with that bastard. But our repairs aren't finished yet."
He could fight without a head unit, but Jincheon had no desire to hand the enemy free information about himself. He wanted at least a complete external configuration before launching.
The Rastold carried spare parts for the Gareld, but a head was not among them. A destroyed head meant the loss of the main camera and the targeting systems for ranged weapons—getting it destroyed mid-combat was essentially the same as being shot down. That was why a separate maintenance craft had been dispatched to retrieve a head, and it would take several more minutes.
"R-right……. Then what do we… Ah!"
Something occurred to Beatrix, and she began scanning her surroundings.
"What about using the head from the mecha you captured? They're both Calsorn Empire tech, so they should be compatible."
"Hmm. Not a bad idea."
Jincheon decided it was worth trying and gave his approval. Beatrix used her authority to order the maintenance crew to transplant the Cabiod's head onto Jincheon's Gareld.
The equipment and personnel were already standing by, so the Cabiod's head was detached and seated onto the Gareld in moments. The sharp, angular head—reminiscent of a canine predator—clashed aesthetically with the Gareld's frame, but the only thing that mattered right now was whether the main camera functioned properly.
"Let's see……. Ah, there we go. Compatible. Good."
"It works? Haah, thank goodness!"
"But this thing……."
As Jincheon reviewed the Cabiod head's specifications—so different from the Gareld's original—an intrigued look crossed his face.
Radar range and effective sensor coverage are both higher than the Gareld's. Fire-control assistance and lock-on distance are longer, too.
The head of the A-class Cabiod far outperformed the Gareld's original. And this was on a unit that wasn't even designed for long-range combat. He couldn't begin to imagine how capable a dedicated long-range mecha's head must be.
For a simple comparison, it was roughly the difference between a Zaku head and a Gundam head.
"Beatrix."
"Yeah?"
"Looks like this head shouldn't be used by me. Someone else ought to have it."
"What? Who? Ah—no, this isn't the time for that!"
"Relax. I can swap it out quickly."
Jincheon smiled, already envisioning a more fitting owner for a head whose performance so thoroughly surpassed the Gareld's.
Shhh-shhh-shhh-shhk!
Peeew-peeew-ping!
Elongated objects roughly the length of a mecha's head moved freely through space, firing lasers.
KRA-KRA-KRAKOOM!
"Th-the Nightmare of Galantid!"
"We can't get anywhere near him!"
Poltein, now one with the Grancion, controlled his bits through brainwaves and tore through the loyalist mechas at terrifying speed.
More! More! Come at me! I'll wipe every last one of you out!
The loyalist tactic of charging one flank to collapse the line had been utterly ruined by him—yet instead of satisfaction, Poltein felt only an ever-intensifying hunger for combat.
It was a side effect of losing all physical sensation: his emotions had gone dull and flat. Unable to sleep, unable to feel anything at all, the only time he experienced the sensation of being alive was in battle.
That was the price of discarding a living body and becoming a weapon itself.
Hm!?
The sensors built into the Grancion pulsed a warning directly into his brain. Poltein shifted the unit with its thrusters and evaded.
But the other pilots, lacking sensors on the Grancion's level—and already operating with reduced range due to jamming—were a beat too slow to react.
KRA-CRACK!
"E-enemy attack!"
"Where? Where is it!?"
As beam cannon fire swept through their ranks, the rebel pilots panicked and tried to identify the direction of origin. Their sensors caught nothing. In the gap, another volley of beam cannon fire arrived, whittling down the rebel numbers further.
He's here!
Sensing Jincheon's presence in the ultra-long-range sniping—an attack that relied not merely on machines but on the pilot's own ability—Poltein felt something like a heartbeat thundering through him.
At first he had believed Jincheon was dead. How overjoyed he had been later, hearing the man had been rescued from a deserted island.
I will be the one to kill you! You have to die right in front of my eyes!
He would not accept another half-finished result like last time. This time, he would finish it with absolute certainty and confirm the death with his own senses.
With that resolve, Poltein fired his boosters toward the direction the beam cannon fire had come from.
KRAHAAAA!
Several more threatening shots streaked toward him as he closed in. The accuracy was such that, in any other machine, he would already have been shot down several times over.
Drawing gradually closer, he magnified the monitor—
Huh?
—and found not a standard Gareld head, but a Gareld fitted with another mecha's head and equipped for bombardment. The color wasn't red, either.
That's not hi—
Beep-beep-beep-beep!
!!
A warning blared that something was approaching at extreme speed. Poltein transformed into fighter mode and opened distance upward.
But the high-speed object banked hard, clung to his trajectory, and swept a laser sword the color of fresh blood.
Poltein shifted back to mecha form and met the blade with his own laser sword.
CRACKLE-CRACKLE-CRACKLE-ZZZT!
"Levin Poltein!"
"Jincheooon!!"
A bitter grudge that could only be severed by one of their deaths collided once more.