The Red Reaper's Full Burst
"He seemed like a decent enough guy. What a waste."
Jincheon cut the transmission and felt a genuine pang of regret at Galdoorn's fate.
Living in the world long enough taught you that some people simply rubbed you the wrong way for no reason at all, while others inspired an instant sense of kinship without anything special to justify it. Most called it chemistry. Jincheon called it the shape of a life.
A life was like a jigsaw puzzle—endlessly mutable, reshaped by every choice a person made and every path they walked. When two shapes didn't quite fit but could be forced into rough alignment through compromise, you got what people called friends. When no amount of effort ever made the pieces match, you got strangers… or enemies.
But every once in a great while, two lives locked together with perfect, effortless precision. Even Jincheon, who had lived for centuries, had experienced that only once.
"Hah! This body of mine is setting the mood—who the hell do you think you are, interrupting?!"
The Gareld's movements slowed for the barest fraction of a second. Enemies seized the opening and poured laser-rifle fire into the gap.
Jincheon didn't simply dodge left and right. He spun the entire frame while returning fire with his own rifles.
KWA-KWA-KWANG!
First things first—I need to clean up this mess.
Commander Sherdon Millsaden really was as brilliant as advertised. He issued layered tactical orders that braided into a single coherent strategy, bleeding the loyalist forces with every exchange. Even in the three-dimensional void of space he knew exactly which points to seize so that his own side's advance and retreat remained advantageous. It felt less like a space battle and more like simultaneous games of go and real-time strategy.
Too many of them. Killing a few dozen here won't give me any real strategic edge.
Jincheon carved through every enemy in his immediate sight and rejoined the allied formation. Everywhere, friend and foe tangled in a storm of lasers and detonations.
There.
His qi sense caught a portion of the enemy mecha force suddenly surging toward a new vector.
If that sector falls, the entire flow of the battle turns against us. I have to stop them.
Where Calsira possessed a survival instinct honed to razor sharpness, Jincheon could literally feel Sherdon's tactics through the currents of qi. Yet the moment he prepared to move, another enemy formation shifted elsewhere.
Damn. That one needs stopping too.
He brushed Calsira's and Heliane's qi and found them racing from crisis to crisis, barely holding the line wherever their hands could reach. The problem was that only they sensed the enemy's larger design; everyone else was too busy killing the mecha right in front of them.
Even at my speed I can't plug every hole. Which means…
Jincheon dropped a few more visible targets with his laser rifle, then rocketed toward the Rastold Silverion.
"This is Jincheon. Returning to the Rastold Silverion for rearmament!"
-This is Rastold Silverion. Confirmed. What loadout are you thinking?-
"Strip the Assault Package. Give me rail cannons and one extra laser rifle. Multi-missile ports on the legs. Remove the Anti-Ship Sword and mount ammo drums on the back!"
He had already told the maintenance crews what he wanted; now he simply confirmed it with the operator as the Gareld slid into the hangar. Under Eirin's full backing the techs had everything staged. The moment the frame locked into the docking clamps, work began at a blistering pace.
Kiiing! Kiiiiing!
The mid-to-close-range Assault Package reinforcement parts peeled away. Twin rail cannons settled onto the shoulders. A fresh laser rifle joined the original so that both hands now held rifles.
-Anything else you need, sir?-
A senior-looking technician called over the comm while Jincheon took a brief rest.
"You got any sub-arms?"
-What kind, exactly?-
"You know—those long mechanical arms for shooting or holding a shield. The simple utility ones."
-We keep spares for mechs that lose arms. Mounting them on the back makes the controls messy, though. You sure?-
"Doesn't matter! Slap the sub-arms on and hang extra laser rifles on them!"
-…Are you serious?-
"You think I flew all the way back here to rearm as a joke?"
The technician was visibly rattled. Sub-arms were almost always fitted with shields for stable defense; Jincheon wanted pure offense. But Jincheon had already drilled the control scheme thoroughly in simulation.
I only practiced it because I wanted to copy Freedom Gundam's full burst. Never thought it'd actually come in handy.
Hardcore Gundam fans might sneer, but commercially the SEED protagonist machine had been a smash hit—and its full-burst mode, firing beam cannons, railguns, and beam rifles all at once, was pure carnage. Jincheon had bolted sub-arms onto the training Gareld more than once just to mimic that barrage. Without qi sense the targeting system never fully cooperated, so results had been mediocre. Reality was a different story.
Bare skeletal sub-arm units—normally meant only for grabbing or hauling when a pilot lost an arm—clamped onto the Gareld's wing roots. Above them sat drum-like ammo canisters packed with rail-cannon and laser-rifle batteries. Multi-missile ports finished the legs. The finished machine looked exactly like something a plastic-model beginner had kitbashed with zero regard for balance.
"Perfect. With this I won't need to come back for resupply."
Jincheon was privately delighted at the time he would save.
-Rearmament complete! You're cleared to launch!-
"Good work! Jincheon, Gareld—launching!"
He rocketed back into the fray in the absurdly over-armed machine. The sub-arms complicated the controls, but that was nothing to him.
KWA-AAAAH!
Ammo drums covering shoulders and waist kept him from lighting every thruster; he arrived on the battlefield slower than usual. Even so, a machine loaded purely for ranged combat charged straight forward without hesitation.
"What the hell is that?"
"Who arms a mech that stupidly?"
Loyalist pilots stared in disbelief at a loadout none of them would ever choose.
"A red Gareld? Is that the Red Reaper?"
"Just copying the paint job, right? The real Red Reaper toys with enemies at high speed."
Pilots still holding the rear lines watched Jincheon advance and had no idea how to react. Whatever plan this was, it was beyond their imagination—and they had no idea how to support it.
"Sss—huuuu—"
Halfway between rear and front, Jincheon halted and drew a deep, deliberate breath. He closed his eyes and expanded his qi sense. Instantly the entire combat volume poured into his awareness.
Thousands of mecha firing lasers and railguns.
Thousands of mecha dodging.
The raw data would have ruptured an ordinary human brain. Jincheon's breathing remained perfectly steady and measured.
"Huuu—hah!"
His eyes snapped open. He killed radar and targeting systems completely, then aimed the sub-arm rifles, the hand-held laser rifles, and the shoulder rail cannons in completely different directions—and fired.
Pikiiing!
"For His Majesty the Emperor!"
On the rebel side, pilots under Sherdon's orders hurled themselves forward for victory in the emperor's name. A few of their own fell to the loyalist counter-push, but sheer momentum carried them to the designated point, where they opened fire on everything that moved. Their breakthrough gave neighboring units breathing room; the rebel line began to reverse the pressure—
Pikiiing!
A surviving loyalist pilot fired from dead ahead. The rebels, still following Sherdon's vector, dodged casually.
Puh-puh-puh-PUNG!
Laser streams poured into the exact space they had just vacated. Four mecha detonated instantly. A half-beat later the rail cannons arrived, smashing two more into half-wrecks.
"Wh-what?"
"Where the hell did that come from?!"
They had been hit the instant they finished dodging—someone had read their movements and pre-aimed. Yet no matter how frantically they scanned, the shooter remained invisible. Across the battlefield the same pattern repeated: rebel mecha vanishing one after another.
"Aaaagh!"
"D-damn it! My arm!"
"Where?! Where is he?!"
The common thread was extreme long-range sniping from beyond any sensor range, and every shot at least clipped something vital. At first they chalked it up to rotten luck. As the losses mounted they realized the truth: a sniper was operating from a distance their radars simply could not reach.
The report reached Sherdon almost immediately—or rather, the situation board forced the knowledge on him whether he wanted it or not. More than half the units he had just committed were flipping to LOST. Ignoring that would have been stranger still.
"What in blazes is happening?! Why are our losses spiking like this?!"
"They're being sniped from extreme range, sir!"
"Nonsense! This rate of attrition is impossible for sniping!"
"Th-that may be true, but…"
An operator's job was to relay, not to analyze strategy; under Sherdon's roar he could only stammer. Whether Sherdon raged or not, allied markers continued to wink out across the board at terrifying speed.
"Count Sherdon! Incoming visual from one of ours!"
An ace-class rebel pilot, hunting the sniper through enemy lines, had captured something astonishing and transmitted it live to his mothership. The feed relayed instantly to Galdoorn's flagship—and gave Sherdon the answer he both needed and dreaded.
"This is…?"
On the screen a red Gareld, absurdly festooned with extra weapons, floated into view. Four laser rifles on its sub-arms spat fire in every direction; each volley flipped four more of Sherdon's markers to LOST. The ace opened fire on the Gareld. The red machine simply vented thrusters and answered with a full salvo from the multi-missile ports on its legs.
-Kh!-
The transmitting pilot shredded the missiles with head vulcans and slid sideways.
Beep-beep-beep-beep!
Heat warnings screamed across his cockpit canopy. He rocketed upward—
Beep-beep-beep-beep!
—but the warnings never stopped. He kept dodging; the sensors howled as if they had gone mad.
KWACHIZ! KWAANG!
-H-how?!-
Laser clusters were already waiting in every vector he chose. One beam punched through a thigh; the frame's balance collapsed. Ace that he was, he corrected with thrusters—
Beep-beep-beep-beep!
—only for a fresh web of lasers to cage him completely. He never managed a proper counterattack. The cockpit vanished in fire and the transmission died.
What… was that just now…?
Even to Sherdon's eye the ace had dodged the Red Reaper's fire with textbook skill. Yet no matter how he moved, the heat warnings never ceased, and the lasers arrived as if the sensors were telling the truth. As if the enemy already knew every escape route.
Not coincidence. That bastard knew exactly where the pilot would dodge.
How? Unless he had memorized every individual pilot's habits—impossible.
The battle gave Sherdon no time to think. The instant his mind stalled, Jincheon's indiscriminate barrage resumed. Four laser rifles and two rail cannons fired in continuous sequence, flipping markers to LOST or crippling frames so other loyalist pilots could finish them. The damage curve went exponential. The only way to achieve that rate was to hit someone with every single shot.
"This is absurd…! How can strategy lose to the power of a single individual?!"
Individual strength belonged to the realm of tactics; it was common sense that it could not overturn strategy. On Earth, transcendent warriors like Lü Bu or Xiang Yu had won tactical victories through raw power, yet every one of them had ultimately fallen to strategy. Even superhuman champions were eventually crushed by the collective. Jincheon was trying to leapfrog that entire principle.
One volley: six mecha destroyed or half-wrecked. He wasn't even taking time for precise aiming. He simply spread his qi sense, laid every friendly and enemy movement on the palm of his hand, and fired every two or three seconds. The transmitting ace had briefly interrupted the slaughter; once he was gone the losses spiked again. Even an army of thousands could not shrug off six dead or wounded every few seconds—especially when the other side fielded equal numbers of its own.
"MZ Battalion! Dive into the enemy formation and hit the Red Reaper! All nearby units, support MZ!"
Destroying him would be ideal; simply forcing him to stop shooting would be enough. Jincheon answered by sniping only those MZ pilots whose killing intent was locked on him, never letting them close. The battalion lost the strength to break through and was annihilated piece by piece by loyalist mecha. Sherdon's plan collapsed.
"Kh! Not yet!"
He threw simultaneous multi-vector tactics the same way he had once pressured Calsira. But where Calsira had been forced to rush to each crisis in person, Jincheon's qi-enabled ultra-long-range sniping—radar and targeting systems completely offline—intercepted every strategic shift before it could mature.
"Wiped out!"
"This sector wiped out as well!"
"Front collapsing! Casualties accelerating!"
"…Am I having a nightmare…?"
A situation that violated every rule of his world was unfolding in real time. Sherdon watched unit after unit he had committed get cut in half by Jincheon's fire, then hunted down by loyalist mecha until nothing remained, and felt only hollow disbelief.
Then the movement that would end the war began.
"Rastold Silverion commencing advance! Massive heat signature detected!"
"Angle confirmed! They're targeting this flagship!"
The Rastold Silverion, which had been conserving its strength until now, finally stepped forward.