She Wanted to Live
Kakakakang! Tang! Tang!
Gelagon charged in, spraying fire from a rifle-form railgun and a pistol-form railgun gripped in the two arms that sprouted from where its wing bones should have been. Its forward pair of hands held shields raised to cover the body — the classic assault pattern of the Orobece race.
They're angling for close combat!
A brawl and a war were too different in scale to compare, but they shared one iron law: follow the enemy's intent, and you lose.
What the enemy wanted was a melee. That made her next move simple.
Pipiping!
Having never expected support from Kahim or the infantry in the first place, Calsira caught the rounds on a shield barely large enough to cover her upper body and forced the distance open. At the same time she tore a submachine-gun-form railgun from her hip and opened fire.
Takakakakang!
Puk! Bakak! Wajik!
Gelagon's shields — a patchwork of scavenged plating lashed together like rags — could not withstand the Zabalcan service railgun. They tore apart under the barrage.
Papang!
The shields shredded like paper, yet Gelagon's pilot did not flinch. He drove straight in.
He's after something.
Even a zigzag would have been the bare minimum. Charging head-on meant he had a plan. Certain of it, Calsira kept shooting while her eyes swept the surroundings.
Papang!
Something luminous burst from Gelagon's thigh, trailing smoke as it streaked toward the Bodenkender. She had no intention of taking the hit and threw the machine into an evasive roll.
Puuuung!
"Kh—?!"
The projectile arced over her shield and detonated in a searing bloom of light.
A signal flare?!
Exactly as she had guessed — a flare, heavily modified to burn several times brighter than standard. The instant her screens flooded white, Calsira judged the enemy would strike through the glare. She covered her torso with the shield and shoved backward.
From the heart of that light, a black silhouette lunged free.
Fast!
In that sliver of blinded time, Gelagon's frame had closed the gap.
Kwajijik!
Two heat knives, blades glowing cherry-red, flashed into Gelagon's hands. It carved downward as if to rip away the shield that would only get in its way.
Kwaang!
An explosion bloomed behind Gelagon — a booster, overworked to reach her in that impossible window, overheating and discarded in a self-destructing burst.
Don't tell me—
The murderous will and venom of someone willing to burn anything — anything at all — to kill her. As the flare's glare faded and her vision returned, Calsira's gaze locked on Gelagon's left shoulder.
There, painted over the horned head of a Bodenkender, was an X.
One of the ones who hold a grudge against me.
The Horned Empress was no ordinary ace. Unlike the other royals, she was always the first name on the list for anyone who wanted revenge on the Zabalcan imperial house. The rest of the bloodline appeared only under heavy guard or on safe battlefields for mop-up work. She alone always stood on the front line — which made her the juiciest target imaginable for every soul who hated Zabalcan.
"But I want to live! I want to live smiling, the way other people do!"
She shouted the vow at herself and launched her counterattack against the Gelagon locked onto her frame.
Good instincts. Catching a surprise attack when she can't even use her radar properly…
The moment she hit the trap, she had fired her thrusters and recovered her stance. Watching it, Jincheon confirmed that Calsira's skill was the real thing.
Either way, this is clearly where that bastard was headed.
"Haha! Finally we get to crush these insect bastards!"
Kahim and his infantry, caught in the resistance ambush, were already fighting back — shield in one hand, railgun in the other. The shields had bloomed from their hands in an instant, the way the suit in the Iron Man movies reshaped a palm into a plate.
The side that sprung the ambush is the one in trouble.
The instant the attack hit, Jincheon had melted into the undergrowth and was reading the shape of the fight. The resistance had set their trap well and landed the first blow — and nothing they threw had punched through the battle suits' armor. The resistance fighters wore suits of their own, but even to an outsider's eye the gear looked half-dead.
The odd part is that no one is using natural cover.
In a modern war they would have gone to ground behind trees and rock and traded fire from cover. Instead they blocked with nano-engineered shields or simply ran and dodged. Hide behind a tree or a boulder and the rounds punched straight through — so the shape of combat itself had changed.
That aside… this whole thing reeks of staging.
The Zabalcan side held overwhelming defensive power. The resistance had numbers and fought with the desperation of the doomed, yet every Zabalcan soldier moved with room to spare. With armor like that, there was no reason to settle for a firefight. Whenever they chose, they could close, shatter the enemy formation, and butcher them at will.
Something's here — but I still don't have enough information.
Jincheon was certain Kahim meant to take Calsira's life on this ground.
"Haaht!"
A battle cry he had heard somewhere before cut through the noise. He turned toward the source and saw Kunlo charging in, the sword Jincheon himself had forged gripped in both hands.
"Ha! You worthless little shit!"
One Zabalcan soldier sneered at the man charging with nothing but a blade and no proper suit, and leveled his muzzle.
Takang! Pakak!
"Kh—?!"
Sensing the killing intent locked on him, Kunlo snapped up a pistol mid-sprint and put a round through the railgun's barrel. Hitting a distant target while running, without a targeting suite, was the kind of shot that belonged in movies — or to pure luck.
"You little bastard—!"
The soldier whose railgun had been wrecked yanked free a laser rifle meant for the forest's high-threat fauna. In that same instant, Kunlo's speed spiked to something inhuman.
"Huh?"
By the time the laser rifle came up, Kunlo was already in his face.
"Hup!"
With a low shout, Kunlo swung. The laser rifle split cleanly in half.
Kagak!
A weapon built tougher than a standard railgun specifically to endure its own heat had been carved through like soft wood.
"Wh-what the hell?!"
Stripped of every firearm, the Zabalcan soldier reeled — but training held. He drove a sharp punch on pure reflex. A battle suit's strength behind a fist could pulp a human body.
Kunlo met the punch with the back of his hand. The instant fist and hand met, he rotated his wrist—
"Urgh!"
—and the soldier felt his own body yanked forward, stumbling as if dragged. The suit's posture-control system snapped him upright almost at once, but that heartbeat of imbalance was exactly what Kunlo had wanted.
Kagagak!
"Ghhhk!"
Blue sword-qi gathered along the edge as Kunlo drove the tip toward the faceplate — the one place where ballistic glass made the armor thinnest. The soldier's arm shot up on reflex and caught the thrust. The blade failed to punch fully through the suit plating and stopped at a stab into the arm.
The Zabalcan soldier knew nothing of martial arts, yet the raw physical power of his race and the force of the battle suit were enough to answer a surprise attack from an Il-ryu-level expert like Kunlo.
"Tch!"
Kunlo wrenched the sword free for another strike.
Kwaaaaaah!
The soldier fired the boosters in his soles and rocketed clear, slipping the follow-up entirely.
So they had that the whole time — and still chose a firefight.
Watching it, Jincheon understood: the clash with the resistance was part of Kahim's plan as well.
And Kunlo… is he not reading the atmosphere at all?
Outnumbered but dominant through sheer battle-suit performance, the Zabalcan soldiers were fighting a ranged engagement that felt forced and theatrical no matter how he looked at it.
Or has hatred of Zabalcan blinded him completely?
Jincheon knew what the Horned Empress meant to the resistance. Kill her, and you carved a deep wound into the Zabalcan Empire. The bait was so rich they might well have stopped watching their flanks.
He left to find the work he wanted. I have no obligation to stop him.
Even if Kunlo had been a woman — even if she had become one of his — once someone walked away by their own will, the bond ended there.
In that case… I'll watch the mecha fight until the Zabalcan plan kicks off.
Jincheon killed his presence and sprang from the undergrowth into the trees. One bound carried him to the crown, and from there he could see the two mechas locked in a brutal exchange.
That four-armed one was called Gelagon, wasn't it? Pilot's an Orobece, then.
Kaaang!
The Bodenkender caught a heat knife on its shield and heaved with raw power. Gelagon was a low-tier machine aside from its four arms and its speed. The Bodenkender outclassed it in strength, speed, and defense alike — so of course the shield sweep drove Gelagon back. The pilot knew it too. He let his frame drop just enough to ride the blow, then lunged in again.
Confident in close combat, is he? He's doing everything he can to drag this into a melee.
Gelagon charged once more, tossed the heat knives in its hands upward, and drew two fresh blades from its hips. In the same motion its dorsal arms snared the thrown knives and stabbed from above and below at once — a dual-axis attack where a shield could stop only one line.
He's ready to die with her.
Which also meant he had abandoned his own defense. One shot from Calsira into the cockpit and he was finished. Instead the Bodenkender discarded its only ranged weapon — the submachine gun — and thrust an arm toward the heat knives descending from above.
Cheolkeok! Pakaang!
A barrel snapped out of the back of the hand and spat flame. Gelagon's upper arm was shredded to scrap. A one-shot shotgun, a modification no other Bodenkender carried — built for Calsira's personal combat style. Against Gelagon's thinly armored dorsal limb, a single blast was more than enough.
Kagagak!
She smashed the lower heat knives aside with the shield. Gelagon's balance collapsed.
Kwaaaaaah!
Flame erupted from the elbow of the arm that had fired the shotgun — a booster-like jet of thrust.
Kwajijik!
Her fist drove down through Gelagon's torso and ended it. With a ruined dorsal arm and a crushed upper frame, the machine toppled. It had no path left to victory against Calsira's Bodenkender.
She ran that fight smart from the first exchange. He was being played the whole time.
Calsira had turned the Gelagon pilot's hunger for close combat against him. She had deliberately opened the range, feigning a desire to stay at distance. When he finally committed to a mutual kill, she met it without panic, calm and precise, and took the win. Not a scrap of luck in it — pure skill.
Kwa-kwang!
"Hm?"
The instant the outcome locked in, an explosion bloomed at the Bodenkender's legs — not from outside fire. From inside.
There it is. But why this timing?
Puhwaak!
The moment the blast hit her legs, Calsira triggered the ejection system.
"Her judgment alone is ridiculous."
Most people would have frozen, scrambling to understand what was happening. She had lived so long under the knife that the second something went wrong, she was already gone.
Kwang-kwang-kwang!
Further detonations rippled through the frame. The Bodenkender collapsed, lifeless.
"Hm?"
And right after that—
The flow of killing intent just changed.
Below the trees, the shape of the battle had shifted.