The Mecha Awakens
Seated in the cockpit, Jincheon first searched for the control gloves and boots, each trailing a tangle of cables.
Fortunately, both were stowed somewhere easy to find. No struggle there.
Is this how you put these on?
He tugged the control gloves and boots on with clumsy, unpracticed hands. The sheer anticipation of boarding a mecha for the first time made even this fumbling preparation feel electric with thrill.
Once the gear was on, Jincheon slotted the USB-shaped master key into the port set into the console before him.
A deep, rising thrum answered him — and on the forward screen, cascades of technical jargon began scrolling past in a rapid downward rush.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Even Jincheon — a man who never lost his composure no matter the situation — felt his face flush and tremble with raw excitement. His legs jittered. His fists clenched and unclenched, over and over.
Then, after what felt to him like an eternity,
> All systems nominal.
> SYSTEM ONLINE.
A soft hiss filled the cockpit — and the dark, enclosed world around him transformed.
A full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree screen bloomed to life, painting the interior of the transport ship across every surface. When he looked down, he could see the mecha's own legs beneath him, so vividly that he almost believed he was floating in open air.
"Whoa…"
He breathed the word in pure awe — and his body, answering some reflex he didn't consciously choose, shifted in the seat.
A soft mechanical whine answered him.
"Hhk—?!"
The mecha's arm had twitched with him. He froze, startled, then forced his racing heart to settle and slowly raised one hand.
The same low whine. The arm rose with him.
"Heh… heh heh… HAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHA!"
A giant mecha moving at his command. For the first time since he had lost every one of his wives, Jincheon threw back his head and laughed like a madman.
Calsira had brought her own Gareld online as well, and her voice came through the comms.
"Comms. The comm unit is…"
The easy, absolute-master aura he usually wore vanished on the spot. He flailed like a raw recruit on his first day of enlistment.
"Look up. You'll see the comm switch and the frequency dial."
"Ah. Right. That."
Her calm advice settled him enough to lift his gaze. A small monitor waited overhead, a handful of icons arranged neatly across its surface. A pupil-tracking sensor must have been built in — a cursor glided smoothly across the screen in perfect time with his eyes.
He opened the channel and spoke.
"Ah — can you hear me?"
"Yes, I hear you. Think you'll be able to move properly?"
"I need to get used to it first."
He moved his hands deliberately, testing the mecha's response speed.
Point-one-four seconds of lag. And…
He caught the delay between his own motion and the machine's, then poured Tushinryeok into his limbs and unleashed a rapid flurry of Seizing Arts.
A sharp, staccato crack of air being split rang out — and for an instant his arms seemed to multiply into four or five.
The mecha whined and jerked, utterly unable to match the speed, thrashing through a series of bizarre, broken motions.
Fast, complex movements are beyond it.
He eased the pace by degrees, mapping Gareld's reaction window. Fortunately, the Calsorn Empire had subjected every mecha pilot to biomechanical enhancement procedures — the machine could keep up with a considerable amount of speed.
Next: locomotion.
This was the critical part. Jincheon spun his mind up to full capacity, dragging every scrap of theory he had accumulated into the open.
The control boots are supposed to be driven with the image of a light walk — ankles only.
If the whole knee swung through a large arc, the mecha's motion turned sluggish. "Ankles only" meant keeping the knee action fast, compact, and minimal.
Working from the expensive tutorial footage he had paid good credits for, Jincheon began to move with careful precision.
A heavy thud. A faint vibration traveled up through the seat.
He refused to rush. One slow step after another, a few circuits around the bay — and then, as if he had always known how, he lengthened his stride and headed for the transport's exterior at a brisk walk.
Boom. Boom. Boom-boom-boom-boom!
"Hahahahaha! Hwahahahahaha!"
Clumsy at first, then effortlessly smooth — his martial-honed senses adapted in moments. He tore across the vast hangar at a full run, a giant robot answering every command of his body. That single fact set his heart hammering and ripped peals of pure, unrestrained joy from his throat.
"Hrah!"
With a playfully exaggerated battle cry, he drove a fist into one of the Garelds standing outside.
A massive crash of metal on metal. The shock of impact rolled through the frame.
The Garelds outside had no master keys — no one could board them. Breaking one was no real loss.
"Wait—!"
Calsira, finished with her own acclimation, had come out of the transport as well. Her voice cut in urgently.
"We need to dismantle the Garelds outside for spare parts!"
She had already drawn up a thrifty plan: strip the exterior units for maintenance components.
"Ah. Right. Can't use them anyway — better as parts."
Fortunately, he hadn't completely lost his grip on self-control. Her shout hauled his reason back into place.
"Ahem."
With his wits restored, he became painfully aware of how undignified he had just been. He cleared his throat and looked pointedly elsewhere.
Calsira, who read people with practiced ease, chose not to poke the sore spot. She let it pass as if she hadn't noticed.
"Get used to the mecha by putting it through a variety of tasks. For now, let's move every Gareld in the hangar into one place."
"They're eating up a ridiculous amount of unnecessary space, that's for sure."
The Garelds stood at regular intervals, each one claiming far more floor than it needed. Jincheon and Calsira set to work relocating them — training and labor in a single stroke.
Given a mecha's mass, the only practical method was to wrap both arms around a unit's torso and haul it along. For Jincheon — whose spatial awareness and raw sensory acuity were overwhelming, but whose experience was near zero — any and every way of moving the machine counted as the best possible training.
Boom-boom-boom-boom! Crash! Boom-boom-boom-boom!
He started slow, walking the Garelds into position one careful step at a time. Before long he was working at speed, the motions already settling into muscle memory.
Watching him, Calsira caught a glimpse of raw talent.
He looked like a complete first-timer at the start…
Mecha were more delicate than they appeared. Balance was easy to lose. Novice pilots often broke into a cold sweat just walking, and without talent, even learning to run could take a month or more.
Jincheon, though — he had staggered for a moment, then become competent as if he had piloted mecha years ago.
It was an illusion born of ignorance. She simply didn't know that the senses he possessed were nothing like an ordinary person's.
No need to worry about him. I should just focus on getting comfortable myself.
Calsira had always flown with stick-type controls. The control gloves and boots were an entirely new language, and she needed to learn it. Jincheon was growing on his own; she turned her full concentration on the new interface and began her own adaptation drills, shifting Garelds across the hangar alongside him.
"The space opened right up."
Calsira had packed the Garelds into a corner in tight attention stances, pressed as close together as they would go, and she surveyed the expanded hangar with clear satisfaction. Getting used to a control scheme so different from stick-type had cost her a fair amount of sweat — but the results were real.
"Hah. Heh heh heh… Khheh heh heh…"
"That happy about it?"
"It was my dream. You wouldn't understand this kind of achievement — or this kind of joy."
In this world, people boarded robots by enlisting in the military or scraping together enough money for a used mecha. From that vantage, Jincheon was incomprehensible. A world that only ever allowed you to dream of such things in fantasy, and a world where — with some effort — you could actually pilot a robot: the two would never share the same sensation, not in a lifetime.
"We've got time to spare. No need to rush. Let's just get comfortable."
He said it lightly, then reached over and gave Calsira's head a gentle pat. He had watched her struggle with the new controls, and this was his way of offering encouragement.
"…Okay."
She was already an adult, but being patted on the head like a child still felt good. She answered with a soft, pleased smile.
"I'm heading over to that Orobece woman next. What about you?"
"I'll keep exploring the facility a bit more. I want to see how far our clearance actually lets us go."
The transport held mecha armaments as well, but using them inside the hangar risked destroying something critical. Calsira intended to study the base maps more carefully — to find useful supplies and a proper training ground.
"You'll be all right on your own?"
From this point on, Jincheon planned to break Heliane in and make her his. Demigod-level strength or not, this was a world where killing a person was almost casually easy. The thought of Calsira moving alone left him uneasy. If a defense system suddenly activated and turned on her, even he wouldn't be able to protect her in time.
"Don't worry. In a nano suit with a laser rifle, I can handle defense emplacements armed with heavy weapons."
The shields built into Calsorn Empire nano suits recharged over time. No matter how dangerous the situation, as long as she wore one, she wouldn't die for nothing.
With that, Calsira set off on her own to explore the base.
I keep wanting to overprotect her.
She was the first woman he had claimed since losing his wives. The urge to smother her in unnecessary protection and attention ran deep. But that kind of overprotectiveness only stunted growth. A person had to overcome ordinary hardship and adversity on their own if they were ever going to become stronger — so he forced himself to let her go explore alone.
Having sent Calsira on her way, Jincheon turned his steps toward the place where the Orobece woman, Heliane, was being held.
"Nngh! Hhh—!"
A grinding strain of effort. Heliane's arms were bound together and lashed to the post of a soldiers' bunk bed. She threw every ounce of strength she had into working the ropes free.
This time, though, the knots had been tied properly. Every struggle came to nothing.
"Haa… damn it…"
In the end, her strength gave out first. She sagged against the restraints.
Father… what am I supposed to do…?
Unable to move, her mind filled with every stray thought it could find. She sank into a knot of torment.
Is killing that woman really true revenge?
She had abandoned everything for vengeance — but even so, her basic reason had not been completely swallowed.
If only she'd been arrogant… if only she hadn't felt any guilt at all…
The Calsira that Heliane had seen and felt carried none of the characteristic Zabalcan pride. If anything, the woman seemed burdened by guilt over killing Heliane's father — seemed genuinely sorry. If she had at least justified herself, claimed she had only been fighting to survive, none of this confusion would exist.
A soft electronic tone. The door opened just as her thoughts tangled themselves around what to do with her hatred for Calsira.
"You…!"
In the same instant, Calsira vanished from her mind — replaced by a surge of pure fury aimed at the hateful Terra man, Jincheon.
"Good. Still full of fight. A woman only looks appetizing when she's thrashing around nice and fresh."
He delivered the kind of line that would have socially buried him on the galactic network without a flicker of shame, and walked toward Heliane.