Victory's Turning Point
"Squad 12 wiped out!"
"The Vulcan is requesting reinforcements!"
Bad news poured in from every direction without pause.
The enemy outnumbered them two-point-three to one, so the situation was hardly surprising — and yet Jotala's expression remained unshaken.
"Good. We're holding better than I expected!"
Their own losses were heavy, but the dense web of defensive installations she'd laid down beforehand had bought them more breathing room than anyone had counted on. Grim reports still crackled across the channels, yet here and there teams were racking up kills of their own thanks to those same fortifications.
"What about those mercenaries?"
"One of them is still tearing through the enemy fleet. The other two are rotating in and out of the fight one at a time."
Gebel, who had finally gathered his wits enough to survey the battlefield, answered Jotala's question with a crisp report.
"Jincheon, was it? He's living up to that big mouth of his."
She had registered the mechas of Jincheon, Calsira, and Heliane in advance, so she knew exactly who had charged the enemy fleet alone. The fact that he was every bit as skilled as he'd claimed brought her a quiet surge of relief. Dozens of reserve units were locked in a chase after that single pilot, unable to rejoin the main battle — and that alone was worth every credit of the four hundred thousand she'd paid.
Reserves weren't merely for rotating out exhausted allies. They were the critical force you threw in to shore up a collapsing line or to widen a crack the moment the enemy started to break. With those reserves wasted hunting one mercenary, Jincheon had already earned his fee several times over.
"The other two are exceptional as well. Every sector they enter is holding up better than the rest of the line. You don't pull that off unless you can read the flow of a battlefield."
Both the Zabalcan and the Orobece boasted no shortage of elite pilots. The truly strange part was watching two races that regarded each other as mortal enemies stroll around as if they were the best of friends.
Then, while Jotala was still juggling responses across the board, one of the operators called out in a voice thick with disbelief.
"Explosion signature in the enemy fleet! One cruiser just vanished!"
"What?"
She snapped her eyes to the radar, half-convinced she'd misheard — and there it was. An enemy cruiser had simply disappeared. Near the empty space where it had been, an allied IFF marker was weaving back and forth at impossible speed.
"Don't tell me… one mecha just took out a cruiser…?"
A cruiser was smaller than a battleship, but properly handled it could pack enough firepower to gut one. Plenty of commanders even preferred a heavily modified cruiser as their flagship for the superior speed and flexibility. Under normal circumstances, destroying a cruiser required at least ten mechas equipped with anti-ship weaponry — and that was assuming the cruiser was alone. Add destroyer escorts or supporting mechas, and the required force ballooned exponentially.
Yet a C-class mecha, locked in a running fight with the enemy reserves and carrying no anti-ship armament whatsoever, had just erased one from existence.
Any veteran officer with real combat experience would have told you to stop spouting nonsense. And yet it had just happened in front of their eyes.
"Confedon fleet, full stop! Half of Confedon's mechas are pulling off the battlefield!"
"What? Why would they— ah!"
What Confedon had wanted when he knelt before Crymal was revenge. Until now he had fought as the head of a faction, aiming for victory. But the moment the man who killed Jezer — a brother in all but blood — destroyed a cruiser right in front of him, something inside him had clearly snapped.
"This is our chance! Factor in the defensive installations and the mecha power gap is almost nothing!"
A fleet stripped of its mechas was nothing more than a tank rolling alone without infantry support.
"All fleets, drive into the front line! Hit their mechas with everything you've got! Move!"
Taking Gebel's advice, Jotala abandoned the cautious supporting fire she'd been maintaining in preparation for a fleet engagement and committed her ships fully to the mecha battle.
"Boss! Allied ships on both flanks are linking up!"
At the same moment, the vessels stationed at the far left and right edges of the encirclement began to join the main force. Their numbers weren't large, but in a fight where every scrap of firepower counted, they felt like a heavenly host.
"This is the turning point! Don't spare the ammo — take down every enemy mecha you can!"
With the cruiser's destruction, Jincheon had begun to rewrite the entire shape of the battle.
I still don't know how he killed that cruiser, but the man has nerves of steel. He knew full well Confedon would come after him for revenge, and he did it anyway.
While Jotala seized the opening Confedon had created, Crymal could only stare at the unfolding disaster in mounting disbelief.
A C-class mecha soloing a cruiser was already hard enough to swallow. Worse still was Confedon's sudden, catastrophic freelancing.
"Confedon! What the hell do you think you're doing?! Get that fleet moving and send those mechas back to the line!"
—Shut up! I'll never forgive that bastard who killed Jezer!—
"Tch…! That was an order! Do as I say, right now!"
Crymal's tentacles stretched taut with fury as he barked the command in a tone that left no room for argument.
—I only bowed my head for the sake of revenge! Get in my way and I'll kill you too!—
"!!"
Faced with Confedon's raw rage, Crymal's tentacles trembled as he forced the anger down. He wanted nothing more than to end the man on the spot — but Confedon was not fully under his command. Crymal had planned to deal with him however he pleased once the war was over, and Confedon had been prepared to accept that fate… after his revenge was complete.
Confedon cut the channel, brought his entire fleet to a dead stop, and began weaving a net of ships with the sole purpose of trapping Jincheon.
"That insane bastard…!"
Crymal had known the man was obsessed with vengeance, but watching him throw an entire war out the airlock still left him reeling.
"Damn it all! Who the hell is that mercenary?! What did he even do to take out a cruiser?!"
A pilot being hunted by the reserves who still managed to destroy a cruiser — that was the second shock of the day.
"Jotala's fleet is driving deep into the battle zone!"
"Allied units taking catastrophic losses!"
The moment Jotala committed her ships fully to the mecha fight, Crymal's mecha losses began climbing at a terrifying rate. In mecha anime, ships' point-defense cannons were the sort of thing pilots casually danced around. In a real melee, coordinated with friendly units, those same guns boasted frightening accuracy. And because they fired larger-caliber rounds than any mecha-mounted machine gun, a target without shields would be combat-ineffective after five or six hits.
"All fleets, charge main batteries and fire on the enemy ships in unison!"
Rather than dive into the same meat grinder, Crymal chose a different path: while the enemy fixated on mechas, he would smash their fleet to pieces.
We still have the numerical edge in mechas. If they want to focus on those, we'll take their ships with a gunnery duel.
Fully charged lasers lanced out from Crymal's fleet on his command. Jotala's ships immediately began evasive maneuvers, but several vessels already battered from the mecha engagement took fatal hits and broke apart.
"Damage report!"
"Three destroyers! Five corvettes destroyed! Two cruisers heavily damaged!"
"They won't be able to fire main batteries again right away! Tell every ship to dump all remaining power into the shields!"
Jotala confirmed the losses, but with the mecha fight swinging her way she chose defense over retaliation. Win the mecha battle, and Crymal's fleet would be left as helpless as tanks without infantry — that was her gamble. Crymal, for his part, answered with textbook doctrine.
Jotala's plan carried a heavy element of risk, but when you were already outnumbered, playing it safe only guaranteed defeat.
In the end, though, the war's outcome was decided somewhere neither of them had expected.
"Okay, this is starting to get annoying!"
The instant Jincheon destroyed the cruiser, Confedon's fleet — which had been advancing toward the front — slammed to a full stop. Half the mechas on the battlefield were recalled and thrown at him in a single overwhelming stroke. Even Jincheon couldn't help letting a strained remark slip out.
Tukakakakakang!
Rounds poured in from every angle. Jincheon ducked behind a convenient hull to break the line of fire —
Tatatatatata!
—only for a destroyer that had spotted his silhouette to open up with its point-defense cannons. He kicked the thrusters hard and slid sideways.
Kakakakang!
The shells that missed him punched straight into an allied ship instead. The sight told him everything he needed to know about the orders that had been issued.
"You're willing to eat friendly fire just to kill me? Hahahaha! That guy I killed must've really meant something to you!"
Hundreds of mechas and an entire fleet were trying to end him, and Jincheon's grin only grew wider.
"Alright. Time to piss them off a little more."
A delightful idea had just occurred to him. He locked his rifle across his back to conserve ammo and drew his laser sword instead.
Kwaaaaah—!
Then he discarded gravity, inertia, and every other inconvenient law of physics, launching into a high-speed weave that sent him knifing through Confedon's fleet like a golden ghost.
Tututatatatata——!
Ships firing interception barrages without the slightest concern for their own side, mechas flooding back from the main line — the difficulty had spiked far beyond anything he'd faced minutes earlier. To Jincheon, though, it was still more of the same. In the three-dimensional vastness of space, as long as you weren't already surrounded, there was always somewhere to run.
He threaded the gaps between hulls, diving hard then rocketing upward in sharp, punishing arcs. Only Jincheon could pull maneuvers like that. The pirates who tried to copy him felt their vision gray out under the g-forces, barely clinging to consciousness before swearing never to attempt it again.
Kwaaah!
"Oh? Someone's actually using their head."
Three pirates, realizing that chasing his tail forever was a losing game, predicted his path and cut him off head-on.
Puhwaaaak!
Tukakakang!
They loosed a volley of multi-launch missiles and hosed the space with machine-gun fire. Jincheon threw the Gareld into a violent right-hand turn, slipping past both the missiles and the stream of rounds. The missiles, however, were guided — they curved hard and came after him.
Kung!
He planted a foot on the flank of a nearby cruiser and kicked off at a diagonal, spinning the mecha in a tight roll as he swept the laser sword through a portion of the incoming fire.
Kwahak!
The blade punched up through the belly of a mecha that had been a heartbeat too slow to evade. One full rotation later, Jincheon kicked the bisected wreck away.
Kwakwakwang!
The pursuing missiles slammed into the tumbling corpse and detonated, the blast wave hurling the remaining pirates clear.
"Heh heh heh. They're furious."
He could feel the killing intent sharpening with every second he toyed with them at overwhelming speed, stacking damage and humiliation. The moment, he decided, had come.
"Alright then. Time to win this war."
Weaving through point-defense fire and mecha attacks alike, he turned and drove straight toward Crymal's fleet.
"After that bastard!"
"Kill him!"
Their boss's orders, combined with the sheer insult of watching the Gareld dance around them, sent Confedon's subordinates boiling after Jincheon in a rage.
"All ships! Do not let that son of a bitch escape!"
Confedon himself, his mind half-paralyzed by the need for revenge, committed every vessel under his command to the chase. For a Kelkata he had always possessed an unusual measure of cunning and judgment — but cornered with nowhere left to retreat, the race's native savagery finally swallowed him whole.
"Tell Crymal to get the hell out of the way!"
The last scrap of remaining reason at least managed to send a warning to Crymal's fleet.
"What?! That lunatic— stop him! Tell him to stop right now!"
Crymal had been focused on a battlefield that could shift at any second when the sudden transmission arrived. The sight of Confedon's entire fleet charging after the Gareld — straight toward him — left him frozen in horror. Moving a whole fleet to dodge a single high-mobility mecha was one of the stupidest things a commander could do.
But Confedon, with no path left open and his skull full of nothing but revenge and Kelkata ferocity, ignored the order and rammed straight in.
This was exactly why so many nations across the galaxy refused to put Kelkata in command positions.
The moment Jincheon slipped into Crymal's formation, Confedon's fleet piled in after him — and the collisions began on a catastrophic scale.
Kwang! Kuuung! Kwajijik! Kkeudeudeuk!
"God damn it! I never should have partnered with a Kelkata!!"
Crymal howled as Confedon, rage having erased even the most basic common sense, tore through his own lines.
Tututatatata——!
And because they were still spraying point-defense fire in a desperate bid to hit Jincheon, the damage to Crymal's fleet only grew worse.
"Huh? What the hell is that?"
"What's going on over there?"
The sight of Confedon's and Crymal's fleets tangled in a grinding mass of collisions rippled out to every pilot still fighting on the front line.
This is it!
Every cell in Gebel's body stood on end. He knew, with absolute certainty, that this was the turning point of the entire war.
"Open the channel! All frequencies!"
"Sir?"
"Do what Gebel says! Open the channel!"
The comms officer hesitated at the sudden order, but Jotala's shout cut through the confusion and made it happen. She had no idea what Gebel intended — only the bone-deep certainty that this was not the moment for explanations.
"What?!"
"When was there ever a plan like that?"
"We've been played?!"
Confedon's pirates had never heard a word of any such scheme and reeled in confusion — but Crymal's pirates, watching an allied fleet deliberately ram their stationary ships, felt a cold spike of dread. The point-defense fire chewing into their own hulls, the relentless drive deeper into their formation — it looked exactly like an attack on friendly forces.
"You bastards set us up!"
"No, wait—!"
Tukakakang! Peong!
A regular military force would have reported up the chain and demanded clarification. But the situation looked damningly convincing, and among pirates — who formed alliances for profit and betrayed them just as casually — trust had never existed in the first place.
Crymal's pirates didn't even bother reporting to their superiors. Convinced they had walked into a trap, they opened fire on Confedon's mechas. If it was a trap, their own lives were on the line — so they struck first.
"Fuck! I already said it wasn't—!"
"Just kill them all!"
Confedon's pirates, still grinding through Crymal's fleet with no orders from above and no way to explain themselves, took the one-sided assault until their own fury finally detonated and they fired back.
Meanwhile Crymal — the one man who might still have stopped the collapse — was still turning over possible responses in his head when Gebel's voice rolled across the open channel and froze his thoughts solid.
"What kind of bullshit is—!"
Kuuung!
"Guh?!"
He had been about to order his subordinates to ignore the nonsense and keep fighting when one of Confedon's ships slammed into his flagship, cutting the command short and leaving him momentarily speechless.
Those few lost seconds were all it took. The window to contain the disaster slammed shut.
Barely a handful of heartbeats. One sentence would have fixed everything.
The price of failing to speak it was catastrophic.
"Ha… haha……"
A three-way free-for-all. An allied fleet driving into his own. And the knowledge that every last piece of this nightmare had been set in motion by a single mecha.
A hollow, powerless laugh slipped from Crymal's lips.