I'll Buy You Time
"Move!"
"Yes!"
Heliane ordered Calsira, who was covering her, to clear out, then opened Saisalas's chest plating and fired the plasma diffusion cannon.
A roaring cascade of force tore through the void. The instant Calsira's Gareld slipped free, plasma masses bloomed outward like shotgun scatter into the space she had just vacated.
Explosions bloomed one after another. Heliane had aimed for the densest cluster of enemies, and the diffusion blast destroyed two mechas outright while dealing solid damage to three more.
"Hup!"
Calsira slammed her thrusters into a hard acceleration the moment the damaged enemies hesitated, and her laser sword carved clean through one mecha's torso.
"Too slow!"
With the ninety-five-millimeter machine gun in her other hand she shredded the cockpit of a second unit that had been a beat late to react. The instant a high-heat warning blared, she dumped thruster output and dropped away beneath the line of fire.
Laser fire scythed through the space above her head. She answered with a burst that punched straight into the shooter's power core and detonated it. Three mechas gone in a heartbeat.
"Haha! This is incredible, Unnie! The difference between having Inner Qi and not having it is this huge?!"
"Agreed. Let's finish them fast."
"Yes!"
Inner Qi had sharpened Heliane and Calsira's senses to a razor edge and freed them, to a meaningful degree, from the crushing press of high acceleration. Both were already experienced pilots; the synergy pushed their skill well past what they had shown before.
Those two… the machines help, but their skill is the real thing.
Beatrix, watching their performance unfold, found herself wanting them. At first she had assumed they ran with Jincheon because birds of a feather flocked together—the same arrogant type. But unlike that insufferable man, the two women had proven themselves diligent. While Jincheon wandered around cracking jokes, they spent nearly every free hour in the training halls and virtual combat programs.
Women that hardworking and that skilled… why the hell are they sticking with a man like him?
Heliane and Calsira—earnest, capable, and already proven—were starting to look like prizes worth claiming. Wars were fought with numbers, yes, but an ace pilot who could create variables was a strategic resource of the highest order.
There was no time for daydreams. Every second counted. Beatrix crushed the stray thoughts and focused on cutting down mechas as fast as possible, watching for any opening to disrupt the enemy ships.
The battle currently split into three fronts.
Beatrix's mecha force against the rebel mecha force.
A rebel mecha detachment that had used numerical superiority to swing wide, and the rebel warships locked in a gunnery duel with the Rastold Silverion.
And Jincheon with the knights.
Honestly, Jincheon's scrap barely qualified as a front—a small, vicious skirmish. But everyone knew what would happen the moment he got free.
While Heliane and Calsira joined Beatrix and the allied side began chewing through the enemy at speed, Jincheon—still tangled with three knights—was feeling the limits of the Gareld.
Tch. The Gareld can't keep up with my reaction speed.
Of course it couldn't. No mecha in existence could match him. He had always identified the Gareld's ceiling and deliberately throttled his own responses to fit inside it. The problem was that his skill as a pilot had grown. Experience had sharpened him until the machine he had once ridden at its absolute limit was hitting that wall all over again.
If he slowed himself any further, he would be no better than any other pilot. Either the Gareld needed an internal overhaul, or he needed a B-class mecha or better.
That problem can wait.
Right now he had knights trying to kill him.
"You miserable little fly!"
"We can't keep getting hung up on this bastard!"
"We end this in one go!"
The knights knew their allies were being pushed back by the Imperial Guard and felt the pressure of every wasted second. They spread out to restrict Jincheon's escape vectors and launched guided missiles from their shields.
Jincheon simply slipped into the open space they had left and shot every missile out of the sky.
"Now!"
One knight found a gap in the Gareld through the glare of the detonating warheads and fired the laser from his lance, aiming to punch straight through a frame still busy intercepting missiles—
A hard thruster burn spun the Gareld on its axis. The laser scythed past empty air.
"Huh?"
The knight who had been certain of the hit went rigid. The Gareld had not shifted position—only rotated in place—and the dodge looked far too clean to be luck, far too impossible to be deliberate.
"Th-that…!"
"How…?!"
The other knights stared at the untouched Gareld in open shock.
"You leave an opening like that and expect to live?!"
The knight who had fired the laser failed to follow up. Jincheon read the hesitation as a fatal gap, floored the throttle, and dumped the engine into full acceleration.
Engine light flared. In a blink the Gareld filled the knight's main camera. The pilot flinched and tried to reverse—
Jincheon's ninety-five-millimeter machine gun was already chewing the mecha's head to scrap.
"Main camera—!"
A heavy impact slammed into him from behind. The Gareld that had been in front of him was suddenly at his back, locking onto his frame.
Jincheon used the enemy mecha as a living shield and charged the remaining knights as if daring them to shoot.
The captured pilot felt the full force of Jincheon's acceleration through his suit and screamed under the crushing pressure. Blood drained toward his legs; blackout clawed at the edges of his vision. He thrashed the controls, desperate to break free.
"You coward!"
"Have you no shame?!"
The remaining two knights, furious at the open use of their comrade as a shield, could not fire freely.
"Sh… shoot…! Just shoot…!"
The trapped knight ordered them over the channel, then cut the link so his own groans would not make them hesitate. The two knights steeled themselves to carry their comrade's death and opened fire. Lasers from their lances punched through the mecha Jincheon was using as cover.
The power core detonated.
They assumed Jincheon had died with it.
The Gareld came through the blast light untouched and still charging. The instant Jincheon had seen energy gathering in the lances, he had shoved the human shield aside, read the laser trajectories, and rolled the Gareld onto its side.
"That's impossi—!"
A laser sword punched through one knight's cockpit and reduced him to ash before the shock could finish forming on his face.
"You… you monster!!"
The last knight poured every weapon he had left at the Gareld. Three of them had barely managed to hold even ground; alone, landing a hit was a fantasy. Jincheon jinked the frame in a hard zigzag, snapped into sharp turns at the apex of each vector, and did not take a single round.
Still mid-evasion, he fired the laser rifle and shattered the enemy's lance. Missiles spent. Secondary weapons spent. Nothing left.
What waited for him was a laser sword driving straight for his cockpit.
"Yippee~ Loot acquired~"
Jincheon pried the circular shield with its built-in anti-beam barrier off the knight's limp mecha. Fortunately it was not hard-locked to a specific unit. The missiles were gone, but the barrier alone made the salvage more than worth it. He locked the shield mount onto his left arm and turned toward the allied lines.
Charging the enemy ships alone won't accomplish much. I need a seriously big gun.
He could sense a warship's power core and land a pinpoint strike, but regular military vessels all carried shields as standard. Nothing he currently carried could break them.
This fight had clarified what he needed.
A higher-performance mecha than what he was flying now.
A high-output weapon capable of punishing a warship.
Of the two, the mecha came first. His skill kept climbing; if the machine could not keep up, he would have to keep throttling himself down to match it. Force a growing talent into a C-class box long enough and it would calcify there.
The Empress Dowager could solve that problem. Jincheon turned to rejoin the fighting allies—
"Hm?"
Killing intent washed over him from a direction that should have been empty. He snapped his gaze toward the source.
"Damn it…!"
Something was coming in from beyond radar range. He abandoned the rendezvous and cut onto a new vector.
Thirty to forty mechas of the same class as the knights he had just killed were burning toward them on external booster units. Someone had clearly staged them in advance with bolt-on boosters so they would not lose the Empress Dowager's party. There was no other way that many units appeared this cleanly out of nowhere.
They never expected a force that had been hunted down to the last of its supplies to try a frontal breakthrough.
If even half those knights had been here from the start, this one-sided slaughter would never have happened.
Every knight I killed had been bio-augmented—faster reactions, better skill than a normal pilot. If that many join the fight, this gets ugly.
Jincheon judged that pilots of comparable caliber arriving in force would tip the entire engagement.
"Where do you think you're going?! Get back here at once!"
Beatrix, forced to rely on radar, saw Jincheon break formation without warning and barked the recall order over the channel.
"Open an escape route for our side. I'll buy as much time as I can."
"What? Buy time? What are you even—"
"No time to talk!"
The serious face and raised voice were nothing like his usual self. Confusion flickered across Beatrix's expression.
Wh-what…? This pressure…?
On the screen, Jincheon's face held not a trace of playfulness. Heliane and Calsira had always said that if he cut the nonsense and got serious he became a striking man—and the Jincheon in front of her now was a different person entirely.
He closed her mouth with sheer presence and burned toward the incoming enemy.
"Ugh…!"
Beatrix, briefly crushed under that force of will, recovered a second later and opened her mouth to argue—
"Captain! Mechas approaching this vector at high speed! Transmitting coordinates now!"
The Rastold's operator cut in, and she had no choice but to shut up.
"This is…?"
The radar feed from the Rastold confirmed it. The enemy was coming from exactly the direction Jincheon had flown.
"How…?"
That he had detected them first was one thing. That a mercenary would deliberately take a risk like this made no sense by any rule she understood. An ordinary merc would have seen the gap and run.
I've got my female candidates here. No way I'm letting them die.
The Empress Dowager and the Guard Captain were both beautiful and gifted in their own fields—beings who carried the kind of "light" Jincheon wanted. If Beatrix ever learned that was his reasoning she would probably shoot him in the back, but she did not know, and the mystery of why a man like him would risk himself for them left her thoughts briefly tangled.
"All hostiles in our sector eliminated, Captain!"
A subordinate's report—her own mecha force finished with its assigned targets—cut cleanly through the noise in her head.
"All units, charge the enemy ships! Damage them as hard as you can!"
"Yes, ma'am!"
Survive first. Kill what was in front of them. Anything else was a distraction that would only dull the edge.
Beatrix ordered the charge on the enemy fleet—yet somehow the image of Jincheon's face, stripped of every scrap of playfulness, stayed burned behind her eyes.