Chapter 47 #3
“Game time.” He gave me a nod, before he charged in, dodging a blast from the mouth of the spherical cannon, then ripping through its metal casing in a single motion. He was already onto the next one before the first one had even finished exploding.
If that was his weaponry at 45% power, I felt sorry for any enemies he might encounter when he was at full strength.
I followed his lead, darting around blasts, getting in close, and rending the pods in two, left and right. Compared to the men I’d had to fight against in VR, these were predictable and easy to destroy.
In the corner of my HUD, a credit count appeared, rolling upward with every slain drone.
The numbers weren’t huge—at least not for these easy, low level enemy units, but seeing the count climb gave me a surge of adrenaline.
If I killed enough of these, I could make enough to cover any food we wanted once I got back to Protectorate 005.
The possibilities were endless. The sheer strength of my Shinka was liberating, the heat of explosions from every destroyed sentry was exhilarating, and the realization that I might find financial security at the other side of all this for both myself and my brother, was brilliantly motivating.
We cleared out the cluster quickly, before moving onto the next batch of lights in the distance.
“It feels good, doesn’t it?” Breaker beamed through our channel, and I simply smiled to myself.
“As intense as battles are in VR, feeling the real weight and resistance of the machine when you shove a sword through enemy armor is impossibly satisfying.”
“Well, you’re doing great for a first timer.
” Breaker barely got out the words, before an enemy Ghul appeared behind him and came out swinging for his head.
It was a split second between the ambush and Breaker spinning around, pulling one of his weapons, activating the blade, and shoving it clean through the enemy’s cockpit.
I was looking right at him, and I couldn’t have even reacted that quickly.
How Breaker had sensed a unit coming in behind him, then executed the drone with such brutal efficiency, was beyond comprehension.
I guess this was the difference between me and a two-year-trained pilot.
“Enough talk. Let’s keep the credits rolling.
You’re going to need your own bike eventually if you’re going to be a permanent part of the team. ”
Those words struck something in me. I really had felt like I’d become part of a team. As long as Elio could get past his hang ups, I wasn’t ready to give up when I finally felt like I belonged somewhere. I’d prove myself today, and he’d accept me.
With an extra surge of determination, I joined the fray of Ghuls, using everything I’d learned to dodge and execute one machine at a time.
In open space, I was managing new dimensions of movement, monitoring enemies above, below, front, and side.
What should have felt overwhelming was surprisingly intuitive and freeing, and the brilliantly engineered propulsion centers of the Shinka were perfectly placed for dynamic direction changes and well balanced six-axis movements.
The mock Ghuls were much more challenging than the tanks, however, and our weakened weapons took several extra hits to penetrate and destroy the drone armor.
An energy pellet or three grazed my armor in an evolving dance of destruction, but once I started to get into a rhythm, it wasn’t long before I was able to predict the the pre-programmed strategies.
Without the human factor, these Ghuls were nothing, and it became obvious exactly how artificial that intelligence truly was.
On my HUD, a leaderboard was counting kills for each pair.
Predictably, Sebastian and Elio were slaughtering enemies with reckless abandon, securing the top spot by a significant margin.
The pairing was almost unfair, really. Though Breaker and I were more than holding our own, hovering around fourth place, mostly because of him, and only partially because of me.
I wasn’t useless, but Breaker easily destroyed two or three for every one I did.
He was a monster, and I was still earning my claws, trying to get used to the real strain of the real mental bridge and movements.
Though the present company certainly made the whole exercise feel more fun than vicious.
Fun?
I wasn’t supposed to be having fun, but this really did feel more like a game than a battle.
Even though dying here would be real death, the risks and consequences didn’t register because there weren’t human lives on the other side, and we could call to have our opponents disabled at any time.
We had fail safes that wouldn’t exist in a real war that offered unrealistic comfort.
Maybe that was the point. Make it feel like a game so whenever we finally ended up in real combat, we would already be desensitized to destroying units like this. It was building instincts in hopes that our lizard brains would remember to use them when push came to shove.
That was how it had to be. If I had to kill someone face-to-face, bare hands to skin, I didn’t know that I would be able to do it.
But if I had to kill someone in a faceless machine, I could trick myself into believing they were just a mindless drone in the big, wide galaxy.
It wasn’t that simple, yet it had to be that simple.
Dehumanizing the enemy was the only way to justify it all.
That was something Vann, time and again, had said he could never do.
I hope I can.
I was mid swing, about to take the head off of another Ghul, when my target was ripped through space, propelled a hundred meters to the west, exploding under the impact of a powerful rifle.
I shot my gaze to the source—barely necessary, as Vetala was in our cluster of Ghuls and ripping them apart within seconds of his first kill shot.
A master class of precision and efficiency, I could only stare as he dodged every thrust, shot, and swing of the enemy, no matter how many surrounded him and how many were attacking at once.
Then he reversed the moves and slaughtered an entire horde on his own in a spinning world wind of his dual wielded violet swords.
Just as Sebastian Takeyama always was, he was as elegant as he was lethal, without an ounce of hesitation in his artful violence.
“Your numbers are appalling. Keep up if you don’t want to be demoted.
” Sebastian’s voice entered my ears with the firmness expected of my Unit Captain.
He’d opened a group channel where four names were listed.
It would be redundant for me to list who he’d included in this preset group.
I should have felt honored to have been added to his little team of misfits, but there was no friendliness in his words.
The statement wasn’t playful. He spoke to me in a way that was scathing and annoyed.
Bitter, I’d call it. Breaker and I were ranked fourth—wait, no, third out of 500 teams, so the only thing appalling about our numbers was that someone who bested him in a simulated training exercise was beneath him in this real one.
I wasn’t remotely ashamed to admit I was new to this, and it didn’t feel the same as VR at all. I had nothing to feel bad about.
“I’ll catch you soon, I promise,” I retorted, not interested in taking that kind of admonishment, even from someone as far above me as Sebastian.
Slowly but surely, both my heroes and my villains had been humanized before me, and I had every intention of making sure they recognized me as a peer and not a burden.
“I’d love to see it,” he said with a hint of a challenge, losing a touch of his bite. I appreciated the encouragement. I would gladly show him that my VR performances weren’t flukes, and I was here for a reason.
I split my staff back into dual blades, and took on two Ghuls at once. I shifted my priority around the expanse of space, choosing drones that were targeting others, taking advantage of the distraction to keep increasing my kills with minimal risk.
The more I moved, the lighter and less stressful the connection felt, and I was finding a comfort in my synchronization while spreading terror with my swords. Between Breaker and I, we were quickly closing the gap on the rank two team.
Minding my vitals and adrenaline levels, I took a brief moment to breathe, when a blade from an enemy Ghul struck my shoulder from behind, searing the metal, and sending a sudden burst of pain through my real joints. I bit my lip to turn a yelp into a grunt, then whirled on the enemy.
I hadn’t even fully spun around before Lamassu shoved a massive wedge like blade through the Ghul’s stomach, then ripped the weapon upward, cutting through thick metal and circuitry to rend its chest and head in half. The drone exploded and Elio kicked the disembodied legs into the debris field.
“Be careful,” Elio snapped, his communication channel being a private link, temporarily overriding the group chat. “This isn’t like the simulation where you can lose an arm and keep full sync, then just skip off to the lockers afterward. You need to stay on your guard at all times.”
“You don’t have to protect me just because you found out I’m a girl.” I rolled my eyes in my cockpit. Was this how it was going to be now? He was going to treat me like he wanted me to live and prosper?
It was actually weird that that offended me so much, in hindsight, but I didn’t come here to be coddled.
“I’m not protecting you because you’re a girl. I’m protecting you because you’re an idiot.” He scoffed right back at me.
Oh, well that was okay then.
“I was handling everything just fine until you two showed up.” I demonstrated that fact by taking down another enemy Ghul while I chastised him. Multi-tasking like a pro over here.
But of course, Elio just had to correct me by taking down two Ghuls in a single swing, using that massive, violent instrument of his, and adding a “I’m going to need you to handle it better,” through the line.
Elio typically fought with his hands in training, but in his personal Shinka, he carried a two-handed energy sword that was as long as his unit was tall.
The blade was single sided, shaped like a heavy wedge, giving it the characteristics of an ax combined with the length of a blade, made more lethal by the hot energy that surged along the cutting edge.
He tore and severed his way through the drones with surprising ease and agility considering its unwieldy size, while he fended off enemies in his periphery with projectile shots from his back unit that looked like glowing white feathers.
It was beautiful and terrifying brutality, in a perfect foil to Sebastian’s poetic fluidity. At odds or not, beauty and skill were still beauty and skill, and I would never pretend they had anything less.
Conversely, Breaker continued to have the most unreadable movement of anyone and anything, plowing through drones like a hurricane.
At one moment, he’d rip a Ghul apart with his claws.
The next, he’d grab a cylinder from his waist belt, twirl it in his hands, then rend the enemy into a thousand pieces with a giant plasma scythe.
He was a virtuoso of blades of all kinds, as he switched weapons on the fly, perfectly calculating the best tool for every job, based on range, speed, and impact requirements.
How was he ranked in the hundreds? I doubted I’d be anywhere near where I was ranked now if he’d been my opponent.
Elio liked to point out that I didn’t fight like someone who had been forced into mandated training, but Breaker was completely out of left field with his jack of all trades weaponry, and his animalistic claws.
Compared to the three of them, I was so ordinary and plain. I never would have beaten a single one of them if they were in their personal machines. I’d have to work harder to develop my own style so they’d be as in awe of me as I was of them.
“Not bad, eh?” Conrad reminded me he, unfortunate for us all, still existed. “I’ve seen these three fight together hundreds of times, and it never disappoints.”
“If destruction were an art form, they’d rival the old masters,” I responded honestly. There was no reason to discount their ability to anyone. Not even myself.
“How about I teach you a way to impress those old masters,” he nudged playfully.
“Activate the sniper cannon, and show me what you’ve got.
Take out one target at a time before they get a chance to kill all of them.
I’d advise starting with the unit about to engage with Takeyama from X-0044, Y-6512, Z-1298. ”
The unit was heading straight for Sebastian, who had his hands full swapping blows with two others, and for once, I actually liked the way Conrad thought.
I backed away from the conflict, landing on a platform that would be able to take the recoil of my rifle without propelling me backwards through space, then I took aim.
“Target Acquired,” I said, trying to get in the habit of being more formal when I spoke to my Spotter, regardless of how unprofessional he was himself. “Executing.”
Focus. I locked on through my scope, adjusting for speed and trajectory.
In the stillness of space, secured in an isolated training sphere, wind and gravity were a non-issue, and all I had to do was predict the enemy like a moving target.
One shot, directly through the core of the Ghul, and the machine was exploding in blue plumes of fire.
“X-0120, Y-6473, Z-1151.” Conrad said next.
“Executing.”
Explosions rang out from every directions, while over ten thousand drones were being ripped to shreds by 1000 frontline Shinka pilots, and the thrill was unmatched by anything I’d ever experienced.
In all my trials and tribulations until this point, this was everything I dreamed it might be. Tension and stress drained out of me with every satisfying pull of the trigger.
I belonged here, and I’d show them all I was an equal.