Chapter 449: Round 1: Endless Sea

[MAP: ENDLESS SEA]

Lucky, Neville thought. How unbelievably lucky.

His mecha was a Reaper class. It was built for exactly this type of map.

On a map with no land, with no place to set down and let your power core breathe, that loadout was worth agonizing its weight.

He could already hear his thrusters thrumming in idle, eating fuel just to hover.

Which meant his opponent’s thrusters would be in for trouble.

Three kilometers across the water, in a cockpit twice the size of Neville’s, Lilianna cursed under her breath.

"Tch."

Lilianna’s mecha was a heavy assault frame.

A walking anchor, on a map like this.

’Damn it,’ said the voice in her head. ’You have eleven minutes of full thruster output before reserve drains below combat threshold. Less if you fire the beam launchers. Less still if you unfold the wing cannons.’

"I know."

’Then stop staring and get to work!’

Lilianna tapped a sequence on her left control panel. Wing locks released with a pneumatic hiss-clank.

The twin great wings spread to their full span, and the Bastion’s silhouette tripled.

Her HUD flickered, and a small red dot pulsed at the very edge of her optical range with a username: NEVILLE.

[MATCH START IN: 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...]

A bell-like ping rang through the cockpit.

Lilianna narrowed her eyes and the thrusters closer to Neville’s direction.

Her mecha thrusters roared loudly.

Twin afterburners blazed along the spine, white-blue and screaming, and the entire frame surged upward in a long climbing arc.

’Up and then drop.’ The voice in her head said. ’Use gravity to your advantage. That Reaper might be fast, but a clean overhead slice from terminal velocity ends it in one beat. Even if he dodges, the shockwave pushes him into the water. The thrusters will intake moisture, and the intake of moisture means a stutter. That stutter is all we need.’

Lilianna silently nodded and pushed to ascend.

As she climbed higher and higher, her altimeter ticked upward in cheerful little numbers.

Eight hundred meters, twelve hundred, two thousand.

The thin clouds began to part around her wings in lazy spirals, and her mecha’s thrusters whined.

It seemed that this mecha was just too heavy. Even with her wing thrusters dumping every joule they had into vertical lift, the climb felt so slow and dragging.

’Drop in three.’

Lilianna inverted the Bastion at the apex, and the world started rolling overhead and below all at once. The endless sea spun beneath her.

Down there, a thin charcoal blade of a mecha was hovering in idle.

’Target locked. Drop.’

Lilianna killed the thrusters and let the gravity do its work.

For one heartbeat, her mecha simply fell. The five hundred metric tons of armor and weaponry are plunging through the simulated atmosphere.

Lilianna drew the great sword off her hip in a single motion. The blade made a sound, shhhhing of cooled alloy unsheathing as it cleared the magnetic clamp.

She angled the tip downward and initiated a perfect move.

A free-fall slice.

The wind howled around her cockpit, the audio simulator faithfully reproducing the rising roar of terminal velocity. Neville’s mecha grew larger in her crosshairs.

Closer

Closer —

’He’s moving.’

Move all you want, you’ll still end up between my blade!

Neville had seen the climb start the moment Lilianna’s wings unfolded. He hadn’t even needed to think through what Lilianna might be planning.

Heavy mecha. Up. Sword.

Neville smiled now, the corner of his mouth twitching inside the cockpit.

It was so obvious.

But Neville didn’t move yet. He waited until Lilianna’s mecha began its descent.

The sword was tip down with wings flared for stability. The white-blue afterburners were coughing up the occasional control burst to keep the descent straight.

The sound carried even at this distance, a long, building whoooomm.

Six hundred meters.

Four hundred.

Two hundred.

Neville’s thumbs flexed on the grip-sticks.

WHRRRRRRRR — KSSHH.

Both wing thrusters fired full reverse.

Neville’s mecha jolted sideways and performed a clean lateral hop of forty meters.

Behind him, the ocean literally exploded.

Lilianna’s great sword punched through the surface where Neville had been an instant before.

The water didn’t part, but it detonated into a column of spray geysering up around Lilianna’s mecha’s torso in a fan of pure white.

The shockwave hit Neville’s mecha a half-second later and rocked his frame ten degrees off vertical. Neville corrected it on instinct, and the heel thrusters began firing in microbursts to stabilize.

FWOOM.

Hiss.

Drip-drip-drip.

Lilianna’s mecha was half-submerged with its sword buried to the crossguard in the water. Its wings were now spread wide and dragging at the surface.

Neville did not waste this opportunity and had his left hand snapped open.

The slingshot on his hip kicked once, twice, three times — small staccato pops as he sent a rapid burst of micro-shells arcing across the gap.

They weren’t really meant to crack Lilianna’s mecha’s armor but rather to test it.

Tnk. Tnk.

Tnk. Tnk.

Four impacts, all tightly clustered on Lilianna’s mecha’s right pauldron.

Four chimes of metal-on-metal, there were no dents or damage made.

But Neville already expected this to happen.

Penetration depth: zero.

Spall pattern: even.

Plating composition: tri-layered with reactive interleave.

Estimated thickness at pauldron: eighteen to twenty centimeters.

Yeah, he thought, not getting through that with a slingshot.

In Lilianna’s mecha’s cockpit, Lilianna stared at her impact telemetry and felt the first prick of interest along her spine.

That dodge was so clean.

It was a perfectly calculated move.

Neville had waited until the sword was almost on him.

Ninety-five percent of experienced pilots would have evaded early on to avoid further damage and given her room to track. He had held on until the last second and then sidestepped far enough to take less damage.

’Damn it,’ she thought drily. ’Change of plans’

Lilianna’s mecha’s leg thrusters hissed to life, pushing it back up out of the water in a spray of foam. She wrenched the great sword free with a wet thrrrrk and let it hang at her side, dripping.

Across the simulated ocean, Neville’s mecha hung weightless on its wing thrusters, idle.

Still watching her movements.

Lilianna narrowed her eyes inside her cockpit. "This slut is really testing my patience!"

’He outranges your sword but undermatches your beam launchers and missiles. He has a speed advantage on all three thrust vectors. He cannot kill you in one strike, but we can theoretically kill him in one strike of the great sword if you land a hit.’

"I already know that. Give me a solution."

’Just continue to attack!’

Lilianna rolled her shoulders inside the harness and brought both forearm beam launchers up to firing position.

FWAACK-CHOOM.

Two pencil-thin beams of supercharged plasma lanced across the water at the speed of light.

In a normal simulation, that would have ended the round. The beams could travel instantly, and they could not be dodged.

But the in-game beam launcher had a quarter-second priming flicker as the capacitor charged. A trained pilot could predict that, and if it was a fast one, they could even move on it.

But somehow, this nobody, Neville, managed to move around it.

Neville’s mecha twisted in midair, a corkscrew that any heavier mecha would have torn its servos performing.

The twin beams hissed past his torso close enough to scorch the silver thread off his side scales.

The water behind him flashed in two parallel lines, white steam rising in a wall.

Ksssshhhhh.

Neville’s mecha kicked off the rising steam, literally using the thermal updraft to bump his thrust efficiency for half a second.

It burned forward, low and fast, skimming a meter above the wave tops.

Lilianna’s missile pods opened with a series of mechanical clack-clack-clacks.

TKTKTKTKTKTKTKTK — FOOSH FOOSH FOOSH FOOSH.

Twelve micro-missiles spat into the air on plumes of orange exhaust. It was fanning out in a starburst before their tracking systems acquired the data, and they all bent inward toward Neville’s mecha.

Neville’s mecha didn’t slow down and pulled up sharply. He made it climb thirty meters in a heartbeat, then snapped a hard right.

The missiles tracked its movements while his mecha cut left.

The missiles tracked its movements against, and Neville’s mecha killed his climb. It dropped sharply by twenty meters in a stomach-folding plunge.

The missiles tracked their movements again.

’Haha. They’re locked on him. He cannot shake that with maneuver alone.’

The voice in Lilianna’s head sounded almost lazy with satisfaction.

’Six seconds to impact.’

But Neville’s left forearm had already started moving. The magnetic dagger clamp released with a soft chk, and a slim black blade flicked into Neville’s mecha’s hand.

He flung it, and the dagger spun out into the missile cloud. The repulse core flared like a tiny blue match.

The first missile caught the dagger’s wash and pitched sideways. It slammed into a second missile in a small, angry whump of fire.

Whump. Whump. Whump.

Daisy-chain detonation and three missiles gone. The rest spread wider as their proximity sensors registered the explosion and recalculated.

The dagger curled around in a wide arc, its repulse core sputtering. Then, it slapped back into his forearm holster with a clean magnetic clack.