Chapter 457: I’m A Human

Neville’s mecha twisted in mid-air.

His mecha folded almost in half at the waist joint. The blade-arm tucked, and the wing-thrusters flared to redirect his momentum sideways.

Three of the six missiles passed through the space his cockpit had occupied.

The other three hit a billboard.

[PROPERTY DAMAGE — PRETTIESTLILY +79,600 / NEVILLE +40]

[CIVILIAN CASUALTIES — PRETTIESTLILY +3,488 / NEVILLE +0]

Lilianna would have screamed if she hadn’t been so out of breath.

She had stopped him. She had stopped him. Her wings were still attached.

Lilianna let out a small smile, seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

’Don’t celebrate yet. He’s coming back.’

"I just took a breath."

’You’re slowing your reaction time. Your heart rate is up. He could guess the way your mecha resets between exchanges. You need to randomize your recovery cycles.’

"I don’t want to."

’You don’t want to?’ The voice in her head suddenly turned murderous. ’I thought we already talked about this earlier?’

"I don’t want you to nag me every single time." Lilianna realized halfway through that she had made a mistake and tried to reorganize her words. "I also need to focus on the fight if I want to win this game."

’Focus?’ The voice in her head scoffed, ’Sure. Let’s see how far that focus will get you.’

Neville’s mecha came around again and again, and again. He didn’t slow down between each attempt. Each repulse just pushed him back, but come back for another wave.

The first three attempts on the wing, she shut down with brute force.

The fourth Lilianna clipped him for the first time. A beam-launcher grazed across his thigh plating, leaving a streak of carbon scoring along the matte charcoal.

The fifth, he came in from a vector Lilianna hadn’t expected at all. Somewhere in that exchange, Neville would suddenly stop attacking the wing she had been guarding and start attacking the other wing. Her targeting reticle was on the wrong side of her field of view when his blade came down.

KRAK-SSSSCH.

The sound of a wing-cannon shearing free of its housing was unlike any other sound in the simulation.

A high metallic KRAK like a snapped femur, then a slow descending SSSSSCH. The severed unit tumbled away, sparking, trailing coolant, and fragments.

Lilianna’s left wing was gone.

Lilianna’s mecha’s balance lurched, and her flight stabilizers compensated sluggishly. Her HUD lit with damage warnings.

PORT DORSAL THRUSTER OFFLINE.

PORT WING CANNON SEVERED.

AUXILIARY MISSILE PORT — TWO/THREE.

’You let him do it again?’

"I didn’t —"

’You let him do exactly what I told you not to let him do.’

"I’m RECOVERING. I CAN still recover. The starboard wing has full ordnance, and the greatsword is still intact. I still have both forearm beam-launchers. I can still close this out, I just need—"

’You’re really useless. What did the master see in you that he put me inside you?’

The voice said it with a flat, freezing cold tone.

Lilianna suddenly went still. Her hands were still on the controls. Her mecha was still rotating, still bringing the greatsword around for a guard.

But in her head, she could feel something cold was crawling in there and gave her brainstem a squeeze.

"What—"

’Since you can’t do anything that I told you to, might as well obliterate you. I have no more reason to keep you alive. You’re officially useless to us.’

"I— What do you— I don’t —"

Then the pain suddenly shot up in the insides of her skull. It wasn’t like any pain that Lilianna had felt before.

If she could still roll around the ground and scream with the pain before, this one was different. The pain crawled around her body, down to her nerves.

Lilianna could feel her hands had left the control panel and froze mid-air. Even if she didn’t want to, it was out of her control.

The pain was too painful for her brain to even recognize that it was in pain. Her body, on the other hand, was feeling it in real time.

Her body began to spasm in the virtual world. Her body in the real world, though, was just groaning in pain.

Lilianna knew that she was having a seizure.

Her avatar, piloting Lilianna’s mecha, mirrored the seizure because of the wrong inputs.

Her mecha’s right arm jerked up and down repeatedly. The greatsword it was holding was being flailed around. It swung wide and scraped along the side of a hover-rail with a screech of metal on metal — kreee-AHHHH — and stilled.

Lilianna’s mecha just hung in mid-air, motionless. It was suspended motionless on its remaining wing-thruster.

But Lilianna couldn’t even control her body anymore. She couldn’t blink, couldn’t move, nor could she speak. The pain made it hard for her to even breathe.

She couldn’t question why she could feel this pain even in this virtual world, as if it were real.

Somewhere inside the cockpit, Lilianna began to hear all sorts of synthetic chimes. It seemed like the game system was trying to get her attention with multiple notifications.

Ping. Ping.

Ping-ping-ping.

Lilianna barely managed to open her eyes.

But all she could see was red.

It was red everywhere.

Notification windows bloomed in concentric rings around her and the cockpit.

All of them were tinted with that emergency-warning carmine that no game system used unless something was horribly wrong.

These warnings stacked over one another. They even overlapped at times. There was no stopping it from producing more notifications to fill the entire cockpit.

However, no matter how much they stacked and got close to her avatar, Lilianna could barely see what was written on them.

When Lilianna finally did, amidst her eyes having trouble opening and was swimming due to the pain, she couldn’t even react.

PILOT BIOMETRIC ANOMALY DETECTED —

SECONDARY SIGNATURE PRESENT IN NEURAL HARNESS —

UNAUTHORIZED CO-PROCESS DETECTED —

One window was at the dead center of it. It was larger than the others. It was the only one her eyes managed to read all the way through:

UNKNOWN SPECIES DETECTED.

What.

What species.

I’m—I’m a human.