Chapter 104 – I Can Do This Too…!

Letaria's reborn Arden bore down ferociously on the three machines ahead of her.

"Wha -- it's fast...!?"

One of the raiders facing Arden let out a voice thick with panic. Inside this hideout, cobbled together out of scrap and wreckage, visibility was poor and the space cramped and enclosed. Shocked that anything could hit this kind of abnormal top speed while charging through such a place, all three enemy machines went completely still for a beat.

"Are you all standing about in a daze!?"

Letaria was never going to let an opening like that slip by. Arden closed the distance in an instant and drove a savage straight punch into the first machine. A tremendous shock ran through Arden's frame, but Letaria immediately followed up with her other fist. Taking the follow-up blow full force, the enemy machine went completely silent without even managing a reaction.

"Damn it! Do it, shoot!"

With an ally turned into scrap metal right in front of their eyes in an instant, visible panic gripped the remaining two raiders. Their Photon Rifle fire, betraying their unmistakable rattled state, lanced out at Arden without any real precision.

"There's no need to even dodge something like that! -- Photon Saber!"

Letaria drew her blade of light and surged forward, closing on the second machine in an instant and cleanly severing both its arms. Carrying that momentum straight through, she followed with a brutal kick to its torso. Stripped of both arms, the second machine went flying in a wretched heap and slammed hard into the wall behind it.

"That settles that!"

Against the one machine left, Arden showed an even more furious burst of acceleration. Giving it no chance to flee, she seized its arm and slammed it into the wall with terrifying force. Unable to withstand the combined weight and speed of the impact, the machine was left half-destroyed.

"My, hardly any resistance at all!"

Without so much as a hitch in her breathing, Letaria savored her victory.

◆

Grain, meanwhile.

Settled deep into Riese's seat, he was reviewing the detailed data his sensors had pulled on the enemy machines. Every hostile lurking in the area shared a single model designation: "Fanness."

"I see. A bit of an older model, but originally proper military hardware. Fancy toys for a bunch of raiders."

Judging by specs alone, it likely wasn't all that far off from the general-use Rude the corps currently ran.

"But... that's about all it's got going for it."

Saying so, Grain calmly pulled the trigger.

One of the functions built into the prototype Photon Rifle mounted on the new Riese, the Arcian -- burst mode.

Three precisely fired shots of photon light caught the Fanness lurking in the shadows square in the torso without the slightest deviation, driving it instantly out of commission.

"Damn it! Quit screwing around, you--!"

Enraged at seeing an ally taken down, the last remaining machine activated its Photon Saber and charged in. It was a well-timed strike, aimed at the brief instant of recovery lag right after Grain fired his burst shot.

But Grain's Riese, too, drew its own Photon Saber instantly and met the charge head-on. Blazing light erupted as the two blades collided with tremendous force.

In that spark-scattering instant of point-blank range, Grain leveled the muzzle of the Arcian, held in his free hand, straight at the enemy.

"Not happening!"

As if he'd been braced for exactly that, the enemy used his machine's mobility to snap back into an immediate retreat. But he couldn't fully escape Riese's superhuman reaction speed -- Photon Rifle energy struck his left leg square on.

"Guh...!? You're way stronger than Nistario's corps, damn it...!"

The enemy's machine rocked, and unmistakable panic leaked into his voice over the comm.

"Well, that's quite the compliment. Good for morale on my end."

Grain answered with perfect composure, plenty of room to spare.

Watching the enemy's evasive maneuvers, this was clearly no mere thug -- a genuinely skilled hand. It was likely exactly this kind of skill and machine performance that had let him slip through Nistario's corps and give them so much trouble.

But Grain pushed Riese's output up even further, accelerating the machine in an instant.

"What--"

By the moment the enemy machine let out a startled cry, the outcome was already decided. Passing each other in a single stroke, Riese had already cut the Fanness clean across the torso with one flash of its Photon Saber.

The hard braking of that pass-through maneuver put considerable G-force even on Grain himself in the cockpit. Had he not been wearing the specialized suit Sora had finished for him, the recoil would have slammed his body hard into the console.

"...! Whew. As a test of this thing's performance, that was a little on the underwhelming side."

Feeling the reassuring strength of his trusted partner, Grain let out a small exhale.

◆

Around that same time, Steshia, handling the other corridor, found herself struggling.

The instant she made contact, Steshia had fired off her Arcian. But amid the poor visibility and clutter of obstacles inside the hideout, combined with a sensor glitch, her shot regrettably grazed just past the enemy machine's side.

"Missed...! Ngh, incoming!"

She saw two Fanness units facing her head-on, both charging straight at her Rasta at once.

Steshia hurriedly drew her Photon Saber and braced to meet them.

"Whoa, whoa-whoa-whoa!?"

Frantically parrying the merciless barrage of Photon Saber strikes from the two enemy machines with shield and saber both, Rasta was forced into a grinding retreat.

"Bad, this is bad, they're way too close!"

"Hah! Here I thought you were riding some fancy new model, but this white thing's nothing special underneath, huh!"

Grinning triumphantly, the raider opened up with a point-blank burst of solid-round machine gun fire.

Steshia tried to dodge by sliding Rasta to the side, but her reaction came a beat too late, and Rasta's left shoulder armor took a heavy, jarring impact.

"Ngh...!"

Captain Grain, who'd picked off his opponents one by one from the very start, and Letaria, whose sheer physicality and overwhelming reflexes made light of anyone in her way --

Steshia had no such genius talent, no special power of her own.

But even so --

"I have to do this...! Everyone's counting on me!"

In truth, Steshia had been chosen as Rasta's dedicated pilot precisely because she was "an entirely average, standard-level pilot" -- though she didn't know that reason herself -- and it was that sense of "being counted on" that she now drew on to steel her resolve.

As Rasta pulled back from the machine gun's relentless fire, one enemy immediately thrust a Photon Saber toward the spot she'd retreated into.

"...There!"

Steshia snapped Rasta into a rapid backward retreat. Rasta's speed and reaction time, outpacing the enemy machine's own, made the split-second dodge possible.

"What--!?"

While the enemy machine was still frozen in shock, Rasta fired its left-arm hardpoint hand cannon in a rapid burst, almost snap-firing shot after shot.

Caught completely off guard by the sudden counter, the Fanness took hit after hit -- right shoulder, side, left shoulder, in unbroken succession. Its charging momentum completely killed, the enemy machine went flying backward, and Steshia's final shot struck true, destroying its head-mounted camera outright. The Fanness, all function lost, drifted powerlessly in place.

"Tch! Getting cocky!"

The last remaining machine leveled its Photon Rifle, taking aim at Rasta.

This time, facing the incoming Photon Rifle fire, Steshia stayed calm. She squared Rasta's shield firmly to the front and took the shot head-on.

"I can do this too...! I can!"

--"Your aim's not bad. Just don't panic, and focus."

The clumsy piece of advice Grain had once given her during training flickered across her mind.

Deflecting the enemy's relentless fire solidly with her shield, keeping her line of sight steady, Steshia charged the Arcian's energy.

"...There it is!"

From the muzzle of the fully charged Arcian, a thick, red beam of light blazed out with tremendous force. That single stroke punched straight through the Fanness -- shield and all, hastily raised in a last-second attempt -- and drove it into a single, decisive explosion.

Amid the rising smoke, Rasta slowly lowered its weapon.

And so, the fierce battle inside the hideout came to a close, ending in Letaria, Grain, and Steshia's complete and total victory.