Chapter 107 – Whatever Are You Wandering Around a Place Like This For

Suddenly, the deep-purple Arden froze in place, dead still.

"What's wrong, Letaria?"

Grain's voice, edged with wariness, came from the cockpit of Riese, running alongside her.

"It should be here... and yet, there is nothing before me."

Letaria answered, clearly at a loss. Her honed magic was picking up, without question, the presence of some "foreign object" right in front of her. And yet, on Arden's main monitor and everywhere her eyes could reach, there was nothing but dark space and drifting debris.

"What...?"

Grain murmured shortly, turning the possibilities over in his mind.

Letaria's magic was catching something this close, and yet even Riese's sensors showed absolutely no reaction of any kind.

"I see. -- Letaria, you have my permission: attack wherever your senses tell you 'it' is."

"...? Very well then, here I go!"

Letaria tilted her head for a moment at Grain's words, but pushed Arden forward without hesitation. Closing in near a large piece of debris, she drove a powerful backfist into a stretch of space that should have held nothing at all.

"...!"

From the empty void her fist had struck, a solid, unmistakable shock of impact bounced back through Arden's arm.

Confirming the sensation, Grain immediately brought Riese in close to Arden's side.

"Just as I thought."

The space where Arden's fist had connected flickered and warped with a faint, static-like distortion, a small mechanical unit shimmering into visibility, drifting in place.

"What is this...? Some sort of concealment magic?"

Letaria's confusion deepened at the mysterious machine that had suddenly appeared before her.

An insect-like, four-legged unit -- it brought to mind the small machines she'd faced once before.

"Optical camouflage. Tech that fools the refraction of light to hide something from sight. ...I'm running a signal pattern analysis on it right now. At the very least, it's not Seldia Bureau spec, and it's not Syn-Fibra spec either."

"Op...tical ca-mou-flage? I do not quite understand what that means, but... in any case, this feeling -- there are a great many more of them out here!"

At Letaria's words, Grain's mouth curved into a fearless grin.

"Good. Go ahead and take them out one after another. I'll pitch in the moment my analysis is done."

"Yes!"

Letaria gave a firm nod and turned Arden toward the spot her magic was pointing to.

Her field of view still showed nothing at all. But there was, without question, an enemy hiding there using this "op-tical ca-mou-flage." And its movements -- compared to Arden's mobility -- were far too sluggish.

"I need not see you, so long as I know where you are!"

Letaria's manipulator closed around a small fragment of drifting debris nearby and hurled it with force toward the spot her magic indicated.

The stone sailed smoothly through space and struck against the empty void, and with a burst of static-like distortion, another small machine flickered into view.

"Hmph... there is no sense of a pilot aboard. This is an unmanned unit."

Just as Letaria was starting to grasp the enemy's nature, Arden's main console blared out a chorus of alerts, and multiple red points of light bloomed across the darkness on every side.

"Analysis complete. Sharing the data with Arden now. From here on, you should be able to see them clearly -- sensors and sight both."

Grain's reassuring voice came through the comm.

With their optical camouflage trick broken, the unmanned machines were nothing more than sitting targets now. And so began the mop-up operation, Arden and Riese clearing out the swarm of small drones scattered through the surrounding space.

The hidden drone swarm, while somewhat inferior to the small Escado units she'd faced before, still attacked with a nimble, far-from-slow agility.

But even so --

"Sluggish motions like that fall far, far short of touching someone like me!"

Letaria swung her Photon Saber in a single stroke, cleaving through a whole cluster of the closing drones at once.

A short distance off, Grain's Riese was fighting its own battle, but from the way the enemy's light-points kept winking out one after another on the comm monitor, it was clear he was making short work of them too, without the slightest struggle.

"The only weapons they carry are solid blades. Whatever are you wandering around a place like this for...?"

Just as she tilted her head at how little resistance any of this offered --

Letaria's magic caught something.

(...Above!?)

Overhead. Something different from all the small drones so far was closing in.