Chapter 125 – I Shall Not Lose This Duel, Either!

"Well then -- I look forward to a good match."

Before boarding the simulator, Priscilla, with a refined gesture, bowed once toward Grain's Vigilante Corps team and Letaria.

"Yes, likewise. Consider us glad for the chance to test our mettle against you."

Grain answered with a calm smile of his own, and each of them climbed into their simulator pods.

Moments later, footage of the virtual space was projected all at once onto the main monitor set at the center of the Vigilante Corps' simulator room.

The Vigilante Corps/Letaria side's lineup consisted of four machines: Grain's detuned Riese, Ethan's general-purpose reinforced machine, the Rude Custom: Ribast, Merry's long-range support machine, the Rude Custom: Breaker Line, and Letaria's deep-purple partner, Arden.

The instant the opposing homeland military team's machines appeared on the screen, a stir rippled through the Vigilante Corps members in the observation seats.

Priscilla's machine had a beautiful, refined silhouette in vivid blue, streaked with pure white lines. A large thruster unit was mounted on its back, and its hands gripped a distinctive rifle that looked to be high-output.

Adelina's machine had a shape so bizarre that at a single glance, one might not even recognize it as a Makina at all. Massively thick, heavy add-on armor swelled its total volume to nearly double the ordinary size, and even its legs had been fused into a single giant thruster unit. It was a fortress, and it moved.

And Ranses's machine, while sharing the same base frame lineage as Priscilla's, was a specialized variant, distinguished by the large-caliber long rifle slung across its back and the rugged, oversized weapon containers mounted on both shoulders.

"Wha--?! Is that... the homeland military's ace-exclusive machine, the Radure?! Don't tell me all three of them are Radures...!"

Steshia, staring fixedly at the monitor, let out an involuntary cry of shock.

"Seems that way... Rather than a design like the Rude's, built for versatility and expandability, this looks like a fully custom-built assembly tailored to each pilot's own tactics. Priscilla's machine is honestly the closest thing to a basic standard model out of the three."

Milea narrowed her eyes with interest as well, analyzing the machine data displayed on the screen.

"The homeland's in-house machines... even just the information we can gather here will be worth something."

The battlefield was a stretch of pitch-black space with poor visibility, scattered with rocks and ship debris of every size.

From their initial positions, set apart from each other, the machines of both sides faced off in silence.

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(--Comm line connection complete)

"Now then... our opponents are elite homeland soldiers. I'd like to proceed carefully and feel out their approach first, but..."

Inside his cockpit, Grain murmured quietly.

"Wouldn't it be better if we struck first, all at once? When it comes to speed, Arden won't lose either!"

Letaria said triumphantly, already moving to level her Photon Rifle.

"No, Letaria. What they're piloting are the homeland military's special-issue machines -- a careless approach would be dangerous--"

Merry tried to caution her, a note of alarm in her voice -- and it was at that very moment.

Tearing through the pitch-black darkness, a blinding, ultra-high-speed streak of light came ripping straight through from far beyond visual range!

"--Evade!!"

At the same instant as Ethan's sharp cry, all four machines scattered explosively in every direction on pure, razor's-edge reflex.

An instant later, photon particles carrying tremendous heat scoured through the very space where they had all just been standing.

"A hyper-long-range bombardment...!"

Grain growled bitterly as he broke into evasive maneuvers.

She hadn't sensed a thing.

Letaria, breaking into a cold sweat, stared fixedly at the point in the pitch-black void where both her sensors and her own intuition pointed.

The enemy machine still hadn't even entered the field of view of her optical cameras. A sniper shot from beyond the outer limit of radar range entirely -- an out-range attack.

What frightened her most of all was that even with her own magic, she hadn't been able to catch so much as the enemy's telltale motion before the attack until the very instant it was unleashed.

◆◆◆

In front of the monitor in the observation seats, Milea was more than a little shaken.

Letaria's evasive move against that last bombardment -- it hadn't been the kind of movement she usually showed, reading her opponent's killing intent or telltale motion ahead of time. In other words, even with Letaria's magic, she hadn't been able to catch the attack coming until the very last moment.

Even in the simulator, the data gathered up to now had proven that whenever Letaria piloted, her magical traits and perceptual responses carried over into the virtual machine. But this time, that wasn't functioning.

--The Arden System, she guessed, simply wasn't being fully reproduced within the simulator's program. Which meant that out at that kind of ultra-long range, the environment itself wasn't letting Letaria's own ability come through at full strength.

Milea crossed her arms, her thoughts racing.

And then another factor occurred to her as well.

That reminded her -- this time, Arden's own numbers hadn't been fed into the simulator accurately either. Not just the thrusters' snap response, but the frame's tracking performance, the armor strength, none of it.

Milea kept her expression tense and fixed her eyes on the pitch-black battlefield playing out on the monitor.

◆◆◆

"That was just their opening greeting. Here it comes...!"

Grain's calm voice rang out over the comm line.

"How kind of them to go out of their way and give away their own position! I'll put a shot straight through that sniper right now!"

Merry's hands flew across her console, snapping her beloved machine Breaker Line's long-range sniper Photon Rifle to lock onto the bearing the earlier shot had come from, in an instant.

"No, wait... that was... Merry, don't fire!"

Ethan's voice rang out, urging her to stop. -- But faster than that, Merry's finger had already pulled the trigger.

A beam of light, loosed from Breaker Line's barrel, tore through the darkness in a straight line toward the enemy's firing point.

--An instant later.

Faster than Merry's shot could even arrive, a single flash of light streaked in from a completely different angle -- as if her sniping position had been read perfectly from the very start.

In a blinding flash, Breaker Line's head-mounted main camera was pierced clean through in an instant this time, by a thin, sharp lance of photon particles.

"Wha--?!"

Merry's cry of shock.

Warning alarms and harsh error tones blared inside the cockpit.

What was supposed to be a counterattack had, instead, been the one that got sniped down.