Chapter 39 – Fast–But Can You Keep Up With Me?!

While Grain and Blang vanished into the debris beyond, Letaria and the others were in the middle of their own desperate fight.

"Everyone--I'll take the fast one!"

At Letaria's shout, the battle divided into two separate storms.

On one side: a high-mobility type--something like one of the small autonomous units, scaled up, capable of acceleration that defied reasonable physics. On the other: a heavily armored machine braced with a massive Photon Cannon, every surface thick with reinforced plating.

"Fast--but can you keep up with me?!"

The echo of that voice was still alive in her mind.

Reach for it--

She had followed the instruction, and her senses had sharpened beyond anything she'd experienced before. The faint electromagnetic waveforms moving through space, the tiny premonitory shift before an enemy machine committed to acceleration--she could read them all.

The high-mobility type kicked off a rock formation and swept toward Arden's rear at near-physical-limit speed.

Letaria didn't even turn. She reverse-fired the thrusters and forced the machine sideways.

The enemy matched her movement with enough agility to be genuinely frightening--but there was something absent from it. No evasion. No hesitation. Only the drive to close and cut, by the shortest route, every time. Pure attack. Nothing else.

Light blade exchanges. Beam fire streaking back and forth.

Against it, Letaria continued to slip through the high-speed attacks by the thinnest of margins, and at each passing moment, drove Arden's fists and blade into the enemy frame with precision.

(Something's different... Arden is responding to me better than ever before!)

A feeling she couldn't name--exhilaration mixed with unease. She took not a single hit, and chipped away at the enemy's armor steadily, methodically. At last, the moment the enemy channeled its energy into one final burst of acceleration, she drove Arden's fist deep into the chest housing.

The enemy raised its Photon Rifle for one last attempt.

The sensor eyes in the head went dark. The machine tilted and fell silent.

◆◆◆

Meanwhile, Zein and the others were caught in a storm of light.

"The attack is relentless--!"

Steshia forced out the words between continuous evasions.

"Are these things unmanned...?"

Retta raised the question from under the heavy-armed type's blank, mechanical fire.

"Doesn't matter right now--no time to think about it!"

Zein's sharp reply came as the heavy-armed type unleashed its full payload. The massive Photon Cannon, a hand-held Photon Rifle, and then hatches across the entire frame opening to launch a swarm of missiles simultaneously.

Retta's Baris raised the shield and took the direct impact--the blast and fragments hammered the armor, stacking damage with every hit. Steshia's machine was grazed by heat rays, but not critically.

Zein read the enemy's firing lines with years of experience and threaded through them. Against the incoming missiles, Fal deployed jammers in rapid succession--stripped of guidance, the warheads detonated in empty space one after another.

"Fal--sniper mode, ready! The moment those corps people create an opening, we push straight through!"

"On it, boss! Locking the enemy sensors!"

Steshia and Retta poured coordinated fire onto the heavy-armed type, forcing it back one step at a time. The moment it tried to raise its head and recover, Zein's long-range Photon Rifle fired.

The high-energy beam went through the enemy's head unit cleanly.

Staggering, its functions partially gone, it left itself open--and Retta closed in.

"This--ends it!"

The Photon Saber on Baris's right arm came down in a single stroke.

The heavy armor was cut through. Internal generator detonation followed--and the heavy-armed type became a burst of light and scattered into the void.

◆◆◆

Silence, slowly returning to the debris sector in the aftermath of the fight. The remains of the destroyed machines reflected cold metallic light as they drifted, fading into the dark.

"...It's over."

Letaria exhaled in Arden's cockpit--long and deep. The strange exhilaration that had filled her during the fight had drained away, and in its place, a solid, settled exhaustion moved in.

At the edge of her vision, Grain's Schuelle was making its way over to rejoin them.

"All units--status report."

Grain's voice came through the shared channel, low and composed.

"Zein here. Minor damage on my end. The target is in pieces."

"Steshia! Some surface scorching on the exterior, but no impact on navigation. I'm a little worried about Retta-san's machine though."

"Retta. Got knocked around pretty well, but we're managing. This is definitely going to be a Syn-Fibra repair bill..."

The resigned note in Retta's voice spread a feeling of relief through the group. It had been a brutal engagement--but everyone had made it through.

Grain swept the area with his sensors and spoke with measured weight.

"...Blang's machine has been secured on my end. The pilot got away, however. That's on me."

"Come now--that man has been slipping away persistently for some time. He simply has a gift for bad luck working in his favor."

Letaria kept her voice deliberately light.

"Appreciated. Right--moving to the final phase of the operation. Recover as much as possible from Blang's machine and the two units you destroyed. We hand everything over to Ichinose-san."

At Grain's instruction, all machines moved to collection.

Zein's manipulator arms worked precisely, securing large fragments of the heavy-armed type with wire. Steshia and Retta worked together to prepare a tow line for the Dien that Blang had abandoned.

Letaria brought Arden to a stop in front of the wreckage of the high-mobility type she had destroyed.

The machine had held its form reasonably well before going still.

From the beginning, there had been nothing living inside it. Her magic had felt that clearly, with a fineness she hadn't noticed before.

And yet--something had been in it. Something that made her feel a chill she couldn't quite name.

"Why did that voice speak to me...?"

The memory surfaced again: the instruction that had reached her directly during the fight.

That voice had not come from these machines. It had come from somewhere else entirely--

"Miss--what are you doing? That thing is pretty torn up after what you did to it."

Zein's comm brought her back.

"I am perfectly aware! I was simply evaluating the situation before deigning to collect it myself!"

A quick recovery--and she reached out and grabbed the wreckage.

Whether anything useful had survived was unknown. But Milea could draw information from almost anything, and even these remains might yield something.

The battered machines turned, each trailing its recovered prize, and began the slow transit back.

Ahead, just visible in the distance: the lights of the Seldia residential sector. The place they were going home to.

"Right then--let's go. I'm hungry."

Letaria looked back once at the dark debris field that had been a battlefield.

Something was lurking in that depth.

Behind the relief of victory, she could not help but feel it--the certainty that something was coming.