Chapter 85 – Excuse Me, Everyone — What Are All These Grave Faces About?

The blinding torrent of light that had swallowed the monitor dissolved into particles and gradually faded from the space.

...What remained was a silence almost strange in its completeness.

In the middle of the gridded virtual space, the dark-violet Arden and the blue Luzam stood frozen in place -- weapons still locked against each other at the moment of impact, neither machine moving so much as a fraction. No sparks. No drive noise. Still, as if time itself had been stopped.

"Oh?"

The first sound to break the silence was Letaria's mildly baffled voice, drifting out from the cockpit capsule.

"Milea -- the screen has gone dark and nothing is responding. Do you think it has broken?"

At the same moment, all of the Luzam's system displays had gone completely dark as well.

"...Confirmed: main generator shutdown on both units. It appears the internal circuitry burned out under the load..."

Milea spoke from the operator's seat, watching the consoles sound their steady stream of warning tones.

The Grave Arc deployed by both machines had pushed their generators to the absolute limit -- and both had failed simultaneously, unable to sustain the immense energy output, tripping a simultaneous-shutdown and internal-detonation flag.

The tense simulated bout came to a forced close under the verdict of "suspended."

◆

The hatches opened and the two girls climbed down from their capsules. Ritte descended with her gaze lowered in something that looked like frustration. Letaria descended studying her own palm with open puzzlement.

"Good work, both of you. That was an intense fight -- come and sit for a moment. I'll put something warm together."

Milea prepared herbal tea with efficient ease, while Steve, beside her, passed over a tin of light snacks he had brought from the corps' stores. The taut charge that had been holding the room began to ease, gradually, along with the rising scent of the tea.

"All the same, it is rather strange... When I fought Restful, that did not happen."

Letaria accepted one of the freshly baked cookies and bit into it with a crisp crunch, her cheeks puffed out in mild displeasure at the mystery. In that battle, she had swung the Grave Arc blade with far more force, for far longer. So why had this single exchange broken the machine when that had not?

Ritte, watching Letaria's expression, held her teacup in both hands and opened her mouth quietly.

"No. ...That was the Grave Arc behaving as the weapon it was designed to be."

Ritte's voice was even, but carried a weight of certainty.

"Even so, Ritte. Your brief was data collection in your capacity as test pilot -- measured observation. You seemed to get rather more invested than that, didn't you?"

Sean, settled deep into the sofa, narrowed his eyes behind his glasses and smiled with faint mischief. At that, Ritte's pale cheeks colored at once in a soft flush -- the self-awareness was evidently immediate. She shifted her gaze and dropped her eyes to her cup.

"...I let myself get drawn in, rather unlike me. To be honest -- her movement overwhelmed me."

The candor -- Ritte's willingness to simply say it -- struck Milea as sincere, for better and for worse.

"Oh my! So you found yourself flustered before my magnificent technique? Heheh, that is entirely understandable. I am, after all, the strongest pilot in all of Seldia!"

Completely cheered by Ritte's honest admission, Letaria puffed up and was drawing breath for a proper victorious laugh -- when:

"Don't get carried away."

Milea's hand came around from behind and covered Letaria's mouth with swift, precise efficiency.

"Mmph!? Wh-What was that for! I was only stating a fact!"

Letaria muffled her protest and flailed in undignified indignation against Milea's hand.

While the two girls' lively exchange played out in the background, Steve let his expression settle into something quieter and turned his gaze toward Sean.

"Sean-san. In other words -- even in your testing at the Perda branch, pushing the weapon past a certain output threshold causes the Makina's generator to exceed its load tolerance. Which is why you run it with a safety limiter on output, for standard operational use?"

Sean's smile left his face. He nodded slowly, and with gravity.

"Precisely, Steve-san. Even under the current limits, it delivers more than sufficient force for city defense purposes. That said -- technically speaking, it is a somewhat... no, a considerably volatile piece of equipment."

"The same holds in actual physical testing, not only in simulator projections. Even in our branch's Luzam -- a military-grade machine -- releasing the safety and drawing that maximum output causes the generator to fail."

Ritte took one quiet sip of the cooled tea and added the detail. On the back of her words, Milea's voice carried a new gravity.

"Which is precisely why... the phenomenon from the Restful battle -- where that old-generation Arden sustained maximum output continuously, and the generator never failed -- was, for the Perda branch as well, a result completely outside any projected range..."

Sean and Ritte both nodded at Milea's words, without speaking.

The greatest mystery that had brought the Perda branch's two members to this station: why had a machine that should have broken not broken? That was what they had come to understand.

And yet -- as the knowing gazes of the adults crossed one another in the gravity of the moment, there was exactly one person in the room who had been left entirely behind by the thread of the conversation.

"...? Excuse me, everyone -- what are all these grave faces about? What on earth is going on?"

Letaria tilted her head with an expression of complete and genuine incomprehension, brushing cookie crumbs from her fingertips.