Infinite Stratos, Volume 1, page 13
—I could use the hypersensors to detect unusual patterns in the air flow, but that takes too long. I need to get the better of her, somehow.
I clenched my fist around Yukihira Nigata and tried to remember all of my training.
“The barrier cancellation?”
Chifuyu nodded. After the battle with Cecilia, Houki and I were thinking a lot about why it I had lost suddenly. We had sifted through the IS log files and couldn’t really make sense of them. Chifuyu eventually got sick of it and explained it to us.
“That’s Yukihira’s special ability. It can bypass the enemy shield barrier and damage the unit. What happens then, Shinonono?”
“U-Um. The IS Absolute Defense system activates and drains a very large amount of shield energy.”
“Exactly. I made use of that ability a lot to become the world champion,” said Chifuyu, offhandedly.
She didn’t make a big deal out of this accomplishment. Every three years the IS global tournament called “Mondo Grosso” was held, and she had won the first iteration, even if she rarely talked about it. I had complex feelings about having such a formidable and well-known sister. There were lots of bad aspects to it.
“So if that strike had hit her, I’d have won?”
“If it had, yes. Why do you think you lost?”
“Um... I don’t know why, but my shield energy hit zero.”
“There’s a reason for it. There always is. Yukira’s special ability comes at the price of your own shield energy. Obviously it would, you idiot.”
“Oh...”
—Yeah, that made sense, so...
“So... You’re basically converting your own shield energy into damage output?” Houki asked, to which Chifuyu nodded.
“It’s a defective unit.”
—What?!
“A defective unit? What the hell do you mean?”
Wham!
I guess that hadn’t been polite enough towards a teacher.
“I suppose that isn’t entirely accurate. The IS is far from a finished development, so you can’t say it’s defective. However, it’s a little more focused on attack than other units. Did you see how all the expansion slots are taken up?”
“O-Oh, that’s a defect?”
“Listen to me; the point is that you can only use Yukihira by sacrificing all the expansion slots. In exchange, the attack power is outstanding.”
—Hmm, I remember that Chifuyu only ever used Yukihira...
It seemed inhuman to me that someone was able to win with just that. I’d always known that my sister was really good, but only since becoming an IS pilot myself did I realize just how good she really was.
“A novice like you could never handle ranged fire, anyway. Recoil compensation, leading the target, controlling the distance, 1-0 stopping, zero-recoil turns, ammo types, atmospheric interference, planning your battle out... There’s so much you can’t do... Or can you?”
“I’m sorry.”
If you understand your faults, apologize. Chifuyu nodded. This was enough for her.
“Focusing entirely on one thing suits you. After all... You’re my brother.”
After that, our practice focused on close-combat and basic maneuvers like high-G stops. It turned out that my experience practicing kendo with Houki was useful in being able to control the distance, and also overall becoming a better fighter.
—Now the important thing is spirit...
Normally you’d think that she was far superior in skill; in opposition to Cecilia, Rin became more composed the more hectic combat was. She was just a fundamentally strong combatant. The only thing that could bridge the gap with an opponent like that was spirit. Without the right mindset, I couldn’t win. That was my single ray of hope in this desperate battle. Now all I had to do was act upon it.
“Rin.”
“Yeah?”
“I won’t hold back.”
I stared at her. The force of my gaze seemed to push her back, as her features melted a little.
“Wh-What... Of course you wouldn’t... A-Anyway! I’ll show you how big the gulf between us is!”
Rin twirled her twin blades around herself and entered a new posture. I readied myself to accelerate and close the distance before the impact cannon could hit me. Much of the time during the preceding week had been spent practicing Ignition Boost. As long as I aimed it right, I could fight on even footing, even with National Cadets. The IS and its safeguards made sure I didn’t lose consciousness from the G-forces involved.
“HAAAAAH!”
I only had one chance at this surprise attack, which was why I also activated Yukihira’s barrier cancellation. Unless I took away most of her shield, her cannons were just going to whittle me down.
BA-BOOOM!
“Huh?!”
Moments before my blade could touch Rin, a blast shook the arena.
—Was that Rin...? No, it couldn’t have been.
Both the area of effect and its destruction were an order of magnitude larger. There was smoke rising from the center of the arena. Apparently something had penetrated the arena’s isolation shield and impacted in the center.
“Wh-What was that? What’s going on?”
Rin was just as confused as I was and had opened a private channel.
“Ichika! The match is off! Go back to the pit!”
—What’s with all the shouting all of a sudden?
Just as I thought about that, my IS hypersensors sounded off all kinds of warnings.
[HEAT SIGNATURE DETECTED. SOURCE: UNKNOWN IS UNIT. ENEMY LOCK-ON DETECTED.]
“Wh—”
The arena’s isolation shields were the same as those used on IS units. An IS unit powerful enough to blast through those shields was now in the arena, and it was locked on to me. What a situation to be in!
“Ichika! Hurry!”
“What about you?!”
I didn’t know how to answer on the private channel so I made an open one.
“I’ll buy you time! Run away!”
“Run away?! I’d never leave a girl behind!”
“Idiot! You’re a weaker fighter than me! Just do it!”
She really wasn’t pulling any punches. Since I hadn’t responded on her private channel, Rin was answering me on the open channel, too.
“I’m not going to stick around either. With a situation like this, I’m sure the academy brass will show up in a moment and clean it u—”
“Careful!”
In the nick of time, I carried Rin out of the way of the blast. A scorching ray seared through the sky where Rin had been.
“A beam weapon... And with a lot more output than Cecilia’s IS.”
Just seeing the estimates the hypersensors were showing me gave me goosebumps.
“H-Hey! Idiot! Let me go!”
“H-Hey, stop struggling. Don’t punch me!”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
I still had the shield protecting me, but she was still slapping away at me. It did not feel great.
“D-Don’t touch me there!”
“It’s firing!”
I ignored Rin’s complaints as rapid-fire energy beams seared through the surrounding smoke. I managed to dodge them somehow, and the shooter began to slowly lift up into the sky.
“Who is that?”
It looked totally different from the IS units I knew. It was dark, mostly black or gray, with unnaturally long arms that were longer than its legs. And it had no head; the shoulders and the head were fused into one. But the strangest part about it was the fact that it was fully covered in armor.
Normally an IS unit has only partial armor plates. Why, you ask? Because more wasn’t necessary. Covering the unit in armor would make no sense. Of course, Guard type IS units carried physical shields, but I’d never heard of an IS that fully covered the pilot. And it was also very large. Clearly, this was no ordinary IS. The arms alone looked to be more than two meters in length, and there were thrusters all over its body, perhaps to maintain altitude. Near the fused head I saw sensor lenses distributed irregularly, and the beam cannons were mounted two apiece on the arms.
“Who’re you?”
“.........”
But of course, the mysterious intruder didn’t respond.
“Orimura! Huang! Leave the arena at once! The teachers will subdue the unit!”
Ms. Yamada popped up on my com. She sounded a lot more dignified than I remembered.
“No, we’ll stop it before you’re all here.”
The IS had penetrated the isolation shield. That meant all the spectators and everyone outside of an IS were in danger of being injured.
“You all right, Rin?”
“A-Are you talking to me? L-Let me go! I can’t move!”
“Oh, sorry.”
As I let go of her, she wrapped her arms around her body protectively. She must have really hated it. I felt sorry for that.
“Orimura! D-Don’t do that! We can’t have anything happen to the stud—”
That was all I managed to catch from her. The enemy IS was attacking again and I had to dodge.
—Phew.
“Hmph. That unit sure is motivated.”
“Looks like it.”
Rin and I were hovering side by side and observing our enemy.
“Ichika, I’ll back you up with ranged fire. You go and attack it. You only have that weapon, right?”
“Yeah. Okay, I’ll do it.”
We tapped our weapons together, then we went in. Rin and I, the improvised team.
◇
“Hey! Are you listening?! Orimura! Huang! Are you listening?!”
There was no reason to yell on the IS com systems, but Yamada was too nervous to realize that. Meanwhile Chifuyu, looking at this from a few meters away, was more calm.
“They said they will do it. Let them.”
“M-M-Ms. Orimura! You can’t be serious about that!”
“Calm down. Drink some coffee. The lack of sugar is making you nervous.”
“Um... That’s salt.”
“.........”
Her hand stopped and returned the white spoonful to its vessel.
“Why is there salt here?”
“I-I don’t know? But it says on the jar that it’s salt...”
“.........”
“Oh! You must be worried about your brother after all! So you mistook it fo—”
“.........”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Too uncomfortable, in fact. Yamada tried to divert the conversation in the hope of changing this.
“U-Um...”
“Yamada, here’s your coffee.”
“Um... But there is salt in it already...”
“Your coffee.”
She drank some of the coffee. It was a little salty. Tears stood in her eyes.
“Thank you...”
“Drink it while it’s hot.”
Truly, demons lived among men.
“Give me permission to pilot my IS! I will attack immediately!” Cecilia pleaded.
“I would like to let you, but look at this.”
She touched the terminal a few times, and the information on it changed. Now it displayed status values about the second arena.
“The isolation shield was set to level four? And now all the gates are locked? Did the IS do that?”
“It looks like it. They can’t escape, and we can’t support them.”
Chifuyu said this in an even, composed voice, but when she punched buttons on the terminal, her irritation was obvious.
“Th-Then we need to request immediate assistance from the government!”
“We’re doing that. The elite from the third years is hacking the system right now. We’re going to send in a rescue squad once the isolation shield is down.”
Chifuyu’s eyebrows were twitching. Her growing irritation was showing. Cecilia interpreted this as a sign of the danger they were in and sat down.
“Hah... So I can’t do anything but wait...”
“You’re not going to be in the rescue squad anyway.”
“Wh-What?!”
“Your IS is designed to fight several opponents at once. Fighting together in a group against one is going to make it harder for the rest.”
“That’s not true! I wouldn’t make it harder for them!”
“Did you practice team combat, then? What was your job there? How did you use the bits? What did your allies do? How competent was the opponent? How much team combat did you—”
“F-Fine! I get it!”
“Hmph. Good.”
Chifuyu could have kept going for another hour. It stopped Cecilia in her tracks. She gave up.
“Hah... I’m upset that I can’t respond to that...”
She felt exhausted, and sighed a little deeper than before, then she noticed something.
“Um... Where is Shinonono?”
Cecilia looked around. Chifuyu looked at the monitors grimly, and somewhat differently than before. But at the time, the others did not notice that.
◇
“Tch...!”
I was in range for my ultimate attack, but my strike was dodged by the enemy. That was the fourth time I’d missed my chance.
“Ichika! You idiot! Do it properly!”
“I’m trying!”
I attacked so fast and ferociously that nobody could have dodged it, but the enemy IS’s thrusters had an astonishing level of output. It needed no more than a second to create massive distance; no matter how much Rin distracted the enemy, it always managed to dodge my attacks in time.
—This is bad...
My shield energy was down to just 60. I had only one more shot to use my barrier cancellation.
“Ichika, break away!”
“Okay!”
Whenever the enemy unit dodged my attacks, it responded with a ridiculous counter-attack. It came at me flailing its long arms, like a spooked horse, all the while still shooting beams from said arms.
“This damn thing is so annoying!”
Rin opened her impact cannons and fired. The enemy slammed aside her invisible projectiles; that had been her seventh attempt. Either way, her fire support distracted the unit, and I escaped its immediate range. Thankfully, its beam weapon’s effective range while in rapid-fire mode was only about half its normal distance.
“Rin, how much energy you got left?”
“About 180.”
Our shield energy was quite spent. She’d lost a fair chunk, but not as much as I had. Having to use the Yukihira Nigata was taking its toll.
“This is tough... The chance of hitting it hard enough to power it down with what little we have left is probably in the single digits.”
“Yeah, but it’s not zero,” I said.
“I give up. We’ve basically run out of options. When faced with something you don’t understand, you take the safe and boring way out like some old man. But really, you like to gamble, don’t you?”
“Oh, shut up.”
I didn’t gamble, by the way. That stuff was addictive for me. Betting on dumb crap with Gotanda in middle school had cost me a lot of soft drinks. I’d decided back then that I wanted to save the normal way, and I was going to need to because our pensions were all toast.
“So what now?” asked Rin.
“Run away if you want to.”
“What? Are you making fun of me?! I’m a National Cadet, you know! Like hell I’d run away with my tail between my legs!”
The single most desired trait in all National Cadets was apparently pride. Cecilia always acted the same way, after all.
“Right. Well, I’ll make sure I have your back, then.”
“Uh... Oh... O-Okay... Tha—”
Rin was turning pink when a beam seared by next to her. Well, we were still in battle after all. It wasn’t like we were paying no attention at all, but we had to focus again.
“Hey, Rin. Don’t its tactics remind you of something?”
“Huh? I dunno. You’re not going to say it looks like a horse, right?”
“That’s just what it looks like. No, I mean, like... Remember that humanoid robot some car company made a long time ago?”
“Nope...”
She must have been living under a rock at the time. ASI-something? I couldn’t remember either.
“I mean... It moves like a machine, don’t you think?”
“An IS is a machine.”
“That’s not what I mean. Like... Do you think there’s really a person inside there?”
“What? An IS can’t move without a human ins—”
Rin fell silent.
“It hasn’t attacked us much whenever we were talking. Like it’s listening to us...”
Rin was trying to recall the battle. These were the times she was dead serious about everything.
“But... An unmanned unit shouldn’t be possible. An IS can never move without a human being inside. That’s how they work.”
I’d also read that in a textbook: there had to be someone inside the IS. But was that really true? We had no way of knowing what cutting-edge research was already up to. They wouldn’t be telling anybody about it, after all.
“Okay... Let’s just assume... What if this unit is unmanned?”
“What, are you saying we can win if it’s unmanned?”
“Yeah. We can attack with everything we’ve got if we know there’s nobody in there.”
Between Yukihira Nigata and Reiraku Byakuya, my ultimate attack, my IS had a ton of destructive power. It was simply too powerful to be used in league matches or training, but against an unmanned unit, it didn’t matter what havoc it could wreak. I had come up with a plan.
“You’re not even hitting it, though. ‘Give everything,’ my butt.”
“The next one will hit.”
“I wanna see that. I don’t think it’s possible, but let’s assume that the unit isn’t manned.”
Maybe Rin knew that I had a plan. She was smiling at me. She’d shown that smile to me before, sometimes. It was the kind of face that said “And if you’re wrong, you’re treating me to crepes.” She was the devil. She’d been basically extorting me since middle school.
