Infinite Stratos, Volume 1, page 6
“Hey, I thought we were learning about—”
“I will check your skills.”
“Fine...”
Why were all the girls I knew so stubborn? Perhaps that was the kind of star I’d been born under. Goodness gracious.
◇
“What’s with this?”
“I’m... not too sure myself.”
We were at the kendo hall together after school. There were a ton of spectators and Houki was understandably upset. We had barely fought for 10 minutes, and I had lost by a landslide.
Houki removed her helmet and glared at me.
“Why are you so weak?!”
“I was studying for the entrance exams.”
“Which club were you in in middle school?”
“The ‘Go Home’ club, where you go straight home after school. Won every tournament for three years.”
Actually, I was working a job to help our finances.
“I will correct this...”
“You’ll what?”
“I will train you! This is a more basic problem than the IS! We will train for three hours every evening!”
“Uh. That sounds like a bit much... I mean, what about the IS?”
“Like I said, this is a way more basic problem.”
Man, she was so angry at me. I had no idea what to say.
“This is sad. You lost to a girl at kendo... Are you not disappointed, Ichika?! This isn’t even about the IS yet, and look how you are!”
“I dunno, I guess I didn’t cut the best figure, huh?”
“‘Cut the best figure?’ You’re not in a position to worry about that! Or do you, uh... Do you enjoy being surrounded by all these girls?”
Snap. Enough was enough! There were limits, and Houki had finally gone too far.
“As if! They treat me like some rare animal! And this stupid school is even making me live together with a girl! I dunno what I did to—”
“A-Are you saying you have a problem with me being your roommate?!”
Bam! I barely managed to block her bamboo sword with mine.
—Step off, you idiot!
We weren’t wearing our kendo helmets anymore. The danger levels were real.
“C-Calm down, Houki. I don’t want to die yet, and I’m sure you don’t want to be a murderer, either. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, right?”
Houki was pressuring me with both arms while I was blocking her with only one. My right hand was trembling from fending her off, while my left pressed the helmet into my chest.
“Houki, please. I’ll buy you dinner, okay?”
“Hmph... Weakling.”
Houki dropped her stance, cast me a scornful look, and disappeared towards the changing room. I was relieved to have survived again. I felt like my life was a roller coaster.
—Good God...
Houki had gotten really strong. When we were young, I’d always won pretty easily. My hand was beginning to sting where Houki’s sword had struck; it was going to swell up.
“Did you see Orimura?”
“He’s pretty weak, huh?”
“Can he really control an IS?”
I could hear the disappointed mumbling among the spectators.
—Damn it...
There was nothing more pitiful than a man losing to a woman. But most of all, I was mad at myself— in the state I was in, I wasn’t going to be protecting anybody, let alone winning. I was feeling a kind of shock and disappointment that I rarely felt.
“Guess I’ll have to train again.”
When you’re at the absolute bottom of your abilities, there’s nowhere else to go but up, and I was as low as you could possibly get right now.
—All right, let’s do this. I refuse to lose.
◇
—Maybe I went a little too far?
I couldn’t shake these thoughts from my mind. My childhood friend, reunited with me after six years. When I looked at him, a part seemed to be the same as when he was a child, and another had grown up with age. It had made my heart beat so fast.
—N-No, what I said was fine. He let himself go. Clearly he hasn’t held a sword in over a year, otherwise he wouldn’t have lost to me so easily.
“.........”
Ichika had been really strong six years ago, and he was always just so cool.
—I-I mean, well... He l-looked cool doing it...
Ichika had matured a lot since then. As a kid he was rather bratty, but now he seemed a lot more... manly. Still, he let himself go. He should be ashamed of himself for losing so easily! Geez. The mere thought of that battle was upsetting.
What happened to him? He was super into kendo before. Had he just abandoned it? That’s not what a real man does! It’s said that if you stop practicing for three days, you lose a week of training— that described Ichika perfectly. It wasn’t just bad technique; his execution and situational awareness had deteriorated. Getting that back was going to take time. After all, they came as a result of many hours of training. Difficult to gain, easy to lose.
—But he also...
I pulled the towel off my hair and touched it. My hair was so long now that it almost reached my waist even when it was tied up. I was amazed that he had still recognized me.
—Six years...
We’d been only nine, then. Our bodies and our faces had changed and grown, but I was quite sure he had recognized me even before we had introduced ourselves.
“Hehe...”
Somehow, that made me very happy. I was only able to recognize Ichika because I saw his name in the news together with a picture; without it, I honestly wouldn’t have been able to tell it was him. He’d become so masculine!
—In fact, you could say he’s looking... handsome, now.
I almost dropped my teacup in disbelief when I first saw him on the news. Ichika said that he read about me winning the national kendo tournament in the newspaper, but there probably wasn’t a picture there. Still, he’d said he recognized me immediately. That made me happy, too.
—It’s a good thing I didn’t change my hairstyle...
I had kept it all this time with hopes that, someday, he would see me and recognize it.
—But it feels so awkward now, though, compared to when we were kids. At our age, boy and girls would start to...
“Hah...?!”
I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but my reflection seemed a lot more bright-eyed than normal, almost like a different person.
“.........”
It didn’t make sense. I was the same as always, but not. Whatever. Now was not the time to worry about such things, when there were more important problems at hand. Time was of the essence.
—I-I’ll have to train him starting tomorrow after school. I need him to be at least average in skill.
Anything else would have been a disgrace. Truly unacceptable! I crossed my arms and nodded at my reflection.
—Besides... With this, Ichika and I would be alone together and...
“No! Th-That’s not what this is about!”
Right. There was absolutely no ulterior motive, none whatsoever. I’m pure. I’m only lamenting the lack of skill of a fellow student. And because he’s my fellow student, I need to look after him. Nothing weird about it at all!
“This is legitimate! LE-GI-TI-MATE!”
It was now the next Monday: the day of my battle with Cecilia had arrived.
“Hey, Houki.”
“Yeah, Ichika?”
After a week of living together, Houki and I had gone back to using each other’s first names. Perhaps the six years we hadn’t seen each other didn’t matter all that much? Things were good.
“Aren’t we forgetting something?”
“I don’t think so. Must be your imagination.”
No. One problem definitely remained.
“What happened to teaching me about the IS?”
“.........”
“Don’t... Ignore... Me... Now...”
A week had passed in which Houki had practiced kendo very diligently with me. The problem was that we hadn’t done anything else.
“Th-There was nothing we could do. Your IS unit hadn’t arrived yet.”
“I guess so— No! You could have at least taught me basic knowledge or something!”
“.........”
“I said... Don’t... Ignore... Me...”
Right. Apparently something had gone wrong with my unit and it hadn’t arrived yet. Yes, it still hadn’t arrived. What was keeping them?
“.........”
“.........”
Houki and I were silent.
“O-Orimura! Orimura! Orimura!”
She didn’t have to call me three times. Ms. Yamada was running over to us at the third arena, pit A. She always looked like she was about to sprawl out onto the ground with her unsteady running. It made me actively nervous. But this time, she was even less steady on her feet.
“Ms. Yamada, please calm down. Take a deep breath.”
“Y-Yes... Nnahhh... Nnahhh...”
“And now stop.”
“Mmn—”
I said that on a whim. Ms. Yamada stopped breathing. Her face was beginning to get red from lack of oxygen. She really didn’t understand when people were messing with her.
“.........”
“Pfwah! Do I have to hold my breath longer?”
Nah, I just forgot to tell her to stop.
“Don’t mess with your teachers, you moron.”
Bam!
I felt like something blew out my brains again. The pain wasn’t a big deal, maybe as much as the fizz of a soft drink, but the damage to my brain cells was no joke. Nothing less from Japan’s representative!
“Chifuyu...”
Wham!
“I told you, it’s Ms. Orimura. When are you going to learn? If you won’t learn, then die.”
I was hoping someone heard that. No teacher should talk like that. That right there was the reason she didn’t have a boyfriend, despite her good looks.
“Hmph. I could get married in a week if I didn’t have to take care of my idiotic little brother.”
Was she telepathic or something? I was no match for Chifuyu, in more ways than one.
“A-A-Anyway! It came! Your IS unit is here!”
—It’s here?
“Suit up, Orimura. We don’t have the arena forever, so I want you out on the field immediately.”
—Excuse me?
“Show me that real men can overcome obstacles as trivial as this, Ichika.”
—Wait a sec.
“Uh... Um... Err...”
“Go on already!”
Ms. Yamada, Chifuyu, and Houki were all egging me on. The women around me were all like that, among other things.
With a sharp metallic sound, the storage bay of the pit opened. The blast doors released diagonally, and as they drew apart, the area beyond slowly came into view: it was... white. Stark white, as far as the eye could see. The IS unit was so unadorned that it was almost blinding. And it stood there, armor plates open, waiting for a pilot.
“This is...”
“Yes! This is your personal IS unit, Byakushiki!”
My IS. It was an inorganic robot, and yet it seemed to be waiting for me. Waiting... forever... for... this... moment... Waiting... for... so... long...
“Hurry up! Get in the damn robot. We don’t have all day, you can format it and do the fitting in battle. If not, you lose. Got it?”
Urged on, I touched the pure, white IS.
“Huh?”
I didn’t receive the kind of electric shock I felt when I had touched the test IS unit. I only melted into it. Understood it; what it was, what it could do. I understood.
“Give yourself to it... Yeah. Like that. Like you’re sitting. The system will determine the best fit.”
I did as my sister said and leaned into my IS, Byakushiki. It caught me and enveloped my body in armor. There was a sizzling sound as air was expelled, and then I felt as though the unit had always been a part of me. I was connected to Byakushiki... It felt as though it had been made only for me, and me alone. I perceived the world around me more clearly, like the resolution was raised. All the sensors of the unit interfaced straight into my field of view, and I understood intuitively what they meant.
“Oh...”
[ENEMY UNIT DETECTED. PILOT: CECILIA ALCOTT. IS NAME: BLUE TEARS. COMBAT SPECIALIZATION: MID-RANGE FIRE. SPECIAL EQUIPMENT DETECTED.]
“It looks like the IS hypersensors are working properly. Do you feel all right, Ichika?”
Chifuyu looked to me like always, but I detected slight tremors in her voice. She was worried about me.
“I’m fine, Chifuyu. I can do this.”
“I see.”
She was relieved. The change in her voice was so faint that I wouldn’t have picked it up without the IS hypersensors.
—I probably would have. She used my first name for once.
I turned my attention to Houki. I didn’t have to look directly at her, though. Everything around me was visible through the IS.
“.........”
She looked like she wanted to say something, but didn’t quite know what it was. Under normal circumstances, insight at this level would be impossible.
“Houki.”
“Y-Yes?”
“I’ll be back.”
“O-Okay. Make sure you win.”
I nodded and went towards the gate to the pit. Byakushiki obeyed even the softest of my movements, and I drifted towards the gate.
Sssssss.
My thoughts were clear, but in the back of my mind Byakushiki was processing a vast amount of information. I could feel it trying to determine the optimal fitting for my body, and also initialize the formatting. With every passing second the armor layers changed and shifted—it rewrote its own software, and rearranged the hardware. The meters were displaying orders of a magnitude that I’d never seen before. Sadly, I didn’t have time to pay attention to background processes. The gate was going to open in 2.05718422 seconds, and the real battle would begin.
“Oh, you haven’t tried to run away, I see,” Cecilia cooed.
She had her arms on her hips again. It looked pretty good. That was none of my concern, though. That wasn’t what the hypersensors relayed to me.
Her light blue unit was named Blue Tears. It had four visually striking armored fins on the back. As a unit, it looked noble, similar to a royal knight. She carried a unique gun, more than two meters in length: a 67-caliber laser rifle called a Starlight Mk. III. Originally the IS were designed with outer space in mind, so levitation was part of its design. And due to the levitation, using large, unwieldy weapons wasn’t uncommon.
The arena had a diameter of 200 meters. The unit estimated that a shot would hit me 0.4 seconds after firing. The bell signaling the beginning of the battle had already rung. She could have fired at any moment.
“I will give you one last chance.”
She had one hand on her hip, the other pointed at me. The gun was in her left and still pointed at the ground.
“Last chance for what?”
“This battle has a foregone conclusion. If you don’t want to be crawling in the dirt by the end, I will let you off easy if you apologize!” she said, with the widest smile across her face.
[WARNING: ENEMY IS PILOT WEAPON-SAFETY DISENGAGED. LEFT-EYE LOCK-ON DETECTED.]
I could instantly process the information the IS was giving me, but so much of it flooded in at once that it was still almost overwhelming.
“Don’t act like there’s even a choice!”
“Is that so? Such a shame. Well, then—”
[WARNING: ENEMY IS PILOT FIRE-MODE ENGAGED. TRIGGER PULL AND ENERGY CHARGE DETECTED.]
“Goodbye!”
Wa—shiiing!
The sound of her shot pierced through the air. Immediately after, a bright flash raced squarely towards me.
“WHOA!”
Byakushiki’s auto-guard had, apparently, protected me. I’d been able to avoid a full hit, but the shot had blasted off a part of my left shoulder armor that was still in the process of recalculation. The delayed sonic boom slammed my left arm aside, and the IS unit transmitted a flash of pain to me as feedback. The IS’ automatic altitude control system pulled so many G-forces that it made my head spin, but they also kept me from blacking out. The constant jostling was stomach turning.
[BARRIER PENETRATED: 46 POINTS. SHIELD ENERGY REMAINING: 521. DAMAGE TO FRAME: MINIMAL.]
—Shit, I’m not keeping up with Byakushiki.
Generally, IS battles were over once the shield energy of one side had been drained to zero. However, if an attack penetrated the shield barrier, it could still damage the frame. That was unrelated to the remaining shield charge, but physical damage to the frame usually affected combat in some way.
By the way, all IS units were equipped with an “Absolute Defense” system that prevented the pilot from dying. Even taking extreme amounts of damage was only going to drain the shield, or so the textbook said; I wasn’t sure whether or not that was true. My shoulder armor had been blown off because the IS had decided that it wasn’t essential to my survival, and so the Absolute Defense system wasn’t activated.
“Now dance! Dance to the waltz of me, Cecilia Alcott, and Blue Tears!”
Another shot, and another, and another. They fell down on me like rain. All shots were the work of precision aiming, and simply holding on would only last for so long. Byakushiki bombarded me with sirens, alerting me to the fact that my shield was being whittled away.
“Don’t I have some kind of weapon?!” I yelled.
Byakushiki immediately displayed a list of my equipment to me.
—A list? No, there’s...
“There’s only one thing?”
All it showed was a “Close-Combat Blade.”
—Goddamn. Are you serious?
“Whatever, I’ll take it!”
Figuring that was better than fighting empty-handed, I called for the “Close-Combat Blade” to appear. [REAL NAME NOT SET.]
T—ching!
“Fighting a mid-range unit like mine with close-combat weapons is the height of foolishness!”
Cecilia attacked immediately. I was able to dodge her fire, but closing the 27 meter gap between us was a whole different story. I may as well have been on the other side of the planet. But—
“I will check your skills.”
“Fine...”
Why were all the girls I knew so stubborn? Perhaps that was the kind of star I’d been born under. Goodness gracious.
◇
“What’s with this?”
“I’m... not too sure myself.”
We were at the kendo hall together after school. There were a ton of spectators and Houki was understandably upset. We had barely fought for 10 minutes, and I had lost by a landslide.
Houki removed her helmet and glared at me.
“Why are you so weak?!”
“I was studying for the entrance exams.”
“Which club were you in in middle school?”
“The ‘Go Home’ club, where you go straight home after school. Won every tournament for three years.”
Actually, I was working a job to help our finances.
“I will correct this...”
“You’ll what?”
“I will train you! This is a more basic problem than the IS! We will train for three hours every evening!”
“Uh. That sounds like a bit much... I mean, what about the IS?”
“Like I said, this is a way more basic problem.”
Man, she was so angry at me. I had no idea what to say.
“This is sad. You lost to a girl at kendo... Are you not disappointed, Ichika?! This isn’t even about the IS yet, and look how you are!”
“I dunno, I guess I didn’t cut the best figure, huh?”
“‘Cut the best figure?’ You’re not in a position to worry about that! Or do you, uh... Do you enjoy being surrounded by all these girls?”
Snap. Enough was enough! There were limits, and Houki had finally gone too far.
“As if! They treat me like some rare animal! And this stupid school is even making me live together with a girl! I dunno what I did to—”
“A-Are you saying you have a problem with me being your roommate?!”
Bam! I barely managed to block her bamboo sword with mine.
—Step off, you idiot!
We weren’t wearing our kendo helmets anymore. The danger levels were real.
“C-Calm down, Houki. I don’t want to die yet, and I’m sure you don’t want to be a murderer, either. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, right?”
Houki was pressuring me with both arms while I was blocking her with only one. My right hand was trembling from fending her off, while my left pressed the helmet into my chest.
“Houki, please. I’ll buy you dinner, okay?”
“Hmph... Weakling.”
Houki dropped her stance, cast me a scornful look, and disappeared towards the changing room. I was relieved to have survived again. I felt like my life was a roller coaster.
—Good God...
Houki had gotten really strong. When we were young, I’d always won pretty easily. My hand was beginning to sting where Houki’s sword had struck; it was going to swell up.
“Did you see Orimura?”
“He’s pretty weak, huh?”
“Can he really control an IS?”
I could hear the disappointed mumbling among the spectators.
—Damn it...
There was nothing more pitiful than a man losing to a woman. But most of all, I was mad at myself— in the state I was in, I wasn’t going to be protecting anybody, let alone winning. I was feeling a kind of shock and disappointment that I rarely felt.
“Guess I’ll have to train again.”
When you’re at the absolute bottom of your abilities, there’s nowhere else to go but up, and I was as low as you could possibly get right now.
—All right, let’s do this. I refuse to lose.
◇
—Maybe I went a little too far?
I couldn’t shake these thoughts from my mind. My childhood friend, reunited with me after six years. When I looked at him, a part seemed to be the same as when he was a child, and another had grown up with age. It had made my heart beat so fast.
—N-No, what I said was fine. He let himself go. Clearly he hasn’t held a sword in over a year, otherwise he wouldn’t have lost to me so easily.
“.........”
Ichika had been really strong six years ago, and he was always just so cool.
—I-I mean, well... He l-looked cool doing it...
Ichika had matured a lot since then. As a kid he was rather bratty, but now he seemed a lot more... manly. Still, he let himself go. He should be ashamed of himself for losing so easily! Geez. The mere thought of that battle was upsetting.
What happened to him? He was super into kendo before. Had he just abandoned it? That’s not what a real man does! It’s said that if you stop practicing for three days, you lose a week of training— that described Ichika perfectly. It wasn’t just bad technique; his execution and situational awareness had deteriorated. Getting that back was going to take time. After all, they came as a result of many hours of training. Difficult to gain, easy to lose.
—But he also...
I pulled the towel off my hair and touched it. My hair was so long now that it almost reached my waist even when it was tied up. I was amazed that he had still recognized me.
—Six years...
We’d been only nine, then. Our bodies and our faces had changed and grown, but I was quite sure he had recognized me even before we had introduced ourselves.
“Hehe...”
Somehow, that made me very happy. I was only able to recognize Ichika because I saw his name in the news together with a picture; without it, I honestly wouldn’t have been able to tell it was him. He’d become so masculine!
—In fact, you could say he’s looking... handsome, now.
I almost dropped my teacup in disbelief when I first saw him on the news. Ichika said that he read about me winning the national kendo tournament in the newspaper, but there probably wasn’t a picture there. Still, he’d said he recognized me immediately. That made me happy, too.
—It’s a good thing I didn’t change my hairstyle...
I had kept it all this time with hopes that, someday, he would see me and recognize it.
—But it feels so awkward now, though, compared to when we were kids. At our age, boy and girls would start to...
“Hah...?!”
I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but my reflection seemed a lot more bright-eyed than normal, almost like a different person.
“.........”
It didn’t make sense. I was the same as always, but not. Whatever. Now was not the time to worry about such things, when there were more important problems at hand. Time was of the essence.
—I-I’ll have to train him starting tomorrow after school. I need him to be at least average in skill.
Anything else would have been a disgrace. Truly unacceptable! I crossed my arms and nodded at my reflection.
—Besides... With this, Ichika and I would be alone together and...
“No! Th-That’s not what this is about!”
Right. There was absolutely no ulterior motive, none whatsoever. I’m pure. I’m only lamenting the lack of skill of a fellow student. And because he’s my fellow student, I need to look after him. Nothing weird about it at all!
“This is legitimate! LE-GI-TI-MATE!”
It was now the next Monday: the day of my battle with Cecilia had arrived.
“Hey, Houki.”
“Yeah, Ichika?”
After a week of living together, Houki and I had gone back to using each other’s first names. Perhaps the six years we hadn’t seen each other didn’t matter all that much? Things were good.
“Aren’t we forgetting something?”
“I don’t think so. Must be your imagination.”
No. One problem definitely remained.
“What happened to teaching me about the IS?”
“.........”
“Don’t... Ignore... Me... Now...”
A week had passed in which Houki had practiced kendo very diligently with me. The problem was that we hadn’t done anything else.
“Th-There was nothing we could do. Your IS unit hadn’t arrived yet.”
“I guess so— No! You could have at least taught me basic knowledge or something!”
“.........”
“I said... Don’t... Ignore... Me...”
Right. Apparently something had gone wrong with my unit and it hadn’t arrived yet. Yes, it still hadn’t arrived. What was keeping them?
“.........”
“.........”
Houki and I were silent.
“O-Orimura! Orimura! Orimura!”
She didn’t have to call me three times. Ms. Yamada was running over to us at the third arena, pit A. She always looked like she was about to sprawl out onto the ground with her unsteady running. It made me actively nervous. But this time, she was even less steady on her feet.
“Ms. Yamada, please calm down. Take a deep breath.”
“Y-Yes... Nnahhh... Nnahhh...”
“And now stop.”
“Mmn—”
I said that on a whim. Ms. Yamada stopped breathing. Her face was beginning to get red from lack of oxygen. She really didn’t understand when people were messing with her.
“.........”
“Pfwah! Do I have to hold my breath longer?”
Nah, I just forgot to tell her to stop.
“Don’t mess with your teachers, you moron.”
Bam!
I felt like something blew out my brains again. The pain wasn’t a big deal, maybe as much as the fizz of a soft drink, but the damage to my brain cells was no joke. Nothing less from Japan’s representative!
“Chifuyu...”
Wham!
“I told you, it’s Ms. Orimura. When are you going to learn? If you won’t learn, then die.”
I was hoping someone heard that. No teacher should talk like that. That right there was the reason she didn’t have a boyfriend, despite her good looks.
“Hmph. I could get married in a week if I didn’t have to take care of my idiotic little brother.”
Was she telepathic or something? I was no match for Chifuyu, in more ways than one.
“A-A-Anyway! It came! Your IS unit is here!”
—It’s here?
“Suit up, Orimura. We don’t have the arena forever, so I want you out on the field immediately.”
—Excuse me?
“Show me that real men can overcome obstacles as trivial as this, Ichika.”
—Wait a sec.
“Uh... Um... Err...”
“Go on already!”
Ms. Yamada, Chifuyu, and Houki were all egging me on. The women around me were all like that, among other things.
With a sharp metallic sound, the storage bay of the pit opened. The blast doors released diagonally, and as they drew apart, the area beyond slowly came into view: it was... white. Stark white, as far as the eye could see. The IS unit was so unadorned that it was almost blinding. And it stood there, armor plates open, waiting for a pilot.
“This is...”
“Yes! This is your personal IS unit, Byakushiki!”
My IS. It was an inorganic robot, and yet it seemed to be waiting for me. Waiting... forever... for... this... moment... Waiting... for... so... long...
“Hurry up! Get in the damn robot. We don’t have all day, you can format it and do the fitting in battle. If not, you lose. Got it?”
Urged on, I touched the pure, white IS.
“Huh?”
I didn’t receive the kind of electric shock I felt when I had touched the test IS unit. I only melted into it. Understood it; what it was, what it could do. I understood.
“Give yourself to it... Yeah. Like that. Like you’re sitting. The system will determine the best fit.”
I did as my sister said and leaned into my IS, Byakushiki. It caught me and enveloped my body in armor. There was a sizzling sound as air was expelled, and then I felt as though the unit had always been a part of me. I was connected to Byakushiki... It felt as though it had been made only for me, and me alone. I perceived the world around me more clearly, like the resolution was raised. All the sensors of the unit interfaced straight into my field of view, and I understood intuitively what they meant.
“Oh...”
[ENEMY UNIT DETECTED. PILOT: CECILIA ALCOTT. IS NAME: BLUE TEARS. COMBAT SPECIALIZATION: MID-RANGE FIRE. SPECIAL EQUIPMENT DETECTED.]
“It looks like the IS hypersensors are working properly. Do you feel all right, Ichika?”
Chifuyu looked to me like always, but I detected slight tremors in her voice. She was worried about me.
“I’m fine, Chifuyu. I can do this.”
“I see.”
She was relieved. The change in her voice was so faint that I wouldn’t have picked it up without the IS hypersensors.
—I probably would have. She used my first name for once.
I turned my attention to Houki. I didn’t have to look directly at her, though. Everything around me was visible through the IS.
“.........”
She looked like she wanted to say something, but didn’t quite know what it was. Under normal circumstances, insight at this level would be impossible.
“Houki.”
“Y-Yes?”
“I’ll be back.”
“O-Okay. Make sure you win.”
I nodded and went towards the gate to the pit. Byakushiki obeyed even the softest of my movements, and I drifted towards the gate.
Sssssss.
My thoughts were clear, but in the back of my mind Byakushiki was processing a vast amount of information. I could feel it trying to determine the optimal fitting for my body, and also initialize the formatting. With every passing second the armor layers changed and shifted—it rewrote its own software, and rearranged the hardware. The meters were displaying orders of a magnitude that I’d never seen before. Sadly, I didn’t have time to pay attention to background processes. The gate was going to open in 2.05718422 seconds, and the real battle would begin.
“Oh, you haven’t tried to run away, I see,” Cecilia cooed.
She had her arms on her hips again. It looked pretty good. That was none of my concern, though. That wasn’t what the hypersensors relayed to me.
Her light blue unit was named Blue Tears. It had four visually striking armored fins on the back. As a unit, it looked noble, similar to a royal knight. She carried a unique gun, more than two meters in length: a 67-caliber laser rifle called a Starlight Mk. III. Originally the IS were designed with outer space in mind, so levitation was part of its design. And due to the levitation, using large, unwieldy weapons wasn’t uncommon.
The arena had a diameter of 200 meters. The unit estimated that a shot would hit me 0.4 seconds after firing. The bell signaling the beginning of the battle had already rung. She could have fired at any moment.
“I will give you one last chance.”
She had one hand on her hip, the other pointed at me. The gun was in her left and still pointed at the ground.
“Last chance for what?”
“This battle has a foregone conclusion. If you don’t want to be crawling in the dirt by the end, I will let you off easy if you apologize!” she said, with the widest smile across her face.
[WARNING: ENEMY IS PILOT WEAPON-SAFETY DISENGAGED. LEFT-EYE LOCK-ON DETECTED.]
I could instantly process the information the IS was giving me, but so much of it flooded in at once that it was still almost overwhelming.
“Don’t act like there’s even a choice!”
“Is that so? Such a shame. Well, then—”
[WARNING: ENEMY IS PILOT FIRE-MODE ENGAGED. TRIGGER PULL AND ENERGY CHARGE DETECTED.]
“Goodbye!”
Wa—shiiing!
The sound of her shot pierced through the air. Immediately after, a bright flash raced squarely towards me.
“WHOA!”
Byakushiki’s auto-guard had, apparently, protected me. I’d been able to avoid a full hit, but the shot had blasted off a part of my left shoulder armor that was still in the process of recalculation. The delayed sonic boom slammed my left arm aside, and the IS unit transmitted a flash of pain to me as feedback. The IS’ automatic altitude control system pulled so many G-forces that it made my head spin, but they also kept me from blacking out. The constant jostling was stomach turning.
[BARRIER PENETRATED: 46 POINTS. SHIELD ENERGY REMAINING: 521. DAMAGE TO FRAME: MINIMAL.]
—Shit, I’m not keeping up with Byakushiki.
Generally, IS battles were over once the shield energy of one side had been drained to zero. However, if an attack penetrated the shield barrier, it could still damage the frame. That was unrelated to the remaining shield charge, but physical damage to the frame usually affected combat in some way.
By the way, all IS units were equipped with an “Absolute Defense” system that prevented the pilot from dying. Even taking extreme amounts of damage was only going to drain the shield, or so the textbook said; I wasn’t sure whether or not that was true. My shoulder armor had been blown off because the IS had decided that it wasn’t essential to my survival, and so the Absolute Defense system wasn’t activated.
“Now dance! Dance to the waltz of me, Cecilia Alcott, and Blue Tears!”
Another shot, and another, and another. They fell down on me like rain. All shots were the work of precision aiming, and simply holding on would only last for so long. Byakushiki bombarded me with sirens, alerting me to the fact that my shield was being whittled away.
“Don’t I have some kind of weapon?!” I yelled.
Byakushiki immediately displayed a list of my equipment to me.
—A list? No, there’s...
“There’s only one thing?”
All it showed was a “Close-Combat Blade.”
—Goddamn. Are you serious?
“Whatever, I’ll take it!”
Figuring that was better than fighting empty-handed, I called for the “Close-Combat Blade” to appear. [REAL NAME NOT SET.]
T—ching!
“Fighting a mid-range unit like mine with close-combat weapons is the height of foolishness!”
Cecilia attacked immediately. I was able to dodge her fire, but closing the 27 meter gap between us was a whole different story. I may as well have been on the other side of the planet. But—
