Chapter 46 – The Likes of You Cannot Stop Me!

Three unmanned machines closing at terrifying speed. Zein analyzed the waveforms the Rigune's sensors had caught in the same instant they appeared.

"All high-mobility types. But nothing like the beast the lady faced before. ...Scatter!"

Missiles erupted from the Rigune's shoulders at his sharp command. The three unmanned machines each broke away in unnatural, irregular paths, peeling apart in different directions. As if drawn by the separation, Letaria, Twoin, and Zein each pushed toward their own target.

The machine that wheeled around in front of Zein and Fal was wrong in a way that was obvious at a glance. Blue-and-white armor plates stacked in mismatched layers, like papier-mache slapped over a skeleton. Its form bore no trace of its original design beneath all the modification - and it closed the distance fast, radiating a cold, mechanical intent.

"It's fast...! The movement is so erratic I can't get a fix on it!"

Fal's voice pitched toward alarm - but the hands Zein kept on the controls were steady.

"The maneuvers are sharp but the underlying path is linear! Fal - read ahead and saturate the space! I'll handle all the evasion!"

The enemy had equipped itself with a single Photon Machine Gun - nothing more. A stripped-down load. But the density of light it was putting out was savage. Each shot carried little individual force, but sustain that fire and armor went up like paper. Zein worked the thrusters with fine precision, threading the gaps in the barrage, and loosed a spread of suppressing missiles.

Forced to dodge, the blue-white machine swept through a wide arc to buy space.

Fal didn't miss it. She swapped the sniper rifle for the heavy gatling and locked the aim on where the enemy would arrive.

"Hit--!!"

Her shout and the gatling's roar came together. A torrent of rounds converged on the predicted line and drove into the blue-white armor, physically tearing away its agility with every impact.

"Movement's slowing!"

"Not down yet...!"

The enemy kept firing, stubborn - rounds raking sparks across the Rigune's frame. Then, mid-exchange, it made a sudden leap - vaulting over the Rigune's head in a bid for the blind spot. A jump attack from a dead angle.

Zein had been waiting for exactly that.

The Rigune didn't turn. The barrel of the Photon Sniper Rifle still mounted on its back swiveled straight upward.

"Got you."

Point-blank range. A perfect blind-spot ambush with no time to dodge. The high-energy burst punched clean through the blue-white machine - cockpit block and all - and split it open.

A flash, then nothing. The misshapen Makina became dust.

"...Good enough."

Zein exhaled roughly and scanned the surrounding heat signatures. Nothing left turning teeth their way.

"Boss, that was incredible...! But the others - !"

At Fal's urgent voice, Zein swung the Rigune's cameras toward the separate arena where Letaria and Twoin were fighting.

◆

While Zein and Fal finished off the blue-white machine, the remaining two battles were each reaching their final moment.

The machine Twoin had drawn was a Makina painted in raw, unpainted gray - no finish at all, just bare metal. The swollen, graceless form had nothing to recommend it aesthetically, but it was no underpowered antique. It carried a heavy live-round rifle and had a Photon Saber energy unit mounted at the hip: a machine with no weakness at either mid or close range.

"Hmm... Let us try this, then."

Twoin murmured it with calm and pushed the controls of his machine, Yera.

Yera moved in a way unlike anything standard. The large physical weapons mounted on both of its legs - Twoin grabbed them with the manipulators and flung them into the dark with full force.

What he had thrown were boomerangs. Enormous ones. Nothing close to standard Makina armament - an unorthodox weapon by any measure. But they were linked to remote guidance signals broadcast by Yera, which gave them limited tracking properties even through vacuum, and a natural return arc that brought them back to the machine.

The irregular, sweeping trajectories the mass weapons traced were something the unmanned machine's sensors couldn't resolve into clean predicted paths. Sharp, heavy metallic impacts rang out as the boomerangs hammered the gray armor repeatedly. Sparks scattered into space - but the hits couldn't crack through the heavy plating to deliver anything fatal. The enemy took the strikes, shook them off, and charged Yera at a dead run, live rifle firing continuously.

Twoin caught the returning first boomerang and simultaneously drew the second from the opposite leg mount, hurling it immediately. Two intersecting trajectories. One of them found the gray machine's head - burying itself deep in the compound sensor and camera unit that clustered there.

By any normal reckoning, losing both eyes should have ended it. But this was an unmanned machine. No pain. No fear. Accuracy savaged, it still swept the area around Yera's approximate coordinates with the rifle on full auto and dragged the Photon Saber from its hip with something that looked like spite.

Several rounds struck Yera's frame. The impacts shook the cockpit hard - Twoin's expression didn't change.

"No issue."

Yera's armor was built thick enough to answer the enemy's. A few direct hits scored the surface plates, nothing more.

Twoin set Yera into a firm defensive stance and waited - Photon Saber blade raised, the enemy charging in - waited for the moment the distance collapsed entirely. The blade came down from above. The absolute instant before it landed.

Twoin pulled the trigger on Yera's second armament.

From every gap between Yera's armor plates, a volley of needle rounds discharged simultaneously. Penetration was extreme, effective range was almost nothing - a hidden weapon designed purely for this: a counter at zero distance. The Lithos Core clearance earlier had burned through most of Yera's standard loadout. That was precisely why Twoin had held every last shot of this weapon for this single crossing.

The steel rain at point-blank range shredded the gray machine without mercy. Several rounds threaded through cracks in the heavy plating and found the main generator inside.

Light bled from the enemy's core. A violent shockwave hammered Yera's shield. When the light cleared, only a drifting gray hulk remained, silent and still.

◆

Letaria's battle, by contrast, was an overwhelming storm of light and mass.

The machine facing her was painted in red-black that bled into the void behind it, every surface packed with missile pods - one machine putting out the firepower of an entire squad, relentlessly.

For Letaria, the sheer volume of it held no terror.

Her heightened perception rendered every incoming missile as a line of light traced through the space ahead - each trajectory visible, the path to thread through them already drawn.

"Not a single one of those will touch me!"

Arden's thrusters roared in deep violet, and she slipped through the gaps in the barrage at speed that left no time for the eye to follow. Not a graze. She closed the distance clean and drove Arden's leg into the enemy's chest with full momentum.

A heavy shockwave rolled out. The red-black machine reeled back - and even as it staggered, it fired every remaining missile at point-blank range.

Letaria twisted aside at the last instant and drove Arden's left fist into the enemy's faceplate.

"I, Letaria Adeniam - !"

A blow. The enemy's sensors threw sparks. Another missile fired at near-zero distance - she rolled her head to the minimum angle and let it pass.

"The likes of you cannot stop me!"

Another punch. The armor buckled. The internal frame warped.

She had stripped every trace of mobility from it. In one continuous motion, she drew the Photon Saber from the hip mount. The blade of light carved a vivid arc across the dark.

"Take this - Photon Saber!"

One stroke.

Arden's blade cut the red-black machine diagonally, deep - all the way through.

The cut missed the generator. There was no violent detonation. The enemy simply lost every function at once, went silent, and drifted away into the void.

"Hmph... All show, and nothing behind it."

Her declaration of victory. And through it, her magic reached out through Arden - and found three presences: living, intact, certain.

(... Zein. Fal. And Twoin as well. All safe.)

A certainty that went beyond words settled into her chest and released something.

Then - in the quiet after the relief, something else slipped in.

Not quite a voice. A faint tremor at the edge of awareness.

(... Taria ...)

"...?"

Letaria swept Arden's sensors in every direction. Nothing. Only the quiet spread of starlight.

She held still for a moment longer - then turned Arden around and pushed toward her companions, and toward the place where the distress signal kept calling from the dark.