7.01 Volume 7 Prologue
December 2384
“Valkyrie Zero-Alpha, do you have visual?”
“Confirmed visual, HQ. Moving to engage!” Carl spoke, watching the feed from the head camera of his mechanized combat armor, or ‘mech’ for short. A woman with blue glowing hair was flying through the air, wearing what looked like a form-fitting partial combat suit. She was accompanied by flying antique swords, though those of course had propulsion systems and visible circuitry in them to even achieve that feat. It was nothing he had ever seen before.
“Valkyrie squad, be advised: target appears to be accompanied by drones. Exercise due caution when engaging!”
Three answers came back, confirming the order, and Carl accelerated, with his unit in tow. Their initial greeting was a salvo of missiles; four each, though they had to fire them unguided, as their target lacked the usual characteristics of a military target. For starters, she was way too small, had no reactor signature and emitted no heat from propulsion engines, not even her sword-shaped drones. It was like she flew through the air with magic.
The strange woman, the terrorist who had just torn a giant hole into Hayder-Katsuya’s corporate headquarters, noticed the approaching salvo. She immediately changed direction mid-air, rapidly ascending into the sky to avoid the missiles entirely. Her maneuver would have been entirely impossible for a mech, despite the systems’ superior maneuverability over other conventional military hardware.
Carl grimaced and pointed the integrated autocannon on his mech’s left arm at the terrorist, while his unit was attempting to encircle her. The shells he shot at her exploded violently with anti-air shrapnel bursts, and for a moment he thought that he caught her in the blast, but instead he saw a shimmering blue barrier.
“Valkyrie squad, be advised! Target has a shield generator!” he barked over comms, and he could hear confused reactions.
“The hell?! Only carriers are supposed to have those!” Zero-Gamma complained, then a surprised shout came through his comms as the terrorist rapidly changed course again and slammed right into his mech, wielding a halberd of all things. She immediately raised that weapon and proved that it could match up to modern hardware as it cut off the mech’s head with a wide swing, while her shield deflected low-caliber rounds from Zero-Delta’s right-arm weaponry as he attempted to assist his comrade.
“Lost head camera! Opening chest view port! Oh god, she’s right in front of me!”
Carl switched to small caliber weaponry as well and shot at the terrorist who clung to his squadmate’s mech, hoping to overwhelm her shield and shoot her off him with some minor scratches to his machine before she could gut him inside his cockpit, but her shield held strong.
She didn’t kill him, however. Her halberd vanished into thin air, and she replaced it with an energy-based melee weapon, a beam only a meter long, emerging from a steel handle. She quickly cut the mech’s arms off, then its missile pods before she kicked herself off the machine.
“Zero-Gamma here, lost all offensive capabilities!” the pilot of the dismembered mech reported, all while the remaining pilots fired their autocannons at the terrorist who flew between them at incredible speed.
“Get out of here, then! You’re no use like this!” Carl barked and the mech disengaged as instructed. Just as he followed the blue-haired woman with his cannon, he caught an explosion from the corner of his eye and let out a loud curse. The terrorist’s drones cut through Zero-Charlie’s propulsion system and ammo stores, slowly cooking them off and tearing off her mech’s limbs with sequential explosions. She immediately bailed, ejecting the cockpit from her machine and beginning a descent with retro thrusters.
Shit, now it’s just Delta and-
Carl witnessed another explosion. The terrorist only struck the propulsion system of Zero-Delta’s mech, but that was enough. The machine fell out of the sky like a brick, and Delta bailed as well. It was only him and this strange woman, now.
Carl moved his machine’s right arm, clipping the low-caliber machine gun to the magnetic holster on the machine’s thigh, then he drew his own melee weapon, a heavy chunk of metal, fashioned like an old broadsword. It had energized edges to allow cutting through other mechs in melee engagements, which would be more than enough to deal with this woman, he reasoned.
He could have sworn that the blue-haired terrorist showed him a little smirk, but the moment passed as soon as it came, and she let her halberd vanish, replacing it with a sword of her own. A medieval longsword. Carl accelerated towards her and took a swing at her. The unbearably loud clang of their blades meeting rang through the air, and Carl wanted to quickly follow up with another attack, but as he was about to swing again, his suit was rocked by an explosion from behind.
“Sorry, I’m not here for fun. People are waiting for me to rescue them,” the woman said, and it only took a quick status check for Carl to confirm that she sneakily used her drones to destroy his propulsion systems as well.
Oh no, I’m not letting you leave that easily…
Just as the terrorist was about to leave, Carl made his suit reach out and grab her with both arms around her body, pulling her close. If he had any more juice in the system he would have attempted to crush her, but with his energy levels rapidly falling, he did something reckless: he activated his suit’s self-destruct.
He could witness the woman turn her head and give him an angry look.
“You utter fool! What have you done?!”
He gave no answer. He grinned, closing his eyes and waited for the explosion to take them both. At least his family would get a fat KIA bonus.
***
Carl stared up at the sky, where the blue glow of a still ongoing mech reactor explosion lit up the city like a second moon. He was lying on a mountain of garbage bags, filled with all sorts of nasty food waste. His mind was hazy about the details, but from what he could remember, the terrorist cut open his cockpit and tossed him out before the mech exploded, even sending her strange drones after him to break his fall. He didn’t know what to make of it.
“Kill confirmed. Good job,” his employer spoke through his headphones and he raised a brow.
“You sure about that?”
“We saw her body flying out of the explosion, and it looked like that did a number on her. We’re sending a team to retrieve the corpse now.”
“Acknowledged,” Carl confirmed, before he passed out on top of the pile of garbage.
Miori groaned, pushing herself on her feet as her body ached all over in ways she hadn’t felt since Minerva beat Bellona in their duel. She quickly looked around to orient herself, finding herself in some kind of back alley. All sorts of tubes and wires were hanging loosely off the side of a building: air conditioning mixed with unplugged neon advertisements, as well as stained mattresses lying in a somewhat dry corner, sheltered from the ceaseless rain that slowly soaked her sloppily thrown-on sweater and pants combo that she dressed herself in after Annie alerted her to the invasion.
She threw a glance towards the sky, where the smoke of the recent explosion that knocked her out was still visible.
“He really blew the suit up… the people in this world are insane.”
“He likely assumed we would kill him.”
“After we only disabled all the other suits?”
Miori heard a sound. There was a group of people approaching her position, shouting commands at each other. She didn’t want to stick around to find out what the commotion was about, so she limped in the opposite direction, letting out small, pained hisses every other step as her sore body complained about the process.
“How long until we can transform again?”
“I’m not sure. That explosion damaged me heavily.”
“Then I’ll hide for as long as I can,” Miori confirmed, hurrying around a corner and peeking into the alleyway. Men in black combat gear entered, aiming guns and flashlights into every nook and cranny.
“HQ, Bloodhounds arrived at designated coordinates. Are you certain that the corpse landed here?”
There was a pause as the obvious squad leader listened to an answer.
“Well, shit. Careful, men! Our terrorist might still be at large! Maybe she’s disguising herself! Stop everyone you see who looks even the littlest bit suspicious and check their IDs!” he commanded, and the men spread out.
Miori cursed under her breath and slipped away from the corner, trying to navigate her way through the narrow alleyways to slip away.
As she had walked a few hundred meters, someone suddenly stepped into her way, shining a flashlight into her face. She froze, ready to fight, even without her transformation, if necessary, but the man in front of her lowered his flashlight and she recognized him as the ginger-haired man from the building she just tore up. Thankfully, he was dressed now.
He cupped his left ear with his hand.
“PPiper? Yeah, I found her. Blonde hair, blue eyes, dressed like some kind of outworlder. I’ll bring her to your place.”
Before Miori could ask who he was or protest the way he talked about her clothes, he quickly handed her what looked like an overcoat with reflective stripes on it.
“Here. Makes you stand out less. We’ll get you to PPiper’s and then we’ll figure out where we go from there.”
Miori hesitated only a moment, but then she put on the overcoat, following this stranger to Annie’s place. This was her best option for now.