Episode-991
Chapter : 1981
"Shut up," Lloyd told the machine.
On the other side of the canyon, the Sirius suit paused. Its sensors were confused. The energy signature coming from Lloyd’s suit had changed. It was no longer a steady, rhythmic pulse. It was jagged, spiking and dipping erratically.
"What did you do?" Anthony asked, his voice losing a bit of its smug edge. "Your energy readings are unstable. You’re going to blow yourself up."
"Maybe," Lloyd said. He slammed the throttles forward, not smoothly, but with a violent jerk.
The Aegis didn't glide forward this time. It lurched. It exploded into motion like a cannonball. One of the leg thrusters fired a split second before the other, causing the suit to tilt dangerously to the left.
To a normal pilot, this would be a mistake. To Anthony’s computer, it was an error. The Predictive Combat Engine calculated that the Aegis was crashing. It predicted Lloyd would try to correct the balance. It moved the Sirius suit to the right, expecting Lloyd to swing wide.
But Lloyd didn't correct the balance. He leaned into the crash.
He let the massive black suit fall into a chaotic spin, using the "mistake" to gain speed. He wasn't flying anymore; he was falling horizontally, a tumbling brick of black steel.
"Target trajectory... unknown," the Fire Fly computer whispered in Anthony’s ear. "Error. Logic fail."
"Logic fail," Lloyd repeated through gritted teeth. "I like the sound of that."
________________________________________
The sky blurred.
Lloyd was spinning so fast that the g-forces were pressing him back into his seat, trying to crush the air out of his lungs. The metal frame of the Aegis screamed in protest. Bolts were popping. Hydraulic lines were hissing as they were pushed past their breaking point. Without the safety limiters, the machine was tearing itself apart to obey Lloyd’s commands.
But it was fast. It was terrifyingly fast.
To Anthony, it looked like the black mech had gone insane. It wasn't moving in straight lines or smooth curves. It was jagged. It zig-zagged violently, dropping ten feet in a split second, then shooting upward with a burst of unrefined fuel.
"Target lock lost," the Sirius computer chirped. "Target movement erratic. Cannot predict impact point."
"Just shoot him!" Anthony yelled, panic starting to creep into his voice. He swung his plasma cannons around, spraying blue fire into the air.
But he was shooting at where Lloyd should have been, not where he was. The blasts sailed harmlessly through the empty space where a logical pilot would have flown.
Lloyd was currently upside down, twenty feet below Anthony, scraping the paint off the canyon floor.
"Now," Lloyd grunted.
He slammed the air-brakes on the left side only. The Aegis whipped around with a violence that snapped Lloyd’s head against the headrest. The suit stopped its forward momentum instantly and shot straight up, directly into the blind spot beneath the Sirius suit.
This was the "Fractured Maneuver." It was a move that no computer would ever recommend because it had a 50% chance of snapping the pilot’s neck. But because it was suicide, Anthony’s computer hadn't seen it coming.
"Below you!" Anthony screamed, trying to fire his thrusters to escape.
Too late.
Lloyd roared as the Aegis collided with the golden suit from below. He didn't use his fists this time. He didn't use a sword. He used his legs. The Aegis wrapped its heavy legs around the Sirius suit’s waist, locking them together in a mid-air grapple.
"Get off!" Anthony shrieked. The golden suit thrashed, slamming its elbows into Lloyd’s cockpit, denting the armor.
"No," Lloyd said. "I think I’ll stay."
They hung there in the air, suspended by the roaring engines of both suits. Atlas, seeing his master had the grip, released his water hold to avoid getting hit by the crossfire, retreating to the canyon floor to watch.
Lloyd looked at his right arm control. The "Tungsten Pile-Bunker" was ready.
A Pile-Bunker wasn't a fancy weapon. It didn't shoot lasers. It didn't use magic. It was basically a giant, hydraulic jackhammer. It was a solid spike of super-heavy tungsten metal, sharpened to a needle point, sitting on top of an explosive charge. It was designed to do one thing: punch holes in things that didn't want to have holes.
Lloyd lined up his right fist with the center of Anthony’s chest. Right where the Fire Fly reactor was humming.
"This is for calling my tech primitive," Lloyd said.
He pulled the trigger.
KA-CHUNK.
Chapter : 1982
The sound wasn't like a gunshot. It was deeper. It was the sound of the earth cracking. The explosive charge behind the tungsten spike detonated. The spike shot forward with enough force to punch through a battleship.
It hit the gold "Null-Alloy" armor of the Sirius suit. The armor was designed to stop heat. It was designed to stop magic. But it couldn't stop fifty tons of kinetic force concentrated on a single point.
The armor crumpled like tin foil. The spike drove through the gold plating, through the inner shielding, and buried itself deep inside the chest of the enemy mech.
Then, it hit the reactor.
The world went silent for a second.
The Sirius suit ran on a Cold Fusion Reactor—advanced science. The Aegis suit ran on the Golem Heart—ancient magic.
When the tungsten spike connected the two, something impossible happened.
Sparks didn't fly. Fire didn't erupt. Instead, the air around them turned purple.
A low, sucking sound filled the canyon, like a giant taking a deep breath. The point where the spike had entered the reactor began to glow with a light that hurt to look at. It was swirling, chaotic, and wrong.
"Warning," Lloyd’s computer said, its voice distorted and slow. "Dimensional... anomaly... detected."
"What did you do?!" Anthony screamed. His voice wasn't coming through the radio anymore. It was coming through the air, thin and terrified.
The coolant from Anthony’s suit began to leak, but it didn't drip down. It floated up. The purple light was creating a vacuum, a hole in reality. It was a Singularity Event.
Lloyd felt his stomach drop. The gravity around them was shifting. Rocks from the ground were starting to float into the air. The sky above them flickered again, the blue turning to a static gray.
"I broke it," Lloyd said, staring at the swirling rift in Anthony’s chest. "I think I broke physics."
The suction increased. The Sirius suit began to buckle, its metal skin peeling away and being sucked into the purple hole in its own chest. Anthony was thrashing, trying to eject, but the systems were dead.
"Let go!" Anthony begged. "You’ll kill us both! Let go!"
Lloyd tried to pull his arm back, but the Pile-Bunker was jammed. The metal had fused together from the heat of the impact. He was stuck. He was locked to a ticking time bomb that was eating reality.
The purple light expanded, swallowing the two machines in a blinding halo. The wind howled, sounding like a thousand voices screaming at once.
Lloyd gripped his controls, his knuckles white. He wasn't scared. The Major General didn't get scared. He just calculated the odds.
"Well," Lloyd muttered as the world around them began to twist and stretch like taffy. "This is going to be a bumpy ride."
The light flashed white, and for a moment, the desert was gone.
________________________________________
The purple light from the singularity event was still swirling around the chest of the golden Sirius suit, pulling at the metal like a hungry ghost. Lloyd Ferrum, locked tight against his enemy in the cockpit of the Aegis, watched his monitors with the cold, hard eyes of a man who had already done the math. The Tungsten Pile-Bunker had done its job. It had punched through the fancy gold armor, smashed the shielding, and cracked the reactor.
By all the rules of warfare Lloyd knew—both from Earth and Riverio—this was the end. The enemy pilot should be ejecting, screaming, or begging. The machine was dead. Gravity was bending around them. The fight was over.
But Anthony wasn’t screaming.
Inside the crushed, sparking cockpit of the Sirius suit, a sound started to bubble up. It wasn’t a cry for help. It was a laugh. It started low, a dry, rasping chuckle that sounded like sandpaper rubbing against bone, and it grew louder until it was a chilling, mechanical cackle that cut through the roar of the dying engines.
Lloyd frowned behind his helmet. "You’ve got a weird way of celebrating a loss," he muttered, trying to jerk his arm free from the mangled chest of the enemy mech. The metal was fused solid. He was stuck.
"A loss?" Anthony’s voice crackled over the short-range radio. The signal was dirty, filled with static and digital noise. "You still don't get it, do you, Ferrum? You look at this suit and you see a vehicle. You see a car. You think it’s a tool you put on in the morning and take off at night."