Chapter 34: A Run-In With A Ghost
That day, Amy had woken up earlier than usual. After she had freshened up, she walked out of her room and over to the training room. The training room was open at all times, but that wasn’t why she was waking up early. The reason she was up and about at that time was to find the so-called mech designing room.
After she had run into her childhood friend days earlier, she had been trying to find any clue as to his whereabouts. Following her promotion from trainee to first-level officer—or in other words, cadet—she had expected to find the room, but it seemed impossible.
Every time she approached someone about it, they always seemed too impulsive to divulge the location for some reason. Those that did manage to talk spoke of the place like some fabled room that existed on another planet. She wished she had access to some map of the mech division base, but there was none. She had no memory of every path she took in her search each day.
Alto meant a lot to her—he was her best friend. But more than that, she wanted to see him again. As she walked down one of the paths she hadn’t passed before, she thought about the recovering mech pilots from the struggling battleship.
As much as she tried to gather information from them, she wasn’t classified to come into contact with them. It felt frustrating, but she wanted to know what war they had fought in. Since the chances of a kaiju-infested planet in their star system were very low, she doubted that was the case. And since their battleship was badly damaged, that must have meant it was a battle in space. She ruled out the possibility that they were attacked by an alien race.
Alien species did not exist in their star system either, so the only thing that could have put their lives in danger was space pirates. It wasn’t uncommon, as they existed in almost every star system—always hiding on some uninhabitable asteroid or unregistered planet, or in some far star system like Xardar.
She knew measures would be taken to ensure that the pirates were dealt with or chased away. She knew it was far above her jurisdiction, but she desperately wanted to be free from the confines of planet Soto. She wanted some action, and she hated that she lacked that.
Soto was a quiet planet—it was the same as being dead, and she hated that. She had no idea what the mech division base stationed there even did aside from occupy space. She had heard of cross-division competitions held in every star system, where various mech pilots in training battled and challenged each other. With her track record, she knew it was a possibility. But without any action, she highly doubted it. After the test with the Shadow Dancers, she had yet to pilot a mech again, and she wanted so desperately to feel that again.
She came to a sudden halt just then as someone appeared before her. A scream escaped from her lungs as she jumped back in fear. She was sure no one had been there a second ago—so where did this person come from? Amy’s trained instinct kicked in, and she threw a kick the moment she felt grounded.