Chapter 1: Business as Usual
It wasn’t every day that a titan rescued a town.
The armored figure was a massive fifteen feet tall, clad head to toe in heavy armor and wielding a poleaxe twice its size, the blade alone the length of a man. The Platinum-rank World Elites – all four of them – assaulting the merely Silver-ranked town never had a chance. The other aspiring Gold-rankers, nowhere near up to the task, huddled at the town center, maimed and exhausted, as the titan smashed through the monsters. It wielded both weapon and magic, moving far faster than anything of that size should and hewing straight through the final wave of the rank-up quest.
That massive poleaxe punched through a roaring, six-legged beast in a ripple of purple aether, opening a gaping hole in its body and leaving it to bleed out as silvery-grey gravity magic orbs tugged an armored elite out of position. It windmilled as it tried to keep its balance, only to be cut in half when the titan blurred past. The titan shifted its grip on the great weapon as it launched itself into the air, a prodigious leap that brought it down on the armored back of a razor-mouthed, long-legged beast and drove the poleaxe blade through the spiked skull.
Movement Skills flashed as the titan crossed to the other side of the town with one swift motion, confronting the final Elite. It was even larger than the titan, an armor-clad, four-armed monster with a flaming scimitar in each hand and lava dripping from its fangs. The titan dodged the fiery slashes with an easy grace and brought the massive poleaxe around to crush the monster’s helmet. The sound wasn’t so much a metallic ring as a tortured screech, the sturdy helm caving in as the strike instantly killed the monster.
The quest finished, solely thanks to the efforts of the towering figure, with the town left miraculously whole and intact. Relieved Coppers and Silvers watched from the buildings in both fear and awe as the titan strode through the town, ducking into the Nexus and touching the crystal there. It did not speak to the failed aspirants, or to those within town, merely vanishing and leaving behind the corpses of the monsters that would have destroyed it.
Within the titan, Kess Miche, née Leese Sekhel stepped back in a purely virtual way and let Raine pilot it alone. With the disappearance of the Sydean Lineage, nobody was willing to move to Bismuth, and so there was a need for something that could mimic that level of power. There had been a lot of ideas and testing over the years, which had ultimately resulted in what Cato had dubbed the Jager Frame.
It was, ultimately, controlled jointly by Raine and Leese, though either of them could step back into a miniature aestivation, or transmit themselves back up to proper infrastructure above. Yet when they both linked into it, the massive frame had the benefits of two people’s worth of System enhancements — getting that right was what had taken the longest time.
Generally, Raine focused on the actual martial combat, and Leese had high-powered amplification and support Skills, but both sets of Skills applied to the combined body. They were, effectively, cheating the System, creating builds that would never have been possible for two separate people. It just wasn’t possible for someone to forego the usual Skill balance and still survive Conflict Zones or dungeons. But Leese hadn’t taken a single movement Skill, while Raine had four.
The combined body appraised as a conjoined identity, which nobody, not even Yaniss, had ever heard of. Yet it turned out that the System had accommodations for such a thing that, through trial and error, they had managed to fulfill. So the titan was Kess-Imel, a double-Peak-Gold Jager — or rather, now double-Fresh-Platinum. They certainly stood out, but were so far different from anything anyone would be looking for that it was worth a bit of risk.