Jinguuji Marimo finished putting on her combat suit and stepped into her TSF.
She started it up and ran a system check. Everything was normal, except that a little over half the fuel had been consumed, and a small amount of ammunition had been used.
Her opponent, the young man named Kain, was not piloting the larger machine. He was using the smaller battlesuit.
The two sides moved deeper into the training ground. This section was an artificial ruined town, built to train pilots in how to use and adapt to an urban environment when fighting BETA.
"I'm in position."
"Good. Then begin, Marimo!"
Yuuko's words made her freeze for a second. They were starting just like that?
She immediately put her machine into motion, using the ruined buildings as cover while maneuvering toward Kain's position.
Hm?
She heard movement. The radar picked up the opposing machine as well.
Without hesitation, Marimo darted out, accelerating at high speed toward the machine standing there as if it had no idea what it was doing. She was about to bring the combat knife in her TSF's hand against it when-
"What?!"
Her opponent leapt away at a speed that left her stunned. He used the surrounding walls as footholds, kicking off them and bouncing from point to point. In the span of a breath, he came flying toward her back like a rubber ball ricocheting through the ruins.
Marimo instantly shoved the thrusters to full power, and her TSF pulled away from the machine just as it was about to land on her back. In the blink of an eye, she had opened up more than a hundred meters of distance.
"Wh-what kind of reaction speed is that?!"
Watching the duel from an elevated observation position, Isumi Michiru of the Valkyries could not stop herself from crying out in disbelief.
She had assumed that a machine only half the size of a TSF would at most have inferior mobility compared to one. She had never expected it to be this formidable.
If the TSF had not had thrusters on its back, its own frame movement alone would never have evaded that.
The battlesuit designated XV104 seemed to have more than twice the response speed of a TSF.
"With speed like that, close combat is impossible."
Yui murmured the words under her breath. If close combat was impossible, then defeating it would require firearms.
And the opponent had already said that Marimo was allowed to use any firepower her TSF possessed, that she should treat him as an enemy and show no mercy.
If he dared to say that, then he had absolute confidence in his machine.
Was he confident he would not be hit?
Or was he confident the battlesuit's armor could withstand TSF gunfire?
Here it came.
Instructor Jinguuji lifted into the air and aimed her gun at him.
In the next instant, orange light flashed at the muzzle.
Boom!
"She hit him!"
Hayase Mitsuki shouted.
"He didn't dodge?"
Suzumiya Haruka muttered blankly, staring nervously at the fading light and black smoke from the explosion.
Then they saw it.
"That shield… no way!"
"You've got to be kidding!"
Yui and Isumi stared at the scene in disbelief. The shield on the machine's other arm had blocked Instructor Jinguuji's attack.
It was not that the shield itself had resisted the blow through raw durability. Instead, a layer of energy had activated across its surface, then expanded outward until it was large enough to cover the entire front of the machine.
In other words, what had blocked Instructor Jinguuji's attack was an energy shield.
Bang, bang, bang!
The TSF under Instructor Jinguuji's control fired in rapid succession, hammering the opponent again as he stood there without dodging.
The result was the same. The shots were blocked.
The next second, Instructor Jinguuji opened fire without restraint, moving at high speed as she tried to shoot him from different angles.
Kain moved the shield along with her and intercepted every attack.
Boom!
A larger explosion tore through the area, collapsing the buildings near the target. Instructor Jinguuji had fired missiles.
These were not the same as the gunshots from before.
However, when the flames and black smoke dispersed-
"He's still fine."
Yui stared at the sight in disbelief.
Her pupils dilated further as she fixed her gaze on the machine, because the opponent was finally about to counterattack. He raised his arm and aimed the muzzle at Instructor Jinguuji.
Naturally, the instructor was not foolish enough to sit there and take the shot. She immediately moved.
She had been flying above the ruined buildings, but now she dropped altitude and hid behind them.
Crackle.
It almost sounded like that. A beam of light, its surface seemingly wrapped in arcs of electricity, pierced straight through a building near Instructor Jinguuji's TSF.
The next second, the beam fired again in rapid succession. In just a few breaths, the buildings around Instructor Jinguuji's position were riddled with holes.
The sight made Yui and the others swallow, or draw in a quiet breath.
With that kind of power, a TSF struck by the beam would likely be pierced straight through, just as if it had been irradiated by a Laser-class BETA.
They could tell as well. It was not that the other side could not aim at Instructor Jinguuji. He was deliberately missing, tracing outlines around her as if drawing a human silhouette with his shots.
Then, suddenly, Kain stopped firing. The two missile pods on his shoulders launched twenty missiles in an instant.
They did not fly straight toward Instructor Jinguuji. Instead, they arced high through the air before dropping around her position.
In the next instant, sheets of white light flared up like miniature suns.
When the blinding radiance faded, the image burned into Yui and the others' retinas was the sight of every building around Instructor Jinguuji's TSF melting away like candles.
For a moment, the TSF under Instructor Jinguuji's control looked as though it had been surrounded by lava.
"What kind of missiles are those? They melted everything instantly."
"Doesn't that mean they could melt through an Assault-class BETA's Mohs 15 shell too?"
When fighting the BETA, Assault-class swarms were especially troublesome. They charged headlong behind shells with a hardness of Mohs 15, and TSF bullets had difficulty piercing them. Usually, pilots had to circle behind them and attack their rear.
But attacking a BETA from behind was dangerous in itself, because doing so meant exposing their own lightly defended backs to the BETA behind them.
With missiles like these, there would be no need to risk going around. They could annihilate them head-on.
Hm?
The group tensed again as Kain suddenly aimed the beam weapon at Instructor Jinguuji once more.
The weapon had changed slightly. The muzzle expanded, and the body of the gun split slightly into upper and lower halves, making it appear larger.
Before, it had looked like a gun. Now, it looked more like a cannon.
Light and electricity gathered inside the barrel, compressing into a white sphere of light. A shell?
Plasma?
In the next instant, the white sphere launched as if accelerated by electromagnetism.
Boom!
The violent roar shook even their observation point. Several hundred meters behind Instructor Jinguuji's TSF, a rocky mountain wall seemed to have been struck by the base's most powerful aerial bomb, and it suddenly looked ready to collapse.
With power like that, even a Fort-class BETA would probably go down after only a few hits.
And with that, the duel ended.
"I surrender."
Marimo conceded. There was no need to continue. They were not even on the same level.
But the size of that gap made a small doubt rise in her mind.
Was this truly a weapon that humanity in the current era could develop?
It was like someone had just developed jet aircraft not long after the end of World War II, only for someone else to bring out a spaceship capable of flying directly beyond the atmosphere.
The leap was too great. Too unreal.
But no matter how unreal it seemed, surely it could not have been developed by aliens.
That would be even more absurd.
So the only explanation was that some research program, somewhere, had undergone a sudden technological explosion and breakthrough, allowing it to create a weapon like this.
Perhaps they had fully absorbed the technology of the XG-70b Susanoo II fortress and further miniaturized its systems.
Put that way, it became much more reasonable.
Then what about the machine that was the same size as a TSF?
How powerful was that one?
It had to be even more terrifying.
(End of Chapter)
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