Mission 9 - A Warrior's Dedication - Part 3

  TA419 - 01/04,

  TSU Outer Surface of Defence Platform 2.

  Chas Collins was in a Hell of his own making. His head swirled with images of his former colleague bleeding and broken and torn apart. His cockpit continued to endlessly ring with that hateful noise attack.

  Everything had gone so wrong so easily, he simply could not process it all. One thought, however, did break into his suffering mind, ‘Why hasn’t he killed me yet?’

  This man, who had slain his friends, who’d cut Chas down with sound alone, for some reason, Chas didn’t feel like Kiyo Kigen was the type of man to toy with his prey, and so very slowly, the young man managed to open his eyes.

  Was what he saw a hero? Perhaps not; their saving Chas could be a chance coincidence. No, what he saw was a warrior, massive chainsaw greatsword, charging in again and again.

  A G-Type just like Chas’s but not uselessly frozen like he was. Two warriors. That was what Chas felt as he watched the Chevalier and the G-Type pass by one another, fighting with their all in a duel to the death.

  Chas was enamoured, entranced by the site. And then it was over.

  “No, not like that,” the words silently tumbled from his mouth. The rifle blast missed. The Chevalier cut deep. The warrior fell. Chas was once again saved by a stranger

  Before despair could grab him or the enemy time to come finish him off, five more mechs appeared to take the place of the fallen G-Type. Sleek and angular, with sloping V-shaped heads, Vijiak-Speicals. Two stayed up high, training their rifles; the other three swopped down onto the Platform’s surface, arc-staffs drawn.

  Chas suddenly remembered they weren’t alone. TSU had nearly two hundred ships in orbit, five times that in mechs. They’d probably been told to hang back as the Casnel’s dueled, but now it seemed all bets were off.

  The three Specials formed a triangle, charging from one direction each, above the other two fired in concert. Chas’s eyes betrayed him; that was the only explanation. A hallucination caused by the damage to his hearing, surely, it had to be.

  It wasn’t, of course.

  The Chevalier took a broad stride towards one Special, an energy bolt from above literally landing inches away. He lashed out with the curved blade - combined with the superior height and strength of the Casnel - he ‘bounced’ the first Speical’s blade back, along with the one wielding it.

  In a move that seemed implausibly human for a mech the Chevalier's size, it pirouetted, bounding away from another missed rifle bolt; it locked its sword with the second charging Special. The third came in on his left and Kigen’s mech simply grabbed the flaming arc-staff with his machine’s palm. Of course, even a Casnel would be damaged from prolonged Arc-staff contact, but there was nothing ‘prolonged’ about this. In a second, Special Two stepped back all by itself, the contact between their swords having filled the poor pilot's cabin with the same defending roar Chas now knew so well.

  A moment later, the Chevalier’s hand clenched. The arc-staff of Special Number Three shattered.

  Chas could barely even keep up. It took all he had to focus his eyes on the fighting. The Chevalier next shifted its weight, taking one step back diagonally. From behind it, swiping into the air as Kigen so effortlessly dodged, was the first Special, recovered from its initial pushback. It stepped right where Kigen had stood, right where the two units up above had just nailed with their rifles.

  Special Number One melted. It warped and liquefied. It crystalised as the intense rifle heat froze in space’s vacuum. In seconds, the mech’s whole torso was nothing more than metal slush, its pilot dead, no doubt.

  From there, it just kept going. Before long, no in a matter of moments, Kigen had taken one of the Speical’s rifles and used it to blast the two in the sky to pieces, none of his shots missing, all while he continued to dodge theirs, continued to dodge lightning bolts pouring down from the sky like they were nothing.

  Chas had faintly hoped numbers at least would mean something. They’d been told the Chevalier had been fighting inside the station, too, and fighting that now-dead G-type couldn’t have been easy. Surely with enough number. That foolish hope was immediately dashed with impunity.

  The five Specials were dead. A swarm followed; that was the only way Chas could describe it. Blocky MBTs and angular Specials bravely charged in wave after wave, and it meant nothing. Numbers no longer meant anything.

  Four more mechs, then five, another three, and five more right after. It should have been impossible, ‘it must be impossible!!’

  And then it paused. The waves stopped flooding in, someone must have realised how absurd, how hopeless that tactic was. A new challenger took this blood-soaked stage. A G-type.

  “Moncha,” Chas whispered.

  What followed surprised him, even though he’d thought such a reaction was impossible anymore. Moncha was incredible - dozens of mechs were floating around the two Casnels; they’d stop trying to use their rifles, perhaps since every missed shot was hitting the Platform instead - so the fight was once more a duel, a one-on-one of epic proportions.

  Chas had spent over a month fighting now, but he’d never really looked that closely at his boss before. He was a good pilot, clearly, but until today, Chas had thought that of himself, too. This was different. Foregoing his spear, Moncha instead had two swords, one a long Calabar blade, the other a short, dagger-like arc-staff. Chas had never seen him use those weapons before, but they danced.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Against Kigen’s curved sword, they danced. Danced through this field of destroyed grunt mechs, over a dozen machines coloured their stage in dismantled and burned parts.

  Chas was a fool. In their world? An ace pilot? It was the machine, his Casnel; that’s what had let him grow so fast and fight in so many battles, he hadn't even been able to see the difference between them. But these two were different - his boss, Donald Moncha, and his enemy, Kiyo Kigen - there machines were irrelevant. Chas realised with startling, illogical clarity that Kiyo Kigen could have been in a Vijaik and would still have fought like this.

  The image of Kigen, or at least a shadowy silhouette of a great man, without a mech at all, with just a sword fighting mechs, sprang to mind, and Chas believed it no matter how absurd it might be. This man with his bare hands would not be swayed, and his hands were anything but bare.

  No doubt, each time their blades connected, each time they landed a glancing slash on one another, that terrible screeching filled Moncha’s cabin, too, if only for a moment. Yet Moncha never flinched, never faltered. He fought on and on. While Chas stood frozen by a stupid sound? One that at this point must be doing permanent…’ Where did the sound go?’

  “Kid, can you hear us, kid?!” Lt. Gemon’s voice. The sound attack had stopped.

  Perhaps it had a limit. Perhaps their side had isolated and removed it. Or perhaps, most terrifyingly of all, Kigen was only now, only after fighting so many, only when faced with Moncha, having to dedicate his and his machine’s all to the fight.

  Chas’s eyes drifted to the slain G-type, the warrior. He’d thought it and Kigen were fighting equally, each putting their all on the line, but no, he saw the truth. That dead G-type hadn’t even phased Kigen, and Chas knew deep down he was even weaker.

  He was no more than a bully. The Casnels were near invincible against lesser machines, so he’d convinced himself all of these wins were his? The two duelling in front of him shattered that delusion beyond repair.

  With shaking hands, Chas slowly reached out to his controls and tested them. The fingers of his G-Type, a machine identical to the one floating bisected and lifeless, twitched at his command.

  So he was a fake, a bully, a fool. So his friends had died and only left him behind. So he could never stand in their world. That wasn’t good enough; it could never be good enough.

  G-Type 001 took a step forward, one hand gently pushing aside a floating MBT corpse, the other drawing his arc-staff. It was a charge of blind sorrow and remorse. It was feckless and foolish. Surrounded by the brutally slain, walking towards such an intense whirlwind of blades, Chas might as well have been an unarmed man charging at a tornado.

  Voices called out to him over the radio, but he didn’t hear them. The Chevalier and Unit 002 both stopped and turned. Their mechs genuinely looked surprised, or perhaps that was just what his tired mind saw.

  There was no strategy or technique. Chas stepped in with staff held over head and swung it down in a broad, clumsy arc. Before Moncha’s sister mech could intervene, Kigen had already ducked right under the pathetic swing.

  His mech reared up, its sword carved from Chas’s left hip, across his chest, and then just the tip scraped off his machine's face.

  The cut wasn’t deep. Having come in so close, the Chevalier hadn’t been able to put much force behind it, but it did leave a nasty score along the G-Type’s chest and a scar on its ‘cheek’.

  The impact caused Chas to judder in his seat. The controls fell from his hands; his mechs simply drifted away. People shouted his name repeatedly but his mind was so very blank.

  Moncha’s mech swiped for Kigen, positioning itself as Chas’s shield. It was just the break in combat the ace had been waiting for. The Chevalier jumped up, and then its thrusters flared. It slashed through two of the many mechs waiting above with ease and then grabbed something.

  “A high-speed craft?” someone said, “We can’t keep up with that, damn it.”

  “Can they block him off?”

  “They better not; they’d just get slaughtered like all the rest. Fuck this is a mess.”

  “Where he’s running to?”

  “That blasted Remembrance fleet hanging around just out of range, of course.”

  “Doesn’t that mean…”

  “Ya, it does. Grab an arm each, you two, get him out of here. I’ll help with evacuation as best I can. This Platform…It’s lost. I just hope our boy is ok in there.”

  It had not been Grand Lord Admiral Columbae’s intention for the Casnels to come to a head in this fashion and for Kigen to singlehandedly face down three of them and for one to fall.

  Mike Smidth had not even been the designated pilot; perhaps it was a miracle the mech’s loadout had matched his skillset - but a miracle can only take you so far. A+ is only the top of the grading. It could not, as Mike himself had thought, make up for ‘supernatural freaks’ who stood above all else.

  It was a lesson he had taught Chas without ever meeting him. One the young man would never forget.

  Whether by a series of coincidences or predestined fate, G-Type Unit 004, the youngest of the seven Casnels in play, would be the shortest lived. Falling alongside a man neither good nor bad.

  And The Bane of Konpei’s name would never be underestimated by friend or foe again, as soon the night sky above planet Bhaile caught fire once more - as the dozen of rigged explosions set inside the Platform by infiltrators that Kigen had bought time for - exploded. As Defence Platform 2 faced its destiny, it was remembered most in the history books as the peak of The Bane of Konpei’s storied career.

  End Of Part 1 - Interlude Will begin Tomorrow, Followed By Part 2 - Thanks for Reading