Chapter 10: Side I - Maxime Awry

Alecto Maxime wiped the sweat that soaked the palms of his hand and beaded on his brows. “Damn, keep yourself together!” he scolded himself. “Come on, it’s just one mech. Even if she is an expert pilot, what can she do with one arm...? That’s right. She’s not even an expert pilot. She’s just a candidate. How long can she oversync for?”

But he couldn’t remain calm. Before the battle, Jeremiah had already contacted him and described his experience with Belevere who fought like another person entirely. He claimed that he could barely see any of Belevere’s old conservative fighting style.

The battle had been a bloodbath, and Alecto, having watched the video, knew Jeremiah hadn’t exaggerated in his descriptions. 

From first contact in melee to the end of the battle with the destruction of Jeremiah’s mech, less than a minute had passed. Belevere simply tore through Jeremiah’s defenses, with almost as much power behind her spear wielded with one arm as it had when it was originally wielded with two.

That was the power that an expert pilot commanded—the ability to defy the laws of physics. 

In the face of an already skilled pilot turned expert, what was a bookworm like him to do? 

“I should at least try. I can do it...”

He took a deep breath and wiped the sweat off his brow one more time with his sleeve. Then he dove into his mech and reconnected his senses. The Tolvar welcomed him and he synchronized with it with no problems. Only... it wasn’t enough.

The connection wasn’t deep enough to bring out his full abilities.

“It’s my doubt. My lack of confidence is causing my mech to reject me. Mechs will not be piloted by cowards,” he mumbled. The synchronance rating this time was one of the lowest he had ever obtained, even during practice.

The only explanation here was that his heart was not in it this time when it came to piloting. Because he was scared. He was scared even though his life wasn’t on the line.

But even if it wasn’t his life on the line, he had been working his whole life for this day! From childhood when his father poured endless knowledge and had him suffer through hellish training in order to groom him into the best pilot possible, it was all for this day.

When his greatest worry, Annabelle, suffered an accident, he thanked his luck, thinking he had victory in the bracket in the bag, but he hadn’t expected the low-key Belevere to advance and throw his dream into shambles.

How can he just let it end like this?

But even if he didn’t want to be a coward, was there anyone aside from another expert pilot who would not quail before an expert pilot? Those people were not brave—they were fools. 

Only experts could handle experts.

With a heavy heart, he urged his mech into motion. It creaked from the stress of moving.

His Tolvar, a heavy bombardment mech, did not escape his previous four battles unscathed. The first two battles were fine. He easily overwhelmed his melee opponents long before they had a chance to threaten him. His heavy railgun and assorted collection of missiles simply tore apart the attacker and knight before they so much as scratched the paint on his mech.

The problem happened when it came to his third and fourth opponents. 

His third was a medium ranged mech armed with a ballistic rifle. He stayed at range so he and his mech had ample time to avoid or destroy the missiles Alecto sent his way. He also ran and hid, so Alecto had trouble targeting him with his railgun, while his own huge heat signature made sure the enemy knew where he was at all times.

Although he won easily when he landed two shots with his railgun, he had taken heavy damage to his missile system and sensors. A lot of his auxiliary weapons were disabled.

His fourth opponent was an aerial mech armed with a laser rifle. He largely mimicked the third’s tactics, but executed it with even greater mobility. 

His Tolvar had suffered so much heat damage from the harassment by the aerial mech that a lot of his systems were working at suboptimal efficiency. Additionally, almost all of his missiles had been spent or their launchers were destroyed.

One time, Alecto ejected a damaged launcher too late and the whole attachment and its remaining payload blew up right next to his mech, almost ending the battle right there in the aerial mech’s favor.

Except for that one incident, though, he was never in danger of being defeated. 

However, all the battles wore down his nerves and armor and exhausted his ammunition. Every battle before this did not matter. They were just an introduction, a prologue, and it all boiled down to this final battle with an insurmountable opponent.

Theoretically, his mech had an edge over Belevere’s, being in better shape and able to strike from a distance, but all those advantages did nothing to alleviate his fears that Belevere would be able to weather his attacks and defeat him.

He could only climb to a high vantage point on top of a mesa overlooking a great rolling grassland where he could see the one-armed spearman coming from a distance away.

Alecto quickly spotted his enemy, sprinting across the grasslands without even bothering to hide its presence. The boldness sent a spear of fear into his heart. After an instant of hesitation, he had his mech squat to stabilize and eliminate recoil, and took aim with his massive weapon.

The railgun crackled as its capacitors charged up and leaking electricity crackled along the rails.

Up until the moment he fired, the Avald had been running in a straight line, but the moment he pulled the trigger, the spearman mech veered off to the side. The railgun slug blew past her and slammed into the ground, throwing up a column of dirt.

“What!” Alecto gasped. “How?”

It was like she knew exactly what he was thinking. As far as he knew, that assumption may be true. 

The exact abilities of expert pilots in a state of oversynchronance were a closely guarded secret. The only things that the public knew was that expert pilots could make a machine do more than was physically possible. Other abilities were hidden.

It’s possible that all expert pilots came with limited precognition.

The capacitors cycled and began charging again. He aimed and fired to no avail again and again, but the Avald deftly dodged each shot without trouble.

“Damn it...” Alecto mumbled. He felt like crying. There was nothing he could do. Even the handful of missiles he shot at were either swept out of the air by Belevere’s spear or dodged.

Soon, the Avald disappeared below the lip of the mesa. Alecto pushed his Tolvar to the edge and looked over, finding the Avald running along the sheer walls of the mesa toward a ramp up to him. His pot shots did nothing but miss outright or barely scratch the Avald. His attempt at destroying the path failed, the Avald reached the top, charging straight at him like an unstoppable haunting specter.

With the end near, Alecto closed his eyes in acceptance.

As he did, though, he realized his mistakes.

He hadn’t really been scared of expert pilots. He admired them and feared meeting one in combat, yes, but this wasn’t real. He wasn’t really about to be killed. He was safe kilometers away piloting his mech while safe in the Mech Hall.

So why was he scared?

It was because he had thought if he failed here, all those years he spent in his childhood filling his mind with knowledge and training constantly in simulators would be wasted. But he realized that he was wrong.

“It’s okay. Those years were not a waste. Even if I do not become a knight here, I have the rest of my life to work towards it. This is only the start.”

Alecto opened his eyes with renewed resolve. The Avald was closing in at a speed three times faster than it should have been able to, but he was not afraid. 

Calmly, he opened every single one of his remaining missile tubes and fired an explosive storm at near point-blank distances. More than a dozen missiles flew toward the approaching Avald.

Some of the missiles required impact to activate, but others were triggered by proximity to an enemy. Either way, the missiles exploded, engulfing the Avald in brilliant fireworks of flame and smoke.

“Did I get her?” Alecto wondered, but his sensors quickly told him otherwise as it warned of a heat signal rapidly approaching through the thick cloud of smoke. A second later, the Avald sprinted out of the miasma, its surface shimmering from a previously invisible shield.

He shook his head. 

“It’s my loss,” Alecto admitted.

Up close, his bombardment mech didn’t stand a chance against a spearman mech designed for melee combat. But he won’t die lying down. At least, he won’t let Belevere win either.

Alecto prepared to execute the last actions that the Tolvar he piloted would take.

He took a deep breath. “It’s okay. The Tolvar is a heavy mech. Even an expert pilot will take a few hits to completely disable it. I have time.”

As soon as the Avald came close enough, the Tolvar tossed aside its heavy railgun and lurched forward, arms outstretched like a grappler. At the same time, the Avald thrusted forward its spear. A glowing aura that enclosed the spearhead allowed it to pierce through the Tolvar’s thick armor like a hot knife through butter, melting a hole.

It clipped through several important power lines in the heavy mech and the Tolvar’s power sputtered before its backup connections kicked in. Then, the Tolvar wrapped its thick arms around the slim spearman mech, locking it in place. It squeezed tightly, trying to crush the Avald, but the shimmering shield held.

Alecto sighed. It was worth a shot. He reluctantly switched on the open channel for the first time the entire match. “Nice work, Belevere.”

“You too,” came Belevere’s even reply. She didn’t even sound strained.

As Avald struggled to break free, Alecto dug into the settings of his mech.

Heavy mechs were expensive, and a captured enemy heavy mech was valuable. Especially sought-after were long-ranged mechs that rarely sustained the catastrophic damage that close-ranged mechs did when they are captured.

That’s why most bombardment heavies like the Tolvar had the option to self destruct as a last resort, and to avoid materiel falling into enemy hands.

Now, Alecto engaged the self-destruction option buried deep in the mech’s operating system. Immediately, most of the power shut off as a majority of the available energy in the mech was diverted toward the energy cells and power reactor.

“What did you do?” Belevere asked. She must have noticed something.

Alecto stayed silent. 

20... 18... 15... 14... The timer counted down the seconds until overload.

“Oh.”

In front of him, through his sensors, he detected the Avald pulling out two backup daggers and the same burning aura that had covered its spear coated it.

What was Belevere going to do with those against a huge mech like his with those tiny knives? 

The self-destruction countdown continued to tick.

13... 12... 10... ... Error.

The Tolvar shut down for good and the world turned black for Alecto as the system announced his loss.

 

Lord Maxime stared in disbelief at the report he just received.

It was just the latest bad news in a series of them.

“No... please, no more!”

He winced and doubled over as pain flared in his stomach. The pain came in rolling waves—as the waves crashed, the pain became almost unbearable, followed by a lull where there was only a dull ache. Lord Maxime stayed hunched over for a minute, barely able to breathe before he could finally straighten.

A drawer behind his desk popped open and he hurriedly dug out a pressure injector. An injection of the drug within after and he could finally breathe easy again.

“That’s the third time this week. Oh, why did this have to happen to me?” he muttered, burying his head in his hands. 

The report he had just received concerned the pilot girl Annabelle whose cockpit pod he ordered compromised. He had hired a hacker to access the BME databases to find out more about her status.

Each piece of news he received was worse than the last. “All I wanted to do was make Alecto a knight. Is that wrong?!” he groaned, pounding the table.

“If only that bastard was actually competent, none of this would have happened! He promised it was safe!”

The only reason he dared mess with that cockpit was because the BME neural interface specialist he bribed to install a software backdoor ensured him that all the switch would do was remotely access the controls. It would then execute a simple command that would temporarily cause Annabelle to black out and drop out of the tournament.

It should have been completely safe, with no lasting damage. At most, it would cause the victim to feel sick for a few hours afterwards. Something to that extent would have been chalked up to a normal, albeit rarely seen, malfunction. 

Even if the reason for the malfunction had been exposed to be due to tampering, the BME’s Enforcement branch probably wouldn’t have bothered to investigate the incident in too much detail.

That’s how it should have been.

“But that bastard lied,” Lord Maxime snarled. “He screwed up!”

The backdoor malfunctioned and the resultant accident damaged Annabelle’s brain. Worse still, the damage had been of the esoteric type that dropped her valuable Grade A aptitude to a lowly Grade D.

That alone would have been enough to cause the BME to move and investigate the incident in greater depth. And there was nothing a knight like him could do to stop them.

Ignorance was bliss. He wished he had never known. Now, the threat of the BME knocking on his doors hung over him like the sword of Damocles.

Just an hour ago, that had been the extent of his worries, but the report the hacker sent him just now painted a much more horrifying story.

The BME’s mobilization was actually much fiercer than he had previously thought. The BME was frantically trying to find the perpetrator right. 

The reason was simple. In the seconds before Annabelle fainted, her skill at piloting spiked. Why?

Because the sensors that littered the Mech Hall of the AMI had detected energy signals unique to an expert pilot’s state of oversynchronance. 

Annabelle Florent had become an expert candidate for a few seconds in her final battle.

He, William Maxime, had destroyed an expert candidate.

The BME will stop at nothing to find him.