“What the heck?”
I’d been led here and told, “This is where you’ll find your assigned mech,” but as soon as I stepped foot inside the hangar, all pumped up with excitement, I couldn’t help but let out a cry of surprise.
By the way, we generally called them “mechs,” but the official term was “Monster-Armored Combat Unit.” I preferred mech, though, because it called to mind old-school anime series like Super Robot Wars and Cybuster. But that was just me. Most people avoided the official term for a different reason: They didn’t like being reminded that these vehicles were made from the corpses of slain monsters.
I couldn’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to go around shouting, “Check it out! I’m piloting the reanimated, armor-wearing corpse of a monster!” either.
So yeah. Mech was by far the better term.
To be fair, the first designs used to be made entirely from monster corpses, but now only the core components came from them. The rest was reinforced with artificial muscle fibers and mechanical parts, all covered in armor made from synthetic materials. Supposedly, there wasn’t much of the actual corpse left in the final product.
Still, that stigma remained. The image of it being a monster corpse was hard to shake, so for PR purposes, the military just stuck to calling them mechs.
As a bit of extra background information, in military terms, a “monster” was described as any mutated animal twisted by some sort of demonic influence. That was how you ended up with weird creatures like bull-headed humanoids called Gozuki and creatures with the head of a bull and body of a spider called Gyuki.
How those creatures made sense biologically, I had no idea. Honestly, you would probably have to ask demons or demonkin themselves to get any answers. Though whether they would actually tell you the truth was another story.
But enough about how they were made.
When I first learned about monsters, my initial reaction was “This is super confusing.”
Take the bull-human hybrid Gozuki, for example. They stood around five or six meters tall—what we called “mid-sized.” The arachnid Gyuki, on the other hand, were over twenty meters long. Naturally, they were considerably more difficult to take down.
I’d heard a story about how, not too long ago, a fully equipped battalion had been sent out to take down a Gyuki. However, when they got to the site, all they’d found was a single Gozuki, leaving them baffled.
Apparently, it was because the recon team from Ise-Shima had mixed up the two bull-headed monsters. So upon receiving their report, Command had assumed they were dealing with the twenty-meter nightmare, not the six-meter grunt. A whole battalion had been geared up for a major battle only to find a much smaller monster waiting for them.
Understandably, Command was incensed by this colossal waste of time and effort. Now, though, it was mostly a joke passed around the military.
Of course, if it had been the other way around—expecting a Gozuki and getting a full-size Gyuki—it would have been a total bloodbath. So now, even if you messed up the size or threat level in your report, getting the name wrong was absolutely not tolerated.
Maybe that was why several of the entrance exam questions had a bunch of monster pictures, asking you to give their names.
Not to brag, but I’d done pretty well on that test. I had made sure to study up on the most famous bits of background knowledge, and Yuna had even helped me prep with a bunch of past exams.
So with all that in mind, let me just say again:
“What the heck?”
Most mechs were based on specific monsters, so if you knew what to look for, you could usually tell what kind of creature a unit was built from by examining the frame before it was equipped with armor.
At least, that was the theory.
But even with all the knowledge I had crammed into my head, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the thing standing in front of me now.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. I could take a guess at what it was; I just didn’t want to know.
After all, the mech I had been assigned had four legs and a humanoid torso. It was hard to believe that freaky thing was meant to be my unit.
A Scylla…? From Greek mythology? But I’ve never heard of anything like that being spotted, let alone killed and turned into a unit. Yet here it is…
“This is the mech you’ll be piloting,” came a voice from the side as I stood there, trying to make sense of it. “It’s a new hybrid model. We just started rolling them out this year, so it’s no wonder you’ve never seen it before.”
I turned to face the man talking to me. He seemed to be—or rather, was—a member of the maintenance crew staff.
“Oh—uh, sorry! I’m Keita Kawakami, Class 1-A. Looking forward to working with you!”
✦ ✦ ✦
First impressions mattered—even the ancient texts said so—and this guy was a mechanic, the person responsible for keeping my mech in one piece. If I got on his bad side, the consequences could be fatal.
Regardless of whether the thing I was being given was grotesque, or whether it was a brand-new, untested prototype—making me a glorified guinea pig—he was going to be holding my life in his hands.
If bowing my head was what it took to establish a good relationship with him, then I would bow.
That said, what happened next would depend entirely on how he explained the abomination in front of me.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Oh—uh, sorry! I’m Keita Kawakami, Class 1-A. Looking forward to working with you!”
“…Likewise.”
Huh. Kid’s got manners. Didn’t expect that from someone his age, thought Takafumi Mogami, head engineer and president of Mogami Heavy Industries, as he watched the young Kawakami bow respectfully to him.
These days, with demand soaring, most recruits aiming to become pilots came from long-standing military families. Meaning they also tended to hold their noses pretty high in the air.
The polite term was prideful, but that was essentially code for calling them spoiled brats. Not that anyone could say so out loud.
Takafumi understood where they were coming from, at least on paper.
Those military families were all split into factions, and there was as much infighting within them as there was between them. When you were constantly surrounded by rivals, showing weakness wasn’t an option. He could understand why they were always on guard, always posturing.
Still doesn’t mean I want to deal with their attitudes all the time.
Understanding their situation was one thing. Tolerating their behavior was another.
On top of that, Mogami Heavy Industries had only recently branched out into manufacturing mechs. Up until now, they had only been in the weapons game. To the military, they were still a no-name start-up when it came to producing full-fledged units, which meant they had faced an uphill battle just to get a spot in this year’s field-testing program.
Takafumi hadn’t known what he’d do if the student pilot they were assigned turned out to be some cocky brat. But instead, this kid—Keita Kawakami—had shown up, bowing properly and greeting him with respect.
All right. I can’t say I like that initial reaction of his, but it is a brand-new model. You can’t expect a first-year trainee to know what he’s looking at.
He’d been prepared for the worst, but Keita had turned out to be a pleasant surprise. True, that first remark about the unit stung a little, but so long as the kid didn’t make a major mess of things, Takafumi decided he was willing to meet him halfway and tweak the mech to fit his needs.