“How much does it weigh?” I asked.
“…Thirty tonnes. Thirty-five with a full loadout.”
I knew it! This was why it was better to call out these engineering types directly instead of dancing around an issue. If you didn’t, they’d go off on a tangent about something completely irrelevant. Having come to this decision, I dropped the polite act and addressed the mechanic bluntly.
“Are you stupid?”
“Excuse me?”
Oh, please.
“Standard types usually weigh fifteen tons. Beast types weigh ten. Why is this thing heavier than the two combined?”
It weighed about as much as a medium-sized tank.
“Y-you need that kind of mass to withstand the recoil of a cannon strong enough to take down large monsters!”
“I guess that makes sense.”
I understood the logic. To match a tank’s firepower, you also needed to match its weight to absorb the recoil. But understanding it and accepting it were two different things.
“You realize that when I store this in a magicite crystal, it’ll weigh thirty-five kilos, right? You’re saying I’ll have to lug that weight around twenty-four seven?”
“…Soldiers often march with forty kilos of gear, you know.”
Did he really expect that would convince me? He might not have been wrong, but his eyes were darting all over the place.
“Soldiers get to put their gear down when they rest. Can I do that? Am I allowed to just summon and unsummon my unit mid-mission?”
“…”
Exactly.
Mech pilots were trained to keep their units inside their magicite core when resting. Leaving a six-meter-tall mech out in the open would make you a sitting duck. Plus, the core helped with auto-repair and absorbed energy from fallen monsters for upgrades.
In that respect, the core functioned like an inn from an RPG—rest, and you recover, maybe even level up. It also strengthened the bond between unit and pilot.
For those reasons, it was generally recommended to keep the mech stored inside the magicite core as much as possible. The magicite’s item-box function came with a very clear downside, however: The bearer still had to carry one-thousandth of the stored item’s weight.
Would you expect a teenager constantly carrying thirty-five kilograms on his back to be able to get any real rest?
Of course not. Whether you were walking, riding in a car, going to the bathroom, or trying to sleep, it would be too much. You would collapse from exhaustion before even reaching the battlefield.
And needless to say, it would be far too impractical to transport it in a specialized trailer. At that point, it was quicker to use a regular mech.
“O-once your compatibility with it improves and it levels up, that weight should drop down to around half!” the mechanic stammered.
Oh yeah? Great.
Sure, half might have been manageable.
Except for the fact that it’d be impossible to get to that point.
“Assuming I’m still alive by then…”
“Uh…!”
Seriously?
Saying it got stronger when it leveled up was just another way of saying it was weak until it did.
This wasn’t a game but real-world combat, where every fight was life or death. How was a rookie pilot, worn out from dragging thirty-five kilos around all the time, supposed to gain the experience needed to level up? Forget surviving a fight—I’d have a hard time even getting there.
“Also, the top half is humanoid, and the bottom half is a quadruped. Can you really imagine yourself driving this thing?”
“W-well, I guess it might be a little difficult at first…”
“Might be? No. It will be difficult.”
If it were a standard bipedal unit, I could rely on my own skills and experiences, and if it were a full beast form, I could probably wing it on instinct and stubbornness. But this hybrid thing? No chance.
Was I supposed to control it with brain waves like one of those Gundam Universal Century mechs? We still had a long way to go before we reached that level of technology.
“…”
Finally speechless, huh?
Well, I couldn’t blame him. No matter how great the specs might look on paper, if you couldn’t actually operate the thing, it was worthless.
Just think about how many weapons had been scrapped during the testing phase.
Sure, the British had approved the Panjandrum during World War II, but that was only because they were high on tea or something. It would be wrong to assume that was normal.
Still…I might have come out with a lot of negative comments about it, but honestly, I did think this unit had potential.
I mean, the whole idea was to snipe from long range, right? I’d get to keep a reasonable distance from the front lines, which sounded good to me.
Thirty-five kilograms was a lot, but I was fit and healthy, and I could store the weight in the hangar when I wasn’t deployed.
Yuna weighed about that much. If I imagined I was carrying her around, it probably wouldn’t feel heavy at all.
If I died, she’d end up all alone. When I thought about the weight as that burden of responsibility, it actually felt kind of right.
And if it still felt too heavy, I’d just have to use my three years at the academy to train up. Even if the unit itself didn’t grow, I could at least improve my compatibility with it and reduce the load. I was being paid to train in a safe environment for three full years, so there was no point complaining.
“…Anyway, whining about it won’t help until we’ve actually tried it out,” I said. “Let’s fire up the simulator.”
“Y-you’re sure?”
“It’s not about whether it’s practical or not. It’s too late to swap it now, so let’s make the best of it. Can you get the simulator ready? And show me the manual, if there is one.”
“R-right!”
Let’s not forget, my role at this school was to be a test pilot.
There was no such thing as good or bad when it came to a prototype unit. As the pilot assigned to this mech, my job was to run it through the wringer and write up a thorough report.
I doubted the military was expecting miracles from a prototype anyway, but if I was going to reject it, I’d better give a convincing reason.
It may look like a freak experiment made by some strange company, but that just means it has the potential to surprise everyone.
With that thought, I started working out ideas for how to handle the unit while the mechanic handed me the manual. He glanced at me, looking half apologetic and half excited, as I started reading everything I could about the mech.