Two days after that conversation, we found ourselves in the middle of what the outside world called Golden Week, a string of holidays in late April.
Unlike the general public, who were needed to keep the economy going, soldiers who’d been fighting demons for over a hundred years since World War II didn’t get to take long breaks. Golden Week, May Day—none of that mattered to us. We stuck to a strict five-day workweek, no exceptions.
To be fair, things had used to be a nonstop grind of Monday-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Friday, but it turned out people actually needed rest to function properly. Also, without time off, they wouldn’t spend any money, so the economy would stall. That was why we had weekends off now.
So what did everyone get up to?
Well, I—Keita Kawakami—was way down south, on the north coast of Kyushu, hundreds of kilometers from Tokyo.
Yeah, I know. Believe me, I was just as confused as you are.
I’ll give you the short version. The previous day, the Boss had suddenly said, “You’re going to Iruma Air Base tomorrow.” When I got there, a group of mechanics was already waiting for me, and in the blink of an eye, I was getting off a plane in Kyushu.
“Wait, what gives?!”
It made no sense. Sure, we were military cadets. Unlike civilians, we didn’t get holidays. Even if the rest of the country was taking time off, the same didn’t go for us. We were headed to the battlefield after graduation, and there would be no time for R & R there.
Even if, by some miracle, we did get time off, we would no doubt spend the whole “vacation” training. After all, if you weren’t used to your mech by the time you got deployed, you were dead. Literally.
It wouldn’t just be us, either. We were officer cadets, so once we graduated, we’d become full officers—squad leaders or their aides. If someone like us died, the chances were good that the whole unit would probably get wiped out, too.
Dying alone was one thing, but we would also be responsible for our subordinates. If anyone could enjoy a holiday knowing that, you didn’t say they had “strong mental fortitude.” You called them a damn sociopath.
At least, that was how the military saw it. And they had zero time and patience for training sociopaths to become officers. Anyone trying to slack off during holidays got unceremoniously kicked out. I mean, we were literally getting paid to attend school. Skipping class was unthinkable.
That said, some students did try to skip nonmilitary classes, which included everything other than PE, military history, combat techniques, battlefield strategy, and mech maintenance. This was quietly tolerated so long as they didn’t fail their exams. In that sense, you could probably say the academy was fairly laid-back.
The general attitude could basically be summed up as “Training takes priority over class!”
That wasn’t unique to military schools, though. I’d heard stories of sports-focused private schools working the same way, where if you got in on an athletic scholarship, your life became all about training and competition.
You didn’t necessarily have to show your face on campus on weekdays, but your exam scores affected your rank, and your attitude in class affected your record, so most students still went to class. Most.
With all that said, there was one circumstance where you could skip class without hurting your record.
At those sports schools, for instance, if you missed class because of a tournament or practice game, it counted as an officially approved absence. Totally excused.
So here’s a quiz question for you:
Q: In a military school training future soldiers, what is the equivalent of a tournament or practice game?
A: Going to an actual battlefield.
Yep. That’s right.
“There’s nothing right about that! What the hell—this is insane!”
“What’s with the shouting?” Mogami asked.
He gave me a puzzled look, probably wondering about my sudden outburst.
But seriously, I was well within my rights to be confused here!
“Come on. I just enrolled, like, a month ago. Why am I being sent to the front lines already?!”
The curriculum did include on-site battlefield training, but that was for third-years. And not just any third-years—only Class A students, or Class B students with mechs assigned to them. In other words, elite students with over two years of training under their belts.
Not someone like me, who was barely a month in and saddled with some irregular hybrid mech that was taking forever to calibrate.
What in the world was the school thinking?!
I voiced my complaint, trying to sound calm and rational.
Mogami grinned and gave me a thumbs-up. “I may have pulled a few strings.”
“You’re the one behind this?!”
After my first day in the simulator, I’d gone home and asked Yuna to dig up whatever she could find on my mech. That was when I discovered something astonishing.
Mogami wasn’t just any old mechanic—he was the president of Mogami Heavy Industries.
I hadn’t heard of his company before, despite having done a decent amount of research into the industry, but I soon realized why. They hadn’t been making full mech units, only parts—tank treads, heavy artillery, weapons systems, and so forth. Now, for some reason, they’d decided to get into manufacturing whole mechs. No wonder I hadn’t heard of them.
Normally, this field was locked down by the big players. The standard models came from Yotsubishi and Mito, while the beast-type models were monopolized by giants like Kaizaki and Kida. It wasn’t exactly a welcoming market for newcomers.
But global instability had changed the game. The counteroffensives in Asia and the fall of the Korean Peninsula had created such a surge in demand that supply couldn’t keep up.
As such, the military had started asking capable companies to help fill the gap. Mogami Heavy Industries, eager to move beyond parts and build full units, had been one of the first to raise their hand.
A few years later, Mogami’s prototype was ready. Normally, no one would assign an untested prototype to a student, no matter how much money had been thrown at it—especially a cadet, one of the military’s “golden eggs.”
However, two years ago, when the Third Division had been annihilated, the top brass had panicked.
Worried about both national defense and overseas deployment, they’d decided to try out the Mogami prototype in live conditions just in case it proved useful.