With my wallet nice and plump from the small token of love I’d received from Isotani, classes finally ended for the day.
Ever since leaving Kyushu, I had been storing the mech inside my magicite crystal—while at home, in the bath, eating with Yuna, sleeping, in class, and handing information to Isotani. Now, at last, it was time to bring it out.
“Hey! You made it.”
“I’m here. Thanks again, as always.”
“Good. Now hurry up and take it out.”
“Roger that.”
Once the mech was parked inside the hangar, Mogami and his team, who had all clearly been waiting for me, jumped into action.
These were the people Mogami trusted most, here to handle the maintenance and upgrades of my mech after its evolution inside the magicite crystal.
Everyone was raring to get to work, so I figured I might as well follow their instructions without further delay.
“Sleeping with that thing and lugging it around during drills was tough…but I suppose it had to be done.”
As I retrieved the mech from the crystal, I immediately felt the crushing weight that had been dragging me down for days vanish.
“Whew! That feels good.”
I felt like an athlete who’d taken off their weighted gear after resistance training.
“…”
“All right. Time to give some feedback on the updates, then hit the simulator… Hmm? Something wrong?”
The moment I pulled the unit out, the hangar went dead silent. Honestly, I’d expected a bigger reaction—after all, their very own experimental unit was back from a real battle with solid results. Had something happened?
Curious, I followed their gazes. Unsurprisingly, everyone was staring at the mech. Except…something felt off.
It was like asking Santa for a Gundam model kit for Christmas, only to wake up and find an L-Gaim kit by your pillow instead. That kind of off.
Huh. What’s going on?
I felt an itchy feeling creep up my back.
“It’s different!” three voices yelled at once.
It was Mogami and the others, who’d finally rebooted from their shock.
Wait—different?
“Oh! You’re right!”
It was only then that I realized what was bothering me.
Originally, the hybrid model had looked like a human riding a beast that was all covered with armor to make it appear seamless. But now it was closer to the kind of mech from the video games I used to play.
The legs were longer and more mechanical, almost like a spider’s if you were comparing it to an animal. In addition, the upper body now looked less like a demon’s and more like a robot’s.
It should have been obvious at a glance, so why hadn’t I noticed?
Simple. From the beginning, I’d been picturing a mech just like this—the kind I knew from video games.
I had trained on a simulator, not the actual machine, and since the engineers were constantly working on upgrades to the unit, I’d hardly ever gotten the chance to get a good look at it.
The only time I’d actually seen it was when we arrived in Kyushu and I had to store it in the magicite crystal. In combat, all I saw were enemies, or maybe the forelegs and weapon arms.
After the mission, it had been put into a special hangar for inspection and maintenance, then I’d immediately stored it away again.
In other words, I had never actually had a chance to examine the finished unit.
That was why, when I’d pulled it out and it looked more mechanical and stylized, it hadn’t immediately struck me as strange. If someone had said I didn’t know my own machine, I wouldn’t have been able to argue back, but it is what it is.
“Maybe we shouldn’t focus so much on how it used to be, but how it is now.”
“It’ll be a problem if it’s too different from before.”
“…Point taken.”
I’d tried to play it off as not being a big deal, but it hadn’t worked.
Of course it hadn’t.
This hybrid model was Mogami’s flagship project, on which he’d staked his company’s future, and now it had changed into something completely unplanned. Obviously, he would be ticked off.
I was about to apologize for being so flippant—until I noticed something strange.
“Is that…?”
“Could it be…?”
“I see. In that case…”
“This unit must be…”
“But that would mean…”
Mogami and his team, silent until a second ago, were staring at the mech as they each muttered to themselves.
“Uh, Mogami…?” I interrupted.
“Hmm? Oh, right. Sorry. I’ve got a theory. Listen up, and I’ll explain.”
“Ah, okay.”
The way he ordered me to “listen up” with that gleam in his eye told me he wasn’t looking for an apology, so I shut up and let him talk.
You never interrupted a tech geek when they were on a roll. That was just common sense.
“First off, the changes to the unit are definitely an update.”
“An update? But it was only in the magicite crystal for a few days.”
I knew storing a unit in a magicite crystal triggered optimization processes and growth, but how could it have evolved this much in only a few days?
“I understand your skepticism. But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense.”
“How so?”
Maybe this was one of those things only industry insiders could grasp?
“Do you remember how many monsters you took down the other day?”
Huh? My kill count? I’d told Isotani not long ago, so of course I remembered.
“Four large, six medium, thirty-one small. Plus, three medium and twenty-five small partially damaged. Right?”
I’d only taken out the large- and medium-class monsters directly, but the incendiary bombs I’d thrown at the end had cleared out a huge swath of smaller ones.
“Exactly. Now, do you know what score qualifies someone to be called an ace?”
Where had that come from? Well, based on where this was going…
“Let’s see… Maybe five of the large class?”
In the world wars of long ago, fighter pilots had originally needed ten kills to be considered an ace, but that had changed to five once the capabilities of their enemies caught up. Taking into account the strength of mechs and monsters, five mids didn’t feel quite right, so I’d gone with five large.
“Wrong. It’s five mids.”
“What?”
That seemed kind of low, didn’t it?
“Don’t give me that look. As you know, most monster fights begin with tanks and naval bombardment, but you won’t be considered an ace for finishing off five monsters that are already half dead. You only qualify if you take out five mids solo. No backup.”
“Oh, right.”
So in most cases, the initial shelling disqualified you from the start.
If you took down five mid-class enemies completely on your own, it could only be because of a surprise attack or if you were sent into combat without artillery support. Essentially, desperate last-stand stuff. If you could survive and eliminate five enemies in such extreme conditions, then you had definitely earned ace status.
“Anyway, back to my point. It’s said that when a mech takes down five monsters in a single battle, it experiences rapid growth. After all, the demonic energy that would normally be split among a hundred troops is all going into one unit. If that doesn’t make it evolve, what would?”
“That makes sense.”
If you hogged all the experience points, of course you were going to level up fast.
“When a unit evolves inside a magicite crystal, it undergoes a wide variety of optimizations. Standard models, for example, get better at syncing with their pilot. You’ve heard of that, right?”
“Of course.”
They’d taught us that at school. Everything about it growing lighter as time went on was also part of that optimization process. When I stopped to think about it, I had been able to sleep fine carrying the presumably thirty-five-kilogram weight on my back, so it had probably started evolving the moment I got home.
“Now look at you. Usually, a full squad would soften up the monsters first, but you handled everything, start to finish, entirely on your own. Four larges. Six mids. Tons of smalls. Think about how much experience that machine absorbed. It’s not surprising it’s leveled up like crazy.”
“…Hmm.”
It had clearly grown more than I’d expected it to. Its new form was probably optimized for the kind of movements I’d had in mind while using it. That was fine, though. The unit was made from materials like monster corpses and magicite cores, so there was no point overthinking it.
What mattered was how I used this evolved form.
The immediate question that needed answering was…
“Can you still run maintenance on it?”
Just because someone was certified to work on cars didn’t mean they could fix a tank. What had started out as their team’s hybrid unit was now something else entirely.
Could Mogami and his engineers keep up with it?
“…!”
I’d struck a nerve.
Maybe he saw the doubt on my face, but for a moment, Mogami looked taken aback. A second later, he let out a loud roar.
“Don’t insult me! It’s not about whether we can—we will do it! So what if it looks a little different now? We built this thing. It’s ours! If we can’t maintain it, who the hell could? Right, guys?!”
“Right!”
Naturally, all eyes had turned to Mogami at my question, but not a single member of his team flinched, and they shouted their agreement in perfect unison.
It was written all over their faces: “We’ll do it, even if it takes sheer force of will. And if we can’t do it, we’ll keep going until we can!”
Looks like we’ll be fine. No way they’re going to scrap it at this stage.
Having guts didn’t guarantee success—but without it, some things just weren’t possible. With the sheer fire they were showing, I knew they weren’t going to throw in the towel and focus their attention on the second unit instead.
After getting duped into going to Kyushu, dragged into a real-life battle, and spending the last few days lugging around the weight of that mech, I finally felt certain that it hadn’t all been for nothing.
Without letting anyone see, I let out a quiet sigh of relief.