“There you are. The second Three,” the boy said. “Good.”
Yu glared at him through the helmet. “What’s ‘good’?”
“Your Replicant’s out cold. Right now, it’s just me, you, and our Asura Frames,” the young man responded. This must have been Devicer Seven, Yu deduced. “That’s what’s good. Now we can really see which of us is stronger.”
“Hm,” Yu grunted coldly. “Is that a challenge?”
“That’s right. I need to know why you were the one to get your hands on the elf and not me. If it’s because I’m weak, then I’ll get stronger. If it’s just luck, well... Then that’ll be that.”
“Don’t tell me you were the one who sent that droid out to attack the town.”
“Had to get you here somehow. This way you wouldn’t be able to turn me down,” the Devicer said. “If the government wasn’t run by worthless trash, maybe I wouldn’t have needed to make things ugly. Those idiots make me gag.”
“I can’t believe you,” Yu growled.
It seemed Devicer Seven and the provisional government were connected in some way. But regardless, the disaster wrought by his droid had burned countless buildings to ash and created no small number of casualties. Yu had seen them even from the sky, and that was to say nothing of what he’d done to Ijuin and Ein. They lay on the hard ground, clearly in pain, and Yu had no idea how to help them.
The rage he felt could not be exaggerated. And yet he did not let it choose his words.
“I am Devicer Three,” he declared. “And I protect the weak—anyone who can’t protect themselves. I will not fight a fellow Devicer of the Asura Frame.”
“Ha!” the white-haired boy laughed mockingly. “All right. Then all I’ve gotta do is prove that I, Leo Makishima, don’t need protecting! Because I’m stronger than you!”
Leo dramatically cast the hem of his poncho up, revealing not only the T-shirt and jeans beneath, but a very peculiar belt around his waist. On its buckle was—a Prayer Wheel.
“Let’s go, Agni!” he shouted. “We’ll knock Three off that high horse and show him what we can do!”
The Asura Frame Mark VII—Agni—was unique. That single belt was the entire device, and the Wheel of Orison in its buckle was beginning to pick up speed. A brilliant sheen enveloped Leo’s body as the antigravity lifters carried him about half a meter above the ground, where he hovered.
But then, Natsuki suddenly leaped out of nowhere, roaring and swinging the Green Dragon down onto the Mark VII as she did. The guandao’s heavy blade arced towards Leo’s head beneath the shimmering light, but it stopped there, blocked by the glowing force field around him.
“Three! Tough guy over here’s got the same defenses as Vritra!” she cried.
“The barrier you used against Quldald!”
“Smart!” Leo interjected. “But I bet your Mark VI can’t do this!”
A beam flashed from the force field, blasting the Mark III with a ray of heat. The black and gold nano-armor’s chestplate burned red. Yu groaned, thrust his hand out towards Leo, and fired a volley of calcium bullets, but the glowing shield was unaffected.
“You’ll have to try harder than that to crack the Photon-Frame!” Devicer Seven crowed.
The blanket of light surrounding him fired another heat ray, this time at Natsuki. The red-haired samurai girl saw it coming, though, and stabbed the Green Dragon into the ground, raising her own defensive barrier. It was dimmer and duller than Leo’s but still did not let the beam pass through to its master. In terms of impenetrability, the two were the same. But there was one major difference.
“I can’t move with this thing up!” Natsuki grumbled. “How come he gets to throw out attacks with his? That’s not fair!”
“In that case, looks like I’m up,” said Yu.
Gritting his teeth against Rudra’s still burning chestplate, Yu darted towards Leo through the air and delivered a fierce kick to the Photon-Frame protecting him. The force field went flying, with the Devicer still inside.
Leo stopped some several meters away, swearing as he did, but the boy himself was untouched.
“Agni!” the Devicer called, the savage look in his eyes intact. “They’re next!”
Flames roared from his right hand and drowned the black and gold Frame in a sea of fire. He very much intended to turn Devicer Three’s body into a singed corpse. The attack was deceptively magical, but in truth it was a weapon derived from nanotech—though the nature of the scorching torrent was irrelevant to Yu as he sweltered inside the Mark III. A data screen measured the interior temperature at sixty degrees Celsius and the exterior at eight hundred degrees, and those numbers were climbing.
Yu shot up, diffusing the torrent along the way with a powerful burst of the jet stream thrusters.
“You’re not getting away!” Leo growled, quickly giving chase.
The Photon-Frame targeted Yu’s back with an incessant barrage of heat rays, but nimbly ducking, weaving, and spinning around them was no problem for the King of the Storm in his domain.
“Natsuki! Can you take care of Ein and Ijuin?” Yu asked over commlink.
“I got ’em!”
Yu nodded and returned his focus to the enemy. He shot back towards Leo, using the force of both of their momentums to land an explosive punch to the Mark VII’s Photon-Frame.
“Keep it together, Agni! More power to the thrusters!” Leo ordered. He defied the force of the blow and continued to push forward against it at full power. This time, he wasn’t going anywhere. “Now! Electromagnetic heat waves!”
The Photon-Frame began to emit high-powered electromagnetic waves, the heat from which could fry anyone within its vicinity. Right now, that happened to be his attacker: Yu and the Mark III.
“Crap!” Yu sprung back a great distance. “It’s not magic, so it’s not being nullified. If this keeps up, Rudra’s not going to make it out in one piece.”
His partner displayed a status screen indicating where the Frame was most damaged. Some of the joint areas were already marked in yellow. Yu himself was fine and Rudra certainly still had plenty of fight left in it, but it would be risky to let this drag out.
“That Photon-Frame doesn’t seem like it has any weaknesses. It has both offense and defense,” he murmured. “But if that were the case, then every Frame in the Asura Series would’ve been equipped with it.” The Mark VII used the Photon-Frame to cover for the fact that it had no physical armor. In other words, there was something exploitable that it was protecting. “He’s playing greedy, so all I have to do is work out a game plan to counter it. Help me out, Rudra.”
Whether it was ironclad and assertive ball control, slow buildup plays, or any of the other endless kinds of strategies available on the soccer field, Yu had never subscribed to any one tactic. What was most important was adaptability and being able to choose the correct play for the situation.
The Prayer Wheel picked up speed in response to Yu’s plea. With every turn, electricity and mana grew, and the Mark III’s power surged. As it did, Yu zipped in a lateral arc around the back of the Photon-Frame faster than Leo could react.
“Cheeky little...!”
“Rudra!” Yu shouted. “Electromagnetic heat radiator!”
He thrust out his hand, upon which a MUV Crow Gauntlet was already attached, having discreetly created it midflight. The weaponized gauntlet’s long, sharp talons clawed into Leo’s force field as electromagnetic waves radiated from Yu’s palm, superheating his target with the Mark III’s own energy.
“Agni! Spin your wheel!” Leo barked. “Increase power to the Photon-Frame!”
“Perfect,” Yu muttered. His sudden surprise attack had forced Leo to prioritize defense, thus shifting his previously invincible balance. Yu funneled as much energy as he possibly could to the heat radiator’s output.
Leo growled, realizing his mistake too late. “So that’s your game!”
“I’m dying to know how you’ll get out of this one,” said Yu.
The Mark VII had no plating or protection for typical hand-to-hand combat. It was doubtful he would be able to pull off any of the same stunts the Mark III had, much less throw it off.
Leo’s surprised expression told the whole story. But the fire returned to him in mere moments. “Read the Gospel Code, Agni!”
The Wheel of Orison at his waist turned as the voices sang the song of awakening: “Gate! Gate! Paragate! Gate! Gate! Paragate! Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha! Gate! Gate! Paragate!”
A deluge of particles flowed out of the Photon-Frame, and the nanofactors combined to form a giant, shining forearm. From fist to elbow, it easily surpassed twenty meters in length.
“Crush this bastard!” Leo roared.
“Using auxiliary droids to account for limitations,” Yu murmured. “Smart thinking.”
Yu had only just evaded the soaring giant’s fist of light when Natsuki came in over the commlink. “I-I don’t know how to tell you this, Three, but Ein and Ijuin aren’t looking good!”
“What?”
“They’re having some kind of seizure, and they won’t stop sweating! I don’t know what’s happening!”
A video feed appeared in Yu’s visor. Ijuin was laying on the ground, twitching and moaning as if suffering from a horrible nightmare. Ein, too, was racked with small tremors all over her body. The girl’s usually bright and confident face had been turned into a horribly pained grimace. Yu had never seen her this way before.
He shot Leo a glare that could kill. “What did you do to my friends?!”
“Optical hypnosis,” Leo replied flatly. “One of the Mark VII’s weapons. Anyone who looks at it falls into a coma and starts to hallucinate. Like they’re stuck in a particularly nasty bad dream.” He shrugged. “The worst cases have seizures, and when they wake up, they’re never the same again.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“If your friends are among the unlucky ones, they’ll need medical attention. They’ll be fine with proper care.” The boy was strangely calm. His ferocity and passion in the heat of battle was gone without a trace. Yu eyed him sharply. “But the only place they’ll get it in Fukuoka is with the military. By the time you get back to your floating city, it’ll probably be too late.”
“What are you saying?” Yu demanded.
“That I’ll put in a good word for you. So long as you surrender,” said Leo. His eyes were keen. Filled with cunning. “I don’t need the Replicant to be lucid. As long as it can recite Gospel Codes, I don’t care if it’s comatose. But I think you might feel differently.”
Yu wanted to scream. He had no choice.