Giant Robots? Say no more. I’m in. Volume 2: Chapter 4

Giant Robots? Say no more. I’m in.

Volume 2: Chapter 4

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Free Chapter: Word count: 2500

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The one good thing that came out of being in the spotlight, was that it got a lot of other people interested in knocking me out of it for themselves.

It kept things nice and fresh, since people came up with new things for me to play against.

“Looks like the stealth function is temporary.” I noted while thundering forward towards the Leviathan. Grey Corpse rumbled softly and there was a faint whine in my cockpit. I didn’t know how the inertial dampening system worked, but it allowed me to go supersonic for short periods of time without turning into paste. I couldn’t use weapons while it was active, the energy draw was too high, but melee at supersonic speeds was fun to play around with. It was too bad that it needed to be taken out and maintained if I used it for too long. I had a feeling that it had a psionic cloned brain inside it using space magic whenever I used it, which was awesome in my opinion. “Can you get a reading on who I’ll be dancing with this evening, Cina?”

“No markings and many of the parts are customized. This war machine is likely to be perfectly optimized to succeed against you.” That sounded about right. The apex of humanity’s arsenal was the ability to make highly-specialized machines perfectly tuned for an enemy. While they sent in waves of disposable assets, they analyzed the problem, and then created a weapon specifically to defeat that problem. Naturally, it was only a matter of time for my ‘enemies’ to build one to defeat me, since I freely offered up all my data. “I advise you to retreat. We cannot target it.”

A custom-made boss fit to defeat my playstyle.

I honestly couldn’t be more excited to engage it, especially while I had the overarching mission to put a nuke into a giant monster.

“Just focus on the Leviathan. I’ll handle it if it becomes a problem.” I hoped that it was going to be a problem, but I prioritized. Dunking a nuclear warhead into a giant monster had more appeal. Not to mention I could analyze my opponent before I engaged it. Fighting to the goal while the rival mech is fighting in the background? Seeing their patterns ahead of time while you deal with the main mission? If you don’t pay attention, you get absolutely destroyed? Sounded like a fantastic level, honestly. “I’ll make do.”

“Very well.” Cina begrudgingly conceded, while I dropped the inertial field after hitting the base of the Leviathan. I gave the thing a scan and looked up. It was a living weapon the height of a skyscraper and impossibly mobile and frozen thanks to ancient technology. Ancient technology that was failing, as made evident by the swarm that erupted from the ground once I landed. “Your energy weapons are inactive!?”

“You just noticed? This is a race. I’m not fighting yet.” Fighting chaff while there’s a time limit? That’s practically asking to lose. My hands drifted over a couple munitions and let them drop off the armor. The transmission was open but Cina wasn’t saying a word. Guess she figured out what I intended to do. “Set those explosives off at my mark.”

“This is absolutely absurd!”

I lightened the frame as much as possible. Gray Corpse had about half the armor it usually did. It was little more than metal frame, artificial muscle, engines, and a cockpit. No shoulder weapons, since I was carrying a nuke on my back instead, and with two laser rifles as my only weapons. Instead, I took massive explosive charges with me, designed for a mech to carry into the fight, drop off, and blow apart a target with after a fly over.

I was going to use it to rocket jump with the help of a little gadget.

“Mark!” I activated the stasis lock at the same time as I said mark. It was a one-time use gadget that locked large objects in an incredibly dense energy field. While it was active, everything inside it was effectively frozen and invulnerable. Apparently, it was derived from alien squid tech. If they can use their minds to rip into other dimensions and take chunks out of the planet, I guess that they had tricks like making stasis fields.

Anyway, activating it was like blinking to anyone who was within it.

For me, the ten seconds it was active was an instant between one moment and the next.

While to everyone else, I set off enough plastic explosives to level a building and sent my mech rocketing halfway up the Leviathan.

“Nice!” I got hit with the g force inherent to going from 0 to four kilometers per second. It was roughly the speed of a rocket going straight up to orbit. I figured that as tall as the Leviathan was, it wasn’t close to orbit, so going that fast for a few seconds was worth the trouble, especially since I didn’t have to waste fuel, accrue any heat, and discarded a couple of tons of explosive at the same time. “Activate all boosters!”

Cina complied, while I held on and guided Gray Corpse upward towards the nape of the Leviathan. The auxiliary boosters were all one-time use attachments. Solid fuel ignited to give exhaust velocity for just a few seconds. I was doing my best to limit energy usage by my engine, and there were few better ways to do that than relying on solid fuel rather than my own boosters.

My speed increased and I forced the limbs of the mech to straighten up. Guns and arms pointed up while legs together. Reducing drag meant reducing strain on the chassis. Alarms were ringing all over, microfractures were spreading across the while of the frame, and the entire maneuver was pushing Gray Corpse to its breaking point.

Gonna need an upgrade after this one, but what’s a better send off than rocketing up a massive enemy kaiju to plant a nuclear explosion?

I couldn’t think of any!

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Interlude: Ryleigh of House Remington, Rising Savior of Earth

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One moment, OS-549 was at the base of the Leviathan.

Then, there was an explosion, and he was halfway up the massive beast while still gaining speed.

“Structural damage reports are coming in! Massive amounts of micro-fractures all along the frame! Sub-system repairs are flooding all parts with temporary polymers!” Reports streamed from every direction, as OS-549’s war machine went from all green to yellow in an instant. “All auxiliary thrusters are active. Pilot’s life support systems are going into overdrive!”

I watched as OS-549 endured stress that would’ve killed an ordinary pilot. His health and vitals were mapped out just as intricately as his war machine. Years of piloting created microfractures all over his body and tore apart muscle, while bruising soft organs. If not for augmentations to his body and his life support systems, he’d be nothing more than paste after all his sorties.

But he wasn’t.

His many augmentations focused on adaptation rather than improvement. It galvanized his body to heal and strengthen, even if they naturally wouldn’t. His bones were as hard as titanium without being sheathed in it. His body’s oxygenation rates were equal to someone who had dedicated machines strapped to their lungs. The interstitial fluid in his body was thickened to a gel-like consistency that suspended his toughened organs and protected them against g-forces and cushioned them against any impact.

It would be possible to replicate most of his changes if one started on a young child and carefully genetically modified them with the intention of replicating him. Even an adult could be augmented to a similar state with enough time and funds.

But all his augmentations did was ensure he could withstand his methods and tacitcs.

The mind needed to come up with them, the fearlessness needed to execute them, and the reflexes needed to survive them?

All of that was OS-549’s and no one else’s.

He landed at the nape of the Leviathan as though it was a simple matter of fact and not a near-impossible challenge. With a smooth motion with his war machine that nearly made it seem human instead of artificial, he unslung the fusion weapon he carried while blasting off all the spent auxiliary thrusters. Then, he began to attach charges on the beast’s nape. Cina was most likely feeding him placement positions for the weapons, but still it was disconcerting to see a warmachine move with such delicate movements, like a human sapper attaching explosives to a fortress wall… rather than machine of many tons on the name of a titanic Elaran.

“Alright, firing charges.” The drilling charges went off. They latched onto the hide of the creature and spun their drills to life. They burrowed swiftly into the creature and embedded themselves deep. Once inside the creature, we switched to technical readouts, and watached as they activated lasers that carved through flesh, connected with one another, and went deeper before finally exploding. A hole a hundred meters deep was carved into the beast and he wasted no time embedding his nuclear charge into it, and pushing it deep into the creature. “Nuclear charge set. Time to see this firecracker blow up in a closed system.”

The weapon system came online and began its countdown, and I expected OS-549 to ask where his opponent was… but instead he gave a dismissive grunt.

“Still down there, huh? Five minutes to get up here… yeah, that’s too slow.” It was an unknown stealth craft fighting its way up the Leviathan. Presumably, it had a skilled pilot or even a Knight without an identification controlling it. It was obvious that he was considering staying and fighting it with his two weapons, but there was something else in his mind. Something he wasn’t sharing. “Hey, Ryleigh, flip a coin. Heads, I engage. Tails, I come home.”

And, as always, he chose to cut through the dilemma.

I fetched a coin from my pocket and flipped it.

I’ve done this many times. Each time, I knew that I could perfectly toss the coin so that it would decide what I would wish. It was simply a matter of throwing it at a certain height, or catching it after it flipped enough times, and then looking upon what I placed on the back of my hand. He didn’t even ask to see me toss the coin, so I could wait a moment and just give him a command.

Yet, I never did.

“Tails.” I declared the results simply, and OS-549 sighed.

“Alright, just bombard the area, I’m exfiltrating.” He made the decision and stuck with it. With a boost, he let his mech fall off the side of the giant creature, before activating its thrusters after reaching terminal velocity. He almost hit the ground but crested it instead and reached full speed faster than his own engines alone would’ve permitted. The stealthier war machine paused at his movement, possibly asking for orders, before realizing that it was now very close to a nuclear charge. “And, mark.”

Mark.

He counted every second since the weapon was deployed, and when it did there was a moment where the ‘head’ of the titan seemed to balloon to inordinately large proportions… before comping apart as gore and viscera the size of buildings. The massive creature lumbered headless for a few moments. A weapon that would’ve merely burned its hide, when embedded within its body, blew apart its head entirely. It then began to fall forward, its fall more like that of a crashing mountain than a living being, and the land beneath it cracked and broke while snow surged upward like a water from the force of its stopped descent.

The stealthcraft disappeared in the deluge, while OS-549 headed straight for us.

For a moment, I wondered if it was necessary to do as he bid and smash the area apart, but I decided against it.

“Focus fire on the area. Smash apart any remaining enemy forces, while ensuring the body can be recovered by our scientists. That biomass cannot fall to the enemy.” The gunnery operations crew of the bridge gave affirmations and OS-549’s vitals and machine faded from focus. Now, it was the time for the ship to do its part. “Make sure that the job is done.”

The cannons on the underside of the ship fire and it shook. Missile tubes opened and spat out ordinance. Communications with sub-orbital airships came through and their automated systems responded to our hails. Firepower in immense amounts streaked towards the former leviathan to ensure that the Elerans would be denied the immense amount of biological matter that composed the creature. There was enough on the field now to create multiple hives, and if those hives were deployed in this land, then the nascent nation coming forth from the underground would find no succor in the ruins of their ancestral holdings.

Only death.

Visual feeds on the battlefield came online while I watched dozens of barrages and their arrival times tick downward. As soon as the first timer hit zero, explosive force smashed the snow and ice. The unmoving body of the Leviathan merely took the blow, its thick hide scattering the blast and distributing the attack across a its body. The massive artillery shell did nothing but give a light burn on the surface of the corpse, but thankfully it was not explosives alone at our disposal.

Incendiary shells were mixed in with high explosive. They were rudimentary weapons filled with base materials such as white phosphorous and even older analogues of thermite, but they did their dity well enough whilst supported by an enhanced, flammable gel made from oil. The initial explosive barrage rolled over the Leviathan to create small wounds and cracks. Then the incendiary shells burst and scattered the fiery compound which spread into every small crack it could find. A modern tank struck with the munition would burn and have its armor pockmarked and compromised by the thermite.

The Leviathan did not have the material advancements of our vehicles and so it burned and burned, not even its bones able to resist as the flames ate away at it, and saturated the surrounding snow with ash and burnt flesh. I watched carefully and aimed the next barrages to set the whole thing alight, shattering more of its hide with explosives, and gaining more cracks and crevices for the inferno to seep into.

Already its protectors were trying to cannibalize the Leviathan to use its biological mass for their own ends, and I moved to shatter the largest concentrations of them as well.

As I did, I couldn’t help but wonder if I could have done the same in OS-549’s place with the same machine that he used.

As always, the answer came readily.

Not without ending up dead.