Posted on April 15, 2025

CHASE 2: BLUE KNIGHT (part 2)

“There might still be survivors,” Dale said cautiously.

“Yeah.” I opened the door on the left side of the bridge with my gun at the ready. At that moment, I heard a woman scream, “AAAAH!”

It looked like a cabin. There were five filthy chairs and a table with one broken leg. The furniture was scattered around with no sense of logic. At the back of the room, a woman was pressed against the wall.

Her hair, tied up in two tails at the back of her head, was disheveled, and she glared at me with blue eyes filled with despair. Her body, clearly that of an adult woman, was visible through her short shirt and jacket, which seemed to be held up only by her neck. Her long pants were tight against her skin, but the soft lines of her cheeks still retained the appearance of a young girl.

Dale came running over. “What is it, Kain? Is someone else left?”

“Yeah,” I said, not taking my eyes off the woman. “How about you?”

“I’m okay,” Dale said, standing next to me. “It’s rare to see a woman on a ship like this.”

“Who are you guys?” the woman asked in a frightened voice. She spoke in standard Astradan, but with a slightly higher pitch. She had a Balarant accent.

“Huh…” Dale grinned and stopped me as I quickly readjusted my gun. “Stand down, Kain. If we take a Balarant woman to Gilgameth, we can sell her for a high price. There’s no need to kill her.”

I’d certainly heard that black market trafficking was taking place during the war. In reality, you could get as many women as you want from enemy countries on the battlefield. However, it seemed that the government officials and military headquarters personnel who never left Gilgameth territory were buying them with money. Their fate was to be used as playthings and then killed, or at best to live as slaves. Either way, they were nothing more than targets for anger toward an enemy.

“Then tie her down to something,” I told Dale. “It’s a nuiscance to have Balarant women wandering around.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that.”

Dale walked closer to the woman.

“You’ve got to be kidding me, you guys.”

The woman picked up a metal pipe that was lying at her feet. But the outcome of a fight was already clear. I returned to the bridge and took the main pilot’s seat in the center. I operated the console in front of me and changed course to Coboto, military headquarters on the planet Melkia.

A G-force suddenly pierced the ship as it accelerated to correct its course. At that moment, I heard gunfire from the cabin.

Dale, I snorted under my breath, you ended up shooting her anyway, didn’t you? And then, perhaps because I was relieved that the enemy was gone, or perhaps because I was confident that we’d be back in Gilgameth territory in about an hour using MH navigation, my body began to tremble and I felt a sudden loss of strength. I threw the gun I’d been holding in my left hand onto the console.

That’s when it happened. I heard the woman yell.

“Take the ship back to Thrall if you don’t want to be shot to death.”

I turned around to see her standing there with a bare chest and disheveled hair, holding Dale’s gun.

“Hurry up and take us back,” The woman yelled hysterically and walked over to me.

“You’re pretty feisty. Are you the boss of this ship?”

“No way! I was just captured by the guys on this ship. I thought I’d finally been saved when soldiers came aboard.”

Human traffickers? It seems that route does exist. This smuggling ship had even gone so far as to traffic humans.

“Just drop me off. You can do that, right? Or do you want to be shot to death like your buddies?”

“I’d hate to die like that. I couldn’t bear being killed by a woman with a gun under her nose.”

As I said this, I slowly reached out to grab the gun on the console.

The woman noticed and shouted, “Don’t do that! There’s no use.” She walked over and picked up the gun. “I’ll take this. From the looks of things, you don’t have the strength to use it anyway. Come on, hurry up and turn the ship back!” She ordered, holding two guns on her hips. “If you don’t hurry up, I’ll really shoot you to death!”

“Do you actually want to do that? First off, this is a bridge. If you fire in here, the instruments will be damaged. And if you kill me, you won’t be able to fly the ship. I can tell from the way you’ve been yelling at me to turn it around.”

“No way…” the woman stammered with a confused look. “That’s not true. I can fly this ship, too.”

“If I can’t pilot it, you can’t return to the planet. Are you okay with that? You want to give it a try?” I laughed. After all, she was a Balarant woman. There was no way she could pilot a Gilgameth-type ship.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t you going to try?” I questioned her.

The woman raised her eyebrows, gritted her teeth, and pulled the trigger. “Damn it!” A bullet shot out of the gun with a thunderous roar. I leaned back and fell off my seat. The bullet whizzed by about 20cm above me, punching a hole in the door on the right side of the bridge.

After making sure I had no strength left, she turned back to the console and began to operate the instruments. However, she couldn’t hide her confusion at handling a machine for the first time. She glared at the instruments, placed both hands on the console, and began to think.

I silently crawled up behind her and stood up on my knees, which felt like over-oiled hinges. My reflection appeared on the cockpit glass for a second. She noticed and turned around. But before she could take aim, my fist sunk into her back, around her kidneys. She gasped and slid off the console.

I tied her to the seat and checked the gauges again. I was so tired my eyes were following the numbers, but my thoughts were not keeping up. I checked the gauges again three times, pointing at them, and the woman regained consciousness.

“You didn’t kill me?” Her voice was a little high-pitched and trembling slightly.

“That right,” I answered. “I won’t kill you if you don’t resist.”

The woman gave a stiff smile. “Compared to the other guy, you’re a good person…”

She was definitely from the enemy country and she had killed Dale. I wouldn’t be satisfied with just killing her. But I didn’t have the energy right then to kill anyone, and I was also thinking about selling her on Melkia.

“You’re called Kain, right?” the woman asked. “I’m Ronni Shatrait. Tell me where this ship is headed. Either way, I’m gonna be taken.”

“Melkia.”

“How far are we from Thrall now?” Ronni’s high-pitched voice was painful to my exhausted senses.

“We’ve already escaped Balarant’s sphere of influence. If we return to Balarant now, we’ll be attacked. Now shut up.”

I tried to keep it down, but my voice was also piercing to my own ears.

“I can’t go back to Balarant…” Ronni said quietly, as if she didn’t hear what I was saying. Then she was deep in thought. I was about to pass out.

“Kain! Untie me! I won’t threaten you with a gun anymore.” I heard Ronni scream.

“Shut up!” I yelled back.

“I’ve made a decision. I’m leaving Balarant and going to Gilgameth. I’m going to live there now.” Ronni rambled on. “Besides, you’re so tired. You’ll die if you keep going like this. I really don’t want to see any more people die in front of me.”

“Shut up! Didn’t you hear me?”

I stood up. In that moment, all the strength went out of my knees and hips.

As my consciousness faded, I heard Ronni shouting. “You idiot, if you die, I won’t make it to Gilgameth alive! I made up my mind!”

I don’t know when she escaped from the ropes, but for the next six days, Ronni took good care of me. However, I checked the navigation device myself. Ronni also helped me with this. It seemed that she was trying to get me to trust her before I regained enough strength to fire a gun.

She said that I had a fever, so she stuck some raw zumishi meat — which is said to have the effect of reducing fever — on my forehead. Then she brought out a mountain of synthetic food from the ship’s warehouse and piled it up in front of me.

Ronni told me about her history from time to time, even though I didn’t ask. She’d moved seven times because of the war. After the ceasefire, she was kidnapped by a human trafficker.

What interested me the most was that she had previously handled Balarant’s A.T., the “Fatty.” However, Fatty is a code name in the Gilgameth military, and within Balarant it’s called a “Blocker.” Apparently, she was in the military reserves and went from simulation to actual training. For me, who had been told that there were no women who rode A.T.s, this was a surprise and it also made me angry.

On the seventh day, when the ship’s computer announced in a synthesized voice that we were approaching the planet Melkia, my physical strength had almost returned to normal.

When I went to the bridge, the familiar planet Melkia was right in front of me. It was green only around the equator, and the north and south were a burnt reddish-black color. The ship had come this far without missing the planned route. The navigation computer had accurately captured the powerful beacon emitted by Coboto Naval Base, a city in the northern part of Melkia.

As I sat in the main pilot’s seat, a console light came on announcing entrance into the atmosphere. Ronni sat in one of the seats. We couldn’t decelerate at one G like we did at launch. There were no problems from entering the atmosphere to approaching Coboto. However, things started to get hectic after we received a call from the Coboto Naval Base.

This ship was well known to Coboto as a smuggling ship. It had appeared several times during the war and was on the blacklist. The controller who appeared on the screen warned us that they would attack if we descended below an altitude of 1000 meters.

I didn’t care and landed the ship in a rocky area a little away from the naval base. However, several land combat A.T.s were waiting on the ground. They started shooting without warning. Ronni and I fled from the bridge, where their fire was concentrated, into the hangar.

I stopped in front of the bulkhead. “Ronni, you can handle an A.T., right? There should be a Fatty lying at the back of the container. Use it to escape.”

“Are you letting me go?”

“Yes.”

“But you…”

“I can’t handle a Fatty. Go quickly.”

“Uh… yeah.”

Nodding unsurely, Ronni ran into the container, where the sound of gunfire was coming from outside. Her back was filled with confidence. A.T. pilots believe that the moment they get into an A.T., they can escape all danger.

The hatch on the port side opened and the Fatty jumped out. With any luck, Ronni would be saved. If she survived, good enough. At worst, she would serve as a decoy until I could escape. What was supposed to be exchanged for gold in Gilgameth just became a shield. Not a bad purchase.

I confirmed that the A.T.s were moving in the direction of Ronni’s escape, so I leapt through the hatch on the opposite side and got off the ship.

The town of Coboto had changed completely.

In the past, military barracks lined the streets, and the town prospered from business with soldiers, but now most of the buildings had exposed steel beams, revealing the scars of war damage. The beams bore black rust on their surfaces, caused by the fires of war.

I’d been hiding out in this town for ten days. For the first two or three days, I was unable to move because the military was running around, but by the fourth day, that had stopped.

There were many ex-military men in khaki pressure suits like me here. I blended in with them and went out into the town, where I encountered people hunting in groups and street thugs who flashed their large caliber guns. I wanted to fight, but without a gun, I could only run and hide. It was pathetic, but that was the only way to survive.

I was ripped off at a dilapidated bar. Everything was taken from me except for the money hidden in the soles of my shoes. If I’d been as cunning as the merchants roaming the streets, it would be a different story, but I was born and raised on a battlefield, and without a weapon I had no power. Everything I’d built up in my life began to crumble.

I could only survive by going on the attack. My life depended on weapons stronger than those of my enemy, and on a quick attack to get one. The two years I spent piloting an A.T. as a soldier were enough to beat that into me. I followed military orders and killed fleeing enemies, even if they were not resisting. On the battlefield, only the strong could be victorious.

But the situation had changed. Now it was post-war. To survive in a decadent city, cunning was more important than strength. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any of those things. My mental and physical stamina were reaching their limits.

Come to think of it, I hadn’t eaten anything in two days since my money was stolen. I thought I should eat whatever meager thing I could afford. I crawled out of my nest, which I’d made by combining steel frames and synthetic leather in rubble on the outskirts of town. A weak ray of sunlight was shining through the gap between the
crumbling buildings.

This town had very little precipitation. That was my only relief. If it rained with some strange additives mixed in, it would be unbearable. I heard that a considerable amount of chemical weapons were used on Melkia during the war. Rumor has it that some cities get acid rain.

I wandered into town. There wasn’t much food to speak of, just synthetic stuff with a putrid smell, thrown out in front of a storefront made of steel beams. Occasionally, there were shops selling natural animal foods, but the prices were eye-poppingly high. Natural foods give you a certain energy that flows from within, unlike synthetic foods. I’ve eaten them a few times. I also had a grotesque grilled dabofish when I was still a soldier stationed on the planet Thrall.

I heard that there were still many creatures used for meat in the Balarant system, and most of those sold on Melkia were smuggled in.

I found a rare steaming shop in the middle of a narrow alley, so I went in. There, they were selling a stew of synthetic foods in a stockpot. No, they weren’t cooking them, just boiling them to kill bacteria — said the smiling old woman selling them. Her wrinkled, hideous face reminded me of a demon. I felt sick, but my appetite won out.

I paid a fortune and was given only a small amount. There were dark-colored chemicals and chlorella-based solid food floating in it. It must have been scraped off the C-rations of soldiers who died on the battlefields around here, and it smelled extremely bad. It was moldy and stung the nose.

Just as I was about to pick a piece up and put it in my mouth, I felt something digging into my pocket. But my senses were dulled, so I couldn’t really tell. I let go of the food and slapped the top of my pocket. Then I heard a voice say, “Ouch!” It was a child’s voice.

I looked in the direction of the voice. There was a skinny kid about ten years old. He was wearing ripped pants and a running shirt full of holes. His eyes were not those of a child, but rather like those of a man who had been running a shady business for the past ten years.

I grabbed the kid’s arm. He didn’t try to run away, showing no remorse when he said, “There’s nothing in it anyway!”

I twisted the kid’s hands behind his back. “What are you doing?!” He shouted loudly for help, but several people just looked on with amusement. No one blamed me.

I felt sorry for the kid, but I said, “You’re not working alone. Take me to your boss.” There was sure to be some money there.

After passing through a narrow alley, the kid stopped at a crude hut made from the steel frame of a building. A wooden door was cleverly fitted into part of the steel frame to serve as the entrance.

“Go in!” I said, letting the kid go first.

The door slid open awkwardly, and a man dressed all in black appeared from inside. Black pants and a black shirt. As soon as he saw me, he let out a strange cry.

“Kain — aren’t you Kain McDougal?”

I recognized the man’s face. He was growing his beard freely now, but with his slanted eyes and the way his mouth looked crooked on the right side, he was definitely Ku Leyar, my comrade from the mopping-up unit known as the Corpse Squad.

The Corpse Squad was a unit organized to kill all enemy soldiers surviving on the battlefield. Before I transferred to the 36th Armored Corps, I had been working with the Corpse Squad for a year, dealing with A.T.s.

“You’re still alive? When did you come back to Melkia?” I said, and Leyar invited me into the room. It was bleak, not a single piece of furniture.

“I stole a ship from Balarant ten days ago. But how did you become a pickpocket boss?”

“I left the army behind,” he said. “Kids wouldn’t be suspect of me. We can’t make a living any other way. Well, I started a legit business recently, though.”

“A proper job?”

“I’m a matchmaker. I run little betting matches,” he said, handing me a pack of cigarettes.

“Want a smoke? They’re Sabenstas”

“Is that the brand issued by the army?”

“Yeah, the same one.”

I picked it up and held it close to the light he offered me. I didn’t inhale the first puff, I exhaled. Otherwise, the smell of the smoke would transfer to my cigarette and I wouldn’t be able to pick up its original scent. This was a habit of mine. That said, it was the first cigarette I’d smoked in a year. I took a deep puff on the second round. It had a filter, so it wasn’t too harsh, but the clear flavor penetrated deep into my lungs.

When I let it out of my mouth, purple smoke rose from the tip. I exhaled lightly. There was a faint bitterness and a pleasant euphoric feeling. And maybe because it’d been a while since I’d last smoked, I felt dizzy. But that wasn’t all. What was the numbness in my hands and feet?

No matter how tense a person is, they can let their guard down. I was careless in letting my guard down with my former comrade. The cigarettes were laced with a powerful anesthetic.

Leyar laughed loudly and said, “Kain, I heard about that transport ship. If I turn you in to the MPs, I’ll get a huge bounty.”

“The MPs?” I muttered with my numb mouth.

“They’re gonna catch you anyway” He said triumphantly. “I’ll tell you who they are before that happens. They’re like a police force that was started by people who got rejected by the military. Except they’re armed. Either way, you’re not escaping them.”

He then roared at his little subordinate. “Stop messing around and go call the MPs!”

At that moment, he was vulnerable. I rammed into him with all my strength, pushed him away, and headed for the door. But the next moment, I suddenly lost feeling in my feet. Leyar, who was still lying on the ground, quickly kicked them out from under me.

“You idiot, you can’t even move your body,” he sneered.

“You…you bastard”

As I yelled, I punched him with all my might. Rather than being captured and sold by such a guy, I’d rather keep punching him until every nerve in my body was torn to shreds, and then I’d die — or so I thought. But my fist was blocked by Leyar’s palm.

“You won’t be able to defeat me while you’re that weak,” he chuckled, tightening his palm. Perhaps because of the anesthetic, I couldn’t feel anything. But my fist slowly began to open.

“You stupid bastard. You got kicked out of the army, so your instincts are gone.”

He grabbed my hair and slammed my face into the floor. The taste of blood spread in my mouth. But then I saw my chance to win. A shining black iron barrel was sticking out of Leyar’s pocket. It was an unusually short barrel, probably a Mizetta-type self-defense pistol.

Listening to his laughter, I slowly reached my right hand up to his waist. The moment my fingertips touched the barrel, he flinched and twisted his body. But it was too late. I grabbed the barrel and pulled it out of his pocket.

“Hey!” Leyar yelled, but it was mine now.

With my left hand, I pulled his hand off my hair, and I put all my strength into rising to my knees as I began to laugh.

“Don’t move!” I shouted as loud as I could and aimed the gun. My fingertips shook a little, but the sight stayed on target. Leyar’s face twitched. The right side of his mouth, which was already crooked, now curved at a right angle.

Staggering forward, I put my back against the door. I would have liked to fire a warning shot at him, but it seemed I no longer had the strength to pull the trigger. Even the sensation of holding the gun was starting to fade.

I pushed the door open with my back and leaned forward, almost falling. But it was too late, and three black shadows stood before me. They were four-meter-tall humanoid weapons — the MP A.T.s that Leyar had sent the kid to call.

The machines were painted in two colors, blue and white. It could be said to be a wartime MP model. However, the red rotating light that flashed on its back was clearly different.

The A.T. in the middle opened its hatch and walked up to about two meters in front of me. In its right arm it held a heavy machine gun with a shortened barrel, and in its left hand it held a shield that was probably about 50 mm thick.

“Were you the one aboard that ship?” a man shouted from the cockpit.

I hid behind the steel beams. The only way to escape from here was to steal an A.T. But I no longer had any strength left in my arms. It was as if my shoulders were being pulled free and flying away…that’s how it felt.

The steel beam I was leaning against vibrated along with the heavy footsteps of the A.T. At that moment, my knees finally gave way. My body started to slide slowly down. Against my back I felt the sensation of a rivet embedded in the beam. But suddenly, something caught me. I looked over and saw a metal bar about two centimeters in diameter sticking out from one part of the beam.

This is it! My senses, floating in a semi-awake state, cried out.

I did as I was ordered. I hooked the gun’s trigger safety onto the bar, grabbed the barrel with my left hand, and aimed it at the A.T.’s cockpit. Next, I placed my right palm on the rear of the gun and leaned my weight against it. In an instant, my whole body was enveloped in a dull vibration.

A bullet shot out of the hammer-loaded gun with great force. It hit right on target, punching a round hole in the forehead of the man in the A.T.’s cockpit. The man twitched and died.

The two A.T.s nearby didn’t seem to understand what had happened until I rolled out from behind the steel frame and readjusted my gun. I quickly crawled up the A.T.’s body with my numb limbs, snatched the goggles from the pilot’s head, pushed his corpse aside, and dropped into the cockpit.

At the same time, a strong impact ran through the A.T. The two machines on the left and right collided with me. Perhaps it was the shock, but the hatch wouldn’t close even when I raised the control stick. The only relief was that the way these A.T.s operated wasn’t that different from what I was used to.

From the cockpit where the dead body lay beside me, I made the arms spread out, pushing away the A.T.s on my left and right at the elbow area. At the same time, I pushed the button on the top of the control frame with my thumb. Normally, the A.T.’s arms would slide forward from their elbows along with a heavy ejection sound, finishing them off. But instead, I heard the sound of a siren coming from the shoulder loudspeaker.

One A.T. that had been pushed over stood up, making a creaking sound. I turned my A.T. on its heels, then shoved my heavy foot into the accelerator pedal. The gliding wheels screeched under the A.T.’s feet, and it started moving with a strong G force.

At the same time, a heavy machine gun roared behind me. I couldn’t see any information from the sensors because I wasn’t wearing the goggles over my eyes, but I was definitely being chased.

The cockpit hatch, still upright, emitted a whoosh and a flash. It must have been grazed by a machine gun bullet. I could feel vibrations from the bullets digging into the machine. Despite this, the A.T. continued to accelerate as long as my foot pressed down on the pedal. After about twenty seconds of driving, a large intersection in front of me caught my eye, filled with people.

Up ahead was a familiar blue A.T. that I had seen on the battlefield. It was the same one I had fought alongside in the Corpse Squad. It had the greatest power for land combat. It had already been six months since the ceasefire. I thought there was no way it could still be on Coboto. It was an A.T. exclusively used by Quent mercenaries. They would have returned to their home planet Quent once the war was over.

However, judging from the shield attached to its left shoulder, the pile bunker, and the axe-shaped decoration on its head, it was undoubtedly an ATH-Q63 Berserga. And I was in the middle of a battle with a dog-type A.T.

It was rapidly approaching. The speed I could feel was over 50 kilometers per hour. This was my A.T.’s limit speed. But my foot was still glued to the accelerator pedal and wouldn’t let go. My machine lost balance and plunged into the crowd. It was impossible to control. In the next moment, I was thrown out of the cockpit.

In my blurry vision, I could see the blue A.T. Suddenly, the hatch opened and a large man, about 2 meters tall, appeared. The man had curly black hair and goggles on his face, so his expression was not visible.

“Let’s get this under control!” the man shouted, staring at my face and removing his goggles. “Kain…” I was losing consciousness, but I recognized that voice. And his face was familiar too. Yes, it was definitely Sha Bak, a Quent mercenary.

Suddenly, a blue A.T. arm moved in front of me. It grabbed me. This was the worst. He must have been planning to sell me out too.

Just as I was thinking that, my consciousness faded and my vision blacked out.

Continue to Part 3

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