Chapter 2: A Mobile Weapon That Wants to Extol the Virtues of Thighs

Before awakening as the mobile weapon Raydas, I was human.

At least, that is what my consciousness and memories tell me.

I was a twenty-first-century Japanese man. One of that breed known as salarymen. I was single, and if I remember correctly—yes, my company was in Ogikubo.

Work was exhausting, but on weekends I immersed myself in the games I liked, mainly strategy games. I had friends who shared my interests, and I lived a reasonably comfortable life—or so I seem to recall.

Then, one day, I was in an accident.

A truck ran me over near the station during my lunch break.

It happened around the terminal in front of Ogikubo Station, where the traffic coming and going can get a little chaotic. I was walking through the area when a truck suddenly backed up and dragged me underneath it.

My memories after that are hazy.

I remember the lights of the ambulance. I remember feeling sorry for the paramedic who kept telling me to hang on.

Then came the charging tone of a defibrillator, followed by the shock.

(Let’s try again. Clear...)

Another charging tone. Another shock.

(Damn it, no response...)

I could see nothing. Hear nothing.

But immediately afterward—

(Move, move, moooove!)

I heard another voice.

(Please... Raydas, move!)

The defibrillator vanished, and there was a boy sitting inside my chest.

An eighteen-meter-tall body.

Four inertial turbines.

I was a G-Strand.

Raydas.

That was honestly how little time seemed to have passed.

Basic tactical data had already been loaded into me, so I had no trouble fighting. When it came to anything else, however, I knew absolutely nothing.

I had instantly recognized those enemy Zells as belonging to the Fusionist military, but—

What was the Fusionist military in the first place?

I belonged to the UIB Orbital Forces. Did that make them my allies...? What was going on?

Once the battle ended, questions began pouring into my mind.

There were countless things I wanted to ask, but first I needed to confirm our location and the date. I was conscientious like that.

“Jin. May I ask you something?”

He was still shaken by his first battle and kept muttering things like, “I killed them... The enemy... I...” There was no point agonizing over it now.

“Huh...? Y-Yeah.”

“Where are we?”

“What? Where...? This is Kronmerin.”

“Kronmerin. Thank you.”

That matched the information in my navigational map. This was Kronmerin, a city on the Moon. Its primary industries were the mining of Element G and research and development.

What was Element G?

“And when are we? What year, month, and day is it? The time as well, if possible.”

“It’s the twenty-fifth. January 28, 125. The time is... 1:08 p.m.”

Jin answered after looking at his watch.

My internal clock read “Jan/28/125 130824 (UTC).”

In other words, January 28, 125, at 13:08:24 Coordinated Universal Time. It matched Jin’s watch.

As for why they used Coordinated Universal Time, day and night each lasted two weeks on the Moon, so they probably just used Earth’s standard time.

But wait—

“What do you mean by the year 125?”

“125 means 125. It’s New Era 125.”

Here we go. A calendar I had never heard of.

So NE stood for New Era.

I did not know what ruler had instituted it, but adopting an entirely new calendar was never a good idea. It only caused confusion. Whoever did it deserved to be overthrown.

“Do you know the Gregorian calendar? What year would it be by that calendar?”

“I don’t really know. Maybe around 2200... Hmm, or 2300?”

Two to three hundred years.

I was stunned.

It felt as though I sat there blankly for quite a while, but in reality, only about three-tenths of a second passed.

Just moments ago, I had been drinking coffee at a Doutor in Ogikubo.

Now, two hundred years later and 380,000 kilometers away, I had destroyed three mobile weapons.

“Life exceeds all expectations...”

“What?”

“Nothing. Please don’t mind me.”

This is entirely irrelevant, but I had always been the sort to speak politely, even as a child.

I came from an old-fashioned family, and my parents and relatives all spoke that way, so I naturally grew up doing the same. Because of that, I was nicknamed “Professor” in the fourth and sixth grades and again during my first year of middle school. For some reason, though, in fifth grade alone, everyone called me “Vice-Captain,” even though I was not the vice president of any club.

But I digress.

If anything, I felt my manner of speaking had become even more ceremoniously polite since becoming a mobile weapon. Then again, I was speaking English—strictly speaking, a form of English different from that of the twenty-first century—so it was difficult to tell.

“You’re a strange AI. You’re almost like AC... No, that can’t be right.”

Had he started to say something?

AC? The Advertising Council?

Jin, however, seemed to remember something else immediately afterward.

“Oh... M-More importantly, everyone else... What happened to everyone from school?”

Jin turned my head.

At approximately ten o’clock from my position, about one hundred and fifty meters away, stood a building in one corner of the underground city that had escaped destruction.

It was a ten-story office building. Or perhaps it was residential.

A large hatch leading underground was located on the first floor. A little over a dozen boys and girls around Jin’s age were cautiously emerging from it. There was probably a parking garage beyond that hatch.

“Everyone... Thank goodness.”

Jin breathed a sigh of relief.

“Your schoolmates?”

“Yeah. They’re my classmates from Kronmerin High School. We were evacuating together.”

A heavily damaged school bus sat nearby.

Hmm. I was beginning to understand.

Jin and his classmates had probably been evacuating aboard that school bus when they encountered the enemy Zells.

The bus was badly damaged, and his classmates took shelter underground.

Then Jin found me while I was being transported on a military trailer and climbed into my cockpit.

But it bothered me that Jin had known my name: Raydas.

When I searched my unit data, I discovered that the codename GSX002 Raydas was classified. It was not top secret, but it was certainly not something a civilian boy should have known.

Yet he had shouted, “Move, Raydas!”

I would have to ask him about that when the time was right.

I also needed to ask about Mr. Smith. Seriously, who was he?

Jin made machine-me walk slowly toward his classmates.

“Jin! Is that you?”

One of them, a black-haired girl, looked up at me and shouted.

Her hair was medium length. Her eyes were black as well, and she was probably of Asian descent. She looked rather strong-willed.

She wore a white knit sweater on top. The healthy thighs extending from beneath her shorts were dazzling.

(A mobile weapon that wants to extol the virtues of thighs.)

“Abby.”

Jin’s voice rose by a full octave.

Hmm. What was this?

His vitals too. His heart rate was climbing.

I see.

“Raydas, do you have external speakers?”

“Yes. Go ahead.”

I connected the audio. The speakers were small and had rather poor sound quality. They were only the bare minimum.

“Abby, it’s me.”

Jin’s voice echoed from the speakers. The moment Miss Abby realized Jin was my pilot, her voice brightened.

“Jin!”

“I managed to defeat the enemy... Um, somehow. Sorry I did something so reckless.”

“Jin, don’t move from there.”

“What?”

Abby leaped.

The distance and height were astonishing.

In a single bound, she reached my knee. She kicked off the knee armor and clung to my waist.

She had scaled my eighteen-meter-tall body with ease.

Just what was this girl—

Oh, right. We were on the Moon, under one-sixth gravity. Anyone with enough nerve could pull off something like this.

The girl clung to the cockpit hatch in my chest. Even in lunar gravity, it was high enough that a fall would not end well.

“That’s dangerous, Abby...!”

“Open it. The hatch is here, right?”

“All right! I’ll open it, so don’t move!”

I opened the cockpit hatch. Abby climbed through it and entered the cockpit.

“Abby, don’t do anything that reckless. What if gravity suddenly came back while you were climbing—”

Before he could say another word, Abby wrapped Jin in a tight hug.

“A-Abby...?”

“Idiot. I was worried about you.”

“S-Sorry.”

“All you ever do is apologize. That makes you an idiot too.”

Oh-ho, oh-ho, oh-ho.

Ah, youth.

I would have whistled if I could, but as a mobile weapon, I had no lips.

(To be continued)