The Inquisitor is a good boss.
Unlike plenty of bosses I've seen before—those who do nothing but draw pretty pies in the sky for their wage slaves—the Inquisitor didn't sell me dreams. On the contrary, she actually put real money on the table.
That night, I enjoyed the most luxurious thing I'd had since coming to this hellhole.
A solid, peaceful sleep.
After we slunk back from orbit in disgrace, the Inquisitor brought me back to Valmonda Fortress. After a brief briefing on the mission to go quell the unrest in Donigaton, she seemed to finally notice that I was so exhausted I was practically about to achieve enlightenment on the spot. In a rare burst of mercy, she had an attendant take me away to rest.
They assigned me a new room. The decor was still the kind of dark Gothic style that would drive a minimalist designer to suicide, and compared to a hotel suite it still felt more like a prison cell, but at least it had a small window that looked out onto the fortress's internal artificial daylight. It had a real bed with soft bedding. It even had a private bathroom with a shower.
After the emotional whiplash of a failed interstellar flight, staring down the Inquisitor's overwhelming aura up close, and the deep dread of having to return to that blood-soaked, chaotic city, my mind and body were both at the limit. The moment my head touched the pillow, I sank into a dreamless sleep.
No need to envy young people. If you can't fall asleep, it's only because you're not tired enough.
Early the next morning, I was jolted awake by the Inquisitor's voice blasting from a ceiling loudspeaker—one of those voices that makes you snap to attention the instant you hear it. I glanced at the camera mounted beside the speaker.
Right. Efficient and "humane" design.
Before I could even finish complaining internally, a half-man, half-machine servant just opened the door and came straight in, then started manhandling me from head to toe…
…After I was cleaned up and presentable, and after I'd had a simple breakfast in my room (still the same grey synthetic food; I felt like my taste buds had committed suicide out of despair), I was led to a spacious area that looked like an armoury or a maintenance bay.
And then I saw the thing I will never forget for as long as I live.
An ivory-white steel giant, covered in ornate, intricate patterns, stood silently on a metal support frame. It was larger and heavier than any armour I'd ever seen, packed with brute force and a kind of Gothic, pathological aesthetic beauty.
Isn't this… the Inquisitor's own suit of "a god descending to the battlefield" armour?
"Your safety is the top priority." The Inquisitor's voice came from behind me, cool and flat as if she were simply stating a datum. "Put it on. Based on the intelligence we've received, the rioters in Donigaton have heavy weapons. Ordinary ballistic protection cannot guarantee your absolute safety. This suit of power armour is my personal property, and it is the best individual protective equipment I can access on this planet at present."
My brain shut down completely.
"M-My lady… Th-This isn't appropriate, is it?" I stammered. "This thing looks like a top-tier treasure. I'm just an ordinary person. Forget using it—if I don't break it, I'll already be doing well…"
"My orders are not a negotiation."
After a round of frantic nodding and bowing that nearly folded me in half, I accepted this "gift" in a daze, caught between the euphoria of being smashed in the face by a massive inheritance and the terror of desecrating a holy relic.
Considering the bullets that had screamed through that dark city, and the gunshot wound in my chest that still wasn't fully healed, I genuinely hadn't expected she would hand over something so precious it was beyond imagination—so powerful it could let one person flatten a battlefield—and so private it felt like a second skin… and she did it as casually as if it meant nothing, to a brand-new employee who'd been on the job for barely two days and still couldn't remember where the fortress exits were.
And then I spent the entire morning on "theory lessons."
"…The Inquisition 'Pale Holy Remains' Terminus-pattern Mark III power armour. Its core is a miniaturized plasma fusion reactor. Its energy reserves support three hundred standard hours of high-intensity combat…" A technician in a deep red hooded robe, wearing a steampunk-style mask and bristling with mechanical augmetics—someone who looked like a cyberpunk monk—spoke in an emotionless electronic synth-voice.
The Inquisitor addressed him as "Brother Zebrun."
He was just like the most rigid, most boring university professor imaginable. He pulled up a mountain of holographic structural diagrams that made my head spin, and in that same dead, synthetic tone, started force-feeding me the "foundational knowledge" of the suit.
"…Its structural layers are forged from a composite of adamantium and ceramite, with superior structural integrity… The armour's outer coating is sintered from a saint's bone-ash, providing effective resistance against the assaults of malign forces… The control system uses a fully dynamic force-feedback neural interface… The armour's machine-spirit will synchronize with the wearer's neural signals, precisely reproducing each of your movements…"
"Hold on!" I couldn't help raising a hand to cut him off. "Brother, you just said… 'machine-spirit'? A machine's soul?"
"Affirmative." The lenses beneath Zebrun's mask flickered. "The Omnissiah grants all sacred creations a soul. The machine-spirit of power armour is the manifested embodiment of its operational logic and combat instinct. Proper communion with the machine-spirit is the key to unleashing its full potency."
I listened, dumbfounded.
Good grief. This is just giving an operating system a religious wrapper, isn't it? By that logic, my old desktop—the one I used for eight years, that crashed countless times, got reinstalled a dozen times, and takes ninety seconds to boot—its machine-spirit is probably a vengeful wraith by now.
"So… if this thing freezes up, do we reboot it?" I couldn't resist. "Or do we call you over to perform an exorcism?"
Brother Zebrun fell silent, as if his brain—built out of gears and vacuum tubes—couldn't process my blasphemous question.
In the end, he simply chose to skip the topic and continued with his mind-numbing lecture.
The entire morning, I drifted through intrusive thoughts like, "Is this what the first lesson of pilot training feels like?" and "Does BlueSky actually teach theory classes for excavators?" and other nonsense.
In the afternoon, the nightmare of practical training began.
How do I put it?
Does anyone here know how to operate an excavator?
Uh, I mean… does anyone know any tricks for operating four excavators at the same time?
Asking online. Urgent.
That—above—was my very first impression the moment I climbed into that cramped, narrow, slightly wobbly "big iron fridge," always feeling like it might tip over at any second… well, not tip over. Fall down.
(End of Chapter)
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