But before that, I still had one top priority.
That was to kill the shamate punks on the other side, especially the one in the middle doing the voodoo dance. It pissed me off beyond belief.
I raised the short twin-barrel autocannon in my hands and had my "gunner," Potato, take aim.
"That horned helmet. Turn him into paste."
"Command acknowledged. Precision aiming complete. Ballistic solution and target bearing overlap: 99.8%," Potato paused for a beat. "Commencing fire."
"Thump-thump-thump!"
A string of heavy, muffled detonations. The monster in my hands spat lethal fire. From what I'd seen earlier, this thing hit like a truck. It could blow a washbasin-sized crater into a wall. A burst like that should be enough to turn a hundred-ton dump truck into spare parts, let alone a person.
…And then, nothing happened.
That horned-helmet bastard was still hopping around like a maniac, dancing and jumping. He even smugly held up a middle finger at me—well, maybe it was some casting gesture I didn't understand.
The corpse-pile under his feet got splattered into a storm of blood and meat, but he himself wasn't scratched. Not even the little goons clustered around him dropped.
What the hell?! How can the shots be off by a hundred miles?!
"Gunner! Potato! Did you crash? How the hell are you aiming?!" I was so furious my voice cracked.
"Attack ineffective," Potato replied, still calm as a pond. "Analysis… Target is enveloped by a powerful psychic shield. Conventional physical attacks cannot penetrate."
Psychic, my ass! You just missed, you piece of junk! Don't you dare make excuses!
I was speechless. Even machines can get dragged into hallucinations now? Great. A superstitious cultist with a Gundam, possessed by a holy engine. That's what this is.
"When we get back, I'm tearing you useless clowns apart and turning you into wine goblets," I cursed under my breath, then roared into the comms. "Potato! Switch to manual control! Get out of my way!"
Talking tough was easy. Taking over was a headache.
I forced the weapon controls into my hands and tried to control the right arm holding the gun. The sensation was like using the muscles of my entire arm to nudge an excavator's controls with precision. Every tiny tremor of muscle was amplified by the power armour a hundredfold.
Now I understood why excavator masters can thread a needle with a bucket, but nobody can shoot targets while driving an excavator. These are not the same difficulty tier. Not even close.
I fired several shots. Every one missed. Only one round's fragments got lucky and knocked over a lackey next to the horned helmet.
Thank the void the gun had an assisted-aim camera that could sync the muzzle direction to the reticle in my helmet display. Otherwise I'd be completely blind. Inside this humanoid excavator, there was no way to use normal "front sight, rear sight, target" aiming.
I was fully tilted now.
Fine. If I can't hit you from here, I'll walk up and shoot you in the face.
"Turnip! Forward! Target: that horned helmet dead ahead. Ram him!"
"Warning! Severe Warp fluctuations detected ahead. Large quantities of daemonic entities detected. Forced advance will raise chassis destruction probability above 90%…"
"There's nothing ahead! Move!" I bellowed at it. "Keep babbling and I'll physically format you right now!"
"…Command received. Executing."
Turnip's deadpan machine voice almost sounded a little wronged.
I drove my power-armour "mount" forward, stomping into motion. I broke out of our messy melee line alone, ignoring the cultist mobs and the incoming fire completely, and just charged straight at the enemy leader like a boar.
Bullets and energy beams of every color hammered into me like a rainstorm, clanging and booming, sparks bursting everywhere. A few enemy grunts who tried to slash at me (or maybe just couldn't dodge in time) got sent flying when I plowed through them like a drunk dump truck.
Inside my helmet display, warnings and data-streams flooded the screen. Turnip, Potato, and Chestnut wouldn't stop screaming either.
"Warning! Chest plate struck by hellblade. Armour is dissolving!"
"Bullshit! It's perfectly fine!"
"Warning! Weapon system cursed by Chaos sorcery. Failure imminent!"
"Nonsense! Weapon status is normal!"
"W-Warning! The power armour's machine spirit is wailing. It is suffering tremendous pain…"
"Make it shut up! If it keeps wailing, I'll format it too!"
…
In the middle of this fierce argument between me and my three "AI teammates" over reality versus imagination, my steps never slowed.
In that moment, it didn't even occur to me that a single round might slip into a weak point, pierce my armour, and punch into my fragile flesh.
My blood was up. My rage was boiling. Like some salty idiot on a losing streak, I had only one thought in my head:
Bastard. Trash. Die.
Through the shaking, clanging view, the cluster of enemies around their boss grew bigger and bigger. I could see it clearly now: my charge had thrown them into pure panic. Their earlier swagger vanished, replaced by fear and disbelief.
I didn't stop until their bodies filled nearly half my screen. I could even make out the twisted faces of the closest cultists, warped by absolute terror.
But I had no time for them.
I raised the gun and, with a patience I didn't know I still had, poured every ounce of concentration I'd ever possessed into micro-controlling that heavy mechanical arm. I pinned the reticle down—steady, dead, unmoving—onto the horned helmet at the center of the crowd.
He'd stopped dancing now. He was backing away in panic, lifting his huge axe in a stiff, uncertain stance, like he wanted to make one last desperate charge.
Then I pulled the trigger.
He exploded.
"BOOM!"
Like a watermelon pumped full of high-pressure air—no, more spectacular than that. His entire body, along with that brass armour that looked so smug and impressive, detonated in an instant into a glorious fireburst of red, white, and molten brass-colored mist, like fireworks made of meat and shrapnel.
Two remaining lower legs wobbled, then folded and toppled over.
The entire battlefield seemed to hit a mute button.
Inside my sealed armour, at this exact moment, I couldn't hear the enemy's shrieks or my allies' cheers. I heard only my own ragged breathing like a bellows, and the hammering of my heartbeat.
In my "VR screen," the enemies who'd been fearless a second ago suddenly looked like they'd seen a ghost. They threw down their weapons, wailing and screaming, scattering in every direction.
And on our side, the soldiers who'd been fighting the air seemed to stop all at once. One after another, they turned their heads and stared at me—this ivory-white steel giant standing in the heart of the enemy formation.
I have no idea how brilliant or ridiculous my stunt looked to anyone else.
I only knew the truth.
I was a rookie "Gundam pilot" who got mad because he couldn't hit the target, so I turned on what was basically a godmode cheat, charged in, and only managed the kill by practically pressing the muzzle to the boss's forehead.
Later, through rumors and secondhand retellings, I learned what everyone else had seen.
In their eyes, they had witnessed an unstoppable war-god.
They saw a white idol of war that ignored the hail of gunfire, ignored reality-warping witchcraft, and ignored the snarling daemons they truly believed were crawling out of a tear in hell itself.
It walked straight through the flames of the abyss and the claws of the damned, smashing forward like an icebreaker crushing thin frozen sheets, unstoppable and inevitable.
It broke into the enemy's core and used the simplest, purest, most brutal method imaginable to annihilate their commander—along with every shred of hope and courage the enemy had left—blasting it all into dust.
"For the Emperor!"
I don't know who shouted it first, that fanatical roar of survival and release.
Then a tsunami of voices rose from every direction.
"For Imperial Law!"
"For that lord!"
"Purge! Purge! Kill these bastards!"
…
A morale that had been on the verge of collapse reignited in a single instant, and it burned hotter than ever before. The reinvigorated troops surged like awakened lions, sweeping the broken, faltering remnants with a withering, unstoppable force.
After that, the battle was pure garbage time.
It became a one-sided slaughter.
When the last cultist was hacked in half by furious blades, the riot that had plagued Donigaton for days finally came to an end.
I stood in the center of a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, slowly lowering the twin-barrel gun that was still smoking. As the adrenaline drained away, crushing exhaustion rushed in like a flood.
I stared at the bodies scattered across the screen. Inside the armour, the air filtration carried only a faint tang of metal and ozone. I couldn't smell blood, but the slaughterhouse scene still made my stomach churn.
Me. An ordinary person.
In just a few hours, I'd fought my first war—maybe my last—through something that felt like a VR game.
I sortie in Gundam mode.
And I won.
(End of Chapter)
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