[Engaging dinsional and temporal neuro-translocation. Please rest in a comfortable position. Initiating in 10... 9... 8...]
"What the hell?"
[6... 5... 4...]
"What is neuro-trans-"
[1... 0... Initiating transfer!]
The world changed as if his mind had been sucked into a wormhole. He clearly felt his body being left behind as if a giant scoop pulled out his consciousness and dragged it along a distance that Ves could not even begin to describe.
Longer than expected but shorter than he thought, the wild ride suddenly ended when his mind abruptly crashed into a body.
A different body.
"Barley!" A strong smack thumped on his back. "Get your head back in gear! I know we’re up in an avalanche of dirtbags, but we can make it through! Persevere!"
Ves instinctively turned around and straightened his back. "We’ll get ’em, Captain!"
"Glad to hear it." Captain Osprey smiled at him, though he couldn’t hide the glint of bone-dragging weariness from his eyes. " Make sure your Cepth-S is in shape to deploy in the next shift. Intelligence think the dirtbags are cooking up an assault, I want to make sure my best knight is raring to go."
"Will do, sir!"
Once the captain walked away, Ves took stock of his surroundings while he nursed his aching head. Ves sohow ended up in the body of an average advanced ch pilot nad Ivan Barley in the Chittering Cicada Star Sector.
"It’s over fifty years ago!"
From the mories Ves had access to, everyone fought with chs that were two or three generations older than the modern norm. The System not only stuffed him inside a body halfway across the galaxy, it also sent him back in ti, all without destroying Ves or Barley’s minds!
To say that Ves had complete control over Barley’s body would be wrong. Ves likened his current situation as a pair of images being superimposed upon each other. Barley was still Barley. Ves was still Ves. The joint entity they made up comprised of both.
"I am still Barley!" He uttered to himself. "No matter what kind of weirdness is going on, I still have a battle to fight!"
Both of them agreed to push aside their existential crisis in favor of addressing the bigger threat to their lives. The invasion of dirtbags onto their current planet.
From what Ves understood from Barley’s mories, he fought for a fairly strong third-rate state called the Exilis Domain. While it couldn’t match any of the second-rate states of the Chittering Cicada Star Sector, its relatively abundant territory transford it into a regional bully among the other third-rate states.
Owing to its size and its wealth, the Exilis Domain frequently threw their weight around. It didn’t help that its neighboring states all consisted of piddling petty republics. The citizens often considered their territory to be the palace among the wilderness, with the surrounding states making up the dirt that borders it. Hence why everyone from the Exilis Domain called them dirtbags.
Quite predictably, the neighboring states had enough of being bullied around by the Domain and decided to form an Alliance. Faster than the Domain thought possible, the Lokis Alliance united their ard forces and ford a vast ch Legion to hit back against their regional aggressor.
The war had dragged on for two years now. Barley fought in the war from the start, but the constant battle slowly took a toll on his mind and his ch. Currently, he’d been tasked with defending the local underground headquarters on a low priority rural planet.
Neither side commited a lot of chs to this war zone. This slowed down the pace of battles and broke them up into smaller skirmishes as both sides wanted to preserve their chs and supplies.
"Right now, I should check my ch."
Ves navigated the sturdy alloy corridors of the underground base. Like every other pilot, he constantly wore his piloting suit in case he needed to be deployed imdiately. His suit’s climate controls already started to fail from constant use and lack of maintenance.
No one minded his odor because everyone else radiated their own stink. Besides, once he reached the ch stables, the harsh sll of tals and fuel overpowered any human scent.
"Chief!" He called out to the burly man overlooking his ch technicians from a ramp. "How’s it going?"
"It’s been better, Barley." Chief Jackson shook his head as he chewed on a stimulant. "We’ve already exhausted the supply shipnt we received last week. I did the best I could to fix up your Jimmy, but I prioritized the shield arm over the sword arm."
That sounded kind of bad. His Jinez had dueled against a swordsman ch in his last engagent. His knight received a lot of cuts trying to block the tricky sword strikes from the much more agile ch.
"I’ll take a look myself." Ves replied with a tone of resignation. "Don’t work yourself to death, chief!"
"Hah! I’d rather die from exhaustion than let the dirtbags shoot in the head." Jackson laughed and strolled away.
From his experience on Groening IV, he knew that the maintenance departnt was straining its ti and resources to the breaking point. They had to triage the chs in order of importance and rank. The more expensive machines piloted by the officers got their turn first before the average chs like his Jinez received so attention.
When Ves reached his Jinez, his enthusiasm deflated like a pricked balloon. Its design was bog-standard for its ti, featuring the maximum amount of armor that a dium knight could carry. Along with its plain but serviceable sword and kite shield, the Jinez had obviously been designed as a defensive knight.
"It’s a slow, lumbering moving shield."
Strangely enough, the insights of Ves the ch designer and Barley the ch pilot combined in an unprecedented clear perspective on the rits of the Jinez. Even if its designer lacked boldness and inspiration, he did a good job in designing a capable workhorse. Barley had piloted his Jinez through dozens of battles and skirmishes over the last two years and the machine hadn’t let him down.
Barley had developed a bond with his ch. Even if the machine had been mass-produced without any love, his irrational affection for his ch pulled him through the constant fighting. While Barley hardly ever thought about the significance of his feeling, Ves found it to be a curious phenonon.
If soone like Barley piloted a gold label ch fabricated by Ves, he’d be able to achieve a much greater synergy with his machine.
The way Barley approached his routine check relied on feeling rather than a solid understanding of the physical makeup of his ch. He mainly tapped against the worn-out armor plating of his ch and stepped inside the cockpit without it on, preferring to breathe in the slls in the dark.
To be frank, he wasn’t inspecting his ch for flaws so much as to distract him from his worries about the war. All of that stress and worry faded away once he stepped inside the sanctuary of his ch.
Still, the addition of Ves prompted a change in routine. He turned on the console and checked the diagnostics of his Jinez. Most of the technical readouts should an gibberish to Barley, but Ves gained a good understanding of the state of his ch.
"Goddamnit. How many corners have been cut?"
A knight should be durable, and a defensive knight should be even sturdier. What Ves gleaned from the diagnostics was that the design incorporated sub-standard materials and the manufacturer didn’t pay much attention to quality control.
Ves pulled up a hidden setting buried beneath the operating system of the ch. It summarized the complicated data into a color-shaded schematic of the Jinez.
"No need to thank , Barley."
Half of the components went from green condition to yellow condition. While that sounded mild, a ch should only reach this stage after ten years of regular use or five years of intensive fighting. A few critical areas such as the sword arm blinked in an alarming shade of orange with a smattering of red.
The overall picture looked discouraging, but it could have been worse. He suppressed the urge to pick up a multitool and perform so easy fixes to his ch. It would have been out of character for a musclehead like Barley to gain any form of technical competence.
It still ached his teeth to let those faults remain in place. "It’s like boarding a shuttle with sputtering thrusters. You just know it will kill you one day."
A few hours went by as Ves and Barley re-familiarized themselves with their ch. The marrying of Barley’s intuitive understanding of his machine with Ves’ extensive technical background resulted in a lot of new insights for both.
"Ah, so that’s why the arms are so frail despite their thick construction. The alloys that make up the internal fra are great at absorbing sudden impacts, but is prone to erosion if subjected to a constant level of low-impact shocks."
"The power reactor is the best part of this ch. It’s obviously licensed from a major trans-galactic corporation. I don’t have to worry about power supply as long as the internals hold up."
"Enduring constant attacks has shifted the dinsions of the Jinez. It’s asymtrical now, with the shield half being pushed back half a centiter compared to the sword half. All of that caused the fra to deform and open up more fault lines.
"What kind of grease monkey had the bright idea to fix the transceiver coupling with a copper wire?!"
A lack of personnel along with the need to work as fast and frugal as possible led to a lot of inevitable screwups. The lackluster longevity of the Jinez also didn’t help, as its design had been pitched to the Exilis Domain as a knight that could deliver a burst of peak performance whenever they decided to bully one of their forrly weak neighbors.
Ves learned a lesson from this realization. "Assumptions don’t always pan out. You can plan ahead for your design, but that doesn’t an they’re subjected to their intended use."
The Domain had no other choice but to stretch out the service lives of their chs. The conflict raging at its borders had dragged on for so long because the hatred had grown too deep to settle with a couple of set piece battles.
Ves didn’t care too much about the war but Barley felt otherwise. His disdain for the so-called dirtbags had turned into blind hatred after losing so many friends and colleagues to their stubborn aggression.
An alarm suddenly rang from the speakers. "Alert! Long-range sensors have detected scouts approaching our position!"
Everyone dropped their routine and entered into a frenzy. The ch technicians hastily put the half-repaired chs back together while the ch pilots gathered up in front of their officers.
Captain Osprey paced back and forth in front of his diminished platoon of eleven pilots. There used to be thirty among their number.
"It’s not likely the dirtbags sniffed us out, but their scouts are ranging closer than we’re comfortable with. Given ti, their scouting systems will be able to read the traces that our chs have inevitably left behind and follow them straight to our base. Our job is to stop them before they make it that far!"
"Won’t they know we’re close if we show up out of the blue?" Shaundra asked as she scratched her head. Her hair had already started greying.
"That’s why we’re taking our chs through a backup tunnel and erge from the other side. We’ll pretend we’ve been conducting a long-ranged patrol and happened to have stumbled upon the scouts. If all goes well, we can fool them into thinking that our base is on the other side of this sector."
"How many chs are we facing?"
"Seven or nine, the scanners aren’t very clear about that. We’re mainly dealing with light chs, so we should be able to smash them apart with force. Any further questions?"
They boarded their chs once everyone understood the stakes. Ves entered his own Jinez and roused it from its slumber. For Barley, one battle was like any other, but for Ves it was an entirely novel experience.
"This is my first ti stepping into battle as a ch pilot."
Barley’s constant reassurance lessened the fear that threatened to overwhelm Ves. He wondered if he would die for real if Barley happened to et an unfortunate end. Would the System pull back his consciousness in ti, or leave him to die as a consequence of his failure?
He couldn’t afford to take the risk. "I have to survive."
Barley’s lust of battle pushed aside his fear. He beca eager to experience how a real ch pilot fought.
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