"Ves?" Jake knocked on the door of the office. He tried to contact his friend through the company channel but failed to get a response. "There’s an issue regarding the board of directors I’d like to talk to you about. Are you in?"
Nothing happened. The door remained stubbornly shut like a high security vault.
He started getting worried. Ves had a habit of focusing on his work for days at a ti, but he usually put down his work if soone needed his input. This was the first ti Jake couldn’t get a hold of his boss.
He considered calling security to force open the door, but called it off after Carlos noticed his concerns.
"Ves can get really intense sotis. You haven’t seen him when he designs a ch. He’s obsessed to the point of being deaf to the rest of the universe."
"What if he’s having a seizure or sothing?"
"Hey, what age are we living in right now? His comm will send out an alert if sothing’s wrong. Nah, it’s best to leave him alone while he’s in the zone. You don’t want to ruin his mood when he’s in the process of designing one of the most important chs in his career."
As the COO of the LMC, Jake knew more than anyone else how much the company relied on the upcoming original design. The LMC could pump out variant after variant, but wouldn’t be able to ascend and make significant progress simply by making cheap copies of other people’s work.
Despite the healthy market for variants, it carried the stigma of too many bad designs. The ch market simply trusted original designs more.
Jake shook his head. "Well, if you get ahold of Ves, tell him his grandfather will nominate a number of people on the board of directors. A company of our size can’t make do with two. The law mandates at least a headcount of five board mbers for companies that earn more than a billion credits a year. We also have to form a number of committees including a labor committee and an ethics committee."
"Sounds complicated." Carlos frowned. He felt sorry for Ves. "It’s a lot different than the old days when it was just and the boss. I kind of miss the simplicity of it. Now I have to fill a half-dozen forms just to use the Dortmund to fabricate a spare bolt."
"We’re not adding those procedures just to make life miserable. Part of it is to comply with safety and tracking laws, but it also helps cut down any possible abuse."
The rapid expansion of the LMC left a lot of hiccups as the company didn’t have a formal structure in place that scaled with its growth. Jake and the other managers had to develop solutions on the fly in order to maintain control over their increasingly complex hierarchy.
While Carlos and Jake talked about the changes that ca with the professionalization of the LMC, Ves was having a desperate ti keeping up with the fighting.
"Barley! We’ve got incoming from your left!"
"I know, but I have to fend off this bastard before he gets to Eloise!"
The hunt-turned-ambush reached a desperate stage as the attackers from the Alliance plowed past the defenses of the Domain chs. Half of their rifleman chs had already fallen, though Captain Osprey and his n gave as good as it got and disabled an equivalent number of opponents.
What caused the combatant to fight as if possessed by devils was the fact that many of the downed chs could still be recovered. So of the ch pilots managed to eject, but many more remained stuck in their disabled machines as the ejection system failed to launch due to battle damage.
The side who won would be able to salvage their chs and the lives of their compatriots. As for the losers, they’d be captured or receive a summary execution.
With the fate of so many brothers and sisters on the line, no one thought of making a retreat.
In these circumstances, Barley’s performance clearly made a difference. He had already disabled three complacent chs before an officer of the dirtbags stepped up to contain his seemingly berserk Jinez.
"I don’t know who you are, but don’t think of getting away from while I’m here." The officer taunted as he flourished his curved sword for another tricky slash.
"Get out of my way!" Barley shouted over the open channel as he turned his ch in a position to bash the officer’s ch with his shield. Unfortunately, the officer easily anticipated the attack and danced around the Jinez, taking the opportunity to leave another mark with his sword.
"What’s this dirtbag ch’s weak point?"
Ves had been trying to puzzle that out for a while. "I’m trying, I’m trying! His ch is clearly first in line when it cos to maintenance. Do you know how hard it is to spot its weak points when it’s been lavished by a full shift of ch technicians?"
"I don’t care! Get a weak point now or we both die!"
There was nothing like the pressure of death to motivate his full potential. "I’ve got it! Target his wrists! They’ve received an aftermarket modification to make them nimbler. That’s how the officer is making all of those tricky moves. You just need to compromise their structural integrity a little bit. Brute force will do the rest!"
Now that he finally received a target, Barley roared to life as he forcefully pushed his ch shield-first into his opponent’s grip. The aggressive move caught the officer off-guard but failed to make impact due to the swordsman ch’s quick reaction.
"Again!"
Barley kept going, targeting the wrists with both his sword and his shield. A satisfying crunching sound rang throughout the forest as one of the wrists couldn’t handle the weight of Barley’s shield.
"Eloise!"
"Got him!"
The female marksman turned her attention away from fending off the enemy ranged chs to snap a quick laser volley at the officer’s ch. While the laser beams didn’t do much except so of its armor, the sudden attacks succeeded in creating an opening which Barley ruthlessly exploited by thrusting forward with considerable montum. The stab succeeded in punching through the waist, though the armor mitigated much of the damage.
That didn’t matter for Barley, as the shock opened up his opponent to a quick triple combo that disabled the officer ch’s engines and forced the officer to eject.
"I’m coming, Eloise!"
He was too late. The other ch that approached from his left had bypassed him entirely and went for the vulnerable rifleman ch. Eloise already lost her rifle as she held it sideways in order to fend of a heavy chop. Her ch drew out a pitiful backup knife that looked like a toy compared to the full-sized ch sword in the hands of the nacing Alliance ch.
"Leave her alone!" Barley roared as he urged his ch to close the distance. However, he realized he’d be far too late as the enemy pilot reared up his ch for a fatal slash that targeted squarely at the cockpit. "I got to go faster!"
"Give control over one of your hands!" Ves suddenly urged. "I can make sothing happen!"
Barley didn’t even doubt the other voice in his mind and relinquished a considerable amount of control to Ves. So of the strong and intensive feedback of the ch ran through Ves, battering his consciousness for a split second. Despite the man upgrades to his mind, his neural aptitude still remained the sa as a norm.
His mind simply couldn’t handle the flood of foreign data. Barley quickly reined in his mind and spared Ves from any further ago.
The delay almost proved disastrous, but Ves managed to use Barley’s co-opted arm to override the safety limits of the Jinez.
With so much power running through its systems, Barley’s ch gained a considerable amount of speed. He quickly lost his footing but not before he slashed the swordsman ch’s back. The hasty attack bounced off the swordsman ch’s armor, but the enemy pilot couldn’t stop Barley from his follow-up attacks.
"Thanks, Barley!"
In the next couple of minutes, Barley completely turned the tide of the battle, having taken out a total of seven chs! Each enemy that the knight pilot cut down was one less ch that could bother his comrades.
Soon enough, the numbers turned against the Alliance. Their flimsy chs already held up poorly against their opposition, and the battle only turned worse when Barley the Destroyer chopped them down one by one by himself or with the help of his brothers.
Half of the Alliance pilots managed to eject, but so got stuck in the beginning stages before the process got stalled for various reasons.
"The sensor readings sent out an alert." Captain Osprey sounded grim over the comm. "Enemy reinforcents are coming. This ti It’s the big boys, likely the main force that’s been trailing behind the scouts.
Their own reinforcents would still take three more minutes to arrive. Captain Osprey faced an increasingly difficult choice as the numbers of the enemy main force beca clear.
They ca with over thirty chs. While much of them consisted of cheap frontline chs, when they gathered in any significant numbers, his remaining chs wouldn’t last a minute under all of that firepower.
"Barley. Johnson. I hate to do this to you, but I’d like you to hold up the rear guard while we fall back."
"Sir! We can’t." Eloise sternly objected. "That’s leaving them to die!"
"We’re all going to die if we stick to this location! We’ve got to rendez-vous with our own reinforcents, but the Jinez models are too darn slow to bring along!"
"Don’t argue any further." Johnson’s cool voice erged from the channel. "It’s our job to hold the line."
"Why are you doing this?!"
"Because I’m a knight!"
"Because knights are ant to protect!" Barley echoed his fellow knight’s conviction. "We’re running out of ti. Go now! Don’t let our sacrifices be in vain!"
The surviving Domain pilots hesitated no longer and disengaged from the fight. They fell back straight towards the direction of the incoming reinforcents. While a number of enemy skirmishers sprang in pursuit, the two knights stubbornly stood their ground with their swords pointed to the ground littered with downed chs.
The threat was implicit. If the Alliance soldiers chose to evade the slow and lumbering Jinez chs, they’d be consigning their fellow ch pilots to an early grave.
Four chs stayed behind, all of them in the dium weight class.
"There’s two to go around for both of us." Johnson mirthlessly joked. "I don’t know how you turned into such a beast, Barley, but keep it up, because we’ll need every bit of your magic!"
"It’s coming right up!" Barley replied as his other hand took on a life of its own. It zood in on the readouts of the enemy chs and rapidly pointed out a series of vulnerabilities which it sent to Johnson’s ch. "Aim for these vulnerabilities! I guarantee you they’re the real deal!"
"Really?" His colleague sounded sceptical, but had no ti to ponder how Barley figured out so many weak points as the enemy dium chs simultaneously sprang forward.
Barley had a difficult ti fending off his two attackers. One of them wielded a sword while another utilized a spear. While the pair showed little cooperation in their movents, the fact that they attacked from opposite angles made it difficult for Barley to finish off one opponent faster than the other.
His ch also suffered from the after-effects of the montary boost in speed. This beca most pronounced in the limp manner in which his Jinez attacked with its sword.
Both Ves and Barley ran through countless of ideas, but none of them had any chance of success. His Jinez had reached the tail end of its operational life and Barley could barely squeeze any more potential out of its beaten fra.
"Too slow! It’s simply too slow!"
A knight served as a protector exactly because it could rely on its faster and more vulnerable allies to cover up its deficiencies. Without any backup except for another equally-slow knight ch, they had no chance to salvage their lives.
"It’s been a good ride, Barley." Johnson said as his ch failed to parry another sword strike. The attack ruptured half the energy channels that supplied power from the power reactor to the engine. "We should have never underestimated the dirtbags."
"Johnson! No!"
His fellow knight pilot died when the other swordsman ch deliberately ran its sword through the cockpit. Such a move was not considered a war cri, though it did foster further hatred.
"You... stinking... dirtbags!"
Pure rage subsud Barley’s mind. As a hitchhiker, Ves remained a little more detached, but even he beca affected by its overpowering influence.
"C’mon, you ghost! Work with now! Even if I’m going down, I’m going to take all four of these dirtbags with !"
Ves wordlessly agreed with the original host of their shared body. He lost much of his rationality after being infected by Barley’s rage. Now he too wished to harvest the lives of as many dirtbags as possible!
After a mont’s thought, Ves ca up with the most effective way of accomplishing Barley’s dying wish. "Give control of your hand again. In the anti, try to last ten more seconds! It’s best if you can pull them all forward!"
Barley did this in the most direct fashion possible. He taunted his opponents, who had all started to relax once they realized how easy it was for four of them to take care of a single Domain knight.
"Hey, dirtbags! Why aren’t you finishing the job? If you don’t co forward now, I’ll do this!"
With a callous couple of steps, his Jinez ch crunched its foot down one of the enemy skirmishers that got taken out in the early stages of the ambush. The cockpit of the light ch didn’t stand a chance.
"You’ll pay for that!" The lone spearman ch among the group broadcasted as it led the charge. anwhile, the other three chs approached from the sides and he rear, completely boxing Barley in. "This is your end!"
"Wrong! It’s yours!’ Barley grinned and ejected his cockpit from his ch just before it blew up in a conflagration of heat, flas and electrical discharge.
Since the ch ran on pure energy cells, it was impossible to achieve a massive explosion. Nevertheless, the simultaneous release of all of that energy battered the four complacent attackers severely.
A normal ch pilot wouldn’t be able to achieve such a feat, but Ves had spent several hours digging through the guts of the Jinez, so he knew exactly how to force a worst-case scenario.
As the cockpit flew through the air in a parabolic arc, Barley started to feel drowsy. All of the excess energy in his body left him now that his ability to fight had ceased.
Ves felt a pull on his consciousness. "It looks like my visit has co to an end."
"Before you go... tell who you are."
"Ves... Ves Larkinson. Sorry for the intrusion. I can’t explain how I ended up in your mind. I rely wanted to know how a knight pilot functioned."
"No problem... you helped out of a hopeless fight. Will I ever see you again?"
"Probably not. I get the feeling this is a one-ti deal."
"That’s a sha."
Ves stayed silent for a few seconds as he tried to resist the pull calling him back to his own body. "Keep an eye on the Komodo Star Sector if it exists in this universe. If everything goes right, you might see popping up in the news fifty years from now.
"That’s a long ti ahead. I don’t know if I’ll survive the war."
"It’s up to fate if we can et again."
Ves uncharacteristically revealed his identity to Barley. It couldn’t be helped, as their psyches intertwined so much that they developed an instinctive bond with each other.
Still, Ves got more out of the lding than Barley as the System automatically closed off any portions of his mind that related directly to its existence. Even if Barley questioned how Ves managed to achieve this bond, he would never in his wildest dreams co up with sothing as miraculous as the ch Designer System.
"It’s the end now. I’m coming ho."
"Farewell, Ves!"
"Goodbye, Barley!"
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