Looking down at the Wakagawa Upper Mountain Range from his Order-series Actanoid Noppera floating in the night sky, Actor Yakugi had a deep crease between his brows.
He’d moved ahead of the Bomber, prepared everything, and driven him into a kill zone.
And yet the Allrounder the Bomber was piloting had kept running through snowfields and forest without putting up a fight, slipping out of Yakugi’s grasp.
“Something’s off.”
The Allrounder’s movements are too amateurish. On top of that, the loadout is too light — nothing that looks designed for Actanoid combat.
This doesn’t feel like the same person who put out a public acceptance to lure him in.
The Bomber carrying the hydrogen cylinder around with no particular precaution is bothering him too. Had he genuinely not expected an attack?
The wrongness nags at him — and that’s exactly why he needs to be cautious, Yakugi tells himself.
As long as the Noppera is up in the air, the Allrounder can’t attack it. Surround it with drones and open fire — it’s over.
All he has to do is follow the plan.
Yakugi speaks to the subordinate operating the drones over voice chat.
“Have you located it?”
“Not yet. It’s dark. But we’ve been tightening the cordon, and the Unison people are locked down in defense — he’s not coming out. We can finish this.”
“Of course. But stay sharp. That Bomber already took out three of our units. We’ve packed the snow, so he can’t throw up a smoke screen — but if snow starts falling from above, we could get signal interference.”
“Understood. This forest is bad enough as it is.”
The brief rain the previous day had been a lucky break too.
The target Allrounder keeps skittering around, but he’d already spread water across a wide area from the Noppera, and the rain had done the rest — the snow is solid.
The Allrounder is cornered. No way out.
Yakugi checks the Noppera’s remaining thruster fuel — and at that moment, gunfire echoes from the forest.
He looks at his monitor immediately, and the footage shared across all units from one of the drones puts a satisfied smile on his face.
The footage has caught what appears to be a muzzle flash from an Actanoid.
“Ha — the bastard panicked and showed his hand!”
Deciding the Allrounder is cornered, the Bomber must have taken a desperate shot at the Noppera overhead. The bullet didn’t reach, but he gets the impulse.
The four drones operated by Yakugi’s subordinates converge on the muzzle flash location simultaneously.
Yakugi moves the Noppera too, to maintain signal coverage.
He adjusts the Noppera’s rear thrusters and glides over the snowfield. The altitude drops slightly, but he keeps it high enough that the Allrounder’s guns can’t reach.
His subordinates report in — the four drones have arrived in the vicinity of the muzzle flash.
“Surround and destroy. Don’t hold back on ammo. Make sure it’s done.”
“Copy.”
The drone-mounted weapons need to be fairly close to punch through Allrounder armor. But closing from four directions simultaneously — the Allrounder shouldn’t be able to handle that.
“There’s wire strung up.”
“Not going to do anything against drones. Window dressing.”
As his subordinates report, the shared footage shows wire strung here and there between trees.
Yakugi holds the Noppera aloft near the muzzle flash site and searches the gaps in the trees for the Allrounder.
His subordinates find the target before he does.
“Got it!”
“Fire, fire!”
An instant later, a volley of gunfire erupts from inside the forest.
We’ve won — he’s certain of it — and then it happens.
With a thunderous roar, the ground heaves upward directly in front of the hovering Noppera.
Yakugi freezes as the Noppera’s monitor is swallowed by the surge of earth — but noticing the Noppera’s instruments are still reading normal, he works out what just happened.
“He buried the hydrogen cylinder in the snow and detonated it?”
Sustained gunfire won’t kick up a snow screen. So he blew it open by force. All four drones, swallowed by the mass of snow and debris, have gone dark.
“……I understand the logic, but would you really go that far?”
Hiding the cargo made sense — sending the location to the client afterward would probably still get him some payment.
But using it as a detonation charge. Misappropriating it like that means reimbursement costs and a hit to his reputation on top.
“Ha — a genuine amateur Actor. What kind of bankroll takes out an Allrounder and puts him out of the game? This works in my favor.”
Yakugi lands the Noppera. The leaf-spring legs absorb the impact of touchdown perfectly, and the deployed thrusters fold back against the unit’s spine.
The Noppera can’t fire while airborne — the recoil from its heavy weapons would throw off its attitude control and risk a crash.
But in the current situation, the odds are more than in his favor.
Yakugi draws the Noppera’s main weapon — the large-caliber handgun Sengan — and points it into the snow cloud.
At this range, the armor-piercing rounds can punch through Allrounder armor. He shifts the memory that had been dedicated to drone support to the various apps for attitude stabilization and targeting, and locks everything into a guaranteed kill position.
When this snow cloud clears, that’s the end.
If the Allrounder got blasted by the hydrogen explosion, good. If it survived, he’ll finish off whatever’s left.
And then, from inside the snow cloud, the Allrounder came charging at him.
“——what?”
It should have been completely blind in that cloud. How did it find the Noppera first?
No — that isn’t even the immediate concern.
The Noppera’s onboard AI fires before Yakugi can operate it, the various systems kicking in at once. But the shots are stopped with no difficulty.
——By the Fernleg Scorpion corpse the Allrounder is holding up as a shield.
The Bomber had spent the whole time being chased by drones, not firing a single shot to avoid giving away his position. There’s no way he had time to take down a Fernleg Scorpion.
“Where did you pick that up!?”
He keeps pulling the trigger while running the Noppera backward.
The Noppera’s leaf-spring legs are built for forward movement — running in reverse is not their strength. Barely enough to delay the Allrounder catching up by a few precious seconds.
Every armor-piercing round he fires in that window is absorbed by the Fernleg Scorpion corpse. He can’t get through to the Allrounder.
The Allrounder raises the assault rifle Breakthrough at the Noppera.
The full-auto burst punches through the Noppera’s light armor like it isn’t there, punching hole after hole.
The Noppera — weight-reduced for flight — is thrown into an undignified stumbling dance from the impacts. The severity of it shows in the image blur on Yakugi’s monitor.
That unsteady, reeling footage cuts off abruptly.
NO SIGNAL.
Yakugi rakes his hands through his hair.
“So that’s the Bomber. ……He’s insane.”