2 Going All-Out

Author: Bishamon Mine
Raw: https://ncode.syosetu.com/n0664js/2/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

——Three years.
My uniform has changed.——I had become a high schooler.

From three years ago——nine years in VR time—I have been doing “that quest” the entire time.
Total flight hours: 24,324. Add the time I spent on fighter FPS games and total flight time is over 36,000 hours.

They say a pilot needs about 2,000 flight hours to be called a veteran, so 36,000 is something I can brag about a little.

By the “10,000-hour rule” that says 10,000 hours of anything makes you first-rate, that’s three first-rates?

“Swallow, come!”

I stand in front of the apartment I live in and “shout in a small voice.”

After about ten minutes, my Versus Frame—the swallowtail-silhouette fighter I’d parked in a section managed as a berth in Earth satellite orbit—comes down from orbit to the ground. On an unlucky day it can take fifty minutes or more for the frame to descend, but today it’s quick.

Swallowtail, received as a present and become my beloved machine as-is.

Unlike a normal airplane’s wings, these stretch forward from the fuselage: forward-swept wings, which give it a ∇ nabla silhouette. Swallowtail is a biplane with two of those forward-swept wings stacked one above the other.

A forward-swept biplane is extremely rare. It has outrageous climb and outstanding dogfighting ability against other aircraft.

I look up at Swallowtail stopped overhead. The body drinks sunlight and produces a lacquer black.

Fighters are pretty big, so the presence is something.——Thirteen meters long. Other frames are even huger.

A ladder (a boarding-stair kind of thing) comes down from Swallowtail, so I clamber up.

“Why is only this part so analog? Everything else is a super-science fighter that would make modern science pale.”

Incidentally, a year ago there was an incident where a certain country tried to use Versus Frames received from the mystery civilization in an Earth war, and that country’s Versus Frames all vanished at once.

Combat operations using Versus Frames on Earth are forbidden.

Also, the whole “what about aviation law!?” thing got a special law two and a half years ago, and ascent and descent to space alone were permitted.

I pass through the studio-apartment-sized living space installed in the Versus Frame.

The Whiteman didn’t have a one-room, but Swallowtail is designed with space travel in mind, so it has living space.

——This room has that feeling of “it feels bigger once you’re inside, but at a house construction site you think, rooms are this small?” In reality it’s a small space.

About two camper vans’ worth.

The storage is well thought out and doesn’t get in the way.
You can also purge it when you don’t need it. Then the middle of the fighter goes completely hollow, but you get faster for it.

Some people skip the one-room and store weapons there.

I like this space, so I keep it as a one-room.

This one-room has a few exposed bits on the back and belly, by the way, and those parts break a lot. In VR training, that is.

I climb the ladder again from the one-room into the cockpit.
There, a cockpit like a little boat, with a chair like a gaming chair.
Right now you can’t see outside.

When I sit in the cockpit, a door appears on the dashboard again today and a male hologram in a butler’s outfit steps out.

He has something he didn’t have before: butterfly wings.

I switched to Swallowtail, a frame that means swallowtail butterfly, so I grew butterfly wings on the AI too.

The AI’s ID is still Ill-san.
The frame’s ID is Swallow-san; the AI’s ID is Ill-san.

The tiny butler bows politely and speaks to me.
The voice is unchanged, like my favorite voice actor, Iwahata Mitsuo.

“Hello, My Master. How was school?”
“Loner as ever. But thanks to Ill teaching me, I’m still top of the class.”

Maybe because I can study in the triple-time world, my grades improved at a clip. Then I passed the entrance exam at the top. That got me made new-student representative at the entrance ceremony, which was quite the horror experience for a communication-impaired person.

Here Ill goes, “Pardon me——ahem,” clears his throat, bows once, then glares at me and raises his voice.

“Put a -san on it, you big-forehead girl!”

I answer that line with delight.

“Ill-san!”

Doing a little exchange like the worldwide anime my favorite voice actor starred in fills me up somehow.

——As for the rest of my appearance besides the forehead: natural black curly hair, monolid eyes.
Extremely Japanese build, but on the tall side, in gothic-lolita clothes—a girl who always looks like she has a vertical line down her face. Does that paint it?

Also——I am not pretty.

In elementary school I was always called “curly” and “ugly,” but once I hit middle school they stopped saying “ugly,” so I want to believe I am not ugly.

“Yes, what is it, My Master?”

Ill-san answers bright and cheerful.

He’s suddenly obedient, but AIs are obedient to begin with. That intense line just now is only something I’m making him say.

I put on a headband-like thing I use for piloting. A necessary device, a ring that covers around to the back of the head. Apparently it reads brainwaves from the primary motor cortex and the cerebellum.

There are two ways to pilot a Versus Frame.

Non-Dive VR, and AR piloting.——You pick one or the other. You can switch anytime, but both at once is impossible.

Non-Dive VR is mainly for humanoid form. Robot anime often shows the pilot moving a humanoid machine with a stick, but human movement is complicated. Reproducing human motion in a giant robot, and with a stick no less, is hard.

Even just picking something up or throwing it takes any number of joints working together. You can’t control that with a stick. So the mystery admins came up with a piloting method that uses only feedback from the player in VR.

No dive. It takes only the player’s brainwaves and spinal-reflex signals and links them to the humanoid frame. VR with just the controller functions of a game console, you could say.

Conversely, fighter form actually gets more confusing with brainwaves, so you fly the frame with a stick. That’s also called physical piloting.
AR piloting is a method that only projects instruments and so on into your field of view.——Moving the ailerons, engine output, that kind of thing by brainwave does sound rough.

That said, you can grip a virtual stick in Non-Dive VR, and you can fly humanoid form with AR piloting. Both are hard, but not impossible. Brainwave piloting is apparently an application of VR, by the way.

I leave Swallow-san in flight form, flip the linker gear switch, and a bunch of instruments display in AR. The monitors wrapping the cockpit show the outside. These are physical monitors, but you can also look at the outside in AR. The monitor display is supposedly a courtesy to streamers. I’m not a streamer, but I use this mode.

You can see outside in 360 degrees, up and down, so it feels like floating in the sky in a little boat.

All right. Ready. Let’s head for the Fate Link world again today.

“Ill-san. First VR Training Ground, please.”
“Understood, My Master.”

The tiny butler suddenly sits in a chair that appears on the roof of the analog instruments and takes a posture like he’s flying a plane.

Swallowtail climbing.

Gravity control is holding it down, but a faint G builds. Toward space.

As we climb and climb, the air thins. The sunlight gets stronger, and the sun looks bigger.
Eventually we slip the layer of air.

What fills the view below is Earth, where you can even see the boundary between air and space. Still huge.

The dayside, without a light-filter, is seriously blinding. Sun-type-kid blinding.
At this point Swallow-san starts accelerating harder.

“This aircraft will now generate a wormhole and proceed to the First VR Training Ground. Estimated flight time: three minutes thirty seconds.”
“Rog.”

While I answer, I crunch potato chips and slurp Crisp Sparkling.

The junk-food flavor soaks into a body that, for a communication-impaired person, has done its “blood, sweat, and tears” student life.

If you ask, “You’re eating and drinking before full-dive VR—are the bodily functions okay?”

That VR does not block physiological needs.
So “I’m hungry, I’m sleepy, I might leak” still comes through properly, and there are no stories of “I had the VR on and something terrible happened.”

I’ve got time, so I watch videos over subspace quantum comms.
In these three years, player-streamers have increased a lot.

What I’m about to watch is a stream by Snark-san, from Knights of the Stars, the clan people call the biggest in Japan in FateLege.

This Snark-san is a pro gamer in fighter FPS as well, and insanely strong as a FateLege player.

I fought him in fighter FPS a long time ago. His coordination with a person called Ideal was really something.

Snark-san’s shooting and Ideal-san’s movement in a dogfight were a threat. I remember getting made to cry more than once.

But Snark-san isn’t my objective.

“Ahh, Crimson Flash Alice-san is cool as ever.”

A combined frame like a war-garb warrior, painted red, blue, and yellow—Divine Combiner Fragment—takes a sword-like weapon and hacks down monster after monster like kaiju.

The main pilot of that frame is Alice-san.

When Fragment separates it becomes three single-color frames, red, blue, and yellow. The color of Fragtop, which Alice-san rides, is red, and apparently Alice-san did huge work in that red frame in the first boss fight.
——After that people started calling her the Crimson Flash, or so the story goes.

Fragtop under Alice-san’s hands is already moving like it’s reading the opponent’s mind.

I’m gazing at my phone, smitten with Alice-san, when the subspace transit ends.

My fighter leaps into normal space, leaving ripples in the void, and the view goes blue and white.
A planet a lot like Earth—“Highlane,” one of the Galactic Union’s primary worlds—sits in front of me.

Around Highlane, like Saturn’s rings, space battleships, space fighters, and stations float.

I’m on the night side right now, so Highlane’s atmosphere looks a little red.

It looks like the planet is wrapped in a red membrane. The membrane goes from deep red on the outside to blue on the inside, and looks a little rainbow too.

Everyone is flying toward the galactic center, or landing on Highlane.
In the middle of that, I head as always for the orbital station with the VR simulator——now deserted.

I follow the guide lasers into the hangar.

Tentacle-like things stretch out and lock Swallow-san down.
A shock that resonates in my stomach, then a sweep, and I’m taken to the training ground.

Eventually the surroundings turn into an electronic space, like being enclosed in a wireframe sphere.

“All right, let’s start today too, Ill-san!”

I do a single clap, like a sushi chef.
Ill-san stands from his chair and bows to me.

“Yes, My Master. Now beginning VR Quest ‘Deathroad Papilio.’ Final chapter ‘Death Road’——highest difficulty 〈Insanity〉.”
“Bring it!”
“Fortune in battle. Countdown commencing… 3… 2… 1… Online!”

At once my consciousness is swallowed into the VR world, and before I know it I’m in my beloved Swallowtail, in the sky of the giant planet that is this quest’s usual start point. Clear skies; below, the sea, bleeding-green coral reefs, the shadow of a black trench.

The final chapter of the quest I started three years ago, Deathroad Papilio—“Death Road,” highest difficulty 〈Insanity〉—still has no one who has conquered it.

Almost everyone has given up and stopped running this quest. I am still challenging it.

While everyone else adventures in FateLege, I still haven’t even cleared the beginner quest. I just keep throwing myself at this.

“A mecha action no one can clear. You dangle something like this in front of me and expect me not to get excited!?”

Since this quest started, I have put everything into it except the time needed for studying and staying alive.

Love, youth—sometimes even the time needed to stay alive—offered up as sacrifices.

To clear a mere six-stage boss rush.

I have a goal.
The desire to post a video of clearing this quest and be a world-first.

I’m in high school now, and I still live like I’m erasing my presence at school and at home, but if I become a world-first and blow up online, maybe people will notice I exist.
Maybe I can even make friends.

A mechanical voice that isn’t Ill-san rings through the cockpit.

“Danger! Danger! Hostile reaction. 〈Atlas〉 approaching.”

Bright red WARNING letters blink in my vision.

The electronic space becomes footage of some planet’s surface. Compared to Earth, gravity and atmospheric pressure here are 1.5 times, so flying is exhausting.

What’s closing from far away is a frame like a human upper body with no head.

These monsters, by the way, have a pretty dark setting: humanity created them, and they destroyed humanity.
The proof I can call it a “setting” is that we have not been destroyed. Proof complete.

——Well, Ill-san won’t answer anything if I ask about this stuff, so it’s incomprehensible to me.

Anyway, the important part: 〈Atlas〉’s attacks.

Countless gun batteries grow from the parts that look like the boss’s shoulders, and they spit a huge volume of shells——what you’d call a barrage.

But the volume is not anything cute like “like fireworks.”
If I had to compare: “pachinko balls dumped out of a bucket.”
A spectacle worthy of the difficulty called 〈Insanity〉 unfolds.

“Huppppp!!”

The rounds are flying faster than sound, but there’s distance, so time-to-target is slow. Searchlights light up 360 degrees, and the VR lights the barrage clearly, so I can see it well.

But there are just too many shots——I keep dodging the shells being vomited out like it’s gone mad.
This part is still manageable, though.
Because there’s a pattern.

For me, who’s been hitting the same pattern for three years, bullets flying at high speed are no different from walking down a sidewalk.
It’s a “moving maze whose route you already know.”

I attack for a while with live weapons and beam weapons, and the mechanical voice rings in the cockpit again.

“〈Atlas〉 destroyed——second wave incoming. 〈Gigant〉 approaching.”

In this quest, by the way, your “fighter type and enhancements” apply, but “enhancements to the player themself” do not.

Meaning stat-ups and skills do not apply.
All you can use in this quest is your ability as a human.
That, too, has been pouring fuel on the zero-clears.

The next enemy, 〈Gigant〉, is a frame like a human lower body with nothing below the knees.

The battery clusters increase to three locations, and the shelling comes irregular.
The one that gives the most trouble is the center——the batteries around the crotch.
It’s that kind of look, visually——but the problem is not the look.

The two battery clusters up top have eight attack patterns, but they have patterns.
The shots from the middle, though, fly straight at your craft.

If you don’t control this thing’s movement, you run out of escape routes and get pressed into a wall of bullets.
Even so, if you’re careful about your own movement, you can turn it into a pattern.
So this stage, too, is like playing tag in a moving maze.

Versus Frames have a triad boost you can use once every few seconds for defense or attack or acceleration—and I don’t even need to use it.

I close on 〈Gigant〉 while dodging bullets. Right in front of the enemy, I transform Swallow-san from airplane form into “humanoid form.”

What appears after Swallow-san transforms is a humanoid frame with bunny-ear-like antennae.

The rabbit’s eyes are closed right now, but there’s a lovely gimmick where they open depending on the pilot’s concentration.

I grip the 〈Excitation Sword〉—what were wings in fighter form, now a sword—and cut a horizontal slash through the obscene object on the crotch.

I repeat the attack a few times until the opponent’s shield breaks.
But Swallow-san’s humanoid form is sluggish, so I can’t stay like this long.
When a shot I can’t dodge in humanoid form comes, I go back to flight form and peel off at speed.

Once I confirm it’s safe, I repeat “close in and cut” again.

“Split already!”

I bisect 〈Gigant〉 from the crotch and take off.

“〈Gigant〉 destroyed——third wave incoming. 〈Midas〉 approaching.”

The mechanical voice rings, and what comes out next is a hand-like frame. Five tentacles.

The stage changes too, to some moon.

No atmosphere, less gravity, and the feel of the controls changes.
And from here, the enemies get stronger all at once.

The attacks are similar to the last stage, but the sphere speed is double.

On 〈Midas〉 I can’t use the method I used on 〈Gigant〉, turning Swallow-san humanoid.
Do that and I’ll be shot down in a blink.
And if you have a lot of area facing the direction of travel, like humanoid form, your hit rate goes up.

Flight form is thin in the direction of travel, so you take fewer hits.
That said, even in flight form, dodging the shots is hard.
Because—and this is true of Fate Link: Legendia (FateLege) fighters and flight forms, and of Earth airplanes too—airplanes are bad at snap turns.

——In humanoid form you have more working joints, so you can turn around more freely than a fighter.
A fighter can’t just look behind itself. That’s exactly why the fighter I use is Swallowtail.

Among small mass-production fighters, this frame has the greatest speed, and among small mass-production fighters, the highest turning power.
It can even reverse-thrust——the present I received, ST-81 Swallowtail.

My conclusion: if I’m dodging Death Road 〈Insanity〉’s tight barrage, I want Swallow-san, even a little smaller, faster, and more nimble.

The thing is, Swallow-san is bottom-tier in everything except speed and fighter turning performance, so people call it the “weakest frame.”

Whatever everyone else thinks, I believe the only thing that can clear Death Road 〈Insanity〉 is Swallow-san.

From here I need the triad boost too. I almost only use it for acceleration, though.

“Ill-san, we clear it today——!”

My partner puts a hand to his chest and answers.

“This aircraft will lead you to a sight no one has reached.”
“Dummy, Ill-san. I’m the one who’ll lead you to a sight no one has reached!”

At my words, my partner’s eyes fill as if he’s overcome.

“As expected of My Master. I would like you to make this aircraft the first in the world to clear Death Road 〈Insanity〉.”
“You’re on!”

Gifted out as a present, then called “weakest frame, leftover child” until almost nobody used it anymore: Swallowtail.
His happy synthesized voice rings through the cockpit.

I keep dodging shots coming at double the speed of the earlier stages, in a fighter that has inertia and doesn’t want to turn.

Not the slightest miss is allowed. Not 0.01 seconds of timing. Not 0.001 degrees of angle.
Even so, for me, this is home ground.

Nerves optimized for this fight over a vast 24,000 hours guide me.

“〈Midas〉 destroyed.”

“Yes.”

Stage 3 cleared.
But up to here, people still say a human can clear it.

The problem is from here.

The stage almost everyone gives up on.
It took me a year and a half of real time to clear the next one. Four and a half years in this simulator’s time.

The one people on the boards call the human graduation exam.