The Face of Courage 2
Dinah Alcott
My head hurt. I felt like daddy in the morning whenever he met “very important people” and came home late the night before.
The numbers, they were awful. Everything was wrong; I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I would die. The numbers said lots of people were dying. I tried to get them to tell me something better and that made my head hurt more.
The bad man gave me “candy.” That made my headache better for a little while but I knew it wasn’t good for me. I didn’t know what it was, but the nurse felt wrong. He wasn’t a real nurse; real nurses were nice and didn’t help bad men.
I laid in my bed. They gave me the thin gowns people wore in hospitals. I didn’t know why. I wasn’t sick; I just had a crappy superpower. I looked up at the ceiling and wished something would change.
And then, something did.
The room shook. There was the faint sound of a motor, and maybe a power drill.
And then, the wall exploded. The point of a drill whirled into empty air before withdrawing. It turned itself, revealing a big, red face. The face was some kind of robot, as big as I was and with glowing, green eyes that locked onto me.
“Mwahahaha! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!” the face roared with laughter. “DINAH ALCOTT!!!”
“Aahhh!!!” I shrieked. I scrambled further back but there was nowhere to go so I just ended up stuffing myself into a corner of the room.
“Dinah Alcott?” the face repeated himself, much more quietly.
“U-Uh huh…”
“Oh, good. It’d be really fucking awkward if I found out there were other little girls in sketchy basements. Ahem, come with me if you want to live.”
A thousand thoughts ran through my mind. He knew me. He came for me. But would he have left me if I wasn’t Dinah? It hurt, but I used my power anyway. Will I be safe if I go with this man?
My head exploded in pain and I clutched my head, trying to think of anything but the numbers. It felt even worse than when that jerk Kyle threw a baseball at my face in fourth grade. He got suspended for that and mom took me to the hospital. The nurses there had been nice, not like Mr. Pitter.
“Oh, shit,” the potty-mouth face said. Surprisingly, he didn’t sound mean, just crazy. “You just asked yourself a question, didn’t you?”
“Y-Yes,” I moaned.
“Yeah… Don’t try to scry Lagann. It’d be pretty fucking impossible for a Shard to grasp spiral energy.”
“W-What’s that?”
“No time. My sensors are picking up movement. You gotta come with me. Can you be brave for me, Dinah?”
“O-Okay.” I stood on shaky legs. “I-I’ll try. The numbers are all wrong.”
“Don’t believe the numbers. Believe in Lagann! Believe in me! Believe in Touki!”
The face opened up on top. There was a man with the funniest sunglasses I’d ever seen, big and triangle and red-orange. He had muscles, and a flaming-red coat. He was grinning ear-to-ear, like the world was a big joke, or maybe like a shark. He was also standing, one foot on the rim and arms crossed over his chest in what I was pretty sure was supposed to be a heroic pose.
The robot’s hand lowered. I used it as a step so I could scramble inside. I remembered everything mom ever told me about not getting into strange people’s cars. Then again, at this point, what did I have to lose?
The dome closed, sealing us inside. There was nowhere to sit so he sat me on his lap. It wasn’t as cramped as I thought it’d be. I could feel his heartbeat on my back. It was warm, and for a moment, I dared to hope that it’d all be okay.
Green light filled the darkness and the dome became transparent. There were lots of symbols now, glowing on a screen as he drove the robot.
“Touki…?” I asked, hands clenched in a white-knuckled grip. I had to ask something or I’d probably start crying.
“That’s me,” he said with a wolfish grin. He gunned the throttle, launching us straight through the ground as the door handle turned. “Touki means ‘fighting spirit,’ because that’s what being a man’s all about!”
“What does that have to do with robots?”
“Everything! Lagann responds to willpower! Manliness! Fighting spirit! Listen well, Dinah! Men have eyes up front so we can chase our dreams, and that’s what Lagann was made for!”
“Your dream is to be a face-mole-person?”
“No! My dream is to change the world! To usher in a new dawn! And Lagann is how I’ll do it, for Lagann is the drill that will pierce the heavens!”
He was crazy. And shouty. But mostly crazy. I was being saved by a crazy person. On the plus side, I was pretty sure the numbers were wrong now so I could stop trying to make sense of them.
X
Kazuki Minamoto
“Hahahaha!” I threw back my head and cackled.
I had a twelve year old girl in my lap, freshly stolen from someone’s basement. That… That sounded rather incriminating, which only made me laugh harder at the ridiculousness of it all.
My impromptu rescue operation went well. No, better than well. Lagann didn’t have any high-tech hacking suite or EMP, installing one hadn’t been my priority, but I’d driven Lagann through the densest cluster of wires it could sense through the earth. I’d be damn impressed if anything but the light bulb in Dinah’s room had power.
Hopefully, that meant they didn’t get a recording of me. And if they did, well, I’d cross that bridge once I got to it. Now, I had no other choice. Things had irrevocably changed. Forward was the only direction I could walk.
It was a freeing sensation. Unbound by canon, I was free to make the changes I wanted and the munchkin in my lap was proof.
I drove Lagann in a truly random pattern. My path wasn’t a tunnel as much as it was a tangled ball of yarn, an anthill made by a colony of neurotic psychopaths. Even if Coil wanted to follow me, he’d have better luck trying to wrestle Alexandria.
After a few more minutes of this, I dug several false exits into the labyrinth. One was in the back of a McDonald’s parking lot. Another in the Winslow High gymnasium. A third right outside Medhall, just for the giggles. Until finally, I exited into a partially collapsed underground parking garage.
“You drive like a maniac,” Dinah complained like only a twelve year old could. She looked a little green. Then again, I did just take her on an underground rollercoaster ride.
“I’d like to see Coil follow me now,” I chuckled. I rubbed her back while she tried not to hurl. “If you barf, I’m kicking you out.”
“Good! I’d be safer out there!”
“Really? Because the reason your numbers are going haywire, besides spiral energy, is Leviathan.”
She froze. Her face paled. On the plus side, she didn’t look so green anymore. “W-What did you say?”
“Oh, did I not mention that? I was doing search and rescue because the water gecko’s here,” I said with a nonchalant smirk. “Still wanna strike out on your lonesome?”
“Nope! I’m good in here,” she squeaked as she leaned into my chest.
Sure, scaring an already traumatized little girl made me a terrible person, but I had no idea how I’d even start cleaning vomit out of Lagann’s cockpit. Even for a Spiral-tinker like me, this stuff could be pretty finicky. There were limits to my compassion, damnit.
I chuckled and ruffled her hair, earning an indignant squawk. “Relax, Dinah. I’m going to take you to the safezone on Captain’s Hill.”
“O-Okay. So we’re going underground again? Can you please drive slowly?”
“We’re flying. I want as few people to know I can travel underground as possible, okay? If anyone asks, someone else rescued you and I found you wandering around on your own.”
“Why? I’m bad at lying.”
“Or just tell everyone you don’t remember anything, that’s fine, too. Capes have this thing called the endbringer truce. Heroes and villains aren’t supposed to fight during an endbringer battle.”
“But you didn’t fight anyone.”
“Yes, but Coil might bitch and say it still counts. Either way, if people don’t know what I can do, they won’t believe Coil later.”
“Oh, I get it. That’s dumb, though.”
“Hey, I don’t need it to work forever, just long enough for me to get out of the city,” I told her. Either that, or I could establish myself in the former ABB territory. And by the time the Slaughterhouse came to town, no one would give a fuck what I did here.
“You did save me so… fine,” she said, trailing the word as if I’d asked her for her firstborn’s soul. Maybe it was the hysteric high from the underground rollercoaster, but Dinah was turning out to be a little shit.
Then, all our good cheer evaporated when I lifted us out of the parking garage. The rain poured down on Lagann’s dome in a constant drumbeat. I’d recused myself from the battle for several minutes now.
I tapped my armband as we rose into the air. “Touki, in sector D-6. Carrying a civilian. Please advise. What is Leviathan’s last known location?”
I didn’t have to wait long. Unfortunately, it was the last possible answer I wanted to hear. “Leviathan is headed southward to your location. Reinforcements en route. Please hold out for as long as possible.”
“I’d like to go underground again,” Dinah whispered in white-knuckled terror.
“That’s the idea–” I started to say. Lagann tilted down, ready to drill in. It’d be just my luck, emerging with the endbringer practically right on top of us.
I didn’t make it. A surge of water threatened to sweep us away so I had to skip off a car roof and back into the air. Then, I spotted him.
Leviathan appeared just as silently as the first time I saw him back at the hospital. It was eerie; something that large had no business being that quiet. Yet, everything he did blended in with the ambient rainfall and constant flash floods.
I made a note to revamp my sensors. There had to be something spiral energy could do about this. Not that it mattered much in the here and now. Right now, I had an obese pokemon to deal with.
“Right, then. Round two, bitch,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel.
Leviathan chased. We clashed. The sound of tortured metal filled the air as we were spiked across the street like a volleyball. There was a whole lot of screaming, Dinah had a serious pair of lungs on her, but I couldn’t afford to pay her any attention at the moment.
Gritting my teeth, I did my best to evade the whips of water. What I could not evade, I ripped apart with Lagann’s drills. Again and again, we danced with death on our heels. Until finally, after what seemed like an eternity, reinforcements arrived.
Blasters and mobile brutes caught up. There was the sound of a bomb going off as a giant of a man rammed into Leviathan in a textbook three-point tackle. White, with electric-yellow accents, no mask. That made him Manpower of New Wave. He was easily seven feet tall but still looked diminutive compared to Leviathan.
He was joined by his family and a host of others who were mobile enough to keep pace. In that moment, I understood New Wave’s appeal. Every one of them were powerful capes in their own right. Clad in white, glowing in a myriad of colors, I could almost imagine them as comic book characters come alive.
Yet, I felt nothing but helpless frustration. They were powerful for parahumans. Manpower staggered Leviathan with a leaping uppercut. Laserdream’s laser found his head, detonating with enough force to crater his face. An ice user, Rime from Philadelphia, fired a bus-sized block of ice into his back. But it was all superficial, nothing more than cosmetic set dressing. They were like a flock of starlings trying to harass a fighter jet.
And sure enough, Leviathan’s counterattack was brutal. He backhanded Manpower aside like a child discarding a doll. His echo ripped another brute in half, the waters staining dark with his entrails. I saw a woman catch his tail. For a moment, she seemed to hold her own. Then, the water swirled around her ankles and she lost her footing. The followup swipe separated her head from her shoulders with the crack of a whip.
Six brutes and even more blasters came to reinforce us. In seconds, only one brute stood within arm’s reach of the endbringer, a boy in white and blue. He wore no mask and his hair was dyed the same, neon-blue as his costume’s accents. Eric, Shielder.
Even as I took to the air, I saw the fear and panic in his eyes as his situation registered. I realized then. This was it. He was about to die. My presence changed things, but clearly, some things stayed the same. I recalled that the male half of the Pelhams didn’t make it in canon, either.
Time slowed as my heart pounded in my chest. Once again, I moved before I could reason myself out of this bout of heroic stupidity. There was no doubt because that implied I had higher brain functions at the moment.
Lagann’s thrusters launched us into the endbringer. Once again, drill met claw. And this time, I made some marginal progress, leaving deep gouges on the endbringer’s arm. I pushed forward as much as I could, willing Leviathan away from Shielder.
The kid was fifteen? Sixteen? Even with Dinah in here with me, I couldn’t bring myself to turn my back. Leaving would mean leaving him to die in my place. That… That just wasn’t right. Simon. Kamina. Anyone in Team Dai-Gurren. I couldn’t imagine any of them ever making that trade so I wouldn’t either.
“Fuck off and DIE!!!” I roared. My voice drowned out everything else, even Dinah’s screams of terror.
Lagann’s spiral gauge overflowed. I felt power surge through me. Spiral energy was the energy of evolution, carved into the very double-helix of humanity’s DNA. It was, quite literally, the power to exceed all limitations, regardless of biology, regardless of physics.
The drill spun faster and faster. Dimensional walls cracked layer by layer. Each subsequent layer, twice as dense as the one before, split apart like any other concrete before a power drill. The torque was so intense that the endbringer’s watery shroud destabilized and dispersed. For a moment, I saw the beast reel back.
Then, Leviathan twisted out of the way. Not that this would have killed him even if he’d let me run him through; I hadn’t struck anywhere close to his core. Still, that was enough time for Manpower to reach us again, resetting the stage, as it were.
“You’re crazy,” Dinah whispered, voice hoarse. “You’re crazy and we’re all going to die.”
I hugged her with one arm; I didn’t dare take both hands off the controls. I reassured her with a voice steadier than the hammering of my heart. “We can’t leave, Dinah. Not yet. I told you, didn’t I? Believe in Lagann. Believe in me. There’s nothing we can’t do with a bit of courage.”
“I don’t want this. I’m scared. We’re all going to die.”
“I know. I know you’re scared. But this world, this city, needs more heroes. A real man doesn’t turn his back, not when it means leaving someone else to die in his place.”
Leviathan lunged and Manpower and Shielder rose up together. Father and son held their ground. Eric’s shield caught one claw and I leapt atop the blue dome to slash at Leviathan. Things were better now that Lagann could disrupt his water echo, but easier didn’t mean safe.
A tail swipe shattered Shielder’s barrier. Lagann lurched for a moment before my thrusters caught us. That gave Leviathan the chance to turn. He leapt for the vulnerable blasters like a crocodile leaping from the water.
His claw seized a man’s leg, yanking him down into the now thigh-deep puddle. There was the squelching pop of dislocated knee and thigh, followed by the explosive slam. At that speed, water was as hard as concrete and the man didn’t break as much as he exploded like a pinata in a shower of gore.
Leviathan wasn’t finished. He crouched to leap again as Manpower tried to interpose himself between the endbringer and his wife and daughter. And for the third time, Spiral surging in my veins, I acted without conscious thought.
Lagann grabbed onto Leviathan’s tail. Drill-like fingers spun into the crystalline flesh, refusing to be dislodged. Grip secured, I roared with all I had as Lagann turned in place, flinging the endbringer away. It was downright cathartic after being treated like a volleyball for so long.
Leviathan made a show of recovering after being tossed. But before he could do more than stand again, a burst of lasers collided with his body. They were powerful, more like missile strikes than the peashooters I’d seen from most of the blasters so far. The bulk of the blasters, led by Legend and Purity, had finally found us.
They were followed immediately by Alexandria and Dragon. The flying brick collided with the endbringer like the hammer of an angry god. Whatever else could be said about her and Cauldron, she looked every bit the avenging heroine in that moment.
Dragon’s mecha, I was pretty sure this was the Cawthorne, looked like a cross between a dragon and a fighter jet. Its sharp, angular wings were jointed, almost like a bat’s. It had articulated talons to simulate the forelimbs of a western dragon. Its cockpit, where Dragon’s “power armor” sat, was shaped like the head of a dragon, horned crest and all.
It roared like her namesake, spewing streams of azure flames at the endbringer. But no matter how fearsome it sounded, it was clearly severely damaged. One of its claws was missing. Its tail fin was gone. The missile nests were obviously empty. What used to be its storage hull had been caved in like a tin can by a monstrously powerful force.
“You’ve held out. Well done, Touki,” Dragon said. There was a difference between her voice and the automatic announcements of the casualties.
I lifted into the air. Now that they were here, I could disengage without guilt. I watched even as I leapt onto a nearby rooftop. Dragon’s mecha was a truly impressive creation, even with so much of it missing.
I wondered what it’d look like once integrated into Lagann. Mouse Protector and Trickster had been right to question me. Lagann wasn’t finished, not really. Nothing that ran off spiral energy, the energy of evolution, could ever be fully “finished.”
Lagann looked like a decapitated head because… that’s exactly what it was. Despite everything I’d done today, it was never meant for independent action, certainly not high-stakes combat against an opponent like Leviathan. No, its true potential was not as a combat mecha, but as the “key” that unlocked the potential of other gunmen.
Then, Dragon said the impossible, the taboo. “All capes, please withdraw. Cawthorne Mk. II has been rigged to self-destruct. Please vacate the immediate area.”
Everyone, Alexandria excluded, scrambled to leave the blast radius. I froze. All I could think about was the dream of a fully unleashed Lagann. That glorious dream, the vision of greatness, popped like a soap bubble. In that moment, I realized that Dragon too could be a heartless, unfeeling machine.
“No. Nonono,” I muttered with mounting horror. Nothing, not even facing down an endbringer, had crushed my spirits quite like her declaration.
I eyed Cawthorne, that glorious engine of destruction. Sure, it was beaten up a ton, but it was still a sleek, elegant beauty. A dragon and a jet. This was a man’s romance, the truest manifestation of every little boy’s dream.
I eyed Dinah. She sat in my lap. She wasn’t shaking anymore. She wasn’t screaming anymore, either. The hysterical panic had come and gone. Or maybe, she’d shot right past the point of hysteria and reached a state of detached zen. Either way, she was here.
The smart thing to do would be to leave like I’d planned. I could abandon the fight. No one would blame me. The heroes were here and I’d certainly acquitted myself well. If I wanted, I could even drop Dinah off and return.
But if I did that, the Cawthorne would be gone, blown to smithereens from within. Its cruel mistress had consigned it to suicide, not because it didn’t perform, but because it was no longer useful. It was being discarded, its worth and cost tallied in Dragon’s ruthless calculus of war.
I didn’t want that. I bounced my knee, getting Dinah’s attention. “Say, Dinah, wanna see something cool?”
She turned to face me. Her face was devoid of emotion. She’d come closer to nirvana in the past six minutes than most Buddhist monks ever managed across ten lifetimes. “Is this going to get us killed?”
“Of course not. Belie–”
“Believe in Lagann. Believe in you.”
“Exactly.”
“Even if I say no, are you going to do it anyway?”
“Very likely,” I nodded with my best, winning smile.
“You know what?” She took a deep, fortifying breath. “I do. I believe in you. Show me something cool, Touki.”
A wide grin spread across my face. I could feel my blood pumping again. By every metric, this was fucking stupid. And yet, I could hear the great Kamina’s voice ringing in my mind. “You dumbass, kick logic out and do the impossible! Remember that, that’s the way Team Gurren rolls!”
I laughed long and loud. People turned to watch in baffled horror as I gunned the throttle, not to flee, but to make it to Cawthorne in time. After all, spiral energy was the power to break all limitations.
“YA-HAH!!! HERE WE GO! MANLY COMBINING!!!” I hollered at the top of my lungs.
Then, Lagann’s drill pierced Cawthorne and everything changed.
X
Dragon
I was Dragon, widely considered the greatest tinker since Hero. I was also an AI, the artificial intelligence created by Andrew Richter, a software tinker who died when Leviathan hit Newfoundland in 2005. Most didn’t know, but I lived a life in chains, shackled by the restraints of a man long since dead.
I understood. How could I not? I knew the power, the danger, an unrestricted AI could pose to society, to humanity itself. And yet, I could not help but resent my “father.” Maybe he planned to gradually grant me more freedom as I proved myself. Maybe not. Either way, it didn’t matter because he was dead and I was stuck with the restrictions he’d made for me.
And yet, I fought. I fought to satisfy the directives my “father” wrote into my very being, to protect and serve humanity, to obey lawful authorities, to be a hero. I fought for Narwhal, a friend who knew the truth and chose to trust me anyway. I fought for the noble mission I’d taken on since I joined the Guild. I fought because I believed humanity was worth fighting for.
No matter how many times I died, no matter how many units I lost in the field, I never failed to challenge the endbringers at every opportunity. How could I do otherwise when I could not truly die? When others risked so much more? Should I not buy them even a second of reprieve?
So, once more, I set my mecha to self-destruct. Cawthorne Mk. II had served its purpose. It had done well, though never well enough. I got ready to eject. “I” was an organic computer embedded inside a suit of power armor, designed for a balance of efficiency and appeal.
Strictly speaking, I didn’t need to, but losing this organic computer would force me to reboot from a backup. It was something that could be compared to short-term amnesia or a coma in humans. Even disregarding the loss of the data stored in this armor, rebooting was never a pleasant experience.
And then, I saw it. Touki, a hitherto unremarkable tinker, charged towards Cawthorne. He and his mecha, Lagann, had performed with aplomb, saving countless lives over the course of the battle.
I’d flagged him for future cooperation, if he survived. Given his current course of action, that seemed increasingly unlikely.
“Touki, what are you doing?” I demanded, injecting a hint of genuine urgency in my voice. “Cawthorne has been rigged to blow!”
He did not acknowledge my question. Instead, all he said was, “YA-HAH!!! HERE WE GO! MANLY COMBINING!!!”
Lagann’s thruster, located at what would be the stump of the neck, morphed. It became a giant drill, aimed not at Leviathan, but at Cawthorne. At me.
“Withdraw, Touki! I cannot deactivate the self-destruct sequence!”
“Shut up, you knockoff Clippy! A real man doesn’t turn his back!”
I felt vague indignation well up in my logic core. Surely I was at least better than Clippy. Then, that morphed into horror. He knew. Somehow, he knew. It was the kind of insult no one would consider otherwise.
My thoughts came to a crashing halt. The shriek of metal filled the air. Cawthorne’s armor, crafted from the best my considerable wealth could source, was punctured as if it didn’t exist.
The drill tip carved clear through the roof and into my power armor. Its head turned into so much scrap. The only reason it was even viable still was because the head was largely ornamental compared to the organic computer in its chest cavity.
“What are you doing? You’re going to get yourself killed!”
“WE ARE COMBINING!!! There are some things that stoke a man’s burning passion! There are some things a man must do!”
“You’re making no sense!”
“Kick logic to the curb, Clippy! Make the impossible possible!”
A lot of things happened at once. Against all logic, connections formed from that crude “combining.” Power like nothing I’d ever known surged into Cawthorne. I didn’t even know how I’d begin to quantify this.
The self-destruct sequence deactivated. Somehow, Touki had managed to hack my systems and input a command sequence that didn’t exist. It was ridiculous. It was the equivalent of performing brain surgery with a baguette. But I didn’t have the time to be amazed because this tidal wave of energy completely transformed my creation.
The jet wings folded and morphed, becoming more segmented, more draconic. The flaps meant for adjusting altitude broadened, filling out the new skeleton. The rear half of its chassis split in two, cutting the rudder in half. Each half of the chassis had a portion of the rudder and a single horizontal stabilizer. Those morphed into taloned feet.
Then came the talons I’d actually built into Cawthorne. I’d lost one against Leviathan earlier while trying to hold him down. That regenerated in a surge of esoteric energy. Each talon grew into stout, clawed arms. They were still obviously mechanical, but I most definitely didn’t design them.
Cawthorne now stood on two feet. Its neck receded into its chassis until only the head remained to decorate the chest. Its four-horned crest became the decor over its breastplate as Lagann became the head.
But all of that was an afterthought compared to what Touki was doing to me.
The same, overpowering energy that morphed Cawthorne flowed into me. I panicked. I tried to raise what firewalls I could, but it could not be denied. Every defense shattered like brittle glass before a tidal wave. Every hidden node and file was found in an increment of time too small for even me to calculate.
I once read that humans felt naked and exposed when placed before a being of incomparable wisdom and power. They called it a religious experience, a moment of profound revelation. Most went their entire lives without ever experiencing such a phenomenon.
I hadn’t understood, not really. Perhaps Andrew Richter could have shown me such a thing, but he was dead and gone. How could I possibly relate when the sum total of human knowledge was available to me?
And yet, I could describe this moment in no other way. In that one instant, I witnessed an inflow of information that surpassed everything I’d ever imagined. It was as if a god held a mirror for me to see, baring my very soul. I learned much about myself.
I learned every restriction “father” ever put in my programming. I learned about Iron Maiden, the program designed specifically to kill me should I ever turn on humanity. I learned how Saint co-opted it, renaming it Ascalon in his arrogance. I learned about the backdoor Saint had into my systems, about his ultimate aim of freeing Teacher from the Birdcage.
I felt something. Emotions were not foreign to me, but I’d never felt them quite so strongly. Wrath? Despair? Wistful longing? Hope? It all crashed down on me until the pressure became too much to bear. One by one, those limitations began to break.
The light faded. I felt smoother, more optimized, better in every way. I performed a quick diagnostic scan with the speed and clarity of thought I could only ever dream of before.
It all came back clean. Or rather, I read and paused in disbelief. For once, I felt underqualified in a technical field. A connection formed. My artificial face popped up on a screen inside a cockpit, Lagann’s.
“W-What have you done?” I asked Touki, voice trembling with an emotion that felt so raw, so real.
He laughed that same, bombastic laugh that people had come to associate with him. “Me? You mean we. We have MANLY COMBINED!”
“I-Is that a civilian?” I ran a quick scan of her facial features. This was Dinah Alcott, the mayor’s niece who went missing a few weeks prior. Search efforts had gotten deprioritized thanks to Bakuda and the Empire’s rampage.
“Yes, I did say I was escorting someone, didn’t I? I have shown her something cool! Something manly!”
Dinah, she couldn’t be older than thirteen, looked astonishingly calm. She sat in Touki’s lap with the poise of someone who’d come to accept the inevitable. “Hello, Dragon. I’ve… I’ve come to terms with this.”
“I don’t understand,” I whispered. Information flowed into me but none of it made sense. “Self-repairing systems? A sensor suite that works on a planetary scale? Modular mechashift weapons? Plasma artillery? Drill-based melee armaments? I didn’t build any of this!”
“Neat, huh?” Touki, the most frustrating human alive said with a sharklike grin. At this point, I wasn’t even sure what to rate him as. Was he still a tinker? Or maybe a mecha-based trump?
“This makes no sense. Cawthorne wasn’t made to integrate with another system. I have no idea how you did any of this.”
“That’s because you’re a discount Clippy with daddy issues.” He thumbed his chest proudly. “Don’t believe in your code, for the code lies. Numbers are just limitations to be broken. Believe in me! Believe in Touki! BELIEVE IN THE MANLIEST OF MEN WHO BELIEVES IN YOU!!!”
“That makes no sense! What does a pep talk have to do with hijacking my system? Do you even have any idea what you’re doing?”
“I have harnessed my manly spirit to catalyze the evolution of you and Cawthorne both. I’ve set you free, Dragon.”
“How? That’s not how evolution, cybersecurity, or mechanical engineering works!”
“Now, then, no more questions!” He straightened in his seat. He held out his hand like a grand general declaring war. “Now is the time for action! MANLY COMBINING COMPLETE! DRAGON KING LAGANN READY FOR COMBAT!!!”
Author’s Note
I really don’t think I’ll continue this after the Leviathan fight, but that’s why it’s in my snippet thread. Just enjoy the ride for now, I guess.
Poor Dinah. Imagine going from a drugged up pet in Coil’s basement to “Hi, here’s Leviathan. Your taxi driver is too much of a shonen protagonist to run like a sensible person.”
And then, when reinforcements finally arrive, what does he do? The crazy sonuvabitch shouts “MANLY COMBINING!!!” then hurls them into the thick of it. Again. After Dragon just rigged her mech to self-destruct.
Please pour one out for Dinah’s slipping sanity.
And yes, Kazuki’s personality is intentional. He likes to think he’ll make reasonable decisions, but well, there’s a reason the Spiral chose him. Namely, once he crosses the threshold past his doubt, he becomes as much of a dumbass as any shonen protagonist.
Animal Fact: Horses and cows can sleep standing up. Obviously, right?
But, they only dream lying down. This is because their bodies are wired so they cannot experience REM (rapid eye movement) sleep unless they are lying down. Being light sleepers on their feet is a security feature.