Mech Pilot who's ejecting so they can break into your cockpit, just so they can look you in the eye after what you did
CODE+++PURPOSE: QUAGMIRE ARCHER+++PERSONAL MISSIVE
DISTRIBUTION: TAG "QA_SURVIVORS_OR_DESCENDANTS"
MESSAGE TO FOLLOW:::
>//[QUA79]:: [PLAINTEXT ATTACHMENT]
I don't know exactly who'll get this message. The school-ship was a few months from my perspective, then a year and change at the academy, and bring that to a total subjective 2 Cradle-standard years for me since leaving home. I'm not quite sure how that works out in real time, or at least, "real time" doesn't seem real. Records say I joined up in 5010u, so my 2 years turned into 10? Well, I don't know what old friends or family are still around, is what I'm saying. So if you get this, it's to you. Hello, you.
I write this following my first real battle. I guess that's why I need to reach out and see if I left any bridges un-burned. I know I kind of ran around with a torch on all my bridges and I know I got burned, but maybe time healed some wounds and distance made hearts grow fonder, or maybe this will just be a one-sided journal which nobody else reads or responds to. Well, besides the spooks who read everyone's mail when you're writing from a warzone. I guess I'll find out.
This is what I pilot. Specs aside, no way I'd be allowed to talk about them openly, it might look intimidating but I'm basically a second line supporting fire unit. When things go the way they're supposed to, that is. They did for a while, then they didn't. Suppose that's the story I need to get out of me. How it went wrong, and got personal.
Probably can't talk too much about exactly who we're fighting and why, not that I'm really privy to the diplomatic details anyway, either. I deployed with 4 others, pretty simple objectives and formation. Out front: Dragonshield (defender) and Soldat (striker). Midline: me (support/artillery). Backline: Grimoire (artillery) and Demon Eyes (support). Grimoire and Dragonshield went to the academy and were assigned out of it at the same time as me, so we already knew each other. They're a tight item too. Some people get uncomfortable, they're so lovey-dovey, but I just think they're sweet, and honestly knowing there's that strong a tie between front and back of the team, I'm happier than otherwise. Soldat's a macho prick, but he does it to hide how much he cares I think, because after saying the worst shit you can imagine, he sneaks around to do favors and make sure everyone's taken care of. Demon Eyes is a little freak, although I say that affectionately, I also mean it. She, or sometimes it, is never in uniform, definitely doesn't bathe a regulation amount, and for some reason this is just accepted. Even Soldat keeps his trap shut about Eyes, because he's had his feet pulled out of too many fires by the stinky little gremlin. Not just in battle either.
Anyway, our objectives were to seek out and engage to eliminate enemy forces in a certain area, and if we found any depot or other base they used in operations, to report in and either occupy it for capture or destroy it, depending on if we got orders back. The default was to destroy it, so I guess... Eh, forget that, anyway, we ended up clashing with a group of enemy units much like our own group, hit and run style, several times. We did the running to disengage, because we figured we were better off hitting their light units and support/supply before getting stuck in. Well, stuck we did get. My own damn fault. I laid down the terraforming alterations to wall up the area of the supply depot we were told needed to be held and put down those stupid magma moats I thought were so clever. Grimoire's always saying "Artillery exists to launch large chunks of budget at an enemy it cannot actually see." But the enemy apparently lived by, "If you're not willing to shell your own position, you're not willing to win."
So thanks to my brilliant plan, our choices were to get pounded in a perfect little target area for their extreme range ballistics, or break for it in an extremely predictable direction. Oh, or wade through lava, courtesy of yours truly. Nobody fancied melting our legs off or enjoying the light patter of high explosives on our armor plates for a few hours, so right into the fucking ambush we went. The close terrain I'd meant to funnel any enemy forces intending to retake the depot to us turned into a warren of paths the other side's aces could jump us from. With the script flipped, they cut us off and put us through the wringer.
If they were as good at fighting as they were at out-thinking us... well, in this case, out-thinking me, but everyone up to and including command thought my plan sound... well, we shouldn't have gotten out of that if they'd been competent. Almost didn't, but if you look at that upside down, they almost lived, and instead they got themselves killed screwing up a perfectly executed ambush on the tactical level. Bastards got what was coming to them, with what they... Okay, I should back up a bit.
When they hit us, they dropped a canyon wall first with mines, made a wall between me and the front line, then another wall dropped behind me. Our front line found out then that their long range snipers were on the top a long way down the canyon they were stuck in, and I was engaged by a front line defender and another mech with a midrange support role like me, while their striker took on our back line. Dealing with that last first, that part of their plan worked out fine. Grimoire is still recovering from surgery, though he lived. Demon Eyes is fine now but by the time I joined the back line, that bastard in the clawed striker mech was dragging her cockpit away, sans the rest of the mech.
Not sure why they tried to 2v1 me specifically, but they picked a bad matchup to do it. They should've tried to pin all three in our front and middle 4v3 instead, because there was no way that shotgun-toting chump and the unarmed repair-bot backing it up were going to take me out quickly. Actually more the reverse, hyper-dense armor plates or not, that gatling cannon I use for supporting fire isn't for show. Yeah, they had the worse of it, though I couldn't chew them all the way up. Still, their snipers assumed a little wall would keep our front line from rejoining me and that wasn't true at all. As melee fighters, they were built for mobility - they had jump jets, obviously. So we left their snipers for later and as soon as we put down the two next to me, I could turn the terraformer equipment on that wall and give support fire while Dragonroad and Soldat jumped on the clawed bastard.
Or so I'd like to say, but they took sniper fire before they got over the wall, that shotgun seemed to reply to every action with another burst, and the clawed bastard hadn't taken anything you could call a hit in carving up our back line like that. He seemed to floor the two front liners in a single movement too, and was coming right at me. Took out my terraformer equipment by the time I finished what Soldat started and took him down.
I figured I owed their snipers for what their team tried to do, and I knew why they hadn't wanted to engage me with the snipers. I've got interception tech sufficient to stop their shots from connecting most of the time. And I knew I could catch up to their speed. So I did. They didn't land a shot on me on the approach, and one of them went down under my gatling fire as soon as I had them in range.
Of course, that left me open to a point blank shot from the other one, and that took out my gatling. The backup plasma-sheathed cutter is more tool than weapon but it was worth throwing, and it managed to lodge in the barrel of the sniper's gun. I wasn't thinking very straight, the alarms for damage and heat were driving me right off the track, and I think the doctors said I had a laundry list of hairline stress fractures from the incoming fire impacts and my own reckless driving. I should've picked up the stupid knife again, the cutter can be thrown because it's designed to be picked up again, duh. But I could only think, "You're not getting away after you tried to take Eyes from us!"
So I tackled the sniper mech with mine, locked the arms pinning its arms, and blew the eject. My hatch smashed open their hatch from the force of the explosive release bolts, and I was blasted right inside in their face. I think the sniper pilot tried to say something like, "you're crazy," but my head was ringing from the inside out, and I wasn't listening anyway. I had my service sidearm. I shot them while looking them straight in the eyes. It's not like shooting mech to mech. That's pretty much exactly the same in simulated or real combat. Heck, I've had some worse bone breaks after simulated stunts. Though come to think of it the mech piloting is real either way, it's the munitions that differ. Anyway. Fuck. Saw someone die, saw it in their eyes, because I shot them. Triple tap, very regulation.
They put us on medical leave for a while after that. I'm on bone therapy, and brain therapy. I predict I'll come out of it with working bones, and not the other. But that's demonstrably not new.
That's it I guess.
RG - "Quagmire" closing comms.
===
Tarot
MAGIC ARMOR
"Resolve"
The smell of blood and gunpowder.
AQUA HEARTIA
"Follow-through"
The prickling of static before lightning strikes.
(Yes I have recently had my consciousness deeply dunked in Mushoku Tensei up to and including reading all the light novels so I could know how it ends, I make no apologies.)
(This is the first missive in an exchange for a game of SIGNAL//r021. I drew heavily from Lancer for setting and style elements and from Mushoku Tensei for names. If I get permission from the other side I'll post both halves of the correspondence; if not, you'll get to see my letters without context, wheeee!)
