Even after we finished talking about Karina and artificial intelligence, there was still plenty to discuss.
No, to be more precise, there was plenty we could discuss.
After all, there were so few people who piloted high-mobility Titans.
High-mobility Titans inevitably employed every method possible to reduce weight. In Ailey’s case, every piece of armor aside from the core armor was only at the level of improving aerodynamics.
And the White Bunny was much smaller than the others.
As a result, its defensive power and firepower were inferior to the rest, and its absolute floor was lower than that of heavy-armor Titans. That was why most people piloted heavy-armor Titans.
It wasn’t as if they could greatly influence battlefield control like artillery types, or provide major support like support types, nor did they possess overwhelmingly superior ambush capabilities.
There was nothing bad about being fast, but there were not many reasons to choose a high-mobility type just for the sake of speed.
As I talked about such things with Karina, it naturally turned into a gathering of high-mobility pilots who had high ceilings but had never once taken first place.
Since we were lamenting high-mobility types, time passed naturally, and in the end, I even got lunch out of it. One way or another, it wasn’t a bad thing.
It might seem like I trusted Karina too much, but Karina was a simpler person than she appeared.
When we first met, I thought she might be someone with a pitch-black inside, but if you gently scratched at her, she got scratched surprisingly easily, and when you talked to her, there were quite a few parts of her that could be reasoned with.
Most of all, in that she treated people as people, she was better than Revan, whose thoughts were utterly impossible to read.
Though the same could be said for Ailey, in terms of being impossible to read.
In the end, I hadn’t found out much about Ailey. At most, I knew she was probably an artificial intelligence created during one of the Luna family’s experiments.
No, perhaps there was almost no hidden information beyond that in the first place.
To say that something was hidden inside Ailey, a piece of software that had been created, was itself contradictory. If information was being hidden, it would be by the Luna Count’s family, not Ailey.
I had not the slightest intention of digging that far. I didn’t want that information either. It wasn’t as if I was going to get a doctorate in artificial intelligence in this world.
More important than that was the ceiling of high-mobility Titans. To be precise, Ailey’s new direction for customization.
The effectiveness of smoke grenades would rapidly decline.
That was only natural. I had taken smoke grenades, which had already been used from time to time, and utilized them with all my might by making the entire Titan emit smoke. Even I would want to come up with countermeasures.
And those countermeasures were simple enough that anyone could think of them with a little consideration. If their vision was blocked and they couldn’t see, they just had to install thermal sensors.
In the end, the ceiling that high-mobility types ought to pursue was the simple fact that they were faster than anyone else.
Buy thrusters far more expensive and superior than the current ones, approach to a distance where the enemy absolutely cannot evade, and drive in the pile bunker—or else stay so far away they can never reach you and snipe them.
That was the ceiling I knew.
But I had ended up seeing a new ceiling. I wasn’t sure whether it could clearly be called high-mobility. But what else could it be called?
Before going to Karina in the morning, I had sent Ian a rough outline of the idea first. It was about time I got an answer.
Dding-dong!
“Ailey.”
“Wh-what! This much of a ringtone is cute, isn’t it? It’s cute!”
If she confessed that she had changed the ringtone just because I called her name, then that meant she herself had worried quite a bit while changing it, wondering whether it was okay.
“I haven’t said anything yet.”
“Ah, then were you about to say it was cute?”
“Please change it back. It stands out too much.”
“I knew it! I knew it, but, I did know, but… okay….”
Beep.
As soon as Ailey changed the ringtone, a second message came right away. I checked the name. This time, too, it was Ian.
How would it be? Had he sent me materials concretizing the blueprint? Maybe he had already started working on it. Ian tended to get to work incredibly quickly.
Now (1:13 PM)
Where are you (1:13 PM)
Huh.
This was a question I hadn’t expected.
Was he trying to meet in person and have a proper discussion before customizing it?
Should I go to the hangar? (1:13 PM)
Where are you (1:14 PM)
In front of the Employees’ Club café right now (1:14 PM)
Wait there (1:14 PM)
Wait there?
It seemed he had been nearby from the beginning, looking for me. The distance from the hangar to here wasn’t exactly short.
Less than five minutes later, Ian appeared in the distance. Just as I was about to raise my hand and call out to him, Ian, who had been looking around, met my eyes directly.
He was holding a wrench in his hand.
“Aha.”
Uh, something was wrong.
“I told you to wait, didn’t I?”
Why were his eyes like that?
“I told you to wash your neck and wait, you bastard.”
Uh, this wasn’t right.
***
I got dragged all the way to the hangar.
“Do you think if you forcefully increase the number of generators, the Titan will suddenly become stronger or something?”
It hurt.
He was seriously insane. He had actually swung the wrench and hit me. He had controlled it so my bones wouldn’t break, but it definitely left bruises. It throbbed.
“I went to the hangar and suddenly there was a medium generator sitting in front of Ailey, and I was so dumbfounded.”
Ian clenched the wrench tightly once again, then slowly relaxed his grip.
“Ailey’s power output is already more than necessary. Titans with a dual-generator system in place are less common than you might think.”
“Wh-why?”
“Because there’s no need for it!”
Why was he suddenly shouting? He startled me.
“A generator is a critical component that can explode when hit, and the amount of power needed to keep a Titan running is usually sufficient with a single medium generator.”
“Wh-what if we wanted to maintain constant hovering?”
“There’s no such thing as a Titan that can’t be hit by bullets.”
Ian’s expression twisted sharply.
“Ailey is already in a sufficiently dangerous configuration, with generators mounted on both thighs. Your opponents aren’t aiming for them because they don’t intend to kill you. The fact that they haven’t been hit even by accident so far is pure luck.”
He wasn’t wrong.
The reason one could block bullets with a pauldron just by slightly turning the body during duels at the Academy was that, fundamentally, people aimed only at places that would not cause fatal injuries, unless circumstances were extreme.
Bullets lacking penetration were fired at the core, whose armor was thick enough not to be pierced, while bullets with high penetration were mainly used to target sensors or the lower body.
Because of that, every pilot except for unusual ones like Revan never turned their back to the enemy.
If a bullet aimed at the core struck the generator on their back, it would explode and kill them.
Revan probably didn’t turn his back to opponents under normal circumstances either. He must have chosen that strategy on purpose only because it was a simulation, and because he knew his opponent was weak in long-range combat.
And I knew it too. I knew at least that the core was both that dangerous and that important.
However.
“What if I’m confident I won’t get hit?”
“You.”
“I already have a track record. I defeated my opponent without allowing a single effective hit.”
And I achieved 59th place. Because the smoke grenades made it impossible to confirm the contents of the exam, the score had been assigned based on the damage status of both Titans.
The reason for that score was simple.
I had not allowed a single effective hit.
The overwhelming difference in the number of effective hits was the same as the difference between Revan and the Imperial Princess. It hadn’t received the same level of attention, but in my memory, that was how it was.
Ian looked thoughtful for a moment, then scratched his head roughly. After wearing a pensive expression for quite a while, he set the wrench down on the table.
“Fine. Then let’s say the generator is one thing.”
Then he picked up a screwdriver.
“What the hell is this about attaching Fafnir’s wings?”
There it was, my ceiling.
“I-Ian.”
“What.”
“Have you ever f-fought Fafnir?”
“No.”
“If you haven’t fought it, d-don’t talk.”
In most cases, flight transport units were used to move Titans through the air. They were low-cost and efficient, but their weakness was clear.
They were slow.
I still couldn’t forget it. The image of Fafnir folding its wings and diving down, crushing Zeus’s body, would not disappear.
If Ailey had wings too.
“Hey.”
“Y-yes?”
“What you ripped off were wings, not thrusters, right?”
Ian slowly walked toward me with the screwdriver in hand.
“F-first, put that down, please.”
“I watched the footage too. Fundamentally, the wings serve to assist flight, and Fafnir itself is operated with one medium generator and flight thrusters with an enormous output.”
He had already finished analyzing everything?
Now that I thought about it, he was right. Fafnir had flown and dive-bombed, but it had never hovered. No, I didn’t even know if it was structurally capable of hovering.
Had there been hovering verniers on its feet?
“One of the heaviest components in a Titan is the generator. Obviously. It’s the part that houses both the fuel and the power generation unit.”
That was something I already knew.
The heaviest components in a Titan were the generator, thrusters, and armor. Excluding the frame, since that was fundamental.
“You’re saying you want to make a Titan with three generators fly?”
Ah, uh.
Now that I thought about it, that was true.
The reason Ian was pissed wasn’t simply because I had asked him to increase the number of generators, nor because I had asked him to attach Fafnir’s wings to Ailey.
He was pissed because I had asked him to increase the number of generators, attach Fafnir’s wings, and make flight possible too. Without even Fafnir’s thrusters.
When I stayed silent because I had nothing to say, Ian raised the screwdriver.
“You deserve to get hit, don’t you?”
“L-let’s talk this out?”
Ian started chasing me, so I ran.
Ten minutes later, I kept running until Ran, who happened to come to the hangar, stopped Ian.
We decided to leave out the wings and just install the generator.
Regrettably.