Disclaimer: I don't own Infinite Stratos in any sense.
AN: Infinite Stratos was the first anime of its kind that I ever saw. It was back in highschool, and I never even knew that Harem was a genre at the time. I didn't even know what the word meant. So I personally put this series on a much higher pedestal than it probably deserves.
Highschool me thought it was absolutely hilarious. It was before I knew about how full of cliches it was, or how overdone all the tropes were, and I saw it as totally groundbreaking. Cliches are only cliche after all, once you've seen them everywhere. But this series was the first time for me. I was a fresh slate when I saw it and I'll always see it as special because of that.
It was probably the series that got me back into anime altogether, actually. I had watched Dragon Ball Z as a wee lad, but then I stopped at some point, and left anime as a whole behind.
Then I saw this series, and ended up hooked. This is also, coincidentally, the fandom that brought me onto this site in the first place.
I lurked on this site for years looking for solid IS stories. Then one day decided to make an account and write a fic or two myself in other fandoms.
So this story is a bit of an experiment. I came up with the idea a very long time ago but only decided to write the first little piece of it now. If nobody likes it, I'll stop writing it and move on. But if someone somewhere thinks it's at least passably interesting, then I'll continue.
For now it's a side project of mine, but I might just turn it into a full story one day depending on whether you all want me to continue it or not.
Hope you enjoy.
-LeviTamm
Chifuyu Orimura stared at the newsfeed on her smartphone in utter disbelief.
She almost never kept up with the news. She was almost always way too busy. But at the moment, she had literally nothing better to do.
So she had taken to rifling through all of the unused applications and features that had come preinstalled on her phone in the meantime.
She had never gone through them all before, and as bored as she was, she didn't have the time to go off and do something she may have actually enjoyed doing instead.
So, due to the way her schedule for the day worked out, she was stuck basically waiting for her next obligation, but did not have the time to go anywhere while she was.
So she had decided to just waste some time doing this in the meantime.
One of these apps of hers that she had found, compiled all of the top trending news stories from all around the world.
She had opened this app, and had glanced through a few of these articles, mostly just reading the headlines.
Then she had froze upon reading one, very specific one.
...And she had so many questions now.
Generally speaking, she was not someone who could be surprised by anything so easily, but this time things were different because it directly concerned her brother.
He had made the news.
'Billionaire Orimura Ichika Launches Asteroid Mission!' was splayed across her screen in giant, bold letters. And there was a picture of a rocket launching in the background.
...
When she had seen this for the first time only a few moments ago, her brain had practically shut down.
Because: 'What the absolute fuck?'
Was this real?
Not a single word in that headline had made sense to her.
Now, she may not have spent all that much time with her brother recently, mostly due to her recent obligations in Germany, but she had at least assumed that she had a decent grasp on what he got up to in his spare time.
Evidently, she knew almost nothing about him at all.
And upon actually reading beyond the headline of the article, things got even stranger.
Apparently, her brother owned an asteroid mining company and had just launched a mineral prospecting mission to a nearby asteroid.
Right on the back of an Orimura Rocket. Because the Orimura's made the finest, most capable rockets in the entire world. Apparently.
This was certainly the first time she heard about it.
So her brother owned a rocket company too?
Wasn't he only 15? Where was he finding all the time to do this?
How did he do all of this without her ever knowing about it?
It was clear, after all, that her brother had become a very high profile figure in the public eye recently. But apparently, she had just missed all of the signs until now.
The public and the media knew more about her brother than she did.
Chifuyu leaned back in her chair and stared blankly at the ceiling of the room trying to wrap her mind around all of these new revelations.
Vaguely, she remembered having a conversation with her brother about a year and a half ago that had entailed him asking her for permission to start a business. He had been a minor at the time, and had been essentially road blocked from doing anything of the sort because of it.
The laws weren't on his side due to his age. He needed to be 18 to be able to do everything he wanted to on his own, so he had asked her to sign a few pieces of paper for him that would essentially give him permission to do so.
She would basically be a co-owner in name only in whatever he did. Which meant that legally, whenever Ichika's age would come into question, he could wriggle out of any trouble by pointing to her and the fact that she was over 18. And since she was technically a co-owner, her brother would be legally protected, even if she had never directly intervened in anything he had ever done.
She could literally just sit back and let him do whatever he wanted and never have to do any work. Which was mostly why she had agreed in the first place. She simply didn't have the time to actually oversee what her brother was doing, or to help him out. So she just existed as a name on paper to offer him a loophole to get out of any legal trouble.
And she hadn't thought much about it at the time. She had figured that maybe it would be a learning experience for him and that it would at least keep him busy when she wasn't around, so she had signed off on it. It had only taken her about 5 minutes or so for her to read all the paperwork required.
Her brother had streamlined the process for her so that she could spend the absolute minimum amount of time necessary to help him out.
Just 5 minutes was all that her brother had asked of her.
Just two signatures, and a cursory scan over a single page document to make sure that her brother wasn't overlooking anything.
And then she could completely forget about it. Leaving it entirely in his hands.
And that's what she had done. Thinking to herself that he'd probably create some small business to begin saving up some money for his future education or something.
Something like what the Gotanda family had. A small family business that provided enough income to live comfortably.
She had clearly underestimated his ambition.
Chifuyu had almost entirely forgotten about signing that document until literally a few moments ago. She had never even asked Ichika what sort of business he had wanted to create.
Clearly, she probably should have.
Because her brother had become a multi-billionaire in less than two years, and had started launching rockets out into the solar system.
It distinctly reminded her of her friend Tabane. And not in a good way. Chifuyu was definitely going to need to check to see if that lunatic had anything to do with this.
But maybe she should have sat Ichika down that day and got him to fully explain what his intentions had been instead of immediately heading out and leaving him to his own devices for yet another extended period of time.
She had been doing that for almost all of his life, after all.
It had always been one of her greatest regrets. But this was definitely the first time it had come to directly bite her in the ass.
There had always been a reason why Chifuyu had practically abandoned her brother at every turn.
It wasn't because she didn't like him, or because she wanted to teach him independence, or anything of the sort.
It was, perhaps ironically, due to the fact that she needed to protect him.
And due to the nature of her and her brother's circumstances, she could only protect him if she was far away from him.
So while she had always loved him more than anything else in the world, ever since she had first laid eyes on him on the day of his birth, she could never allow herself to stand by his side until she completed one very specific goal.
To get strong.
How strong?
She needed to get so unbelievably strong that in a hypothetical scenario where all the world's militaries joined forces along with every other IS pilot in existence, and they all ganged up on her and her alone, she needed to be strong enough to win that battle.
Strong enough to not just be considered number 1, but to be strong enough to beat literally everyone else, all at once.
Strong enough so that the only threat to her was Tabane Shinonono herself. Who she happened to be close friends with, and who would never turn on her or Ichika for any reason.
And this was why she always left Ichika on his own.
So she could spend every spare moment of her life developing her skills.
It was wrong. She knew it was. And some part of her hated herself for doing it, but she didn't have much choice either.
If it were up to her, she and her brother Ichika would have been living an ordinary life together in peace, all this time.
But that just wasn't an option. It had never been an option.
Because of her mother.
Chifuyu knew that if her mother had had her way all those years ago, she'd be dead right now, and Ichika would be under her thumb.
She couldn't allow that to happen, so she had to get stronger. Strong enough to protect Ichika against anything. Against their mother, and against the entire world if it came to that.
So she had to train.
Her friend Tabane had given her the tool that she needed to keep him safe. The IS. But as good of a pilot as she was, she still was not satisfied. She felt that she had still not mastered it, and could feel that there was something more there, to reach for. A higher level.
And she needed to reach it.
She was already confident in her ability to defeat any other IS pilot in the world in single combat, but her mother had an entire organization at her beck and call.
So Chifuyu had to get strong enough to defeat everyone, all at once.
That was what she had always been reaching for.
To be able to win even if everyone else in the whole world turned against her and Ichika.
And she wasn't there yet. She knew she wasn't. Hell, she may not even be at the level yet to be able to defeat her mother if that woman ever managed to get her claws on one of Tabane's creations.
Her mother was a monster, after all.
Chifuyu still wondered every now and then about how things could have been different back when she had escaped with Ichika all those years ago, had her mother been there at the time to try and stop her.
Her mother had been in a different country, and she had let her guard down due to the facade of obedience that Chifuyu had put up for her for years.
It had just been her lackeys that Chifuyu had had to deal with instead. And that had allowed her to get out with Ichika.
She had changed her and her brother's names since then, since he had been too young at the time to notice, gotten new identities for them both, and had whisked her brother away to a new home.
But she had no doubt at all that that woman was scouring the Earth in an attempt to find them again.
And Chifuyu knew that her mother would eventually succeed in doing so one day.
So she had to be ready. Even if that meant never being around the one person that she loved more than anything else in the entire world.
If she allowed herself to stay with Ichika for any extended length of time as she currently was, she knew that she would never be able to leave him again. He was simply too irresistible, and she wouldn't have the willpower. And while that would probably make her the happiest woman in the world, it wouldn't last when her mother got involved. And then she'd be too weak to defend that life.
So she had to keep going. She had to spend every waking second of her life, either training, or resting from the injuries she sustained from said training.
Then maybe at the end of it all, once she had the strength she needed, then she could finally stand by his side. To earn that life that she craved more than anything else. And to be able to keep it forever.
In the end, that was all that she really wanted.
Unfortunately, however, this all came with the unintended side effect of never being there to see her brother grow up.
Or to see him create a multi-billion dollar corporate empire.
...A phrase she had never imagined would ever apply to her brother.
Life just kept throwing her weird curveballs.
But as much of her brother's life as she had missed out on, she hadn't missed all of it.
Just a significant portion.
Which meant that upon reflection, Chifuyu could actually point out two instances where something about her brother had radically changed.
She had no idea what the underlying reason for either of those changes had been, and she could only pick up on these changes now that she had had her eyes opened as to what her brother had been up to recently, but she could still tell that her brother had changed quite significantly in those two moments.
The first time had been when he was 6 years old.
He had been a very happy, bubbly, and noisy child one day, and then a still-happy and cheerful, but much quieter child the next.
All of a sudden, it had been as if all of the thoughts he used to express aloud had just been muted suddenly. As if all of the childish immaturity had simply been stripped from him.
Chifuyu had put it down to him simply maturing, and had frankly appreciated the change, but in retrospect, she probably should have picked up on the fact that it had practically happened overnight. Especially since she didn't know the cause of the change, even today.
And then there was the second change. The one that she really regretted not addressing when it had happened.
Back when he had been in grade 6, one day, he had come home with an unbelievably determined expression on his face. As if he had simply discovered what his life's purpose was.
And Chifuyu hadn't asked him about it at the time since, just like always, she had been about to leave again.
She had walked out the door without ever asking about what the fire in his eyes had been about.
Perhaps he had planned on creating all of these businesses of his even back then. She had no idea.
But the point was, she hadn't asked about it. So here she was, relegated to researching her own brother on the internet, because his Wikipedia page had more info on him than she did.
He had made his fortune in robotics.
...Which meant he had a third business venture she hadn't known about.
He had created what was essentially, a general purpose labourer that could do almost any physical task that a human could. Somehow.
She had absolutely no idea where he had gotten the knowledge or the skillset to do something like that, but he had clearly figured it out somehow.
And his robots were meant to replace a huge number of menial jobs and allow people to have more free time. In theory.
Of course, this invention of his had caused a pretty huge controversy that still wasn't resolved, since a whole lot of people were currently working jobs that could be easily automated by his robots. And since they were so much cheaper than paying humans to do the same tasks, there was a lot of uncertainty about the future.
His robots weren't as versatile as human beings were. Not by a long a shot. They weren't able to hold conversations at all, or even speak for that matter. But her brother had managed to invent a system that allowed humans to teach these machines how to perform tasks quickly.
A human would demonstrate a task to the robot, and then the robot would copy it. And then there were a bunch of machine learning algorithms that would be used to refine and optimize the task even further until it ended up well beyond the ability of the humans that had taught it in the first place.
So they weren't perfect by any means. But any one of his robots could learn how to do any physical task that a human could. And they could do it better without ever getting tired, or needing a break. All at the cost of pennies of electricity.
And there was a huge demand for this. So Ichika had made a lot of money from the mass production and sale of these robot labourers since he was the only one in the world who had the capability to make them.
There were no other competing companies in this field in the entire world. So he was even making agreements with foreign governments, and private companies overseas.
This alone would have been enough to set him up for life.
But he hadn't stopped.
With these funds, he had started a rocket company.
One that had earned one hell of a reputation.
He could turn around a launch pad in less than 24 hours, consistently. Meaning that his company had the unique ability to launch something into space literally every single day. More than this, actually, since he owned multiple launch pads.
And he had never had even a partial failure before. From the first rocket he had ever created, to his most recent one, every single mission of his had gone off without a hitch. Making his company the only rocket company in the world with a perfect record.
From there, he had picked up some satellite launch contracts from the government, and from some other private companies, and had used that money to further develop his rocket design.
Then he had started an asteroid mining company and had launched his own prospecting mission.
She guessed that he had wanted to get an estimate on how much that giant rock was worth.
But Chifuyu couldn't even begin to imagine what her brother's ultimate plan in doing all of this was. It made no sense to her at all.
There was a good deal of public speculation, but nothing confirmed. It was known that the first person to begin mining and refining material from asteroids on a large scale would probably become the world's first multi-trillionaire, but this didn't feel like something her brother would try to do.
Was it really all to just make a big pile of money? One bigger than everyone else's? Or was there something more?
...
There was a lot of information about him on the internet that she had never known about.
And some of it really gave credence to her theory about him coming up with the ideas for all of these businesses after he had come home that one day with that unbelievably determined expression on his face.
Because now that he was so famous and in the public eye, information about his early life before becoming a public figure, information that would not necessarily be worthy of a Wikipedia page on its own, had also been dug up about him and published.
Before all of this, he used to be a professional gamer.
Which was a very strange profession that Chifuyu had never even imagined her brother taking up. She didn't even know he had been interested in those sorts of things.
But apparently, he used to be a damn good one.
She noticed, after clicking through all the provided links and doing some more research, that her brother had practically had the equivalent of her own reputation, but in video games.
He was considered the best, and had hundreds of world records, particularly in the speedrunning community.
She definitely didn't understand all of it. Something about being really good at playing video games, really fast.
But a lot of other people certainly cared about it.
She had never said it out loud, but she had always had the hope that no matter what her brother decided to do with his life, that he would be the best at whatever it was. It had been a bit of a selfish desire on her part, hoping to see him reach the potential that she knew he was capable of reaching, but it had been a hope of hers nonetheless.
So even though she didn't fully understand his old life as a gamer of all things, she could at least be satisfied in the fact that he had become the best in the world at it.
But the point of all of this was, he had been doing relatively normal things before that one day he had come home with that look in his eyes.
Playing video games professionally was normal. Building robots and launching rockets wasn't. All of his business adventures had started happening almost immediately after this moment where his demeanor had changed.
It really made her wonder what had happened that day.
Chifuyu let out a sigh.
She had missed so much about his life.
He had been travelling around the world for years without her knowledge. Negotiating business deals, participating in video game events and tournaments, giving interviews, and he had even given a bunch of public lectures on all sorts of topics.
There was so much information about him on the internet that there was no way she would be able to go through it all in one sitting.
He had millions of followers on his social media, and was a very well known and controversial public figure.
He had also become the national champion for Kendo when he was 8. Which seriously made her wonder why her brother had never told her about it. She hadn't even known that he had intended to compete, let alone that he was good enough to win.
Was this how her brother felt about her and IS suits in general? Where she was just part of her own separate world that defied understanding, while he was just a spectator that could do nothing but observe from the outside?
That was certainly how she felt about him, now.
When she had more time, she'd have to take a look at some of the other stuff he'd been up to.
There were a lot of videos on the internet either created directly by him, or created by someone else, about him.
Next time she had one of her training sessions, or maybe during another lunch break of hers, she'd have to throw on one of his videos or interviews in the background. She could probably even get her IS suit to stream it straight from the internet.
Chifuyu wanted to slam her face into the closest wall.
Because her brother just couldn't make things simple, could he?
He was on the news again, having just rocked the world with another revelation.
The first male capable of piloting an IS.
She had absolutely no idea how the hell he had managed that one, but at least she was in a position to do something about it this time. The IS was her domain after all.
She took in a deep breath... and sighed, before finally planning out what she needed to do.
If her mother hadn't seen Ichika on the news during any of his stunts before now, then she certainly had now. His face was everywhere. This would definitely have caught that woman's attention, and she'd recognize her son immediately. She would make her move soon.
So Chifuyu would have to start making preparations now. Both to protect her brother from his mother, and to protect him from the rest of the governments who now very clearly, all wanted a piece of him.
It was going to be a long day.
She'd need a drink or two before it was done.
AN: I have no beta reader for this story by the way. So there may be errors.