Disclaimer: I don't own Infinite Stratos in any sense.

Discord: A3dTszc

(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)

"Heard you were looking for a stud," one man said. "Well, I've got an STD and all I need is you."

"Are you an antiquer?" another man asked. "Cuz' I have some junk that hasn't been touched in years."

The third man in the group stepped up next and attempted to one-up the other two.

"I'd rub my ballsack all over a bed of steel nails just to smell the chair you sat on in 3rd grade."

As the first two men 'oohed' and 'aahed' in admiration of the 3rd man's heroic one-liner, Chifuyu slowly swirled around the liquid in her glass.

She was staring at the wall in front of her, expressionlessly.

...Because this is the sort of shit she had to put up with on a daily basis.

She was tired. It was still early in the morning and the coffee hadn't kicked in just yet. So unless her instincts warned her of some impending threat, she wouldn't be leaping into action anytime soon.

She was sitting at a bar counter with her arm propped up on the tabletop supporting the weight of her head. Her left hand was spread across half of her face. It was a pretty ungraceful position, all things considered, but she was too tired to care about that.

She was a picture-perfect example of exhausted despondency.

Every now and then, she would transfer her gaze from the wall in front of her to the cup of coffee in her right hand. This was already pushing the limit of effort that she was willing to expend for the moment. She just couldn't spare the willpower to deal with anything else.

As soon as these three stalkers had approached her, she had zoned right out and stopped listening to her surroundings entirely, choosing instead to get lost in her thoughts. All of their words had gone in one ear and straight out the other.

It was a skill, really. One that she had been forced to practice daily throughout her life―instantly forgetting all the disgusting, vile, and otherwise degrading comments directed her way. She had become an expert at this and now, she didn't even notice herself doing it anymore. It happened automatically. Her brain just filtered out the information. She couldn't remember what any of these men had said to her a few moments ago even if she tried.

Idly, she felt the spider on her shoulder start to crawl up the side of her face. As long as it didn't block off her ability to drink her coffee, she didn't care what it did.

"Holy motherfucking shit!" one of her stalkers shrieked at the top of his lungs. "That thing is real!"

He leapt away from her in terror. The other two did the same.

Chifuyu calmly took another sip from her mug.

"M-my sweet B-buttercup," one of the men crooned, sounding incredibly concerned for her well-being. "Did you know that there's a s-spider crawling on you?"

The spider took an abrupt, flying leap off Chifuyu's shoulder and at the group of men. They all collectively wailed and raced out the door of the bar.

...Then the spider scurried back a few moments later and crawled up her side to its original position.

It was a speedy little bastard.

The bar was silent again after that. The men didn't come back. Nobody else was there except for Chifuyu and the bartender.

The three idiots she had just chased out had been the latest in a long line of stalkers. Chifuyu had heard so many slurs, insults, and poor pick-up lines in her time, that she didn't even acknowledge them anymore.

She had heard it all before.

Having sensed that, her group of stalkers had organized and communicated with each other and had started changing up their tactics.

They had had a strategy meeting.

Rather than continuing to use trashy one-liners on her that went nowhere, they instead started crafting far more outrageous, outlandish lines, hoping that Chifuyu would show some sort of reaction to them other than the cold indifference she usually displayed. They were going for shock value, hoping that she would remember them in some capacity regardless of whether or not they left a terrible impression. Because even earning her hatred was better than facing her wall of indifference.

Chifuyu was determined to make this tactic fail.

As usual, she hadn't even looked at any of them, let alone said anything. She had long since given up on speaking to her stalkers or dishing out threats toward them. Nothing she had ever said to any of them had ever made a difference, so she had become a wall instead. Immovable. She just carried on with her life as if her stalkers weren't there, and if any of them were stupid enough to try and close in on her then they would find themselves in a world of agony on the ground moments later.

These men were so unworthy of life in her view that they needed to be completely purged from the world in every extent possible. Since she couldn't kill them directly, the best she could do is wipe all memory of their existence from her mind. She'd feel dirty otherwise.

So that's what she did. Chifuyu was determined, now, to never remember any of them.

Ichika's spider made that so much easier to do. Chifuyu hadn't needed to lift a finger. The spider on her shoulder had handled everything.

Ichika's 'plan' was way more effective than Chifuyu had anticipated and it completely changed the game. Rather than having to constantly put up with this ceaseless, sustained perversion from practically every man she ever came across, she could just carry this spider around with her. A single, 2-or-so-pound creature and the problem was completely solved. Like a miracle cure for a disease that had plagued her ever since she was a child.

Now, normally, she didn't like accepting help from other people. It made her feel indebted to them and there was always a lingering expectation to repay them somehow. But if it meant solving this problem of her's that her monstrous strength and intimidation tactics had thus far failed against, then she was willing to try it.

It also helped a lot that Ichika was the one helping. Chifuyu knew all about how he felt self-conscious about all the times he had needed her help with various things in the past, and how he had always been looking for a way to pay her back for it all somehow. So Chifuyu figured that this was a win-win situation. By accepting her brother's help with this, she could also help him in exchange by easing that unnecessary guilt that he had.

Once again, Chifuyu had no idea how to sit him down and explain to him how he didn't need to pay her back for any of what she had done for him in the past. She wanted to do this…but talking about stuff like that was not her forte by any means. She didn't know how to. It was just easier to handle the problem indirectly like this, in her mind. That way, everything she did could be denied if she were ever asked about it.

Chifuyu took another sip of her coffee and let out a sigh as the effects finally started kicking in.

The purpose of her trip to this bar was pretty straightforward. Lure a couple of her stalkers in and get them to start spreading the word to the other stalkers about the dinner-plate-sized spider that she was carrying around with her now.

Chifuyu had wanted to test how effective a deterrent the little creature would be, so she had decided to spend a few minutes of her time finding out. All she had to do was walk into a public place and then a bunch of fat, greasy stalkers had followed her inside moments later, like clockwork. They constantly kept track of her location and always had someone tailing her when they could get away with it, after all. But Chifuyu could take advantage of that. She had taken advantage of that.

Now the word was going to spread because of how organized they were. So all she had to do now is see if the number of stalkers she met reduced.

Chifuyu let out another sigh before paying the stunned bartender―who had just watched all of these events unfold―for the coffee and headed out.

Unfortunately, she couldn't drink anything with actual alcohol in it today. It was a school day, and she had brats to look after. So she'd have to wait until the evening for that.

Chifuyu walked up the steps of the Academy.

The spider leaped off her shoulder and took off down the street.

...This was another reason why Chifuyu didn't mind accepting her brother's help. Whenever he made a plan to assist her, he always worked out all the details in such a way as to minimize the amount of effort that she had to put in.

She didn't have to feed the spider or take care of it. It would take off on its own whenever she didn't need it, and it took care of itself.

It almost felt like it could read her mind. When someone was bothering her, it'd start moving around to scare them off. When nobody was bothering her, it'd hide. Either in her bag, her clothes, or even in a nearby corner or enclave.

The thing was fast when it wanted to be. So she didn't even have to wait for the thing to catch up whenever she decided to go somewhere. It'd just bolt after her. And then when she returned to the Academy and had no use for it anymore, it'd jump off her shoulder and take off down the street somewhere.

It was smart. And it understood when it was needed, and when it wasn't. So she didn't have to kill or shoo it away upon entering the school.

Ichika's plans were designed to be as convenient as possible for her specifically, probably to ensure that she would agree to them more easily. In the end, that was the main reason why she had accepted his silly proposal.

Chifuyu walked into the control room.

Today was the day of her brother's duel with Cecelia. It would take place in just a few minutes. She didn't show it on her face, but she was very curious about how well Ichika would do in it.

Walking up to the window, she looked down into the hangar bay and spotted her brother talking with his friend Houki. Chifuyu couldn't hear them through the glass, but she was pretty sure she understood what they'd be talking about at a time like this.

Chifuyu glanced to her right a moment later and met the gaze of her assistant, Ms. Yamada. She nodded once at her, giving the signal to begin.

Ms. Yamada turned on the PA system and started speaking. She explained to Ichika everything that he needed to know. How the fight would progress, how it would be won or lost, what Cecelia's IS looked like, its specs, and finally, Ichika's personal IS was revealed.

The Byakushiki.

After a quick explanation on how to set it up, Chifuyu watched as Ichika got himself into the pilot seat, and readied himself for the match that was about to begin.

In the hangar bay

Ichika tilted his head side to side a few times, feeling a couple of satisfying pops in his neck.

As it turned out, there wasn't a whole lot that Houki had been able to teach him. She had gone through all the basics over the past week, but nothing that Ichika hadn't learned already in those 5 seconds where he had memorized the whole textbook. But it would have been suspicious if he suddenly showed off all of that knowledge immediately, so he had needed to use Houki as an excuse. Whenever he pulled off some complicated shit now, he could just point at her and say he had a good teacher if anyone asked how he had gotten so skilled so quickly.

He'd probably need to make use of that convenient excuse today, too. Because he did not plan on losing no matter how complex the battle was going to get or how much skill he was going to need to demonstrate in order to win. Important people were attending this match in the VIP booths above the stands, and Ichika was not about to embarrass his sister in front of them by being a terrible pilot.

Anything less than a total, decisive victory was unacceptable.

Ichika activated his machine and just like was mentioned in the textbook, all of the sensory information from it was immediately beamed into his head. His IS greatly expanded his field of view and all of his senses, and frankly, it blew his mind. He had experienced it once before back during the qualifying match he had needed to undertake to get into the school in the first place, but he hadn't had the time to really explore what these machines could do back then. So he hadn't internalized how magical the piece of technology was.

He didn't like it.

It was an abomination to the laws of nature and an insult to the entire domain of physics as a whole. These dumb machines never should have worked in the first place and he was pretty sure he could prove, on the back of a napkin with nothing but a few, simple, physics calculations, that they can't work in reality. That they're impossible to build even in principle and that the whole idea was flawed from the get-go. They violated thermodynamics, conservation of mass and energy, and every other law of physics known to man.

Yet somehow, they worked.

'Tabane Shinonono is a witch that needs to be burnt at the stake for this.'

For heresy and the practice of black magic. She was violating the universe with these monstrosities and none of what she did was real science.

Ichika had told her this once before to her face, too. Because it was true.

Tabane, in response, had cried about it and called him a 'meanie'. Then she had ranted about how her 'Tabane science' was superior.

One day, he was going to do it. Someone had to. Tabane Shinonono desperately needed someone to set her mind right because she was batshit crazy and barely hanging on. She either needed to be removed from the world completely for her own good or she needed to get a boyfriend (or a girlfriend) that would really step up and lay into her, daily. A wonderful, generous individual that would either beat or screw the crazy right out of her skull every time it cropped up, and keep that witch in line with nothing held back.

'She needs to be collared, leashed, and fucking trained.'

For the good of the human race. Because that witch was going to blow up the world one day if nobody intervened and if no one else was going to stop it, he'd have to do it himself.

Ichika tested the controls on his suit for a few moments and frowned.

'...What the fuck is happening here?'

"Are you ready, Orimura?" Ms. Yamada suddenly asked over the intercom, cutting off Ichika's thoughts.

"...Yup."

He wasn't.

"The machine isn't giving you any trouble?" she asked. "Everything is working correctly?"

"Of course."

It wasn't.

"A-are you sure?"

"Yes," Ichika confirmed. "It's my personal IS, after all. Nothing could possibly be wrong about it. It's absolutely perfect and there's nothing you need to worry about. Everything is working just swimmingly. Swimmingly, I tell you."

He hated his machine and everything about it sucked.

'IS's suck, and the controls to get them to move suck,' Ichika thought to himself.

He hated this school and everything about it.

'Class representatives suck. Duels suck. Life sucks. Cecelia sucks. Tabane sucks. Britain sucks. Blondes suck. And Blue Tears is a stupid name. So is Cecelia, and so is Byakushiki.'

"T-that's great to hear!" Ms. Yamada cheerfully replied. "It looks like you're all set, then! W-when you are ready, you may meet Ms. Alcott in the arena!"

"Sounds good," Ichika replied. "Toodle-oo, then, ladies."

"G-good luck," Houki called after him.

Ichika flew into the arena.

"What a slimy piece of dog shit," Ichika finally revealed his true thoughts aloud, complaining the very second he was out the hangar door where nobody could hear him.

He was pissed.

He had spent a significant portion of his life playing video games of all kinds, including plenty of games based around the IS suit. Those things had been such an Earth-shattering invention that they had long ago bled into all the most popular video games throughout the world. And since he had speedrun many of these IS-based games, Ichika was somewhat used to moving machines like these around incredibly quickly, and in quirky, bizarre ways. Virtual IS machines, anyway.

It was different in real life, though, piloting a suit. It was much more complicated, but the core principles he had picked up in his video games should have still applied.

They didn't. His real-world IS just wasn't moving properly.

It had taken Ichika about 10 seconds for him to fully figure out the controls. They were way more advanced than the games he used to play, but he was Ichika Orimura―the greatest gamer in the world. And he had adapted to them very quickly. So the problem wasn't on his end.

It was his IS. The machine just sucked donkey dick through and through. That was his professional opinion on the matter.

After coming to this inescapable conclusion, Ichika felt a surge of anger coming from…somewhere.

...It took him a few moments to figure that one out.

It had come from his machine, somehow.

"What the hell?" he said with a raised eyebrow. "This thing has feelings?"

Ichika could feel the feelings it felt, too.

Now that he thought about it, he had read something about that in the textbook. But he had dismissed it as nonsense, thinking that the author was just one of those hippy, New Age nutjobs that thought everything had feelings. Like rocks and crystals and other shit like that.

But nope. Apparently not. Ichika had just felt his machine get angry at him, specifically for identifying the species of animal whose schlong it liked to wrap its lips around.

'Why would it get mad about that?' Ichika thought to himself, confused.

"It's the truth," Ichika said, with absolute conviction.

It was completely undeniable, too.

His IS got even angrier. It was very frustrated with his current train of thought, and also for calling it 'Slimy' earlier. It really didn't like that he had called it that.

"In fact, forget Byakushiki," Ichika declared. "Your new name henceforth is Slimy. As your pilot, I am your god and my decree is law. You have no say in the matter."

His machine was furious.

'Donkey Siphon would also be an acceptable name for you.'

The Byakushiki didn't like this name either, by the way. In case that wasn't clear. It had a name already and it very much wanted him to use it.

Weirdly, however, his machine disliked 'Slimy' more. Ichika would have thought that the opposite would be true, but no. His machine disliked both names he had suggested, but it thought 'Slimy' was the worse of the two.

His IS wasn't thinking straight.

In any case, since Ichika's IS didn't like 'Slimy', that was the final name he decided to give it. It was also very appropriate for what his machine was doing.

There was a reason he was mad at it, after all.

"Stop shifting around, Slimy!" Ichika roared at it.

It was infuriating! His IS kept on messing around with the control sensitivity!

His IS had started with a base set of controls. Ichika had gotten used to those controls almost instantly. But then his IS changed them around and fucked with them, and Ichika had had to adapt all over again.

He was pretty sure he knew what was going on, but it pissed him off a great deal nonetheless. The IS suit was designed to try to adapt to the user. But this was contrary to all of Ichika's professional gaming experience. He thought that this was exactly ass-backwards. The pilot should be the one adapting to the machine, not the other way around, and he had gone into this with that mentality.

Ichika had always learned how to use the default controls of every single video game he had ever played, and how to exploit those controls with astonishing precision. He routinely made movements so precise in his games that if the sensitivity of his controls was altered by even a single percent, it'd throw him way off. So when his IS 'adapted' to try and make it easier to pilot, in reality, it was throwing off all of Ichika's attempts to get it to do what he wanted.

And that made it Slimy.

"Get your ass in gear, Slimy, or we're gonna lose! And if that happens it'll be your fault! Stop being a try-hard! All you have to do is nothing! So stop...doing shit! I will handle everything!"

It was a whore. Slimy kept on fucking with every single control, sensor, and line of programming that it could find in its systems. It just...went down the line of them. One-by-one like a cheap, under-the-table hooker at a sleazy bar. The changes it made were subtle and they probably would have been imperceptible to another pilot, but to Ichika, they were a huge deal.

'Don't make me come in there!' Ichika shouted at the machine inside his head.

Slimy was just begging for him to come inside and beat its ass into submission.

According to the textbook, IS users with a personal unit could communicate with their machine in a sort of 'Inner World'. Only the most advanced pilots could do this, however, and the machine and the user had to have extremely high compatibility with each other to get it to work.

This was another passage that Ichika had originally written off as New Age drivel, but after what he had seen so far, he knew that it was probably true after all in a literal sense.

Ichika vowed to himself in that moment that he would figure out how to do it too if he had to. He would 'communicate' with his IS so hard if it kept acting up like this.

After finally making it to the center of the arena, Cecelia suddenly called out to him, interrupting the mental lashing Ichika was giving his machine's backside.

"This is your last chance!" Cecelia warned, in a disgustingly haughty tone.

Ichika decided right then and there that he was going to completely wreck the girl in front of the whole school. There would be no mercy. He was not in the mood for her bullshit right now.

...He didn't reply to her, though. He knew that ignoring her would piss her off far more than any insult or clever comeback would, so he did that instead.

He was right.

"Stop ignoring me, commoner!"

Once again, Ichika didn't reply. He didn't even acknowledge her. His full attention was instead glued to the screen full of information that his IS was providing him.

While his IS was a piece of shit, it was still competent enough to provide him with a basic interface, thankfully.

"That's it, you stupid ape! I'm going to humiliate you in front of everyone here!"'

Cecelia continued ranting but Ichika refused to react to any of it. Even when she insulted him directly and started talking shit, he kept a facade of uncaring laziness on his face. His actions alone would prove to the world who was right, in the end, and he knew that. So instead, he focused on the countdown in the upper-left corner of his screen.

It slowly ticked its way closer and closer to zero and the match would begin when that happened.

So he waited.

Excited cheering was going on in the stands. Cecelia continued to shout obscenities at him for not giving a 'proper lady' like her the respect she deserved.

If you asked him, this 'proper lady' deserved nothing more than the back of his hand and his boot planting her face-first into the mud.

'That'd set her straight.'

The 'Caveman DNA' was strong in him, Ichika knew. If some stupid asshole or some dumb bitch started acting up in his presence, he'd get this screaming urge to violently shut them down. Man or woman, it didn't matter. He had to actively take steps every single day to suppress it.

But Cecelia was a once-in-a-generation, ultimate expert, at getting Ichika to bring that side of him out and she just would not stop talking.

It was a lost cause, in this case. Ichika wasn't going to be able to hold himself back here, he knew. Cecelia was like a newborn infant that just wouldn't stop screaming.

He wanted to kill it with fire so that he could bring that blissful, euphoric silence back.

"...Still got nothing to say?!" Cecelia continued. "What are you deaf, too?! And stupid?!"

Things were going to get messy if this girl didn't shut up. Because Ichika's eyes were whispering things to him again. And he was listening. Cecelia was insufferable and someone needed to knock her down from that pedestal she thought she was on. At this point, Ichika almost felt like it was his duty to do that. He'd be doing the world a public service.

The timer continued to tick down.

Every second was agony. He needed this timer to hit zero already so he could show this bitch her place in the world.

...Because she was still talking. Talking shit about how trash men were, how uncultured Japan was, and how Ichika should be kissing the ground beneath her feet because that was where a stupid ape like him belonged, apparently.

'Keep talking. I dare you.'

She just kept on digging that hole. Deeper and deeper.

She just kept on screaming. Louder and louder.

Ichika had never actually been in a situation like this before. Every single time someone had pissed him off like this in the past, he had handed them their ass on a silver platter two seconds later.

...But he couldn't do that here. He had to show restraint. He couldn't attack yet, not until the timer expired because he'd be disqualified and lose the match if he did. That was the only thing saving this girl right now.

He had no choice but to bear with it. So this surge of unbelievable fury that Cecelia was stoking within him just...built up. It had nowhere to go.

The pressure mounted.

Ichika still refused to speak and just allowed Cecelia's words to wash over him. He knew that she was trying to goad him into getting angry. It was working wonders, too. But dammit, Ichika was going to ensure that he was the one in control of the battle, not her. He would not be manipulated like that and he was going to win this battle as optimally and as efficiently as possible.

He was not the berserker type, after all. So Cecelia's plan was going to backfire on her. When Ichika got angry, he didn't mindlessly flail around in a rage and make mistakes like most other people did. Instead, he tended to get incredibly quiet and he'd focus it all down like a laser. It brought tremendous clarity of thought and made him far, far more dangerous than usual. It made him more accurate, more precise and far more willing to find extreme solutions to simple problems.

None of those things boded well for his opponent right now.

Cecelia was a simple problem. He was sure he could defeat her conventionally. It would probably be a little tricky because she was skilled enough to become a representative candidate, but Ichika was confident he could do it.

He wasn't going to fight her conventionally, though. Not now. Not anymore. Not when he was feeling like this.

He was going to destroy her.

He had fallen into the same mindset that he always did when he was speedrunning a video game. He had a goal. Victory. And now there was an NPC in his way.

That NPC was about to have a bad day.

Ten seconds.

Then five.

Then three.

He could currently see everything around him, simultaneously. All 360 degrees of it. This was due to his IS beaming a bunch of information into his head. His senses had literally merged with his machine's and he could experience the world around him with far more lucidity than ever before.

That wasn't unique to just his IS. All IS's did that, and so all IS pilots experienced the same phenomenon whenever they were at the wheel of one of these machines.

But Ichika had something up his sleeve that truly was unique to him.

What would happen if he activated his eye ability while he was inside his IS with all of his enhanced senses?

That's what Cecelia was about to face off against. An Ichika at 100%, holding nothing back.

He'd ruin her.

As far as he could tell, this was like bringing a minigun to a kendo match. Pissed off like he was, Ichika didn't care.

The timer finally, after an eternity, hit zero.

Ichika smiled in utter relief. He let go of all the pressure that had been building and allowed it to explode.

A horn-like sound blared marking the start of the match.

Ichika closed his eyelids and flashed his ability. He put in exactly zero effort into holding himself back after that. Because Cecelia deserved everything she was going to get.

AN: Have a nice day!