The Nuclear Option

by LeviTamm

Orimura Ichika discovered at a young age that he was a little bit... different from the other children. It had been a total accident. A fluke. And due to the way he discovered this, he almost felt as if he had cheated God. Fearing what his sister would do if she found out, he kept his mouth shut about it, and told no one... Then he learned he could pilot an IS. Minor AU.

8. Chapter 8: A New World Record

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

Discord: A3dTszc

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

---

Oh my god, man. What a marathon this was.

I double dog dare you to read this whole chapter. I'm willing to bet 90% of you will get lost and give up in the forest of mechanic explanations below.

I actually kinda did myself. Some of it still isn't worded in a way I like, but I've been endlessly editing and editing and editing and I think I just kinda want to move on now. The main ideas are all there, there might just be some awkward phrasing and repeats. I'll probably edit some stuff later anyway.

I am well aware that this chapter violates many rules on how to write a good chapter that appeals to lots of readers, so for all of those trying to inform me of how 'Akshually, Levi, you shouldn't write chapters that are this full of complicated mechanic explanations and exposition…' just save your breath.

I know, you know, and I don't care. This chapter is ridiculously over-the-top on purpose. So is this story. It's literally the intent. The overly wordy nature of this chapter is a meme.

Feel free to skim the parts you don't want to read. You won't offend me if you do. The detail is there only for those who are interested.

---

The instant he flashed his eyes, Ichika knew that he had made a mistake. It was a small mistake, granted, but it still annoyed him that he had made it at all as it immediately limited his options. Testing out how his eye ability interacted with his IS for the first time during an important match had been a bad idea and he knew he would be paying for it later.

With that said, however, he had no intention of paying for that mistake right now. It was a problem for future Ichika to deal with and he refused to allow it to cause him to lose.

…But the pain was immense. It was so strong that he only had a handful of seconds before he'd pass out from it. That left him in a bit of a dilemma. If he deactivated the ability immediately, he'd be able to cut his losses and walk it off as if nothing happened. However, he'd be battling a migraine all throughout the rest of the match and that would be incredibly aggravating. He'd still win of course, but it'd drag out into a slugfest and that wasn't what he wanted.

Part of his goal was to make a statement here. He didn't want this battle to drag out. If it did, it'd almost…legitimize his opponent. It'd make it seem like they were close to evenly matched and that Cecelia was actually a pretty decent pilot and that all her boasting and self-aggrandizing had a basis to it. That was unacceptable and so he decided against this approach.

He wanted to shut Cecelia down so completely here that there was zero room for debate about the outcome, and for that, he needed to go with his other idea.

He already had his eye ability active, so he'd keep it active for the rest of the fight. He'd use their new, enhanced powers to win as quickly as humanly possible, before he passed out, and then he'd just deal with the fact that it would feel like he had pepper sprayed himself afterwards.

It would take around 3 seconds by his estimations to pass out from the level of pain he was currently experiencing, so he had to win within that time frame.

He had no intentions of passing out. That would have been way too cliché. To avoid that however, he had no choice but to keep a little extra time left over as a cushion which, now that he thought about it, shortened his window a little further.

It was actually closer to two and a half seconds.

Winning an IS match that quickly had never been done before. Hell, such a goal probably sounded impossible even in principle to a regular person. Cecelia was hovering more than a hundred meters away after all and her IS was in pristine condition. IS's could barely close that distance in 2.5 seconds when pushed to the absolute limit, so how could anyone possibly win a battle like this in such an aggressive timeframe?

It turned out that there was a way. There were actually a couple of different winning strategies that he could think of. All of them were quite technical and involved however, and he was pretty sure that only he could pull any of them off.

One should not underestimate the sheer amount of computation power he had at his disposal when he was in this state. His eyes were a total game changer. He didn't just have them active right now, but all of the incredible benefits that they provided were being multiplied by his IS's hypersensor. He was thinking and processing information on the same sorts of timescales as actual computers right now. Time had effectively frozen from his perspective, so he had more than enough time to calculate a solution.

Three seconds was an eternity.

---

Cecelia had her eyes closed and she was in the middle of a haughty-toned explanation for why she would win the match. In this slow-motion world, however, to Ichika, it looked like she was standing still.

Everything was silent. All sounds had their frequencies dropped to the point that Ichika couldn't hear them anymore.

After taking a fraction of a second to analyze everything in his environment, he got to work, his mind firing on all cylinders.

He would defeat Cecelia before she opened her eyes again.

Ichika had no doubts that what he was about to do would attract a ton of unwanted attention but he didn't care. The sheer satisfaction he'd get by absolutely wrecking some dumb blonde bitch like Cecelia was way too good to pass up.

He wasn't about to fight Cecelia in a standard, back and forth IS match. That would imply that there was a chance he'd lose.

Ichika Orimura doesn't lose.

Ever.

He won at everything all the time and he'd prove it once and for all right here and now.

…There were just a few, annoying little hurdles to get over before he could do that.

The first one was his underperforming IS machine. A 2.5 second victory was going to require ultimate precision, but his machine's AI was fucking around with his controls to such an extent that he couldn't rely on them. As a result, to win this match in the way he needed to, he had to go without any assistance whatsoever from it. In fact, it wasn't just without assistance from his AI, but he'd have to actively work against it and treat it as another enemy.

Thankfully, he didn't require its help. He had all the tools he needed to win without it.

---

In speedrunning, there was something known as a tool-assisted speedrun. A TAS for short. Essentially, a TAS was a speedrun of a game that was performed by a computer. The creator of the TAS would advance through the game frame by frame and they would create a program that would tell the computer exactly when to press each button.

Then they would press play when they were done and the sequence of inputs would be executed.

They were perfect speedruns in theory, limited only by the TASer's game knowledge. No other mistakes would appear in them because nobody was actually playing the game while the TAS was executing. Instead, a robot was in control, and robots were perfect.

The idea behind the creation of a TAS was to create an ultimately precise, theoretically perfect speedrun by which all others could be measured.

Depending on the complexity of all the tricks and the overall length of the speedrun, a TAS could take weeks to make. Sometimes months. But when it was finished, every single frame of gameplay would have been perfectly planned out and optimized to the point that no human could ever replicate it in real time.

Naturally, it would be cheating to try and pass one of these things off on the speedrun leaderboards of a game as a real run. But most people didn't create a TAS in an attempt to cheat. They did it to try and see what the theoretically lowest time possible was so that the speedrunning community at large could compare their own times to it and learn where the floor was. They were an attempt to understand how far the game could be pushed based on currently-understood game mechanics and exploits.

Ichika intended to create one. Right now. A TAS. Reality itself was going to be his game and the laws of physics and the properties of his IS were his exploitable game mechanics.

There were two things that allowed this to be possible.

The first was that he intended to win this match so quickly that there wasn't going to be enough time for the current situation to destabilize. Cecelia was hovering perfectly still, and she would remain perfectly still by the time he delivered his final attack. She simply was not in a mindset right now that allowed her to perceive him as a threat, and so Ichika was going to be attacking a stationary target. That was key.

If Cecelia had actually decided to take him seriously right from the start and knew about the imminent threat that he posed―taking immediate action by chaotically flying in a random direction to pre-emptively dodge what was coming―Ichika's TAS idea wouldn't work on her because he'd have no idea where she'd be.

He had to know exactly where to aim for this to work. In this case, however, he did know, so this wasn't an issue. Cecelia wasn't about to pre-emptively leap out of the way like that. And to be fair to her, no reasonable person would. Nobody knew about what his eyes could do, after all. If they did know, then they'd take immediate steps to counter them.

But, no. Cecelia was just going to sit there. And 3 seconds wasn't enough time for her to change her mind about that. The attack was going to come far too quickly, long before she had any time to react to it.

This meant that Ichika had perfect knowledge of where everything in his environment was going to be over the next 3 seconds or so. Constructing a TAS was therefore possible in theory, provided that he also found a way to move his IS around with TAS-like speed and precision.

That was the second thing that allowed him to do this, by the way. He had a method to do exactly that.

Ichika's eyes granted him perfect, robotic control over all aspects of his body when they were active. This meant that, unlike regular human beings, his movements were perfect. With his eyes active, he could keyframe his every action and plan out exactly how his body would move with any degree of precision that he wanted.

He made no mistakes when he was in this state. Well, his body didn't, anyway. He could still mess up if he planned his movements incorrectly or if he approached a situation with the wrong strategy, or if his opponent was just overall stronger and faster than he was and could outspeed his perfect movements, but his body would perfectly follow all of the input commands he gave it without any of the sloppiness or imprecision that regular humans had to deal with.

His body was functioning as a video-game controller where the same inputs always produced the same outputs and his eyes allowed him to input commands on that controller with TAS-like speed and precision. And crucially, since his IS read his body's movements in order to move around, he could extend the infinite precision of his body to his machine by leveraging this concept.

…In theory.

The problem with this, however, was his machine's AI. It was 100% going to fuck everything up. It would try to 'interpret' his perfect movements and all sorts of errors would creep in since it didn't know what it was doing. It would make changes to his inputs. That's why Ichika had to find a way to get around his AI. If he took any action that required it, it would step in―drunkenly―and mess everything up.

Removing his AI from the equation was the first thing he planned to do. By leveraging the unbelievable precision granted to him by his eyes, he didn't actually need it for anything anyway. He could take over all the tasks it normally did and perform them all himself.

He had not been idle at this academy. As a self-proclaimed computer nerd, one of the very first things he had done upon getting his hands on some IS technology was poke around inside to see how some of it worked.

This hadn't been difficult to do. In fact, students at this school were encouraged to do this in their own time and there was a vast support structure in place to help them out. There were all sorts of labs and facilities scattered around the campus where dummy machines were set up to allow students to get some hands on experience with the software they'd be interacting with throughout their time at the academy. All Ichika had done was take things a little bit further than a student his age should have been able to.

In the textbook he had memorized, there had been two sections near the back―one on IS maintenance, and the other on troubleshooting―that had proved invaluable. Both sections dealt extensively with the system console―the command line―and he had spent a few hours experimenting with it in one of the labs Houki had shown him during her lessons.

He hadn't wanted to step inside one of these crazy machines again without having a basic understanding of some of what was going on under the hood, so he had taken the time to memorize a bunch of different system commands.

All of them, actually.

That knowledge, as it turned out, was all he needed to create a workaround to his 'drunken AI' problem.

The method was rather simple. Rather than relying on the standard control system, where his machine's AI would read his mind and body motions and try to translate them into movements of the IS frame itself, he would instead make his machine move just like any other programmable robot. There would be no interpretation and his AI would not be involved because there were functions he could execute in the command line just like in any other typical operating system and he'd be using those instead.

By running the RotateLeftArm() function in the console for example―along with a series of parameters representing that arm's new intended orientation as well as the speed of the motion―the left arm of the machine would rotate to that new position at the stated speed.

Since an arm was so mechanically complicated, there were dozens of other functions that controlled all the different parts of it, too. There was a function to fold the arm at the elbow by a specified amount, and one to move each of the fingers along each of the different axes, etc. There were dozens of functions mapped to just the movements of the left arm alone, and with them, it was possible to move the limb in any way imaginable.

Any arbitrary movement of the arm of an IS could be broken down into a series of precisely timed function calls and this idea extended to every other part of the machine, too.

This was his answer. These function calls, in combination with the power of his eyes, granted him absolute control over his IS.

It did, however, come with its own set of problems.

For starters, trying to move an IS around like this by manually executing these system commands one at a time was terribly inefficient. That's why nobody else did it, after all. Trying to instruct your machine's arm to move a particular way using numbers and function calls was so much slower and more difficult than just…moving the arm and having the onboard AI read your intentions. Computers were necessary in order to handle these sorts of complicated calculations, after all. Human minds just didn't work anywhere near fast enough and they weren't properly structured to handle that sort of math-heavy information processing on their own.

That's why the brain interface between the pilot and the AI existed in the first place. It was the whole point of it, in fact. To divide the workload, allowing the pilot to do what they did best―coming up with battle strategies and tactics―and the AI to do what it did best―all the brute force computation to allow those battle strategies to manifest.

This concept―executing all of these commands line-by-line straight into the console―was actually how IS's worked at a fundamental level. That's all that was happening under the hood. It's just that the AI was responsible for that, not the pilot.

The AI would read their pilot's mind, interpret their intended movements, translate them into thousands of precisely timed function calls, and then stream them into the console in real time. The operating system would then handle the rest and the machine would move accordingly.

Despite appearances, no part of an IS was controlled by the physical strength of the pilot. The mech suit was just way too large and cumbersome for an ordinary human body to manipulate the limbs with their own muscles. So a pilot's body worked more like a controller. The AI would look at the movements that a pilot made with their body and guide the mech suit to mimic them, and it was so fast at doing this that it appeared instantaneous.

IS's took advantage of a gimmick in the way human brains worked.

When you hooked up a person to a brain scanner and told them to do something―whether it was to pick something up off a table, or to move a limb, or to do pretty much anything else―you could actually see the moment that person decides to perform the task in the charts. Their brainwaves would spike, indicating that they had just decided to pick up the object, and then a few moments later, the person would move.

There was a delay between the decision and the action. This delay wasn't very big of course―it was often on the scale of milliseconds―but computers were fast enough to see it and react.

It was this delay that allowed IS machines to coordinate with their pilot's movements so seamlessly. The IS knew what the pilot was going to do a few moments before they actually did it, allowing it to stay a step ahead of the plan and do all the complicated processing in advance. It was ever-so-slightly precognitive, which gave the illusion of instant feedback when an IS pilot moved their machine around. The machine moved with the pilot so that they wouldn't feel any weight or resistance.

The brain interface was an extremely powerful tool and it was one of the foundational components of the IS.

But to Ichika, it was useless. It was too imprecise. There was too much interpretation going on and an IS had to be familiar with their pilot's brain patterns first to be able to do it with any kind of accuracy. That's why they got better over time.

Ichika didn't have that time, though. He just got his IS. But he had to win right now. That meant that in order to achieve the kind of control he needed, he had to do all of this processing himself, mentally, in real-time, without his AI screwing things up as it so liked to do.

His eyes granted him more than enough computation power and precision to do this job.

Other people did not have the ability to do this. Well…unless there were others out there with similar eye powers as him, anyway. But regular people couldn't even dream of doing something like this. It required way too much mental arithmetic.

In any case, this idea got him over his first hurdle. His underperforming, sloppy AI that was screwing around with his controls could be entirely bypassed by accessing the console himself and personally ordering the machine to move how he wanted using thousands of function calls that he himself would plan out, organize, and execute.

This would eliminate the only remaining source of error and would allow him to ascend into the realms of computer perfection, granting him perfect, TAS-like movements with his machine.

This did leave a couple of questions remaining, however.

How was this even possible to do?

This self-appointed task he was saddling himself with was absolutely staggering in its scope. Getting his IS to throw even a basic punch using nothing but these manually executed function calls would take thousands of lines of code, especially if he needed to get precise about it―which he would very much need to do. Even during a movement as simple as throwing a punch, there were all kinds of leg movements, torso rotations, and complicated arm mechanics to preserve the momentum of the swing that he would need his machine to emulate and that would require tremendous amounts of math, and a hell of a lot of coding.

All of that for one motion.

…And then he would need to repeat that effort for every other movement in the battle.

Was it even possible to do that? Wasn't there just too much calculation required? IS battles―even ones as short as this one was going to be―consisted of hundreds of movements, attacks and counterattacks. He'd probably be looking at millions of function calls at least by the end.

Wasn't that just too much to handle?

There were two reasons why the answer to this question was an unambiguous: 'no'.

The first reason was that he intended to end this battle within 2.5 seconds, win or lose. This dramatically reduced the total amount of processing he'd need to do. He only needed to be in full control of the machine for that tiny period of time and upon actually doing the math, he knew that this was feasible. Things would only get out of hand in terms of the number of lines of code if he allowed the fight to drag―which wouldn't happen because if he allowed it to, he'd simply pass out.

There was no situation in which he'd be controlling his IS like this for an extended period. He'd either win in 2.5 seconds, or he'd pass out in 3. So the total amount of function calls he'd have to manually execute was capped at however many he could squeeze into that interval, and that was a manageable number. You could actually calculate it pretty easily if you wanted to by multiplying the internal clock speed of his IS by 2.5 seconds.

That was a huge number, by the way. More than large enough for his purposes.

…In any case, he didn't need to concern himself with anything that happened later than that because win or lose, the match would be over by then. So the total number of lines of code was far lower than one would at first expect due to this time restriction.

The second reason why the answer to that question was: 'no', was that keeping track of so much information in real-time was exactly what his eye ability allowed him to do. That was its specialty. Ichika could plan everything out inside his head practically instantly. With his ability active, he could have his entire assault against Cecelia deconstructed into hundreds of thousands of precisely timed function calls and have them all queued up and ready to go in fractions of a second―just like creating a TAS on a computer.

The only real problem he had to overcome was output.

Because sure, he could create a perfect, optimized TAS of his assault against Cecelia inside his head at lightning speed, but that didn't mean anything if he couldn't type those commands into the console quickly enough.

If there were not a way to get around this issue as well, his whole plan would have fallen apart right there. Because he was going to need to do an astronomical amount of typing.

…But there was a way to do it.

It was just a simple setting, actually. It probably hadn't been designed to be anything more than a basic quality of life improvement for IS pilots that were in combat. It certainly hadn't been intended to be anything game-breaking or exploitable.

But that's how all the best exploits in video games started―as simple settings, features, and game mechanics that the game developers simply hadn't fully grasped the implications of on launch. This was very much the same sort of situation.

There was a simple setting on every IS that did thought-to-text conversion when it was enabled. The program had been designed to allow IS pilots to make notes and send texts to each other while they were in combat and didn't feel like having―or were incapable of having―a video call.

It was just like speech-to-text on smartphones. Only…you know. Without the speech. It basically just transcribed everything that that voice inside your head would say.

However, there was an unintended side-effect to this setting that Ichika was uniquely capable of exploiting.

When thought-to-text was switched on, there wasn't an upper bound on information transmission speed like there was with something like speech-to-text.

People could only speak so fast. If they went any faster, their words would start to jumble and become unintelligible. Understandability would plummet.

This wasn't true when it came to thoughts. People could think way faster than they could speak and this setting could potentially allow you to exploit that.

For most people, this difference wasn't big enough to matter. They could maybe type 2 or 3 times faster than normal if they decided to turn this setting on and type with their minds, but that was about it.

For Ichika, however, when his eyes were active, the processing speeds he could reach inside his head were absurd. He was more than fast enough to match his machine's AI, even. He could probably go even faster than it when he went all out.

The only catch, of course, was that he could only think at those speeds for a handful of seconds at most. After that, if he hadn't won the battle by then, he'd lose it. His brain would get fried and he'd pass out. So this ability could only be used in short bursts.

But those handful of seconds were more than enough time. His perception of time had been accelerated by somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10,000 times.

When you did the math, that meant he experienced approximately 3 hours per second.

He had all the time in the world to plan out his assault.

---

It was jarring having time slowed down so much.

The extreme degree of pain he was experiencing had lessened dramatically. In fact, he could barely feel it at all. Nerve signals just weren't quick enough to give him the full picture when his mind was accelerated like this.

However, for a brief moment right as his ability had been activating, he had felt the full brunt of it, so he knew that his body was suffering quite extensively right now, even if he couldn't feel it.

…And from his prior experience with eye-ability-induced-migraines, he could estimate how bad that pain was compared to previous incidents. That's how he had been able to come up with his '3-seconds-before-unconsciousness' prediction, after all. On previous occasions back when he had first been learning to control this ability, when he had suffered a similar degree of pain from his eyes due to overuse, it had taken about that long for him to pass out. So he could compare his current situation to those ones.

It was especially weird this time, though. Everything was way more intense.

The sheer magnitude of the time acceleration this time completely fractured his sense of touch and pain from the rest of his conscious experience. If someone poked him right now, it would take a ridiculously long amount of time for him to feel it due to how slow his body's nerves functioned compared to how fast his mind was racing.

On top of that, he couldn't move his body at all. It was as if he was frozen in time and everything around him had crystallized. From his perspective, it would take close to an hour to even throw a punch. Even shifting his eyes from left to right to focus on something that he wasn't already looking at would take ages―though, this wasn't actually a problem with his IS's ability to give him 360 degree vision. He didn't have to turn his head to focus on something behind him. He could see everything simultaneously.

But the point remained. While his mind had accelerated, his body had not. His muscles, nerves, and biological functions were all operating at normal speed―which felt like extreme slow motion while he was in this accelerated state.

Now, these weird effects were not entirely new to him―he had been using his eyes extensively ever since he first unlocked them all those years ago. They allowed him to accelerate his mind even without an IS. But when he was inside one, everything was dialled up to 11. Even for him, it was shocking to see just how slow time was moving right now. It was orders of magnitude slower than his base ability because of his machine's Hypersensor.

He was frozen in place.

…But this inability to move didn't matter at all. The real beauty of his strategy was that he didn't need to move his body to pull it off. He wasn't using the brain interface, so he didn't need to move his arms and legs to get the machine to move. He only needed access to the console and thought-to-text conversion―neither of which required him to move his body.

The machine would be the one moving and his body would get dragged along for the ride.

With the console and thought-to-text, he could now completely solve his output problem.

…And that output problem was the final piece he needed to achieve perfect control of his IS, finally eliminating the first obstacle on his path to victory.

Only the first obstacle, though. There were definitely more of them to contend with. Perfect IS control and TAS-like movements weren't enough to win the match on their own―not under the 3 second time restriction anyway.

Obstacle number 2 was arguably even trickier to deal with. The laws of physics themselves.

Three seconds probably just seemed like too little time, at first glance. While Ichika's enhanced brain could handle such speeds, the real world couldn't. An IS just couldn't cross a hundred meters from rest and win a fight in such a short time even if Ichika had godly control over it and if his mind was working more than 10,000 times faster than normal. It was simply beyond the physical capabilities of any IS. The laws of physics wouldn't allow one of them to move that fast.

But this problem, as it happened, had a solution as well.

An IS actually could reach those speeds. They were only too slow when you tried to move them around non-destructively and when you lacked creativity.

But by sacrificing vehicle durability, you could get higher―albeit temporary―performance boosts. And so long as he was careful and controlled the process, it was possible to win before his IS broke apart completely.

It only had to last 2.5 seconds.

He had looked up all the relevant information in advance. In order to win an IS match, it didn't actually matter how many pieces your machine was in at the end or how badly damaged it was. There was no minimum state that it needed to be in mentioned anywhere in the rules. You just had to have at least a single shield point left. So Ichika could get away with tearing his own machine apart completely so long as the core functions related to the power system and the shields remained at the end of the battle―and even they only needed to be in-tact for just long enough for him to be declared the winner. They could literally crap out right after.

So he didn't need the limbs. And he didn't need the chassis. And he didn't need any of the safety features. And he didn't need any of the onboard equipment or practically any of the other systems.

He only needed the absolute bare minimum, and because of that, sacrificing everything else became a possibility worth consideration.

His thrusters weren't powerful enough on their own, so he could get rid of them, too. Trying to use them to get to the speeds required was like trying to get to orbit by driving really fast in a sports car. They were just completely different realms of speed.

He had to cross this distance fast. So fast that not even IS technology could withstand the forces involved on their own. Not while remaining intact, anyway. His IS would, without question, be destroyed by the end of this fight. But as long as he controlled his machine's self-destruction―precisely disassembling it in a controlled way like a spaceship on its way to orbit, each piece sacrificing itself to do its job―he could leave just enough pieces left over at the end, and for just long enough, to be declared the winner.

If he wasn't going to use the thrusters, though, then how was he going to move?

There was only one way to achieve the speeds he required.

Kinetic energy manipulation.

He needed to tap into some of that crazy rabbit's black magic voodoo.

---

Every IS had a system on it called the Passive Inertia Controller. The PIC for short. Basically, a PIC was designed to protect the pilot from the extreme maneuvers that IS machines were capable of.

If you rammed your IS into something at an extremely high speed, for example, the PIC would kick in and nullify the impact forces and protect you from any damage.

There were a couple of important details to take note of for how this process actually worked, however.

For starters, the PIC didn't work on the entire machine. It only worked on the pilot.

Upon ramming into a wall at super-high speed, your IS could very well take some serious damage. But the pilot wouldn't, as the PIC would create an 'inertia bubble' around them that cancelled out the G-forces.

That bubble wasn't big enough to protect the entire IS―that would have been too energy-intensive. It was only just barely large enough to contain the human inside.

As an aside, this system, while incredibly powerful, was absolutely absurd. It openly violated so much about physics that it genuinely pissed him off when he thought about it too much. Ichika had no understanding whatsoever behind how this 'inertia cancelling' nonsense actually worked at a fundamental, physical level and he was pretty sure that nobody else did either. The textbook sure hadn't mentioned anything about it.

But what he did know was how to exploit the hell out of it.

He knew a fair amount about physics. So he knew perfectly well that acceleration and deceleration were the same things. Whether you were coming to a sudden stop, or whether you were rocketing forwards from a state of rest, the same amount of force was exerted upon you so long as your speed changed by the same amount in the same time frame in both cases. The two situations were effectively the same, only differing in their respective frames of reference.

Slamming into a wall, and the wall slamming into you were equivalent scenarios from a physics perspective.

What this meant was that the PIC's ability to cancel out all of the force acting upon a pilot instantaneously meant that it had to be able to apply an equal and opposite amount of it instantaneously. Otherwise, nothing would stop the pilot from slamming into the wall and turning into a spray of chunky salsa. To eliminate the impact forces, the PIC had to be able to produce forces of its own that were just as strong as the ones the pilot experienced, just in the reverse direction.

That led him to the core revelation. The PIC was able to invert the process under the right circumstances.

If he could find a way to trick his machine into thinking that he already had a tremendous amount of speed built up and that he had just slammed into a wall when he hadn't, and was actually hovering perfectly still, his PIC would think: 'Holy Shit! I need to protect him from all that force right away!' and then it would expend a tremendous amount of energy to do it.

It would attempt to cancel out all the forces that it believed he was experiencing, and it would use as much energy as it required in order to do it.

That second part was key.

There was no upper bound in terms of energy expenditure on this system. That was by design, too. It's not like you'd want to have an IS that would say: "You hit the wall too hard and your velocity changed too much, too quickly, so I'm not even gonna try to protect you."

It wouldn't give up. It would do everything it could to keep the pilot alive no matter how extreme the forces involved. It would only fail to do so if the impact was so unbelievably extreme that all of the energy inside the IS was used instantaneously and it still wasn't enough.

This was an extremely important detail and it was what made his entire plan possible.

IS thrusters had an upper bound on them. They had a top speed and they could only use a set amount of energy per second. A pathetic amount if you asked him.

PIC's, however, did not have this limitation. They were only limited by the total energy they had access to. They had the ability to use as much energy as they felt they needed on any timescale. If the PIC judged that it needed to use all of the energy inside the IS in a nanosecond to save the pilot from a crazy powerful impact, then it would do it. It would steal all the energy from all the other systems within the IS if that's what it took.

The IS shields also had the ability to do this. If any high-energy attack tried to puncture through the shields and hit the pilot, the shields would draw as much energy as required to ensure the pilot's survival.

The PIC and the shields were the two highest priority systems and so they were designed to have no energy rate limitations. They were the only two IS systems with this property and together they made up the Absolute Defence system to protect the pilot by any means necessary.

But this was completely exploitable.

For example, if you did the math and calculated the speed you'd need to hit a wall for the PIC to use all the energy contained within your IS to save your life―an absolutely ludicrous speed, of course―and if you found a way to trick your machine into thinking you were already moving at that speed and that you had just hit a wall, the PIC would respond accordingly. It would use the calculated amount of energy to ensure you experienced no impact forces and that you remained in the pilot's seat and that you weren't ejected from the machine.

…But since you would actually just be standing still at the time, this sudden force would launch you instead.

Why would it launch you?

It was a bit tricky to explain. But in order to understand how this worked, it was best to try and imagine what would happen if the PIC wasn't there.

If the PIC wasn't there and your IS crashed into the wall at a super high speed, you'd pretty much splatter due to your body slamming forwards into either the wall itself, or into the interior of your IS frame.

This was true even if the IS didn't hit anything at all and if it just suddenly came to a stop by other means. Even if you didn't hit anything, massive decelerations like those would kill you under normal circumstances. There was simply no way to bring a human being down from such incredible speeds to 0 in such a short amount of time without killing them. The laws of physics wouldn't allow it.

…But the PIC allowed the laws of physics to be suspended.

The PIC generated a bubble-like field around the pilot that Ichika still didn't fully understand the mechanics of, admittedly, but to his understanding, it changed the properties of space within its confines.

Within this PIC induced field, force propagation doesn't occur in the way it does in regular space. The laws of physics themselves were somehow different inside this field.

In regular space, experiencing massive deceleration puts a tremendous strain on you. But in this PIC field, you don't feel anything.

The surface of this bubble―the PIC field―has a very strange property. No external force can act upon it to change its speed or momentum. So, if this bubble crashes into a wall for example, it will quite literally keep going at a constant speed through that wall, blowing it apart. And it will not slow down or change direction when it does this.

However, it still requires energy to maintain. This PIC field may have openly violated the laws of physics, but it still seemed to follow basic energy conservation laws. It could somehow translate outside forces that should otherwise act upon it to change its motion into a raw energy expenditure. So upon slamming into a wall, rather than slowing down, this bubble would 'pay off' the energy cost by expending its internal energy in some unknown process that allowed it to maintain its speed and direction.

When you are inside one of these bubbles, you are pretty much a god. You can plow through anything and everything so long as your PIC has enough internal energy remaining to offset all the external forces.

Once you run out of this energy, however, then that field shuts down and you are no longer protected.

This concept raised a ton of questions back when he first heard about it.

The PIC field is always active for starters. If this bubble that the pilot is stuck inside can't have its speed, kinetic energy, or its momentum changed by any external means, then how can IS machines move in anything other than straight lines at constant speeds?

What happens when you turn in your IS? Shouldn't the bubble want to keep going on its original, straight line trajectory? That's what the standard laws of motion would suggest, anyway.

This is where the real wacky hijinks start.

The bubble can't have its motion changed by anything external to it, but it does have the ability to move itself. Once again, it does this by expending its own internal energy in another unknown process that only Tabane understood.

IS machines can technically be thought of as two separate pieces. The outside frame, and the PIC field that the frame is built around―the bubble.

Now, the really weird part about this setup is that both of these pieces move independently from each other. They are not attached in any way and they use different propulsion systems to get around. They are two distinct pieces, and it's only due to crazy amounts of computation that both of these pieces remain perfectly synchronized.

These two pieces are like two planes flying through the air at an airshow, flying at exactly the same speeds, one right next to the other, and perfectly synchronizing their moves so that they always stay in the same relative positions from each other.

It should be so easy for these two pieces to separate but they don't. They can't. And they can't for a very good reason.

If the PIC field on the inside were to ever somehow crash into the external IS frame, for example, it would plow straight through it and tear apart the IS because nothing external can stop a PIC field from moving, frame included.

This, however, can never happen for two important reasons.

The first reason is that the PIC field always does everything in its power to remain at the exact center of the IS frame. If the field starts to drift even the slightest amount, it immediately expends energy to correct itself. And since this PIC field is 'sticky', the pilot is trapped inside it when it's turned on. So when the field moves, the pilot's body is forced to move, too. So as long as the PIC has enough energy remaining and everything is working correctly, the surface of the bubble can never collide with the external IS frame and so this problem never arises.

But even if the PIC field could somehow drift away from the exact center of the frame and de-synchronize its movements from it, all of the components that generate this PIC field exist outside that field. The field was not self-sustaining and so it could only exist inside those very specific―and narrow―confines established by those outside components.

The bubble can only exist inside the frame of the IS, and more specifically, within the confines of the PIC field generators. So there is a range of effectiveness. If the field ever drifts too far from the center of the IS frame, it will leave its containment, destabilize and collapse. It will deactivate, and it would do so before coming into contact with the external frame where it would otherwise cause those collision problems.

This is how the PIC protects the pilot from all impacts. It side-steps the problem. The laws of physics could not be allowed to jerk a human being around at those sorts of speeds, so a new type of space, different than regular space, has to be created with new properties that don't allow force propagation, and that space has to surround the pilot in a bubble, and the strange properties of that bubble have to be responsible for jerking the pilot's body around because it can do so without causing any kinds of impact or shock forces that would otherwise be lethal.

The bubble would expend as much energy as required to keep the pilot at the dead center of their machine at all times where they would be safely tucked away within the range of the PIC field generators―the only place the bubble can exist―immune to all impact forces even as the external frame is beaten around and thrown all over the place.

It was a bit of a strange concept to wrap your head around, he'd admit. When the external frame hits a wall and has its speed changed against its will, the PIC field basically freaks out and expends a bunch of energy to ensure that it always stays inside the machine. Because otherwise, the bubble would just keep going while the rest of the machine suddenly stops. Then the bubble would leave the PIC field generators behind―because they were attached to the frame, the thing stopped by the wall―causing the bubble to leave its containment, collapse, and leave the pilot unprotected.

The pilot would then slam into the interior of their IS and die.

That was why the synchronization between the bubble and the external frame was so important. The bubble had to know exactly where it needed to be at all times and it could only roam within the narrow confines of the PIC field generators.

The mechanics behind it are weird, as the bubble is not attached to the PIC field generators that create it in any way.

After being generated, the bubble is locked in place where it is and can only receive instructions on how to move itself. If the IS frame―and therefore the PIC field generators―move somewhere else, the bubble will still sit there where it was originally created unless it is instructed to move as well, and this was the single most counterintuitive concept about this whole setup.

It would be like sitting on an airplane as it's taking off and immediately destroying your seat and everything behind it with your back because the plane can't move you from your exact positional coordinates for some reason. So it destroys itself as it moves around you. It would be like being an indestructible, immovable object, that destroys everything that touches you. You would have to run at the same speed as the plane just to stand still in the cabin.

Physics just doesn't work like that.

But that's how the bubble works. And it's the weirdest thing because it doesn't make any sense.

You'd think that because the PIC field generators are creating it, that when those generators move, the bubble should automatically move with it. But it doesn't. It remains in the exact position it was originally created unless it is instructed to move too.

It was just so weird and nonsensical, but that was pretty much how the system worked and why the bubble and the frame had to be so synchronized in their movements. Because otherwise, they wouldn't be able to protect the pilot.

This mechanism, however, was also the exact reason why the PIC was able to launch him.

For the PIC field to know where it needed to put the pilot, it had to know where the frame of the IS was and how fast it was moving. The PIC would then copy those values and expend all the energy necessary to position both itself, and the pilot in just the right spot.

But these values for the IS frame's current speed and position were just variables existing somewhere inside the database of the IS computer. It was therefore possible, in theory, to dig through the code and find them. So if he found a way to change those variables somehow, he could trick the PIC into believing that the frame of the IS was moving at a different speed than it really was and cause a de-sync between them as a result. He could make the PIC think the external frame was moving really, really quickly, and so, in a panic, the PIC would race to increase the bubble's speed to match those insane values in an attempt to ensure he stayed in the pilot seat.

It'd launch him, because the PIC would be attempting to match his body's speed and position to where it thought the rest of his machine was.

That was the core principle behind the 'PIC launch', a technique of his own creation.

Using it, he could potentially go from 0 to mach 10 in less than a millisecond. Perhaps even faster. His top speed would depend entirely on whatever fake data he came up with to fool his machine and how much IS energy he was willing to expend.

Since there was no upper limit on this process, his top speed was only limited by the total energy in his machine, completely unlike when he was moving around with the thrusters.

This was what he meant by kinetic energy manipulation. He was converting internal IS energy into kinetic energy by exploiting the PIC. This allowed him to effectively weaponize this safety feature.

It also came with the added bonus of completely shitting all over Tabane Shinonono's intentions when she originally developed this system.

Because a PIC was not intended to be used like this whatsoever, and Tabane would be very upset if she learned he was using one in this way. She didn't like it when he found weird, unintended uses for her gimmicky inventions. As a result, Ichika went out of his way to find as many as possible. This was just another example. Her tears and angry shouting made him happy.

'Witch.'

That rabbit bitch deserved it.

In any case, this amazingly perfect plan of his raised a couple of immediate questions. The foremost of which was probably: 'Why don't other people exploit this same oversight with the PIC?'

Well, there were two main reasons.

The first was that it was just too difficult and impractical. Precisely manipulating your own speed like this with the PIC had to be done through the console directly and you had to do all the calculations yourself.

You first had to trick your machine into thinking the IS frame was moving at a different speed than it really was. That couldn't even be done while the AI was active. That AI was way too smart to be fooled like that. So you had to first deactivate your machine's AI by putting your IS into standby mode. Only then would you be able to fuck around with it to the required degree.

But here was the kicker. Nobody could fight when their machine was in standby mode.

Well…nobody but him.

'Standby mode' was the state you needed to put your IS into whenever you were performing maintenance on it or modifying the equipment, or updating the software, or doing anything else that typically required the use of a lab. It was the only way to deactivate the safety features. If you tried to make changes to your machine without putting it into this state first, the AI would interfere with whatever you were trying to do because it'd register your attempted modifications as damage. So it had to be turned off first.

Without the AI, though, an IS couldn't do anything. While the brain interface was still operational in that state, the AI wasn't, so nothing would be interpreting your body's movements and translating them into movements of your frame.

In other words, you can't move.

The only thing you can do when your IS is in that state is use console commands. For normal people, anything combat-related was completely out of the question like that. It'd be like trying to play a modern, first-person shooter using nothing but your operating system's command prompt instead of a game controller. It was just completely unnatural and nobody could type that fast.

But people like Ichika with special eye powers were an exception. With the assistance of thought-to-text, he could absolutely type that fast.

In any case, that's why nobody else ever tried anything like this. Nobody else had the mental agility of a supercomputer. Only he did. But even he had limits and could only sustain an effort like this for a couple of seconds. Given that, what hope would anyone else have?

Ichika would likely be the first person to ever even attempt something like this. He was probably the first person to even imagine that it was possible to get an IS to fight and do useful things while it was in standby mode.

If that wasn't enough of a deterrent, then there was still the second reason why nobody else ever tried anything like this and it was even more of a barrier.

If you didn't know exactly what you were doing…you'd literally rip yourself in half and kill yourself by messing around with the PIC like that.

Why would this happen, you might ask?

Well…think about it. The PIC field only contained the pilot. Not the frame. Ordinarily, when you crashed into something at high speed with your IS, this wasn't an issue because whatever you crashed into would do all the work in stopping your IS's external frame from moving. The wall would stop it. The PIC didn't need to help with that.

But when you did this exploit―tricking your machine into thinking that the frame was suddenly coming to a stop when it wasn't―well, the PIC would try to stop you but not your machine. Your PIC would think that your machine had already been stopped and that it just needed to match your body's speed and position to it.

That meant that you would be the thing that gets its velocity suddenly altered while your machine would stay behind. Because…you know. It wasn't actually crashing into anything.

The respective positions and velocities of the pilot and the IS frame would then separate. And that would cause all kinds of problems of the 'chunky salsa' variety. Wherever the PIC tried to put you, the rest of the IS wouldn't be there. That would pretty much obliterate you if it happened.

The components that generated the PIC field were mounted on the frame of the IS and were therefore not within the boundary of the PIC field itself, so these components would go wherever the external frame would go. But the PIC field itself would want to go in a different direction. So at some critical moment, the PIC field would leave its containment and collapse, and it'd collapse just in time for your unprotected body to slam into the inside of your machine at mach speeds.

If there were not a way to get around this, then this too would have stopped his plan in its tracks.

…But there was a way. He had yet another trick up his sleeve.

In order to understand the trick, it was important to first understand that in order to PIC-launch himself forwards, his PIC had to believe his machine's external frame was moving backwards.

If his PIC believed he was moving at crazy fast speeds backwards, away from Cecelia, and if it thought his machine suddenly slammed into something and stopped on a dime, in order to keep him in the pilot's seat, the PIC would have no choice but to exert a tremendous force on him in the opposite direction, towards Cecelia.

The same held true the other way around. If he wanted to 'PIC launch' himself backwards, the PIC had to believe his machine had been moving forwards when it slammed into a wall.

With that out of the way, Ichika now needed a way to prevent the launch from killing him on the spot in the way he described.

To prevent his body from slamming and pulverizing itself on the interior surface of his IS during the PIC-launch, the IS frame simply couldn't be there. The front of the mech suit had to have an opening for him to eject through.

As to why ejecting was such a great idea and why his plan required it…he'd get into that later. First, he just needed a method to pull it off.

Luckily, IS's had the ability to break physics in yet another way. They had the ability to manipulate their own mass.

Personal IS machines had the ability to enter something known as a closed form. When this happened, the machine disappeared and somehow compressed itself into an item of some kind―an earring, or a bracelet in his case.

But somehow, when this happened, all the mass vanished. It just…noped out of the universe. Somehow.

Where did it go? Who the fuck knew. But it sure wasn't there anymore. Whatever item the multi-tonne IS turned into would weigh less than a pound. Often much less.

But the real interesting aspect of this was that you didn't have to compress the entire IS at once. You could leave certain components active and vanish others. Similarly, when the IS was in closed form, you could activate certain components and leave the rest disabled. That was known as a partial deployment and it was the next concept that allowed his plan to work.

Ordinarily, partial deployment was used on specific pieces of equipment or items. When an IS was in closed form, you could 'partially deploy' a weapon, for example, and make use of it without the rest of the IS appearing.

However, it was possible to take this idea one step further.

You did not technically have to specify an object to partially deploy. It was far more computationally intensive and it couldn't be done by ordinary people without eye powers, but you could actually select a region of the IS instead and partially deploy that.

IS's were, at their very base, nanomachine swarms. They were not solid chunks of metal. They were dynamic swarms of nanomachines that came together to create what only looked like solid pieces of metal. But every single nanomachine in these swarms had their own instructions and commands to follow and it was only through emergent behaviour that they collectively functioned as solid mech suits.

These swarms could technically create anything. The same technology that was used to get these nanomachines to create a mech suit, was the same technology that allowed them to create any other object. You could make something random like a water tower out of an IS swarm. Or a main battle tank. Or a toaster. Or a jet fighter. These swarms had the potential to create any physical structure you could imagine.

…IS's just weren't currently designed to do such a thing.

The reason why they weren't, though, was a complicated mess. It had to do with the fact that there wasn't just one type of nanomachine in these swarms. They were whole ecosystems and each of these different types of nanomachines had complicated interactions with each other. There was also no way to convert one type of nanomachine into another, so you had to set the IS up in advance with the proper ratios of the different types to create whatever it was that you wanted.

So while these nanomachine swarms could theoretically create anything, you had to pick what you wanted them to create in advance. If you set the IS up to create a toaster when it was deployed, it would always create a toaster. To convert it into an IS that turned into a car, you had to completely rebuild it from the ground up with a different set of nanomachines and only Tabane had the ability to do this.

While Ichika himself had quite a bit of knowledge on nanomachines, even he would not be able to do this. Mainly because his own nanomachines obeyed the laws of physics and were understandable while Tabane's were magical bullshit and nobody knew how they worked.

It pissed him off. That rabbit bitch Tabane was practically a sorcerer with some of the bullshit she could pull off.

Ichika thought it was so annoying how there were people like her out there who had these ridiculous magical superpowers to help them out in their daily life.

It was so unfair for everyone else.

In any case, the reason why IS machines weren't all-in-one atomic 3d printers was because of that. And the reason why Tabane had used her nanomachines to create a mech suit instead of anything else was that the IS in its current form factor was the most optimal thing you could create with those nanomachines for essentially any purpose. It was already the world's best weapon and it couldn't be made into anything stronger. Any weapon that was better than an IS would itself be an IS. It was the peak of the tech tree in terms of firepower and since they were humanoid vehicles, they were very intuitive to control, too. So why make anything else?

Well…that's what an uncreative, naive person like Tabane probably thought, anyway. She constantly failed to grasp the implications of her own technology and couldn't imagine just how useful it could be when used in other, non-military applications.

Once he figured out how they worked and stole all her technology, he had so many ideas on what he could do with them.

Unfortunately, such things were all beyond his reach for the moment.

But that didn't mean he was totally helpless when it came to manipulating these swarms. Because what wasn't out of his control was an IS swarm's shape. His current IS was set up to always create the Byakushiki and there was no way for him to change that without talking to Tabane and having her rebuild the whole thing. But that didn't mean he couldn't work with the swarm he already had. His swarm contained all the building materials needed to create the Byakushiki, but he could control what shape that swarm of materials would be in through what Ichika referred to as arbitrary partial deployment.

That was when you didn't turn your nanomachine swarm into a completely new object, but rather, you rearranged the materials you already had. It was when you selected individual nanomachines within your swarm, one at a time, and gave them different instructions than the ones they usually received.

Nothing physical was changing when you did this. He was still using the same ratios of the different types of nanomachines. He was just changing where they all went. Just like how the atoms in a sheet of steel could be 'rearranged' into a cylinder. They were still the same atoms at the end of the day.

The problem, however, was that there were hundreds of quadrillions of nanomachines in each IS swarm. So it was completely impractical to individually instruct every single one of them at once. Ichika was limited by the complexity of the task and so he could not stray too far away from the standard shape of the Byakushiki when he made his changes. He'd need an extremely powerful supercomputer to pull anything more than that off and probably weeks worth of processing time. IS's were already designed with a specific form in mind so all the nanomachines knew exactly where to go by default. They'd all have to be individually reprogrammed to do anything else.

Not even Ichika with his eye powers could handle that much processing. Not even close, in fact.

But he could do a lot more than an ordinary person could. Enough to overcome the next obstacle in his plan.

With some rapid 3d modelling, he could 'partially deploy' a region rather than a piece of equipment. For example, he could materialize his IS with a big hole in the front of the chassis if he wanted to. And that hole could be in any shape he wanted. All he'd have to do is create a 3d model and select the region of nanomachines that he didn't want to deploy and deactivate them. The system would register that as a partial deployment if he did it right.

Of course, it was extremely difficult to do this and it required a ton of programming. IS's weren't designed to have this sort of pinpoint precise redeployment capability. They were designed to be easy to use instead so partial deployments typically only involved the pilot picking a 'thing' to partially deploy. And then that thing would appear. Rapidly creating 3d models and getting super precise about what parts appear and what parts don't is just way too computationally intensive for anyone else to manage on the fly.

But in any case, using this method, he could now create his ejection hole. He could order the nanomachines that made up the front part of his machine to vanish and get the hell out of the way. That way, when he launched himself with the PIC, he'd eject himself through the hole and would avoid being obliterated when the PIC field collapsed.

For completeness sake, there was one last thing to mention about PIC launches and how they worked. It was another small detail that just barely allowed them to be possible.

This small detail had to do with the manner in which the PIC field would accelerate his body during the launch.

Essentially, PIC launches were only just barely possible to perform. Due to the way the collision avoidance system worked between the external IS frame and the surface of the PIC field, the PIC field was at all times located in the dead center of the frame. If it ever strayed too far away, it would either expend energy to correct itself, or it would leave its containment and collapse. But at the same time, PIC launches required the PIC field to move in a different direction and at a different speed than the rest of the IS, seemingly contradicting that.

This was because there was a tiny bit of wiggle room and that was where all the magic happened. When he caused a de-sync between the external frame and the PIC field during the PIC launch, the PIC field really would collapse, leaving him unprotected.

However, it did not collapse instantaneously. It took a couple of milliseconds for the field to break down completely and during that time, the field will have already accelerated his body up to whatever insane speeds he was intending to work at.

That's why it worked. His acceleration was so high during the moment of the launch that he could go from 0 to insanity in the fraction of a second that it took for the PIC field to collapse. By the time it finally did, he will have reached whatever speed he needed.

The margins on this were, however, razor thin.

Barely possible.

In any case, he now had a way to make an ejection hole and a way to eject at ridiculous speeds.

But of course, while that solved one set of problems, it immediately created another set of them.

Once he left the protection of the PIC field and his body flew out of the ejection hole he created in the external frame of his machine, he'd find himself outside his IS, moving at hypersonic speeds, unprotected.

The instant he touched any air molecules his entire body would turn into that black stuff you see on a slice of toast when you leave it in the toaster too long.

So naturally, he needed a way to avoid this as well.

The solution to this problem was quite involved and required many steps.

Since air resistance would fry him at the speeds he was planning on launching at, there simply couldn't be any air. So the first step in the solution of this problem involved performing the PIC launch in a vacuum.

Creating a pretty decent vacuum with an IS was actually surprisingly easy. You could do it with the shields. All you had to do was concentrate the entire area of the shield on a single point and then expand that point in all directions like an inflating balloon ensuring that no gaps appeared in the surface at any moment. That would push all the air out of the way and leave none inside either, assuming you did it right.

Of course, such control over the shields was only possible with his eye ability as well, and even more 3d modelling, but that was beside the point. He had the ability to do it.

It was fine if the vacuum wasn't perfect, too. It just had to be good enough to stop him from burning up for a short period of time.

It wouldn't completely solve the problem on its own, though. The shield would only enclose a small region of space, after all, and at the speeds he'd be going after the launch, he'd run out of space within that vacuum and would collide with the surface of his own shields next.

That was problem number 1.

Problem number 2 was the fact he'd be exposing himself to a total vacuum without any protection. Vacuums and human bodies did not tend to get along with each other.

…However, this wasn't actually much of an issue at all in this case because he'd only be exposed to that vacuum for a tiny period of time―far too small to do any real damage to his body. People could survive a couple of seconds in a complete vacuum while experiencing only minor injuries. It was only as the time period started exceeding 5 or 10 seconds that it started to get serious.

Everything would be happening so quickly here, however, that Ichika probably wouldn't feel anything more than a slight ache as his exposure time would be measured in milliseconds.

In any case, problem number 2 was so minor he could ignore it. So really, there was only the one major problem he needed to solve at this step of the process. Running out of room within the shield enclosed vacuum due to his tremendous speed from the launch.

At this point, a pretty important question needed to be answered. Why was he even ejecting out of his own IS in the first place?

How was that helpful? Was it even allowed in an IS match?

Ejecting was not allowed in an IS match. There was a rule that stated in pretty clear and direct language that it was illegal. However, what he was doing wasn't technically an ejection because there was a loophole in the wording of that rule. As long as the pilot remained protected within the confines of their shields, they didn't technically have to be in the pilot seat. This rule was to accommodate some of the stranger IS transformations and abilities out there in which the pilot had to move positions within their machine.

Basically, the rules didn't care where the pilot was, only that they remained protected from anything dangerous at all times. So it was technically legal to eject so long as he remained within the bubble of his shield at all times.

That just left the other question. How was ejecting going to help?

Once he PIC launched himself, he would find himself rocketing his way towards Cecelia without his machine. And since his shield generator was located on that machine, he would eventually―almost immediately, actually―leave the effective range of his shields and be disqualified for violating that rule.

This was another thing that should have stopped his plan in its tracks.

But he had another trick.

He basically needed a way to bring his machine with him after he launched himself out of it with the PIC. He needed to drag it with him into his new ultra-high speed reference frame and get back inside it.

And that is where the next layer of whacky, physics-destroying shit started to happen.

Before the PIC launched his body too far away from his machine, he could simply put it into closed form. The entire machine would then vanish and reappear as a bracelet on his arm.

Then, because it would be strapped to his body, it would then inherit all of his insane momentum.

But then he could just…reactivate the machine.

Byakushiki would then reappear around him. And crucially, it would then be travelling at the same speed he was.

That was the strategy. He called it frame dragging. Pulling a stationary IS into a new, high speed reference frame by strategically deactivating it and putting it in closed form precisely as you whip past it at ridiculous speeds, and then redeploying it a moment later.

It was a casual violation of the laws of physics and the conservation of energy. In fact, Ichika was pretty sure it was possible to create free energy and perpetual motion machines by exploiting this idea because he wouldn't slow down at all upon pulling this maneuver. When you did the energy calculation here, you would find that a bunch of extra kinetic energy would come out of nowhere. The mass of the machine would accelerate and match his speed without requiring any energy input.

But that was for future Ichika to figure out.

To be fair, this strategy was a little bit more complicated than it first seemed. For starters, the timing on the deactivation and reactivation of his IS needed to be perfect. If he was too slow, his body would pierce the bubble of his shield and he'd kill himself before his machine reappeared. At the same time, it took a little bit of time for those nanomachines to compress and redeploy themselves. So there was a limit to how fast he could do this.

The window was so narrow that it was nearly impossible to pull this off at all. And it actually put an upper limit on how fast he could launch himself with the PIC in the first place. If he was too fast, he wouldn't be able to vanish and redeploy his machine fast enough to do it before he left the vacuum contained within his shields.

However, with some admittedly janky 3d modelling, it was possible to shape his shields not into a sphere, but rather, an elongated tube granting him just that little bit of extra room to make this strategy possible―like one of those elongated balloons that clowns make balloon animals with. If he shaped the shield vacuum into a tube like that, he'd have more time before he reached the edge and that made all the difference.

So, in summary, his plan went like this: he'd begin by putting his machine into standby mode and accessing the system console. Then he'd use his shield to create an elongated tube, enclosing himself in a vacuum. At the same time, he'd trick his machine into thinking he was moving unbelievably quickly in reverse and that he had just slammed into a wall, stopping him on a dime. The PIC would then respond, launching him forwards.

Since the PIC field would be travelling in a different direction than the rest of the IS, it would leave its containment a moment later and collapse, but not before imparting all the speed upon him that he needed.

At that point, he would eject himself through the hole at the front of his suit that he would have had to make in advance and then immediately put his machine into closed form a fraction of a second after he left his pilot's seat. The machine would then compress and snap itself onto his wrist so long as he wasn't too far away from it yet. That required careful timing but it was possible to do it under the guidance of his eyes.

He couldn't put his entire machine into closed form though. He'd have to leave the shield generator behind. If he didn't, his shields would deactivate. This was because of the fact that any component of an IS that was compressed in closed form could not function. IS components had to be materialized to work. So if his shield generator was compressed, it would no longer protect him, causing him to violate that safety rule and forfeit the match. As a result, he had to leave it behind.

But that came with its own set of problems. For starters, it basically required him to split his IS frame in two. He'd have to separate the shield generator and all the components required to allow the shield generator to function from the rest of the machine. He then had to somehow leave the shield generator behind while he launched himself and everything else with the PIC.

That shield generator he was leaving behind would then just…sit there, in the open air, with all of its electronics left unprotected.

And that didn't even mention the fact that if he left his shield generator behind while he PIC launched himself, he would very quickly leave the range of those shields and, once again, break that safety rule.

He had to solve both of those problems next for his plan to work.

This probably seemed like an impossible task at first glance. If he left behind the shield generator while he PIC launched him with the rest of the machine, it would literally just fall out of the sky under the influence of gravity, dropping like a stone.

However…on the sorts of timescales he would be working at, this would take a very long time. He only needed the shield generator to remain active for a fraction of a second in total while he launched himself, put the rest of his machine into closed form, and then reactivated it. As long as it lasted until then, he would have enough time to set up his next trick and continue the fight.

This was just barely possible to do. But he had done the math and had seen the specs of his machine. The shield generator would remain operational for just long enough as it was falling from the sky, deactivating, and breaking apart so long as he flooded it with a little burst of energy right beforehand.

It'd continue running for no longer than one second under those circumstances in the most optimistic case―more than enough time to suit his needs.

…But then it would keep falling and eventually crash into the ground, broken, unusable, and completely inaccessible to him. When that happened, if he didn't have another trick up his sleeve, he'd eventually just launch himself outside his shields and find himself completely unprotected once more, in violation of that safety rule.

That's where his next trick came in, though. He only needed to use the shield generator he left behind a single time.

Because he could make another one.

Thanks to a fortunate design decision by Tabane Shinonono, he could get another copy of his shield generator before his tremendous speed carried him out of the clown balloon vacuum bubble.

IS machines had spare parts.

Well…sort of. What was actually happening was that even when an IS was fully deployed, it still had extra nanomachines that remained undeployed in a sort of reserve. So you never actually saw an entire IS at any one moment. There was always a little bit left compressed in closed form. The purpose of this extra reserve of nanomachines was to provide the materials necessary to either repair critical damage to the machine or to allow the machine to transform into first or second shift.

It was the IS equivalent of having a spare tire in the trunk of your car.

And conveniently, since the shield generator was one of the most critical systems on an IS, there were enough nanomachines in this reserve pool to either repair it, or to create an entirely new copy should the need ever arise.

So by taking advantage of this redundancy, by the time he left the elongated clown balloon vacuum, he'd have another shield generator ready to go on his machine.

He'd then pierce through the other end of the vacuum bubble fully protected with a second shield and with all his built up speed, allowing him to avoid any rule violations.

That concluded the acceleration phase of his attack―going from zero speed to hypersonic without violating any rules or getting himself killed. That was Phase 1.

From that point forward, however, there were 2 more phases. Travelling the rest of the distance towards Cecelia, and the actual attack itself.

---

Phase 2 was much simpler than Phase 1. Since he would have already perfectly adjusted his trajectory in Phase 1 with the PIC launch, he wouldn't need to make many more angle adjustments. Non-uniform air resistance would cause some perturbations, but he would be closing the distance to his target so quickly that there just wouldn't be enough time for those deviations to become significant. By using the thrusters as attitude control, he could undo all of these small disturbances in his trajectory and remain locked onto his target with minimal effort.

In addition, Cecelia would be a stationary target. That made everything so much easier. He could mostly just allow himself to be carried forwards by his momentum.

The only things he had to keep in mind in this phase of the attack were the conservation of his shield points, and surviving against the superheated plasma that he'd be ramming into with his ludicrous speed.

But once again, these were solvable problems.

On the heating front, if he chose to do nothing and simply allowed his shields to take the brunt of the effects…he would lose a decent amount of shield points.

He wouldn't lose a ton of them, just a decent amount. While the atmosphere at this altitude was about as thick as it could get on this planet, and while he would be moving at speeds in excess of mach 10, he just wouldn't be moving at those speeds for long enough for it to matter―only about 30 milliseconds or so, in fact, to cover the complete distance to Cecelia.

So realistically, doing nothing about this heating problem was a possibility worth exploring.

…But he quickly rejected it. It was just an unnecessary concession when there was clearly a better way to handle the issue.

Instead, with some rapid 3d modelling, he could literally create his own heat shield by sacrificing some material from the chassis of his IS. This would spare his remaining shield points, however, it would come at the cost of damaging his IS frame. A good number of his finite pool of nanomachines would be burnt to a crisp if he decided to do this. But by allowing them to melt and ablate away, they would take the heat with them and that would prevent any of it from reaching the surface of his shields, sparing some points―points he could then allocate to other things such as a faster PIC launch, or a stronger attack against Cecelia.

To create this heatshield, all he'd have to do is the same thing he came up with earlier when creating his ejection hole during the PIC launch. He'd send new commands to a set of nanomachines in his IS frame and order them to basically leap in front of him in the shape of his heat shield. They would sacrifice themselves and some holes would open up in his suit due to the missing material, but none of that really mattered. He had already committed to completely destroying his IS anyway.

That would take him all the way up to the moment he struck Cecelia―Phase 3.

---

Computationally speaking, Phase 3 was by far the most difficult to handle. The actual attack wasn't so bad―it was actually relatively straightforward. He wasn't really planning on landing an attack on her so much as he would be ramming into her with all his built up speed.

In phase 2 of his attack, he will have already needed to create a heatshield out of nanomachines to spare his shield points from the friction of the air during the split second he would be exposed to it. But by continuously adding material to that heatshield, he could gradually turn it into a more elongated, conical shape, which would allow that heatshield to serve a secondary purpose.

He'd gradually mould that heat shield into what was essentially the tip of a railgun projectile, and that tip would act as a crumple zone at the moment of impact―much like the crumple zones that existed in the front end of passenger vehicles everywhere.

That was the most energy efficient approach he could come up with to defeat Cecelia. It was in fact, one of the only approaches that allowed him to save the required amount of shield points at the end.

By sacrificing the entire external frame of his IS in this way, he'd be able to conserve just enough shield points to survive the impact and slow himself back down afterwards with his PIC. Because during the collision, all the material he haphazardly compressed into this crumple zone would disperse much of the impact energy as it was crushed and obliterated, sparing his shields from having to handle that strain.

Once again, that allowed those extra shield points to be dedicated to other purposes.

But perhaps the most difficult part of phase 3 of this attack was predicting the exact outcome of it. When he delivered this cataclysmic attack, he needed to know exactly where Cecelia was going to go―her precise trajectory.

Why did he need to know this?

Because his attack might end up being lethal. There was a decent chance that if he wasn't careful, he'd fling her broken machine into the ground and kill her with the sheer immensity of the impact he would be subjecting her to.

So he needed to know exactly what was going to happen so that he could make any necessary changes to his plan.

Luckily, this wasn't too difficult to figure out. He would be moving so fast at the moment of impact that Cecelia would effectively bounce right off of his machine like a ray of light off a mirror―with a nearly perfect reflection angle.

So he would continue forwards on his unstoppable trajectory while Cecelia was blasted out of the way like a billiard ball hit by another.

She would then travel in a straight line directly into the ground at speeds in the neighbourhood of mach 10, and Ichika would use whatever was left of his machine to bring himself to a stop with the last little bit of his energy, and then float towards the ground in the shattered and burnt remnants of his IS, with only a couple of drops of energy left in the tank.

He'd be declared the winner at that point, but more importantly, Cecelia would be declared the loser. And that was really all that mattered at the end of the day.

If you weren't Ichika Orimura, this whole sequence of ideas was impossible. There was just an outrageous amount of math that had to be done to make sure everything worked as intended and no other IS pilot could possibly replicate any of it. It all depended on PIC launches, after all, and those were impossible even in principle unless you had powers like his.

Even if some other IS pilot decided to put their machine into standby mode while they were in combat and figured out how to get it to explosively move around using the PIC by being superhumanly fast at programming and by using the thought-to-text setting, then there was still the absolute wall of arithmetic that they would have to do in their head to ensure that all their inputs were correct.

We're talking thousands of math problems, all of which needed to be completed in a fraction of a second. And if even one mistake was made, you were going to kill yourself.

This wasn't some pencil-and-paper, idealized physics scenario where you could just ignore inconveniences. Air resistance was real here, and it had an effect at the kinds of speeds he'd be moving at. That would affect his top speed and the amount of energy he could get away with using in his initial PIC-induced launch towards Cecelia. It would also affect his acceleration rate.

When he launched himself forwards from rest to hypersonic speeds nearly instantaneously, the air would be rammed out of the way so forcefully that it'd create a superheated plasma between his IS shields and the air. If he didn't have so much experience with rockets, he'd have no idea how that would affect his trajectory.

Then there was the heating to consider. How much damage would that wall of superheated plasma cause to his shields? How much energy would they need to consume to protect him? That extra energy would be energy that could not be used by the PIC or for anything else, so he'd have to set the right amount aside in advance.

The amount of energy required would also depend on the shape of the shields as well, not just the strength. And to further complicate matters, he could actually control that shape through the console.

He could precisely manipulate his shields into any shape that he wanted. But he needed to know what the most optimal shape would be beforehand…which depended on his planned trajectory.

More optimally shaped shields would reduce energy costs, which would allow him to launch himself with the PIC faster at the start…which would change his planned trajectory, which could very well require differently shaped shields…etc.

It was a cycle. The sort that you couldn't ask an ordinary human to figure out in their head in less than a second.

Ichika was the only person on Earth who could feasibly do this.

…Tabane, too, he supposed. She might be able to. But she wasn't a human being so she didn't count. She was an eldritch abomination that desperately needed someone to put her in her place.

But in any case, other than her, no other human could do any of this.

And this was just one component of the calculation that he had to work through. What about his orientation on his trajectory? His angle of attack through the air would create all sorts of lift and drag forces that all had to be modelled and optimized. For that, he needed to take into account his cross sectional area, which also depended on the shape of his shields.

Then there was the impact itself. He had to collide with Cecelia. What was the optimal angle and orientation he should be in to convert all of that speed into an attack that would reliably one-shot Blue Tears while still leaving him with enough energy afterwards to be declared the victor?

He wasn't in a very optimal position at the start. Cecelia was flying a distance away but also at a higher altitude. If he collided with her straight on, she'd be flung upwards. To get her to slam into the ground in the way he needed her to, he had to smash into the top side of her machine at just the right angle.

He needed Cecelia to smash into the ground because the original impact wasn't going to be strong enough to wipe out all her shields. He actually needed that extra damage that her slamming into the ground would provide to win because IS machines were unbelievably sturdy. So he had to consider all of these things as well.

On top of all of that, Blue Tears was better all around than Byakushiki. It had more energy, stronger shields, it was more durable, faster, more agile, had better equipment…it was just better at everything because it had already gone through its first shift.

Byakushiki had not.

This made all of his mental simulations of the impact much more complicated and things would happen in counterintuitive ways that were hard to visualize. He had to model how his weaker shields would interact with her stronger shields as they slammed into each other and deformed―and those deformations would affect the trajectory she'd be sent away on.

Then there was the problem of figuring out exactly how much energy he needed to allocate for each phase of this attack.

By the time he reached Blue Tears on his hypersonic trajectory, he already would have expended something like half of his total energy just building up his speed. So during the impact itself, he needed to ensure that a lot more damage was done to Blue Tears than to Byakushiki.

This was only barely possible to do. His crumple zone idea was literally the only method he could think of to do it. But he had to know exactly how much energy that would save so that he could allocate the right amount he would need for his PIC to slow him back down and keep him alive during and after the impact.

Then there was the fact that he would be colliding with Cecelia twice. The first one was when his crumple zone struck her and started disintegrating, and the second was when the surface of his shields impacted hers and started expending tremendous amounts of energy to not shatter.

He needed to compute the optimal timing between these impacts as well, as the longer he could spend obliterating his crumple zone, the more energy he'd be able to save during the second collision. By delaying the process like this for as long as possible, he'd translate would-be damage to his shield points into physical damage to the chassis, saving more energy.

…But for this idea to work, he couldn't allow Cecelia to do the same thing. His attack had to land on the surface of Blue Tear's shields and could not hit the chassis. Otherwise, some of the impact energy on her end would be dispersed in much the same way, saving her shield points.

He needed to strike on the tiniest area possible, too.

An IS shield wasn't very adaptable, after all. If he struck Cecelia's shield at hypersonic speeds on an area as thin as the tip of a toothpick, her shield wouldn't instantaneously reconfigure itself to concentrate all of its energy at that same point to be as energy efficient as possible. That just wasn't how they worked.

IS shields could be rapidly reconfigured like that at those sorts of speeds in theory, but only when you were Ichika Orimura and could perform the changes manually through the console.

Cecelia couldn't do that, and neither could her machine's AI. Those AI had very limited control over the shields and weren't capable of this sort of dynamic, pinpoint defence. It wasn't considered 'safe' to do that, after all, as concentrating your entire shield on a tiny region like that left all the rest of you exposed and that was a big no-no.

This worked to his advantage here. Since the AI wouldn't do this, it meant that the only way to protect against such a powerful attack over such a tiny region was to reinforce the entire area of the shield which was incredibly inefficient energy-wise.

…Inefficient enough to make this plan feasible, in fact. Cecelia would be using up her machine's energy far more quickly than he would be all throughout this impact.

But the collision had to be carefully modelled, nonetheless.

How would his machine crumple as it obliterated itself? How should he strike? Where? How should he manipulate the shape of his shields to save as much energy as possible? Whatever shape he decided to use on his flight over likely wouldn't be the most optimal when his IS finally slammed into Blue Tears. So he'd have to change it mid-flight. Perhaps several times. Perhaps he'd even need to keep changing it continuously.

What would happen when their machines finally slammed into each other? How would the interaction between their respective IS shields go? Both would deform under the extreme forces of course, but neither would shatter. They'd act like two elastic, rubber bullets colliding mid-air.

Then he had to figure out what direction Blue Tears would fly into after the momentum transfer. And then after Cecelia was launched away, he had to figure out how fast she'd be moving.

Would she still have enough energy left over to slow herself back down safely? How much energy would her IS still have left over after Ichika hypersonically bodychecked her away? Would it be enough?

He may not like Cecelia very much at all, but he wasn't about to kill her here. He was a nice guy, after all. He just wanted to put the fear of God into her and maybe give her some PTSD and a few other lifelong mental health problems. You know. Like any other typical nice guy would do.

He wanted to keep her alive so that he could make fun of her and rub her loss in her face at a later date. But for that, he had to take into account what her machine's PIC would do and how much energy it had access to at every moment throughout this process.

When Cecelia slammed into the ground, would she bounce? Or would her impact angle be too steep causing her to crater?

Both of these scenarios required different amounts of energy for Blue Tears to handle safely in his mental simulations and it was why he was emphasizing his need for perfect inputs so strongly. This could very well turn into a life-or-death situation depending on how the energy calculation worked out and how narrow the margins turned out to be.

And even if it turned out that Cecelia would be perfectly safe no matter what Ichika did, what about the spectators? He had to make sure that none of them would be injured, too.

Even if they were far enough away to be unharmed by the inevitable earthquake he'd cause by blasting Cecelia into the ground with so much force, he'd also have to calculate the strength of the shockwave his machine would be producing once his mach number hit the double digits.

He didn't want anyone to die and he also didn't want anyone's eardrums bursting. So the distances between himself and the closest spectators all had to be taken into account. So too did the strength of the barrier surrounding the arena.

IS matches were dangerous, after all, so every single arena designed to host one had an invisible force field around it to allow spectators to get closer to the action than they otherwise could. Fortunately, those shields tended to be quite strong. They were also only semi-permeable to sound so shockwaves were massively dampened.

But nonetheless…all of this needed to be factored into the calculation to determine his top speed. All of it affected his trajectory and his plan of attack. It was one giant optimization problem that ordinarily would require a supercomputer to model.

Luckily, he had something way better than that. His eyes had memorized plenty of flight data from the rockets he had developed. He had been doing calculations just like these with them for years. Never on such short timescales, perhaps, but since he could usually get results more accurate than his computer simulations, it was the best option most of the time. All of that experience helped him immensely here.

This time, however, things were a lot more complicated, he'd admit. He had to consider factors that he didn't often have to think about.

These IS machines were a physicist's wet dream. They were perfectly idealized. Their shape as they flew through the air could be perfectly controlled. If you didn't want to model the airflow around the complicated shape of a mech suit as it whipped through the air, you could just use the shields to create a bubble around it in whatever shape you wanted, completely changing the aerodynamics.

Regular tech didn't have this pseudo-shape-shifting capability. For typical rockets and spaceships, whatever shape they were manufactured into was the shape they were stuck with.

IS shields changed the whole game.

---

Now, one could be forgiven for asking a simple question at this point:

Why?

Why, Ichika? Was it really worth sacrificing your personal IS, potentially killing some people if you made a mistake in your calculations―perhaps even yourself―showing the entire world what sorts of things you can do in an IS, raising all sorts of questions as to how you managed to learn how to do what you're about to do, making a ton of people super suspicious of you…all because your opponent annoyed you a couple of times?

Was doing all of this crazy and super dangerous PIC manipulation really necessary to defeat an opponent you could just beat normally if you tried?

100%.

It was 100% worth it and necessary.

Was that even a question?

Like, seriously. Cecelia called him 'uncultured' that one time. He'd fucking sink the entire British Isles for that if he could. That was a fair trade if you asked him.

'I'll show you uncultured.'

It was 100% worth traumatizing this girl to the maximum extent possible. Winning wasn't enough anymore. He had to shatter her worldview and bury her a hundred meters deep in the ground under the weight of all her failures and her shattered ego, and then make fun of her for it. It's what she fucking deserved.

And to top it all off, he intended to do it with style, too. He intended to push things right to the very edge of possibility. He was going to hit her as hard as he could get away with to cause as much damage to her IS as possible even if it was totally unnecessary in order to win.

He intended to finish the battle with exactly 1 shield point left, having transferred all remaining energy into the destruction of Blue Tears and into slowing himself back down after.

He didn't need to do that. He had done the math and knew that he could one-shot Cecelia with a hypersonic bodycheck and still leave himself with a little over 40 points left over.

…But upon doing a few additional calculations and getting a little creative, he had discovered that it was possible to increase his speed a little more and make his attack target slightly less optimal to cause more damage.

Right now, his 40 point trajectory was perfectly optimized and simple to execute. It was ultimately efficient energy-wise, and was definitely what he'd do if his goal was to save as many points as he could at the end. It was pretty much as good as he could do on that front.

But there was a trickier trajectory that he was calculating now that used far more energy and was way more dangerous. The main idea behind it was to increase his speed and therefore the power of his attack, but target a less optimal position. Instead of a high-precision strike on a perfectly selected area, he'd make the attack more globalized to cause more widespread damage.

The overall energy of the attack would be dispersed, giving her shields an easier time and a good chunk of the impact would be taken by her machine's chassis instead, saving some of her shield points.

It was possible to get those two factors to exactly cancel each other out―to do the same amount of damage to her shields as the slower trajectory, and use all the excess energy to damage her IS chassis.

It was so tricky to calculate, though. And unfortunately, he ended up running out of time before he could finish.

The final problem he ran into was Cecelia's impact with the ground. Everything worked perfectly up until then. But in this higher energy trajectory, the system became too chaotic. When analyzing her impact angle with the ground in his mental simulations, changes as small as a millionth of a degree would completely alter the way her machine obliterated itself, and on some of those trajectories, Blue Tears would be in real danger of running out of energy which would kill Cecelia if it happened.

This didn't even mention the fact that he didn't know the tensile strength of the ground to the sufficient degree required. He could only approximate it based on what it was made of. Dirt.

There was some gravel in there too, though, and it wasn't perfectly mixed together. Some parts of the ground would be tougher than other parts and at this level of precision, even these small, seemingly innocuous things started to matter.

If he had more computation time, he knew he'd be able to figure out a workaround. But he didn't have that time right now. In all of these calculations, he needed to resort to using polynomial approximations with many, many terms in them. Each of these approximations, however, produced an error term which would feed into the next approximation, further skewing the results. The more approximations he had to make in succession, the more uncertain the final result would become.

And while it was possible to shrink his error to be as small as he wanted, he could only do so by adding more terms to these calculations. To get his margin of error small enough to remove the chaos and be confident in the way the events would unfold, he just needed too many of them.

It was too much for the time he had left. He still needed to deactivate his machine's AI and fake a bunch of sensory data after all, then feed it to his PIC in a tedious process that he hadn't even started yet. Only then could he actually execute this plan of attack.

He didn't have enough time to do it all. If he tried, he'd run the risk of failing to do anything and instead just losing himself in all these calculations as his 3 seconds ran out and he passed out.

So it was with great frustration that he had to chicken out of his way cooler trajectory and go with his safer, more energy-efficient approach. It was technically speaking a way better trajectory by every metric, but it didn't cause enough unnecessary destruction and that just left a bad taste in his mouth.

---

The final obstacle in his way was actually the easiest to handle―conceptually anyway. Faking all of the sensory data and tricking the PIC into thinking his velocity was way faster than it really was could be done fairly straightforwardly in theory. It wasn't difficult to do, but it was tedious. He had to pull all sorts of wonky programming tricks to manually edit the relevant bits of memory.

He had to create a fake file that looked identical in every way to the real file that the PIC usually read its sensory information from. Then he had to trick the PIC into thinking that the new file was the real one, and then he had to actually input his trajectory data into that file.

There were no onboard systems or functions that would make that process any easier so he had no choice but to exploit his machine's firmware update system.

Essentially, the strategy he ended up going with was to create his own firmware update from scratch that did nothing more than change this one function on his machine. The update would force his machine to look at his fake sensory data instead of the real sensory data.

Since he was the administrator of the system, there were no significant security measures in place on his IS and he pretty much had free reign over everything in the source code. The only security to speak of was biometric. But since the machine was his, that wasn't an issue. It knew who he was and therefore it gave him full control.

The update he was creating was also tiny, so it could be installed in less than half a second.

Once it was complete, all he had to do was simply copy and paste all the data that he had created in his mental simulations into this new file and that was pretty much it.

Easy.

With all of the pieces of his plan in place, all that remained was the execution.

---

The first thing he did was deactivate his machine and put it into standby mode.

Well, he tried to anyway.

In the first few moments of the battle―right after finishing his calculations―Ichika attempted to deactivate his machine's AI. He opened up his menu, navigated through dozens of different screens and menus, pulled up the console and started typing with his mind.

He had switched his thought-to-text setting on before he had even left the hangar bay, so he could navigate through all these menus as fast as he could think about doing it.

It didn't take a millionth of a second to blaze through some 35 different menu screens to get to the command line and start typing out the shutdown command. There was actually no way he could have done it any faster. In typical TAS fashion, all his inputs were frame-perfect and matched the internal clock speed of his IS. It couldn't compute instructions any faster.

But that's when a problem appeared. One that he hadn't even considered until that very moment so he was caught completely off guard by it.

His own machine's AI immediately tried to interfere with his plans.

Of course it did. The Byakushiki had been designed with a specific directive in mind, after all. Fuck over Ichika Orimura at every conceivable opportunity.

He was absolutely incensed.

Worry.

Concern.

Alarm.

'You piece of dogshit!'

Ichika could sense Slimy's feelings. It had been trying to follow along with his thought processes as best as it could and more or less understood that he intended to deactivate it and do a whole bunch of indescribably dangerous, borderline suicidal things right in the middle of the battle that it didn't agree with.

While this was very much true, Ichika didn't like that his machine was pointing it out. He had everything under control and had total faith in his abilities.

Slimy, of course, didn't understand this. It only understood somewhere around 10% of what was even happening right now.

At the speeds his mind was moving, Slimy simply couldn't keep up with everything. It was extremely surprised at the sheer amount of information and data that Ichika had just processed in his mind but at the same time, it didn't understand his ability or what he was able to do with it.

But it tried to step in anyway because it thought it knew better.

A battle of wills immediately ensued between them.

Danger!

'Fuck you!'

Want to help!

'Get lost!'

He about lost his mind when Slimy tried to forcefully take over and close the console window on him.

It was trying to ensure his safety.

…

Have you ever had an asshole friend that just grabbed your phone right out of your hand while you were busy texting someone and then ran off with it? You know. As a joke?

That's pretty much what just happened to Ichika.

His own IS just tried to do that.

Ichika immediately fucking blasted the AI with a wave of absolute fury.

He held nothing back. He redirected all of the pent up anger that had been stewing in him because of Cecelia and all her bullshit and fired it at his own IS across the mental bond.

The magnitude of this attack was so extreme that he felt his machine immediately recoil in shock.

'Get in the fucking corner and sit your ass down! Worthless trash!'

Taking advantage of Slimy's shock, Ichika re-opened the console and finally shut the AI down, leaving him in a chunk of falling metal that could only be moved through console commands.

Finally, he had achieved total control and could get to work.

---

With his machine deactivated, it immediately started falling toward the ground. All the systems were down so he couldn't float anymore unless he manually instructed his IS to do so.

He didn't need to do that, though. In this super slow motion world, gravity was essentially negligible. Gravity at Earth's surface was approximately 9.8 meters per second squared. When in a reference frame that was accelerated by a factor of 10,000 however, this was pretty much zero.

It would take an eternity to fall any appreciable distance. Everything would be happening so quickly that his lack of use of thrusters to keep afloat wouldn't even be noticeable. By the time he was ready to launch himself with the PIC and unleash his attack, he would basically be at the same height he was at now.

'It's time to begin.'

The first step was creating and forcing through the firmware update.

It was hardly difficult. There were probably millions of people all around the world that had the know-how to pull it off. The only thing special about this particular programming montage was that he completed it in about a tenth of a second.

It was about 18 minutes in his accelerated reference frame. Hardly impressive when looked at from that perspective and for how small the update was.

Then came the update itself. There was nothing he could do to speed up the installation so he mostly just had to wait it out. It was going to take another half a second.

In the meantime, he once again reviewed his calculations to make sure everything was correct.

Slimy's intervention there at the beginning had put him slightly behind schedule, so he had to make sure that all of his trajectory information was still valid.

It was good enough. It was no longer the most optimal solution, but it would get the job done.

He would win with 39 points left now. If he wanted to get that number above 40 again, he'd have to recalculate everything and he was too lazy to do that right now.

It did not escape his notice that Slimy's intervention back there would have forced him to abandon his more interesting, single point trajectory behind even if he had finished simulating it.

That pissed him off even more.

The update completed a moment later, and he wasted no more time in initiating phase 1.

He copied and pasted his trajectory data into the file, and initiated the PIC launch as planned.

At the same time, he performed all the 3d modelling he needed for his elongated clown balloon vacuum shield, and to create his ejection hole.

The PIC launch triggered a moment later, just in time for the front of his suit to vanish in an arbitrary partial deployment, stopping him from splattering all over the insides of his IS. His PIC field dragged him towards the ejection hole. It left its containment and deactivated, leaving him completely unprotected as he flew out the hole at a final speed of mach 13.4.

Exactly on target. Instead of hitting the air molecules of the atmosphere he flew into the vacuum he had created with his shield and immediately started compressing his machine back into closed form.

Every component of his machine returned to his wrist except for the shield generator which held the vacuum.

The machine finished compressing and he immediately deployed it again, just in time for his clown balloon shield to break open.

With his new shield generator created from his spare parts, he had a new shield up and running just in time. At no point had he been unprotected, so he had not violated any rules. However, it had been a very thin margin.

With the acceleration phase complete, he entered phase 2.

Using his shields and his IS chassis he formed the most optimal, hypersonic, aerodynamic surface he could manage as he plowed through the air creating a fiery inferno, while simultaneously forming his heat shield.

Using thousands of precisely timed commands, he used his thrusters as attitude adjustment to ensure his target was exact.

He changed his heatshield into a rail gun projectile tip and slammed into Cecelia, entering phase 3.

Her eyes were still closed.

Ichika's crumple zone did its job and annihilated itself, sparing his shield points.

Then the second shield on shield collision occurred.

There were no surprises.

Cecelia went exactly where he had calculated she would go, and slammed into the ground.

It took her approximately zero seconds to cross that distance.

Her shield points hit 0 instantaneously. Ichika saw it happen on his screen. From that point forward, he no longer needed to worry about that pesky 'no ejection' rule as he had already won the match. So he no longer needed to worry about always staying within the confines of his shields.

He then began the process of slowing himself down. He had no choice but to use another PIC launch to pull it off. He had saved just enough material on his IS to create another PIC field generator and to keep his power system running.

Since he no longer had an external frame on his IS, he didn't have to worry about making another ejection hole or anything like that. He simply copied and pasted some new values and flung himself backwards to cancel out all remaining horizontal speed.

He then started falling toward the ground like a stone.

He deactivated his eyes and at the last second before hitting the ground, activated what was left of his thrusters to gently bring himself to a stop.

The ground was still shaking from Cecelia's impact with it. Spectators were already screaming in panic in the stands. Parts of the ground were on fire. Bits of both of their IS machines rained down from the sky.

The whole battlefield had been destroyed and the impact had been so intense that it caused a tremor that could be felt all across the island.

Blue Tears pretty much shattered on impact.

Cecelia was still alive, though. She was just a loser.

As impossible as it might be to imagine, however, Ichika's IS was in worse shape than Cecelia's. The collision energy had been so high that his IS didn't have a chassis anymore.

Imagine a head-on car crash that was so severe that one of the vehicle's frames literally boiled off and evaporated into the sky.

That's pretty much what just happened to his machine.

It was gone.

The only components remaining were the ones he had specifically protected―everything he needed to allow his PIC and shield to function, and to allow him to return to the ground.

He had just enough energy to pull it off.

After his feet touched solid ground, he looked at his flickering screen and noticed that he had a whopping 39 shield points left―exactly as he had calculated.

Amidst the cataclysmic sound that was still echoing across the shattered arena, he heard the starting buzzer finally end.

Typically, when an IS match started, there would be a buzzer that would sound and it would last a second or two before ending. Ichika had won so quickly that he defeated his opponent before the buzzer finished. That's what he heard just now. The buzzer finishing.

The entire battle lasted 1.815 seconds exactly.

All the audience had seen was a thunderbolt.

It was a new world record time. He just stole the title from his sister.

'Sorry, Chifuyu. But not even you can beat my time in a video game.'

She was highly skilled, no doubt. Way more skilled than he was. But she did not specialize in speed the way Ichika did. He was highly skilled in throwing absolutely everything away in an attempt to shave off as much time as possible. She was highly skilled in winning IS matches conventionally.

Objectively, her skillset was more valuable without question, as she didn't need to sacrifice her own machine for the sake of victory and could fight with it again later.

The damage to Byakushiki was so extensive that it would take weeks of round the clock work from a team of engineers to bring it back to anything even resembling working order again. It would have to be totally rebuilt from the ground up.

Not that he cared, of course. Slimy could get fucked if you asked him. It got exactly what it deserved for fucking around with his control sensitivity like that.

He was not unaware of what this match and his winning strategy implied, though. If he were ever in a serious battle with a serious opponent inside an IS, while this technique he had just used could win pretty much any one-on-one confrontation, all it would take to counter his strategy was add one more opponent.

In a 2v1, this idea wouldn't work. And he could also only do it once. To put an IS into closed form, it needed to be a personal IS, too, so he wouldn't be doing this again until Slimy was back in action, however long that took.

He didn't care, though. He got to put Cecelia in her place. Right in the dirt where she belonged.

With a smirk, and as the crowd erupted in chaos all around him, Ichika began walking towards the exit of the arena.

He wanted to go to sleep.

His eyes were bleeding and he had the mother of all headaches.

---

Discord: A3dTszc

Yes that is correct. You just read (or skimmed through) 20k words covering a whopping…5 seconds of plot? Maybe less?

Next chapter will not be like this.

But now I am finally free to move on. This chapter was bogging down all my other writing projects and I finally decided to put my foot down.