She looked down at her console. The ISO was still open. The lyrics. The damned lyrics.
Aoba smiled. It was a terrible, manic smile.
“Did you bring the backup?” she asked.
That was the official story. The one the brass would tell the families. Otomedius Excellent -NTSC-U--ISO-
“Twelve?” Aoba whispered. The outer perimeter had three Gradius-class cruisers.
“No!” Aoba dove, her Vulcan cannons stitching a line of hot lead across the tentacle. It didn't even flinch. It simply retracted the limb, sucking Strue’s wreckage into the fleshy surface of the moon. She didn’t eject.
She armed the —not as weapons, but as signal boosters. She overclocked the neural interface until blood dripped from her nose. And she uploaded the ISO. Not the fragment. The whole thing. The corrupted, looping, infinite version she’d found buried in the file’s metadata. She looked down at her console
“The NTSC-U sector is lost,” Tita said, her own Angel—the Lord British —launching from the adjacent bay. “All remaining forces, form up. We’re punching a hole for the Excellion to retreat.”
She looked up at the rescue shuttle and smiled.
Commander didn’t shout. She never did. Her voice was a cold, precise blade that cut through the panic. Aoba scrambled, her purple-tinged ponytail whipping behind her as she slid under the rising blast door. There she was: the Vic Viper , its polished white and blue frame incongruously beautiful against the grimy deck. But this wasn’t the Vic Viper of legend. This was hers —the Vic Viper “Anoa” custom , tuned for high-speed interception, not planetary invasion. The damned lyrics
No one laughed. Because no one was sure if she was joking.
It wasn't a core. It wasn't a battleship.
The song began.
“Status report!” Aoba yelled into her comm, strapping into the cockpit as the neural interface hummed to life.
Then the white light swallowed everything. Three weeks later, the Excellion ’s salvage team found her.