Chapter 7: The Giants Who Stride Into Battle

“The beast has returned?!” The village chief’s cry cracked with despair.

For four long years, there had been no sightings. He had even dared to hope the monsters had perished. Maybe starved, or perhaps dried to husks in the endless drought. Of course, reality was never so kind.

“Are you certain?” he demanded, gripping and shaking Old Hunter Gen’s shoulders.

“Of course I am certain. I hunt in the mountains regularly. If anyone’s sure, it would be me. Don’t forget it was also me who reported the sighting seven years ago.”

The villagers muttered in anxious huddles.

“How can they be back?”

“It’s not like we have slain them.”

“But the last time they appeared was five winters ago.”

“Why are they back?”

“Even the season is wrong!”

“Maybe they missed the winter.”

“Missed the winter for four years?”

“Maybe they overslept?”

“For four winters?!”

“Enough!” the village chief barked. “I will send my son to Branvar’s Hold immediately to request for military intervention. With them here, it will be resolved in no time.”

Someone dared whisper, “Would they? Last time, no one came.”

“That was different,” the chief snapped. “The beast was three mountains away. Now it is near. By law, Branvar must respond.”

At that very moment, Aina lay at home, burning with fever. The terror and exhaustion of their flight had wrung her frail body dry. She had collapsed the instant they reached the chief’s house; only Rhielle’s strength had carried her home on the scooter. Old Hunter Gen alone had remained to deliver the news.

For two days, Aina drifted in and out of delirium, missing the arrival of the army entirely. By the time she recovered, the soldiers had already vanished into the forests to hunt the monster. For three days until the army’s return, the village chief forbade everyone from approaching the mountains. Not only for fear of becoming casualties but also out of fear that they could interfere with military business.

On the fourth night, the soldiers returned triumphant. Darkness shrouded the village, until the glare of their machines carved it apart. Three towering warstriders stomped down the narrow streets, dragging a mountain of flesh. The carcass left a trail of noxious liquid, oozing a foul, alcoholic stench. Villagers gagged as the carcass slumped past their homes, its rotten blood leaving a black trail in the dirt.

The striders’ electric lamps seared the night like captive suns, flickering as though struggling to hold their charge. The brightness created a glow that could be seen even before they were heard. As the striders walked into the village, the villagers shielded their eyes, dazzled by brilliance most had never known.

It was the same with Rinia. She squinted from her doorway, awed and bitter all at once. She stood marvelling how electric lights existed in this seemingly primitive world.

“So… this world isn’t so primitive after all. Some people can barely eat but some people have access to electricity. How unfair.”

As the towering machines stomped past her house, Aina’s breath held in her throat. Then her heart leapt. There it was. The dream she thought she’d lost with her old world, walking right before her eyes.

“Mecha!” she cried, voice cracking with giddy disbelief. “That’s a mecha!”

Her children jumped at her outburst, wide-eyed and confused.

They didn’t know the word. To them, these were titans, vast and strange, a hundred lifetimes beyond their wooden plows and even beyond their mother’s miraculous scooter. Perhaps, they thought, these were tamed beasts clad in iron skin.

They thought with something so massive, no wonder they were able to defeat the giant beasts in the mountains. They wondered if these massive things are actually giant beasts. Similar to the beasts of the mountains, but tamed by humans.

Only Tallo, her eight-year-old son, squinted harder. He remembered the lessons from building the scooter at his mother’s side: gears, joints, movement without wheels. His small fists clenched with certainty.

“No… not beasts,” he whispered to himself. “Machines.”

None of the children noticed their mother slip out of the house. Aina was already in the street, chasing after the towering mechas and their foul-smelling quarry. The stench of the rotting beast barely registered—her mind was too consumed by the giants ahead.

Half-walking, half-stumbling into a run, she trailed them breathlessly until they halted before the village chief’s mansion. By the time she caught up, her lungs burned, and she was panting like a stray dog.

She thought just seeing them move would have been enough. But then the chest plates of the mechas split open with a hiss, and people climbed out of the cockpit. Aina’s knees nearly buckled. She pressed herself against a villager’s fence, clutching at the rough wood to keep from collapsing outright.

She wasn’t just watching machines. She was standing before the dream of her other life. Her dreams were alive and real in this impossible world.

Since childhood, she had been obsessed with giant battle robots. She played every mecha game on PC, ran a streaming channel in university devoted to mecha lore and games, and even chose her robotics degree. She had only a single dream in mind, to one day build and pilot a machine of her own.

Unfortunately, reality was far less kind. In her youth, the technology wasn’t yet ready, and her career led only to designing ready-made toys and hobby kits for toy companies. Whenever she pitched her vision of pilotable mecha to defense contractors, the response was always the same: “Why bother? They’d just be giant targets. Tanks are smaller, cheaper, and can hit from farther away.”

Still, she never let go of the dream. It wasn’t until her mid-thirties that she finally had the chance to build one through the Autonomous Support Unit programme. The project wasn’t about piloted mecha at all, it aimed to create autonomous worker machines. Yet to her, it was a foothold. If she could master the techniques and gain fame from this programme. She would gain the knowledge and mechanical foundation to one day build a true piloted war machine.

Of course, now that she had died and awoken in this famine-stricken world, dreaming had seemed like a luxury she could no longer afford. How could she dream when every day was a battle to keep her children fed? How could she build anything when her body was too weak to even lift a hammer?

Yet these towering machines shattered that feeling of hopelessness. It was proof, undeniable proof, that battle mechas could exist. Her long-buried passion stirred awake, surging through her like fire. Eyes damp with emotion, she stepped closer and laid a trembling hand against the massive steel leg.

Her knuckles rapped gently against it. She expected the muted resonance of advanced alloys. The kind of lightweight composites like those used in prototypes back home. Like the ones used to build her Asu. Instead, the sound rang out sharp and hollow, unmistakably steel.

She frowned, wondering how it could be. In her world, the construction of such bots used composite alloys as lighter than steel, heat-resistant, yet just as strong. While there was nothing wrong for such mechas to be built with steel, it wasn’t the material of choice.

Curiosity gnawed at her. She stooped, grabbed a fist-sized stone, and struck the surface. Clang. Again she struck, and again the sound rang true. Unrefined, heavy, but somehow it worked.

Her brows furrowed, mind already dissecting the design. What kind of steel, what treatment, what limitations? And even as the villagers recoiled at her strange behavior, she kept hitting, again and again, listening, testing, analyzing.

“Hey! You stay away from my strider, or I’ll have you flogged!”

The shout snapped Aina out of her feverish trance. Guilt surged through her as she dropped the rock from her hand with a clatter. Heart racing, she bolted into the shadows, praying the pilot hadn’t caught her face in the dark.

Daris Kael was exhausted and furious. The battle against the beast had been his first against something not human. His time at the academy had never prepared him for the raw, crushing power of a giant primal monster. If not for his commander’s experience, he would’ve been lost, and soon dead.

His strider bore the scars of that lesson, battered and limping. His lip was split, his pride bruised, and now some filthy villager was hammering at his machine with a rock. He knew she couldn’t actually harm it, but after the fight he’d just survived, the sight made his blood boil.

“Please, sir, don’t be angry,” the village chief stammered. “That’s just the corpse of the Virell household matriarch.”

Daris blinked. “…The what?”

“The corpse, sir. She crawled out of her grave one day. Made the whole village scared shit - I mean, scared to death.”

“You have a corpse walking around the village?” Daris asked, not believing his ears. “Wait, corpses can walk?”

“I don’t understand it myself, but one day she just crawled out of her grave. Had the whole village scared shit - I mean, scared to death.”

Daris stared at him. “You’re telling me corpses crawl out of their graves here? That’s normal?”

“I wouldn’t say normal,” the chief muttered, scratching his neck. “But… it’s the sticks. Strange things happen.”

Daris gave a sharp, humorless laugh. “No kidding.”

Between the giant beast and a walking corpse, Daris Kael was at his limit. He longed to leave this dry, dirty, dust-choked village behind. Why in the emperor’s name had the lieutenant insisted on a 'victory feast'? It wasn’t as if these mud-smeared peasants could serve anything remotely edible. He doubted they could even boil water properly.

With a shake of his head, Daris pushed into the village chief’s mansion, searching for a quiet corner where he could collapse until the farce of a feast began.

Meanwhile, the chief’s son barged into Aina’s home not long after she returned, demanding food for the celebration. Aina crossed her arms and flatly refused. 

“We’ve nothing left,” she said, her tone firm. She didn’t mention the small sack of grain tucked safely away. It was a precious reserve that she would not surrender under any condition.

The man sneered but stopped short of a fight. No one in the village dared to press the infamous “Bitch of Virell.” Instead, he spat a warning that his father would hear of her defiance, then stormed off, muttering curses.

Grumbling to himself, he dragged his cart next door, where more pliant villagers offered up a handful of chestnuts. He tossed them into the cart with a scowl and moved on, his complaints following him down the street.