Chapter 17: To Scam A Soldier

“Yo! You’re finally walking, soldier man!” Aina greeted, her excitement from being able to pilot her own mecha from its cockpit made her forget her place and spoke casually to him.

It was very easy to see that she was in a very good mood.

Either not noticing or not caring, Darus the Soldier Man asked urgently, “What was that!” He pointed a finger at the warstrider in front of him.

Aina looked behind and nonchalantly said, “That’s a mecha - I mean a strider.”

“Yes, my strider! How-”

“Stop right there, soldier man! While I will admit that the thing has parts of your strider, the strider itself is not yours. It took a lot of parts to repair and some parts had to be made new.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that it’s mine. If I can go back to the base, I can even show you the deed of purchase!”

Darus closed his mouth as the corpse-woman squinted at him.

In his happiness of seeing his strider walk again, and his exasperation of listening to this corpse woman trying to tell him that the strider that he bought out of three years of blood-merit was no longer his, he forgot that he was injured and completely at the mercy of these people. If they insisted on claiming the strider and decided to make sure there were no complications…

It would be very easy for them to silence him. It would be almost just as easy for them to make sure that there was no trace of him too. There were many times when he thought he should’ve stayed quiet. But this one, he feared he wouldn’t come back from.

For Aina though, she was actually sweating in nervousness inside. She didn’t know these things had a deed of purchase. She had just cannibalized one mecha to fix another mecha. If this was the modern era, wouldn’t she have been taken to court? Would it be the same here? Would she go to prison for doing something she didn’t know was illegal?

Darus of course wasn’t aware of Aina’s inner turmoil. He himself was sweating inside, wondering if the villagers around him would strike him down for insisting on claiming ownership of the strider. He looked around, wondering if everyone was thinking of silencing him.

He thought if he was completely healthy, it wouldn’t be impossible for him to escape. He could just run to the base, inform the captain and get reinforcements to punish the thieving villagers. It would be over in just a few days and he would get back his strider, no problem. It wasn’t like they could hide something so big in a shed.

But in his current condition, forget running away. He wouldn’t even survive being beaten up by the corpse-woman’s son. He was just skin and bones, sure, but he was strong enough to lift Darus off the bed. That was no mean feat. Darus could be called many things, but small and light would never be among the adjectives used to describe him.

Aina continued to stare at Darus. But inside, she wasn’t even looking at Darus. She was busy thinking up ways to justify her earlier claims. She clung tightly to the experiences of her past life. She asked herself, what would a mechanic say?

And she found the answer. “Ehem, what I meant was, you couldn’t just take it away like that. The parts were taken from other striders. Some parts were completely broken and had to be replaced with newly manufactured parts. Then there was all that labour from me and my sons. Are you trying to say that our work is worth nothing?”

Darus Kael breathed a sigh of relief. So it was just about money, then? She could’ve just asked for money. I thought I was going to get killed and buried in an unmarked grave!

“I don’t have any money on me right now, but once I get back to the base, I can arrange for the money to be delivered.”

“Sweet talk is sweet. What’s stopping you from just refusing to pay when you get there? It’s not like we can crash into a military fort to demand payment.”

“My word is my bond!” He held up a hand with three fingers pointed upward and said, “If I refuse to pay, may the lightning god Fenier strike me down!”

“Five hundred silver, not a coin short,” Aina said.

“Five hundred? Miss, aren’t you mistaking the number?” Darus Kael visibly sweated. After all, when he bought the second-hand strider, he only paid the equivalent of three thousand silver.

Now it was Aina’s turn to sweat.

Did I ask too much? Will he call the police on me for scamming?

Aina was once scammed by a tow truck company working together with a workshop. Not only did they quote three times the market price, they had also punctured her tire at a parking lot so that they could charge her a lot for towing her car. Coincidentally, her policewoman friend had called her to catch up on that exact day and was outraged to hear the amount she had to pay just to change a punctured tire.

Will I be the one to go to court for scamming now?

“Mother said five hundred silver and not a coin less. It means exactly that. Don’t try to shortchange us!” Varn argued. He didn’t know how much five hundred silver would be like but it couldn’t be too much or his mother wouldn’t have said it so nonchalantly.

“Yeah! We worked hard to fix it, five hundred silver for such a beaten up strider is reasonable!” Tallo said. He also didn’t really know how much five hundred silver was but he trusted that his mother knew what she was doing.

“E-exactly!” Aina thought she had overcharged, but if her sons said it was reasonable, then of course it was reasonable. “Do you think fixing a strider is cheap?”

“Or easy?” Varn added. He had worked hard to help his mother lift those huge parts with a pulley. If they weren’t going to keep it, he certainly wasn’t going to have his work be in vain.

“Alright, I understand.” Darus gave up. He admitted that fixing something like that wasn’t going to be cheap. Even at the base, the repairs he would get would be barely passable, unless he could exchange for military merit. Roughly whatever parts from the junkyard that the technicians could find that fit, even if it wouldn’t normally fit, would be fitted into it. They wouldn’t care if the performance would suffer or if every move sounded like the cry of a wailing grandma.

Happy that the soldier finally accepted defeat, Aina held out her hand. Palms up.

Darus wasn’t sure what she meant. He assumed she wanted proof of agreement or cooperations, so he put his hand on hers, palms down. It was swiftly slapped away.

“I was asking for the repair fee,” Aina said.

Darus made a look of shock. “You don’t seriously think I would carry that much money around me during a scramble, do you? Besides, even if I did carry that much money with me, wouldn’t you have already looted it off my body already?”

Aina and her sons looked at each other, one after another, and then nodded together.

“I guess that’s true,” Aina said.

“I don’t think I would’ve been able to keep my hands off them,” Irek said.

“Well, it’s silver.” Varn said.

“Imagine how much food we can buy with just one,” Rhielle said.

“Even one silver is a lot of money,” Tallo said.

“Food! Delicious food!” Vila joined in.

“Vila, go play with the other kids,” Aina said.

“Okaaay…” Vila said dejectedly as Rhielle led her away.

Darus watched both girls leave, before turning his eyes at the strider he had considered his buddy for the past year. As well as his source of pride. Then he turned to Aina.

“So how did you do it?” he asked.

“Well, it requires a man and a woman, getting together. They would take off their clothes, maybe giggle a bit and then jump into the bed-”

“I’M NOT ASKING ABOUT HOW YOU MAKE A BABY!” Darus Kael roared. “I’m asking how you fix my broken strider. In that last battle, nothing worked anymore, just pushing one arm was the most I could do.”

“Would you like the engineer’s answer or the layman’s answer?” Aina asked with one hand on her shapely hips.

Darus Kael froze. He didn’t want to sound too ignorant, but he also wanted an actual answer. But he wasn’t an engineer, whatever that was, and he was afraid the answer would be too overwhelming. So he replied, “Please lay it easy for me.”

Aina nodded and said, “Many problems I had to fix, but mostly many parts were broken in the fight. The actuators also seized up from repeated overloads. And there was bat poop in the engine compartment.”

“But how did you fix it in this village? Fixing striders require giant gantries. I don’t see any of them here.”

“Ingenuity and a lot of farmers.” Then Aina looked at her sons and added, “And a lot of good sons.”

Her sons beamed with pride.

“I don’t know what that means, but… I guess seeing is believing. I should get going. The battle should have ended but it could still be happening. The base needs every help it can get.”

“With your current condition?” Varn asked in disbelief.

“I’ve had worse… well I guess I could stay for another day. It’s probably better to move at night anyway, just in case there are still roaming bands of the blasted Gurns in the countryside.”

“Gurn?” Aina asked.

“Those people,” Darus pointed at the blue-black warstriders in the distance. “They’re from the Gurn Confederation. We’ve been skirmishing with them on and off for the past twelve years, but only recently there had been major infiltrations past Ferradorn’s border. We’ve had our hands full just monitoring them. When those four broke into the region, there were only the captain, me and another pilot available to engage them at the time, but even with the captain’s experience, four against three was still too many. Come to think of it, where is the captain?”

“Didn’t make it,” Aina said as if she was stating a fact in a newspaper, “Died on the spot. But he fought two of them at the same time, and he defeated both, so that’s pretty amazing.”

Especially in that crappy primitive barbaric mech.

Of course, Aina didn’t say that out loud.

“Captain… he was a great guy. He took me under his wing even before he knew who I was. His skills were legendary. Can you show me his grave? I would like to pay my final respects.”

“Sure, I’ll have one of my sons take you there. But first thing’s first, what about the money?” Aina, ever the mercenary, wouldn’t let the matter about money go.

“Can’t we talk about this later?” Darus asked. Preferably after I got back to base.

“No can do, important things should be resolved immediately,” Aina argued.

She knew this delaying tactic. She went through enough board meetings back in her previous life to see the pattern and knew the signs of people trying to shaft her funding. They would always tell her that they will discuss it later, only for it to drag on and on for a year. And then either they would completely drop the project, thus making the funding option moot or have someone else take over, making negotiations start all over again.

Oh no, Aina knew such methods, and she would not let this go.

“Money first, pay respects later.”

“But I don’t have money on me!”

“You can write an IOU and pay me back in a week.”

“I - I don’t have - I can’t give you 500 silver in a week.”

“So how much can you give?”

“Five?”

“Are you freaking kidding me?”

“Look, I’m a soldier. Just a mere leftenant. I’d have to save up months of my salary just to pay the repair bill.”

“Alright, I’m not entirely unreasonable…” Aina said as she placed a hand on Darus’s shoulder, “You can pay it off in half a year.”

Darus looked at her with eyes filled with suspicion. “Why the sudden generosity?”

This is generosity? Aina thought before she said, “But there will be… let’s say interest.”

Darus’s forehead released copious sweat. He had heard of usurious loans, of course. His father ran one of the biggest loan agencies in the kingdom. So he was no stranger to crippling debts, loss of assets and bankruptcies. Now he was on the receiving end instead.

“How many percent?” Darus asked cautiously, wondering if he had to butter her up to reduce the loan interest.

“Not percent, food. Every month you fail to pay one fifth of the debt, you have to send us two silver’s worth of common foodstuff. If you don’t even bother to try paying the debt, though, well, maybe you’ll see some red paint sooner or later,” Aina said with a grin.

Seeing their mother, her sons also made a similar grin. They might’ve had some falling out in the past, but now, they were all united. United in fleecing the poor soldier.

“A… alright, alright. I can work with that. But can you help me strap the captain’s strider on the back of my strider?”

“What for?”

“Well, striders are usually passed down from father to son, because of its cost. The captain has a son serving in the same fort as I do. By right, he should inherit the strider. He probably has the deed of purchase as part of his inheritance anyway.”

“I see, well I guess we could do that. But…” Aina made a gesture with her fingers as if she’s rubbing money.

“Alright, fine! Add another fifty to the debt. I’ll ask his son to pay me back later!” Darus exhaled exasperated.

Aina kept her surprise deep inside, but she was actually cheering in her mind. She was originally planning on asking for just 10 silver, but well, she wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Still, she reserved rejoicing. After all, money not yet in hand is money likely lost.

“What about the blue-black mechas - striders?” Aina asked.

“What about them?” Darus asked, not understanding the question.

“Won’t someone come claim them later?”

Darus burst out in laughter. “I would like to see them try! War has not been declared. They’re likely a covert unit on infiltration or sabotage mission. Officially, they don’t exist, so nobody will come to claim them.”

Aina felt like her heart had leapt all the way to her throat. At this point, she couldn’t keep her excitement in check anymore. “So I can take them?”

“Yes, go ahead. It’s yours now.” Then as if an afterthought, Darus asked, “So that means I’ll only be owing you four hundred silver-”

“Not gonna happen,” Aina cut him off before he could finish his sentence.

Darus Kael clicked his tongue. “Worth a try.”