The door slammed open.

Yseni slammed the barrel he held onto the parts crane in response and glared at the entrant from his perch on his mech’s cockpit.

“I got us a match!” Daryll entered, hands in the air as if celebrating a victory.

“And what mech are you going to use in it?” Yseni spat out, annoyed. She had just ran out without consulting him. They were not ready for a fight.

“Uh,” Daryll stumbled with the door locks for a moment, “Yours.” She turned to Yseni and smiled. “Mine’s broken, you see.”

“It’s a junk heap!” Yseni exclaimed. “It’s got no armour or weapons! It’s barely calibrated and we have no idea how reliable it’ll be in an actual fight! Heck, we both know it underperforms. It’s nowhere near battle ready!”

Daryll stared at him in silence for a moment, then mumbled with a cheeky smile, “... Should we call it Junk Heap?”

“No!”

Daryll raised her hands again, this time defensively, as she saw Yseni’s unamusement. “We need the funds, ‘Sen. We’d need them even if we had to get it battle ready.”

He hated that that was true. “Still, we could have tried to figure something out! We’ll get shredded out there!”

“Relax, it’s a one on one and we’ve got time.” Daryll approached the mech and began climbing it.

Yseni sighed. “How much?”

“A week. It’s against Torak, rank 173” Daryll said as she reached the cockpit.

“... A week?” Her voice was like a death knell. That was too soon, and against an opponent too strong. They were never going to get prepared for the match in time. He stumbled backwards, until he reached the pilot seat, and collapsed onto it. He looked around in defeat. “I’m going to lose my life’s work so soon, huh...”

“I won’t rough it up that bad.” Daryll rested a hand on his shoulder. “Do I look like the kind to wreck mechs?”

Yseni recalled the mech in the bay next to him. He remembered the deep gashes in its shoulder plates it got during that one possession match, the numerous replacement parts he had seen throughout her different matches.

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s rude.” Daryll sighed. “I promise I’ll get it back in one piece, kay? Besides, we don’t need to get it fully ready, just enough so I can fuck up that Torak bastard.”

Yseni gave her a blank stare.

“What?”

“Can you even defeat someone with a rank that high?” Yseni asked.

“Probably,” Daryll shrugged. “Haven’t tried yet.”

Yseni felt weak. He really was going to lose his mech!

“Hey, hey, hey!” Daryll tried to stop him from fading. “At least you’ll get to see your work fight! In the Overburn! Against a guy as strong as Torak!”

That was true. It was something he would have been thrilled beyond belief to have happened were it not in this context.

“I guess...” Yseni mumbled and closed his eyes.

“So, moving in already, eh?” Daryll chuckled. “Is that all of it?”

Yseni opened his eyes and looked beside her to the pars crane. It had all of his personal belongings. He had decided to shove them into the crevices of the cockpit when they were about to move the mech.

“Yeah. I didn’t have much in the first place.” Yseni nodded.

“Get up then.” Daryll ordered. “We’ll discuss more after moving it all to your room.”

“Fine, fine...” Yseni pushed himself out of the seat. He had a feeling that the next week would be one of his busiest.

—

Yseni began on mech renovations that very day. His next week went by in a day and felt like it lasted a decade.

He roped in Daryll and noted all that was missing in the mech, all that they would need to even stand a fighting chance. Yseni checked and double checked all of the mech’s moving and structural parts. He had only built it with enough care to make sure it worked, but now that there was a chance that it would fight, he had to check if the parts could withstand impacts and actually output the power required.

Every evening, Daryll would pop into the mech and give him a motion data report. She’d also let him know what felt good and what needed attention. Yseni would then spend his sleepless nights and days fixing and tweaking all he could.

She was a lot more proactive than he had expected, and spent most of the day scouring through Torak’s match recordings, training, and helping Yseni. She also pulled some strings with her previous mechanic and let them get some crucial parts on credit.

—

“How’s the armor hunt going?” Daryll asked as soon as she entered the workshop. She had been out for a run.

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“Not great.” Yseni grumbled, moving another piece of workable plating from the Dust Devil to a pile on the side.

He hit a switch on the crane and lowered the part, before replying, “Dust Devil’s a scout, this is a close-combat. Barely any plates are compatible. And any that are—”

“Too damaged?” Daryll provided.

Yseni nodded with a grunt, removing the cables from the plate. “... I can get some of them back to shape, but they’ll be weaker. I don’t know if they’ll last a hit.”

“Better than nothing.” Daryll sighed and joined next to him. “Tell me which ones are compromised when you’re done.”

“Got it.” Yseni affirmed. He gestured for Daryll to follow and went to grab another plate. “We’ll need to get buy the rest.”

“... I feel like I jumped the gun on that match more and more every day.”

Yseni would have flicked her forehead if she weren’t a whole head taller than him. “Understatement of the damn millennia.”

—

Somehow, they got the armor sorted. Some parts scavenged (again), some bought from shady vendors, and some acquired from Daryll’s friend. It ended up heavily mismatched and multicoloured, and they did not have time to repaint it. Daryll renamed it Clown Parade. Yseni vetoed that decision.

One day, Daryll pinged Yseni to cover the mech and hide. That day, she brought someone home—tall, stocky, with that same way-too-graceful motor control that one develops when training to be a pilot. The two sparred, and Yseni sneaked in a peek through a remote feed from his mech.

The first few duels were decisive victories for Daryll’s friend. He was fast, blazingly so and Yseni could barely catch his moves. He used that agility to swerve around Daryll, keeping barely out of reach while harassing her with attacks, as if a predator playing with prey.

Daryll was always on the defensive, using minimal movement to dodge and occasionally try to score an attack. That seemed a bit off to Yseni. He’s usually seen her be overtly offensive, like a berserker. This was off character for her.

Eventually, she seemed to get used to the man’s attacks and was able to fight back. It wasn’t much, and the man could still eke out a win every time, but the gap became shorter. Daryll could now step in closer and deny her friend the mobility advantage. She could now land punches and an occasional swipe with a dagger. A couple of bouts later, she was nearly toe to toe with the man.

Still, it felt odd, different from the Daryll he knew. Her movements seemed mechanical almost, subdued and constrained, and she made movements that didn’t make sense to him. He thought it might just be his combat illiteracy speaking, before he realised that there was a sense of familiarity in her movements.

She was mimicking the state of their mech! The hitches he thought he saw were issues he had still not resolved! The odd movements were to avoid hits on the faulty armor plates! He couldn’t help but stare, slack-jawed.

That evening, when he and Daryll got together to re-test the mech, Yseni told her that he had made some plans to improve the mech’s agility.

“Really?” Daryll popped open the mech’s hatch.

“Yes, but it’ll eat up at your uptime.” Yseni said. He explained that had come up with a plan after looking at her match that morning. He was going to add some mini-thrusters to the mech’s joints. The ones that they had—the leftovers from the wreck of Dust Devil—were not enough to provide flight worthy lift or a meaningful boost to its speed, so they had decided to not use them to save on weight and fuel.

“But if we add them to the joints itself...”

“More oomph when I deck him.” Daryll nodded with her sagely conclusion. “I like it.”

Yseni sighed. “It’s going to cut down the time the mech can fight, though, so we’ll need a way to end it quick. No use adding it if we can’t figure that out.”

Daryll grinned. “I was gonna talk to you about that. I have an idea.”

She explained. He listened. They got to work.

—The rest of the week was a blur. Daryll had gotten Yseni an anonymous channel to contact her old mechanic, Kars, and he would spend all his time that wasn’t spent on their mech asking her questions and reviewing the reference material she provided him.

There was always something more to do. Something to fix, to improve, to add. The day of the match loomed ever closer, and Yseni couldn’t help but feel that his efforts wouldn’t be enough. He had done a lot, more than he had thought he could, but it wasn’t enough and he was running out of time and-

Before he knew it, it was the day before the match.

“Trust yourself.” Daryll told him. “You’ve done all you could.”

Yseni shook his head. “No, it will fall apart. It won’t last the match.”

“It won’t.” Daryll reassured him. “You’ve done your best.”

They took their final readings, and they looked better than Yseni expected.

It would not blow itself to pieces. It would be fine.

Or well, it shouldn’t. Yseni was having a hard time convincing himself.

Daryll dragged him to the bar they’d met him after that, to relieve his nerves, or at least that’s what she claimed.

Instead, he and Sedge had to pull out all stops to stop Daryll from drinking too much.

----------------------------------------

“Get away from it already!” Daryll nudged Yseni with a leg. He had been checking to see if he could fix that one misaligned sensor in the mech’s left foreleg.

“It will be a quick fix!” Yseni insisted, and picked up his screwdriver.

“No!” Daryll snatched it from his hand, and then yanked away his toolbox as well. “I’m confiscating this.”

“But Daryll-”

“No!” She whacked his head with the screwdriver. “No more tinkering. It’s match day.”

Yseni groaned.

“Up. Now.” Daryll ordered. “We’re nearly there.”

“Okay, okay...” Yseni stood up and let the tarp fall on the mech again.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and focused on calming his beating heart. He didn’t think he had felt this nervous even when he was fleeing for his life back at Parino V.

He opened them to find the doors of the giant elevator parting open.

The plaza it revealed was stunning. Gigantic, with faux granite floors and walls, resplendent with plant life, and abuzz with pilots, mechs, and audience members, moving through the large labyrinthine complex and finding their destinations.

It wasn’t the extravagance that caught his eyes though, neither the green plants that he hadn’t seen in years, nor the various mechs that he could only ever have dreamt of.

As he stepped forward, the only thing in his eyes was the floor-to-ceiling window right in front of him, and the view beyond that—A series of platforms affixed to the inner circumference of a cylindrical superstructure, each with a unique artificial biome enclosed in a cage. Besides those, floating rafters and ships ferrying people to and fro. Beyond that, obstacles and debris, suspended in the vacuum of space.

He looked closer and saw two motes of light. No, two mechs dodging and weaving through the debris, colliding with each other. There were a hundred such matches happening right that instant, in a hundred arenas. A hundred dances of a thousand dancers, with an audience of millions.

He had seen this place countless times on his terminal screens, but he had never imagined that he would one day see it in person.

He was in the Overburn.