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Prologue
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You don't really know fear until you’re staring up at an eighteen-metre-tall mech pointing its massive rifle down at you. Until a machine the height of a five-story building and its bleak gun barrel, is all that encompasses your vision. It was the sort of war machine that lacked character or style, bland colours, and a practical, overly rigid design. That was what I was about to die to: a bland, featureless doll.
Its rifle would output enough heat that I would probably be dead before the beam hit me, melted, eviscerated, atomised – There would be no body left to recover. It seemed, only a week into the job, I was to become just another paving stone, just one more unremarkable name for the organisation ‘Remembrance’ to, well, remember. I was about to die.
I grew up with bedtime stories of heroes. I mean, who doesn't? We all have a book or two as kids starring a larger-than-life hero. Mine was this noble knight, an old-fashioned religious one, a paladin. His story started simple – He helped weary travellers cross a harsh desert – But as the stories went on, his tasks got more noble, his deeds grander. The other knights eventually grew jealous of him, spreading lies and accusations. In the final book, he was made to face off with these envious traitors, eight opposing one in a battle to the death. I think that was my first experience with a child’s sense of loss, silly as it sounds.
The public panned the books for getting so dark and upsetting kids, but soon that was swept aside by much larger cultural events. And likewise, my first taste of loss became overwhelmingly minor in the face of what was to come.
For thirteen years now, there have been real-life heroes and villains. After all, we’ve been at constant war. Thirteen years of war to try and claim our independence, to claim the humble right for the Abhielien people to be left alone to live life in peace.
I'm a soldier now, too. Like my mother and father, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, and their families and almost everyone I've ever known. I fight to remember them. So few ever came back after all.
In a world like this, there are heroes and villains made flesh, but they're never the same. A 'hero' is simply someone in a mech, a Vijaik pilot who saves a fleet from certain doom with their skills as a pilot. But they could be a terrible person, a philandering, sadistic murderer for all you know or care. And a villain? That's simply what we call the other side's heroes, even if said 'villain' is the better human being.
It was an honour, I was told, to be posted to a battleship for my first deployment, a mark of pride for our organisation. I would be working in the gleaming hangar of the vessel, so new that the floors sparkle silver, while the view of space outside the main door is better than any tourist destination.
Well, that pride, our spacecraft's shiny new equipment and status as a mighty ‘battleship’ did little to save us. Attacked while simply moving from one port to another, our five mechs went out, and mere minutes later, only one returned, a mangled mess missing both its legs. Before I or any of the dozens of others in the cavernous space could so much as get our bearings, never mind do something to help the single surviving machine – More arrived. Five enemies, an entire Vijaik squad of dull grey and green States-Union mechs.
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They had no mercy. Their sleek rifles fired off brilliant orange beams of raw energy in all directions. The ship jolted under our feet, and the walls burned bright red before disappearing. Slowly, the warship was being gouged out from the inside. And then one of those towering ugly machines turned to me. They probably had no intention of wasting energy on shooting a single soldier, but rather, I was an afterthought, a convenient marker to focus the gun on with a real ambition of gouging more holes into the ship. I was about to die.
It happened almost too fast for my eyes to follow. As that rifle's barrel began to glow faintly, coming in like an arrow on the left side of my vision was a gleaming white and silver lance the size of a mini-bus. The enemy, my executioner, detected it coming far too late, their mech's domed helmet turning seconds before impact. The mighty weapon collided straight into its torso, the bland camo-green machine crumpled in on itself. Its cheap metal armour folded like paper as the pilot inside was no doubt crushed to a bloody pulp in a single violent instant.
That was how I didn't die in the end, and that was how I met him. You heard rumours of them, official military posters display their members as monuments, living legends. Although I'd never believed it before. I believed he would be just like every other hero; flawed, corrupt and fundamentally just plain old Human.
My saviour turned and lunged towards the other four invaders, a cape billowing behind it as it passed. Its armour long and flowing, hands gauntleted, head bucket-shaped with a deep red cross engraved as a camera screen. It looked like a knight, a giant, twenty metres tall, white, silver and red warrior out of those silly kid's books. No doubt intentional, a deliberate over-the-top design to boost morale, but I didn't care about all that. It ducked and divided under the barrage of enemy fire, never taking a hit. Once close enough, it drew its weapons: Firstly, that mighty lance, of course, alongside a flaming calabar blade in the shape of a longsword and a gleaming white shield that looked unbreakable.
He even smacked one enemy with the back of his gauntlet while the lance had some sort of inbuilt booster, letting it smash like the king of all pile drivers into an enemy's chest over and over again.
It no longer looked like two-legged tanks fighting amongst themselves – It looked like a knight, swirling his trusty blade to maim his foes with one hand, launching his awesome lance to gouge out their hearts with his other. And as I stood there, still transfixed in a mix of fear and awe, I watched as in just sixty seconds, the entire enemy squad lay dead at his feet.
The knightly mech now stood alone, surrounded by a field of mangled, buckled machine parts and spilt hydraulic fluid staining the silver surfaces of the ship’s floor a vibrant crimson-brown.
Third-ranked among the Five Great Aces. A veteran of all thirteen years of this war. The pilot known to all simply by his title:
The Knight Templar
This isn't my story. I'm just a junior mechanic who should have died their first week on the job. No, this is his story, Templar’s. Of the one true, unambiguous hero I have the honour of serving alongside.