Free Web NovelWhat Did Pavela Do After Crying Her Eyes Out?
The first thing she did was try to completely erase that memory from her mind.
Oh, not the part about the fight.
She actually quite enjoyed that part.
She had never been that reckless and domineering when piloting her old, beat-up thug-iv before.
What she wanted to delete was the part that came after.
The image of herself slumped in the wreckage, wailing like an abandoned little animal.
Herself, hugging her knees, face a mess of snot and tears, mindlessly repeating 'I want to go home,' 'I don't want to kill,' 'I don't want to be here.'
Just the thought of it made her face burn with shame.
Pavela von Schwartz—no, Pavel Ivanovich Sokolov, the soldier from the 404th Independent Mecha Punishment Camp.
Had cried.
Like a three-year-old child, crying until she was gasping for air.
"..."
She mentally graded her own performance.
Probably a negative thirty.
The good news was, there were no living creatures around at the time.
She had killed all the enemies, the mecha was wrecked, the snowstorm was still raging, but snowstorms don't talk and they don't go around spreading devastating intel like 'Pavela is actually a crybaby.'
The bad news was, she wasn't sure if the void realm had any weird surveillance mechanisms.
What if that woman Margaret could replay everything that happened in the void realm—
No.
Don't think about it.
Thinking too much about that would be fatal.
Then came the second thing: taking a deep breath.
The kind of rough, forceful breath that squeezes out all the foul air from your lungs in one go, then violently fills them back up with icy air.
It hurt.
Her ribs hurt, her chest hurt, her throat hurt even more—she had cried too hard, her vocal cords were probably swollen.
But the pain was good.
Pain meant she was still alive, meant her body was still functioning, meant she hadn't been completely devoured by that damned Gatekeeper, that damned Path of the Tower, that damned psychic contamination.
Third thing: stand up.
This step was much harder than she imagined.
The difficulty wasn't the pain.
The difficulty was the psychological inertia.
After crying, a person becomes soft.
Like all the reinforcing steel had been pulled out of her skeleton, leaving behind just a soggy, exhausted lump of flesh that didn't want to do anything.
Her body was begging her, just lie here.
The snowstorm was cold, but the wreckage still held some residual warmth.
Close your eyes, don't think about anything, don't do anything.
Just lie here until the void realm collapses, until someone comes to rescue her, until it's all over.
Pavela even spent about three seconds considering this proposal.
Then she cursed herself with a swear word and pushed herself up using a piece of twisted armor plating. freewebnovel.cσ๓
In this world, the option of lying down and waiting for rescue had never belonged to her.
On the battlefield, there is no rescue.
The only time someone saved her was when her sister Eleanor saw a little girl dying in the ruins and was reminded of her own sister.
That was pure, dumb luck.
And Pavela never bets her life on luck.
So she stood up.
Wiped the mess off her face.
Looked around.
The thug-iv was completely finished.
The cockpit had been burst open from the inside by her, the boiler had exploded, its limbs scattered within a fifty-meter radius.
Steam pipes hung from the wreckage like pulled-out intestines, still emitting the last wisps of white vapor.
The probe from the spinal direct-link system had torn out a small piece of skin and flesh when it detached from her back and was now dangling from the back of the pilot's seat, swaying in the wind.
She looked down at herself.
Her tattered mecha pilot suit could no longer be described as 'tattered'—a more accurate term would be 'rags.'
The part from her left shoulder to her waist was almost completely torn open, revealing the layers of bandages and scars beneath.
She didn't know when half of her right pant leg had been burned away.
Her boots were still there, but the sole of the left one had come unglued, making a 'flap-flap' sound when she walked.
She had to figure out how to tidy herself up first, then go 'borrow' a suitable weapon.
And as luck would have it, she remembered where her fellow Punishment Camp comrades were during this rout.
Surely they wouldn't mind helping out a good brother in such a dire time.
And so, we have the current scene of a heavenly soldier descending.
...
Pavela peered through the crosshairs of the sniper scope, carefully examining the massive, pitch-black silhouette at the bottom of the basin.
Familiar.
Too familiar.
That tower shield.
The smooth-as-mirror, dark-as-the-abyss tower shield that extended from shoulder to knee.
She had seen this shield before.
From less than thirty meters away, she had watched it grind forward like a moving fortress wall, flattening her comrades-in-arms and their mechas into thin sheets of metal. freewebnσvel.cѳm
Helmuth von Clausewitz.
Grand Master of the Empire's Second Mecha Order.
"The Iron Wall."
But something was off.
Clausewitz didn't use a sword.
At least not on that day, during that 'Third Army Salient Counterattack,' he didn't.
He used a steam-powered warhammer.
The hammerhead was larger than the torso of Pavel's thug-iv, each swing carving out a ten-meter diameter crater in the ground, accompanied by the shriek of steam pressure valves and the trembling of the earth.
That sound was something she would never forget in her lifetime.
Like God ringing a funeral bell.
That Clausewitz clearly wouldn't resort to underhanded or risky tricks.
It had also integrated a significant part of 'Pavel' into itself.
Pavel as the 'Ghost of Kaldburg,' Pavel as the 'devious and cunning one.'
The incarnation of destruction was slowly turning its massive body, the tower shield returning to its defensive position on its chest, covering the shattered breastplate and exposed core left by Frederick's impact.
Its head, if that faceless black helmet could be called a 'head,'
Was tilting towards the direction of her ridge.
It was looking for her.
Pavela didn't give it the chance to find her.
She pulled the trigger again.
"BANG—!!"
The second shot.
The muzzle flash tore a brief orange-red gash through the snowstorm.
The recoil traveled from her shoulder throughout her body, and a crisp cracking sound immediately came from her shoulder socket.
Her first shot earlier had already made the bone in her right shoulder emit some rather unpleasant noises.
So it wasn't strange that a crack or two had appeared now.
Despite the pain, the bullet's point of impact was unnervingly precise.
It struck the elbow joint of its right arm as it was raising it.
"CLANG—!!"
Sparks flew.
The arm lifting the greatsword was forcibly pressed back down by this impact, the sword's tip dropping a few inches.
Pavela knew its movements all too well.
When Clausewitz raised his sword, there was a 0.3-second hesitation in the elbow joint.
That was the inherent delay when the steam drive system switched from 'defense mode' to 'attack mode,' requiring the hydraulic lines to redistribute pressure.
It was precisely this piece of information that had allowed her to escape from this reaper's grasp back then.
Yes, her squad had once encountered this Order Master head-on in that battle.
Afterwards, only two people survived.
One was her.
She had practically drained herself of all her cleverness and cunning tricks to escape from under his hand.
Of course, it was also possible she had been let off the hook.
The other was Grigori.
That bastard ran incredibly fast after seeing even the disciplinary troops fleeing.
Pavela pulled the bolt again, loading a third round.
The snowstorm blew into the collar of her ill-fitting uniform, making her neck shrink from the cold.
"Hey—"
She shouted down the slope, her voice torn and fragmented by the wind.
"You few down there, can you still move?"
