That night, the total number of mechanical monsters destroyed by a certain troublesome little girl—the Chosen Pilot who had wielded an arc lance and gone on a rampage—was somewhere around seventy or eighty. That didn't include the ones missed by the recording equipment carried by Li Kui and the others, so the actual number could have been higher. Kira, piloting Freedom Gundam, had destroyed around a hundred and ten.
At a glance, the score between them differed by a full twenty or thirty kills. But keep in mind that one of them had been practically fighting barehanded, armed with nothing but an arc lance designed for armor penetration, while the other had been piloting a nearly twenty-meter-tall Freedom Gundam, equipped with a high-energy beam rifle that could keep going "BIU~! BIU~! BIU~!" and fired beams a hundred millimeters across!
Under those circumstances, the two of them had nearly matched each other's scores. That said a lot.
Anyway, when the battle was over, when the cunning mechanical monsters that had set up an ambush and surrounded them—only to be "surrounded in turn"—had been wiped out, and when the nearly two hundred steel beasts of all shapes and kinds had been annihilated, everyone hurriedly relocated in the dead of night and settled into another culvert more than ten kilometers away. Afterward, everyone, including Kira, looked at Annie as if she were a monster.
It made sense!
Those had been mechanical monsters—a pack of steel beasts!
They were mechanical constructs constantly deployed by the Machine Race to hunt humans across inhabited planets. Any one of them could probably slaughter and destroy an entire village, or even a town, without anyone finding that particularly surprising.
But now, a little girl had wiped out those monsters with nothing but an arc lance designed to pierce