Everyone's experience of piloting a Thundercloud was a little different. Liva had once discussed that with many pilots, and she had received plenty of interesting answers.
Some described the feeling with a touch of innocent romance. One said it was like dancing, except the partner was not someone you desired, but the Machine Spirit's greedy soul, starving for destruction and violence.
The Machine Spirit was never satisfied, forever hungry, forever urging them to bring destruction down upon the heads of their enemies.
Others said the feeling was like eating a big piece of rationed dark chocolate while half asleep and half awake, entering a realm full of emptiness amid the bitterness filling the mouth and the lingering aftertaste. It was a dream, and yet it was not.
The taste buds would carry sensations that did not actually exist. Within that realm, he would directly become the Thundercloud, no longer its pilot, but one with it, becoming, in the truest sense, the Thundercloud floating above the enemy's head, and then bringing down destruction.
But for Liva, it was another feeling entirely.
The cockpit closed, and the seat adjusted automatically. Her field of vision rose. Neural connection lines gently pressed against her temples, and complex streams of data flashed before her eyes.
She gritted her teeth and endured the pain caused by the neural connection. This was only the first wave. The pain would keep coming. She had long since grown used to it, and even had the strength to soothe the increasingly irritable Machine Spirit.
Weapon check: intact. Ammunition reserves: intact. Neural connection successful. Synchronization rate: normal. Inhibitor reserves: twelve.
Login protocol: passed.
Thirty-six complex runes lit up inside the pitch-black cockpit, and pale-blue fluorescence activated in an instant with a hum. The Aquila-pattern silently changed the operating mode of the