As soon as Chifuyu finished speaking, the White Knight had already turned toward the convergence zone on the left.
Lin Cuo looked at Tabane through two layers of tactical displays. She was watching him too, her chin resting on her hand. Neither spoke. Their eyes merely shifted a few times between the Brain-class, the four activation fluid lines, and the increasingly dense layers of BETA defenses.
Then they laughed almost simultaneously, and Chifuyu's voice immediately turned cold.
"What are you two laughing at?"
Lin Cuo answered with a perfectly straight face. "You only said not to engage the Brain-class ahead of schedule. You didn't say we couldn't make it think we were about to."
Tabane nodded along, her rabbit-ear hair ornament bobbing twice as her Technical IS adjusted its posture.
"The little Regent and I had the same idea. Before the main lines are severed, someone has to lure away those ten thousand-plus little cuties around the core. Since all it knows how to do is assign more obstacle-clearing resources to high-intensity threats, we'll give it the brightest, hottest, loudest decoy in the entire shaft."
Chifuyu paused for barely a moment.
"I don't approve."
"Too late." Lin Cuo had already unlocked the final power limit on the Radiation Fluctuation module in the Shen Hu Mech's left arm. "Besides, we're not actually attacking the Brain-class. We're just setting off a string of firecrackers on its doorstep."
Tabane picked up where he left off with a beaming smile. "A very big string of firecrackers that'll make the entire Reactor think it's about to be torn apart."
"Tabane."
Chifuyu said only her name, but that tone alone would have made most IS students reconsider their entire lives within three seconds. Tabane acted as though she hadn't understood the warning at all, directly linking