There's been no further alien activity since the last chapter, and the Kurogane has been missing for months by now. The crew has continued to scour the Earth for any remaining DC forces they might encounter, with little success. When the chapter opens, Ryusei and Ryoto are finishing up another fruitless enemy scouting trip, and they're frankly getting a bit tired of doing this all the time. This does leave plenty of time for small-talk between them, leading to them talking a bit about their recruitment through the Burning PT competition.
For one, Ryusei still doesn't rightly know what Adler's motives are, particularly in regards to the recruitment of Burning PT players. This is one thing that Ryoto does know about: Adler plans to take over the world using autonomous mechs, and they've been recruited to provide combat data for the AI. Of course, he could have used anyone for that task, but that would require intensive training and medication to get to the skill level of players like these two. According to Adler's theories, they are mutants of some sort, capable of two things: rapidly learning how to effectively fight in mechs without training, and being able to handle real-life combat without going crazy.
There's also something that's been bothering Ryoto: three of them — Ryusei, Ryoto and Tenzan — were recruited through this program, yet they ended up on opposing sides of the war. It's an EFA program and its actual purpose wasn't publically known, so the question is how the DC decided to do exactly the same thing by recruiting video game pilots. Barring the unlikely notion that this suddenly became a fad in military intelligence, the most logical conclusion is once again that there is a spy among them. If so, it's anyone's guess who it could be. (Not really, we all know it's Hans. Have you seen that face? Obviously evil.)
Now that this conversation is over with, Tetsuya calls both of them back to the ship because they've received an SOS signal from the Dukedom of Riksent, which is currently under attack, naturally either by the UCC or DC remnants. Not that this country has any relation to the ongoing war, but it's rich in gold mines, so they're gonna plunder it anyway. After all, they need funding after they both lost their main bases. The Hagane does not have any obligation to get involved in this either, but as Daitetsu is noble as always, he decides to answer the call anyway and sets course for Riksent.
In Riksent, Princess Shine Hausen
and her butler Joyce L'Dahl (probably one of the most bizarre names I've seen yet) are barely keeping the UCC forces at bay, while arguing whether or not the princess should evacuate in a dangerous situation like this. Joyce thinks it's most important that the princess survives, while Shine thinks she should stick around to protect her people to the end. Well, the princess will probably survive either way, since the enemy really wants her as a hostage, but that is slightly besides the point. Still, she's determined neither to flee nor to let herself get captured.
JOYCE: But, Princess, we're losing ground...our soldiers are dying to protect you. Please don't let them die in vain.
Yeah, at that point the crown on your head starts getting rather heavy. She's not just doing this out of some foolhardy sense of duty, though. As it turns out, she has amazing powers of clairvoyance that lets her know the Hagane is already on its way there so she'll just keep stalling her enemies some more.
The enemy side is once again led by Tempest, who has second thoughts about this, since kidnapping a little girl goes a bit far even for him. For a moment, anyway, since he quickly concludes he must never hesitate in his actions if he wants to get his revenge. I'd say he's almost worse than the ones he's getting revenge on, but a monomaniac like him is unlikely to care about hypocrisy. The next few lines confirm this as he plans to toast this country in the name of revenge after he absconds with the princess, which is obviously a deal breaker as far as handing over the princess goes.
Luckily, at this exact moment the Hagane arrives on the scene, which does a good job of redirecting Tempest's attention in their direction. He's still threatening to kill her if they don't meet his demands, but the princess herself is particularly unimpressed by these vain threats, and frankly threatens him by claiming she'll kick his ass if he tries.
JOYCE: Y-Your Majesty! That's unbecoming of a lady!
SHINE: O-Oh...pardon me.
All trash-talking aside, she's still a stickler for royal protocol as you can see. It's one of those royalty gags that her dialogue is rife with, but more of that later. Anyway, the crew decides they better act quickly if they want to save the princess, and so it's finally time to deploy.
Well, time to get rescuing then. Plenty of cover on this map, with the white buildings offering up to 25% defense. The mission is to evacuate the princess from the royal castle before enemy troops can get to her, which might not be very long since they're using rather fast-moving jets. The second objective is to destroy all enemies, but I've got plenty of time for that. For that matter, neither is there a time limit on obtaining the Battle Mastery for this map, which is to destroy Tempest's Rhinoceros near the top of the map.
From the starting position, the first thing I do is take out the jets, as I mentioned. I try to do all of them in one turn when I play this map, just to make sure none will escape my grasp later. Once again, if one measly enemy unit reaches the destination, it's an instant game over, and that includes these jets that I can take out in one or two hits. Two things really come in handy on this map: mechs that can fly, and pilots that have the Accel command. It makes it a lot easier to traverse the distance.
I decide Irm will be the one I send over to rescue the princess since he's got high speed and defense, while the others take care of nearby enemies. On the other hand, Irm already manages to take out one anyway in fly-by, which is fortunate. I'm not too concerned with conserving ammo right now, so I'll just make sure I make one- or two-hit kills on all of them. Within a turn, this group of enemies has been largely eliminated and later cleaned up by my weaker units, so it's time to send everyone forward towards the castle. Conveniently, the path of my units and the enemy units intersects, which leads to another squad that is quickly taken care of. My units are making progress towards the castle, but I gotta say all the walls and buildings really slow down the ones that can't fly.
After a few turns, it looks like Tempest is the only one still standing...until a gaggle of Barrelions suddenly spawns almost in front of the castle, led by none other than king douche himself, Tenzan. Yeah, of course it wasn't going to be that easy. Fortunately I was prepared for this one; if I had sent all my units to attack Tempest, as I originally did, Irm would've been hard-pressed to make his way there in time through all the enemies. Nailing the player with inconvenient mid-chapter reinforcements is almost tradition for SRW games anyway, so I could've seen that coming even if I hadn't played it before.
These enemies will all take a few more hits before they go down, so I do the best I can to form a wall of units to delay them as much as possible. Just a matter of taking care of the ones already behind me this turn, and the rest of them aren't fast enough to pass me in time. Most of the usual front-liners don't need any particular buffs in dealing with these guys, but the weaker units are definitely profiting from hiding in nearby buildings. A lot more defense, AND harder to hit. They can still deal 1000 damage a hit, though, so it's no reason to get careless.
Amazingly, the wall tactic from chapter 8 still works, and they just come to a dead stop in front of my troops instead of bothering to move around them, which is once again to my advantage. I eliminate them all at a leisurely pace, leaving the usual hard hitters to deal with Tenzan. Annoyingly, he's got the Prevail skill, so I need to hit him REALLY hard for those last few hit points if I want to damage him at all. Nothing a T-Link Knuckle to the face can't fix though.
Now all that remains is Tempest, who isn't particularly tough, but will run away when he's low on health. He's already emptied just about all of his main weapons, and is now just shooting mildly damaging missiles. Lots of hit points, but really no challenge at all. I take my time to get his HP down to around 10000, which was a bit of a precision job. This is one of those precision jobs where you can actually be unlucky by scoring one critical too many and bringing his health lower than intended, but fortunately no such thing happened. Once I got around that point, Irm successfully dealt the decisive blow with a Valor-enhanced Darkness Slash, which is pretty much my finisher of choice. The Hagane's Tronium Cannon deals about as much damage, but neither of its captains have Valor, unfortunately.
Just like Tenzan, I pulverize this clown for the umpteenth time, and victory is mine. The princess has been safely escorted to the ship, and we're out of here. Joyce thanks Daitetsu for helping him and Shine out of a tight situation, though the princess herself is nowhere to be found. Seems she ran off again somewhere, although she was told to stay on the bridge. This butler's pretty much her only guardian, too, since her parents are both dead. Eita, in his infinite wisdom, just let her leave since she ordered him to, apparently not realizing she's not his boss. Way to go, bridge lackey.
One thing that Daitetsu still wants to know from Joyce is why they wanted to capture the princess anyway, as it probably wasn't just to have a kid as a hostage. The explanation given is that Shine possesses powers of precognition, as we saw earlier, and the DC probably wants to use that ability for military purposes. A precog in a mech would have almost unbeatable dodging abilities, and according to Ingram it would actually be feasible to implement something like that. They still might try to capture her again, for that matter, so right now the most important thing is taking her somewhere safe before they return.
Aya's kinda sad they have to leave so soon since she wanted to see all the fine art and museums the country had to offer, which greatly amuses Ryusei since he never figured her to be that kinda person. What, a person whose cultural exposure extends beyond giant robots and video games? Naturally, she gives him a stern ear-pulling for his smart remarks. Garnet now butts in with her adoration of princesses, given that Shine is pretty much a textbook princess, and Aya joins in the squeeing over pretty princesses.
GARNET: Anyways, wouldn't it be great to be a princess, Aya?
AYA: Oh, yes. It's every girl's dream...
RYUSEI: Girl!? Ha! You better double check your ID, grandma...
Here we have a boy who either never learns his lesson, or is a glutton for physical punishment. I'm going with the former, and he gets his fill of ear-pulling. Some more barely-related tangents follow, such as getting Latooni to wear that dress again, and the question of where the princess is anyway, but otherwise the conversation isn't going in any particular direction anymore.
The princess herself is wandering around the hangar where she encounters Rai, who is too busy with internally monologuing about his father to notice her at first, but with some more shouting she finally has his attention. She orders him — and nobody other than him — to give her a tour of the ship, but he flatly refuses her request as "princess" is not a rank aboard this ship. He leaves, though he does deign to give her his name upon request.
RAI: Lieutenant Raidiese F. Branstein, at your service.
SHINE: Branstein...a-are you...!?
A question she doesn't get an answer to, alas. In the briefing room, everyone now officially gets to hear about their new mission of safely transporting the princess to Japan. And to mind her manners around her, to pile on some extra frustration. Everyone considers Rai to be pretty much the best choice to handle her, since he's a noble and knows how those people act — according to Ryusei, anyway. Hopefully this royal brat won't be too much of a drag.
Meanwhile, Ingram is speaking to Kusuha in private, to inform her she has to become a pilot, and will begin training the next day. This leaves her utterly stupified, but has no say in it since it's an order. Well, at least we'll be getting an extra pilot. She'll come in handy.
At the apocalypse-proof bunker known as the Earth Cradle, Egret and Adler are checking up how construction is coming along. Not well, apparently; the walls are yet to be done, and Magus, the central computer, is not yet online. Which should at least exclude any risk of AI malfunctions, but that's not much solace. Another one of their crucial projects, known as the machine cell, won't be done for another year, which is obviously longer than they can wait given that they're about to be obliterated by aliens. He calls for Sophia Nate, the scientist responsible for these projects, despite objections that she's currently unavailable. In the meantime, they discuss the news they received from their spy regarding the princess' location, so they'll probably be following us soon.
For this mission I got a Hybrid Armor and a Radar Module as loot. I guess I'll give the extra armor to Irm, and give the radar module (all weapons range +1) to Aya for now. As the medic, I'm leaving her out of combat far too often, but I might let her snipe a bit.
