Cast Honor Aside part 1

 

Kou expanded the monitors inside his office and called up Astraea.

「I want to talk about the Lanius C-Type Block-4.」

「Understood. Improvements on the way to Block-5, then.」

「Unit 5’s Detonation Drive has it performing on the edge of Hrafnagud’s territory. Block-4 isn’t so much a refit as it is control-system optimization based on field data.」

「In overall performance—battlefield deployment capability included—it already surpasses Hrafnagud. There’s no major leap on paper, but repeated live combat has refined it: more efficient thruster output, responses beyond swordplay—throws and the like—and more flexible mobility overall.」

「We can’t pour Hrafnagud-level cost into it. I couldn’t touch the frame itself, and there was no room for extra armor.」

He wanted to push the reinforcement further. But with no hope of another technology unsealing from Asia, all he could do was iterate—refit, optimize, repeat.

「Even so, cost-wise it’s ballooned to the point you’d never think it was Lanius-line.」

「A tradeoff for weight reduction