"Luca??"
Hearing the familiar voice boom from the towering mech, Gwen cried out in shock.
Even Tony Stark, usually unflappable, looked genuinely surprised inside his helmet.
But the mech didn't respond immediately. Instead, it raised its massive right hand—a three-fingered claw—in a gesture that clearly said, Hold on a sec.
"Gimme a minute!"
With that, the mech ignored their baffled expressions and pivoted its torso back toward the path it had just bulldozed. A few Dark Elf survivors, having narrowly escaped being flattened, were now scrambling in the wreckage.
Realizing they were still in danger, the arrogant aliens raised their rifles in a panic, firing wildly at the Boxer.
Crimson lasers rained down on the mech's hull.
But the energy beams, which had been punching holes through concrete walls earlier, did nothing but singe the paint on the Boxer.
Don't let the aesthetic fool you. Sure, the Boxer looked like a scrap-heap special, welded together from junkyard refuse.
But beneath the rust and grime, its core components were salvaged from decommissioned Jaeger parts.
And in the Pacific Rim universe, Jaegers were hundred-meter-tall leviathans built to wrestle Kaiju weighing thousands of tons.
The sheer density and tensile strength of those materials were off the charts. Dark Elf infantry rifles? Might as well be shooting spitballs.
Facing the frantic laser fire, Luca simply crouched the mech low, mimicking a farmer scooping up a pile of melons, and swept both massive arms inward.
CRUNCH.
A dozen Dark Elves were instantly reduced to paste.
"Whoa, hold up. That's a no-no."
Luca spotted one surviving elf trying to prime a black hole grenade.
He didn't give the alien a chance. The Boxer's left arm—which ended in a massive excavator bucket—swung down.
SCOOP.
The bucket dug deep, scooping up the elf along with a ton of dirt and debris, and hurled the whole load high into the air.
BOOM!
The grenade detonated mid-flight.
The singularity swallowed the elf, the dirt, and the rocks, crushing them into nothingness before vanishing. Not a single flower petal on the ground was harmed.
Luca was confident in the Boxer's armor, but he wasn't stupid enough to face-tank a literal black hole just to prove a point.
This is taking too long. No built-in weapons systems really slow things down.
Thinking fast, Luca decided to improvise. He engaged the hydraulics and made the mech hop.
Two hundred tons of steel slammed into the pavement.
It wasn't an attack; it was just a jump. But the impact sent a localized earthquake rippling through the street.
The remaining Dark Elves lost their footing, tumbling to the ground.
A few unlucky soldiers who had just pulled the pins on their grenades dropped them in the confusion.
POP. POP.
Mini-singularities opened up, swallowing their owners whole.
From there, the battle turned into a farce.
The Boxer stomped around like a toddler in an ant farm.
Left foot. Right foot.
If an elf tried to stand? Stomp.
If one tried to run? Jump—shockwave—knockdown.
Then a gentle tap on the head with a multi-ton finger to make sure they stayed down.
A fifty-foot steel beast against flesh-and-blood soldiers under six feet tall. It wasn't a fight; it was landscaping.
In moments, the street was silent, save for the hum of the mech's reactor. The ground was packed flat.
Luca turned the mech back toward the ruins where Tony and Gwen were sitting, covered in dust.
His voice crackled over the speakers again, casual as ever.
"So, where were we? You guys were saying?"
---
One minute later.
Inside the Boxer's cockpit.
Gwen was huddled in a corner, using her "empty" web-shooters to strap herself securely to a structural strut.
Tony, on the other hand, had zero chill. He was practically vibrating, circling the pilot's harness where Luca was strapped in, poking and prodding at every panel he could reach.
Luca was sweating.
"Hey! Quit touching stuff! Find a seat and strap in! If I start moving and you get turned into paste against the wall, I'm putting the photos in the Daily Bugle!"
Tony ignored the threat completely. He was in engineer mode.
"360-degree panoramic cockpit? Heavy ion battery power? Is this motion-capture or neural drift? Why no H.A.R.O. integration? And if you have this level of tech, why does the chassis look like a garbage truck threw up? Wait... this isn't normal scrap. The tensile strength is insane. Is the ugly aesthetic a choice? Where are the weapon systems? Did you forget to install them?"
The rapid-fire interrogation was making Luca's head spin.
"Yes to all, now sit down! My dad built it, okay? He died before he could finish it or leave me the manuals. I'm still figuring half of this stuff out myself."
Tony paused. He looked around the cockpit one last time, a thoughtful expression on his face.
"Mr. Herman... was a visionary genius."
Of course, that was a lie.
Luca had synthesized the Boxer using the system just a few days ago. He'd had Shamila gather the necessary raw materials in a warehouse, originally planning to study the core component—the "Spider-Bot" tech—before assembling the full mech.
But with the invasion in full swing, he'd had to rush the synthesis.
Thankfully, he had his white Haro unit with him. It wasn't as advanced as the orange one, but its basic processing power was enough to interface with the mech's OS and get it running.
Right now, the little white robot was wedged tightly into a gap in the metal frame to keep it from rolling around the cockpit like a pinball.
Seeing that Tony had finally strapped himself in, Luca took a breath.
"Haro, patch me into the main comms. Let's see how Thor is doing."
"Contacting Thor! Contacting Thor!" the robot chirped, its eyes flashing white from its wedged position.
A static hiss filled Luca's headset.
"Hello—"
CRASH——!!!
Before Luca could get a word out, a projectile slammed into the earth right in front of the Boxer.
The ground, which Luca had just flattened, erupted into a new crater.
Dust swirled.
In the center of the hole lay a figure. Bloody, battered, his cape torn in half.
It was Thor. And he looked like he'd gone twelve rounds with a freight train.