86: The Blade of San Magnolia

Content warning: A realistic style, little romance, and a deconstruction of the original's idealist premise. The setting is a parallel universe based on the world of the original 86: Eighty-Six, but with modifications. There are no mecha heroes who can solve everything, and no high-and-mighty nobles full of compassion. While the Federation still believes in the romance of "mecha," and Lena still tries to save the Republic with kindness from within the system, Mathilde Juste, the daughter of a commoner officer, chooses another path. The mecha's legs are too fragile? Then crush them! Electromagnetic interference? Then use vacuum-tube stainless-steel interceptors and anti-radiation missiles. She joins an underground organization and launches a revolution, sending the old nobility away with the gunfire of revolutionary tribunals and smashing the old order with the Declaration of Equality for All Races. With fuel-air explosives and systems engineering, she forges tens of millions of underclass citizens and the Eighty-Six into an unstoppable war machine. She embraces justice, but justice's thorns leave her covered in wounds. "If the Republic of San Magnolia can still be saved, Lena will be the one to save it. If it is beyond saving, then Juste will be its gravedigger." This is the founding epic of a materialist, and the story of how a blade named Juste carved a bloody path through the corpses of the old world.