An age when the Mateger exoskeleton is standard-issue equipment for individual soldiers.
Ren Chuan, an orbital paratrooper in the Asia-Pacific Union, abandoned his flesh-and-blood body for full-body cybernetics and uploaded his consciousness as data. After dying in battle five times, he retired and scraped by as a down-and-out mercenary in the slums, until corporate magnate Avian took notice of him.
“Want to live like a person? Why not become a gun again?”
She offered him a job he couldn’t refuse: enter the Armored Combat League and pilot a twenty-year-old exoskeleton against the latest female combat androids developed by corporate conglomerates.
There is no glory of the battlefield here, only a death show controlled by the corporations. The androids’ blades are cold and sharp, their high-frequency edges slicing through steel as easily as rotten wood. The crowd roars, while gamblers place bets on every drop of engine oil.
Ren Chuan grips his rust-spotted sword and sneers amid the hail of bullets and ruins:
“Combat androids? They’re just toys made by humans.”
When an elite veteran faces a perfect war machine, when memories forged in flesh challenge a flood of data…
In this death match, he must either tear the rules apart or become wreckage on capitalism’s game board.
[Exoskeleton Armor] [Combat Androids] [No System] [Brutal Combat] [Hardboiled Male Lead] [Mecha]
The battle scenes are fantastic, but the power dynamics are a bit odd. Even with orbital drop ships at their disposal, the two major powers are only vying for control of Earth. Furthermore, the intensity of the battles fluctuates wildly. At the beginning, it feels like a world war, but after the protagonist retires and joins a company, the company uses the front lines as experimental sites and stores long-term arsenal satellites in space—it feels more like a proxy war.
A very good book
So far, it's great! Keep it up! 👍👍 I quite like this background and worldview.