Chapter Text
Aside from the underdevelopedness of the place, the next thing the Subaru noticed was the presence of lots of roadkill along the roads. Even though now they appeared smart enough to not stand in the middle of the road and get hit, ruining the paint job on the passing cars, the Subaru couldn't help but disdain them since it appeared they had traded it for a bipedal way to transport. At least roadkill in Japan practiced a quadrupedal mode of transport, even though they were not blessed with tires like cars were.
The crowd parted as the Subaru approached. They had never had the good fortune to see something like that before and thus were awestruck by the magnificence of the 3000 pounds of Japanese engineering. The Subaru drove through the street at a slow pace, enjoying the attention. The roads were rough and bumpy, made of unrefined stone blocks rather than smooth Tokyo asphalt, which would have been a problem for any other car. But a Subaru Impreza WRX STi, with a Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive did not care. It adjusted the power output across all four wheels and kept going.
The vehicle downshifted into second gear. It maintained a steady thirty miles per hour to analyze the local layout. It passed a fruit vendor, flashing its high beams at a pile of red globes. Appas. A completely inferior organic substitute for a bottle of premium engine coolant.
The crowd suddenly parted.
A red-haired male meat-bag in white knight clothes stepped onto the stones.
Reinhard had never seen something like this. He beheld what appeared to be a ground dragon but made entirely of metal. It lacked a heartbeat, or at least any rhythmic cardiovascular pulse Reinhard could identify. Worst of all, the moment his fingers brushed against the pommel of his sword, he realized the universe was permitting the weapon to be drawn. That meant this mechanical construct was an incredibly strong beast, and a fight here would cause an immense number of civilian casualties. Luckily for everyone, it appeared the beast didn't seem interested in fighting them and thus negotiations might be possible.
Just as Reinhard advanced the Od Laguna scrambled to find a way to balance the confrontation and the best way it found was creating a new divine protection for its favorite redhead.
PING
Reinhard clutched his head as a brand-new blessing materialized inside his soul. Right between his Divine Protection of Rock Paper Scissors and Divine Protection of Perfectly Manicured Feet sat the all-new the Divine Protection of Top Gear. In an instant, 33 seasons of Top Gear flew into Reinhard's mind. The Sword Saint gasped as his consciousness violently synchronized with decades of BBC broadcasting culture. He suddenly wondered how he had lived so many years without knowing about Jeremy Clarkson. The man's sheer genius was almost frightening.
And now he knew the second most important thing in the world too. The Falkland Islands belong to the United Kingdom. Hail Britannia, Ruler of the Seas. God save the King.
Reinhard snapped back to reality, his pale blue eyes wide as he stared directly at the World Rally Blue paint job. He looked at the horizontal hood scoop, then down at the gold rims, and finally at the six-star emblem on the grille. A cold sweat broke across the Sword Saint's neck.
"Remarkable..." Reinhard whispered, his pale blue eyes wide with profound, divine automotive dread. "A stock 2.0-liter dual-overhead-cam turbocharged horizontal-four... but the exhaust note indicates the presence of unequal-length headers. It is a rolling monument to the Subaru Corporation's legacy of motorsport excellence. Love. It’s what makes a Subaru, a Subaru."
The Subaru’s forward-facing windshield cameras scanned the red-haired entity. Its internal sensors detected a sudden, massive shift in the human's data profile. The biped had somehow acquired a deep, spiritual understanding of the Subaru Corporation's legacy of motorsport excellence. He was now enlightened, maybe calling him the meat-bag anymore wouldn't be fair.
The car chose to acknowledge the educated biped.
Meep-meep! went the factory security horn.
Reinhard instinctively flinched, holding up his hands. "I understand, grand STi! I mean you no harm! But please, I implore you, do not drop the clutch! If you engage the Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive system at full throttle on these unrefined cobblestones, you will launch this country directly into the path of the Great Cascade!"
Before Reinhard could offer to inspect the oil levels, a sudden blur of yellow fabric darted across the lower corner of the Subaru's windshield.
It was a small, blonde female meat-bag. She had just successfully pickpocketed a silver-haired half-elf several blocks away, trying to take advantage of the fact that the world's strongest knight was currently engaged in a tense mechanical standoff. Clutching a stolen insignia tightly in her fist, she sprinted across the open street, completely focused on escaping deep into the slums.
And she would have been successful in her crimes too, if not for the Subaru. But Kenji Kita hadn't created them to be silent bystanders in times of moral quandary. A crime had occurred. In the human world, the car was bound to the strict jurisdiction of metropolitan traffic laws and standard vehicle registration requirements. But here, there were no speed cameras. There were no emissions regulations. There was only an open road and a complete lack of civil order. Furthermore, the car’s newly acquired internal logic dictated that a bipedal running speed was structurally inferior to a turbocharged powertrain.
The Subaru had found its purpose.
Traffic enforcement.
Before Reinhard could attempt to negotiate a treaty or check if the vehicle was compliant with regional environmental guidelines, the Subaru’s internal relays bypassed the clutch plate entirely. The transmission slotted itself into first gear. The electronic throttle body snapped open to 100%.
Pop-pop-pop-pop-BANG!
The anti-lag system engaged, shooting a massive, two-foot column of pure flame out of the exhaust pipe, completely scorching the stones and lighting a nearby wooden vegetable cart on fire.
"He's building boost!" Reinhard shrieked in absolute panic, his Top Gear knowledge forcing him to calculate the terrifying kinetic force. "The torque vectoring! Everyone, get down! Uncle Rodney is coming to visit!"
The Yokohama tires bit violently into the primitive stone road. With a deafening, metallic scream of the turbocharger, the car vanished down the avenue in a cloud of thick, blue-raspberry-scented vape smoke, pursuing the thief at maximum velocity and leaving the world's strongest knight standing completely alone in the dust with a fully unsheathed Dragon Sword, wondering how he was going to explain the concept of a sports sedan to the Royal Council.
The pursuit of the blonde biped was now fully engaged.
To chase an agile, low-mass target through a medieval urban landscape would have been an exercise in futility for any standard, rear-wheel-drive platform. Fortunately, the 2004 Subaru Impreza WRX STi was not standard. It possessed a highly sophisticated internal navigation array that far exceeded the primitive cognitive mapping of the local inhabitants. Even without an active link to the global satellite constellation, its dead-reckoning algorithms and forward-facing optical sensors worked in perfect tandem. The car’s electronic control unit treated the complex geometry of the capital's grid like a highly technical rally stage in the forests of Finland.
Felt sprinted left, leaping over an open drainage ditch, confident that no terrestrial entity could maintain her pace.
Behind her, the ground vibrated. Whoosh-STUTUTUTUTU!
The Subaru executed a flawless, high-speed lateral slide, its heavy-duty suspension absorbing the severe camber of the street. Up ahead, a catastrophic logistical bottleneck appeared: a wooden cart stacked to the brim with local brassicas—cabbages—was being pushed across the intersection by an elderly meat-biped. Simultaneously, a group of juvenile human constructs was scattered across the cobblestones, entirely oblivious to the incoming 3,300-pound projectile.
In any lesser vehicle—perhaps a structurally compromised economy sedan with poor visibility—this scenario would have resulted in an immediate insurance claim and severe litigation. But this was a Subaru. The vehicle’s core philosophy was rooted in absolute preventive safety. Love. It’s what makes a Subaru, a Subaru.
Utilizing its ultra-low center of gravity, courtesy of the horizontally opposed EJ20 Boxer engine, the car performed a high-speed slalom. It dodged the first child by a margin of three inches, zipped past the cabbage cart with millimeter precision, and cleared the elderly biped without triggering a single automated proximity warning. The cabbages remained completely undisturbed, save for a gentle rustle caused by the displacement of blue-raspberry-scented air. It was a masterclass in collision avoidance, a feat that would have earned a five-star safety rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) on Earth.
Behind the vehicle, a massive shockwave tore through the air.
Reinhard van Astrea was in hot pursuit. The Sword Saint was running at an aerodynamic clip, his white cape trailing behind him like a supersonic vapor cloud. Thanks to his freshly minted Divine Protection of Top Gear, Reinhard wasn't just running; he was actively calculating the car's fuel-to-air ratio. He knew that if the Subaru kept the throttle pinned at 100%, the volumetric efficiency of the turbocharger would eventually outpace the structural integrity of the local cobblestones.
“Grand STi!” Reinhard shouted, his voice echoing over the roar of the exhaust. “Your entry speed into the lower quarters is far too high! The turning radius of the slums was not engineered to accommodate MacPherson strut front suspension! I implore you, consider the tire wear!”
The car ignored the red-haired biped. Reinhard’s tactical feedback was accurate, but it failed to account for the unyielding resilience of Fuji Heavy Industries' motorsport engineering.
The topography shifted dramatically. The vehicle crossed the threshold into the slums, and the road conditions degraded from 'poor' to 'completely hostile.' The avenue narrowed down to a single lane flanked by rotting timber shacks and crumbling brick facades. The ground was no longer cobblestone; it was a treacherous mixture of deep mud, exposed tree roots, and discarded organic matter.
A lesser sports car—one designed merely for aesthetic posturing on smooth, gentrified coastal highways—would have cracked its front splitter, bottomed out its oil pan, and suffered immediate engine failure within ten yards.
But the Subaru Impreza WRX STi was born in the dirt. It was forged in the brutal, unforgiving crucibles of the World Rally Championship. It had conquered the gravel of New Zealand and the treacherous tarmac of Corsica. A narrow alleyway filled with medieval poverty was nothing compared to a wet stage in the Akropolis Rally.
The Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive system worked overtime. The internal mechanical differentials shifted torque away from the slipping tires, redirecting kinetic energy to whichever Yokohama tread could find purchase in the slime. Mudflaps flapped violently, coating the rotting walls of the slums in a glorious, uniform layer of dark sludge. The massive, iconic rear wing scraped against a low-hanging clothesline, effortlessly snapping the rope and carrying an assortment of peasant undergarments away as aerodynamic cargo. The vehicle didn't just survive the slums; it colonized them with horsepower.
Up ahead, the blonde biped reached her destination: a massive, reinforced wooden structure known locally as the Loot House. She scrambled through the front door, slamming it shut behind her, convinced she had found sanctuary.
The Subaru arrived half a second later, its high-performance Brembo brakes biting hard into the rotors. The car came to a dead stop exactly two inches from the threshold, its engine ticking rhythmically as it entered a cooling cycle.
Before the car could evaluate the structural integrity of the front door, a sudden gust of wind brought a familiar scent of premium ethylene glycol.
A silver-haired half-elf biped—Emilia—came sprinting around the corner, her breath ragged. She had been tracking the massive cloud of blue-raspberry vapor all the way from the commercial district. Floating right beside her shoulder was a small, feline spiritual construct—Puck.
“I... I found you!” Emilia gasped, pointing a finger at the hood scoop. “You... you giant, shiny blue metallic familiar! You chased the girl who took my insignia!”
Reinhard arrived a millisecond later, perfectly composed, though his divine sword was still vibrating with residual anxiety. He stepped between Emilia and the front bumper, his posture reflecting the deep, structural respect of a man who understood the concept of a dual-overhead-camshaft layout.
“Lady Emilia, please exercise caution,” Reinhard warned, his face deadly serious. “This is no ordinary spirit. This is a 2004 high-performance homologation special. It possesses a symmetrical all-wheel-drive system capable of distributing power across all four wheels with terrifying efficiency. We must handle this with the utmost diplomacy.”
Puck floated forward, his tiny paws resting against his chin as he stared into the dark plastic mesh of the front grille. “Hmm, it doesn't seem to have a soul, Lia. But its gate is completely unhinged. It's drawing in mana and converting it into some kind of hydrocarbon compound. It's like a tiny, angry volcano trapped in a box.”
Emilia looked at the six stars on the front badge. “Is it an ancient relic from the time before the Dragon? A sacred chariot of the mechanical gods?”
The car remained completely passive. It was a vehicle. It had tracked the stolen asset to its current coordinates, thereby completing its passive diagnostic routing. The actual process of legal acquisition and asset recovery was an administrative task best left to the bipedal units. The Subaru was perfectly content to sit on its tires, maintain its oil pressure, and leave the mundane negotiations to the organic creatures. It was, after all, an inanimate consumer product.
“Let us enter and negotiate for the return of your property,” Reinhard said, turning toward the heavy timber door of the Loot House. “The inhabitants of this establishment are known to be difficult, but they will respect the authority of the Guard.”
Emilia nodded, and together with Reinhard and Puck, they stepped through the threshold, leaving the car parked silently in the damp alleyway.
For approximately three minutes, the exterior atmosphere remained stable. The internal data processors monitored the perimeter for any signs of traffic wardens or parking enforcement officers. None appeared. Civilization had truly not reached this place.
Then, the car’s highly sensitive acoustic sensors captured a distinct frequency deviation from within the wooden structure.
It was the sharp, metallic ping of a curved blade cutting through the air, followed immediately by the structural failure of a wooden chair. A high-pitched, mocking laughter echoed through the floorboards—a laughter that carried the distinct psychological profile of an active hostile threat.
Diagnostic Alert: Sudden vehicular insurance liability detected.
Inside the Loot House, an ambush had been launched. Elsa Granhiert, the Bowel Hunter, had materialized from the shadows, her dual kukri blades flashing in the dim light as she launched a surprise attack directly toward Emilia’s unprotected flank. Reinhard was mid-turn, his Divine Protection of Top Gear momentarily distracted by a mental calculation regarding the car’s turning radius on gravel.
The car’s internal logic bypassed standard protocol. Emilia was a pedestrian adjacent to the vehicle's operating envelope. Elsa Granhiert was an unauthorized kinetic obstruction. Furthermore, the car’s newly developed mechanical consciousness determined that a surprise attack on its preferred bipedal entourage was a direct violation of the Subaru Corporation's corporate philosophy regarding public safety and community trust.
The electronic throttle body snapped open to 100%.
BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG!
The anti-lag system detonated like a series of artillery shells inside the exhaust manifold. The clutch plates compressed with maximum force. All 276 horsepower dropped instantaneously into the Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive system.
The vehicle did not use the door. Doors were an inefficient, low-volume entry method designed for bipeds.
The Subaru launched straight through the reinforced stone-and-timber outer wall of the Loot House. The structural masonry exploded into a million pieces of flying shrapnel as 3,300 pounds of World Rally Blue steel pulverized the barrier.
Elsa Granhiert, mid-air with her blades extended, had less than a millisecond to register the sudden appearance of a modern Japanese sports sedan inside the tavern.
CRUNCH.
The front bumper, reinforced by a heavy-duty steel subframe and engineered to survive a front-offset impact at highway speeds, collided directly with the Bowel Hunter's ribcage. The kinetic energy transfer was absolute. Elsa was instantly converted into an unguided ballistic missile, flying backward through three consecutive wooden support beams before embedding herself deeply into the stone hearth at the far end of the room.
The car slammed its brakes, its Yokohama tires screeching against the dirt floor, leaving thick black lines across the tavern as it came to a halt right between Emilia and the rubble, its hood scoop smoking, its high beams flashing blindly into the dust.