Disclaimer: I don't own Infinite Stratos in any sense.

A/N:

Hi.

So I'm trying a bit of an experiment with some of my stories. Whether it's a good idea or not remains to be seen. But here's how it works. I have a Discord server which I'll link below. On this server, I have links to the Google Docs versions of all of the chapters in this story with the permissions set up to allow anyone to suggest edits and comment. This means that you can highlight and comment on specific points in the text.

If you come across a part of this story that doesn't feel right or could be made better somehow, and you are willing to spend a moment or two to explain your idea, feel free to point it out. If you make a suggestion, and I accept it, I'll credit your username with the change at the bottom of the chapter along with a quick line summarizing the change you made. (Unless you want to remain anonymous. In this case, there will be no name present next to the change.) Any sort of comment though is fine. If you just want to talk about a specific paragraph or line, since this site doesn't allow that functionality with the current review system, you can do it this way.

I'll periodically re-post the older chapters of this story as they evolve over time. This story is sort of in the midst of a transformation, so you will likely come across moments where the writing style changes, or is inconsistent with the other chapters. This is especially true earlier on.

If you want to just hang out and talk about anything, Discord is also the way to go. Especially for longer, detailed conversations. I've lost track of plenty of reviews and PM's, and I am much more active there than here.

This is the link: A3dTszc

- LeviTamm

Chifuyu Orimura stared at the newsfeed on her smartphone in utter disbelief.

She almost never kept up with the news. She was almost always way too busy. But at the moment, she had literally nothing better to do. So she had taken to rifling through all of the unused applications and features that had come preinstalled on her phone in the meantime.

She had never gone through them all before, and as bored as she was, she didn't have the time to go off and do something she may have actually enjoyed doing instead. So, due to the way her schedule for the day worked out, she was stuck basically waiting for her next obligation, but did not have the time to go anywhere while she was.

So she had decided to just waste some time doing this in the meantime.

One of these apps of hers that she had found, compiled all of the top trending news stories from all around the world. She had opened this app, and had glanced through a few of these articles, mostly just reading the headlines.

Then she had froze upon reading one, very specific one. And she had so many questions now.

Generally speaking, she was not someone who could be surprised by anything so easily, but this time things were different because it directly concerned her brother.

He had made the news.

'Billionaire Orimura Ichika Launches Asteroid Mission!' was splayed across her screen in giant, bold letters. And there was a picture of a rocket launching in the background.

When she had seen this for the first time only a few moments ago, her brain had practically shut down.

Because: 'What the absolute fuck?'

Was this real?

Not a single word in that headline had made sense to her.

Now, she may not have spent all that much time with her brother recently, mostly due to her recent obligations in Germany, but she had at least assumed that she had a decent grasp on what he got up to in his spare time.

Evidently, she knew almost nothing about him at all. And upon actually reading beyond the headline of the article, things got even stranger.

Apparently, her brother owned an asteroid mining company and had just launched a mineral prospecting mission to a nearby asteroid. Right on the back of an Orimura Rocket. Because the Orimura's made the finest, most capable rockets in the entire world. Apparently.

This was certainly the first time she heard about it.

Wasn't he only 15? Where was he finding all the time to do this? How did he do all of this without her ever knowing about it? The public and the media knew more about her brother than she did.

Chifuyu leaned back in her chair and stared blankly at the ceiling of the room trying to wrap her mind around all of these new revelations.

Vaguely, she remembered having a conversation with her brother about a year and a half ago that had entailed him asking her for permission to start a business. He had been a minor at the time, and had been essentially road blocked from doing anything of the sort because of it.

The laws hadn't been on his side due to his age. He needed to be 18 to be able to do everything he wanted to on his own, so Ichika had asked her to sign a few pieces of paper for him that would essentially give him legal permission.

She would basically be a co-owner in name only in whatever he did. Which meant that legally, whenever Ichika's age would come into question, he could wriggle out of any trouble by pointing to her and the fact that she was over 18. And since she was technically a co-owner, her brother would be legally protected, even if she had never directly intervened in anything he had ever done.

She could literally just sit back and let him do whatever he wanted and never have to do any work. Which was mostly why she had agreed in the first place. She simply didn't have the time to actually oversee what her brother was doing, or to help him out. So she just existed as a name on paper to offer him a loophole to get out of any legal trouble.

She hadn't thought much about it at the time. She had figured that maybe it would be a learning experience for him and that it would at least keep him busy when she wasn't around, so she had signed off on it. It had only taken her about 5 minutes or so for her to read all the paperwork required. Ichika had streamlined the process for her so that she could spend the absolute minimum amount of time necessary to help him out.

Just 5 minutes was all that her brother had asked of her. Just two signatures and a cursory scan over a single page document to make sure that her brother wasn't overlooking anything. And then she could completely forget about it. Leaving it entirely in his hands.

And that's what she had done. Thinking to herself that he'd probably create some small business to begin saving up some money for his future education or something. Something like what the Gotanda family had. A small family business that provided enough income to live comfortably.

She had clearly underestimated his ambition.

Her brother had become a multi-billionaire in less than two years, and had started launching rockets out into the solar system. It distinctly reminded her of her friend Tabane, and not in a good way. Chifuyu was definitely going to need to check to see if that lunatic had anything to do with this.

There had always been a reason why Chifuyu had practically abandoned her brother at every turn. It wasn't because she didn't like him, or because she wanted to teach him independence, or anything of the sort. It was, perhaps ironically, due to the fact that she needed to protect him. And due to the nature of her and her brother's circumstances, she could only do that from a distance.

So while she had always loved him more than anything else in the world, ever since she had first laid eyes on him on the day of his birth, she could never allow herself to stand by his side until she completed one very specific goal.

To get strong.

How strong?

She needed to get so unbelievably strong that in a hypothetical scenario where all the world's militaries joined forces along with every other IS pilot in existence, and they all ganged up on her and her alone, she needed to be strong enough to win that battle.

Strong enough to not just be considered number one, but to be strong enough to beat literally everyone else, all at once. Strong enough so that the only threat to her was Tabane Shinonono herself. Who she happened to be close friends with, and who would never turn on her or Ichika for any reason.

And this was why she always left Ichika on his own. So she could spend every spare moment of her life developing her skills.

It was wrong. She knew it was. And some part of her hated herself for doing it, but she didn't have much choice either. If it were up to her, she and her brother Ichika would have been living an ordinary life together in peace, all this time.

But that just wasn't an option. It had never been an option because of their mother. Chifuyu knew that if her mother had had her way all those years ago, she'd be dead right now, and Ichika would be under her thumb. She couldn't allow that to happen, so she had to get stronger. Strong enough to protect Ichika against anything. Against their mother, and against the entire world if it came to that.

So she had to train.

Her friend Tabane had given her the tool that she needed to keep him safe. The IS. But as good of a pilot as she was, she still was not satisfied. She felt that she had still not mastered it, and could feel that there was something more there, to reach for. A higher level.

She needed to reach it.

Chifuyu was already confident in her ability to defeat any other IS pilot in the world in single combat, but her mother had an entire organization at her beck and call. So Chifuyu had to get strong enough to defeat everyone, all at once. That was what she had always been reaching for. To be able to win even if everyone else in the whole world turned against her and Ichika.

And she wasn't there yet. She knew she wasn't. Hell, she may not even be at the level yet to be able to defeat her mother if that woman ever managed to get her claws on one of Tabane's creations.

Her mother was a monster.

Chifuyu still wondered every now and then about how things could have been different back when she had escaped with Ichika all those years ago, had her mother been there at the time to try and stop her.

The woman had been in a different country, and she had let her guard down due to the facade of obedience that Chifuyu had put up for her for years. It had just been her lackeys that Chifuyu had had to deal with instead. And that had allowed them to get out.

She had changed her and her brother's names since then, since he had been too young at the time to notice, gotten new identities for them both, and had whisked her brother away to a new home. But she had no doubt at all that that woman was scouring the Earth in an attempt to find them again. And she knew that her mother would eventually succeed in doing so one day.

So she had to be ready. Even if that meant never being around the one person that she loved more than anything else in the entire world.

If she allowed herself to stay with Ichika for any extended length of time as she currently was, she knew that she would never be able to leave him again. He was simply too... irresistible, and she wouldn't have the willpower. And while that would probably make her the happiest woman in the world, it wouldn't last when her mother got involved. And then she'd be too weak to defend that life.

So she had to keep going. She had to spend every waking second of her life, either training, or resting from the injuries she sustained from said training. Then maybe at the end of it all, once she had the strength she needed, she could finally stand by his side. To earn that life that she craved more than anything else, and to be able to keep it, forever.

In the end, that was all that she really wanted.

Unfortunately, however, this all came with the unintended side effect of never being there to see her brother grow up. Or to see him create a multi-billion dollar corporate empire. A phrase she had never imagined would ever apply to Ichika.

Life just kept throwing her weird curveballs.

But as much of her brother's life as she had missed out on, she hadn't missed all of it. Just a significant portion. Which meant that upon reflection, Chifuyu could actually point out two instances where something about her brother had radically changed.

She had no idea what the underlying reason for either of those changes had been, and she could only pick up on these changes now that she had had her eyes opened as to what her brother had been up to recently, but she could still tell that he had changed quite significantly in those two moments.

The first time had been back when he was six years old. He had been a very happy, bubbly, and noisy child one day, and then a still-happy and cheerful, but much quieter child the next.

All of a sudden, it had been as if all of the thoughts he used to express aloud had just been muted suddenly. As if all of the childish immaturity had simply been stripped from him.

Chifuyu had put it down to him simply maturing, and had frankly appreciated the change, but in retrospect, she probably should have picked up on the fact that it had practically happened overnight. Especially since she didn't know the cause of the change, even today.

And then there was the second change, the one that she really regretted not addressing when it had happened.

Back when Ichika had been in grade 6, one day, he had come home with a… disturbing look in his eye. Chifuyu had never really been able to put her finger on what it was. Fanatical determination probably fit best. As if he had discovered life's ultimate meaning.

Chifuyu hadn't asked him about it at the time, though, unfortunately. Just like always, she had been about to leave him alone again. She had walked out the door without ever asking about what had happened. And when she had come home a week or so later, nothing had seemed out of place.

She hadn't asked him about it. So here she was, relegated to researching her own brother on the internet, because his Wikipedia page had more info on him than she did.

He had made his fortune in robotics, according to his biography. He had created what was essentially, a general purpose labourer that could do almost any physical task that a human could. Somehow. She had absolutely no idea where he had gotten the knowledge or the skillset to do something like that, but he had figured it out somehow.

As a result, he was currently at the center of a huge controversy because that technology could automate hundreds of millions of jobs away.

His robots weren't as versatile as human beings were. Not by a long shot. They weren't able to hold conversations at all, or even speak for that matter. But her brother had managed to invent a system that allowed humans to teach these machines how to perform tasks quickly.

A human would demonstrate a task to the robot, and then the robot would copy it. And then there were a bunch of machine learning tricks that would be used to refine and optimize the task even further until it ended up well beyond the ability of the humans that had taught it in the first place.

So they weren't perfect by any means. But any one of his robots could learn how to do any physical task that a human could, and they could do it better. Without ever getting tired, or needing a break. All at the cost of pennies of electricity.

There was a huge demand for this. So Ichika had made a lot of money from the mass production and sale of these robot labourers since he was the only one in the world who had the capability to make them. There were no other competing companies in this field in the entire world. So he was even making agreements with foreign governments, and private companies overseas.

This alone would have been enough to set him up for life.

But he hadn't stopped. With these funds, he had started making rockets, and earned one hell of a reputation doing so. He had picked up some satellite launch contracts from the government, and from some other private companies, and had used that money to further develop his rocket designs.

Then he had started an asteroid mining company and had launched his own prospecting mission, wanting to get an estimate on how much one particular, giant rock was worth.

She continued going through various links, in escalating disbelief.

There was a ton of information about him on the internet that she had never known about. Before all of this, he used to be a professional gamer. People actually paid him money, to sit in front of a TV and play video games. She didn't even know that that was a thing. But apparently, he used to be damn good at it, too.

Her brother practically had the equivalent of her own reputation in this industry. He was considered the best, and had hundreds of world records, particularly in the speedrunning community. Apparently, he was really good at playing video games, really fast.

'What the hell had happened that day?'

He had been doing relatively normal things before that moment, but now he might as well be an alien.

Playing video games professionally was... somewhat normal, she supposed. Weird and unexpected, but normal. Building robots and launching rockets on the other hand, wasn't. All of his business adventures had started happening almost immediately after that moment when his demeanor had changed.

Why couldn't she have just asked?

Chifuyu let out a sigh.

Fuck.

She had missed so much about his life.

He had been travelling around the world for years without her knowledge. Negotiating business deals, participating in video game events and tournaments, giving interviews, and he had even given a bunch of public lectures on all sorts of topics.

There was so much information about him on the internet that there was no way she would be able to go through it all in one sitting.

He had millions of followers on social media, and was a very well known and controversial public figure.

He had also become the national champion for Kendo when he was 8. Which seriously made her wonder why her brother had never told her about it. She hadn't even known that he had intended to compete, let alone that he was good enough to win.

Was this how her brother felt about her and IS suits in general? Where she was just part of her own separate world that defied understanding, while he was just a spectator that could do nothing but observe from the outside?

That was certainly how she felt about him, now.

When she had more time, she'd have to take a look at some of the other stuff he'd been up to. She needed to get to know him again.

Next time she had one of her training sessions, or maybe during another lunch break of hers, she'd have to throw on one of his videos or interviews in the background. She could probably even get her IS to stream it straight from the internet.

Chifuyu wanted to slam her face into the closest wall. Because her brother just couldn't make things simple, could he? He was on the news again, having just rocked the world with another revelation.

The first male capable of piloting an IS.

She had absolutely no idea how the hell he had managed that one, but at least she was in a position to do something about it this time. The IS was her domain after all.

She took in a deep breath... and sighed, before finally planning out what she needed to do.

If her mother hadn't seen Ichika on the news during any of his stunts before now, then she certainly had now. His face was everywhere. This would definitely have caught that woman's attention, and she'd recognize her son immediately. She would make her move soon.

So Chifuyu would have to start making preparations now. Both to protect her brother from their mother, and to protect him from the rest of the governments who now very clearly, all wanted a piece of him.

It was going to be a long day. She'd need a drink or two before it was done.

AN: I have no beta reader for this story by the way. So there may be errors.