Episode 11 · Buddy Complex

Buddy Complex

It's the first day back after summer break and Aoba Watase is just trying to get through it. Then a giant machine drops out of nowhere and starts hunting him through the streets. His classmate Hina shows up in a robot of her own and pulls him out of the fire. She's from the future, she says, and so is the thing that wants him dead. Before he can ask a single question, she throws him seventy years forward. The last thing he hears from her is a name. Dio is waiting for you. He wakes up inside the cockpit of a machine called Luxon, alarms screaming, caught between two armies that have been at each other's throats for years. One of the pilots, Dio Weinberg, links with him mid battle and something clicks: the two of them can share thoughts, reflexes, everything, and it makes them terrifying together. It saves his life. It also gets him dragged onto the FPA ship Cygnus, where nobody trusts a kid who appeared out of thin air. Aoba keeps asking the same question. Can he go home. Nobody answers it. What they want instead is for him to climb back into Luxon and fight a war he never signed up for, against an empire that may already know exactly who he is. And if Hina sent him here on purpose, what was she really saving him from?