Bear with me. If you’re going to paint a portrait of the Chevaliers, then prime a canvas in your mind and make sure you’ve got the good gouache.
Your standard Autumn Chevaliers’ main battle upright (MBU) sports two arm-mounted cannons that may or may not jam on the first round in the belt. It’s got a saucy, top-mounted plasma mortar guaranteed to hit the same county as your target. The small-caliber array might strip the paint from an incoming warhead.
The rear mount boasts two racks of seekers (and there’s an ejection seat for when those antique rockets cook off in the tubes). It all rides atop a 9-meter chassis scrounged from the finest junkyard dealers across the Gulf of Heracles. The muscles, the guns, and the counter-grav gennies pull amperage from a cobalt induction reactor one swift kick away from meltdown—which is also the best way to restart an upright that’s stalled out.
If you think all that sounds idiotic to bring onto a modern battlefield, you’re right. Only an idiot would step into a pitched battle with no orbital targeting, no high-altitude recon, and no hypersonic artillery. But Chevaliers are proud, ever-stubborn idiots. And idiots have one tried-and-true tactic that has kept us alive and reproducing long enough to spread to every backwater corner of the galaxy.
We drag you down to our level and beat you with experience.
Take away all those fancy toys, and you might as well be fighting an ancient Terran crusade, back before the first Templar and Saracen rockets left Earth to drag a hundred more worlds into their squabbles. But the Chevaliers still remember how it’s done. We’ve been around a long, long time. Viser juste, Chevaliers.