Kurogane Kurogane is VANTA's flagship, and the best melee machine on the coast. Matte black steel, a faceless horned helm with a cold V-shaped visor, crushing clawed hands, and a pilot who has beaten every TIDEWALL girl one on one. It doesn't win by size. It's the same height as the mechs it fights. It wins because Shin is better. Built in secret, for one pilot Kurenai built Kurogane in secret, for Shin alone. Most of the Breakwater didn't know it existed until the night it hit the pier at full boost. It was designed for a manual pilot who has to beat a resonant one, which means it can't afford to be slow, clumsy or wasteful. Every part of it is there to close the distance and end the fight. Like every VANTA frame, it runs on fuel and ammunition, not a link. It can't fire a single energy weapon. It doesn't need to. Its armor was built against everything TIDEWALL fires. How it fights Kurogane never walks into a fight. It arrives on bursts of its calf boosters, cracking the ground every time it pushes off. Between attacks it goes perfectly still, and then it's somewhere else. Shin flies it the way he fights in the sims, reading his opponent so precisely that he starts moving before they do, which cancels the fraction of a second every manual pilot loses to his own hands. Up close is where it lives. It parries, it throws, it catches blades with its bare claws. The guns are there to set up the kill, not to make it. In the whole fight against all four TIDEWALL mechs, its revolver fires six times, and every shot takes something off a TIDEWALL mech. Loadout Clawed hands. Big enough and strong enough to crush armor plate and tear limbs off. Forearm scythes. Blades that unfurl from the forearms on segmented steel spines for strikes from impossible range. Six-round revolver cannon. Heavy, slow, and only ever fired at contact range. Shoulder cannons. Conventional rounds to pin a target in place. Calf boosters. Short, violent bursts that launch it across a battlefield. Specs Height: About 20 meters, the same size as TIDEWALL's mechs Class: Melee assault Drive: Manual Pilot: Shin Jae-won The people around it Shin. Its only pilot. The boy who failed the test by the thinnest margin ever recorded. Moo-jin. He trained Shin the way he once trained Shin's father. Yuna and Reina. His squad. Hush pins the target. Reina finds the weakness. Kurogane finishes it. White Petal. The only machine on the coast that can stay with it hand to hand. Spoilers: Kurogane in Season One Everything below this line happens in Season One. If you'd rather find out on screen, stop here. Kurogane's first appearance is the first shock of the season: minutes after Tidemaw falls, a black mech hits the pier at full boost and tears through a spawn swarm with its bare hands. Later it drops in to steal White Petal's kill over the cliffs. The safety protocol finally puts it in front of all four TIDEWALL mechs at once, in the iron-on-iron fight of the season. Shin has beaten every one of them alone. He has never faced four pilots fighting as one, and he falls. When resonance ends, Kurogane is one of the only mechs left in the world that still moves.
