Chimera Rising [BOOK 2 COMPLETE]

SUMMON YOUR MECH. LEAD YOUR SQUAD. BECOME THE WEAPON. Valoris Kade has ten minutes to summon forty feet of dimensional war machine using nothing but meditation and sheer force of will. One shot. One mech. Forever. Valoris doesn’t want to be a hero. She wants to survive her family's legacy. She wants her squad to stop hating her. She wants her mech to stop cracking under the weight of everyone's expectations.  Her squad is a nightmare: Zee Zavaretti, the street fighter who should be leading; Saren Maddox, who thinks Valoris is a nepotism fraud; Quinn Sterling, who only feels real inside a mech; and Milo Renn, whose backyard experiment created a dimensional rift that nearly killed someone. They name themselves Chimera—a monster made from pieces that don't fit. The enemy: dimensional entities bleeding through a broken barrier, corrupting reality, killing everything. The weapon: mechs summoned from liquid dimensional metal, piloted by teenagers who train to touch space between worlds. The cost: Every time you pilot, you change. Every battle takes something. Every victory brings you closer to becoming the thing you're fighting. Training is brutal. Combat is worse. But something's wrong with this war. The entities move like refugees, not invaders—always fleeing toward the dimensional rifts, never attacking unless cornered. The liquid metal reservoir that births their mechs smells like death and regenerates after every kill. Long-term pilots develop strange symptoms: translucent skin, involuntary phasing, voices in empty cockpits. The academy calls it "adaptation." It looks like corruption. Chimera has two options: Figure out the truth. Or die not knowing. Five pilots. Five impossible mechs. One team falling apart. Welcome to Chimera Squad. [Writathon November 2025 participant] WHAT TO EXPECT:  Evangelion meets Ender’s Game meets Fourth Wing ✅ Giant mechs summoned through meditation (your soul externalized as 40-foot war machine) ✅ Found family squad dynamics (five disasters who choose each other) ✅ Body horror that escalates (slow corruption, forgetting your human body, dimensional scarring) ✅ Moral complexity with no easy answers (are we the bad guys?) ✅ Character-driven plot (relationships drive decisions drive action; this is psychological focus like Evangelion, if you're looking for shiny explosions and crunchy mech stats look elsewhere)