This was fantastically grim and visceral. There's a level of uncomfortable detail to all the minutia of how the mechs operate, how they meld with their pilots and all the physicality of it that this doesn't shy away from in the slightest, to the point it turns back around to being cold and clinical despite the grossness of it all, and it's not easy to reach that point. The descriptions were delicious, and it felt as cold as the sheet metal around them and as awfully warm as the torn insides all throughout this.
Absolutely loved the worldbuilding of the mechs too, it felt like a natural escalation of the living mech idea, mixed with the crushing apathy of the army. Despite being so short, this felt exactly as long as it needed to be to tell the story, and I loved every minute of it.