"Ugh…"
The cramped cockpit was packed full with four people.
"So squished…"
Cagalli was crushed until she could hardly breathe.
[LMAO, over there the villains stole four machines, over here four people are crammed into one.]
[First time I've ever seen a cockpit this packed.]
[And they're all girls.]
[That cockpit must have quite the mix of smells.]
[LMAO—maybe Coordinators don't have any smell.]
[Bro, then what kind of Coordinators are these? I move that we crank the smell up!]
[And here I thought the Arknights Tieba bros were already off the charts.]
The audience worlds reacted the way they always did.
In a certain sense, this crowd was even more unhinged than the very first audience world.
"Ugh…!"
The cockpit kept shaking.
Murrue couldn't do anything about it.
"What's happening out there?!" Kira asked urgently.
"No idea—this machine's imaging equipment hasn't even been installed yet!" Murrue didn't know the situation outside either. The hull kept shaking, and she didn't dare open the hatch.
"Huh? Again?!" Kira's mouth fell open.
[I'll admit it, that word "again" hit my funny bone.]
[Does Kira realize the reason this machine's cameras aren't installed properly is basically her own fault?]
[For all we know, she wrote the OS too, lmao.]
[Most hellish opening ever—four enemy Gundams, half a Gundam on your side.]
[Nah, those bare-handed-MS-wrecking special forces from Gundam: Gravity Front, THAT'S the real hell.]
[Still, out of all the protagonist openings, this really is the hardest one yet.]
[I honestly don't see how she wins, and the other side is four Coordinators on top of it.]
"Kira, use my eyes."
Inori handed Kira a VR visor.
She set Cagalli down and squeezed over to Kira's side.
"Mm."
Kira put on the visor.
The space outside appeared before her instantly.
After being ground under two Gundams' repeated assaults, the entire factory had begun to collapse.
Inori had also thoughtfully projected feeds of the others onto the screen, so Kira could see with her own eyes the terror on Miriallia and Flay's faces.
"Damn it, how did it come to this!"
By now Murrue had started working the controls too. "At the very least I have to get the Strike on its feet—even just as a gun turret!"
But the moment Murrue moved it, the four people inside the cockpit were tossed around brutally.
"Can this thing even actually move?!" Cagalli couldn't hold it in.
"The OS was just a temporary install—getting it to move at all is already the limit!" Murrue said helplessly.
"Please let me take over! It's extremely dangerous out there right now!" Kira shouted.
"Huh?"
Murrue stared, baffled.
"Hurry!"
Kira pressed her.
"Nn…"
—Can that visor actually see the outside world? Is it VR?
Kira slid into the seat, and the machine switched to AR mode, laying the Gundam's interior bare as well.
"What kind of person wrote this reckless OS?! How is a system this bad supposed to run a machine this complex?!"
The interface crammed everything on top of itself—it was beyond words.
"Every part of this design has to be redone!"
Inori, ever so thoughtfully, displayed the OS source code.
Kira: ???
Whose familiar, comment-free mountain of garbage code was this?
Why did it look so damn familiar?!
"Found it!"
At that moment, as the collapsing factory's dust settled, Dearka and Nicol outside also caught sight of the Strike lying there.
Both of them raised their assault rifles.
"An attack's coming! Defense… Phase Shift armor!"
Kira brought the Strike to its feet.
"While acquiring calibration, resetting the zero-moment point and CPG…"
"Direct-control module linked to a pseudo-cortical molecular ion pump…"
"Adjusting posture first!"
The gray machine turned blue, corrected its stance, and reduced its exposed profile to the enemy.
[Holy crap, she's writing code on the spot.]
[Coding and fighting at the same time—also off the charts.]
[That was way too cool.]
[Kira, has it ever occurred to you that there's an AI sitting right beside you?]
[Pilot little Inori like you did in Episode Zero! This isn't what I came to see!]
[The ultimate pinch-hitter has entered the field.]
Hand-cranking code on the spot was undeniably impressive, but everyone wanted to see the way Kira had piloted in Episode Zero more.
"Nani?!"
Dearka and Nicol were both stunned.
"What's going on?!" Yzak flew over too.
"The fifth machine's moving!" Nicol said.
"What do you mean—wasn't that unit still incomplete?!"
Yzak looked over at the Strike as well.
Still, Yzak didn't overthink it.
Since the other side could get it standing, that just meant the earlier intelligence had been a little off.
"We can't let the Alliance take it away—proceed with Plan C, destroy it!" Yzak drew his assault rifle and aimed it at the Strike too.
"Neural link reset… auxiliary systems calibrated… all systems Clear! System reboot!"
"Damn it, you people—do you really intend to destroy Heliopolis?!"
Just as Yzak was about to hit Kira, the Strike suddenly leapt, dodging the attack.
"There's some skill there, but it's still too stiff!"
Yzak instantly raised his muzzle at Kira again.
The Strike's code was a total mess, but the code on the other machines had all been written by Inori—clean underlying logic, high system efficiency… well, with one tiny little problem: the code on those machines was all "incompatible" with the Strike over here.
Being the puppeteer was no easy job.
"Wahh!" Cagalli nearly smashed her head, but Murrue caught her just in time.
"What in the world is happening out there?!"
Cagalli asked.
Inori said nothing—she simply had the rice-cooker project the scene outside.
—Inori had manufactured a great many Funells. These rice-cooker robots all remained cloaked, lurking in every corner of Heliopolis.
"Four?!"
Murrue cried out.
At that moment the stage cut to the outside as well.
By now the Aegis had also arrived on the scene.
The shot became a full three-hundred-sixty-degree rotating long take: four Gundams encircling the single one in the center.
"Weapons… the head vulcans… the Armor Schneider knives… why is this all there is?!"
[One against four.]
[Asuka fighting the mass-production EVAs, is that it?!]
[When's GBN gonna do an EVA crossover? I wanna pilot an EVA.]
[Drop an EVA into GBN and it'd just be a bullshit god-tier machine.]
[Wrong, EVAs are living things.]
[Turn A Gundam and the Unicorn are the real bullshit god-tier machines.]
[This is even more hellish than Asuka—four fully-armed Gundams on the other side, and all you've got is a knife and a head cannon. I don't see how she wins.]
[Plus she can't make any big moves, or everyone in the cockpit gets reduced to a bloody mess.]
"How did that half-built thing get activated by someone?" Athrun had just arrived.
"The intel was wrong!" Yzak said. "In any case, let's destroy this machine first."
Athrun raised his rifle too. "Right—let's take it down together!"