After lingering on the surrounding scenery to set the mood, the shot cut back to Kira.
One perk of sticking close to the protagonist was that you didn't need to spend a camera card; just tag along and you'd slip into frame.
All about that budget savings.
(Flay's actually pretty easy on the eyes)
"Kira, why don't you show Inori around for now? I'll call you once the professor arrives," Tolle said.
"Thanks." Kira nodded.
"Tolle's just like an older brother to Kira." Miriallia sounded subtly jealous.
"Well, everyone always looked after Kira, and after we found out she was a girl, we just can't help ourselves." Tolle waved a hand.
"A girl, huh..."
But Kira seemed to sink into thought.
No one but Inori understood why Kira reacted that way.
Because they had no way of knowing that, as a child, Kira had actually been born with no biological sex.
Back in Chapter 230, "Ouma Mana" had once handed Youlian Xiang a file.
The sex self-determination gene.
It was biological data from the Knights of Sidonia world, purchased earlier from the popularity-points shop.
In fact, Kira could even replenish energy by basking in sunlight; high-concentration cosmic rays barely affected her, and alongside a self-repair function, they could even top up part of her energy reserves.
It was just that Kira herself wasn't fully aware of this.
Inori, on the other hand, knew all of it.
The car rolled slowly toward Morgenroete's Entrance No. 3. Kira swiped her pass, and the gate opened.
The shot cut to a security monitor.
"Three students from the Kato Research Group, confirmed."
"Switching to tracking mode..."
[Grass (a type of exclamation)]
[I'm shook]
[It really is a damn AI]
[Impressive]
The danmaku detonated all at once.
Because there were only three figures on the monitor. Inori, seated in the passenger seat beside Kira, didn't appear on the security feed at all.
The moment the audience noticed, the danmaku predictably exploded.
[Almost forgot Inori's real identity]
[Come to think of it, there's still that mysterious BLACK MONOLITH that hasn't shown up yet—what even is that thing?]
[Yeah, feels like a ton of unsolved mysteries—like the pink-haired girl at the end of Episode Zero]
[Haro showed up at the end too, but hasn't appeared in the main plot yet]
[Rice-cooker bot: Haro's obsolete, this is my era now]
[Tori: So I just don't exist, huh?]
Amid the audience's clamor, Kira and the other three had already entered Morgenroete.
On the Stage, though, the shot switched again.
By now, Athrun and his group had already set out; fully geared up, they were coordinating with the team outside, prepping to move.
"Come to think of it, how do they portray the battle scenes?"
Inori was genuinely curious.
"If someone's being killed, how does the Stage render that?"
[In standard all-ages works, scenes like this are redrawn.]
[When the client is short on budget, the production team resorts to mosaics, blackout screens, "holy light" censor beams, and the like.]
[In B-movies or works that call for gore, blood-splatter effects are added during playback.]
So it turned out the content-rating system was surprisingly meticulous.
She just didn't know exactly how those ratings were drawn up.
The Stage kept cutting between shots, and at last it landed on the long-awaited final boss—Rau Le Creuset.
[Holy crap, the masked guy!]
[Char, is that you? Char!]
[The second a mask shows up, I'm wide awake]
[Bring out your red, horned, triple-speed unit already!]
"Heliopolis, the star of that collision incident a year ago. A pity all the leads were wiped out in the final explosion."
Le Creuset watched the footage on the screen.
Because it had come so close on the heels of the Bloody Valentine Incident—right when Junius Seven was destroyed—few people paid any attention to an "accident" somewhere else.
But Le Creuset had investigated every scrap of related intel.
Because at the time he had also been tracking the matter of "the world-ending legacy of the Mendel Colony."
At first glance it seemed bizarre: a genetics-research colony harboring some world-destroying weapon sounded like pure fantasy.
But Le Creuset knew that place truly concealed things no one was meant to know.
Such as... clones.
Or, for instance... the Ultimate Coordinator.
Le Creuset had heard of the "BLACK MONOLITH" as well.
Only, even at Mendel, the intel on the "BLACK MONOLITH" amounted to no more than a few scattered fragments.
What exactly was the BLACK MONOLITH?
There was no way to know.
So, holding onto the thought that "perhaps someone else could ferret it out," Le Creuset kept an eye on the others poking around—maybe they'd turn up a lead.
And in the end, there was indeed a discovery.
Some junk dealer had found the thing—the BLACK MONOLITH.
A pitch-black construct, shaped like a coffin.
"You believe Heliopolis actually received that legacy? But isn't that just a legend?"
The speaker was the captain of the Nazca-class high-speed destroyer Vesalius, Le Creuset's second-in-command, Frederic Ades.
"It's no legend—it truly exists. Back at Mendel, a junk dealer found it; afterward, one of our ZAFT warships recovered it, only to lose it on the voyage home. And then, once that fleet returned, it was scrambled to another sector to fight the Alliance—and took the enemy down with it as it went." Le Creuset kept his eyes on the footage.
"So it's real, then? Which would mean Orb..."
"Who knows. For now, the only proof the BLACK MONOLITH exists is the ship's black box, the captain's mission report, and this footage."
The footage showed a GINN steamrolling everything—a scene of sheer horror.
Every enemy needed just one shot to be reduced to ash.
"At the time, we still didn't know how that GINN was destroyed. But piecing it together with the intel we've gathered today, the thing that destroyed it was most likely a 'G.'"
[The way he phrased that "a G," though...]
[Manners! Show some manners!]
[It's just the in-world translation, why're you all losing it]
[Now it's giving off that AI flavor, but the plot also says Mendel researched genetics, and Inori says she's an AI yet she bleeds—something really doesn't add up]
[I think it's easy to explain: not an AI, not a cyborg, but an alien. Bio researchers studying aliens—totally normal, right?]
[The more you talk the wilder it gets—now we've got aliens]
The audience wrote it off as wild speculation, never realizing that some of the seemingly ridiculous theories had crept infinitely close to the truth.
Inori simply watched in silence.
Through Lacia's abilities, her Analog Hack and her hacking skills, she had found a way of "directing" the script's course quite different from Hanabi's. And as it turned out, such alterations were permitted.
In the "original work," Le Creuset, upon receiving the intel, had chosen to act first and report later.
This time, however, faced with a Heliopolis on heightened alert—and with time to spare—he chose to inform the PLANT Supreme Council first.
And the Council, in light of the earlier incident, likewise suspected Heliopolis might be hiding some secret, so it granted him the authorization.
And that was how, on this set, the script came to have Athrun and his group infiltrating Heliopolis...
(Athrun's squad)