"This is terrible!"
Outside the colony, Mu was piloting the Moebius Zero, tangling with a single GINN alongside his two subordinates in their Moebius units.
It should have been three against one, yet two of the Moebius units had already been shot down by the enemy.
But without the "dead-weight teammates," Mu was freed of his constraints, and he heavily damaged that GINN.
The only trouble was that the Marseille III-class transport ship Mu had launched from earlier had its steering thrusters wrecked by the GINN, leaving it unable to change course. It plowed straight into Heliopolis and crashed.
The scene now cut once more to the interior of a ZAFT ship.
"Olor returned with his GINN critically damaged?" Le Creuset was taken aback to hear the news.
Then CIC continued its report: "Athrun Zala has sent back intel—Plan D has been executed."
Plan D was the contingency plan for when things went badly.
The cut-your-losses, quit-while-you're-ahead plan.
In other words—the mission was incomplete.
"The MS codenamed X105 remains in Alliance hands. Combat footage has been transmitted back."
"Mm."
Le Creuset opened the footage.
But as he did, he was deep in thought.
—The spy's intelligence work was thorough, very detailed. But it seemed a little too detailed.
In a sense, this intelligence practically walked them through, step by step, how to infiltrate and steal the MS.
And the OS installed on the MS was remarkably complete too. Athrun and the others had only needed minor modifications after taking the controls to draw out their combat capability.
It was strange.
It was as if he'd fallen into a vast net, and he himself was the prey that had been caught.
"This movement?"
Le Creuset had opened the footage now. At the start of the fight against the Strike, things had actually been fine. Overwhelmed by the four Gundams surrounding it, the Strike had struggled, caught in a hard fight.
At one point, the Strike had disengaged its Phase Shift armor.
It looked like it was giving up in despair, ready to surrender.
But that wasn't it at all.
After disengaging its Phase Shift armor, the Strike's movements had, if anything, taken an enormous leap.
With the ease of someone on a leisurely stroll, it dodged every hail of gunfire, casually plucked away Yzak's beam saber, and sliced off both of the GINN's hands as Miguel piloted it…
The latter part especially.
The Aegis Athrun piloted had that miraculous Phase Shift armor, yet it was driven back by the Strike using kinetic weapons—simply unbelievable.
All four Gundams had recorded footage, so Le Creuset could see the entire battle.
"This trajectory… every round landed in the same spot."
Le Creuset thought for a moment, then switched to Athrun's main viewpoint.
"So that's it."
From Athrun's main viewpoint, everything before him was almost a solid sheet of white—every round had struck the camera.
And when Athrun switched to the sub-camera, the rounds instantly changed trajectory, beginning to attack the sub-camera in near-perfect sync.
To everyone else it looked like Athrun had stalled under the enemy's attack, but from Athrun's own viewpoint, he was being flashbanged the entire time, from start to finish, without a single opening.
"The Grim Reaper…"
Le Creuset thought of that rogue GINN they'd called the Grim Reaper.
The GINN itself was nothing special, but its ghostlike pilot could truly be described with the words "terrifying beyond reason."
It wasn't a perfect match, but the Strike before him, with its clean and decisive movements, still made Le Creuset think of that thing.
"You mean the one from a year ago?!" Executive Officer Ades said in surprise.
"I can't be certain, but perhaps it's worth confirming. And that Moebius Zero that took out Olor needs to be dealt with too." Le Creuset stood up as he spoke. "I'll leave things here to you. I'll take the CGUE and go pay the Alliance a visit."
[Y'know, that earlier GINN and little Inori might genuinely be from the same source.]
[Enemy and ally, same origin—I get it, I get it.]
[Can GBN please do a Kamen Rider crossover?]
[Drag the crossover gremlin out of here, quick!]
[You know what, you might actually be onto something, lol.]
[I wonder which is stronger, this masked guy or Char.]
[Drag the power-scaling gremlin out too!]
[And what's a CGUE? A new Gunpla?]
Unfortunately, the scene cut away again at that point.
This time it moved to the area where the Archangel was, off on the other side.
Heliopolis was a colony built atop an asteroid, shaped like a lollipop doing the splits.
And the Archangel lay buried deep within this "mining zone."
"Ensign? Ensign Badgiruel?!"
Natarle came to from her unconscious state.
"This is…?"
Her head still swam.
The shock of the blast had left her whole body sunk in a car-sick sort of daze.
She lifted her head—floating corpses were all around her.
"The captain… where's the captain?! Where's everyone else?" Natarle finally came fully awake.
Neumann shook his head with regret. "This place is already…"
"Damn it!"
Tears welled up in Natarle's eyes.
[This part's a tribute to 0079, right?]
[The White Base all over again, is it?]
[Never seen 0079, someone explain.]
[Lin Youde—that's Bright Noa, the deuteragonist of 0079. At the very start of the story, most of the crew is killed in action, and the result is that this very low-ranking man ends up as captain.]
[Now that you put it that way, it really is pretty similar.]
[No idea what the Archangel even looks like, though.]
By now the scene had cut again, back to the protagonist Kira's side.
"Phew, saved. My head…"
Once she'd confirmed they were safe for the moment, Cagalli was the first to leave the cramped cockpit.
Cramming four people into that tiny cockpit had been brutal.
"What in the world is going on with you two?"
Once Kira and Inori had come down as well, Murrue finally couldn't hold back her question.
"How on earth did you two pilot the Strike just now?"
Murrue really did find it strange—how could these two possibly have operated the Strike without going through the control console?
Wait.
Murrue suddenly recalled something else.
She hadn't been directly involved, but a year ago, an incident had occurred at Heliopolis.
"A year ago, someone piloted the Strike frame and destroyed a rogue ZAFT GINN. But at the time, that Strike frame had only the most basic transmission system installed—the control interface hadn't even been finished. And yet that machine was activated by someone, no one knew who… could it be…"
Murrue looked at the two of them.
Could it be that the ones piloting the Strike frame back then were these two girls right in front of her?
If she could control the Strike while in some special state, then it really might be possible.
The rogue GINN had been strong as a demon-god, but Murrue had just observed the entire fight from a first-person view.
If it were these two children, their power really could stand against that GINN!
It wasn't her intention, but there were some things Murrue still had to get to the bottom of. She reached to draw her gun, planning to secure them first and ask questions later.
"Hm?"
Hold on—where's my gun?!
Murrue patted herself down—her gun was gone.
"Talk. When exactly did you start working with Orb?!"
And over there, Cagalli had already raised Murrue's gun, leveling it at Murrue…