[What kind of development is this now?]
[The abstract kind.]
[Orb's princess is holding an Alliance soldier at gunpoint, demanding to know when she started working with Orb—so you're actually the spy, huh?]
[Cagalli, are you all there?]
[LMAO, this Orb princess has a real case of princess syndrome.]
[To be fair, Murrue was trying to threaten Kira and Inori with a weapon here—I've got to say Cagalli did a nice job.]
[Annoying as she is, this move was legit, lmao.]
[Honestly, all three on Kira's side are from the Orb camp—what's wrong with protecting your own, lmao.]
Cagalli hadn't thought it through.
In fact, back in the cockpit she'd kept feeling like something was digging into her uncomfortably.
Only after climbing down did Cagalli realize it seemed to be a gun. Connecting it to what had happened earlier, Cagalli immediately understood—this was that Alliance officer's weapon.
—Right now was the perfect opportunity!
She instantly raised the weapon and leveled it at Murrue.
There were some things she absolutely had to get clear.
"Who exactly are you…?"
Murrue broke out in a cold sweat. A spy? But this dopey look didn't fit that either.
"Orb is a neutral nation—why would it be working with you people?!"
Cagalli shouted.
Inori tilted her head.
She had, admittedly, meddled a little. But why did it feel like Cagalli still hadn't learned a thing?
She was actually still fixating on this?
Here Inori had been looking forward to a more interesting development.
"I heard voices over this way just now."
"That was the MS that lured away the other four earlier, wasn't it?"
"Ah, Kira!"
"Inori!"
"That—that's—!"
The ones who came following the voices were Sai, Tolle, Kuzzey, and Miriallia.
They'd been in the factory district before, and with no way to escape, all they could do was hide off to the side.
But on a battlefield there are no "civilians."
The two warring sides had paid no heed at all to a handful of fleeing students.
Only Kira had noticed them.
Under Kira's guidance, they had finally been saved.
But the four of them had barely arrived when they discovered their "Princess" pointing a gun at a woman they'd never seen before—while Kira and Inori looked on from the side as if munching popcorn at a show.
"You don't actually believe that just by declaring yourself neutral and uninvolved, you can go on standing outside it all, do you?" Murrue thought Cagalli hopelessly naive.
"Impossible! How could—doesn't that prove everything she said?!"
Cagalli looked at Inori.
Everything she'd feared in her heart seemed to have become reality in this moment.
Despair spread across Cagalli's face.
And Murrue turned back, seizing the chance to grab Cagalli's hand and disarm her.
Inori: …
Truly hopeless—you can't help someone who won't help herself.
"Damn it, let go of me!"
Cagalli shouted.
"Hey, who is this person anyway?!" Tolle rushed forward first.
"She's an Alliance officer." Kira didn't know what to say—she didn't even know whether she should help.
So Kira looked at Inori.
"If Kira wants me to do something, I can do it—so long as you make up your mind."
That was how Inori answered.
"I…"
Bang! Bang!
Murrue fired two shots into the air, finally getting Cagalli to stop resisting and bringing the others to a halt too.
"I'm sorry, but I still can't let you go."
Murrue pulled a zip tie from her person and bound Cagalli's hands behind her back.
"Damn it! Why should I do what you say?!"
Cagalli shouted.
"Because this is Alliance classified information, and you—and the two of you—have all seen it. That's your reality."
[Here's a joke: hiding Gundams in a neutral zone, lmao.]
[No sword in hand, and you still want to be a neutral nation?]
[Too clever by half.]
[Setting up a military secret in a neutral nation, with no army to protect it, and letting the enemy find it—ridiculous.]
[A neutral colony helping both Zeon and the Federation—it's the first to get wrecked.]
[Poland gave this a thumbs up.]
[Not a shred of Poland left.]
[Hold on, has anyone counted how many shots that pistol's fired? She hasn't swapped a magazine this whole gunfight, right?]
[I bet there are no bullets in your gun.]
"This is… what's going on?"
Though she was being held at gunpoint by Murrue, Kira didn't feel the slightest bit of panic.
At first she didn't quite understand it, but then it dawned on her.
"…So that's it. Because I have the power to resist this violence, I feel not the slightest fear."
Because she knew she could counter the other side, she felt no fear.
Just as Inori had said—neutrality requires power.
"Hey, isn't this a bit too rough?!"
Sai frowned.
"Rough or not, we're in the middle of a war!" Murrue barked. "PLANT and Earth. Coordinators and Naturals."
As she said "Coordinators," the shot even thoughtfully cut to a close-up of Kira.
Kira lowered her head, her eyes somewhat gloomy.
[You know what, you've actually got a point.]
[Already screenshotted—this frame is dripping with obsessive-heroine energy.]
[Hold on, how'd you screenshot that? A screenshot comes out as a black screen, right?]
[Get the premium membership—with premium you can take screenshots.]
Murrue sighed. "This is what the world outside is really like for all of you."
And at that moment, Inori spoke up again: "Heliopolis—excluding the deceased, 99.999 percent of personnel have evacuated the colony. All shelters are now locked. Current remaining lifeboats: 0. Remaining escape pods: 0."
The shelters couldn't possibly launch that fast, of course.
But once Inori had confirmed there were no living people left, she'd immediately jettisoned all these shelters.
"Nani?!"
Kira didn't care about Murrue's threat, but hearing that line threw her into a panic.
Murrue's threat wasn't actually much of one. And she'd been the one who first got everyone into the Strike to avoid the initial blast, which showed that Murrue was actually a good person.
Besides, Kira figured that with her own physical abilities she could easily counter Murrue.
But if the lifeboats were all gone, then they'd have no choice but to be stranded on Heliopolis.
That was absolutely not good news.
And just as everyone was plunged into crisis once more, the scene cut back to Mu.
By now Le Creuset had taken the CGUE out to engage Mu.
After a strange resonance, Mu sensed the other man's presence.
"Rau Le Creuset, is it?!"
Le Creuset was a clone of Mu's father. Mu didn't know this, but Le Creuset and Mu shared a kind of telepathy-like ability, so the moment the other man appeared, Mu knew almost instantly whether his enemy was Le Creuset.
[A Newtype?]
[An NT?]
[The Cosmic Era is full of tributes, but they surely wouldn't just directly lift the setting. Feels more like telepathy or something.]
[What's an NT?]
[Newtype—literally "new type," referring to a new humanity. In the UC world, NTs have very strong spatial awareness and empathy and so on—mostly they're natural-born pilots. Using Dynasty Warriors as an example: ordinary people are the mob soldiers, and NTs are the named officers who can unleash their Musou attacks and mow down whole armies.]
[Thanks, boss.]
"You're always this much of a nuisance, Mu La Flaga!" Le Creuset was shouting too. "But I suppose you see me the same way!"
Neither could actually hear the other's words, of course, yet both somehow knew the other could understand them.
Fighting the Gunbarrel-equipped Moebius Zero out in open space was very unfavorable, so Le Creuset went straight into the interior of Heliopolis, using the terrain to limit the Moebius Zero's performance, and blasted apart its Gunbarrels.
And in the thick of that dogfight, they entered Heliopolis's interior.
At that moment, the scene cut once more, back to the Archangel.
"Don't know if we'll make it in time…"
Inori was still quietly orchestrating events behind the scenes.
The situation now had already deviated significantly from the "original story."
Keeping Cagalli around hadn't gotten her "docked points"—which meant this kind of change fell within the permissible range.
Since she couldn't rewrite things freely like the protagonist, all she could do was poach away his advantages one bit at a time…