"Wait, why was Songstress-san aboard the Strike too?"
Mu had suddenly noticed something rather odd.
Because Kira had carried Inori down from the Strike in a princess carry.
Had the Strike just now been piloted by two people?
But no matter how hard Mu thought about it, he couldn't imagine how two people could pilot the Strike together.
And the Strike's final feat—four kills in a single second, ending the battle in an instant—had been nothing short of stunning.
Still, the moment the Strike touched down, the pilot suit on Inori's body had changed back into her goldfish dress, or Mu would probably have been even more astonished.
"Orb stole our technology!"
Seeing that the Astray and the Strike wore the same twin-like "faces," even a fool would know there had to be some connection between the two MS.
"If that's the case..." Murrue thought it over. "There was a data leak at Morgenröte a while back."
After running back through it, Murrue found the matter seemed rather obvious.
In that leak, Orb had obtained the data—and it was entirely possible that ZAFT had learned about the project through that same leak as well.
If Orb had deliberately engineered this to get its hands on the Alliance's technology...
This nation of Orb—what on earth was it thinking?
"Captain." Natarle suddenly came to her senses. "These two MS could become part of our fighting strength as well."
Hearing Natarle's words, the first thing Murrue did was glance over at Kira and Inori.
"Those belong to Orb..."
Kira shot a look toward Cagalli.
Orb played both sides, but it was, after all, her own country. Except—after learning that Orb's forces had fled with their tails between their legs, Kira found it hard to feel any sense of belonging to this nation.
Cagalli was, for all practical purposes, Orb's "princess." Seeing what she thought about it was naturally the most fitting move.
"Hm?"
Cagalli had been staring blankly at that red Astray. Now, feeling Kira's gaze, she turned her head.
"Ahem." She cleared her throat. "This thing—can I get in it?"
Cagalli was a bit of a tomboy. Seeing such an impressive giant robot, her first reaction was to wonder whether she could pilot it.
[This is the episode where I've related to Cagalli the most]
[Between a peerless beauty and a real-world Gundam, which would you pick?]
[GUNDAM! GUNDAM! GUNDAM!]
[GANGDAMU! GANGDAMU! GANGDAMU!]
[This Cagalli is literally me!]
[What exactly are you all relating to? You're just jealous—but for Cagalli, this Gundam really is her family's property]
[Holy crap, Cagalli, marry me!]
[Cagalli, I'm your dog!]
[Wait, have you all forgotten about Inori?]
[Inori's great, but a Gundam's worth more]
[But those two Gundams were dug up by Inori]
[Ah, well]
[2333]
[Paused on purpose to watch you all spamming the comments]
[Heads-up, front row: these comments will all be kept when the anime version airs later]
[Hahaha, public execution]
The audience's chatter was all over the place. But the Popularity Points kept climbing all the same.
Inori suddenly felt Cagalli wasn't entirely useless after all.
—She could pull in views!
A view-magnet star, this Cagalli!
Cagalli herself was an important character in Gundam SEED—call her a major supporting character, fine; call her a secondary protagonist, no problem there either.
The Popularity Points Cagalli brought in amounted to roughly sixty percent of Kira's, and that was already no small amount.
Cagalli might be a brat, but... she wasn't unusable.
Unlike others, Inori didn't mind a character acting foolish.
On the contrary, sometimes a character dramatic enough could deliver a genuinely entertaining experience.
She didn't have to stay alive, but she did have to keep things lively.
For a walking, self-propelled content machine like Cagalli, letting her slip away just like that would be far too wasteful.
"Since it's an Orb machine, handing it to Orb's own people to pilot is only proper!"
Cagalli planted both hands on her hips.
"Ah—you? A Coordinator?" Natarle found her rather unreliable.
"A Natural!" Cagalli said, hands still on her hips.
Natarle then turned to look at Mu. "And you?"
Mu shook his head furiously.
"The OS can be adjusted for Naturals," Inori said.
"Oh oh oh, then what are we waiting for!" Cagalli got excited.
Murrue immediately thought of another matter. "The data you sent over earlier—there's also a Unit 4 and a Unit 5?"
"Yes. They've already been built, but not assembled. The parts are inside Morgenröte," Inori said.
"Captain, we should recover the MS at once," Natarle said to Murrue. "Even unassembled, they can serve as spare parts. And if we had five G-series machines, we wouldn't need to worry about ZAFT."
"Those machines probably aren't as capable as the G-series units, are they?" Mu said.
"I just looked at the specs," Murrue said. "They don't have Phase Shift Armor—they use foamed-metal armor instead, which keeps their weight relatively low. The battery endurance also has a few shortcomings. Even so, their overall performance is still superior to a GINN's."
"So the problem is the pilots? Even if Naturals can fly them, counting me, we still don't have enough pilots here..."
—No manpower.
That was the biggest problem the Archangel faced.
Getting the severely undermanned Archangel running at all was itself a problem.
"AI can be added to the Archangel to assist with management."
Inori spoke up again.
"AI...?"
"The Archangel's operations are barely automated. Most systems aboard this cutting-edge warship still require human operators or manual control—that's a major problem."
[Makes sense—I don't need this many logistics people in GBN]
[Games are games, reality is reality. GBN is very realistic, but it's still quite different from the real world. Do you know how long it actually takes to keep a real Gundam running?]
[The CE world develops pretty fast, doesn't it? Compared to UC, the pace of historical development over here is downright savage]
[Coordinators really are that broken huh]
Yes, Coordinators really were that broken.
Four generations of mobile suits in four years—compared with the Tomahawk missile, which took the real world roughly a century to go through comparable iterations, it was science fiction bordering on outright fantasy.
"In any case, ZAFT took fairly heavy losses; they shouldn't come charging in right away. Let me send people to recover them first," Murrue said.
Murrue had also considered whether it might be better to break out while they had the chance.
But all four G weapons were still operational, and there were still two ZAFT warships outside.
Back at Heliopolis, the Archangel could use the colony for cover, but once they left, it would come down to warship-against-warship combat.
Given the situation, the more fighting strength on her side, the better, naturally.
But as Mu had said, the Archangel was short-handed—even the bridge was undermanned.
Letting Kira keep controlling three machines alone was certainly possible, but Murrue noticed carefully that once Kira began controlling all three machines at once, she'd activated the Phase Shift Armor—meaning Kira no longer had the spare attention to dodge.
For her, the burden was too great.
"So who should pilot it?"
"I can! I can!" Cagalli volunteered again.