Don't ask what this is. I don't know what this is. Sometimes I just have to write dumb trash. I say that like everything I write isn't dumb trash, haha. Anyway, since we all know the CG movie is a weird fan fic-esque AU of Harlock, I went ahead and wrote some weird AU versions of other Leijiverse characters for it.
Enough bad jokes. I apologize for any mistakes and hope you like reading this strange thing.
The silence on the deck held for hours. Only the breath-like sounds of the dark matter generator and hum of the engine offered anything to my ears until Mr. Bird flapped his way to my shoulder like a drunk trying to fly. As much as I preferred quiet days to explosions and yelling trying to burst my eardrum, I saw no appeal in sitting at a bridge station. I counted the hours to my relief on one hand while rubbing the alien bird's head with the other. Unless Kei felt like coming back to look at radar early, I had a while to go.
As Mr. Bird warbled his appreciation, a blip cut through the pervasive drone. Then a second blip. A third.
The pinpricks of yellow on the radar were only large enough to fit one-man fighters. When a fourth popped up, I tapped out the command to widen the radar scope. Blips followed each other in rapid succession, as though I'd won the lottery of radar scans. The fighters closed in on us like a swarm of insects, more than I could hope to count. The alarm sounded automatically.
"What are we dealing with, Yama?" Harlock called from his throne.
Good question. "Cosmo fighters," I said, though I didn't sound too sure of myself. "At least one-hundred. Their models appear to line up with Gaia's usual fare, but our scans aren't picking up the mother ship."
I turned back to find curiosity lighting up his eye. He stood, flaring his cape out behind him, and Mr. Bird flew back to his shoulder on cue. "I hope they're planning something, or this is a terrible plan of attack," Harlock said. "Give me the helm." Despite letting me pilot on simple missions, he either didn't trust me on unpredictable ones, or he just enjoyed being in control too much to let me have a go. His eye flicked to me as I hung over the radar station. "You're good with turrets. Go see how many you can take out."
I glanced from the console to him, one brow raised. "We need someone on radar, don't we?"
"Kei will kick you off of her station as soon as she gets here," he said, "and we need you more on a gun."
It felt like he was trying to get rid of me, not that I could read radar that well, and Kei liked to keep things organized her way in a fight. I dashed off the bridge, passing her on the way. "Fighters?" she yelled as she passed. "Really?"
"Yeah!" I called back over my shoulder. A weird tactic, but with so many of them, they would be able to do some damage before we took all of them out. Still, it was nothing the dark matter generator wouldn't be able to fix.
My boots rattled each metal panel under my weight until I grabbed the doorframe to swing into a turret chamber. With the sheer number of them outside, I imagined I wouldn't need to aim. Just shooting could hit something in that swarm.
As I peered through the sights, they arrived just within our firing range, but instead of an uncoordinated mass, they flew in pre-determined patterns. Like an air show, they crossed over and under each other, zig-zagging back and forth in equal time. None of it stayed constant enough to make for an easy target. Curses and questions from the other gunners crackled through the communication lines between us. "Almost feel bad for killing them," one said. "They're putting on such a nice show."
I'd learned to think of the fighters only as hunks of steel, because it still stung to remember the pilots inside. Despite the show, I could still hit them, and so could the Arcadia's main cannons. Just as Harlock said, I counted off each ball of fire caused by my turret. I did miss more than usual, blasts vanishing off into empty space. As though the pilots' brains synced, they each made sudden swerves at the same time, just a hair away from hitting each other.
The bridge tended to keep to itself during battles, so hearing Kei screeching beside my ear made my heart thud in my chest. "Get the one on the port side!" she demanded. I swung my sights around that way in time to watch the sharp nose of a fighter smash into the side of the ship. Curses from the other gunners filled my ears, but I couldn't find a voice to say anything. The Arcadia's side bled waves of black smoke, like the clouds we hid in so often. No pilot could survive a hit like that.
"Is that their plan?" I asked through a bubbling laugh.
"More of them are trying it," Kei gasped. "Get them!"
I blinked. My stupid joke wasn't allowed to be reality. This strategy cost too many lives. Most of Gaia's army only fought because they had food to eat and a place to sleep in return, so no one in their right mind would go on a suicide run like this.
But they would die either way. As human missiles, they had a set path, no more dodging. I searched for those exclusively, but there were so many, coming one right after the other. The ship rattled with the impact of a second fighter, my aim trembling out of place. Tendrils of fire brushed the edges of space, before the automatic system sealed off the damage.
We were still better off. Their numbers dwindled, patterns thinning out. No matter the damage, the dark matter generator would repair it. We only had to finish the fight.
I heard my name, yelled or snapped in varying ways through the speaker, along with a desperate command. "Move!"
There was a chance I could have turned my sights up to destroy the fighter before it hit, but orders were orders. Throwing myself from my seat, I dove into the hall. Before I could stagger out of the line of fire, the crash shook the ship out from under me. Surrounded by empty air, I threw my arms out, clawing for the floor. It found my back instead, and all the air flew from my lungs. The ceiling remained intact above me, though the dull light flickered. As I caught my breath, I sat up to find my door jammed halfway open, a fire blazing inside. It was enough to make me miss the deck.
Once I confirmed my legs still worked, I pulled my communicator from my pocket and started back toward the bridge. "Hey," I greeted, fitting the bug into my ear. "I'm not dead."
"Congratulations," Kei sighed. "You weren't murdered by a remote control fighter."
My steps stuttered. "Remote control?" The adrenaline rush throwing my head for a loop slowed at the information. "You didn't tell us that."
"Well I was too busy trying to keep you alive," she snapped. "But they don't have human pilots. I'm trying to figure out where they're being controlled from. There has to be a ship nearby carrying the people controlling them, but nothing is showing up on radar."
"They're all being controlled by one person." My mouth said it before my brain caught up. The memory of her hands swimming around a projection of the battlefield, the way the ships weaved through each other at each twitch of the tips of her fingers – of course it was her.
"No one can control this many ships at once," Kei said. I couldn't blame her. I didn't believe it until the first time I saw it.
My pace picked up, and I weaved around a hunk of the wall, blasted in from the second fighter. "No, that's why she uses the patterns, so she can keep track of all of them at once. She has to be in one of those fighters, one keeping in the back or in more defensive positions."
"She?" Kei echoed. "But, Yama, I told you already, there are no living signatures coming from those fighters. I scanned them after the first hit."
No, it had to be her. That was why Gaia chose her as their second bet. She could strategize better than any of us. She had to be throwing off the scans in some way.
The collar of my shirt pulled back into my neck, silencing me just as the bug tore from my ear. The click of it turning off was punctuated by the crash of my back hitting the wall. With the pressure from my neck gone, I opened my eyes to find myself in an unlit room. A vent on the door let in enough light to show the outline of a supply closet, along with her standing in front of me. The edges of her form shone from the thin light, and a green light blinked from the silver headband she'd always used to control the ships. Hints of her blue hair lined her shadow. The familiar silver shine of her knife flashed up toward my throat, just like last time we fought.
That round she won, her blade so close to my skin I stopped breathing out of fear. But I remembered well enough to raise my hand in mirror to hers. After that, well, I hadn't thought that far ahead. My only thought was to keep that knife away from my throat, so I jammed my hand onto the blade and pushed it away.
"Better than last time," she said, her tone just as sharp as the knife. My hand throbbed with rushes of endless pain. I could only see the shine of the blade, piercing through the back of my palm. Blood oozed down from the wound in heated trails, and sweat built across my face as I wheezed uneven breaths. "You're still a child," she said, disappointed as always.
"You think you'll get out of this alive, Marina?" I spat between gritting my jaw against the pain.
In the silent space of a moment, I could imagine her blinking as she always did when I said something she considered stupid. "My orders were to assassinate the traitors. Getting out alive was not a requirement. You knew you would become a target, yes? So you shouldn't look so surprised." Her other arm shifted, and I remembered the second knife strapped to her wrist. "No hard feelings, right?"
The close quarters left me with few options, but my body worked on autopilot. Bringing my knee up to my chest, I slammed my foot into her gut. The door smashed open behind her as she stumbled back into the light of the hall, the knife ripping back through my hand. My vision rolled as though the ship took another hit, waves of heat and pain twisting my gut. I hated assassins who fought with knives.
Guns worked better anyway. My bleeding hand shot toward the holster, but Marina's trained eyes flashed to the movement. She tossed the blade, forgoing accuracy for speed. The damn thing seemed to appear in my thigh. I felt no pain until I looked down to find it there.
A distraction, of course – her main method of attack. She lunged forward, grabbing my gun from the holster. Before she stepped back to fire, I pulled myself out of the closet by the doorframe and dove to the side. My leg felt like it was ripping in two as the knife's sting spread, but the shot burned a hole in the back of the closet instead of me. My only advantage now was her lousy aim with guns.
I needed to run. There was no winning a fight with a knife in my leg. As I tried to lunge my way into a run, the pain in my thigh bucked it out from under me. My knee hit the floor once again.
"It should have been me," Marina hissed. I turned to find the gun pointed at my back. "I would have done the job right. Harlock should be dead and gone by now."
"There was no right way to do it!" I ripped the knife from my leg with a choke of pain. Burning heat spread from the wound to the bone and the rest of my thigh. Any more of this, and I would throw up. "Gaia was wrong," I slurred like a drunk. "You don't have to do this." I was just stalling as I tried to blink the world back into focus.
I knew she would shoot regardless, so my last option left me to pivot on the ball of my foot and launch myself at her with my good leg. Through some miracle of my elbow hitting her hand, the gunshot flew toward the wall. The clatter of the gun hitting the floor followed as both her hands clamped down on my wrist.
The first time we practiced hand-to-hand combat, she knocked me on my back with one sweep of her legs. "Prone on your back is the last position an assassin wants to be in," she said.
And now, with all my weight pinning her down, I saw her on her back for the first time. Her knife hovered over her heart as I bared the strength of my arms down on her. They trembled from the strain, just as hers did from trying to hold me back.
"You're still the same," she scolded, the fire of loathing in her blue eyes. "Your heart's not in it. You have more strength than me, but you still won't use it, even now."
"I don't have to kill you," I said. The blood from my hand rolled down the tip of the blade to stain her gray shirt.
As always, her brow furrowed, disappointment clear on her face. "You're too soft for an assassin, but I'm not." The strength vanished from her arms. I had no time to pull back. All the force straining my muscles smashed the blade into her heart. The crack of her sternum shot through the knife and up against my hands. Either I couldn't hear, or the world fell silent. Nothing reached me as I rolled off of her. I could only stare at the sleek handle protruding from her chest.
She reached up and ripped it out with little more than a wince. The squelch of it broke through the silence. "At least I did some damage," she murmured. Her eyes deadened as her words faded. "The others will finish the job."
Whether she died then or just passed out, I didn't know. I had no plans to check. I lay on my side, my arms shaking once again as they held me up enough to see the blood blossoming across her shirt. "What others?" I asked.
I waited for an answer from a corpse. Waited and stared, even as a rush of footsteps reached my ears.
I love Marina so much, and I feel bad for her.
I mean, having to deal with Yama just seems like the worst.