Prologue – This Is Not How the Dai-Gurren Brigade Does Things

I had a dream. Not a dream like a hope for the future. I don't have those any more.

Not much, at least.

Sometimes I look at the stars in the sky, I see the Grappals rising above the horizon, and I have hopes about the future, or even, paradoxically, hopes about the past. That somehow it could be changed.

But I'm not working towards those dreams, so I guess I don't really have a right to call them that, or to have them.

This dream I had, it had nothing to do with hope.

It was absolute despair.

I was staring into Nia's eyes, my whole body feeling weightless, the altar and the cherry blossoms feeling like a projection, knowing exactly what was going to happen. I was trying to make it feel as if Nia, the only thing there that wasn't real, was.

Nia kept looking into my eyes.

You know Nia's eyes, they always looked like flowers to me. Like the blossoms that were falling on the shoulders of my coat, getting stepped on by everyone else – an omen, you could have put it.

Instead of flowers, I saw galaxies in her eyes.

She knew what was happening too. Didn't she? Yet she stared into me with so much hope it was terrifying. The galaxies were growing, inside her pupils. Her eyes began to spin. Somehow, they never ceased to be human. I would have known it was just a nightmare if they did.

First inside her eyes were glowing spirals. Finally inside the glowing spirals, I could still see her eyes.

No-one did anything. No-one said anything. The rest of the world was completely still. I'm not sure if the cherry blossoms were even moving. I should have noticed this.

She opened her mouth as if to say something.

Then her face started twisting and straining. The galaxies were stretching out their arms like octopi. I grabbed her shoulders. Suddenly my hands couldn't move. They were growing, still growing (the galaxies). Pulling on each other. Soon her face was covered in twisting green light. I couldn't bear to look but I couldn't stop. She was still saying something. Something was muffling her words.

A tiny black point appeared in the middle of her forehead.

The green light stopped expanding, the tiny stars stopped multiplying like bacteria. The black hole began to grow, sucking everything in. I thought I could hear voices inside it like tiny screams.

"Dead people are dead people," I said. I told the person I trusted to succeed me. "If we revive them unwillingly, they'll just get in the way of our followers."

But when Gimmy said "Then we should use the spiral power!", the only honest thought running through my mind was 'if only I knew how'. That was the only thing that really prevented me.

I only knew how to use the spiral power to destroy – to break through walls, so that others could build, so that others could make life.

That's why I left the rest to Gimmy and Darry and Viral and Yoko and the others. I was still Simon the digger. I had finished the tunnel I was supposed to dig.

I wonder if I would have really made such a good husband.

Because I didn't know how to use the spiral power to bring Nia and the others back, I created a limit in my mind. A wall I wasn't allowed to drill through. It was comforting, in its own way.

To have a wall that would always be there.

But…

"Then make sure… to protect the universe."

We wanted the universe to live forever, didn't we?

"Of course. Humans aren't that foolish."

No, what did I tell the anti-Spiral earlier?

"That is who we are. The Dai-Gurren Brigade!"

"Even if we were to be enslaved in the galaxy's cycle of rebirth, the feelings that we left behind would open the door! Even if the infinite universe were to go against us, our burning blood will cut through fate!"

The Dai-Gurren Brigade or the universe. One of us had to be wrong.