Sirens suddenly wailed, alerts flaring up over a screen.
"Of course they'd come now."
A slackened hand is dragged across the man's weary features
"We have to call for help, we have no choice."
With a deep sigh, he continued to pull his hand across his face and over his shaved head down to nape of his neck.
"And will you tell them?"
Breath hitched and a red-haired girl slightly flinched.
"Of course."
Eyes narrowed thinly, doubt emerging.
"It was a fluke. Trust me, it won't happen again."
Shaking his head slowly, he nodded in affirmation.
/
Eight sets of feet and two wheels moved rapidly through the halls of Plantation 13. The sound of their footsteps was drowned out by the cacophonous volume of alarms ringing throughout every inch of the dome. Rounding corners, scaling ramps, and panting heavily, the members of Squad 13 burst through the doorway of the strategy room in a frenzy. Goro and Ichigo immediately sprinted over to the consoles at the head of the room and toggled the cameras that lined the exterior of Cerasus to be on. A multitude of holographic screens whirred into existence around the duo.
On the displays, a orange horizon was littered with silhouettes of varying animalistic geometry. The waning sun fell to the earth just beyond a horde of approaching klaxosaurs. Thousands of hermit-crab like klaxosaurs, similar to the ones who'd been in the mine, stampeded across the valley towards the plantation, kicking up a tsunami of dirt in their wake. Erupting behind the army of molten monsters, a massive beast emerged into view. Three serpentlike heads writhed about the top of a trio of long tendrils. The basilisk like creature's heads sprouted from a torso akin to a lions, massive fissures of rock shifting as if they were flexing muscles. A shrill cry echoed through the speakers and the squad members were visibly intimidated. Hiro finally rolled into the room, having caught up with his peers. He arrived just in time to see a steel drop ship glide into view and open its bay doors. His eyes widened as a scathed and burned Strelitzia fell from the opened hatch. The Franxx touched down in stampede mode about a mile in front of the oncoming surge of klaxosaurs, placing itself between the plantation and the threat. As the air cleared from the impact, the mech reared its head and let out a lamenting howl of fury, fire shooting up around in in columns from its exposed engines. Breaking into a dead sprint, it crossed ground in split seconds before heaving itself into the tumultuous, molten blue sea beneath it, throwing up klaxosaur after klaxosaur in visceral fashion. Sprays of blue blood and a fountain of fire joined the scene developing on the horizon.
"Zero Two…" Hiro broke the silence. Biting his lip, he steeled himself. This was the chance he was waiting for. "I have to see her, I have to go to her!" he declared aloud to nobody in particular. Miku looked back at him incredulously alongside Zorome's unsure gaze. Futoshi frowned and Ikuno shook her head, hearing the fervor in Hiro's voice and knowing there wasn't a chance in hell they'd persuade him against his volition. Ichigo and Goro made steady eye contact with Hiro, searching his irises so as ascertain how serious he was. Mitsuru casted his eyes to feet and leaned against a console. Kokoro sat cross legged on the amphitheater's seats, her face pensive and worried. Ichigo strode over to Hiro and placed her arm on his shoulder, looking at him directly. Seeing not even a single droplet of doubt in his countenance made her mind up for her.
"Ok, Hiro," she smiled warmly, "I'll get you to her." Her words rang out like an oath and Ichigo considered them such, promising herself she'd bring the one she loved to the one he himself did.
"But all the Franxx are still being repaired, how are you going to go out there?" Miku's unsure voice interjected.
"Not to mention the klaxosaurs! They'd rip us to shreds if we went out there, you saw what happened last time!" Zorome's wavering words added to Miku's appeal.
Hiro frowned at this reality check and ran his hand through his hair, trying to think of a strategy. Goro jabbed his hands into his pockets and rolled his head back onto his shoulders, staring at the ceiling in thought. A horrible cry of pain from Strelitzia caused Hiro to curse his mental lethargy.
"The training mechs" a cold voice from the corner of the room sounded. Hiro turned his head to the source of the sound only to see Mitsuru, his unkempt strands of brown hair veiling his eyes. The training mechs? The pill-headed and miniatures sized mechs? There were always three of them sat in the docking bay at all times. It could be done, Hiro realized with a start.
"Huh! That'd be suicide!" Miku tried to shut down the train of thought before it could even depart the station.
"No, it's possible" Mitsuru's calculated voice parried Miku's in a form of verbal riposte.
"But there's only three of them," Hiro added to the argument, his eyes searching his comrades', "and I can't pilot them."
"I'll take you, no one else needs to put themselves in danger" Ichigo declared confidently, clenching a fist to her side, the burnt skin of her knuckles stretching.
"Hell with that!" Goro jumped back into the conversation. "I won't let you do that alone Ichigo!" he swore aloud. "You don't even know how to use the controls!" he tried to strengthen his position. Ichigo's eyes softened at the passion in Goro's statement but tightened her fist as she reinforced her resolve.
"For just one or two training mechs to go out there would be too dangerous!" Kokoro cried from her seated position, finally having enough of the conversation unfolding around her.
"I'll go" the words froze the argument in a hail of ice. All eyes turned to the speaker and all brains double checked if they heard the boy right. Mitsuru pushed off of the wall and stood broad chested before the squad, "I'll do it." Ikuno's face was completely awestruck at the atypical willingness on display before her and she could do nothing but stare.
"But… why?" Hiro questioned, the prior, scathing argument still fresh in his mind.
"Oh can it, it's my plan anyways. Of course I'd be the one to carry it out" his eyes avoided Hiro's as he spoke the untrue words. Hiro grinned and shook his head. What an idiot.
"Ok," he inhaled a deep, empowering breath and conjured an image of his goal in his mind, pink hair charging him with confidence, "Let's do this then!"
/
Tears struck the console and rolled down the expanse of the dark metal. The sounds of the battle they monitored silenced all other audible things in the room. A pair of eyes noticed the droplets of salty water finally and snapped to their source.
"Nana?" Hachi questioned her loudly.
The red-head pawed her face in panic, trying to wipe away the tears violently.
"Damnit! DAMNIT! NO!" she slammed a fist into the steel counter before her, tears flowing freely across her face. With a cry not dissimilar to a banshees, she bashed her forehead against the desk over and over again. Hachi rose to his feet and wrapped her up, pulling her now bleeding form away from the displays.
"Nana! Stop! Calm down!" he tried to snap her out of her crazed state.
"Please don't take me back! I'll be a good girl please!" she shrieked pulling her hair with all her might, strands of long crimson being pulled away on her fingers. Hachi sneered in remorse for what he about to do and put Nana into a headlock. Struggling against his muscular forearms, Nana writhed beneath his clutch, smacking and clobbering him with messy blows. Dozens of seconds later, she collapsed into him, unconscious body falling limp.
Hachi shook his head and wrapped his arms around her in a warm embrace, his eyes clouding in pain, "Tch. You always were too soft."
/
A large door rose up and the innards of the docking bay were revealed. Three training bots rolled out of the aperture, treads spinning quickly against the concrete until the ground changed to dirt and sand below them. Mitsuru and Goro gripped onto the steel paddles that came alongside the mechs, ready to defend the package they were delivering with all their might.
"Let's do it!" Hiro called out from the hands of Ichigo's training bot.
"Ok, watch my back Mitsuru, Goro. We need to get him Strelitzia!" Ichigo called out from within her small cockpit.
"And then what?" Mitsuru's voice rang out over the intercom. Hiro faltered only for a second, before answering.
"If she sees me, she'll come to me! I know she will" he shouted to his comrades.
"Of course she will," Mitsuru shook his head within his bot, "I still think someone else should carry Hiro though! Ichigo's not used to the controls."
"No. This is easiest job, I won't be able to defend myself while holding Hiro. Protecting us will be much harder than driving in a straight line!" Ichigo declined the idea over the comms.
"Enough! Here they come!" Goro disrupted their argument as the horde came within a hundred meters of them. The familiar crab like klaxosaurs were only a couple feet taller than a training bot, but they would almost assuredly weigh much more than the thin frames the three were operating. Ducking into a delta formation with Ichigo at the front, the three pilots evaded the brunt of the charge by wheeling to the left, trying to circumvent the horde. The treads of their mechs kicked up clouds of dust in their path. The dusk sun beat down of them in rays of gaseous magma. Sweat already drenched the four daring teens as they engaged.
"Goro, right!" Mitsuru called out to his ally.
"Yah! I got him!" Goro responded as he flourished his paddle, striking an airborne klaxosaur out of the air, the blow digging into its side and launching it back into the teeming mass chasing them. Ichigo weaved around a klaxosaur that had jumped in her path only for Mitsuru to appear behind her and clobber the monster diagonally, making it slide away on the ground, leaving a streak of shattered earth in its wake.
"Keep moving!" Ichigo reiterated to her team. In the distance, blue blood sprayed into the sky like fireworks, Strelitzia tearing across the horde like a lawnmower to fresh grass. The basilisk behemoth roared as it engaged the feline mech. Strelitzia responded in part with its own howl as it leapt into the titanic scale combat. Air visibly streamlined around the massive limbs of the beasts as they stabbed and swung at each other. Strelitzia pounced upon one of the necks and wrenched its teeth into the rocklike flesh, blue-blood exploding forth from the wound. Screeching in pain, another head of the klaxosaur slithered into action. The jaws of a snake like head tried to consume the mech whole, but ended up wrapping its teeth around just the left haunch of the Franxx. Attempting to tug Strelitzia off of one of its necks, the creature jerked. The sudden force caused Strelitzia's teeth to completely burst through the klaxosaur's neck it had been clamped onto, decapitating one of the three heads in a burst of azure gore. The klaxosaur wailed as it catapulted the Franxx away from its body. The mech tumbled and skidded for thousands of feet before stopping in a heap. Fire erupted forth from the boosters lining the lion-like mech again as it rolled back to its feet. A slight limp in the leg that had been bitten barely slowed the dervish down as it whirled back into the horde, tail and tooth ripping and shredding. The mech ran three klaxosaurs through with its tail and swung them in a semi-circle, their corpses sliding off of the tail and being launched like projectiles. Strelitzia sprinted after the organic cannon balls and used their impact to break through into the middle of a pack of about twenty more klaxosaurs. With a dozen cleaves of its claws, Strelitzia turned the monsters to ribbons, their blood coating the Franxx in a fresh coat of blue paint. An overly ambitious klaxosaur strayed too close to the rampaging demon and was punished by a swift chomp of Strelitzia's jaws, the magma-infused teeth puncturing through the obsidian flesh like daggers flowing through honey. With a spin the klaxosaur is freed from the teeth and dozens more are felled with a sweep of Strelitzia's tail. Beyond the carnage, the trio from Squad 13 approached rapidly to their target with package in hand, their treads eating the dirt and launching them forward at high speeds.
"Ichigo look out!" Goro warned her with a shout. Turning her mechs head upwards, she made out a klaxosaur falling onto her just as it was meters from her cockpit's exterior. Goro gritted his teeth and growled in effort as he catapulted into the side of the beast. Blue innards sprayed all over the front of Ichigo's mech and shards of black rock clipped into her frame. Goro tumbled with the klaxosaur to a halt some hundred feet to their side.
"Goro! No!" Ichigo screamed in realization of his sacrifice, turning her minorly damaged mech. The horde of klaxosaurs closed in on him rapidly as he wrestled with the klaxosaur he'd saved Ichigo from.
"Come on you bastard!" he challenged over the radio, grappling with the pincers of the beast. Metal wrenched as his mech was overpowered. His grip on the sharp incisors faulted and the klaxosaur ripped into his mechs right arm, severing the metal limb in a blast of smoke and bolts.
Hiro outstretched a hand from his helpless position as he watched his friend be consumed before him, "GORO!" A shout of effort rang out over the comms as Mitsuru turned his mech around and charged to Goro's aid.
"Ah! Always slowing us down, huh! This is way too lame a way to die, stop messing around!" he screamed as he ran his paddle into the klaxosaur's side with all his power. The metal head of the staff snapped off upon contact and the creature rolled off of Goro's mech. Wielding the now sharp end of his paddle like a spear he impaled the klaxosaur with a final cry of aggression, running the beast through in a single movement. Panting heavily Mitsuru turned to Goro's mech and uprighted it as quickly as he could. "Let's go already, shitty leader!" he called out in a unsteady voice, his voice cracking as he inhaled and exhaled rapidly. With a huge smile on his face and fire in his eyes, Goro spurred his mech to move again, the treads spinning into life as he moved out alongside Mitsuru. They were closing in on the main stage of the battle, the massive duel now within a mile of them. The trio weaved and dodged countless klaxosaurs as they neared their goal with absolute grit. A shadow spread out around their mechs and they casted their eyes to the sky to see a gigantic, severed snake head heading directly towards them.
Diving to the sides, they narrowly evaded the massive impact of the dislodged appendage striking the earth. A hurricane of debris rose up around them as they continued with their momentum towards their goal, nearing the finish line. They blew out of the cloud and dust grabbed onto their mechs, being pulled along by their velocity and streaming around them. The majority of the klaxosaurs were now behind the members of Squad 13, for some reason focused on chasing them. This meant that only the now single-headed basilisk klaxosaur and Strelitzia were in front of them. Blazing across the desert and circling the fight, they tried to get as close as they could without being directly in the thick of the fight. With a shrill howl, the snake-klaxosaur whipped Strelitzia away with its neck into the air. Targeting the airborne mech, a ball of blue lightning appeared in its mouth. A beam of arced lightning shot from the jaws of the klaxosaur and collided with the Franxx in a deafening blast. Strelitzia was blown further away, careening far into the air, and much to the luck of Squad 13, landed in the trios path.
"Hiro! If you had a plan, this is a insanely lucky time to use it!" Ichigo called out. The squaddies quickly closed in on the crater that Strelitzia had landed in and wheeled to the front of the mech, parking before its huge head. Holding Hiro up like an idol before their god, the three bit their tongues in terror as hundreds of klaxosaurs leaped over the cusp of the crater and blacked out the sky.
"Zero Two!" Hiro cried out with all the bottled rage he'd had for days, his uselessness and inability to do anything for those around him being funneled into every syllable of the words he spoke. "Come back to me, please!" he shouted, tears flowing down his face. His heart bled audibly through the conduit of his tongue, his deepest desires to be reunited with the one he loved shooting out of him like a star beneath the shadows of the thousands of klaxosaurs descending upon them. In the face of death, only thoughts involving pink hair and turquoise eyes filled his mind. The world could wait. "Please" he whispered, falling limply against the arm of the mech that he was held by. "Please come back to me."
/
Zero Two had been trying with everything she had to break free from her constraints for the past week. But seeing her love, her darling before her, pouring out his soul in the face of impending slaughter, pushed her beyond her best. She snarled, veins of red sprouting from her eyes, bulging beneath the skin of her face and glowing. Acid slipped from her lips and burned her mouth and the floor beneath her. Her horn and stump shined a glorious shade of crimson. The chains binding her to her seat whined from the pressure she'd exerted on them for a week, finally giving into her raw determination. Snapping free from her constraints she rose up in her seat. The stamen behind her had been dead for minutes now. The cockpit around her was covered in every inch by scratch marks and charred scars from acid. She felt the horde of klaxosaurs closing in on her and her darling, gravity pulling them to down upon them like meteors. She heard the klaxosaurs in her head, drumming like cannons in her ears. She halted her panting with a long exhale, the breath drawing out for what seemed like an infinity. She'd defend him this time. And always.
/
Hiro casted a final gaze upon Strelitzia as the klaxosaurs began to land around him. He swore he could hear Mitsuru and Goro scream as they were overran. He swore he could hear Ichigo crying alone in her cockpit. And he swore that Strelitzia was just in front of him. But. It wasn't. Like someone had taken a marker and draw a white line across his vision, a slash, so fast it blew air into hemispheres about him, ripped through the world. A thunderous crack deafened his ears, leaving them ringing. The klaxosaurs fell around him in halves, like the sky was leaking corpses. The final head of the basilisk, slit at the base of its neck, slid down the side of the crater to a halt near Ichigo's mech. No blue blood burst from the eviscerated bodies, they merely fell to the earth and calmly leaked pools of cerulean upon landing. The strikes were so true and clean that it was like time had been frozen while each klaxosaur was dissected in precise fashion.
Strelitzia blinked back into view before Hiro, the mech kneeling it's head before Hiro. The training bots of Squad 13 sat alone with the cat-like reaper in a lake of blue blood and limbs. The small mechs, never designed for actual combat, were rendered immobile from overuse. The sun was barely visible on the horizon above the precipice of the hollow, like it was peeking its eyes around a doorway to witness the events unfolding. Four pairs of eyes stared at the hatch of Strelitzia as it opened slowly, hydraulics grumbling as the face plate folded down. Hiro reached a hand out and tried to straighten himself in Ichigo's machine's battered, metal arm.
His breath hitched and he whimpered at what he saw next. Suit ripped into parcels, covered in blood and burns, and pink hair flowing around her like the wreath of an angel, Zero Two limped out of the mech onto the platform of the opened door. Her body heaved with each breath and her head was tilted to the left, a single horn at least two feet in length weighing her neck down. She collapsed to the floor, the sound of her knees striking the metal the only sound in the crater that had become a graveyard. As she closed her eyes and fell to her side, Hiro swore he could see a smile bless her sacred lips. It was over. He'd made it back to her against all odds. It was like he was in a dream. She was right there. Just meters away from his outstretched hand, laying there like a goddess dozing on clouds. His dream became a nightmare in the blink of an eye. The fog of dust and dirt encompassing the crater blown away by the twin rotors of a drop ship descending into the pit.
"No."
The hatch of the ship opened and darts shot out, grappling onto the frame of Strelitzia.
"You're kidding right? Let me wake up now."
The ropes pulled taut as the engines of the drop ship roared to full capacity.
"Come on, please. Any second I'll open my eyes and see her inches from my face. Her scent will be everywhere and her touch will be anywhere I seek it."
The earth released the mech and it became airborne, wobbling side to side slightly as it rose.
"No. Come on. Stop messing around."
He could already feel the sheets of his bed wrapping around them both, protecting them from the dawn's pestering light. He could feel her laughter burning his skin, her breath dancing across his cheeks like embers.
The dropship ascended with Strelitzia in tow and flew off into the somber clouds littering the now nocturnal sky.
"Just. Let me wake up already. From this damn nightmare."
(AN - rip xxx)