Chapter Five

AKA: The Chapter Where I Spell Several Names Wrong

"We refuse to accept this tyrannical reign you're suggesting!"

"We fought hard for our freedom, and we aren't about to give it up just so you can feel that you've achieved that much more in life!"
"We would never accept you!"

The shouts and protests were issues from the throats and souls of over six hundred men, women, and even children who refused to accept the 'new reign' proposed by Daacom and Mariemaiea. More trucks full of people- anything from the semi trucks people had squeezed themselves into for the ride to the protest grounds in order to voice their lack of faith in where the world was going.

Serpent mobile suits stood before them to prevent anyone from actually getting to the Brussels estate and storming it, but they lost precious feet with each second as they were forced to back away as people attempted to climb the suits in some cases.

This is the way. This is the way we end all suffering- through peace and through removing those who wield tyrannical power from that power without death.

If one were merely told the thought they would not have known whom it came from. Everyone present was in such a state of rebellion and uprising that the thought could have belonged to any number of them.

The actual mind that thought it was that of Samso Yamato. He was a veteran of the Libra engagement and, in that battle, had destroyed two mobile suits with minimal damage to hit own.

He supported his young son, born on the day the war ended in his arms and stood next to his wife smiling at what was happening from the middle of the crowd while his daughter, now six, sat on her mother's shoulders.

Smiling at her he indicated one suit in particular that was swarming with people. "See, sweetie," he said, addressing her in the softened voice one usually uses upon children, "This is what happens when you wield power the wrong way. This is what happens when you try to end peace. You're part of a protest to end a war before it can even begin!"

Ironically enough Mr. Yamato was the first casualty. The bullet that killed him was not alone, but it was all that was required to do the job.

The ammunition used for any mobile suit is, by definition, bigger than the ammo used on any other conventional weapon short of an explosive. While a mobile suit's armaments can certainly be used to kill people, it is an intense overkill as these weapons are designed to raze areas which are, in most cases, explosive and which have a high number of people crammed into them. Using the double gattling guns on the Serpent to kill a crowd of people, however clustered they may be, was the equivalent of using a guillotine to sever a loose thread from one's shirt. It will do the job, but it can be accomplished through far more conventional means.

The bullet ripped through his body like an arrow into gelatin and smashed into the cement the man had stood on. Shards of it, flying at speeds in excess of thirty miles per hour shredded through his wife, dropping their six-year-old daughter to the ground. She looked down at her mother who had fallen, transfixed by a particularly large sliver of the stone and cocked her head in uncertainty.

Her daddy had just disappeared. That couldn't be right. He mommy's head was lying at an impossible angle. She had once showed her a trick where she made it look like there was an arrow through her head. It had just been a headband with the two halves of the arrow made to look as though they had passed through her skull. This had to be the same exact thing. There was no other explanation. Only old people died.

Getting up off of the ground she waddled over to her mother and with the conviction of everything being all right that only a toddler possesses, attempted to slide the slab to the side and off of her mother. As she did so blood splurted from the wound to geyser up and squirt her in the face. A still-laboring heart could be made out where a smaller piece had smashed through her upper torso, the hole in the right ventricle plain as day, but the little girl refused to accept it.

Only when the heart failed to beat any longer did she finally realized what had happened. Her mommy was lying in a steadily increasing pool of blood. None of the heads rolling around her were fakes, and the blood was most certainly not fake.

The weight of it all drove her to her knees, and the impact brought a splash up resulting in that many more droplets of blood dripping down her face. Her tears cut through some of the blood, but when they struck the limbs they were as scarlet as the river she kneeled in which was steadily rising to fully encompass her leg.

James M. Truluck was not a violent man by nature. He just did what he was told, and he did it without question. According to Daacom he was one of Mariemaeia's most valuable soldiers, and that was primarily because of his lack of self-control.

And so he went on being valuable. When the order came to contain the crowd as efficiently as possibly and by any means necessary he was among the first to fire. Emotionlessly he smashed bodies to bloody pulps, tracked fire to destroy those who ran, and generally obliterated anyone who chose to rebel.

As new semi trucks arrived with more protestors he simply targeted them with his missiles while his guns still raked the crowd. He regarded the people he shot and classified them all as fools. They were fighting for a dead idea that, according to his lord and master, had never been right at all.

His bullets spent he fired off the remainder of his missiles into the crowd, creating huge pits into which the dead and dying fell. Executing a precise military turn with his mobile suit he blasted off toward one of the set destinations for mobile suits that could no longer fight. He intended to have his suit refueled and rearmed, but then it would be right back to the battlefield.

Daacom had classified them as the enemy. How could these people possibly be anything but that?

The little girl couldn't breath. In her six years she had yet to learn how to swim, and while she could breach the surface with her hands she simply could not swim up to the surface to get a breath of fresh air.

She was stuck in one of the craters created by Truluck's missiles. She lay at the bottom of one almost alone save for the eight dead bodies she shared the pit with. Their blood and that of a thousand others had filled the crater, and inside she drowned.

She held out for the entirety of the thirty-eight seconds she had been able to hold her breath before anything had happened and even for a handful of seconds after that, but she simply could not find a respite. She opened both her mouth and eyes and drowned in her own lake of scarlet.

A/N: Damn, am I violent or what? For anyone who was severely offended by this chapter: Tough. These people are engaged in a war, and while amounts of blood might be just a little bit exaggerated, this is a very real occurrence. When an armed militia group opens fires on protestors there is often enough blood on the ground that when someone new falls they create a splash. This being Japan the population density is ridiculous, and a large amount of the population has arrived to protest. While I'm not sure that the Gundams land in Japan in Endless Waltz, it works for my story, and I'm sticking to it.