Note: This scene is a rough version of a battle that takes place near the end of the Vestige. Since Pacific Rim: Uprising was so horrific it basically obliterated my will to go on with Pacific Rim crossovers, I thought I'd post up some of the ideas I had, so people can get a feel for where things would have gone.
The Last Hurrah (The Vestige)
"Ma'am," Lebreau murmured. "We need to evacuate."
Lightning stared at the holographic display. Eden City's Eidolons were all locked in mortal combat against the most powerful fal'Cie in recorded history. There were four Category Vs and a Category VI. Even with Chaos, Spira, Shiva, and Bahamut on the battlefield, it just wasn't enough. The Category Vs were holding the Eidolons at bay while the Category VI advanced toward the Ark itself.
"Clever bastards," Lightning whispered. "They've worked out that we're the ones in charge. They're not prioritising the Eidolons anymore. This isn't a raid or a conventional offensive. It's a decapitation strike. If they destroy the Ark and wipe out our command and support structure, they don't need to kill the Eidolons to win."
"Ma'am," Lebreau repeated. "We need to evacuate now."
"There's no point." Lightning pointed at the holographic display. "Look."
The Hawks and Knights had engaged the Category VI, Tyraneant, in a desperate bid to beat the colossal fal'Cie back. It had to be at least twice the size of even the largest of the Category Vs. It lashed out with speed that should have been impossible, knocking the aircraft out of the sky with its tail or tearing them to pieces with its claws. There was a brief flash of light before a shockwave rippled outward, pulverising all of the remain aircraft and shaking the Ark to its foundations.
"Even if we tried to evacuate, we wouldn't get far."
"We can't just stay here," Lebreau pointed out. "All of the Eidolons have already been deployed. There aren't any left to defend the Ark."
Lightning's lips curled. "We still have one."
"What?" Lebreau's eyes widened. "You can't be serious…"
X X X
Nora rushed after Lightning as the marshal hobbled down the corridor as fast as her bad leg would allow. "Marshal, this is insane. If you get into that Conn-Pod, you are going to die."
Lightning didn't bother to stop as she replied, "And what would you suggest, doctor? If we do nothing, we are all dead, and trying to flee isn't going to help. We'd be lucky to last five seconds against that thing." Tyraneant had continued its advance. The Ark was pummelling it with every weapon it had, but the titanic creature continued to press forward. The Ark's Eidolons were still locked in combat against their opponents. By the time any of them were in a position to help, it would be too late.
"Can't someone else pilot?" Nora asked. She reached out and grabbed Lightning's arm. "Lightning! You don't have to do this! It doesn't have to be you!"
"Who else is there?" Lightning growled. "The cadets are too raw. None of them have seen any real combat, and you want them to go up against a Category VI in an unfamiliar Eidolon? You might as well line them up against the wall and shoot them."
"Is you getting into the Conn-Pod any better?" Nora hissed. "You're a mess, Lightning. We both know that. Your brain is… the damage you took from solo piloting Odin years ago never fully healed. If you're lucky, you might last five minutes before you have a seizure, a stroke, or an aneurism. This is suicide."
"Five minutes is better than nothing."
"How will you pilot? You can barely walk. There's no way you'll be able to actually operate the controls."
"Dr Dia," Lightning snapped. "Is the support ready?"
Vanille winced. She'd been trailing after the pair, unwilling to insert herself into the argument. "I mean… it works… and it hasn't melted the brains of any of the volunteers, but I'm not sure…"
"Get it. Bring it to the preparation room."
"What are you two talking about?" Nora asked.
Vanille made a face. "I might have been working on a neurally-operated prosthetic that can be attached to someone's leg to support them. Assuming it works properly, it would give the marshal the leg strength needed to operate an Eidolon."
"And it's neurally controlled?" Nora threw her hands up in despair. "As if connecting your brain to the Eidolon isn't bad enough, you're going to connect it to a prosthetic as well? Forget five minutes, Lightning. I doubt you'll have even three."
"Why are you so against this?" Lightning shrugged off the hand Nora had put on her shoulder.
"Because you're my friend, damn it." Nora grabbed Lightning again. "And I don't want to see you die in a Conn-Pod. I've seen what solo piloting does to people. I know more about your medical history than anyone. You are going to die if you get in there. Doesn't that matter?"
"Not when you weigh it against everything else." Lightning's jaw clenched, and she continued down the corridor. "I watched my parents die – my whole home city die – because I wasn't strong enough to do anything. I promised myself that day that I wouldn't let it happen again." She snarled. "If this Ark falls, then Eden City will fall with it. I refuse to let that happen. If it takes my life to hold the line, then that's what I'll do. Now, you can either help or get out of the way."
X X X
Lightning shivered as the connection to Odin activated. How long had it been since she'd stood in a Conn-Pod. Wrapped around her damaged leg, Vanille's prosthetic gave her the strength to stand unaided.
"We're not getting a stable connection," Lebreau said over the communications channel. "Marshal… you're not connecting to Odin well enough to pilot."
Lightning's jaw clenched. She hadn't come this far to fail. "Come on," she whispered. "Amodar always used to say that we left something of ourselves behind whenever we piloted. I don't know if there's a bit of me or a bit of Serah still here, but if there is, I'm begging you, please. You didn't fail me all those years ago. Don't fail me now. Even if it's just this one time, even if you never move again, I need you to move now."
Maybe it was her words, or maybe it was just the connection taking some time to warm up, but she felt the connection deepen. For a moment, she was back in the shallows off Bodhum, her leg mangled in the wreckage of Odin's Conn-Pod as she screamed her hate and fury at SIN. And then the moment passed. Shadows danced at the edges of her vision, and the Conn-Pod was filled with the echoes of a thousand half-remembered conversations.
"How is the connection?" Lightning asked.
"It's… well… it'll do," Lebreau said. "But are you sure about this?"
"As sure as I can be." Lightning swallowed thickly and willed Odin to move. "Clear the area around the main doors. I'm going to greet our guest."
X X X
"How are her vital signs?" Lebreau asked Nora.
"A mess." The doctor's expression was grim. "Look at her brain scan."
It was customary to keep track of a pilot's neural activity during piloting. Green was good. Red was bed. Lightning's brain was a single mass of angry red.
"How is she even still conscious?"
"I don't know. Her brain scans looks like someone in the middle of having a seizure. I have no idea how she's still standing, never mind piloting."
"I guess she's just too stubborn to die," Vanille said.
The other two women stared.
"What?" Vanille asked. "We were all thinking it."
X X X
Tyraneant braced its claws against the massive blast doors that protected the Ark and pulled. Ten thousand tonnes of alien muscle strained, and the doors began to give way. A cruel gleam entered the monster's eyes. It was not intelligent in the way a human was, but it could still savour the prospect of victory.
And then the doors jerked all the way open.
And two thousand tonnes of humanity's finest weaponry smashed into the fal'Cie. Odin slammed into Tyraneant at a full sprint, somehow pushing the titan back despite the disparity in weight. As the fal'Cie staggered to get its balance back, the Eidolon drew one arm back.
Electricity crackled along the robot's fist, and a rocket ignited at its elbow. With the force of ten jet planes, Odin's Thunder Knuckle caught Tyraneant right on the point of its chin. The fal'Cie's head snapped back, and its knees sagged. A dozen giant teeth flew through the air, and the water lapping at the base of the blast doors hurtled outward as the shockwave of the blow rippled through the air.
A massive blade unfolded from a holster on Odin's back. It was the prototype Blazefire Sabre 2.4, a plasma-edged weapon designed to cut through just about anything. It had yet to see widespread deployment since the power demands were so insanely high that it couldn't operate for more than five minutes at a time in the field.
Lightning likely had less than five minutes before she collapsed, so that was perfectly fine.
As Tyraneant finally got its bearing back, the huge sword swung down. The blade bit deeply into the monster's shoulder and jammed, unable to cut cleanly through the unbelievably dense flesh of the Category VI's body. Tyraneant's tail swung out, and Lightning had no choice but to let go of the sword or lose the upper half of her Eidolon to the blow.
As the tail reached the end of its arc and slowed before coming around for another attack, Odin's left fist transformed. This was another prototype weapon – a rail gun built into the Eidolon's arm and deployed by retracting its wrist to create a suitable barrel. Lightning jammed the weapon into Tyraneant's chest and fired.
A tungsten-tipped pole weighing roughly ten tonnes hit the fal'Cie's chest at close to 65 miles per second. The impact had energy output comparable to a 10 kiloton tactical nuke. Of course, there was a reason Odin was the only Eidolon with a weapon like this. Dr Dia had never quite been able to work all of the kinks out. Firing the rail gun at full power instantly slagged most of the interior of Odin's left arm.
There was a brief alarm in the Conn-Pod before the entire limb went dead and unresponsive. Lightning didn't care. She couldn't possibly hope to beat a Category VI in a fair fight, especially with a time limit. She had to sucker punch the bastard and keep it off balance if she wanted to have any chance of winning.
The rail gun blew a hole right through Tyraneant's chest and out through its back. The exit wound was a terrifying sight to behold, a vast, crater of mangled flesh that took up most of the colossal creature's back. As Tyraneant staggered, one of its secondary brains completely destroyed, Lightning reached out with Odin's working arm and grabbed hold of the Blazefire Sabre. Already, she could feel the buzzing in the back of her head, the swarm of angry bees that told her that her time was running short.
Not yet.
Just a little bit longer.
She wrenched the weapon free and then drove it up through Tyraneant's chin and into its brain. The fal'Cie quivered, its whole body thrashing at the sudden onslaught of damage to its brain. Yet even with a sword driven through its brain, the creature refused to die. Its tail swung round and ripped Odin's left arm off at the elbow. Another savage swipe of its claws cleaved through the armour on the Eidolon's chest to expose its core. Radiation spewed out of the gap, and the Conn-Pod became a nightmare of alarms and warnings.
Lightning grit her teeth. She was losing power. Odin's reactor was doings its best, but it was haemorrhaging energy into their surroundings. Another swing of the monster's tail cracked Odin's left leg and shattered the right leg at the ankle. Hobbled, crippled, and with only a single working limb, Lightning bet everything on her next move.
The rocket on the elbow of Odin's right arm ignited one last time, and she drove the Eidolon's fist up and into the hilt of the Blazefire Sabre. Odin's knuckles shattered, and half a dozen fractures raced through the super structure of the right arm, but the limb had struck true. The impact drove the Blazefire Sabre up and through Tyraneant's skull, completely tearing off the top and front of the fal'Cie's head.
For a long moment, there was only stillness as Eidolon and fal'Cie alike remained locked together before the gigantic monster toppled back and sank into the shallows just off the Ark.
X X X
"Son of a bitch…" Lebreau whispered as the entire command deck stared in awe at the battered figure of Odin slumped against the blast doors. "She actually killed that thing." She grinned. "And it looks like the others aren't doing too badly either."
With their leader dead, the other fal'Cie seemed to have lost confidence, and the Ark's Eidolons were finally on the front foot.
"Lebreau…" Lightning said. "The… target… is… is… is…"
"She's slurring her speech," Nora looked around. "Lebreau! Cut the connections to Odin now!" She shot to her feet. "Get a med-evac team to Odin and someone start prepping the operating theatre." When nobody moved, Nora grabbed the closest person and simply shoved them at the communications console. "Stop standing there and do what I said!"
X X X
They'd won, but Fang could help but feel like a failure. The fal'Cie had managed to separate the Eidolons from the Ark, allowing that behemoth of a Category VI to lay siege to the facility. Somehow, Lightning had managed to get back into Odin and pilot him long enough to kill that damn thing.
Even now, just thinking about it made her shiver. Lightning hadn't piloted in years. With her brain still damaged from her last mission and her leg only working because of Vanille's prosthetic, the marshal had somehow found a way to win against an opponent she should never have been able to beat.
But the cost…
Nora had operated on Lightning for close to eight hours.
"It's a miracle she's alive," Nora said, peering through the glass at where the marshal was hooked up to far too many machines. "I didn't think she'd last three minutes piloting, but she lasted a solid four."
"How… how bad is it?" Fang whispered.
"We don't know if she'll wake up," Nora replied grimly. "And even if she does, we have no idea if she'll even be coherent, never mind able to walk or talk. We're not talking a bit of minor brain damage. We're talking about massive, systematic damage across most of her brain. Quite frankly, we've done everything we can. All we can do now is hope."
"Shit."
"Pretty much." Nora's lips twitched. "But Vanille said it best. The marshal is too stubborn to die. We just… we have to hope she pulls through this too. If anyone can do it, she can."
X X X
Author's Notes
As always, I do not own Final Fantasy or Pacific Rim. I am not making any money off this.
A lot of people have asked to know what happens later in The Vestige, so I thought I'd post this. It's very rough, and it's missing the connecting pieces since it's not imbedded in the larger story as a whole, but I thought you might appreciate it. There are other snippets too, as well as parts from a sequel that never made it, so I might share those to later. Let me know what you think.
Finally, if you enjoy my fan fiction, you can also find me on Amazon as L. G. Estrella. If you like humour, fun, action, and adventure, I'm sure you'll enjoy my original stuff too.
As always, I appreciate feedback. Reviews and comments are welcome.