Thanks to everyone who's been responding and reading since this fic resumed updates! You guys mean a lot to me! =D It helps give me a lot of motivation to press on and keep working towards finishing this story.

Anyway, there's some grim stuff in this chapter.


Chapter Sixty-One: War Pigs

The false Strike was driven backwards by my shot and it fell onto the ground before exploding, sending fire and smoke all over the immediate area.

"They found us!" I had time to yell before all hell broke loose around me.

Trees shattered around me as beam lasers blasted through them, causing small fires and trunks crashing to the ground in their wake. I forced the Justice to maneuver throughout the forest to get a better shooting angle, and the Justice broke and knocked over trees on its own accord. The Justice was just too strong to be stopped by trees. All of the Mobile Suits were.

The next thirty seconds were a blur of chaos and terror smothered in smoke. I was firing blind, using the lasers fired by the false Strikes to guide my own shots. I felt more than one shot hit me, but the Phase Shift continued to hold. But I couldn't help thinking that if I had been piloting an ordinary GINN how I would've gotten killed many times over by the enemy Mobile Suits.

When the firing finally stopped, I was gasping for air, my body shaking and trembling. The smoke was dissipating, and it was apparent my side won, but that didn't matter right now. The false Strikes were far tougher than artillery trucks or Mobile Armors.

I heard a voice then. "You like what we're dishing out, space monsters? We have our own Mobile Suits now, the Strike Daggers! You won't be beating us so-"

I switched it off. Propaganda on the main channel, go figure.

"'Space monsters', huh?" Asta asked, clearly bemused . "These guys aren't exactly self-aware, are they?"

"What we need to do is clear as many Strike Daggers out of here as possible," Athrun replied. "We won't have any chance of clearing the other sectors if we don't take out as many as we can."

"We'll be sitting ducks in the air, though," I said. "We'll have to walk."

"I know. That's what bothers me," Athrun replied. "We don't have time to keep walking."

My radar beeped again. "There's more of them coming, Athrun!"

"Must've attracted the whole damn Earth Alliance army," Asta said grimly.

I heard a voice on my radio then. This time the voice was ZAFT. "Captain Zala! The enemy Mobile Suits are converging on you and Team Foster's location! You're drawing them away from the other sectors! We'll be able to drop the Gungnirs momentarily!"

"What are you telling us to do?" Athrun shouted.

"You and Team Foster dig into a defensive position and continue drawing their fire! Take out as many of them as you can until the EMPs deploy!"!

"But sir!" Athrun cried. I knew why Athrun was against this order. I didn't like it either.

We were being used as bait, and the moment those EMPs went off the GUNDAMs were going to get fried.

This had to have been the worst order I had ever been given.

"No time for arguing! This is the only way the plan is going to work! Just hold on for five minutes!" the commanding officer said.

"Athrun," Nicol said. "I swapped primary weapons with Dearka. Just set me up in a sniping position and I'll take out what I can. The rest of you guys just help Foster hold the line."

"Dammit, Nicol! I'm not going to-"

"There's no choice, Athrun," Nicol replied.

I heard Athrun audibly bite back a curse, and finally Athrun said "Fine! Dearka, get Nicol to a sniping position! Everyone else, form a perimeter around the Gungnir landing site, and whatever you do, don't stay out in the open!"

By the time I made it to the perimeter, the Strike Daggers were already on top of us.

"Weapons free!" Athrun shouted.

I immediately opened fire, but I was swarmed by five of them at once. I took out two but immediately had to thrust backwards to avoid getting speared by one of the other Daggers.

"There's too many of them! GAAAAH!" screamed a GINN pilot. A second later, his GINN vanished from my radar screen.

I drew my saber and clashed with one of the Daggers, but another one was trying to get on my left flank so he could have a clear shot at me. I aimed my beam rifle with one arm and fired before he could get into position. The shot disintegrated the Dagger's midsection and it crashed to the ground on its back before exploding.

I pivoted then, using the Justice's brute strength to force the Dagger's sword arm to lower, and then I forced the Justice's gun hand to aim right at the chest of the Dagger I had pinned.

I fired and the Dagger, just like the last one, was left with a gaping hole before it fell to the ground. Unlike the previous Dagger, however, it did not explode. It just fell, lying at my feet like some sort of broken, discarded doll.

Four kills in maybe thirty seconds of fighting. Who knew how many I would have to kill for the remainder of the five estimated minutes.

For the first time in my life, I was wishing that I would see the seed. I should've seen it a long time ago. The fighting was so intense, like desperate battles to defend the Archangel. I had seen the seed multiple times in those fights. Why wasn't I seeing it now?

Why was it not activating, when I sorely needed it? How was I going to hold on, just as myself, against this overwhelming force?

I saw more enemy reinforcements advancing on my position and I knew that somehow I had to survive. There was no choice. I had to hold on, using my own skill and the Justice's power, if I was to have any hope at all. Clearly the seed in my eyes was not going to activate no matter how dire this situation became.

I backed myself behind a destroyed bunker and let loose with my beam rifle. Several shots went past me and one even winged me on the right shoulder, which made the Justice briefly stagger before I regained control of it.

"There's too many of them!" I shouted.

"The Gungnirs have landed, Cagalli!" Athrun shouted. "We have to hold on just a little longer!"

I barely bit back an insult that we were holding on just to get EMPed. Including me. Rau Le Creuset himself had said he didn't expect the Justice to be able to handle an EMP blast either.

I heard Dearka scream on the radio. "Dearka?"

"They got me pretty good," Dearka said. "I'm done."

"You're both useless, you-AAGH!" That was Asta.

Unlike Dearka, I could actually see Asta from my position. The Duel was smoking pretty badly.

"You're out of action too!" I said.

"You don't think I know that?" Asta screamed before she started a violent coughing fit.

I had never heard her cough so violently before. I had heard of her issues, of her ill health, and I had seen brief glimpses of her pain and struggle, but this was the first time hearing it for real. She sounded sick, her cough clearly full of blood, almost like she was dying.

"Asta!" Athrun shouted.

"Focus . . . on the damn battle . . . you idiots!" Asta growled between coughs and gasps for air.

For a girl who I intensely disliked and who I wanted to be wrong all the time, Asta had a tendency to be right in certain situations. It drove me insane.

I turned my attention back towards the battle and resumed shooting at the enemy, but it was already clear they were going to swarm us by using sheer numbers. Clearly the Strike Daggers' goal was to eliminate the GUNDAM machines. And I wasn't sure who was playing into who's hands anymore. No GUNDAM could fight off such an enormous force on its own.

In desperation I aimed the FATUM-00 at the enemy forces. The only thing I could think to do was to try to carve a swath out of them and scatter the survivors, which might buy us enough time to hold on until the Gungnirs activated. I fired blind into the charging airborne force, and immediately ducked back as several lasers rushed past me.

They were landing all around us. This was a rush, intent on using numbers to overwhelm our position. Even my attack, which had to have eliminated several of them, wasn't even close to being enough.

I prepared to move out when suddenly my controls sparked all around me, and everything went dark inside the cockpit.

I realized, to my horror, that the Justice was falling forward. I grabbed the control stick with both hands and tried to prevent it, but it hit me, right before impact, that the EMPs had gone off, and there was nothing I could do.

At the last second, I braced myself. I folded my arms in front of me, almost like I was going to grab my shoulders, in order to keep my arms from being broken.

Wham.


The Justice, thankfully, had a manual opening mechanism. I forced it open despite my sore arms begging for mercy, and I struggled outside, making sure I wasn't going anywhere without my pistol.

It was quiet out here. Extremely quiet. My radio coms were no longer working, unsurprisingly.

All I could hear were distant smoke and fires, and random people chattering away about who knows what.

I saw three Strike Daggers on the ground in front of me, bent in unnatural positions, undoubtedly due to running out of power like my own.

I wasn't sure what I was going to face when I approached them, but I did.

The cockpit in the Strike Dagger directly in front of me opened up. A female pilot with her hands in the air gingerly stood up. "P-Please don't shoot."

I removed my helmet and dropped it to the ground. All right, these were reasonable types. They had to have known they had lost.

"I'm not going to shoot you," I said. "Get down here with your hands behind your head. You're now my prisoner."

Her two companions soon did the same thing.

I had no communication with ZAFT HQ or even with Athrun. I had no clue where he was. But with all of these Strike Daggers and random Earth vehicles lying around everywhere, surely there were more survivors. The only thing I thought I could do was gather them all up. There were ZAFT DINNs and GINNs flying overhead, clearly communicating to the Earth Alliance forces that they had lost.

Soon I had gathered about thirty survivors from the immediate area. I had no idea how to talk to these people. How exactly do you take prisoners, again?

"All right," I finally said, looking at them, but particularly the girl I had captured first, "I'm going to walk you guys back to ZAFT lines. I guess you are staying in POW camps by Carpentaria until the end of the war."

"J-Just don't hurt us," the girl said. "W-We've been hearing you're killing your own Natural allies."

It hit me then, that the driving emotion behind all of these people was fear. They were terrified of me. Was this the primary reason why so many of them had biases against Coordinators? Fear?

No wonder why so many Naturals bought into anti-Coordinator propaganda. It's easy to make people do what you want if you scare the hell out of them. It's Propaganda 101. And if there's any element of truth to what was being spoken, it makes it easier to believe in it.

"I don't know what's going on with that, but I sure as hell am not going to kill you," I said.

Of course, when that happened, I heard gunfire in the distance. Sounded like ZAFT armaments. It was kind of sad that I knew that.

"My name is Lieutenant Cagalli Yamato," I said. "You guys are my prisoners of war. I still believe in that concept. I'm gonna-"

I was interrupted then, by a cascade of loud, whistling noises. I looked up and saw what seemed to be an endless rain of missiles fly overhead, like an enormous enraged swarm of hornets, and I followed them towards the horizon. Enormous golden fireballs erupted, swallowing everything in sight, and even from this distance I could feel a rush of heat.

"My God!" one of the male pilots half-screamed, half-whispered. "They just killed everybody in the city!"

My prisoners immediately began panicking, shouting over each other. I was going to lose control over them if I didn't do something.

"Stop it!" I shouted. "We don't know what happened with that, not for sure!"

But I knew in the back of my head what had happened. What the pilot had said was true. That was the main Panama base, and it doubled as a city, it was full of civilians.

ZAFT had just blown it to hell. So thoroughly that there was no way anyone could have survived.

Panic began to grip me. I was still hearing gunfire all around me. It was beginning to hit me that it was not Earth Alliance resistance that was drawing the gunfire. It was ZAFT murdering Naturals. This whole area was becoming a massacre, and it was only a matter of time before-

"Cagalli!" Athrun's voice.

I spun towards him. "Athrun. What's going on?"

"I don't know, but I . . ." Athrun turned and saw my prisoners. "Oh God."

They were looking terrified, like they wanted to run away. I didn't blame them.

Suddenly, a ZAFT GINN landed right beside us, and pivoted right towards Athrun and I and the prisoners, who screamed in fright.

I could hear the GINN pilot. It was a man, and his voice was slightly garbled due to the microphone. "Look at this. Thanks for saving me the trouble of hunting them down!"

The GINN aimed its gun right for the prisoners.

What I was hearing, what I was thinking, it was all true. ZAFT was exterminating every Natural they could find. Killing defenseless, surrendering people. They were so caught up in hatred and rage that killing people no longer had any meaning to them.

I just knew I wasn't going to let these people die. I had to stop this.

I sprinted in front of them. "Stop! What the hell do you think you're doing?"

A man's voice, slightly garbled by the microphone. "Stand aside, Lieutenant!"

"No!" I shouted back. "These are my prisoners of war, I decide what to do with them! They're coming back to base with me!"

"Bitch!" The GINN fired over our heads, destroying much of the forest behind us. The shockwave actually knocked several of the soldiers in the rear.

"That's your only warning, Lieutenant! Stand aside before you join them!"

"Stop it!" That was Athrun now, he was running towards my side. "You are out of line! You don't shoot at an allied pilot!"

"You're the one that's out of line, Captain Zala!" snarled the GINN pilot. "These animals deserve to be put down like the dogs they are! They slaughtered us at JOSH-A, they deserve the same fate!"

"Please . . ." the girl behind me begged. "Please, Lieutenant Yamato . . ."

Hearing her beg for her life put a pain in my chest. There was no way I was going to win this. I was a girl with a pistol staring down a giant robot with a gun as big as a car aimed right for me. I was going to die if I kept this up. The hateful venom spewing from the pilot's words made it pretty clear that he was going to kill these people, no matter what I did.

"I'm not standing aside!" I shouted. I felt something fatalistic come over me then. I was going to die.

There was no way I was going to get out of this. What did it matter what I did?

There was no way I would be able to live with myself if I let this GINN slaughter these people. I was dead no matter what I did. This was the only thing I could possibly do. Stay true to myself, and pray. Pray that somehow, someway, reason would win.

"These are people just like we are!" I shouted at the GINN. "They're scared of us, soldier! And acts like this are just going to make the Naturals more frightened! They're just like us!"

The GINN pilot snarled something unintelligible, anguished, enraged noises that didn't sound like any language I had ever heard. It was like he had crossed so far into rage that he was an animal himself.

"They deserve to go into a prisoner of war camp! That's what civilized people do! You take prisoners and you let them go when the war is over! It's called 'mercy'!"

"There aren't any prisoner of war camps anymore, bitch!" the GINN pilot screamed.

It didn't quite hit me. "What?"

"After what we did why should we bother wasting the space on them? They can all go to hell!"

He was going to shoot. The GINN's finger was closing on the trigger. He was going to shoot, and I was going to die.

A force hit me from the right and I found myself on the ground.

Immediately afterwards, I heard the gun fire into the crowd of prisoners.

A person was on top of me. I shoved him aside and sat up just in time to see all of the prisoners get torn apart by the gunfire.

What I saw is something I can't forget, and still can't bring myself to fully describe.

Perhaps the image that stays in my head the most is the look of the girl. She had clearly tried to run in my direction, and so was facing me when she got killed. The look of fright in her tearful eyes, before her head was torn apart by yet another bullet, is something that's burned in me to this day.

The prisoners no longer looked like people after the GINN finally stopped firing. Just red goo on the ground. The GINN walked forward then, and stomped on the ground repeatedly, driving the blood and severed limbs deeper into the ground, crushing and obliterating all that was left.

I had no voice. I had no ability to move. I was petrified by what I was seeing, my eyes unable to even blink, and I had only the thinnest sense that tears were forming in my eyes.

Athrun told me later that I was making the softest choked noises, like I had even lost the ability to breathe. I believe him. I wasn't sure if I was even doing that, staring at what had happened to those people.

The GINN moved on then, leaving the dirty, squashed mess in its wake, and a putrid, overwhelming smell of blood.

It was the smell that finally got my body to work again.

I crawled a few feet away and finally threw up all over the ground.

I clutched at my stomach, and begged myself to stop, but I couldn't. I kept heaving until there was nothing left, and even then, the urge to throw up was overwhelming me. I was a sobbing, vomiting mess, and I couldn't even function beyond that at all. I barely even knew what I was crying over, I couldn't believe what had happened was real.

It was the most horrific, barbaric act I had ever seen in my life, and it was happening all around me, repeatedly, over and over. All of these pilots, soldiers, becoming the executioners for these surrendering people who had nothing to do with JOSH-A, whose motivation to fight us was fear. Fear we were more than justifying. We were becoming the animals now.

Pigs. We were all just pigs.

Maybe even worse.

What I had seen was something so barbaric it crossed the line into evil. It was evil, what that pilot had done, and I didn't know what to do or even how to live anymore after seeing the massacre right in front of my lines.

I barely sensed Athrun's arms around me. I had no more strength. I had the faintest thought to punch him but I could not bring myself too. A damning thought, What's the point?, had seeped into my mind, and it was dominating me. It was worse than my despair after discovering what I was at my parents' house. This was something different, something that had grabbed me around my heart and my head, smothering me.

His words, despite being spoken right into my ears, sounded so far away. And yet, I could still hear him. No matter how gone I was, I could still hear Athrun, like his voice was calling out to me from a distant horizon, yet somehow distorted by a thick haze. Like he was calling me back.

"I'm sorry," I heard him say. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

Was he crying? I don't know. Maybe he was. Maybe, in his Athrun way, he still was managing to control his emotions, because it was something he was so good at doing. Maybe even this wasn't enough to break him, because he was that strong. Or maybe my presence, and my falling apart, was what was motivating him to hold himself together. I can't really say. I barely remember him in this moment.

But I remember his words, his simple apology, over what had happened, over the battle, maybe over even bringing me to ZAFT, resonated with me somehow. He prevented me from fading away completely.

Eventually he brought my head into his chest, and he let me cry. I was grabbing him, grabbing his pilot's suit, but my grip was so weak that I could not hold on. Eventually I think I just went limp.

But I didn't go away. Not completely.

Even in my numbness and despair, I still felt something inside me. Something inside me to not give in. That I couldn't. That there had to be something I could do. That I absolutely had to, after what I had witnessed.

Someone needed to live for them, to speak for them, so this wouldn't happen again.

Would I have to be that person? I didn't know. But I knew there was no way I was going to live with myself unless I ended this war, and I knew that a ZAFT victory would not be the right way for this war to end.

I just did not know.

All I knew was that I had seen evil, unquestionable, unjustifiable evil, and I was fighting on the side committing that evil.

I couldn't help but wonder if that made me evil, too . . .


I wish I could have made what had happened more affecting. But there was no way I could without moving this fic from a T rating to an M rating. The best I could do was focus more on the conflict in Cagalli's head more than what was physically happening in front of her. I hope that is acceptable for anyone.

In any case, gratuitous blood and gore is gratuitous. It's not for everyone and not everyone wants to read it, which includes me sometimes. Maybe it's for the best that a lot got left out . . .

Well, anyway, here's an update for you. The rollercoaster ride is only through the first few corners . . .