Chapter Seventy-Five: What Lies Beneath

"Abominations?" I yelled. I couldn't believe Rau Le Creuset, who had basically revealed himself to be insane, was daring to call me an 'abomination'. As far as I knew, I was more human that Rau was. "What the hell are you talking about? I'm a human being, dammit!"

"You are the product of Ulen Hibiki's desires to play God and nothing more. You and Asta Joule are from the only children he has experimented on, but the two of you are the only ones who survived in his artificial womb."

Rau chuckled then. "And Asta here and only be classified as a partial success, at that."

I wanted to yell out to Asta, but every time I had done that, I had attracted a gunshot from Rau Le Creuset. Eventually he was going to hit one of us if he kept firing that thing. Flay and Mu were already wounded, and I couldn't afford to get shot. And Flay seemed to have lost her gun after getting shot.

So I answered Rau Le Creuset again directly. "So you're saying that Asta and I shouldn't exist? Is that it?"

Rau chuckled again. "You are the product of a man who had lost all reason in the hope of achieving human progress. What do you think the answer is? What do you think that means for humanity as a whole?"

It was tempting to say he could shove it up his ass, but that would, again, just get us shot at. I wasn't sure what the best plan was. Should I keep playing along and try to stall, or should I try to find a way to get us out of here?

I leaned around the edge of the sofa, and I saw Rau Le Creuset in the open.

I opened fire. Rau immediately jumped away behind cover, and I couldn't tell whether I had hit him or not.

I fired two more shots to keep him pinned down behind his corner. "Mu! Flay! Go!"

I turned my eyes to Asta just for a moment. She was on her hands and knees, tears in her eyes. "Asta! Either come with us or help me kill Rau! You don't have to listen to his garbage!"

I saw Rau lean out and I fired another shot to keep him pinned. "Asta, please! Help me!"

"Shut up." I realized right away, by the tone in her voice, she was going to go right for her gun. I immediately turned and ran away, heading right for the stairs where Mu and Flay were heading down.

"Shut up you bitch!"

Asta fired wildly as I ran for the stairs, and I wound up leaping over the railing and landing a couple of steps down, and it took everything I had to avoid falling down the stairs and taking Mu and Flay out with me. It was a miracle I didn't turn my ankles.

After taking a moment to steady myself, several gunshots slammed into the wall above me. Over the din of the gunshots, I could hear Asta screaming "Shut up!" over and over and over.

"Not getting through to her, eh?" Mu asked. It was tempting to slap him.

"Let's keep going. Try to find a place to hide so we can kill that bastard. Then maybe we'll get through to her."

I heard the faint echo of Asta's gun making a click sound, repeatedly. That was as condemning as the gunshots themselves. She had lost total control over herself, and if we couldn't get her to snap out of it . . .

I forced myself to focus. Rau Le Creuset was the enemy here. Asta was the victim. And now Rau was going to poison her mind even more than he already had.

"Right," Mu said, with a trace of a sardonic tone. "I don't think we're in much shape for an ambush, but I don't think we have much choice either You're not taking any of his nonsense seriously, are you?"

"I've already heard part of it straight from my birth father's mouth. Long story," I replied.

"Wait, what?" Flay asked, surprised.

"Let's keep going before he makes it down the stairs," I said, so everyone could keep their focus.

"Probably a good idea," Mu said, and we went down the flight of stairs and onto the next floor.


We hid in another office, albeit one that had more cover than the office above us. Flay and I sheltered by some computer terminals, and Mu was across the room to the left. It would hopefully guarantee us a chance to shoot Rau Le Creuset if he was stupid enough to expose himself. At the same time, the terminals wouldn't stop every bullet that came our way. If there was going to be a gunfight to end it all, it needed to end quickly.

Flay was hissing and moaning in pain. Clearly the wound was getting to her, and it was still bleeding. It didn't look lethal but this was no time to treat it. The only way we could treat it was if we killed Rau and possibly Asta and then could take our time trying to get out of here.

I heard Rau walking down the flight of stairs we had. I couldn't tell whether Asta was with him or not. "I am not much different than you, Cagalli! I did not come into this world by natural birth!"

"God, what is wrong with him?" Flay hissed.

I turned towards her. "Let him rant. The moment he comes in here, Mu and I are going to kill him and he'll never talk again."

"My genes were altered artificially, early in the embryonic stage of development!" Rau proclaimed as it sounded like he was coming down the last couple of steps. "As were yours, Cagalli! Perhaps you even more so, because you didn't spend any time in your mother's womb at all!"

I wasn't going to answer and reveal our position. I wasn't going to be that stupid.

Suddenly, as if he knew we were in this room, I heard Rau Le Creuset enter it, and my heart slammed against my chest. It was like he was psychic. He knew we were in here, despite there being so many rooms for us to be hiding in this facility. How did he know?

I heard a light switch flip, and the entrance to the room flickered on. "George Glenn was the first Coordinator humanity knew. Do you know of the chaos that he set into motion? Here, I'll show you just oneaspect of the chaos!"

Suddenly, I heard another switch flip, and I suddenly heard voices talking in the room. Like recordings of people, overlapping each other.

"I want my child to have blue eyes and blonde hair."

"I want my son to have my calm, steady surgeon's hands."

"I want my daughter to have my grandmother's smooth auburn hair! It was so lovely!"

There were more like those. It was like listening to a never-ending recital of the most vain of humanity making the most asinine requests.

Rau laughed after the recordings went on for a bit. "That is merely one of the doors he opened! Humanity's desire to somehow perfect themselves! That we somehow knew how to create ourselves better than natural selection did! Want to hear the results of these attempts, Cagalli, Mu, Allster?"

"I don't want to hear this anymore," Flay moaned. I didn't either.

I leaned out, just a bit. I did not have a clear shot, and judging by the fact Mu hadn't fired yet either, he didn't have one himself.

"We have no choice. I don't have a shot," I replied.

Suddenly, the recordings changed. And then it went from grotesquely silly to just plain horrific.

"She suffered a miscarriage! How could you let that happen! We spent a fortune on our baby girl and she didn't even make it to five months!"

"Her eyes are all wrong!"

"The mother's body will affect the stage of embryonic development! We made that very clear when you signed off on this!"

"How the hell did my son wind up with Down Syndrome? He was supposed to be superior!"

It never ended. The people raging against their children's appearances, their flaws, the doctors, and the things they didn't expect. There was so much outright hatred for their babies, like they were commodities, like they were little more than luxury cars that had turned out to be lemons.

"People paid dearly for this dream, of the perfect child, so of course they wanted it to come true. How can you blame them?" Rau said above the recordings. "It's only human nature to want the best for yourself! No one wants to see their dreams shattered!"

The recordings stopped, and I recognized the voice that was next, from the recordings at my own house. It was my birth father, Ulen Hibiki.

"After the latest round of failures, I can only come to one conclusion: the greatest variable in the process is the mother's own body. If we could eliminate the mother's body from the equation . . ."

I immediately realized what that meant. Now Rau was leading into the story of how I was born. Or, as he was trying to put it, created. That I was a literal test tube baby.

Rau stopped the recording. "Is that what drove them onward? Because people demanded it? That their hopes and dreams come true no matter what the cost?!"

Another recording. An alarm was going off in the background. Undoubtedly Rau was playing one of my birth father's seemingly endless failures.

"We have a failure in Unit 3!"

"Damn it! Increase the power to the filtration system!"

"Heartbeat is increasing! Blood pressure is over two hundred! We're losing him!"

Then I heard my birth mother's voice. "Stop this, Ulen! That's a human life in there!"

"I know that! That's exactly why I have to see this through to the end, Via!"

"You're trying to manufacture life! You have to stop!"

I was hearing my birth parents fight all over again, just like in the recordings my adoptive mother had played to Uzumi Nara Athha.

"And what were the results of their dreams?" Rau roared. "What did people receive from this? What did they get?"

And then played a recording I was intimately familiar with already. The argument I had heard played by my adoptive mother.

"Give her back to me! Give her back! Don't do this to her, Ulen! You're playing God with our daughter!"

"I've almost cracked it. The last subject was almost perfect! I have to continue in this direction! I must!"

"That poor girl you experimented on will be lucky to make it through more than a decade of life! I won't let you do this to our daughter! I won't let those bastards use her!"

"That girl is my daughter, Via! I will do with her what I have to do for the sake of the project! Your son is expendable and frankly so are you. Do yourself and your son a favor and not interfere with my work!"

"What did you become, Cagalli Yamato? What did your birth father turn you into? And what did your mother do about it?" Rau shouted.

"The 'Ultimate Coordinator'? Is turning our daughter into that going to bring her happiness?" my birth mother wailed.

"The urge to make things better has always driven progress, and that brings about happiness, Via!"

"Damn you! Damn you for doing this to her!"

"How much hatred grew in your mother's heart, Cagalli? What did she do in order to save you from your own father?"

He was going somewhere with this, and I didn't like it. In fact, it was horrifying me to the core.

"They thirsted for knowledge, they did everything they could to fulfill their desires, and ultimately, theyforgot why they were doing it! Even as they proclaimed their reverence for human life, they begin distorting it! What does a person watching this do, Cagalli? What does she do?"

I was biting back my response at this point, just to keep up the pretense we were not in this room and Rau was yelling at nothing. But it was futile, pointless, and I think we all knew it. Rau had tracked us down, and he had an audience for this rant about the human race and how terrible it was.

"She begins destroying it!" Rau shouted. "Your mother, Via Hibiki, is none other than one of the founding members of Blue Cosmos!"

It took me a split second for me to register that. It took me another second to respond.

"Shut up!" I got out behind my cover then and started shooting at Rau Le Creuset, but he ducked behind the corner again and I missed. It seemed the terminal Rau was using was behind that corner, so I couldn't at least smash the damn terminal augmenting Rau's rant.

"You're lying!" I shouted. "Blue Cosmos has tried to kill me! My mother would never do that!"

"How would you know? You never knew her!" Rau replied.

"You don't know her either!"

Rau laughed. "I know her better than you do, Cagalli!"

Suddenly, I heard her voice. My birth mother.

"I had to kill Ulen today. I . . . I can't explain how that feels. It was the only way to stop the madness . . . to stop his heartless experiments. I can't let more of these children . . . these poor children, fall prey to this damnable project. Cagalli will be the last. That much I guaranteed today with his death."

Her voice . . . it was different. She was calmer, yet more distant. Like the emotion was just drained out of her.

"All of this . . . all of this trying to play God, it . . . it was a mistake. All of the human lives we've tampered with, it's a Pandora's Box that should never have been opened. And I will close it, and we will be pure again."

"No." For the first time throughout all of this, I finally froze. Hearing my birth mother say these things, it didn't make any sense! It had to be a trick! Hell, my adoptive parents had outright said that Via Hibiki was dead! How could this be true?

"This . . . everything that Ulen did . . . it's forbidden knowledge. As will Cagalli's existence. The Coordinators are a mistake that need to be rectified, but I will not punish my daughter for my crimes. I have hidden my daughter away, and she will live her life in peace. Asta Joule will die young, and when that happens, and when the Coordinators are destroyed . . . maybe I will have done what little I can do to ensure that humanity survives."

Rau laughed as the recording ended. "Well, that explains why Blue Cosmos took so long to track you down! Your mother hid you! But she certainly didn't try to save you when they finally found you, did she?"

"Down, Cagalli!" Suddenly I was tackled by Mu, and a round of bullets went over our heads.

I snapped out of it enough to crawl behind cover with Mu. But the words of my mother, calm as they were, were like a bullhorn into my head. I couldn't shake them off. It was my mother's lack of emotion that was destroying me internally. She was calm, too calm. Like she had become sociopathic, like she had snapped.

"No matter what we learn, no matter what we obtain, nothing ever changes! This is what humanity becomes! They become envious of each other. They begin hating each other! And they kill each other! Italways ends this way!"

Two more gunshots by my new position, barely missing my legs. I cried out and tucked them in. I wasn't a soldier by that point, hearing my birth mother seemingly agree with Blue Cosmos' ideology was enough of a shock that it had reduced me to a scared girl. A scared girl who just wanted to cover her ears and pretend Rau Le Creuset did not exist.

"Snap out of it, princess!" Mu growled. "He could have doctored that audio! All of it!"

"He didn't." I was told I said that. I don't remember it, though.

"Damn it. When even saying 'princess' doesn't get you riled up . . ." Mu sighed.

"If this is the only conclusion, if this is what they all want, why don't they exterminate each other?" Rau yelled, in what seemed to be approaching his grand crescendo.

Mu decided that he was going to yell in my place, apparently. "What gives you the right to sound sosuperior?"

He leaned out over me and fired multiple shots at Rau Le Creuset, before ducking back. It was clear he had not killed or wounded Le Creuset, because he responded right back.

"I do have that right! Above all else in the known universe, I alone have that right! Though if Cagalli Yamato or Asta Joule want that right, they can share it with me! We all can end humanity together!"

Rau Le Creuset fired several more shots at that, hitting one of the pieces of equipment hanging above the room, causing it to crash to the ground. Smoke and debris filled the air, and I heard Flay cry out in fright, which jarred me from my trance, if only a little.

My foggy mind managed to deduce some things. Rau Le Creuset must have reloaded before coming down here; otherwise he would have run out of bullets long ago. That meant he had come prepared for an actual gunfight. He had fired way more shots than La Flaga and I at this point; and there was no indicator he was running low. That meant we weren't going to wait him out any time soon.

Suddenly, another recording played; this one from my birth father. "But human cloning is illegal!"

"I am paying you enough money to break the law. Some laws can be changed. After all, they're only made by humans."

"Dad?" Mu La Flaga gasped, but he seemed more pissed about hearing his own father's voice than surprised.

"But still!" My birth father protested, albeit feebly.

"This technology you've invented came at great cost. You should put it to use. You want funding for further research, don't you? Don't you want to see where your research goes? Don't you want to see if you can make life the way you want it to be?"

"I'm surprised you don't remember!" Rau Le Creuset yelled as the din of the broken equipment faded away. "We met once before, Mu!"

"What?" Mu shouted, clearly as bewildered as I felt in that moment.

"Long, long ago, before we ever met on the battlefield. Want to know how?"

The voice of Mu's father played again. "Are you sure that's me in there?"

Silence. Clearly my own birth father didn't want to talk.

"Oh well," Mu's father said, fatalistically. "He will be my successor in any case. Why should that woman's child be my heir? I will make sure he is educated well, and won't grow up into another weakling like my wife's son."

What was with our fathers and talking about their children like they were possessions of other people? Why couldn't they be moral? Or at least have some semblance of empathy and sanity?

Rau just chuckled at that recording. "I am he, that arrogant fool, who thought he could thwart death itself with his money . . . Al Da Flaga. However, I am merely his defective clone!"

"The hell?" Mu shouted. "My dad's clone? Who do you expect to believe all of that crap you just spouted off?"

"I don't want to believe it either! But unfortunately, I have to live with it!"

I caught movement behind our position. It was Flay. What was she doing?

Suddenly, I heard more footsteps. Rau sounded smarmier than ever as I listened to them. "Ah, Asta, have you finally come to join us? Or have you been listening the whole time?"

"Play the recording with my mother that you say you have," Asta said softly. "Play it."

"Sure, why not? I've already revealed to Cagalli and Mu their darkest secrets! Why not play yours too?"

The audio roared to life again. I heard my birth father talking, calmly, almost like he was at a bedside.

"Your fertility is rare for a Coordinator. I know you can have another child, possibly several more, but are you sure you want to do this?"

"I believe I have no choice in the matter but take this chance on my daughter." I was amazed how young Asta's mother sounded. Was she only a teenager when she did this?

As if confirming this, the youthful voice added "I did not think the consequences of my actions through. My parents believe I'm too young and I will miscarry, as do my doctors. This is not a healthy pregnancy. It took a lot of careful thought, but I feel this is the best course of action to take for her. If it succeeds, she will be the best among us. If it fails, it might as well be the miscarriage they've been predicting for me."

I heard Asta gasp softly. Rau chuckled. "Don't you see, Asta? Even to your mother, you were nothing more than a pawn, an inconvenience she felt she had to justify! She decided you were better off as a science experiment than left in her womb!"

"A science experiment?" Asta asked softly.

"What do you think we all are? Me, you, Cagalli Yamato? We're nothing but science experiments concocted to somehow advance the human race! Don't you understand now, any of you? Aren't we all abominations in the end?"

He fired a warning shot at Mu and I, in case either of us were thinking of trying to lean out. "That's why I'm opening the final door! I'm going to make those insatiable fools' wishes come true! It has been the inevitable destiny of humanity since the destruction of the 'innovative society'! We are the instruments that will destroy the human race once and for all!"

"What the hell is the 'innovative society'?" Mu yelled.

"That is another story for another time. The demise of that society is quite delicious to discover," Rau replied. "Especially since they have gone through so much effort to cover it up. After all, they want to erase history to keep forbidden knowledge away from the masses. They don't realize all that does is allow history to repeat itself and destroy everything all over again!"

"And you think you should make history repeat itself?" Mu yelled.

"It's already repeating itself! I'm just accelerating, codifying, the process," Rau replied.

I did lean out then, and I saw Rau Le Creuset twirling around a jump drive. "Here, Asta! I have in here the reason you and Cagalli exist in particular. You two were born for an even more selfish reason than I was! You want to see what the 'innovative society' left for you? The answer lies inside."

He flipped it to Asta, who presumably caught it. "What . . . what makes you think I'd do this for you, C-Commander?"

"I think this might convince you to!"

That youthful voice again, Asta's mother. "You've turned my daughter into a freak, Doctor Hibiki!"

"I warned you about the process, Ms. Joule! That this is largely untried technology! Your daughter's survival, however, means that I'm on the right track! The next child might succeed next time!"

"Shove it up your ass, Hibiki! My daughter's life is ruined! She's practically pointless the way you left her! She won't even make it to the age of ten! What kind of child has a life like that? She's better off dead!"

"P-Pointless?" Asta asked, shaken.

"I should never have allowed you to do this to her! Asta is, basically, defective! And I'll have to waste all of my time on her for no reason because she won't even make it to puberty before she dies! What was the point of having her in the first place?"

"N-No, Mom . . ." Asta whispered softly, tears choking her voice.

"Don't you get it, Asta Joule? You have no loving parents! You were supposed to die years upon years ago! You're nothing more than a defective luxury, suffering because of human experimentation! What makes you think you are thought of the same as all other humans?"

Suddenly, Flay tore from her cover, holding what looked like a piece of metal, screaming as she rushed Rau Le Creuset.

Rau immediately turned his weapon on her, but Flay was running at a full sprint, without any regard for her own survival, and as Rau aimed at Flay, she was already there, and she stabbed the metal shard into his stomach.

"AGH!" Rau cried, but Flay, using all of her strength, muscled him into a terminal and began wrestling the pistol out of his right hand. Before I could tell what was going on, Flay had the pistol turned right on Rau and fired two shots right into his chest. Rau collapsed on the terminal and rolled onto the floor, wheezing from the wounds.

I was stunned. That had been Flay who did that. Flay.

"That a girl!" Mu yelled. "Just the way I taught her!"

Flay, without hesitating, turned her stolen pistol on Asta, but I could hear footsteps of Asta running for her life as Flay fired. All I heard are deflections.

"She's getting away!"

"There's no escape for her," Mu said. "Dearka's out there. I assume you left him orders to kill her if she tried to escape, correct?"

"Y-Yes," I said, remembering that after a moment. So it was going to end, whether at our hands, or at Dearka's. No matter what happened in here, Rau and Asta were destined to lose. Wasn't that it?

Rau laughed raggedly at the ground. His mask had come off, and he was feebly trying to hide his eyes from us, but as he rolled onto his back, his right hand stopped covering his eyes, and I saw them.

It was like staring at Mu La Flaga, except different. Older, perhaps. I was surprised at how unexceptional Rau's appearance truly was. I guess if you are a clone of someone else, though, a completely normal appearance doesn't seem normal to you at all, and you would want to hide your face from yourself.

"How do you feel, Le Creuset? Your plans are ruined. I'm surprised you're laughing," Mu said.

"Oh, they're not ruined," Rau managed from the floor. "This . . . changes nothing. All that means is that humanity will follow after me. I won't witness their demise myself."

"Shut up!" Flay shouted as she aimed Rau's pistol right at Rau.

Mu put her arm in front of Flay. "Don't shoot. Let him talk. I am sure he wants to tell us everything before his dying breath."

Rau laughed. "Sure . . . why not? It's not like telling you will make any difference anyway."

He coughed then, nearly rolling on his side, but Mu grabbed him and forced him to remain on his back, so his blue eyes, so identical to Mu's, would continue staring at ours.

"I noticed your . . . your Prince Kira . . . he's begun broadcasting a peace message using L4's transmitter. So I decided to do the same thing . . . broadcast a stream of information directly to Muruta Azrael onboard the Dominion."

"What?" Mu asked, shocked.

Rau coughed blood out of his mouth, which trickled down his chin. I thought he was already entering his death throes, but he followed that up by chuckling. He wasn't done yet.

"I brought with me all of the information relating to the neutron jammer canceller," Rau said. "And now all of that is in Muruta Azrael's possession. What . . . what do you think one of the leaders of Blue Cosmos . . . will do with such information?"

"You bastard!" Mu yelled. Now he was the one aiming the gun at Rau.

"You can't stop it, even if you could I wouldn't tell you how," Rau said. "So your Prince Kira may summon five ships of defectors, ten, twenty, thirty, it doesn't matter. Muruta Azrael will use this knowledge to launch nuclear weapons directly at PLANT, and PLANT will respond with its own doomsday weapons, one of whom I have given to Asta Joule."

"That's how you're going to end it all? Have both sides destroy each other and their civilizations in the process?" Mu shouted.

"Isn't the most deserving way for humanity to die?" Rau asked. "Torn apart by their own hands, annihilated by the knowledge they strive to maintain?"

"Good luck with that," Mu growled. "Especially since Asta Joule has no way out of this facility! She can't assist with your doomsday scenario if she can't even get out of the building!"

"You think Dearka Elsman, of all pilots, will be able to stop her?" Rau rasped. "I had a strike team waiting on the outskirts of the colony, just within radio range, for my order, which I had given while the three of you cowered in here. Even if Elsman still lives, he will be kept much too busy to prevent Asta Joule's escape."

I had a feeling that Rau's prophecy was going to be proven true. Dearka wasn't incompetent, but he couldn't fight off a whole team and keep Asta from escaping if she hijacked one of our Mobile Suits. Not even I could.

Rau looked right at Flay. "Judging by the youth of Allster, I am sure her password is the easiest for Asta to crack. She'll just steal your standard-issue Mobile Suit and fly it right back to the Vesalius."

Flay made a snarling sound, and this time, when she aimed at Rau, Mu did not stop her. "I've heard enough out of you! I'm not letting you die on your terms!"

This time, she was allowed to fire.

And she did.

Two more shots in the chest. And a final round in the neck.

And then, after a soft gagging noise, Rau Le Creuset breathed no more.

In the end, what lied beneath the eye-covering mask of his was a psychotic man who only wanted everyone to die.

Mu spoke for all of us as he turned away from Rau's corpse.

"Good riddance."


Yes, Flay killed Rau Le Creuset. Irony is ironic.

I admit this is a narrative risk on my part. From my perspective, the best way for the story to go is this route: killing Rau off and pray Asta is a strong enough OC to carry the final villain baton. I didn't want a straight reprisal of the original show's ending, nor attempt to bring about any of the proposed endings to Gundam SEED because hardcore fans could predict and spoil those for others.

So I decided to do an original route. I hope that pleases people. While there will be elements of the canon showdown present in this scenario, the final confrontations will be much, much different.

Chapter 76 will clear up the loose ends in this chapter. I originally ended this chapter with more material, but I decided to move it to 76. It will clear a few things up, particularly regarding with Ezalia Joule.

I hope you enjoyed the newest chapter, and look forward to the new chapters to come.