Asmodeus looked left. Strike Crusaders lay in smoldering piles of scrap. Asmodeus looked right. Strike Crusaders missing arms, legs and heads were heaped about like broken dolls. Asmodeus looked to the front again. The blue and grey mobile suit with the cloak like thing stood about thirty meters away, beam saber in one hand pointed carelessly at the ground. The bastard is mocking me. Asmodeus thought, but couldn't get angry about it. He knew when he was outclassed and that was clearly the case here. The Freedom upgrade hovered silently behind the caped mobile suit, weapons pointed in Asmodeus's general direction. There was no chance of escape while they were this close. But surrender was hardly an option, was it?

"This is Kira Yamato, in the Liberty, addressing the pilot of the Freedom." A teenager's voice crackled over the international channel. Worse it was a familiar teenager's voice. Asmodeus had heard it not too many hours before, at the steam bath at the hot springs. If he had but known he had Kira Yamato within his grasp, things would have been so much easier. But he might as well wish for the reinforcements to be here already as well, instead of being a good five or six minutes away.

"This is Captain Asmodeus Sark, of EFSOU, in the Purifier. I hear you, Kira Yamato. Or should I say, Kira Hibiki?" Asmodeus replied in a weary voice.

Kira was momentarily flatfooted. How did this man know his birth name? But then he remembered. This man was the intelligence director for Cervantes Zunnichi, who led Blue Cosmos. It was little wonder that Blue Cosmos would have a file on him.

"Excuse me, what machine did you say you were in?" Kira asked, searching for a more meaningful question. Asmodeus chuckled grimly.

"This isn't the Freedom. The Freedom was built by the space monsters… your people. The Purifier you see before you was constructed by my people… Blue Cosmos. It may look like the Freedom and indeed was constructed to be identical to that loathsome machine, but the Purifier is a sanctified machine, meant to lead the holy JIHAD to destroy the PLANTS." Asmodeus replied, laying on the Blue Cosmos dogma heavily, hoping to have his enemies dismiss him as a witless Blue Cosmos thug. It was also a bit of misinformation. The giant Judgment was actually destined to lead the JIHAD war, but it was only 55 complete at the moment.

"Your troops have been defeated. You are alone and to be blunt, you aren't skilled enough to be a challenge to my friends and me. Will you surrender peacefully?" Kira asked, ignoring the rhetoric as a delaying tactic.

"Ah, but not all of my troops are gone. You have yet to defeat my champion." Asmodeus countered, calling up the data link from the Fury. To his disappointment, the Fury was currently deadlocked, in a clinch against the Justice upgrade. There seemed to be no evidence of destroyed foes about, so Frost must not have killed any yet, which seemed mildly unlikely.

"What are you talking about?" Kira asked. He was answered seconds later, but not by Asmodeus.

"Kira! Athrun needs help!" Cagalli announced over the international channel in her haste. Asmodeus started. He knew that voice… he'd studied it for quite a while now. Who would have guessed that the fallen princess would return to her home nation? "Frost is on the mountaintop. He nearly killed me before Athrun stopped him. Athrun's too busy to talk, but he said for you to get there as fast as you can!"

The Liberty turned at once and shot towards the mountaintop on a pillar of blue light. The mobile suit with the cape brought up its sword and activated it, but by then Asmodeus had turned and was flying for his life back towards the approaching reinforcements. Ysak snorted in disgust and started to switch out his weapons so he could shoot the coward down. Before he could complete the motion, a wing of fighter jets screamed out of the sky. The advance guard for Asmodeus's reinforcements. A volley of missiles fell from the sky, throwing mud and fire into the air all around the Duelist. "Fuck!" Ysak yelled, dodging back towards the mountain, the Purifier out of range and soon out of sight behind another mountain ridge. Dearka wiped out the jet wing with a combination missile attack and shotgun blast, but the damage was done. Asmodeus had gotten away, and doubtless would only return with a great many reinforcements.

Athrun had finally broken the clinch with Frost. He opened up with his flyer pack cannons and shoulder railguns, but Frost danced his machine through the fire as ably as the man himself dodged normal bullets. Frost checked his Celerity system. Still had six minutes of safe operation. Plenty of time. Frost attacked in a tornado of green fire, blades flashing so fast Athrun had a hard time tracking them. His shield and sword were kept busy fending off the unending diluge of strikes. Come on, you're supposed to be one of the best. Don't let some real life Frankenstein monster embarrass you like this in front of the love of your life. Athrun goaded himself to higher performance. He tapped his thrusters and jumped over Frost's machine, out of reach for a moment. Athrun flipped the Righteous in mid jump and stabbed downward with the beam sword, directly into the enemy machine's back. To Athrun's disgruntlement, his beam splashed and twisted away from the triangle of hexagonal pods on Frost's back. Beam deflectors, like the machine with the scythe had carried during the last battles of the last war. Nothing is ever easy.

Frost spun so fast the Fury seemed to invert itself before taking to the air himself. He sliced at the Righteous, which was flat footed and awkwardly placed. His attacks would have struck home but for the nearly divine intervention of the Liberty. Kira fired his triple beam sniper cannon and blew the sword out of Frost's right hand, tearing the hand assembly itself off and throwing the Fury to the ground out of control.

"Thanks." Athrun said.

"No problem. Nothing you wouldn't do for me." Kira replied. He hovered nearby. "Be ready, he's not down yet."

Frost was aggrieved. He'd been so close twice now. God himself seemed to be against him today. Frost didn't like that, though he'd beaten the bearded man in the sky at his own game before. He fired his beam grapples, the eight plasma tipped grapples arcing out like the tentacles of an octopus. Frost followed them almost at once, the remaining beam sword carving a glowing line through the air as he homed in on the new machine.

Kira dodged around the grapples, fending one off with his shield and another with his foot, while Athrun cut the lines of the ones that came for him, rendering them into projectiles rather than grapples, projectiles that sailed out of sight before tumbling down inert to the valley floor. Kira blocked Frost's first strike with his shield and fired point blank at the Fury with the sniper cannon, but the chest deflectors bounced the beams around the smaller machine and they impacted fruitlessly on the mountain below. Kira was immediately forced on the defensive as Frost hammered repeatedly at his shield, using his right wrist stump like a club along with the left hand beam sword. Athrun sliced at Frost from the rear and distracted him for a moment, allowing Kira to back up and blast at the Fury with his railguns. Frost dodged them, but was thrown out of position, hanging helplessly in midair. Athrun did not let the opportunity waste. He dropped his beam sword and yanked out a boomerang, which he launched in a wide throw before detaching his flyer packs and pulling out his dual 57 beam rifle. The Righteous dropped out of the sky.

Athrun thumbed his rifle trigger as fast as he could and also fired his shoulder railguns as fast as they could charge. He set his flyer packs to automatic fire as they converged with wingsabers lit on Frost's machine. Missiles ripped out of the launchers and cannon tracers raced through the sky as Kira pulled back a few dozen meters and cut loose with his own arsenal. Beams of several different hues erupted from his sniper cannon, dual 57 rifle and shoulder cannons, while railgun rounds punched through the sky towards the enemy. Both pilots had their Angel Halo's running at maximum, needing every bit of defensive advantage they could wring when fighting such a maneuverable foe.

Frost's machine seemed to go into convulsions, but it was actually a frantic dance of evasion. Even Frost had his limits though, and shots began striking home. He completely lost track of the beam boomerang until it was less than five meters away. By then, it was almost too late. He managed to raise his leg a fraction, which resulted in it only being deeply gouged and disabled rather than severed. Still, the loss of thruster power on that side sent the Fury tumbling through the sky in a spiral of smoke before Frost could regain control. He checked his time again. Three minutes before reactor went critical. The two enemies converged and faced him as one. Frost snarled wordlessly, lips drawn back over bloody teeth. His wounds had reopened and the smell of blood was overwhelming in the tiny cockpit. It was driving him crazy. He charged again.

"This guy never gives up!" Athrun complained. "He's lost a hand and a leg and he acts like it never happened. What do we need to do to get rid of him?"

"This." Kira replied, moving directly in front of the enemy machine and opening his arms wide. His Halo abruptly died off and the jet thrusters on the back flickered rapidly on and off. A wave of air seemed to spread out from the front of the Liberty. Frost only realized he was being attacked when lightning coursed across the control screens, blowing them out in sleets of glass splinters. His remaining thrusters suddenly died and his cameras went to pure static. He couldn't see it, but his beam sword winked out like a snuffed candle. Unpowered, the Fury dropped out of the air like the stone it had suddenly become. The impact with the ground below snapped off the damaged leg like a twig and the Fury began the long and painful roll to the bottom of the mountain. Kira drew a bead on it with his sniper cannon after reactivating his Halo. Good riddance. Kira thought, only a little ashamed at the execution he was about to deliver. However, fate intervened once again, though for once, Kira wished it wouldn't have helped him upkeep his ideals.

A beam glanced off his back, the energy absorbed by the Halo but the impact enough to throw his aim off at the last instant. Instead of blowing Frost and his machine into tiny fragments, the beams blew a large crater in the side of the mountain and hurled the disabled enemy machine further and faster down the mountain slope. "What?" Kira protested, before his screens made sense. Dearka, Ysak and Cagalli were conducting a fighting withdrawal, as what looked like scores of Strike Daggers and tanks assaulted them from the front. Jet aircraft filled the sky around him, firing machine guns and launching missiles at him and Athrun. More Strike Daggers were flying not far off, blasting away in his direction enthusiastically with their beam rifles. They were being overwhelmed. He and Athrun had been so concentrated on Frost that they had failed to notice the enemy reinforcements.

"We need to retreat!" Miriallia radioed. "We can't stand against these numbers! They just keep coming! Cagalli's starting to run low on power, and we're all running low on ammunition."

"She's right. We need to get out of here." Athrun replied. He re-coupled to his flyer packs. "I'll go help Cagalli. You cover the other's retreat. We'll have to finish him another time."

"You're right. See you in Hawaii." Kira replied, before turning his considerable attentions to the foes near him.

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"Kill them!" Asmodeus screamed in a rare display of emotion. He did his best to show his troops what he meant, firing relentlessly at the fleeing mobile suits. But despite his best efforts, the Liberty was always a few steps ahead of him and his troops, shooting down missiles, deflecting beams and disabling another two or three machines with every passing second. Still, there was no way the single suit, with a tired pilot could possibly defeat the near army Asmodeus had with him now. A call light began blinking on his communication set. Asmodeus stared at it balefully for a long moment before composing himself some and answering it. He dropped back to the secondary line to take the call in peace.

"Asmodeus, you need to call off the attack." Cervantes said without preamble. Asmodeus felt his heart flutter a little bit. This was personal. He didn't want to give up on this until the brats were all lying crushed at his feet.

"Why, sir?" he asked calmly.

"Those bastards in ZAFT have stolen a march on us. As we speak drop pods are descending towards Washington DC. They're attempting a knockout blow. All available troops are ordered to get to the Washington area as soon as possible. Theres nothing I can do, my friend. The generals are panicking; they issued recall orders to all the troops without consulting me first. Your troops will retreat no matter what you do." Cervantes replied. He spoke the truth. As Asmodeus watched, trembling with rage, the mobile suit and jet squadrons peeled off, flying back towards their bases with all possible speed. All around him, mobile suits and tanks rushed back, a tide of metal hurrying to defend a place few of them would ever reach in time. Asmodeus had no choice but to retreat in turn, watching with a sick feeling as the Liberty soared away, free and clear.

"I had them in my grasp." He whispered resentfully. "They won't be so lucky next time." He promised himself.

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Author's Note: this chapter ends the first arc of the story. I haven't decided on a name for it, unlike the other arcs in this story. Next chapter is the beginning of a new arc. Still a TON of ground to cover, so if you're liking what's been done so far, you have several hundred more pages to look forward too.