Dearka breathed a sigh of relief as Ysak swung the photon cloak around in time to absorb the blast of what looked for all the world like a purplish-blue arc of lightning which blasted forth from the center chest muzzle of the white enemy mobile suit. Sand turned to glass in a radius of twenty meters around the Duelist... plainly that lightning bolt had carried a lot of power. Dearka was glad it hadn't connected... there probably wouldn't have been much left of Ysak. And then no one would have been happy. He turned his attention away from helping Kira. His help there was marginal at best anyway... he couldn't draw a solid bead on Frost to save anyone's life. Better to help somewhere he could make a real difference. "Shoulder turrets are yours... try to bracket him for me." Dearka informed Mir.
"I'll do my best. Pulling Ysak out of the frying pan are we?"
"I know you will. And yep. He's going to be insufferable about it too."
"Don't you mean we will be?" Mir replied with a grin, shooting at the white enemy as she did so. It wasn't so bad firing at him... she didn't know who the hell he was... had never been threatened by him or maybe even her, never seen them face to face. So there was plenty of room to get angry and indignant instead of scared. How dare this faceless enemy threaten her and her friends? She couldn't let them get away with it. Dearka opened fire with measured blasts with hyper impulse cannon and anti armor shotgun, trying to drive the enemy away from the recovering Duelist. It only partially worked... the enemy did move away but in such a manner that the Duelist was now between them, caught in the crossfire.
"Damn it... why do they have to get tougher every battle?" Dearka complained, jinking the Grand Buster to the left in order to get a better shot. It didn't work. The enemy jinked right at the same time, keeping Ysak in the middle, so Dearka could not engage at full capacity. "Bastard!"
Mir was about to agree when her threat screen lit up like a christmas tree on overload power. The alarms had just begun to wail when she slapped them off. "Get us out of here!"
"What? Where?" Dearka cried, looking for the threat.
"Anywhere but freaking here! MOVE US!" Mir ordered at the top of her lungs, sensor screens flashing urgently with big red labels that said "EMERGENCY" like she couldn't figure that out for herself. The third enemy mobile suit had finished mashing up the ZAFT forces and had moved to engage them from the side. The emergency labels were because the monster mobile suit... the one they'd seen attack Pearl Harbor, which was thirty meters tall if a centimeter... had locked onto them with more weapons than Mir could quickly count. Including one that was highlighted in flashing orange that turned crimson just as Dearka jerked the Grand Buster into clumsy and erratic evasive maneuvers. The crimson weapon warning read very simply "semi-strategic weaponry, missile". Mir didn't know what exactly semi-strategic meant but she could make a pretty certain guess. She'd seen the city of Pearl Harbor. "He's more insane than Frost!"
"What? Tell me what's happening, I don't see anything!" Dearka complained. Mir slapped a macro and displayed the highlighted weapon lock indicator on the main screen, while opening the all hands channel. Dearka's jaw dropped. "Semi-strategic... missile... damn..." he turned the Grand Buster out of his maneuvers and just ran for his life instead.
"We've got a big problem here!" Mir informed everyone.
"Gee... I hadn't noticed him kicking my ASS, thanks." Ysak commented sarcastically from below.
"We're in a bit of a pinch over here too." Athrun said through gritted teeth, trying to place his shots to pry the limpet like Frost off of Kira, to little avail. The short little bastard was stuck on the Liberty like nothing else in the world even existed... Athrun had tagged the enemy mobile suit a few times... but for all Frost reacted he may as well have been shooting spitballs.
"Forget that. We have much bigger problems. Thermonuclear problems." Mir retorted. There was a long moment of static on the line. "GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE! HE'S SHOOTING A NUKE AT US!" Mir clarified, highlighting the image of the giant enemy hovering a few thousand feet above them and sending it to everyone. Everyone who quickly scattered like frightened mice. Everyone except for Kira, who turned and actually circled around, as if waiting for the hammer to drop.
"Kira... what are you doing, you idiot? You'll get Lacus and yourself killed!" Cagalli berated her brother.
"Kira knows what he is doing. I think." Lacus replied calmly.
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"Get out of the way you morons!" Cray ordered. "Or not... not like I give a damn. INCOMING!" he cried exultantly, firing not one but both of the tactical forty kiloton nuclear cruise missiles mounted on the Merciless's back. He'd meant to use them on Gibraltar... but there simply had been no need... the defenders were too pathetic to waste such brilliant weapons there. He also opened up with the rest of his weapons... he saw no need to return to JIHAD with a single unused shell in the machine... you weren't playing your all if you didn't come back empty. He didn't really target anyone specifically... at this range he was unlikely to strike well enough to cause damage... it was mainly just fun fire, designed to cause enough confusion to prevent enemies from concentrating on the real threat of the missiles. He held down all his triggers, laughing like a man possessed.
"GOD DAMN IT, CRAY! You BASTARD!" Ashino snarled, throwing the Bane into overdrive as he struggled to get out of the target zone. That was Cray's problem... like Frost he had no sense of empathy or pity... but unlike Frost he really liked to throw his weight around too. Thus the deluge of beams and bullets, and the total overkill of TWO nuclear missiles. What, did he think they were invading a hardened military base or something? There were no targets of value for a hundred miles. It was just a waste of power.
Frost ignored the antics of his fellows. He was so close now. He could almost reach out and touch the enemy mobile suit on the back. He drew his swords and activated them. Maybe five... six more seconds at the most. The enemy took a sharp turn up, sacrificing speed for height. Frost shrugged... maybe they were tired of running and wanted to die with face to the sun. It didn't matter. He brought the Fury up after them, arms going back for the death blows.
"Kira..." Athrun said over the comm.
"Not NOW..." Kira replied very firmly but quietly. He could not afford to be distracted. Not while flying partially blinded by Lacus, with her ridiculously long hair, with Zacahris Frost foaming at his heels quite literally, straight into the path of two thermonuclear missiles. Calling the situation tense was... totally inadequate. He stood a better than even chance of not surviving the next four seconds. The ways he and Lacus could die were more than he could imagine. But there was simply no other way to solve both dilemmas... to get Frost off him so he could get Lacus to saftey, while also getting rid of the missiles before they could inadvertently strike and damage or destroy the Archangel in it's bunker. Less than two seconds to go now... the missiles were coming dead on, one slightly leading the other. Converging velocities and trajectories. He hoped Frost could not see around the bulk of the Liberty... else this would be very embarrassing, shortly before being fatal.
"I love you, Kira." Lacus murmured, barely audible, composed now. Unafraid. Trusting in him.
"Love you too." he managed.
"THAT KID IS FUCKING INSANE!" Alkire screamed on the bridge of the Archangel, which was just starting to power up all its systems. "FLYING INTO THE NUKES! WHAT IS HE ON?"
"Believe in him." Murrue suggested, drawing astonished gasps from the crew, who were all of course aware of her former condition as a grief stricken vegetable. They were staring at her like she had come back from the grave... and maybe she had, in a way. Some were even managing to ignore the imminent death by nuclear fire that was currently about a second and a half from engulfing them all. Alkire consigned himself to dying amongst the company of madmen and women. It had been a good run...
Kira waited until he could read the stenciling of factory identification on the front part of the missile farthest back before flicking the Liberty to the side just enough of a fraction for both missiles to flash by him like streaks of light... one actually close enough to scrape along the Liberty's leg for a hairsplit moment of time. Kira closed his eyes. Now the ball was entirely in the court of a man who had utterly no humanity left in him. A beast of pure murderous instinct... as close to nature red in tooth and claw as ever was. It was Frost's move. Kira hoped with all his heart the psycho was up to it.
Frost had perhaps an eighth of a second to react. Suddenly the enemy was nowhere in front of him, and he found himself staring down two nuclear missiles from a range of about five meters, while closing on a converging velocity of close to a kilometer per second. A lot can happen in an eighth of a second. Especially for someone like Frost, so full of adrenaline stimulants and wired reflexes that such a length of time could not only be discerned but utilized productively. He hit the celerity system activation and crossed both swords before him before either missile could hit and detonate... slicing off the warheads cleanly, sending each spinning to the ground below... detonators flying off about a half second later, severed by a second series of cuts performed faster than the computer camera's could detect. However, the amazing move did not come without cost. Both of the Fury's arms broke off from the stress, and he did not dodge the missiles, which still retained about 80 of their mass. And while they did not and could not detonate in a nuclear reaction, they still carried about eight tons of hydrogen fuel and weighed a good twenty tons each. The energy of the collisions was intense, to say the least. Most mobile suits would have flown apart into tiny pieces. But the Fury was designed very ruggedly, to handle the higher than human levels of performance expected from the pilot. It held together. Barely.
The Fury struck the ground about four seconds after the disarmed warheads, smoking and twisted into an almost unrecognizable shape. Both missiles had detonated their fuel supplies on impact, and conveyed much of their knietic energy into the Fury as well. It gouged out a crater more than four meters deep and twelve across when it hit. But it still stayed intact. They hadn't been joking around when they said they'd built it to last. Frost was jerked around so hard by the collision that his restraints snapped. The impact with the ground should have turned him to paste... even him. But he'd braced himself during the fall and so was only ejected from the mobile suit, through the hatch door... shut at the time... and thrown more than two hundred meters laterally through the air before landing and rolling another thirty meters. He lay face down in the sand and did not move.
"WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?" about eight different people screamed over several different comm channels. Kira finished the barrel roll he'd been forced to enter to level out from the brush with the missile and brought the Liberty down slowly. He was exhausted... it had taken almost everything he had, all his concentration... all his focus and energy to pull off that simple little twist. He never, ever wanted to do anything even close to that level of difficulty again. Lacus collapsed against him... neither could say a word, only gasp and pant and hold each other very tightly.
"I do not believe what I saw." Ashino said, jaw agape. That could not have happened. He could not have done that intentionally. I thought Frost was insane... but to actually try to fly your enemy into two nuclear missiles... just on the off chance he might be good enough to disarm the missiles in midflight, on the even more off chance the missiles missed you in the first place... no. That has to be luck. Filthy, unimaginable luck. No one is that capable. Not even Frost. Not even close.
"What the hell happened? Why did my missiles not go boom?" Cray complained, stupified. Where had that enemy and Frost come from? And how had they managed to run into the missiles without going up in the huge fireball like they should have? There should have been nothing left of either mobile suit but dust and smoke, mixed in with a hell of a lot more dust and smoke from the ground. But the enemy was mostly unharmed, if not active, and the Fury... well it was totalled... but it wasn't ruined. And Frost should have been a little messy red smear inside the Fury... but there he lay... whole, if not necessarily alive, out on the sand. Cray was too far away to see if the BCPU 6 actually still breathed... but he didn't doubt it. Until he actually cut Frost's head off himself, and burned it himself and maybe not even then would he believe Frost was really dead.
"He couldn't have planned that. No sane man would have given the odds of that stunt working at greater than a bazillion to one! I can't believe I'm still alive. It's almost enough to get me religion. Holy crap." Alkire said, collapsing to his knees on the bridge.
"Sometimes you just have to have faith in the abilities of your friends... though I must admit I thought we were all dead too." Murrue commented from the Captain's chair. She seemed remarkable unruffled by the brush with death to Alkire... maybe her sense of reality wasn't fully quite back yet.
"He's still alive..." Chanel breathed, her eyes closed in concentration. She could almost feel the undiminished malevolence of Frost, lying out there on the sand. Well... maybe more than almost... he burned with hate to even the naked eye. Little surprise he should be easily observable in other ways.
"How do you know that? He can't be alive. No human could live through that." Chief Murdoch retorted.
"I've seen him live through some serious shit... the bombs and all... but I still think that this time he bit it." Victor added. "Do you have any idea what sort of stress he must have undergone at just the first impacts, with the missiles? He should be atomized right now. He should be..." Victor trailed off. Frost was slowly climbing to his feet. It was a painful process... plainly the little man was badly injured... but he was up. And he was smiling.
Frost did not feel. He was too badly damaged. Several important organs were slushies. But his implants and his obstinancy were keeping him up... for the moment. He staggered slightly. He could not move his legs. He stared at the Liberty balefully. Against all odds they had escaped him again. Some cosmic twist of fate had denied him again. The other enemy mobile suits were starting to return. And a massive warship... the Archangel, his eyes told him... was unearthing from beneath the massive sand dune that the enemy was gathered around. So that was why they were here... they wanted their ship. They were going mobile. Frost barely registered the Bane swooping down and picking him up, gently enough, in one hand. The Merciless descended and lifted the Fury in its arms. The enemy was still too stunned by his display of speed and skill... and the sudden realization they weren't all going to die... that they did nothing to stop the two BCPU's from salvaging the Fury and making off with Frost. They would be back. There would be other times.