Celestial Being Chronicles - Chapter 50
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the Gundam series, nor any of the various series which are used or referenced in my fic, so please point that damned lawsuit cannon at someone else, also, don't read this if you are not of legal age to read such material. The story contains possibly disturbing content and should not be read by close-minded people (i.e., people who are easily offended.) Everything in the story is fictional. I am also not responsible for any actions taken by people who read this story and society's problems. I do, however, own my original character; Hope Yamato.
Cagalli Yula Athha, Hope Yamato, Kira Yamato, Lacus Clyne, Mayu Asuka and Murrue Ramius, all clad in their flight suits, slowly approached a large underground bunker located in Paris, France. Each of the six Gundam pilots carried a high-power flashlight, they also had a beam pistol in one of the two holsters that were built into their flight suit, in the other holster they carried a beam sub-machine gun and finally, on the forearms of their flight suits, was a miniturized beam shield generator.
After a moment of hesitation, Hope reached out and opened the thick steel door gaurding the entrance. As the group walked into the underground bunker, Kira flashed his flashlight to his right, the beam illuminating the old emblem that was still visible despite it's age.
An eagle. A swastika.
"Holy Jesus." Lacus breathed.
"Jesus doesn't know about this place." Mayu and Hope replied in unison.
"He does now." Kira said, smirking slightly.
Kira looked at the lid of the crate. Lacus slapped a bayonet into Kira's hand and he started prying on the lid. The lid gave with a screech, a sharp, brittle sound. The crate contained boxes, all marked with the same emblem that was on the map of the building.
"Open one." Murrue ordered. Kira shrugged, grabbed a box, and tore it open. Sheathed knives fell out. Four of them.
"Holy mother of God." Cagalli whispered as Kira bent over, picked one up, and lifted it.
It was an old Nazi SS dagger. The crate must have contained hundreds of them.
Suddenly, a loud shriek came boiling down the stairwell and out of the vents. Following it was a sound like a woman sobbing loudly.
The hair on Kira's neck stood up. Everyone watched in horror as the door slammed shut, and they heard the click of the lock. The sobbing sound was overlaid with shrieks.
Suddenly, a phone hanging on the opposite wall rang, causing the entire group to jump.
"Don't." Mayu said, when Kira moved to reach for it. "Just. Don't."
The phone kept ringing. Kira's mouth was dry, and his imagination was running wild.
Ignoring the ringing phone, Cagalli shined her flashlight around, and draped on one wall was the Nazi flag.
Their flashlights chose that time to die. Kira bent down, tucked the dagger in his boot, and dug out his last set of long life batteries. When his flashlight came back on, Kira swept it over everyone's faces.
"Let's get the fuck out of here." Mayu said, and Hope grunted in agreement. Kira led the way. They headed back to the door at a quick walking pace, and they all laughed nervously when they found that the door was still open, but even so, they quickly exited the bunker. Hope locked the thick steel door behind them. Now that the door was shut and locked, they couldn't hear the phone ringing, even though it had been doing so when Hope closed the door.
"Kira, did you keep that dagger?" Murrue said, pointing at Kira's boot, as the group walked back towards their waiting Gundams.
"Yeah. I wanted proof. If we examine it, and there's nothing wrong with it, then this place isn't haunted, and it's just a side-effect caused by the interaction of all these different timelines." Kira replied, almost challengingly as the six made their way back to their waiting Gundams.
"Aw man, this is fucked." Kira said about an hour later, as he stood in one of the Excalibur's science labs, staring at the results of the examination of the Nazi dagger on the screen.
"We were in a goddamn haunted building." Mayu said, her voice rising slightly in volume.
"You want to know what's worse?" Hope asked, grinning.
"What? What could be fucking worse?" Cagalli asked.
"You're blonde." Hope told her, grinning.
Cagalli stood there, staring at Hope for a moment. Then they both started laughing. Kira, Lacus, Mayu and Murrue were laughing with them.
"You know." Lacus said after the laughter had died down. "Considering how many diffrent timelines there are on Earth right now, I'm surprised that the Excalibur's temporal core hasn't overloaded, exploded or otherwise destroyed both itself and the rest of the ship."
At that moment, Lexi, the Excalibur's AI appeared, and immediately began speaking. "I hate having to interrupt this fascinating discussion, but there is a force of more than two-million ships approaching us."
"Two-million ships?" Kira frowned, and Lexi nodded. "That's just excessive."
Blue-red streaks of energy filled the air, impacting harmlessly against the Excalibur's shields, but the mobile suits weren't so lucky. Dearka and Miriallia's Buster Gundam was almost immediately pinned down by the unrelenting barrage of destructive energy. Kira's Divinity Gundam and Athrun's Infinite Justice Gundam tried to move closer but found it difficult in the face of the well coordinated and timed fire from their enemies, which wasn't made any easier with the erratic volleys from the Divinity, switching from one of them and then to the other, whichever seemed the closest to breaking through. "Some back up would be nice!" Kira growled.
"Working on it." Dearka replied, typing furiously into the OS of his new weapon, which had been appropriately dubbed Earthshaker, while Miriallia read off sensor displays rapid fire and worked at anchoring the leg stabilizing struts securely.
"I'm firing as fast as I can." Cagalli snapped in frustration, her beam rifles blasting away at the relentlessly approaching enemies. "They've got really good cover and they're moving around enough that I can't do much more than hope I get lucky."
"Here comes the secondary attack!" Miriallia called out, her eye catching on the radar scope. "Kira, Athrun, you've both got a couple dozen missiles coming your way."
"Wonderful. Just fucking wonderful." Kira grumbled, throwing up his beam shields to catch a few more hyper impulse blasts and bringing his twin plasma cannons into play for a few seconds before he was forced to duck down again. Still, he'd managed to thin the swarm that was headed his way, hopefully by enough. Besides, with Mirror Coated Phase Shift armor, mere missiles weren't much of a threat anyway. None of Kira's or Athrun's missiles even got more than halfway before being picked off by accurate beam rifle fire.
"Done." Dearka declared triumphantly.
"Done here too." Miriallia replied. While missile detonations churned the grassy fields below into a morass of fire and smoke, the Grand Buster stowed its carried weapons onto special racks on its back. With ponderous grace, the Earthshaker artillery cannon slid around on its track until it was well braced by both arms. The stabilizer struts drilled deep into the solid granite around the feet of the Gundam to provide a steady and balanced firing platform. Dearka reached back into the ammunition hopper mounted on the Buster's lower back and removed a single shell, which was more than ten feet long and weighed a good five tons. He slammed the shell home into the breech of the gun and locked it into place.
"I feel like a soldier from centuries ago, with those muzzle loading guns." Dearka muttered. "This thing takes forever to fire." The gun cranked around to the pre-programmed firing position. Everything was still for an eye blink. Then the world shook to a mighty thunderclap. Stone cracked and danced under the Buster's feet and the torso rocked back alarmingly, until Dearka was sure they were going to fall over. The muzzle flash had temporarily blinded his cameras, so he couldn't see what was happening. Miriallia was following the projectile's progress on her radar. The image impacted on the enemy ridgeline.
"Radar says we hit. Did we? Our cameras are out for the moment." She asked. There was a long pause.
"I'll say you did." Athrun said numbly, the Infinite Justice staring at the ridge. He stared at the gaping hole the shell had blown in the enemy held ridge. Pretty much the entire right half of the ridgeline had disappeared in the cataclysmic explosion. Bits of burning trees and melted armor were pattering down like rain all over the place. Lacus slowly brought the Chimera up to a full stand. No one fired at her, the enemy was in disarray.
"What's that?" Cagalli muttered, scanning the ground back to the south of the battle. She'd seen the results of the Buster's artillery cannon shot, and she had been cheered up immensely. The enemy couldn't last against that kind of firepower, especially now that Kira and Athrun were free to advance to close combat range. Some sixth sense had told her to check behind her and so she had twisted the Akatsuki around.
Something was moving through the trees at an incredible pace. Her cameras were panning as fast as they could go and it was all they could do to keep the image in the middle of her screen. And that was at a distance of at least a mile. She brought up her ion cannon. Whatever it was, it wasn't likely to be friendly. "Could you check out this contact for me, Miriallia? It's closing from the south, down in the valley and its closing very quickly." Cagalli requested. She didn't wait for a reply before opening up with her beam rifle. She had a bad feeling about this.
Her fire blew trees apart and sent fountains of dirt and rock flying through the air, but she didn't even manage to slow down the oncoming target. Indeed, if anything it increased its velocity. "Yeah, sure thing, Cagalli. Hold on...okay, I've got it. Wow, it is fast. Computers are running the info...come on...okay...no match. Unknown mobile suit or mobile armor, closing rapidly from the south. Probably hostile."
"How rapidly?" Athrun asked.
"Sensors indicate a speed greater than two hundred miles per hour...and it seems to be traveling on the ground, not flying. That's through a forest mind you." Miriallia shook her head. "And not a blade of grass disturbed." She whispered. Well, maybe not that, but no trees were being knocked down she could see.
"What's that you say?" Dearka asked.
"Nothing. See if you can't slow this guy down, would you?"
"Which guy?"
"The one Cagalli is shooting at!"
"Okay, okay no need to shout." Dearka had just finished stowing the Earthshaker. Kira, Athrun and Lacus should be able to finish up without another shot. He drew out his other weapons and started tracking the new enemy. By this time, whatever it was was only a half mile or so from the field Lacus, Kira and Athrun were engaging the enemy in. "Quick bastard." Dearka said with a frown of concentration. He cut loose with everything he had. Beams, explosive shotgun shells and red-blue plasma cut through the air, followed closely by sixty missiles. A section of forest more than three acres on a side vanished in smoke and flame. By the time the smoke had cleared, Dearka expected to see nothing but twisted wreckage.
"You missed." Mir sounded disappointed.
"What do you mean? My targeting was dead on!" Dearka protested.
"Look at the radar. He didn't even slow down a tiny bit."
"That's impossi...ble." Dearka stared open mouthed at the target icon, which had changed course. It was approaching HIM now.
Kira Hibiki, the pilot of the Fury Gundam, smiled icily. The enemy would now learn the true meaning of fear. He activated the Clarity system mounted on the back of the Fury. The system dumped raw fuel into his engines and pumped overflow current through his maneuvering thrusters. In practical terms he got several orders of magnitude faster and more agile, at least for the next couple of minutes. He'd have to be careful. If he let the system run too long his reactor would go critical, which would be a flashy way to go, but he still had things to do in life.
Landscape had been blurring by before. Now, even with his enhanced eyesight he couldn't see more than a blur of green and brown outside his screens. He was piloting more by instinct now than anything. He stopped dodging trees; just bulling them out of the way was enough now that the enemy had given away their position. He would take out their ranged support and then punish the melee fighters for their foolish decision not to run away when they had the chance. The enemy was shooting at him from their position near the top of the mountain. Hibiki went into evasive maneuvers and activated his Geschmeidig Panzer beam deflector shields. Mounted on wire guided pods, they were based off the Moebius Zero gun barrels, but with a defensive goal instead of offensive. Hibiki elected to keep the pods attached to the Fury for the present; the system didn't function too well in atmosphere, with the drag of air friction, especially at his current pace.
"Goddamnit!" Dearka shouted, startling Miriallia. "I can't get this guy! He's too fast!" He blasted away desperately with his hyper impulse cannon and beam shotgun while willing his missile tubes to reload faster. "I'm giving you the turrets, so help out." He said through clenched teeth. Miriallia nodded without saying anything, she could sense his concentration. She tried to catch the rapidly approaching enemy between her crosshairs, but the mobile suit moved like something you'd see in a movie on fast forward. It brought to mind images she'd rather have kept buried.
"Hibiki." Cagalli echoed in concert with her, unknowingly. Her beam rifle was worthless at this range, not that she'd been able to do much with it when he was farther away either. She dropped it and pulled out a beam saber, while filling the air with fire from her twin beam machine guns. She even opened up with her CIWS guns, in desperation. Nothing seemed to make a difference. The unidentified enemy mobile suit...piloted by the insane monster Kira Hibiki in all likelihood...was still storming upslope at her at an unbelievable speed. "SOMEONE HELP ME!" Cagalli shrieked, quite unnerved.
Lacus froze in mid attack. The Strike Dagger she'd been about to finish off tried to take a swing at her with its beam saber, but Lacus's mind re-engaged and she fended it off and tore off its sword arm with a casual kick from her right leg. The enemy fell back weaponless.
"What is it?" Kira asked in concern, spitting a Dagger's head on his beam saber nearby. The enemy pilots were reasonably skilled, and working as a coordinated team it was taking longer than he had expected to deal with them. That the leader was in a Freedom Gundam didn't help matters either, it was quite disconcerting to fight against it and while the pilot was no genius he was still skilled enough to make Kira wish the Freedom was under his control again.
Lacus didn't bother to reply. From the tone of Cagalli's cry, she was in immediate and life threatening danger. She had no time for conversation. She ignited the Chimera's wings of light and soared towards the mountain top as fast as she could go. She hoped she wasn't too late; the enemy had been moving incredibly quickly when Miriallia had first spotted him, though Lacus doubted it could maintain that pace going up a mountain. Still, something deep and visceral inside her clenched with fear and urged her to greater speed.
Hibiki was enjoying himself. He could almost taste the terror of the pilots of the slim gold mobile suit and its chunky looking green and tan companion. They were doing everything in their power to slow him down, but it wasn't enough. He was too fast for them. Too agile. Big guns didn't matter a bit if you couldn't hit the target, and the Fury was a very hard to hit target. Now all he had to decide was how he would kill them. Hibiki casually went through his weapons list while the half seconds crawled by. He elected to keep the beam rifles stowed...in his current mood, blowing them apart with gunfire would be supremely unsatisfying. He wouldn't use the beam grapples on the arms and legs...at this speed he would only trip himself up. And the enemy had Mirror Coated Phase Shift armor in all likelihood, even though his computers couldn't identify the exact class of mobile suits he was fighting, so his combat knives would be of little use. That left only one weapon system besides the CIWS array. The twin pair of wide bladed beam swords. His weapons of choice anyway. Funny how logic tended to reinforce his latent desires. Hibiki whipped them out, one per hand, twin eight meter long by two meter wide slabs of green plasma fire, perfect for butchering his mechanical foes like cattle.
Hibiki would take the gold one first. The machine seemed to be cowering away from him, its guns lifting up into the air reflexively, sending their torrent of fire up above his head. Hibiki was excited. He loved it when the victim knew they were helpless to resist and just gave up and waited for death to claim them. Not that he would make it that easy or quick, oh no. The enemy would get a little while to regret being his foe before they left this world. He put his left arm low and right arm high, planning to take a leg with the left sword and the opposite arm with the right sword.
Cagalli tried to bring the beam rifles down, but her involuntary shiver looked to have cost her her life. The left arm seemed to descend with the speed of a bug trapped in amber, while the enemy rushed at her like a charging bull, dodging her outstretched beam lance with a slight twist that didn't slow Hibiki by a fraction. The twin wide bladed beam swords surged forward. Cagalli cried out in terror and squeezed her eyes shut. When nothing happened for a second or two, she cracked one open again and blinked hard. A red and pink arm was interposed across her vision, less than a foot from the outer hull of her cockpit. The double bladed beam saber gripped in the arm had parried Hibiki's attacks and the Chimera was currently engaged in a clinch with Hibiki's mobile suit, each trying mightily to push the other back so they could disengage their swords.
"Lacus!" Cagalli cried out in concern, tears in her eyes.
"Little..busy." She gritted in reply. The enemy mobile suit was short but massive. It was all she could do to keep her sword in its current position, much less counterattack. The enemy machine looked almost bug like, with the crimson and forest green splotchy paint job and eight large spikes it sported, two to a limb. Engine exhaust ports and attitude adjustment ports dotted its hide like chickenpox, which no doubt helped explain its maneuvering and speed. Six hexagonal shield like pods were attached in two triangles of three, one triangle on the back and one on the front. Lacus had no idea what those might do.
"It's Hibiki!" Cagalli said, backing up as fast as she could go, to give her friend room.
"What?" Lacus said; sweat beading on her face as she struggled to free her sword while also keeping the enemy at bay.
"The pilot of that machine! It's Kira Hibiki, I'm sure of it."
"Me too." Miriallia cut in. Dearka was maneuvering for a clear shot, but it was hard. The Buster didn't really carry any weapons designed for close quarters combat. "I don't know how it can be, but considering how fucked up the timelines are, and that speed...that speed and how the machine dodged our shots...it's him. I know it." She sounded a little panicky.
"Calm down." Dearka said in a slow and sure voice. "We're going to be okay." He switched to Lacus's channel. "I don't want to seem like a coward or anything, but this machine of mine doesn't have the equipment to fight that little monster."
"Fuck this." Kira growled, as the Divinity Gundam unleashed its DRAGOON units, the remote weapons swarming the Daggers and the Freedom leading them, and disabling all of them in less then thirty seconds, before once more docking on the Divinity's back. With that done, the Divinity turned towards the battling forms of the Chimera and Fury. With a flash, the Divinity ignited its wings of light and screamed towards the Chimera and the Fury, hundreds of blinding afterimages trailing in the angelic machine's wake.
Lacus's eyes widened in surprise when the Fury Gundam was suddenly punched away, with the Divinity streaking after it an instant later.
"Hello, Kira Yamato." Hibiki smirked through the communications line.
"Go fuck yourself, you asswipe." Kira snarled, as he activated the Trans-Am system and once again unleashed his DRAGOON units, the brightly glowing weapons streaking through the air, leaving dozens of afterimages in their wake as they pummeled the Fury with beam blasts.