Celestial Being Chronicles - Chapter 77

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.

The air suddenly turned to pure white light, the clouds instantly scattering away as a huge gap was blown through the sky from high above, as a beam of coherent light, each as thick as the Archangel was tall, streaked down from the heavens and slammed into the ground, right on top of the six Celestial Being Gundams, the green-white glare of GENESIS blinding to everyone present for a dozen miles, a column of laser light that briefly connected heaven to earth. His eyes watering and tearing up, the Infinite Justice's polarizing lenses being all that had saved him from permanent eye damage, Athrun staggered backwards, falling onto his butt next to the Buster and Duel as they both shied away as well, golden sparks crawling along their armor just from the proximity heat of the blast, the ground turning to glass beneath their feet, as rippling waves of heat distortion expanded outward in a five mile wide shockwave where the air itself ignited from the residual heat. "KIRA! Noooo!" Athrun screamed in disbelief, frantically toggling onto the command channel for the Earth Alliance forces. "What the fuck did you just do, you fools!"

"Calm yourself, Commander Zala." The cold, slick voice of Rey Ze Burrel replied, the triumphant smirk on his face evident even without Athrun having to look. His voice practically oozed with arrogant smugness. "I actually must thank you, without you and your friends keeping them busy, we never would have been able to precisely calibrate our shot in time. Normally a target the size of a Gundam would be very hard to hit with the GENESIS, especially through the atmosphere. You are to be commended, you lured their Gundams out and staked them down and we were able to take a one out of a hundred shot to remove them from the board before the game even started!"

"You moron! You have no idea what you've just done!" Athrun yelled, veins throbbing in his face as a murderous red rage descended upon him.

"I know exactly what I've done." Rey retorted icily, as the GENESIS beam winked out, leaving the area around the Orb Gundams shrouded in smoke and dust and embers that obscured all vision for more than three miles in every direction, the ground charred white and glassy in a huge circle around them. "I've just half won this battle already. I was going to offer you the credit, but if you're going to be this way about it..."

"Credit! You fucking idiot!" Athrun howled in disbelief. "Didn't you read the report on the Divinity's first combat deployment!"

"It was just a Gundam, there's no way it could have survived even an indirect hit from GENESIS." Rey answered defensively. "I doubt that even your precious Mirror Coated Phase Shift armor could take that."

"The Divinity's DRAGOON units, you stupid jackass! They can refract and reflect any form of beam weapon!" Athrun forced himself to stop shouting, he was going to need his voice in the future. Mostly because of Rey's hunger for glory and inattention to detail. "You haven't killed them...you've just really pissed them off!" Athrun brought the Infinite Justice up to a standing position once more, as the smoke began to clear around the center of the glass zone, where he could distinctly make out six humanoid shapes beneath the glowing dome of a beam shield, with half a dozen DRAGOON unts projecting the glowing dome, a wide trench digging into the Earth's bowels forming a perfect circle around the position of the six Celestial Being Gundams. The eyes of the Divinity flashed purple, the eyes of the Akatsuki flashed blue, the eyes of the Strike Freedom flashed yellow and finally, the eyes of the Destiny and the Destiny Impulse flashed green.

"Can we kill them now?" Hope asked sardonically, as she brought the Destiny back up to its full height. "Or would you like to parlay some more, give them a second chance to snipe us from orbit?"

"We can kill them now. I was a fool to trust them. The Earth Alliance has never treated others fairly if they had any choice in the matter. I don't know why I expected differently. I must still be a bit insane, expecting different results from the same process all the time." Kira replied caustically, chiding himself for his continued faith in those who seemed to be determined to remain faithless.

"Are you sure, Kira? They are our friends after all..." Hope said, the concern in her voice a crueler taunt than any mere agreement could have been

"They were our friends, yes. We don't seem to have any friends in Orb anymore." Kira answered bitterly. He looked up at the sky, along the path that the shot from GENESIS had taken. "I'll be back in a bit." Kira told the other four Gundam Miesters, before the Divinity leapt into the sky and transformed into its mobile armor mode, headed for orbit and the gamma-ray laser known as GENESIS.

The other four watched the Divinity receed into the sky. Then they turned their attention to the three still slightly dazed Orb Gundams in front of them. Cagalli twirled her scythe happily around herself, making the scorched air whine and scream as she sliced it apart. "Yzak Joule. Athrun Zala. Meyrin Hawke. Dearka Elsman. Miriallia Haw. It's been too long." She stopped the scythe in mid spin, and put both hands on the shaft. "The crucible of conflict screams your names...time to strike the iron!" And with those words, she charged straight at them, her scythe drawn back for a cleaving blow that could have sundered all three of the machines in half if it had landed. However, the Duel was there to meet the charge of the Akatsuki with a blitz of its own, holding a deceptively slender two handed sword in both its hands, the blade glowing an actinic blue, like an arcing spark frozen in time. The physical blade met and scraped along the inner edge of the Akatsuki's scythe, before locking against where the blade met haft, arresting the swing of the threshing tool and locking the two Gundams in a momentary clinch, thrusters throbbing as they each pushed at each other. Yzak was forced to break the clash and fall back behind his beam shield, however, when the Strike Freedom began to snipe at him from above.

"Athrun..." Cagalli sighed as the Akatsuki turned to face the Infinite Justice and began to almost casually move towards the crimson machine.

"Cagalli..." Athrun quietly replied, even as he ignited his beam shield and took a half step backwards. Athrun most certianly didn't want to fight against Cagalli. Millenia ago, long before either of them became immortal, they had been in a fairly serious relationship. Although their relationship eventually ended up being one which had parted, the break up itself had been done on very good terms, so the two of them could never hate each other. In fact, Athrun considered Kira and his lovers to be family.

"I'm not going to fight you, Athrun." Cagalli said after a few short seconds. "You should go after Kira." Athrun hesitated for a moment, but then the Justice leapt into the air, transformed into its mobile armor mode and sped after the Divinity.

"KIRA!" Kira heard his name shouted across the communications line that he'd had open with Athrun and the others, and he looked behind himself just in time to flick the Divinity into a barrel roll, barely avoiding the winged form of the Justice as it blasted past him in mobile armor mode. The Justice's mobile armor mode greatly resembeled that of the Aegis, only with the addition of a pair of wings, which were formed by the subflight lifter. The crimson machine made a slick transition back to its mobile suit form once Athrun had passed him, putting himself squarely between Kira and the not so distant form of GENESIS as it floated in geosynchronous orbit, high above the huge mass of storm clouds covering Munich. "Stop this! This is crazy! You're not seriously going to kill all of those soldiers, are you?"

"I don't want to fight you, Athrun." Kira said resolutely.

"I don't want to fight you either!" Athrun replied, his eyes wet with tears. "So let's..."

"But if you persist in getting in my way, I won't have a choice. I'm sorry." Kira drew one of his beam rifles and pointed it at the Justice. The air around them lit up with glowing green energy bolts as a pair of Nazca-class ships fired their beam cannons towards the surface, targeting the Excalibur as it hovered far below, even as dozens of other streaks of light in the upper atmosphere indicated the descending paths of heavy bombardment artillery shells and missiles, as well as beam and positron blasts from the secondary batteries of the numerous escort vessels. Off to the side, dozens of fat bodied bulk transport spaceplanes were dislodging drop pods filled with mobile suits, until a steady rain of the pods glowed red as they powered down through the atmosphere. On the ground, the land battleships were deploying more mobile suits, to stiffen the first wave of assault vehicles, while even more mobile suits and vehicles began moving up from the back of the convoy formations.

"Please, Kira...don't do this...this is madness!" Athrun pleaded.

"This is my world now." Kira growled.

"Damn it, Kira! I can't let you do this!" Athrun yelled, his voice conquered by equal parts sadness and fury. He freed a pair of Ion Disintegrator rifles from his machine's hips and fired, aiming for Kira's wings and legs, hoping to bring his best friend down and disabled without killing him.

"You just made a big mistake. A mistake which I once made myself." Kira replied, rolling out of the way of the blue-white beams, and coming up to face Athrun directly. No more just brushing him aside, Athrun wasn't so weak that he could just let him fly about forever. One of them was going to have to go down. "Do you recall when? It was when I thought that I had lost everything after the end of the Second Bloody Valentine War. By the time one month had passed, I had become so depressed that I ended up taking my own life. That was definitely one of the biggest mistakes of my life. And now, you've just made it yourself. You can't let me do this, Athrun? You must let me do this, or I will have to kill you."

"They have lives and families too!" Athrun retorted fiercely, aiming his rifles and firing once more, this time some of the DRAGOON units deployed and bent the searing beam blasts away from the Divinity, spearing off into the distant parts of the atmosphere harmlessly. "They're not just faceless goons! They're just following orders and doing what they believe is right!"

"I know. That is exactly why war is so terribly sad. Those who truly deserve to die in a war so rarely do, it's always the innocent fools they deceive into taking up their cause that eat up the casualties. But innocent or not, those casualties are part and parcel of what makes war so awful, and I will inflict as many of them as is necessary for you 'humans' to realize that war itself is insanity and cannot be allowed to happen, for any reason!" Kira could not contain some tears of his own. "Lenore has already lost her cousins. And now...her father too. My poor niece..." Kira holstered his beam rifles, raised the Divinity's palms and fired at Athrun, a single shot from each ion disintegrator. The Justice twisted and turned frantically, Athrun was clearly familiar with the ability of those little red flares to penetrate armor and shields. Those had not been warning or disabling shots, those had been aimed at the torso.

Athrun's blood had run cold the moment he realized that Kira had meant to kill him with those shots. This was no longer just angst and heartbreak, the Kira Yamato he'd long known and loved like a brother...that Kira was gone now. There was only the Gundam Miester and Supreme Commander of Celestial Being in there now. It would take someone with a stronger connection to Kira than Athrun to break him out of the madness that had swept over him. But did anyone like that still exist? Even Kira's five lovers seemed to have been cut away from his heart by the recent events. The five of them still followed his orders, but only because they respected him that much.

'Forgive me, everyone...it's come to the worst case scenario already. I don't have a choice. I'm so sorry...' Athrun clamped down with his teeth, almost biting his cheek as he fought to stomp all of his pity, sympathy and pain down into the deepest recesses of his soul. He could no longer afford them. "Kira..." He whispered. "Your sacrifices will never be forgotten by the people of Orb. You will forever be remembered as our hero. The entire nation, no the entire world, will bow down in respect to you, I will make a point of that, but it will have to be a posthumous outpouring of respect." His eyes were dry and determined. His hands were steady. His heart was broken.

The emerald green seed dropped through the vastness of his mind, before striking that invisible terminating surface and detonating, filling him with light and life and power, his eyes fading to metallic green sheens.

Athrun suddenly found himself fighting madly for his life, parrying a flurry of quantum crystal anti-ship sword slashes with his physical shield, the armor of the Justice had been impregnated with quantum crystal slivers for exactly this reason, to prevent them from being sliced in half like they were made of butter. Embedding slivers of quantum crystal was much cheaper and less time consuming than making fully quantum crystal weaponry and shields. The Justice and the Divinity were close to equally matched in size, mass and strength, and thus; neither could beat down the other's guard. Which was why Athrun was so surprised when, after making one parry, Kira lost his grip on his left hand sword, the crystalline blade spinning end over end as it dropped away from them. Before he could react to take advantage of his numerical superiority in weaponry, the Divinity's eyes flashed amethyst as the angelic machine suddenly swung its left hand up above its head. Athrun barely had time to blink in shock as the dropped sword unexpectedly came spinning back up the gravity well, aimed at the middle of his back, and only an instinctive, desperate dodge prevented the Justice from being cut in half at the waist. As it was, Athrun had lost both legs from the midcalf down.

The Divinity snagged the sword out of the air and sheathed it, Athrun's evasive maneuver having allowed Kira time to put a few hundred meters of distance between them. The left hand grabbed one of the beam rifles and snap-fired a flurry of blasts at the crimson machine's chest. Still unbalanced from his previous evasive maneuver, Athrun knew that he would not be able to dodge again in time. Frantically, he thrust both arms in front of himself, throwing all available power into the beam shields as well as the geschmeidig panzer energy deflection armor on his machine's arms. Much to Athrun's elation, the glowing green blast did stop, about fifty meters away from him, safely captured by the Justice's energy deflection armor. "KIRA!" Athrun screamed angrily, thrusting his arms and hurling the searing bolt back at the Divinity.

"ATHRUN!" Kira retorted, with equal volume and feeling, holstering rifle and sheathing sword, reaching out with the Divinity's own energy deflection armor and arresting the motion of the beam blast again, about midway between the two machines. He watched the brightly glowing violet seed, veined with gold, fall through the void in his mind, before reaching out and snatching it, determined to end this once and for all. Kira appeared in a lush meadow in his mind's eye, gently clutching the bright glowing seed in his right hand. After a few seconds, he clenched his hand into a fist and slammed it into the ground. The seed instantly took root and with a flash of light, a brightly glowing purple and gold veined tree sprung from the ground.

The impact of Kira's sprouting seed was nothing short of extraordinary; everything around the Divinity Gundam had been frozen in place. Time itself had stopped and the very fabric of the universe was now bending to Kira's will.

Meanwhile, as she lay in the Excalibur's infirmary, Lacus was going over Cagalli's memories, or more specifically the ones which led to the rape of their son, Allister.

-FLASHBACK-

Storming into her quarters, Cagalli threw her keys across the kitchen, causing a loud crash, as they flew through a glass cabinet door, before then flying through a few of the glass cups inside the cabinet. Seconds later, her son, Allister came in.

"Mom, why are you so mad?" Allister asked. "Mad? No, mad doesn't even come close!" She yelled. "Try thoroughly pissed, damnit, Allister, grow some fucking balls!"

"I've got some!" He yelled back.

"Oh yeah, prove it." Cagalli said, facing Allister. "Show me you've got some balls."

She then pushed Allister. "Mom?"

Cagalli grinned as she pushed him again and said. "Come on, do something!"

Allister growled as he yelled. "Damnit, Mom, quit it!" Cagalli pushed him again, but harder. "I said stop it!"

"Come on, Allister, what are you going to do?" Cagalli asked, even as she pushed him again, but this time his back slammed against a wall. Allister growled as he then pushed back, causing his mother to stumble backwards, but she didn't lose her balance.

After regaining her balance, Cagalli pushed back yet again. but she held on and pulled her son into a deep and passionate kiss. A kiss that carried out to the living room, then on to the couch, where Cagalli ripped Allister's uniform shirt off.

"M-Mom…." Allister asked in between breaths. "Wha-what are…you doing?"

Cagalli growled softly as she replied. "Just shut up...and kiss me."

-END FLASHBACK-

Lacus shuddered slightly, Cagalli has not only raped their son, but she had also been impregnented by him as well. The pink-haired beauty allowed a slight sigh to escape her lips. Lacus had to admit that she, like Cagalli, was attracted to Allister, but even so, she would never dream of having sex with him, much less raping him as Cagalli had done.

Everyone stared at the Divinity Gundam, as the machine's MCPS armor suddenly began to change color, from its normal white, black and red color scheme, into a non-reflective black and blood red color scheme. The chest armor which, had only seconds earlier been black, changed to blood red, while the armor covering the arms and legs which had been white, with black accents, changed to black, with blood red accents, and finally the words 'CB-X60D DIVINITY GUNDAM - APOCOLYPSE TYPE' appeared, in gold letters on the Divinity's arms, the text looking almost like a demonic tattoo.

Kira carefully scanned his surroundings for a few seconds, before then beginning to speak, utilizing the Divinity's external loudspeakers to do so. "I am ready, but one question still remains; is this universe ready for the true apocalypse?"

The Divinity Gundam then let out an ear-splitting roar, which was heard all around the world, and after the roar had died down, the machine began to extend a pair of brightly glowing orange wings. Just as the Divinity's wings began to sprout, a stabbing pain erupted in the center of Kira's back, and he was lifted into the air.

"AAAAAAAA!" He screamed in agony as something tore into his back, hurting him more than he could remember being hurt in a very long time.

"Kira, Kira! Oh my god! Athrun's got the Lance of Longinus!" Asuka Langley Soryu screamed, as she witnessed what had happened and Evangelion Unit 02 ignited its thrusters, jumped off the Excalibur's deck and streaked towards the now free-falling form of the Divinity Gundam.

For a moment, Kira thought that Athrun must have grabbed the Lance of Longinus from him during the battle, and was now using it against him. Kira quickly realized that the original lance was still sheathed at his back, and that Athrun must be using one of the pseudo-lances which were hidden within one of the millions of weapons containers that lined the Excalibur's outer hull.

"Asuka!" Misato called from within Evangelion Unit 04, as the crimson colored Evangelion Unit 02 suddenly leapt from its position on the Excalibur's foredeck and caught the motionless Divinity Gundam as it fell through the sky. Without any hesitation, Evangelion Unit 02 quickly grabbed the Divinity around the waist, carefully cradling the angel-winged machine and helping to slow its decent, before then gently setting the now motionless Gundam on the Excalibur's foredeck. Evangelion Unit 02 then turned its eyes towards the Infinite Justice Gundam.

As soon as the Divinity Gundam had been set on the foredeck, Lexi had sent out a signal telling all Celestial Being forces to fall back to the Excalibur, effectively bringing dozens of battles to a screeching halt.