Celestial Being Chronicles - Chapter 81
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.
Kira and Yumi had been quick to send their children to the mobile suit hanger, with very simple instructions; take control of one of the Gundams, launch from the hanger and defend the Excalibur from any external invasion or attack. This was due in part to the fact that they didn't know whether the invasion was coming from inside or outside the Excalibur.
The walls were sparsely sprinkled with doors, some broken open, some locked. Kira poked into all those he passed that weren't locked. They were mostly equipment bays: areas meant to contain data storage and the technology meant to make solar system spanning, or in some cases, galaxy spanning communications equipment. There was more blood on the walls, splattered liberally here, there and everywhere, but no more zombies or demons so far.
Kira reached a T-junction in the corridor and broke left, remembering the general direction of his location. He froze up as he heard an all too familiar groan. Something lurked ahead of him in the corridor, its back to him. He stared at it for a few seconds, hesitating to squeeze the trigger. From the back, the guy looked pretty mangled. His clothing at least. He'd been a technician, clad in a generic blue, torn jumpsuit.
While the cloth was torn and stained with blood, the flesh beneath looked solid, even if it was way too pale and a little decayed. The zombie held a pistol and released another generic groan. Why did they groan? Kira decided that he was better off not knowing that one, raised his beam rifle and squeezed the trigger.
The zombie went to its knees like in a movie or something as its head blew apart as if it had a grenade in it. Freshly coagulated blood splattered thickly across the dead walls. The corpse finished collapsing forward to the ground. Kira grinned and kept an ear open for anything else that might be around. Nothing came running or screaming as he knelt and retrieved the pistol from the zombie's hand, as well as a pair of clips from its belt.
He got up, pressing deeper into the communications center.
"I made contact. A single zombie." Kira said.
"Really? Funny. I just blasted a pair of imps." Yumi replied with a hint of grim satisfaction. She would probably never admit it, but she missed killing the undead just as much as he did. Kira chuckled.
"Yep. Let's do what we do best." He replied.
"Roger that." She punctuated her sentence with another shotgun blast, followed by a loud roar of pain. Kira turned another corner, coming into a somewhat broader corridor where he found himself facing another trio of zombies. These guys were soldiers and were all holding sub-machine guns. And they weren't facing away from him this time. Kira raised his beam shotgun and fired true, blasting the center zombie off its feet with a chest shot that ripped its ribcage to shreds. The others roared their replies and raised their weapons.
Kira fell back around the corner and cocked the gun as the gunfire plinked around where he had been. When it ceased, he popped back around and fired. Another head exploded in a shower of blood. Gathering initiative, Kira swiveled the left-side plasma cannon, zeroing the sights on the final abomination and pounded out another blast, as well as another gallon of blood. The final zombie fell and all was silent once more. Wary but motivated, Kira continued forward and knelt at the corpses. He frisked the zombies, hunting for anything useful, and took one of their sub machine guns.
"Kira." Kira jumped slightly at the sudden voice in his head.
"Yeah?" He replied, keeping an eye out for survivors or wanderers.
"I just ran into a pair of those hellknights you were talking about earlier." Yumi said.
"So, by your report...I imagine you survived the attack."
"No, I'm being held down by the pair of demonic things."
"Hmm, speaking of a pair of things...I don't suppose you've reconsidered that threesome thing?" Kira chuckled, finishing his sweep of the battlefield and plunging deeper into the Excalibur's storage area.
"I told you, Kira, don't really feel like that." Yumi replied.
"Yeah...how about if it was girl on girl and I just watched?" Kira suggested.
"Hmm...she'd have to be hot."
"Well, yeah."
"Ha. You find me a hot, skinny redhead that will go down on me, and you've got yourself a deal."
"Fun, fun. I'll get right on it when-shit!" Kira narrowly leapt back to avoid a huge jaw full of equally huge teeth.
"Kira, are you okay?" Yumi's voice sounded distant as Kira took another step back and fell on his ass. He brought the shotgun up and pounded out a blast. Blood flew, but the beast kept coming. He pounded out another blast, all the while trying to dig in his heels and push his ass backwards to avoid getting his groin area chomped off. More blood, but not enough. Not enough damage. Kira snarled as his plasma cannons filpped forward and unleashed a pair of bright blue-red beams which instantly vaporized the creature.
"This is bullshit." Kira growled darkly as he stalked through the bloody, flickering corridors. The beam rifle was a dead, warm weight in his hand, as if surgically attached. It might as well have been, considering how tightly he was gripping the weapon.
'Aw, come on, Kira. At least it gives us something to do.' Yumi replied telepathically. He grinned briefly at her snide remark, keeping his eyes on the shadowed doorways, locked in the crimson trim of emergency lighting.
Kira finally made it down the long corridor, locating the double doors that led deeper into Main Engineering. At least his path was simple. The double doors in front of him led to the Excalibur's secondary and tertiary hyper deuteron nuclear reactors and then that led to the trio of warp cores and finally to the millions of ultra-compact energy batteries. Three simple sectors. Easy as pie. He stopped before the large double doors and stared up at them.
"I've got a problem." Kira muttered.
"What? Resistance?" Yumi replied immediately.
"Not of the alive kind. More of the locked door variety. And it's a big one. Can you...reroute it or something? Get to a security station, hack it?" He asked.
"Negative. If you can't find a way to open it from there, you'll have to go around. Security Centers are shot, far as I can tell. Besides, there's not enough power for a hack."
After a moment of thought, Kira brought both rail guns to bear and fired a pair of shells into the double doors, blowing them off their tracks and sending them spinning into the room to slam against the far wall.
Kira stepped out into a narrow corridor and glanced left. Nothing. He turned right and nearly soiled himself.
"Holy shit!" He bellowed, bringing up the beam rifle and managing to get off a single shot before a walking skeleton with glowing green eyes and a rocket launcher on each shoulder grabbed him. It managed an all too firm grip on his weapon and began pulling. Kira pulled back, desperate not to lose his critical killing machine, but it was obvious the creature, which Kira had already mentally dubbed; Revenant, was going to win. He let go, sending both of them stumbling backwards. The Revenant managed to recover faster, snapping the weapon in two and hurling both ends aside. It let out a shriek and blasted out a pair of rockets from its shoulder mounted launchers.
Kira's eyes widened as the incoming glare filled his vision. He barely managed to let himself drop. The rockets flew overhead, before continuing down the corridor to detonate against a wall. The amethyst-eyed man scowled as he unleashed a pair of blasts from his plasma cannons, vaporizing the hideous creature.
Kira entered another room that were actually part of a small series of rooms, which eventually led to the Excalibur's secondary hyper deuterion nuclear reactor. He slowly wound his way through them, becoming more and more disturbed as he did. It became apparent that something very bizarre was going on. The walls consisted mostly of panels of blipping, flashing switchboards, monitors and circuitry. But he began seeing patches of rotten, blackened flesh intermittently along the walls. Circuits were slowly becoming larger and thicker, and had blood flowing through them.
Closer inspection revealed that the metal had somehow grown pours, some of which sweated foul smelling liquid. Kira shuddered. This place was going from bad to worse. The air stunk of wretched, evil corruption. The lights were becoming dimmer, and the amethyst-eyed man was beginning to wonder if it would just be easier to activate the warship's massive self-detonation system and have all surviving crewmembers abandon the ship. Kira continued through the maze of tiny rooms made of flesh and steel, and began to suspect that there was something in there with him. He crept forward, his plasma cannons still out.
Something shrieked and pounced from the shadows to his right. No time to fire. He spun and bashed it in the face with his fist. The impact sent them both stumbling. It landed on its back, and Kira realized he had just come in contact with something new. It was hideous and very animalistic. The thing had five arms, four it perched itself on, like a dog, and one sprouted impossibly from its back. It also had a unique quality that, as far as Kira knew, he had never seen before: two heads. Each with a long, black tongue snaking out periodically.
Its back was a wreck, with two large, tumor like bumps that had split open and had bone like barb wire sticking up out of it.
"Just die." Kira sighed, firing twin beam blasts from the multi-phase cannons in his chest.
And suddenly the flesh and metal tunnel was torn away from around him. He was held aloft, suspended in eternal oblivion. Colder than space. Colder than death. And then he was shown the worst things he could ever imagine.
He saw the past. It was called up in front of his eyes very suddenly. He saw himself in the Strike Gundam, the crimson Aegis Gundam floating motionless for a few tense seconds before the Heliopolis Colony's outer shell cracked and split apart, venting the atmosphere into the cold void. He saw himself fighting Andrew Waltfeld; The Desert Tiger, in Africa, before plunging the Strike's anti-armor combat knife through the energy battery and cockpit. He saw the grey colored Providence Gundam floating omniously before his own Freedom Gundam, with the the giant gamma-ray laser GENESIS looming omniously behind the grey mobile suit. He saw the battle that ensued, a battle that he barely even comprehended and barely won. He saw the beginning of the Second Bloody Valentine War, which eventually led to the intense battle between his own Freedom Gundam and the Impulse Gundam. He saw the Impulse Gundam slam its anti-ship sword through the Freedom's torso, just beneath the cockpit.
He saw more recent images. The last few years. He saw the death and the face of every single man and woman that had died under his command as he united and led them in their attempt to eliminate all conflict. He watched as he failed, time and again, to save those around him. Regret, sorrow and self loathing welled up and burst inside his psyche in a horrific plume of disgust and terrified hatred. He watched the fall of Earth, first to the huge war which was raging on the surface and in the atmosphere, and then to the demons as they slaughtered the remaining humans.
He watched demonic things slay hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of his own people. Watched as they were tortured, slain and even how some of them had worked with the demons.
And then he saw things much worse. He saw possibilities, his worst fears come to life, his fears of what could happen.
He watched as he was stripped of his rank, dishonorably discharged and kicked out of Celestial Being, which was now nothing more than a small band of only a few hundred survivors, mostly the Gundam Miesters and their famlies.
He watched as Yumi was crucified to a wall, skinned alive and ruthlessly raped. She had unspeakable, impossible things done to her.
And still it worsened as he saw himself being divorced by Yumi. Her telling him that she never loved him. He watched her cheat on him, over and over again. He was shown and had no possibility of looking away. He was forced to watch by whatever entity controlled the current situation. He watched as Yumi, whom was once again pregnant, aborted their child before mercilessly raping and then brutally murdering Aoi, Allister and Akira. Finally, she walked away from him forever and left him alone in the darkness. All that he had ever loved was stripped away, bit by bit, turned against him.
A tidal wave of emotions welled up within him, threatening to overwhelm him. Impossible terror, vicious anger, disgust, unspeakable depression and sorrow and unimaginable hatred. And as this hurricane, this typhoon of negative emotions, swirled around him, all these images of everything that he ever hated or feared surrounded him, then a single beam pistol appeared. It dangled in front of him, like a steak in front of a starving man. Almost without thinking, he snatched it out of the air and shoved it into his mouth.