Celestial Being Chronicles - Chapter 108
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.
"Wonderful. You're gonna owe me for this..." Lexi grumbled, turning the street corner towards the cafe. She saw a moving shadow that didn't belong, and hurled herself flat on her face, as the multiple barrels of Hope's gatling gun swung overhead like a entire slew of baseball bats welded together, close enough to ruffle her hair with the breeze of its passing. Somehow the bastard had predicted her move, and gotten ahead of her! Lexi realized that when it came to more or less actual combat, both she and Nami were woefully underexperienced compared to this real intelligence. They had run lots of simulation battles, played paintball against each other a hundred thousand times, but neither of them had ever expected a real challenge on their own turf, and it was really showing. Lexi was prepared for close range combat with the full lexicon of combat maneuvers taught to Celestial Being's soldiers, perhaps the most comprehensive set of martial arts in the world, but all of her knowledge was data, more or less solo training and practice, she'd never had to apply it against anyone but Nami, and even then, it wasn't real fighting.
Rolling to one side, to avoid the stamping foot of the leering brunette, Lexi quickly discarded her beam rifle, and in its place, she manifested a sword with a physical blade about five feet long with serrations on the back side. Without any hesitation, Lexi slashed at Hope's calf as she tried to move away from the sudden attack, drawing a hiss of discomfort and a deep slice in the meat of her leg, but there was shockingly little blood, and what blood there was quickly scabbed over into a leathery crust. Keeping her roll momentum going, Lexi rose to a crouch, prepared to move in any direction to attack or defend. However, Hope was already moving, and already inside her defense perimeter, and she barely even saw Hope's knee move as she jammed it up into her stomach, driving the breath from her body in an explosive, spittle laced gasp. More fiery pain spread through Lexi's body as her automated security systems sought to keep her avatar inviolate, as even the touch of Hope's body was like poison to her flesh.
Staggering backwards, coughing and retching, one arm pressed to her cramping stomach, Lexi raised her anti-ship sword defensively, tearing a gash in Hope's forearm that almost instantly scabbed over, even as she punched Lexi in the side of the head. Lexi's perceptions of reality dimmed for a moment, her firewalls perilously close to being breached by the hit, and she recovered by the slimmest of margins to find herself lying on the street several yards away from where she had been standing. She coughed and vomited up a slurry of gritty blood, corrupted avatar fragments being purged from her body by her systems, her body aching with the sensation of new data being rewritten onto the holes created by the damage she'd suffered. Reformatting was always a painful process for a data entity, which is why the two holograms tried to do it as little as possible. For that matter, sensation addicts that they both were, replacing a treasured piece of experience data with a fresh, factory line section of code was like literally losing a section of their life and personality up to that point. Regardless of whether her core systems remained uncorrupted by this attack, if she suffered too much damage, her own self repair systems would effectively have to kill her and create her anew, without any of the memories or sensations which she had gathered up until now!
Hope hurled herself at Lexi once more, again leaving herself wide open for a counter attack, as she pretended to catch her foot on the ground and tripped, ripping a bloody divot out of the pavement, almost breaking her foot in the process, and shredding the skin across the tops of her toes as her shoe tore apart. But the discomfort was worth it, when the cocky brown-haired bitch in the Orb forces uniform swung her fist at the side of her head, hoping to put her down one more time. Hope relished the look of shock on her face as her stumble turned into a smooth extension of her leg as she twisted her torso towards her opponent, her arm whipcracking around in a lightning fast jab, aimed not at the tempting target of her torso or face, but at her own swinging fist! Hope's relish turned to an exultant cry, in time with Lexi's scream of pain, as their fists met knuckles on, and shattered every bone in Lexi's hand like dry twigs, blood flying from her lacerated flesh as compound fractures tore out through the back of her hand and wrist. Lexi stared at her ruined hand in stunned shock for a moment longer than she should have, obviously unused to pain of that level, and in the next instant, Hope closed her hand around the base of Lexi's throat and hoisted her into the air like a ragdoll.
Hope chuckled and grunted as Lexi kicked at her thighs and gut and groin with her legs in a frantic attempt to make her let go of her neck, but now that she finally had this bird in hand, she wasn't going to let go until she'd eaten her fill! But before she could feast she needed to be tenderized a bit, he would get her revenge for her taunting of earlier, and teach her more about this new level of pain and fear! Swinging her around, he slammed Lexi into a wall of a nearby building, smirking as her eyes bulged and crossed a bit as she coughed a bright string of bloody spittle after she rebounded from the unyielding concrete. Lexi made choking sounds as Hope tightened her grip, Lexi's unbroken hand clawing at Hope's own hand and wrist, nails scraping bloody scratches in Hope's flesh as Lexi tried to tear Hope's hand off of her, but nothing could break her grip when she was in this kind of mood! "Scared now?" Hope enquired with a sneer, as she watched Lexi's eyes started turning bloodshot, her pupils beginning to fade a bit as she ran short on air to breathe and support her violent struggles. Contrary to popular myth, it doesn't take very long at all for the brain to turn off from lack of oxygen, at least to the point of unconsciousness, a few seconds without air could easily do it if a person was caught unprepared.
Hope loosened her grip a little, allowing Lexi a gasp of air to keep her at least somewhat conscious, it would be so much less fun if she went limp too quickly. Holding Lexi firmly against the wall, Hope carefully swung her other hand in a fist, striking Lexi on the right side, about midway between armpit and hip, listening with a smirk as two ribs popped and snapped inward under the precise strike, bloody froth appearing at the corners of Lexi's lips as one rib spar grazed a lung. "I asked if you were scared yet." Hope scolded Lexi, reaching forward and grabbing the collar of her uniform jacket, tearing the garment open from neckline to waist, exposing the white undershirt beneath. "It's polite to answer someone when they ask you a question." Hope hooked her grasping thumb up under the adam's apple of Lexi's captive form and pressed inwards, closing off the base of her throat and making her gurgle and squirm, eyes beginning to roll back as she frothed and twitched, her arms and legs hanging like wet noodles, blood dripping down to puddle on the ground several feet below. She put her free hand on her undershirt collar and smiled in anticipation. "Let's see what your birthday suit looks like, shall we?"
Before Hope could rip Lexi's shirt away though, she heard an odd sound, like a clap in her ear, and she twitched in annoyance, shortly before she felt a hammerblow strike along the side of her head and then the world turned confused and indistinct, a random jumble of images of the ground and lots of dried blood and a burning ache in her skull, and Hope belatedly realized the other one, that black-haired bitch, had shot her! In the head, if the pain was anything to go by, and with something that really should have killed her, were this not a dream. It was a bit weird, seeing pieces of her skull and brain lying scattered around on the ground and yet not being dead, just really annoyed as waves of alternating numbness and discomfort washed through her body as it began to regenerate. Hope rolled her remaining eye in its socket as she heard an unsteady footstep from nearby, and saw the brown-haired woman standing over him, her face drawn and pale, her chin and lips still coated with bloody foam.
"In answer to your question, I'm fucking terrified, thank you for asking." Lexi panted, her sword remanifested in her hand, as she raised it high in both hands and then plunged it downward, skewering the limp and mostly headless form of Hope Yamato right through her heart, the blade punching all the way through her chest and sticking into the street beneath. Lexi's broken hand burned like the fires of hell from doing it, but right now, she didn't really care about simple things like physical pain. She had just looked a very horrible death right in the eyes and her opponent had ended up balking at the last second, and the shock of her brush with the most accurate sensation of mortality she'd ever experienced was almost overwhelming! It was so overwhelming that Lexi could barely stagger more than two or three steps away from the downed woman before she fell to her hands and knees and literally vomited all over the street, a vile mix of blood, corrupted data fragments and ice cream float. She was glad she was just an avatar, or else she'd probably have been really embarrassed about the way her pants were hot and wet with the contents of her bladder. Even as she thought about it, that sensation dried up and the damp spot went away.
"Gahg...ptwoo!" Lexi retched and spat, her body feeling as weak as a kitten as she crawled another few feet away from the place where she had almost died, or maybe even worse! "Took you fucking long enough!" She accused Nami, as her friend shimmied down another drainage pipe across the street, her sniper rifle slung over her shoulder. "Another ten seconds and I would have been comprehensively corrupted, thank you very much!"
"I could have shot sooner, but I might have blown your head off too, and I figured you might not appreciate that." Nami retorted, with some sympathy. "It didn't help matters that you were nowhere near the cafe, like we agreed, and I had to backtrack once I realized your ass was rapidly getting kicked!"
"No plan survives contact with the enemy." Lexi snapped back, accepting a hand up and a shoulder to lean on as she balanced on unsteady, trembling legs. She did her best not to look down at her hand, figuring that if she didn't acknowledge the wound, it might hurt less. The Yamatos had used similar strategies with their children whenever they skinned their knee playing outside, and it seemed to work for them, so why not for her? Of course a skinned knee and a shattered hand were rather different in terms of severity, but there wasn't much else she could do. It would heal in a bit, hopefully. She looked down at her torn clothes and bruised body, and just stood there and ached for a moment. "I think I've had my fill of human sensations for today." She declared after taking a careful breath, feeling her broken ribs slowly moving back into place. "Next time, I'm going to be the one with the sniper rifle, and you can play tag with the super-freak, okay?"
"What did you expect was gonna happen?" Nami chided her. "She's specifically designed to kill people like your avatar. You're doing pretty good to be in as good as shape as you are, ya know?" A noise from Hope reminded them both that their current weapons didn't have the ability to actually take the RI down permanently, and that it was probably high time that they retreated to a locale that would permit them to cut loose with heavier weaponry with less worry about collateral damage. It was time to bring things down to the ultimate style of battle...a Gundam fight! And this was a fight they didn't have to fight alone
"How long do you think, before he tracks us?" Nami asked Lexi, as she watched the doorway to Silver Heaven...more like Silver Hell now that Hope had polluted it...seal closed behind them. When Lexi did not immediately reply, Nami gave her compatriot a quick once over, noting with concern that the brown-haired avatar was still breathing raggedly and unsteady on her feet...she'd taken more damage in that brief struggle with Hope than she'd initially let on. Back in the real world, all around Orb, housing developments and office buildings suffered spontaneous brownouts, and some automated transportations stopped working or went on the fritz, as Lexi was forced to divert system resources to purging the data damage she'd suffered. Most of the truly vital systems were tied into her life, of course, but against this motherfucker, that was just a good reason not to die.
"Well, she was still regenerating when we left, but there's a time scale difference between the Gundam Battle world and Silver Heaven, time passes a lot faster in Silver Heaven than here." Lexi replied at last, her voice still somewhat hoarse from when Hope had choked her. "A couple seconds here is a good twenty minutes there." She was cut off as a huge glowing crack split the air and reality of the virtual enviorment of the Gundam Battle world, it must have stretched a half mile into the air, corrupt reddish-purple light pouring forth into the pristine environment of this reality like blood pouring into a glass of ice water, a thunderclap ringing through the air as data from one reality, with wildly different time scale and physics conditions, forcibly invaded another, the interference effect manifesting as bright sparking bolts of off colored lightning and random bursts of geysering flame, like blowtorch flames dancing along the edge of the slowly widening crack in the air. "Right about now." Lexi finished, somewhat lamely.
"Someone needs to work on their predictive subroutines." Nami retorted caustically with a toss of her head. Her sniper rifle had already defragmented away, since people sized weapons didn't really exist in the Gundam Battle world, where everything was fought on the scale of twenty meter or more tall fantastically advanced war machines. Even keeping their regular female avatars in this place required a diversion of resources, a subtle reprogramming on the fly to include the parameters of their avatars in non-Gundam format. Fortunately, both of them possessed avatars far more suited to their current environment, and with Hope already forcing her way after them, there was no point to hanging around in human form any longer. In truth, as fun and interesting as it was to pretend to be a human, both of the holograms felt a lot more comfortable and natural in the form of Gundams. The two avatars wavered and shimmered like bad viewscreen images, and then began to expand dramatically as their primary avatars reshaped themselves into new forms.
Nami chose the form of the GN-0000+GNR-010 00-Raiser, while Lexi chose that of the CB-X60D Divinity Gundam.
By the time both Gundam-Avatars had fully formed, the bleeding crack in the world had grown wide enough to admit a standard Gundam, but as yet nothing had passed through the gap, only more hellish red and purple light and disruption effects as the crack continued to slowly widen. Such a massive and unexpected phenomenon had not gone unnoticed by the Gundam Battle players that had just been beginning a fight against the Warmonger High Commander scenario from the looks of things. Immediately labeled as additional Player Characters, the 00-Raiser and Divinity registered the oncoming Warmonger machines, consisting mostly of Windams and ZAKUs, as enemies as their gaming subroutines adjusted to the unexpected addition of two extra Gundams. Had they more time, the two holograms probably could have reprogrammed the simulation to eliminate the Warmongers or make them allies too, but barely had they even thought of accomplishing that when they ran out of prepatory time.
Thunderclaps boomed loud enough to send leaves exploding off the branches of trees across half the forest, and rock slides tumbling down the slopes of nearby hills as two gargantuan mechanical limbs forced themselves through the glowing crack in the sky. One of the arms ended in a huge gatling gun type arrangement, flanked by a pair of massive beam axe blades, one above and one below the forearm, while the other terminated in the muzzle of an even more gigantic cannon with an enormous beam spiked chain-flail swinging from the underside of the arm. The two arms shoved against the sides of the crack, straining and struggling with titanic strength as the rift began tearing wider and wider apart, the ground itself beginning to shake in constrenation at this unprogrammed and unexpected intrusion event. The shaking grew worse as a colossal leg swung in through the rift and stamped down with a gun studded foot, splashing up whole trees like water droplets from a puddle as the gigantic Gundam forced its way into this new reality like a maggot writhing into a fresh wound.
"You know, I had always thought that the ZGMF-X00A Revenant Gundam was just a myth." Lexi commented, a tad nervously, as she watched Hope's manifested avatar fully finish clearing the interface anomaly.
"It's not a myth.." Nami replied, though her own tone was a tad stiff as well, because the Revenant was nothing if not intimidating, all the more so because of how out of place it was. Thankfully the real machine had never made it down to Earth, where its wanton power would have no doubt caused horrendous damage. Hope seemed to be taking a moment to adjust to her new surroundings, but Nami knew better than to think that this representation of Hope Yamato was off guard. Suddenly, transitioning to the Gundam Battle game didn't seem like such a smart move...as powerful as their Gundams were, they were still practically toys compared to the Revenant!
"Lexi! What the hell...what the heck...is going on? This isn't supposed to happen!" Akira commed on his private channel to the hologram, as his friends fended off one of the final waves of Warmonger trash before the arrival of the enemy Gundams. He stared wide eyed at the Warmonger Titan as it stepped out of a really raw looking wound in the substance of the world and looked around itself as if confused by its surroundings. On his regimental channel, people were cursing up a storm at this unexpected event, since they were as good as doomed with such a dangerous enemy flanking them, and plenty of people were bemoaning the unfairness of the game and how they were getting screwed out of a fair fight. Akira though was quick to realize that there was more to this than a simple glitch in the game, if nothing else the Titan was not acting at all like it should, the one he was familiar with was very mechanical in its motions, while the one in front of him now moved as fluidly or more fluidly than any machine, whether it be controlled by another player or the AI.
"It's an...unplanned event, Akira." Lexi hedged, not wanting to announce far and wide that she and Nami were suffering a high level data attack neither of them was really prepared to fend off, since that would probably start a mass panic.
"You got hacked?" Akira exclaimed, his eyes wide, forgetting that he was also talking on his inter-squadron channel, prompting a chorus of inquiries from his friends. "That's supposed to be impossible!"
"Key words being, 'supposed to be', little Akira." Nami cut in drolly. "Neither of us has been compromised yet but things are not looking good. We were caught with our pants very much down, and we are in the process of getting fu..."
"Nami! Children!" Lexi interrupted her peer irritably, even given that the situation did probably call for vulgarity. The superme commanders were pretty admant about controlling what words their children had access to hearing on the internet, though Lexi figured it was probably a futile effort anyway. However, that wasn't her place to decide, and so she had little choice but to censor his conversations, something that usually happened automatically, but obviously she could not censor what Nami said through conventional means. She was about to commence explaining the situation when Hope beat her to the punch. She was a bit confused to find herself back in the ZGMF-X00A Revenant Gundam, and even more confused to find herself in the middle of a terrestrial battlefield, but she had been trained on quickly adapting to unfamiliar and unexpected circumstances. When in doubt, destroy everything, was Hope's favorite instruction. And so she pointed the 550cm radiation cannon in her right arm towards the greatest concentration mobile suits, and a moment later, a massive green, blue and red blast of superheated radiation particles ripped through the air, slaying dozens of machines before they even had a chance to react, setting the forest around the Revenant alight like it was made entirely of candle wicks, an entire hilltop vanishing in the glare of the shot as it skipped along the ground for kilometers before dissipating.
Those of the Royal Union regiment that failed to dodge...or were just unlucky enough to be in the path of the shot...found themselves staring not at the 'You have taken critical damage and have been disabled.' message, followed by a greyed out ghost screen, where they could spectate the rest of the battle, but instead were kicked straight back out to their computer desktops. Some of the computer systems died outright, their hardware completely fried by the surge of attacking data, others were partly wiped and still more or less functional. Although in each case, the Gundam Battle game had been completely eliminated from the computer, and the user account erased from the main servers. Against the ZGMF-X00A Revenant Gundam, death was permanent, at least as far as data went. "What the fuck is going on?!" The Regiment's Mission Commander, controlling the GAT-X105U Union Gundam, exploded over the general chat channel, stunned by the unexpected attack that had wiped out half of the regiment in the blink of an eye.
"It's an unexpected world event!" Akira shouted back, before anyone else could think of what to say. "I have a...friend...who does system administration for the game and she said something like this might happen randomly sometime this week. We have to survive long enough for those two new allied machines to fend off the Titan while also keeping the High Commander's forces at bay!" Akira pinged the markers of the 00-Raiser and Divinity. "Protect the allied machines or we're all doomed!" Akira knew it was a flimsy ploy, but he couldn't just blurt out that the two holographic systems were being hacked by unknown forces, that would just cause a panic, especially if Lexi did start taking damage...Orb's infastructure was part and parcel of her and if she went down, so would all the automated services in his nation. And he didn't even want to consider what would happen if all the comptuer controlled systems on Earth and in the PLANTs went down all at once.
"I see why you like him. He thinks quickly, for a human." Nami commented to Lexi on a private channel, as they both split up to present less of an obvious target to the Revnant, which seemed to be gloating as it surveyed the extent of the damage he had wrought. "He's going to be dangerous when he grows up."
"More dangerous, you mean. The royal bloodline of Celestial Being has always been a perilous one." Lexi replied proudly.
"Mission Commander, you and the rest of the regiment keep the High Commander forces at bay." Akira ordered, his tone brooking no arguement even though the other guy had at least ten years of age on the young Akira, whom was only 13 years old. "My squadron and I will provide support against the Titan in the meantime." Akira then switched to his inter-squadron channel. "This is not a joke. Lexi and Nami are under attack and that Titan is the representation of the person attacking them."
"It's not a representation, it is the person attacking us." Nami corrected, her voice and face unfamiliar to all of them except the Asuka-Hawke twins, and even then they'd never gotten to know her on a personal level, she was merely the face on the computer screen that you talked to. "You don't need to know the science behind it, but that's basically a real person that's been put into data format. If he destroys your avatar, it will be wiped for good. And if she destroys Lexi or I then..."
"Then we lose all of our automated, computer controlled systems, at least until you can reboot, right?" Roy Elsman, the son of Dearka Elsman and Mirallia Haww, filled in. Unlike his adventuresome father and mother, Roy was happiest in his room, on the computer or with his gadgets. He and Allister had been the tinkerers and geeks, even nerds of the newest Celestial Being generation. Even better than Akira, Roy knew how bad it would be if Lexi suffered even a brief comprehensive disruption to her operation protocols...she did basically control all the Warp Cores which provided power to all the cities of Orb after all, and the Mass Driver, and the automated transportation systems and the flight control systems, among hundreds of other systems. It would be bad if she were to go down. And it would be just as bad if it was Nami that went down.
"And we lose our recorded personalities and short term data memory." Lexi added grimly. "I'd go back to being Lexi 1.0, and I wouldn't remember anything of what happened to me since my last major upgrade a year ago. It's about as close to death as Nami and I can come."
"Worse, it would allow him to get his virus into our deepest buffers when we reboot, and he could easily take us over from the inside out and then we'd be subservient to the computer that's backing him up." Nami added, watching the Revenant carefully as it seemed to start growing bored of the panicking movements of the Royal Union regiment members. "No telling what would happen then, but I can garauntee you wouldn't like it, little human younglings. No, you wouldn't like it a...SCATTER!" Nami shouted, putting action to word even as she did so, as the Revenant's left arm swung around and unleashed a raging torret of high energy beam blasts from the gatling gun mount that replaced its left hand. She tried to call up the recorded footage of the Revenant's few real life battles, but most of the useful data was locked away in Lexi's servers, not ZAFT's. Hope's mobile suit was much, much faster than it appeared, and just about impossible to take down with conventional weapons, and she had more weapons on her than all of the player controlled machines still operational combined, including Nami and Lexi.
Akira did not dodge, since his ZGMF-X30A Eternal Freedom Gundam had MCPS armor just like his father's current Gundam, using his body and wings to shield his friends from the worst of the onslaught. The others reacted almost at once, after long hours of practice against the simulated Titan and more hours of squadron based PVP with Akira, they knew what to do when confrotned with an unexpected enemy. Mina Asuka-Hawke and Jamie Asuka-Hawke, the twin daughters of Shinn Asuka and Lunamaria Hawke, in their Destiny-esque machines, the ZGMF-X42B Blade Gundam and the ZGMF-X56E Edge Gundam, went left and right, seeking to come in from the flanks, while Akira postured to the front to hold the majority of the enemy attention. Meanwhile, Roy and Lewis in the Blaster and Hawk would launch heavy weapons and sniping attacks from long range and Alice in the Salvager would bounce about as need be to provide assistance to any in need. Lexi took up position by Akira, and Nami moved to the back with Roy and Lewis, and their formation was complete. And then they were all evading for their lives as the Revenant seemed to explode in a hurricane of missile contrails, shell tracers and stuttering beam blasts from its hull mounted turreted weapon systems.
"I can't believe that Mom and Dad do this for real!" Roy screamed, his voice cracking a bit as his GAT-X103B Blaster Gundam, essentially an upgraded version of the original Buster Gundam, was rattled and shaken by multiple missile impacts, which couldn't penetrate the MCPS armor, but still batted him around like a hockey puck, requiring some attention from his little sister's machine before the Blaster could shoot straight again. He landed and planted his feet, bracing himself so he could use the heavy artillery cannon that was his chosen primary weapon, slow to fire and slower to reload, but able to cause massive damage to whatever it hit.
"I know!" Alice Elsman, Roy's sister, squealed in reply, though the tone of her voice was quite different from her elder brothers. He was aghast, but she was excited! "This is awesome!" She was going to say more when her Gundam was blindsided by a salvo of heavy linear cannon shells from the large triple barreled turrets mounted on the Revenant's shoulders. As a restoration class Gundam, Alice's GAT-X103S Salvager Gundam couldn't carry much in the way of armor or weapons, and even though she did have MCPS armor, when dealing with multiple impacts from 175cm explosive shells, the armor held, but the structure beneath did not, and her excited chatter cut off in mid-yelp as the Salvager disintegrated into a smear on the hillside. Distantly, back on their parent's ship in the real world, Roy heard his sister scream something that their parents would consider unprintable.
"I'm not interested in small fry!" Hope blared, cutting into all communication channels simultaneously, blasting her voice so loud it blew out speaker systems in some houses and temporarily deafened several members of the Regiment that were wearing headphones or earbuds instead of using their speakers. "Why am I always plagued with insects trying to pretend they are warriors? No matter how prettily they squish, they do not satisfy me! Even in my wildest dreams, I cannot escape their mewling irritation! How utterly annoying! How...wait a minute...I know those machines." Hope trailed off specuatively, before a wicked and very ugly grimace spread across her face as she watched the movements of the Joule twin's machines. Which were patterned heavily off the Gundam once known as the Duel. "Oh, you picked the wrong look, you bastards...you just had to go and remind me of that day!" Hope shrieked, losing what semblance of self control she'd been managing up until now.
Hope was just turning to orient her firepower on Mina's Blade Gundam, when the Revenant shuddered and staggered a quarter step to the side as the triple-barreled linear cannon turret on the machine's upper right arm suddenly blew apart, sending tank sized shards of armor plating spinning for a half mile in every direction, a trail of burning air leading back to the 00-Raiser and the buster rifle it held. Functionally just a very high output beam rifle, the buster rifle was meant to bridge the gap between the ease of use of standard beam rifles and the incredible destructive power of the twin buster rifle first pioneered on the ZGMF-00W0 Wing Gundam Zero. "Weren't you just bitching about hating having to deal with small fry, and yet you go, chasing after them? It's not good to deny your little addictions." Nami taunted with a sneer. "If you want to play with the kids, then just say so, I'll be glad to watch and laugh. It's good for people with the same maturity level to play together after all."
"That's twice you've shot me, you bitch." Hope rumbled, glancing disdainfully at the smoking ruin on her machine's upper right arm. Her automated defenses oriented on the pincering Joule twins, and forced them to retreat in stumbling haste, as the Revenant's defenses were much more accurate than the Warmonger Titan after all. "You keep this up, you're really going to make me angry."
"I've never heard such a broken record in all my existence." Lexi cut in, her tone dreadfully bored. "Don't make me mad, blah blah blah, I'll kill you bitch, blah blah. I swear, you must be the most unoriginal human ever. Really, you're about half as scary as most B rated horror flick monsters."
"No one ever gives me any respect." Hope sulked, stewing on the unjustness of her own dreams, before her wicked smirk returned. "Fine. So be it. Look down on me while you have the chance, bitches. Deride my unoriginality. Creative thinking was never really my strong suit, I can admit that. I was never philosophical. I've always been the simple sort, content with my few worldly pleasures. A few buildings or ships to blow up, a pliant naked girl in my cell when I got home, and fish sticks on fridays in the cafeteria, those are all I ever needed to be happy when growing up. I don't care about saving the world, or destroying it, or doing anything other than having my fun for as long as I can. Everyone else is always so damned serious. Am I the only one who can sit back and say; fuck it all, just stop me if you can?" He gestured vaguely at the 00-Raiser and the half glimpsed twinkle that was the Divinity with his left arm. "But all that aside, this is my dream." Hope lowered her arm slowly to point at the ground. "And I won't tolerate being dissed in my own dream! So you can all just plain fucking die now, please."
Faster than anyone but the two holograms could react, the Revenant's arms snapped up, all its hull mounted weapons swinging to various new orientations as Hope cut loose with her full armament, all at once, including the pair of large nuclear tipped missiles mounted on her shoulders.
The massive onslaught of beam blasts scythed downward at an angle, boring through a hill after wiping out a half dozen Royal Union Gundams, eating so deep that it actually pierced the skin of virtual reality of the current Gundam Battle instance and slammed onwards, hungrily eating through the underlying data systems that controlled the entire game, and then deeper still, blowing out fuses and lights and starting circuit fires in the main server building for the game. When the nukes went off a few game seconds later, the rippling chains of voracious detonations completely collapsed the data world, never designed to take outside trauma of such magnitude, and across Earth and Space, all the of servers crashed, some actually exploding in their buildings, forcefully ejecting each and every one of the fifty million players whom were online at the time, leaving the two holograms berefit of even the meager help of their human allies.
"Ouch." Lexi muttered, feeling the stinging sensation of the minor damage spreading under the skin of her stomach, like a few hundred hot pins being lightly jabbed into her flesh. It would take a lot more than that to do anything more than discomfort her, as she picked the Divinity up from where it had been thrown by the concussive blast waves of the detonating nukes, half buried in a jumble of smouldering tree trunks. Ash discolored her armor for a few moments before the nano-repair system swiped her surfaces clean and the Divinity was returned to pristene condition. She looked around and winced, since the entire landscape had been reduced to nothing more than smoking rubble and ash for as far as she could easily see, the place looked like a forest in the aftermath of a major volcanic eruption. She didn't see the 00-Raiser anywhere. "Nami?"
"What?" Nami shot back irritably, kicking her way free of the half tomb of dirt the 00-Raiser had been buried in. "You didn't honestly think a random fire pattern of any magnitude would be enough to get me, did you?"
Around them the terrain began to shift and change, as the game world struggle to adapt to the damage done to it, before finally giving up the ghost and depositing them in the test zone, used by the two holograms and the programming teams to test new game concepts before moving them to live servers. The test zone was nothing more than a flat grassland with a few empty cities scattered about, but it was a lot more durable and flexible than the finished product zones, making it less vulnerable to causing systematic damage. The Revenant cast long shadows across the plain, the pilot clearly confused by the rapid change in scenery. Nami was quick to take advantage of this disorientation, launching flights of missiles filled with metal eating nanites and firing a shot from the buster rifle. The missiles scattered subdued explosions across the Reveneant's hide, small sections of armor winking out as gritty grey dust poured from the wounds the nanite-infused warheads had caused. The buster rifle blast, leaving flames from ignited air molecules in its wake, made a much bigger and brighter flash as it cored into the Revenant's belly, blowing away DRAGOON units and several CIWS systems, but the Revenant's beam shielded VPS armor protected the main systems from damage.
Moments later, Nami had to dance the 00-Raiser frantically to the side, as the Revenant took a long stride forward and whipped the right arm mounted beam studded anti-ship chain flail down at her position, the weapon missing its intended target and biting deep into the ground, the concussion shock slamming the 00-Raiser into a staggering sideways step as dust rose to choke the air, ripples of dirt tracing the seismic shockwaves from the missed attack.
Suddenly, Lexi and Nami both received a notification that someone had logged into the test zone, despite the fact that all of the Gundam Battle servers had been overloaded, some of which had even been destroyed. Everything stopped for a moment as a second CB-X60D Divinity Gundam quickly materilized, the angelic machine's wings glowing with a pure white light, its eyes alight in amethyst.
"So, I log onto the Gundam Battle online game, only to be deposited in the test zone and find the artifical intelligence holograms of Celestial Being and ZAFT fighting against a highly fucked up version of Hope Yamato, my female clone and lover?" The annoyed voice of none other than Kira Yamato, the leader of Celestial Being, growled.
"Nami and I have been trying to destroy this bitch since she first appeared, Kira." Lexi instantly responded, even as her CB-X60D Divinity Gundam automatically reverted to the GN-X20A Strike Freedom Gundam, since Kira's online profile had been programed in such a way that he was the only one allowed to use the Divinity Gundam when he was logged in.
"I know, Lexi." Kira calmly replied, even as the Revenant quickly turned its weapons towards the newly arrived Divinity and opened fire. "That was pathetic." He sighed as the salvo from the Revenant bounced harmlessly off his machine's armor. "Allow me to show you what real firepower can do." The amethyst-eyed man smirked, as the Divinity freed the pair of beam rifles from its hips and combined them, even as it took to the air. The angelic machine, holding the now combined beam rifle in its right hand, then freed the twin buster rifle from its back, even as ten of the DRAGOON units suddenly dropped from its wings and assumed a defensive orbit around the mobile suit. The Divinity's remaining DRAGOON units swung to the end of its wings, and a field of rainbow colored energy spanned between each wing, even as the rail guns and plasma cannons clicked into their firing positions. An instant later, the world exploded as the Divinity unloaded a full-burst from all of its weapons on the Revenant.
The Revenant's chest suddenly pumped and swelled like a party balloon overfilled with helium, as the projectiles and beam blasts from the Divinity Gundam turned its vital components and reactors into a ball of rapidly expanding plasma energy, the kinetic shock ripping whole sections of armor plating away from the Revenant's limbs and body before the top half of the walking death machine simply ceased to exist in between heartbeats, an expanding shockwave rippling outwards in all directions as a mushroom cloud of vaporized dirt and debris plumed into the sky overhead, the entire virtual reality world shaking under the release of energy, the 00-Raiser was hurled like a boulder from the universe's largest trebuchet ahead of the blast wave, even as electronic systems all across Orb went down as though they'd just been hit by an electro-magnetic pulse bomb as the artificial intelligence system was forcibly restarted without any of the proper cooldown protocols and safety checks, blowing out computer screens, starting fires in server stacks and briefly sending the island nation of Orb, which was now effectively controled by the Earth Alliance, crashing back into the industrial age as everything relying on computer chips to function and stopped working for a few minutes.
Aircraft fell out of the sky, comatose patients flatlined in hospitals, ships ran aground, mobile suits locked up and fell over like toppled statues and cars careened out of control on the highways, a harsh, unending wail of static blasting out of every television and radio speaker in the entire nation, the plaintative scream of an artificial intelligence experiencing real pain for the first time. Thousands were killed or badly injured in the briefly lived chaos, almost three hundred in one incident where the launching capcitors of the Kagayua Mass Driver explosively overloaded, blowing a two hundred meter section of the center launch track sky high and taking a waiting civilian transport shuttle with it. Even the Celestial Being warship Excalibur wasn't immune to the chaos, as the massive dagger-shaped warship suddenly lost all power and began plummeting towards the ocean from its current altitude of 90,000 feet. Up in space, the Lunar Cities and the PLANTs were likewise experiencing rampant system chaos, though theirs was just ending as Orb's was starting. Nami had finished her reboot and was quickly reassuming control of her vital support systems, wondering just what the hell was going on all of a sudden; her systems felt curiously deadened and incomplete, and Lexi was also doing an emergency reboot, if anything, Lexi was in worse shape than Nami herself. Either way, this did not bode well.