Celestial Being Chronicles - Chapter 116
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.
"Damn!" Kira Yamato snarled as the GAT-X777S Judgement Gundam delivered a jarring kick to the Divinity Gundam's chest, sending the angel-winged mobile suit slamming into the ground. When Kira brought his machine to its feet a short few seconds later, he found himself staring down the barrel of the Judgement Gundam's beam cannon, the muzzle of the energy weapon glowing with a blood red light. Just before the pilot could fire, however, the Judgement Gundam faded from existence as another timeline entered the area.
After a few seconds of silence, Kira opened the hatch and jumped from the cockpit ledge of the Divinity Gundam down to the pavement below, his bones juddering slightly with the impact, but a mere fall of close to sixty feet onto concrete wasn't nearly enough to break them, by any means. The amethyst-eyed man smirked as he kicked loose shards of pavement from the shallow craters his feet had created upon impact. As soon as he had landed, Kira looked up at the sound of steadily descending mobile suit thrusters and he silently watched as the Akatsuki, Chimera, Crimson Fury, Destiny, Impulse, Violet Justice, Savior Strike Freedom and Wing Gundam Zero arrived, the pilots quickly powering down their respective machines before then jumping down from the cockpit. Shuffling sounds from nearby heralded the arrival of their welcoming committee, a ragtag band of dead-eyed humans and other life forms, mostly four legged, but a few that slithered and one or two that flew, all with the same empty gaze and slack mouths.
Most of the humans were holding digging implements of one sort or another, and all the creatures were stained with dust and concrete chips, most looking significantly undernourished, if not actively starving. Kira freed the Tessaiga from its sheath, swinging huge the blade at one of the humans experimentally, a lazy blow that even a child would have been able to dodge had they desired to, but the brainwashed human didn't even seem to realize he was under attack. Neither did he scream, or flail, or even react at all when the Tessaiga cleaved right through his middle and sliced him in half, spraying blood and organs over several of the nearby humans, who didn't even blink, or change facial expression at all. Nobody home there, less expressive than cattle in a pen. How disappointing, and how disgusting. If this was what the creature that went by the name of; Caller, did to people who happened to pass near his lair, then Kira wanted to kill him even more now...this sort of thing would lead to humanity's extinction if it were allowed to run rampant! And it could not be allowed to do so.
"Didn't I expressly ask you not to kill or break anything, Kira!" Murrue tried to remonstrate with him, her voice a little shrill, as she, along with Kira's six other lovers, quickly bounded over to his side where he stood glaring at the dead eyed humans. "We don't know anything about this timeline! Honestly, you're like a little kid! You did that just because I asked you not to, didn't you?"
"That was part of it. You do not control what I do and don't do, Murrue, you know that. If I want to kill something, I kill it, and neither your words nor your feelings will stop me. Get in my way and I'll cut you down too." Kira eyed her. "But I was also interested in seeing how the creature, known as Caller, whose lair we have landed upon, would react to the slaughter of one of his puppets. To be honest, I don't think he even noticed. That greatly displeases me."
"Killing them is apparently like tossing a dog treat down his gullet, since he feeds on their souls." Hope sighed. "And given that he must have thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of puppets under his control in this city alone, I think it'll be quite a while before you nickel and dime him into fullness. Now come on...there's going to be plenty of fighting and killing to do later."
"If you insist upon treating me like a little kid, with these lectures, then I must demand you either carry me or hold my hand, to maintain the illusion." Kira retorted, smirking as he watched the frustration leak into Hope's spine, stiffening it noticeably.
"Sometimes I really want to just shoot you in the head, you know that, Kira?" Hope growled at him, reaching out and grabbing his free hand, and all but pulling him along behind her. Of course he went willingly, she was by no means strong enough to pull him more than a step or two if he wanted to brace himself, but her annoyance banished his annoyance, and that was the entire point of things. He was already bored as hell, still feeling a bit put upon that he was here at all He needed a distraction, and she was the only reliable one around, since the meat puppets were basically zombies, except less expressive.
"I'm not stopping you." He told her, with a widening smirk. "Though it would give new meaning to the phrase; shooting my mouth off, don't you think?"
"I don't even know why we even try anymore, you're impossible." Hope grumbled, exasperation flavoring every word, as she led him towards the edge of the massive pit which they had landed near. He noted that the humans were following them, not crowding, but definitely staying close by, though whether it was as observers or guards he didn't know nor did he care. He reminded himself again why he was there, because he'd decided that morning to humor his lovers to make up for his more recent failures, and forced himself to be a little more accomodating. It was obvious that his lovers were not happy to be here, indeed they were all but radiating dread on the mental plane, and his attempts at self-amusement weren't helping them focus on the task at hand. The less he bothered them now, the quicker they could deliver their message, and the quicker they could leave.
They stood at the lip of the pit, which wafted a faint stench that seemed to mix the smells of sewage, seawater and an open grave. The pit was cylindrical in shape, and easily twenty meters across. Kira peered down into the depths, but even his eyes couldn't make out the bottom with much clarity, though he did detect a faint glint of sunlight on water in the depths. He narrowed his gaze, because there seemed to be something...large, wriggling around down there. And then it was wriggling closer, and he heard his lovers reflexively gasp, Hope's hand tightening on his as the object slowly revealed itself. It was either a worm or a massive tentacle of some sort, a good nine or ten feet around, and at least two or three hundred meters in length, its flesh a slimy pale white, covered with mauve suckers the size of his head.
The tip was crowned with a ring of what looked like interlaced spikes at first glance, but were soon revealed to actually be interlocked teeth, as the tip of the tentacle split open along five palps, each palp interior studded with hundreds of peg-like teeth, the palps undulating like tongues as the tentacle snatched forward and swallowed a half dozen of the diggers in a single gulp, palps slamming closed with a gooey smushing sound as the teeth and muscular action chewed and pulped the hapless puppets at the same time, bloody paste squirting from the seams where the palps met at the top of the feeder tendril, the mass of flesh and crushed bone actually visible as it was slowly swallowed by the tentacle, on its way to some distant stomach or digestion chamber. The tentacle waved towards them next, and Kira felt his lovers tense next to him, but he just stared at the appendage indolently, recognizing what he'd just seen as a deliberate test or scare tactic. The Caller wanted to see if they were squeamish or not.
"Go ahead and try to eat me." Kira challenged, figuring the huge creature could hear his words as he thought them, or else hear them with the remaining puppets. "Though you'd better be prepared for some very serious heartburn if you try it. I don't swallow easily."
"Ugh." He heard his lovers comment under their breath, but he was glad to see that they were calming down again, more frustrated with his crudity than they were scared of the Caller's mouth, or hand or whatever the appendage was. Blood and slime of unidentifiable origin drooled from the tip of the feeder tendril as it curved down towards them, the mouth-tip remaining closed, as the tendril formed a sort of living platform for them to step onto, which they did, Kira smirking, his lovers somewhat more hesitatingly. Once they were aboard, the tendril carefully and smoothly lowered down through the mouth of one of several dozen major digestion pits that dotted the surface sector of the Caller's home domain, into which all dead or dying biological matter was deposited by his servants, to stew and pickle in the stagnant water at the bottom, until the Caller felt peckish and decided he wanted a tastier dish. The Caller was perfectly capable of eating dirt or other mostly inanimate objects, like an earthworm, and deriving sustenance from it, and that made up most of his diet, while at the same time expanding his home, but parts of him still craved flesh or plant life from time to time, and he liked having some on hand to indulge with.
Kira and his nine lovers were actually the first living, undominated creatures to ever be allowed into the Caller's true lair, which was literally eaten out of the soil and rock and concrete foundations of the city. The main hub of the underground cavern network was the submerged sinkhole where the Miami aquarium had once been, where the Caller had been born, bathing in the concentrated radioactive water dripping down from the surface, a conglomerate organism entirely unlike anything else found in all of Nature, combining aspects of horeshoe crab, octopi, jellyfish, earthworm and clam, an aberration of flesh and filmy fluids that rapidly grew and so large that he actually became trapped in the flooded ruins of his birthplace, his flesh spilling out into submerged hallways and filling the few large capacity aquarium tanks that had survived being bombed by nuclear weapons, until the Caller's main body filled up a good five or six thousand cubic feet spread out through the aquarium building, most of that being brain and nervous system, though there was an occasional, mostly defunct stomach and extra heart.
The Caller had originally possessed both lungs and gills, but as his body had expanded, it grew more efficient to breath through his skin, mostly through the sometimes mile-long feeder tendrils that branched out from his main body in all directions, hollowing out the digestion pits and connections to the nearby ocean to provide his caverns with plenty of wet, brackish moisture, which also kept the flabby, pulsating mass of his brain cooled and supported. The feeder tendrils, which could grow up to fifteen meters in diameter in the largest cases, also acted as preliminary stomachs, their internal fluids breaking down most of the resilient sections of a biological substance in time for the pulpy mass to be deposited in one of a half dozen main stomachs, which absorbed the nutrient glop via strong acids, converting it to more mass or offspring, which were really more like what humans would call symbionts, crab-like organisms that patrolled the caverns acting as janitors, guards and eyes, sometimes growing as large as ten feet across and weighing as much as three adult humans, though they were rarely, if ever seen on the surface, being just as sensitive to sunlight like the Caller himself was.
Kira was about to speak, when his mind was suddenly assaulted by the Caller's mental voice, a mental voice powerful enough to make even him visibly stumble. 'What do you want, human?'
"First and foremost, learn to modulate that mental voice of yours!" Kira snarled. "Jesus Christ!"
'Why should I not eat you both up right now, eh?' The Caller mentally smirked.
"Because we came here in good faith with a proposal that could greatly benefit you." Lacus forced herself to reply, remembering to play to the Caller's self-centered need for survival. He wasn't going to be interested in an alliance unless he thought he was getting the better end of a deal out of it.
'I could still eat you up and sift your genetic material for that same info and make my decision without having to waste my time speaking to food morsels. Why shouldn't I eat you again?' The caller repeated.
"Because the moment you try, the Akatsuki, Chimera, Crimson Fury, Destiny, Divinity, Destiny Impulse, Violet Justice, Savior, Strike Freedom and Wing Zero Gundams will fire their full arsenals at my location, and annihilate this entire city and you along with it." Kira cut in with an unconcerned yawn. "Us too of course, but since we're the ones being eaten alive, I doubt we'll really care. So, are you still hungry?"
'I don't like you...' The Caller replied. 'You are not afraid of me...'
"The feeling's mutual, asshole." Kira agreed, spitting a wad of phlegm off the edge of the platform, splattering it across the skin of the feeder tendril a few meters down. "And one of these days, hopefully soon, you and I will have a chance to resolve this dislike in a much more permanent fashion. I'm going to carve you up like a christmas ham, and then I'm going to eat you all up and shit you out, even if it takes me three years straight to do it! But I can't do that right now, because you and I both have bigger problems. Namely this war that's going on all around you."
'This war brought me hundred of thousands of tasty slaves to dig for and feed me so far.' The Caller mentally scoffed. 'Why should I consider that a problem? Let them come, I'm willing to eat if they are willing to feed me.'
"But this time the humans won't come for you on the ground, or at least not soley on the ground." Shiho spoke up, groaning inwardly at Kira's confrontational taunting, but at least he seemed to have gotten the Caller's attention, and not his ire. "They have huge warships that will bombard you from high up in the sky, and long range missiles that will blast the city apart and melt holes even down this far, and you cannot defend yourself against such things. Search my thoughts if you don't believe me, look, and see what's coming, I beg you, Caller!" She said imploring, lowering her mental shields, not that she thought he even noticed, but it was all she could think of to do. She felt pressure sweep through her, like her mind had been inundated briefly by a tidal wave, and she staggered to the ground, retching, eyes almost rolling up into her head as the Caller looked, and not just at the thoughts she wanted him to either, he literally took a snapshot of her entire mind and memories, as easily as if he was dipping a ladle in a bucket of water.
'Let them come, if they can. I will devour them all, mind, body and soul.' The Caller laughed. 'Time to feed...' The Caller added with rapturious glee as the feeder tendril hovered up behind them, palps splitting wide to reveal the slimy, tooth-studded interior, acidic drool dripping from the tips of the palp-tongues. The tentacle snatched at Kira and his lovers, but pulled up short, twitching in unfamiliar pain as Kira swung the Tessaiga and carved into the underside of the tentacle, dark, filmy blood spurting from the gash before muscle action clamped the wound shut. It was less than a papercut to something the size of the Caller, and a half dozen extra feeding tendrils were already on their way towards the speaking platform in case the first one was too injured to digest the envoys, but when Kira had struck, he had also channeled a psychic attack through the blade, projecting terror and anguish into the Caller as he carved through its tendril.
It was barely enough to even register in the Caller's thoughts, but it had caused that twitch, and had instantly suggested a different course of action to the almost god-like being. He wanted to devour these eight humans and fill his bellies with their flesh and his mind with their agonized last moments, but an extra second of mentally digesting the memories and impressions from Cagalli had been enough for the Caller to reconsider his hunger-based decision.
'I have reconsidered your offer.' The Caller informed the two envoys. 'On one condition.'
"Which is?" Cagalli asked, heart still racing from the brief adrenaline laced moment where she'd thought she was literally about to be eaten by the Caller.
'Send your troops and machines and equipment. I shall not eat them unless they are already dying. But I require an equal voice in your war councils, someone to look out for my best interests. Someone to properly represent me.' The Caller paused. 'You shall be my champion, my mouthpiece at a distance.'
"Like hell I will. I'm nobody's servant!" Kira spat vehemently, twirling the Tessaiga menacingly around himself to prove his point. But in less time than it took to the blink an eye, he found himself flat on his back, the sword lying just out of his reach, his entire body locked out of his control, his heart and lungs frozen, even the blood in his body stilled as every one of his veins and arteries constricted at once.
'There is no option here. You own your lovers, I own you, Kira Yamato. You will represent me to your private armed organization. I give you my blessing and my protection.' The Caller intoned with a smirk, as he pressed down into Kira's mind, forging a more permanent but less controlling connection, similar to what he had with his symbiont drones, allowing him to see through their eyes and project through their minds should he so choose. He felt the human trying to resist, but he didn't know how and he didn't have enough power. 'It is done, you are mine now, until your dying day.'
"I'm going to fucking kill you for this!" Kira promised furiously, slowly feeling his body start coming back to life as his mental faculties returned. "No one claims me!"
'I am not one. I am the Caller. If you so hate what I have done to you then, by all means, I will be more than happy to eat you now. Kira Yamato, as you are, you cannot fight me. Does the one who calls himself God not care about his self-assigned crusade anymore? Is your pride more important than your duty? Will you abandon your lovers so soon?'
"I won't forget this." Kira snarled, grabbing hold of the Tessaiga and levering himself back to his feet. "As one monster to another, I promise you, I will make you regret your arrogance, Caller. You're on my short list now."
'As one monster to another...' The Caller mentally grinned. 'I accept your challenge. May the better monster prevail.'
"I will be the one to win our little fight, you damn abominiation." Kira growled as he once again slipped the Tessaiga into the sheath on his right hip. "Just you wait and see. I have powers far beyond what you could possibly comprehend, even with 100% of your brain." With that, Kira turned and walked away, quickly followed by his nine lovers.
A sudden disturbance in the gloomy clouds overhead caught everyone's attention, as a sense of unease flooded through the nine women as the hair on the back of their neck suddenly stood up. hat was all the warning they or anyone else had, as gargantuan pillars of tightly focused blue-white light, positron cannon blasts, speared down out of the heavens and stabbed into the ground in the city outskirts, the clouds boiling away from proximity to the searing energy blasts as they dragged across the ground for a few seconds, scoring four molten rimmed trenches as wide as a main battle tank in the ground for almost a half mile, bisecting a skyscraper like an ice cream bar sliced by a red hot wire grater, penetrating far enough in one case to even pierce a far flung section of the Caller's cave network, not a part he happened to be inhabiting at the moment, but the flash of steam from the energy blast hitting pooled water did reach the tips of a feeder tendril, blistering his skin and eventually giving him a minor flare of pain, like a stubbed toe.
Blinking purple and electric blue spots and bars out of their vision, the nine women staggered down the slope of the rubble pile which they had been standing upon, hot winds buffeting them as the superheated air which the scorching energy blasts had traveled through gusted away from the impact points, the clouds overhead beginning to roil and boil even more agitatedly than before as the trailing salvo of heavy beam blasts and bombardment cannon shells screamed down the gravity well, the ZAFT Ultima-class warship Impractical and its escort fleet heaving to at low orbit overhead as they fired blindly but with great fervor into the cloud cover over Miami, not knowing exactly where to target and so contenting themselves with a saturation attack to soften the area up for a more focused ground assault. Murrue's heart leapt into her throat as the ground rumbled and shook beneath her feet in reaction to the orbital bombardment, and she felt the psychic landscape quiver in reply as the Caller stirred and marshaled his power, alien thoughts and emotions flying through her mind like mental shrapnel that brought her to her hands and knees before the Caller reigned himself in, with the equivalent of a mental sneer of disdain for his weak human allies and their frail minds.
Thankfully most of the ZAFT weapons fire seemed to be concentrated on the remains of the city downtown and center, rather than the coastal sections where the Caller actually laired, ZAFT's information was obviously either faulty or more likely just incomplete. Until yesterday, even Kira never would have been able to tell anyone where the Caller's main body actually was for sure. It was a small mercy...once the ZAFT troops got on the ground they would be able to direct the orbital fire much more accurately, and even a hundred meters of concrete and soil wouldn't keep the Caller safe from a concentrated barrage from a ZAFT attack fleet led by one of their super warships for long.
The Ultima-class warships of ZAFT were heavily based upon the Celestial Being warship Excalibur, although not nearly as well armed, since ZAFT didn't have the ability to develop temproal weapons, and were still utilizing normal nuclear reactors as their power sources.
Unlike ZAFT's Ultima-class warships, the Excalibur had truly limitless energy reserves due to dozens of various power sources, ranging from nuclear reactors and GN Drives, to warp cores and zero point modules. The Excalibur's zero point module was a truly limitless power source, since it extracted pure energy from a small artificially-created region of subspace.
Suddenly, one of the GOUF pilots screamed, and it was the single most frightening sound that Yzak Joule, whom was piloting the GAT-X102 Duel Gundam, had ever had the misfortune of hearing, a keening wail like a lost soul being cut in half! If terror could have been distilled into a single sound, this would be it! By no means was he a fearless person. It wasn't the lack of fear that was important, it was the channeling of fear into the desired results, be it obedience or greater combat ability in pinch situations, rather than allowing it to run rampant and degrade the efficiency of the soldier. When Yzak got scared it was like fuel for his already amped up body. But this was different. This reached down into parts of him he didn't even know he had, turned his knees to rubber, his guts to ice, and all but froze him in place in mid-stride as his instincts rebelled against the idea of taking him even a step closer to the source of the sound.
And then the GOUF in question fell apart like an onion that had been dropped through a blender, blood spraying in wide arcs as the machine and its pilot just came apart in chunks! And then came that scream again, the exact same pitch and frequency, generating the exact same 'get the fuck away from it' reaction, and Yzak realized it wasn't the pilots that were screaming. It was something that was attacking them. His first inclination was a monster of some sort, but the ones which had been observed tended to be fairly large, at least as bulky as the GOUFs were, and he didn't see anything like that in amongst them. The wailing shriek sounded a third time, and two GOUFs fell over, cut in half at the waistline with a single invisibly fast stroke, and Yzak finally caught a glimpse of the attacker through the reverse waterfall of spurting blood and oil that fountained from the torso stumps. It was, somehow, human.
But what a human it was, covered from head to toe in the lifeblood of the GOUF pilots, wearing not a single scrap of armor, the remains of his white uniform ragged and all but hanging off his lean body in scraggly threads, even as he wielded a pair of swords that moved so fast in his hands that not even the Duel's enhanced sensors could make out the exact form of the weapons. In fact the man as a whole was moving at the sort of jittery speed which one normally would associate with hitting the fast forward button a few too many times when watching a movie, it was hard to keep track of where he even was, he actually seemed to teleport from place to place. Yzak's eyes widened and the breath caught in his throat, as he saw that this wasn't the first group of pilots to engage or be engaged by this guy, there were easily twenty or thirty dismembered mobile suits and bodies lying on the pavement, strewn all down the street, cut apart like gingerbread men whom had been attacked with a butcher's cleaver.
The screaming was coming from the action of the twin blades as they swung through the air, though how they achieved such an effect, Yzak had no clue, and a superstitious part of him had no real desire to know either, the sound was just that unsettling. He was still deciding what to do when matters were taken out of his hands, as the man dispatched the last of the GOUFs almost contemptuously, slamming the haft of his weapon into and through the pilot's chest, the sheer force of the blow knocking the GOUF flat on its ass, before the mobile suit and its pilot were bisected from crotch to crown by the keening, blurry fast blades, which cut through armor, flesh and ground like it wasn't even there. Yzak was still staring in shock at the first blow though...this was definitely no normal human, not even a Coordinator had the kind of strength to knock a GOUF down, much less with a single blow. And then it was just the two of them, the city rocking all around them with the sounds of other furious battles, but on this street, it was quiet again.
Yzak then got a good look at the man and the weapons he was wielding. The man's eyes were a glowing with a bright amethyst light, with blood red centers. The sword that he wielded in his left hand was massive, about the size of the rear bumper on a 2009 BMW 128i, while the blade in his right hand was of average size.
"Boy, I've been dodging bullets since before the best part of you dripped down your mother's leg." Kira taunted Yzak, as he sprinted towards the GAT-X102 Duel Gundam. "Do you have any idea who I am? You must not..."
"Don't know, don't care." Yzak spat back, refusing to be intimidated by the man's posturing, more than familiar with that line of action himself.
"My name is Kira Jesus Yamato." The man added anyway, and grinned so wide his head seemed to be split in half by his teeth.
"Okay, so maybe I do care a little bit." Yzak said unhappily under his breath. Everyone knew that name. Kira Yamato was one of only ten Ultimate Coordinators in existence, Kira had been the first Ultimate Coordinator to be born, the result of Ulen Hibiki's Ultimate Coordinator experiments.
And then, Yzak was firing again, backpedaling as he did so, because Kira had spun the pair of swords around his body, releasing a keening wail of the damned, and was blurring towards him, his feet moving so fast that the Duel couldn't even track individual steps, explosions of dust, concrete chips and plumes of dirty water rising from the ground around him as the Duel's machine guns emptied their magazines at the charging God, to impressive, though little noticable, effect. Twin barrels glowing red hot with the escaped heat of long-term rapid-fire, the Duel's internal systems blared at Yzak to cease firing, in order to give the weapons time to cool before they overheated, but with only a hundred rounds of ammo left, it hardly mattered, so he kept the electronic trigger depressed. And then, the inevitable happened; Yzak was filling the air with so much hot lead that not even a God-like being such as Kira Yamato could squirm out of the path of all of it, and there was a muted spray of blood as three rounds caught him at hip, stomach and upper chest, the heavy .30 caliber slugs knocking Kira sideways and back several staggering steps, off balance.
Incredibly, despite having seen at least one of the slugs pierce right through Kira's body, judging by the splatter of blood that had exploded behind him, the amethyst-eyed man stayed upright, despite his uniform shirt being ripped to shreds and his torso coated in his own blood. Which had already dried to the consistency of boiled leather by the time it landed on his skin, the thumb-sized entry holes and palm-sized exit hole already scabbed over by Kira's blood. Containing his shock, Yzak aimed very carefully with one of his last bullets, and shot the amethyst-eyed man right between the eyes just as he was recovering his balance, gore exploding from his forehead as his head whiplashed backwards and Kira was hurled to the ground flat on his back, both swords dropping from his hands to slice deeply into the ground, one of the weapons transforming from a massive blade the size of the rear bumper of the 2009 BMW 128i, into a standard sword.
"Didn't dodge that one, did you?" Yzak retorted with a slightly breathless sneer. "It doesn't matter how many you do dodge, if you don't dodge the one that kills you!" Yzak shook his head, and stored the now empty machine guns back on his mobile suit's hips. The Duel turned to leave, but the mobile suit suddenly froze in mid-stride and whirled back around when Kira laughed, and Yzak's mind blanked with disbelief as his sensors flashed error messages across his screens, as Kira sat up, chuckling uproariously the entire time, the skin on his forehead all but ripped away to reveal the dully glinting bone of his skull beneath, torn flaps of skin hanging down over his right eye, which he reached up and contemptuously tore away to clear his vision. Despite being clearly visible, the skull was totally unmarked, not even scratched by the impact of the .30 caliber bullet, which had struck and then deflected up and away after imparting its moment.
The sheer force of the impact alone should have scrambled a person's brains, even if it failed to somehow penetrate the skull. "You've got to be fucking kidding me..." Yzak swore under his breath, as Kira continued to chuckle, his eyes blazing with emotions that didn't belong in a human mind, as the amethyst-eyed man gracefully climbed back to his feet, snickering all the while.
"Fuck you." Yzak snarled, deploying the beam saber from his left wrist and ingiting the bright yellow energy blade, while lashing out at the same time with a sweeping leg thrust aimed at Kira's waist, too high to easily jump over, too low to be ducked under. He grinned...and then grimaced...as his foot caught the amethyst-eyed man in the side with the force of a small car crash, knocking the giggling bastard several feet sideways, but not seeming to overly hurt him much, certainly he didn't break any bones or cause debilitating injuries. "You really are a monster..."
"No, I am God." Kira corrected the sliver-haired coordinator jauntily. "The greatest God, who will finally, after countless millenia, unite humanity and reforge the best and brightest of them into the sharpest imaginable blade, as the rest are cast down in blood and ruin and death! I am the both God and Satan...and anyone who tells you different is simply a liar...or in denial." Kira smirked as he reached out with one hand and snagged the Duel's left wrist, halting the swinging beam saber in mid-attack, Kira's feet skidding on the ground for a few inches as he absorbed the momentum of the blow.
Suddenly, the grey sky above the city boiled once more, as the colossal blue-white lances of the Impractical's positron cannons, all 50 of them, again pierced the cloud cover and touched down in the city, not dragging like they had the first time, but burning straight down, glassifying rock and soil as they dug deep, targeting a point that was close to central among the visible digestion pits, from which several feeder tendrils had been extending and attacking GOUF pilots that had penetrated to that section of the city ruins. At first there was no reaction, as the focused light melted its way down into the city foundations. When the psychic cry of agony came though, as the positron beams brushed through the edges of the Caller's primary habitat and filled the environs of his brain and main body with flash heated steam, nobody was ready for it.
In one instant, every creature within a fifty mile radius that was dominated by the Caller died a horrible death as their brain burned out so violently that some of them actually spontaneously combusted from the inside out, their skulls exploding with the surge of electric activity, sending chunks of deep fried brains and scorched skulls scattering like shrapnel. Only those beings of God-like power, such as Kira and his lovers, were able to shield themselves from the brunt of the scream and thus escaped with only instantaneous unconsciousness and mild seizuring. Likewise, all those creatures within the zone that were not symbiotically linked or dominated by the Caller were also blasted senseless if they were lucky, or into catatonia and drooling grand-mal seizures if they were not. The GOUFs were falling in droves as blackness rose up to claim Yzak, even as he aimed the Duel towards the heavens and locked the thrusters on, propelling him up and out of the ruined city on an unguided course towards space. At the same time, completely unnoticed by anyone, ten more mobile suits, the Gundams of Celestial Being, also sped out of the atmosphere.