Celestial Being Chronicles - Chapter 136

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's more skilled than you...you yourself have admitted this in the past, and that's when he wasn't fully serious about things, unlike now. His Gundam is technologically more advanced than both of ours, admittedly not by very much, but by enough to matter. As both a Newtype and an Ultimate Coordinator, he is stronger than both of us, perhaps even combined. And he has access to a level of Seed boosting that is far and above superior to our own. Oh yes, and, in the past, you have never beaten him despite several attempts. In fact, once he had a bit of time to adjust to flying a Gundam in combat, he routinely kicked your sweet little ass every time you encountered him, sometimes with truly embarrassing ease! Now you know I believe in you pretty much without conditions, Hope, but I can't help but feel your confidence today is unjustified, can you see where I'm coming from here?" Mayu Asuka was plainly struggling to keep her tone level and reasonable as she sat on the bridge of the Minerva, and not succeeding particularly well.

"Well, you're not wrong about any of that." Hope admitted from the cockpit of her Destiny Gundam, though she did not waver in her course for the Divinity, which was currently engaged with the bulk of the Orb defensive forces that were trying to dig in throughout the capital city. "But it doesn't change the fact that you and I are two the few people who realistically stand a chance against him, any chance at all. I didn't send Athrun away because I was worried about his ability to attack Kira, not really. I sent him away because we both know he's not at top form even if his head was in the game, and if we're going to go after Kira, I can't afford to be looking out for anyone else but us. Because, goddamn it, he IS my friend after all, and besides, it's not like we're really entirely helpless against him. We do have one or two strategies in reserve for this kind of situation, don't we?"

"You want to use that plan? Hope, when I suggested that, I was both drunk and pissed off, I didn't mean it seriously!'

"Regardless, it was a good idea and it might very well be our best and only shot at beating him now. That's assuming you can actually pull it off." Hope challenged her, knowing that she wasn't the sort to back down from a challenge, the same way he was.

Hope activated her Seed Mode, knowing that if this battle wasn't over with in the first few exchanges between them, then it wouldn't be her who was victorious, so there was no reason to hold anything back. Kira was, damn him, just too fucking good at Gundam combat, too creative with his DRAGOON units, too experienced even, for any strategy involving trying to wear him down to work, at least not without massive casualties on the other side. And he was also one of the few people that seemed to become stronger and more effective with increasing numbers of enemies arrayed against him, especially if they were heavy on beam weaponry. So if you wanted to beat him, basically you had to get up close and personal as fast as possible, never let up for an instant and don't play fair. If the battle lasted more than a minute or so, you were going to get out maneuvered, trapped or just plain blown away, Kira was just that good, end of story.

So when she fired the twin buster rifle, she wasn't so much trying to hit Kira as she was trying to tie up his DRAGOON units so that the Divinity could not shift rapidly away from its current position without leaving behind its most adaptable offense and defense in the process. The DRAGOON units, and their nearly infinitely complex ability to combine into stronger and stronger barriers or act as refracting or focusing mirrors for Kira's own attacks and to turn the attacks of others against them, were not only one of the greatest strengths of the Divinity, but it was also one of its primary weaknesses. While the DRAGOONs were very maneuverable and quite quick across short distances, certainly to shift across several tens of meters in an eyeblink, they could not keep up with the Divinity Gundam itself, should it have to maneuver away at cruising speed, and the DRAGOON's could only operate for so long detached from their charging stations on the Divinity's wings before they ran out of power and became inert, the same as any other DRAGOON system. Normally, Kira had a rotation of DRAGOONs in active use and then in recharging set up during combat, but against something like the twin buster rifle, he needed to use all 36 of his DRAGOONs interlinked in order to stand any chance of deflecting the radiation beam.

And that meant that Kira had to stay in the area, within about a hundred meters, for at least another few seconds in order to begin his recharge rotation once again, unless he wanted to basically discard his DRAGOONs. So, even as Hope fired her biggest gun and then discarded the rifle off to the side, there being no time to reholster it and not wanting to give Kira a chance on figuring out a way to reflect even such a mighty weapon as the twin buster rifle through repeated exposure, she knew that Kira would be there waiting for her as the Destiny closed in on the interlinked DRAGOON shield. She felt Mayu strain from behind her and inside her thoughts, shoving the equivalent of mental battering rams against the fortress walls that were Kira's mental defenses, but despite the effort she was putting in, Hope knew there was little chance of her overpowering Kira directly, given that he had demonstrated the ability to shrug off attacks even from Lacus, who was orders of magnitude more powerful in most situations than Mayu ever was. She was basically beating her bare fists against a brick wall, but even that was better than nothing.

Relying on her own senses to inform her of danger, Hope interposed her own beam shield in between herself and an innocuous building that was miraculously still standing despite the backblast of the deflected twin buster rifle shot. The building wasn't standing much longer though, as it was carved apart by four thick, dark purple energy beams fired from the Divinity's torso area. Alarms shrilled inside Hope's head as the beam shield took the brunt of six energy beams and two physical projectiles, the hailstorm of firepower consisting of two hyper impulse blasts, two plasma cannon blasts, two rail gun shells and two twin buster rifle blasts, all at once, and even as the beams were fading away, her beam shield emitter overheated and fried itself, rendering her physical shield into a simple anti-beam coated Phase Shifted armored slab once more, which was about as good as a sheet of thick tissue paper against the weapons of the Divinity Gundam. Hope opened fired with her twin barreled rail cannon, but the Divinity merely flicked its right hand and the hypersonic rounds were deflected away like swatted flies, courtesy of the gravitational field generation systems built into the Divinity's hands. With its left hand, the Divinity lifted and fired a shot from its combined beam rifle at the Destiny, barely two hundred meters away.

Hope hurled her half crippled shield into the path of the neon green energy blast, sacrificing the shield in exchange for her own life as she took a two handed grip on the quantum crystal anti-ship sword and hurled herself at the Divinity. Kira, of course, seemed to have anticipated this tactic and had shifted aside, but Hope had anticipated the anticipation and swung her plasma cannons over her shoulders to bear on the Divinity as he skidded to a halt, her swing cleaving through empty air. The hot blue-red torrent of light slashed through the air like a bar of sunlight made solid, but Kira was ready for that too, several DRAGOONs whirling over to interpose themselves between the two mobile suits. To Hope's impressed dismay, the DRAGOON's actually managed to not only divert the constant beam of superheated plasma, but actually bent it twice more and sent it right back at her, slicing both plasma cannons right off her shoulders and almost decapitating the Destiny at the same time. Countering a countered counter...Hope's head was starting to hurt with all the permutations of predictions and possibilities and trying to see eight moves ahead to the point where Kira hadn't seen ahead.

Unable to force her way through Kira's defenses, Mayu instead targeted the one weakness in his defenses, a weakness that was peculiar to only a certain type of Newtype...one that was in a deeply connected relationship with another psychic. In other words, Mayu's special attack, thought up one time when she'd had a little too much to drink and was railing against the unfairness of Kira and Lacus's psychic strength, targeted the special bond that two such intimate Newtypes had with each other. Even so, it could only work in certain very specific circumstances...such as where one of the bonded pair was somehow cut off from contact with their partner, which was why Mayu had dismissed the whole thing as a joke, because for that to happen, either Kira or Lacus would have to be dead, and that was simply too horrible to think about. But now, of course, that had happened, Lacus was gone. But the bond connection wasn't something that just went away, it was like an amputated limb, sometimes you would get feelings from it even though there was nothing on the broadcasting end.

Or at least that was her assumption, and she had a unique grasp of Lacus's mental taste. Good enough to at least partially mimic her on the psychic plane, at least to a degree. Of course, if Kira had any time at all to think about things, he would instantly recognize that it wasn't Lacus trying to contact him, since she was dead, but in the heat of battle, in the grip of very emotionally controlled powers, things might be different. Especially for someone like Kira, whom they both knew was completely torn up inside regarding Lacus's death, and probably somehow was still deceiving himself with the hope that she was just missing and not dead, as he feared she was. Kira had always been good about lying to himself over things like that. He wasn't the only one, it was only human nature to deny the horrible things that happened to you, especially involving your loved ones.

So Mayu tuned into what she was pretty sure was the mental frequency that Kira and Lacus had used for their intimate conversations...again not something anyone other than another psychic who had spent a great deal of time around them would know or even be able to guess, and broadcast a single phrase. 'Kira, help me.'

The effect was both instantaneous and dramatic. The Divinity suddenly spasmed as Kira almost tripped over himself as he dodged back from another swing of the quantum crystal anti-ship sword, his attention completely stolen for just a second as his heart screamed in reply to what felt so very much like a desperate brush of Lacus's thoughts on his own, completely derailing all of his focus as he thrilled with the impossible thought that she really was alive after all. But even as he thrilled, he recognized the ploy for what it was, realized that he was grasping for a ghost placed there specifically to break his concentration and unbalance his emotions and subconscious. It was the ultimate method of taking advantage of his emotional nature and his unconditional, unreasoning love for Lacus Clyne, and it hit him with his figurative pants completely around his ankles, searing him with a tantalizing and very deliberate taste of what he might never be able to have again.

And in his moment of distraction, Hope made her own move, activating a purpose built switch in one of her more passive systems, the EMP generators within the Destiny's hands; the generators had a side-effect of being able to protect the mobile suit against missiles and electronically fused physical munition warheads. Though, in this capacity, it was only designed to pulse in a 25 meter radius and at intensities that would not harm electronics with any real degree of shielding such as those possessed by most mobile suits and other war machines, by channeling almost 120 percent power from the Destiny's warp core and nuclear reactor into the twin EMP generators, Hope was able to unleash a single much more powerful EMP blast that scoured the surrounding hundred meters in a globe of crackling blue and white sparks. Even boosted as it was, the pulse wasn't strong enough to overwhelm the shielding that protected the Destiny or the Divinity themselves. But the DRAGOON units were another story entirely. There could only be so much shielding on them, with all the other systems crammed into the one meter long and half meter wide remote weapons, and with Kira distracted, they were still oriented to surrounded and envelop the Destiny, perfectly position to be hit by the red-winged Gundam's EMP. Even as Kira recovered his poise and saw what was going to happen next, not even he could react fast enough to prevent the burnout pulse from sweeping across his DRAGOONs and wiping their complex guidance and control circuits blank.

The DRAGOON's clattered to the ground like a steel rain, now little more than oblong and stylishly colored blocks of metal with no inherent flight or defensive capabilities above that of a metal bolt. But that didn't really register with Kira right at the moment, because he wasn't just angry. He was infuriated by what Mayu and Hope had done to him. There was the saying that all is fair in war, but taking advantage of his deeply personal feelings and insecurities in order to hurt him and distract him...it would take a saint not to freak out over that kind of attack. And Kira was, despite some prior effort on his part in times past, anything but a saint. He had been kind of half planning to just disable the Destiny before...he wasn't entirely through trying to convince his former allies of the unsustainable nature of their position just yet after all...but in the wake of this taunting manipulation of his love for Lacus, all thoughts of mercy fled from him as if terrified!

"THAT WAS THE WORST MISTAKE EITHER OF YOU HAVE EVER MADE!" Kira's infuriated voice suddenly roared over an open-channel, all-frequency communications line, through his tightly clenched teeth, his hand turning white knuckled on the hilt of his anti-ship sword. "HOW DARE YOU...YOU OF ALL PEOPLE!" He couldn't reach for the rumored Second Stage of Seed Mode with this much personal anger roiling within him, but he didn't need to go that far to beat Mayu and Hope anyway, even without his DRAGOON units, his regular Seed Mode would be more than sufficient here. He watched the purple seed with veined with glowing gold, fall through his mind. He had never wanted to hurt someone as much as he wanted to hurt Hope and Mayu right now.

"I told you he was going to blow his top." Mayu hastened to point out as she flinched away from the roiling storm of emotions that Kira was projecting out around himself, even as the Destiny Impulse Gundam launched from the Minerva's portside launch bay. "Now he's fucking PISSED!"

"Good." Hope replied, calmer than she actually felt. "Whether either of us likes to admit it or not, Kira and I are fairly similar in many respects. The most pertinent of which is that when we get angry...personally angry, not angry over wider injustice or a noble cause...when we get mad over an injustice done to us personally; we make mistakes we normally wouldn't. We act through anger rather than righteous fury, and in that distinction lies a great deal of difference in effectiveness. I want him steaming at the ears if possible. Even with Seed Mode, it's only going to make him reckless and more easily manipulated in the future."

"In the future!" Mayu shrieked, even as the Destiny Impulse landed beside the Destiny. "Hope, I can tell you this much, he's not planning on letting either of us live out the next twenty seconds, and he has the means to make his wishes reality here! Worrying about the future is...HOLYSHITWATCHOUT! Mayu screamed the last words in one breath as her mental perceptions picked up a colossal amount of mental energy moving their way very, very quickly. Both the Destiny and Destiny Impulse were suddenly lifted into the air by Kira's mental outburst, before then being thrown on a ballistic trajectory, soaring through the air for nearly an entire minute, before slamming into the ocean. The two Gundams landing nearly 100 miles east of Orb's coastline.

"Kira...can you hear me?" Cagalli asked from the cockpit of her Akatsuki Gundam, wishing she didn't feel so tentative.

"You should go away." Kira replied, his voice thick with pain and unshed tears. "I am not in the mood to deal with you right now, Cagalli. Please leave before I do something I'll regret later."

"You know I can't do that, Kira." Cagalli replied, as gently as she could. "You're leading an attack against my country. I can't just leave you alone, no matter how much we both wish I could. Just talk to me, Kira. We can work this out, I promise. I'm willing to listen to what you have to say."

"The time for listening has long since passed, Cagalli." Kira pointed threateningly at his sister's Gundam, causing the attendant Murasame's to cluster protectively between the two machines. "I was originally intending to show mercy to you and the others for old times sake...I was going to simply disable your Gundams but I wasn't planning on killing you. But things are different now that you've decided it's apparently okay to strike at me through Lacus. If you're not going to hold anything back, if you won't even hold her memory sacred, if even our most private connection is a legitimate target for you to attack me through, then you can expect no mercy from me."

"Kira, please, I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm sure there was a good reason for..."

"No reason could justify the pain you've just inflicted upon me. I thought you were my friends. I thought you understood my pain, at least a little. I thought at the very least you would respect my sorrow and grief, not trample upon it and spit it into my face! I thought wrong."

"Kira, you're really scaring me. I don't know what happened but there has to be a way we can talk this thro..."

"No. There isn't. I'm done talking. I already told you that once before, but apparently I wasn't clear enough. You say you're scared, Cagalli? Not scared enough. It's obvious that you still don't recognize who I am now. I am Executor Kira Yamato, and I can never...and do not desire to...return to being Kira Yamato of Orb, or Gundam Miester Kira Yamato. Not after all that you and my other so called friends and family have inflicted upon me. This is your last and final chance, Cagalli. Only the fact that you are my living blood relative makes me give you this opportunity. Run away now. Abandon the Akatsuki at the city edge and go inland. Hide in the shelter with Allister and the other children, and order your troops to stand down and disarm. I can't promise things will go bloodlessly, especially with the Alliance still resisting, but this is your best option for preserving the lives of Orb's citizens. If you are still here by the time I count to five, I'll kill you and every last one of Orb's soldiers I find fighting. One..."

"Don't do this, Kira! This isn't the way...!" Cagalli protested.

"Two..."

"Your Majesty, I believe your brother is either deranged or really being serious. Either way, I don't think this is a bluff." One of her escorts radioed, nervousness bleeding through in every word.

"Three..."

"It doesn't matter. We can't back down, not even for my brother. You don't have to stay if you feel it would be pointless. I can't and won't order my people to commit suicide for my sake." Cagalli answered, trying not to choke up as she saw not a single Murasame flinch from their positions.

"Four..."

Cagalli gritted her teeth and brought her twin buster rifle down to point at Kira, even as she settled the crosshairs for her twin VTP 6 tube packs, one on either shoulder, upon the angelic Gundam. Lexi was already helping her adjust her targeting systems to a degree even Athrun would have found difficult to compete with manually. "Please, Kira...don't do this! I really don't want to fight you, how could I ever explain it to Allister and..." Cagalli all but begged.

"Five." Kira intoned, and in the next moment the Divinity was in amongst the Murasame's, a tiger among sleepy sheep, quantum crystal anti-ship sword in one hand, combined beam rifle in the other. In the space of two seconds, six Orb pilots were down, shot or stabbed directly through the cockpit, the tangle of huge mechanical bodies impeding the ability of the Murasames to effectively engage the blurry fast Divinity. But Kira did have to give them credit...not a single one of them faltered, in fact they just threw themselves at him all the harder, trying to physically overbear him and knock him backwards. It was a selfless and heroic act. It was also ineffective, as he waded forward, now with a sword in either hand and punching out with nudges from the Divinity's gravity manipulation system, none of the Orb machines managed to get closer than arm's reach before being hacked down and sliced apart and then sent flying in pieces by a wave of the Divinity's hand. He had become an angel of death for real. Smoke and flame erupted from the Akatsuki's shoulders as Cagalli launched her missiles, only to have them ensnared by the Divinity's gravity manipulation system and slammed into the ground and nearby buildings, detonating harmlessly to the sides and front of their target.

With a heavy but still determined heart, Kira stepped forward, sword raised high. The least he could do, despite all that had come between them, was to make it quick and painless. Cagalli would never know what hit her. A small mercy, but it was all that he was prepared to grant anymore. Explaining things to Allister would be tough, but Kira wasn't afraid of doing the hard things anymore. If his nephew came to hate him for this, then that was just one more burden Executor Kira Yamato would have to carry. It was the nature of his chosen duty. Cagalli started to bring up the shaft of her polearm, but the Burden had already showed him her pathetic attempt at a defense and his sword was coming down from an entirely different angle. She was finished. But just because he had already seen her die, and died a little inside himself as well, didn't necessarily mean that the seen future was the only possible future.

Something slammed into the side and back of the Divinity with all the force of a large cat pouncing up a not inconsiderably sized possum, striking him so hard that he actually lost his grip on his swinging sword, sending it hurtling end over end across the street before slicing into and through a building as the Divinity was knocked sprawling onto its face and side, his assailant agilely pushing off from the toppling Gundam even as it fell, landing with perfect balance half a hundred meters down the boulevard. As the Divinity slowly rose to its feet, Cagalli noticed that Kira had attached the twin buster rifle to the shield on his right forearm.

"Great." Cagalli sarcastically said, freeing her own twin buster rifle with her right hand. "Now, not only does Kira have an anti-ship sword and a combined beam rifle which he can attack me with, but he also has a twin buster rifle."