"CAP flight, be advised; we've found what we believe is the group of rogue aircraft the UPEO comms were referring to, bearing 320. They're about 50 klicks away from you. We're sending reinforcements your way; intercept immediately."
"Two aircraft holding out against more than 50?" Dision asked in an amused voice. "I know we're good, but that's pushing it, even for us. Oh well," he said with a sigh.
"Uhh, are you sure we can handle this, Dision?" Keith wondered as he followed his wingman's turn toward the enemy fighters. Even if we have reinforcements on the way, how are we supposed to deal with that many aircraft?"
Dision chuckled. "Well, they are UPEO airframes, after all. We'll give whoever this is a taste of what General Resource is capable of. Besides, we've got the element of surprise."
Keith didn't argue with him after that. He wasn't one to question orders very much, especially when Dision was following them. His ample experience as a pilot and close relationship with Keith was more than enough to keep him on Dision's wing. Despite how close the two of them were, though, Dision didn't think for one moment to ever reveal his true nature to Keith. Besides, Keith would barely understand his true state of being anyway- a limbo between life and death. He was dead in body, but his mind was very much alive. It was a blessing and a curse, all made possible by the Electrosphere.
"Approaching targets," Dision reported. "Enemy aircraft confirmed on datalink."
"Huh? Hey Dision, look at that. Two IFF contacts, conventional aircraft," Keith pointed out.
"One now," Dision corrected him as one started spiraling down toward the ground. "The remnants of UPEO, it looks like."
"That last one's makin' a break for it. Think we should help them, Dision?"
"We'll end up doing that whether we like it or not," Dision replied. "Any pilot worth their wings will know to take advantage of an opportunity when they can- although this is a UPEO pilot we're talking about," he added, smirking.
As the two pilots began to get closer, eventually getting a visual on the massive furball of planes, Dision felt as if the last UPEO pilot's maneuvers looked vaguely familiar. He couldn't figure out why for the life of him, but the way they moved as they tried to escape reminded him of… something. He cast the thought away from his digital mind. He could focus on that later.
"Confirmed visual on hostile aircraft. Dision, ready to engage," he reported.
Keith took a deep breath. "Guess we're doin' this, then. Keith, ready to en- AAAAAA!"
Dision looked over at Keith's plane. He was still flying completely level, which perhaps surprised him more than the fact that his wingman randomly started screaming bloody murder. "Keith, what's wrong!?"
"Oh god, my-" he paused, taking another moment to scream in agony. "My head, Dision. It feels- shit! It feels like someone's sticking a bunch of knives in my brain!"
That's when Dision felt it. Whatever was controlling these UPEO aircraft was trying to take control of theirs, too. Although it didn't take long for whatever, or whoever, it was that was invading their planes to realize that it was futile to try and control Dision's plane.
'So you can think, then,' Dision mused silently before turning his attention to Keith, hoping since this thing relented with him, it might do the same to his wingman. "What's your status, Keith? How are you holding up?"
Keith's initial response was more agonizing screaming, which was the only response Dision needed. "My- my vision's going dark." He paused to yell again. "My ears are ringing. I- I can't…"
"Keith. Listen closely; your brain is experiencing sensory overload," Dision explained, hitting the brakes on his Eagle+ and maneuvering behind his wingman. "I'm going to shoot your plane and knock out its ENSI system. Once you're disconnected, eject your COFFIN pod as quick as you can," he instructed, searching for the weak point on Keith's Gyrfalcon.
"Shit, just do it- do something! Make it stop, Dision!" Keith pleaded.
Dision responded by shooting a handful of rounds from his cannon through the spine of Keith's plane. Then, the engine shut off, and the aircraft began tilting toward the ground. Within seconds, the coffin pod on the Gyrfalcon popped out from the airframe and began slowing its descent toward the ground. With his wingman safely ejected, Dision turned his attention back to the massive formation of fighters seconds away from being in range. A single order came from the robotic voice in his plane that he happily obliged. "Engage."
Dision set his afterburners to full thrust and shot toward the mass of enemy fighters. Right away, he began to thin the horde, splashing three planes on his first pass and then a fourth as he turned back around. The COFFIN planes were seemingly caught off-guard by the maneuverability he was capable of as he shot down another two, three, four, and eventually five planes. Finally, he heard his missile lock warning and was forced to break off. Dision looked to see a Super Flanker turning to get on his tail, with a steady stream of gunfire coming out of its nose. Dision smirked and threw the nose of his plane up into the air. The plane's thrust vectoring did its job and aided his borderline unnatural loop behind the plane that had been on his tail mere moments ago. A pair of missiles was all it took for the Su-37 to explode.
Dision scoffed. "I knew UPEO's pilots weren't as good as General's, but I didn't think they'd be this incompetent," he said with a smirk. "These planes are barely putting up a fight."
He sent another pair of missiles into the engine of an EF-2000E and pulled straight up, watching the F-16XFU trying to merge on his tail. Dision flew higher and higher into the sky, not making any attempts to change course and only barely evading the attacks coming from the Gyrfalcon behind him. The blue sky began to get darker and darker as the two planes climbed higher into the atmosphere, and eventually, they both stalled. Dision wasted no time turning this to his advantage, using the extra altitude that he had to come straight down on the COFFIN plane and gun it down with his cannon. He then sent his plane speeding back down to the furball below at max thrust, burners lighting up the dark blue behind him.
Suddenly, the large formation of COFFIN aircraft all began to break off, pulling away from Dision. At first, he couldn't help but laugh. After all, he had taken on the threat that completely decimated UPEO single-handedly and won, or so he thought. Before long, he realized that they weren't just retreating. They were forming a perimeter- an impenetrable barrier surrounding him and one other plane: a UPEO Su-37 Super Flanker painted blue.
"So, you finally decide to reveal yourself," Dision said over an open channel. "I must say, there's a certain irony that comes from you using the plane of UPEO's star to break them."
The Super Flanker gave no response. Instead, it prowled along the edges of the circle its other planes had made, watching as Dision did the same on the opposite side. The two fighters went around and around. Neither made any move to attack the other. They just watched each other like two predators waiting for the other to make the first move. That's when Dision made the connection.
'This is a gentlemen's duel,' he realized, watching the blue Su-37 closely. 'Whatever- no- whoever this is, they have a sense of honor. A foolish notion.' Up until that point, Dision had been relatively sure these planes had been infected with some kind of virus or hacked into. Now, watching the plane that had once been the face of UPEO preparing to fight him one-on-one, he realized this was someone who was very much alive, but not for long.
The engines on Dision's Eagle+ lit up, and he pulled hard toward the center of the circle, going toward his adversary at full speed. A few moments later, the Super Flanker did the same, and the duel had officially begun. Dision fired a volley of four missiles the second he was in range, and the other pilot pulled up to evade. They played right into Dision's hand. He continued toward them at full speed, and now that they were facing away from him, he unleashed a hail of bullets from his canon.
'Textbook,' Dision thought to himself. 'What an amateur.'
A few seconds later, Dision was glad he didn't speak those words aloud. The Super Flanker inverted itself and curved gracefully underneath Dision's plane, dodging every single bullet he fired as if it were nothing. Dision pulled his plane away as hard as he could, but he still took a few shots to his left wing for his hubris.
He wasted no time in going back on the offensive, curving around to the left to face his opponent head-on. "Not bad," he complimented the silent pilot. "But it's gonna take a lot more than a few bullets to kill me. I've survived much worse."
As he expected, the Super Flanker didn't respond, instead choosing to throttle up and speed toward Dision as fast as they could. They sent a salvo of four missiles straight at him, forcing the General Resource pilot on the defensive. He turned his plane up and to the right, cutting his afterburners and watching the missiles fail to adjust in time before returning to his original course. As the two planes got closer, Dision returned the favor by sending his own missiles toward the Su-37, but what he didn't expect was for the other plane to evade them with a simple roll, continuing their course straight for him and hitting him with pair of missiles.
"Caution: Damage," his plane warned him as he flew straight past the Super Flanker while assessing the damage.
'Damn,´ he cursed silently. 'That one hurt.' He felt the damage to the plane that was now his body. It would be difficult, but he could keep going- he had to, after all. There was no way he was letting this pilot show him up now.
A missile alert at his twelve o'clock caught his attention, and he just barely had time to maneuver away from the missiles the other planes that were forming the perimeter for their duel fired to keep him inside. Even now, Dision had no time to rest, as his adversary had been following him the whole time and launched another pair of missiles his way. The damage he took certainly made it harder, but Dision pulled down and to the left, narrowly evading the missiles and looping back up to get behind the Super Flanker. He launched a volley of four missiles, accompanied by a burst from his cannon, but none of them found their mark. Instead, the other pilot pulled their plane straight up and around, making the most elegant kulbit Dision had ever seen. He tried to counter it with gunfire, but the damage he took earlier wouldn't allow it, and the Su-37 hit him with another two missiles.
"Shit!" cursed aloud, feeling the pain in his very core. It was as if a bullet had passed through his flesh body, or perhaps more than one. "I- I can't… dammit!" He pulled his plane away as best he could, trailing smoke the whole way as he found himself inches away from the final blow his opponent had in store for him. "It's too much; I can't." He panted heavily, looking back at the blue Super Flanker pursuing him with ease. "This drive, this motivation. Who are you?" he demanded, knowing full well that he would receive no answer. It was as if the hatred of a thousand men had been channeled into one plane. "No! I will not die here- not to you!" he declared. "I've worked for far too long, sacrificed far too much to be killed here by the likes of you," he spat. "This isn't over."
With alarms blaring in his plane, Dision broke off from the pursuing Super Flanker. They fired another missile at him, but it couldn't adjust in time, so it simply careened off into the sky while Dision pushed his plane to full throttle. 'Just a little more,' he insisted, watching the speedometer climb higher and higher. Finally, it was enough, and just before the planes boxing him in with the Super Flanker broke their circle to converge on him, he pulled straight up into the sky, rolling once, twice, three times, four, and then the black Eagle+ vanished, leaving nothing but the former UPEO fighters in the airspace.
Home at last. The pain Dision felt from the damage his plane took felt as if it was no longer there. Here, he could finally feel at ease, surrounded by the ever-flowing nature of the Electrosphere. Now, he just needed to recover, and once he was fit to return to the land of the physical, he would stop this mysterious Super Flanker pilot. First, though, he needed a plan. He felt every byte of data that made up his mind get to work as he began to think long and hard about where he should go from here, but before long, his thoughts were interrupted by something- a sound he never, in all his existence, expected to here in this place: a radar lock warning. Dision looked behind himself, and sure enough, there was the blue Super Flanker. Somehow, they had followed him into the Electrosphere- the one place he thought he was safe.
Dision felt an emotion he hadn't felt in years: genuine terror. "Y- You?!" he demanded. "How did you- why are you here?"
The ever-silent Su-37 gave its response by firing a missile toward Dision, which he only narrowly avoided after recovering from the shock of seeing his adversary follow him here. This couldn't be possible. He was the only one to be able to call this place his home. How could anyone follow him here unless- unless…
"You're… you're like me," Dision realized as the pieces began to come together in his mind. Of course. It made so much more sense now. It explained how this pilot could make the maneuvers that they did. It explained how they could keep up with him so effortlessly. However, even with this newfound knowledge, he still felt he had more questions than answers.
Dision had always said to keep your head clear when you're in the sky because it only takes one second being spent out of focus to cost you your life. He had drilled this into Keith's mind within the first few months of meeting him, and now, ironically enough, it had been his failure to adhere to this advice himself that would cost him the ultimate price. Preoccupied with the overwhelming emotions that came from this realization, Dision failed to respond to the missiles the Su-37 had fired at him, and as they made contact, another wave of pain shot through his body like a thunderbolt, and he lost control of the plane.
He felt his life literally flash before his eyes, and this gave him the answer that would've saved his life had he figured it out just a few moments earlier. If this pilot was like him, how had they become so? The secrets to sublimation died with Yoko, and the only one who could come close was-
"I see now," Dision said, sounding as if he was on the verge of either tears, laughter, or perhaps both. "All this time, it was… Simon!"
Up until that moment, the blue Super Flanker had been entirely expressionless. The only thing Dision understood about them was their persistence in shooting him down. Now, though, having ushered the name of the man who signed his life over to the Reaper, Dision understood the meaning of the Su-37's next actions crystal clear. They unloaded everything they had on the General Resource pilot, and Dision felt the full force of this pilot's unbridled rage as he was torn apart, byte by byte, and shredded from existence.