Over the past two days, Lacus had barely slept at all.
By downloading one livestream after another, she had been trying to understand the worlds of the other members.
Of all of them, the world she had watched the most was Kain's.
Among all the members of this Hyperdimensional Channel, his situation was by far the worst.
The moment he returned to his original world, he would be stepping straight into earth-shaking catastrophe.
The planet he lived on was under invasion by both daemons and Tyranids, and the entire world had been turned into a battlefield for migration and slaughter.
In order to wipe out the daemons and Tyranids, humanity had even resorted to something called an Exterminatus, planning to literally boil the entire planet.
It was horrifying beyond words.
Although Kain's intervention in the end meant that the Exterminatus did not have to be fully carried out, the damage caused by the one strike that had already been launched was still beyond imagination.
And after the planetary crisis was resolved, the next place he went to was no less grim. There, he encountered a species called the Orks, another great enemy of humanity in that world.
The description of those Orks sounded almost like a joke.
And yet they were warlike, savage, and so insane that they treated the planets of an entire star system like billiard balls.
It was a race that had completely lost its mind.
And Kain had clashed with them too in battles so perilous that he had once again walked the line between life and death.
As for the livestreams of him visiting other worlds, Lacus had not watched those closely. Instead, she spent roughly the other half of those two days watching Mobile Suit Gundam SEED.
That was the work from Kuroneko's world based on Lacus's own.
Kuroneko herself had sent those discs over to her, transported through space by that absurd system, which only made Lacus believe even more strongly in the reality of the Hyperdimensional Channel.
And it had been Kain who suggested sending her the complete animation set of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED. Even the one energy coin required for the transfer had been paid by him.
It took her almost an entire day to finish all fifty episodes.
And when she was done, her heart felt unbearably heavy.
The PLANT colony Junius Seven had been struck by a nuclear weapon. That was the Bloody Valentine Tragedy.
PLANT believed it was retaliation by the Earth Alliance.
But in truth, the Earth Alliance itself had only been established a few days earlier. The catalyst for its formation had been a terrorist attack just days before Bloody Valentine, one in which the leadership of the United Nations had been killed in the lunar city of Copernicus.
Using that as a pretext, the Atlantic Federation had taken the lead in forming the Earth Alliance and then issued a declaration of war against PLANT, claiming that the terrorist attack had been carried out by PLANT.
Three days after that declaration of war, on February 14, the agricultural colony Junius Seven was destroyed by a nuclear strike, killing more than two hundred thousand people. That was the Bloody Valentine Tragedy.
As for that event, the Earth Alliance currently denied that it had used a nuclear weapon, insisting instead that it had been a self-destruct operation by PLANT, a claim that also conveniently gave them justification to launch formal attacks in return.
But after watching the work Kuroneko had sent her, if what was shown there was true, then most of the upper ranks of the Earth Alliance probably genuinely believed it had been PLANT's self-destruction and did not believe one of their own had launched the nuke.
The truth was that there was an organization in the shadows deliberately creating contradictions and setting off the war.
The terrorist attack on the moon had been their doing.
And the destruction of Junius Seven had been carried out by someone from within the Earth Alliance military, secretly transporting in a nuclear weapon and launching the attack.
That organization was called Blue Cosmos, an extremist group made up of Naturals who hated Coordinators.
Under the ideology of Blue Cosmos, they believed genetic adjustment was a violation of the natural order, and so they were committed to exterminating all Coordinators in order to protect a blue and pure world.
And that organization did in fact truly exist in Lacus's own world.
It also had deep ties to many nations on Earth, especially the Atlantic Federation, whose upper ranks were rumored to be largely made up of Blue Cosmos members.
That was also why the Atlantic Federation was so openly hostile toward PLANT.
According to the story, using the lunar terrorist attack to push through the creation of the Earth Alliance and secure control over it had itself been part of that organization's scheme.
But even Blue Cosmos was not the true mastermind.
Behind it stood LOGOS.
A secret organization known as a syndicate of merchants of death, LOGOS secretly developed weapons and sold them to the warring sides.
The reason for provoking war between both factions was obvious enough.
Arms trafficking.
And the leader of that organization, Muruta Azrael, was both the head of LOGOS and the leader of Blue Cosmos.
That person naturally existed in Lacus's reality as well and was currently an important figure within the Earth Alliance.
He was the chief culprit behind the war between the Earth Alliance and PLANT.
So if all of this was the truth, then if that man were dealt with, would that mean no further tragedies would occur?
But how was Lacus supposed to tell the world the truth?
By revealing the secret of the Hyperdimensional Channel?
No one would believe it.
And even if someone did believe it, they would never allow her to successfully make the truth public.
Besides, the truth needed solid evidence. Could some animated series really count as proof?
And beyond that, the tensions between Earth and PLANT had already escalated to an extremely dangerous point. Now that things had gone this far and war had already begun, neither side would calmly listen to what she had to say.
In fact, plenty of conspirators would likely try to eliminate her at the first opportunity.
So what was she supposed to do?
The first person she turned to for help was the only one she felt she could truly trust.
Her father.
She told him about the impossible experience she had gone through.
After thinking it over carefully, her father gave her his answer.
Maintain the status quo.
Do nothing.
If possible, she should continue acting exactly as she would have if she had never become a member of the Hyperdimensional Channel in the first place.
She was not to interfere in politics.
She was to continue being a songstress.
Everything else, her father would handle.
The best course was to preserve the current situation and allow events to develop until the official story of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED truly began.
Which meant about one year from now.
That would be the moment to truly drag the hidden masterminds into the light.
Until then, nothing could be allowed to alert them. They had to pretend they knew nothing, because otherwise they would only scare the enemy into hiding even deeper.
They would maintain the present as much as possible, which was effectively the same as gaining advance knowledge of the future, allowing them to respond far more effectively when the time came.
He also told her that when she was with Athrun, she must not show anything unusual, nor should she lose control and tell him the truth.
There was a very high chance Athrun would tell his father.
And even if his father believed what Lacus said was true, the radical Patrick Zala would not stop.
He might become even more extreme.
Patrick already hated Naturals to begin with, and his wife had died in the Bloody Valentine Tragedy, leaving his mind consumed by vengeance.
And in that case, Lacus herself might be in mortal danger.
She would become a major obstacle to Patrick Zala's purge of Naturals.
But if she could not interfere with anything, lest she alert the enemy, then Lacus did not want to simply stand by and watch.
So she thought of a kind of cooperation.
Rebroadcasting the livestreams of other members could generate profit for them.
And with her own influence as a songstress, she should be able to bring them a very considerable amount of traffic and revenue.
She intended to discuss profit-sharing terms with him, and at the same time, she hoped that when the day came, she could receive his help.
So she sought out the member whose ID was Mr. Golden Toilet.
Mr. Kain.
He was currently the biggest streamer on the channel, and the one most capable of helping her.
(End of Chapter)
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