"Mmh...!"
Cagalli let out a dull, pained sound as her body hit the ground rather hard.
At the same time, she felt most of her body pinned down. In reality, someone had grabbed her and tackled her to the ground.
And she was not the only one who had been tackled. Another person had been taken down by the same person as well. In order to protect both of them as much as possible, he had wrapped them tightly in his arms, pressing her and the other girl together.
She had never expected that right after Lacus made her request to the young man named Kain, they would be hit by artillery in the very next instant.
The enemy had actually used a long-range sniping weapon mounted on a mobile armor, a weapon meant for war, to fire at the three of them.
Then, suddenly, the pressure on her back vanished. The person shielding them had gotten up.
Cagalli and Lacus also rose to their feet and looked at the devastation some ten meters away. The motorcycle they had been riding, as fragile as porcelain, had already been blown into countless fragments. In its place was a crater large enough to bury all three of them alive.
The two of them were immediately drawn to another disturbance nearby. An explosion had gone off there too.
The reason was that the fighter flown by 6O had swooped in to attack. In an instant, it launched more than a dozen miniature missiles, carpet-bombing the position the shot had come from.
Calling it an explosion was not quite accurate, though, because those missiles did not rely on blast force to kill. They looked more like a swarm of thermite bombs, instantly melting the entire patch of ground.
Normal thermite definitely did not have that kind of power.
And the attacker was not one of the six GINNs Lacus had asked him to deal with. That was most likely another group sent after Lacus, one that had hidden itself inside the construction site and attacked directly using a weapon mounted on a mobile armor.
As for the emotionless warriors named A2 and 2B, they reacted at once, making the motorcycle they had been riding transform even further and reveal its weapons as they took up a defensive posture.
"Mr. Kain, are you all right?"
"It's nothing serious."
Nothing serious?
The expression that appeared on Lacus's face was not relief. It turned even gloomier.
How could that possibly be nothing serious when she had just seen him reach behind himself and forcibly yank several metal fragments out of his back?
Judging by the size of the fragments he threw onto the ground, and the blood smeared across them, it was obvious how deeply they had pierced him.
A normal person could never have endured that.
And yet, he was already recovering.
Still, in a certain sense, compared to the kind of injuries he had suffered in his own world, this really might qualify as nothing serious.
She had seen him survive after being pierced clean through by multiple metal spears the size of javelins fired by monsters called Orks. He had lived through wounds like that and had still been able to stand and walk, if only barely.
"What do you mean, it's not seri... wah!"
Cagalli had seen those horrifying fragments too, and was about to say something with a pale face when he abruptly tossed something at her and covered her with it.
It had seemed to appear in his hand out of nowhere.
"Find somewhere and put on those bulletproof suits."
This thin leather outfit in her hands? This was full-body bulletproof gear?
Cagalli found that hard to believe. It was too thin, more like a skintight rubber suit.
But when she looked back at him again, she froze in shock. A fighter had appeared beside him, and he had already put on a set of power armor that looked distinctly futuristic. Calling it armor felt more accurate than a suit, though, because it was not especially bulky.
Ah, so that was probably the flight suit for that fighter.
After putting it on, he climbed into the aircraft.
A violent gust of wind swept over them, and then the fighter lifted into the air and sped away.
Wait -
"Has he lost his mind?!"
That guy had suffered injuries like that and still intended to accept Lacus Clyne's request. He was asking to die.
"Why didn't you stop him? In his condition, if he doesn't stop the bleeding and get treatment right away, he'll die!"
Cagalli immediately turned on Lacus in anger. Lacus had not even tried to stop him any further.
"Mr. Kain should be fine. We need to find somewhere to change into the protective suits he gave us first."
"Fine?"
"Yes, fine. Please trust him. The only thing we should be doing right now is making sure we don't hold him back."
It was not that Lacus had never thought about taking back her request. But after watching so many livestream recordings over and over again for eleven months, she already had a rough understanding of what kind of person he was.
If he had said that, and moved immediately, then trying to talk him out of it would have done no good.
Rather than wasting time arguing, it was better to do as he said and make sure she and Cagalli were protected first.
"Trust him...?"
Cagalli said nothing more and could only stare blankly as he flew away.
Still, her impression of Lacus had changed.
The Lacus she had known before would never have seemed like someone who could coldly make use of another person for the sake of some goal.
...
At the G manufacturing plant...
"Captain Ramius, wh-what was that fighter?"
"I've never seen one either," Murrue Ramius replied in a dry voice.
It had happened far too suddenly and badly shaken everyone here.
At a construction site not far away, a tremendous blast had erupted. A mobile armor hidden there under the guise of construction equipment had opened fire...
And the target of that attack had felt completely inexplicable. No one knew what it had been shooting at.
Then, right after that, a fighter none of them had ever seen suddenly emerged from a transparent state and appeared above her group's heads.
No, that was not quite right. It had not flown past them. It had hovered directly overhead, then launched more than a dozen missiles into the construction site. The detonation that followed filled her with a trace of fear.
It was not destruction caused by a simple physical blast wave. After the flash came a vast orange-red glow, and the mobile armor, the surrounding buildings, and everything else in the area turned red-hot and melted away in an instant.
"Is that a new ZAFT fighter?"
"It probably isn't ZAFT!"
Murrue immediately rejected one of her crew members' guess.
There was no way the pilot had failed to see what was happening on their side. The G weapons were being loaded onto transport vehicles. If that craft had belonged to ZAFT, it would never have remained idle, and then simply flown off.
Even though it cloaked itself again afterward - optical camouflage, perhaps - there was no doubt it had left, because the sound of its departure had been unmistakable.
"Move it! Get the G units loaded now!"
Her shout jolted the others out of their daze.
At the same time, inside the woods atop a distant rocky ridge...
"Athrun, what was that? Support from our side?"
"I don't know. Nothing like that was mentioned."
Athrun shook his head.
After infiltrating this place, they had cut off contact with the battleship to avoid being discovered.
Only after the operation began and the capture succeeded would they initiate contact again themselves.
"We don't have any fighter like that, do we?"
"Could it be a new Earth Alliance fighter? Maybe one of our people got hold of it first and brought it over to support us?"
"No idea. But the only thing I know right now is that it's time for us to move!"
"Right. We need to move immediately, then go pick up our princess!"
With those words, the elite ZAFT squad that had secretly infiltrated the area before the princess's arrival released the safeties on their weapons one after another.
In the next second, they charged out from cover and launched their assault on the factory below.
...
"What's that?"
"The radar's picking up something incoming. Fast."
"Where? I see it - coming from that direction."
"I can't see anything."
"But something is definitely approaching. There's a heat signature closing in fast."
"Stealth? Optical camouflage?!"
"Damn it, it's almost on top of us!"
In an instant, a fighter unlike anything they had ever seen seemed to appear out of nowhere, practically right in their faces.
In the very next moment, the muzzle of what looked like one of its weapons began to shine.
(End of Chapter)
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