The void tasted of metal and heat; it smelled like everything that had been torn apart to make this fight possible. Gary rode the Strike through the seam, ribs of wreckage forming a jagged canyon around him. He had come through the maw screaming and alive, but the price was written in sparks and dented armor. Every meter forward was won by will and the brittle kindness of other pilots who refused to let one lone suit be chewed up for spectacle.
Then a new blip bloomed on his scope—clean, bright, and blessedly allied.
"Shirogane line, moving to intercept," a voice reported over the comm, crisp and younger than Bright's but firm. The call sign flashed with a new IFF marker; a carrier signature dove through the debris with a calculated ferocity. It cut a swath toward the nearest Musai wedge and, like a blade, opened a path.
Gary felt a stupid, overwhelming wash of relief. "Finally," he breathed. "About time someone showed up to mop the floor."
The carrier came close enough that Gary could read the emblem on its flank—a stylized chrysanthemum with a thin, corporate ribbon beneath it. The assault fleet had arrived.
On the bridge of that carrier, Miyuki Shirogane didn't wear the exaggerated calm of career officers. His face was young and taut with the stress of command, but him eyes were dangerous with competence. He tapped a holo-map and sent targeting arcs to the White Base channel. "Bright," she said, voice steady, "coordinate suppression with our left wing. Strike Gundam—Lin? You've got a corridor to punch. We'll handle the heavy interceptors."
Bright clipped the acknowledgement. "Shirogane, we'll work the corridor. Lin, link with Miyuki and follow her lane. Don't get cute."
"Copy," Gary said, feeling something like gratitude and embarrassment mix in his chest. "Thanks, Miyuki."
He offered no flourish, only the efficient precision of someone who commanded men and machines for a living. "Keep your head down and your shots clean," he replied. "We don't have the luxury of beautiful deaths today."
The carrier's guns opened up like a throat of lightning. Ballistic salvoes and coordinated missile volleys hammered the nearest Musai formations, tearing away their screen of Doms and Zakus. The assault carriers, one after another, staggered under the bombardment. Miyuki's pilots poured disciplined fire into the gaps that Hayato and Kai carved; together, they made a moving corridor of salvation.
Gary rode that corridor like a kite caught on a good wind. He keyed his comm to Miyuki's discreet frequency and kept his voice low. "Your timing is miraculous."
He didn't smile. "We were never meant to be late," she said. "We were meant to be decisive." The words were a statement of fact, not a boast. He launched a squad of GMs in a tight wedge; they screamed into the maw, bait and blade at once.
Even as relief warmed him, Gary's scope pinged with a motion he hadn't wanted to see. Two fast signatures—sleek, predatory—cut through the far side of Delaz's screen. Their patterns were wrong for Zeon grunts, wrong for Federation gunners. They moved with a terrible, practiced hunger.
Gfred and Gquuuux—Nyaan and Machu—tore through the field like twin specters. Gary's initial hope curdled. The two Gundams were not on his side. They were Zeon-aligned by orders he had not expected to exist and by loyalties older than the war.
He watched, sick with the complexity of it. Nyaan's blue chassis and Machu's crimson silhouette moved in concert with Tanya's formations, yet they struck at the very same pockets Gary and Miyuki were trying to hold open. The battlefield had become a tangle of overlapping loyalties; the line between friend and foe was a smear.
"Those two," Gary muttered to the system. "They're Zeon. How—why—"
> [SYSTEM]: Hypothesis: allied vectors ambiguous due to parallel-world reallocation. Host likely experience cognitive dissonance. Recommend: tactical focus.
"Shut up and give tactical focus," Gary snapped.
Miyuki's voice came through crisp and immediate. "Lin, adjust corridor vector forty degrees starboard. Gquuuux on an intercept course. They'll slice through our flank if you don't move."
He obeyed without thinking. The Strike twisted, engines screaming. A spray of micro-beams chewed into the trailing edge of his left panel; he felt the sting of metal and the hot spatter across the cockpit glass. The Shirogane pilots answered with a barrage that forced Gquuuux to break rhythm—an opening Gary exploited to drive another Musai to ruin.
Up close, the combat was noise and choreography. Gfred's beam rifle arced with a brutality that felt surgical; Gquuuux's sword cut like cold intent. Between the two, the Ged squad's pilots danced a deadly ballet: Mila's Gelgoog dipped low to punish a Dom, Zhou Wei's micro-beams danced a trap, Ritcher's sniper shot snuffed a commander's head unit. Tanya's orders tracked like clockwork, each micro-adjustment preserving equipment and lives by degrees.
From his cockpit, Gary watched Tanya's face in the holo-feed—calm, efficient, eyes like burning brass. She wasn't surprised by the presence of Gquuuux and Gfred; there was a bore of steadiness about her, as if her world had folded around these anomalies and made sense of them through duty. She spoke once into the local net, voice clipped: "Maintain fire discipline. Don't let their spectacle blind you."
Her words cut through the radio clutter like a scalpel. Ritcher keyed to her channel. "Major von Zehrtfeld—thanks. If we last this, drinks on me."
There was a pause, and then the tiniest, almost inaudible inflection—something like irony—on her reply. "Make them nonalcoholic."
They laughed, a raw, quick sound that almost surprised them into real humor, and then the field closed again.
Miyuki pushed her advantage. "Lin, I can pull a flanking pass on Delaz's cruiser. If you make a run at the port engines while I distract their gunners, we can take another Musai down."
Gary swallowed. His right stabilizer burned under an earlier strike; the Strike answered like a wounded animal. "Right," he said. "Let's be theatrical about the math this one time."
They moved as a unit—a white-and-blue spear, a corporate carrier's tactical hand, a GED squad's precise bite. The Symmetry of their violence felt absurd, like choreography written by necessity.
Delaz's command cruiser shuddered as another Musai blew open, the internal hangars rupturing in a glitterstorm of broken suits. The net spooled backward; where it had been tight and inevitable, now there was a gap the size of a hope.
Gary forced the Strike through that gap. He felt the Strike's entire skeleton protest and then answer like a living thing. Beam rifle seared. A Musai's engine ruptured in a blossom of light. The HUD blinked: Target Destroyed 2/5. Progress: 36%.
Bright's voice cut soft and sharp. "Lin. Reserve your beam for engines. We'll take the rest."
Gary obeyed. He didn't want to waste the Strike's breath on soft targets when the heart of the line still beat.
As the carrier and White Base synchronized their strikes, as guncanon squad carved arcs of survival through the storm, something in Gary loosened. Relief. Not victory—never that—but the small, bone-deep relief of a man who had not yet been written out of the fight. He keyed a quick, foolish line to his HUD that the system recorded and teased him about for hours to come.
> [SYSTEM]: Emotional note logged—gratitude to allied unit. Recommend: preserve vessels that enable gratitude.
"Yeah," Gary breathed, chest aching, eyes burning with intensity and exhaustion. "Yeah. Let's keep them."
They pushed forward in bloody, glorious increments. The line shuddered; Delaz's network, forced to respond to too many precise threats at once, began to show micro-fissures. For a sliver of time, there was an elegant geometry to war: strike, distract, move, survive. The carriers staggered; a Dom squad pancaked. A Musai died with a last, choking spark.
Then the Great Zeong spoke with a cold, mechanized confirmation—a mental pressure that flattened small sensors—and the battlefield remembered itself again. It would not be easy. The monsters above would lash back.
But for now, Gary had the corridor, Miyuki had the guns, bright had the cold efficiency of a commander who had learned to accept paradox, and the GED squad's presence—those strange, foreign Gundams and their pilots—kept the tapestry of war from becoming a single thread.
As he banked to reload, his HUD blinking repair warnings, Gary let a smile leak through. It was a small, stubborn thing—half delirium, half relief.
"Alright," he muttered, loud enough for his suit to pick up the feed. "Let's go make an ugly, improbable legend."
Miyuki's voice came back, clipped and fierce. "Then do your part, Lin. Because I don't want to have to write apology memos about losing one of my best pilots today."
He laughed, breathless, and answered, genuine for the first time in hours: "Neither do I."
Tanya, miles away by strategy and yet adjacent in the heat of their shared fight, watched the line hold and glanced at her squad. Machu and Nyaan fought with ferocity that belied their newness to this world. In the slant of their attacks she saw grief and purpose braided together; in their movements she saw two girls who had been torn out of one story and forced to soldier in another.
She let them be what they were—tools and people, both—and kept giving the orders that made survival possible.
The war did not pause for insight or revelation. It took what it could, and it offered back in return only the possibility of another breath. Gary flexed his fingers on the stick, felt the Strike hum like a thing alive, and leaned into the next run.
Solomon's heart beat on, and for now, so did he.