The gunshot came so suddenly it was like thunder exploding right beside their ears.
It nearly stopped their hearts.
After all, everyone aboard the Archangel had already understood what the other side wanted. There was no way they could hand over the Archangel.
The instant they grasped that intent, the atmosphere became oppressively tense.
It was as if the air itself were filled with gunpowder, waiting for nothing more than a single spark to ignite it.
And then that spark appeared without warning.
The sudden gunshot.
No one knew who had fired it, but it could easily make both sides believe the other had struck first, leading to a fatal misjudgment and an immediate bloodbath.
At the same time, in Natarle Badgiruel's field of vision, the man standing beside Lacus Clyne - the pilot who had come down from the transformed fighter - moved.
He had originally been standing slightly behind Lacus and Cagalli, between them.
Then, in an instant, he seemed to flash right in front of Lacus.
More importantly, his hand looked as though it had intercepted something in midair.
Natarle's pupils widened. From her angle, she could actually see something in his palm.
It was a deformed lump of metal.
A bullet, twisted out of shape by a high-speed impact, had been stopped dead in his hand.
The reason it had not pierced through him was obvious. The combat suit he wore clearly had bulletproof properties.
But being able to perceive the bullet and get a hand in front of it in time...
That was not something a human being should be capable of.
Natarle had no time to think further. A sharp tearing sound split the air, snapping her back to herself as several laser beams fired from the hovering fighter behind him.
Most of the beams shot into the area behind her, but two struck places still within her line of sight: the shadowed blind corners on either side of the hatch leading out of the warship.
As those two lasers hit, the sudden flare of light let her see two armed men with guns, both apparently just about to fire the rocket launchers in their hands.
Unfortunately for them, before they could pull the trigger, the lasers sliced through the launchers and cut their bodies apart with them.
But that was only the beginning.
Natarle's eyes had barely registered those two being killed, less than half a second ago, perhaps not even a tenth of a second, when the man in the combat suit, who should still have remained within the corner of her vision, seemed to vanish into thin air.
As she focused on him in alarm, she felt a rush of air brush one side of her face.
It was as if something had shot past her at incredible speed, stirring the air as it went.
So she sensed at once that something was behind her.
The moment she whirled around, she saw a blurred figure disappearing, so briefly that it almost seemed like a hallucination.
And as that blurred figure vanished, what entered her sight instead was an ensign, the same rank as her, frozen in the act of having just drawn his pistol and about to raise it.
Then, in the next second, after what seemed like a blink, the hand gripping the pistol suddenly split in two, gun and all.
No.
His body split diagonally in two as well.
Once the severed halves shifted apart, blood burst out and splashed all over Natarle.
At that moment, her pupils trembled. She had no idea what she had just seen.
Then more dull, heavy thuds of things hitting the floor snapped her back to reality. She realized it was not just one person who had been cut apart, but three, all among the crowd that had come down from the Archangel.
The others finally reacted and scrambled back in terror, as though trying to avoid some invisible monster.
That movement opened a path directly in front of Natarle, allowing her to see the man in the combat suit standing before a soldier who was also holding a rifle.
That soldier stared at him in pure horror.
He stared at the arm raised slightly above his head.
In that hand was a short blade.
In the very next instant, at a speed the naked eye could barely follow, that blade came down.
Then the man in the combat suit turned around and faced Natarle, calmly stepping toward her.
When he took that first step, the tiny motion it caused was enough for the soldier behind him to split cleanly into two.
At that moment, fear began racing through every inch of Natarle's body.
Especially when he passed right beside her.
It felt as though all strength was draining out of her body.
"F-for the sake of our blue and pure world, die with us, monster!!!"
That voice was full of terror and madness.
Natarle turned toward it and saw that it was one of the maintenance crew. The man had flung open his coat, revealing explosives strapped across his entire upper body, and was pressing forward.
Bang!
That was not the sound of an explosion.
It was a deep gunshot, like the report of a heavy sniper rifle.
The instant the sound reached her ears, Natarle saw the crazed maintenance worker seem to flash with light, and then disappear.
Not literally vanish into nothing, but disappear amid tiny sparks, as though his body had been instantly vaporized by some unimaginable heat.
It really did seem to be heat-induced vaporization, because the floor where he had been standing was glowing red, as though the metal itself had nearly melted.
She simply could not understand exactly what had caused it.
And before the shock of that apparently suicidal attack could deepen the terror already spreading through her, Natarle mechanically turned her head toward the source of the shot.
There he was.
The man who had just walked past her.
He held an unfamiliar gun in his hand, and a faint wisp of smoke seemed to be drifting from its muzzle.
With a casual single shot from that weapon, he had erased a man.
"All right. You can announce it now, Miss Cagalli."
"Huh?"
Cagalli, who had been scared nearly witless, still had not recovered from Kain's reminder.
How much time had passed since that first sudden gunshot?
Probably not even as long as it took an ordinary person to draw a single natural breath.
And yet in that instant, every hostile threat that had burst into action had already been eliminated.
The fighter taking out targets, that she could at least understand.
But Kain's own movements made her swallow hard.
No human being should be able to move that fast, let alone cut people apart like that.
Human muscle, human bone, the clothes they wore, even their guns - all of it had been sliced cleanly in two like tofu.
How terrifying did his strength have to be to do that?
At that moment, Cagalli finally started to understand why the people who had tried to attack Lacus earlier had screamed so miserably, so full of terror.
Because the women called 2B and A2 were not human either.
They must have been cut to pieces.
Back then, while riding on the motorcycle, she had glimpsed some strangely mangled remains. She had thought part of the bodies were merely hidden by weeds.
Clearly, they had really been dismembered.
Right.
Lacus had joked with her earlier, saying he belonged to the third category.
Th-this couldn't actually be true... could it?
(End of Chapter)
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