Kira, whose eyes were brimming with tears and whose admiration for Wang Hu was nearly overflowing, stood frozen in place.
Beside him, Cagalli—who had been calling him "scum" just moments ago—now couldn't bring herself to utter another word, her reluctance to leave palpable.
The two of them turned back every few steps, their hearts heavy with sorrow as they finally disappeared down the corridor.
"Heh." Wang Hu chuckled softly. Just seconds ago, he had been holding up the collapsing ceiling with seemingly Herculean effort.
Now, he casually let go and strolled out from beneath the falling debris with effortless ease.
"Should be effective enough, right?"
Brushing the dust off his clothes, Wang Hu surveyed the scene—dangerous-looking, but in reality, completely harmless.
Wang Hu did indeed possess the Amuro template—in other words, he was a so-called Newtype.
But Newtypes were still human, and in terms of physical capabilities, UC-era Newtypes were even inferior to Coordinators.
Even after some core enhancements, Wang Hu wasn't some roaring Hulk.
There was no way he could actually hold up a ceiling that weighed several tons.
Everything had been carefully calculated.
Balance—as long as equilibrium could be maintained, the illusion of a life-or-death struggle could be perfectly staged.
In their panic, Kira and Cagalli had failed to notice the subtle support points at either end of the ceiling!
"Next." Muttering to himself, Wang Hu picked a direction and walked off.
Long before arriving at the Heliopolis colony, both Wang Hu and Li Chengzhi had memorized the entire layout of this place.
In a way, even Kira, who studied here, wasn't as familiar with the terrain as these two.
Twisting and turning, avoiding the fleeing crowds, Wang Hu silently made his way to a perfect vantage point.
"Beautiful." Standing atop a hill, Wang Hu whistled as he watched the factory engulfed in raging flames.
The chosen one of this world had just embarked on his legendary journey.
What? Why didn't Wang Hu just take the Strike Gundam for himself—or any other Gundam, for that matter?
Don't ask. The answer was simple: Wang Hu lacked the confidence.
Not confidence in piloting a Gundam, but—
"This is just unscientific." He stared down at the Strike Gundam, which had been stumbling like a newborn baby mere seconds ago, only to suddenly spring to life.
In an instant, it launched a devastating attack, taking down Michel—the so-called "Twilight Phantom"—and forcing the Red Coat Elite-wannabe to resort to self-destructing his mobile suit just to escape.
"Piloting a Gundam? No problem. But coding?"
Wang Hu shook his head and fell silent.
He remembered the intel clearly—the original operating systems of the Allied Forces and Orb's Gundams were a complete mess.
Even the specially selected pilots struggled to make the machines walk during training.
Wang Hu prided himself on being a top-tier pilot, but—
"I input the commands to move forward, but the machine either lags or just doesn't respond."
In short, every possible glitch would rear its head.
Was he really supposed to gamble his life debugging a Gundam?
Moreover, Wang Hu had silently counted the time in his mind. Kira had managed to set up such a system in such a short span.
The cheat he was using must be massive, no less impressive than Seed Mode.
Because anyone who's ever written code knows that once you get into the zone, you can churn out tens of thousands of lines in one go.
But when you later have to go back and figure out what each line of code actually means—
Forget being the one who wrote it—even if you left comments beside it, you might not understand it clearly in a short time.
Yet here was Kira, not only comprehending it instantly but also modifying the code and redefining parameters on the fly.
"If any of the big tech companies in my past life had just one Kira, all the coders would be out of a job."
Wang Hu clicked his tongue in sheer admiration, utterly awestruck.
"Thank goodness there wasn't anyone as ridiculously skilled as Kira in my previous world."
Surveying the battlefield where the smoke of battle had temporarily settled, Wang Hu strode forward with deliberate calm.
Clang. Before he could even get close to the Gundam, Wang Hu heard the sound of a bullet striking something solid.
"Get down from that Gundam immediately! It's a top-secret asset of the Allied Forces!"
It was the voice of Murrue, the legendary warship Archangel's most prominent figure—now awake.
"What the—!" The indignant voices of teenagers followed.
"If it weren't for Kira, you'd be dead by now!"
"Yeah, yeah! We're the ones who saved you!"
The sight of a humanoid weapon like the Gundam had awakened something primal in their blood.
Tolle, Katz, and the others, who had climbed into the Gundam's cockpit, muttered complaints under their breath.
Hearing the teenagers' reproaches and glancing at the bandages wrapped around her arm, Murrue—whose temperament was anything but military—flushed red. She faltered, too embarrassed to insist further.
Just as she was steeling herself to regain composure—
"The Allied Forces' secrets have already been exposed to ZAFT. At this point, letting a few civilians take a look won't make a difference."
Wang Hu's voice cut in as his figure came into view.
"Who?!" Startled, Murrue hadn't expected someone else to be lurking nearby. She quickly swung her gun toward the approaching Wang Hu.
"Big Brother Wang Hu?" Kira exclaimed, both surprised and delighted, his affinity for the man sky-high.
"That guy?" Kira's friends exchanged glances at the newcomer's title.
"Wang Hu?" Murrue glanced at the boy piloting the Strike Gundam beside her, mulling over the name.
"The Prodigy of Nova! The Strongest Natural! The Fangs of the Alliance!"
She rattled off Wang Hu's three epithets in one breath, recalling the personnel list for the Gundam retrieval mission.
"The Prodigy of Nova? The Strongest Natural? The Fangs of the Alliance?"
Kira and his friends were stunned by the barrage of titles.
"It's him!" Katz, usually unassuming, pointed at Wang Hu with a trembling hand. "The East Asian Army's super ace—the one who single-handedly held off countless ZAFT Forces!"
"Wang Hu, the most dazzling MA pilot in last year's Nova Resource Satellite siege!"
"Ah!" Upon hearing Katz's introduction, Kira and the others first turned their heads to look at their friend.
Never expected you to be a military enthusiast too!
Then they turned to stare at the grinning Wang Hu, surprised—could he really be such an impressive figure?
"Captain Wang Hu," Murrue confirmed the newcomer's identity and holstered her gun.
"You're late. The results of the G Project have already been taken by the Coordinators. Fortunately, we still have one Strike Gundam left."
As she spoke, Murrue subtly glanced at Kira before turning back to Wang Hu with hopeful expectation.
"If you're the strongest pilot in our forces, Captain Wang Hu, you should be able to pilot the Strike Gundam, right?"
The moment those words were spoken, before Wang Hu could even respond, Kira suddenly felt an inexplicable emptiness in his heart.
It was as though something important was slipping away from him—yet he couldn't quite grasp what that something was.
"The Strike Gundam, huh?" Wang Hu's eyes flicked toward Kira as he walked up to the foot of the Strike Gundam.
"Who was piloting it earlier? It wasn't you, Captain Murrue, was it?"
"No," Murrue replied without hesitation.
"The one who piloted the Strike Gundam was this young man here."
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