Chapter 167: There's Nothing to Be Afraid of Anymore
Late at night, the dark room was silent. Ange looked at the sleeping man beside her with a misty gaze and quietly listened to his breathing. In order to run away in time if an accident happened, Ade insisted that everyone should sleep on the ship, and this room was the same one that Ange and he had stayed in when they first encountered Iserlohn — and this was what Ade insisted on.
"Give you three days? it's definitely a lie, right?" Ange stretched out a finger and gently poked the man's cheek, "I know you just want to sneak off on your own while everyone is not paying attention, well, it must be."
The man beside him was still asleep, and Ange wasn't expecting a reply. She didn't know what Lacus and C.C. thought, but her gut told her that Ade was lying during the day.
"You and Dad are really the same kind of person." Ange grunted unhappily, "I will be heartbroken, bastard!"
She puffed up her cheeks and wrung on Ade's face, Ade frowned, but still did not wake up.
"My real mother gave birth to me to use me, my real father didn't even know my existence. I only have you, do you know?" Ange said, and her eyes unconsciously covered with a layer of fog and with a cry in her voice, "You just know to play hero, what should I do if you died? You're the idiot! You are the Friday!"
The more Ange said, the angrier she became, and all of a sudden, she bit hard on Ade's shoulder, leaving a shallow circle of teeth marks. Ade unconsciously moved his body and made a dazed sound, however, still did not wake up.
"See, I have a hundred ways to punish you, and you don't even know it." Miss Friday smiled smugly, "Hum, that's the publishment for you toss me all day long."
Ade still didn't answer her, and his breathing was as usual. Ange lay on his side with one hand on her cheek, staring at his calm sleeping face for a while, and fell silent.
"I know you'll be sad if something happens to me, but I'll be sad if something happens to you, too, Ade, so what should I do?" Ange said to herself, "If there must be a person to be sad, I hope it's you."
She pivoted her upper body to place a soft kiss on his lips, then carefully rolled over and got out of bed, looking in the dark for the clothes Ade had neatly folded for her before she went to bed, and couldn't help but smile heartily.
"I never felt this before, but you really like my father." Ange stood by the bed after dressing piece by piece. Her light red eyes glowed in the darkness, "I'm going out for a trip, wait for me to come back."
She took a deep breath, trying to calm her breathing that was perhaps a little disturbed by excitement, tension, or fear. A few moments later, Ange leaned down and pressed her lips to his again, this time, with a bit of bitterness in her mouth for some reason. After a long time, she took the knife out of her pocket, tremblingly cut off a strand of golden hair, and placed it on the pillow.
"Ade, I love you." Ange finally whispered in his ear, then turned away decisively.
At this time of the day, everyone was asleep and the ship was empty, with only a few people on night patrol. Ange walked silently inside the battleship, listening to the sound of her imperceptible footsteps, and her heart was incomparably calm at the moment.
Maybe she had not much IQ in other areas, but Ange was never lacking combat IQ. From the moment she felt Ade lie, she foresaw his course of action. If Moonlight Butterfly didn't work, Ange didn't doubt for a second that Ade would rush inside ELS and try to use his Geass to forcibly cut off the other party's consciousness.
"Because that's the kind of person Ade is, exactly like dad." Ange silently thought, "You're always fooling yourself about being an outsider, but you obviously like this world, right?"
Lacus and C.C. may not have cared much about it, but Ange was very concerned about Yang. Not only did she privately seek Garrod to read through Yang's biography, but she also secretly sought Chang Wufei to ask for Yang's life. The more she knew, the stronger her sense of guilt and treachery became. No matter how much Ade denied it, she simply could not look at the two completely separate.
"What is different? Nonsense, you two are simply one person, okay?" Ange muttered and complained, "Anyway, I don't know how many times we've done it, I'm not going to give up. You are responsible for making up for all that you owe me. Want to play self-sacrifice? Hum, as long as I can still breathe, you are not allowed to do it."
After coming to the hangar, Ange patiently lurked for a while, waiting for the patrolling officers to leave before entering TurnA's cockpit. With the start-up of the system, the lights in the cockpit came on and a window popped up on the main screen, requesting the boot password.
"Oops, crap!" Ange panicked and clapped both hands together, "I totally forgot there was such a thing as a boot password… what to do, what to do? Aaaaahhhhhh, it's so annoying, why do you set a password for everything?!"
"It's to prevent people like you from stealing Gundam." An abrupt voice sounded, and Alice's figure appeared on the screen, "What are you doing here? Where's Ade?"
"Wow!" Ange was caught off guard, "Alice? Why are you here? No, no, no, can you decode TurnA?"
"I'm under no obligation to answer your question." Alice responded indifferently, "According to my deduction, there is a high probability that you have sneaked out. I will call Ade immediately, and you can just wait to be caught."
"Stop it!" Ange shouted sharply as she tapped the control panel, "Stupid AI, do you want to get Ade killed?"
"… explain it clearly." Alice coldly asked, "What do you mean 'get Ade killed', and what do you mean stupid AI? this is not the Unicorn Gundam, your life is in danger at any time."
"I knew you weren't a normal AI, you tried to get me killed before! No need to threaten, now I'll give you one more chance to get me killed, let's make a deal." Ange paused, "Ade wants to play the hero again, this time, I'm going for him."
"Three days later is a lie, he plans to solve the problem himself." Through Ade's phone, Alice also listened to the meeting on the daytime lecture, and she instantly parsed out Ange's metaphor, "The probability of survival is not calculable, your behavior is completely incomprehensible to me, why do it?"
"Because it's dangerous." Ange rightfully said, "What if Ade dies?"
"What if you die? Isn't self-preservation a biological instinct?" Alice asked rhetorically, "And if you die, Ade will be sad too."
"If I died, C.C. and Lacus would still be with him. But if he died, I would have nothing." Ange whispered, "Even if I lose my life, I still want the person I love most to live happily. You're an AI, you probably can't understand such thoughts."
"You said … the exact same thing." Alice was silent for a while before she slowly spoke, "Deal."
"Really?" Ange was so happy that even her voice was much lighter, "No, the password was set by Ade, can you unlock it?"
"First, you're not Ade, I don't have to answer all your questions." Alice's tone became like an electronic tone without any emotion, "Second, your IQ is below the average level of Gundam pilots, listen to my command later."
"Tsk." Ange bristled, "Even the AI bullies me, it's unreasonable."
…
A few hours later, Ange in TurnA looked at the huge sphere in the distance and was shocked for a long time, "Is it? I thought we had to fly for at least half a day, right?"
"The accuracy of short boson jumping toward the calculated coordinate can be very high, so I jumped to a nearby position and flew a short distance to it. Specifically, the boson stance in the unfolding—" Alice thought about it, "Forget it, with your intelligence, you probably can not understand it. Take out the beam rifle to prepare for the battle."
"Beam rifle?" Ange took out the beam rifle as instructed, "What's the use of that? Didn't Ade say that only Moonlight Butterfly can deal with it?"
"Nanobot is relying on self-proliferate to achieve a huge range of kill. The enemy is too large, so the nanobot must be used sparingly." Miss AI said discontentedly, "I would have come by myself if I know you know nothing. You are completely useless."
Ange did not bother to refute her. She planned to use her subtle operation to let Alice shut up. The distant sphere split into a dense mass of metal shuttles and silver-white MSs, flying towards TurnA. Ange raised her rifle, aimed at the lead MS, and pulled the trigger. With a particle beam comparable to a battleship's main cannon gushed out from the muzzle, the enemy was swept through instantly.
"Rifle? Rifle?!" Ange casually fired a few more shots, looking at the large swathes of enemies disappearing in front of her, and swallowed hard, "Is this power… a little too much?"
"The power is a little small, because it is in a continuous fire mode. Adjust it to point-and-shoot mode, the power will be several times greater." Alice asked in a tone as if she was taking care of a retarded child, "The principle is similar to VSBR, do you know what VSBR is?"
"You definitely learned that tone from C.C.! Ade would be furious if he knew it!" The careless mention of Ade suddenly made Ange feel a little depressed, "He should be looking for me at this moment, no, he's so smart, he must have guessed the truth right away. He must be very worried and maybe angry now…"
"Should I put on some music?" Alice asked tentatively, "I've copied all the music on Unicorn."
"Are you a music player?" Ange breathlessly asked. Being interrupted by Alice, her upset was also washed away a lot, "I must go back alive, I miss him. Alice, what to do next?"
"We've already come to this distance, the gravitational force is not right. The mass is too small than expected. Well, Ade said that ELS may have an NT-like nucleus, could it be a neural network inside the sphere?" Alice did calculations quickly, "There must be a huge space inside. Try to open a hole close to the outer wall, we'll see if we can fly in and then directly use nanobot to break the core down."
"Close?" Ange's mouth stretched the tone of voice, "It's easy to talk, do you know how much of this thing? We won't be able to kill them all even if we have one month!"
"According to the calculation, with the current efficiency, if there is no new change in the enemy, it is possible to kill the enemies all before next month." Alice corrected sternly, "Surely, the pilot is not useful at all. Why don't I do it myself?"
Ange calmly observed the endless shuttles and MSs on the huge ELS's surface, and quickly found the best course of action at a glance. The blonde girl took a deep breath and gripped the joystick hard, "No need to wait until next month, you'll know right away whether the pilot is useful or not."
TurnA accelerated violently and sped towards the spherical ELS. An uncountable number of silver shuttles and MSs launched a suicidal charge towards TurnA, as dense as a tsunami. Ange dodged left and right deftly in the crowded enemy line, and when there was no way out, she used her rifle to open up a whole new path. The huge sphere grew larger and larger in the young girl's pupils, while the surface of TurnA remained unharmed.
"Make a hole, right?" Ange dodged another round of suicide charge, set the beam rifle to point-and-shoot mode, aim at the surface of the sphere, and snapped the trigger, "Tell me, what can the pilot do!"
ELS was pierced by TurnA's terrible beam and blowing out a big hole. As Alice had expected, it was hollow. The interior seemed to be vaguely visible with light, and the dull universe had illuminated a small corner here.
"Unscientific, completely unreasonable." Alice collected the battle data of Ange during this period of time and got a very surprising conclusion about Ange's battle power by using Anaheim's standards, "Who's the designer of GBN? Its battle power calculating algorithm must be wrong. Are you the author's own daughter?"
