The Federation compound had never been built to survive what came down on it that afternoon.
Gato's Gelgoogs cut through the outer GM screen in the first ninety seconds — six Federation units reduced to wreckage before their formation had finished registering it was under attack. It wasn't a fair fight. It had never been designed to be one. Every GM pilot on that perimeter had been pulled from garrison duty rather than front-line rotation, competent enough to hold a checkpoint and hopelessly outmatched against pilots who had spent the better part of a year sharpening themselves specifically against opponents like this.
"Perimeter's clear," Ridden reported, already advancing his own Gelgoog toward the compound's inner ring. "Building's exposed. Officials are still inside — no evacuation attempt yet."
"They won't get one," Gato said, and meant it as simple fact rather than threat.
That was when the Union Flags arrived.
Ten of them came in low over the compound's northern wall, linear rifles already tracking, and for the second time that week the Federation's survival on a piece of contested ground came down to a private army that owed the uniform nothing and had shown up anyway.
They didn't fight like the garrison had. Where the GM screen had folded in ninety seconds, the Flags fought with the same disciplined cohesion Gato had already seen once at the political office — spreading into overlapping fire lanes, forcing his Gelgoogs to break formation rather than press the advantage cleanly. Two Zaku-class support units caught in the crossfire went down before Ridden could reposition his own line to compensate.
And then, cutting through the formation behind them, came something none of Gato's scouting reports had accounted for.
It moved differently than the standard Union Flags around it — heavier, more deliberate, but with a precision to that heaviness that made it clear the extra mass wasn't a liability so much as a promise of what it could absorb and keep functioning through. Its beam weapon fired in a longer, more sustained burst than the linear rifles flanking it, forcing three of Ridden's units to break for cover rather than risk standing in that line for even a second longer than necessary.
*"Federation compound, this is Masaki Shido, Shinomiya independent asset,"* the transmission came, calm and almost conversational despite the violence surrounding it. *"You're welcome for the assist. I'd recommend getting your remaining people somewhere with better walls."*
Gato watched the Over Flag carve a path directly toward his own position with an economy of movement that told him everything he needed to know about the man piloting it — someone who had built the machine himself, who understood exactly what it could do because he'd designed every joint and weapon mount to do precisely that, and nothing more or less than that.
"Ridden. Grievous." Gato's voice was level, already recalculating. "The Over Flag is mine. Clear the rest."
"Copy," Ridden said, already moving.
Whatever cohesion the standard Union Flags had shown against Gato's initial advance came apart the moment Grievous entered the engagement properly.
He didn't fight the Flags the way Ridden did — methodical, economical, one clean kill at a time. He fought them the way he'd once fought entire squads of enemies with four blades moving independently of each other, treating a formation not as a wall to break through but as a set of individual problems to be solved simultaneously. His Gelgoog Jaeger closed distance faster than any of the Flag pilots had accounted for, weapon systems tracking two targets at once with a coordination that shouldn't have been mechanically possible for a standard frame — and wasn't, quite, except that nobody had told Grievous his borrowed machine had limits he was supposed to respect.
"Machines like this were built for people with considerably fewer arms than I'm used to having," he said, almost cheerfully, cutting down a Flag pilot who'd hesitated a half-second too long trying to track him. "Fascinating how much easier that makes this."
Ridden, for his part, said nothing at all — simply pressed the advantage Grievous's chaos created, picking off Flags that broke formation to avoid him and left themselves exposed to Ridden's far more patient, far more lethal precision instead. Between the two of them, disciplined cohesion collapsed into something closer to a scramble within minutes, five Flags down, the remaining survivors falling back toward the compound's edge in a retreat that had stopped pretending to be anything else.
"Formation's broken," Ridden reported. "They're disengaging."
"Then let them," Grievous said, already turning his attention toward wherever Gato's engagement with the Over Flag was heading. "We have better things to finish today than chasing people who've already decided to leave."
Masaki Shido fought the way a man fights when he trusts his own work completely — not recklessly, but without the small hesitations Gato had learned to read in pilots who weren't entirely sure their machine would do what they needed it to. Every motion of the Over Flag came a fraction of a second faster than Gato's read on its mass should have allowed, its beam weapon cycling through what should have been a punishing cooldown period with a smoothness that suggested the designer had solved that problem himself, on his own terms, long before this fight ever happened.
Gato matched it anyway. He'd fought machines built by people who understood them better than anyone else alive before, and the lesson had never changed: understanding a machine perfectly didn't make its pilot immune to a fight fought on someone else's terms instead of his own.
He forced the engagement close, inside the Over Flag's ideal firing range, where its longer sustained beam burst became a liability rather than an advantage — too much commitment, too little room to disengage cleanly if the shot missed. Masaki adjusted for it, competent enough to see the trap forming, but a fraction slower than Gato needed him to be.
The Gelgoog Jaeger's blade found the gap between the Over Flag's shoulder plating and its main frame in a single, unhurried motion, and for a moment neither machine moved at all.
*"...Noted,"* Masaki said, voice tight but controlled, already disengaging the crippled arm and falling back rather than press a fight he'd just watched himself lose the shape of. *"Federation compound, Shinomiya assets are withdrawing. I'd get out if I still could."*
Gato didn't pursue. There was nothing left in the retreat worth the cost of chasing it.
By the time the last of the Union Flags cleared the compound's perimeter, there was nothing left standing between Gato's forces and the building itself.
He didn't linger over what came next. It wasn't the part of the operation that required precision — only certainty, and the specific, practiced discipline of not letting himself feel any particular way about it while it was happening. The officials inside had known, by the time Gato's Gelgoog breached the last defensible corridor, exactly how this was going to end; there was no theater left in it, no negotiation to be had, only the flat, quiet finality of an outcome that had been decided the moment Lelouch drew this building on a map days ago.
When it was done, Gato signaled the withdrawal.
"Objective complete," he reported, flat and unembellished. "Compound secured. Targets eliminated."
Behind him, Ridden and Grievous fell into formation for the retreat, and the three of them lifted away from a building that had, an hour earlier, still believed the war was something happening to other people.
On shinomiya coorperation unit.
*"Kaguya. Report."* Masaki's voice came through scratched with static, the aftermath of the engagement still audible behind it in the low whine of a damaged actuator he hadn't bothered to mute. *"Flag units performed well against the standard Zeon line, but the Gelgoog Jaeger units — Gato's, and whatever the second one was — went through our formation like it wasn't there. I lost an arm proving that the hard way. I'd recommend we start looking at a new frame instead of another round of upgrades on the current one."*
There was a pause on the other end — longer than Masaki expected, long enough that he checked the connection hadn't dropped.
"...Report received," Kaguya said finally, flat and formal, none of the usual sharpness in it.
Masaki frowned at his own display. "...Is this the military now? You're going to log it and move on?"
She didn't answer that. The channel closed a moment later, leaving him staring at a dead connection and the ruined arm of his Over Flag, wondering exactly when the woman running this operation had started sounding like someone reading from a script instead of making a decision.
Kaguya set the comm down slower than she needed to.
*A new frame.* She'd heard the same suggestion twice now in the space of a week, from two different people who otherwise agreed on almost nothing, and she still didn't have an answer that felt like more than a guess. Designing a mobile suit wasn't a decision you made because a battle had gone badly. It was months of frame stress testing, actuator calibration, a hundred failure points that only revealed themselves once real pilots were already depending on the thing not breaking under them. She had exactly none of that time to spend, and an enemy that had just demonstrated, twice, that whatever she already had wasn't going to be enough for much longer.
She was still turning that over when Sei found her.
"You look like someone gave you a problem you already know the answer to," he said, dropping into the seat across from her without waiting to be invited. "And you don't like the answer."
"I don't have an answer. That's the problem."
"You have half of one." He set a data slate down between them — rough sketches, incomplete frame geometry, the kind of thing that looked less like an engineering proposal and more like something drawn from memory rather than calculation. "I told you a few days ago I had an idea. I still do. It's not finished. But it's further along than 'nothing,' and nothing is currently what we're planning to build next."
Kaguya looked at the sketches for a long moment, then at him. "You understand what I'm risking, committing production capacity to something unproven. If it fails, we lose the time and the materials both, and we're worse off against the next Gelgoog Jaeger than we are right now."
"I understand."
"And you're still telling me to gamble on it."
"I'm telling you I think it's a better bet than standing still." Sei held her gaze, steady in a way he rarely let himself be about anything else. "You don't have to believe it'll work. You just have to believe it's worth finding out before someone else answers that question for you the hard way."
She didn't answer right away. She'd learned, over months of working with him, that Sei rarely pushed this directly unless some part of him was more certain than he was willing to fully explain — and she'd also learned, the harder way, not to ask him to explain it further when he clearly didn't want to.
"Fine," she said finally. "Work on it. Quietly, and without pulling resources off the current line — I still need Flag units coming off the floor every day this war keeps going." She paused. "It's a bet, Sei. Not a promise. Remember that if it doesn't pay off."
"Understood."
She turned to the comm panel before he'd finished standing. "Hiroto. Status on Gaia."
*"Final assembly stage,"* came the reply, brisk and efficient. *"We're within days of a completed frame. Just need Shido cleared and ready to pilot once it's done."*
"Good. Keep the timeline moving. We may not have the luxury of days to spare much longer."
The channel closed, and Kaguya sat back, gaze drifting up through the workshop's high windows toward a sky that offered nothing back in return for the weight of what she was carrying — one line already stretched thin, a new one not yet born, and a war on the ground below that showed no particular interest in waiting for either of them to be ready.
She didn't say what she was thinking. She wasn't entirely sure, herself, that she could have put it into words even if she'd wanted to.