☆★ ash like snow ★☆

There weren't nearly as many ghost stories about Krugis as there might have been. More than anything, it was due to the fact that no one wanted to go there. It was a dead, dead place, and Neil wasn't entirely sure from the pictures that he'd seen of the ruins that ghosts would want anything to do with it at all. It would explain that certain void a lot better than respect. There was barely enough of that to go around without bringing the place into it.

It wasn't somewhere that Neil Dylandy ever thought that he'd go, because there was simply no reason to. No one went there, for that same reason. There was nothing there. The fact made the story he heard make a little more sense though. Rumors of a mobile suit sighted there, something not quite the same as the other wrecks. A much newer model, from the sound of things. He wanted to talk to that pilot he'd faced again, to get an actual answer out of them. If there were any answers left in the world at all. The place that no one went would be as good of a place as any to hide a Mobile Suit for a while, wouldn't it?

Going there was easier than trying to figure out where Celestial being might go next, in any case. Keeping out of a current war zone was in his better favor, anyway. He shouldn't have been in the Mobile Suit he'd 'borrowed' at all, let alone flying it, and his body protested, his chest more than the rest of it. Not that it helped that he'd taken a unit that had been ready for the junk pile, that he had to fight like hell with to get moving. It moved though, and flew, and that was all that he needed.

When he finally reached Krugis, he had at least an idea of where to head. A set of coordinates that he was very thankful for in the circumstances. Having to scan the entire place would have had the heap that he was flying on the ground before he'd even started.

Instead though, it wasn't long at all before he spotted what he'd come there for, and he kept his eyes on it as he headed to the ground. The unit was unarmed, and so was he, but the closer he came the more apparent it became that it didn't matter. Once he had a good look at it, he knew without a doubt that it wasn't the same model that had attacked his base. But he was already there, and whatever it was still wasn't anything that he'd ever seen, and he needed some time out of the relic of a suit he'd been flying, so he opened his cockpit.

It was nearing dawn when he got close enough to see the major features of the military base that had been designated as the target: the high, almost fragile-looking radio tower, the rooftops of the multilevel buildings such as dormitories. The weak sun was reflecting off of them in pale lines, and it would have made an interesting sight if the pilot in question's attention wasn't focused wholly elsewhere.

His target was the storage and repair yard adjacent to the base, wherein the AEU was working on creating a more powerful type of mobile suit for use in battle. It wasn't complete yet, but the chances were that here, on this particular base, the prototype and the initial design specifications would be held, which made it an important target. Doubtless the plans would be duplicated somewhere else, and the most that this would do would serve to stall them, but it was considered marginally better than inserting himself into a border war that would resume again immediately after he left... and risk the chance of overwhelming him. He had already had that happen once, in his second mission, and while it had ended in success, he did not care to repeat the experience.

It didn't take as long as he had thought to pass over the base, and because of it he was perhaps half of a second late in deploying the gas that would conceal his presence, but it didn't effect his overall timing, and he was right on target in activating the GN particles. Virtue responded to him almost intuitively by now, and it was simple enough work to begin his assault on the facility. Aim and fire; he had no enemy mobile suits to worry about yet, though he knew that they would come. From behind, probably; he had already accounted for their presence and lack of preparedness. He could destroy the prototype at the least before they were able to stir and get to their mobile suits.

If they were slow or stupid, he could destroy the whole damn facility before they could get to him. He tried not to count on more remote chances, though, and that was only a 30% chance according to his calculations. It was more prudent to plan for a second sweep of the warehousing while already engaged in battle.

Tieria Erde did not take chances.