8Reckoning
A/N: This fic was inspired by the works of Garth Ennis, particularly Fury: Peacemaker, Fury: My War Gone By, The Shadow: Fire of Creation, War Stories, and Unknown Soldier by Joshua Dysart. It also occurred that no one has explored the effects of the Infinite Stratos system around the world beyond the gender disparity. We'll get to the that. I'll say that I have never watched or read Infinite Stratos although I lurked the wiki some. It was originally a one-shot but it seemed to go to long for me so I'll release this in chapters. It may not be to your taste so I advise to read it with an open mind.
Phantom Task primary bunker complex
Itissaalik, Greenland
Third day of siege, 2345 Hours
United Nations' Operation Hardholme was going well. American, British, Canadian, French, and Russian forces had invaded Iceland to lay siege on Phantom Task's northern base, part of a synchronized attack against the terrorist group's havens and strike bases around the world. This was the fruit of extensive planning behind a shroud of secrecy thick as pea soup and it paid off well... initially. This operation also drew out of hiding previously unknown bases and cells of Phantom Task and its allies, causing a melee of shifting, destructive battles across the world. Casualties on both side have mounted in the millions, regions in the reduced into war zones that rivaled those of the Second World War in intensity. U.N, Phantom Task and co-belligerent regimes and organizations, and of course, the civilian caught in the middle. The Infinite Stratos mechas of every country who had them had joined the fight, to face their opposing numbers from the enemy.
In the midst of the rubble inside the subterranean hideout of Phantom Task beneath the frozen wastes of Greenland, two people have rendezvous with destiny, the culmination of the disastrous effects created by the introduction of the I.S. One of them intercepted the other, emerging from the darkness.
"This is quite an odd time to meet," said the man, a tall husky Congolese dressed in black cargo pants and sweater, a scarlet beret on his head. The pistol he held was pointed squarely at a woman who wouldn't look out of place from Tokyo's Akihabara district. She is Tabane Shinonono, the genius who created the Infinite Stratos weapon system and the woman who brought the world at a new cold war.
The woman hopped joyfully, like a child. She had that saccharine cute smile with a cuddly face framed by long pink hair. Her head was adorned with mechanical bunny ears. Her eyes bulged with life and curiosity.
"Who might you be?" she asked in her cute voice. The voice had roused anger and hate inside the accuser's heart for so long. Yet each one was always new.
"Call me Temedu," he replied with more calm than he actually felt, the pistol still level in his hands. "It is an honor to see you, Doctor."
"Oh really?" The voice echoed loudly in the humongous, cathedral-like chamber. The rubble of ice and concrete, the fallen twisted still beams, the uneven and unstable-lighting all lend Wagnerian grandeur to their conversation. The rocking of the scene with the battle above ground and bunker busters piercing the surface gave the background score.
"Not exactly." The man's face turned to a subdued frown. "We need to talk about something."
"You just wanted to talk to me? Oh how sweet. It seems so sudden but I don't you need to point that gun at me." At the mention of gun, her voice took a temperature drop. The man remained unmoved though was surprised to her this from. She seemed so sweet, nonchalant, and abrasive.
"Well, old habits. It's not everyday that a lowly foot-soldier of Phantom Task gets to meet a celebrity."
"Oh, thank you~." She made a cutesy bow, her cheerful voice returned. "What do you wanting to talk about, Temedu-kun?"
He face to the I.S. Black Knight, Madoka's Orimura's smoking, headless corpse sitting in the shattered cockpit. It had fallen from a huge hole on the ceiling created from several bunker busters exploding in the ice beneath her. "Alas, poor Madoka. Finest I.S. pilot Phantom Task has ever known. She should have been careful about taking on the newly-upgraded Byakushiki and Silver Gospel, the latter doing away with the AI system and sticking a pilot instead."
She shrugged her shoulders like it was a simple prank. "I didn't expect the Americans to learn that fast. Look's like they got over the Silver Gospel screwing everything at the academy."
"And they approved hundreds of millions of dollars to overhaul Silver Gospel and created new protocols that governed deployment of the I.S. That's a lot of money."
"Oh, I see. Does Temedu-kun want some pocket change?" she inquired. "It might be a little difficult to..."
"I have no interest in 'pocket change,'" Temedu replied. "I just noticed it always boiled down to money... riches."
"I don't understand." She stroked her chin as she pondered the thought.
He wondered if she did that to irritate him. Japanese, it seemed, have a habit of making such "cute" gestures. He sighed, a bit dramatically for his taste. "An Infinite Stratos unit cost billions to build and maintain. And this technology is far advanced than anything before it, a leap by several generations." He lowered the gun and sat on a block of concrete, seemingly deflated. "My apologies for pointing a weapon at you."
"That's okay~."
"All that money, all that technology..." His voice became heavy, of a man who has seen all that is wrong with the world. "They could have improves lives... Medicine, farming, engineering, even take us the stars. Instead, all of it has gone into this." He gestured to Black Knight. "An arms race in the form of a jousting match between robots that could wipe out the planet twenty times over."
She tilted her head a bit with a frown. "Oh, what's wrong, Temedu-kun? The I.S. matches are lotsa fun to watch."
He scoffed. "If only you can afford it. Governments, defense contractors, the whole lot, watching. Seeing the advancements of the Infinite Stratos systems so they can get to work on how to one-up the other countries'. All in all, the rest of the world has to shoulder the expenses so girls in powered suits of armor can battle each other. " He breathed heavily. "To do that, legislatures approved increased funding for these weapons, taxes raised and redirected to the defense contractors and money flows freely from there - up to the end of the line."
"What's the end of the line?" she mewed curiously.
"Congo, Angola, Indonesia, southern China, Kazakhstan, and other places you or anyone in Japan or the rest of the first world never heard or even cared about."
"I hear some of those places but I don't get what you mean." Her "ears" flicked again.
"To build an Infinite Stratos, raw material has to be obtained and to get that, all eyes turned to the regions beyond: in third-world countries and the wild, backwater regions of developed nations. In what you call 'shitholes' lie what you needed."
A/N: This is my first, and probably only Infinite Stratos fanfiction. Time for the references. Hardhome is a reference to a settlement featured in A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones series. It was a Free Folk fishing village north of the Wall that played two pivotal moments in ASOIAF universe: the burning of Hardhome and the massacre of Hardhome featured in Game of Thrones. Temedu is a Yoruban named used an equivalent of John Doe in Nigeria.
