After the death match with Xia Ya in the space around the abandoned Mendel colony, Rau Le Creuset immediately used the privileges Patrick had granted him to order the technical department to carry out a modification to the Providence Gundam that appeared so extreme to outsiders it was practically self-destructive.
It was exactly what the mechanic had mentioned earlier: pushing the quantum communication speed between the machine itself and the eleven DRAGOON terminals on its back to its theoretical limit.
He had completely removed every safety restriction in exchange for flawless control with no delay, as though they were extensions of his own body.
In that battle, although Rau Le Creuset had exhausted every ounce of his strength and had even used poisonous words to stab at his opponent's soul, he had still failed to kill Xia Ya.
He had not blamed the machine itself for the total destruction of the DRAGOONs. More than anyone, he understood that since the Providence Gundam was the ZAFT Forces' first attempt to introduce this special all-range attack weapon, it had been put into service without sufficient combat testing. Thus, the system had been designed with extreme emphasis on stability rather than ultimate controllability.
It was a natural compromise, and an inevitable limitation.
But Rau Le Creuset had concluded that with such sluggish response speed, he could never defeat that "son" piloting the Unicorn Gundam, blazing with crimson light.
More than anyone, he understood how terrifying one's spatial awareness had to be, and how delicate one's control had to be, to handle sensitivity at such extremes.
Yet infuriatingly, the talent engraved in the deepest recesses of this body's genes, though utterly loathsome, was undeniably real.
Though this body's biological age was already that of an old man whose life flickered like a candle in