Black Knights
The Black Knights are a loose affiliation of primarily Japanese resistance groups set to announce themselves as a cohesive organization roughly at the game's launch. The bulk of their membership comes from fed-up citizenry and former Japanese military personnel, and while the OCU officially provides them no support, in practice some of the best and brightest in the country from south of Tokyo are sympathetic to the cause.
A fair number of Federation-hostile or Federation-skeptical organizations on Earth have affiliated themselves with the Black Knights, including the Mafty anti-Federation resistance movement and the Build Base Kyushu Zone monitoring station.
The genius behind the Black Knights' formation is Zero, a mysterious masked revolutionary with a flair for the dramatic and an impossibly keen strategic mind. The acts associated with the Black Knights have generally been kept narrowly-targeted at Union forces, and have been a thorn in their side as they try to spin up the war effort against ZAFT.
Notable Characters
- Zero - A brilliant strategist with the mysterious power to create "miracles" on and off the battlefield, Zero seems to be gathering up disparate elements toward the goal of Japanese sovereignty.
- C.C. - Zero's aide de camp, a mysterious woman who seems to contribute little.
- Kyoshiro Todoh - An OCU Japanese officer who scored one of Japan's few victories during the Britannian invasion. He has remained with the Japanese Liberation Front, a group of OCU Japanese soldiers who continue to resist Britannian occupation in the hopes of leaving the Federation altogether, but would be an asset to the Black Knights.
- Miwa Uzuki - Leader of Build Base, a monitoring station for the Kyushu Zone, and veteran of both the incidents surrounding the Zone and the Zentradi War. She refused integration of Build Base into the NERV infrastructure due to an intuitive distrust of Britannian Emperor Charles zi Britannia.
- Hathaway Noa - Sixteen year old Hathaway Noa carries out operations alongside the Black Knights under the name Mafty Nabiyu Erin. He sees the greed of the Federation's elite as intractable, but also fights to assuage his own guilt over the outcome of his battles during the Axis Shock.