Thousand Shinji (NGE crossover)

[Academia Nut]

I just posted the battle to the rest of the update since it was less than 2000 words, so you can all see how the fight with my version of Sandalphon goes.

[KlavoHunter]

Seven: boiling hot magma!

I get this sorta vibe from Sandalphon in this alternate version of the fight....

[Academia Nut]

A somewhat shorter chapter, not a lot really happened in this episode in the OTL anyway.

---

“You know, I’m considering coming up with a pamphlet,” Shinji notes.

“Oh?” Asuka asks with a giggle.

“Yeah. I’ve been converting a lot people to Chaos lately that I figure some streamlining is in order, make things easier to handle,” Shinji explains.

“Two people are a lot?” Asuka asks.

“You and Rei? I would call both of you a lot to handle,” Shinji says, receiving a playful whack upside the head.

“I’m a lot to handle?” Asuka asks in a dry, superior tone.

Cupping her breasts playfully, Shinji says, “Well yeah! I mean you’re 14 and look how big you are already! You’re already a lot to handle.”

Whacking him playfully again, Asuka glares at him and says, “Oh, so you know this about Rei then?”

Laughing, Shinji kisses her and says, “You have me there!”

“Do I? Or is this all part of your master plan?” Asuka replies with a mischievous growl.

Tapping her on the side of the nose, Shinji says, “You never can tell with me, you never can tell.”

Giggling, Asuka returns the kiss and after a time asks curiously, “So what would this pamphlet be like?”

“I’ve already figured out the title. ‘Chaos: Fuck Yeah!’ I’m thinking it would feature a smiling, confident looking guy giving the reader an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Inside would be the various benefits of Chaos. Do you think I should start with talking about the lack of angst when you’re with Chaos, or finish off with it?” Shinji asks.

“Hmm… when writing a persuasive argument, its best to finish with the most compelling argument,” Asuka says in a pseudo-serious tone.

“Would having a hot girl sitting on your lap, her blouse open, making out with you count as the most compelling argument?” Shinji asks.

Giggling again, Asuka replies, “Considering the fact that your converts so far have been girls, I would probably put that under ‘fringe benefits’.”

“Should I make ‘access to the rich, handsome, stud Ikari Shinji’ a benefit then?” Shinji asks.

Laughing, Asuka wraps her hand around one of Shinji’s arms and asks, “Oh, you think these twigs make you a ‘stud’ now do you?”

Frowning, Shinji says, “Hey, all this is muscle here. It’s not my fault the testosterone hasn’t ramped up to full production yet. Give me another two years and I’ll make all those sports jocks look like little pansy girls.”

Grinning, Asuka says, “Shinji, you can hurl a tank with your mind, and that’s when you’re not in the gargantuan, nuclear powered war robot you pilot. You already make them look pretty pathetic in comparison.”

Sliding a hand along her leg and sliding it up to a point on her thigh just beyond the hem of her skirt, Shinji grins and says, “That’s not all my mind can do. For example, I know that you’ve got an itch you’ve want to scratch right here, but didn’t want to do it because you’re so ticklish there.”

Freezing up in horror, Asuka tries desperately not to laugh but soon breaks down into a gale of laughter as Shinji ruthlessly tickles her, eventually dropping her to his bed, and pinning her shoulders, smiling at her while leaning over to kiss her.

“You are such a pervert,” Asuka tells him.

“And yet you love me for it,” Shinji replies with a crooked grin.

“Don’t I know it,” Asuka say with a smile, returning the kiss. She then adds on, “Isn’t it a little unfair of you to tickle me like that?”

Thinking about this for a moment, Shinji says, “No.”

“Cheater! I don’t think you’re even ticklish,” Asuka accuses.

Smirking, Shinji composes himself into the perfect picture of faux-dignity and says in a tone dripping with fake gravitas, “As a disciple of Tzeentch, I am simply too stoic and impassionate in my scheming to respond to such juvenile things like tickling. I am the model of composure.”

Her top already opened up by previous making out, Asuka pulled up her bra to flash Shinji, causing him to put on a goofy grin.

And Operation Asuka’s Boobies is a success.

I heard that.

Huzzah! Operation Get Asuka to Actually Practice Her Telepathy is also a success!

Is there anything you don’t plan for?

Operation Give Asuka a Healthy Sense of Paranoia is proceeding smoothly.

You’re very annoying, you know that? And if you start thinking about ‘Operation Piss Off Asuka’ I swear…

That’s not an Operation, that’s a Mission Statement.

Do you want to see these puppies again any time within the next decade?

Oh, but they so want to be free! Better yet, unlike the uncertain pawing of other guys my age, I know exactly what to do with these things.

You asked Misato for help, didn’t you?

Nah, I just have to listen to your thoughts and I’ll know when I’m doing the right thing. Like now. You sure you want to cover them back up?

Enjoying the moment a bit longer, Asuka then puts her hands her hands on Shinji’s and pushes him off, saying, “Yes. For now.”

Rolling off her to give her some mobility to get dressed again, Shinji props his head up with one hand while running a finger lightly over Asuka’s exposed belly, enjoying the feeling as her flesh goose pimples at his touch.

“You’re still scared you know,” Shinji says softly.

Asuka wanted to say that she wasn’t scared of anything, but she knew that Shinji knew her better than she knew herself. While she had made her life out of piloting Unit 02 up until meeting him, he had made his life out of knowing others.

Running his finger up to her sternum, Shinji leaned over and placed his head right between her breasts, his ear directly over her heart, enjoying the sound of her heart beating.

“This… this beats more strongly than it ever has now, the wounds finally fading away, but there are still scars there… I can hear it. The beat is not quite as sure and confident as it could be. When we touch, when we kiss, there is still a tremor of fear before you relax and enjoy the moment,” Shinji tells her, his head rising and falling with her breathing.

“I… I’m afraid that if I become attached to you, I’ll lose you,” Asuka admits, her voice trembling at it.

“I would not fear that Asuka, for I promise you I shall always return to you,” Shinji reassures her.

“You can’t promise that. No one can promise that,” she says morosely.

“Remember that one of the selling points of Chaos is no angst and crap. I can promise you this Asuka that I will return from anything if it is to be back with you. If you should find my body broken and dead, then to whatever hell my soul travels I will find my way back to you,” Shinji tells her.

“What if you end up in heaven?” She asks, tears starting to slide down her cheeks.

Turning his head to face her, he smiles and says, “No matter the surface trappings, any heaven would be a hell without you.”

Half-laughing, half-sobbing, Asuka says, “Damned poetic idiot.”

Smiling, Shinji says, “I promise you that I will find my way back to you. But do you know what would really help?”

“What?” Asuka asks.

“Fight. Fight for me. Fight for you. Fight for us. Your soul blazes with such fury and passion, is it any wonder I was attracted to you in the first place, like a moth to a candle? So long as you fight, I can guide my way by the light of your soul. Fight, it was what you were born for,” Shinji tells her.

“Have I told you I love you?” Asuka asks.

“Not in the past ten minutes,” Shinji says with a grin.

“How can you be so awesome Shinji?” Asuka demands.

Rolling over and propping his chin on his hands, he says, “Confidence. Every step taken in confidence is a sure one.”

“And how come you’re so confident?” Asuka asks.

“Because I know I am strong; I am stronger and better than most other people on this planet, and that is not a statement made in arrogance but simple, cold hard fact. I do not overestimate my strength, but I know I have it, and that clears away so many existential problems. Most people never realize their own strengths, and thus underestimate themselves, and thus become timid and weak. I know my strengths and I know myself, and from there my confidence flows,” Shinji tells her.

“And your weaknesses?” Asuka asks.

“My age, for people automatically treat me with less respect, but that is also an asset in the right situation. With each passing day that weakness fades away. My need to maintain the secrecy of my true abilities is another weakness. And then there is the fact that, beyond my initial intentions, there are now three very precious people in my life,” Shinji tells her.

“They are?” Asuka asks, wanting to hear the words despite already know the answer.

“Misato-san, the mother I missed during my childhood, for all her terribly human flaws. Rei-san, the sister I never had, as much as she can annoy me at times. And you, the girl who I never knew I wanted to steal my heart. If anything ill were to ever happen to any of you, it would be bad,” Shinji says with a smile.

“How bad?” Asuka asks.

“Ah, so its more pillow talk you want now, is it? Well, first I would find those responsible and I would begin by… oh, let’s say cutting their Achilles tendons so they can’t get away. Then would begin the slow, methodical removal of limbs, inch by inch, each new wound being cauterized to avoid death by blood loss. By the end they would be skinless heads attached to torsos, eyes gouged out, noses cut off, tongues yanked free of mouths, lips sewn shut with rusty ten gauge wire, and tubes inserted to keep them alive and in pain. I would then probably conquer the world, or at least a large chunk of it, so as to build a suitably grand tribute to the loss, probably a pyramid to embarrass the ones in Egypt, only made out of the bodies of my enemies coated in resin to prevent decay and give better structural stability. This of course would be occurring while I try everything to undo the damage,” Shinji describes vividly.

Shivering in a mix of fear and pleasure, Asuka says, “Sweet talker.”

Laughing, Shinji snuggles up close and says, “And that’s just if someone cuts you off in traffic.”

Holding him close, they enjoy the silence for a moment before Asuka asks, “Shinji… we love each other so much, and you are so confident, why don’t you…”

“Remember how I said that when I touch you, there is still fear there for just a split second? Well even if I have the confidence, you don’t, not yet. I would not even dream of anything like that until I knew you were happy with who you were, and unafraid of facing the future. Because, if you weren’t ready, I know it would hurt you, and I would be the source. And the last person I could ever forgive for hurting you is me,” Shinji tells her.

For a moment Asuka wanted to ask what he would do if she asked him to go further, but she let the question die unasked. Shinji had his own warped sense of principles, of morality. She knew that if she asked him to kill a random stranger on the street, he would smile and ask “How?” but that even if she were to stab him in the heart from the back, he would never lift a finger against her. As he said, the three people precious to him were his weakness, and he would never hurt them.

He would never hurt her, even if she asked him to. He might hit her, he might insult her, he might otherwise cause her physical or emotional harm, but he would never take that extra step to turn harm into hurt.

So she asked another question.

“Shinji, if I asked you to stand up in the middle of class, bend me over my desk, and screw me in the butt, would you?” She asks as crudely as possible.

Hugging her tight, he says, “If you actually asked me to.”

“I thought so,” Asuka says while smiling warmly.

Shinji was a psychopathic monster at times. But he was her monster.

And slowly, he was turning her into his monster.

But damn it, it was better to be loved as monster than alone as a human.


Rei had discovered something interesting over the past few weeks. As the smell from her apartment became more pungent, it had started drawing in animals. Despite being such a new city, Tokyo-3 had a well developed stray population, possibly related to the phenomenal rate of expansion.

When the first stray cats had started picking at her garbage, they had been terrified of her very presence, but soon she started leaving leftovers for them to pick at, and they got to know her. Of course, the easy access to food only drew more animals, and now Rei had an entire congregation of the city’s lost and damned animals loitering about her apartment.

The companionship was pleasant.

Only a select few were actually allowed inside her apartment though, an inner circle of those touched by Nurgle. Only those who were sick and dying were allowed within the shelter of her home. The door and lock was still broken, but somehow the animals knew that they were not allowed in until their final days.

Rei lay naked on her bed, the sheets having not been changed in months, not since before the night of her epiphany. Dirt, sweat, hair, grease, food, blood, and a thousand sundry other substances stained her bed, something others would consider disgusting, but to Rei it was merely the comfort of home.

And right now there were about a dozen stray cats and dogs sharing the bed with her, most of them deathly thin and frail, their fur tangled and matted or just plain falling out. Their eyes were often clouded over; their teeth and gums the wrong colours; a hundred other ailments marked them as frail, diseased, and dying.

In any other condition many of these animals would be fighting, indeed two of them were rabid, but around Rei they were at peace, content to simply bask in her body heat as they faded away. And whether feverish or already cooling before death, they all delighted in her touch, the soft stroking of her fingers across their bodies. She traced ribs sticking out, festering wounds, and bulging tumours.

As one her chosen slipped off her, excepting one tiny kitten too far gone. Only a few days old, it was from a feral colony and was extremely inbred, resulting in severe organ malfunction. Its father had brought it to her, somehow knowing that this was the best place for the infant to spend its first, and last, days. The kitten’s eyes had not yet opened, and never would.

Not bothering to dress, there was no one to see her these days, the entire building having been abandoned as people were driven away by a creeping sensation of doom, an unknowable miasma of death shrouding the already desolate place, Rei rose from her bed and picked up the kitten, its tiny body barely filling a single palm.

Carrying it close to her heart, she walked out of the apartment, the animals remaining behind. The path from her apartment to the roof was well worn and streaked with blood, a consequence of things being dragged along.

Reaching the roof, Rei entered into a graveyard, tens of thousands of bones littering the tarmac surface, most from rats and mice and other small creatures, but there were also larger animals, the remains of the cats and dogs passed from Rei’s congregation. The only living creatures other than Rei and the kitten were already dressed for the funeral.

In its last moment, the kitten offered up a tribute to its god by purring just once before its heart failed and it breathed its last. Rei smiled and stroked it one last time across the head.

She then held out her arms, the kitten still in her right hand, her fingers closed protectively about the rapidly cooling body, and the chosen mourners gathered about her, landing upon her shoulders and arms.

“A wake for the dead, a feast for the living,” Rei says, opening her hand.

The carrion birds leapt upon the body, ripping it apart in seconds, carrying it away such that the only evidence upon Rei was a slight stain of blood on her palm with some fur clinging to it. One of the birds perched upon her wrist and politely cleaned it off for her.

Rei did not attend all the funerals, in fact with school and her job at NERV, she missed most of the deaths, but somehow the animals knew how to dispose of the bodies, explaining the drag marks.

All of them.

The birds had feasted for days on the body of the man brought up here. Rei had not even known he had existed until she found the half cleaned body, but she could tell what had happened. He had been a bad man, had tried to go where he was not supposed to, and he had faced the wrath of Rei’s congregation at the defiling of her domain. Only Rei and the dying were allowed within her apartment. The man had been neither, so the infected teeth and claws of her chosen and amended that situation.

It had taken a week, an impossibly fast speed, but the bones were now clean, the flies and maggots having cleaned off what the birds did not. Things decayed faster around Rei, perhaps because of some innate ability, perhaps because the birds and flies were already waiting upon her shoulders for their chance to feed.

Rei broke open the bigger bones with her bare hands, scattering them like shattered twigs for the marrow to be devoured, for the pieces to blend into the charnel house of bodies brought here by predators and scavengers, but she kept the skull. The brains had already been removed, the back of the head broken open just before or after the man died, the soupy, fatty meat plucked out.

Rei imagined the skull looked peaceful in death.

She had to go down to NERV today so she would have to wash up enough to conceal the grime coating her body. She refused to use soap, she didn’t need it or like it, but she knew that she did not want to be questioned about what exactly was covering her.

Rei was just getting into the shower when she collapsed.


They were sparring when it happened. One moment Shinji had caught a blow from Asuka and the next he was on the ground, clutching his head in agony, his whole body curling up automatically into the foetal position as he screamed, his whole body feeling like it was on fire.

“Shinji!” Asuka cried out, dropping to his side.

Convulsing a few times, Shinji finally settled down, his face pulled gaunt by muscle spasms and his skin clammy and pale.

“Shinji! Shinji, what’s wrong?” Asuka asks.

Huffing a few times, Shinji manages to get out, “An… An… Ang… Angel. It’s an Angel. Psychic attack.”

“Psychic attack? Why is it targeting you?” Asuka asks.

“It’s not,” Shinji says before convulsing again. Settling down a bit more, he says, “It’s… it’s disrupting the city’s power grid. It’s… it’s like a flashbang going off in my face.”

“What? Why am I not affected?” Asuka asks.

Tensing up again, Shinji spasms violently for several seconds before he says, “You’re not as well trained… and… ugh… blood for the blood god.”

Shinji jerked his head a few times until Asuka clued into the fact that he wasn’t suffering spasms, but trying to point at something. Looking up, Asuka found he was pointing at a mirror, and she saw her reflection. The whites of her eyes were brilliant crimson and a thin trickle of blood was leaking from the outside corner of each eye.

Dabbing at the blood, Asuka can only say, “Whoa.”

Grunting again, Shinji says, “Listen… listen… Rei may or may not be affected… it… it doesn’t matter. Get to NERV, get to… to… ugh… to your Eva. If… if you’re lucky, Rei will be there with you… if… ah… if not… just… just kill the fuck…”

“What about you Shinji-chan?” Asuka asks desperately.

“Kill… kill… the Angel and… and I’ll be fine,” Shinji tells her.

“I’m not leaving you!” Asuka cries out.

“You… you… you’re not. You’re help… helping me. Take… take its skull… and I’ll… I’ll recover. I… I… I can stay here and stay safe… ugh… or you can carry me and I’ll slow you down. I… I can’t pilot right now…” Shinji tells her.

“But…” Asuka says.

“You… you… jumped into Sandalphon’s mouth… and detonated a nuke… then cut your way out… then faced down Misato-san’s chewing out… ugh… without blinking… and you’re scared now?” Shinji asks.

“Yes,” Asuka states firmly, trying to hold back the tears.

“Are… are you going to… to… give up because you’re afraid? Are… are you going to let me… ah… suffer like this?” Shinji asks, glaring up at her.

“No,” Asuka says quietly.

“Then go!” Shinji shouts out before convulsing again.

Asuka runs from the room before she can look back. She doesn’t stop running until she runs out of breath and falls to her knees. Huffing and puffing, she looks up to find Rei crawling naked along the ground across the deserted street. Walking over to her as fast as her winded frame can carry her; Asuka reaches down and picks up the lightweight pilot.

“Are… you… going… to… live?” Asuka asks between panting for breath.

Looking at her, Rei reveals a nasty looking gash along the side of her head.

“I believe I am in need of medical attention,” Rei states weakly.

“The Angel?” Asuka asks with her breath just about back. She rips off a strip of cloth from her skirt and begins to bind the cut on Rei’s forehead.

“Yes. I collapsed while getting into the shower,” Rei states. “I recovered somewhat and made my way here before collapsing again.”

Stripping off her blouse, Asuka wraps Rei in it to give her some modesty before picking her up and carrying her on her back.

“Listen First Child, we need to get to NERV, and… and I don’t think I can find my way through the tunnels in the dark. Can you help me?” Asuka asks.

“Where is Shinji-kun?” Rei asks.

“In a worse state than you,” Asuka says grimly.

“Alabama?” Rei asks.

Laughing darkly, Asuka shoulders her new load and begins walking, saying with dry sarcasm, “This is a perfect time for jokes.”

“I am afraid that in my current condition the only positive contribution to the situation I can make is jokes,” Rei says.

“Then I stand by my previous statement,” Asuka states wryly.

“You are in an uncharacteristically good mood today,” Rei states.

“Making out with Shinji-kun tends to do that,” Asuka says smugly.

“What base did he get to?” Rei asks.

Pausing, Asuka glares at Rei across her shoulder and asks, “Why do you want to know?”

“I want to know if he got as far with you as you have with me. I believe you are already at second base,” Rei says with a weak smile.

Shaking her head angrily, Asuka continues marching and says, “Shut it First Child.”

“So it was at least second base. Clothing or no clothing,” Rei inquires.

“I said shut it,” Asuka says vehemently.

“No clothing. How scandalous,” Rei says while closing her eyes and picturing herself enviously in Asuka’s place.

“Are you trying to piss me off?” Asuka asks.

“We’re at the station, aren’t we?” Rei says.

Looking about, Asuka realizes that they are indeed at the transit station leading to the Geofront.

“What?” Asuka asks in amazement.

“You draw strength from your anger,” Rei says with a shrug.

Frowning, Asuka looks at the security doors and says, “No power… great. We need to find a door with a manual override.”

“This way,” Rei says while pointing the way.

Reaching a door with a hand crank to open it in the event of a power failure, such as this one, Asuka sets Rei down and begins cranking it, wishing she had Shinji’s strong back here to help with the process.

Once the door was open, Asuka picks Rei back up and says, “Lead the way.”

“Then you should hold me in front of you,” Rei points out.

“Point the way then,” Asuka growls.

After about an hour of plunging deeper and deeper into the labyrinthine tunnels, Asuka notes that the banter between her and Rei is slacking off, and she asks worriedly, “Are you doing okay back there?”

“I believe I have lost a significant amount of blood and I’m suffering a mild concussion. The interference from the Angel is not helping,” Rei reports.

“Don’t you dare die on me First Child,” Asuka growls.

“Why?” Rei asks.

“A few reasons really. First of all, I still owe you for hauling me off Sandalphon,” Asuka says.

“I did not do that for you. Shinji-kun would be sad if you perished, and I do not want him sad,” Rei states.

Half-hissing, half-growling, Asuka says, “That’s the second reason. You’re one of three people precious to Shinji-kun. So I guess you’re precious to me too.”

“I… I’m precious to you?” Rei asks in a groggy sort of surprise.

“Only by proxy!” Asuka snaps. “Shinji would be furious if I left you to die.”

“He would,” Rei agrees.

“The third reason, and the most important, is that I still have no idea where I am, so if you pass out on me, we’re both lost,” Asuka states.

Grinning, Rei replies, “Pragmatic as always. Tell me, is Shinji-kun a good kisser?”

“What?” Asuka roars furiously, nearly dropping her cargo so that she could slug her.

The cry echoes throughout the tunnels for a moment before there was an unexpected cry back of “Asuka? Asuka is that you?”

Her eyelids fluttering, Rei smiles and says, “My voice doesn’t carry as well as yours,” before she faded away.

“Damn it Rei!” Asuka cries out as her passenger goes quiet.

Light suddenly floods the end of the tunnel as people with flashlights begin searching for her. Rushing over to the technicians, she says, “Rei’s hurt real bad.”

Taking Rei’s limp body, one of the technicians says, “Quick, you’re almost to the Eva bays, there’s an Angel approaching and…”

Pointing to her bloodied eyes and cheeks, Asuka says, “I know, it’s the reason why the power’s out, and why Rei is hurt and Shinji isn’t here.”

Recoiling in shock, the tech quickly shakes it off and points down a hall, saying, “Quick, get to the Evas!”

Rushing now that she was free of Rei’s weight, Asuka quickly reaches the bays where the Evas are being manually prepared, with Ritsuko watching over them all.

“Asuka! Where’s… oh my God, your face!” Ritsuko says in horror.

“Defence mechanism against the Angel I suppose. It’s already incapacitated Shinji and Rei,” Asuka states.

Taking in this fact, Ritsuko says quietly, “Of course! Clever bastards!” Shaking her head, she says, “Get in your plug suit, you have to stop this thing.”

With the news that only one of the Evas could sortie reaching them, the crews quickly focus all efforts on Unit 02, which ironically was still being repaired from all the damage inflicted by diving into Sandalphon and then firing her melta point blank. Asuka hoped the bastard was using a lot of power to shut down the power grid otherwise she was going to be in for a world of hurt.

Screw thinking like that. This Angel made it personal by hurting Shinji; it’s the one in for a world of hurt.

With the extended operation battery packs loaded on and a bolter in hand, Asuka heads out, crawling her Eva through the access tunnels for the nearest vertical shaft. Punching off the blast door, Asuka vaults out into the cylindrical shaft and begins shimmying up.

Her first clue that something was wrong was a burning, tingling sensation on her shoulder. Looking up, Asuka nearly loses her grip in pain as a blob of orange acid drips on her Eva’s face, damaging one of the eyes. Soon an entire deluge of the acid is raining down on her, the Angel directly above her position, ‘crying’ acid upon her.

For just a moment, Asuka almost lost herself in the pain before the welling rose high enough to strike the little pilot light of anger she had kept lit in her heart. She entered what she called her ‘berserker state’. Her senses sped up and time slowed to a standstill, such that she could see everything before her with perfect clarity and act exactly as she needed to.

She released her grip from the wall with one hand, the one where the metal was being burned through by the acid and would have given way in any case, and reached around to snatch her bolter off her back. Angling her body to shield the weapon from the corrosive rain, she targets the Angel at the top of the shaft, a pathetically easy target that didn’t even need targeting confirmation before she pulled the trigger.

The best description of what happened next was that Asuka “splashed” the target. This was to say that she “splashed” the target all across downtown Tokyo-3, the rounds designed for killing the armoured hides of Shamshel and Ramiel plunging into the Angel’s soft body and detonating, transforming it into a substance typically described of as “chunky salsa”.

Surprisingly, Asuka had no victory shout, merely a relieved sigh. Everyone was safe now.


Ritsuko passed her hand over Rei’s eyes, shutting them forever.

“Does anyone else know?” Gendo asks quietly and menacingly.

“No. Once Asuka launched I went to Rei and when it became apparent that she would not last much longer, I took measures. She suffered a massive blow to the head, I’m surprised she lived as long as she did,” Ritsuko replies.

“How soon can another one be prepared?” Gendo inquires.

“An hour tops to fish one out of the tank and upload the memories,” Ritsuko tells him.

“Then do it. Do you have any idea the cause of her recent personality changes?” Gendo asks.

“I’ve been comparing her blood samples and I just realized that the mood stabilizing drugs have been showing up less and less in her system. It was a very slow process, each new sample a little lower despite the fact that I kept increasing her dosage,” Ritsuko explains.

“She wasn’t taking her medication?” Gendo asks suspiciously.

“No… no, I think she was rapidly developing immunity to them. One of the primary abilities of the Angels is their ability to adapt and evolve, her Angelic DNA may have been at work there,” Ritsuko explains.

“The new one should be a clean slate then,” Gendo states rather than asks.

“Yes,” Ritsuko says with a nod.

“Very well, take measures to ensure this does not happen with the new one,” Gendo says before staring down at the dead body of Rei II. “I will dispose of this.”

I bet you will.

Unbeknownst to either the doctor or the commander, the giggling Reis in the tank all looked directly at them for just a moment, their blank expressions replaced by ones of intense curiosity and suspicion. The moment lasted for less than a full second.

Had Ritsuko bothered to check, she would have discovered that all the Reis had developed a complete immunity to all hostile pharmaceuticals sometime in the past few hours, sometime after Rei II passed on.

Any attempt to kill the now completely cognizant, if still mostly non-sapient clones, would have ended… messily.


Several hours later at the very depths of Terminal Dogma, so deep down no one would have ever found anything, something skulked up to the broken, rag doll form of Rei II, dismissively tossed into the depths. Pale, delicate hands grasped the body and hauled it into a more easily accessed location, before grasping the shattered remains of the neck and pulling.

With a wet, meaty sucking sound, the head separated from the body.

Holding it up by the greasy, blood stained hair, Rei looks at her own face and grins. This would make the beginning of what could very well be a very interesting collection.

---

So tell me, how many levels did I just raise the creepiness factor for Rei there?

[FA Xerrik]

Shinji was a psychopathic monster at times. But he was her monster.

And slowly, she was turning her into his monster.

Is that meant to read "he was turning her?" Or "she was turning herself?

Good character developments, and given the ease of the battle even in the OTL it seems like this was a good time to do it. I'm especially happy you gave some time to Rei, as she was falling out of the spotlight somewhat ever since Asuka came on the scene and Shinji turned his attentions to her. Is Rei going a little Predator here, collecting skulls that are significant or meaningful to her, or just gathering them for the sake of decay and disgusting-ness?

[Darth Fanboy]

Haha! I had a feeling you'd update today! So I checked every 15 minutes when i've had the chance to be online.

I like this Rei, and since it seems her personality might carry over to the next, she could end up being one incredibly creepy chick.

[Academia Nut]

The former FA, and I've corrected it. The worst bit was that I had it right the first time. And she's collecting the skulls mostly for the decay aspect. She's of the opinion that if she's going to die and be resurrected repeatedly, keeping a collection of her own skulls will amuse her.

[FA Xerrik]

So did that first skull, from the anonymous intruder, end up making it into her collection? Or did she remove it more for examination and dramatic effect.

[KlavoHunter]

So tell me, how many levels did I just raise the creepiness factor for Rei there?

... *shudder*






The Emperor Protects. The Emperor Protects. The Emperor Protects...

[Darth Fanboy]

Shinji's pamphlet.

[Sidewinder]

I'm surprised at how quickly the relationship between Shinji and Asuka is developing. By the way, does Shinji regularly check his room for hidden cameras, microphones, and other surveillance equipment? (I'm assuming Gendo has ordered such equipment installed in Shinji's room to keep him informed of anything unusual, e.g., Shinji demonstrating his psyker powers.)

[Darth Fanboy]

I had this vision of Shinji as Horus, and Gendo as the GeOM now. How weird?

[Academia Nut]

Fanboy: Right click, saved.

Sidewinder: You'll see next update. Which should be sometime tomorrow in all probability.

[Darth Fanboy]

Sidewinder: You'll see next update. Which should be sometime tomorrow in all probability.

But with all seriousness, I appreciate the psotive commentary on my impromptu artwork. The description given was too vivid NOT to try something.

[Academia Nut]

The composition was too good to pass up. There are maybe a few things that could be moved around, and possibly some element of background detail to more fully flesh it out, but the VaultTec boy is sublimely perfect for it. The inherent combination of 50s innocence and absurd, over the top violence the character represents works flawlessly with the idea of a pamphlet for Chaos.

Incidentally, this (mildly NSFW) image is kind of the inspiration. If the guy was giving the thumbs up it would be perfect.

The update should be sometime tonight, I'm kind of stringing it along because this is the Monster of the Week middle phase of the show where not a lot happens, and at this point the characters have diverged so radically from their OTL counterparts that a lot of the original plot points don't actually work anymore, and while I am setting up a few things for later chapters, revealing too much now would wreck it later.

Oh, and I think to tide you barbarians over I'll throw you all a scrap, a little character exploration piece I did while trying to think what to do next. It doesn't really have a plot, just excuses for making and showing off amusing characters, so there is little risk of it taking over from Thousand Shinji.

[Academia Nut]

As promised, here is the update. Technically it is still the 26th in some parts of the world, so I suppose I kept my word.

---

In the ever present struggles between Gendo and SEELE, the Pilots were the ultimate prize and target, which meant that they could not be moved against too strongly. Still, there was always observation. But something had gone wrong with the observation around the First Child. The agent that had gone in to see why the monitoring devices had suddenly stopped working had simply disappeared.

So now it was time for his partners to try and find some clues as to what had happened. Guns drawn, they slipped into the complex after the First Child had left for school. The building, as always, stank, but now it had the miasma of rotting meat clinging to it. Quickly ascending the stairs while sweeping for any targets, they reached the floor where the girl had her apartment and stopped. The stairwell leading up was stained with old, bloody drag marks. Following them, the agents emerge into what appears to be a slaughter house, with bones everywhere.

“My god… what the hell is going on here?” One of the men asks.

“Let’s… let’s get the fuck out of here,” the other agent suggests.

Turning around, they find the stairwell behind them filled with mangy looking cats and dogs, their eyes glowing ominous in the darkened passage. Backing away in horror, the level their guns on the approaching horde.

The cawing of a crow makes them whirl about and see to their horror dozens, perhaps hundreds, of crows and ravens perched all about the roof, staring down at them with black, beady eyes.

One of the men points his gun a bit towards the surface of the roof and fires a round, expecting the noise to scare off the animals. The noise merely causes the birds to blink a few times and for one of the crows to caw again. As the mongrel brigade continued its advance, it became evident that several of the animals were clearly rabid, and getting bit or scratched by any of them would probably require an immediate trip to the hospital for aggressive treatment of just about every disease an animal could transmit to a human.

Still backing away, wondering what kind of nightmare they now found themselves in, the agents whirled about again as something began to rattle in the vents, and soon mice and huge sewer rats, still encrusted with the filth of their home, began to pour out of the ventilation shafts. Soon the tide flowed to a trickle, and the only sound was their frantic breathing as the men began to panic, and the cawing of that single crow.

Whirling about, one of the men shouted out “Shut up!” before spying the crow… and what it was perched upon. The man screamed and stumbled to the ground in horror.

The crow, an enormously fat and old bird with greying plumage, was perched upon a head; a human head. It had clearly been out in the sun for several days, yet neither animal nor insect had touched it, only rot touching its desiccating flesh. That was not the true horror though, for the head was clearly that of the girl they had just watched leave the building ten minutes ago.

The head was on a table with another skull sitting beneath, arcane looking symbols carved into the surface of the wood. Somehow they both knew that the cleaned, grinning skull staring back at them was of the man they were looking for.

Their panic reached a crescendo and the two SEELE agents began firing into the mobs of animals around them. The rats and birds and some of the cats tended to practically explode when hit by the .45s fired from the pistols, but the dogs could take two or three rounds to drop if they didn’t aim properly.

They both emptied their magazines three times until with a dry finality they each clicked empty, the slides of their pistols back to show the spent state. The advancing horde merely stepped over their fallen while the birds gathered in closer.

One man soiled himself in fear and they both whimpered as the circle closed in tighter.

When the shooting began the old crow had stopped its cawing. It stared at the two interlopers long and hard before letting out a single caw.

The men’s screams were drowned out by the flapping of wings.

Returning home several hours later, Rei was surprised to find Old Priest perched on the railing just outside her door. The ancient crow had a great deal of difficulty flying and probably would have perished weeks ago had he not found Rei and the enormous supplies of food created by the strange environment she generated.

Holding out a hand, Rei let the crow hop onto her hand, and stroking the bird’s head, she proceeded to take him back up to the roof. The only reason he would come down was if he had something he wanted to show her.

Opening the door to the roof, Rei found a banquet of carrion going on. The carrion birds were out in full force, as were the rodents, unusual as they tended to prefer the interior of the building to roof. Many, many things had died very recently.

Still carrying Old Priest, Rei went to the largest concentration and found two men lying on the ground, one already nearly picked to the bone by the vast congregation of feasters, while the other was still alive, his body covered in wounds that were already dripping with pus as his body desperately fought off the hundreds of infected wounds covering him.

Stroking Old Priest, Rei sets him on the ground before kneeling down and picking up the man’s head so that she could rest it in her lap. One of his ears, having been mostly torn off in the initial mauling, simply plopped off as lack of blood and infection had caused rapid necrosis and rot. Rei ignored it to brush the blood matted hair out of his face.

Delirious with fever and pain and several mind altering diseases, the man just stared up at her and croaked, “Mama?”

Cooing gently, still brushing the man’s face, Rei says, “Yes, it’s mama, and she wants to know all about what you’ve been up to lately. Won’t you let mama know what you’ve been doing with your life?”

The man began to talk, telling her everything his fevered brain could dredge up, which while not much, was certainly very enlightening. He spoke for a good ten minutes before he finally expired.

Gently taking his head off her lap, Rei turned to Old Priest and said, “You can have the eyes, I know you like them.”

As the murder and unkindness shifted to partake of this new addition to the banquet, Rei had but one thought.

I must tell Shinji about this.


The SEELE agents in Tokyo-3 were more stirred up than a kicked hornet’s nest. First they lost one man when he went to renew the monitoring equipment about the First Child, and now the two who went to investigate the first man’s disappearance had also dropped out of contact. Someone was keeping them from investigating the First Child, someone powerful, someone unafraid to act so openly against them.

“It can’t be Gendo or Section 2. They don’t want to up this game any more than we do,” one man tells another as they begin doing the final check of their equipment. The main planning had been done out of town, but whoever was doing this had to be taught a lesson.

“Who else? Bastard’s the only one with that kind of pull in this town,” another man points out.

“I don’t know who, but I’m telling you Section 2 doesn’t do shit like this. All of our sources inside say that they didn’t even know about those guys,” the first man says while doing a weapons check.

“Then we obviously need to get our sources deeper,” the second guy replies.

It was at about that point that the power to their base cut out. An emergency generator kicked in almost immediately, but sudden the forty Special Forces agents went to full alert and were manning their posts, tense and prepared for an attack from any angle. There was a sudden clatter from a nearby alley and then silence.

Nodding, a team of five men went out to examine it with full fire support from the base. Reaching the edge of the alley, they use a periscope to peer around the corner and find…

Nothing.

Sweeping around, they quickly search the area, and again find nothing.

“Must have been a fucking cat,” one of the agents comments.

“Hey, what’s this?” One of the men asks, pointing to a funny looking ceramic jar with a stylized animal head on top.

Eyeing it cautiously, they sweep it with a battery of instruments and find…

Nothing.

Gingerly picking it up, one of the men opens up the lid and finds…

Nothing. Nothing but dust and ashes.

“There’s nothing here, probably just some dead hobo’s ashes,” the man holding it asks.

“How the fuck does a hobo get such a fancy urn?” Another man points out.

The power then goes on in the warehouse district once again, nearly causing the men to jump out of their skins.

“What is going on here?” One of them asks as they begin moving back towards their base.

The lights go out again, accompanied by the sound of swirling wind and blowing sand.

The lights flicker on again.

For five minutes the base tries to reach the team, eventually dispatching a ten man team who find all five men in five or six pieces each, their torsos seemingly blown open from the inside out, with the jar sitting innocently in their midst, upright and untouched, not a drop of blood on it despite the massacre all about.

That team quickly grabs what is left of their comrades and retreats back to base, sealing it up tight as they try and figure out what the fuck is going on.

The lights go out again.

“Someone is fucking with us!” One man cries out.

“Want to tell us about the colour of the sky Captain Fucking Obvious?” Another says bitterly.

As the minutes tick by and angers flare, one of the radio operators suddenly asks, “Hey, did you guys retrieve Kowalski’s radio?”

Doing a quick scan of the bodies, one of the men replies, “No.”

Looking askew, the radio operator just flicks a switch and the transmission can be heard. For a moment there is silence, and then a deep and quiet voice with a strange reverb effect says over the channel, “All is dust.”

Switching it back off, he asks, “Anyone have any idea what that means?”

“Sir… something weird is happening,” one of the men on lookout replies.

The power had gone out again, and now pea soup fog was rolling in, impossible for this climate and this time of year and the weather they had already had that day.

“All is dust. All is dust. All is dust. All is dust. All is dust. All is dust. All is…” The chant went up, the whispering phrase repeated over and over and over and over again. It seemed to be coming from all around.

“Yogi, shut off that… radio…” the commander says, his demand trailing off as he realizes that the radio operator is dead, the man’s head and spinal column ripped off and rammed through the main radio unit.

The chant was coming from all of their radio units. Including the ones set to broadcast.

“This is impossible!” One man screamed.

He promptly exploded, something punching through the cinderblock walls of the factory, an ammo drum, and his body armour to detonate inside his torso, spraying blood and gore all across his shocked comrades.

Outside, in the direction the shot had come from the fog had opened up a corridor to reveal an enormous armoured figure dressed in blue and gold armour, the helmet sculpted into an elaborate Egyptian style headdress. In figure’s hands was a gun that looked like it should be crew serviced if not for the fact that it properly proportioned next to the giant.

It took everyone a moment to realize that the chanting had stopped.

Then they began to open fire as the armoured figure advanced. In the first few seconds hundreds of 9mm, 5.56mm NATO, 7.62mm NATO, and .50 BMG rounds struck the target… and bounced off. The men just stopped and stared in abject horror at the way their tracer fire showed the bullets bouncing off like rain off a tank.

The figure hadn’t even been troubled and continued to advance, oblivious to the fire that should have shredded it in an instant.

It raised its gun and fired three times. Each shot punched through the walls of the warehouse the men were using for cover, and each shot took out a heavy weapon’s position. One struck the crew manned machine gun, another other the sniper’s position, and the third blew apart the man bringing forward the grenade launcher.

Then the figure stops and vanishes in front of them, as if made of dust and blowing away in the wind. But there was no wind, the air was completely still. Soon the fog had consumed the position, leaving the men to rub at their eyes and clutch their guns uselessly, their breathing fast and frantic. Had they actually even seen any of that?

“We’re getting the fuck out of here,” the commander orders. These men were the cream of the crop from seven nation’s Special Forces divisions, forwarded to the UN and seconded to SEELE through various back room deals from the powerful members that made up that body. They knew when to pull their losses and make an order get away.

They opened the main doors so that they could take their vans and leave. They had already checked that the path was clear.

Three of the armoured giants were standing there, right in front of the doors where a second before there had been nothing.

There were forty men in the original group. Five died in the alley. The radio operator had been ripped apart by an unseen force. One man died in the opening shot of the appearance of the first figure. Three men died when the ammo canister for the .50 machine-gun exploded and the ammunition cooked off. The sniper was blown to pieces. The man carrying the grenade launcher and the man next to him died when the launcher exploded and the grenades went off. That was thirteen dead before the massacre began, leaving twenty-seven men left.

“All is dust,” the giants whispered as one as they raised their weapons.

Eight seconds later they were out of targets. One man nearly managed to run out the opposite way, only to run straight into a fourth monster and have his head ripped off his body by an armoured hand closing about his skull and pulling up.

The doctor had snapped and was curled up in the foetal position on the floor, slowly rocking back and forth, while the commander emptied out every weapon he could find, wondering for a second why they had stopped shooting and just stared at him with their glowing blue eyes, until he realized that they knew he was the commander… and thus the one with most information.

He whipped out his pistol and pointed it at his own head, pulling the trigger.

Click.

The man looked at the traitorous gun and wondered why it had failed to fire when it suddenly was yanked out of his hand, hurled away where it discharged, the reaction somehow impossibly delayed. He tried to move, but the same force that had pulled his gun out of his hands held him still.

The armoured giants faded away into dust in the wind. For a moment only the sobbing of the doctor could be heard, but it was soon replaced by a grim, echoing laughter and the sound of approaching footsteps accompanied by the thump of something heavy and metallic on the ground.

Emerging from the thinning fog was the Third Child, chuckling grimly at the slaughter all around him.

“Oh, this will be a most interesting enigma for my father and SEELE to fight about as they each blame the other for this awful, awful mess,” Shinji says with a humorous tone.

Finding limited mobility returned to him, if only enough to allow him to speak, the commander says, “NERV will never get away with this…”

His voice is cut off by the ability of speech being stolen from him again, “NERV had nothing to do with this or the disappearance of the men sent after the First Child. You merely stumbled upon something beyond your comprehension and paid the price for interfering with the Children.”

At a gesture from Shinji, the commander is lifted up off the ground, suspended impossibly in mid-air. His eyes go wide in terror at the implications of this.

“You see… the Children, we are very special people who can do very special things, and ironically piloting the Evas are probably the least special things about us. We have… secrets that we do not want to be exposed, and your men stumbled upon something they shouldn’t have. We will protect our secrets as we must. I do apologize for taking a page from the Night Lord’s playbook, but I wanted to give NERV and SEELE a boogeyman to hunt for, something that they would never find because it won’t exist when they turn their lights upon it,” Shinji says crookedly.

Looking at the babbling doctor, Shinji smiles and says, “Poor man, he’s lost his mind. Only way to soothe his broken psyche after tonight will be to obsessively write down names. Not important names of course, just the names of every SEELE compromised agent I can extract from you.”

The commander finds his voice returned to him again and he shouts out, “You won’t get anything out of me!” He then spits at Shinji only for the wad of saliva and mucus to freeze mid-air and rocket back at the man.

Smiling, Shinji says, “I’ve always wanted to hear someone say that since I learned this ability. My word choice was very precise when I said extract.”


“Discedo solus, what in God’s name is that supposed to mean?” One of the shadowy members of the SEELE council asks.

“Nothing. It’s Latin, but its nonsense,” Lorenz replies flippantly. “Whoever did this probably just looked up a couple of words that looked right and mixed them together without thought for grammar. The message is clear though.”

“Oh?” Asks the French member of the council.

“Get out. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re being told to leave Tokyo-3 by a force capable of dismembering a heavy assault black ops team without anyone knowing, driving a hardened war veteran insane, and then mailing the torso of the commander with the words Discedo solus carved into his chest to my name,” Lorenz says, somewhat exasperated by it all.

“This is a declaration of war,” the Russian member exclaims.

“Indeed, but it is not Gendo, as much as you all might want to blame him,” Lorenz says, looking out over the members anonymous and not.

“You have his word for this?” The Russian asks contemptuously.

“No. Conveniently for him, he is in Antarctica retrieving the Lance of Longinus as per our orders, and is thus out of secure communication at the moment,” Lorenz says evenly.

“Very convenient,” one of the American members says broodingly.

“Yes, so convenient in fact that I believe him. The timing of the raid was to be done when he and his second in command were out of the country,” Lorenz notes. “It is not his style to leave the execution of something like this to a subordinate like that. He might never get his hands dirty, but he wants to be there to watch.”

“Unless of course he knew that we knew this sort of thing would be outside his style,” the American from before points out.

“True, but we could play ‘He knows I know’ all day and get nowhere. In any case, not only is this sort of thing outside Gendo’s preferred managerial style, it is outside any sort of sane response. The occasional agent on either side going missing is simply part of the game we play. A normal response would have been to lead the follow up agents down a false or dead trail, taking them away from whatever he desires hidden. Killing anyone who approaches your secret is not the way to hide it. That merely shows that you have something to hide and where it can be found,” Lorenz explains.

“Unless of course this is merely the proverbial scrap of red cloth being waved in front of us, concealing the dagger,” the paranoid American points out.

“I will concede that point, and we are looking into just such a possibility, but the move is too aggressive for Gendo right now. He still must maintain the pretext of cooperation,” Lorenz says with a sigh.

“No… no, I feel that we have stumbled upon a third player in this game, a player that may not even realize what the game is. They are powerful, but inexperienced in this sort of thing if talented. Whoever is doing this, they want us to fight with Gendo,” Lorenz points out.

“Like that goal is difficult to achieve,” the Russian comments dryly.

“In any case, we need more intelligence on the situation before acting, but because of the actions, we can’t touch Tokyo-3 for the next month at the very least. At least Section 2 will be tied up for at least as long trying to figure out what happened,” Lorenz notes unhappily.

“I would hate to be the one in charge over there right now,” one of the members notes dryly.


“Thanks for letting us in, that rain sure is coming down hard out there,” Kensuke says while towelling off his hair.

“No problem guys, just keep your voices down, Misato-san has been working late for the past couple of days,” Shinji says, putting a finger to his lips.

“Ah,” both Toji and Kensuke say, hushing up immediately.

“Hey, what are these stooges doing here?” Asuka asks from behind a curtain.

Shrugging, Shinji says, “We have yet to find a Shemp, and you don’t want to break up the Three Stooges do you?”

“Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk,” Asuka says sarcastically from behind the curtain to flick them each in the nose.

“Shh! You’ll wake Misato-san!” Kensuke hisses.

Sliding open the door to her bedroom, dressed in her regular business attire, Misato says with a weary look, “No worries boys, I was already up and getting ready for work.”

As she goes to prepare for her day, Kensuke notices the change in her rank pins and immediately blurts out, “Congratulations on your promotion Misato-san!”

Going along with his friend, Toji bows as well and adds in his, “Congratulations Misato-san.”

Smiling weakly, Misato says, “Thanks boys.” Turning to Shinji and Asuka, she says, “You’re father and the vice commander are both out of the country now, so I’m the base commander, and with that mess down in the warehouse district…”

“You won’t be home for dinner tonight,” Shinji finishes for her.

Sighing, Misato shakes her head and says, “No, not going to be home for dinner tonight, probably not tomorrow night either. So don’t worry about cooking anything for me.”

Nodding, Shinji says, “A pity. You will be back to regular hours, or at least regular for you, once you’re no longer the senior officer in command, right?”

Smiling, she says, “Yeah, I promise I’ll make it up to you guys somehow. It’s not fair for you guys to be ignored like this.”

Giving her a quirky grin, Shinji says, “Don’t worry about it Misato-san, we both know you’ll be back.”

This comment caused an unexpected outburst from Misato… or at least the equivalent of an outburst when she was in her professional mode. She just tensed up at that statement before going over to Shinji and Asuka and bundling them up into a fierce hug and saying, “I can definitely promise you that.”

Releasing them, she then smoothes out her uniform and gives her two charges a fierce look, reminding them, “Now while I’m gone I don’t want to find out about any hanky-panky between you two.”

“We’ll remember to destroy the evidence,” the say in unison.

Smiling, she says, “That’s what I want to hear.”

“Or rather don’t want to hear,” Shinji points out.

Smiling and mussing up his hair playfully, Misato says, “Exactly. Now remember that you have a harmonics test coming up tomorrow. I can trust you two to get to NERV on your own if I’m still working, right?”

“Of course,” they say in stereo, their synch training still remembered.

Shaking her head, she gathers up her things and heads to the door, slipping on her shoes and saying, “See you guys later. Do please remember to do your homework in between make-out sessions, okay?”

“We will,” they say.

“Bye!” Misato says before heading out.

Toji and Kensuke just stare at the two of them in shock for a moment, Kensuke more than Toji as he had not quite been paying attention to how far along the two of them were in their relationship. Sliding next to one another, their sides pressing together, they grin mischievously and ask, “What?”

“You’re scandalous,” Toji says with a shake of his head.

“I see that Hikari is rubbing off on… is that because she is rubbing up to you, or are you still fantasizing about that?” Asuka asks.

That pretty much caused Toji’s brain to lock up.

Shinji just laughed at Toji’s mental paralysis and, grinning, he glances at Asuka and then asks Toji, “At least tell me you two have moved up to this?”

He then kisses Asuka, their tongues playing with one another for a moment before breaking off to turn to his friends and grin, saying, “Aren’t girlfriends grand?”

Both Kensuke and Toji fainted, causing Asuka and Shinji to break down laughing.


A few hours later after Toji and Kensuke had left the two of them lounged together in one of the chairs watching TV, and Shinji commented, “Does anyone in this house not have abandonment issues?”

“You probably,” Asuka says while munching on popcorn.

“I think wanting to gut my father for leaving me counts as an ‘issue’,” Shinji points out.

“The fact that you don’t says that you’re handling it well,” Asuka points out.

“You worked with Misato for years before coming here, any idea what went wrong for her?” Shinji asks.

Shaking her head, Asuka replies, “No, she never really talked about it.”

“We’ll have to do something nice for her when she has the time again,” Shinji decides.

“A shopping trip perhaps?” Asuka suggests.

Glaring at her, he says, “Something that would not be a form of torture for me.”

Smiling impishly, Asuka says, “But kind gestures like that usually involve some sort of sacrifice of the self.”

“Oh, and what exactly would you be sacrificing?” Shinji asks.

Her impish features changing to one of perfect angelic innocence, Asuka says, “Why, I would have to sacrifice my own relative beauty for surely after such a trip Misato-san would outshine me like the sun outshines the moon.”

Glaring at her, Shinji says, “Okay, after that load of bullshit, I’m afraid that it’s now going to have to be tickle time.”

“You fiend, I still haven’t figured out a counter to that,” Asuka says in mock horror.

“I know,” Shinji says with a smile while snaking his hand up her skirt to the ticklish spot on her thigh. Soon they were rolling on the floor giggling and laughing before Asuka suddenly cries out, “Son of a bitch!”

Stopping immediately, Shinji notes that she’s holding one of her eyes and he asks worriedly, “What happened?”

“One of my contacts fell out,” Asuka says while patting down the ground looking for it.

Joining her, Shinji says, “I didn’t know you needed contacts.”

“I don’t… not exactly…” Asuka says before looking up at him and opening the eye she had closed to reveal that the whites had not returned her eyes still blood red.

Brushing a lock of hair out the way, Shinji smiles and says, “You need not have hidden such things from me, the gifts of the gods are to be celebrated and embraced. And besides, such change and growth is the pinnacle of beauty in my eyes.”

“Thanks Shinji. Still, I would prefer not to have the rest of the school learn about these things,” Asuka says, going back to her searching.

“Of course,” Shinji says with a nod, returning to the search.

After about a minute Asuka finds the lens lying on the floor and looks it over before sighing and saying, “I’ll have to clean it off.”

“Take out the other one,” Shinji suggests.

Pausing for a moment, Asuka takes out her other contact and goes to the washroom to clean them off and put them in their solutions for the night before returning to Shinji and dive bombing him and then pinning him to the floor in the resulting melee.

“You’re getting stronger too,” Shinji says with a smile.

“I have a good teacher,” Asuka says, leaning over to kiss him. After a moment of making out she suddenly finds herself pinned on the floor in her underwear, wondering what had just happened.

“You need to work on your capacity for treachery though,” Shinji says smugly.

“You know, I’m not even mad at this point, I’m impressed. How did you get my clothes off that fast?” Asuka asks in mild shock and awe.

“A good magician never reveals his secrets,” Shinji says while waggling his eyebrows.

“It was telekinesis, wasn’t it?” Asuka asks.

When her bra unhooked at the back on its own, Shinji just grins and says, “A good sorcerer still keeps his secrets, but he tends to flaunt the implications more.”


“The Tenth Angel has been identified, and it is currently in orbit above the Indian Ocean, making its way here,” Misato tells the assembled Pilots the next day, bringing up images on the projectors to show the bizarre shape of the latest Angel with three eye-like lobes and numerous smaller projections.

“Code named Sahaquiel, this Angel appears to be using parts of its body for the purposes of orbital bombardment. Protecting the pieces with an AT-field, they build up a massive amount of kinetic energy as they drop, and then upon impact a small portion of the Angel flesh is converted to energy, releasing a massive amount of energy explosively,” Ritsuko explains, showing additional images of the Angel correcting its aim for drift.

“It is currently jamming us, so we won’t know where an attack will come until the Angel is a few minutes from impact,” Misato explains.

Raising his hand, Shinji asks, “Question? How do we know the Angel will launch a kamikaze attack on us? So far it has been immune to N2 mine bombardment, so why won’t it just drop smaller pieces on us and regenerate as necessary until we break?”

“A fair question Shinji-kun,” Misato says with a nod before pulling up a defensive schematic of Tokyo-3.

“If we presume that the Angels have some way of sharing combat data with one another, then previous attacks where the armour has been breached will show that any attack below a certain size will fail. We estimate that Sahaquiel will have to drop at least a third of its mass to guarantee armour breach and damage to Central Dogma. It would take a good week to regenerate that, during which time we could come up with counter measures,” Misato explains.

Smiling, Shinji says, “It doesn’t want us adapting to it.”

“Exactly. So the only attack it can launch is an all out assault,” Misato confirms.

Nodding, Shinji then asks, “What if it launches multiple pieces at once during the attack? What if it were to say drop off a third and a bunch of little pieces as chaff and decoys and then drop with half of its original mass. A hit from even a small piece could be devastating and distract us from the primary strike.”

Sighing, Misato says, “We have already considered this, and any attack involving less than 10% of the Angel’s mass will be ignored.”

The Pilots all became sombre at that announcement. The Angel could drop hundreds of bombs without using up a significant portion of its mass and completely flatten Tokyo-3 without actually damaging the armour layers underneath, and they would just have to watch.

“Then we pray it launches all at once,” Shinji declares.


Misato had taken Shinji and Asuka up to the cliff overlooking the city, and she stared out at the now dull landscape, the skyscrapers having lowered into the Geofront. The evacuation orders had been given, emptying the city of all nonessential personnel. Now all that was left was to wait for the attack.

“Kids… I brought you up here because I have something to tell you,” Misato says, tired and world weary as she contemplates the consequences of her actions.

Taking a deep breath, she begins, “Fifteen years ago an Angel, not an asteroid, caused Second Impact, something you already know. What you might not know was that there was an expedition there at the time, with one survivor. The Katsuragi Expedition. I was that one survivor because my father sacrificed his life to save me.”

Trying to hold back the tears of memories long suppressed, Misato continues, “When I was a child, my father let his work consume him. He was never home, never around, and it hurt my mother and me. It hurt so much that when she filed for divorce, I was happy that he would be completely gone from our lives instead of hanging around, a wound in our family that refused to heal. He couldn’t understand why I was so upset with him.”

Pausing to collect herself, she touches the cross about her neck to gather strength before saying, “And then he invited me on one of his expeditions, and he died while I lived. I hated him as much as I loved him after that, never knowing what I really felt. And now I’ve sworn revenge on the Angels, maybe so that I can finally have some closure with regards to my father. Does that make me a terrible person? Am I sacrificing everything just to get back at the Angels and my father?”

Both Asuka and Shinji walk over to Misato and hug her. Bursting into tears, she returns the embraces.

After a time, Shinji says, “Revenge is what makes us human Misato-san. We have memories; we can remember that which threatens us, that which hurts us, and attack again at a later day. We did not become the species we are today by playing nice, and we will not survive by playing nice. Revenge at a time like this is not just acceptable, it is preferred. So long as your hate sharpens your focus and resolve and does not blind you, then hate them, for in a war of annihilation with no chance of reconciliation, hate is the only thing that keeps you sane. Better to hate your enemy while killing them than to feel nothing at all.”

“Second Impact wiped out half the human population. Three billion graves, many without bodies. So many families destroyed, so many lives wasted even when death did not come… revenge is not justified, it is necessary. The Angels must be made to pay,” Asuka says fiercely while hugging all the tighter.

“The Angels have taken something from all three of us, in different ways. We want revenge too Misato-san,” Shinji tells her.

“We want to mount their heads on our walls like animals, because that is what they are to us: beasts worthy only of slaughter and butchery,” Asuka says.

“We want you to stop hurting Misato, because you’re the mother we wish we had never lost. You’re a slob, you drink too much, and you’re way too lenient at times, but we love you all the same because you care. You care about us; you care about whether we live or die even when you prepare to make sacrifice us in battle. We will destroy anything and anyone that threatens you,” Shinji tells her.

“This Angel threatens you, threatens everything we love and hold dear, they all do. We would kill them for you even if we didn’t already have reason to hate them,” Asuka finishes.


Misato watched as the Evas were deployed to the three points around the predicted drop zone to give the maximum coverage. When the attack came the closest Eva would rush out and try to catch any significant pieces and stop them from making ground contact. The Evas were prepped for close combat only, Shinji with his AT-staff, Asuka with her chain axe, and Rei with an enormous progressive sword that was really more of a giant meat clever than a normal weapon. She had asked for it to be built because she apparently liked it that way. They were all also armed with retractable progressive claws for close in work.

The Evas were currently hooked up to umbilical cables, but once the attack started they would eject them to increase their mobility. They would not have much time to operate, but then again at the speeds the Tenth Angel would fall, they would not have much time to act either.

“Tracking has the Tenth Angel in our scopes… it is budding off several smaller pieces… confirm three clusters of five heading directly for the Evas’ positions,” Shigeru reports.

“Damn it, clever bastard,” Misato hisses. “It’s going to either destroy their umbilical cables or force them to move. It’s going to run out our power before attacking.”

There was silence for a moment, and then Shinji says, “I think I’ve got this.”

Remotely activating a nearby shield launcher, Shinji fires an enormous metal and ceramic composite plate up before grabbing it with his AT-field and hurling it up into the sky. High above the city the cluster of bombs heading for him collided with the hurled plate and exploded, prematurely detonating, their matter-conversion systems keyed to the impact.

Seeing the idea but not having anywhere near the telekinetic power or control that Shinji has, Rei and Asuka each take up a different method. Using her chain axe, Asuka cuts out several chunks of the road and begins batting them into the sky, missing several times but hitting one and causing it to detonate and take out three of the others, leaving only one bomb to be caught by her AT-field and thus exploded safely away from her.

Rei’s method was even more brutal and close. She used her prog sword to slice off the top of a building and then combined with her AT-field, she hurled it at the incoming bombs, the debris field catching them a mere two hundred metres above her position but detonating them all.

“Angel has begun final descent… oh crap…” Shigeru says in horror, pointing to the screen. The distance the Evas could travel in the time they had before impact was displayed as a series of shrinking circles, and the Angel was already outside the coverage zone of all three.

“Update my position, I already started moving,” Shinji reports, the automated GPS tracker offline due to the Angel’s jamming. Correcting, they see that he can just make it to the edge of the impact zone.

“Rei, Asuka, get moving!” Misato orders.

“On it!” They cry out.

Racing across the city, leaping over buildings and highways and high tension power cables, the three Evas rush for the point where the Angel will strike the Earth. Above, the Angel can be seen by the cherry red glow of the entry plasma streaming off its surfaces. Pouring in all available power, Shinji extends his AT-field and then dives forward, sliding like a professional baseball player to get beneath the Angel in time to catch it just before impact. Their AT-fields clashing, Shinji feels the shoulders of his Eva did into the ground until impacting the first layer of armour.

Then Asuka and Rei arrived, their AT-fields at the ready, and they grabbed the Angel by the edges and hauled up, throwing it off Shinji. Manipulating his own field, he rips a hole in its defences and punches upwards, the prog claws extending off his wrist to jut out from over his knuckles. Punching upwards, he drives the blades directly into the crimson core of the Angel.

The Angel explodes, the Evas disappearing into the glare.

After about half a minute the Evas can be seen casually walking out of the smoke and fire, undamaged.

"Mission successful Misato-san," Shinji reports.

[Setzer]

Thank you so much for your handling of Misato in this chapter. It always felt fake to me, her big teary confession with two episodes left in the series. Why would she spill the beans then, when she had clammed up all the other times people she loved were in danger of dying? It just seemed to me that she was trying to jump on the Angst bandwagon "Ooh, look at me, I had a shitty childhood too!" Here it feels actually believable.

[KlavoHunter]

Ahhh, nothing like a little fresh air for Shinji's dust bunnies, eh? I can imagine they'll get a HELL of a workout during the equivalent of EoE.

[Sidewinder]

A good chapter, but I have a question regarding the Thousand Sons' use of bolters: where do they get the ammo? Unless they're somehow resupplied, e.g., magically gather up local materials to make new bolter shells, they'll eventually run out and be forced to use local weapons or even hand-to-hand combat.

[KlavoHunter]

A good chapter, but I have a question regarding the Thousand Sons' use of bolters: where do they get the ammo? Unless they're somehow resupplied, e.g., magically gather up local materials to make new bolter shells, they'll eventually run out and be forced to use local weapons or even hand-to-hand combat.

Magic, man. If they can be summoned from a jarful of dust into full form by psychic power alone, then I don't think it would be a big deal for them to 'spawn' with a full load of ammunition.

[Academia Nut]

Not just is it magic in this case supplying the ammo (you will note though that they were rather sparing anyway, pretty much one shot, one kill at a minimum), but the bolts the Thousand Sons use are psychically manufactured anyway, so its not much of a stretch.

Oh, and I'm glad someone finally figured out what the dust bunnies are going to be used for.

[FA Xerrik]

anyone else get a bit of a Predator vibe when the Angel got it's comeuppance.

[KlavoHunter]

Oh, and I'm glad someone finally figured out what the dust bunnies are going to be used for.

I don't know why I didn't make the obvious connection sooner. Y'know, the ONLY small-arms combat in NGE at all...

[Academia Nut]

There is something about WH40k that makes everything so much more epic, even things that probably should not be epic.

---

Ritsuko had a headache that was, for once, not related to the Evas. Oh, true, they continued to evolve and change in response to their battles with the Angel, but that was a headache she had already taken aspirin for. They were slowly bringing Unit 01 in line, keeping it from becoming sentient and going on an apocalyptic rampage. And the tech crews had grown used to the hazards of working around Unit 00’s various new hazards, so much that they had painted a giant biohazard symbol on one of its pauldrons, a move Rei had merely smiled at. The only Eva that seemed to have a sane evolution was Unit 02, which was apparently just getting faster and stronger.

No, the headache she was having today was from the Magi. Right before a scheduled maintenance, it was giving them all sorts of trouble, and they had yet to figure out what exactly was the problem.

Primarily the problems revolved around the investigation of the warehouse massacre. It was all very hush-hush on the surface, but in the backrooms and intelligence offices across the planet everyone was in an uproar, NERV included. Forty top black ops specialists from across the planet were not where they were supposed to be, and that was because thirty-nine of them were six feet under and one of them was still screaming his head off about phantoms in a NERV asylum.

The investigation had turned out to be equally maddening. They had found nearly a thousand spent cases on the scene, but all of them matched up to weapons used by the dead operatives. Even stranger still was the fact that the main killing grounds had next to no spent casings while the places where there were large concentrations of fire should have been enough to put down a small African rebellion, but there had been no signs of any casualties.

Finally there were the bodies. A few had normal wounds caused by ammunition cooking off, but the fact that the ammo was in an armoured box that had been blown to pieces made the situation equally unusual. One man had had his head ripped off by what appeared to be the application of industrial machinery to an unintended purpose. One man had his head ripped off by some unknown mechanism and then his head and spinal column used as a spear to destroy their radio equipment, which was impossible to say the least. One man had been violently dismembered with his headless and armless torso tossed in a box and mailed to the head of SEELE, although quite obviously it didn’t go her far as bodies in boxes tend to get noticed by security.

Those were the bodies they could somewhat understand. The vast majority of the dead had quite simply been blown apart from the inside out by some unknown force that left no shrapnel, no powder burns, and no other physical evidence of what had happened to them. There were a few holes in the walls to indicate what might have been bullet holes, but they were huge and would have required a 20mm cannon to make, if not for the fact that a 20mm cannon would not have behaved the way the ballistics of the holes dictated the rounds had.

Thus, it was only somewhat surprising that when all the data had been entered from forensics, the Magi had compiled it all and then spat out, “Incorrect data entry, please re-enter.”

The three supercomputers could be obstinate mules at times, her mother had programmed them that way, and it had taken well over an hour for Ritsuko just to figure out that the bastards were rejecting the data because it was literally impossible. In that light, it was simply a well designed UI trying to prevent user error by inputting nonsensical values. It had taken Ritsuko and her team another four hours to write a patch that would override that and allow for the analysis of data that defied the laws of physics.

Ritsuko had sent her team home for the night while the program ran and she stressed out about it. So far it had been cooking for two and a half hours. Ritsuko was just about to go get another cup of coffee when the screen displayed that the program had finished its analysis. Sitting back down, Ritsuko presses the display button and sees what the Magi have come up with.

By far the biggest chunk of the analysis was the ballistics for the road where most of the bullets had been recovered, most of the bullets having shown obvious signs of ricocheting off of something. The Magi analysis showed a rough time-line of what had happened.

The defenders in the warehouse had all opened fire at a small target. By analyzing the angles, the Magi showed that an approximately human shaped target about 2.5 to 3m tall and about 1.65 to 1.9m wide had simply walked through everything thrown at it and then fired three rounds, inflicting five casualties, including one casualty it should not have been able to see, let alone target.

“What would be required to take that kind of punishment and survive?” Ritsuko mumbled while typing the properly parsed question to the Magi.

The report was terrifying in its implication.

“Current limits on materials, power production, and miniaturization technology makes such a small yet resilience and mobile object impossible to produce,” was the report.

“How impossible?” Ritsuko asks of the Magi.

“Unknown. Time scale involved is a minimum of 100 years of research to achieve such technological breakthroughs. 100 years is considered an unrealistically optimistic minimum, but predictions in research beyond a century in the future are impossible to make,” the Magi state.

A cold chill ran down Ritsuko’s spine. The Magi and NERV represented the pinnacle of human science, and right now they were saying that whatever had done this was as at least as far beyond them as the Evas were beyond the first tanks to roll across the battlefields of World War One, if not the mounted knights of old.

The next simulations showed what would have been needed to inflict the wounds found on the men, and again it showed the impossible. Weapons with armour piercing profiles and energy densities requiring more than a hundred years of advancement in science and technology to be made possible, if at all.

Worst of all though were the deaths of the commander and the radio operator. The report showed that the only way for them to have been killed was by internally applied forces, the sort of thing that would require huge and complicated machines that would take time to set up and leave nasty marks from all the needles and such to work.

Or a more esoteric method of causing the damage.

“What about the Angels and AT-fields?” Ritsuko asks.

There is a pause followed by the response, “Theoretically possible, but the fine control necessary has never been demonstrated. Additionally, the power bloom would have been detected.”

A sudden dread washed over Ritsuko as she pulled up the monitoring logs for that night at the approximate time of the attack. There was nothing for blue patterns, but there were other patterns, patterns that were normally ignored. Like the red pattern, the one used for humans like the Children, the people who were special.

The red pattern that night was so bright it drowned out the city. Ritsuko started winding it back, to see when and where it started.

It didn’t end. She went back weeks, months, and the pattern only diminished slightly.

There was a human out there with the power of an Angel.

There was only one creature she knew of that could possibly do that. Grabbing her gun out of her desk, Ritsuko stormed off for Terminal Dogma. First she would have to destroy the remaining clones to ensure the bitch didn’t get back up, and then she would hunt her down. She was a threat unlike any ever before.

Arriving at the clone tanks, Ritsuko began to initiate the sequence to destroy every one of the damn giggling Reis. She was half-way done when she noted that the inane babble of their blank minds had ominously ceased. Turning about slowly, she found all the clones staring at her, their red eyes glowing with a light that shouldn’t have been there.

And standing behind her, naked and dripping LCL was one of them. When she spoke, her voice was hollow, with an unnatural reverberation.

“What are you trying to do to my sisters Dr. Akagi?” The clone asked curiously.

“I… uh…” Ritsuko tried to say something, but then her mind exploded into pain, and she could feel the thoughts being torn out.

“Ah… yes… that. I’m afraid that won’t work anymore doctor, I already took precautions to disable that system. Oh, and you won’t be needing that,” the clone says, gesturing with a finger, causing the gun to rip out of Ritsuko’s pocket and then go flying away.

“You killed all those men,” Ritsuko says.

“The first three were an accident. We knew more would be sent, so I asked Shinji-kun to take care of it for me. He was happy to help,” the clone tells her.

“What?” Ritsuko asks in horror.

“Of the Children, Shinji-kun is by far the most experienced and powerful. He was the one who knew how to wipe out the likes of them. It saddens me that I only discovered how much I craved him after he met Asuka-san, and irks me that he would be saddened if I tried to take away that which he holds dear,” Rei tells her.

“That… that’s impossible, Shinji doesn’t have any Angel DNA in him,” Ritsuko says unbelievingly.

“He does. The ability to pilot an Eva requires incredible psychic talent, something the world lacked until Adam exploded, releasing his substance into the atmosphere. All the children born since then have had pieces of the Angels with them. In the Children, these pieces give rise to incredible psychic talent… or at least that is what Shinji-kun has pieced together from what he knows and from the various NERV reports on Second Impact,” Rei explains.

“Why… why are you telling me all this?” Ritsuko begs.

“Because then the thoughts will rise to the surface of your mind and be easier to find. There is much we want to know that you know. There are also things that I want to know personally as well… like what it is like sleeping with an Ikari,” Rei says with a smile before advancing.

“Don’t worry Dr. Akagi; you are too valuable to kill. Although I am afraid I am inexperienced with this technique, but you should recover within a week,” Rei tells her.

That deep in Terminal Dogma, there was no one to hear the screams.


All of NERV was in a sombre mood with the lead of their science division currently hospitalized for what appeared to be a stress related stroke. It was very minor and no permanent damage aside from some memory loss was expected, but she was still in a coma. This was devastating news with the Magi repair cycle coming up, but there was nothing that could be done.

Life had to go on even while Ritsuko lay in a bed hooked up to a dozen machines.

Especially since Gendo was not the sort of person to allow his employees any slack for this sort of thing.

He did however allow that without Ritsuko the process would be significantly slower.

Gendo was also secretly quite worried about what had happened. Ritsuko had been discovered in the elevator leading down to Terminal Dogma, her lab coat stained with LCL drippings. What had she been doing down there and why? And whatever had happened to her had not been a stroke, although it had caused neural bruising to the part of her brain pertaining to memory. The implications of what could have happened were… frightening.

Fortunately Lilith still seemed well restrained, the Lance of Longinus recently recovered from Antarctica ensuring passivity. Still, considering that the last thing Ritsuko had been working on before she suffered her “attack” was the analysis of the warehouse massacre, this was simply compounding the mystery.

Still, with everything this badly messed up the old men would be sure to leap upon him if he let news of this weakness get out. So since they were expecting new data on the Dummy Plug project, he had ordered the current batch of testing to go forward as scheduled: without Ritsuko, and with the Magi still being analyzed for anomalous activities.

So far the pilots had gone through with letting themselves be stripped down for this latest battery of tests with a minimum of grumbling, the majority of said grumbling coming from Asuka.

“I still don’t get why we have to be naked,” Asuka gripes while they are put through the decontamination process.

“Oh relax Asuka, it’s not so bad,” Shinji tells her.

“That’s because you’re a pervert,” Asuka points out.

Rolling his eyes, Shinji says, “Please. If anyone should be worried about dignity, it’s me.”

After all, I’ve seen both of you naked, while neither of you have yet to gaze upon my manly physique in its full glory!

You saw Rei naked! When was this?

Before you arrived here. Neither one of us particularly cared at the time.

It was less that she was naked and more that she was not wearing any clothes.

A likely story!

I am amused by the fact that you are not upset by the fact that Shinji claims to have seen you naked.

That’s because I’ve already shown him most of the good stuff.

Actually, I used remote viewing to peep on you when you changed into your plug suit back when we first met. Full frontal for the win!

Pervert!

At least I’m an honest pervert, unlike somebody who decided that since I did not look on you, physically at least, you would peek at me while I was changing.

Uh…

Climbing naked into the entry plugs, the three Children were then inserted into the simulation bodies and were immediately confronted with some rather bizarre sensations, the lack of their plug suits and the simulation bodies themselves giving them odd feedback. Asuka had yet to learn the telepathic communion that Shinji and Rei used to control their Evas, so she was perhaps the least affected, but both Shinji and Rei were disgusted by the mindless nature of the simulation bodies.

Still, it was something they just had to live with.

Meanwhile a patch of corrosion began to grow on a protein wall in the system. Unbeknownst to the members of NERV watching this happening, this corrosion was in fact the growth of billions of microscopic organisms, each one a fragment of a larger whole.

The Eleventh Angel had come to NERV.

As it began to grow and spread, preparing to make its move for the Pribnow Box and the simulation bodies, both Shinji and Rei stopped what they were doing. Every time before when they had encountered an Angel, its psychic presence had been massive, blotting out the details, but now they felt a presence actually begin to grow, very near them.

There is an Angel in the base.

Yes. Do we tell anyone?

How? They won’t believe us, and if we do we’ll just let them know what we can do once the attack begins.

Then what do we do?

I’m thinking.

By this point the spread of the corrosion had warranted alarm from the technical crews and they began to prepare for the spread of contaminants. They were not prepared for what actually happened.

Rei’s simulation body jerked back as the Angel spread into contact with it. Panic began to set in as one of the arms tried to smash open the observation window, only for an emergency charge to blow the limb free. Someone ordered the pilots to be ejected.

Two entry plugs rocketed away from the simulation bodies, exiting out hatches and heading for the artificial lake on the bottom of the Geofront.

One of them had jammed in its firing sequence, still trapped in the Pribnow box. In the chaos and confusion of the evacuation and sealing of the area, no one noticed that they were one Pilot short, except for the Pilots themselves, who remaining in telepathic contact with their missing comrade.

Rei, are you okay?

I will endure for the moment, although I am afraid that the Angel is currently trying to absorb me into its collective. It is so far rather unsuccessful.

I can feel it from here… a quadrillion tiny fragments of a greater mind… it’s a viral entity, a hive mind… and… you caused the launch failure.

I am confident I can make use of this situation.

Rei! You idiot! It might be like a germ, but I can feel its mind. It’s an evolutionary creature; it will simply find adapt to your attacks and find ways around your defences.

Then we will have to work together. My body swims with contagions. If you help them to evolve into a better plague, then I will begin the counter contagion.

Son of a bitch Rei! Are you insane?

One could say that we all are. If you could please begin, I do believe that the NERV staff are about to make a mistake.

Damn it! Alright, listen up both of you; we’re going to do this in a well organized manner. Rei, you’re obviously on the front lines, while I’ll cook up better weapons for you. Asuka, you’re damn near immune to psychic attacks since you got those eyes of yours, so you’re going to be the shield whenever possible, got it?

Sure, this is no way to fight, but if the Angels are going to be sneaky little bitches like this I guess we’ll have to go along with it.

The technicians are making their move.

Inside the Pribnow Box, ozone began to flood in, destroying countless trillions of units of the Angel, but it began to evolve, adapting to the new environment and planning on using the oxygen in the ozone as fuel for the next stage of its evolution.

The Children struck back in the moment of weakness as the Angel was still adapting. The colonies attempting to corrupt Rei from the inside out sudden discovered two massive problems. The first was her super charged immune system, the second was competition. Bacteria and viruses and even fungi began to spread from Rei, feeding upon the Angel, their spread enhanced by Rei’s psychic powers.

The Angel reeled back from this unexpected assault. The ozone adaptation was only partly done, and while the Angel was an incredibly quick learner, the attackers had a few billion years of living in oxygenated environments and were unhindered by what was still killing the colonies.

The Angel adapted and began a counter-attack. The contagions fell back to their lines at Rei’s simulation body before making their stand. The Angel, wanting to complete its mission and destroy this base by hacking the computers, felt that the threat was well contained and began to reconfigure into a structure capable of hacking into the Magi.

Shinji meanwhile had been forcing the diseases in Rei’s body into ever more vicious evolutionary cycles, producing strains of such incredible virulence that if they had been adapted for humans they would make the Black Plague look like a case of the sniffles. Even though these creations were meant for killing this Angel, if they got out into the outside world they could still make smallpox look like a nasty rash.

Their lines over-extended and the defenders overconfident, the attacking Angel colonies suddenly discovered that the fallback was a ruse and met with toxins specifically tailored to killing them. When they adapted to those toxins, new ones were used that used the adaptations to the old ones to be even worse.

The newly forming circuit colonies were mercilessly bombed. New thoughts died half formed, and to top it all off a special strike team found the physical connections to the Magi and severed them.

Furious now, the Angel resorted to using its AT-field on a microscopic scale to deal with this insult. The diseases responded by bringing forth something special Shinji had cooked up just for something like this: psychic bacteria. Trillions of nanoscopic lightning bolts began to leap out, punching through the tiny AT-fields. A well placed bolt in the circuits could destroy an entire colony as the energy propagated down the superconductive lines, burning out switches and relays.

The AT-field got stronger. The bacteria began to group together to throw about sparks visible to the naked eye. All the observation areas were destroyed and visual sensors were down, but the inside of the Pribnow Box was suddenly alive with shifting, twisting colours and sparking lighting and bubbles escaping from every surface.

The battle was brutal, but ever so slowly the Angel began to turn back the tide, its defences getting stronger by the second while the lightning throwers were no longer causing enough damage to counter the growth of the Angel’s colonies.

It was at this point that the Angel noted that it was having problems forming new colonies as the substrates to attach down to were corroding in a highly basic environment. The change had been slow enough that the Angel had adapted, but it now realized that everything it had faced had been adapted to a basic environment before the battle began.

It was at this point it noted that there was a massive bubble of oxygen and hydrogen sitting at the top of the Pribnow Box, the water broken down by the AT-fields and electricity thrown about. A tiny spark was launched by a strike team at the surface.

If bacteria could have grinned, they would have.

The Pribnow Box was blown apart, the pressure wave destroying millions of colonies, the sudden boiling temperatures killing millions more, and the sudden draining of the water annihilated yet more as the colonies were exposed to a dry environment. Quintillions of the units died in three seconds. And into this devastation arrived the nastiest creations Shinji had cooked up yet.

They were microscopic battleships, adapted to the air and to the heat, and they were packing the reason why the environment had become highly basic. Huge colonies of fungi had spread down the simulation body and began harvesting water… heavy water. Separating the deuterium from the oxygen had produced ionized oxygen that tended to strip hydrogen off water to produce two hydroxide ions.

Shinji had created flying, thermophilic psychic bacteria armed with fusion cannons. Telekinetically accelerating deuterium ions together, the bacteria hurled the products at the still shell-shocked colonies, bombarding them with x-ray, neutron, and alpha radiation. The attacks also positively charged the target, and the bacteria let the electrons stripped from the deuterons fly off towards their targets.

The walls of the box melted under the barrage. The bacteria were very thorough, starting at the top, causing the melted remains to fall down on lower colonies, frying them. They also salted the destroyed areas with friendly spores capable of surviving on the melt. With outside atmosphere leaking in, the spores began nitrogen fixing to produce acids and toxins that they rained down on the lower colonies.

By the time the Angel got its head together, so to speak, it had lost 81.4% of its initial mass and the attackers were already varying their tactics and techniques to avoid adaptation. Condensing its remaining colonies together, it projected a massive AT-field as it began construction of a full sized S2 organ. It needed all the power it could get in fighting these unholy monstrosities.

Once protected behind a full strength AT-field, something that the bacteria could not punch through, the Angel punched forward a line of growth directly at the disease covered simulation body that housed the source of the power for these ludicrous attacks. The Angel steamrolled everything in its path, using its AT-field to slice, crush, and destroy everything that stood in its way while it rapidly formed new connections, becoming smarter with each passing moment.

Crashing into the simulation body, the Angel punched tendrils of growth deep into its decaying flesh, towards the entry plug. Right when it hit the plug it struck a counter AT-field and the casing was the scene of a monstrous battle on the micro-scale as plasma blasts, lightning bolts, and telekinetic attacks were exchanged between opposing forces. The Angel however had learned many tricks, and with its S2 organ, it could bring more power to bear than Rei’s defenders.

It cracked the case of the entry plug and immediately found Rei, for she had grown too. Her body, the primary factor for the most monstrous contagions ever dreamed up, had swollen with cancerous growths to surface as an incubator for new strains. The Angel punched straight through the layers of overlapping tumours for the central nervous system. It wrapped about Rei’s spinal column and then began travelling up towards her brain.

Asuka dropped the mental shield she had been projecting.

For just an instant the Angel heard the mental chatter it had been protected from and it knew that its race was doomed. The Angels ultimate strength was their adaptability, the ability to react to a changing environment.

The Lilim on the other hand could adapt before a change occurred. They could see what was coming and act accordingly. They did not need to see a challenge coming to be ready for it. They could use the reactive nature of the Angels to prod them into evolutionary paths that ended in an ambush.

The Children had shielded the Angel from psychic chatter so that it would never develop the appropriate defences. They had unleashed hellish, impossible plagues against it, forcing it to divert all of its energy, all of its attention towards defending against the physical, and then when it had linked with Rei and both minds were open, the mental attack was launched.

The Eleventh Angel did not have time to communicate its findings to its brethren. It had just enough time to get off a psychic scream of absolute despair and fear that rattled them all to the core. For what it found in Rei’s mind was one word, one command that could not be denied.

Die.

The Angel’s mind and soul were shattered and sent hurling into the abyss, its body dissolved as the components all ceased to live and the pieces were disintegrated and incinerated as all the life forms Rei had released also died as one in an apocalyptic explosion that caused the nitrogen in the air to burn with the oxygen for a time.

Rei III also died giving the command, but it was no great deal for her, her soul immediately jumping to the bodies of her sisters to await revival by Gendo. In the peaceful silence of that limbo state she would share the new gifts she had acquired in the fight. She had absorbed all those wonderful, awful diseases into her soul, and now they would spread to the genome of every clone.

The blood of Rei IV would be capable of killing everyone on the planet if she so desired it to.

Up in their entry plugs the other Children were also absorbing their new gifts.

Asuka’s eyes had changed again, her once light blue irises darkening to a rich blue-violet that was almost black, a consequence of the strain in shielding the Angel from the thoughts of the other Children. There were also subtler changes that would take several days to manifest, but for now she seemed the least affected.

Just beneath the surface of his flesh, a new, strange neural net had developed, Shinji’s body quite liking the biological nano-computer design the Angel had come up with and replicating it. Weaving in and out with the rest of his nervous system, this new network was invisible to normal scans, but it took much of the load for autonomic actions off his brain, allowing more space to be freed up for higher brain functions.

As his already formidable intelligence increased, Shinji’s first major post-battle thought was not a happy one.

This situation is WAY too suspicious.

---

Well, the next episode is a clip show, and the one after that isa psychological epsidoe, so I think I'll roll them into one update. After that is the Twelfth Angel, the Dirac Sea one... and then things will get interesting. Mwuahahahahaha!

[FA Xerrik]

Wow 1000 XP and a Level Up for the pilots eh? That was a pretty awesome battle, and it's interesting to see that all of them are gaining new abilities after each fight. I'm looking forward to seeing how the subtler changes in Asuka manifest, doubtlessly something a WH40ker could anticipate.

Still, it feels like your updates are getting shorter as you advance through the story. Is that a consequence of the source material at this point in the show? Also, how much of the events building up to EoE will go forth, as opposed to what went down in the last two episodes of the original run.

[Master of Cards]

You made Fusion armed microlife..... That is the most disturbing and funniest thing to picture I hav heard today.