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.
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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.
