Aozaki Aoko [690-691]

Chapter 690: Hope and Despair

Explosions rang out nearby, followed by violent tremors—the Tenth Angel had already breached the operation command center.

"Staying here any longer is too dangerous. All non-combat personnel, evacuate immediately!" Misato Katsuragi shouted. "Fall back to the second auxiliary command center!"

But before anyone could move, the command center's giant main screen shattered. Bursting through the wall behind it came the Tenth Angel's face—like a skull carved from fish bones—its hollow eye sockets blazing with a light that made all hope shrivel.

The NERV staff, normally responsible for command and logistics, were facing a living Angel for the first time, forced to feel the crushing pressure of a life-form utterly unlike their own.

So this is the enemy those EVA pilots—those fourteen-year-old kids—have to confront? They're meant to stand before monsters like this, seize their courage, and fight without fear of death?

These support and command personnel had, consciously or not, harbored some degree of contempt for the Angels—not because of any flaw in their character, but because when you watch one fourteen-year-old after another climb into an EVA and "easily" knock the enemy down, how frightening could the Angels really be?

It's like office workers in a city who cannot comprehend the fear mountain villagers feel when a wild beast slips into their homes at night. If you've never experienced it yourself, you can never truly empathize.

Now they understood why that withdrawn boy Shinji resisted so fiercely when he was forced onto the battlefield.

But the Tenth Angel had no intention of letting them linger in melancholy. A new cross-shaped beam was building in its eyes; the humans before it would soon be cinders.

Is my life to end here, before all the Angels are destroyed—before my revenge is complete…?

Misato clenched the cross her father left her, unwilling to accept it.

At the very instant the cross-beam was about to fire—about to vaporize Misato and everyone behind her—the wall on the other side of the command room exploded inward.

Bursting through came two familiar silhouettes, one purple and one yellow: EVA Unit-01 and EVA Unit-00.

"Shinji-kun! Rei!" Misato cried. Whether it was relief or worry for her two HQ pilots, she couldn't tell—but hope flared to life again.

"Haaah!" Shinji roared, charging the Angel of Strength. He leapt and kicked it hard, sending it flying into the opposite wall and collapsing it in a shower of debris.

But the cross-beam it had been charging hadn't dissipated—it still fired. The staff, whose hearts had just begun to settle, found their breath catch in their throats again.

At that critical moment, Unit-00 rushed in with the same massive shield used in the Operation Yashima campaign, planting itself before the command dais and bracing to block the cross-beam with its heat-resistant barrier.

When the beam finally ebbed, Shinji and Ayanami Rei—brother and sister—matched each other's steps, pooled their strength, and drove the Angel of Strength back out of the command room, smashing through the wall into the adjacent hangar and launch rails.

They clashed again amid the EVA hangars. In the cramped space, the Angel's ribbon-like limbs couldn't fully deploy, but its beams were still very much in play.

As Shinji raised his right fist to deliver another punch, cross-beams snapped from the Tenth Angel's eyes and, with surgical neatness, severed Unit-01's arm.

By this point in the fight, losing an arm—"just a scratch"—couldn't slow Shinji down. A rush of adrenaline drowned out the pain. He roared and shoved the Angel backward with his remaining arm. At the same time, Ayanami jammed her shield to choke off any path the Angel might use to escape deeper into the facility. The two of them were going to force it back to the surface.

Unit-01's severed arm slammed against the hangar wall. Gendo Ikari, watching coldly from the scene, was spattered half-red by the EVA's blood. He showed no fear or hesitation, leaving others unable to read what was passing through the Commander's mind.

"Miss Misato!"

Pinning the Angel of Strength to the launch rails, Shinji shouted. Misato, still in the command room, immediately grasped his intent.

They could not let the Angel get any closer to Lilith in Terminal Dogma. If it did, humanity would be annihilated.

"Release all lock bolts! Fire the rail catapults on tracks C11 through C14! Hurry!"

Misato's orders snapped the NERV staff from their stupor. Under quake-like tremors, they began punching in the commands.

With a machine-gun crackle of discharging currents, Unit-01, Unit-00, and the Angel they had pinned to the rails were all launched upward at once. The Tenth Angel was crushed under the two EVAs, unable to move.

On the scorched surface of Tokyo-3, the armor plating covering an EVA shaft blew open as the pair of EVAs and the Angel burst free, then crashed onto the ground in a tangle.

Unit-01 clamped its left hand onto the protective tissues around the Angel's core and planted its left foot on the skull-mask, trying to rip the last layers away—

—so the Tenth Angel's core would be fully exposed before them.

A grueling, bloody victory seemed within arm's reach.

But then Unit-01 abruptly froze, the light in its eyes snuffing out. It slumped before the Angel.

"Out of power?!"

Shinji felt the irony like a slap. One final step from finishing it—and Unit-01 ran out of juice now?

In truth, they hadn't quite hit the five-minute limit, but Unit-01's movements had been more intense than Unit-00's—draining its internal battery first. Its functions shut down completely.

The Angel, finally granted a breath of respite, seized its chance. Its skull-mask yawned wide to reveal a tri-lobed, xenomorph-like maw as it lunged to swallow Unit-01 whole.

"Shinji—kun, look out!"

Piloting Unit-00, Rei moved on instinct engraved on her soul. Without thinking, she rushed in and shoved Unit-01 aside.

But the attack was already loosed and could not be recalled. With Unit-01 pushed clear, Unit-00 took its place before the Angel's gaping maw. In an instant, the jaws clamped down, swallowing Unit-00. Only a pair of lower legs remained on the ground, spurting the last of their blood.

The Angel seemed to savor the taste, chewing and chewing, then spat the head of Unit-00 with a wet "ptoo," letting it thud to the ground before Unit-01.

The whiplash of the battle's reversals left everyone in the command staff dumbstruck.

Moments ago, Unit-01 and Unit-00's stellar performance had restored a sliver of hope; now the battle had swung back into abyssal despair.

Chapter 691: To Hell With the World

"Shinji-kun! Rei!"

Using emergency passages, NERV HQ personnel reached the surface just in time to see the Angel—the one that had swallowed Unit-00 and Ayanami Rei—rapidly changing form.

Its inhuman shape was slimming into a more slender, curving silhouette, yet its head still retained the skull-like mask.

"The Tenth Angel's IFF is shifting from blue to Unit-00!" Shigeru Aoba stared at his laptop screen, voice shaking. "It's gaining access to Terminal Dogma by consuming an EVA. Our automated defense systems won't touch it now!"

"The route to Terminal Dogma is wide open… to the Angel!" Ritsuko Akagi said, eyes fixed on it. "We've lost. Completely."

Suffocating despair crashed over them. Everything human ingenuity had wrought looked as fragile as a sandcastle before the mightiest messenger of God.

Inside Unit-01's entry plug—drained of power and sunk in absolute darkness—two red eyes opened.

"Give Rei… back to me."

With Shinji Ikari's whisper in the dark, Unit-01—despite being out of power and supposedly inert—initialized again.

"It's well past its operating limit… how is it moving?!" Makoto Hyuga was at a loss. He couldn't understand how Unit-01 could stand again, but there it was.

"Berserk…?" Misato remembered Unit-01's battle against the Fourth Angel.

"I don't know," Ritsuko replied. "Whatever's making Unit-01 move—it should be impossible…"

The portions of Unit-01 not covered by armor began to glow a deep red. If Touko had cared to explain, the others would have understood: this was a sign of pseudo-divinity activating, the materialization of soul-stuff.

Unit-01 slowly straightened, facing the sky as its sealed jaws opened. The light in its eyes burned brighter and brighter.

The Angel sensed danger. It converted its Rei-like arms back into ribbon limbs and hurled them at Unit-01.

But the attack that had never failed before now slammed harmlessly into an impregnable Absolute Field. Unit-01's A.T. Field held firm.

The Angel didn't let up. It reeled its limbs in, yanking its whole body up close, then fired the most powerful cross-beam yet at point-blank range.

Even so—an attack that could level all of Tokyo-3 could not scratch Unit-01's Absolute Field. Besides a tooth-aching sizzle where the beam kissed the barrier, the perfect wall of defense held without a mark.

Neither Shinji nor Unit-01 had the temperament to take a beating without answering. Unit-01 lifted its severed arm stump, and in the blink of an eye, a new limb—woven entirely from Absolute Field—"regenerated."

It clenched a fist; the field-hand unfolded into a hexagonal corona of A.T. Field plates. They flipped and locked, then discharged their stored power in one burst, blasting the Tenth Angel away and plowing a long furrow through the earth.

Staring down the enemy, Unit-01 opened its jaws and loosed a low, rolling growl. Its eyes flashed in unison—then a cross-beam indistinguishable from an Angel's lanced forth, shattering the Angel's once-unbreakable compressed A.T. Field with ease.

The arrogant Tenth Angel crashed to the ground, the blast wave making it hard for anyone nearby to keep their footing.

Under Shinji's control, Unit-01 stalked forward step by heavy step. To the shock of almost everyone watching, a vast halo—like those that appeared only when Angels used their power—now gleamed over Unit-01's head.

"An EVA… can do this?!"

"Unit-01 is exceeding the theoretical limits we assigned it…" Ritsuko answered Misato, as if trying to convince herself as much as anyone.

"Entry plug depth over 200—and still rising!" Aoba shouted.

"Shinji-kun, stop! You won't come back!" Ritsuko couldn't help yelling up at Unit-01.

"I don't care what happens to me. I don't care what happens to this world," Shinji murmured from the soul-lit throne. "But Rei… at least Rei… I'm going to save her."

As his words fell, Unit-01's eyes fired cross-beams again, slicing the Tenth Angel's A.T. Field—and most of its body—in two. The "ribs" shielding its core shattered; a titanic cross-shaped explosion spanned the sky, proclaiming the power of a deified Unit-01.

"Go, Shinji!" Misato suddenly shouted. "Not for anyone else—do it to fulfill your own wish!"

High above the chaotic battlefield, an out-of-place, easily overlooked black raven circled, intelligence glinting in its eyes.

Anyone who knew Aoko would have recognized the bird at once: it was her familiar—Stark.

At that moment, it wheeled in the air with a delicate camera rig hanging at its neck, recording everything—including sound.

"Well? Did you get Misato Katsuragi's line just now?" Aoko's voice reached Stark's mind through the telepathic link between mage and familiar.

"Caw! Mission accomplished!" Stark replied happily. "Not a word missed!"

"Mm. Good work. I've prepared a special dessert for you," Aoko said. "You can come back now. Things are about to get dangerous for you there."

Stark took one last look at Unit-01, its hands pressed to the Angel's core, then blinked out of sight—vanishing from the battlefield as if it had never been there at all.

"Heh-heh-heh…"

Aoko's laugh carried both mockery and a trace of delight, as if she were watching an entertaining chain of events unfold.

Her figure shimmered in the sky above the battlefield, though no one had yet noticed her.

Back in the ruined NERV base, many personnel had yet to make it out. Aoko had ordered the homunculus Asimi—who possessed copies of some of her abilities—to control those she had singled out over the years, among them her assistant Maya Ibuki.

A "youthful Ritsuko Akagi"-caliber talent like Ibuki was not someone Aoko would let slip.

The same was happening in the Bethany and French branches, though in those places Touko had begun her arrangements earlier and so moved even faster.

Unit-01's awakening was the greatest catalyst to drive SEELE to accelerate both arcane and scientific development. For interlopers like Aoko and Touko, it was also the crucial trigger to seize the things they wanted.