Chapter 4: Second Invasion
Chapter 4:
Second Invasion
THE EVENING CONTINUED to darken, and the combination of diamond dust and densely rising fog blocked what little visibility remained. The shock wave’s impact had knocked Eva-01 back, but it hadn’t fallen into the lake. As ice shards continued to fall, Shinji’s Eva stood on the frozen surface of Lake Ashi.
Shinji was out of breath, his heart pounding. The flood of endorphins made him feel like he might puke. The sensors in his plugsuit detected his agitation. Shinji felt a small jolt of pain in his arm, and his eyebrows twitched. A soft resin needle had delivered a sedative straight into his veins.
“What…happened?” Shinji panted.
The world around him had become frozen and white.
Eva-01 did this.
What happened to Quatre…and her Eva-0.0?
“I told you to shut up.”
He’d acted out of embarrassment, wanting to silence her words.
What have I done?
A loud rumble broke the stillness.
A mountain of fallen ice blasted into the air. An arm thrust out, striking the frozen surface of the lake as Quatre’s Eva leaped up and rushed toward Eva-01, grasping the giant with one bare hand.
“Ayanami! Number Quatre!”
Number Quatre, he’d said—not as a name, but as the number she’d been assigned. Misato detested that practice—Don’t treat a human being like she’s a number, she’d said—and Shinji felt the same way, or at least, he’d thought he did. But in the moment, on a subconscious level, he’d used the number to separate her from the other Ayanamis. This one was broken.
Her Eva was severely damaged. It had lost its shoulder sensor arrays and propellant system, and its body was misshapen—more so than the impact should have caused.
An Eva’s shape is determined by its pilot’s self-identity…
The twisted and mangled Eva-0.0 dragged its broken laser cannon in its right hand, attacking Eva-01 with its left.
Taken aback by this vicious tenacity, Shinji reflexively asked, “Do you want to kill me, Number Quatre?!”
The reply came by speaker. It was Quatre’s voice.
<<Quatre doesn’t want to kill you. Ayanami does.>>
Meaning the girl Shinji’s mind attached the name Ayanami to—the one in the high-school uniform. The melancholy Trois.
“That…can’t be!”
<<If this is the world you wanted, Ikari-kun, then maybe if I kill you…>>
She left the rest unsaid.
What does she think will happen?
Dropping its A.T. Field and tucking into a roll, Eva-01 nimbly slid across the ice, maneuvering behind the other Eva.
Quatre’s voice sounded tearful. <<After all, this world is already ending.>>
Shinji didn’t know what she meant, but her words inexplicably pierced him.
Had that last part come from Ayanami?
“I don’t understand what you’re saying!”
If Shinji could disconnect the Series-0.0 Eva’s external S² Engine, its internal power would quickly run out, and the giant would be immobilized. At least, that was Shinji’s plan.
What?!
The S² Engine was supposed to have been hooked up to the rear-facing umbilical connector, but Quatre’s engine had fused directly into the Eva’s back.
Asuka’s Eva-02 crawled from the rubble of the annihilated sniping post at Mount Komagatake. The power source indicator on her entry plug’s display flickered between the remote supply and the Eva’s internal reserves.
“Tch. There must be a malfunction somewhere.”
It’s a miracle the umbilical cable wasn’t severed completely.
Wait—why is everything white?!
She’d heard and felt a tremendous rumbling, but the blast had severed her data link, leaving her in the dark about what had happened.
The floor jolted and sunk a little, and Eva-02’s power source switched to internal reserves. The operational time limit began its frantic countdown.
Well… now my umbilical cable is severed. Some part of the structure beneath me, weakened from the blast, must have given way.
I need to get out of here fast…
When she emerged from the scorched, crumbling building, the first thing she saw was the two Evas battling on the frozen white lake.
But then she saw something else.
“What?”
The vision was straight out of a nightmare.
As ice crystals cascaded down, a dense fog rose from Lake Ashi’s frozen surface like steam from a boiling pot.
The Eva-0.0 and Eva-01 grappled with each other.
Then, for an instant, the fog parted, and Asuka saw a third giant figure striding across the ice, away from the tussling pair and toward Tokyo-3.
Where had that one come from?
“It can’t be,” she gasped. “Shinji!”
The giant figure was so shocking that briefly her vision and hearing distorted. When she called Shinji’s name, she felt as if she were struggling against a great weight.
The electromagnetic interference had disappeared, and Eva-02’s communication systems finished rebooting. From the command center, Misato’s voice reverberated in the plug’s LCL.
<<Follow the anti-Angel counterattack sequence. Ready the city’s defenses. The target is…Unit Quatre!>>
Everyone was focused on Quatre’s Eva.
But it was the other giant, the one with the familiar, shark-like face, that made Asuka start shouting.
“Shinji! A mass-production Eva is here! Behind you!”
Ice crystals flitted through the air as far as she could see, and for a moment, Asuka wondered if the sparkling light had tricked her into seeing a phantom. But no, the white giant really was there.
“Command center, this is an emergency! There’s a mass-production Eva directly between you and Unit One! Why haven’t you noticed?!”
“What did she say?!” Misato yelled.
On a normal day, the middle of Lake Ashi was easily visible from Tokyo-3, but Nerv’s line of sight, and its electronic sensors, were blocked by the still-collapsing mountains of ice and the rising white fog.
The cameras at Mount Komagatake had been destroyed, and the camera at Yamabushi Pass on the western shore was aimed at Eva-01 and the Series-0.0 Eva. But when this camera panned to the left, the image of the white giant sent a shock wave of its own through the command center.
A wiper arm passed across the camera lens, clearing away the condensation. For a moment, the rising clouds parted, and the creature could be seen lumbering toward the city. Its head rose above the fog, but the rest of its massive body remained shrouded.
Misato started barking orders. “As of this moment, our objective is to annihilate that mass-production Eva! Notify the UN and government officials! If Unit Quatre interferes, disable it by any means necessary!”
Throughout Tokyo-3, the alarm systems switched from disaster to combat.
It’s finally come, Misato thought, but…
The commander called Maya’s lab on the main screen. “What’s the status of the other two orbital Evas?”
“Their synchrographs are an absolute mess,” Maya said. “According to our simulations, if they activate now, there’s a ninety-six percent chance they’ll go berserk. Where’s Trois? She needs to control them…or else.”
Aoba answered. “The security team brought her to the public shelter in sector twelve. We haven’t heard from them since.”
My precious search-and-destroy system is unusable!
“We don’t have anything that can fight it,” Misato said. “We need to hurry and—”
Hyuga interrupted, his voice uncertain. “What’s happening? I’m not getting a color pattern!”
It took Misato a moment to absorb what he’d said. “—prepare the armament transport—Wait, what does that mean?”
“We stored the individual DNA patterns of all the mass-production Evangelions in our databanks, but I’m not getting a match with any of the patterns we encountered three years ago.”
Every member of Nerv Japan had been searching for Seele’s vanished Evas, but none of them had expected one to appear without warning…and so close to home.
The giant had come from nowhere, as if rising out of the frozen fog, a monster striding across the ice, indifferent to the events happening around it.
“That’s impossible!” Shinji shouted angrily back at Asuka.
But his restored data link gave him coordinates and an image, hazy through the showering ice crystals, of the white giant.
This can’t be happening.
If that’s the mass-production Eva’s current position, the thing must have walked right past me. I should have noticed!
Shinji looked back and forth between the mass-production Eva on his display and the Series-0.0 Eva in front of him.
He grunted as he blocked Eva-0.0’s punch with Eva-01’s arm, which recoiled upward, leaving his front undefended.
During their fight, Quatre’s Eva had only been attacking with its left arm, its right hand still clinging to the massive laser cannon. The entire right arm seemed to have been damaged from the shoulder down.
But now, seizing Shinji’s moment of weakness, the arm moved and—
—shattered like so much glass.
“Was it frozen?”
Eva-0.0 collapsed onto the ice, sheltering its shattered arm beneath its body. A plume of ice dust rose and scattered.
The pain from the feedback must have been intolerable. The fallen Eva writhed on the ground, its feet scraping nosily against the ice.
Rei Quatre’s anguished cry echoed through the Eva’s speakers.
“Ayanami—Quatre! Don’t move!”
Her wailing was more than he could bear. Shinji turned his attention to the mass-production Eva. Easier to deal with that monster than face a friend in pain.
Eva-01 turned and vanished into the thick, cold fog.
<<Command, this is Asuka. Send me a weapon! Everything at the sniping post has been melted!>>
Asuka’s voice sounded distant through the hydrospeaker in Shinji’s entry plug.
The response didn’t please her. <<We can’t do that. The underground rail system is damaged south of Togendai.>>
<<Damn it! Well, as long as the tunnel hasn’t collapsed, I can run through it on my own. There’s an exit in Togendai. I can arm myself and get back outside. I want a positron rifle! I don’t have much power left. Shinji, say something!>>
Shinji winced. When he replied, his words tumbled out reluctantly, as if he were making an excuse.
“Eva-0.0 is disabled on the ice…I think. I’m running across the lake to get in front of the mass-production Eva. My Type-F has internal weapons—I’ll try to stop it.”
Eva-02 dove into the shaft of the broken elevator.
Meanwhile, at an anti-air station not far from the sniping post, every automated artillery cannon that could aim below the horizon swiveled in unison and engaged the mass-production Eva. But the extremely low temperature robbed the barrels’ special steel of its strength. The motors lost conductivity and couldn’t operate smoothly. Several cannons exploded.
<<Shinji-kun?>> Misato’s voice. <<We’re sending up additional armaments with Asuka at Togendai. Regroup with her there. I know we’ve been trying to find one of these white giant bastards, but if we don’t do this properly, the result could be catastrophic!>>
Eva-01 ran through the crystalline mists of Lake Ashi as if fleeing from Rei Quatre. Soon, his Eva overtook the white giant in the haze. After three years, he’d finally found the enemy.
Where did its wings go? And why are its bones sticking out?
“Confirming visual on the mass-production Eva. It’s holding a staff-like weapon.”
The enemy kept on walking, as if it had a purpose.
Guided munitions from the city’s defense sectors soared over the mountains of ice to join the direct attacks from the anti-air station. But their ordnance didn’t pack enough punch to slow the mass-production Eva’s silent strides.
“Its A.T. Field is blocking the attacks!” Shinji said.
He opened the front-facing armor plates on his Eva’s shoulder pylons. Using the icy mist as cover, he closed in on the mass-production Eva and fired two impact bolts.
The command center was a flurry of activity.
“Defense systems, cease fire!”
“Shinji-kun, what the hell are you doing?” Misato shouted. “Don’t rush into the targeting area!”
<<I need to buy you some time. It’s approaching the city!>>
“Get a hold of yourself!” Misato examined Eva-01’s images of the mass-production Eva.
Something about this monster looks different from before. She called Maya in the laboratory.
“Are you seeing this? Tell me what you think.”
<<If its form has changed, then we should assume that its tactics and fighting abilities have also changed in the last three years.>>
A blindingly bright flash filled the command center’s main screen.
Eva-01 had fired its impact bolts, which were close-range projectile weapons unique, for now, to the Type-F Evas. In front of each shoulder pylon floated a small black orb, a virtual image created by the phase interaction of the A.T. Field and normal space. But the surge of electricity—a product of the difference in potential—was real, and several whip-like bolts of lightning slammed into the target. Still—
“No effect,” Misato said. “Is it because of the enemy’s A.T. Field? Run the pattern analysis again!”
“Still no match!” Hyuga said. “No color pattern.”
“Could its shield be something other than an A.T. Field?”
From the laboratory, Maya offered, “If there’s no pattern, maybe that means the mass-production Eva isn’t alive. It’s an animated corpse.”
The mass-production Evas had been killed by Eva-01 in the Battle at Nerv HQ three years prior. Most of their corpses had disappeared before they could be recovered.
“If that thing is dead,” Misato said, “then how is it getting power? How is it manifesting a shield? Maybe that cocoon inside its ribcage is its core.”
<<Maybe.>> Maya paused. <<We don’t know a single thing about the cocoon. It could be anything.>>
“Pattern detected! It’s blue!” Hyuga shouted, and Shinji yelped.
“What?!” Misato looked up from her terminal.
On the main screen, the mass-production Eva’s cocoon cracked open. An arm emerged and threw a javelin made of light. Eva-01 raised its left arm to protect its face, and the spear pierced its metal plating.
I know that arm!
Eva-01’s restraint armor shattered where it had been struck, and sharp, agonizing feedback flooded Shinji. But despite the pain, his mind made the connection.
“That’s the arm of the Angel Sachiel!”
He would have recognized it anywhere. After all, it was the first Angel he’d faced.
“How and why is an Angel coming out of that cocoon?!”
Eva-01 hopped backward and retrieved a progressive knife from its shoulder pylon. The knife was larger, its blade thicker, than the one it had replaced. It was shaped something like a mountaineer’s machete. The high-frequency vibrations of its blade turned the ice crystals that landed on it into wisps of steam.
Shinji swung his prog knife. The blade’s tip struck the mass-production Eva’s power shield and went no further.
The mass-production Eva, carrying its cocoon and the Angel within, continued walking in silence. Its one strike had come from Sachiel’s arm. No attack came from the giant itself.
<<Shinji-kun,>> Hyuga said, <<don’t provoke it needlessly.>>
“Keep collecting data,” Shinji said. “We need to find a weakness!”
Is there nothing else I can try?
The monster’s shield had stopped both the impact bolts and the prog knife.
But wait—
Eva-01 opened the front panel of its shoulder pylons and prepared to fire another round of impact bolts. The two black spheres materialized again, but this time, they didn’t generate lightning. Instead, they remained in place while Shinji rushed forward and crashed them through the mass-production Eva’s shield.
The floating spheres had been designed to create an intensely powerful difference in electrical potential. They worked by focusing an A.T. Field large enough to shield the Eva’s entire body into two single points. Each had a heightened phase differential with the space around it.
And now Shinji was smashing them directly into his enemy.
“I’ll tear through you!” he shouted.
And he did. The black spheres tore through the enemy’s shield, and Eva-01 pushed its shoulder through the hole. The next instant, Sachiel’s arm came flying out to counterattack—but Shinji was expecting it.
Come on, that arm is longer than the cocoon is wide. How the hell does it fit inside there?
Sachiel’s hand flicked open, and a javelin extended out, piercing Eva-01’s arm. Shinji gritted his teeth against the pain, grabbed the Angel’s arm, and growled, “Come on out!”
Shinji yanked the Angel from its cocoon with all his strength. He could feel something tearing on the other side. When the arm emerged, Shinji could see that its other end was attached to a small, soft, larva-like body, which still clung to the cocoon.
“It’s not fully formed yet…”
Shinji felt eyes upon him. The mass-production Eva turned its head and looked at him for the first time.
The cocoon’s carrier—Mother? Shinji wondered—swung its arm and struck Eva-01 with its staff. Shinji and his Eva went flying.
He screamed in pain.
The single strike had broken Eva-01’s arm, and the giant crashed into the ice, bouncing to a stop.
But the hand that had been holding the prog knife was empty.
The blade stuck from the cocoon where Shinji believed Sachiel’s core to be. He’d sunk it deep.
“How’s that?” Shinji shouted.
The knife had struck true. The Angel’s body began to disintegrate from the edges in.
“I did it!”
Cheers filled the command center, but the mass-production Eva didn’t falter in its approach.
Scattering tiny fragments of the disintegrating Sachiel through the cleft in its cocoon, the giant changed course, proceeding toward a new goal.
“Or did I?”
Shinji had guessed—wrongly, it appeared—that the stillborn Angel in that cocoon had been providing power to, and maintaining control over, the animated corpse of the mass-production Eva.
A wall of ice blocked the mass-production Eva’s path ahead. The shock wave from the heavens had shattered more than half of the ice bowl Eva-01 had created in its temporary berserk state, but the remaining ice formed a thick-walled dam across the valley, with Tokyo-3 sheltered on the far side.
I’ll attack again when the mass-production Eva stops at the wall!
But Shinji never got the chance. The Eva didn’t stop. It passed straight into the ice.
“What?”
The monster didn’t break or melt the ice. Nothing shattered. The giant simply…disappeared into the wall, as if becoming one with it.
Shinji was stunned.
“I can’t let it escape!”
He brought his Eva to its feet. As he did, the restraint armor split open and fell off its shoulder, perhaps due to the impact that had broken its arm.
Unconcerned, Shinji pursued the white giant with his damaged Eva.
He opened the remaining shoulder pylon and fired a volley of impact bolts, but the severely low temperature impeded the air’s conductivity, and the bolts went wild, striking the ice wall instead. The mass-production Eva finished submerging into the ice and vanished.
A moment too late, Eva-01 collided with the ice wall in an explosion far larger than the giant itself. But it didn’t reach the enemy.
Shinji drew his other progressive knife and thrust it into the ice. Each time he struck, the vibrations created a wide burst of shards, but Shinji never felt the blade strike the flesh he sought.
“Command! I’ve lost the mass-production Eva. I don’t know what happened.”
<<Shinji, find a way to cross that ice wall. The longer you delay, the later you’ll join Asuka. How’s your right arm?>>
“Broken, but we can still fight.”
Damn it!
Eva-01 pounded the ice with its good arm. Nothing unusual was supposed to happen today. He should be having dinner with Asuka and Misato-san right now.
“Damn it! What the hell is going on?!”
<<This is the world you chose, Ikari-kun.>>
The ice clouds parted behind Eva-01, revealing the Series-0.0 Eva standing there like a ghost.
“Quatre?!”
Her Eva was changing shape; its metal shrieked and groaned.
Its body was stiffening. Has it gone berserk?
And there was the gamma-ray laser cannon—fused directly to its upper arm.
The launch rail had twisted unnaturally to point directly at Shinji.
Nothing unusual was supposed to happen today.
I was going to check my e-mail, watch a movie, and go to bed. That was supposed to be it.
Eva-01 dodged backward.
But the cannon’s tip followed and pressed against his outer armor with a distant thud.
<<Save me. Take me back to that time.>>
The nuclear excitement unit is damaged, so there’s no way it can fire—
This was the last thought of Ikari Shinji in his final moments as a living human being.
With a six-inch diameter and four hundred megaelectronvolts of energy, the gamma-ray laser was a dazzling golden light capable of piercing through anything.
The fierce beam punched through Eva-01’s armor like paper, entered the giant through its side, sliced a notch out of its core and S² Engine, evaporated the entry plug whole, and exited through the back of the neck, hurtling into the heavens.