Chapter 55: At the End of the Road
Chapter 55:
At the End of the Road
At the End of the Road
A
TOP THE FLYING EVA,
Quatre began to laugh.
She’d been Seele’s obedient pilot for Eva-0.0, and the role had freed her from the terror that was her one and only emotion. But now she laughed as if she’d reclaimed herself, and each time Shinji wailed, the sound grew louder.
“Heh heh heh, ha ha ha, HA HA HA!”
As if freed from its shackles, Quatre’s Eva-0.0 began making rapid, reckless maneuvers.
“What’s wrong?” the Kaji-vessel asked. His arms were still around her.
But everything she’d been keeping buried was now bursting forth; the dam had broken.
“Ha ha ha!” Quatre laughed. “
You
were the one who chose this world!” Her eyes opened wide. “And this is how it ends!”
She looked up and raised her hands aloft.
The black-winged Eva-0.0 flew toward Super Eva and Armaros’ battle. When the mutant Eva arrived, it began to circle the fighting pair, passing just overhead, as if mocking them.
“It’s been three years since the Instrumentality Project failed!” Quatre said. “You decided, Ikari-kun, that we should all be separate individuals instead of understanding each other. Heh heh!”
Seele was taken by surprise. He shouted into her ear, “Get away from them! We’ll get sucked into their fight!”
But with a tight grin and arms spread, Rei Quatre said, “Your ego has sucked everyone into the world you made, Ikari-kun! And what do you have left now? I’ll tell you what—despair, just like me!”
Her voice began to crack; she wasn’t used to speaking so loud.
And still, she laughed.
Eva-0.0 snagged its wing on a rock ledge and lost balance.
“Control your Eva, puppet!” the Kaji-vessel ordered.
But she wasn’t going to stop now. She laughed and laughed, until her lungs couldn’t take it anymore.
“I—I didn’t want to be the only one in despair! I know what you’re feeling right now. You weep for this absurd reality. So do I. Now we understand each other!”
Unit Quatre crumpled and began to fall. The giant’s wings kept flapping, and their gravity field was still in place, but Quatre had suddenly forgotten how to fly—as if she’d only been dreaming she could and was now waking up.
The Eva’s wings flapped uselessly as the giant began to plummet.
“Enough!” the Kaji-vessel snapped.
Up to this point, Seele had been delivering detached, logical statements through Kaji’s casual speaking manner, but now, he’d finally lost his temper. He grabbed Quatre’s chin and roughly turned her head sideways to look her in the eye. She kept her grin. Her eyes were unfocused. She was like a puppet whose strings had been snapped.
Seele clicked his tongue. “There’s no reasoning with a thing that won’t listen. Useless toy.”
“We…understand each other…”
Having said all she wanted to say, having seen all she wanted to see, she broke completely.
As her scarlet eyes stared off into the distance, tears began to fall.
Clinging to the shoulder of the plummeting Eva, the Kaji-vessel shouted to Armaros.
“Black colossus! Surrogate! Don’t you understand? Stop that heartbeat! That pulse is rattling the consciousnesses inside the Ark. They’re resonating with it! They’re going to lose their form!”
The origins of this calamity had begun three years after the Battle at Nerv HQ, starting with Quatre’s Eva-0.0, and then Ayanami Rei Quatre herself. After being implanted with Armaros’ Q.R. Signum, Quatre was emotionally shattered by terror—the terror of being corrupted by an unknown entity while in the solitude of orbit and the terror of losing her link with the other Ayanamis, who together shared a single soul. Her brokenness led to despair, which continued to this day.
Her Eva plummeted at an angle toward the base of the deep canyon. By the time the ground came near, the giant had stopped even attempting to right itself.
The Eva’s knees scraped the ground, and then the giant was barreling through the human-shaped rocks—the Evas of the past world—shattering them, until it finally slowed to a stop and planted its shoulder on the ground.