Chapter 56: The Observers

Neon Genesis Evangelion ANIMA — LNCrawler · All chapters

Chapter 56:
The Observers

“W HAT’S HE DOING?” Kensuke asked.

Misato, who was dragging Kensuke through the canyon, saw it, too.

On the far side of the gorge, where Shinji was throwing himself recklessly into battle with Armaros, the black colossus raised his hand to the sky and pointed.

Misato looked in the direction Armaros was pointing. Far above, a thread of light raced through the sky.

“Where’s he pointing?” she asked. “At the lance?”

Most people had taken to calling the lance’s current manifestation the Longinus Ring. The lance had stretched into a thin band of light, visible even in the daytime, that traveled at ninety kilometers per second. When the lance’s tip was overhead, the band of light extended beyond the horizon, and the tail wasn’t visible; it was somewhere on the opposite side of the globe.

The lance was growing longer as it circled the Earth. Presently, the band had reached 28,000 kilometers, well over half the Earth’s circumference. Though no one knew for sure, most planetary

physicists, geologists, and the scientific community at large agreed—once the lance formed an uninterrupted ring, the world would end. The lance’s length had come to represent a final countdown.

And there, directly above the Valley of Human Bodies, the lance’s tip stopped.

The entire sky seemed to split open.

“The sky is splitting,” Misato said with a gasp. “Or…melting?”

Far above, the barrier appeared like a thin layer of clear ice silently shattering, its pieces sinking and vanishing into deeper waters.

“Could it be?” Misato said. “The Longinus Curtain is disappearing?”

What’s happening? she wondered.

The shattering was oddly beautiful. The break spread like a chain reaction from west to east. On the eastern side, the pale moon hung low between the clouds, and when the sky shattered there, all of humanity felt a small but noticeable tug in that direction. A new and very large force had begun acting on the Earth.

“What’s that?” Kensuke asked.

Behind the crumbling image of the moon loomed something bright and large.

It was daytime on Cyprus, but the object was so bright and so large that it might have cast shadows on the land.

Dominating an entire corner of the sky was a moon— the moon, but swollen to twice the size of the moon they’d always known.