Chapter 57: The Lance of Longinus
Chapter 57:
The Lance of Longinus
The Lance of Longinus
B
UT THE MORE IMMEDIATE CONCERN
wasn’t the Curtain’s vanishing but rather the stilled lance.
The Curtain lifted because Armaros had assigned the lance a different task.
From the ground, the Lance of Longinus appeared to have frozen in orbit 20,000 kilometers above northern Africa, but appearances were deceiving. Without altering its speed at all, the lance’s tip had changed direction and was now traveling straight down toward the Earth. Had the long-range communications or the backup relays still been operational, the group on the ground might have noticed earlier. As it was, they only realized what had happened after the fact.
The lance dove toward Africa at ninety kilometers per second. From far below, the relic appeared still, and by the time it was close enough for its descent to be noticed, it was too late to do anything about it. Shinji alone had time to react. In a flash, he raised his SRL Bizen, but it didn’t matter.
The Bizen’s blade shattered, and the vertical thread of light skewered Super Eva, passing through the chest and out the back.
Shinji saw it all happen within time compressed to less than an instant.
The twin tines of the lance scooped the Center Trigonus—Super Eva’s heart—from its chest.
The pain, the indescribably excruciating pain, came a moment later.
“Aaaahhhh! Aaaahh! Aaahh! AAAAaaahhh!”
Shinji’s screams wouldn’t stop.
“Aaaah! Aah! Aaaahhh! AAAhhhhh! Ahh!”
And the lance was absurdly long. 28,000 kilometers long. Even at 90 kilometers per second, its entirety would take more than fifteen whole minutes to pass through.
Super Eva tried to grasp the lance with both hands and stop it. But the lance’s energy reacted to the A.T. Field on Super Eva’s hands, sparks cascading violently. The weapon’s momentum was too staggeringly great to be halted. Under the Eva’s feet, the ground swelled from the force of the passing lance and then burst all at once. But Super Eva, still impaled, was helpless against it. The lance pressed the Eva into the bottom of a deep crater, and Shinji’s screams continued without end.
About that time, the Lance of Longinus’s tip pierced through the opposite side of the Earth. It was night on the western Pacific when the lance vaporized New Zealand’s North Island. The band of light continued moving directly upward into space, and when it reached its previous altitude of 20,000 kilometers, the weapon turned sharply again and resumed its orbit, this time without hiding the moon behind a false image.
Shinji’s heart had been taken from him.
With the breaking of the Longinus Curtain, the people of Earth saw for the first time what had become of the real moon.
On Earth’s night side—in and around Russia, Asia, and Australia—the situation seemed the most dire. The light of the shattering sky appeared far more intense, and the moon suddenly loomed gigantic and ferocious, with countless glowing red cracks spiderwebbing its shaded side. Panic broke out simultaneously in every region.
The moon is falling!
Or so it seemed to everyone who saw, and they weren’t entirely wrong. The moon’s orbit was now 290,000 kilometers from the Earth and closing. Not only that, the moon had expanded with the material the Lance of Longinus was stealing from the Earth’s crust. The result was a sight dreadful enough to strike terror into the heart of any observer.
The idea that a person could look at the moon and be driven mad was a commonly held folk belief shared across many cultures throughout history. Tonight, the legend became real, and cities erupted into riots with damage rivaling that of war.
The people near the equator didn’t notice the more direct physical threat that was coming toward them. All eyes were on the moon instead of the sea rising as tall as a mountain.
A high tide was coming, the likes of which had never been seen.