Chapter 5: Into Hell
Chapter 5:
Into Hell
ASUKA, IN EVA-02, ran through the underground tunnels, unaware that Shinji and Eva-01 had been destroyed.
The weapons had been waiting for her at the end of the broken rail line. Because her Eva’s IFF system had been taken offline by the electromagnetic interference, syncing the positron rifle’s FCS had cost her a little extra time, but she’d also equipped herself with a Powered 8—a next-gen revision of the pallet gun—and two curved swords.
Mere paces from the exit to Togendai, Asuka froze. Eva-02 was towing a mobile power terminal on a linear transport rail. The rail cart sensed that the Eva had stopped but wasn’t capable of halting its momentum nearly as quickly. Sparks sprayed from the cart’s wheels as it struggled to brake. Asuka planted a foot in front of the vehicle to stop it.
“Misato,” Asuka said. “Misato! Can you tell me what’s going on? I’ve got a mass-production Eva down here!”
Like Nerv’s previous HQ, the new headquarters had been built atop several dozen layers of thick armor. Unlike the old construction, the new foundation contained small gaps between each of the layers, spaced wider apart the deeper they went. The concept was the same as spaced armor on a tank; the plating absorbed and dispersed the force of incoming attacks, the gaps leaving room for any residual force to dissipate before reaching the next layer.
Through one such gap walked a white giant, its head narrowly avoiding wedging itself in the various divots formed by the angular ceiling.
Asuka transmitted the mass-production Eva’s coordinates along with a video feed to the command center. The other end of the line erupted in a flurry of crosstalk. Misato sounded surprised as she said, <<Wait… Asuka? Is this real? How could it have gotten inside?>>
It was the same mutated mass-production Eva that Shinji had failed to finish off. The larval Angel Sachiel, still mid-disintegration, dangled from its broken cocoon as the giant walked. Walking toward—
“The old HQ!” Asuka said.
Why, though? What is its goal?
<<Asuka, listen to me. I’m going to unseal the Lance of Longinus. Come retrieve it.>>
Misato must have a bad feeling about this… She doesn’t want me fighting that thing—she wants me to finish it off in a single strike. In an earlier time, she’d said, All we need are me and Unit-02. The memory made her chuckle.
<<What’s funny?>>
“Nothing. Unit Two, acknowledged. Misato, where’s Shinji?”
<<We don’t know the situation on the lake. There’s been another burst of electromagnetic interference. I suspect Quatre is still operational and has fired her laser again, but we’ve lost contact with Unit One. I’ve just launched a drone, so I’ll have a better idea soon.>>
What the heck are you doing, Super Shinji?
Misato put her hands on her hips, surveying the command center.
“You were after the inner citadel the whole time,” she muttered.
Reports from every emergency shelter converged; the extremely low temperatures had caused superconductive interference that halted power transmission in affected areas, water pipes were freezing and bursting—in some places causing floods—and the water was entering other cracks, freezing, and causing a chain reaction of damage.
But it was even colder outdoors. Merely breathing the air was potentially fatal. If a catastrophe occurred beneath the surface, how could the residents possibly be evacuated from the caldera?
“Forget about fielding complaints for the moment. Asuka and Unit Two need our full support. Understood?”
The command room responded in agreement.
Asuka stood at the door to Underground Armory Six, or as Misato had named it, Pandora’s Box. At the time, the Eva pilots hadn’t been amused, but Kaji had said, “We can’t go around saying this is where we’re storing the Lance of Longinus, can we?” So, the name had stuck.
The armory had been sealed behind a series of blast doors, which had all been remotely unlocked from the command center except for the last one.
Asuka grumbled. “I told you my IFF system wasn’t working.”
She manually entered her backup identification code, and the lock disengaged. The sound of a vacuum pump stopped.
The Lance of Longinus slowly rose from the vessel of liquid nitrogen in which it had been stored. Eva-02’s right hand grasped the weapon.
Ugh…
“How disgusting.”
Even near absolute zero, it’s still humming.
The lance vibrated just at the edge of perceptibility.
Apparently, the original one had, too. Three years ago, Eva-00 had thrown the lance at Arael, and the weapon had landed on the moon, where it remained to this day.
And this is a copy.
This particular weapon held a deeper significance for Asuka. In the final stage of the Human Instrumentality Project, this lance had pierced through her and Eva-02.
“This must be fate,” she said under her breath. She furrowed her brow.
But what the hell is fate?
A mass-production Eva had carried the lance into the Battle at Nerv HQ. Supposedly, the weapon was a copy of the original, but Asuka had trouble conceiving how Seele could possibly have managed to replicate the weapon.
Evangelions themselves relied on a framework of extraordinary technology, but they could still be understood as the product of advancements in science made by the minds and efforts of humankind. Replicating the lance, on the other hand, should have been far too great a leap.
As the mass-production Eva continued its march, the path ahead opened up. The low ceiling—low to a giant, anyway—gradually raised, and the space between the rows of support pillars widened. The stark cleanliness of bare concrete transitioned into the decay of an abandoned ruin. Each step the white giant took stirred up fresh clouds of ash-colored dust.
The Eva had reached the outer edge of the old Geofront.
The destruction was left over from the Battle at Nerv HQ, when the swarm of mass-production Evas had descended upon the Geofront and dropped the ceiling and its city into the underground, where the wreckage remained untouched for three years. The Geofront had been abandoned in favor of sealing away the former HQ at its center.
An unadorned wall of Hard Tektite Concrete interrupted the scene of devastation. When viewed from below, the rubble obscured the structure’s full scope, but the barrier surrounding the former HQ formed a giant dome—or, as most people called it, a sarcophagus—over the top of it. An opening in the Geofront’s ceiling provided a partial view from above ground, though the sarcophagus was too large to be seen all at once.
And on the inside…
The ground exploded beneath the mass-production Eva, the floor giving way and sucking the giant under.
The Eva remained perfectly upright as it landed on the level below.
The very next moment, even as dust was still thick in the air, the Lance of Longinus impaled the giant through its chin, sticking out the back of its head.
Standing before the white monster, Eva-02’s eyes glimmered through the smoke of the explosion.
“I know it’s been a while since we last met,” Asuka said as calmly as she could manage. “I’m sorry to ambush you like this.”
Eva-02’s red-armored arm wrenched the lance upward.
The lance’s twin tines were twisted into a double helix that became a single shaft. The small, open space in the middle of the helix began radiating light, and the mass-production Eva’s chin disintegrated to dust.
A hole opened up all the way through the back of the Eva’s skull, exposing the giant’s neckbones to the air. The top of the monster’s jaw remained, with its ghoulish row of white teeth. The mass-production Eva staggered, raising its staff aloft, and—
Wham!
The mass-production Eva’s power shield materialized, knocking Eva-02 back, but Asuka managed to keep her hold on the lance.
“How are you still moving?! With that cocoon in your chest, I was sure your core would be in your head.”
Assuming this monster even has a core.
Eva-02 gripped the lance tighter.
“Come on! In a zombie movie, you always have to go for the head.”
The mass-production Eva took one step to regain its balance and then drew its arm back, holding the staff above its shoulder.
What, are you going to throw that at me? You’ll never hit me!
But the white giant’s target wasn’t Eva-02. Even on this lower level, the wall of the sarcophagus remained in sight.
A whoosh of air brushed past Asuka.
The mass-production Eva had thrown its staff like a javelin at the sarcophagus’s armored wall.
Watching through their monitors, the command center technicians didn’t expect the staff would do more than maybe scratch the shell. But the giant had placed a power shield on the staff’s tip, and the weapon struck the sarcophagus with terrible force, piercing the outermost layer of Hard Tektite Concrete and sending a sunburst of cracks down into the next layer.
But the sarcophagus held. Or at least, that’s what Asuka was thinking when the mass-production Eva charged past Eva-02 toward the wall.
There was a bright light followed by a terrific impact.
“Asuka!” Misato shouted. “Sachiel is still inside the cocoon!”
The light had come from Sachiel’s face, which turned to dust as the last of the Angel’s power was spent. The cocoon was now empty.
The energy beam stripped away several more layers of HTC, allowing the mass-production Eva to smash through. The wall of the sarcophagus crumbled, and the white giant, now streaked with blood, tumbled inside.
Misato pounded her fist on the commander’s console. “Damn it!”
On the main screen, the Magi AI system presented the option of initiating the base’s self-destruct sequence and announced that it was considering the merits.
Alarms blared, and red siren lights, located every one hundred meters along the sarcophagus’s wall, began to spin. Industrial lights inside the casket switched on, illuminating the ruins of the attack from three years ago. At the center of those ruins was—
A black sphere—like a hole torn from the world.
An eerie, black dome filled the space the former Nerv HQ building had once occupied. It didn’t reflect even the slightest light, appearing like a hole neatly ripped in the structure. The dome was merely the top of a sphere, extending below the Geofront’s surface, with Lilith—the second Angel and progenitor of humanity—at its center.
Toward the end of the Battle at Nerv HQ, just after Shinji and Eva-01 destroyed the altar of light in the sky and put an end to the Human Instrumentality Project, Lilith had created a pocket of space where time was frozen—this sphere of perfect darkness.
Supposedly, the space contained everyone who had been in or beneath the HQ at the time, including Ikari Gendo, Akagi Ritsuko, 150-odd workers, and a dozen or more soldiers from the SSDF—all of whom had been frozen instantaneously.
No device, exploratory beam, or sound wave had been able to penetrate the sphere. Even its temperature was unmeasurable.
The object had been named the Chronostatic Sphere, though later examination had shown that it was more egg-shaped than spherical. But that was the extent of what anyone had learned about it. The speculation about time being frozen within hadn’t come from any direct measurements, as no physical object, electromagnetic wave, or anything—down to and including neutrinos—had been able to penetrate it.
But the complete lack of data was, in itself, informative. A conjecture arose—nothing propagates though the field because there’s no time for anything to propagate. A counterargument followed, perhaps obvious: Time can bend, but it can’t stop altogether without violating the laws of physics. The conclusion: Time is, in effect, frozen—as close to true stasis as temporally possible.
Those who knew of the sphere held many theories about its nature, and vigorously debated them, but they all agreed on the theory about why it had come to be.
When the Human Instrumentality Project was terminated, Lilith went to sleep—an absolute sleep, impossible to disturb.
No one knew the purpose of this slumber or when the second Angel might awaken. Nor did they know what would—or wouldn’t—happen when it did. And so a decision was made to seal away the entire Geofront. A few passive sensors had been left behind, but all active investigations into the sphere had been halted.
The victims swallowed by the Chronostatic Sphere were to be treated as if they’d died in the battle. Everyone involved agreed to go along with this story, even if they didn’t accept it in their hearts. Three years later, the black sphere remained, swallowing up their thoughts and prayers for the people trapped within.
<<Asuka! Stop that Eva!>>
And now, a visitor had come.
“Yeah, you don’t have to tell me!”
Eva-02 decoupled its umbilical cable with a spray of sparks. Asuka dashed forward as the internal battery timer began racing toward zero.
Asuka didn’t know why the mass-production Eva had come here, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was about to happen.
Where is its weak point? Misato thought impatiently. What’s powering it? She noticed something on the video feed and brought it to Asuka’s attention.
<<Sachiel may be gone, but there’s a red light coming from the rear of the cocoon. Stab it!>>
Asuka didn’t think that sounded like much of a strategy, but she needed to do something.
“On it!”
Asuka swept the mass-production Eva’s legs with the lance’s shaft. When the giant toppled, she ran ahead of it, positioning herself directly in its field of view. She didn’t know what effect the lance would have on the giant. And if the mass-production Eva exploded, she didn’t know what effect that would have on the Chronostatic Sphere. But whatever might come, she’d hold it back with her Eva’s A.T. Field.
As the mass-production Eva rose to its feet, Eva-02 spun to face it, dust thick in the air. Asuka put the momentum of her turn into a fierce thrust with the lance.
The white giant activated its power shield, but the Lance of Longinus pierced through it, sparks flying, toward the glowing spot within the cocoon.
“There!”
The lance met resistance, its twin prongs catching something and coming out the enemy’s back.
In that moment, Asuka knew, as if the lance had spoken to her, This is what gave life to this corpse.
The white giant tried to push Eva-02 away, but Asuka smoothly ducked the attack. Keeping her hands on the lance, she came up on the other side of the shaft, like a gymnast switching sides under a horizontal bar. She threw her Eva’s full weight against her enemy and drove the lance deeper.
The mass-production Eva grabbed Eva-02’s mask from behind, but it was too late.
“Go back to being dead,” she said.
The lance trembled, and the helix at the base of its prongs expanded and glowed.
The thing at the back of the cocoon shattered, and the five white fingers obstructing the view through her holographic display began to disintegrate as if the tissue were unraveling.
Then the rest of the mass-production Eva’s body followed.
It’s over.
But when Asuka glanced over her shoulder, the decaying giant wasn’t looking at her. Its eyes were fixed on the blackness of the Chronostatic Sphere.
And in its face, Asuka saw satisfaction.
The towering monster fell to the ground with a thunderous crash, and the shrine of the giant black egg returned to silence.
<<Good work, Asuka. Leave the cleanup to us.>> Misato’s voice was unexpectedly dispirited. <<I hate to ask anything more of you, but as quickly as you can, take the nearest elevator back to the surface. Unit One was disabled in combat, and I need you to assist with the emergency recovery.>>
“Shinji? What did that idiot do?”
By the time anyone at Nerv learned that Eva-01 had been damaged beyond the point of return, Ayanami Quatre and her Series-0.0 Eva had disappeared from the battlefield.
Misato convened a search, but no trace of Quatre could be found. It was as if she’d been erased.