Chapter 10: The Illusory Passage, Part Two
Chapter 10:
The Illusory Passage,
Part Two
EVERYTHING WAS RECEDING into the distance.
This displacement jump was longer than the others—long enough for Shinji’s impatience and rage to drain away, leaving him empty.
When he came back to his senses, he noticed that Quatre’s upper body was exposed, having spilled out from her torn uniform. Her right cheek was red and swollen in the flow of the LCL.
Shinji looked down in horror at the hand he’d used to toss her aside.
Hastily, he guided her back to him, then got out of the pilot’s seat and sat her down in his place.
“Ayanami,” Shinji said. “Quatre…”
She stared forward in silence.
Guilt weighing heavily upon him, Shinji arranged Quatre’s clothes back into place, but no matter how many times he tried, he couldn’t get the broken zipper to close back up. From the display screen, flashes of light silhouetted the graceful curves of Ayanami Quatre’s chest. But the sight of her only sharpened his remorse.
“Damn it,” he muttered. His face burned with embarrassment. “If…if you hadn’t done that, none of this would have happened.”
Shinji regretted what he’d done, but he couldn’t bring himself to apologize. He gave up on the zipper and crudely closed her collar with an attached fastener.
Her red cheeks moved pitifully as she faintly said, “This…is the future you chose.”
“Could you please not make everything my fault?”
Just then, Shinji realized they weren’t alone in the passage.
Ahead of Super Eva, a two-hundred-kilometer-wide molten ball of rock was flying through the tunnel at the same rapid speed.
The large, dark-red mass followed the path through the low-gravity, near-vacuum subspace.
The sky, if it could be called sky, was an empty darkness. But everything in the passage was brightly lit—washed out, even—as if under intense sunlight. In the next moment, Shinji lost sight of the rock.
Did we pass an exit? Where did it lead?
The tunnel continued. Apparently, their exit was still ahead.
For a moment, Shinji wondered if the space inside the tunnel was expanding, like when he’d fought Victors Two and Three, and that maybe he wasn’t moving at all. But the increasingly sparse background was still passing at great speed. It seemed like their destination truly was that far away.
The next thing Shinji knew, the overbearing, tangled arterial network of root-like tunnels was behind them. He sensed that they were now in a single, one-way tunnel.
And that tunnel was narrowing.