Chapter 13: The Dormant Land

Chapter 13:
The Dormant Land

 

ONCE SHINJI BEGAN to suspect something was wrong with this place, the two-tone world of desert hills and empty sky began to resemble a surrealist painting created by an unbalanced mind.

Nothing moved. That, in and of itself, felt wrong. At the very least, the sun should have been shifting overhead.

Shinji didn’t know what kind of danger to expect, and Super Eva proceeded with caution.

 

After some time, Super Eva’s survey module broke the silence with an alarm—a series of short beeps that Shinji hadn’t heard before.

Or maybe he had.

“Wait…I think I heard this alarm during the connection tests for the swords I got in North Africa.”

The two blades were a new design, with experimental sensors dangling from each end—one on the pommel and another at the end of the sheath, making four in total. He’d only received a brief overview of the devices, but each sensor contained an array of quantum wave mirrors repurposed for detection.

When the alarm sounded, Super Eva’s automap opened to show a twenty-kilometer range around his current location. Because he didn’t have any matching topographical data, the map had only been filled with his direct visual observations. Everything beyond the range of sight remained blank, and it was in that blank space that an icon blinked.

“Predicted arrival?” Shinji wondered aloud. “What’s that?”

Who had heard Super Eva’s distress signal, and how were they arriving?

Apprehensive, Shinji switched off the signal. At first, the arrival icon bounced around within a three-kilometer-wide area, but it soon began to focus on a single point.

The alarm gave one last, long tone, and the icon stopped flashing. It turned solid red, indicating an enemy.

Beside the marker, a label appeared: MUTANT EVA-0.0 (CONFIDENCE 62%).

“What?!” Shinji sputtered, speaking to the display. “H-how do you know?”

Until now, the enemy had always been able to get the drop on him. Shinji wanted to know what had changed, but—

I can think about that later!

Shinji readied himself. The designation referred to Quatre’s Eva-0.0, which had been corrupted by Armaros’ Q.R. Signum. Shinji had been told that Kaji—now a vessel for Seele—had hijacked Unit Quatre.

He looked over at the Eva’s former pilot, but she remained silent and expressionless. He realized he knew nothing of what she’d been through.

Strangely, Shinji felt a sort of relief upon seeing a familiar enemy marked on the display. He’d begun to feel stir-crazy, trapped in this place where time itself was caged, where the terrain never varied and the sun never moved.

Armaros’ attendants—the Angel Carriers, the mutant Eva-0.0, and the Victors—had always arrived without warning. For the first time, Shinji knew one was coming and could choose his response. He elected to advance toward the enemy’s entry point in hopes that he might find some answers about the place where he found himself.

 

Without hesitating, Shinji refilled the plug with LCL, and then, on the map display, he overlaid the shortest route to his target that still provided cover and started walking.

I wonder if I can—he focused his thoughts on the Vertex wings—jump!

He tried to fly low along the ground.

“Whoa,” he said. as Super Eva listed forward. The giant’s toes scraped along the ground and kicked up puffs of sand. It could hardly be called flying, but he was moving much faster than he could have by running.

His chest tingled with heat. The closer the unstable Q.R. Signum was to the ground, the more stable it was—relatively speaking, at least.

“I must have had a good teacher,” he said, thinking of Asuka-Eva pulling him along.

The red giant had flown freely, innocently.

At first, Shinji had assumed she’d regressed into some kind of early childhood mental state. But as he’d watched her, he’d realized that wasn’t the case. She was simply free to be who she was on the inside.

Asuka was easily fascinated and easily surprised, but she hated showing it. And so she kept her true self hidden, feigning disinterest and reacting instead with weariness and derision.

“Of course, I’d never say that to her face,” Shinji said, “or she’d be pissed.”

He wondered if Misato and Toji had been able to convince her to keep flying to Japan.