Chapter 22: Shinji’s World

Chapter 22:
Shinji’s World

 

“I FOUND YOU,” the Kaji-vessel said.

Using Ayanami Trois to pilot the mutant Eva-0.0, Seele had searched the nightside continent for over half a month before finally finding Leliel’s Angel Carrier. Perched atop the Eva’s shoulder, he held Trois in front of him with one arm and commanded her to approach the white giant. But then Kaji’s innate caution—Kaji’s, not Seele’s—sent up a warning.

He’d keenly spotted a place where Super Eva had trampled the vegetation, despite Shinji’s attempts to conceal any tracks.

The misshapen Eva flapped its wings and generated a gravity field to bring itself to a quick stop.

“Gendo’s son,” the Kaji-vessel said. “You were here. Did you figure it out?”

Scratching at his beard, the Kaji-vessel looked around.

But there was no sign that Shinji had retrieved the lance. The Angel Leliel only swallowed objects. It never let anything back out. Any attempt to forcibly remove an object from the imaginary space would surely kill the Angel…and spray blood everywhere.

Neither did the Kaji-vessel sense Super Eva anywhere in the vicinity.

“Puppet,” he asked, “do you know what Gendo’s son is thinking?”

Trois’ cheeks were flushed from exhaustion. She’d been piloting the Eva nearly without rest, and she was starting to get mildly feverish.

“I don’t,” she answered expressionlessly.

The Kaji-vessel clicked his tongue. “I don’t know why I bother talking to you.”

Kaji found another of Super Eva’s footsteps and attempted to trace his movements. He was done listening to Trois, but she kept on muttering—perhaps due to the fever.

“I don’t know what he’s thinking. He’d distancing himself from me, and I…”

I’ve become more like his mother, she thought. I don’t know if that repulses him, or if he’s expecting something more of me. Either way, he doesn’t see me as my own person. But what does it matter? It’s not like I can tell him any of this from here.

“He left the area,” the Kaji-vessel said. “Maybe four or five days ago.” He shrugged. “All right.”

With Kaji’s concerns quelled, Eva-0.0 approached the Angel Carrier. The Eva charged the gamma-ray laser cannon on its right arm.

“Do it!”

Trois responded immediately. Eva-0.0 thrust its non-cannon arm into Leliel, and the Angel Carrier moved.

All at once, color returned to the carrier’s seemingly dead Q.R. Signum scales, and it awoke. That must have been the trap.

The carrier reached out its right arm to grab the mutant Eva-0.0. The Eva raised its cannon arm and fired.

KRA-KOOM!

For an instant, the dark fungal forest was as bright as midday, and the gamma-ray laser obliterated one of the carrier’s Q.R. Signum scales.

The Angel Carrier reeled backward, taking Leliel with it, and the mutant Eva-0.0’s left arm slid out from inside it. Clutched in the Eva’s bloody hand was the lance’s shaft.

 

The Lance of Longinus could pierce anything and had been the master key to unlocking the Human Instrumentality Project.

“That’s the way,” the Kaji-vessel said. “Keep pulling!”

The lance’s long shaft kept sliding out of the imaginary dimensional space.

“Do you hear me, black giant? You’re just an oversized cog with no sense of time, mindless of any element missing from the original plan, no matter how useful. Do you have any idea how much work we put into making this duplicate?”

A shrill sound shook the air. It was Leliel’s death cry.

“We’re done here.”

Ayanami Rei Trois let out a small gasp, her face registering surprise.

As Leliel shrieked, from inside the Angel appeared a hand, clenched around the lance, then a strong-looking arm, and a shoulder.

“Puppet!” Kaji shouted. “Stop!”

He’d been taken completely by surprise. He quickly realized what was happening and moved to stop it, but he was too late.

“Gendo’s son!”

Blood exploded from Leliel, and out came a curved horn, then a visor that opened to reveal two gleaming eyes.

<<Trois!>> Shinji shouted. <<Cut the mental feedback link!>>

Super Eva sprang from the Angel with his bloodied left hand clutching the lance. In one moment, his right arm was pressed close to his side, and in the next, it flashed out a sword. The force of the swiftly moving blade sent Leliel’s blood flying in an arc.

Eva-0.0 didn’t even have time to lift its shield.

In another instant, the blade would shatter the Q.R. Signum in the mutant Eva’s chest.

Trois yelped as the Kaji-vessel roughly seized her right arm and moved it in front of her chest. The mutant Eva-0.0 mimicked the motion, blocking Super Eva’s blade with the gamma-ray laser cannon.

The sword cleaved the cannon cleanly in two, and the long convergence barrel flew off into the distance.

But the cannon had turned Super Eva’s sword—Basara—aside, and the blade narrowly missed the Q.R. Signum, tearing deep into the mutant Eva’s chest armor. A piece of flying shrapnel gouged Kaji’s cheek and severed his ear.

This all happened in moments. The next instant, Super Eva had completely freed himself from the prison of Leliel’s imaginary dimension space. His feet slammed into the ground.

Using his forward momentum, Super Eva rammed the mutant Eva and sent it staggering backward. The mutant’s grip loosened on the lance, and Super Eva seized the weapon and swapped it with the sword in his dominant hand.

He kept moving—not into the mutant Eva, but past it, like a javelin thrower making a run-up.

“Time for Plan B!” Shinji said to Quatre. “I hope you got the calculations right!”

“Don’t mess up the throw, Ikari-kun,” Quatre replied.

Super Eva ran forward and raised the lance aloft. He planted one foot, leaned his upper body back, and—

<<What are you doing?!>> the Kaji-vessel shouted.

But Shinji wasn’t listening. “Go!”

Super Eva hurled the lance with tremendous speed, and the weapon whistled through the air, easily breaking free from the gravity of the Apple’s Core. In the blink of an eye, the Lance of Longinus disappeared into the starry sky.

 

<<Gendo’s son! What do you think you’re doing?>>

“What am I doing? You’re the one with a hostage.”

Shinji had decided that if he failed to disable the mutant Eva-0.0, he would throw the Lance of Longinus away before Seele/Kaji could try to use Trois as leverage to take the weapon back.

It was the wrong decision.

The original Lance of Longinus was constricting the Earth to cataclysmic effect. If humanity could be armed with its duplicate, then why worry over the sacrifice of one person?

“You were the same way when you stopped the Instrumentality Project,” Quatre muttered. “You only see the world that’s directly around you.”

She was wearing Shinji’s plugsuit. The current-issue suits could suppress synchronization rates as high as 400%. Wearing it prevented Quatre from becoming disembodied inside Leliel due to over-synchronization. Having become one with his Eva, Shinji assumed he could no longer be dissolved himself, and he’d exchanged his plugsuit for Quatre’s engineer’s uniform.

If he’d been truly committed to saving humanity, he would have reclaimed the lance the moment he’d found Leliel and then compelled Quatre—by any means necessary—to make the jump back to Earth.

But Shinji hadn’t done that. As long as he knew Trois would eventually come, he wanted to rescue her.

And this was the result.

Quatre sighed. “See? Now you’ve got nothing.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Shinji replied as he returned Basara to his right hand and retrieved his other sword, Kesara, from his right shoulder pylon.

“Kesara on standby, and…mark.”

“You know, Ikari-kun,” Quatre said. “All this time, I’d thought you made a mistake.”

The pylon’s cylindrical chamber tilted forward and opened with a loud thud, and Shinji unsheathed the second sword.

“Wait,” he said. “You had thought?”

“Three years ago, you made this flawed world because it was the world you wanted. It wasn’t by mistake.”