Chapter 26: Off the Shore of Tokyo

Chapter 26:
Off the Shore of Tokyo

 

UNFORTUNATELY FOR HER, Ibuki Maya hadn’t been there to witness the U.S. Eva. The chief scientist was on the deck of the battleship Yamato with Asuka/Eva flying overhead. After returning home at the end of World War II, the last-century super-large battleship had undergone many improvements, including having its coal-fired boilers switched over to heavy fuel oil, but it was later moored and converted into a museum memorializing Japan’s defeat. Now the battleship had been further modernized, gaining an N2 reactor in the process, and was back at sea. The ship had just completed its sea trial in Kanto Bay, where there weren’t freak swells like there were in the open ocean.

Rumors were circulating that the Yamato was intended as a shelter vessel for select citizens.

Nerv Japan had been uncharacteristically generous in providing the N2 reactor to the Japanese government. The global cataclysm was breaking down supply chains of every kind, and the reactor was one way Nerv Japan could drag the government to the bargaining table.

Talking to herself, the chief scientist remarked, “Even with the reactor, this ship is still…” She tried to remember what Fuyutsuki had called it. “Fudara-something-or-other.”

Fuyutsuki had called the government’s plans for the ship a “twenty-first-century version of the Fudaraku tokai,” which was an extreme religious practice where pilgrims committed suicide by boarding themselves up within a boat bound for a paradise. But Maya didn’t know the reference.

The Yamato had passed its sea trial, but Maya still had work to do.

“Asuka, please come down,” Ritsuko said.

Asuka/Eva was making a game of disappearing into and appearing out of clouds in the pre-storm sky. She’d been carrying a giant, unstrung bow—or at least, something that looked like one—and was still holding it as she landed on the stern end of the flight deck, which was currently being used for takeoff and landing of helicopters and VTOL aircraft.

“Sorry to interrupt your game,” Maya said.

Unfortunately, the research into separating Asuka back into human form was only just beginning. But the Asuka/Eva synthesis was responding to her own name, and through the repetition of some simple exercises, she was even learning to communicate. She had a lively curiosity and was surprisingly agreeable, which seemed unlike her previous self. But maybe that was closer to her true nature than anyone had known.

Maya thrust her fist forward as if she were holding a bow. “Hold that with your left hand, like this.”

Asuka/Eva thought for a moment and then mimicked the action. The bow’s bottom tip slammed down onto the flight deck, and the red giant turned her torso, pulling her rear leg back into an archer’s stance.

The bow had been discovered along with the giant, semi-transparent eggshell that had appeared from the bottom of Lake Ashi. Maya was treating the mysterious object as an Evangelion-sized weapon. The bow possessed no string. Instead, each half contained a particle accelerator that met at a shared focal point. When the particles collided at an angle in the middle, the resulting energy shot forward like an arrow—or, as Maya thought of it, an energy slingshot.

The bow’s construction remained a complete unknown, but Maya figured that if it was an Eva-sized weapon, having an Eva wield it might lead to new discoveries.

“So, the bow is a little larger than an Eva,” Maya remarked. “Almost like it’s sized for Armaros.”

 

Ibuki Maya had given herself two assignments—to recreate the guided cannon, Neyarl, which had performed beyond expectations and destroyed a Victor with particles drawn from Super Eva’s heart, and to identify the guided particle that had done it.

The resulting magnetic field had either destroyed Super Eva’s full data records or, at best, left them temporarily inaccessible. But in North Africa, Maya had been able to retrieve one valuable piece of information—when Super Eva fired the weapon, time stretched out so much that he perceived the behavior of elementary particles. “Without ever touching the enemy, or undergoing any change itself,” Shinji had said, “the beam tore through the Victor and made its protons decay.”

That was enough to give Maya at least part of an answer—magnetic monopoles. They were particles that had existed only in the first moments of the birth of the universe, and even then, only in vanishingly small numbers.

Whether humanity liked it or not, Armaros had displayed acts of godlike power. But if such particles could defeat him and his retainers, then those fearsome giants were fundamentally no different from any other entities born after the beginning of the universe. There was no reason for humanity to simply hang their heads and accept defeat.

Ask others what that knowledge changed about the present situation, and they would likely struggle to answer, but to a scholar like Maya, it changed everything. Here was an enemy who defied all measuring, and maybe, finally, she’d been given a set of laws that could place him on a scale.

“Don’t worry, Asuka,” Maya said, looking up high. “I don’t think that bow will do anything without a lot of energy being dumped into it.”

Horaki Hikari had been the first to call Asuka by her name, so that she might reclaim her identity, but now everyone followed suit.

“Today,” Maya continued, looking down at her tablet, “before we completely hand over the N2 reactor, I want to take one last opportunity to make use of it, along with those two miniaturized ones you’ve got, and see if we can test-fire that bow. So if you could hang on to it until it shoots, that would be great.”

A storm looked like it was brewing, but for now, the waves were calm, as was everything else.

Asuka looked over her shoulder.

The red giant froze, as if she’d heard a voice she recognized.

“Asuka?” Maya said. She looked back up from the screen and noticed that Asuka/Eva was staring at a point somewhere in the distance. “What’s the matter?”

Maya tapped on the tablet and pulled up Asuka’s status display. According to the data, the giant wasn’t particularly alarmed. She was just focusing her attention in that direction.

BANG!

Maya yelped. Asuka/Eva must have let go of the bow, and the weapon had dropped to the deck.

The graceful red giant stood completely erect, as if someone had called to her.

Her Allegorica wings billowed upward, like long hair caught in the wind. She took one smooth step and then began gliding toward the coastline in the direction she’d been looking.

“Asuka!” Maya spoke into her tablet. “Where are you going? Is something there?”

On the shoreline of Kanto Bay stood the ruins of the old metropolis abandoned after the Second Impact. Suddenly, black, root-like tendrils burst out from the rubble and coiled around Asuka.

“Asuka!” Maya shouted.

Asuka didn’t resist as the tendrils pulled her into the ground. Just like that, she was gone.

Alarms sounded throughout the battleship, and the close-range autocannons swiveled their daruma-doll heads, but by then, it was all over. Still surrounded by the upgrade crew’s scaffolding, the main battery cannons swept their barrels across the sky at nothing.

Where the Asuka/Eva synthesis had disappeared, the rubble had been scattered away, leaving the barren ground exposed. But other than that, there was no trace that anything had passed through.