Chapter 37: Deadlocked

Chapter 37:
Deadlocked

 

“I’LL SEE IF COMMAND will give the go-ahead for a regroup,” Clausewitz said with a sour expression.

He was responsible for failing to manage Hikari. But assigning blame wouldn’t change anything now. The only option was to break off and regroup. Neither side in this fight could currently hold a battle line.

 

A great, unpredictable—and unpredicted—battle had erupted within the basin. Now, on its northern side, a change came, small at first.

A sharp, flat piece of metal, not unlike a sword blade, poked out from the ground and began to slide around, like a submarine’s periscope gliding across the surface of the ocean.

The blade grew taller, grazing an armored truck and plowing through a barricade of stacked forty-foot containers. It kept moving toward the center of the deadlocked battlefield.

The soldiers nearby could do nothing but watch. The sword glided right past them. They felt the blade’s vibration on their

skin—a strong, unsettling growl—and they knew, instinctively, not to touch it.

Radioing in to the control plane, an officer shouted, <<Some kind of sharp, blade-looking thing appeared on the north side of the Frying Pan and is sliding across the ground at high speed toward the center of the battlefield. Can you confirm what it is?>>

Clausewitz didn’t know. But a squadron of U.K. observation planes, loitering beyond the northern edge of the basin, performed a scan of all objects on that side of the battlefield. After filtering out the soldiers, stationary weapons, combat vehicles, and transport vehicles—and anything else that either gave an IFF response or was registered in the database—the field of dots were reduced to a single unknown.

“What is that?” Clausewitz asked as he stared at the camera feed.

An…arm?

An arm, holding a sword aloft, had appeared out of the ground.

The hand flipped the sword around, so that the tip pointed straight down, and then stabbed it into the earth with a wham.

The arm’s muscles bulged, and its forward momentum halted. Using the sword as a handhold, Super Eva hoisted himself out of the ground and leaped onto the battlefield.

The giant opened his mouth and let out a fearsome roar, shaking the very air. His message was clear to everyone present.

Give me back my heart!

After traveling to another planet, and drifting through the extradimensional corridors, Super Eva’s own stolen heartbeat had led him here, back home to his turbulent planet.

But just as he arrived, his heart was leaving.

Abandoning the Angel Carriers, the wounded Torwächter accompanied the spurned Asuka/Eva back into the tunnels. Shinji and Trois had come too late.

 

“Where are we?” Shinji asked. “And what the hell is going on?”

A loud explosion rang out, the impact rippling through his body. His head spun.

Having suddenly emerged onto a battlefield on an island at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, Super Eva took a fierce volley of friendly fire. He brandished his twin swords, Kesara and Basara, and Ayanami Trois, riding inside with Shinji, deployed the Eva’s shield. Blindingly bright bursts immediately covered the shield’s surface. Returning to Earth in an unfamiliar location would have been disorienting on its own, but appearing amid a massive battle was bewildering. For Shinji, the experience was a lot like vertigo.

After about thirty seconds, the friendly fire temporarily stopped. Shinji was trying to regain his balance when two razor-like ribbons shot toward him through the smoke. At that last moment, he raised his swords to block them. Sparks flew. He’d managed to guard himself, but the force of the impact pushed Super Eva’s more-than-four-thousand-ton mass nearly two hundred meters backward. Then Zeruel’s ribbons were gone, retracted back into the smoke cloud.

An Angel?!

Shinji shouted to Rei Trois behind him. “Is there an Angel Carrier here?”

He was hoping she could sense what was out there, but she didn’t reply.

He looked over his shoulder. Ayanami’s eyes were unfocused. She was fighting against something trying to steal her consciousness. Her fingers dug into Shinji’s shoulder.

“Trois?”

“Wait, I’m getting something. A message…from the heart’s owner? No, from the heart itself? My name is…”

Trois received the Torwächter’s message just as the giants disappeared into the gateway.

“My name…is Shinji.”