Chapter 44: From the Butterfly’s Dream

Chapter 44:
From the Butterfly’s Dream

 

WHEN SHINJI OPENED his eyes, he was racing through the tunnel network.

When did I return here?

He looked over his shoulder to ask Trois, but all he saw were shadows flying past him.

The tunnels didn’t recede into some far-off vanishing point but wound together into something like a black cloth, which itself flowed back up the corridor toward Shinji, to be sucked into the tip of the black plate on his back.

Shinji realized he wasn’t inside his entry plug.

He himself was flying through the corridors—or rather, the corridors were a part of him.

Panicking, he looked down at his body.

It was dark black. His surface reflected the glowing particles that occasionally strayed into the tunnel system.

He felt the warm presence of someone next to him. “Trois?” he said, looking over.

It wasn’t Trois.

“Asuka! What are you doing?”

The Asuka/Eva synthesis moved though the corridor next to him. She’d been facing ahead but now turned to look at him.

She, too, bore a black plate, which sucked up the corridor behind them. Her long hair waved in the darkness.

“Why do you look like a Victor?” he asked.

She tilted her head quizzically. His eyes followed the flowing curve of her neck to her shoulder, then to her long, slender arm, and finally to her hand, which she held lovingly over his chest.

THRUM!

“Oh,” Shinji said. Warm light radiated from him. “There it is!”

The light and the low-pitched rumble spilled out between Asuka’s graceful fingers.

Such heat…

The heart beat strongly.

THRUM!

Housed inside the badly cracked Center Trigonus was the window to higher dimensions that had opened inside Super Eva’s chest.

When Super Eva’s S2 Engine had become damaged and slipped into the higher dimensions, Shinji and the soul of his mother, Yui, had opened a dimensional rift to restore the engine’s connection. She’d given over Eva-01’s body to her son and gone through to the other side, while Maya and the Nerv team had combined their efforts to control the torrent of energy that flooded out from the rift. They’d succeeded, and the heartbeat was born.

Shinji had almost forgotten how hot, ferocious, and wild his heart was.

He opened his black hand and tried to reach inside his chest to grab his heart. But just at the edge of the Center Trigonus, his hand froze.

<<Don’t touch me.>>

“Who are you?”

<<I’m Shinji. I’m the person you’re trying to grab.>>

The voice sounded just like Shinji’s.

<<Give me back my body and my prize. Without it… Without it, I—>>

 

“Ikari-kun!” Trois shouted into Shinji’s ear.

Shinji opened his eyes. He was inside his entry plug.

Super Eva was falling, about to crash into the sea of lava. Matching Super Eva’s speed, a crest rose from the blazing, looming surface. Something’s there!

Shinji intentionally turned his Vertex wings off-balance and put Super Eva into a spin. He thrust Kesara forward just as the lava burst upward, as if to block his path.

Kesara passed into the rising lava, into Sandalphon’s mouth, and all the way through to the Angel’s tail.

The Angel larva thrashed about, wrapping its long front fins around Super Eva’s arm and trying to sear it off. But Shinji hardly noticed.

<<I found my heart!>> he said, unable to contain his excitement.

“You what?” Trois replied.

Shinji’s voice hadn’t come from his mouth but from the entry plug’s hydrospeaker. Trois realized what was happening. Shinji had entered the high state of synchronization that shifted his consciousness into Super Eva’s body.

<<Reforge the sword with Sandalphon’s pattern!>>

He wanted to use the thrashing Sandalphon’s heat to reforge Kesara’s blade and spare Trois from having to draw energy from the Q.R. Signum.

Trois touched Shinji’s face. Just like last time, his body had become unusually stiff. When he spoke again from the hydrospeaker, he sounded like he’d just come home from a trip.

<<There’s…a lot going on, and it’s bad. A Victor has my heart, and Asuka has turned into the other Victor—the one I thought we’d killed. I don’t understand any of it!>>

Trois tried to reconcile what Shinji was saying with everything they’d experienced.

“When we met Asuka in the tunnels,” she said, “the heart had been calling to her. So, the Victor with your heart is the one calling itself Shinji?”

<<I think my heart is calling itself Shinji. It wants a body and a weapon.>>

“And that’s why Super Eva has been moving on his own, especially when you’re holding Kesara and Basara?”

<<I think so. And so…>> Shinji sounded like he had an idea. <<This time, we’re going to use my heart’s power.>>

Something pushed Super Eva hard from behind. The force surged against him as relentlessly as a waterfall and propelled the more-than-four-thousand-ton Eva forward, swords, Sandalphon, and all.

For a second, Trois couldn’t breathe, and she felt like her body was going to be thrown backward.

She could’ve let go of Shinji and given herself over to the back of plug seat. But Trois wasn’t the type to go against what she’d been told, so she kept pressing her forehead against Shinji’s back, if a little tighter than before.

As she watched over Shinji’s shoulder, Super Eva flew with incredible speed. Something distant one moment was right in front of her eyes the next.

While kidnapped by Seele/Kaji and forced to pilot Quatre’s mutant Eva-0.0, Trois had learned how to draw power from a quantum resonance scale. Once she was inside Super Eva’s plug with Shinji, where he struggled to do the same, she’d taken that responsibility upon herself.

Trois had been depressed because she felt unimportant as an individual, and Shinji’s reliance upon her gave her happiness, even if it meant subjecting herself to the Q.R. Signum’s corruption.

But now, a different kind of energy flowed into her from Shinji’s faraway heart, warm and comforting, like a ray of sunlight. But it was also unrelenting, and it pushed the Q.R. Signum’s cold reach away from her body.

Shinji realized that if the heart was exerting control over Super Eva, then it was still connected to him in some fashion. Just as the Angel Carriers had drawn power and become oversized, he was drawing power from his stolen heart.

Shinji stood still as a statue as she clung to his back. She let a shiver run down her body. The top of her black chiffon dress, stained with North African sand, rose and fell as she breathed deeply in the LCL. The color had returned to her cheeks. She stared into the distance.

She found herself at the junction of flowing energy and looked out across the network.

“It’s true,” she said. “Ikari-kun is on the other side, too.”

Something about that struck her as funny, and she laughed.

Asuka is protecting Ikari-kun’s heart. Well, then I’ll be his heart over here.

The power flowed through her and filled Eva-01’s body. Super Eva flew through the sky, burning an orange trail behind him.

<<Reforging complete!>> Shinji announced.

The larval Sandalphon still thrashed upon the sword in its mouth. Suddenly, flames erupted from the Angel’s body. It began to burn up and then exploded into tiny fragments, leaving Super Eva’s right hand and the red-hot Kesara behind.

From far away, Heart-Shinji shouted, <<There! The weapon! Give that to me!>>

Super Eva-Shinji shouted back. <<Yes, this is your sword and my sword. Now, let’s bring them together! Give me your strength!>>

 

“Ikari-kun,” Trois reminded, “you have to temper the blade or the impact from the next strike will destroy the molecular arrangement.”

<<That won’t matter if I kill it in one hit. This is going to get bumpy, so hold on.>>

Super Eva fixed its sights on the flying Sandalphon carrier, which had lost the lower half of its body to Ramiel’s particle beam. He charged forward, holding the still-hot sword behind him in his right hand, and tackled the carrier with his left shoulder.

Their shields clashed, but Super Eva kept pushing forward until the carrier slammed into the side wall at a shallow angle. It bounced off the membrane, and its body turned. Shinji waited until both of its Q.R. Signum scales were lined up just right, and then he swung the sword.

The blade, attuned to the same field pattern as the Angel the carrier had borne in its cocoon, pushed through the oversized giant’s supposedly thick shield like it wasn’t there at all.

By the time the Angel Carrier realized something was amiss, the sword had already split one Q.R. Signum in half and was on its way to the carrier’s face. The white giant’s head split open like a dropped watermelon, and the sword passed through to the second Q.R. Signum, shattering it.

Kesara had finished its job but didn’t have time to slow down before it struck the membrane of the pyramidal tower.

CLAAAAANG!

The sword hadn’t passed even one millimeter through the barrier, but the loud noise thundered across the surrounding battlefield.