Chapter 49: Their Own Ways Home

Chapter 49:
Their Own Ways Home

 

MARI DECIDED to leave the battlefield.

The light of Wolfpack’s new Q.R. Signum had calmed, but the Eva’s body and armor had retained their enlargement even after the tower was gone, though the effect hadn’t been as dramatic with her as with the Angel Carriers.

The UN giant-transport plane was circling the battlefield from a distance. Wolfpack’s telemetry system temporarily reconnected and began sending its data. The Nerv U.S. staff stared in mute amazement at Mari’s biotelemetry readings…and the video of the pilot.

Within the tower, she’d shared some kind of mental connection with Shinji and Trois, and had had no trouble communicating her thoughts. But now she couldn’t speak at all—she merely barked like a dog. Her support robot was with her inside the entry plug, its four legs folded against it, and it transmitted an alert that Mari’s body was rejecting several of its medicines.

In order to establish some form of communication with Mari, the Nerv staff tried converting the signal from her interface’s image plotter into words on the comms display, but the results still weren’t very clear.

Aside from the new powers provided by Wolfpack’s Q.R. Signum, Mari’s changes hadn’t been unforeseen by the medical team, and guilt hung heavily among the crew in the control room. Indifferent to their feelings, the wild “pack” ignored the crew’s commands and followed the terrain south.

The American Eva contained several remote shutoffs as a fail-safe, but when the beast had gone berserk, its internal, organ-like systems had bypassed them all. Yet even if the U.S. military could somehow make Wolfpack stop, the Eva had become too big and heavy for them to pick up.

Wolfpack ran all the way to Novaya Zemlya’s southern shore and then leaped into the Barents Sea.

When asked where she was going, her reply appeared on the screen: To Asuka.

A golden retriever nudged its way through the crowd and peered at Mari on the display. The girl apparently noticed, because she added: Momo to Ayanami Rei Six and Azuchi.

In other words, she wanted them to return the dog to Rei Six on Hakone Island. Mari didn’t know that Six had exceeded escape velocity and was currently missing.

The U.S. Eva swam south with its head above the water. The cargo plane followed until the Eva crossed into a storm front where thick, electromagnetic clouds were gathering. The plane was forced to turn away, and the beast disappeared into the raging tides. With no satellites, Nerv U.S. had lost its Eva.

 

Super Eva flew over the Arctic Ocean, where the aurora borealis now shone even at midday. Trois didn’t feel that using the tunnel network would be safe.

Shinji’s faraway heart was sending power to the Eva, if only a modest quantity. The Q.R. Signum’s effects had diminished, which might have hampered travel through the transdimensional corridors.

Though Armaros’ darkness had retreated into the scale, the back half of Trois’ hair remained black. But there was a brightness behind her blank expression, and her pale blue hair smoothly transitioned into the darker color as it floated in the LCL.

Before Super Eva accelerated into his suborbital flight back to Japan, Shinji and Trois opened the entry plug’s hatch and stuck their heads out into the cold, desolate air. The feeling reminded Shinji of being on the desert side of the Apple’s Core, the site of the Instrumentality Project’s initial test. Shinji’s long journey was ending. And an even longer one was about to begin.

The grotesque swollen moon began to rise in the east.

The Longinus Ring had lengthened in the time since the lance pierced the Earth and stole Shinji’s heart. The gap between the lance’s head and tail was shrinking. Before long, they would meet, and the ring would be complete. People were saying that when that happened, the Earth would end.

 

Kensuke didn’t show up again. Nerv Japan Acting Deputy Commander Suzuhara Toji had been wounded on Novaya Zemlya, and his cybernetic arm was replaced with one that had been regrown from his own tissue years ago. Not yet able to walk, he was flying home to Hakone on a stretcher, with Lieutenant Colonel Kasuga and his vanguard unit.

While the moon had expanded, the Earth had drastically shrunk, and deformations frequently occurred in its crust. Geography had changed everywhere on the globe, but the transformation had been especially drastic at Hakone Caldera. The base of the Izu Peninsula had fallen several hundred meters, and the caldera became an island amid a newly formed straight between the former peninsula and mainland Japan.

Nerv Japan continued to search for little Rei Six, who’d become lost after her Eva accelerated beyond her intended suborbital flight path. Since the submarine communications cables had ruptured, and the satellites had flown away, humanity now relied on a stratospheric airplane network for nearly all communication. Nerv Japan had turned some of their antennas upward, while they also negotiated with various astronomical observatories to help search for Six’s Eva-00 Type-F Allegorica.

In that process, they’d picked up a weak signal belonging to a few surviving scouting drones that the Euro military had flown through the Torwächters’ gateway to see where they’d come out. The signal came from the moon.

 

But even more changes were happening in the abandoned area underneath Tokyo-3.

Lake Ashi’s water level had been drastically lowered, and now, the lake’s waters were flowing into the Geofront beneath Nerv Japan HQ.

The grounds of the former headquarters had been sealed away under a giant dome of hard tektite concrete. There, in Central Dogma, Lilith had gone dormant. Immediately following the failure of the Human Instrumentality Project, Lilith had shut itself away from the world in a giant sphere. Over 150 people had been trapped inside this timeless space, including Shinji’s father, Gendo, Dr. Akagi Ritsuko, and a dozen or so JSSDF special forces soldiers who’d assaulted the old headquarters. For three years, everything had stopped within this black egg.

But years were nothing when time was frozen. At some point, everyone had taken it for granted that the egg would remain there forever.

Until, one day, it was gone.