Chapter 1: Final Regeneration

Chapter 1:
Final Regeneration

 

THRUM!

The giant pulse echoed throughout the underground complex.

DA-THRUM!

Would Super Eva finally make its reappearance?

The crawling giant lurched one of its arms upward, as if trying to grab hold of something. The thin layer of ice covering it slowly broke away as smoke rose from its body. The giant was acting strangely. It trembled, as if it didn’t have full control. Heat shot out of its body as it tried to reposition itself.

“It’s lost its balance. It doesn’t need to accelerate as much as it did,” Maya whispered.

The ruins of Central Dogma. The underground lab complex and former headquarters of Nerv. Lilith’s Chronostatic Sphere, its defining feature, had been stolen away, leaving an imprint in the place where it had been. Maya had hurried to the deserted area on a hunch. She was grinning now, though she didn’t know it.

“But… Look at you. Such an old model.”

The giant that looked like Super Eva turned again, shaking off the ice, which highlighted the yellow accents of the old Eva-01. It broke through the experimental aquarium, boiling away what little water was left. Steam rose from the giant’s super-heated body.

“Heh… Ha ha… Ah ha ha ha ha!”

Maya, the grim chief of science and engineering, exploded with laughter. The giant continued reaching for the invisible sky from within the smoke and rubble, as if to say, “I should be flying by now.”

 

The entry plug shook violently. Asuka held on to the headrest of Shinji’s plug seat. She looked up through the center hatch at the classroom ceiling, gasping when it suddenly closed. The entry plug shook from all sides now.

We’re accelerating through 3D space…and it feels like we’re inside something much larger.

She heard the unmistakable contractions of a giant’s muscle fibers.

“No! We’re inside an Eva?!”

THRUM!

Shock waves reverberated through her body, originating from in front of her.

“And a pulse… It’s Super Eva’s heart!”

I can’t believe it! We actually brought Super Eva back!

Asuka was shocked that her prayer had come true. She knew Shinji would concentrate on his Eva once he was seated in the plug. And she would’ve considered the experiment a great success even if Shinji had only traced Super Eva’s signal from Yomotsu Hirasaka beyond the Bonin Islands, also known as the Ogasawara Islands. She had not been expecting this kind of magic to occur.

“Hah!” Asuka giggled. “Good job getting your better half back, Shinji!”

She looked around, but she couldn’t tell where they were because of the distortions in the virtual display.

His vision is getting narrower…

“Asuka,” Shinji croaked. She looked over and saw that he was turning pale as he struggled to shift the heavy control stick. His breathing had grown shallow.

It’s tunnel vision. He’s panicking.

“There’s something wrong… I can’t…breathe…”

Shinji clawed at his throat with his left hand. He unbuttoned his collar, tearing off the first button of his shirt in the process.

“Father and Ritsuko-san… They’re here… The only things left in this body… Painful… All of it!”

“Stop talking nonsense and get up!”

According to Toji and the others, this Shinji was a representation of himself in the dream. Asuka had placed her bets on the classroom being a secure location that Shinji had dreamed up, but things weren’t as safe as they seemed.

“Get a hold of yourself!” Asuka shouted.

Shinji was suffocating. Asuka tried to bring him back into reality through his projection.

“I have to get out of here. But I can’t fly…and that’s the only way out!”

The plug rumbled as the Eva collapsed to the floor. Asuka yelped, her back slamming against the wall. She caught the interior of the entry plug just as her face was about to smack into it.

“Pull yourself together!” she growled,

“I can’t fly,” Shinji said. “Where are my wings?! Did you take them away, Father?!”

He’d lost control of himself. Asuka groped around in the entry plug, raised her hand, and brought it down on Shinji’s face. “Calm down, you idiot!” Several pop-up windows appeared on the screen, informing her that the Eva was now in combat mode.

“An enemy…” Shinji muttered.

A chill ran down Asuka’s spine. Is he confusing his pain with the Eva’s?

Shinji and Super Eva shared the same heart, and the line was blurred between their two entities. But if the dream theory was correct, then the Eva was currently his only remaining body.

Did the Eva feel that sensation just now? Is Shinji’s dream nothing more than a dream?!

“Enemies… Aaah!” Shinji frantically tried piloting his Eva. “Weapons… I’m defenseless! I can’t fly… I can’t even move!”

The Eva was kneeling, but it slipped as it kicked the ground, having yet to recover its balance. It tumbled forward as it struggled, kicking up a cloud of dust. The giant rose and fell again. It looked like a baby that didn’t know how to walk, lurching around the prefab laboratory, tearing it apart in the process.

“Get back here, Maya! It’s not safe!” Misato shouted at the figure in the white lab coat as she watched the whirlwind the giant was kicking up.

THRUM! THRUM!

Misato recognized the pulse, rapid though it was.

“Is that Super Eva?!”

Its head certainly looked like that of Eva-01…

But those orange shoulder pylons look like the ones Unit One used to have. And there’s four of them. Wait, four?! It’s been modified! Did Maya do that?

Misato knew there must be a reason why Maya had been preoccupied in Cage Two, but even she couldn’t make such modifications this quickly.

Still, she knows something!

“Maya, what happened here? How did Super Eva return? And Shinji…”

The giant’s modified appendages were skeletal, not fit for combat. It lacked the polish of a newly installed system, and its movements seemed a bit desperate.

“Maya!” Misato approached the scientist.

“This is the only place it could have appeared,” Maya said, not looking at her.

“Appeared?” Misato asked. “Are you saying this thing came out of nowhere?!”

But Maya remained silent.

“It would be really nice if you could explain this whole thing to me.”

“I don’t think you’d understand even if I did.”

Maya watched the flailing giant, her eyes filled with surprise, expectation, and anxiety. Misato knew she couldn’t make sense of the situation herself. And she certainly couldn’t allow her friend to remain in this stupor.

“Chief Ibuki,” Misato said, acting as the Commander of Nerv Japan, whose mission was to protect human life and society from supernatural threats. “You have used a great deal of energy and resources—natural and human—without authorization. I know you and your people are exhausted. How about we have a little chat, preferably in a small room, so you can recuperate?”

Maya turned to face Misato, looking very annoyed. “I can’t stand by such a foolish decision! That will only bring destruction down on humanity…on us! We must tune this unit immediately!”

The modified Super Eva flailed, sending a block of concrete the size of a car flying past them, shaking the floor as it landed.

Misato shrugged her shoulders and took a step back. “Well, excuse me for being a fool, then.”

Maya sighed. “I apologize, Commander Katsuragi. I’ve been making restraint armor in the cage for that thing.” She’d asked others to bear her uncertainties long enough. “I took the liberty of preparing it on a hunch. This place is still the hub of reality for all individuals last seen here—even without Lilith’s Chronostatic Sphere—which is probably why the giant also reappeared here.”

She turned her back on the struggling giant.

“I don’t know how it happened, but Super Eva returned to the location of the Chronostatic Sphere, to where the decommissioning facility for Unit Zero used to be, in the old Central Dogma.”

 

Back inside the modified Super Eva, the A.I. had begun pouring LCL into the plug as an emergency measure after receiving information from the unit’s accelerometer. Unfortunately, it didn’t fill the plug in time to prevent the impact. Asuka yelped, clinging to Shinji’s neck as the liquid buffer failed to absorb the shock.

“Stop it, Shinji!” she yelled. “There are no enemies around!”

Shinji was still fighting the invisible foe. The giant awkwardly thrust its hands up to the sky, destroying what little balance it had. Asuka hung on for dear life, unable to tell what might come next.

“I can’t move, Asuka!” Something flashed across the display, increasing Shinji’s panic as the giant turned to see what it was. “Let go of me!”

“Stop it! That was your own shadow!”

Shinji grabbed her shoulder with his left hand. “Let go of me!”

Asuka’s thin shoulders flinched when she heard the anger in his voice, but she squeezed his hand and shouted back at him. “Not on your life!”

The shock of this forced him to look at her for the first time. He inhaled sharply. Her expression wasn’t one of fury but of sadness, her hair tossing about in the LCL.

He turned away and muttered, “Sorry.”

Shinji’s apology seemed more reflexive than sincere, but at least his panic had subsided for the moment. Asuka floated through the LCL over to the pilot seat and pulled Shinji into her chest.

“All the power in the world and you’re still a big baby.” she said, her arms trembling around him.

“Asuka…?”

She quietly exhaled, bubbles drifting away like stardust, and took a deep breath of the LCL—slowly, so as to keep herself from sobbing.

“Shinji…they say you’re a denizen of this dream.” Asuka’s lips brushed against his hair.

“This is all…a dream? I’m dreaming?”

“You are the dream! Your dream has invaded reality! The real you has gone missing, along with Super Eva, after you triggered the Third Impact! They say no one can survive that, but…”

Asuka held him tighter. Her chest rose and fell with the rhythm of her breathing, and Shinji could feel the warmth of her body, even through her uniform.

He could feel it. Him. Shinji. Not Super Eva.

“But I made it back! And in one piece, too! So tell me how it happened, Shinji! Tell me how I made it home!”

Asuka had kept this anxiety to herself long after her return. She’d spent a significant amount of time as the Asuka/Eva synthesis. Her mind and body had been scrambled after she was amalgamated with the ocean of organic data on the Ark. Her memories about the experience were hazy to the point of seeming unreal. She still found it hard to believe that she’d actually reverted to her human state.

“Asuka, move,” Shinji whispered into her chest. “I was fighting Armaros on Yomotsu Hirasaka…and then the Third Impact. Right.”

Shinji’s eyes were open now, next to the ribbon on the front of her uniform. He was staring into the distance.

“I want to see what’s in front of me,” he said. Images began to appear on the virtual display, reflecting his calm.

Where am I?

“I was in the classroom, but now… This is the ruins of old Central Dogma,” Shinji said.

Asuka wrinkled her nose. “Where’s Lilith’s Chronostatic Sphere?”

“Armaros… He took it.”

“Excuse me? What the hell have you people been doing?!”

“I could ask you the same thing, you know.”

“Well, I… Stuff happened.”

“Uh-huh. Stuff happened down here, too.”

But what happened to me?

Shinji looked at the Eva’s body through the display. “Who modified me? Maya? Where’d my Vertex wings go? I can’t fly without them.”

“You’ve got bigger things to worry about than flight right now,” Asuka said. “How about standing on your own two feet? Look, you’ve got just the thing to help you,” she said, pointing to what looked like a railing. “Use that to support you as you get up.”

She was referring to the circular linear rail Maya had built around a Q.R. Signum to simulate the Tower of Babel.

“Stop treating me like a baby!”

“And look! Maya and Misato are at your feet.”

 

“Maya, that thing is going to step on you!”

Maya was running toward the giant’s foot. She stopped, beckoning Misato to come closer.

“What?” Misato asked, tilting her head.

She’s like a kid in an amusement park.

Maya was beaming. “I found it!”

“Found what?”

Thrum!

The giant’s heartbeat was beginning to calm down. Misato gave Maya and the giant an apprehensive once-over before approaching them. Maya pointed to some scratches in the metal.

Are those words?

 

I observe from the far side of time –Ikari Gendo.

 

Misato gasped. The words had been etched into the otherwise pristine metal with the precision of a progressive tool. Akagi Ritsuko’s name appeared next, followed by dozens of others in different handwriting. A single word connected them all at the end: ALIVE.

“What is—Maya?!”

Maya had disappeared behind the giant.

“There it is. The Time Brake.”

The small black disc took her breath away. Shinji had slowed down the event horizon.

You have 0.8 seconds of the Third Impact left, Shinji. And you can use it however you wish, in whatever form you take.

“It’s all up to you, now.”

Thrum!

The rhythmic heartbeat of the Eva shook the air.