Chapter 17: Shinji

Chapter 17:
Shinji

 

WHAT HAD BECOME of Shinji’s body? Was he truly human at this point?

The question had first been asked when he was regenerated within Super Eva. He’d begun sharing its existence ever since the Eva’s heart took the place of his own.

And now, he was a dream. A dream within an Eva. A representation of what Shinji saw in the classroom.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t bothered by it.

He had no sense of time and space.

It feels like I’m living in one point and then another.

“Get in, Shinji,” Asuka had said confidently.

“What? No!” He’d frowned and refused.

He snorted, laughing at this memory.

 

Eva-01 Final Model’s shoulder pylons shifted in the direction of Yomotsu Hirasaka. The wings of light extending from behind it propelled the Eva with tremendous force.

It was a strange sensation, and Shinji felt as if his perspective had been squashed. He could see the Izu Peninsula—now an island—far away, but by the time he registered it, the distance between them had closed. He was already zooming past it.

“So light.”

The four-thousand-ton Super Eva had felt light because of his immense propulsion potential. Now the restraint armor was even thinner, and he felt lighter. Still, gigantic objects can’t move quickly by their very nature. The period of pendulum movement was determined by the length of a thing and not its mass.

This feels like the dream…

The raging output felt like it could break the laws of Newtonian physics.

Shinji brimmed with the worst power in the world. The peak of the Third Impact’s energy, the energy that flowed through his heart from a higher dimension, threatened to wrench open his chest through the time compression. This violent knocking rumbled through every inch of Final Model’s body at regular intervals, forming the Eva’s heartbeat.

THRUM!

The all-consuming power was somehow offset by reverberations created by the artificial Kodama in his chest.

“I feel fine…for now.”

This was Shinji’s current reality.

“Toji, where are you?” he called out to the N2 Flanker Platypus-2.

<<Shinji…you’re going…too fast…>>

They could still communicate through electromagnetic waves, though Toji’s voice was lagging and distorted. It was then that Shinji realized his thoughts were traveling at an immense speed.

Still too fast… Calm down.

Final Model had been in a constant state of acceleration ever since Hakone, and now it slowed in order to allow the Platypus-2 to catch up to it.