Chapter 49: Hakone

Chapter 49:
Hakone

 

TROIS HAD RETURNED to Cage Two—Shinji’s cage—instead of Cage One, and was currently in the process of forcing Super Eva’s shoulder pylons into Eva-0.0.

“Urgh!”

She grimaced with pain as she drove the pylon’s anchor into her shoulder. This kind of work required high levels of precision and would usually be conducted with a positioning gantry with the Eva in a pilotless and dormant state.

But she was running out of time and couldn’t wait for permission to be granted. She checked her synchronization rate through squinted eyes, beads of sweat forming on her face, only to be lost in the flow of the LCL.

<<Trois, what are you doing?!>> Hyuga barked from the command center.

Trois paid no heed to him, went to the third tier of the arming tree, and equipped herself with the Field Penetrators Kesara and Basara.

“I’m going after Unit Two.”

<<Stand down, Eva-0.0,>> Fuyutsuki said. <<You are not to operate without orders issued from Command.>>

“Asuka can’t face Armaros on her own, even if she is synthesized.”

The ground rumbled as Trois’ Eva stepped into the lift deck.

“Epicenter!” Fuyutsuki leaned against the edge of the console for support and shouted to Aoba’s subordinate on the lower deck who was in charge of meteorology.

“Detecting several epicenters! Sending it to the main display now!”

And yet, the screen showed the sky instead of the Earth. There was another planet on the far side of the roots, a planet that was also entangled by them. The moon. The former satellite had swollen to the point that it was now only ten thousand kilometers away from the Earth.

“It’s falling, and fast! It’s causing massive tidal disturbances all over the Earth!”

The command center erupted.

“We’ve been close enough to feel its effects before, but not like this. Why now?!”

“Nothing in geophysics or planetology can explain it,” Aoba’s lecturer, the aging theoretical physicist, said. “This is the appropriate physical reaction to the relation of mass between the two bodies. If anything, the gravitational pull we had before this was preposterous. Something interfered with it.”

“Base isolation systems back online!” someone in the damage control unit shouted.

They’d finished repairing the damage done to HQ by Quatre’s mutant Eva. Their operation jacks were pulled out, and the rumbling in the command center settled.

Outside, the quake continued.

“What do you mean by ‘something,’ professor?” Fuyutsuki asked. The elderly man scratched at his receding hairline.

“I think it’s because we lost the Longinus Ring.”

Fuyutsuki didn’t understand what this meant. The Lance of Longinus had been constricting the Earth from orbit. Was it also controlling the ever-expanding moon?

“It’s only a hypothesis. If the exchange of matter between Earth and moon are interrupted, the moon would cease to be the stage of the new Earth. They would need something to control that process.”

The Lance of Longinus was currently flying through the roots of the World Tree, spread out over the Earth and moon.

“I guess the lance’s disappearance didn’t solve our problems.”

Misato entered the command center—noisy with the whir of construction tools—with Kaji in tow.

<<External cameras!>>

Alarms blared from the observatories surrounding the Komagatake sniping post. Black ash scattered from the sky, peeling off the surface of the vertical roots.

“Open fire, Katsuragi!” Kaji whispered urgently. “Those are the same things as the black creatures from the sea!”

You’re kidding! Misato thought.

“Arm the anti-air guns!”

“Magi, assign the fire control A.I. in the armory to simultaneous suppression of multiple targets per turret.”

<<Understood.>>

Having issued the order, Fuyutsuki looked at Misato and then at Kaji. Could he really trust her decision?

This man was possessed by Seele, by the shadow of Chairman Keel.

Fuyutsuki couldn’t believe him so easily.

“The roots of the World Tree are probably connected to the Ark on Yomotsu Hirasaka, Fuyutsuki-sensei,” Kaji tapped the side of his head.

Did he retain the memories of Seele?

“Only the parts they consciously thought about,” Kaji said, as if reading his mind.

Anti-air guns fired from the armory.

“They’ll fade soon enough. They aren’t exactly alive and only know how to eat…but you should still warn the rest of the world.”

It was as Kaji said. The black shadows descended from the roots, consuming everything—plant, animal, and person—in sight.

The world was thrown into chaos, the air filled with crying and wailing.

Within the roots that covered the sky, Armaros and the Asuka/Eva synthesis continued to do battle, their silhouettes undulating along the stem.

<<Take care of this place, Six,>> Rei Trois said.

Six’s Eva-0.0 Type-F was currently shooting down the descending black shadows.

“What?!”

She turned and saw Trois’ Eva-0.0—armed with the Field Penetrators Kesara and Basara, a rifle, an N2 grenade launcher, and the gamma-ray laser cannon—fly away with her external jump boosters.

<<Quatre erased my memory of the warp procedure, but with the tunnel network clearly visible…>>

The orange body, flanked with boosters on four sides, leaped toward the tips of the dangling roots of the World Tree.

“You’re kidding!”

The icon for Trois’ Eva-0.0 disappeared from the combat link.

<<I can’t communicate using ordinary means, but with our tin can telephone… You can hear me, can’t you, Six?>>

Trois’ connection had dropped out, but she could still speak through the mental mirroring that connected the Ayanamis.

<<I’ll need you to speak for me.>>

Misato and the others still didn’t know that the mirror link had been reestablished. Six pictured the moment she would break the news…and their response to it. She squeezed the trigger on the Powered 8, her mood visibly soured.

“I guess I’m the one getting yelled at today.”