Chapter 4: Six’s Attack
Chapter 4:
Six’s Attack
Six’s Attack
I
F THE ROUND HAKONE CALDERA
were the face of a clock, with Mount Hakone at the center, Lake Ashi occupied the seven to ten-o’clock range, and Tokyo-3 and Nerv Japan’s headquarters covered ten and eleven.
On Mount Komagatake—technically one of the many peaks of the greater Mount Hakone—stood a variety of antennas, automated defense systems, and a heavily armored sniping post designed for Eva-00 Type-F.
With one functional leg, Eva-00 Type-F wasn’t built for running and instead arrived by underground transport and a slowly ascending elevator. Its tiny pilot, Ayanami Rei Six, her breath burbling through the LCL of her entry plug, checked that the alignment of the barrel on her baryon accelerator cannon was within acceptable tolerances. The weapon—code-named “Angel’s Backbone”—replaced the Eva’s entire right arm, and its right leg had been discarded in favor of a firing stand with more stability.
“Okay,” Six said, satisfied with her weapon’s condition.
Currently, the mental mirroring between the multiple Ayanamis had broken down, and individuality had begun to awaken within each girl. But of all the Ayanami clones, the most lacking in expression of individuality was Rei Trois, and her Eva-00 Type-F remained largely a blank slate. For Six to pilot the Eva, the only adjustments necessary had been on the level of repositioning the driver’s seat in a car. Once the plug had been swapped out for one made to fit Six’s diminutive, seven-year-old-sized body, the Eva had successfully launched.
When she received her targets’ incoming trajectories, Six immediately began firing. With this data, targeting the planes wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, but the air battalion was still far beyond the horizon. For the time being, Six instead targeted the missiles soaring toward Hakone on a ballistic course.
The analysis from the command center concluded that the incoming projectiles were most likely to be cluster munitions that had not yet dispersed.
It wasn’t likely that Nerv Japan would be facing N
2
ground-penetrating bombs—not when their opponents’ goal was to seize their facilities and resources—but air-burst N
2
warheads remained a possibility, as did ultra-low-frequency explosives, assuming the headquarters’ earthquake-dampening structure was a known secret. And for now, that seemed a safe assumption.
The missiles’ trajectories weren’t necessarily fixed—even without dispersing the cluster munitions, the projectiles could drop mass to alter their flight. They may have had other means of changing course as well. Mid-flight attitude control was by no means new tech.
Each shot from Six’s cannon split the missiles into more and more fragments. Typically, the debris could have been excluded from the targeting data, but some of the unexploded warheads might have been hiding among it, so the number of targets gradually increased.
Each appeared as one of the increasingly numerous pinpoints on the cockpit’s display, accompanied by spectral analysis, size, and an automatically generated ID number.
Beneath the giant’s feet, all roads leading to Tokyo-3 had been closed down, and the city’s fortified sectors had been deployed.