LNCrawler

Chapter 42: Kaji, Misato, Quatre, and…

Neon Genesis Evangelion ANIMA — LNCrawler · All chapters

Chapter 42:
Kaji, Misato, Quatre, and…
R EI QUATRE WAS THE FIRST to be attacked. Armaros embedded his Q.R. Signum into her Eva and made her hear his voice. Under the centralized control of the primary Ayanami—Trois—Quatre had lived in a perpetual state of slumber, with no individuality of her own. Her individuality had awakened amid the terror of being shot while orbiting the Earth.
She’d been running away, desperately trying to escape the despair, confusion, and loneliness.
That was her whole existence now. After the voices of her other selves became intermittent, those negative emotions defined her, and her fretfulness had driven her every move.
She saw herself in Misato, suffering in agony after Seele hijacked Kaji’s mind. And so Quatre escaped the role she had been forced into and brought Misato all the way here to this island on the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.
And yet, she still had questions.
“Why don’t you escape your cage?” Quatre asked Misato.
“My cage?” Misato asked. “Never mind. You can explain what you mean later. Take Eva-0.0 away from here as quickly as you can. You don’t have any reason to fight the Euro Eva.”
The Euro-II was parting the clouds and heading this way. It likely already had them in its sights.
“Answer me,” Quatre said. “Why do you keep playing your part? Seeing Kaji like this, how can you act normally? You cared for him, didn’t you?”
With Quatre not taking any action, Misato saw no choice but to respond. “You call this normal?” She gestured to herself. “Look, I’m not going to answer you, because you’ll never understand unless you realize it for yourself. But what I’ll say is this. If you think it has anything to do with my age—my adulthood—you’d be wrong.” Then she asked Quatre a question of her own. “What did you want me to see here?”
Observing this exchange, Seele’s vessel chuckled.
“You’re wasting your time,” said the man who used to be Kaji. “Ikari Gendo’s puppet can only act out interpersonal relationships; there’s no actual understanding there.”
Apparently, Seele wasn’t going to treat Ayanami as a human being. Speaking as if he could see right through her, the Kaji-vessel continued. “The puppet that’s your primary—what did you designate her? Ayanami Rei Number Trois, was it? When the link that connected the puppets was disrupted, all the emotions the primary had never been able to express were distorted and brought to the surface. It’s painful to see.”
Eva-0.0’s warped armor suddenly creaked and groaned, and a giant hand scooped up Kaji. But the vessel kept on grinning.
“Let me guess,” he said, “you’re her fear.”
Apparently, he’d guessed the truth, and it had struck a nerve.
“Quatre! Stop!” Misato said.
Fear that she’d lost Gendo by rejecting him.
Fear that the future was lost after the failure of the Human Instrumentality Project.
Fear of the emptiness she felt when Shinji wouldn’t become the person she could lean upon.
The confusion and disorder stemming from those fears formed the core of Ayanami Rei Quatre’s being.
The former Kaji kept on stoking her anger. “As Akagi Ritsuko might say, pathetic.”
The Eva’s fist tightened, nearly crushing the Kaji-vessel. She raised him higher, closer to where she stood and level with the Q.R. Signum in Eva-0.0’s chest, so that she could glare at him.
It was that Q.R. Signum that had radically and traumatically changed her Eva. The black giant on the moon had shot the scale into her Eva, but the key had been the portion of Ayanami’s emotions divided into Quatre herself.
Showing no signs of pain at all, the Kaji-vessel scoffed and continued to goad Quatre. “I bet you don’t even know that you’re angry right now.” Then the man looked down and shouted, “Katsuragi Misato, I’ll show you an old trick!”
The Kaji-vessel reached out a hand, past Quatre’s ear and around her back.
“Thanks for the assist, puppet,” he said, placing his hand on the Q.R. Signum.
Eva Euro-II was still far away, but the military escort planes began peeling off and hiding on the far side of the mountains, as if to avoid the shock waves of an imminent attack.
“Quatre,” Misato said, “we can worry about everything else later. Just please, escape now !”
But if Quatre wasn’t going to leave, then Kensuke had another suggestion.
“The Euro-II’s within range of your gamma-ray laser, isn’t it?” he shouted up to her. “Take that Eva out!”
“No,” Misato said quickly. “You mustn’t do that. The pilot is your classmate, Horaki-san!”
Kensuke’s shoulders stiffened. “What?”
In truth, Kensuke was secretly responsible for Hikari’s family being taken by Germany. Even so, this came as surprising news. When Asuka left Germany, she’d brought all of the data on pilot and Eva compatibility to the Japanese side. Kensuke knew that Germany had restarted Evangelion development using their old, scrapped models, but they’d struggled to find appropriate child pilots. They’d even looked to other countries to find sample candidates. But Germany’s Eva was a symbol for Germany, not the world, and as such, Kensuke couldn’t imagine they’d let anyone not of German descent pilot the machine.
He smelled something burning deep in his nose, like he’d taken a punch, and his ears rang. “Damn it!” he said. “Damn it!”
The mutant Eva-0.0 picked up the disoriented Kensuke along with Misato.
The Kaji-vessel was no longer in its hand. Instead, he was standing behind Quatre with both arms around her.
“Fly, Ikari’s broken doll,” Kaji said.
“Yes,” she replied. “As you command.”
With a tremendous blast of heat and electricity, the ground exploded.
Eva Euro-II’s positron shell released a burst of electromagnetic and radiation waves, which carved a crater across the entire area. But by then, Eva-0.0 had already vanished, seemingly melting into the ground.
The sky and the ground spun.
Misato felt the sensation of being transposed through the Earth, and Unit Quatre reemerged at the bottom of a deep chasm. It was a strange place with nearly vertical cliffs and blood-red ground.
Looking out between the Eva’s fingers, Misato demanded, “What did you do to Quatre?!”
“A puppet is nothing more than a transmitter. Besides, I didn’t do anything. That was the black giant’s scale—what you call the Q.R. Signum. I told you we can access its abilities.”
“Kaji-kun—who, need I remind you, is inside you right now—would never refer to Quatre in that way.”
“Katsuragi Misato, why don’t you stop and enjoy the view?”
The vessel continued to speak in Kaji’s flippant manner, and it was only making Misato angrier.
But their eerie surroundings had caught her attention. All around them stood formations resembling giant limbs that had been dragged out from the cliff face. Strewn around the limbs were smaller, grotesque, viscera-like rocks half-buried in the surface.
“What is this?” Misato asked.
“Quite the repulsive scenery, isn’t it? Technically, everything you see is natural stone. But sometimes, after the great flood resets the world, if the thoughts and deeds of man run deep enough, an image from the past world carries on to the next in some shape, such as these formations.”
Still reeling from his first displacement through space, Kensuke looked through the gaps between the Eva’s fingers and said, “What is this?”
“Exactly what it looks like. This place is called the Valley of Human Bodies. This was the site of a bloody battle between hundreds of Evangelions. In the last world, that is. They killed each other, round-robin style, until only one Eva was left standing. They hoped that the scale of death would open the tree of life.”
Misato had seen that tree etched into the sky during the battle at HQ three years ago.
“The Human Instrumentality Project,” she said.
“Yes. In this case—well, actually, the earthquakes opened a crack in the rocks. You can see a little bit if you walk around over there.”
When they saw it, they were struck by a flash of light with no brightness and a roar with no sound.
Misato and Kensuke staggered back inside the Eva’s hand, covering their ears and looking away.
We’re being rejected. A message without words. What had she glimpsed as she covered her eyes? Something…black? Dark-colored glass, like obsidian.
Casually, the Kaji-vessel said, “That’s the Ark everyone’s been searching for. Welcome to the northwest shoulder of Africa. These are the Atlas Mountains, named after a giant.”
“What?” Kensuke said, struggling against the force that was trying to keep him away. “Let me…get…closer!”
“That’s a good idea,” said the Kaji-vessel. “You should learn for yourself.”
Kaji snapped his fingers.
Kensuke yelped as the mutant Eva-0.0 lowered its hand and opened a finger, dumping him to the ground while keeping Misato within.
Separated from the Eva, Kensuke began to writhe and moan on the ground.
“Aida-kun!” Misato shouted. Then she smelled a familiar, sweet scent.
When the first portal had opened outside Tokyo-3, the wind had carried this same scent from the other side.
She hadn’t noticed, until now, the fallen pillars of salt dotting the ground.
“No, Aida!” Misato shouted. “You have to come back.”
“This is the fruit of his labor,” the Kaji-vessel said.
Kensuke clutched at his chest with his left hand and reached out his right toward the object the Kaji-vessel had called the Ark.
“I’m impressed he still seeks it,” the Kaji-vessel remarked.
Kensuke’s right arm turned to salt and crumbled. His sleeve lost structure and went slack.
“Aida!” Misato shouted.
But his transformation stopped there. Kensuke fell to the ground and curled into a ball, moaning and convulsing.
“Oh, does he have the metal?” the vessel asked. “Is he clever or just lucky?”
Just then, the roar of Allegorica-wing graviton floaters rumbled through the canyon, and Eva Euro-II appeared from the red, viscera-like rock face.
“What?!” the Kaji-vessel exclaimed. “Were you dragged here because your Q.R. Signum resonated with our displacement, or have you figured out how to displace yourself? If it’s the latter, I’m going to be annoyed.”
Euro-II fired before it had even fully materialized from the rock, and the dazzling positron shell whizzed past the mutant Eva-0.0.
“You’ve picked a fine way to waste my time until the next Instrumentality Project,” the Kaji-vessel said.
The mutant Eva-0.0 dropped Misato to the ground, and she tumbled, stopping when she struck Kensuke’s cowering form.
From atop the Eva’s shoulder, the man who’d once been Kaji smiled down at her and shouted, “He’s carrying ancient metal. If you don’t want to die, stay near Aida Kensuke! The Ark will reject sentient beings, but the way it was initially set up, if there’s a male and female pair, well, you might say it won’t reject you as strongly. Anyway, good luck, Katsuragi Misato!”
Covered in dust, Misato realized with surprise just how close she’d leaned in to Kensuke’s face.
I didn’t mean to land here!
But she did feel like the repelling force was a little weaker here.
“Misato…san…”
Kensuke was still conscious.
The mutant Eva-0.0 stood, and its restraint armor creaked and groaned.
“Do you know why Evas are so gigantic?” the Kaji-vessel asked. “Because they’re part of a ritual. They’re made to gather the attention of people throughout the land. The more attention they gather, the better they can command the flock.”
“Don’t you ever shut up, Ryoji?” Misato snapped. She tried to help Kensuke to his feet, while behind them, the mutant Eva-0.0 began charging up the gamma-ray laser cannon on its right arm. It flapped the black wings it had stolen from the Angel Carrier and extended them to their full length.
Red dust scattered violently, and Unit Quatre ascended to confront Eva Euro-II.