Neon Genesis Evangelion ANIMA Vol. 3
Neon Genesis Evangelion ANIMA Vol. 3
Color Inserts
Title Page
Copyrights and Credits
Table of Contents Page
Part 1: Children
Chapter 1: The Value of Humankind: Alpha
Chapter 2: Eva-01, the Corrupt
Chapter 3: Entrusted
Chapter 4: A Distant Reunion
Chapter 5: A World Forgotten
Part 2: A Journey Without Maps
Chapter 6: The Value of Humankind: Beta
Chapter 7: Falsehood
Chapter 8: The Illusory Passage, Part One
Chapter 9: Recovery Team, Above the Deccan Plateau
Chapter 10: The Illusory Passage, Part Two
Chapter 11: Recovery Team, Above Mainland Southeast Asia
Chapter 12: The Illusory Passage, Terminus
Chapter 13: The Dormant Land
Chapter 14: A Chance Meeting at the End
Part 3: The Apple's Core
Chapter 15: Earth Simulation
Chapter 16: The Commander’s Return
Chapter 17: Understanding the Planet
Chapter 18: Transcontinental Flight
Chapter 19: The Continent of Perpetual Night
Chapter 20: White Guardian
Chapter 21: An Invitation to the Final Battle
Chapter 22: Shinji’s World
Part 4: Symmetrical Components
Chapter 23: At the Foot of the Great Tree
Chapter 24: The People Left Behind
Part 5: An Invitation North
Chapter 25: Retuning Humanity
Chapter 26: Off the Shore of Tokyo
Chapter 27: An Island Awakening
Part 6: The Invitees
Chapter 28: Lost on the Way Home
Chapter 29: The Gap Between
Chapter 30: The Battle on the Northern Island
Chapter 31: A Person in Spirit
Chapter 32: The Closing Mirrors
Chapter 33: Eyes Open
Part 7: Divergent Paths
Chapter 34: Resolution and Execution
Chapter 35: Their Own Reasons
Chapter 36: Stray Children
Chapter 37: Deadlocked
Chapter 38: Friend
Part 8: The Extent of the Self
Chapter 39: Giants, Humans, and Beasts
Chapter 40: The Wolves
Chapter 41: The Tower of Babel
Chapter 42: Stand-in Executioner
Chapter 43: Playing the Hand that’s Dealt
Chapter 44: From the Butterfly’s Dream
Part 9: Kaleidoscope Sky
Chapter 45: Inside the Pyramid
Chapter 46: Transferred Power
Chapter 47: Leaving Babel
Chapter 48: Zeruel
Chapter 49: Their Own Ways Home
Part 10: In the Bright Night
Chapter 50: Leaving for a Dream
Chapter 51: Home at Last
Chapter 52: The Deputy Commander’s Return
Chapter 53: Moonlit Gathering
Postscript
Omake: Concept Gallery
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Chapter 1:
The Value of Humankind: Alpha
M ISATO CHANGED into the uniform, put on the helmet, and walked
outside to where Eva-01 was squatting on the ground for emergency repairs.
As she circled the giant, she wrinkled her nose at the stench of scorched
metal, resin, oil…and decomposing flesh. Shinji’s Eva hadn’t undergone as
radical a mutation as Quatre’s Eva-0.0, but the foreign presence of the Q.R.
Signum had discolored portions of the giant’s armor and musculature.
The changes are only this minor, Misato thought, because Shinji is still
resisting.
The Eva’s EXW-038 Neyarl—an experimental shoulder-mounted
energy cannon—had been destroyed. The recovery team had anticipated that
the weapon wouldn’t survive its first use in the field, and the necessary
replacement parts were ready and waiting on the cargo plane.
But would handing all that over be wise?
“About Super Eva’s armament,” Misato said. “Keep it to swords…or
blunt weapons.”
“That’s all?” Toji was incredulous. “The repair crew says we can
restore the FCS as soon as we swap out the electronics. Once that’s finished,
ranged weapons should be working again, no problem.” Misato pursed her
lips and shook her head. Toji’s eyes widened as he realized she’d mentally
reclassified Super Eva as untrustworthy.
Super Eva hadn’t merely been rendered ineffective; the giant might
now be a net negative. The situation could be even worse than Fuyutsuki had
indicated.
To keep Super Eva—and Shinji—alive after the Lance of Longinus
ripped out their heart, Hikari had made the split-second, unilateral decision to
replace the device with a Q.R. Signum—an object carrying a direct link to the
apparent commander of their enemies.
And what had happened the other time a Q.R. Signum had been
implanted into a Nerv Japan Eva? The scale had caused Ayanami Quatre’s
Eva-0.0 to go haywire in orbit—disrupting Quatre’s psyche, giving her self-
awareness, and even mutating her Eva’s physical form. Quatre had attacked
her allies and gone fugitive. She and her Eva had, in effect, joined the enemy.
For now, Shinji and Super Eva remained of sound mind, but there was
<<W HOA!>>
Shinji’s cry blared from his Eva’s external speaker.
Startled by this exclamation, the crew looked skyward. Toji moved
closer to the mobile command center’s one-way mirror—which, from the
outside, was indistinguishable from the other armored panels—for a better
look.
The Asuka-like red giant pulled the entry plug out of its own back,
opened the hatch, and gave it a good shake.
“What?” Toji sputtered. “Wait! Don’t do that!”
To the watchers’ relief, Asuka didn’t suddenly come plummeting out
of her cockpit. But it wasn’t all good news.
As the giant swung the plug, the open hatch offered a brief glimpse of
the empty seat within.
Shinji sighed. “I thought that might be the case.”
Asuka had lost her physical form and had merged with her Eva. She
now existed as part of the red giant.
Those who knew Asuka were devastated, but the giant just kept
shaking the plug. Finally, she seemed to give up, and her shoulders slumped.
She held the plug out to Super Eva and went still.
“What?” Shinji asked. She seemed to be waiting for his reaction.
Toji shouted up to him. <<Shinji!>>
The young deputy commander had removed his communications
headset and was waving it at Shinji. There was a camera attached.
Shinji hopped onto his parked Eva’s outstretched hand, and Asuka-Eva
withdrew the plug. As the red giant’s arm rose, her muscle fibers made a loud
scraping noise. Her hand pushed through what Shinji supposed was her hair,
and she reinserted the plug. Nothing in her actions indicated whether or not
she was aware that she’d left the book for Shinji.
Her attention turned to the European Eva, Heurtebise, kneeling a fair
distance away. She began to walk toward it.
“Huh? What?” Shinji stammered. “Asuka, stop! There are people on
the ground that way! You’re going to step on them!”
The red giant paused and looked over her shoulder at him. Then she
resumed walking, following the path cleared by a large, camouflaged
transport vehicle that had just passed by her feet. For the time being, at least,
it seemed she’d decided to avoid trampling anyone. As she approached the
other Eva, her body language so strongly evoked that of an excited child
finding a turtle at the edge of the water, that Shinji blurted, “Asuka, don’t
poke that Eva! You’ll surprise it!”
What am I saying? Shinji thought. And why is she acting like a child?
But he could only guess at what was going through her mind. She still
hadn’t spoken a single word.
A TECHNICIAN ARRIVED with a new headset to replace the one Toji had
given to Shinji.
“Commanding Officer Suzuhara,” she said, “I’ve reset the system to
your communications credentials. You have a transmission from Lieutenant
Colonel Clausewitz, the direct commission officer with the Euro Sixth Rapid
Response Unit under Hartmann’s command.”
“I was waiting for this,” Toji said cheerfully, but then he hung his
head. “Wait, how are we supposed to understand each other?”
The technician was ready with a short cable, which she stretched out
between her hands. “Your tablet can auto-translate. Don’t worry, we’ll also
be monitoring your conversation from the command center to catch any
translation errors in the software.”
“You’ve thought of everything. Thanks.”
Watching from a distance, Misato admired how the organization had
adapted to Toji’s leadership style.
Clausewitz… Misato thought. The head of Nerv Germany.
“Misato-san—I mean, Commander Katsuragi,” Toji said, catching
himself. “I can’t return command to you until we get back to HQ.”
“Because I’m not supposed to be here. I understand.”
“And, er…” Toji cleared his throat awkwardly. “Could you do me a
favor?”
Again, Misato understood. She knew why he’d been so determined to
see this mission through himself.
“You have a chance to meet her?” she asked.
Toji stopped fidgeting and stood up straight. “Yes, but on one
condition. I must speak with her alone.”
“Then go. I’ll hold down the fort.”
“Thank you.”
Toji hopped out of the mobile command center and scrambled down
the red rocky slope.
“Go to her,” Misato said cheerfully as she watched through the
window.
At the bottom of the slope, the security team’s SUV was ready and
Nerv Japan’s Acting Deputy Commander Suzuhara Toji had put in the
request to Euro-II’s control team for a face-to-face meeting with their Eva’s
pilot. He figured that if they refused, he’d be no worse off than he already
was. But they’d said yes.
Euro-II’s unit seemed to hold a special place within the European
forces. They didn’t mix with the other soldiers and instead had claimed a
section of the red mountains for themselves. Though the European military
was primarily composed of units recruited from member nations on a
provisional basis, the Sixth Rapid Response Unit was a standing force
reporting directly to the European Joint Forces Command. Though their
numbers were small, they held nearly absolute authority over the army, navy,
and air force—since their sole purpose was to deploy Heurtebise into battle at
a moment’s notice.
Toji’s SUV was waved past the perimeter without being asked to stop,
but he knew he was being subjected to any number of electronic scans.
Because this was a personal meeting, no grand reception awaited him. The
SUV proceeded straight to the feet of the kneeling white giant.
As Toji got out of the car, he immediately noticed the Eva’s positron
rifle, currently undergoing maintenance. This was a different model from the
Japanese ones. The particle-generating cyclotron wasn’t a torus. Instead, it
began in a cone—much like Eva-00 Type-F’s long rifle, the Angel’s
Backbone—before continuing into the accelerator’s long barrel, which
curved back on itself in a U-shape. This form, combined with the golden
color of the weapon’s electromagnetic-field-resistant coating, resulted in an
The Akashima was loaded into one of the two giant-transport cargo
planes, while the other, which would have transported Crimson A1, had no
cargo. Both ignited their rocket boosters and lifted off, leaving tremendous
smoke plumes in their wake as they departed the continent that had been the
birthplace of humankind.
As Crimson A1 pulled Super Eva up and over the Valley of Human
Bodies, the anomalous aurora painted eerie, rainbow-colored trails across the
northern sky. Just then, a massive earthquake struck the mountain range
below. The ground turned pale and hazy, as if the Earth had coughed, but
Shinji was too focused on his perilous flight to notice what happened next.
Everything they’d seen and touched down there crumbled into dust.
T O RECOVER SUPER EVA, Nerv Japan had sent two UN cargo planes—
large enough to transport one Evangelion each—and six additional aircraft.
But the red Asuka-Eva was pulling Super Eva across the sky, leaving one
Eva transport empty. It followed the pair of giants, its searchlights
illuminating them. Their only other escort was a single N2 Flanker, which had
peeled off from the retinue.
The Flanker was supposed to be Toji’s transport, but right now, the
exhausted leader was sleeping in the empty cargo plane, on the floor of the
passageway outside the CIC, while the unmanned, heavily modified Flanker
accompanied the slower, larger craft.
Even with Super Eva’s meager assistance, Asuka-Eva was too heavily
burdened to reach the cruising speed of the jet-powered transport planes. The
other aircraft, fully loaded with equipment and staff, had no choice but to fly
ahead. Otherwise, they risked running out of fuel. Shinji and the other
stragglers were still flying eastward over the Indian subcontinent as night fell.
Shinji felt a sharp knot in his chest. He grunted in pain and clutched the
front of his plugsuit.
Intuitively, he knew why. The Q.R. Signum implanted in his other
chest—Super Eva’s chest—had responded to Ayanami’s call. The girl’s
words were an incantation directed at Armaros’ black scale, the source of
Super Eva’s power.
“If Ikari-kun won’t set this world free, and if I can’t escape…then at
least take us to the edge of the Earth!”
Shinji was clutching his chest so tightly his fingers had nearly dug
between his ribs. “You’re…Quatre?!” he realized. “But how?”
Super Eva continued to fall toward the Earth—one arm extended, the
other trailing limply behind.
Super Eva passed through the tunnel and was spat out into the air.
Shinji was fully expecting to crash into the ground, back first. He’d
lowered his head and tensed his back muscles to brace himself, but no impact
came. Instead, his back was skyward now, and he’d been expelled on an
upward trajectory.
Apparently, a traveler left the tunnel with the same velocity they’d
entered.
He looked down and saw an expansive white forest of dead trees,
perhaps done in by pests or pestilence.
Super Eva’s mighty bulk reached nearly five hundred meters before
descending again, and the receding landscape came rushing toward them.
Super Eva covered his face with both arms, and Shinji felt the snapping
of dried-out tree limbs. In the last moment before the crash, he was once
again swallowed into the ground and found himself briefly back in the tunnel
before appearing near a glacier-covered mountain. He fell into a valley and
leaped across space again.
Super Eva appeared near plateaus and plains, leaping from one place to
the next without rhyme or reason.
“Where is this taking us?” Shinji cried out.
Super Eva was tossed out onto a peninsula buried under sea waters
surging from a recent earthquake, or maybe a tsunami. A caldera rose, island-
T HE CARGO PLANE entered a holding pattern over the site where Super
Eva had disappeared.
The pilots switched the N2 reactors to standby and directed the planes’
complex sensors below, but Misato knew they would find nothing.
Q.R. Signum dislocation left no traces detectable by current methods.
As the retinue debated what to do next, the red giant, Crimson A1—
who’d been pacing the ground where Super Eva had vanished—suddenly
leaped into the sky and resumed her previous route.
“It looks like Asuka has realized that Shinji and Unit One are gone,”
Misato said, “and that they’re not coming back.”
She didn’t have concrete proof, but no one offered a counterargument.
“Let’s go, too.”
There was nothing left to be done here.
Word had spread among the crew that communications with Tokyo-3
had been lost, and everyone was anxious to get back. Now that Asuka-Eva
was no longer saddled with a flight partner, she took off at incredible speed.
Likewise, the cargo plane had no further reason to fly slowly. Its massive
array of half-lowered flaps rose back in line with the wings, and it picked up
altitude and speed.
The next thing Shinji knew, the overbearing, tangled arterial network
of root-like tunnels was behind them. He sensed that they were now in a
single, one-way tunnel.
And that tunnel was narrowing.
Shinji ejected the plug. Just as he was about to open the hatch, an alarm
sounded. It was the environmental sensor.
“A decompression sickness warning? Why would that be an issue?”
The display indicated low air pressure outside—on par with the
atmosphere atop a tall mountain.
A sudden change in pressure could be dangerous, particularly after
time spent in the LCL. Then the AI announced another hazard—high
radiation—and a recommendation to avoid prolonged exposure. At first,
Shinji thought he might have been transported to a former nuclear test site, a
nuclear waste repository, or something along those lines, but according to the
computer, the radiation didn’t match a human-made source. Apparently,
these were cosmic rays from above.
Without exiting, Shinji opened the hatch, and bright sunlight
illuminated the chamber—but the air was cold. The atmospheric pressure was
low, the sky a bluish black. Are we on a high-altitude plateau, maybe?
Shinji didn’t see the swollen moon anywhere, but he didn’t have a full
view of the sky, nor did he know what direction he faced.
But something else was odd.
“The Longinus Ring is gone.”
Shinji groaned. “Why did this happen?” To Quatre, he said, “So, we’re
here. Somewhere far away, just like you wanted. Are you satisfied?”
“Satisfied?” Quatre asked. “I don’t know what that feels like. When the
one of me was split into four, I was afraid. I knew fear. Commander Ikari was
gone. You didn’t choose me. Though I didn’t realize that until I learned how
to be afraid.”
She’d been sitting in the pilot’s chair—not by choice but simply
because that’s where Shinji had put her—but the cold air had begun to freeze
her wet clothes, and she curled forward, shivering.
Super Eva walked across dry land. There was nothing green. The earth
rose and fell in monotonous brown waves across the seemingly endless
plateau. He had no GPS—the satellites had long since scattered, due to the
Earth’s weakening gravitational pull. The topography didn’t match anything
in his geological database, and nobody replied to his transmissions. Shinji
began to take measurements of the sun’s angle to try and get even a rough
approximation of his location. He realized something was off.
Even after several hours, the shining sun hadn’t moved from its zenith.
The planet wasn’t rotating.
O NCE SHINJI BEGAN to suspect something was wrong with this place,
the two-tone world of desert hills and empty sky began to resemble a
surrealist painting created by an unbalanced mind.
Nothing moved. That, in and of itself, felt wrong. At the very least, the
sun should have been shifting overhead.
Shinji didn’t know what kind of danger to expect, and Super Eva
proceeded with caution.
After some time, Super Eva’s survey module broke the silence with an
alarm—a series of short beeps that Shinji hadn’t heard before.
Or maybe he had.
“Wait…I think I heard this alarm during the connection tests for the
swords I got in North Africa.”
The two blades were a new design, with experimental sensors dangling
from each end—one on the pommel and another at the end of the sheath,
making four in total. He’d only received a brief overview of the devices, but
each sensor contained an array of quantum wave mirrors repurposed for
detection.
When the alarm sounded, Super Eva’s automap opened to show a
twenty-kilometer range around his current location. Because he didn’t have
any matching topographical data, the map had only been filled with his direct
visual observations. Everything beyond the range of sight remained blank,
and it was in that blank space that an icon blinked.
“Predicted arrival?” Shinji wondered aloud. “What’s that?”
Who had heard Super Eva’s distress signal, and how were they
arriving?
Apprehensive, Shinji switched off the signal. At first, the arrival icon
bounced around within a three-kilometer-wide area, but it soon began to
focus on a single point.
The alarm gave one last, long tone, and the icon stopped flashing. It
turned solid red, indicating an enemy.
Beside the marker, a label appeared: MUTANT EVA-0.0
(CONFIDENCE 62%).
Without hesitating, Shinji refilled the plug with LCL, and then, on the
map display, he overlaid the shortest route to his target that still provided
cover and started walking.
I wonder if I can—he focused his thoughts on the Vertex wings—jump!
He tried to fly low along the ground.
“Whoa,” he said. as Super Eva listed forward. The giant’s toes scraped
along the ground and kicked up puffs of sand. It could hardly be called
flying, but he was moving much faster than he could have by running.
His chest tingled with heat. The closer the unstable Q.R. Signum was
to the ground, the more stable it was—relatively speaking, at least.
“I must have had a good teacher,” he said, thinking of Asuka-Eva
pulling him along.
The red giant had flown freely, innocently.
At first, Shinji had assumed she’d regressed into some kind of early
childhood mental state. But as he’d watched her, he’d realized that wasn’t the
case. She was simply free to be who she was on the inside.
Asuka was easily fascinated and easily surprised, but she hated
A figure stood in front of the Q.R. Signum jutting out from the Eva-
0.0’s chest armor. Kaji’s black coat hung from his shoulders, flapping in the
wind.
When he spoke, his voice came over the hydrospeaker.
<<Gendo’s puppet… I thought you were broken. And who is that with
you? Gendo’s son? How did you know we were here?>>
Seele had hijacked Kaji’s mind, but the man still spoke with Kaji’s dry,
teasing tone. It might have been endearing once, but now it served as a
painful reminder to anyone who’d known him.
Hearing what had happened to Kaji still hadn’t prepared Shinji for the
reality. Shaken, he said, “Kaji?!”
Staying behind the mountain, Super Eva circled around to the Kaji-
vessel’s front, and Shinji saw another person standing inside Kaji’s open
coat. She wore the same black mini-dress that Quatre had previously taken
from Trois.
“Ayanami?” Shinji asked. “Trois, is that really you?”
She stirred faintly but kept on staring straight ahead.
Holding her from behind, Kaji smirked. <<Is this where I say,
“Haven’t you heard, Shinji-kun?”>>
“Now that you’re our enemy, the way you talk is really starting to piss
me off,” Shinji retorted.
But inside, he was distraught. Why was Trois here…and with the
enemy?
Seele had manipulated Quatre and taken control of her mutant Eva-0.0,
but once she went into a near-catatonic state in the Valley of Human Bodies,
the Eva had malfunctioned and crashed.
Meanwhile, Ayanami Rei Trois had separated from Misato and the
others to strike out on her own, bereft of any kind of home. The Kaji-vessel
had found and captured her. She remained a fully functional Evangelion
control device, and that was all he needed, so he’d discarded her broken
But Shinji’s sentence ended there. The valley’s edge led to…nothing.
The land abruptly terminated at a dark blue sky that faded into
darkness below.
What is this place? Shinji thought. Can’t anything make sense?
In exasperation, Shinji called out to the man who was trying to kill
him. “The sun is stopped. The ground is missing. Kaji-san, can you tell me
what the hell is going on here?! The Lance of Longinus isn’t in orbit, and the
bloated moon is gone!”
<<There’s no moon here at all,>> Kaji replied. Electromagnetic
interference from the ionized air caused the signal to crackle and made his
overly casual tone somehow even more grating than before. <<The moon that
was here was carried off long, long ago on a collision course with Earth, to
provide the material and energy to form your moon.>>
Shinji couldn’t process what he was hearing. His mind seized up as he
tried to work it out.
“Huh?” he blurted in confusion. “Where are we? Where on Earth is
this place—”
The Kaji-vessel continued, not waiting for Shinji to catch up. <<As I
understand it, the natural satellite didn’t have enough mass on its own. But
since this place wasn’t needed once the test was over, the material to make up
the difference was torn off from this land. That’s why it looks like it does.
And without any moon, this place eventually stopped rotating. The side we’re
on now permanently faces the sun. Does that answer your questions? Are we
Much like Super Eva’s heart had been stolen from his chest, the moon
had been stolen from this unfamiliar planet.
According to prevailing scientific consensus, the Earth’s moon had
been formed from the debris of a collision with a Mars-sized body. Though
the moon had been Earth’s companion through the ages, humanity was only
recently beginning to understand the satellite’s vital role in regulating Earth’s
celestial movement and ecology. In that sense, the moon was like a
metronome…or even a heart.
Was the former satellite of this strange planet the object that had
slammed into Earth and created the moon?
Regardless, this planet had lost its beating heart and grown still. Then
Shinji had arrived, his heart stolen as well.
Now everyone else had left, and the place was quiet once more.
Shinji brought Super Eva over to the edge of the land he’d seen from
above. The deep blue sky darkened into a rich navy-black hue at the horizon
and continued down, below the edge of the world, into a pure black void
dotted with stars.
If the Earth had been flat, as was once believed, the edge of the world
would have looked just like this. It was an overhang, and Shinji couldn’t see
the underside. But far below, a sphere of clouds had gathered as if
surrounding something. Super Eva’s feet knocked a few rocks over the side,
and they tumbled down toward the clouds.
When Shinji’s thoughts calmed, he realized something didn’t add up.
“Wait a minute,” he said. If Seele wanted to leave us here to die on this
forsaken planet… “Why did he bother telling us?”
T HE BASE OF THE IZU PENINSULA had sunk some four hundred meters
and was now swallowed by the sea.
The Hakone Caldera, with Nerv Japan cradled inside, became an island
stranded in the middle of this newly formed strait. When the great sinking
happened, the ground turned fifteen degrees counter-clockwise, and anything
aligned to the cardinal directions became skewed. Miraculously, the ground
within the caldera sank straight down rather than tilting to one side or
the other.
After two agonizing days in Hamamatsu trying to secure a VTOL,
Misato and the others had finally arrived home. Elated to see that Maya was
all right, Misato remarked, “At least the ground didn’t tip over. That was
some good luck.”
“Good luck?” Maya shook her head. “You must be joking. The ground
within the caldera titled point four degrees to the east. That’s a huge deal!
I’ve been working this whole time to re-level the particle accelerator’s
framework. Do you want to ask me how many doors won’t open because
they’re misaligned?”
“Take care of what you can,” Misato said with a placating smile. “I’ll
straighten out the supply situation.”
After the initial jolt, the sinking had been smooth. There had still been
many injuries, and the dead numbered in the double digits, but the greatest
difficulty Nerv Japan faced was the loss of the roadways and railways.
Hakone had no airports, and of course no seaport. The most pressing
concern was securing new supply routes for the immense volume of materials
needed to rebuild.
Hyuga came rushing into the command center, wearing a hard hat and
a cheerful smile. “Welcome back!”
Fuyutsuki was the next to arrive on the middle deck. “You’re back.”
Misato bowed her head. “Deputy Commander Fuyutsuki. Thank you
for stepping in.” She turned to Hyuga. “I’m glad you’re all right, too. So, can
you tell me what that thing in the lake is?”
“Ah. I take it you’ve seen it, then.”
S UPER EVA FLEW LOW along the clifftop’s edge, keeping the drop-off to
his right, until he came upon his own footprints at the place he’d started. The
loop took two and a half days. Apparently, this was the full extent of this
world.
Shinji thought back to a pre-medieval world map he’d seen in a history
textbook. “I think the people living before the Age of Discovery had more
reasonable ideas about the workings of the universe than this.”
Shinji seemed to be standing atop a flat expanse of arid land the size of
a continent, about five thousand kilometers across at its widest.
“I wonder if there’s any way down,” he muttered.
He couldn’t help but wonder what was under the continent’s overhang,
several thousand kilometers below.
“I feel like I can smell water. Can you?”
Apparently, Quatre thought the remark too illogical to be worth a
reply.
But at least she seemed to be cooperating for the time being. Without
her help, Shinji wouldn’t have been able to fully utilize the Q.R. Signum, and
he wouldn’t have been able to get the lay of the land without her powering
Super Eva’s flight.
They only had two days’ worth of emergency food and water left, give
or take. But Shinji was hoping Rei Quatre might be more amenable to
making the leap back home once her survival was at stake.
Super Eva once again looked over the impossible cliffside. Far, far
below was the unidentifiable mass obscured by clouds.
The parasitic Q.R. Signum had increased Super Eva’s functions, and
the Eva had begun to automatically repair its injuries. Shinji realized he could
once again see with the giant’s left eye. With fully restored vision, he
squinted down. Beyond the clouds and the dark mass, he saw the faint,
jagged, rose-colored outline of something else.
He realized that their floating continent, the dark mass below it, and the
distant red outline were all lined up on the same axis. He suddenly
remembered that Kaji had called this place the “Apple’s Core.”
A man was seated on the bench seat in front of Shinji. The man kept
his head down, but his shoulders seemed familiar.
Then the train was gone. With one foot forward, Shinji was poised to
run down the rusted tracks, while Ayanami Quatre, in orange coveralls,
pulled on his hand from behind, holding him in place. They were in the forest
of eternal dusk.
They came upon a giant tree towering far above the surrounding forest.
It stood nearly five times the size of their Eva.
The tree had thousands upon thousands of branches—at least, that’s
how Shinji thought of the appendages—which glowed as if from countless
hanging lanterns. Shinji narrowed his eyes, attuned his senses to wavelengths
outside the visual spectrum, and observed that the light wasn’t being
C RIMSON A1, the Asuka/Eva synthesis, left the city, where recovery
operations were underway, to visit Shinji’s watermelon patch, as had become
her habit. She bounded across the countryside, landing beside the field.
She sat on the northern side, so as not to block the sunlight, and noticed
three small, round dots weaving through the watermelons. Rei Six had come
to water the plants, and the three Type-N robots had accompanied her, along
with the two golden retrievers, Azuchi and Momo. But Asuka/Eva must have
thought the robots were harmful pests. She plucked one from the ground and
flicked it away with a loud pwing that reverberated through the caldera. And
just like that, with a little help from Earth’s decreased escape velocity, the
Type-N robot began its journey through space.
“Noooo!” Six shouted as she ran up to Asuka/Eva’s feet. She waved
her arms furiously while the dogs barked in objection. And so, the other two
robots, currently running in fear, were spared the same fate.
The straightest section of the Hakone Caldera’s outer ridge lay along
its southern rim, from Mount Daikan to Mount Shirogane. Before the caldera
had been leased to the UN, the area was known for its picturesque driving
routes.
But now, Six was ruthlessly blasting apart those peaks with Eva-00
Type-F’s rifle, Angel’s Backbone.
After her A.T. Field-accelerated baryon cannon flattened the land,
Nerv engineers compacted the ground with a monomolecular vibrating
ribbon, and where that wasn’t sufficient, they used soil-hardening agents to
reshape the sediment. This feat of rapid construction remade the ridgeline
into a four-thousand-meter-long runway for what was provisionally being
called the Daikan Airport.
But the new airport wasn’t finished in time for Commander Katsuragi
Misato’s return from the United Nations conference. Instead, her heavy
VTOL craft landed at the Nerv HQ heliport, which was crowded with
containers and pallets of supplies.
Deputy Commander Suzuhara Toji met her as she deplaned.
“Welcome back, Commander,” he said. “The Yamato will be coming
The Lance of Longinus could pierce anything and had been the master
key to unlocking the Human Instrumentality Project.
“That’s the way,” the Kaji-vessel said. “Keep pulling!”
The lance’s long shaft kept sliding out of the imaginary dimensional
space.
“Do you hear me, black giant? You’re just an oversized cog with no
sense of time, mindless of any element missing from the original plan, no
matter how useful. Do you have any idea how much work we put into making
this duplicate?”
A shrill sound shook the air. It was Leliel’s death cry.
“We’re done here.”
Ayanami Rei Trois let out a small gasp, her face registering surprise.
As Leliel shrieked, from inside the Angel appeared a hand, clenched
around the lance, then a strong-looking arm, and a shoulder.
“Puppet!” Kaji shouted. “Stop!”
He’d been taken completely by surprise. He quickly realized what was
happening and moved to stop it, but he was too late.
“Gendo’s son!”
Blood exploded from Leliel, and out came a curved horn, then a visor
Deep in the fungal forest on the nightside of the Apple’s Core, Super
Eva stood before two hostile giants with his twin swords drawn.
One was the mutant Eva-0.0, formerly Quatre’s, now controlled by the
Kaji-vessel and his hostage, Trois. The other was an Angel Carrier Type-3.
The carrier’s shoulder was injured, and its larva, Leliel, was dead.
But the white giant was still moving.
“The carrier is down one Q.R. Signum,” Shinji said. “Did Kaji-san do
that? The carrier was undamaged when Leliel swallowed us up.”
“Well,” Quatre responded, “whatever happened between them while
we were inside, that carrier is obeying Seele now.”
“You can tell?”
“Seele can control Q.R. Signum scales by touch, and through the scale,
he can influence the pilot. That was how he hijacked my Eva in Cyprus.”
The Kaji-vessel called out. <<Do you really think you managed to fool
me? You sent the lance into an orbit that will bring it back down to Earth in a
matter of months.>>
Behind Shinji in the entry plug, Quatre whispered. “He saw right
through us… But at least he can’t do anything about it.”
Shinji remained silent, watching through a zoomed-in view on the
holographic display. The Kaji-vessel still held Trois in one arm. He raised his
other hand and placed his thumb and middle finger against her carotid artery.
<<You know what happens next,>> he said. <<I’ll kill this puppet.>>
Shinji shot upright, but Quatre placed a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t
panic.”
She opened the comms channel so that her next words would be
transmitted.
“He can’t do that, Shinji. Seele can access the Q.R. Signum and
nothing more. He can’t control that Eva without a compatible pilot, let alone
Shinji looked at his swords through the holographic display. “Are they
too dull?”
A sub-window opened, and Maya’s voice spoke through the seat’s
speakers.
<<You’ve drawn both swords, Shinji-kun.>>
“Maya-san?!”
<<This is a recording,>> Maya said from the sub-window. <<I don’t
have time to prepare a field manual for you, but I can tell you the basics. If
the swords are working, that’s great. But if they don’t work, put them back in
their sheaths right away, and the system will deal with it.>>
That was too brief.
With nothing else to do but to trust Maya’s instructions, Shinji returned
both swords to his shoulder pylons.
“What now?” Quatre asked.
Shinji’s eyes went wide as he realized Super Eva was now weaponless.
<<Oh, but do be careful,>> Maya’s voice added. <<The swords will
need 201 seconds to retune.>>
“Whaaaat?!”
This was no time to go unarmed for well over three minutes.
Super Eva grasped the swords’ hilts, but the sheaths had locked the
weapons firmly inside; they wouldn’t budge. Another new window opened
on the display, this time showing a three-dimensional cube along with a too-
The Kaji-vessel had come to this planet to find the duplicate Lance of
Longinus, but Shinji had hurled it into space.
The weapon was traveling too fast to pursue directly, and the tunnel
network only connected points on land. The Kaji-vessel had no way to
recover the lance now.
But he could still try to force Shinji to give up the trajectory data.
So why isn’t he moving?
“Be careful,” Quatre said. “Eva-0.0 is repairing the end of the laser
cannon where you cut the barrel off…so that it can be fired at that length.”
The gamma-ray laser cannon—when working at full power—was the
strongest weapon available to any Eva.
So that’s why he’s leaving the fight to the Angel Carrier.
Shinji pretended not to have noticed. “Two great trees, you say?
Where’s the other one?”
<<Didn’t you see it in the center of the sunside continent? That one has
mostly weathered away. It may once have been the Tree of Knowledge, but it
died and toppled a long, long time ago. All that’s left is a flat patch of ground
where the stump used to be.>>
The Tree of Knowledge, the fruit of knowledge…the forbidden fruit?
I’d eat just about anything that got me expelled from this paradise.
Both sides were trying to buy time.
“Let’s see if I can even the score before you jump back in the fight,”
Shinji said to himself.
By observing the lights of the forest, Super Eva had dodged several of
the Angel Carrier’s invisible fists, but eventually, it read Shinji’s movements
and aimed an attack directly at the spot where he was about to land.
Below him, the ground exploded, and a giant sheet of rock flew toward
Super Eva. Even with the prog knife running on high power, the rock looked
too large to smash. He hadn’t yet been able to control the Q.R. Signum’s
power shield as well as his A.T. Field, but at the last moment, he focused the
shield’s power into the knife, and—
KA-CRACK!
The rock shattered into tiny fragments. Shinji had discovered how to
The earth swelled as the swords’ tremendous heat dumped into it, and
the forest’s underground moisture instantly vaporized. Steam exploded
upward, filling the air with white mist.
Despite losing sight of Super Eva, the Angel Carrier held its staff aloft
and jumped into the dense cloud in search of its quarry.
“Gendo’s son…what did you do?” Kaji muttered.
A wrenching sound echoed from the steam, then the carrier’s staff flew
out of the cloud and impaled itself in the ground in front of the mutant Eva-
0.0.
The carrier’s arm was still holding on to the shaft.
“Did he cut through the shield?” Kaji wondered aloud.
The Angel Carrier was ejected from the steam cloud and crashed into
the trees. As it rolled, the giant raised its blood-soaked stump and threw one
invisible fist after another into the mist.
Super Eva came leaping out from the cloud, breaking through the outer
wall and leaving a black trail in its wake. The Eva held both swords crossed
and focused the strongest part of his shield at the point where the blades
The mutant Eva-0.0 grabbed the Angel Carrier’s staff from the ground
and held the weapon in front of its body. But Super Eva’s sword, Basara,
smashed into the staff with a shower of sparks, scraping all the way down its
length and into the mutant’s A.T. Field.
The Field Penetrator was attuned to the Angel Carrier’s power shield,
not the mutant Eva’s field, and couldn’t slice through easily. But the field still
crackled and splintered as the weapon forced its way through with murderous
fury. The blade’s tip inched inexorably toward the Q.R. Signum in the mutant
Eva’s chest.
The Kaji-vessel stood on a platform in front of the Q.R. Signum,
holding Trois.
Shinji cried out through gritted teeth as he forced the blade to stop at
the last possible moment.
Shinji breathed heavily, and the sword’s tip trembled—centimeters
from Rei Trois’ face.
“Fire!” the Kaji-vessel ordered from behind Trois’ back. The girl
shuddered, and the mutant Eva’s arm muscles groaned. The shortened
gamma-ray laser cannon swung toward Super Eva and fired.
At the exact same moment, Super Eva slammed his right shoulder into
the mutant Eva-0.0, swinging Kesara upward. The severed cannon-arm sailed
The LCL inside Super Eva’s plug had stopped flowing. After a
moment of confusion, Shinji realized that the entry plug was sliding out from
Super Eva’s back. He turned to see Quatre opening the hatch.
Before he could ask what she was doing, she pressed her lips to his.
The roar of the ejecting LCL faded into momentary silence.
“You can see me as part of Ayanami, too,” Quatre said.
“What are you doing, Quatre?!” Shinji sputtered.
She slipped out from the seat and stood. She was holding her arm, her
face contorted in pain.
“I’m synchronized with Trois right now,” she explained. “I told me—I
mean her—the way back home. And the duplicate lance’s trajectory.”
“What are you saying?”
The mutant Eva-0.0 had gone still, leaning against Super Eva.
Even though the two Evas were touching, they were still dizzyingly
high off the ground. Yet Quatre nimbly jumped across to the titled platform.
She approached Trois and said, “The me who unifies, the one in
control—close off my access to memories of the duplicate lance. Lock away
my knowledge of the lance’s trajectory.”
“What do you think you’re doing, broken puppet?” the Kaji-vessel
said, clinging to the edge of the platform.
Quatre was still wearing Shinji’s plugsuit. Using the built-in controls,
she instructed the medical telemetry unit to inject a sedative into her arm so
that she could take on the full amount of the feedback pain.
Then, to Kaji, she casually said, “Seele, I’m going with you. We could
kill you right now, but I have some acquaintances who don’t want your
vessel to die.”
“Trois!” Shinji called out from the hatch. “Are you all right?”
She didn’t respond. She was curled up on Eva’s hand with her arms
around her own shoulders, staring at the patch of ground where the mutant
Eva-0.0 had disappeared.
Worried, Shinji climbed down to her.
“Let’s go home, Ayanami.” He knelt and added, “Trois?”
That’s when he saw something he’d never expected to see.
Her blank expression had shattered. She was bawling.
Maya entered the cage where the engineering team was giving Eva-00
Type-F’s Allegorica system its final adjustments. The work was part of Nerv
Japan’s preparation for their role in the counteroffensive, but developing the
system was in their best interests either way. Nerv HQ currently had no other
Eva at their disposal.
The Type-F configuration turned part of the Eva’s body structure into a
specialized weapons platform. Notably, the Eva was missing one leg, which
restricted its movement. The Allegoric Wings would compensate for this.
Asuka/Eva had come home with nothing but a single blue book.
Shinji had given Asuka the book, a collection of marine life
photographs, to help her pass the time on her reconnaissance-in-force mission
to the moon. During the synthesis between Asuka and her Eva, the book
alone had retained its original shape, although a great volume of data had
been written into its pages.
In the command center, Maya presented a report on her team’s analysis
of the book, with the main screen providing visual aid.
“Of course,” the chief scientist was saying, “Asuka didn’t write this
data by hand. The book had dissolved in the chaotic stream of information
and was reconstructed, incorporating the data into its pages. Now, the
contents of that data were written in what can only be called a new language,
created by Asuka’s subconscious. The language itself changes as it goes
along, which makes the translation quite difficult.”
Of everything Misato, Fuyutsuki, and Toji had learned from Asuka’s
journey—including that the moon’s expansion was due to Armaros taking
matter from deep within the Earth and depositing it on the moon—the book
was the part they had the most trouble understanding.
“The data includes, in a compressed form, the things Asuka witnessed
at her final destination at the far side of the moon,” Maya explained.
The picture on the main screen switched to a 3D reconstruction of
Asuka’s memories and Eva-02’s sensor data. A massive, blue structure made
of many cubes was half-buried in the lunar surface.
Misato had seen the same thing in Africa.
“The Ark?” she asked.
“What?!” Toji gasped. “That’s the Ark?”
Beads of light collected on the structure’s surface, then slid down to
the lunar soil and took the shape of a small Angel. A mass of Angel Carriers’
arms sprouted from the ground, grasping for it.
“What, is that the enemy’s main base?” Misato asked.
Ibuki Maya had given herself two assignments—to recreate the guided
cannon, Neyarl, which had performed beyond expectations and destroyed a
Victor with particles drawn from Super Eva’s heart, and to identify the
guided particle that had done it.
The resulting magnetic field had either destroyed Super Eva’s full data
records or, at best, left them temporarily inaccessible. But in North Africa,
Maya had been able to retrieve one valuable piece of information—when
Super Eva fired the weapon, time stretched out so much that he perceived the
behavior of elementary particles. “Without ever touching the enemy, or
undergoing any change itself,” Shinji had said, “the beam tore through the
Victor and made its protons decay.”
That was enough to give Maya at least part of an answer—magnetic
monopoles. They were particles that had existed only in the first moments of
the birth of the universe, and even then, only in vanishingly small numbers.
The ground troops were outfitted with CBRN gear (airtight suits and
gas masks) to protect against being turned into pillars of salt—if that
phenomenon could indeed be protected against.
At least the protective gear wouldn’t be uncomfortably hot this far
north.
But even if the soldiers grew too warm for comfort, no one would
remove the gear by choice. In the previous century, Novaya Zemlya had been
a nuclear test site, and even now, Russia maintained a stockpile of N2
weapons. They tested these weapons so heavily that the northern edge of the
Hikari made her way through the quantum mirror truck calibration
checklist.
After she finished testing the gravitational field control of several
dozen different attack patterns, she made a soft beat with her graviton
floaters. The sound matched Super Eva’s heartbeat perfectly, only much more
In the speakers in Toji’s helmet, Ibuki Maya and the Hakone control
center were coordinating the search for Asuka, but as the chaos unfolded
around him, he was in no position to participate.
“Oh, come on!” he shouted. He recognized the Center Trigonus
immediately. “Super Eva’s heart?! That’s what’s causing the heartbeat?
Hyuga? Maya-san? Are you seeing this?”
He hurried to the N2 Flanker but ran backward so that his helmet
camera could send video of the Victor back to Hakone, even if it meant a few
stumbles along the way.
Shaken, Maya exclaimed, <<I don’t believe it! That’s the singularity—
the window to higher dimensions and to the energy they hold. It’s the one we
stabilized into a heartbeat with the quantum wave mirrors inside Super Eva’s
chest!>>
No one spoke in the command center in Hakone. They were all too
stunned by the feed from Toji’s camera. They were hearing Maya, too. It
wasn’t like the chief scientist to raise her voice, but she wasn’t speaking for
their benefit. She was talking herself through what she was seeing.
<<The Lance of Longinus stole the singularity from Super Eva and
broke the shell that contained it. But when the singularity didn’t split the
Earth apart, and we didn’t measure any unusual burst of energy coming from
the lance’s orbit, I assumed it had exploded in the space they use to travel
between their gates.>>
“That’s right,” Misato replied. “Once the singularity was torn from
THRUM!
The enemy’s heartbeat frightened Hikari, and at the same time, she had
to suppress the Q.R. Signum’s pulsing urge to seek it out. Her own Eva was
producing a heartbeat, too, but hers was a mere imitation, overpowered by the
real thing.
Nevertheless, Hikari managed to pick up the positron rifle from the
ground at her feet. The fire control system loaded up, and the blue options of
the practice menu were replaced one by one with a wave of orange live-fire
modes. The Eva’s reactor spooled up and began charging the weapon’s
capacitors.
“Ritter to Kommandobrücke, requesting permission to fire!”
Hikari felt sweat pouring from her skin into the circulating LCL. It was
a strange feeling.
THRUM!
Super Eva’s stolen heart pulsed in the center of the circle of dust and
debris stirred up by the spindle’s sweep. The heart’s current owner, the
Torwächter, advanced toward the sound of Heurtebise’s imitation heartbeat.
Were Armaros’ retainers driven to steal the heartbeat’s source? Or did
the imitation heartbeat simply offend them?
Hikari’s eyes darted between her Eva’s visual feed and the map with
the deployment diagram. The dot indicating the Torwächter’s location
crossed a demarcation line on the map.
“Th-the target has entered the mirror array!” Hikari stammered.
“Heurtebise to Kommandobrücke—I’m switching the graviton floater mode.”
The graviton floaters stopped making the imitation heartbeat and
prepared to generate gravitational distortions. Losing the sound of the
heartbeat it sought, the Torwächter slowed its advance, as if unsure, which
was just what Hikari wanted.
From the control plane, Clausewitz announced that the trap was ready.
<<Mirror convoy, close the circle! Ritter, begin!>>
The sixteen armored trucks, with trapezoidal arrays of quantum wave
mirrors mounted on gimbals, raced across the barren land. The convoy
overtook Heurtebise and began to spread out.
Heurtebise’s graviton floaters hummed. The majority of the energy
created by gravitons escaped out of our dimension through gravitational
waves. But when positioned right, the graviton wave mirrors could reflect
and focus those waves into a single point in space.
The Torwächter continued swinging the spindle. As the giant took
another step, the space beneath its foot warped slightly and snapped violently
back into place.
This was the limit of the N2-based graviton technology. By producing
gravitons in greater quantity, the effect could be used to make Heurtebise and
the N2 Flanker fly, but those were fixed targets upon which the floaters could
be applied in great number. Gravity-based weapons that could blast away or
even knock over a distant target remained the stuff of science fiction.
The two plates separated. Between them, visible through the smoke,
T HICK, BILLOWING SMOKE rose from the smoldering earth of the battle-
ravaged arctic island of Novaya Zemlya.
A window to another place stood open. Seven Angel Carriers had
arrived from the other side. One group dominated the sky, white wings
thundering, while a second group landed on the ground.
Two Victors—or Torwächters, as the Europeans called them—had
opened the gate. The first Victor carried Shinji’s stolen heart, and had been
gravely injured by the Euro and Russian forces and the Euro Eva, Heurtebise.
But the Eva had also taken a deep wound.
When the gateway opened, several units on the front line went radio
silent.
A tepid, sweetly scented wind blew out from the other side.
Soldiers who’d properly protected themselves with CBRN gear sent
panicked reports as they watched their less-prepared comrades transform into
pillars of salt—some of whom dutifully radioed in their own disintegration
during their last seconds of life.
Heurtebise’s control airplane closed off all external air intakes. From
the comms station, a radio operator said, “Kommandobrücke to all mirror
trucks, check that your personal equipment is airtight, pressurize your cabins,
and switch to interior air recirculation!”
Despite being badly shaken by these events—or perhaps because they
were shaken—the operators carried out their duties by the book, and they
disseminated the instructions that had been prepared for this eventuality.
Good, Lieutenant Colonel Clausewitz thought as he watched his crew.
“Hikari,” Clausewitz said into his headset, “you’d better arm yourself
with Dora while you have a moment.” He paused. “Hikari?”
A message came in from the joint forces headquarters by way of the
Sixth Army command center. They’d lost contact with three artillery units
near the Torwächters. The joint commanders wanted to know if Heurtebise
could buy any time for rescue efforts to be staged.
Clausewitz plucked the headset from his assistant, who, to his credit,
remained resolute despite the chaos.
Speaking into the microphone, the lieutenant colonel minced no words.
Acting in parallel with the main combat operations, the plan was to fly
the squadron of scout drones into the open window to determine the location
on the other side. The gateway had previously shown glimpses of a glasswork
cubic structure—the Ark. These reports had been corroborated by spies on
the ground in the Hakone Caldera. Now that Armaros had moved the Ark
from North Africa’s Atlas Mountains, the Europeans hoped to learn its new
location.
By this time, Nerv Japan had passed word on to the Europeans that the
Ark didn’t offer salvation, but rather was a high-density repository for the
information of all life, so that the Instrumentality Project could be more
quickly rebooted after each failed attempt. But the European military had
been searching for the Ark in the Mount Ararat region because of the area’s
connections to religious stories, and they weren’t convinced that what Nerv
Japan had found was, in fact, the same Ark they sought.
Europe’s religious constituencies contained a great many people who
looked to the Ark for salvation.
But even if Nerv Japan was right, Armaros had specifically moved the
Ark to keep its location hidden from humanity. Whatever else Armaros was,
he was the enemy, and the Ark was important to him. All the more reason to
seek it out.
No one knew how many more lives would be lost on the battlefield this
day.
Because of this, humanity needed to start focusing on the next step.
The attacks of Heurtebise and the Russian naval railguns had fatally
injured the first Torwächter, reducing it to a torso, a head, and one arm—the
same arm that had been swinging the spindle-shaped weapon. The giant had
turned into a grotesque statue, propped up only by the black plate that grew
out of its back, no longer contributing to the battle except as a raggedy
scarecrow, while Super Eva’s heart raged out of control. But the second
Torwächter—Asuka/Eva—had come over and calmed the heart. Rather than
self-destruct, the broken Torwächter had begun rapidly reconstructing its
missing limbs.
A volley of guided munitions sailed toward the wounded Torwächter,
but Asuka/Eva neutralized them with her A.T. Field. Though partially
concealed by explosive flashes and billows of smoke, the Torwächter’s
recovery seemed to progress differently from the way Evas or even Angel
Carriers regenerated. The giant’s black armor was reassembling, as if guided
by unseen hands, but only the Torwächter’s external layer was being
reconstructed, not the body underneath.
In the control plane, the observers from the science teams turned to
each other in confusion. “Where’s the Torwächter’s Q.R. Signum?” one
asked.
Previously, the Torwächters had arrived, opened a gateway, and then
quickly departed. The location of their Q.R. Signum scale—or scales—
remained unknown. The working assumption was that the black-and-red
scale must have been hidden somewhere internally. But now, a gatekeeper’s
body had been shredded apart in plain sight, and there was no sign of a Q.R.
Signum inside.
The resident theoretical physicists’ minds raced. Supposing the
Torwächters don’t possess any Q.R. Signum scales at all, what does that
mean?
Rather than being merely linked to Armaros, are the Torwächters his
So far, the battle had been a messy free-for-all. The ten giants seemed
to move with no apparent order, and the soldiers fired their cannons and
missile launchers at will. But when the seven carriers began striking the earth
in unison, the armies from each nation could sense something bad was
coming, and their chaotic barrage temporarily subsided.
The armies shifted from offense to defense while new orders filtered
down from their commanders.
During the lull, the joint command officers took a moment to assign
each Angel Carrier a number from one to seven. Any allied forces with
electronic sensors and line of sight—from fire control teams stationed around
the edge of the battlefield, to warships, to Heurtebise’s control plane—shared
their information with the rest of the military, and each carrier, along with its
number, appeared in real time on the strategic map.
The fundamental strategy employed when eradicating Angel-class
enemies—whether they appeared alone or in groups—was to focus as much
firepower as possible on one target at a time. In practice simulations, this
seemed to be the best approach. However, in a real battle, with this many
targets, while the military evaluated the effectiveness of a given attack, the
other carriers might already be striking back. To allow for better response
time, the attacking forces were split into groups that would attack in a
predetermined order. When assigned a target, the groups would focus on that
target, regardless of what the enemy was doing, while groups without a target
would be free to defend themselves against whatever was attacking them.
“If you identify an Angel Carrier carrying Zeruel in its cocoon, take
that carrier out,” Clausewitz ordered, “even if you’re under attack from the
other carriers.”
The Angel Zeruel was capable of firing long-range attacks in quick
succession. The human forces relied on striking their enemies from superior
With Heurtebise’s hand, Hikari pulled the camouflage tarp off of the
massive cannon lying sideways in the trench and bent to pick it up.
I want to be you.
“What was that?”
She sensed someone else was focusing their attention on Asuka, and
she turned around to look.
A chain-like object flew out from the Angel Carrier’s cocoon and
launched toward the U.S. Eva’s head. The chain was shaped like a double
helix. It had to be the Angel Armisael. The U.S. Eva lifted its head out of the
way of the first attack and stopped the second by biting down on the Angel
with fanged jaws, stopping the whiplashing double helix dead in its tracks.
“Eliminator Torus!” Mari shouted. “Engage!”
Four conical structures were mounted on the U.S. Eva’s back. One
began to rotate, smoothly accelerating faster and faster.
The four cones contained American-developed super-directional N2
explosive charges. The high-velocity spin caused a more compact N2 reaction
along the core and the outer ring, which then produced a secondary reaction
in the middle. The result was a hyper-directional N2 explosive, created within
the barrel of the cannon that fired it.
<<Mari!>> an officer transmitted from the giant-transport plane.
<<Don’t waste those! You only have four. And you’re too close!>>
“Bang,” Mari said.
Once the core of the N2 explosive had been compressed into the
density of a micro black hole, the charge launched from the cannon and
struck the Angel Carrier’s tough power shield like a rock tossed into a pool of
water. Small droplets of the shield splashed outward, and the N2 charge sank
straight through. The reaction on the other side was massive. A tremendous
explosion completely obliterated the carrier’s right-hand Q.R. Signum,
shoulder and all, and even tore a hole in the shield of a second Angel Carrier
The stray railgun slug had damaged the N2 Flanker’s nose and the
floaters on the port side of the cockpit. The plane tilted and, unable to
recover, went into a spin.
“Toji!” Hikari shouted from Heurtebise. She’d flagged his Flanker on
her display and had been keeping track of him. She noticed his airplane’s
distress immediately.
The Flanker kept spiraling down, but Hikari saw no sign that Toji had
ejected. Then the plane disappeared behind the smoke clouds.
Hikari let go of her cannon.
The air warped around Heurtebise as the Eva grabbed the cross-shaped
spear in front of it, dislodging the weapon from the ground. Hikari roared as
she charged the nearest enemy.
The quantum wave mirror trucks couldn’t keep up with her. The crew
in her control plane frantically called out to her to make her stop, but she
ignored their commands.
The 550-ton, eighty-centimeter caliber cannon slammed breach-first
into the ground. The impact detonated the loaded charge, and the eight-ton
shell flew out from the barrel at a low angle.
The shell zoomed past the sprinting Heurtebise and struck the shield of
an Angel Carrier, whose larval Shamshel was reaching out from its cocoon
with two tentacle-like appendages. The shell failed to penetrate the shield but
sent the carrier flying backward.
Hikari saw a small crack in the Angel Carrier’s shield, and she thrust
the spear deep into the cocoon, vaulted over the carrier, and kept running into
the smoke cloud.
The carrier hadn’t died, but the U.S. Eva was about to have a turn. As
“Where are we?” Shinji asked. “And what the hell is going on?”
A loud explosion rang out, the impact rippling through his body. His
head spun.
Having suddenly emerged onto a battlefield on an island at the edge of
the Arctic Ocean, Super Eva took a fierce volley of friendly fire. He
brandished his twin swords, Kesara and Basara, and Ayanami Trois, riding
inside with Shinji, deployed the Eva’s shield. Blindingly bright bursts
immediately covered the shield’s surface. Returning to Earth in an unfamiliar
location would have been disorienting on its own, but appearing amid a
massive battle was bewildering. For Shinji, the experience was a lot like
vertigo.
After about thirty seconds, the friendly fire temporarily stopped. Shinji
was trying to regain his balance when two razor-like ribbons shot toward him
through the smoke. At that last moment, he raised his swords to block them.
Sparks flew. He’d managed to guard himself, but the force of the impact
pushed Super Eva’s more-than-four-thousand-ton mass nearly two hundred
meters backward. Then Zeruel’s ribbons were gone, retracted back into the
smoke cloud.
An Angel?!
Shinji shouted to Rei Trois behind him. “Is there an Angel Carrier
here?”
He was hoping she could sense what was out there, but she didn’t
reply.
The biggest reason for Shinji and Trois’ predicament had come directly
before their arrival, when Asuka/Eva appeared with a black plate on her back
and rescued the first Torwächter from certain destruction. The Russian and
European militaries’ trust in Nerv Japan had plummeted, not that the pair
inside Super Eva had any way of knowing.
Currently, the allied soldiers considered Super Eva another of the black
giant’s underlings. Recognizing that he was in danger—though not why—
Super Eva hid in the thick vapors that blanketed the battlefield.
The ground had been cratered and scorched. White and gray smoke
rose from the smoldering earth, and black, electromagnetic clouds flashed
with lightning, blocking all sensors from seeing anything within.
The clouds would likely offer little shelter from the Angel Carrier that
had attacked him, but at least the bombardment from his fellow humans
would ease. Their weapons weren’t as effective as the Angels’, but they still
A wide hole opened in the smoke, and a white, staff-like weapon thrust
toward the U.S. Eva. Thanks to Super Eva’s previous attack, the Eva beast
was already on guard and had managed to roll sideways out of the weapon’s
path. The staff impaled itself in the ground, which exploded, forming a crater
wide enough that Super Eva had to retreat to keep his footing.
Shinji didn’t even notice when two other staves similarly impaled
themselves.
A fourth came swinging down to the beast’s new position. The U.S.
Eva sprang backward, out of the way—but when the beast tried to advance
again, it ran headfirst into an invisible wall. Shimmering colors, like on the
membrane of a soap bubble, swirled across the wall’s surface.
Super Eva and the U.S. Eva had been trapped in a four-walled space,
with each staff at one corner.
Shinji looked up, searching for a way out. The four walls converged at
a point far overhead. He struck one of the walls with his sword, but the
weapon bounced off with a loud clang.
“They trapped that beast,” Shinji said, “but now we’re caught in here
with it!”
A voice came down from above. <<No, it was meant for you as
well.>>
Outside the invisible pyramid, four pairs of wings beat away the smoke
of battle and the steam of heated permafrost.
Shinji gasped as four Angel Carriers leaped into view.
The white giants circled the pyramid once, and then each placed a hand
against one of the four walls. The carriers slowly pushed their way through
the barrier, which rippled around them like the surface of a pond.
“They’re trapping us in here where they can gang up on us!”
But that wasn’t all.
“Ikari, look!” Trois said.
Inside the barriers, the carriers’ arms—and then their bodies—were
twice, maybe even three times as large as they had been on the other side.
Like light refracting through water, the carriers’ bodies grew as they passed
through the walls.
W HEN SHINJI OPENED his eyes, he was racing through the tunnel
network.
When did I return here?
He looked over his shoulder to ask Trois, but all he saw were shadows
flying past him.
The tunnels didn’t recede into some far-off vanishing point but wound
together into something like a black cloth, which itself flowed back up the
corridor toward Shinji, to be sucked into the tip of the black plate on his back.
Shinji realized he wasn’t inside his entry plug.
He himself was flying through the corridors—or rather, the corridors
were a part of him.
Panicking, he looked down at his body.
It was dark black. His surface reflected the glowing particles that
occasionally strayed into the tunnel system.
He felt the warm presence of someone next to him. “Trois?” he said,
looking over.
It wasn’t Trois.
“Asuka! What are you doing?”
The Asuka/Eva synthesis moved though the corridor next to him.
She’d been facing ahead but now turned to look at him.
She, too, bore a black plate, which sucked up the corridor behind them.
Her long hair waved in the darkness.
“Why do you look like a Victor?” he asked.
She tilted her head quizzically. His eyes followed the flowing curve of
her neck to her shoulder, then to her long, slender arm, and finally to her
hand, which she held lovingly over his chest.
THRUM!
“Oh,” Shinji said. Warm light radiated from him. “There it is!”
The light and the low-pitched rumble spilled out between Asuka’s
graceful fingers.
Such heat…
The heart beat strongly.
THRUM!
CLAAAAANG!
The edge of Super Eva’s sword struck the thin, transparent, soap-
bubble wall from the inside.
The sound reverberated for kilometers in all directions.
On the battlefield, a reenactment of the myth of Babel was taking
place.
The tower’s influence had cut off all forms of communication—every
language, certainly, but even diagrams, symbols, electronic signals, and
power conductors had been thrown into disarray. With no way to find any
meaningful mutual understanding, the Russian and European allied forces
were beginning to panic.
But in that moment, when the sound of sword against barrier rang out,
everyone reacted in unison. All at once, they looked up at the tower rising
above the clouds of battle.
Some gazed up with fear, others with curiosity. With the smoke
swirling inside it, the tower looked like a giant cloud-in-a-jar experiment but
with colossal shadowed figures clashing within.
From the air, Shinji looked down at Wolfpack bounding across the
ground.
Super Eva was one being split into three, while Wolfpack was a great
many souls in a single body. Though the pair had no way of knowing, they
came from very different origins, despite their similarities.
<<Now, who’s next?>>
As Shinji looked for another target, his voice came not from his mouth
but through the entry plug’s hydrospeaker.
He occupied a state of super-high synchronization. Under his orange
coveralls, his body had gone completely stiff. He might as well have been
part of the entry plug.
But he’s still warm, Rei Trois thought as she held on to his shoulders.
As she braced herself against the rapid changes in acceleration, she quickly
scanned their surroundings through squinted eyes.
“Eight o’clock,” she said. “The Ramiel carrier is getting ready to fire
again.”
A ring of light had formed around the oversized Ramiel carrier’s waist
—even with the cocoon—and it suddenly grew brighter.
“It’s at full energy!” Quatre said.
Super Eva raised his sword and performed an uneven corkscrew
maneuver, just as the Ramiel carrier fired its particle cannon from the right
side of its ring of light.
Super Eva narrowly evaded the initial burst, but the light beam
persisted for approximately 0.6 seconds, during which Ramiel swept the
beam after the Eva’s movements. For the briefest moment, the beam grazed
the surface of Shinji’s A.T. Field. The air burst, as if from a mighty
explosion, flinging Super Eva backward.
<<Ack! What is that light ring? Three years ago, when the Angel was a
Super Eva dropped altitude and accelerated, skimming over the ground
below the flying Ramiel carrier.
The carrier changed directions to try to block Super Eva from getting at
its weak underside and fired another particle beam. But Super Eva deftly
evaded the beam. The sword had finished reforging, and without stopping, he
slashed the ground with the red-hot weapon to temper the blade.
Steam erupted from the earth.
Directly below the carrier now, Shinji burst up through the white
cloud.
But something was coming back down at him—the tip of a spiraling,
spiked drill.
Oh, crap! I forgot about that part!
When the original Ramiel had encamped itself in Tokyo-3, the Angel
had used the drilling organ to penetrate all the way into the Geofront. On a
subconscious level, Shinji had wiped the drill from his thoughts. After all, the
The Zeruel carrier had been standing still, with its back to the tower’s
northern barrier, but no longer. As if to dispel any doubt that the carrier had
joined the action, flashes appeared from the smoke from where the ribbon
had passed, and countless explosions burst across Super Eva’s A.T. Field.
<<Whoa!>> Shinji said.
With smoke rising from his field, Super Eva dove downward. Shinji
wasn’t sure how much cover the terrain would give him within the large
basin, but he’d take whatever help he could get. He flew low to the ground.
Meanwhile, the Ramiel carrier’s corpse splashed into the sea of lava amid a
giant plume of fire.
Behind the veil of hot lava droplets, Shinji saw a light.
<<But how?!>> he gasped.
Ramiel’s accelerated particles traced a wobbly ring around the U.S.
Eva beast where it lay on the ground.
Wolfpack unsteadily got to its feet.
In between the wafting trails of gray smoke, Shinji caught glimpses of
the beast forcing its head up. Its jaws held the Ramiel carrier’s Q.R. Signum,
still shining brightly. The accelerated particles circled the scale.
Mari had torn off the Q.R. Signum when the giant flung her away.
Even after the larval Angel’s death, the Q.R. Signum continued the last
task it had been assigned.
<<What are you doing?>> Shinji asked.
<<You showed me I don’t have enough strength like this.>>
Wolfpack’s powerful jaws crushed the quantum resonance plate—no,
the beast was devouring it. All at once, the many shapes that had been
circling the Eva beast converged, feeding on the Q.R. Signum like a pack of
hunters sharing a kill. When a Q.R. Signum was broken, it typically shattered
into a mist of crystal particles, but this time, the process was hastened by the
As Wolfpack leaped from island to island across the sea of lava, the
ferocious four-legged Eva beast instinctively tapped into the ring of light
around its neck and fired Ramiel’s particle cannon.
The induced electric current left a lingering trail of blueish-white paw
prints behind the beast as it ran. The same phenomenon hadn’t occurred with
the original Ramiel, or its Angel Carrier, because they fired the cannon from
higher off the ground.
Shinji would have expected the particle cannon to be a one-and-done
affair. Mari had inherited the particle accelerator created by the Q.R.
Signum’s field, but she didn’t possess the Angel’s original particle-
generating organ. And yet, after she fired the cannon, the ring maintained a
dim light, which gradually increased in intensity as it readied the next shot.
The trail of lightning tracks made the beast seem even more like
something straight out of a myth. But in contrast to the beast’s fearsome
image, the little girl who piloted it spoke calmly.
Before Shinji had any time to think, Zeruel’s light beam struck Super
Eva. His A.T. Field managed to hold, but he still needed to stay alert. The
ribbons’ tips were hidden somewhere in the net’s complex weave, and he
couldn’t tell from which direction they’d attack.
Something struck Super Eva’s left arm, and Shinji grunted in pain. He
looked down. A ribbon had sliced away his armor plating.
While he was distracted, the second ribbon split the empty scabbard of
his broken sword directly through the quantum flux inclination sensors.
Not only was Zeruel a formidable adversary, but the Angel and Shinji
also shared a significant history.
When Super Eva was fitted with the Vertex wings, Zeruel had been
among the invading Angel Carriers. Super Eva had overpowered the carrier
and its larval Angel, but that wasn’t the first time their paths had crossed.
Three years before, Eva-01 had gone berserk in the fight against Zeruel, and
the Eva had devoured the Angel’s flesh, absorbing its S2 Engine into its own
body.
At the time, Shinji hadn’t known what his Eva was doing. He’d
expended the last of Unit One’s internal power reserves and become trapped
in the total darkness of his entry plug. He’d since watched the recorded
footage of the event so many times he could have puked, but it still didn’t
feel real to him. Facing Zeruel again like this put him in a strange mood.
This thing gives me chills.
A section of the net rose up in front of Super Eva to cut him off, and
Shinji veered around it with as little movement as possible. He realized that
another attack might be hiding on the opposite side, and he was ready for it.
But he’d been outflanked.
Something struck him from above. The Angel Carrier had flipped
upside down and done something the carriers almost never did—it kicked
Super Eva from outside his range, knocking him down.
Shinji was more impressed than anything, though this might not have
been the best time to admire his adversary. Okay, I’ll give you that one.
You’re really good at reading what I’m anticipating. Or is that just because
Unit One took a part of you inside?
Time seemed to crawl. As he was sent backward, a ribbon came
rushing in, and he blocked it with his knife.
His left hand was reaching for the hilt of his not-yet-reforged sword.
The second ribbon appeared and lopped his arm off above the elbow.
Grasping at nothing now, his hand and arm were flung away.
The air inside the tower vibrated, and the four walls began to ripple
like the surface of a lake. As if on cue, the explosion of a massive cannon
thundered across the battlefield.
Out on the battlefield, some soldiers were still firing in a blind panic,
but most continued their silent exodus. With the tower gone, their ability to
communicate was resuming, but only gradually. Normalcy wouldn’t return
right away.
The radio frequencies offered only gibberish—languages weren’t yet
coherent again. Shinji tried to get through to Hikari, but she didn’t even look
his way. Heurtebise stood with its back to him, the Euro Eva pointing away
from the battlefield.
Shinji and Trois were having trouble understanding what was
happening around them, now that they’d emerged from the tower. But all
things considered, the situation was favorable.
After barging into the middle of a chaotic battle, they’d defeated the
Angel Carriers—but they’d also let the first Victor escape along with
Asuka/Eva, who’d arrived as a second Victor. Politically, the fallout was
going to be a challenge. But if Super Eva were to stick around long enough
for the confusion to settle, the conflict might not just be political, but a
violent, physical showdown.
Super Eva flew over the Arctic Ocean, where the aurora borealis now
shone even at midday. Trois didn’t feel that using the tunnel network would
be safe.
Shinji’s faraway heart was sending power to the Eva, if only a modest
quantity. The Q.R. Signum’s effects had diminished, which might have
hampered travel through the transdimensional corridors.
Though Armaros’ darkness had retreated into the scale, the back half of
Trois’ hair remained black. But there was a brightness behind her blank
expression, and her pale blue hair smoothly transitioned into the darker color
as it floated in the LCL.
Before Super Eva accelerated into his suborbital flight back to Japan,
Shinji and Trois opened the entry plug’s hatch and stuck their heads out into
the cold, desolate air. The feeling reminded Shinji of being on the desert side
of the Apple’s Core, the site of the Instrumentality Project’s initial test.
Shinji’s long journey was ending. And an even longer one was about to
begin.
The grotesque swollen moon began to rise in the east.
The Longinus Ring had lengthened in the time since the lance pierced
the Earth and stole Shinji’s heart. The gap between the lance’s head and tail
was shrinking. Before long, they would meet, and the ring would be
complete. People were saying that when that happened, the Earth would end.
This time, Kaworu said as his voice faded, the Eve is no imitation.
That’s why she’s been prepared. But imitations quickly melt into the real
thing…
“What?” Shinji asked.
“I didn’t say anything,” answered a beautiful imitation. At least,
according to Kaworu.
Inside the LCL, Rei Trois looked at him with her bright red eyes.
As they had approached Hakone, Shinji and Trois had reported on their
adventures in digest, and the Eva pilot standby room had been converted into
a medical inspection room in anticipation of their arrival. On opposite sides
of a single curtain, the medical team stripped Shinji and Trois of their clothes
and gave them each a standard examination. The process wasn’t exactly
pleasant, but it was hardly surprising, either.
If anything, Shinji wasn’t sure if the precautions went far enough.
They didn’t take us to separate rooms, which means they don’t feel a
need to interrogate us separately. Does that mean they believe our surreal
story? Heck, I’m not sure I believe it myself.
Here they were, home after visiting an alien planet, and yet only a
small team of scientists had come to meet them, their tests mostly
perfunctory.
“So, the prodigal son and daughter finally return.”
“Fuyutsuki-sensei,” Shinji said.
The old soldier parted the antimicrobial curtain at the doorway and
entered the room.
Smoothing down her white patient gown, Trois stepped through the
cloth curtain behind Shinji and sat beside him on the examination table.
Together, they looked up at Fuyutsuki.
“Sorry for all the fuss,” he said. “I’m sure you have questions. We
couldn’t tell you what’s happened over the radio, so I’ll fill you in.”
Shinji and Trois learned that Lilith and the Chronostatic Sphere had
disappeared from the old Geofront and that Rei Six had gone missing.
Spearheaded by Chief Scientist Ibuki, the majority of the Nerv
The soapy cleaning solution rinsed down Super Eva’s body. It would
take more time to repair the countless scratches and dents from the Eva’s
Super Eva’s external armor hadn’t been fully inspected for structural
fatigue. The Eva’s internals had repaired themselves during the battle. But his
new arm—the one regrown from the Zeruel’s tissues—would need to be
thoroughly inspected at some point. The cage crew had been given just
enough time to replace the restraint armor around the Eva’s abdomen, where
the spear had passed through, and to switch out the sword-sheath shoulder
pylons for the standard-spec pylons.
Super Eva’s visor lifted. Something clanged into his back. Though the
Eva no longer needed an external power source, he still possessed an
umbilical cable plug in case of emergency. The noise must have been the
work crew installing the phase contrast electricity generator into his socket.
The module stuck out from his back like a bird’s tail feathers.
S UPER EVA flew over Kanto Bay, where Tokyo had been submerged
following the Second Impact. On the north shore, at the High Energy
Accelerator Research Center, he fulfilled his duty as a mobile power plant,
and the proton accelerator ran right on schedule. Gold mirrors focused and
directed the proton beam, which produced pions that traveled through 130
kilometers of bedrock to the sarcophagus dome in the old Geofront under
Hakone—and into specially placed tanks of purified water, where the pions
were converted into neutrinos and muons.
Now that the Nerv scientists had obtained a baseline particle sample,
the observation system performed a series of minute adjustments and
reinitialized. The computer performed corrections on the historical data, and
the resulting logs indicated that the Chronostatic Sphere had disappeared half
a day before the great collapse. That was when the sensors had first detected
muons coming from the interaction of solar rays in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Previously, the sphere had blocked particles of any kind from passing
through.
Seeing Super Eva’s departure from Hakone, JSSDF Lieutenant Colonel
Kasuga got an idea. He instructed the maser towers—designed to transmit
power to Eva-02’s rectenna—to turn their microwave antennas to the north,
where the waters of the newly formed channel separated Hakone from
mainland Japan. On the opposite shore, the Akashima carried a JSSDF maser
howitzer equipped with a relay rectenna.
The N2 reactor that powered Nerv Japan and Tokyo-3 had excess
power capacity. Kasuga wanted to test to see if that excess power could be
shared with less power-stable areas on the mainland in times of emergency.
And so, when Super Eva came home in the early evening, he saw the faint
purple glow of the focused microwave beams above the water.
Shinji walked down the hallway carrying a bag with cabbage and
wheat flour for Toji’s okonomiyaki.
Shinji had picked up the ingredients in Tsukuba. That was what had
started this whole thing.
“No, not the test tanks,” Maya said. “They’re filled with purified water.
If anything got in, the water wouldn’t be pure anymore, would it? I was
outside the dome, in the Geofront—everyone’s calling it the underground
lake now. Drainage water. I hope I got the smell out. Did I?” She sniffed at
the sleeve of her lab coat.
“It’s not like it’s sewage water. It can’t be that gross,” Shinji said.
“Were you looking for the Chronostatic Sphere? The containment dome is
still intact, right? So the sphere must have gone through the extradimensional
tunnels, or something like them…”
When a large portion of the Earth’s crust had disappeared under the
base of the Izu Peninsula, and the land had suddenly sunk, the dome’s
earthquake sensors had tripped, activating an automatic lockdown of any
passage, in or out.
His father had abandoned and deceived him…but he’d also needed
him.
If the sphere had lifted its spell, and Shinji had been able to see his
father again, he hoped they could’ve gotten along.
He’d imagined running into his father one day. He’d even played out
the scenario in his mind. Shinji wasn’t averse to social contact the way he had
been before. He was awkward, but so was his dad. Maybe this time, they
could have been some kind of family.
But when he thought back to who he used to be—someone who only
found purpose in other people needing him—he got chills. If he met his
father again, would he revert to that person? Part of him wanted to find out,
Toji tried to flip an okonomiyaki patty on the hot plate, now that one
side had finished cooking, but he couldn’t quite match the movements
between his right arm and his newly connected left. It was a miracle he could
move the arm at all. He let out a panicked cry as the patty landed hard on the
hot plate and split down the middle.
He shook his head forlornly. “There’s nothing sadder than that to
someone from Kansai. Ayahachi, do the rest, will ya?”
He foisted the twin spatulas onto Trois and pressed his fingers against
the bridge of his nose.
Shinji was chopping up additional ingredients. “Suzuhara Toji, the
greatest tragedy of Kansai.”
Trois moved next to Shinji and began flipping the okonomiyaki.
“If Six were here,” Shinji added, “she’d definitely want to do that.”
“Next time,” Trois said without looking away from the hot plate.
The group understood her optimism. The mental mirror link between
the Ayanamis was still dysfunctional, but Trois had said, in an
uncharacteristically roundabout manner, “She’s still alive. I think she’s
sleeping. Once she wakes up, I’m sure she’ll phone home or look for a way
back herself.”
“How about we take those okonomiyaki to everyone waiting for her
call?” Shinji asked.
Misato couldn’t believe that something twice the size of an Eva had
gone undetected so close to home.
“What about vibrations?” she asked. “They would’ve showed up on
All right, and that was Part Three of Neon Genesis Evangelion:
ANIMA, serialized in Dengeki Hobby Magazine from November 2010 to
August 2011. It was the kind of third part that makes you say, “Hey, where is
this going?”
The big earthquake hit during this period of ANIMA’s serialization, and
creators of all kinds had to take a lot of different sentiments into account.
Depending on the subject matter, scripts had to be rewritten. Theatrical runs
were postponed. With ANIMA, I received the request to tone down the
disaster elements. I’d built up an association in my mind between myths and
natural disasters, and with ANIMA I had been so relentlessly destroying the
Earth that the very title had come to mean cataclysm. I took a few measures
to temporarily divert course—namely, setting the story somewhere that
wasn’t Earth and making the battle an embodiment of the character’s internal
conflict. Looking back now, I don’t know if that added depth to the story or if
it only acted as a detour, but I’ll be thrilled if you come along with me to the
final two volumes.
—Ikuto Yamashita,
Evangelion Mecha Designer