He was drifting away.

The feeling was pleasant... the warm and dense fluid that rocked him was
his own blood, and the borders of his body were somehow inverted: his
very soul was floating peacefully outside his being. Then, with a
breathtaking upsetting, everything flowed back within him; his body
returned to its heavy, impermeable oneness. A vertiginous feeling.

He opened his eyes and tried to raise his head, shaking it. He had come
to a standstill on a shoreline, the orange sea gently caressing his
naked body. He let his head fall back on the sand and looked at the sky.
Above him, the sea of stars was gruesomely cut in two by a ring of
blood.

His own memories surged with the force of a hurricane. He screamed.

*********************

- AAAAaaaaah!!

In a most skillful execution of an awakening from a dream sequence,
Harry Stoner jumped on his folding bed, drenched in sweat. The gloom of
the barracks, its sounds and its smells, that he knew so well, soothed
him. Cursing between his teeth, he fell back on the military blanket.

- Shit... that dream, again. Just when I'm gonna stop dreaming that?

He had spoken in a low hiss, to no one in particular. But

- That's why we pay you that much, Stoner.. get over it. - the answer
came. Opening his eyes, Stoner saw before him the stout figure of
captain Moretti, martially framed against the door of the dormitory.
Moretti was, at least formally, his ranking officer, but Stoner made no
effort to rise from his bed.

- You know that's impossible, damn you, - he spat. The captain just
raised his shoulders.

- Weeell, I guess we could put you on sedatives, but that would spoil
your synch rate, right? Now get the fuck off, we have a UFO approaching.


- Another one? - asked Harry rising. Oh well, he thought, maybe I need a
distraction..


======================================================================

IlCorra productions presents

NEON GENESIS GRENDIZER


a NGE/Ufo Robot Grendizer fusion shortfic (whoa, who could have guessed
that?). The author owns neither. This fic is rated S(poiler) if you
haven't seen End of Eva.


======================================================================


2,04 minutes after, Harry Stoner found itself in the entry plug of his
mech, an Eva MkII placed beyond the external perimeter of the
Dukedom of Mantua. Harry was a Child, of course, born from American
father and Indian mother in the Anno Domini 2001, twenty-five years
earlier. He was supposed to be in the States right now, in some secret
base providing backup for one of those damned albinos, or at least he
had been raised to that purpose. As things went, when several of the
countries arisen from the ashes of Third Impact began assembling
Evangelion forces, his ass had suddenly developed a stratospheric value
on the biological weapon market. So he packed up and put himself for
rent, together with a small group of friends equally fed up with the
USAF. Hence his nickname, "Dirty" Harry, or Harry Latrina as he was
called in Mantua. He didn't care.. he couldn't stand another day in
there, not after he had discovered what they had done to his parents.

- Bastards.. - he mumbled, eyes fixed on the head-up display. The UFO
was approaching at mach 3, making a bee-line towards the atomic
generator of the city-state.
And towards him, that is, courtesy of the army. The anticipation gave
him the goose-bumps, and he tormented the trigger of the pallet shotgun.


The worse thing about being an Eva pilot was that you couldn't leave the
Third Impact behind you, like pretty much everyone else could. The
dreams in which you were condemned to live again and again the agonizing
hour of the Awakening were but a fraction of that burden.

He could remember very clearly. The Improvement. But that was beside the
point: everyone remembered that, more or less. It had been, after all,
the most important moment of their life. The brief hours in which all
the people in the world had been a single being. They didn't stay that
way for a lot, and took one single decision: that it was better, after
all, when it was worse.
Stoner grinned. There was to that day a lot of debate on _ who _ had
taken that decision: some remembered clearly forming that wish in their
hearts, others retained only a vague memory, or none at all. And then *
wham *, everyone on the seashore, naked ad dazzled.
That was one big mess.

After that, nothing could ever be the same. Some were totally changed by
that experience, some were crushed, some took refuge in denial: about as
many reactions as the human beings on earth. New sects, philosophies and
communities rose like mushrooms and died equally fast, or at least the
greater part. There was a huge demographic boom, consequence of the
attempt of the human species in those first days after to ease the
horrible feeling of solitude that had fell unto them. The children thus
conceived, or still in their uterus in the time of the Improvement - the
second generation of Children - were practically a race on their own:
with uncanny emphatic powers, a much greater intelligence... and the 
gift to synchronize to the 100% with Evas and find the path back to
their bodies without breaking a sweat. Perfect soldiers, if not for the
small detail that at the moment they were just a bunch of ten-years-old.

That explained the desperate need of people like Harry. People like him,
yeah, right. What a wonderful generation, his own. Jumping on an Eva
after 2015 meant to accept the risk that a loss of control, even a
minimal one, could reduce you to a empty plugsuit in a heartbeat. It
meant to belong to a social class looked upon with fear, hatred,
adoration, greed... meant to be pretty much fucked up.

God, I hate my life, thought Stoner darkly, eyes fixed on the blinking
dot approaching. I hate the army. I hate this machine, can't even go
berserk to impress the girls, I hate to be in here when I could be
playing Robattle 3D or making out with Maria. And everything.. because
of.. YOU!

With a war cry, Stoner let out a volley of fire against his target. The
energy blasts zeroed on the angel and bounced on its AT field like oil
sketches, but the raw kinetic shock succeeded to slow down its race, and
that was even more than the mercenary had hoped for.

Without bothering to wait for the orders of Moretti, Harry let the
shotgun fall and collected the lance from the ground. Dirty Harry's
melee weapon of choice vaguely resembled its medieval counterpart: a
steel spindle with a quadrilateral section, sharp points and ticker
around the handle. Harry liked the holes it could carve in the angels,
but of course it couldn't pierce an AT field. That was the reason he was
there.

The angel landed heavily a little short of an hundreds meters from him,
and Stoner took a few second to appraise his opponent: an air-to-ground
offbreed, and a rather common one. It looked like a pale worm, with
membranous wings and a mouth that opened up to about one third of his
body's length. Its core's gonna be under the glottis, he thought, and he
immediately got a confirmation when the angel opened its jaws and let
out a pretty powerful sonic wave.

They had been codenamed angels given the obvious likeness, but the upper
echelons of the human race didn't need much time to find out they really
weren't more "relatives" of the human race on a somewhat misunderstood
courtesy visit to their ancestors.

For starters, they came from a definite place: Vega. They fed on an
anti-matter power source, rather plainly christened "s^3 engine", and
were capable of hyperspace travel. Last but not least, they were 
incontestably man-made, cloned from the infamous Eva 01 and crafted in 
a hundred shapes by an unknown race with an obvious thirst for conquest.

That's just too easy, thought Stoner engaging battle. I bet it's only a
reconnaissance model, searching for a defenseless city, without a clue
that by now there nearly aren't any more, thanks to their continuous
invasions.

The human race had in fact found shelter underground, or in fortified
cities with enough money to afford an Evangelion. Nations collapsed like
sand castles, leaving on their fall such conglomerates as the North
American and the Sineuropean Confederations. The only one to hold on, as
well as the target of 50% of the angelic attacks, was Japan. Stoner had
never been there, but he had seen on TV the desolation of stone and
scorched steel that was Megatokyo. Those Japanese were incredibly
tenacious, must possess the DNA of cockroaches. He had received numerous
demands from the Japanese government, as all of his colleagues had, but
he wouldn't have swapped his provincial assignment for a place on the
front line for all the gold in the world.

More than so, since that would have meant fighting alongside Ikari and
Soryuu Langley. Stoner knew the Langley girl, and often thought of her,
also, but he wasn't exactly dying to see her again. And Ikari, well...
he had met him, only once. Couldn't sleep for a while, after that.

Harry doubled his efforts on the attack, working up the angel like a
fencer, forcing it to mere defence. He knew he had the outcome of the
battle already set, and that enraged him. He thought briefly to get rid
of his umbilical cable, or to allow his opponent to sever it, just to
make things a little more interesting, but he gave up the idea. That
would cost him the prize for the flawless victory, and he didn't want to
lose a single opportunity to milk money from the Duke. He knew the
attack pattern of that particular subspecies to heart, so when the angel
spread its mouth open in an extreme attempt to behead him, he lifted his
lance with both hands and drove its point square in the angel's core,
perforating it.

The energy outbreak engulfed him, banishing for a few blessed moments
the scorched earth from his sight. He pictured in his mind the cruciform
pillar rising up in the evening light, the citizens of Mantua looking up
with despair in their heart, and shriveled.

// Target eliminated. Time total, 03:27. Congratulations, Stoner, you did
a good job. Bring your giant ass in the hangar, you are licensed for
this evening //

Free evening, Stoner thought. Maria. For the first time since he had
awoken, he felt he was something more than a survivor.

*******************************************

In that same moment, light years away, the general of the invasion fleet
of Vega was observing on the interlink monitor the course of his
personal war. His own attention totally focused on Megatokyo, he failed
to notice the loss of a recognition unit in the sineuropean sector, which
was annotated and archived by a hidden Vegan behind him. The loss was so
insignificant that the reptilian creature didn't attempt to report to
its general, leaving it as a footnote on the evening report. The general
was totally absorbed by the battle that was unfolding in front of its
eyes. The most advanced technology of the Vegan empire allowed him to
assist at every battle live from an inconceivable distance, but not to
give orders to his units, that had thus to act in full independence.
_ Ironical, _ thought the general. His last creation - a creature ten
times larger than the one fought by Stoner, equipped with armor, energy
generators and weapons proportionally - gained the upper hand for a
short time, then succumbed to the joined attack of four Eva units. The
scene was sickeningly familiar to the general. Even since the beginning,
he hadn't been able to get rid of that team. The limitations of the
hyperspace tunnel prevented him to send on hated Japan more that an
Archangel at a time, and even if sometimes his toys succeeded in
destroying an Eva, the two units he wanted the most - the purple and the
red ones - were still missing from his trophy plate.

The battle came to its usual end, with a destroyed angel and Megatokyo
still whole, in spite of some superficial damage. The city-pit hidden in
the former black moon was safe once again.

Annoyed, the general stood up from his throne and paced towards a
balcony that jutted out from the highest floors of the violet tower.
Offering his face to the light of Vega, the general wondered for how
much his King would have forgiven him for his continues failures. The
perspective that he had flashed before him -to conquer the Earth- was
proving to be more difficult than he had guessed. When the Vegans had
recovered in the deep space Unit Eva 01, and himself within it, they had
blessed their luck. A greedy and cruel race, they had an absolute need
of that weapon, and his knowledge, in order to create their galactic
Empire. And the King's tantrums aside, the general knew that they would
have supported him until the end, so great was their yearning of power.

Let Vega have its empire, and let me have my revenge, thought the
general.
More determined than ever, the being that had once been Gendou Ikari
returned in the command room.


THE END




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