Evangelion and any associated characters are the property of GAINAX.
Warhammer 40,000 and any associated characters are the property of Games Workshop.
The Reborn Warriors
Prologue
Lilith felt Rei's soul fade into her own. Already she could feel her body undergo the shifts as she imposed Rei's physical template over her own. Lilith turned her mind outwards, feeling all of humanity, touching every soul. Above, she felt Shinji and Unit 01, locked into the Red Earth ceremony, call to her. She began to rise from the cross that had held her for so long.
STOP! Lilith stopped in surprise as the voice reverberated in her mind. Turning her own mind outwards, she found the mind that had spoken to her.
Who are you? She asked. Your mind seems…so different, yet familiar to me.
There was the sound of chuckling. I suppose…you could say I am the first.
Lilith felt her forehead crease in a slight frown; a strange sensation that apparently came with her new, human-like body. Surely…the first Rei clone died at the hands of Doctor Akagi?
Ah…no. What I meant was, I am the first human-angel hybrid test subject. I was created by SEELE before Rei, but they used artificial methods to try and 'speed up' my development to get a better test subject quickly. While my human DNA grew at the accelerated rates intended, the Angel DNA refused to respond to the treatment. The upshot of this is that while I was still a fetus, the angel DNA was 'clipped' out of my DNA chain and became a group of closed-off loops that didn't interact with anything else. It's the reason why Rei and Tibris were allowed to develop at a more normal rate.
Then you are human?
Not exactly… The Angel DNA, before it was removed, altered the activities of several gene sequences. The upshot seems to be that I am practically immortal, I have these psychic abilities and my basic physiology is much more efficient then a human. I am an improved human.
But Seele wanted a hybrid. They would have killed even a superhuman failure.
They do think that I am dead. I used my abilities to fool them with the illusion of my demise, allowing me to escape. Since then, I have been watching the events leading up to this with great interest.
You knew that 3rd Impact would occur?
Yes.
I am surprised you did nothing to prevent it. Seele are bringing about 3rd Impact because they are a bunch of 'spoiled brats' that fear death. But even an immortal like you would not be immune to this event. Why did you not stop it?
Interesting, I would not have thought that Rei would be so…outspoken.
Rei's soul is merely a fragment of me, if admittedly a dominant one. I have been absorbing the souls of the dead since long before I was found by SEELE's operatives, so my personality is hence larger and more developed. My question still stands, however.
It's true, I could have stopped it. I could have controlled Shinji while he was in Unit 01 and vanquished the Angels quickly and easily, I could have altered Gendo's mind to stop him abandoning his son, or I could have turned Seele into mind puppets to control everything. But 2nd Impact occurred before I was made, and even with all my power, I could not have prevented the 3rd from occurring. My interfering would probably have made things worse, and this way, everyone who wants 3rd Impact are…easy to find.
I see. But what makes you think that I will stop?
One of my abilities is a form of precognition. If 3rd Impact occurs, those who survive or come back from it will build a stunted, broken society that will not even cover the planet before dying out. Yet I see that if 3rd Impact is not completed, humanity will spread across the stars, creating a glorious civilization. You can examine my memories for yourself if you wish. There was a pause as Lilith did just that.
You are right. Why do you think this will stop me, however?
What mother would not give her children the brightest possible future? There was a long pause.
You have a point, she admitted grudgingly.
So you will allow this to continue? Lilith opened her eyes.
"No."
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"The anti-A.T. field is reaching…" Maya Ibuki was saying in the control room before stopping dead as her console beeped.
"What is it?" Shigeru Aoba found himself asking.
"This, can't be right…" Maya murmured, as she typed, before shaking her head. "According to the Magi, the field is…focusing on several places both inside and outside the Geofront." She turned to face Fuyutsuki. "Sir, what's going on?"
Fuyutsuki shook his head. "I…have no idea."
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Throughout the world, the anti-A.T. field focused itself with all the precision of an expert assassin. Twelve of the world's oldest and most powerful men collapsed into a mess of LCL, clothes and metal implants.
Gendo, still in shock at Rei's betrayal, broke apart into LCL, mingling with the LCL stored in the vast pool under Lilith's cross, his glasses drifting to the bottom of the tank.
Many of Seele's most trusted operatives, the men of the JSSDF still in the Geofront, everyone who was directly involved with and wanted 3rd Impact collapsed into the primordial water officially called LCL.
The surviving MP Evas collapsed, crushing some of the surviving ruins, or exploded, raining large chunks of cloned Angel meat and shards of metal on the remains of Tokyo-3. The half transformed Lancea Longinus ripped it's way out of Unit 01 reforming from a cross shape back into its original shape of a two-headed spear. Unit-01 staggered as it hit the ground, before collapsing next to Unit-02's half-eaten body.
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3rd Impact was over.
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"Why?"
The man on the left, Fuyutsuki paused, looking over two Evas in front of him. Two of the cages, badly damaged by SEELE's attack on the Geofront, had been reassembled in a new pattern. The purple Unit 01 stood silently in its restraints, while the newly regenerated red Unit 02 was supported alongside it. A faint hum could be heard in the background and the eyes of both Units glowed with faint power.
"Why have them repaired? Or why have them powered? Same answer to both questions; they deserve it." Fuyutsuki paused for a second, apparently in deep thought. "When Unit 02 was hit by the copies of the Lancea Longinus, apparently one of the side-effects was to force a 400 synch ratio, probably to ensure that the pilot felt all of the Eva's pain. When Shinji saw what happened to her, the shock apparently caused him to do the same thing in a repeat of his actions against the 14th Angel. Without Dr. Ritsuko, the chances of successfully extracting the pilots are virtually nil, while the chance of destroying their souls in the attempt is greater then 90.
"We don't actually know what happens to a soul in an Eva… But I suspect that if there is no power the soul is trapped in a form of eternal darkness. They…" Fuyutsuki shock his head. "After what they went through, leaving them powerless like that, or in pain from the injuries they sustained seemed almost criminal. They deserve more, but this is all we can give them."
The man standing next to him in a newly pressed U.N. uniform shook his head. "Actually… I was referring to that," he replied, gesturing to the cabling connecting the two Evas. The largest cable was a double headed version of the plug that powered the Evas, and linked the plug socket of Unit 01 to the socket of Unit 02. Other cables stretched between the two biomechanical robots, many of which were wired up to the exposed end of the inserted entry plugs.
"Ah…" Fuyutsuki began. "Well, an Eva is effectively immortal, virtually the perfect time capsule. As one of my students said 'Suppose, five billion years from now. The Earth, the Moon, and even this Sun will be gone. Eva can survive, however. She can survive on the power of a Human Soul. It will be a lonely existence, but humanity will be remembered forever.'
"No stored power supply could last as long as an Eva even in minimal power mode, so Unit 02 would be rendered powerless in less then a decade. Unit 01's S2 organ, on the other hand, provides more then enough power for both Eva's, so we reversed Unit 01's plug socket and connected the two together. It's how we were able to regenerate Unit 02's damage so quickly.
"As for the other cabling… It may allow the two pilots to 'talk' to each other and keep each other company. It was the least we could do."
"Hm…" the U.N. officer mused for a second, before shrugging. "I suppose it makes some kind of sense. Unfortunately, the U.N. council won't be impressed by that. There's been a lot of unrest in some areas, especially after SEELE's control over their more… fanatical tools was removed, and some elements think that we should purge the Eva's of the inserted souls and set them up with other pilots or dummy plugs to provide a useful weapon to quell the various terrorist groups. I'd need to take something more substantial then 'they deserve their rest' back to the U.N."
"You can tell them that it wouldn't work. 'Purging' an Eva would only remove the pilot's soul, and the Eva's would refuse to cooperate with the people who literally removed all trace of their children from the Universe. As for the M.P. Evas, the scans performed by our science team under Ibuki Maya showed that SEELE left several instructions in the Evas that we can't remove, and would cause a lot of trouble if activated. I can have the reports for you in less then an hour if you want."
"That would be useful," the U.N. official began as they turned and began to walk towards the exit. "But even then, several people I could name wouldn't be satisfied until they tried."
"What if you had an alternative? One of the files the MAJI found when we used them to hack SEELE's data banks was a set of designs for a new weapon that they had based on the 'Jet Alone' prototype. It would be much more likely to work and would be cheaper and easier to build then rewriting the Evas. It was called a 'Titan' and…" Fuyutsuki's words were cut off as the doors sealed behind them, leaving the two Evangelions in darkness, lit only by the faint light in their eyes.