Blood Resolve

I do not own Neon Genesis Evangelion or the rights to anything associated with it. Gainax created this world, I just play in it.

I do however own any and all original characters that appear within this story.

Please read, enjoy, and review.

Chapter Two

At the stroke of midnight Misato was hiding in the shadows of an abandoned building down the street from the high school. Upon getting home she had managed a couple of hours of fitful, nightmare filled sleep before giving up on it and settling in front of her computer to bring up a map of the city and the area around the school specifically. Once she had familiarized herself with it, she redressed the wound to her foot and set out for the school, spending the rest of the day scouting out her target.

Parking a couple of blocks away, she had approached on foot, taking a circuitous route around the neighbourhood. She was careful to stay out of sight, using other damaged and abandoned buildings for cover, stopping often and observing the area through her binoculars.

The west end of the three storey school building had suffered the worst of the damage. It looked like a stray shell from one of the Eva's rifles had hit the end of the building and blown it in. All of the doors seemed to be chained shut on the outside and a temporary fence had been erected around the damaged end of the building. There was a hole cut next to one of the support posts that was big enough to allow a person to squeeze through, leaving it as the only entrance.

She had seen five people enter through the fence during the evening and she knew there was a least one more person inside. She had seen glimpses of them throughout the afternoon as she observed the building. They were in a room on the third floor and it had looked like they were talking to someone that was out of her line of sight. Hopefully that someone was Shinji. She hadn't been able to get a look at the person's face because they had rarely turned towards her and her view was limited because they had covered most of the window. She noticed several other windows that were covered and that told her that the electricity was probably still live to the building. They were blacking out the windows of the rooms they were using so that no one would see the glow from the lights.

Her theory had been confirmed when it got dark and she could see slim lines of light around the edges of the third floor window, which had now been fully covered over. There was also a faint glow through the doors and windows that looked over the central foyer and staircase at the front of the school. It looked like they were utilizing just enough of the lights to keep themselves from stumbling around in the dark, but not enough to draw undue attention from outside. Not that they would have anyway since all of the buildings for three blocks were completely uninhabited.

She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths to calm her nerves and focus herself. Chances were good that they knew she was coming. It was probably a set up and she was rusty at close quarters combat, though she had been well trained and she was an excellent shot. She hoped that would be enough to compensate for a lack of practice.

Still, she stood an excellent chance of getting herself killed, but so long as she got Shinji out of there first, she didn't care. She had already failed him by not being able to answer his call for help, and knew she hadn't been a very good guardian to him. But there was no way in hell that she was going to leave him in the hands of people who meant to harm him. She was determined that she wasn't going to fail him this time, even if the cost was her life.

She pulled her pistol and clicked off the safety, cracking the slide open to make sure there was a round in the chamber. She looked up at the window of the room where she had seen activity during the afternoon. There was a determined look in her eyes and she was ready to get down to business.

"Hang in there Shinji, I'm coming to get you."


Shinji Ikari was wondering if he had been born under a black cloud or some other equally suspicious circumstance. After everything else that had happened to him in his life, now he was tied to a chair with a gag in his mouth, in a classroom in an abandoned school. The room had been his home for the last two days, his bed a gym mat and a blanket. They gave him bottles of water to drink, but he hadn't eaten since he had been there.

Until earlier in the day his kidnappers hadn't even spoken to him except to silence him by making threats towards Misato when they first grabbed him. Earlier in the day though, he had been asked a bunch of questions by the man who led the group, asking him how much he knew about NERV's purpose. There wasn't much he could say, since as far as he knew, NERV's only purpose was to fight the Angels.

When he was done asking his questions, the man told him that someone would be coming to try and rescue him tonight and that his ordeal would be over one way or another. Currently, while Shinji was seated near the front of the room under the only light that had been left intact and functional, the man was at the back of the room behind a stack of desks waiting to ambush Shinji's rescuer should they live long enough to find him.

He had never seen the man's face, or the faces of any of the other kidnappers for that matter. They either wore masks around him or had him blindfolded when they were around. The man in the room with him was the leader of the group and Shinji could only identify him by his cold, gravely voice. He had asked the man repeatedly about why he had been abducted but he would tell him nothing. However, he had overheard two of the other men talking outside the room later on, though and he didn't like what he heard.

'We're being well paid to do this job and it isn't about the kid anyway, so stop complaining. He's just the bait. A convenient tool to lure a target and nothing more.'

He was scared to death. He didn't know what they intended to do with him when this was over. What he did know was that he didn't want to see someone give up their life in order to try and rescue him. No one should have to pay a price that high for something so worthless. He was ambivalent and apathetic about his own chances of survival, not really caring if he lived or died. But if he was to die tonight, he would have only one regret. He would regret not thanking Misato for taking him in and caring about him. He would regret not telling her that she truly was his best friend and that he loved her. She was truly the only family he ever really had.


Gaining entry had been easy enough, but it was so dark in the damaged end of the building that she had to carefully feel out every step. There was dim light ahead at the central core of the building, but it was far too dim and weak to do her much good yet. She hadn't seen or encountered any of the kidnappers yet, but she wasn't really surprised. It was too soon for them to attack. They would likely wait until she came to the dimly lit central foyer where the darkness could no longer cloak her and she tried to make it to the central staircase. Another way to gain access to the third floor undetected, something they might not have expected, would have been nice.

There had been a set of stairs at the end of the building where she entered, but they had been mostly destroyed along with the rest of the end of the building. There would be stairs at the far end as well, but she would have to pass through the kidnapper's likely ambush point to get there. She supposed she could have went to that end first and tried to gain entry, but she couldn't pick a lock and she had no tools to cut the lock or the chain that secured the door. She could have shot it off but the noise would have alerted them to her plan and they would have rushed to meet her in force. Besides, she was only guessing that Shinji was on the third floor and if she was wrong it would have been all for nothing anyway. Better to go in where they wanted her to, understanding that they would be waiting for her somewhere along the way.

Every few steps she would stop and listen carefully for any sounds of her foes, but so far she had heard nothing of them. The only sound she did hear was her own breathing and the soft rustle of her clothing as she moved. The cut on her foot was bleeding again and it hurt like hell, making it difficult to walk without favouring it as she slowly advanced down the hall.

She held her gun in a two handed grip and up at eye level, tracking everywhere she looked, just like she had been taught to do years ago. As she got closer to the centre of the building, she heard a slight sound and saw a shadow move. Someone was probably getting tired of waiting for her and had fidgeted a bit in their position.

In the faint light from the central foyer, she could see the mostly glass walls of the administration office up ahead on her left. It was the last room at the end of the hallway and occupied the whole corner block on that side of the hall. A hallway continued back past the far end of the office around the corner to her left, from the front entrance and central stairs. She looked at the door of the room she was now even with, which was the last one before the office, and noted that it was the school's first aid clinic.

Keeping her eyes and her gun focused on the area ahead of her, she reached out with her left hand and tested the doorknob, finding it unlocked. She stepped up to the door, listening carefully as she opened it very slowly. When the door was open wide enough, she slipped through and closed it just as slowly and quietly. As she had hoped, there was a hallway to her right that led down to the office, passing the principal's office along the way. If she stayed away from the dim light that was coming in through the office windows, she should be able to observe the foyer and the staircase and hopefully spot her enemy.

She edged her way along the hallway, staying low and moving very cautiously. She scanned every inch of the area outside that she could see. Up on the second floor she caught a glimpse of someone stepping back from the railing and into the shadows behind him. She ducked in behind the big L-shaped reception desk that followed the contours of the room and stayed as low as she could. The desk was topped with a chest high counter that offered her good concealment.

A couple of minutes later she saw the guy again, and she saw him gesture to someone across from him. At least she now knew where two of the six people she knew were on site were located. Two of them had the stairs covered and if she assumed that there was at least one person with Shinji, she still had three unaccounted for, unless there were more people she hadn't seen and she wasn't ruling that out.

She thought the chances were good that there would be someone waiting down the hall that ran straight back from the stairs and past the office. If she was running the show she would have someone there. If she was right, she would have been covered from two sides from above and from her left on the ground floor if she had entered the foyer. There would be no need to have someone to the right since that was the direction of the front doors and they were chained shut from the outside and offered no escape, and there was probably someone in the other ground floor hallway on the other side of the foyer.

She hadn't encountered anyone along the hallway on her entry, but that didn't mean that someone hadn't been hiding in one of the rooms, waiting for her to go by so they could seal off her only exit. Again, that's what she would have done, because it would effectively leave an intruder boxed in on all sides. Sooner or later though, someone would have to leave their position to look for her. Her bet was on the guy covering the only way in and out and he would probably realize where she was pretty soon.

She crept back down the hall to the first aid room and stopped just before she entered and put her back to the wall. She had heard a slight noise, like the sound of something brushing against the door. She caught a heavy whiff of stale tobacco and cheap aftershave and it confirmed for her that someone was entering the first aid room. He was so close that any noise she made, no matter how slight, would draw his attention.

It was unlikely that she could physically overpower him and do it quietly, and reaching for her knife would cause too much movement since she would either have to put her pistol away or switch it to her left hand, which wouldn't work either. She was wearing a nylon jacket and the movement of her sleeve against the body of the jacket would make a soft rasping sound that he would definitely hear. Besides, without a free hand to work with she wouldn't be able to cover her prey's mouth to keep him quiet while she slit his throat or speared the knife through one of his kidneys. She didn't have much choice.

She pointed her USP at what should be the centre of the target's body mass and fired two rounds in quick succession. She was rewarded with a pained grunt that told her she had hit her target. As the guy went down he reflexively yanked the trigger of his weapon, a shotgun, sending a scattering of shot across the first aid room that smacked into the nurse's desk. The loud report of the weapon was harsh on her ears in the confined space, and the flash from the muzzle screwed up her night vision. When she bent down to retrieve the weapon, she could just hear one of the other gunners repeatedly calling out the name Asuhara through the ringing in her ears. When he got no response he called out the names Imagawa and Hisamatsu. He was sending two people to take a look.

She was going to go back into the administration office when she heard a door hinge squeal. There were two entrances to the office. One was just a few feet up the hall from where she was, the second was around the corner and down the hall, on the far side of the office. She had been right about there being a shooter down that hallway.

She stepped back into the first aid room so that she could watch the office hallway, the outside hallway through the short stretch of the office windows that she could still see, and the door to the first aid room. She didn't have the luxury of time to move the dead body blocking the door so she could close and lock it. Looking out through the office windows, she saw someone pass through the dimly let foyer. It looked like they intended to come down the hallway and in the first aid room door in an attempt to pinch her between them and the guy coming through the office.

As quietly as she could, she pulled down the slide on the shotgun to chamber the next round and backed a few feet further into the room and sought partial cover behind a short supply cabinet. She could stay pressed up against the wall and fire over top of it, leaving very little of herself exposed. She didn't know which one of the thugs would show themselves first, but it didn't matter much. As soon as she saw a body part or a gun poke through one of the doorways, she was going to open fire. Waiting for them to come to her probably wasn't the best idea, but it was all she really could do at the moment. She was flying by the seat of her pants here as it was and she had to take whatever came her way and make the best of it.

About twenty seconds later she heard movement at the first aid room entrance. A sub-machine gun opened up from the doorway just as she fired. Several rounds whipped past her, far too close for comfort, but her shot silenced it. The guy was screaming his head off out in the hallway. She had fired at his muzzle flash and had probably hit his weapon and his hands as well as any other random body parts that happened to be in the way.

She racked the slide and immediately fired at the other doorway, deflecting the buckshot off the wall and down the hallway. She heard someone start swearing furiously, but it didn't sound like the pellets had done much damage to the guy. She racked the slide to fire again, but it wouldn't come all the way down. The empty shell casing had jammed in the ejection port. She didn't have time to try clearing it so she tossed it aside, drawing her USP and dropping down behind the storage cabinet. It was a good thing she did.

Her adversary stuck his weapon around the corner and blindly sprayed an entire clip around the room. Luckily, none of the bullets found her. As soon as his gun went silent, she dove out from her cover and slid into view on her right side, firing a quick double tap. The first round struck the sub-machine gun the guy was trying to reload, while the second struck him just below his breastbone, staggering him back. She followed up with two more rounds, one through his right eye, the second through his forehead.

She got up and went to the first aid room door and peered cautiously out into the hall. The guy she had wounded with the shotgun was still making a lot of noise, but he was retreating down the hall and was nicely silhouetted against the faint light. As he stumbled away from her, she lined him up and squeezed off two shots, both going through the back of his head and blowing out his face.

She had no qualms about shooting the guy in the back. This wasn't some cheap Hollywood flick where the hero gave you a heads up and a sporting chance. This was the real deal and you didn't let the bad guys off easy or let them have a second chance. Hell, you didn't give them a first chance if you could help it. They were trying to kill her and they had Shinji. She didn't care who she had to kill, or whether she had to do it with a gun, a knife, or her bare hands, she was getting him back and fuck anybody who didn't like how the game was played.

She ducked back into the room as someone from the second floor landing fired a burst in her direction. They had little chance of hitting her from up there, the angle was no good. She needed to get moving and going through the office would offer her better cover since anyone shooting from the landing had a very limited field of fire. She doubted they could hit anything in the room beyond the area in front of the counters because they would be shooting downward at too steep of an angle to hit anything farther back.

She went back through the office and behind the desks to the door on the far side. Remembering that the hinges squeaked, she took a deep breath, yanked the door open and sprinted out and to her right, heading for the underside of the main staircase. The gunners opened fire in her direction when the heard the noise from the door, but they couldn't reach her.

When they stopped she stepped out and fired around the right side of the stairs, exposing herself just long enough to blindly fire two quick shots up at the landing. She immediately ducked back and ran the other way, sprinting into the hallway on the opposite side and going several meters down the hall and sticking to the right side. The gunner she had fired at was the only one with a firing angle, and all he could do was pound the wall opposite her new position, never coming close.

She eased her way back towards them, but stayed out of sight. If she stayed quiet one of them might think she was trying to get to the stairs at the far end and would rush down there to cut her off. She actually thought about trying to beat them to the other end of the hall, but with her bad foot she would never outrace them.

She heard one of them tell the other one to stay there and then heard boots slapping the floor as they started running. Hopefully she had them figured right and the runner was on his way to the stairs at the end of the hall. She gave herself a moment to settle her breathing and swap the nearly empty magazine in her pistol for a full one before risking a look around the corner. She nearly got her skull ventilated for it as a three round burst hit the wall just above her head. She did see where he was standing though. She stuck her arm out far enough to snap off two quick shots in his general direction before pulling back again. He returned fire and as soon as he did she whipped around the corner and fired off five shots in rapid succession.

He must have been expecting something like this because he hadn't moved and kept firing as she opened up. Her first two rounds missed entirely. The next two were on line but struck the railing that went around the landing. The last round struck him in the chest. He managed two, three round bursts from his early model MP-5 before she took him out. One round burned down her left forearm as she fired, the second tore through her hair above her left ear, but didn't hit flesh, while the third round and the subsequent three all missed high to her left.

She ducked back around the corner, her heart racing a mile a minute from the close call. She brushed her fingers through her hair and dislodged several purple strands that had been severed.

"Too close," she breathed. She pushed up the sleeve of her jacket to inspect the wound to her arm. A bloody two inch furrow was gouged out of the top of her forearm, just short of her elbow. It stung like hell and was bleeding quite a bit.

"I really didn't need another scar."

She didn't have time to worry about it. She heard the sound of someone running towards her from the other end of the hall and it was soon joined by the sound of a sub-machine gun on full auto. She had to dive across the hall and roll around the corner as rounds began to chew up her previous position. She got up and started running down the centre hall to find some cover. She saw a sign over a door, marking it as the teacher's staff room and decided that it was as good a place as any.

However, just as soon as she thought that, someone stepped out of the recessed doorway and slammed their arm hard across her chest, taking her off her feet. She had no chance to avoid it. She was flung over backwards and her head bounced hard off the floor and she very nearly lost consciousness. The light in the room was switched on and she was dimly aware of two people standing over her. Their faces looked vaguely familiar but she couldn't place them. One of them reached down and picked up her pistol. She heard the man that had been chasing her come to a stop behind her.

"It's about fucking time you lent a hand Kamio," the guy complained. "Why the hell didn't you step in before?"

"You know very well Hamamoto that we're only here to observe and make sure the job gets done," the man who clubbed her answered. "The job you and your friends were hired to do, but can't seem to accomplish. With results like this it's little wonder you were all kicked out of the army."

"Fuck all that," Hamamoto spat as he cocked his weapon and pointed it at Misato's head. "She's down, I'll finish her and collect my money."

"No," Kamio's partner said.

"No?" Hamamoto questioned. "What the hell do you mean no, Shimedzu? You changing the rules in the middle of the game?"

"Quite the opposite," Kamio answered. "This went pretty much the way we thought it would. We expected that she would kick your asses. Her military training was much better than that of you and your friends and she's motivated by something other than money. She's also a far better shot than all of you put together."

"You set us up?!" Hamamoto bellowed.

"Her rescue attempt had to look like a heroic, but failed effort," Shimedzu told him. "And that has been accomplished."

"And now your usefulness has ended," Kamio told Hamamoto as he raised Misato's pistol and shot him between the eyes, then tossed the pistol aside. He looked down at Misato who was starting to regain her wits and he kicked her hard in the ribs. She let out a loud grunt of pain and clutched at her side.

"You on the other hand, Major Katsuragi, we do still have a use for," he told her. "Our boss said if we took you alive we could enjoy your company for a couple of hours, just so long as we kill you before the sun comes up."

"Lucky me," she wheezed.

"You have no idea," Shimedzu said. "By the time we're done with you, you will wish we had let Hamamoto kill you."

He grabbed her by the hair and jerked her to her feet. She let the momentum carry her up and forward towards him, allowing her to do two things. She lunged at him and brought her head up hard under his chin, slamming his jaw shut and rewarding herself with the sound of snapping teeth. His head snapped back and he stumbled back into the wall. She followed up immediately by slamming her knee into his crotch as hard as she could. She could actually feel his testicles rupture against her knee. His mouth flew open with a breathless gasp, spilling out blood and broken teeth. The pain was so intense that he didn't even scream. His eyes rolled up in his head and he began to slowly slump to the floor.

Kamio swung a punch that caught her hard in the side of the head and knocked her stumbling aside, allowing Shimedzu to complete his graceless fall unimpeded. Another shot to the head was not something she needed right then. She swung a disoriented right at his head, which he sidestepped as he positioned himself to stomp her right knee. She felt something pop inside her knee and she fell against the wall. He reached out and clamped his left hand around her throat and used his right to hit her across the left side of the face with a heavy open handed slap. He gave the other side of her face equal treatment with the back of his hand. She saw stars and she could taste blood in her mouth. He then slammed her up against the wall and held her in place with her feet several inches off the floor.

"I should have taken a piece of you a long time ago bitch," he seethed. "You cost me and Shimedzu our jobs."

Now she knew where she had seen them before. They were former Section 2 agents. They had been in charge of the detail that had lost Shinji when he ran away after his battle with the Fourth Angel, but had been spending more time chasing skirts than keeping an eye on him. They never had taken the job seriously. She made sure they not only were taken off the protection detail, but that they got thrown out on their asses. Apparently they had found a new calling as hired thugs.

He wasn't trying to strangle her, but his grip was tight enough that she was having major difficulty breathing. Between that and the hits to the head, she was having a hard time fighting back. She tried kicking at him and chopping at his arm with her hands, but her struggles only seemed to make her weaker. Her vision started to get cloudy and she knew she would pass out soon. She heard him laugh and the pressure eased on her throat as he let her down until her feet touched the floor. Any relief she felt was short lived as he buried his right fist in her stomach with enough force to lift her off her feet.

He let her collapse to the floor in a wheezing, retching heap. When she made it back to her hands and knees he kicked her hard in the ribs again, sending her crashing back to the floor.

"You cost me my job, which cost me my wife and my home," he spat. "So when I was asked if I wanted to take on this job, I couldn't say yes fast enough."

"If you had kept it in your pants, you'd still have all that," she wheezed. "Don't blame me because you're fucking stupid."

He responded by stomping hard on her left hand and grinding his heel into it. She heard the bones snapping and screamed in pain. He roughly yanked her to her feet by the hair, painfully bending her back so he could look down into here eyes.

"Let's go find out if all the filthy things I've heard about you are true," he sneered. "Hell, maybe I'll take you upstairs and do you right in front of the kid. Then when we put a bullet through your brain, his horrified face will be the last thing you see."

That, was the exactly wrong thing to say. Her anger flared and he saw something in her eyes that he really didn't like. He suddenly felt a sharp, burning pain in his gut, just above his belt. He let go of her hair and looked down to see her hand tightly gripping the knife she had just rammed into his belly, right up to the hilt.

She stared back at him, her gaze as cold as the grave.

"Still want to fuck me, or am I too aggressive for you?"

She pulled out the knife and drove it into him again, this time just below the diaphragm, hopefully severing one of the major blood vessels that ran through the abdomen. He cried out in pain and sank to his knees, clutching at his wounds.

She stumbled over to Hamamoto's body to retrieve her pistol, then turned it on Kamio and shot him in the head. She used Hamamoto's shirt to wipe the blood from the knife blade and returned it to its sheath before turning her attention to Kamio's partner. Shimedzu was starting to come around and was making pitiful groaning sounds while clutching his crushed testicles. She silenced him with a shot to the head as well. Neither of them may have posed much risk, but you never left a live enemy behind you, especially when you were operating alone.

Hobbling away from the carnage, she leaned against the wall to take stock of her injuries. Besides the graze to her left arm and her lacerated right foot, she now had a broken left hand, a split lip and a cut inside her mouth. A small piece of bone was protruding from the back of her left hand and had nicked a vein on its way through. The blood from it was mingling with the persistent trickle that was running down her arm and dripped off of her fingers to the floor. Her ribs felt like she had broken a few, making breathing and moving difficult and painful, and her stomach hurt like hell where Kamio had driven his fist into her. There was a good chance that she had ligament damage in her right knee and she would be fortunate if she didn't have a concussion. She certainly had a whale of a headache.

If pain was nature's way of letting you know you were still alive, then Misato felt very much alive at the moment. She took a few minutes to catch her breath, every expansion and contraction of her chest a painful one. She looked towards the staircase.

"Well Shinji, I'm still alive. And with a little luck I'll get you out of here yet."

She pushed away from the wall and limped towards the stairs.


Well, two thirds of the way there and Chapter 3 should be coming your way next week.

Possibly.

At least it will if I can get the end of the chapter to come together into something I can live with.

Thanks for reading and please take time to review if you're so inclined. As always your reviews are encouraged and appreciated.

That goes for my other stories too. You know how to find them.