Creation began on 09-28-15
Creation ended on 10-20-15
Neon Genesis Evangelion
An Ancient Guardian: Justice, not vengeance
As Fuyutsuki stood in front of Unit-01, he pondered how Yui would react to the fact that her only son was a completely different person when he returned to the Geo-Front, no longer needing a wheelchair, but against NERV's beliefs.
None of us can imagine what he'll do if and when he returns, he thought, wondering what Shinji might do to any of them after the blow to the head he gave his father the last time he was in the Geo-Front.
As he continued to stand in front of the Eva, Misato was talking with Ritsuko about the continued reduction in NERV's personnel after the revelations Shinji caused…and the identity of the creature in Terminal Dogma as Lilith.
"You think he's gonna do something about it when he comes back?" She asked Ritsuko.
"With the Third Child, it's hard to say," she responded. "I'm still wondering how he was able to recover the use of his legs after so many years of damage to his spine."
-x-
Standing in front of the pyramidal building that represented nothing but agony in various aspects, Shinji pondered on what monsters to unleash upon the people to ensure that justice was obtained. At first, he considered unleashing creatures similar to the ones that had attacked the men his father had sent after him, but he decided against it. It was his disgust towards the Evangelion that enforced his decision, and made him consider an alternative to supernatural and organic creatures. Since NERV represented a huge step into the future, and the future often meant the greatest achievement of science and technology, Shinji would show them the extent of their advancement with science being misused.
"Mother chose to play the ghost in the shell that was a grotesque blend between manipulated flesh and metal," he uttered, "I shall unleash a legion of machines."
-x-
"…Uh, someone?" One of the female technicians still around NERV HQ gasped in Central Dogma. "The Third Child just entered the base!"
Misato rushed over to a nearby console with a monitor and saw this to be true, and saw that Shinji now looked vastly different from the last two times she saw him.
"What is he doing back here?" Hyuga questioned.
"He's back to deal with his father," Shigeru answered. "He said so himself. If Commander Ikari blew his one chance to make amends for his choices, the kid would come back to get what's left of him."
"You think he's here to kill him?"
"He did say that he expired the last time he was here."
CRASH! Something made a loud noise beneath the command bridge, and in the center was a large hole…where a large, mechanical spider and wolf emerged.
On the back of the spider was a pair of missile pads and the wolf had four cables for tails. Their orders among the machine legion were simple enough to follow: If they found Gendo Ikari, and they knew what he looked like, they were to hold him until Shinji came to deal with him, but should they encounter anyone else, the order was to incapacitate them to keep them out of the way of the primary target. And since Shinji was only after Gendo, murdering everyone else wasn't an option.
The spider's missile pads opened up and fired a barrage of missiles into the air.
"Aaah!" People screamed when the missile exploded and released a smokescreen of gas.
"Aw! Man, it's tear gas!" A man gasped, falling to the floor.
Misato was able to get away before she breathed in the gas along with everyone else that decided to run out the chamber.
In the halls were several other machines, many of which were unlike anything the personnel had ever seen in their lives. Some looked like massive, cybernetic versions of the guillotine with arms and were capable of levitation, while others appeared to be based around the human body, only made bigger or worse than their organic inspiration.
The purple-haired woman thought she had found a guy that had been fortunate enough to get away from Central Dogma or wherever else these machines were popping up, but found herself to be deceived by mere appearances from a distance. The "guy" she saw looked human to a degree, but was equipped with heavy machinery and a sub-machine gun.
"Halt!" He uttered, his very voice sounding mechanical. "Cease and desist! Only the primary target, Gendo Ikari, is to be dealt with! All others are to be restrained and kept at bay! Surrender immediately, and no harm shall come to you!"
Misato couldn't believe her eyes and ears. These machines were ordered to keep everyone except for Gendo alive, probably ordered by Shinji, however he was able to gather such an army in such a short amount of time. She attempted to shoot the cybernetic soldier, but his reflexes were quicker than hers, and he shot her HK USP out of her hands and fired additional rounds that reduced it to molten metal as it fell to the ground in front of her.
"I repeat, only Gendo Ikari is to be dealt with," the machine man repeated.
-x-
"What are these things?" Fuyutsuki asked as he looked at several monitors in the Eva cages, revealing the personnel present were either captured or incapacitated by strange, mechanical creatures unlike anything he'd ever seen before.
They were appearing allover the facility, smashing up through the floors and ceilings. The Sub-Commander saw on one of the monitors one such machine that resembled a giant ball with limbs and watched it roll over at least a dozen of the personnel in the hall, either killing them or incapacitating them. On another, there was a machine that looked like someone's attempt at creating a dragon, but only managed to create a triple cannon variety of the sort, with the cannons replacing the head and two arms, firing energy blasts that either caused explosions when they hit the walls, floor or ceiling, or knocked out a running person when they got hit somewhere on their body, falling to the floor. And on another monitor, he saw Shinji, not as who he used to be, accompanied by another type of machine that looked like a mechanical mockery of a medieval knight. In front of them were some members of Section Two, raising their guns at them, but then Shinji just threw some sort of spinning top in between them, and it lit up and unleashed some sort of hologram…which then started beating the persistence out of the men.
Shinji looked up at the camera and uttered, "This is justice, not vengeance."
"Can we flood the halls with bakelite?" Gendo, who was also in the cages, asked the personnel there.
"We're trying, but these machines have cut most of the system's wires," a woman responded. "Got it!"
-x-
In the hall, Shinji, with a Robotic Knight, heard and saw a loud, rushing wave of red liquid that reminded the boy of blood.
"Gah!" He gasped, but took out his sword and quickly cut open a small rip in the space in front of them, pulling himself and the Robotic Knight into it and sealing it before the red wave hit them.
-x-
"Impossible," Gendo uttered, seeing what his son did on the monitor, just before the camera's vision was obscured by the bakelite.
"And yet, he did the impossible," Fuyutsuki added.
-x-
The rip in space opened up and released Shinji in the last place he expected to find his father: Terminal Dogma, where Lilith remained crucified to the massive, red cross. As a memory derived from his near-death experiences came to him, he found himself shuddering from what had happened when Lilith was exploited and made to absorb all the souls still on Earth. It took him a while to calm himself, but the awful memories of himself being absorbed into the colossal being didn't fade from his conscious mind.
"I can't allow you to remain here where you can still hurt people by being exploited," he told the silent giant. "As long as you exist, you're a danger to us all."
He raised his sword and slit the space in between them, watching as Lilith was sucked into the rip. It took up to three minutes, but Lilith was completely absorbed into the rip and no remnant of her was left on the cross when the rip closed up.
"And now…all that remains is to dispose of her artificial tomb to ensure that nobody can achieve the same outcome," Shinji sighed, opening another rip in space with his sword and going through it with the Robotic Knight.
-x-
Somehow, he wasn't sure how, Gendo sensed that Shinji had done something he didn't expect him to. It was something so severe that it would crippled his plans for Instrumentality, if that plan could still be carried out, despite what that creature that appeared and defeated the Third Angel did as a consequence of its victory.
"They're taking over the entire facility," a woman said, watching the monitors and seeing the machines either incapacitating or gathering every person within reach, and taking them into rooms with ample space to keep them there.
"It looks like the only place they haven't appeared yet are the cages," added a man, seeing through a monitor that several machines in Central Dogma had collected the personnel staff in the command center, and how at least three machines that looked like large, red spheres with single eyes and metal claws latch onto the MAGI before exploding, taking out much of the chamber and the cameras there. "They've just destroyed the MAGI."
Fuyutsuki and Gendo looked at the man and felt they had reached a crossroads just then.
"They're not going to stop until you've been dealt with, Ikari," Fuyutsuki then told Gendo.
Gendo then sighed and took out his gun, checking its mag and then stepping out of the room.
"Handle things here, Fuyutsuki," he told the Sub-Commander. "I will resolve the Third Child's erratic behavior myself."
As he left, Fuyutsuki had to wonder if Gendo was even capable of committing the impossibly-unforgivable act he expected him to be capable. He wondered if Gendo was perfectly willing to murder to his own son.
-x-
Shinji appeared in the command center of Central Dogma, now standing before the destroyed MAGI supercomputers that were more of a pain than a valued asset to NERV in his eyes, after recalling from a memory how any power outage that could affect this entire facility would have the higher-ups put its continued usage over any life-support functions that the people needed to survive down here. He sighed as he picked up a charred piece of the supercomputer's external frame and tossed it over the bridge, almost next to the hole a Launcher Spider and Giga-Tech Wolf came out of. So far, his legion of machines had taken care of most of the personnel within the installation without any loss of life, excluding what would be his father's, and the MAGI and Lilith were disposed of, leaving just two other obstacles in the way of achieving true justice.
"Scanning for priority target," he heard the Robotic Knight behind him say. "Currently scanning. Subject, Gendo Ikari, at present, in motion within the Geo-Front, within NERV HQ."
"There's a possibility that he'll be heading towards that place where we met for the time in years since my…since that awful moment frozen in time."
"Scanning. Scanning. Subject, Gendo Ikari, at present, in motion towards the Eva cages."
Shinji sliced open another rip in space and they jumped in it, heading towards the Eva cages. When the spatial rip opened on the other side of the bridge between the previous location to the next or desired location, Shinji landed onto the bridge that stood in front of Unit-01. He looked up at the horned, purple behemoth and groaned in annoyance over its detestable sense of favoritism by his father and anyone else that valued it more than people's lives.
"Scanning. Scanning. Warning. Spiritual energies detected within foreign, unregistered flesh mass." Robotic Knight informed Shinji. "Spiritual energies detected within unregistered flesh mass located approximately three feet from you."
Shinji then looked at the Eva again, realizing that his mother was obviously aware that he was present.
"You're either going to sit in there and do nothing but watch as the world passes you by, or you're going to come out here and explain your actions, Mother! Because that bastard's not the only person that has caused me grief with neglect and exploitation! You made me watch your experiment! You're on the hook, too! There's nothing good about anything that you've done if it means that countless people have to be the ones that pay the ultimate price for them. Bits of what happened to the planet because of Second Impact are coming undone due to the power of one that saved me from death twice since I got here. I've actually seen snow, something you once promised to show me. If I hadn't been so clueless back when I was still a toddler, I'd probably have a clearer understanding of what you meant by the seasons you helped to halt around the country for too many years."
The immobile behemoth gave no indication that the woman that resided inside was listening.
"You claim that you would be there…but that was just a lie in a series of lies and half-truths. Here's a truth for you to listen to, Mother. What you and your husband have done, what you still want to do, it turns my stomach in! Irony in all that has happened. Light has become darkness, darkness has become light. Pure has become impure, impure has become pure. Right has become wrong…and wrong has become right. In a way, you unleashed a darkness that you thought would get you closer to your goal, but it unleashed a light that would drive it back to its abyss, ruining your messed-up plans."
Still, Unit-01 gave no indication that his mother was listening.
Shinji sighed and reached into his coat's left pocket, pulling out an object that he then attached to the hilt of his sword.
"We can either do this the easy way," he threatened his mother, "or we can do this the hard way. It's all up to you, Mother."
And still, Unit-01 didn't do anything besides stand where it stood in its cage.
Why waste time on a behemoth that can't even talk back? He thought, having attached a talisman that represented an ability to forcibly release seals that entombed the souls of those still alive, but were spiritually displaced from their original bodies, either willingly or unwillingly. "Have it your way, then, Mother. You brought this on yourself."
He raised his sword up, preparing to slash at the space between himself and the Eva.
BANG! A gunshot was heard, and Shinji turned to his right on the bridge, seeing his father on the far end, holding a smoking gun in his right hand.
He lowered his sword and faced his father.
"The sword and the gun," he uttered, "how very different we have become. I'm old school and you're cruel school."
"Enough, Third Child," Gendo ordered him. "You have gone too far in your tantrum."
"First of all, I have a name, and it's Shinji. Second, you don't know what a tantrum is, having never seen a fit being thrown that was nothing but a fit. And thirdly, this is justice, not just for me, but for everyone that suffered because of Second Impact and the bane of existence that is the Eva."
"You're going to condemn us all to the nothingness of Third Impact if you continue to run wild. You need to be controlled."
"Controlled? Like those people you left me with that treated me worse than a dog when I lost the use of my legs? I'm a person, not some mindless automaton for you to exploit. But maybe that's all anyone with a conscious is to you, reducing your ability to form meaningful attachments to people. You don't know a thing about relationships, other than to dispose of them if they don't suit you. Is that why you entered into affairs with both Akagi women? Because you knew you could exploit them to suit your sick needs?"
"Don't you dare talk to me like that!" Gendo shouted at him.
"Or what? You're going to shoot me? Go ahead and shoot me! That would just prove that you don't know anything about relationships, and maybe knowing a thing or two about filicide. I'm not here to commit parricide, but you and your wife are on my list of people that need to be dealt with, and you will be dealt with."
"Not if you're dealt with first."
Shinji glared at him a hateful passion as Gendo aimed the gun at his head.
"Grr," something behind Gendo growled viciously, which surprised Shinji.
GASP! Gendo reacted with fright, as something large and muscular grabbed his gun-toting arm and turned him around, forcing him to face the same creature that had destroyed the Third Angel, towering over him.
"You shall not harm Shinji Ikari," it, no, he, uttered in a menacing voice, tightening his grip on Gendo's arm until he was forced to drop the gun.
"Aaaaurgh!" Gendo groaned, now being lifted off his feet…and hurled backwards into the pool in front of Unit-01. "Aaaaugh! Help!"
As Exodia vanished, the threat on Shinji's life negated, Shinji found a life preserver and threw it over to his father, who then had to dog paddle just to reach it.
"I didn't expect him to show up," Shinji expressed, being honest; he really didn't expect Exodia to show up and save him from his father. "I guess this is what people mean when they tell you to expect the unexpected, huh? Things happen that you don't expect will…just like what you don't expect me to do when I swing my sword right now."
He raised his sword again and swung it in front of Unit-01. The schism in space connected this dimension with the dimension within the Eva. He could see a person being dragged from wherever they resided within the Eva into this dimension. As they got closer, Shinji could see the outline of a woman with pageboy-styled hair, a diver's suit with small wings on the back, and appeared to be resisting the force that was bringing her through the vortex.
"…No… Shinji, stop this!" Yui Ikari, the same as the day she went into the Eva, grunted as she was being pulled through.
"This is the power of the Soul Release," he uttered to her.
"It's necessary for me to be inside the Eva!"
"You brought this outcome upon yourself, Mother."
As she emerged from the other side of the schism, she was dropped onto the bridge rather harshly.
"Aah," she groaned, just as the schism sealed up and disappeared from existence. "Oh, my God."
"No," Shinji expressed, lowering his sword down. "Not God. Nowhere near God. God doesn't commit the acts of irredeemable atrocity that you have committed. You say the Eva is a copy of God, but that's bull from the fruit of a poisonous tree. Eva is just a harbinger of despair, an inescapable source of darkness that must be removed from the world. God is believed to be merciful, a teacher who shows us not to be boastful of any achievements. I thanked him for those that gave me back my legs, just as I thank him for giving me the means to gain back my independence and free will. All of it, including my right to refuse you my questionable role in your individual agendas."
Yui slowly got up and made an attempt to approach Shinji, but he raised his sword up against her, making no verbal sign that he would make her regret that choice.
"Shinji," she tried to explain her reasons to him, certain that the serious gap in the years between his time as a toddler and his current time as a young teen have hampered his memories. "I can explain if you let me."
"There's nothing left to explain," he told her, and pointed towards the wet form of Gendo, who made his way to the bridge. "I'm not interested in helping either of you or anyone that wants to fight the creatures you call the Angels, God's own messengers, and I will make sure that you won't lay a finger on them, either. To face and kill God's messengers is to renounce God and question his divinity and infallibility as the absolute authority. Those that wanted for Second Impact to happen are those that must be brought to justice, one way or another. And you, you knew it was going to happen, and instead of trying to keep it from happening, you helped the people behind it. Heh, and you never really matured any further since before you went into the Eva that godforsaken day. If you had, then you'd know that life has been nothing but Hell for me since he (he gestured his head towards Gendo as he climbed out of the colored water) abandoned me. But I'm not here to make any of this about me. That would be vengeance, not justice, which is what this is about. Justice for those that suffered because of NERV, the Eva, people that want to end the world for some bullshit project that they believe will save them. Human Instrumentality, forcing people to evolve and merge into a single, consummate being? It's no different from global genocide, and I'll let the world know of this all…and everyone directly involved, which includes you two."
"You can't do this!" Gendo told him. "People will need the Eva to deal with the Angels when they come back!"
As he made a move for the fallen gun, Gendo saw it turn to molten pulp; the Robotic Knight behind Shinji had taken action and fired a laser at the weapon.
"Thank you," Shinji praised the machine creature. "You say the Angels will keep coming, huh? Why do you say that? Maybe because of Lilith, whom is no longer here because I disposed of her? Maybe because of Adam, who you would've had devoured to give yourself his AT-Field? Dispose of Adam, and they'll stop. Dispose of the Evas, and Instrumentality can't be achieved, and people can move on with their lives."
"We can't do that, Shinji," Yui uttered.
"Can't…or won't? Either way, it doesn't matter, for it has become something of an ambition for me to preserve the life that will return to this blue marble from your flawed science. What good is your science…when it can't really save anyone?"
"We didn't have any other choice," Yui expressed. "We were relying upon you to see us to a brighter future for all of mankind."
"That's too much expectation to force on one person…and it's a really lame excuse, Mother. It just enforces my own decision to…sever personal ties."
"What?" Gendo asked him.
"I can't stand being used by people that claim to care about me, and I can't stand being left alone by people that claim to care about me. So I'm washing my hands of the Ikari name. I renounce you two as my parents, and I will likely never see you after this night." He revealed.
"Shinji, you can't leave us," Yui pleaded to him. "Please, we can talk about this."
"At a time before any of this, I would've wanted to talk about any hopes of reconciliation, but it's moot to discuss this any further. I'm going to dispose of your precious Unit-01 now."
He swung his sword horizontally, creating another schism in space, and unleashed a dozen or so of the same machines that had destroyed the MAGI, floating in the air before latching onto the purple behemoth's head and plunging into the water, likely to latch onto the other parts of the behemoth.
"You had best leave now," he told them. "These Blast Spheres were timed to self-destruct five minutes after latching onto the Eva. That should give you enough time to reach the minimum safe distance."
After opening another schism behind himself, Shinji and the Robotic Knight went through it.
"Shinji!" Gendo called out to him, but the schism began to seal up. "Shinji! SHINJI!"
-x-
He never heard the large explosions that signaled the end of Unit-01, but he felt the vibrations when he stepping into the destroyed room of where another memory provided by his last near-death experience revealed to him as the Dummy Plug Plant, where all the spare bodies for the Rei Ayanami girl once resided. The entire room had been destroyed, scattering bits and pieces of the multitude of cloned bodies everywhere. As he looked around, he found pieces of Blast Spheres littered around with the remnants of the cloned bodies. Now, the girl was no longer replaceable, no longer expendable, truly unique, one of a kind.
"I did it," he uttered to himself. "Lilith's gone. Unit-01's gone, the MAGI's gone, and these forgeries are gone. NERV is in shambles now. Nobody will suffer because of them, anymore."
He opened another schism in space and went through it, intending to reappear atop a mountain outside of the city.
-x-
In less than five hours, after the machine army had disappeared from the base after letting free some of the personnel members so that they could release the remaining captives, the Geo-Front was emptied of people. While the damages caused were either minor to less than extensive in some areas, the damages to the MAGI, the cage of Unit-01 and Unit-01 itself, as well as the Dummy Plug Plant were over the Hayflick Limit; it would've taken months to repair the damages to all four. And the loss of Lilith was also a major crap in NERV's operational requirements against the Angels. The only real bright side to all of this was the complete lack of civilian casualties when this all started; even with the injured members, nobody was killed.
"We…we need to… We need to put out a manhunt for the Third Child," Ritsuko declared. "We have to hunt him down and incarcerate him."
"No way, lady," went a man to her. "I'm not messing with that kid, crippled or not. He might as well have put us out of a job."
"He had machines that were unlike anything we've seen before," added a woman. "Some of them looked like people wearing cybernetics with guns. They destroyed the MAGI."
"I got rolled on by a robot…after another that looked like a dragon with cannons shot me in the back and legs," another woman revealed. "I wished they had just killed me."
Misato, having surrendered willingly after that cyborg destroyed her gun earlier, suspected that there was now more to Shinji than what had happened to him before he returned to the city after regaining the use of his legs. To discover that he had renounced his ties to his family, that he had set his mother free from the Evangelion (against her will, by the way), and that he had the entire conversation between his parents and himself broadcast throughout the entire base for all that were conscious to hear. Yes, he took the entire facility out, all to get back at his parents for their absence, but he had also claimed that it was justice, not vengeance. If it had been vengeance, he would've simply killed them.
"So what now?" She heard Maya ask.
"What now?" Shigeru responded. "I'm going home."
"Yeah, me, too," added Hyuga.
"Same here," Misato agreed with them, as she needed to check up on Pen-Pen.
-x-
In the abandoned shrine, laying beside a small fire, Shinji had set his sword aside and reflected upon all that he did over five hours ago. In that time, he had torn down NERV by removing the resources that they had present that could've been used to harm the people. He had removed Lilith, sending her to another dimension that was as barren as a desert or frozen tundra where she couldn't be exploited by human hands, had the MAGI supercomputer system at their disposal ruined beyond reconstruction, set his mother free from her Evangelion tomb to punish her, and then severed his ties with the Ikari family. Did he feel shame for any of it? He did feel some shame, but not enough to feel for his parents and their future after all was said and done.
By crippling their agency, he had helped to preserve mankind's future as the planet truly began to heal. He owed these monsters, these spirits, machines, dragons, dinosaurs, warriors and beasts a tremendous debt of gratitude for their services. He owed Exodia for saving his life three times when he had been placed in danger. For the first time in a long time, he felt like he could look into the sunlight with hope restored to him.
Looking past the fire, he saw the being that had protected him, standing in front of him, looking down with soul-piercing eyes. He didn't fear his presence at all, giving a small smile.
"Thank you, Exodia," he praised him, and the being disappeared from sight.
And for the first time since his legs were restored to him, Shinji slept without a heavy doubt handing over his mind.
To be continued…
A/N: And here's the new chapter. What do you think of it? I don't know how to progress right now, but I hope this chapter will satisfy some of you out there that read it. Peace.
