An echoing shriek tore through the city, and with it, a crushing wave of smoke, dust and grit scoured down town Tokyo-3. Beyond the mere physical, stranger things rose in the wake of that psychometric wail. Small pest animals died messily, while NERV and the as a group suffered crippling migraines and bloody eardrums and noses. The keening wail broke glass and crystal well in advance of the blast wave, all the way out to the sniper position, demolishing glass and sensitive equipment. Both Makoto and Ritsuko pulled their glasses off, gaping at the ruined lenses.
Somehow the LCD screen remained intact, though split into seven sections by a spider web of cracks. "High energy reaction!"
Misato reeled and blinked blood out of her eyes. "Shit! It saw us coming! Shinji-kun!"
The positron pulse built up with almost zero delay, as if it was charged in a capacitor and waiting to fire. For all they knew it probably had been. The beam carved through the north side of Mount Hakone, and melted through the nearby low slung hills with incidental discharge. The waters of Ashinoko boiled and swept up in waves that crashed against the forward base. The shore was choked with the remains of dead fish. The physical, concussive shock wave of displaced air crashed into th concrete structures so hard that the leading surfaces of reinforced battlement cracked, and at the edges, abraded away. Below and behind in the safest relative place, the command trucks and generators rocked in the blast wave, while cables and transformers crackled in protest.
All together this took barely two seconds. The beam hadn't even reached them yet.
To those outside, it was almost perverse. The beam itself was bright, but against all expectations, not as bright as the Sun. Instead it was akin to an overcharged florescent light, an extending shaft of charged particles. The 'bright' part of the beam was itself misleading, as that was merely waste energy; positrons slamming into air molecules and transferring their energy on them, which in turn discharged light.
Time seemed to slow as the attack approached, and as it raced unerringly towards the sniper nest, it grew brighter and brighter. And then Unit 01 stood in its way. From behind the Evangelion was a solid black silhouette with its edges cast in flickering red-orange light. The great machine shoved the shield forward into the invisible, leading edge of the attack, digging in with its heels.
The beam slammed into the shield, splitting into ionizing streamers of charged air and fire. Almost immediately, the shield superheated. Ceramic tiles cracked and flaked away, even as lower layers took on the thermal strain. The superconductor array blew out almost instantly, as well as the cooling devices on the inside of the shield. That was okay though, Ritsuko had warned the pilot that would happen.
Behind him, Rei was utterly unfazed. She had already pulled the charging handle before Makoto shouted 'High energy reaction'. A fuse the size of a freight locomotive slammed into the chamber, and behind her, capacitors started filling for the final discharge. The targeting computers spat out tens of thousand lines of junk data per second, hundreds of thousands. The shield and chaotic positron deflection was wreaking havoc with everything electronic for half a mile around. The systems held, however, even split by static and distortions.
Below, in the command truck. Makoto hissed at his console. "Charging in nineteen seconds! The shield will fail in sixteen!"
Misato stared at the beam on her monitor. "Shinji-kun. We're only going to get the one shot at this. Can you hold out against that beam for three seconds?"
He didn't answer.
The shield would break. There was no getting around it or last minute ploy to avoid going head to head with a charged positron attack. The AT field at best would only blunt the assault, and Unit 01's available power was dropping precipitously. Someone had tossed a countdown timer into his mental awareness, tagged with the appropriately ominous tag 'time to shield collapse'.
Seconds ticked by, and Shinji found himself stepping forward into the beam. The streamers and curling wreaths of charged particles swirled around the Evangelion's limbs. Lines of carbon scoring seared fern patterns along the Evangelion's arms and armor, etching burn-tattoos with frightening ease.
The shield gave out as the timer reached zero, and the positron blast continued unimpeded, until it slammed into the Evangelion's torso plate. The seconds ticked by with agonizing slowness, while armor melted like wax, and artificial flesh sublimated layer by layer.
Throughout the command trucks, the cheerful, blessed sound of guidance lock warbled through surviving speakers and headsets. Misato laughed and shouted the order to fire.
Rei's response was immediate and unexpected. "No."
Rei leaned into the eyepiece while she explained, breathing softly. The Angel remained perfectly still and centered in her reticule; it was as perfect a target lock as one could ask for under the circumstances, except for one thing:
"The enemy positron beam will interfere with my own shot. Until the beam is disrupted, I cannot guarantee sufficient accuracy to fulfill my orders."
The command crew gaped, and then realized she was one-hundred percent correct. The Operations Director whirled and gave the order to save them all. Misato had held an arsenal of rockets and missiles in reserve for a reason. Earlier it was to distract the Angel so that the sniper could make an unobstructed shot. She had merely hoped to make her attack before the enemy preempted her. Every surviving emplacement within five miles revealed itself, and in a near simultaneous barrage, fired.
Hundreds of conventional missiles tipped with dedicated, 'bunker busting' and similar high-penetration warheads.
Misato's grin was savage. "Make your choice, you son of a bitch."
Ramiel was confronted by the impossible choice. If either attack were allowed to strike home, its capabilities as a fortress would be severely compromised. New neurological growth within the Angel allowed it to further comprehend and adapt to the threats it faced. The conventional weapons would damage it, and possibly render it incapable of wielding its primary weapon. The unconventional weapon or the Beasts would most certainly counterattack, if given the opportunity.
Like Sachiel before it, Ramiel's increasing capability to understand proved to be its downfall. The positron beam clicked off with an audible snap as air rushed in to fill the vacuum. Around the Angel, light bent in alien ways as it raised its AT field to full strength. A hundreds missiles slammed into the barrier of altered space, washing over the boundary in sheets and rivers of fire, fuel and explosions.
The beam cut out with one second to spare, and Shinji, the Evangelion, slumped to its knees. Inside the plug, the pilot's chest was a near solid sheet of fading red, and the LCL was thin and soupy after boiling. The bridge crew gave the order and flushed the plug of old, stale fluid and replaced it with blessedly cool, refreshed LCL. Shinji collapsed into his seat.
The Angel was turning and twisting, bringing its defensive field to bear against the incoming missiles and artillery. That was alright though, because the Angel always rotated on an exact, perfect center axis. It had never once broken free of the reticule.
The peppy, green warbling tone of 'guidance lock' filled Rei's ears and mind. She pulled the trigger.
The human-made positron beam cut through the air and boiled yet more Ashinoko boiling into the air. Less than a minute had passed since the Angel's first preemptive shot, and already the base was surrounded in the stink of over-cooked, dead fish and algae. Ramiel continued to spin, swatting down more and more conventional assaults. It finally noticed the positron beam, and with an almost frantic motion, split open and charged its own attack. It paid no heed to the remaining conventional weapons pounding into its rear faces, nearly chewing through a fourth of the Angel's entire body with explosive force.
Less than a dozen yards away, the Angel's positron buildup slapped into the onrushing bolt of power, sending them both positron blasts cork screwing around each other. Rei's shot dug a twisting spiral pat through the Angel, just off center and growing wider and more chaotic as it cut into the inner torus reactor. Ramiel lost magnetic containment and vented the result of a sustained fusion reaction inside its own body. The blue crystal seemed to flare orange from within, like someone locked molten magma inside a diamond. The sniper shot exited out the back of the Angel, tearing out a massive chunk of alien flesh and venting plasma.
The mournful, chaotic shriek echoed throughout the city once more, and the MAGI refused to acknowledge the Angel had gone silent.
An armory building collapsed under the psychic wail, and the command truck and numerous other, lighter vehicles were sent tumbling, even so many miles away from the Angel itself. Ritsuko was nowhere to be found among the broken windows and dislodged consoles. Makoto muscled his way back into the chair, now above him since the truck landed on it's side. Once belted back into his chair, he couldn't believe what he saw.
Misato untangled herself, cut , bloody and bruised from another wrecked console. Aoba had been their driver, and he was out, dead or unconscious, she couldn't tell. "Time to recharge?"
Makoto fought gravity and cracked ribs to tell her. "Twenty seconds, ma'am!"
The woman scrambled for a headset and fumbled for transmit. "Shinji-kun! We need twenty more seconds... I'm sorry to ask this. The Evangelion can take another hit... Can you?"
The remote feeds were down, so she couldn't see how her boy was doing. In the plug, the pilot coughed, and a cloud of red mist mixed with bubbles rushed out of his mouth. "Hurts..."
She cradled the headset. "Shinji-kun."
"...I'll try."
Unit 01 had no shield, and barely two minutes of power left. He thought about unfurling his AT field, but decided against it. The Angel, even weakened and listing, could probably cut through it anyway. His whole chest hurt. It wasn't just his nerves, but his actual skin was damaged and burnt, on top of another partially healed burn. His plug suit was in no better shape. Plastic and circuits had melted and flaked away in the LCL, choking the filters with toxic grit.
Ahead, the Angel slumped into the city, crashing through multiple armory and fortress buildings. One entire face had been chewed to utter ruin, looking more like a bismuth crystal than anything else. Fire and thick black smoke spiraled into the air, lit by secondary explosions of toxic gasses. The drill snapped off at the base and shattered, raining shards onto Central Dogma below.
All of Japan was once more focusing every scrap of power it could into the capacitors behind Rei, and ahead of her, Shinji willed his Evangelion forward to defend her.
The fortress city was abandoned, evacuated more accurately. While the civilian structures were underground, none were occupied due to various contingencies, like being able to completely disconnect a three-hundred meter square chunk of the city and send it plunging into the Geofront below.
But, if you knew the right people and knew what you were doing, you could hide out in one of the civilian buildings as it retracted below ground. And you could get out into the city surface.
Above, the Angel dwarfed human sense of scale. It was itself the size of normal city blocks, and even damaged its presence was all-encompassing.
Below, a single man hauled a small armored case along on simple metal and plastic rollers. His instructions were to get as close as he could to the Angel, open the case and press the button. Everything else would take care of itself after that.
The Angel triggered its positron blast, sending paper, utility poles, trash bins, cars, and one person flying through the air. Ryoji Kaji pulled himself out of a pile of debris and tightened the strap on his helmet, groaning. "This is a terrible place to be."
Above, a missile streaked across the sky, a rather large one too, according to his casually acquainted eye. Something you fire from a base, not the back of a truck or aircraft. It slammed into the Angel and tore out another massive chunk of crystal. The eldritch invader's beam cut off with a wink, and it screamed again, it screamed like a dying god. Maybe it was. Kaji felt blood run from his tear ducts. A few yards away, a sporty white car melted into slag. All around rampant, alien destruction built in terrifying number and scale... And Kaji got off easy. He glanced at the armored case with a raised eyebrow. He got off easy.
"A very terrible place to be."
Faster than anyone thought possible, the Angel righted itself, hovering even and level above the city skyline and splitting open once more. Still damaged and on fire, it charged up its primary weapon, heedless of any further conventional attack.
The beam lashed out, cutting into the shore of Ashinoko and past it, up a small hill and over an old Pre-Impact highway. The beam raked over forests and more hills and all and sundry, before immolating a power transfer station, and every single conduit cable leading to the positron capacitor banks.
NERV had lost power to the cannon. They had nothing to stop the Angel with now.
Ritsuko had lost her right arm. She had been blown out of the command truck and been partially under it when it rolled over. Misato had dragged her out while work crews and EMTs scrambled over the ravaged command post. Behind her a bit less than a mile away, the transfer station lit off in secondary explosions. A medic shoved the dark haired woman out of the way and started tying a tourniquet around the scientist's arm. It was a miracle she hadn't bled out already.
Misato scrambled back to the truck and found the radio. "Shinji! Rei! Change of plans. the Angel cut our power, so we're going to hook you up to our local generators and get your batteries topped off!" She turned to stare at the generators and work crews already working to reconfigure them. Good, she actually had the assets needed to execute her plan.
"Once that's done, you're going to have to run to the city and engage the Angel before it has a chance to recover." Her voice softened, almost pleading. "I know I've asked a lot of you already today, and you've done more than I could ever have hoped... But we need you to do a little more."
In the distance, the Angel was burning, throwing out fitful, listless positron bolts into the sky. "We're winning, if you can believe that. The Angel's on its last legs, and we need to keep that momentum going, or we're back were we started... And the Angel will know our tricks next of time."
Rei gave no protest. Shinji's cockpit camera reappeared on one of the functioning screens. Still wracked by pain, he just extended held one hand out and gave Misato a shaky thumbs-up.
The refit and recharge took a merciful six minutes. The Angel had started listing again, almost drunkenly, but even from here they could see it regenerating. It was like watching salt crystals grow in time lapse, slowly building up more and more bulk and structure.
Ritsuko tapped a cheesy bar tune through video and still images. "See that torus structure? That's the primary weapon. We normally expect Angels to use S2 organs to fuel their capabilities... this one is using fairly pedestrian physics and engineering. It's a fusion reactor, though it bypasses a few of the hurdles we face."
The head of Project E leaned against the roof of the tossed command truck while a paramedic tried to treat her her arm. She was already doped to the gills on pain killers, and covered in dirt, cuts and bruises. Misato huddled next to her, stretching the radio headset out on its coiled cord. "This'd be an amazing thing for a paper." The scientist let out a delirious laugh. "The Angel can 'brute force' its own positron beam by using an AT field to maintain magnetic containment, that's how it fired even though we cracked the torus open."
She chewed on a cigarette but couldn't light it. "And you can bet that this thing will work to mitigate its weaknesses as we speak. Like the Third Angel developing a ranged attack after we dropped an N2 mine on it."
Makoto shouted back from inside the truck. "MAGI predict you'll be able to engage in close combat before it can regain full power, but the positron beam is still in play."
Misato nodded and relayed that to the pilots. "The JSSDF and UN forces are bringing in every spare gun they can to serve as a distraction, because so far it still can't use its AT field and beam at the same time. They'll provide covering fire, you get in close and tear it apart."
Maps and data were fed to the pilots just as much as power and resupply. Shinji too enjoyed the blessed relief of pain killers, though far weaker ones. "We're also going to split your deployment up. Ideally we'd deploy you on opposite sides, because so far the Angel's proven to only have one beam. That may change however."
The maps changed, designating a pair of dots on either side of the lake. "Shinji-kun, you'll be running along the edge of Mount Hakone. Rei, you'll be on the western shore. Hopefully the Angel won't be able to decide what to target, and if you keep moving, you can avoid sustained contact, the beam won't kill you immediately."
Ritsuko took on a stoned, liquid grin. "Of course the best plan is to not get hit at all, so..."
Ramiel did not have time to fully evolve in response to the massive, impossible setbacks it had experienced. The humans understood the concept of momentum and initiative far better than it did, but that was of no matter. Its mission must be completed, or it would die trying, so that the next may make the attempt.
It did not notice the human with the small armored box waiting below.
The plan was simple, the obstacles were immense.
Ramiel responded with all due speed, taking potshots at the two charging Evangelions, before the rush of missiles and artillery forced it to shift back to defense. The Evangelions charged along the earth and shore with long bounding strides. Each footfall compressed the ground, and on the rise, dragged streaming plumes of dirt and rock into the air.
Rei quickly out paced the Third Child, running along the western shoreline and rapidly eating up battery power. A bit more than six kilometers was a pittance to an Evangelion, though Shinji had never actually attempted to run so far or fast outside of simulations. His chest stung and ached beyond description despite the pain killers, and every time he breathed, it reminded him that his lungs were half burnt from outside in.
Sluggish and labored, the injured pilot guided his war machine to the fight, barely managing to dodge low intensity beams, the interceptor positron blasts. The Angel was firing as fast as its damaged body could allow, and was content to take pot shots at the Evangelions. The creature seemed to forgive itself lapsing on accuracy, because it paid no mind if its shots missed, leaving melted, explosive craters for the pilots to run over or around. The beam refocused and swat more missiles and guns out of the sky; now real threats since it was unable to raise its AT field.
Rei had ducked behind an extensible blast shield layered in ceramic tiles and other technologies, fortifying it against angelic bombardment. So protected she plugged into the nearest generator building and armed herself. Shinji however was fading fast. Even if he ensured his Evangelion could continue, he couldn't. He was finally reaching the extent of his enhanced enduranc
e and tolerance for pain. Even now his vision faded to black and blurred with weird colors.
Two minutes of power left. That sounded about right. The Evangelion's shoulder pylons snapped open, dropping a pair of progressive knives into his hands.
Kaji stared up at the Angel and whistled, lighting a cigarette. "Well Katsuragi, you better have a rabbit or three in that hat of yours..."
Evangelion Unit 01 slammed into the flying fortress, gouging out a massive scar between the two halves of the positron charging valley. Inside the entry plug, the world was soaked in pure gold sunlight. The pilot was digging into every reserve he had just to fight down the pain, from both his own burns and the Evangelion's feedback.
The Angel thrummed, and its AT field snapped back on, shoving the Evangelion away and into the air. The great purple war machine seemed to slide off an invisible slope, before the Evangelion drove one knife into the region of altered space. Its own AT field unfurled with a roaring thunderclap, and Shinji forced his own set of physical laws on the Angel. The progressive knives hummed as the pilot and machine dug and ripped at the alien ego barrier, riding with gravity and into the Angel itself.
The agent blinked, puffing idly. "That'll do, Katsuragi. That'll do."
It hurt too much to scream. It hurt too much to think. All he could do was tear into the Angel and deny it any chance of hurting anyone else. He carved off great sheets of crystal flesh, opening new vents for smoke and fire to gush out. Even as the Evangelion's armor burnt away, he dug in harder, reaching with long knife-bearing hands. The progressive blade gouged into the Angel's body, and slowly, Shinji levered himself on top of the pyramid face.
The knives were reduced to slag after a few strikes, trying to punch into the energetic innards. At the same time, the Angel's keening wail spun up, followed by the cloud of glittering motes preceding a positron blast. The bloom of excited particles hovered next to the Evangelion's legs, hanging down over the charging valley... And it shook from side to side. The lambent chunk of subatomic particles bobbled back and forth, like a man shaking its head. It refused to fire.
Miles away, Misato's grin was manic, and all the more frightening cast in the green glow of broken monitors. "That damn thing can't target that close! I knew I was right! Rei! Forget ranged weapons, try and jump on the thing while Shinji's got it pinned!"
Rei acknowledged and moved into position.
Now seemed a good a time as any to complete his mission. Kaji let out a cheerful, tuneless hum as he pulled open the armored case, revealing a strange apparatus. It was mostly brass and copper pipes, with thin wires leading into a titanium clamp. That clamp in turn secured a small cylinder of flawless black volcanic rock. The rock was about the size of a soda can, mirror smooth and polished to a glossy shine.. A green button blinked brightly, waiting for a finger to press it. Kaji obliged.
Just as Shinji completed one final haymaker and Rei coiled for a leap, the device activated. The black rock hummed, transmitting a signal beyond human awareness or comprehension.
Above, Ramiel was gripped by several alien thoughts. The signal forced the Angel to evolve greater understanding to even comprehend the message. The signal imposed and absolute minimum of cognitive capacity. Wracked by psychometric pain it could now acknowledge as such, Ramiel was about to comprehend the concept of its own individuality, when those external thoughts resolved in terrifying clarity.
MORTALITY
WEAPON
TERMINATION
The damaged, crippled ruin of Ramiel shuddered, spinning so hard it flung Unit 01 from its body and into the streets with a bone-breaking crack. The angel screamed, shrieking and howling like a wounded, terrified animal. Kaji felt his ears and nose bleed, while a migraine crashed through his brain.
And then, a split second later, Ramiel was gone, having left the atmosphere in less than a second, completely ignoring air resistance, gravity and acceleration.
Shinji and Rei looked up at the hole in the smoky air.
The MAGI wound maintain that the blue pattern remained in detection range for over a week; the Fifth Angel was still alive.
Then, the blue pattern vanished, and NERV rushed to pick up the pieces.
AN: Shorter chapter than I would've liked, but it hit all the notes I wanted to hit and it felt like a good place to stop, take stock and depressurize after such a wham-bam action-fest. No idea when Chapter 15 will hit; I've no words written and will still need to plan a few events.