Neon Genesis Evangelion: Nobody Dies: Six AIs, One Continent

Epilogue: Reboot

...

It was not quiet in the centre of Australia. There was life everywhere, though not of the Lilim variety. The wet-finger-on-crystal cries of the Baraqielim were everywhere, as this ecosystem, born not of Lilith, flourished. The red swamp had given way to blue-grey crystal trees, rising, like fractal mangroves, from the red that pooled. Around them, the land was forced up, and it revealed that the amount of the viscous gel was diminishing rapidly. There was a lacquer-like scum of glowing material, covering the surface of the dead lakes, which filled the craters which Baraqiel and its opponent had blown all across this plane. A flock of arrow-shaped crystalline darts flew in a delta formation, their tiny crackles of lightning still enough to shock the lesser shapes that formed shimmering clouds of tiny shapes around the fractal trees that blossomed across the landscape. The arrows, their barbs at the front needle-sharp, pieced the lesser, stunned crystals, and carried them off, to the 'nurseries' which hung from the branches, where the grey-blue substance ran like liquid mercury to coalesce into new shapes. Small seed clusters, fractal recursions already blossoming into a crude arrowhead, could be seen.

The joys of life. Birth from death.

It was a world which did not need water, which did not care about the heat of this hellish place, and it thrived. The autotropic 'trees' drew minerals from the ground, and built themselves, and the heterotropic 'animals' preyed upon them, and each other. The actions of the abomination may have killed the Baraqielim for hundreds of kilometres around, but here, they were blossoming again, more naturally, not driven into a breeding frenzy by the storms and the desperation of their father. And already, the 'vegetation' was growing together, fronds intermeshing to form a vast dome-structure of grey crystal over the colossal pit in which lay the once-again quiescent form of their progenitor.

Those inclined to humour might have remarked on the similarity of the shape to a Geodome. And, indeed, this was the barrier which had obstructed GEHIRN and their attempts to drill down to reach the father of this branch of the Tree of Life, being built anew by his children.

The structure rang like a bell, the connections carrying the vibrations around, and setting up strange counterpoint resonances as the organisms attempted to mitigate and dampen the damage. Again, and again the bell tolled, and, for those with the eyes to see, there were cracks spreading along one area, thicker than most, just by the edge.

And then it broke. One hand, bloodied and bruised, shards of bone briefly visible before the flesh sealed around them, erupted from the grey crystal, now splattered by flecks of red. One hand, a faint orange heat haze enveloping it, broke through, like a hand from a grave.

It should have been her grave. But such reckonings had been made without accepting who Xuan Do was, and what Xuan Do was.

"Once there was a maiden," she whispered in a long-recurring mantra, as the ringing began again, as she fought to widen the hole, "... who... argh... who struck an iron wall until it shattered her hand." A sickening crack was audible, as her wrist snapped, and she switched to her right hand, while the bones reknitted themselves. "S-s-she did not stop, though cracks spread throughout her bones. She..." there was a gasping of agonised breath, "... did not stop, though bl-bl-blood sprayed her eyes. She did not stop until she shattered the wall!" The last words were roared, as, with a crunch, an entire section of dome gave way, and she pulled herself out, one torturous motion at a time.

The Major was, not to put it lightly, a mess. She was caked in her own dried blood, which admittedly left her in a more decent state than she would have been otherwise, given that she was naked otherwise. Skin and tissue; all that was visible was puffy and too pale, newly regrown from the horrific damage done by Baraqiel. Bones had not quite regrown right; there was a subtle wrongness about far too many of her joints. And that was very obvious, because she was emaciated, little more than skin tight over bones, because her body had cannibalised itself to keep itself alive. Her entire torso was covered in horrific burn scars, where even her regeneration had not been able to handle the liquefaction of the ceramic inlays in her armour.

"Survival is fury," she declared to the world, unfocussed eyes gazing up at sunlight for the first time in well over a week.

She was also in much better state than the laws of nature, and, come to mention it, physics, should have permitted her to be. In that she was not dead.

Her LOGOS had managed, in that one, perfect, moment of sheer exhilaration, to manifest a visible AT-Field for the first time ever, and it had been enough to keep her alive. It had kept her alive, because it would die if she did. And the woman had kept herself furious, kept herself terrified all the time since, and her LOGOS had therefore kept itself active, which had kept her alive.

SEELE would have been shocked, both appalled and fascinated by how far, too far, she had pushed the foetal Nephilim placed within her, kept from maturing for these last eight years. But at the moment, Xuan Do didn't care. She was free of that place, free of that terrible chthonic place, and half a lifetime of training and violence was not enough to overwrite the bone-deep fatigue that now overcame her.

She wasn't scared of death. Not anymore.

The skeletal woman simply lay back, and waited for it to all end.

It took almost a minute for her to realise that what was under her back was wet. Wet, and soft, unlike the crystalline hardness all around her. Shifting, slowly turning, she rolled over, to stare at the pool of... not even truly water, more like wet sand, that lay at the base of the fractal tree-thing that towered over her. Reaching out with one sore finger, she gently stroked the trunk of the formation, and found it slightly slick. Her motions left a trail of her own dried blood on the greyish blue luminescence, which seemed to somehow be absorbed by the Baraqielim. Raising a finger out, she could see the blood taint it, but before, it had been clear.

And there something scummy and green growing in the wet sand. Not grass, not a true plant... a moss, at best, but, yet, it was still a matt chlorophyll-green in the midst of this blue and grey.

It was... oddly beautiful. Xuan smiled. It was a sign. It would have been bad to die away from any green at all, wouldn't it? Not really worth escaping, if she was still going to be surrounded by crystal.

A sudden burst of hunger, an outside hunger, filled her. Yet, for a moment, she held out. In the depth of this alien landscape... was it really right to kill the only thing that was any way familiar? Let her greed destroy this simple lifeform, and leave this entire region to the Angel-spawn, to rule as their biome?

The hunger pulsed again, thrust into her mind with sledgehammer force, and she scrabbled at the green, uncaring of the agony in her wrist or the greyish-red sand she swallowed as she tore up the vegetation and thrust it into her mouth; sucking at the dirt to get the water. Raising her head, with a trace more alertness, she could see similar damp patches at the bottom of other tree-like protuberances. Maybe it was the product of the strange creatures' metabolisms; after all, they were crystals. They probably didn't need to drink, but maybe they made water as a by-product of whatever their growth was caused by. The woman didn't know. Her job was...had been to kill stuff like that, not find out how it worked. What she knew was that this meant that there was water there. And maybe plants, too, if this was typical.

She could probably just about survive here. Maybe there would be animals, too, come to feed off the water and plants, and they'd have meat and blood. It wasn't like she couldn't slaughter things in the Australian ecosystem, she thought, with a trace of the old arrogance. In fact, it'd be a challenge, and a good one. Everything was going to be a let-down, from now on it, given that she'd actually injured an Angel, but maybe fighting Australian wildlife naked, heavily malnourished, and unarmed would be enough. And, of course, as soon as she killed her first large creature, she'd cease to be any of those, because that would get her skins and meat and bones, and from those, she could...

Yes. She would survive.

"Thanks, Logos," Major Do muttered, resting one bruised palm in her bare, horrifically burned, and slightly swollen abdomen. "Thanks for forcing me to eat. We'll get us both fed, and we'll both survive. If that Sigma-thing can do it, we can. An' if we can live through that, we can live through anything." She gave out a weak chuckle. "Man, Zilicaet is goin' to be so surprised when he sees us."

A kick met her questing hand, and she gasped, in shock.

...