Chapter 33:
Giant Killer

I pressed my fingertip down on the main power disconnect and the MFDs lit up. Every inch, every scratch, every screw of the cockpit I sat in was familiar, like a long lost friend. It had felt like years, and been many more since, but the memories still felt fresh.

A time long ago, in another world, with another girl... But here and now, it still felt like home. The cockpit of a fighter jet was a place where I felt that I could truly make a difference, where I could accomplish my goals, save the girl, save the world.

Or so it felt like. I wouldn't have ended the world from the cockpit of a plane, but I did from an entry plug. That's what she'd said to me, what I'd done, the trigger I'd pulled…

But I saved Asuka, I killed the Angel. If I'd stayed in the P-38 and did what I could from there, would it really have turned out any better? No, I'd have died, everyone would have died. Maybe Mari could have gotten to Unit One in time, but would it have been any better?

Maybe Victoria was right, I shouldn't be allowed back into an Evangelion. That didn't mean I would sit by idly while other people did the fighting, not while I could do this. The start-up went by in what felt like moments, memory and reflex carried me through it without much attention paid. Soon the engines were both turning and my ears popped as the cockpit pressurized.

"You doing okay back there Ayanami?" I asked while looking up in the mirror. With the helmet and O2 masks on, we looked the same. Sisters.

"It is not my first time. I will be fine." She answered calmly. Always calm. "I've had fifteen years of practice, without Evangelion I had to find a new purpose."

That answered the question I would have likely eventually asked, I filed it away in the back of my mind. I tapped through the MFD and stopped, I had seen some weird fittings on the pylons earlier but the MFD readouts confused me even further. "Ayanami, would you explain what I'm seeing here on the armament screen?"

"Direct fire weapons have replaced air-to-air and air-to-ground ordnance. As the primary threat faced by WILLE is Evangelion, standard anti-fighter munitions are insufficient." She explained while doing something in the back seat.

I toggled the armament selector over to the only two weapons systems being displayed and they seemed to activate in a 'pair' firing mode. That was certainly an interesting default. "So what do we have?"

"We have a pair of twenty-seven millimeter fire-linked railguns. The remaining weapon stations are occupied by charging and energy storage devices. Each railgun is provided with ten rounds of Anti-AT Field Ammunition, after which we are unarmed."

"Oh." I answered with a dumb look on my face that she was thankfully unable to see. "Good to know."

I shook my head and pushed the throttles up and keyed up the radio, "Ikari ready to go, fire the catapult."

I pushed the throttle all the way into afterburner and a moment later we were both slammed back into our seats as the catapult fired. A second or two of intense acceleration was followed by the less extreme but still substantial acceleration provided by a pair of afterburning jet engines.

Cross flares in the distance told me that time was up. The fifteen minutes that had been quoted had been more than spent. The line had broken and ships were being sunk, men were dying and-

Off to our right, the ship we'd left from originally, the flagship that Victoria was aboard, lurched violently and suddenly upwards out of the water and issued a sound that was almost agonized. The ship itself had a skeletal form that was burdened by man-made structures and components all around, but looked, to me, like it was built upon the back of some sort of Angelic whale skeleton.

"What in the hell is that thing?"

We didn't have enough airspeed yet to climb away, not as fast as I'd have wanted to. The noise it was making was drilling into my skull, rattling my teeth and my soul. I felt a fear forced into my bones and I stepped hard into the left rudder, rolled the stick over to get the hell away from that abomination. Abomination; the word was forced into the front of my mind and I found it apt.

"It is our flagship, the AAA Wunder. It is our final offensive option against Nerv, to end the threat they represent to the world," Ayanami explained. Her voice sounded… strained, almost. There was a slight hitch at the end. Had she felt it too?

"It's… wrong, somehow." I said as I pushed for distance. The fear and revulsion started to fade with the distance, but even looking at the thing struck some deep chord in my heart. I had a feeling of powerlessness, insignificance. I needed Unit One and a fleet's worth of backup, and even then I might not feel safe.

"Yes."

My hands shook against the controls, I felt my entire body trembling as that soul-piercing sound got louder. Marionette strings made of light descended from the sky and latched themselves onto the naval fleet below, hoisted dozens of ships into the sky along with the Wunder.

I caught myself with my finger hovering over the button that would have jettisoned all of the external stores, dropped the cannons and the charging equipment into the ocean, so that I could run. Still, the airspeed kept climbing and I kept pulling away from that repulsive…thing.

Shaking hands refused to pull the stick back towards the fight, even as the ship was attacked by ribbon-like foils, even when it fired cannons to attack the odd disk-shaped Evangelions. Their screams were… unsettling, but not equally so. They were more familiar in some way.

"Ayanami I can't… I can't…"

I felt a hand reach up and grab me by the shoulder. In the mirror above I could see Ayanami had crawled halfway over her panel. "Ikari, you must calm down. This feeling is… not unexpected. You will not be harmed. You can overcome this."

"Ayanami, I don't think I can. I'm… afraid." My hand kept shaking, so hard that the jet was fluttering, shaking from the control inputs that I couldn't stop.

I felt her grip tighten. "Ikari, you have faced greater challenges than this. You are a giant killer."

A smiled tugged at the corner of my mouth and I pulled the throttle back down to half. Giant killer, I didn't hate the idea, it certainly had some similarities to reality anyway. "Been reading fairy tales, Ayanami?"

"I had to occupy my free time with something."

"Alright. Fair enough. Giant killer it is." I tightened my grip on the stick and stepped hard into the rudder, turning the jet back towards the Wunder, and come what may-

Something fast and orange and big as hell rocketed past the canopy. The jet shook violently in the wake turbulence and I hauled on the stick to try to correct. Ayanami's hand disappeared from my shoulder and I heard her helmet clank against the canopy.

"Ayanami get strapped back in! If we have to punch out you don't wanna leave the seat without a parachute!" I yelled back to her. There was a fight to be had, and I'd faced fear before. Fear had driven me into that viper cockpit so long ago, hadn't it?

I turned my head to the right to track whatever the hell had buzzed us and saw something that looked… different. Another Evangelion, much more conventional looking, but with a weird white ribbon-cape hanging from its back, and it was flying. The head was a little bit like unit zero, and the color scheme matched, but the robotic eyeball in the center of the head broke me of any illusions that it was the same unit.

And Ayanami was with me.

"Ayanami are you okay back there?" I asked over my shoulder, or as close to over my shoulder as I could. The Evangelion's single cycloptic eye kept rolling back and forth between us and the Wunder.
The same feeling of revulsion I felt towards the Wunder was emanating from this new Evangelion as well.

"I am secure, Ikari. That Evangelion is not one of ours." She answered me. Her voice was disturbed, more than before. She was feeling the same thing, and she wasn't trying to calm me down this time.

I could think of no better way of curing that feeling of revulsion than to destroy the source of it. I was a giant killer, she'd said that much. I pushed the fire selector to the railguns and was rewarded with a green ready-to-fire status indicator and a CCIP readout on the heads up display.

I rolled hard to the right and pulled back, a maximum rate turn that bled a ton of airspeed, but then that was the point. The CCIP drifted over to that cycloptic eye and I mashed down the firing stud. The whole jet bucked with the recoil and I slid forward into my harness. Those things definitely packed a punch.

An instant later the Evangelion's head, north of the lower jaw, evaporated into a cloud of red mist… and nothing happened. That kind of damage would have knocked any Evangelion I'd ever seen out of a fight, maybe permanently. Pilot wouldn't have been doing a whole lot better, but this unit didn't even react.

In panic I stomped into the rudder and held the firing stud down, dumping the remaining eighteen rounds in raking fire across the Evangelion's chest. Each impact pockmarked the orange and white armor, but seemed to do no further damage after punching through. And then the indicators turned red. Ammo spent.

Very not good.

I slapped my hand down on the jettison stores button and every pylon on the jet dropped its payload, lightening up the plane substantially, and more importantly cleaning up the aerodynamics. I rolled the throttle up into afterburner and pulled back on the stick, angling away.

"Ikari to Wunder. I'm… having a bad day. Please send help." I called into the radio, hope for a miracle. The orange and white, now headless, Evangelion started moving again, towards me and tracking my movements.

That primal fear instinct kicked back in, and this time I knew I wouldn't be able to shake it. I'd fought Angels in a fighter jet, but they had something else to worry about, I wasn't their concern. This time I had an Evangelion that could fly after me.

I didn't feel like a giant killer.

I rolled towards Wunder and kept the throttle wide open, if I could get around the thing and get closer to the ship, friendly forces might have an easier time at covering my escape, or my landing. The headless giant was tracking in at my lower quarter, cutting inside my turning circle to physically prohibit me from getting a clear line of approach on the ship.

So, so much for that idea.

I rolled into the inverted and then pushed the stick forward to nose over into a climb. The negative G forces were sure to give me a hell of a head rush but the unorthodox maneuver might throw the Eva pilot long enough for me to get to where I needed to go.

I rolled hard through a left spiral after the turn, but the headless Evangelion was right in front of me, hand outstretched as if it was going to pluck me from the air. I hauled back hard on the stick and felt the whole plane shudder and shake, and then there was a violent jolt as the fingertip scraped along the lower fuselage.

I had almost missed, so nearly close that the impact didn't destroy the jet outright, but the airframe started shaking violently and alarms started sounding in my ears. I still had control authority, but it was twitchy and the left engine was surging.

"Ayanami, I don't think we're gonna win this fight!" I yelled through the intercom channel. The MFDs in front of me shorted out, sparks started flying from the panel and sparked a fire. It was how that first Victoria had died, the one who'd never borne the name 'Becket'.

But I would endeavor to do better.

The fire started to lick at my flight suit and I screamed into the intercom, "Eject! Eject! Eject!" My hands gripped against the striped levers and I pulled hard, an instant later the canopy blew off the top of the aircraft and I felt my legs jerked out of the rudder wells and against the seat. It felt like my head was being driven down through my spine as the rocket motors launched me and my seat out of the jet.

It felt like I'd been hit by a truck when I entered the airstream. We hadn't been supersonic, but we weren't going slow when I'd pulled the loud handle and now I was feeling the full brunt of that. I tried to clear my head from the sudden shock of the ejection, tried to look around as the seat rotated so I could be sure Ayanami made it out.

I caught sight of her seat for a moment, and she was still attached to it, it had only been a few moments. I could see that she was okay, that she'd made it out. An instant later I felt my own seat collide with something before I had the chance to separate from it, and my head and helmet slammed back into the headrest, and I saw nothing more.