Creation began on 02-26-16
Creation ended on 02-27-16
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Hope from the Sky: Judgmental Eyes
A/N: Here's this year's new chapter.
"…So you were with that boy that uses that purple giant out at sea?" Kaede's mother asked her as she returned to the space they used in a building as their family's new dwelling. "Were you okay on your own?"
"Mother, I was fine," Kaede assured her. "I helped them a little on the carrier."
"Your grandfather would be proud of you," she praised her.
Suddenly, her face's positive expression turned sour.
"Uh, yeah," she responded, but it was completely without a hint of joy. "I'm just going to change out my clothes and then head back out."
She retreated to the room she claimed as her own and shut the door. She grabbed at her chest, clutching at her heart.
That man, she thought, full of spite right now towards her grandfather. That awful, awful man! Why did she have to bring him up?! He hurt me inside the Walls!
When she calmed down, she walked over to the small room that served as her closet and grabbed a clean pair of trousers and a tan dress. She undressed to her undergarments and redressed. Up until a few minutes ago, she was at ease, but when her mother brought up her grandfather, she felt her subtle happiness began to fade. Ever since before Wall Maria fell over five years ago, Kaede's relationship with her grandfather was permanently strained, possibly beyond reconciliation.
I just wanted to leave him where he belonged, she thought, brushing her hair. And he belonged buried under all that rubble and ash.
But now, as much as she wanted to forget about him, she couldn't right now. He was etched into her mind, a permanent guest in her consciousness.
"Kaede!" She heard her stepfather yell, banging on her door. "Kaede, we gotta get out of the building!"
She opened the door and questioned, "What are you talking about?"
"The purple giant that's not a Titan! It's fighting a red giant that's not the Colossal Titan!" He informed her, and she ran over to her window where she hoped she could get a view of what he was talking about that was going on outside.
She saw the purple Eva engaged in a knife fight with a red giant that was of the exact size.
"Another one?" She questioned.
-x-
"…He's trying to keep this red Eva away from the city," Armin informed the civilians as they were running for the hills. "Keep calm, everyone!"
As the people were gathering on the hills, Unit-01 had managed to stab Unit-02 in the left leg.
"Aaaurgh!" Asuka yelled, and stabbed Unit-01 in the right side of its waist.
"Gaah!" Shinji gasped, and pulled his knife out and backs-lapped Unit-02 away from him. "Dammit, Asuka! I don't know how you even expect to get any Titans to NERV, but you wouldn't be able to do anything with them without risking the lives of thousands of people! They're giant man-eaters! Cannibals! And what's worse is that they don't even need to eat to survive! They do it because they don't have the necessary capacity to think about anything else!" Shinji yelled at her.
"And yet, they make your Eva stronger just by eating them!" Asuka retorted. "Such power would be more beneficial than this prototype reactor my Unit-02's using right now! You know that an Eva powered by what you're using as an energy source would increase our chances against the Angels, and you don't have the guts to admit it!"
"Because the Titans are a double-edged sword! I didn't find out until later that they were once people that had been turned into Titans by a guy that can turn into one! He turned countless people into mindless monsters! As much as it sickens me that this has happened, I did help apprehend him and now he's locked up where he can't hurt anyone! Now, I just want to help find a way to restore the Titans left back humanity! I couldn't ask any of NERV for that sort of help because all you want are the Titans! That's not helping the people at all! And look around you! Look at what I'm trying to help the people left do!"
Asuka did look, but all she saw was a world that was not worth fighting for.
"What do you see in these people? This place?" She asked him.
"I see a world that deserves to be saved more so than the other world does, Asuka. You have no idea what it was like for them before I showed up. To be on the brink of extinction. To literally be on the brink, and having to live cut off from the rest of the world by living in a cage to keep the predators out. And to have to run for cover every time the predators come looking for you, ignoring any other creature that happens to be there."
"And you think that, just because you show up and are asked to help these people you don't know by fighting and devouring these giants, you can return hope to the world?"
"I can try…because the only way I'm leaving this place…is as a corpse."
-x-
"The only way I'm leaving this place…is as a corpse," Misato heard Shinji say to Asuka through the intercom system.
NERV was fortunate enough to be able to have gotten enough satellites and a stronger network to maintain communication with Unit-02, which would be able to share that connection with Unit-01.
Gendo was further displeased that such a potential resource as these giants that had provided Unit-01 with increased power was being blocked by the Third Child…and his morals.
"You have your orders, Second Child," he uttered to Unit-02. "Disable Unit-01."
-x-
As they gathered with the other civilians on the streets going towards the hills, Kaede took this opportunity to slip away from her mother and stepfather and go the opposite way, towards the danger that was the Evas fighting. Peeking behind a corner, she saw Unit-01 engaged in a brawl with the red Eva, which (from her perception) looked like it had four eyes, two eyes more than the purple Eva. As fierce as she heard Shinji was in Unit-01 when facing off against the Titans, he looked like he was having difficulties trying to face the red Eva that he explained was operated by a girl that was (as he himself put it) very violent and full of herself.
Oh, come on, Shinji, she thought, watching as the purple Eva threw the red one aside. Is he trying not to kill her?
Then she saw the red Eva use a knife and stab the purple one in its chest.
Shinji said that he could feel whatever pain the Eva experienced, as if it were actually happening to him. He also mentioned that he felt that his hand had been snapped in two and he was pierced in the head. Who would actually be crazy enough to make something like a Titan made of metal that forces a person to suffer as it suffers?
Then, without a moment's notice, she saw the red Eva stab the purple in the waist, causing blood to spray out.
Damn it, Shinji.
-x-
"Urgh!" Shinji groaned, feeling like he was bleeding internally now because of Asuka.
"Whenever you're ready to give up, Third Child," he heard her say to him.
"Bite me, bitch," he told her, feeling the taste of his own blood in his mouth.
BOOM! The ocean water nearby exploded and caused a shower of salty water to fall upon everything.
Asuka looked over and saw several large humanoids. They were covered in a rock-like exterior and stood almost sixty meters tall. She could see at least eight of them, and several more were rising from out the water.
"Oh, no," she heard Shinji say. "They must've followed us back here."
"Coming from you, these must be just like what you had your Eva consume. It must be my lucky day."
"Asuka, you have no idea what these Titans are capable of. They're unpredictable!"
"I doubt you do yourself, idiot."
"At least the Titans are good at one thing: They don't share personal opinions because they don't think about opinions."
Unit-02 then kicked Unit-01 aside and went over towards the Titans; she was confident enough to be able to deal with these creatures.
"Asuka…don't…"
She stopped three feet in front of them…and soon wished she hadn't.
The Titans that had lived an unfathomable degree of time underwater and adapted to drawing heat energy from thermal vents, which were believed to be no different from the sixty-meter-tall Colossal Titan that Unit-01 had defeated earlier, weren't as slow as the smaller Titans were sometime. They suddenly went from being slow…to being hyperactive! They jumped Unit-02 to the ground and bit at its armored exterior.
"Aaaurgh! Get off me!" Asuka shouted, throwing one off her right arm and punching another off her chest. "Filthy scum!"
Unfortunately, her verbal didn't phase them, as they just came back and got on her Eva again. They weren't even as big as an Eva, and they had her outnumbered.
Shinji looked over at them, and, as much as he felt she probably deserved whatever these Titans had in store for her, knew he couldn't let her get killed by some mindless remnants of mankind…nor let her take advantage of them.
"Grr," he groaned as he tried to get back.
CLASH! He heard an explosion and saw something appear from beside one of the skyscrapers.
At first, he thought it was Eren turning back into his Rogue Titan form, but then he noticed many things that were different about this Titan that appeared. It appeared to be much larger than a fifteen-meter Titan…and even greater than a sixty-meter Titan; it had to be close to one-hundred meters, the same height as an Eva. It had an androgynous, muscular build, long, dark hair and even darker skin.
"Grrraurgh!" It shrieked, and the Titans on Unit-02 took notice…and felt compelled to go after it instead of the human inside the red Eva. "Grrrraurgh!"
-x-
"No way!" Armin gasped, and Eren thought he saw a ghost from over five years ago, only larger. "That's the biggest Titan ever!"
"It looks just like that Titan that appeared when Wall Maria fell," a woman expressed.
"The Dark Titan?" A man questioned. "That's the Dark Titan?! The Titan that fought and killed over eighty Titans before it disappeared?"
"It's as big as the two behemoths," went Mikasa.
But what caught Eren's attention about the Dark Titan right now was the way it showed up. It was just like when he turned into a Titan. And with the Colossal Titan, too. He was convinced that it was no different from him or the captured Beast Titan. The Dark Titan, if this was indeed the same one he saw years ago, was a human that had somehow gotten the power of the Titans, and thanks to his father's notes, he and the rest of the Survey Corps knew that how this Titan Shifter came to be. But the question now was who was the person behind the Dark Titan.
To be continued…