Creation began on 08-26-20

Creation ended on 09-22-20

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Newfound Strength

A/N: Super Teamwork Combos make for improved resilience.

When Shinji returned to NERV HQ, he met with Asuka, who was less than welcoming when she had to explain to him what he missed.

"Verdammt, Shinji, where were you?!" She demanded as she dragged him down the trauma ward to see Toji; she was hoping that she sounded convincing enough that he knew that she was aware of his involvement in the last attack. "Misato was injured and Wonder Girl and I had to deal with an Angel that took over Unit-03! That brainless stooge was lucky it didn't get worse with your father taking command authority!"

"What are you talking about, Asuka?" He responded, unsure of what she was talking about; he did know everything that happened, but once he left, he had to fake not knowing what had happened. "My father was in charge of the operation?"

"Nothing much happened the way I had expected it to. I was almost done for when some strange robot showed up and took out the Angel faster than I thought I could, rescued the stooge and set the Angel ablaze, defeating it and walking away after handing over the Entry Plug the stooge was stuck inside. Your father is furious, too."

Stepping into the room, Shinji saw Toji laying on the bed with his right leg raised up and wrapped in bandages. He was surprised by this, hoping that Toji had been spared from injury by the Angel.

"The docs say that I'm lucky," Toji uttered. "It's only a compound fracture below the knee. One guy suggested amputation, but I was conscious and voiced my refusal to lose any of my limbs."

If they had done that, I would have used my Magiswords to undo the wrong, thought Shinji. "Will you be allowed to go home?"

"Yeah, I'm off the combat roster they have. Unit-03 was reduced to burnt remains. They haven't said if they're going to rebuild it or not."

"It sounds like I really did miss a lot."

"Where were you when this was happening?" Asuka asked him.

"I had to go to the bathroom," Shinji lied, "and then I had to go to the store for more food. My phone's battery was dead, so I didn't know there was an Angel attacking."

"Shinji Ikari," they all turned to the door and saw a Section Two agent present. "Commander Ikari demands that you meet him in his office, immediately."

Shinji looked at Toji and Asuka and sighed.

"I'll see y'all later," he expressed as he vacated the room.

-x-

The sight of Unit-03's charred remains was not the talk going on, despite their presence giving much of the personnel time to work on their disposal to ensure that there was no further threat of the Thirteenth Angel. No, the talk going on…was on two different things: The personnel members that spontaneously revived the night before…and the mysterious robot that appeared and eliminated the Angel and rescued the Fourth Child. Nobody wanted to talk about the Angel or the Evas.

"Are you sure you should be up right now?" Ritsuko asked Misato as they stood in front of the ruined Eva.

Misato, sporting a sling over her left arm, looked at the faux-blond with bandages wrapped around her head and responded, "You're not one to talk. Everyone was injured, and everyone that was declared dead a few hours ago are all up and about, trying to make sense of what happened here."

"Well, Unit-03 is completely ruined beyond salvation. The armor and organic components were incinerated by intense heat and the circuitry fried in too many places."

"All courtesy of a strange robot that appeared and saved the pilot."

"Which shouldn't have been able to stop the Angel at all."

"We weren't there when it happened, so all we have is the footage to rely on for understanding. Have you seen the footage yet?"

"Not yet, but I hear Commander Ikari is furious about what happened. There shouldn't have been anything else capable of defeating an Angel."

You'd be surprised at how wrong we were to believe in that falsehood, thought Misato as she turned away. "A win's a win. Take it for what it's worth and move on."

As much as Ritsuko wanted to do that, she knew Commander Ikari would not prefer to look the other way regarding this turn of events. It was either they find out how an unknown, mechanical creature was able to show up without any of NERV knowing and defeat a parasitized Evangelion without an AT-Field…or they would, potentially, look like a laughingstock by the world. But Misato could care less about their image; her priority had to be the survival of the pilots over the Evas, and Shinji's Magiswords had likely increased their chances of living by an astronomical margin if he used them to save a life.

-x-

Shinji found his father to be in a bind right now. Not only did he not know that the mecha that stopped the possessed Eva was due to his involvement, but he was upset that said mecha could not be found in any organization currently researching advanced robotics.

"We were facing a crisis…and you were not there to do your job," he told Shinji in his office. "Where were you when this happened?"

"I was preoccupied with several of life's minor inconveniences and graces," Shinji responded. "I had to go to the restroom, then go to the supermarket, my phone's battery was dead, so I was left in the dark about what was going on. Nobody told me there was another Angel attack. And wasn't it defeated by the Evas? Crisis averted."

"Maybe," went Fuyutsuki to Shinji, "but not by NERV or the Evas. The Angel was defeated by an unknown robot. We have no information on it, and it possessed superior abilities than the Evas currently display."

"A robot, you say? A robot defeated the Angel? That seems like a load of fiction. Where's the evidence? Do you have proof that this is the truth?"

Gendo typed down on few keys on his desk and turned his computer screen around to face Shinji, displaying what the Evas had seen. It was an impressive sight of how the robot appeared and defeated the Angel and rescue the pilot before leaving.

"Now, that's a robot," Shinji expressed with enthusiasm, "and the way it moves…you can't get that with current technology out on the streets or from some guy's garage."

"Don't give praise to something we have no knowledge or control over," Gendo told him. "This unknown factor risks putting NERV in a bad situation."

"If it defeated the Angel and rescued the pilot, I don't see a problem."

"NERV was tasked with defeating the Angels. Anyone else trying to intervene with little to no knowledge on how to face one of these threats runs the risk of jeopardizing the future of the entire human race."

But Shinji wasn't concerned about that. Since he had saved Toji's life and revived the people that were harmed in the incident, he had no issues regarding NERV or the Evas. In fact, he knew what he had to do to move forward on his own terms and free himself from the path his parents had set before that awful day they tried to destroy his life slowly while destroying everyone else's. He just didn't want to anticipate what his father would do to try and cause him difficulty.

"Except you don't really know that for sure," Shinji told him. "Whoever made that robot probably has ties with some level of government not too different from NERV, just…more adaptable than what people attempted with the Jet Alone robot."

"You sound as though you admire whoever built this thing and used it to defeat the Angel," said Fuyutsuki to the boy.

"I do admire it," Shinji responded. "It was faster, stronger, and it rescued the pilot. Did NERV have any course of action to do the same?"

"In the event of any scenario where an Evangelion unit has become compromised, the life of the pilot is forfeit," Gendo stated.

"That's…a cruel and immoral choice to make."

"The only function of any pilot is to defeat the Angels. If they can't do that…"

"Then they have no place in NERV? That's bull. That's the thinking of someone that believes in making cold, calculated decisions in order to achieve something. You so much as create a percentage factor in what it takes to save someone over defeating someone, all you get is problems that have no acceptable answer. What was the probability rate of saving the pilot against defeating the Angel?"

Gendo didn't answer Shinji…so Fuyutsuki answered.

"The probability of rescuing the pilot of Unit-03 was less than thirteen percent," he revealed, getting a frown from Gendo. "Defeating the Angel carried a forty-eight percent chance of success with two Evas instead of three."

"Less than thirteen percent? Well, that's not a zero, is it? What is it, twelve? Eleven?"

"Nine percent."

"Still not a zero."

"The defeat of the Angel is still the priority, not the pilot's safety," Gendo finally spoke.

"Save the pilot, defeat the Angel, everyone goes home to see their loved ones."

"You're chasing a foolish belief that that justifies what is done over what should be done."

"Then it was better to let the pilot be sacrificed just to defeat an Angel?"

"In the end, the end justifies the means."

Then Shinji reached into his pocket and pulled out his NERV card, placing it on his father's desk, making his move against his father.

"What are you doing?" Gendo demanded, and Shinji sighed and turned away.

"You say the end justifies the means," he stated, "then I can say this with certainty: I can't be a cog in a machine that operates on the notion that even one life can't be saved when placed in jeopardy. If not even one life can be saved, then why bother trying to save any lives? You say that a pilot's life, someone my age, is expendable, then NERV just lost one of its pilots because he can't risk being the next life that is forfeit the next time an Angel attacks and an Eva is compromised. Even if the chances of saving a life are less than favorable, it's still not a zero. Even if it's only one percent, that's more than enough to convince someone like me to save someone at risk."

"So you're running away?"

"No, I'm quitting. Even if I was there to pilot the Eva, I'd be a hindrance due to my low synchronization ratio, making me a liability. And after hearing of your blatant disregard towards individual lives, I have to say that…you disappoint me with your lack of humanity…and you disgust me with how far you're willing to go to defeat some monster that nobody else understands beyond what some people willingly disclose to others."

When Shinji walked out of his father's office, he felt relieved to have severed his ties to the Eva his mother condemned herself to. Now, he was free to operate however he chose to stop his parents and protect the lives of everyone they deliberately placed in danger. He just had to hope the next Angel wouldn't show up until after his Legendary Swordmecha Magisword had recouped the necessary energy needed to use it, which was still a few hours away. He would need it at its strongest again when the situation required for larger solutions.

Meanwhile, in Gendo's office, the two men were wondering how to make sense of this turn of events. This wasn't a foreseen situation, but Gendo knew he needed to regain control before things escalated too far out of his control. He picked up his phone and dialed a number.

"Erase the Third Child from all NERV records," he ordered. "As of now, the First Child is the primary pilot of Unit-01…with the Dummy System as a backup."

-x-

Swing! Shinji swung his bokken up on the roof of the apartment building as the sun started to set, blocking out the world's disorder and flaws. Swing!

Under an hour left before he could use his Legendary Swordmecha Magisword in case the next Angel attacked. The next time one showed up, he would deal with it to ensure that nobody else would suffer.

"You gave notice?" He heard Asuka say to him as he pulled back his bokken.

"Why do you sound so surprised?" He asked as he turned to face her.

"Even if the Evas are hazardous, they're still viewed as something that can defend against the Angels. And even if they're more dangerous than the Angels themselves, what choice do we have but to pilot them?"

"Look me in the eye and tell me that even one life is worth sacrificing to defeat an Angel," he told her, just wanting her opinion.

But Asuka knew from Shinji's mindset that while he was willing to put his life on the line to protect everyone else from the end of existence as they all knew it, regardless of who they were, good or indifferent, he was only willing to do so as long as the life on the line was his own. Anyone else's life, whether they were a budding girl of three days old…or some man about to keel over on the street due to drinking too much. Ever since he discovered the power of the Magiswords, he not only became more devoted to life, Shinji became more sensitive to the matter between life and death, believing that any life ended before it's their time to take their final breath…was no different from cruel and unusual punishment committed by people in power against powerless people.

"You can't save everyone, Shinji," she told him, "but try your best to save them, anyway."

She knew he was trying to handle the impossible, but she couldn't fault him for trying. As hopeless as it seemed, at least he had some measure of hope that he could only find elsewhere.

"Tell me something, though," she at least wanted to know, "when this is all over…if it ever ends…do you ever think you'll try to go back to that other dimension? Back to Lyvsheria, to Rhyboflaven where you met the Warriors and everyone else?"

Shinji made like he was sheathing a sword with his bokken and responded, "Going back there may seem impossible…but so was the thought of finding a way back here. Who knows for sure? Maybe…someday."

He had the Magiswords needed to travel through time and space, but he didn't want to think about returning to that place that became like a second home to him for five years. Even if he could go back there, he had to protect this world first, try to prevent its end by the Angels and anyone that sought to commit unspeakable genocide. Only once this was accomplished would he even consider such a possibility.

I wonder how they're doing, though, he thought as he looked up at the darkening sky.

-x-

Across space and time, in a land not unlike that of a world ruled by humans, but more medieval, stood a more modern house with a sense of Zen architecture, of two stories tall, that was situated several feet away from another house with a sign on its front that read, "Warriors for Hire". This was the home and business place of the Warrior siblings Vambre and Prohyas. Next door to their home was the preserved residence of Shinji Ikari, who left after five years of living in Lyvsheria among various others, leaving his little domain untouched for days. But every once in a while, Grup would walk by it and think he saw Shinji looking out one of the windows or working in his rock garden, which prompted Vambre to look around, just in case the young man had returned from his world.

"Still empty," said Vambre in mild disappointment. "Och."

Standing in the hall of Shinji's home, Vambre looked at one of the pictures adorning the walls. It depicted Shinji, herself and Prohyas standing in front of Slugburger, just having a good time after facing another monster guarding a rare and powerful Magisword that would only be awarded to whoever could best it in combat.

"Maybe one day, you'll come back," she uttered, wondering how he was doing back in his world after five years away. "One day."

To be continued…

A/N: I hope this chapter update will impress you until I get back to it. Peace.