Tokyo-2, Outer District 6
September 28, 2041
1153 hours

When the strip of sunlight leaking through the crack in the curtains crept onto his face, Kaworu's eyes cracked open and immediately squinted. Turning over, he slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position, a bleary groan escaping his lips.

Then his eyes found the alarm clock.

"Aw, shit...!"

He practically threw himself out of bed, scrambling to get a new shirt before he suddenly paused. A few seconds later he sighed and collapsed back onto the bed, his earlier frenzy gone, as his brain caught up remembered a crucial detail that made getting to school moot.

It was Saturday.

With that said, he still pulled himself off the bed after a while. Kaworu was never a light sleeper and right now, he felt like he desperately needed something to help him fully wake up. It wasn't anything unusual for a teenager to have a cup of coffee in the morning... but Kaworu happened to use something much stronger than coffee.

He waddled out into the kitchen, immediately drawing a beeline for the fridge and pulling out a transparent plastic bottle from inside. The boy only took a single gulp before parting from the bottle and exhaling loudly, the home-made 120-proof spirits burning his throat as if it was acid. Ice-cold acid, that is.

Like all teens, the boys of Vienna in Kaworu's age group experimented with things the adults didn't want them to do – which included alcohol. Sometimes a couple of them sat together to share a bottle someone managed to procure from somewhere. It was during these sessions that Kaworu discovered something: for some reason, his alcohol tolerance far exceeded everyone else's. Nothing less than hard liquor could even begin to warm him up - and even then, he managed to drink everyone he ever met under the table without any effort whatsoever. Literally, in some cases; more than once Kaworu found himself sitting alone at said table, with everyone else lying haphazardly on the ground in near-comatose states of inebriation.

On one occasion, he even drank a glass of pure ethanol on a dare. Granted, he almost puked it right back up, but not only he didn't pass out, even the dizzyness went away after a few hours.

While he didn't have the funds to maintain a drinking habit (nor did he particularly felt the need to), Kaworu still kept a bottle at home to wake himself up with. He tried coffee, but caffeine just didn't give him a strong enough kick unless he drank eight cups at once... and even then, it barely lasted for an hour. He found it much more effective (and cheap) to buy a bottle of ethanol, pour it into a larger bottle and water it down 3:2. A single bottle tended to last around two weeks.

It was cheaper than proper alcoholic beverages... but tasted absolutely horrible. At least it wasn't denatured; Kaworu really didn't want to repeat the one time he tried that, even if he had a guarantee that it wouldn't mess up his eyesight for nearly a month this time around.

For now, he sealed the bottle and put it back into the fridge before immediately making a beeline for the tap and rinsing his mouth to get rid of the taste and smell. It wouldn't do for him to stink of alcohol in public, after all. Even with no school, Kaworu had plans that involved him going outside.


Plans that were promptly derailed when he reached the hobby electronics store he saw a few days ago and found nobody there.

It wasn't that big of a problem; he could simply come back later. What bothered him is that not only was the store closed despite the opening hours table saying otherwise, so was every other store he had seen. The entire city was deathly quiet, no car noise from anywhere. Even the birds were completely silent.

And in the twenty minutes or so since Kaworu walked out onto the street, he hadn't ran into a single person. He was completely alone.

It was a typical late-September day: sunny with some clouds, but not hot. Yet, a suffocating and oppressive presence hung over the city, making the hairs on his arms and neck stand on their ends. He didn't know why, but he felt... unsettled. It was vaguely similar to how he felt when his vortigaunt teacher examined him, but the nature of the sensation was less alien and more that of... doom.

A deep noise came from somewhere; he couldn't tell from where or from how far away.

Then he saw it. A Gauntlet-class destroyer emerged from behind a cloud, its 325 meter hull gleaming from sunlight before an even brighter flash came from its front. The sound reached the teen almost ten seconds later, the earthshattering roar of the military spacecraft's 155mm spinal coilgun launching its hundred kilogram payload and accompanying plasma trail shaking the electronics store's window even from kilometers away. He couldn't see what it was shooting at... but it became irrelevant very quickly when a beam of light lanced upwards and speared through the ship end-to-end.

The way the smoking destroyer fell from the sky most definitely didn't seem like an exercise to him. Nor did the violent series of secondary explosions rippling across its lateral missile launch tubes, literally blowing the ship into flaming pieces.

With no one around, no one stopped him from taking a stairwell up to its building's roof. And the reason why no one was around became evident once he had a vantage point over the cityscape.

It was a massive humanoid, easily larger than most buildings in the city, descending on one of the forested hillsides hugging the city from everywhere but the south. Disproportionately wide shoulders framed a skull-like face of the same material as the rib-like protrusions on the sides of the main body, the rest of the entity covered in dark green, almost black, skin. While Kaworu was no biologist, he learned enough in school to know that what he was looking at was definitely not of this world. Or from Xen, for that matter. It was surprisingly, shockingly fast for its size.

A series of thundering booms came from the rest of the hills before the entity was suddenly blanketed by explosions, the massed artillery fire obscuring it almost completely. Tthe entity raised its arm almost casually before a beam of light shot out of its palm, the arm moving sideways in a sweeping motion for several moments before the beam cut out, a trail of fire left in its wake. Kaworu noticed the number of explosions on the entity decreasing significantly.

Then the low rumbling he's been hearing since the street became almost deafening, a shadow fell over him... then the entity was completely covered in clouds of shrapnel as the 96-meter Ezekiel-class barely a hundred meters above Kaworu unleashed a full barrage. A single fragmentation shell designed against aircraft wouldn't be much of a threat against a single target on the ground – but when 24 double-barreled turrets all simultaneously open fire at the same target at 300 rounds per minute per turret, the result is something else entirely. Unfortunately for Kaworu, whoever commanded the ship didn't seem to be satisfied with quantity over quality: the frigate slowed down to a complete halt directly over him, only hovering in one place... then the 90mm spinal coilgun let loose with an extremely loud blast. The aerial shockwave followed only a split second behind, blowing the teen off his feet and literally sending him flying backwards for several meters.

As the frigate slowly edged out of his field of vision, Kaworu just stared motionlessly upward in a daze. High-pitched ringing was the only sound he could hear, along with the sensation of something warm running down his earlobes. It took him almost a whole minute to get his brain into working order and sit up, wincing from the stabbing pain in his ringing ears as he reached up to his ear. His fingertips came away bloody.

Still dazed, he looked at the smoke cloud that blanketed the giant, the frigate still furiously emptying its weapons at it. A bright flash came from inside the smoke and a beam of light shot out, carving a massive gouge into the frigate's side with a glancing hit. The wounded vessel almost fell out of the sky until it managed to stabilize and pulled up before its belly kissed the rooftops, limping away with smoke trailing behind.

Even with such distractions, Kaworu's attention failed to miss the large, partially molten piece of armor that used to be attached to the frigate's side until just a few seconds ago, currently flying on a ballistic course in his general direction.

He tried to urge himself to get up and run, but his shellshocked body didn't feel like responding.

Then the piece of debris was jolted to the side by a powerful impact. Again. And again. It finally crashed into the roof to his left, cracking the concrete and kicking up a sizable dust cloud.

His daze clearing bit by bit, Kaworu's head slowly turned to the right to assess a new development: Rei standing on the edge of the roof, a very large scoped rifle in her hand and three spent shell casings at her feet.

Only when she yanked him up to his feet and dragged him back into the stairwell did his head start to clear out. He realized he had absolutely no idea how she even got onto the roof in the first place, considering that the stairwell door was in his field of vision the whole time and he didn't see her come up that way.

"It is not safe here. Get to a civil defense shelter." – Despite hearing practically nothing of his surroundings, Kaworu could hear Rei's voice plain as day once they got back to the street. The sidewalk on both sides of the street was covered in broken glass, the shockwave of the frigate's coilgun having blown out every single window nearby.

Shaking the last of his dizziness away, Kaworu found that his throat at least was still working. – "Uh... slight problem: I don't know where any of the shelters are."

She glared at him.

"I just moved here!" – he pointed out. – "How could I have known I'd need to go there someday?"

She kept glaring at him.

Kaworu sighed. – "You know what? I'll just go home. I mean, that's got to be safer than out here."

"No time."

"Time for wha-" – he started to ask before she grabbed him by the neck of his shirt and pulled him after her as she broke out into a sprint, glass cracking under her boots.

As they ran, the boy noticed that his companion was moving with a purpose, seemingly headed to a specific location instead of just blindly running. They weren't even backing away from the entity, which was already walking the city's streets; more like moving sideways.

She suddenly let go of him and reached into her pocket to pull out a cellphone; Kaworu's aching ears still couldn't hear it ring. – "It's me."

"Rei, are you in position?"

"Two minutes."

"You ran into a delay?"

She glanced back at him. – "It is nothing. Do we have a go?"

"Unit-00 is arriving to the surface as we speak."

That's when Kaworu spotted an orange speck beyond the rooftops; he couldn't see enough of it to tell what it was, only that it was large. Very large.

When she ran directly into another stairwell, he followed without a word. Taking the stairs two at a time, Rei ran all the way up to the top and shoulder-charged the roof access door without even slowing down; the door gave way with a loud crash and as Kaworu passed by it, he could've sworn that there was a slight indentation in the riveted iron plate.

This building seemed to be a floor or two higher than the one where he met her a few minutes ago – and with the additional height, the orange object he saw above the roofs was right in front of them.

Now having a close look at the object, Kaworu still couldn't tell what exactly it was. All he saw was orange-painted metal. But Rei still didn't slow down and actually reached behind her to grab him by the neck again, this time with a stronger grip. – "Run as fast as you can." – she called out to him. – "Do not hesitate or you will die."

He wanted to ask what she intended to do, but the rapidly approaching edge of the roof left him no time for questions.

"Jump!"

He jumped.

After what seemed like an eternity of sailing through the air, Kaworu felt something solid under his feet and almost fell over as inertia kept carrying him forward. Fortunately, the object was more than large enough to arrest his stumble before he fell down and broke his neck on the pavement below. Catching his breath, he looked back and realized he had no idea how they made the jump: there was a clearance of almost ten meters between the roof and the object, much more than the longest distance he'd ever jumped.

But as he peeked over the edge, he saw a massive, five-fingered hand at street level and it suddenly clicked: the object was a humanoid battleframe, roughly on the same scale as the entity but currently lowered to one knee. The curving wall he could see at roughly the same level as himself was actually the battleframe's slightly pointy head, with what he thought was a vertical pillar actually being the peak of the head lengthened diagonally backwards into a horn. A circular, cyclopean 'eye' crowned the face, with what looked like a closed mouthpiece beneath it.

With the battleframe in a crouching position, he also got a good look at the enormous hump on its back. It didn't seem like a part of the machine itself, more like something attached like a backpack: it had the general shape of a slightly elongated quarter-sphere with a flat top, the unpainted metallic gray of the hull bearing the distinctive yellow-black trefoil of a radiation warning symbol.

The still-quiet sound of pneumatic hissing reached his ears and he looked in Rei's direction just in time to see her type something into a formerly hidden keypad. Then a large plate between the battleframe's neck and nuclear backpack retracted towards the latter and a large metal cylinder emerged from inside, its top separating and sliding upwards to reveal a hollow interior. All he could see inside was a seat with a white package on it and a pair of control sticks in front of it.

Rei stepped inside and threw an empty plastic bag in his direction. – "Take this." – It was so sudden that Kaworu barely caught it.

"What do I do with this?" – he asked.

In response, Rei slipped out of her coat and threw it at him as well. – "Put these in."

The coat was quickly followed by her top, then her shirt, then her boots, then her jeans. Soon enough, she was standing completely naked; Kaworu absently realized that she didn't throw any underwear his way. With that done, Rei grabbed the white package and promptly ripped it apart, revealing it to be a disposable plastic bag containing clothing made out of a white, rubbery material she immediately started donning in plain sight.

While he was stashing her clothes into the waterproof bag, Kaworu noted to himself a change in Rei. She seemed to behave differently than yesterday. Ever since the roof, she seemed... twitchy, eyes darting around all the time, visibly sweating and even panting slightly. It wasn't from heat and, while she did live quite far from their current location, he suspected she wasn't tired either. More like stressed out by something – almost spooked.

He was broken out of his musings just in time to see her do something at her wrist that caused the material she wore to tighten, becoming a perfectly skintight full-body suit (well, not perfectly skintight; whoever designed it sensibly padded the chest). Without a word, she snatched the bag out of his hand and pushed the air out of it before sealing it.

Then she grabbed his wrist and pretty much shoved him towards the cylinder. – "Get in."

He stepped over the threshold and almost fell on his face when Rei gave him another shove from behind. – "In the seat. Now."

As he settled down, he saw her open a panel just behind the headrest and reach inside to pull out a pair of small, white objects she immediately clipped to her hair, slightly behind the top of her head. Looking at the control sticks in front of him, Kaworu started to wonder whether she wanted him to pilot the battleframe or something; there's no way he would be able to do that.

He got his answer a second later when the girl abruptly sat on his lap, her back firmly pushed against him. She reached behind him and pulled the seatbelts forward, tying both of them into the chair just as the hatch abruptly shut itself, plunging the two into darkness.

It lasted for almost no time before the walls around them erupted into a multicolored display, finally settling on black. Then a glowing holographic rectangle materialized in front of them, containing the image of a woman. Kaworu had never seen her before but it immediately struck him how similar she looked to Rei. Well, Rei with normal hair and eye colors.

The woman opened her mouth to say something before she paused and looked directly at Kaworu. – "Who is that behind you?"

"Classmate of mine."

"Rei, you are not authorized to bring a civilian into the entry plug!"

"He would've been in the way." – Rei replied simply. – "Lilith, engage Mode 3."

"Understood." – an electronic voice replied from every direction at once.

The walls of the cylinder suddenly started spewing something liquid, rapidly rising from the bottom – which Kaworu found quite alarming. – "Uh... Ikari?"

"What?"

"Something is coming in."

"I know."

"It is oxygenated breathing fluid." – the electronic voice said. – "Do not be alarmed."

Kaworu had nothing to say to that. When the fluid reached mouth height, he saw Rei submerge her face and immediately breathe out, the air bubbling up around her head. The fact that she immediately breathed back in while still "underwater" lent further credence to what he heard, even if he still didn't like it. But he didn't have a choice: in a few seconds, his head was completely submerged and he was left with two pptions. Breathe the liquid or suffocate. Actually, there was only one option; people can't consciously hold their breath until they pass out and Kaworu wasn't any different in that regard.

At least he didn't puke from the taste. The seatbelt tying him and Rei together was extremely tight, uncomfortably pressing her body firmly into his. It wasn't tight enough to restrict his breathing, but if he found himself having to throw up, he wouldn't be able to do it anywhere but onto her shoulder... and that would be extremely embarrassing. Judging from yesterday's first impression, she already seemed to not like him; throwing up onto her most definitely wouldn't improve things in that regard.

His constitution was further tested by a sudden wave of wrongness washing over him. His entire body broke out into goosebumps with a shiver – but what made him feel sick was the rapidly shifting kaleidoscope of sensations. One moment, he felt like himself, sandwiched between Rei and the chair; the next, he felt like the battleframe, multi-ton armor plates pressing down on his skin as he knelt on the cracked pavement; the next, he felt like Rei, strapped by seatbelts to another body behind him.

For a single instant, he could've sworn that the walls of the cockpit vanished from his sight, leaving only him and Rei floating in a void, the pale skin of their bare bodies shining like the purest light from the blackest darkness.

"Lilith, what's going on?" – Kaworu heard the woman's voice, yanking him back to reality. He more felt than heard a groan of discomfort from Rei as well.

"I am detecting significant signal noise. Correction: I am detecting a non-echoing dual input signal."

"A dual signal? Where is it coming from?"

"I don't know. I am attempting to filter and compensate; however, I estimate a 36% reduction in sync ratio."

The feeling lessened, although Kaworu could still swear he could feel Rei's breathing. And not via physical contact.

"That's too much. We have to abort-"

"I can do it." – Rei interjected, her voice slightly weaker than usual. – "Restricting communication to critical-only from this point." – A moment later, the woman's image blinked out.

"Are you alright?" – Lilith asked, concern evident in her tone.

"I can keep going. Main display on."

Kaworu had absolutely no idea what was going on. However, he figured that now wasn't a good time to be obnoxious by demanding an explanation.

Instead, he only asked one question. – "Do you want me to do anything?"

"Only one." – Rei replied curtly. – "Do not get in the way. Lilith, full system and subsystem check."

"Everything is fully operational. Reactor core temperature is at 3000°C, output stable. Evangelion Unit-00, ready for combat."

Kaworu felt his balance shift at the same time as the external view on the cockpit's walls leveled out and rose, signifying the battleframe he currently rode inside the neck of raising its head and standing up, respectively. – "Target information."

"The target made atmospheric reentry over China four hours ago and immediately headed in this direction. All attempts by the military to intercept were unsuccessful. Neither battleframes, nor ship-mounted weaponry inflicted visible damage; based on gun camera footage, the target seems to be protected by a defensive energy field of some kind."

"Nuclear weapons?"

"Multiple tactical warheads were used; no effect. No strategic warheads deployed and our current position makes further attempts unlikely."

"It's got an energy weapon too, I think." – Kaworu spoke up. – "A laser beam or something. I saw it blow a ship out of the sky."

Rei silently nodded at that before turning her attention back to the front. With a slight jolt, the Eva started to move forward at a surprisingly rapid pace, passing by two city blocks before turning a corner to reveal the alien entity standing on the street ahead.

As its armored nemesis approached, the entity turned around and Kaworu could've sworn he saw it take a step backwards. The pressure he felt for a long while was much stronger now, as if someone was physically squeezing his head.

He heard Rei audibly swallow.

"Who are you?"

The voice didn't come from Rei, the woman he had seen earlier, or the electronic voice the other two called Lilith. It just... was, as if someone was talking to him from inside his own head.

'That thing can talk?!'

Rei didn't seem to hear, nor care, accelerating into a sprinting charge. Apparently taking that as the answer, the entity raised its hand towards its attacker. A glowing spike shot out of the palm, intent on intercepting said attacker via impaling its head.

What happened instead is that Unit-00's head tilted to the side with lightning-fast reflexes, turning the impalement into a glancing blow that carved a deep gouge into the side of its helmet. Not pausing its charge, the orange titan's left hand grabbed its prey's extended wrist and yanked it forward before letting loose a kick with its right leg, hitting where the kidney would be on a human.

But Sachiel wasn't human. An armored boot being planted in its side wasn't quite as painful as it would've been otherwise. Its left hand balled into a fist and swung towards the Eva's head in retaliation. However, Rei wasn't an amateur hand-to-hand fighter either, leaning out of the way of the blow before yanking on the wrist she was still holding. Except instead of just using it to control her opponent's distance, she grabbed the forearm with both hands and brutally twisted in opposite directions, snapping the limb like a twig.

Sachiel roared in pain but had no time to retaliate before the Eva kicked him in the chest and out of arm's reach. A pair of small holes snapped open on the Eva's upper chest and the pair of triple-barreled rotary autocannons opened fire, spitting dozens of 30mm shells at the Angel. Only a few met their mark before an octagonal energy field sprung up in front of the Angel, deflecting the bullets in every direction.

Then the Angel's eyesockets flashed and Kaworu felt like he got hit in the chest by a sledgehammer. He only saw the sky for several seconds before the sensation of weightlessness was replaced by a powerful jolt that painfully bashed his forehead against the back of Rei's head. He half-expected the girl to snap at him, but she didn't say a single word.

"Is that the best you have?" – he heard the entity again. It was approaching them slowly, caution evident in its pace.

And cautious it was. When Sachiel came to this world to investigate the strange presence he felt, he did not expect to find a planet populated by Lilim. That in itself wasn't a problem; Lilim grew like weeds and he had his fair share of encounters with their kind before. All Angels had. But to feel a Lilim presence from so far away... that was certainly unusual. None of the planet's native lifeforms felt like that for him. Even from up close, they were but flickering candles before a titanic forest fire at night when compared to him. Scattered among them were entities he never felt before, but the presence didn't emanate from them. No, it was most definitely a Lilim, albeit faint and warped in a way he had never felt before.

What gave him pause was the... thing before him. It felt like a Lilim; he could feel the light of its soul as soon as it appeared. But that's where the similarities ended. He felt both normal and warped Lilim presence at the same time, along with Angelic presence as well. It was as if multiple entities resided within the body, which he didn't think was possible. Even the warped Lilim presence wasn't the same as the one that drew him here: it was warped, yes, but not as much. And never before did he see a Lilim on the scale of an Angel. Without the Fruit of Life, Lilim were unable to grow to such size and survive. It was simply impossible, no ifs and buts.

Now he remembered having heard something about anomalous energy emanations coming from this area not very long ago. There was debate over whether to investigate it; in the end, Sammael decided not to bother. And what Sammael wanted, Sammael got. It was a simple rule to remember, one that gathered the Archangel of Death quite a lot of followers since the recent change of the guard. Yes, times were changing. Traditions that lasted for more time most Angels had been alive were being cast aside, new bonds of power forming between Angels who had been individualistic and indifferent towards each other.

Sometimes Sachiel found himself envious of the family bonds some Angels shared; Shamshel in particular. Maybe if he would've been in her place, he wouldn't be stuck in the position he was in: doing errands for Angels who couldn't be bothered to do so for themselves. But he was weak, weaker than even those soulless Ramiel constructs. If he wanted to avoid being kicked around, he had to do as others said. And what others said frequently involved him enforcing their will on those even weaker than him. He didn't like being kicked around, but he couldn't do anything about it.

At least his usual victims were ones who couldn't fight back against him. It gave him a sense of guilty pleasure to lord over them; he could feel like he was in control, even if it lasted for but a moment. His fellow Angels sometimes accused him of looking down on others only to avoid being looked down upon himself... but Sachiel knew he was looked down upon regardless, so what could be the harm in counting himself among both groups?

"Weakling. No armor will grant you the power to face me."

"Yeah?" – Kaworu retorted. – "How's that arm of yours?"

The entity raised its broken arm, examining the damage. Before Kaworu's eyes, the snapped limb reset itself, flesh knitting back together to remove all traces of the injury. – "Like new."

'Uh oh.'

"Know the name of your better. I am Sachiel. I am your death."

"You're not doing a very good job at that. We're not dead yet."

Rei glanced at him questioningly, but Kaworu only made upward gestures with his hand in response, silently urging her to get the Eva up and standing while he kept stalling.

She seemed to have gotten the message.

"Soon, you will be. Just like all the others who dared to stand against me."

"What did they do to you to deserve death?"

"What does it matter? One insect is as good as another."

"And just what makes you any different?"

"Don't lecture me, armored coward. I had the power to take their lives, just as I have the power to take yours. That is all that matters."

Kaworu's eyes narrowed at that. It was the same, the exact same, reasoning he heard from many bullies throughout his life. To hear this thing, this who-knows-what talk about taking lives for no reason other than because it could... it made his blood boil.

This was it. This was the very end of his patience. Very rarely throughout his life did he ever feel fury of the kind he did right now. He still didn't know what was going on, but he didn't care anymore. All he cared about right now is ensuring that the target of his wrath suffered a painful death. To dismember it limb by limb, rip off its face and stake the corpse to a mountainside.

But as he opened his mouth to tell the entity just what he thought of it and its excuses, Rei interrupted him. – "Stop talking."

Then she charged.

Sachiel's arms immediately snapped up at the same time as its face flashed, all three weapons firing at once. Without slowing down, the Eva deftly jumped to the side mid-stride, causing the beams to fly past it and drill through several higher buildings unfortunate enough to be in the way. The Angel couldn't get off another shot before Unit-00 was already too close and launching a backhand blow.

But Sachiel still had another trick up its sleeve. It jumped backwards at the same time as a vertical ring of light momentarily flashed into existence behind its upper body, launching the Angel into the air and away from its attacker.

Rei wasn't done, however. Driving its feet into the ground with its own momentum, Unit-00 crouched so deeply that it almost sat down... then launched itself into the air with a grasshopper-like leap, lashing out with its hands to catch the airborne Angel by its ankles. Sachiel had no way to respond before the Eva yanked hard on the ankles, using them as a pivot to twist itself into a forward somersault and drive its heels into the Angel from above, letting go of the ankles at the last moment to quite literally stomp Sachiel right back to the ground. Both combatants were still airborne when Unit-00 fired its chest autocannons again, punching a series of bloody craters into its quarry before the octagonal barrier flickered into existence again.

Unit-00 landed just a second after Sachiel did, the Eva coming down into a perfect three-point landing while the Angel crashed uncontrollably into a building, kicking up a massive dust cloud. – "You will not evade me." – Rei growled.

A split second later, a flash came from inside the cloud and the Eva sidestepped in an almost casual manner, causing the energy beam to miss it by mere centimeters. Its cyclopean head snapping in the direction the attack came from, the Eva's shoulder racks snapped open and it pulled out a pair of serrated combat knives, the blades coming to life with an ultrasonic shriek.

Sachiel dashed out of the cloud with a roar, blood oozing from the already-healing bullet holes on its body. Both arms lashed out and fired a sustained beam, decapitating several buildings as the furious Angel did a crossing sweep.

Neither of the beams hit their target, however. With inhuman agility and reflexes, the Eva leaned so far backwards that its hump flattened a lamppost, the Angel's attack sweeping above harmlessly. Then Unit-00 twisted its entire body into a mid-air barrel roll and launched itself back onto its feet.

Sachiel was onto her almost immediately, but Rei wasn't caught unprepared. As the Angel reached for the Eva's face, Unit-00 literally slapped the three-fingered hand away before nimbly spinning around and stabbing one of its knives directly into the exposed elbow. Sachiel howled but couldn't do anything as the Eva continued its spin and swept the Angel's legs out from under it, finishing up with an upwards slice along the Angel's leg that sprayed the Eva's armor with blood.

'How do you like being on the other end of the equation, fucker?' Kaworu thought with a feeling of vindication.

It apparently didn't. The ring of light flashed beneath the Angel again and it was catapulted off the ground, bodychecking Unit-00 with its entire mass. The pavement tore apart underneath the Eva's armored boots as it was pushed back, but it didn't fall. And when Sachiel extended glowing spikes from both of its arms and tried to go for a deadly bear hug with them, the Eva simply kicked its opponent away, flipped both of its knives into a reverse grip and lashed out, simultaneously slicing both of the Angel's arms in half along their entire length.

Through the haze of pain, Sachiel realized his mistake but couldn't back away fast enough before Unit-00 flipped its knives back into normal grips and drove both blades into the Angel's eyesockets. Then it shifted to a reverse grip again and ripped both knives out to the sides with a sickening wet crack and twin sprays of blood.

Sachiel was scared. Very, very scared. But that feeling lasted for barely a split second before Unit-00's chest autocannons opened fire at practically point-blank range, the high-caliber bullets slamming into his core and shattering it. Then he felt nothing anymore, his body limply falling to the ground with a crash that knocked down another cloud of dust before going still.

Unit-00 stood motionlessly over its kill for several minutes, Rei's eyes waiting for even the slightest twitch that could suggest another attack. – "Lilith?" – she asked after a while.

"I've reconfigured my magnetometer during the battle. No electromagnetic field evident of neural activity can be detected anymore."

"Could it be shielding its activity somehow?"

"If it was capable of doing so, it would have done so right from the start. You appear to have killed it."

"It might be feigning." – Rei replied.

"I do not think so. Observe its injuries: regenerative activity has ceased as well."

Rei kept watching the corpse for several more seconds before she spoke. – "Open a channel to Dogma."

The rectangle with the woman's image appeared again, this time with considerably more worry visible on her features. – "Rei, what's your status?"

"Target has gone silent."

A pause. – "Is it dead?"

"I think so, hakase-dono." – Lilith replied. – "The crystalline formation on the entity's chest appears to have been a vital organ; its destruction caused the entity to collapse and cease all activity."

The woman let out a deep sigh. – "Good work. Are you mobile?"

"Minor joint pain. No externally visible damage detected."

"Alright then. Return to the elevator and come down."

"Understood." – Rei replied.

"And Rei?"

"What is it?"

The woman's eyes looked directly at Kaworu. – "Bring him in with you."

Rei's eyebrow edged upwards at that. – "I was under the impression that he does not have authorization."

"And thanks to you, now he knows too much. We can't let him go just like that."

"Don't I get a say in this?" – Kaworu spoke up.

Rei turned around on his lap and both women glared at him.

"...never mind."


Chapter rewrite completed on 15/04/22.

A critical mistake I've made while writing the original version of this story was not consulting a calendar. September 28 will indeed fall on a Saturday in 2041, a fact I only noticed after I wrote this chapter back in 2012. Afterwards, I decided to just ignore it and keep writing with a one-day shift from the real-world calendar (as this story doesn't take place in the real world, hence specific dates don't necessarily fall onto the same day) but now that I had the chance to correct it, I did.

Regarding Kaworu's eyesight issues with denatured alcohol: denatured alcohol commonly contains methanol, which gets metabolized by the liver into formaldehyde, then the formaldehyde is metabolized into formic acid. Formic acid is so destructive to the optic nerve that even 10 mL of pure methanol is enough to cause permanent blindness. It CAN be counteracted with ethanol (that is, alcohol) because ethanol binds to the same enzymes as methanol does and prevents the latter from being metabolized before it's flushed out of the body, but it is still very much inadvisable to consume methanol in any quantities. Kaworu can get away with it because he's a special case, but don't try this after him because YOUR optic nerve most definitely won't regenerate.

The 155mm caliber used by the coilguns of the Confederacy's Gauntlet-class destroyers is roughly the same caliber as the current NATO standard for solid-shell artillery weapons. The Gauntlet-class guided missile destroyer is the Confederate fleet's mainstay powerhouse, designed for long-range combat. While it does have the coilgun and a quartet of conventional gun turrets, its primary weapons are long-range anti-ship cruise missiles fired from broadside horizontal launch tubes, fundamentally similar to the Vertical Launch System used on current naval vessels. These launch tubes are covered by retractable armored shutters in order to avoid an unlucky hit potentially setting off destructive secondary explosions (as demonstrated by Sachiel in this chapter); these shutters are retracted when the destroyer is in firing position. Because of its vulnerability to being flanked and broadsided causing ammunition explosions, the Gauntlet-class is not a frontline combatant but instead launches its missiles from maximum range. The destroyer's coilgun is also capable of orbital bombardment by loading special shells designed to survive atmospheric reentry heat.

The Ezekiel-class frigate is the smallest carrier-independent combat vessel used in the Confederate fleet. Aside from its 90mm light coilgun, it has no weaponry for engaging targets as large as itself – but that's not its role anyway. Instead, the Ezekiel-class is designed purely for close-in defense of larger ships, being outfitted with a large array of autocannons firing proximity-fused fragmentation shells suitable for destroying small, high-speed targets by launching so much shrapnel in their general direction that the target can't possibly evade all of them. Aside from anti-air duties, Ezekiels are also commonly used as pickets.

In the Talmud, Sammael is the archangel of death, ruling over the fifth heaven but residing in the seventh. He is a member of the heavenly host – that is, the army of angels commanded by archangel Michael , but the number of angels he rules over is unclear. Sammael nominally serves God but tempts men into evil and is often tasked with destructive duties. He is described to have a height equivalent to a distance that takes five hundred years to walk, and is covered from head to toes (implying that he's humanoid) in glaring eyes; his mere sight scares the shit out of Moses during his ascension to heaven. Some Kabbalistic texts however identify Sammael as the serpent who tempted Eve into sin, impregnated her with Cain, then became the spouse of Adam's first wife Lilith and sired several demons (that is, Lilim) with her before God, fearing that their demonic offspring would overrun the earth, castrated Sammael and cast him down to hell. This, however, might be a mistake by demonologists who confused him with Azazel. Sammael is not officially recognized by the Roman Catholic Church due to their refusal to venerate angels not in the Bible.