'So, apparently another Angel is attacking and Gendo needs me to bail his guys out… Or rather, bail an aircraft carrier out… After those two Angels earlier, a third one shouldn't pose much of a threat. That being said, I should still maintain a good degree of situational awareness and take care not to overreach…' Momonga thought as he paged through one of his electronic books that had been installed on his laptop.
Gendo had given him a series of coordinates which apparently would lead Momonga to appear on top of the Angel, roughly fifty meters in the air. However, Momonga quickly cross-referenced his geography-book, as his knowledge of the 'Neo-Japan' geography wouldn't apply to the Post-Second Impact world due to massive floodings, plate movements, and other shifts which had reshaped much of the world.
'Appearing right above an enemy whose abilities are a mystery is quite foolish… Gendo-kun said that the Angel attacks at range, in which case it would somewhat make sense to go for close quarters battle instantly, but just because it has attacked at range doesn't neccessarily mean it isn't strong in close quarters as well…' Momonga sighed at the situation which was quite close to his first Player Killing lessons in YGGDRASIL, with Touch Me- A warrior-class player who had saved Momonga from getting chain-PK'd to the point he'd quit YGGDRASIL altogether. 'Touch Me-san caught me off-guard a few times by pretending to switch to Archer-class using his equivalent of [Perfect Warrior], only to instantly toss the bow the off when I had closed in as even a Warrior can equip bows even if they can't use them very well… However, at that point I had already charged to his melee range in order to try to leverage my close-range abilities as Archers were as powerless as Priests at short range…'
He shook his head as he was starting to reminisce about his past with his friends in YGGDRASIL, even though he had something to do that could help him find Nazarick- Assuming, of course, that the guild-base had managed to transition as well.
'Right, those coordinates should take me to the Angel, in which case if I alter them a bit and get my bearing, I should appear twenty kilometers away from the Angel, which in turn allows me to scout it with Corpse Carrions and other aerial summons…' Momonga nodded to himself, equipped his class-gear after checking that he was alone, as he had gone to the high-school's toilet stall to read about geography and to get a grasp on how to analyze coordinates in 'new world'.
He then cast a few buffing spells just in case, cast [Body of Effulgent Beryl] to patch his hole against bludgeoning damage, and then cast [Gate].
.
.
"Shit-shit-shit-shit…" Misato was groaning as she crawled on her hands and knees.
The aircraft carrier 'Over the Rainbow' had been hit again, after the heat- eradication ray had caused most of the bridge crew to turn into meat slushies.
The Angel had fired some sort of slicing beam that caused a huge chunk of the carrier's deck to fall off as it was cut off from the rest of the ship, alongside severing Unit-02's leg and few fingers.
Asuka's screaming had flooded an earpiece into which Misato had linked the EVA's communication radio, and Misato started to feel resignation creep into the terror and anger she felt.
'Just come and finish us off, you bastard…' Misato had contemplated escaping the command bridge as it's lower levels had started to burn, and she had hesitated as she would have to jump as the heat ray had melted emergency stairs and caused the surface of the metal to be red-hot, and the lower parts of the bridge had caught fire so stairs were not an option.
She had attempted to give the order to direct the aircraft carrier away from the Angel before she could evacuate the bridge, though, as it was clear that her earlier plan to ram the Angel with the carrier wouldn't work- Without Unit-02's AT field in full operation, and even if that was still operational, the Angel would just eradicate the aircraft carrier before it would get anywhere close to the Angel.
However, the carrier's communication lines had broken after the slicing attack as the attack had apparently carried a strong electromagnetic pulse that broke most of the electric systems close to the impact sites.
'Figures…' Misato coughed blood as she had been forced to jump off the command bridge after the Angel fired another slicing attack at the carrier, effectively decapitating the aircraft carrier's command deck from the rest of the ship and causing it to fall to the ocean.
She had landed on the carrier's deck after a moment of free fall, but she had broken both of her ankles from the impact, likely fractured few ribs, and hit her head. All things considered, Misato considered herself lucky.
Misato glanced at the near-motionless Unit-02 which managed to only twitch and curl it's fingers in rage and anger as it lay on the deck. And then she looked at the sea and air, both of which were chock-full of blood, fire, smoke, wrecks and oil.
It was all that remained of the Pacific Fleet, UN's strongest battlefleet.
She looked at the Angel which was slowly floating towards the aircraft carrier and had stopped attacking, all the while the carrier had picked up speed and was still in it's ramming course.
In other words, there was only one thing Misato could do.
"I'm right here! Come on, kill me! Do it! Do it you little bitch! Come at me! DO IT NOW!" Misato lifted both of her middle fingers towards the slowly approaching Angel and screamed expletives at it.
The Angel opened it's polyhedral structure to turn it into a pair of sideways pyramids pointed at its central S2 Organ, and Misato realized that it was about to fire it's laser again.
'Well shit.' Misato stared defiantly at her fate while waving her middle-finger at it.
.
.
Momonga walked out of a [Gate] and cast [Fly] as he had appeared in the air, just in case as he didn't particularly want to risk getting stuck into anything that might be occupying his 'end location'.
'Right…' Momonga scratched his chin as he saw that the Angel was closer than he had anticipated… Before he realized that the Angel wasn't closer, but it was just huge. 'It's like two real-sized pyramids stapled together, with the bottom one being upside-down…'
He glanced over as he saw smoke. 'Hm, Gendo did say that NERV's allied fleet was in trouble… Although, 'in trouble' seems a bit underselling it. There's only one ship afloat, I think? A drone carrier, or something? Wait, I think that's the carrier I'm supposed to bail out…'
Momonga was wondering if he should fight the Angel first or go and check the carrier, and he figured that he should probably at least check if anyone was alive aboard. He could then use his 'heroic intervention against the Angel' to drive up his reputation and fame, which he assumed he could then leverage for favors in addition to what he could swindle from Gendo.
"[Teleport]... Whoa." Momonga arrived on the carrier's deck and looked around the utterly wrecked yet still somehow floating ship.
The carrier had huge slashing impacts on it's deck, it was tilted to one side as if it had lost a huge chunk from one side, which was showing exposed crew and machinery quarters from the cut as if someone had taken a giant cake cutter to it and took a chunk, and the deck was belching flame from under some of it's plates.
Moreover, there was a huge one-legged red mech on top of the carrier's deck.
Momonga got an urge to go and loot the mech as soon as he saw that it was motionless. But caution overtook his loot-goblin instincts.
"Right… Hm?" Momonga cast widened [Detect Life] and [Detect Mana] to check if anyone was alive and noted that the 'mech' was still in fairly good 'health', if one ignored it's missing leg and crippling chest injury, and was in full mana. However, what interested him more was the fact that there was a 'life sign' below the decks that didn't quite register.
'A '-' amount of health. Odd. That's not a number.' Momonga was a bit puzzled and wondered if his ability had malfunctioned, as the detected health-number was a special letter and the 'mana' number was quite odd as it was ten to the power of eighty. 'I'm pretty sure the number is incorrect, what does that little number above and to the right of 'ten' even mean anyway…'
He wondered about it while he heard someone scream expletives behind him, and an attack landed on a [Anti-Magic Barrier] that Momonga had cast around himself before taking [Gate].
The attack broke the barrier in one shot, but attack was stopped by it nonetheless.
'Hm.' Momonga raised the threat level of the Angel by a notch and turned to face it while standing on the carrier's deck. 'Oh? Misato-san?'
The officer was currently sitting with her back against a pile of wrecked and bent steel, with bones jutting out of both of her ankles and feet pointing to random directions, and she was giving the approaching Angel a double-middle finger while staring at it in blank shock.
She then turned her head with mechanica, rusty motions until she looked directly at Momonga with an unreadable expression on her face.
"[Maximize Magic: Anti-Magic Barrier]" Momonga put the odd health-sign aside for now and refreshed his barrier as it's cooldown had ended due to him casting it early. 'So, it has magical attacks. Not bad.'
The second attack followed roughly five seconds after the first, and punched clean through the [Anti-Magic Barrier], hit Momonga directly in the chest, and launched him straight off the carrier's deck and into water roughly half a kilometer away. 'What?!'
"Right… It fired a low-power shot at the start to gauge my defenses…" Momonga realized that the Angel was stronger than the ones he had faced before, and he adjusted his strategies accordingly. 'That's nearly ten percent of my health gone in one hit… After it broke the strengthened [Anti-Magic Barrier]. Not to mention it deals heat damage, or in other words, fire… Right [Body of Effulgent Beryl] needs to go-' "[Body of Effulgent Ruby]"
He noted that the 'fleshy' exterior he had been given had exploded and had turned to little more than blood and ash from taking the impact head-on. 'Oh well. Ritsuko-san can probably make a new one, I think…'
"Well then… The last one didn't have defenses against Instant Death, so…" Momonga teleported a few times to get in range for his spells, as the Angel had been roughly twenty kilometers away from the aircraft carrier when it had attacked.
The Angel fired it's beams to where Momonga had been after each teleport, and he refreshed the teleport right afterwards with another spell and thus allowed him to dodge the attacks at a quickly-mounting mana cost by spamming teleportation. "Time to loot another one- [Grasp Heart]."
The Angel's S2 'engine' appeared in Momonga's hand and the Angel's blue reflective polyhedral 'body' that was roughly half a kilometer away froze utterly still.
'Right, that was easy.' Momonga noted as he started to move the house-sized S2 engine to his inventory… And then noticed that there were hundreds or thousands of fifteen-feet long blue twin rectangles pointed at him all around him.
The pairs lurched together, and Momonga [Teleport]ed away just before he could be one-shot by hundreds and hundreds of all-out laser-attacks, although he detonated his [Body of Effulgent Ruby] to block what he failed to dodge.
'Hoooo…' Momonga realized that the Angels had started to catch onto his tricks. 'I guess relying on one attack won't cut it anymore… Hm, Grasp Heart stuns it's target if the spell is resisted, so I'm guessing that the freezing-up was the spell applying it's secondary effect… In other words, I have to fight more creatively.'
That being thought, Momonga faced another problem- Namely, range. 'My spells don't actually have all that long of a range… And this thing seems like it can switch freely from a artillery piece to a short-ranged salvo-gun, and doesn't seem to have pauses in it's attacks… Worrying…'
The Anti-Magic Barrier came off of it's cooldown and Momonga applied it, as well as Body of Effulgent Ruby and used both to stand his ground against a salvo of small light-dots that appeared all over the ocean, likely intended to clip Momonga by saturating the area with explosives as the Angel hadn't manage to hit Momonga directly after it's initial blasts.
True to Momonga's instinctive theory, the light-dots exploded in skyscraper-sized cross-shaped firestorms.
"[Hold Species] - [Fireball], [Penetrate Magic: Fireball], [Penetrate Magic: Greater Poison], [Corrosive Dart], [Plague], [Widen Magic: Emit Force], [Reality Slash], [Maximize Penetrate Magic- Magic Arrow], [Weaken]..." Momonga appeared out of teleportation next to the Angel and chained a pile of different types of damage-spells, some with modifiers and some without, to figure out the Angel's weakness after stunning it with the holding spell.
The Angel's ever-shifting 'body' froze into a polyhedral cube which Momonga guessed was it's 'armored' form and the hail of spells hit it, although only Reality Slash had any effect on the Angel.
And when it resumed movement, it just shapeshifted it's body so that the slash repaired itself.
Momonga, however, noted that the Angel was perfectly intact after each shape-change, almost as if it had been entirely utterly unaffected by the damage- And that made him suspicious. "[Scroll of Dispel Illusion]!"
The Angel turned into a gigantic geometric star that pointed it's hundreds of triangular, sharp ends away from Momonga, with the S2 Organ visible to him from the center of it… And then it shapeshifted into a pair of long rectangles that lurched together and launched a massive blast of energy at Momonga.
'I see…' Momonga realized what was going on as he teleported away from the splash zone. 'In other words, it isn't transforming itself, but rather, using an illusion. But the illusion is solid, since spells had an effect on it… Haa… In other words, it is partially equivalent to that pain-in-the-backside Illusionist Super-Tier spell, at least partially- [Fool the World].'
The Illusion-spell was one that allowed a player to temporarily ignore many of the 'global' effects of spells, effectively rewriting the game's system for a brief moment to rewrite the rules to ones that best suited them. Until they made a mistake and made a 'rule' that counteracted a rule they had already written, thus undoing the illusion- Or the opposing player outright overpowered the spell's effects through doing something that was too strong for the spell to affect, such as attempting to use the spell on a raid boss.
'If I apply the principle behind that spell to how my spells work in the 'new world', I'm guessing that the spell would quite literally 'fool the world' into believing that whatever it wanted would have actually been reality all along. That way it can't be really damaged by non-oneshot attacks as whatever chip damage I do would just 'not be there' when it's shape changes, or rather, it convinces the world that it was like that all along. The fact it can just ignore low-level non-Penetrate modified spells doesn't help… I'm guessing it has [High-Tier Magic Immunity III] or equivalent.' Momonga thought as he focused his attention on dodging using teleporting while thinking, now knowing that just grinding the enemy down with a volley of spells wouldn't work. 'In other words, the counter to it is to use something with enough force that the world won't believe the Illusionist could pull it off, thereby breaking the illusion as it would no longer fool the 'watcher'. Hm…'
Momonga glanced at the drone carrier in the distance as the battle was taking place roughly ten kilometers in front of it… And realized that the carrier was headed straight for the Angel. 'Huh, they will get blasted to oblivion if they try to ram the Angel… Moreover, I don't think that sort of ram will be enough to overpower it's illusion…'
That being thought, Momonga had got a 'preview' of the loot when he had been trying to stuff the Angel's core into his Inventory, and was pretty certain that getting another S2 Organ wouldn't be enough to justify using a Super-Tier spell instant-cast item to get it. 'I only have a limited number of those instant-casts… [Sword of Damocles] could probably be enough to counteract the Angel's illusion, but only if it stops moving and I can anchor it to the ground… I'd guess that should be good enough to count as a 'structure'… Hm. I'll need to think about this…'
Momonga nodded to himself as he had gained a rough idea on how to fight the Angel. 'Here it has open terrain, I have no cover, no line-of-sight blockers, and nothing to anchor the Angel into with [Creation] or [Nature's Bunker]… This battlefield is basically as good for it as it gets for it. In other words, the winning move is to not fight in it's chosen battlefield.'
However, Momonga had promised Gendo that he'd bail the carrier out of trouble, so he figured that he could at least partially fulfill his promise and that way keep some parts of his end of the bargain. 'Partial delivery is better than none, and Gendo has shown himself to be a reliable trade partner, if quite scheming and with few hooks in every promise, so I might as well rub his back if he rubs mine.'
He recast his [Anti-Magic Barrier] and [Body of Effulgent Ruby] before teleporting again.
.
.
Misato was currently in a bit of a shock.
The energy beam that would have ended her life had broken against some sort of energy dome that had shattered in turn, canceling out the attack.
She had turned her head around, hoping that Unit-02 would have recovered and could continue the plan of ramming the carrier into the Angel and having Unit-02 and the Angel duke it out… And instead she had seen him standing on the deck of the carrier, looking at Misato with a curious expression on his face.
The Second had arrived.
Misato wasn't sure if she should be horrified or glad as he looked at her.
And then the Second took a direct hit from the polyhedral Angel's beam-weapon, and got blasted clear off the carrier in one hit in a shower of blood and gore.
'Ah…' Misato wasn't sure what she felt, as the glad feeling had turned to resignation and horror had turned to numbness.
However, before she could start to think about what had just happened, the city-sized Angel in the distance froze still, and she squinted her eyes to see that the massive Angel's S2 organ had moved itself roughly half a kilometer to the side of where it had been, out of the Angel's body.
And then a light-show of rapid-fired explosive beams began.
'...Hehehe… It's like a firework…' Misato was starting to feel a bit insane as she stared at the Angel trying to hit Second with it's projectiles as if the angular Angel was a bee-allergic kid trying to swat a skeletal hornet with a whack-a-mole hammer.
Misato knew that the situation was out of her hands.
Asuka had stopped screaming in pain at some point, and Misato guessed that both she and the rest of the pilots in Unit-02 had passed out from neuro-shock feedback pain, a theory which was further reinforced by Unit-02 becoming utterly still and lifeless, except for the massive amount of LCL it was losing through the missing leg and fingers that hadn't been remotely 'closed off' from the circulation loop due to the fact MAGI couldn't reach the EVA and issue the remote commands to valves.
Misato then looked at the wreckage of the Pacific fleet, and she started to giggle.
The giggle intensified until Misato had started to laugh, which was only barely audible through the roaring of the flames and groans of metal as the aircraft carrier kept picking up speed from it's still functioning nuclear engine feeding power to it's rudder and propellers.
The polyhedral Angel returned to it's usual double-pyramid shape twice in a quick succession after a while, and then it suddenly expanded into a outright freaky-looking half of a star with it's S2 organ visible in it's center,
It was too horrifying, too ridiculous for her to properly understand.
Mistao wasn't sure how long she had been laughing, only that she did. She even forgot that her ankles were broken and her head spun from concussion, and that she had likely broken some of her ribs. She also ignored the possibility that the broken ribs might have punctured one of her lungs as she had started to cough blood during the laughter.
Second was suddenly on the deck of the carrier, after the Second Angel had seemingly just appeared from thin air in it's skeletal form, clad in it's violet robe and ridiculous pauldrons, and with the red S2 Organ clearly visible just below it's ribcage.
"Umu…" The skeleton looked a bit uncertain, at least if Misato had learned anything from Second's body language during the past two days, and he waved his hand a bit. "Come to think of it, I haven't tried to move anything this big before… [Widen Magic: Gate]"
A huge swirling portal appeared in front of the aircraft carrier, both half-submerged in water.
The angular Angel reconfigured itself in the´distance, this time into a huge triangle pointed at the carrier.
The triangle opened like a flower to show hundreds of triangles inside it, which then opened in turn, each opening causing a single dot of light in front of the Angel to form and grow, and grow, and grow as the Angel opened its geometrical shapes more and more…
Until the Angel opened fully to look like a half of a star made of outwards-pointing geometric shapes, and the building-sized dot of light launched itself at the aircraft carrier as a all-consuming, sun-like beam.
The beam pierced right through a dome similar to the one that had saved Misato earlier, and…
The Second took the hit directly on his forehead.
The attack fizzled out, and it looked like the Angel had frozen still in shock.
.
.
'Hm, so it uses fully Fire, er, heat-based attacks since detonating [Body of Effulgent Ruby] removes all damage from the direct hit- I can use this… Ah, and it looks like [Hold Species] still works, even if the duration doesn't seem all too long…' Momonga felt quite glad that he had managed to glean a lot of valuable information from the foe, while also only using a single fairly low-value consumable in the process.
.
.
Misato realized that the Aircraft Carrier 'Over the Rainbow' had already entered fully into the swirling portal while she had stared ahead in shock, and she also realized that the aircraft carrier had appeared into Geofront and in doing so dug a massive trench into the underground cavern's forest-like 'floor' as it ground to a halt.
The impact had thrown her on her face on the deck and had almost knocked Unit-02 off of it entirely, but the Evangelion managed to gather enough strength to latch onto the deck with the fingers of it's remaining functioning hand, digging the appendages two layers through the deck and causing few of the still intact fighters within the second layer of the carrier to be flattened.
Misato waited idly for the crushing, rumbling, sliding and groaning of metal to end until she rolled on her back on the carrier's deck which was now tilted slightly sideways to the other side.
And then she coughed blood in a geysir as both her lungs collapsed.
She looked to the side to see the pyramid of Central Dogma in the distance, looked up to see the upside-down Tokyo-3 colony hanging from the ceiling of Geofront like stalactites… And looked to the other side to see Second scratching it's forehead with it's bony fingers.
"Umu." The skeleton nodded. And then disappeared.
Misato's eyesight darkened…
And then Second reappeared in front of Misato a couple of seconds later, which she spent staring forwards and coughing a bit in a desperate attempt to draw air to her blood-filled lungs. "Ahem… I almost forgot. Right, yes, Misato-san. Stay still."
Misato turned her barely-seeing eyes towards the skeleton to stare at it, as she was fairly sure she couldn't move anyway, so she did as ordered.
The skeleton took a bottle from a swirling portal and poured the red liquid within the bottle on top of Misato.
She felt a lot of things lurch back together all of a sudden.
"Haaae?"
"Ah, good. It works like before… I didn't actually bother to test that before, since I didn't want to spend one of these on nobodies. Ahem, anyway. Please ignore that, I am a bit occupied at the moment with coming up with strategies to fight that Angel from just now. Ah, and there's something I'd like to check, so excuse me." The Second nodded to Misato, and then it flickered off again.
Misato stumbled to her feet, feeling thoroughly shell-shocked.
"What the hell was that?"
Unit-02 could only twitch in response, before it powered down entirely and slumped limply on the carrier's deck.
.
.
Kaji dusted his hands to clean them as he finished turning the carrier's nuclear engine off. 'I had planned to just hunker down until Gendo's reinforcements arrived, but after that slicing attack almost cut my arm off alongside half the ship, I'm pretty sure the nuclear engine going boom would kill me just as surely as the Angel would…'
Kaji shrugged as he patted the technicians on the back as they had done most of the heavy lifting, with Kaji just going to tell them to shut the ship down. Which was surprisingly easy as the crew surprisingly didn't want to die in a nuclear meltdown, specifically after Kaji had pulled a rank on the chief engineer and reminded him that NERV had taken command over the ship, and then convincing them that Kaji had been sent by the commanding officer specifically because the ship's internal communications were down.
'Well then… I might as well find a place to hide until I get an all-clear message from Gendo or we reach shore… I'm kind of sad I didn't get to reminisce a bit with Misato-chan, but there will be time for that, if she survives…' Kaji thought as he waved his hand at the engine crew and walked off to the carrier's hallways, aiming to head for somewhere where he'd be both hidden and could jump ship if needed.
He managed to creep roughly twenty meters forwards before the ship felt like it had lost gravity, and was falling from the sky. "Eh?"
A rough screech and bang echoed through the ship and Kaji tumbled around the tight hallway as the ship ground to a halt, with the special operative clutching tightly to the briefcase that was stuck to his wrist with handcuffs.
The rumble and tumble ended after a moment, allowing Kaji to stand up and shake his head as he was fairly sure he had a concussion. 'Did we run ashore? I thought we were above the part of the coast which sank after the sea levels rose…'
He shook his head again as he was fairly sure he had seen something skeletal flicker in his sight, before he headed off again.
He managed twenty steps and two corners before he suddenly ground to a halt.
Kaji felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked at it to see that his shoulder was being grasped by a skeletal hand.
He then turned his head further, and saw that he was being halted by a skeleton clad in ridiculous regalia, and who had a red orb in it's chest.
"Greetings. Do you mind telling me what you have in your briefcase?" The skeleton's voice was like two ancient tombstones being ground together.
"Bunch o' paperwork for NERV. Tax papers and so on, don't mind me." Kaji tried to play it cool while his heart dropped to his ankles. 'Another Angel? Figures…' "Do you mind if I smoke?"
"Go ahead. I'll just take this off your hands before that, though. [Hold Species]." The skeleton nodded cordially, and Kaji froze as he had been reaching for his pistol, even though he knew logically that it was a useless gesture.
However, he froze utterly still, not out of fear but because he simply couldn't move. 'What? What the hell?'
The skeleton touched the handcuff chain, and it seemed to get infected with darkness that devoured and corrupted the metal into a nightmarish black mess, and the chain snapped.
The skeleton grabbed the briefcase.
The briefcase glowed blue all of a sudden.
Kaji couldn't even scream even as he saw the Third Impact get initiated right in front of his face… And the Angel put Adam into a swirling portal.
"Thank you for your cooperation. [Control Amnesia]."
Then there was only darkness.
.
.
The Fifth Angel floated up and down a bit as it searched for the presence of Adam… And then the polyhedral cube began to float towards it.
.
.
'Adam, huh… [All Appraisal Magic Item] shows a huge list of jargon… It's like someone opened history and science books and copy-pasted the entire thing into it without formatting anything… Figures that 'new world' magic is bullshit complicated…' Momonga felt resigned as he had gleamed through the memory of the person who had been carrying the item, and got a rough idea on who the person was. 'So Gendo had Kaji bring that here as an emergency delivery? I'm guessing that Gendo planned to give that to me… It seems to be quite a complex magical item, so I guess that is the mythical 'IT' I 'asked for'… Haa… '
Momonga thought about the item he had looted. 'Figures that Kaji wouldn't really know much about 'Adam' either. Just something about 'it' being what the Angels wanted, and 'Adam' being necessary for 'Third Impact'... The Second Impact was a huge explosion, so this 'Adam' is basically a huge bomb, right? That could be useful, if I need to blow up an Angel at some point… Just toss Adam at it and boom, no more Angel…'
Momonga shook his head as he almost teleported back to school, before he remembered he'd need to get another skin-coating from Ritsuko before he could do that. 'I'd really have preferred to get a lot of search-teams looking for Nazarick, but I suppose I can ask for that after I defeat that angular illusion-Angel… Apparently that guy, Kaji, was supposed to get orders from something called 'seele' too, when he reached Geofront? I could probably ask Gendo what that means, he seems quite knowledgeable… Although, I have to play it cool and pretend to know what 'Adam' is or he'll call my bluff, but perhaps I could get some hints if I act all mysterious…'
He sighed and [Gate]'d back to Terminal Dogma, and sent Ritsuko a [Message], requesting another fleshy body.
.
.
"Oww… My chest hurts…" Asuka groaned as she regained her consciousness in the Entry Plug. "Leg is owie…"
Both Shinji and Rei had been flopping all over the Entry Plug during the massive crash outside, and had ended up floating slowly past Asuka.
Shinji had hit the back of his head against the side of the plug, knocking him out, and Rei was floating around while holding Shinji's head against her chest to protect it from further harm.
The fact both of them were in Asuka's spare red skin-tight plug-suits didn't help how ridiculous it looked.
"Get a room…" Asuka groaned and passed out again.