Chapter 13: Revelations
Tokyo-3
The sound. Like a bat's echolocation, copy-pasted a thousand times and transposed into audible sound and the visible spectrum.
A lot of things start happening very quickly from this point, within the span of a few seconds.
An irritated Ramiel attempts to annihalate Danny Phantom, Kensuka Aida and Touji Suzuhara, and the office block they're standing on.
Danny, in a last-second moment of insane inspiration does something... creative.
First off, he splits himself in two. One part, containing about a quarter of his lifeforce, grabs the two kids, one in each arm, and jumps off the building, phasing out and gliding down into the Geofront.
Most of him, though, three-fourths or more of Danny Phantom, screams at Ramiel. A Ghostly Wail, a sonic and very much psychokinetic wall of force. Anguish and energy channeled into an all-consuming frontal cone of sonic waves.
The concrete edge of the roof shatters into a thousand pieces in an instant. So does the floor in a cone in front of Danny, and the entire front side of the building. Time all but stands still as Ramiel fires its lesser positron beam into the building-turned-dustcloud. And it is deflected.
Not nullified, no. But the sheer psionic and emotional wrath of a single human being has managed to make spacetime itself ripple. And these waves are what cause the positron beam to bend, to stagger and twist... And positrons... positrons have a positive magnetic charge. As Ramiel pours more and more positrons into the tiny little area of warped space between the half-ghost and the Angel's side, the rear parts of the beam start getting bent out of shape by the cut apart front parts of the beam.
The end result of all that pent up energy, funneled back at Ramiel? A blast like a shaped charge, cutting into Ramiel's flank. Of course, this kind of violence is more than even Danny can survive. When it comes right down to it, Ghost Danny is nothing more than a person-shaped gas cloud, not much tougher or physically stronger than a regular person, despite all the phenomenal cosmic power. And Danny's sonic cone has a weak point. The point where the sound waves come from.
And so his head, as well as the rest of his body, is atomised by an extremely hot spike of light. The building crumbles, and the light goes on to spear a mountainside a few miles away, digging a small hole of molten rock and setting the forest on fire for about a mile around it.
The lesser part of Danny? That small split carrying Aida and Suzuhara? He all but drops Kensuke as he staggers downward, and every fibre of his being goes into maintaining his ghost form for a few seconds more. He floats down into a bunker. The one he... why did he pick this one again... He falls to the floor, blood everywhere, and it all goes black.
The people in bunker 8 are mostly hospital staff, and patients. A few shoppers and salarymen, but a large part of the area is filled with hospital beds, hurriedly rolled out of the abandoned hospital. Anyone who was in too critical a condition to move in an evacuation was very carefully transported to other cities after the first Angel attack...
So when Danny falls through the wall, shifting out of ghost form and bleeding from every orifice, with two boys in his arms who are also pouring blood from their ears, they are very quickly picked up. After the first half-second of shock, an elderly doctor immedeately rushes over and starts checking the very pale foreign man for fractures. Other doctors and nursing staff flock to his aid and within minutes, under the trembling of the geofront, Danny is stabilized and the boys are left to sleep off the trauma of light pressure shock.
However, in the moment that Daniel pushed back Ramiel's fury, somebody took notice. Somebody who really should've kept their mouth shut.
"Hm, interesting, Sonic wave pattern, but interwoven with psychokinetic activity. I didn't think it was possible. What is that boy... Could he be a-" The nanoprobes inserted into Unit 01's gums have finally completed their work, and the mysterious voice's musings are transmitted through the radio for Shinji and all of NERV to hear.
In Gendo Ikari's office, two jaws drop.
Misato Katsuragi blinks. "Pardon?" That was neither Shinji nor Rei's voice. It was a grown woman whose voice Misato swore she recognized from somewhere, but couldn't quite place.
Unseen by Misato or the rest of the bridge crew, Akagi almost collapses to the ground, bending over her computer console to keep herself upright. "No..." She whispers.
Shinji is completely dumbstruck, even as the building Danny had just flown to exploded under Ramiel's wrath, his mind seems to slip and fall into an abyss he'd never noticed.
Misato frowns at the image of Unit 01 confusedly looking around. "Whoever you are, get off this channel."
The... voice over the Eva comm link gasps. "Wait... You can HEAR ME?"
"Yes." Rei confirms dryly.
"Well, crap." The voice answers.
Unit 01 stands up straight. The Buran shield falls from its arm and crashes to the ground with a deep clang. And then the purple Evangelion sinks through its knees and buries its head in its hands.
"Mom...." Shinji gargles, sounding extremely queasy and close to tears and screaming.
The sound of microphone feedback, or more accurately, Subcommander Fuyutsuki's microphone suddenly switching on, dances over the combat communications network.
"SHUT DOWN UNIT ONE! NOW!" He screams.
Akagi trembles as her fingers fly over the keyboard. Heh... Unit 00 was supposed to be the dangerously unstable one for this sortie... Now it turns out, Unit 01 is suddenly manifesting the fully cognizant presence of YUI IKARI. Shinji's mother, Gendo's husband, the most brillant and quite possibly evil woman on the planet. She was the first to try and activate the Evangelion, at that point nothing but half a torso and half a head. And she died getting liquefied into the experimental god machine while little toddler Shinji and a very emotionally dependent Gendo watched it happen. Maybe she even set it all up on purpose. It's thoughts like that that drove Akagi to drink...
But, too little too late... Unit 01's transciever shuts down before Akagi can even open up the commands menu, the lights behind the Eva's eyes go out, but instead of crashing headfirst into the pavement, Unit 01 crouches down, exactly the same way as it did when it first emerged a few minutes ago. Only without the shield this time. And everybody can see that the purple Eva won't be picking it back up.
"Shit..." Misato mouths. "Shit shit shit..." She hisses. Despite everything, despite... Gendo, who she wants to shoot. Despite Fuyutsuki and Akagi who she wants to strangle, despite her own fuckups in not seeing this coming...
Both of her Pilots, both of her best strategic and tactical assets, both of her... charges... are now stuck in the field of fire of that giant flying gun, without any cover.
The Captain snarls in abject frustration. She who fights and runs away... leaves a gap in the defenses. But they need the breathing room to reorganize now, so damn the consequences. "Aoba! Blow the plate the Evas are standing on. NOW!"
His objection that it would open a hole in the Geofront is shoved back down his throat before it even gets a chance to get past his vocal cords. He navigates the submenus for the right command. The lady wants a big explosion to make the ground fall away and swallow the kids in their Evas, then that's what the lady gets. He's not sure whether he's relieved his commanding officer isn't letting the kids get vaporised, or angry that she just basically opened up a murder hole for the Fifth Angel to turn the Geofront into a slag furnace.
The Box Ghost
The roof detonates, and Evangelion Unit 00 and Evangelion Unit 01 crash down into the Geofront lake.
The former comes down on its feet, then falls down backward with a hard splash, but immedeately scrabbles back up...
While the latter crumples down into a heap, not bothering to move.
Emil, coming out of retirement as the Box Ghost for just one day, sighs ruefully at the tableau before him.
Lieutenant Ibuki had been giving him intermittent updates on the sad state of affairs. Apparently, Danny had been taken out of action. The incorrigible hero had saved the lives of two boys identified as the Third Child's friends and was now unconcious, shivering and delirious in a bunker somewhere.
Speaking of the Third Child... The Box Ghost frowns disdainfully at Evangelion Unit 01, currently face-down in the Geofront lake, completely inactive. He didn't blame the poor boy for shutting down the thing. Apparently it was haunted by the ghost of his dead mother. "Sort of." As Lieutenant Ibuki had put it.
Emil could understand what a revelation like that could do to a kid. He could not understand how NERV could let things get this far.
He sighs. Nothing for it then. He takes Pandora's Box into his hands. He had held the old, old artefact once before. He'd resolved not to open it this time though. Last time he did, and it had been... bad.
He roughly grabs the ancient thing, shoves it under his arm and holds his hand over the sealed lock.
Power, enormous reserves of power, flow through him. He knows there's a real risk that using his powers like this could cause him to regress into the raving lunatic he once was.
Exhale.
At least he had more fun back then.
He opens his eyes and sees Ramiel. A perfect, near indestructible container, with one (1) Angel Core with S2 Organ, and one (1) positron beam particle accelerator within.
He can work with this. He reaches out an arm and mimics grasping the slowly rotating fortress.
Ramiel, still on high alert after the two... Abominations had just fallen through the floor, feels a force cling to his immense body. He pushes on toward the hole in the Geofront, increasing his torque, but nevertheless slowly grinds to a standstill.
"Gotcha." Emil breathes, beads of sweat on his forehead.
And Ramiel stands still in the air above Tokyo-3. Its damaged side has been retracted into its dimensionally transcendant body, but the Angel can sense that the damage is stubbornly not healing.
The sound of trembling glass, louder and louder, Ramiel struggles to rotate forward. And like an engine belt slipping, Ramiel suddenly snaps free for an eighth of a stroke, before being 'caught' again.
"Feisty..." The Box Ghost snarls darkly. It's only a delaying action, he knows, but that's exactly what the First Child needs right now.
Shinji
Inside Unit 01's Entry Plug, I sit with my head in my hands.
While a hologram of my mother pouts in front of me.
"I never meant to hurt you." She tries to soothe, but I can't respond.
What can I say? I don't even know what to feel.
The first thing that comes to mind is sadness, I feel betrayed.
Dad knew. Fuyutsuki must have known. Everybody probably knew.
Misato, Danny. Rei? Rei...
I am very much aware that Rei is out fighting that Angel on her own. And I couldn't help her. I couldn't...
My memory goes back. I cut the explosive bolts, and the shield fell with a clang.
I couldn't think anymore. I felt like I was choking. So much... red. Chirping cicadas.
"You were having a panic attack." The ghost of Yui Ikari says softly.
"So I shut down Unit 01 for you." Mom crouches down in front of the control seat. "Can we talk about this?"
I nod very slowly. "When... When you..." What is it that I want to know?
Did she abandon me? Was it an accident. "Did you know all of this would happen?" I whisper, trembling like a reed.
The translucent image of Yui Ikari closes her eyes and sighs into the LCL as if it were air. "Yes."
She smiles at me, a lopsided pulling of muscles that doesn't reach her eyes. "This is my fault."
Her hologram sits down across from me, sits down on nothing, and looks me square in the eye, her features a mixture of regret and respect that makes my skin crawl. "I knew the Evangelion wasn't going to move without a mind inside. It's just a mass of disjointed instincts. It would have to come together, one way or another."
Yui closes her eyes again, clearly searching for the right words. "I knew there were... risks. I brought you to the test because..." She blinks, and I think she's almost crying. "Because I needed to see your face to remind me why I was standing there risking my life."
Oh.
"It was selfish, and it was stupid, and I'm sorry." She croaks, sobbing.
I reach out from my chair... and my fingers pass right through her cheek. My mom flinches back, only briefly.
"I... I'm sorry..." I mumble, feeling the hot sting of tears unable to leave their tear ducts in the soupy LCL.
"I should never have had you watch it. And I should never have left things in the state they were!" Yui Ikari all but shouts bitterly.
I am I. / Blood oath / Aki's Aunt / NO!
The Entry Plug briefly lights up, and I see a flash of white with a streak of blue down the middle.
My mom's hologram fizzles and her voice distorts with static, her grief immedeately replaced with confusion, almost panic. "What... What is going on!?"
"MOM!" I can see the pain in her face as her hologram pixellates and reforms, clear as day.
Yui sighs once again. "I'm sorry Shinji. I'm sorry you had to get dragged into this. This was never supposed to happen this way."
I blink. She blinks.
Silent understanding passes between mother and son.
I can see the steel in her eyes. She isn't giving up. I... I don't know anymore, what's up and what's down. But I love my mom. And I admire her tenacity. "So what are you thinking?" I ask, and can't help but feel the tiniest spark of... hope.
The holographic image of my Mom stands up and starts to pace around the confined space of the Entry Plug. "Okay, I'm only really waking up just now. I have... no idea what's going on, other than that Gendo is still maintaining Unit 01, we've killed two Angels together, you and I..."
Ichi / -ICUS PRINCIP- / Engel
Images, incredible images screaming through my head. Unit 01 blue, Unit 01 in golden armor, Unit 01... Terrifying. The Entry plug flashes white once again, in tune with my neural connectors. My mom falls to her knees and smothers an agonized shriek.
The pulse of images fades again, and the static in my mother's image stabilizes.
"We've faced two Angels together..." Yui Ikari continues through gritted teeth, obviously hurting. "And we're currently in the middle of combat with another."
"Mom, what is that... that thing that keeps happening!?" I ask. My mother's face is still contorted in pain. The fear that she might leave me again tries to wrap around my heart. But Rei's out there, and Misato and Danny and everyone, and they could use my help. So I try and focus on blue hair, a white cape and a red jacket. A camera and a tracksuit.
"Unit 01's core is falling apart. And with it, I am too..." Yui laments quietly.
No.
No no no...
In Chaos, all things are possible... / Oh NO YOU DON'T! / Nine fingers / Lightning and bleeding eyes / They nullify eachother.
"How can I help you?!" I shout desperately at my mom as she grips her stomach in clear agony as the Entry Plug ignites in bright white light again.
Yui shudders, trying to look up at my face. "I... I don't know Shinji... I'm sorry."
I'm pretty sure that even when I was young, I never saw her as I see her now. In agony... And livid."I'm sorry, but whoever did this was a cruel bastard. This... interface is tearing me apart. Is tearing Unit 01 apart." And there's nothing she can do to stop it.
No...
The Entry Plug walls activate and for the briefest of moments, Unit 01's eyes light up red. I see Rei, screaming under Ramiel's positron beam. Unit 00's AT field collapsing. Then nothing...
"Rei? Who's Rei?... Wait..." What little colour still graces my mom's face drains out as she has a terrible thought.
Perhaps it's my mom's face going pale as snow and utterly expressionless in realization, perhaps it's our connection through Unit 01 that makes the idea jump from her mind to mine...
But only now do I see the striking resemblance between Rei and my mother.
I can feel my mom hurriedly digging through my memories like a plow through loose soil. I open up my head and she rummages through it with a speed I can only barely keep up with.
She cradles her forehead in the palm of her hand. "Oh dear GOD Naoko..." She steadies herself, then turns back to me. "Okay, so Rei? She's not just a very nice girl who definitely should have Unit 01 watching her back. She's got my DNA. She's your sister."
Yep.
She is indeed.
My chest constricts.
And she's going to die. And Unit 01's going to die. And Ramiel is going to turn Tokyo-3 into a smoking crater.
I don't want her to die. I don't want Rei to die.
I DON'T WANT REI TO DIE!
The featureless white void of the Entry Plug explodes in the familiar rainbow of light of synchronization.
"Unit 01 is powering back up! Synch ratio at 100%!"
But instead of the inside of the Geofront, I see a starfield of red lights in a sea of black. And every star loves me.
"Synch ratio at 200% and rising!" / "SHUT IT DOWN!" / "It's not responding! It HASN'T BEEN RESPONDING!"
Mom frowns, her eyes flitting from side to side. "Okaaay... I'm detecting a whole sea of Unit 01's all around us. Each of them... Oh, Shinji..." Mom smiles at me, sounding... hopeful? Her smile is beautiful.
And her smirk reminds me so much of Danny. "They all have S2 engines."
GIVE. HER. BACK! / Weaving of a thousand strands of nuclear light / Sachiel obliterated in a single motion / An enormous metal cuttlefish creature torn limb from limb.
-
"Synch Ratio is spiking past 300%!" / "I'm getting telemetry... The Core is forming a spiral tesseract!"
The starfield is eclipsed by white-beyond-white. My A-10 connectors burn and I feel myself, and my mom within me, fall away, falling asleep, into Unit 01's incredible presence.
In the infinity, I see a young woman with short brown hair and wearing an American Air Force uniform. She is flanked by... Two Shinjis. Two different twenty-something young men, two me.
"Don't worry." The other Pilot says softly. "Despite its power, the Eva is still nothing without you."
Absolute power and light. The synch ratio passes 400% and I explode into LCL. "The Eva is you."
The hologram of Yui Ikari blinks at the image. The trio of other Pilots fades away and her sensors tell her that Unit 01's Core is no longer connecting to that of others of its kind.
She turns and smiles sadly at the empty seat. "It's out of my hands now. All that's left is the popcorn. Good luck, Shinji."
Rei
(Within Temptation, Stand my Ground)
The Box Ghost had been overcome. A last shout of "Beware!" was all the warning the Pilot of Unit 00 got before Ramiel was hovering above her, aiming at her through the gap in the Geofront roof.
Rei looks up at the Angel's corner opening above her. An installation of captured light thrumming to be released. Right as Misato had planned. Rei Ayanami swings the Ectocannon upward and depresses the trigger, intending to shoot through the barely-contained Positron stream inside the Angel's hard shell, disabling it with a single last-second shot.
Ramiel's glass shriek as it realizes what is about to happen is oddly pleasing to Rei. Perhaps it is the fear, she muses.
But the Angel of Thunder manages to react in time. It slams its firing port shut and twists. Its battered corner emerges from nowhere once again, and the crystal octahedron becomes a dizzying display of shifting plates, a non-eucledian flower of glass... A toroid, a donut.
The ectobeam passes harmlessly through its middle, and with the same swinging motion of splitting apart, the Angel closes itself once again, corners finding themselves and snapping together. Unit 00, its gun at 3% charge, is faced with the exact same sight of Ramiel about to fire its beam down at the Geofront.
In Central Dogma, Misato slams her fist on the console. "DAMN it!" Akagi is already explaining. "It appears the Angel's dimensional transcendance, its existence in multiple phase spaces at once, is far more advanced than we could have expected." So the ectobeam had done nothing. If they could catch the Angel in the middle of a shift... It would be extremely vulnerable... But that was idle theorizing, too little too late.
The all-devouring beam of white light erupts from Ramiel and tears down toward the orange and white Eva.
Rei isn't afraid. She may die, yes. But, she may not. Risking berserking and contamination, she reaches down into Unit 00 and raises her synch ratio higher than it has ever been before. Despite everything it hates, the Test Type Evangelion has no interest in being destroyed. The Absolute Territory of Rei Ayanami and Unit 00 takes shape around the Eva.
But Rei pushes it out further. At the speed of thought, her AT-field bubble pushes upward to seal off the Geofront's armor. The beam hits the AT-field just as it completes the seal and Unit 00 almost crashes to its knees from the initial jolt.
Almost.
Like Atlas holding up the world, the Evangelion stands with trembling knees, and the AT-field holds, barely. Rei screams in agony, her eyes screwed shut. Ramiel is quite literally tearing at the skin of her soul, and the incredible pressure on her AT-field is almost more pain than even she can handle.
But she can handle it. And she can keep the flowers from burning. And she can keep Unit 01 from being destroyed. And Pilot Ikari. And so she holds the bubble of her Absolute Territory out at the hole in the Geofront...
Finally, finally, after thirty horrific seconds, the beam seems to weaken.
Her power cord explodes off her back and within the span of five seconds, the numbers of her battery run to zero. The power distributor that connected the cable to the Test Type Evangelion to had simply melted under the sustained wattage pumped into it.
Unit 00 and by extension Rei Ayanami are subjected to the tail end of Ramiel's wrath. A two-second shower of positrons that sends a tremendous blast of steam billowing through the Geofront. It heats the Eva's armor to such an extent that, in places, it cooks loose from the flesh. The First Child is subjected to boiling LCL for well over a second.
Lungs scorched, eyes temporarily blinded, her Eva quite literally falling apart at the seams.. Barely able to breathe and only seeing through a cracked camera lens, Rei Ayanami and Unit 00 stand tall.
Always.
The pale girl grips her butterfly controls and Unit 00's arms slowly extend upward. Octagons tesselate over eachother at the bottom of the scorched hole in the Geofront, but they slide away and shatter like soapbubbles. Sparks dance off the Eva's armor, and despite Rei's blind gaze upward, despite her defiant gasp, Unit 00 falls to its knees, staring up at the captured, beautiful light that is about to obliterate her.
Shinji
What do I want?
I want Rei safe.
I want to save her, with my own two hands.
I want to fucking kill Ramiel.
Oh, the Beast's instincts liked that...
I want to... I will protect my friends, Tokyo-3 and the whole damn world!
The Geofront
Ramiel fires a final positron beam at the broken Evangelion in the Geofront.
Bake the Lilim blasphemy in the oven they so kindly built for it.
A hurricane wind blows over and through the Geofront lake, and the water between the two Evas explodes apart. Unit 01, returned to the physical, scrabbles back up and walks forward, cloaked in light of Shinji Ikari's soul.
And I beheld a great Beast, skeletal and gleaming, and taller than the trees.
From its back sprouted an eight of wings, unfeathered and bright as the sun.
A ring of whitest love and hatred flew unmoving above its head.
It was the colour of king's flower, and the wings a robe, and the ring a crown.
The hunter boy stood as the hunter girl could only fall.
Unit 01's core thrums with the perpetual power of an S2 organ.
Everything broken had been mended again, and in the mending, something new was born.
With eight glowing wings, ascendant, Unit 01 hurriedly stabs out its arm, hand and fingers in the shape of a cup.
A bowl of octagons forms in front of Angel Ramiel's Positron Beam. Unit 01's hand is pushed downward ever so slightly as it walks up to its sibling.
The projected AT-field strains and stretches like rubber, and Ramiel rotates faster and faster, pouring more and power power into it... It roils and boils and twists... But despite the scalding light, it does not break. Indeed, it seems to absorb the scalding caldera of plasma and subatomic particles. Until Ramiel's own internals begin to overheat, and the Angel of Thunder pauses its assault.
Unit 01, halo on its head, looks up.
Shinji Ikari kills Ramiel.
And the man stood before the mountain of ice in the sky, the Angel of dead God.
The scuplted god of thunder had struck down his beloved sister, who walked and ate with him often.
And the man, moments ago a boy, dispersed the mountain's lightning in his hand, in his bowl.
The purple Eva pushes the incredible power of its Domain, the Absolute Territory of a god, upward.
The Geofront plate shatters like so much porcelain, an enormous, jagged area all around the Angel of Thunder exploding upward into the sky.
Minutes later, after reaching the apex of their trajectory into the upper atmosphere, the rain of steel and ceramic shrapnel would come falling down on the fields of Hakone and the Fortress City itself.
The mind of Shinji Ikari, the incredible, boundless anger of one boy, envelops Ramiel. The Angel's attempt to raise its own Absolute Territory implodes like a fairground balloon twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Distortions and ripples in the air, like air currents in the desert, caress and lick at the Angel's outer skin, tearing off flakes of crystal, even before Shinji conciously pushes the entirity of his power onto the Glass Angel from all sides, shattering it into a thousand pieces.
As its outer shell is subjected to shear forces usually only seen in interplanetary collisions, Ramiel's particle accelerator, charging up a shot that would never come, loses containment and annihalates the core, along with about half of the Angel's crystal shell.
Standing in his cave, built by hands. Standing as an Angel of Man, built by hands.
He took the mountain in his hands, and hammered and kneaded.
And it shattered and fell from the sky.
And again all was right with the world.
The otherworldly diamond shards that made up Ramiel are acted upon by gravity for the first time in their brief existence when the Angel's core is atomized by positrons. An instant later, the glass ice is ejected out into the mountains and sea around Tokyo-3 by the same explosion. They embed themselves in the ground before the Geofront shards even start falling.
Tokyo-3's industrial area is leveled by Ramiel's particle accelerator and Core detonating. Every window in Hakone is shattered. Fences collapse, strings of shingles are ripped off roofs...
Nothing the N2 mine used against Sachiel hadn't done, but this time Ground Zero was inside the city.
Unit 01, its eight wings of light catching the backdraft, looks up through the hole in the geofront at its handiwork: man-made metal and Angel shell raining from the sky.
Shinji turns away, and looks down at Rei.
Still smouldering, Unit 00's head turns to face its sibling. The single eye, a crack running through it, refocuses at the sight. The shattered orange Evangelion holds out a trembling hand.
Shinji smiles and Unit 01 helps Unit 00 up.
With a jolt of sudden awareness, a naked Shinji's eyes open in the Entry Plug. With the Pilot's absence from the Core, the ascandant Evangelion immedeately shuts down. Unit 01's halo and wings wink out, Yui Ikari's hologram disappears with a scream and the Entry Plug goes dark. Again, the purple Evangelion falls face-down into the Geofront lake's mud.
A moment later, Unit 00 follows, sitting down flat on its ass without preamble and powered down by an exhausted and heavily injured Rei's order.
Ambulance heli-jets had already been dispatched, and fly through the enormous hole in the city, down through the shaft of light into the cave below.
Author's note: Third Impact Unit 01, baby! ^_^
This story can also be found on Spacebattles, with a whole bunch of annotations!