Neon Genesis: Rebellion

by Mark Geoffrey Norrish

An AU of the anime's second season. An all-new Angelic host attacks Tokyo-3; the Marduk Institute sends a Fourth Child; a rogue Angel hunter arrives in Tokyo-3, pursued by Seele; one Angel refuses to die; and a council of elders plans to rule mankind, not as kings, but as Gods.

13. Lucifer

"This is the United Nations Tokai Military Force. By special UN order, martial law has been declared in the Tokai district. A curfew has been imposed. All citizens are to remain in their homes until evacuated by authorised military personnel. Those caught violating the curfew will be shot without warning. Anyone with information about Nerv is invited to call the special hotline at 1-2-3, repeat 1-2-3. Anyone coming into contact with any Nerv personnel is required to inform the UNTMF by the hotline as soon as possible; photos of senior staff are currently being dropped across the city. This is the United Nations Tokai Military Force …"

Misato vaulted over a back fence and hid under a tree as a helicopter went overhead. This was harder than she'd expected, and she'd expected a suicide mission. The streets were crawling with soldiers, methodically pulling civilians out of the burning city. She'd hoped to be able to mingle with them to make it to her apartment, except that it had been one of the first places evacuated, and there were mugshots of her all over the ground. They sensibly were trying to clear out any possible cover Nerv might use to get their pilot back. Between the soldiers, the curfew, the aircraft buzzing overhead, and the various armoured vehicles patrolling the streets, it had taken her the better part of two hours to make it six hundred metres from the egress, even with the smoke thick in the air from the N2 explosion and burning city blocks. Now that she was there, it looked even more futile. There had to be fifty soldiers in the block, with mounted machine guns, and probably snipers and God only knew what else. They had more men than she had bullets.

Still, giving up was just as hopeless. She probably wouldn't even make it back to base; it was miraculous enough that she'd made it as far as she had. Once she had Asuka, they could grab one of the Jeeps. Only Asuka had to make it back alive. She tore off her Nerv insignia, pulled on her military beret and sunglasses, checked her gun's silencer, and marched straight up to the apartment. Two guards spotted her immediately and trained their rifles on her.

"Halt!"

"Put those down, you idiots," she said, projecting as much authority as she could into the order, flashing her Nerv ID.

Soldiers are trained to listen to superior officers almost reflexively; officers are trained to give orders in such a way that soldiers will obey. The guards hesitated while she walked up, just for a few seconds.

"You're Major Katsuragi Misato," one said, uncertain. "You're under arrest."

She shot him point-blank.

The second soldier clubbed her with his gun; she fell into him, bringing both to the ground. He was twice her size and pinned her gun hand; she pulled her spare and shot him too. She kicked him off her.

'Silencer' is a misnomer, as one can reduce the noise of a gunshot from something which will cause permanent hearing damage to something like a firecracker. There was immediately a crackle of radio chatter. Misato bolted up the stairs.

She had to shoot another three soldiers to get into her apartment. It had been ransacked. She passed over the broken doors and furnishings; ignored the looted beers lying around; barely hesitated over Pen-Pen, shot dead in her bedroom; scooped up Asuka's A-10 connectors in the hall; and found Asuka, hands cuffed behind her to a radiator in the dining room. She was still in her nightclothes, had a black eye, and there was what looked like an explosive collar around her neck. Misato hadn't thought of that, and hadn't brought the tools to disarm it.

"Misato," Asuka said, her usual bravado gone. "What the hell is going on?"

"I think I've made a mistake," said Misato. The sound of radios was getting quieter, not louder. The soldiers weren't going to bother storming the apartment. Either the building was wired, or there was a big X on an artillery officer's map. "Asuka – I'm sorry." And she bent down to hug the girl.

Outside, the captain counted his men. "Everyone minus the number of bullets."

"Shall I get the bodies out?" asked his lieutenant.

The captain shook his head. "Our orders were clear. The fate of the world is at stake. I'm sorry. Xinping, do it."

The combat engineer nodded and pulled out a detonator. He disabled the safety, hesitated, and pressed the red button. His thumb slid off an orange sheen.

"Please don't press that," said Nagisa Kaworu, walking up. He wore his black velvet yukata and an affable smile, although he was scuffed and had obviously been in a nasty fight.

"Our orders …" the captain began.

"… are superseded by mine," said Kaworu, showing his Seele ID. He was the sixth-highest-ranking member of the organisation. "Maintain your perimeter. I shall deal with them myself. They're more valuable alive."

The captain frowned. Five of his men were dead, and a fourteen-year-old apparently had the authority to tell him not to avenge them.

"Understood?" Kaworu asked, with a pleasant tone that still managed to stress that it would be very little hassle to simply vaporise the captain and his company.

"… Yes, sir." The captain nodded to his men, and they stood down. As soon as he was out of earshot, he radioed back to base for instructions.

Kaworu walked up a staircase of light to Misato's balcony. The door was broken open; he walked through and found Misato and Asuka, embracing and waiting for the end. He waved his hand, and Asuka's collar and cuffs opened themselves.

"Huh? … Smarmy? What's going on?" She rubbed some feeling back into her wrists.

"Are you here to finish us off?" Misato asked, helping Asuka to her feet.

"No. I'm bringing you home."

"Why would Seele tell you to do that? I thought you were on their side."

"I changed my mind," he said simply.

Those four words entailed months of soul-searching. He couldn't leave Seele without knowing what else he could be; he'd spent his entire life with them, he had no other choice. But Hikari and Shinji both loved Asuka, and Kaworu loved both of them. When that thought occurred to him, the answer shone through, unstoppable as the dawn. It wasn't a question of divided loyalties; it was a question of whether she would live or die, whether to do the right thing or the wrong thing. If the price of the right thing meant losing himself, then so be it.

"Are you well, Miss Soryu?"

Asuka pulled out of Misato's arms to show she could stand. "Better than I could be, considering I was just stuck with those Schweine for the entire day."

"Well enough to run six hundred metres in under two minutes while dodging nerve gas and incendiary bombs? I can't block those." He offered a hand to each woman. Asuka hesitated, until Misato gave her a nod.

"Block?" Asuka repeated, taking his hand.

"I promise I'll explain when there's time," said Misato, "but for once in your life, I need you to just do as you're told without asking questions."

Kaworu led them down his staircase of light and down to street level. "Just act like everything's normal, you do this every day, and you're both my prisoners."

"Sure," said Asuka, "because you apparently have Angelic powers, nothing out of the ordinary at all about that."

"Calm down," Misato said to Asuka, "don't think about … anything at all, pretend you're just going for ice cream –"

"Hey! Stop!" A burst of gunfire rattled overhead.

As one, they broke into a headlong sprint. An alarm sounded, and gunships converged between them and the Geofront ingress.

Four kilometres away, in a field hospital, General Hyakutake glared at the phone in his hand.

"We should never have let them take the initiative," Hyakutake said to Maj-Gen Reichner, who had the other stretcher with extensive but cosmetic burns. He switched lines. "Begin the attack. Destroy everything. Hold nothing back. Nerv burns."

Four point one kilometres away, Kaworu and the women ran, as VTOLs swooped into strafing runs, their bullets pinging off his AT Field as flames and clouds of poisonous gas blossomed around them. They made it into the trans-Geofront depot and sprinted along a walkway of orange light twenty centimetres above the electrified tram lines, until the Geofront came into view, and then they leapt into space. Light coruscated around them, slowing their fall.

Holograms of five monoliths appeared around them.

"What are you doing?!" demanded 01.

"Making a choice. I'm the Angel of Free Will. Remember?"

"Tabris! You dare betray us now?!"

Kaworu considered this.

"My name," he said quietly, "is Kaworu. Goodbye, Father."

There was a crackle of orange light. Seele's secret telco array fizzled and sparked, and the monoliths winked out of existence.

"You have even more explaining to do," said Misato, "but later." She looked upward.

Pieces of the armour plating above them were blowing inward, one by one; they had withstood Angelic blasts, but not tons of shaped charges placed along fracture lines in access shafts. The weapons and support towers crashed down into the Geofront; in their wake came explosive, incendiary, and gas shells, VTOL gunships, and soldiers with abseil lines and gas masks. Two Jet Alone units winched down.

"We'll have to get you both into Eva, immediately," Misato said, focusing on the JAs. "Will you be able to pilot?"

"Um, no?" said Asuka.

"Maybe," said Kaworu.

"My synch rate was zero last time; why would that have changed?"

"I can't think of any reason, but you're getting in the plug anyway," Misato said. "It's not like there's anywhere safer for you. Kaworu, why only maybe?"

"Unit-00 would go berserk because of Seed conflict. Units-01 and -02 have imprints that don't like me, not if Yui knows how betrayed Shinji feels. After Chitose copied her S2 organ onto Unit-01, I doubt you even could erase that imprint. Unit-02 would be a safer bet, if you were willing to format the imprint and leave Asuka out. I could use my own S2 organ to help it; it wouldn't need the power cable, which I know the UNTMF will target."

Misato looked around. Paratroopers had jumped from the other ingresses, free-fallen most of the way, and were already attacking HQ; they were going to have to fight their way through them. "We don't have time for that. If they get to Shinji before we do, he's dead. You'll escort us to Unit-02, Asuka will get in, then you'll take me to Central Dogma, we'll find him on the security system, and you'll get him to Unit-01. If neither of them can pilot, you can swap into Unit-02 and I'll have Ritz format the imprint."

"In that case," Kaworu said to Asuka, "I have a message for you. From your mother."

Asuka's eyes widened, then narrowed. "No."

"It's relevant to synchronisation. It will help."

"I don't care."

"You're making a mistake."

"It's mine to make."

"You should listen, Asuka," said Misato.

"When you've experienced a tenth of what happened to me, then you can talk."

Misato and Kaworu frowned, but neither said anything.

…

Slightly under seven thousand kilometres away, a fuel tanker disengaged from a long-range fighter plane. The pilots tapped their radios in acknowledgement and flew their separate ways.

Chitose yawned and uncurled from her seat, partly rested, and watched with interest as the other plane flew away. Her irises were both red; she'd taken out her other lens for her nap, and thrown it away. "Did we just have a mid-air refuelling? Bother; I've wanted to see one of those for years."

"I figured you needed your rest," Kaji said. "You're the muscle here. You need your strength." He reached down and retrieved a box of rations, and handed them back to her.

"Mmph. I guess. How long until we get there?" Chitose sat the rations in her lap, pressed her face to the window, and peered out at the land passing below.

"Do you even know where 'there' is?"

"I thought you knew that?"

Kaji stretched a kink in his neck. "I've been calling in and creating new favours for the past twelve hours. Flight controllers not reporting us, friends telling me about movements, refuelling, that sort of thing. You owe me massively for this."

"I suppose so. But you know where Kihl is?"

"Yeah. A country house in Germany. I have the GPS, but we'll know it when we see it."

"Because it's so grand?"

"Because he has an Eva guarding it. Think you can fight that?"

Chitose opened the ration box. It was the kind of food that one can put away for years and eat at a moment's notice, plus a very necessary water bottle. Nephilim theoretically could survive without eating, if they didn't mind being permanently sleepy, but they needed more energy to fight at full strength, and they couldn't synthesise their own water or vitamins. "Evas' S2 organs are larger than I am. Size does matter, you know."

"That's what she said."

"Hmm? Has Dr Akagi been talking to you about S2 theory? I've asked her, but she never tells me anything about it."

"Never mind. Do you have any cute tricks you could use?"

"None that's likely to work. You know the eighteenth Angel? Even if I'd gone all-out, Kaworu and I together still couldn't have beaten it head-on. An Eva has an even stronger AT Field, plus it's attached to a giant mecha body."

"So what's your plan?"

"Sneak past the Eva and kill Kihl. He's the leader of Seele, and the rest of the Committee mistrusts each other. Without him, they'll fall apart. I hope."

"They should. That's another favour or ten."

"Hmm?"

"I'll get us there and sort out the aftermath. You just worry about Kihl."

"I'm more worried about Kaworu's brothers."

Kaji blinked. "His … brothers."

"Genetic twins, I think? Clones of him. Seele made them of both of us when we developed AT Fields, since they then knew that our genes coded for viable S2 organs. I think one of them piloted Unit-04, you know, against the fifteenth Angel, in America, and they gave Kaworu the legs from another after the seventeenth, with some HGH so they'd fit him. Anyway, Kihl uses them as bodyguards. I assume they euthanised all of my clones when I rebelled – they were all lobotomised, but even so I can't picture Kihl taking that risk – but he still has the Kaworim. I can take them one-on-one, they're younger and weaker than us and they're stupid and predictable, but Kihl knows this and has more than one. And it might be awkward marrying Kaworu after killing a whole lot of his genetic sons."

Kaji shook his head. "You have issues, you know that?"

"How so?"

"How many people have you killed in your life?"

She thought. "It was my attack that destroyed Berlin, so everyone there probably counts, although to be fair I was Absolutely Terrified at the time, and I didn't know what it would do. I was acting on instinct. That's easily the largest one, so probably a million or so."

"Forget that one. Where you knew what you were doing."

"Hmm. The next time was at the Himalayas. I was being kept prisoner there, although they pretended it was for my own good. After that, there was Mrs Bauer, and her henchmen, and since then there've been a few would-be abductors and one civilian man who tried to attack me at night. I'm not sure what specifically he wanted. Then Mr Ikari and the Section Two men, and a few platoons' worth of soldiers escaping the city. And the city, obviously. I panicked with the civilian, but the others were self-defence. If Seele got me again, they would have lobotomised or killed me. It's not possible to imprison a Naphil, not after she realises she doesn't have to do what you tell her. I don't see any moral difference between higher brain death and medical death."

"I see," said Kaji. "You could have thrown Bauer and Ikari and their goons away without killing them. You're pretty much indestructible without an opposing AT Field."

"One of the men who tried to abduct me pumped halothane into my apartment at night. AT Fields don't stop gas. Well, they can, if you concentrate, but not when you're asleep, and they can't filter out oxygen so you eventually pass out. The dosage was too low and I woke up on the way to the airport, and I bought a gas alarm after that, but if I'd let him live, he or someone like him would have tried something else, and eventually figured out something I can't counter. He could as easily have used poison. I don't murder people just because it's easier than thinking of a peaceful solution, Special Agent Kaji. I know I'm desensitised, but after what I had to endure in the Himalayas for all those years, it's really, really hard to be sympathetic toward any of Seele's people. Even Kaworu-chan, sometimes."

Kaji could have pressed this, but she obviously wasn't going to feel guilty either way. "What about those N2 mines you just set off in Tokyo-3? The city wasn't evacuated. That must have killed at least tens of thousands of civilians."

"You were the one who asked for a distraction. If I hadn't, they would have shot us down."

"You can't call that self-defence. Almost none of those people was threatening you."

"Is that a legal definition? I took the only course of action which wouldn't result in my death."

"You don't see the distinction?"

"I don't care about the distinction. I want to live; if the law says I can't, I won't obey the law. Besides, the sailors on the Over the Rainbow weren't threatening you, and you could have warned them about the bombs so they could evacuate."

"I know. I could have. And it would have blown my cover and got us all killed."

"So, you let … I think there were a few thousand? people on that ship die, to save yourself, Misato, and me? And we're all still probably going to die very soon anyway?"

"Would you have done differently?"

"Of course not. But I thought you were trying to say that killing people is bad?"

"There's a difference between killing people and letting them die."

"Is this another legal opinion?"

"You know what," said Kaji, "let's talk about something else. Anything else. If we make it out of here alive, what will you do with the rest of your life?"

"I'd like to travel. See the marsupials in Australia, and the auroras, and the deserts, and the ruined cities, and the thriving ones. I think I'd like to be an engineer when I grow up. Or a scientist. Why? What will you do?"

Kaji thought about Misato. "Stop running," he said.

…

Slightly over seven thousand kilometres away, bombs rained down on the great pyramid of Nerv HQ. Inside Central Dogma, alerts covered every wall; sirens blared.

"Report!" said Fuyutsuki.

"Our radar's not responding," Maya said, trying to reclaim the systems and failing. "Our missiles can't lock onto anything. I can't control them manually, either; they're jamming those frequencies."

"They're coming in through the holes the Fourth and Fifth Children made earlier," Makoto said. He watched a monitor show a platoon hopping in, before one soldier glanced directly at the camera and shot it out.

"Section Two's collapsing," said Shigeru. There remained only a few pockets of half-trained employees with small arms and makeshift barricades, all steadily being overwhelmed by innumerable soldiers with grenades and assault rifles and flamethrowers. A Jet Alone had broken into one of the far wings, and was crushing everything in its path; more soldiers flooded in behind it. They had nothing that could even scratch it.

"The automatic systems aren't stopping them," Makoto added. One by one, UNTMF electronic warfare teams disabled their circuits, or infantry blew open doors or destroyed cameras and autoguns with demo charges. They had set up pumps pouring in Bakelite solvent. One system after another went down.

"It's going to stop us, in a moment," said Ritsuko, typing security overrides rapid-fire. "They're trying to hack Magi remotely. We're blind to everything outside HQ already. This isn't good."

"Senpai?" Maya asked, panicking, unsure what to do.

There was a moment's lull, then another siren joined the cacophony. Ritsuko glanced up at it, and turned grey.

"Those psychopaths," she said. "Maya, save Magi. I have to stop Third Impact." So saying, she turned with a swirl of her coat and left.

"Save …" Maya repeated. The building shook under another particularly large bomb. She sat down at Ritsuko's terminal and took one look at the notifications scrolling across the screen, almost as fast her eye could track. "Oh, no …"

The room shook again, and a wall blew in, followed by a hail of bullets. Fuyutsuki and Shigeru bent under the desks and pulled out sub-machineguns; Makoto found a pistol, all he had trained with. Maya stared.

"Fight or die!" said Shigeru, laying down suppressing fire.

"Wouldn't mind having one of those Angel Children here now, eh, Shigeru?" Makoto joked, taking aim for a more precise shot.

Two RPGs flew through the breach and hit the base of their tower, blowing it in and bending their platform forty degrees. They staggered against the railing, and the computer monitors all went blank. Makoto dropped his gun; a bullet blew out Shigeru's temple, and he tumbled over the railing.

"Fall back!" cried Fuyutsuki, firing into the breach; another RPG came out of it, blasting a hole in the main screen, and was followed by men with ballistic shields or assault rifles.

There were two gentle clinks from among the soldiers, followed by two explosions and a rattle of gunfire, and they fell dead. Misato walked over them, traded out her empty magazine for one of theirs, and waved up to the bridge crew. Kaworu floated behind her, AT light shining around him; he motioned, and one soldier's combined gas mask and radio headset rose and fixed around his head.

"We're clear," she said. "Maya – anyone – I need to know where Shinji is, now!"

"I can't!" Maya called back. "Magi's locking me out. And half the cameras are gone. And – argh!"

Misato huffed. "Kaworu, it's all up to you, then. Find Shinji, and get him into his Eva. If Asuka doesn't manage to synchronise, we're still going to need someone to deal with those damn JAs, fast." She looked back to the bridge crew. "Where's Ritz?"

Several hundred metres below, Ritsuko ran into Adam's vault. In a locked cabinet was something which had looked like a human kidney but half a metre across, and which now looked like a plate of bloody mashed potatoes. In the middle of the room was Adam, in His Bakelite prison. There were fine cracks all across it, and they were spreading, fast.

"The filtration system," she murmured, staring at it. She had used it to modify Lilithian LCL to make a sedative, to keep Adam dormant. When Kaji first brought it here, she'd assumed that Seele had installed a backdoor in case she ever tried to reverse-engineer it, and so had left it alone; she'd never thought they might set it off just to keep her off-balance. Still, there was only one chance. She had to synthesise a replacement, sometime in the half hour or so they had before He regenerated too much to stop.

She flipped open her laptop and got to work.

…

In abstract space, ten monoliths were illuminated against a dark room. 04 and 11 were still absent.

"What is the meaning of this?!" demanded 02. "Sabotaging Adam's containment? The Angels are undone, the Scenario achieved! Why would you risk everything like this?!"

"The first stage of the Scenario is achieved," 01 corrected. "With possession of Adam, Ritsuko Akagi could reproduce human S2 organs and threaten the second." 09 went dark. "Without suitable containment, she will have no choice but to surrender Him to us."

07 went dark.

"The second stage? What are you talking about?"

10 went dark; so did 06 a moment later.

"Human Instrumentality. Seele's purpose was the defeat of the Angels, and you have fulfilled that purpose. You are therefore no longer necessary."

02 went dark. The remaining five monoliths morphed into holograms of men in white, red, blue, green, and yellow.

"And now, gentlemen," Kihl said, "the hour of our Instrumentality is at hand. Your data and biological materials should be arriving presently. Our operations shall begin as soon as Nerv is demolished."

…

In Nerv's Eva cages, Asuka sat in her plug, her A-10 connectors in her hand. They were all that lay between her and her … mother.

"This is insane," she said. "You're insane. Why am I even considering this?" There was no response. "Of course, I know why. It's that, or the UNTMF kills me. Them or you, does it really matter? I won't be any deader." She sighed. "You really messed me up, you know that? This has been eating me alive for years." No response. "Why did you have to go and do it? If you hadn't done whatever you did to become an 'imprint', would I even be here right now? I couldn't have piloted. Would I just be a normal girl? Would I ever have come here? Would I ever have met … any of these people? Would I be anything like who I am? … Does that mean that you're still a part of me? But then, wouldn't that mean everyone is? I wouldn't be who I am if I'd never met … well, yeah. Is he a part of me? What does that make me, then? Just the sum of everyone I've ever met and cared … and thought was maybe okay? If I am, why am I so scared of dying? Does that mean I don't want them to die? But if they're also just the sum of everyone they've met … what even is humankind?

"Does it even matter? I guess I'm just putting this off, talking a whole lot of philosophical crap to avoid letting you back near my head. You have a lot to answer for, Mutter. And if you were still alive … what would it even be like? Shinji and his father?" She sighed again. "Well, I guess I need to try, or they're both dead too. But he owes me for this." And she put on her A-10 connectors.

Nothing happened.

"Oh, don't tell me. Mutter, you worked for me before. We can talk about this later, but I need you to move. Move. I said move! I know you're in there. Stop screwing around, stop dragging me down at every turn, and move for me!"

Nothing happened.

"Well, fine. Everything else is your fault, why not this, too? Why not ruin my entire life, from useless start to disappointing finish? God, imagine what would have happened if you hadn't died, if I'd had you trying to help me with other things, like dating. I'd be single at twenty-five."

Nothing happened.

"So that's it? Everything was pointless all along? Just a great long waste of time that never went anywhere, until I finally get pulled out of this soup can by a demo team, like some retarded rabbit? All the Angels we killed before now, none of that matters? Graduating from university at thirteen, all the work I had to put in for that, wasted? Spending nine years training to pilot this, to pilot you, but it's not going to make a difference because you're just going to sit there and do nothing?!"

Nothing happened.

Asuka hit the controls, her eyes itching. "Please. I don't want to die. Help me. I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I don't want to die. Help me."

Unit-02's four eyes lit up.

Fifty metres away, Kaworu floated back from a Jet Alone, dancing out of range of a haymaker. He was supposed to be finding Shinji, but it wouldn't matter if the soldiers got to the cages and dynamited all the entry plugs first. He'd blasted the JA again and again, pitted its armour and denatured or driven back its support, but he wasn't strong enough to take it down single-handed. The thing was as tall as an Eva and much heavier, and even if it didn't have an AT Field, it was covered in high-tech superalloy/ceramic armour plates thick enough to dissipate his attacks. He could deflect the bullets from its pallet rifle, barely, but when it tried to stomp him, he could do nothing but run.

Unit-02 punched through a wall, seized the JA's gun, spun it round, and opened fire. Its armour dented but held; it threw a punch in return. Asuka caught its fist.

"I've missed this," she said, and her mouth split into a grin. "Smarmy, find the Idiot. I got this."

She ducked another punch, then twisted under its arm and flipped it over her shoulder; the ground shook with the impact. She snapped a control rod off its head and bludgeoned it in the face. It hit her in the stomach; she whoofed, then pinned the arm, tore off its chest plating, and pulled its nuclear reactor out of its torso. She threw it down the hallway it had torn through HQ; it fell apart, steaming with heavy water and blobs of plutonium. The JA went still.

"Hey, everyone? Keep away from whatever's just north of the cages, it's full of radioactive crap."

She turned and bounded down the hallways of Nerv, scattering enemy soldiers, firing the Jet Alone's gun in bursts, trying not to hit too many of the few remaining Nerv people. The UNTMF troops took the hint and fell back behind their second JA. This one took out her power cable with a lucky ricochet; she beat it to death with its own leg.

She burst out of the wrecked pyramid, into the Geofront. It was nighttime now, dark but for the glow of her eyes and AT Field, and the muzzle flashes of field guns, MRLs, tanks, and helicopter gunships, all firing at her. She laughed gleefully and charged them. Orange light sparkled and crashed around her, turning missiles and bombs aside, tearing machinery to twisted scraps of metal, giving her the power to throw a tank and knock a VTOL out of the sky. The UNTMF broke and fled.

"Ah, jeez," she said, noticing that her power was down to 2:44. "Can I get another cable here?"

The surviving bridge crew had relocated from their usual position in Central Dogma to a row of computers at ground level, some of the only equipment that had survived the UNTMF attack. Makoto scanned their inventories. "They destroyed everything they could get at, but there's one in depot 4-B. I'll send it up." He pressed a button. "I said, I'll send it up. Um. It's not doing anything."

"I'm sorry!" Maya said, running every security countermeasure she could think of, but she wasn't Ritsuko. Magi wasn't responding. "And the power systems are going. I can't."

"Fine," said Asuka, "I can still … well. Those would have been really fucking useful about fifteen Angels ago. Smarmy? Forget the Idiot and get out here. We have a situation."

She looked up at the gaps in the Geofront armour, where two gliders descended, laden with Units-04 and -05, yellow and green twins of Unit-02. In their arms they carried double-headed Progressive Halberds; on their shoulders rode boys with grey hair and vacant red eyes.

Kaworu floated out of HQ and looked up. His eyes glowed dimly.

"Asuka," he said, speaking very quickly. "I'm not going to be coherent after they get close. The boys can project AT Fields and fly; they're individually weak, but they will swarm you. They're mostly distractions. Leave them to me, focus on the Evas. Their pilots are using their own S2 organs to resonate with their Evas'; they won't run out of power, and they will regenerate, even if you destroy their cores. You need to smash the entry plugs. The pilots look human, but aren't, not any more. Don't hold back, not even for a – raargh!"

He shot upward, and the four clones dropped toward him. His Field clashed with two clones' combined; the other two flanked him and blasted him out of the sky. Asuka covered him and swatted one clone like a mosquito, then a prog halberd sliced a shoulder pylon off: Unit-04 was on her. She grabbed the shaft and flipped the Eva over her shoulder, into the path of Unit-03's blade; Unit-03 stopped short clumsily, giving her time to knee Unit-04 hard in the back and seize its weapon. She parried Unit-03's follow-through, and the Kaworim zapped her from behind.

They fought dirty. They circled around opposite the Evas to get behind her; when she turned to swat them away, the Evas would attack. When Kaworu recovered from their first attack, they swarmed him again; she left them to it, buried her weapon into Unit-04's head, and caught -03's halberd by the shaft. She crouched and emptied her shoulder spike cannons into its chest. Unit-04 pulled the blade out and swung it back at her; she threw it and dodged another slash by -03. She caught its wrist, bent it over her knee, and tore out its entry plug.

"Kill him!" Kaworu screamed into her headset. She hesitated for second; Unit-04 got back to its feet and shoved her from behind. She went sprawling; -04 caught the plug and stuck it back into -03.

Asuka swore, rolled to her feet, and charged. She leapt over -04's attack, under -03's, pulled a spike from its chestplate, and shoved it through its sternum, into the entry plug. Then she pivoted, bashed -04 in the back of the head, pulled out its plug and crushed it in her hand. The clones hesitated; she leapt at them and twirled in mid-air, splattering them across her shin.

She panted, her eyes shining. "Yeah! Suck it!"

"Thank you," said Kaworu, his eyes returning to normal.

"Hey, that wasn't so hard. So. What now."

"The second wave. They're not going to give us time to regroup."

He pointed upward. Visible in the light from the burning wreckage all around was a second wave of gliders with mass-produced Evas. This time there were five of them: white, grey, black, pink, and brown. Each had two more clones on their shoulders.

"… Okay, but this time, I know how to fight them," said Asuka. "We stick together, back to back. I cover you from the Evas, you cover me from the –"

A tone sounded, and her Eva slumped. She saw the timer. 0:00.

"No. No, no. No no no no no no no no no –"

With glacial slowness, her Eva's balance shifted. Kaworu dodged out of the way as it toppled backward and crashed to the ground. Lying on its back, the plug couldn't eject: she was trapped.

"No! Move! Move! Dammit, move!"

Kaworu dropped to her level and threw his Field at the Eva, trying to roll it off its back so she could eject, but it was too heavy. He strained until he felt the clones' Fields boring into the edges of his mind, then turned and fled back to HQ.

"Kaworu? Kaworu! Get back here! Help me! Someone! Anyone!"

Kaworu zoomed through the burning halls of Nerv, up and down escalators and stairwells, until he found Shinji and Rei. They were lying on their backs in an abandoned store room, him with his head in her lap.

"Shinji," Kaworu said, landing. "We need you."

Shinji's eyes flicked to him, then back to staring at the ceiling. "Go away, Nagisa."

Kaworu flinched. "Shinji, there are five –"

"Go away, Nagisa."

"Shinji, listen to me."

"You lied. Leave me alone."

Kaworu pulled at his wrist to drag him to his feet; Shinji moved with it and punched him in the face. Kaworu rolled with it but didn't block.

"I said leave me alone!"

Rei folded an arm around Shinji and stared at Kaworu, not giving him anything.

"Asuka's in danger. Only you can save her."

"You've been lying to me ever since we met. Why should I believe anything you say?"

"The other Evas will kill her. Please. Come with me. I can show you the feeds if you follow me."

Shinji turned and walked away. Rei's gaze lingered for a moment longer, before she walked with him.

Kaworu stared, searching for something to say, when his headset crackled. It was Dr Akagi. "Kaworu. Have you read the Dead Sea Scrolls? The originals?"

Shinji wouldn't pilot. Kaworu shook his head and set off for the cages. If Chitose could make Unit-01 move that time, he had a chance, although unlike her, he did have the handicap that Yui knew he liked the girl who murdered her husband, enough to call her 'treasure'. "Yes, or parts of them. What specifically?"

"I'm trying to reverse-engineer an Adamite sedative from scratch, and the stochastic search isn't working. It might be luck, or maybe there's just no replacement I could make in time, but maybe my theory's wrong. Is there anything else from the Scrolls that Seele lied about when they told me?"

Her computer was running through simulations of a million candidate molecules which her heuristics said could maybe work and which she could hope to manufacture in time, before checking in more detail to see whether they would actually work. So far it had gone through over four hundred thousand. All of them were failures.

"I didn't know that they lied about anything at all. What makes you think they did?"

"The number of Angels. They said there would be eighteen, based on how long Adam was active during Second Impact, but there've only been seventeen proper ones, the third through eighteenth plus the virus one. Why would they attack us before we'd finished with them? It'd risk Third Impact."

"There are eighteen. The last is me and Chitose."

"No, you're Nephilim, not Angels. Or an Angel."

"We share Adam's soul. We are an Angel. When one of us dies, the other shall take full control of that soul and become the eighteenth and final true Angel."

Ritsuko shook her head. "Souls don't actually exist, Kaworu, they're metaphysical abstractions invented by civilisations four thousand years too primitive for real neuroscience. Even if they do somehow exist, they don't affect the material world. If they did, people wouldn't lose their minds from Alzheimer's or strokes or lobotomies."

"Is this really the time to argue theology?"

"Ugh. The line about Adam releasing eighteen souls is a mistranslation anyway. The correct version is eighteen lives, meaning eighteen embryos. You were cloned after Second Impact; you weren't part of the germination."

"A soul is a life."

Ritsuko reached for her packet of cigarettes. It was empty. "So, in short, you're saying you have no useful information to give me."

"I cannot answer the question you asked. How urgent is it?"

Ritsuko glanced at Adam. The Bakelite was slowly being pushed out of the little box, as He stirred. "On a scale from zero to ten? Ten. We have fifteen minutes before the end of the world."

"I have time," said Kaworu, alighting in Unit-01's cage. The plug was waiting for Shinji, but it would accept another pilot. He climbed inside and hit the button to initiate contact. LCL flooded the chamber. "Yui? My name is Nagisa Kaworu. I … I didn't betray him. I had to! Major Katsuragi's killed every Angel she's found, ever since –"

He hit eject, and sprinted out of the cages. The angry Eva roared, and tore free of its restraints. Armour plates flaked off its jaw and both biceps.

The alarms went off in Central Dogma again. Misato's eyes widened. "Kaworu, what the hell?!"

"It was a calculated risk," he said, putting as much distance between it and himself as possible, heading down narrow corridors it couldn't follow through.

"What did your calculation say to do if the unstoppable Angelic death machine went completely out of control?! My God, you're as bad as Ritsuko."

Unit-01 smashed its way out of the cages, then began walking through HQ, searching.

"Major?" Makoto asked. "Was there ever a plan for if Unit-01 went rogue?"

"Yes," she said. "Have Units-02 and -03 take it down."

He considered this. One was out of power, and the other was blown to atoms and scattered across the Antarctic seabed.

"Was there ever a backup plan?"

"Can you send it a command to go outside and fight the MP Evas for us?"

Makoto obeyed, and checked Unit-01 on their cameras. It was still tearing the base apart.

"Someone," Misato ordered, "find where the hell Shinji is, and get him to Unit-01. For the love of God, hurry! He's our only chance!"

Asuka bashed at her controls. "Move! God damn you, move! What was the point of letting me synchronise if you're just going to lie down and die now! Why can't you be like Unit-01? That one went berserk in its first battle, and then there was that bullcrap it did with the Weird Girl! Why won't you help me?!"

"Soryu," Kaworu said, looking for a suitable weapon now that he was a reasonable distance from Unit-01. "Your mother – listen to her, now!"

"What?! No, I – I can't!"

"Strength doesn't mean that nothing affects you," he said, quietly. "It means that you survive, no matter what."

"I …"

The five Evas landed around her.

Asuka was crying now, scrunching her eyes shut and curling into a ball. "No – not in my head – not now, don't talk to me, don't tell me to die, I don't want to die, I don't want to die, don't say it, I don't want –"

The Evas converged on her. The pink one, which had landed closest, stabbed its hand into her gut, reaching for the plug.

I love you

My little Asuka

Live

Asuka's eyes flicked open.

"You … you're the part that went missing," she breathed.

In the smouldering wreckage of Central Dogma, Makoto's monitor beeped. He tabbed over to Asuka's synchrograph. His mouth dropped open.

An opaque orange screen rolled over her and through the offending hand, slicing it off at the wrist. She pressed her hand over the wound, and it spat the hand out and roughly stitched itself closed. She rolled to her feet.

"You have been watching over me."

She dived at the pink Eva, flipped it, snapped its back over her knee, and stabbed her hand through its plug. Its two clones leapt off and blasted at her; their attacks splashed off her AT Field, now bright enough to obscure her for a moment.

"Protecting me."

The black and grey Evas tackled her and pinned her arms. The brown brought its glaive down in a vicious vertical swipe; she kicked the black off, used the recoil to roll out of the way, and grabbed the grey as a shield against the white's follow-through. She clapped her hands on the grey's shoulders, squishing its clone passengers, and brought her knee up and into its plug.

"All this time!"

She pivoted into the brown's attack and kicked the white's chest, then threw the brown over her shoulder and stomped its plug like an egg. Two clones raised their hands to blast her from behind; Kaworu flew out of nowhere with a flamethrower and torched them.

"Mama!"

She flipped the white's weapon out of its grip and skewered it, then leapt on the black, tore its chestplate off, and ripped its plug out the front and crushed it. She rolled to her feet and raised her hands; a pulse of orange swatted the last clones out of the air.

She panted, her smile no longer one of fury but of elation, her heart lighter than it had been since she first learnt to talk.

"Alright," she said. "The enemies are dead, our base is secured, and Asuka is back. Now, who is going to tell me what's going on? Where's my support this time? Don't tell me the Commander's forbidden them from piloting again."

"No," said Misato, "Rei's been lobotomised, Mogami also turned out to be a Nephilim, and she killed the Commander so Shinji's sulking somewhere."

Asuka's euphoria faded in record time. "What."

"And the other Nephilim is with you."

"Naphil," Kaworu corrected, perching on Asuka's shoulder and throwing his flamethrower away. The Eva's AT Field made him uneasy, but, being a machine, it didn't have strong emotions and couldn't really evoke them in him.

"You wiped the First's brain? Just before a fight? Whose brilliant idea was that?"

"The Commander's, and yes, I said the same thing."

Asuka pinched the bridge of her nose. "And the Weird Girl's a Naphil? Like, with the same powers as Smarmy?"

"Apparently."

"She specifically told me she wasn't!"

"She's a crafty one, isn't she?" Kaworu said sardonically.

Asuka fumed. "She told me you had Angel genes, although she forgot to mention you actually had powers. Why would she tell me that but not about herself?"

"We wanted separation of information," he said. "If one of our covers was blown, the other would still be fine. She went out of her way making her synch ratio look random, even though it meant she couldn't pilot as well; I think she mimicked Shinji's progression. Kaji stole that data months earlier. I helped her by sticking to round numbers, so you'd think we were using different methods to synchronise. Seele considered telling Nerv about her, in the hopes that you would classify her as an Angel and send the Evas, but if they did, then she would tell you about me. Mutually assured destruction. I suppose she guessed that you wouldn't tell anyone, Pilot Soryu, and she wanted to be in your good books."

"Whose side is she on? Why'd she kill old man Ikari; where is she now?"

"Ours, mostly," Kaworu said. "She despises Seele, and wishes to protect all of us. She killed the Commander because he thought he would buy enough time for his Scenario by handing her over. I expect she's gone to – persuade – Seele to call off the attack."

Asuka ruminated for a moment, then looked up. "Oh, hell. Can't they give us a break?"

The third wave of Evas was gliding down. This time there were sixteen, each with the upper and lower halves painted different colours.

"Being surrounded sucks," she said, and fell back into the pyramid. "Do you have any ideas about this? Misato?"

"Yes," said Misato, "you should grab – wait, where did Unit-01 go?"

Makoto tabbed through the few remaining camera feeds.

"I don't believe this. How can we lose an Eva in our own base?"

"It's a really large base," he said helplessly. "There's still pockets of poison gas around the edges, and most of the rest has been blown up or is radioactive and on fire."

She ran a hand through her hair. "For all intents and purposes, it's an Angel now. Find it. Ibuki, it should register on the seismograph."

"That's not responding," she said, typing frantically.

"They bothered to hack the seismograph? Do you have anything at all left?"

Maya just stared at her monitor. Misato read it over her shoulder: SELF-DESTRUCT INITIATED: 1:53. She reached for her phone. "Ritz? Maya's lost Magi and the base is going to self-destruct in less than two minutes."

Ritsuko watched her simulation finish. One million molecules attempted: one million failures. Time for drastic measures. "This is why we can't have nice things. I'll be right up." She hung up, hit the elevator, and called another number.

Rei's phone rang. She glanced down at it, then at Shinji. He said nothing. She would have left it, but it was Doctor Akagi. She owed Akagi an explanation, if nothing else.

"Rei. Or Yui or whoever you are now. Can you pilot?"

"Yes."

"Wait … Rei? What – how?"

"But I won't. I need to stay with Shinji."

"You're with – get to the damn cages, and bring him with you! We needed you there an hour ago!"

"No."

"I don't – for pity's sake, Rei, out of your entire life, now is literally the very worst time you could have picked to not do what I say!"

"He needs me."

"You know what else Shinji needs? A world without a revived Adam. Leave him if he won't come, but you have ten minutes to get the Lance of Longinus out of Lilith and into Adam, or He'll germinate again, and we'll have to fight this entire war all over again in another fifteen years. If any of us survives for another fifteen minutes."

She hung up just as her elevator arrived at Central Dogma. Maya spun, wild-eyed, as the doors opened.

"We have ten seconds to self-destruct! Senpai, I – I need to say that I l–"

Ritsuko calmly walked past her, yanked out the Ethernet cable, and sent an interrupt signal. The countdown paused. She hit two more keys, and Magi rebooted.

"…"

"That'll do, Maya," said Ritsuko. "That'll do. Find a cot somewhere and get some sleep. That's an order. I don't want you self-destructing anything else on me. Now, where were we?"

She brought up the security feeds, showing the sixteen enemy Evas landing in the Geofront and heading for HQ, the piles of destroyed military hardware and Eva gear, and dead soldiers and Nerv personnel.

"I leave you alone for half an hour … where's Unit-01?"

Misato did a palms-up. Ritsuko stared in disbelief, then shook her head and returned to her computer.

"Asuka, your battery pack is exhausted. Why are you still alive?"

"I finally worked out how to synchronise properly," she said. "No thanks to all of you."

Rituko checked Asuka's status and raised an eyebrow. Unit-02 had developed an S2 organ of its own, copied from the MP Eva's pilot. Well, Yui hadn't been Nerv's only genius. "So I see. Try not to get hit; that's high enough to give you sympathetic injuries."

"Sure, I'll just kill all these fresh Evas and clones without taking a scratch. How hard could it be?"

"Good, you do that. Maya …" She glanced around, but the tech had already left. The only people still there were Misato, Fuyutsuki, Makoto, and a handful of assorted technicians she didn't recognise, who'd fled from the UNTMF forces and hadn't felt like leaving. "Where's Aoba?"

"Dead," Makoto said shortly, pointing to his friend's body.

"Will someone turn that racket off?" Ritsuko asked. Most of the alarms had broken when the UNTMF had fired rockets at them, but one was still ringing. The bridge crew hadn't even noticed, putting it down to tinnitus; Makoto looked around and shut it down. "Actually, Asuka, belay that. I need you down in Terminal Dogma, now."

"What, like, now now?" Asuka asked, dodging a swing from a green-and-blue Eva. Inside HQ's narrow halls, they could only attack her two at a time, but she couldn't get behind them to smash their plugs without exposing herself.

"Yes, now now."

"Ritz?" said Misato, miffed. "I'm in charge of battles, not you."

"If we don't get an Eva down there within the next three minutes, we'll all die."

"You might not have noticed," said Asuka, ducking and weaving, "but I'm already tapped out on the not dying front. Besides, we've all been about to die for, like, the past hour; what's so special about this?"

Ritsuko rolled her eyes and hit the PA. "Shinji, I don't know where you are, but stop wallowing in self-pity and get up here! We need you to pilot Eva."

"Not going to work," said Misato. "For one thing, we still don't know where Unit-01 is."

"Did the soldiers take it, or –?"

"No, it got up and walked away. Makoto, find a forklift and operators and get Asuka a prog knife."

Asuka blocked another attack bare-handed and shoved the second Eva back, but the first Eva fell back in step, keeping her from manoeuvring behind it. They rallied, but then stepped back again, instead of resuming their relentless attack. The six Evas queuing up behind them turned and left; then the vanguard left, walking backward, leaving her be.

"What the heck?" she asked. "Are they running?"

Kaworu, spattered in dead clone, floated down onto her shoulder. "It looks like it."

"But … we weren't even winning this time."

"Shall we follow them?"

"You really, really need to get down to Terminal Dogma," said Ritsuko.

"No," Asuka said stubbornly, and set off after the retreating MP Evas. "We need to know what these things are doing."

Ritsuko ran her hands through her hair and looked for an alternate strategy.

Visibility in the corridor was low from rubble and smoke. Asuka followed the withdrawing Evas along it, until they left the pyramid altogether. Once outside, they turned and ran to the end of the Geofront. The pitch darkness of before had given way to silvery moonlight, which showed the Evas climbing the walls, approaching one hole the UNTMF had blown in.

"They waited until dark to attack," Asuka said. "Maybe they think the moonlight will give us an advantage somehow?"

"How?" asked Kaworu. "We were indoors."

"Do you have any brilliant explanations?"

"Stay alert," Misato ordered. "And stay under cover. They might be pulling out for an N2 attack. I don't know why they haven't tried one already."

"Hang on," Ritsuko said distractedly. "This is a moonless night."

"No it isn't," said Asuka.

"Yes it is."

"No it isn't! Look right there!"

"Look at this moon chart," she said, pulling one up. "It's a new moon now."

"You know that?" Misato asked. "I didn't know you went outside."

"Ha. The Fifth Child mentioned it last night, and some of us actually read the logs of battles."

"That sounds incredibly fascinating," said Asuka, "but I can see moonlight, right there."

The bridge crew considered this.

"I'm going to put this back in for exactly fifteen seconds," Ritsuko said, picking up the Ethernet cable, "and, Hyuga, you are going to ping every remote sensor we have. On my mark. Mark!"

The remaining sirens all went off as one. Red ALERT messages flashed on the less damaged parts of the walls, then flipped to yellow AGGRAVATED ALERT, then turned to blue MAXIMUM ALERT. A message flashed on Ritsuko's screen:

BLUE PATTERN DETECTED

DEPLOY ALL RESERVES

EVACUATE ALL NONCOMBAT PERSONNEL

FINAL ANGEL INBOUND

GOOD LUCK – M, B, C

…

Several hundred metres below, Adam's Bakelite prison cracked, buckled, and shattered. He raised a single claw, and grew, and grew. He wasn't bound by the limitations of mere super-solenoid biochemistry. In fifteen seconds, He had grown from the size of the palm of a human hand to fill the lab and press against the walls; they shuddered and strained, until Unit-00 jammed a pole through Him. He twitched, and fell dormant again. Rei made sure the Lance was secure, and turned to climb the elevator shaft again.

…

"Those stupid, stupid, stupid idiots," Ritsuko said, her vocabulary failing her for once. "Seele's doomed us all because they couldn't count past seventeen. Nagisa, you're not an Angel, and neither is Mogami. You never were, and never will be. You're both human. With some extra genes and super-powered renal systems, but still human. That … this is the eighteenth Angel."

"I always did think the idea of a shared soul sounded rather ad hoc," Kaworu admitted. "And I was never quite certain about whether my and Chitose's clones also counted."

"What are we going to do?" Asuka asked. "If we fight it, those enemy Evas will swoop in after we wear each other down and finish us off. I can barely hold them off now, never mind after another Angel."

"We don't have a choice," said Misato. "If it gets through to either Seed, it's all over. Hopefully, it'll home in on those MP Evas' and clones' AT Fields and fight them instead of us, but we're in a corner. We'll just have to fight it and win."

"Then what's the plan?"

"That'd be a lot easier with information," Misato said. "Ritz, what can you tell me about it?"

"It glows," Ritsuko said shortly. "The UNTMF dynamited almost all of our sensors. I can't even tell you what it looks like."

"Nothing about its speed, abilities, toughness …?"

"You remember the eighth? Angels are biologically plastic while they're still embryos; they look completely different from their final forms and can become more or less anything. Once they decide on a final form and grow into it, they become biologically elastic; they can recover from any damage that doesn't destroy their cores, but they can only make minor modifications. The longer they spend as embryos, the more time they have to find a powerful final form. This one has spent the longest maturing. So it'll be worse than anything else we've fought before."

Asuka and Kaworu considered this.

"Okay, that's reassuring and all," said Asuka, "but I was hoping for something actually usable."

"If you want advice without having any firm data, don't ask a scientist."

"Perhaps I should look at it?" Kaworu suggested.

"Can you?" asked Misato. "Or will that make you freak out and attack it by yourself?"

"At a distance of at least a kilometre, given it's still outside the Geofront? I doubt it. Besides, Absolute Terror only makes beings of comparable power attack each other; if one is much stronger, as the Angel should be, it makes the weaker one flee."

"Okay. But try to keep your own Field down, and don't let it see you if you can."

Kaworu walked through air, toward the shaft of silver Angel light. It was dim, but slowly brightening. He got to within a metre of it. The moment he got under it, he gave a blood-curdling shriek, and shot back toward HQ like a lightning bolt, smashing straight through a wall without slowing.

"Kaworu!" Misato called. "Kaworu!" He gave no response; his radio headset had fallen off. Makoto scanned through the camera feeds, but the impact had apparently knocked out the last of them in that sector. Kaworu was gone. Rubble settled over the hole he'd punched, and then there was silence.

"Well," said Asuka. "That's not good."

"Is there any point at all trying to find him?" Misato asked Makoto.

"We don't even have the manpower to find Unit-01," he said, "we're not going to be able to find a pilot."

"True. Fine. Can you at least tell us anything about the Angel?" she asked Ritsuko instead.

"It was strong enough for him to feel its Field at this distance," Ritsuko said, typing. "And it glows. I'll generate random Angels satisfying that and run some sims. One moment."

She typed in the parameters (Unit-02; success defined as the Angel being destroyed without touching either Seed of Life) and set her program to run a million trials, to get some sort of starting point. From there, she would look for patterns in the successes and hopefully give useful recommendations.

Simulation complete

Time taken: 4.23 s

Number of trials: 1000000

Number of successes: 0

Number of failures: 1000000

"None," Misato said flatly. "Give me one chance in a million, and I can take on the world, but nothing?"

Ritsuko scanned the logs. "If Kaworu can't even look at it, then Asuka can't get through its AT Field, not by herself. Without more Units, we can't even hurt it."

Fuyutsuki cleared his throat. "Katsuragi. Can you get the other Children back in their Evas?"

"I'll definitely try, sir," she said.

"Of course. But will you succeed?"

"…"

"I see," he said. "Ritsuko, are our communications in shape to make a call outside the Geofront?"

"Not even close," she said. "The UNTMF blew our telco towers and cables to the surface, and they still have those jammers running. We wouldn't even be able to talk to Asuka without the IR mode of her radio."

"Then, Major Katsuragi, you're now acting Commander of Nerv." He swapped his assault rifle for a revolver and turned to leave.

"Sir?" said Misato. "Where are you going?"

"To parley for the only other Evas available," he said. "Catapult F is still operational. Prepare it."

Asuka stared at the slowly brightening light. The bridge crew might have muted their mikes while discussing her chances, but she wasn't stupid, she could guess roughly what they were saying. Dying wouldn't be too bad. She'd faced her own mortality time and again before. Still, she'd hoped it wouldn't be like this, with the weight of the world bearing inexorably down on her shoulders until they broke, abandoned by all her friends, knowing that everyone would die and it would be her fault.

She heard stomping. For a moment she thought it was another Jet Alone, and then her heart leapt when she realised it was an Eva: Shinji had finally come for her! Then it came into view, and she realised it was Unit-00. Her heart sank, then bounced back up. Rei was far from her first choice for a wingmate, but still miles better than fighting alone.

"Wonder girl," she said, smiling. "I guess you and I are the only ones stupid enough to still be here."

Rei nodded, and moved to stand shoulder to shoulder with Asuka.

"Honestly, though, I'm glad you came," said Asuka. "I didn't want to die alone." She paused. "Wait, didn't someone say you'd had your brain wiped?"

"I disobeyed orders," Rei whispered.

"You …" Asuka shook her head. "Only you would feel guilty about refusing an order to have your brain fried. You realise that's incredibly neurotic? I bet modern psychiatry doesn't even have a word for how messed up that is."

"If I do not have orders, what do I have?" asked Rei. "Commander Ikari will be upset."

"I thought he was dead? Misato, you said the Weird Girl killed him."

Misato did some mental arithmetic and winced. That had happened about fifteen hours ago, and they hadn't told Rei. She wasn't sure they'd even got around to scrubbing his residue from the cages. She made a mental note to do that before either Rei or Shinji went back there.

"I'm sorry. I would have told you earlier, Rei, but I thought you were gone. You didn't answer your phone, and we couldn't find you."

Rei said nothing.

Misato shot a look at Ritsuko, who did a palms-up. "Speaking of which, try the sims again with two Evas on our side."

Ritsuko tweaked the parameters and ran her program again. Number of successes: zero.

"Does anyone actually know why she was going to have her brain scrubbed?" Asuka asked.

Rituko patted her pocket for a cigarette, but she was still out. "Years ago, Ikari Yui, the Commander's wife and Shinji's mother, volunteered for a brain scan to be uploaded and serve as the core AI for Unit-01. It worked, but we didn't realise until it was too late that it would be fatal for her. We never did get the scan technology safe, although the German branch made it survivable with only severe brain damage. The Commander was inconsolable. They were very much in love; his desire to see her even one more time overwhelmed everything else, to the point of mania.

"She happened to have donated some gametes to science a few years earlier. He ordered me to use them to clone her, spliced with genes from both Seeds. The idea was that we would eventually download Yui's mind into Rei's emptied brain and so resurrect Yui, into an immortal Naphil body. Between the facts that human cloning is a poorly-developed art – thanks so much, ethics committees – that I had limited ova to try with that I also had to splice Seed genes into, and that Adamite genes are inimical to the Lilin, so I had to use Lilithian genes to contain that, I never had a chance of getting it perfect.

"Rei grew an S2 organ, but it's defective. It didn't develop properly and doesn't work: no limitless energy, no AT Field. With the Naphil technology that Seele's had for a while and which I've recently duplicated, I could fix it and make her as powerful as either of them. The downside would be that Kaworu and Chitose would try to kill her whenever they saw her. With no Commander ordering it, I see no reason to continue."

"Wait, could you do that quickly?" Misato asked, wondering if they could have Rei somehow use her S2 organ to stimulate Unit-00's and give it the same sort of upgrade Chitose had given Unit-01.

"That depends on whether you consider eight hours 'quick'."

"Wait, back up," said Asuka. "She's a clone of the Idiot's mother, and they went on a date?"

"That's clearly the most important question," said Ritsuko. "And no, she isn't. Cloning is hard. Seele may or may not know how to do it reliably, but I don't, so I cheated and used an anonymous sperm donor and a surrogate, to get a biological child rather than clone. She's genetically only his half-sister, modulo the Angelic material."

"She's his sister, and they went on a date?"

"Half-siblings are as consanguineous as double cousins. You do realise that cousin marriage is legal, don't you?"

"The Japanese have no decency," declared Asuka.

"It's also legal in Germany. If anything, it'd be more legal there in this case, because the age of consent there is fourteen."

Asuka, who had pointed that out to Kaji on and after her last birthday, many times, said nothing.

…

A kilometre above, Fuyutsuki's elevator reached the surface. He looked around, wondering which way the nearest UNTMF officer was, when a sniper left as a rearguard against a second Nerv exfiltration shot him in the gut. He fell to the ground, bleeding out.

…

Five holograms sat around a table set for six.

"A nineteenth Angel?" said Green. "The Scrolls never predicted this, Kihl. What if they've made other mistakes?"

"This is within the Scenario," Kihl answered. "With their Fall from our grace, Tabris and Tamiel are no longer an Angel, but an outcast. This is the true eighteenth Angel."

"The Scrolls never mentioned anything about a Fall," said Blue.

"A deviation at this point could prove fatal," Green pointed out. "We must defer Instrumentality until this has been fully investigated, and Nerv is destroyed."

"And what about the Angel?" asked Yellow. "It's an even more imminent threat to the Scenario."

"Let the rebels and traitors deal with it," said Kihl. "They are still well-equipped for it. After they are done, we shall proceed at our leisure."

…

Down in the Geofront, Rei stared at her hands. "… If the Commander is dead," she said, "then why do I still pilot?"

"Are you stupid? What else are you going to do?" asked Asuka. "Speaking of which, what else have you been doing? I thought you were busy having your brain cooked, but if you weren't?"

"I was comforting Ikari," said Rei.

"Ew," said Asuka, her face shuttering.

"I did not have sexual intercourse with him," Rei clarified.

"Like I care."

"You do."

Asuka killed the broadcast except for her line to Rei. "Look. You want him? You can have him. I meant what I told him. If he wants to date you, that's fine. Congratulations! You win. I'm not going to compete with you for him."

"I wish for him to be happy. He will not be if you are not. He cares for you, too."

"If you want him to be happy, try 'comforting' him again."

"Soryu. Ikari is in love with you, not with me."

"…"

"I believe he always has been."

"What? No, he … if he loves me, then what was he doing last night with you?"

"He wishes for me to be happy too. Most of his attention was occupied by Nagisa. It isn't when he is with you."

"… But if you knew, why did you even ask him?"

Rei thought about this for a while. "Because I wished to be happy with him." She hesitated. She'd spent too much time with the Fifth Child. "I wished to know what that would be like. I am glad that I now know. But he does not love me, not in the way that he does you."

Asuka was silent.

"What will you do?" asked Rei.

"I … how should I know? Are you even sure he is?"

"Yes."

"…"

"Do you love him?" Rei asked, meaning it rhetorically.

"… If you ever, ever, tell anyone I said this, I will gut you like a fish," Asuka said, meaning it. "Yes."

"What will you do?" Rei repeated.

"I don't know. What can I do? I can't, I can't tell him." Rei said nothing. "What? It's not that easy. I mean, what if – look, it's easy for you, you don't have any pride. But I do. I can't."

There was a chime, as Ritsuko opened a link.

"Do you mind?" Asuka snarled. "We were having a private conversation."

"Great," said Ritsuko.

"What?"

"I said, the army destroyed most of our Eva equipment. See if you can salvage anything of theirs."

"The stuff which couldn't even break through my AT Field, and you want to try it against the strongest Angel?"

"Would you rather fight it with your bare hands?"

"Urgh, fine," said Asuka, and stomped off, avoiding the patches of Angel light falling through the demolished Geofront armour, by now as bright as daylight.

Ritsuko waited until she was out of earshot of HQ's PA. "By the way," she added, "you could really do with another Eva, couldn't you?"

"Well, duh? Who wouldn't want reinforcements for a fight like this? But we don't have any more."

"Right," said Ritsuko.

Misato gave her a questioning look, as she remotely downloaded Unit-02's black box recorder, which Asuka hadn't thought to disable, and skipped back a few minutes, and replayed it.

"Look. You want him?"

"Ritz!" Misato said. "That was personal!"

"You're not seriously saying that's the thing I'm going to Hell for," said Ritsuko.

"At least you had reasons for all the other stuff! Why are you eavesdropping on this?"

"To edit out the parts that won't help," she said, and hit some keys to feed the conversation into the PA to the entire building.

"Soryu. Ikari is in love with you, not with me."

Misato gave her a look of deep disgust.

Deep within the great pyramid, Shinji's mouth slowly fell open.

…

A kilometre above, Fuyutsuki coughed frothy blood. This was inconvenient. The light grew brighter than the flame of a welding torch; he looked directly at it, and his eyes burnt out.

According to the Dead Sea Scrolls, Adam came to Earth first, and then Lilith, three and a half billion years ago. The Seeds had a safety mechanism, the Lances, to prevent their Fruits from combining. Lilith's should in theory have disabled Her then, and She should have been eternally dormant; however, Hers was by chance destroyed, so Adam's activated instead, ceding Earth to the Lilin. Perhaps this was unjust; but to Fuyutsuki's mind, two hundred thousand years was enough time for humankind to claim Earth as its home.

He was a scientist, but had brushed up on his theology for dealing with Seele. In the stories, first there were God and His Angels. Later, He made Man, who would be the inheritors of Earth. The Angels, in their pride, refused to accept this, considering themselves superior to humans made of mud. They rebelled, led by the brightest in God's choir, and were cast down. It is prophesied that, in the final war, the rebel Angels would be made to submit to Man, and then be destroyed.

Fuyutsuki would have liked to say all of that, but he only had breath for one word: "Hizamazuke." He drew his revolver and fired blind toward the light, until his gun clicked empty and the radiant heat vaporised the city around him.

…

Asuka had done a thorough job of obliterating the attacking forces; after picking through the destroyed VTOLs and MRLs, she found exactly one item which an Angel might not ignore out of hand, a large FAE bomb. She stowed it in her intact shoulder pylon, then picked up two of the MP Evas' glaives, throwing one to Rei.

Ritsuko watched her scanner. "Here it comes," she said. "It's approaching the Geofront."

The light was painfully bright now. Evas had retractable tinted covers for their eyes, much like sunglasses, intended against optical attacks; the pilots activated them, but it was still blinding. The trees and grass inside the Geofront sizzled with heat, wilted, and burst into flame. The girls raised their hands to cover their eyes, but it was still too much, and their armour heated and began to warp. Debris swirled and bounced down into the Geofront with the Angel's approach; scorching air, metal softening and melting, a noise like a hurricane.

"How are we supposed to fight this thing?" Asuka shouted. "I can't even look at it!" Her glaive began to fold in on itself, like a stick of warm butter. Her voice was garbled in Central Dogma: the Angel was giving out enough energy to act as a radio jammer.

"Neutralise its AT Field!"

Ritsuko checked her display. The Angel was giving off interference and her sensors were scrambling, but she could see that its AT phase space was easily larger than the girls' combined. "They can't."

"Then fall back! Get to the pyramid!"

Both girls ran for it; their armour warped and locked around their joints, and they fell to the ground. Rei moaned; Asuka screamed.

"Cut their synch rates!" Misato ordered. "Thirty percent! Rei, Asuka, hang in there!"

…

Shinji ran toward the Eva cages, down one of Nerv's many seemingly pointless corridors, past scorch marks, piles of debris, and bullet holes, and skidded to a stop before Kaworu, who was huddled in a ball on the ground, snivelling.

"K-Kaworu?" Shinji said, astonished: he'd never seen the other boy anything but unruffled.

Kaworu gripped his head tightly and shuddered.

"What are you doing here? We're under attack! They need us!" Shinji said.

Kaworu just shook his head.

Shinji suddenly saw himself as he was on that fateful night, the first time he had seen Eva, but from the his father's perspective. A little boy, weak and afraid, unable to even move until Rei had been sent in. Then he'd stepped up, because he had to protect her.

"Didn't you hear Asuka and Rei crying out just then?" Shinji asked; for some reason the chatter from Central Dogma was broadcasting on the PA. "They're dying! If we don't get out there right now, this was all pointless!"

Kaworu folded in on himself even tighter, and dug his fingers into his head.

Then, Shinji saw himself as he would have been if even the sight of Rei's broken body hadn't moved him to get into the entry plug. He saw his father turn aside, and use her instead, even though it meant almost-certain doom, because the tiniest sliver of a chance is still a chance. He saw her crawl into Unit-01 for a hopeless fight to save the world, and knew what he had to do.

"You're pathetic," he said, his voice perfectly level, stating a fact, not an insult. He kept running.

At the end of the corridor, Unit-01 finally found him. He slowed to a stop, and locked eyes with the great Angelic machine for long moments. Then it knelt, and the entry plug ejected.

…

The alarms blared in Central Dogma, competing with the roar of the Angel's hurricane and the crackle of evaporating masonry. The junior techs had all run for it, although exactly where they thought would be safer, Misato couldn't imagine. She watched the Angel's path on Ritsuko's wireframe screen: it was ploughing straight through the walls and floors of HQ without slowing, vaporising everything in its path from sheer radiant energy. Magi reported one subsystem failing after another.

"It's heading for Lilith," Ritsuko yelled. "We're directly in its way. We've got to evacuate!"

"Where to?" Misato yelled back. "That's game over anyway. If it's getting Her, it's going to have to go through me."

"You're insane," Ritsuko shouted. She turned and ran.

Misato turned to Makoto, the only one left. She could feel the room heating up.

"Thanks, Makoto," she shouted, drowned out by the roaring.

He met her eyes and smiled. "I've always wanted to die beside you," he said, nowhere near audible, "but not today," and with that he sucker-punched her in the face. She staggered; before she could recover, he grabbed her wrist and yanked her along and out through a doorway. He hit the control to slam down the blast door, a moment before the Angel burst through the ceiling of Central Dogma and turned the room to plasma.

The floor vaporised under it; it descended the elevator shaft to Terminal Dogma, melting the walls as it passed, hurricane-force winds swirling around it. With the Lance of Longinus in place, the pull from Adam was drowned out by that from Lilith; the Angel floated straight past Adam's vault, and a moment later, a purple mass slammed into it from above.

Shinji roared, completely blind, and hammered at the Angel with both fists. He felt its AT Field without seeing it; he dug his fingers into it and pulled, but it was stronger than any he'd fought before, too strong for him to neutralise. He struggled with it, pulling it wide enough to stick his heel in, until his Eva absorbed enough heat to scorch. His cries turned from rage to agony, and he pulled back; the Angel reached the bottom of the shaft and began moving laterally, and he slid off its Field and into the pool of LCL covering Terminal Dogma, screaming in pain. The LCL cooled his red-hot armour, turning to steam from his heat and that of the Angel, and funnelled up the twisted shaft. The Angel melted through Heaven's Gate in a second and faced Lilith.

She stood by Her cross. Her lower half had regenerated when Rei had removed the Lance; the weight had pulled the nails through Her hands. The Angel dimmed as it approached, so as not to damage Her, until it was revealed to be just a red sphere: entirely core material, its only attack its immense power output. Lilith's mask of seven eyes fell off, and She turned to face the Angel that was approaching to claim Her Fruit. Her face was that of a mother.

She opened Her mouth to tell it without words that a mother will always protect her children, and then She burst apart into LCL. It fell into the lake below. There was a wave that looked like a ripple, and She was gone.

The Angel quivered in mid-air for long moments, then snapped back to full temperature. It glowed white again, even brighter than before, and air hot enough to melt steel blasted in all directions. It reversed, returning for Unit-01, and another Eva dropped out of the shaft, this one with crinkled red, green, and yellow armour.

"Get the hell away from my partner."

Asuka opened her pylon, pulled out the fuel-air bomb, and threw it. She scooped up Unit-01 and leapt as high as she could, catching the steel cable Rei held; Rei yanked her upward, and the bomb exploded with enough force to bring the ceiling down on the Angel.

"Huh?" Shinji asked, his head spinning.

"Armour was trashed," she said, voice tight with pain, thinking for some reason that he was asking about her colours. "No time to fix it properly. Misato, are you alive?"

"Barely," the Major shouted back, her voice garbled from the Angelic interference. The collapse of Terminal Dogma had caused most of HQ to cave in; Makoto had taken her to a bunker with Ritsuko and Maya, one with a direct connection to one of the Magi. As far as she could tell, they and the pilots were the only people still alive. "Regroup at Adam's vault. It's heading there next. With all three of you, you might be able to break its Field."

Maya had stopped checking the list of non-functioning systems and had instead turned to the much-shorter list of systems which hadn't been completely destroyed. "Senpai, the Magi banks have almost twelve tons of liquid nitrogen left between them. The Magi aren't designed to survive overheating, but this is the final battle, and if we rerouted it …"

Ritsuko did some mental arithmetic. "… Then it would buy them about one point two seconds of time," she estimated.

"Oh," said Maya, disappointed.

"Do it," said Ritsuko. "On Misato's mark. Sorry, Mother." She reached into her pocket. She wasn't sure about it, but desperate times call for desperate measures. She stuck a nicotine patch onto her neck.

Asuka swung on the rope, jumped, and made it into the short corridor before the vault, which was mostly taken up by the Lance of Longinus. She set Shinji back on his feet. Seconds later, Rei tied her cable around a heavy piece of debris, slid down, and joined them. Her armour was mostly melted off, enough to expose her Unit's innards and skeleton; blue fluid seeped out of the holes, and she was stooped, barely able to stand. The downed Evas' armour wasn't shaped for Unit-00; unlike Asuka, she couldn't peel it off and wrap it around herself. Her power cable was long gone, her battery draining.

"Asuka," Shinji gasped, his body still twitching from sympathetic pain. "Before it gets here … I have to. I. Do you know the Hedgehog's Dilemma?"

"That sounds like a Japanese version of Aesop's Fables," she said. "Is this really the time?"

"Yes! When two hedgehogs try to get close, they just end up hurting each other. But if they pull away, they have to be lonely for their entire lives, and that's so much worse. I thought I was like that, I thought we were. But then I saw Kaworu and Chitose fight. They actually, literally can't get close. Compared to that, what excuse do I have? That I'm a coward? What happens for the rest of us that's so bad?"

"Shinji, you're not a –"

"I am a coward," he said. "I run away, and I hate having to pilot. I run from everything. I almost – I like you, Asuka. I like you, as more than a friend, and I wanted you to know that."

"I," said Asuka. "Yeah. Me too. Don't die. And, Shinji? You're not a coward. You came back. That's what counts."

They smiled at each other through their HUDs. Misato took the opening.

"Pilots," she said. "Rei, Asuka, Shinji. This is it. One way or the other, this is the final battle of the War of the Angels. You've fought time and again, no matter the cost, and you've always come through. You've done more than anyone could ever have asked, and I couldn't be prouder of any of you, not if you were my own children. So no matter what else happens, remember, you are not alone. Everyone, all three billion humans still alive, are with you right now, everyone who has ever lived, everyone who will live because of your actions, we're all in this together. Here, now, is humankind's last stand, and we are going to show that thing that we will not go gentle into the night. Draw strength from each other, from all the lives you've saved. And then kick its ass!"

The wall of the shaft glowed white, then blew outward in the Angel's wake.

They raised their AT Fields and struggled against the Angel's. Shinji tore into it from the middle, with Asuka on his right and Rei on his left, giving everything they could to bring it down.

It held.

Their own combined Fields gave them partial protection from its radiance, but its heat still seeped through. Maya's computer displays of the Evas turned from green to yellow to orange.

"No!" Misato yelled. "No! Keep going! You have to win! Maya!"

Over ten tons of liquid nitrogen at two hundred degrees below zero sprayed down the ruined shaft, buying one precious extra second before it boiled, but the Angel's sheer power was too much. The pilots felt their hands burn and blacken.

A fourth Field bloomed into existence against the Angel. Without vision, Shinji felt rather than saw Kaworu floating above them, his hands outstretched, attacking with every iota of energy even as his body disintegrated. Shinji finally tore through.

He screamed and leapt onto the Angel, knocking it into the shaft's wall. He got three good punches in, digging spiderweb cracks across its core, before a blast of superheated air blew him backward with enough force to tear Unit-01 limb from limb and rip its chest open. Its S2 organ burst apart, and it was still. Rei was there before Unit-01 even hit the opposite wall, and drove both elbows into the Angel, knocking out chunks of red material, before her arms fell off; she headbutted it, before her head melted off, and Unit-00 fell apart. Asuka was last; she pummelled it with everything she had, kicking it when the nerves burnt out of Unit-02's arms, until finally it shattered. The last of its core material, losing the cohesion of its AT Field, turned to red vapour and was gone. The hurricane died down around them, the great heat slowly began to dissipate.

What was left of the three Evas, scorched, eyes gone, most of their armour and limbs melted off, Units-00 and -01 damaged far beyond any repair, lay half-buried in the pile of rubble that used to be Nerv HQ, humanity's last bastion against the Angels.

"We did it," Asuka said at length.

"Yeah," Shinji replied. Misato had once told him that the entry plug was the best-protected part of Eva, as long as you faced the enemy, since it was surrounded by heavily armoured tissue. Apparently she was right.

"When the MP Evas come back, we're going to be completely helpless, aren't we," Asuka said.

"Yeah."

They exchanged smiles, and passed into unconsciousness. Rei smiled, tenderly, and she too shut her eyes. For the first time in her life, she dreamt.

…

Kaji pointed at the German countryside below. "Mogami?"

She leant forward to see and followed his finger. Below was a wide, green estate, very neat and full of well-trimmed trees, hedges, and flowers. An opulent manor stood in its midst. Kaji was pointing past the manor, at the yellow-and-red Eva, lying on its front, with the entry plug still out.

"Here's the plan," he said. "I'll come in low. You eject and AT-blast the plug before it can insert, then fly to the manor and kill Kihl."

"I can't fly," Chitose said.

"What? But I thought …"

"Kaworu can. I can't. It sort of makes up for him not having my capacitance attack, I suppose. I've been trying to work out how he does it for years; I should be able to, I mean he says it's just like treading water, but I've never managed it at all. That advantage was why Seele thought he could beat me in a fight. Well, that, and because he's a boy; our Fields are equally strong, so him being physically stronger does make a difference."

"Okay," said Kaji, "for the record, that's the sort of thing you should tell people in advance."

"I thought Seele told you," she said. "And I didn't think it'd come up."

"You thought they would have volunteered information to me?"

"They told me and Kaworu everything."

"Yes, because you're both Nephilim and had to know about yourselves to be effective. I didn't."

"Well, what do we do? If there's a clone in that plug and I eject at a safe height, it'll be able to insert before I'm close enough to hit it. It'll take even longer if we land and walk to it. Oh, no, I think we've been overthinking this. I can just blast it from inside the plane."

"That's also the sort of thing you should tell me in advance," Kaji said. "Okay. I'm about to go into a dive. We're at ten thousand feet. Three kilometres," he quickly added, correctly predicting Chitose's response. "We'll have about … five seconds before I need to pull up. They probably can't insert that fast. Afterwards, I'll climb, and you can parachute out. Can you hit it?"

"I'm pretty sure I've hit things about that size and relative speed in the Pribnow Box," she said. "Sometimes."

"I want you to take a moment to think about how terrible those will be as last words," he said, and pitched the Zig's nose downward and hit the afterburners.

G-forces pressed them both against their seats, as the plane went into a dive. The ground approached them at almost twice the speed of sound. Chitose splayed her fingers; orange light crackled and coalesced around her hand. At the last moment, Kaji killed the afterburners and pulled the pitch up. The plane passed thirty metres from the Eva; Chitose made a motion like throwing a softball.

An octagonal pyramid of pure light flashed between her palm and the plug, blasting open the plane's fuselage. It didn't destroy the armoured plug, but did warp it enough to stop it from inserting. Kaji swore and yanked at the pitch as the plane yawed and rolled: the hole in the fuselage created a Bernouilli pressure difference that sucked air out of the cabin and threw the little Zig's aerodynamics into chaos.

"You idiot! You complete idiot!"

Chitose waggled her fingers, and her parachute shot up and into her lap. Kaji pulled the plane up into a climb; she waited until they were at five hundred metres, then ejected, held the parachute in her arms, and pulled the cord. She dangled from it, spinning completely out of control, for two minutes, before hitting the ground and losing her balance; it fell on top of her, and she threw up.

"Hey! Freeze! Don't move!"

She stayed that way, on all fours under the material of the parachute, waiting for her inner ear to stabilise and spitting, while the man approached. He had spoken German.

"Alright. Crawl slowly backward out from under there. I'm armed."

She obeyed, and once she was out from under the parachute, slowly rose to her feet.

"Put your hands up and turn around."

She did so. There were in fact two men, obviously private security guards, both holding submachine guns on her, quite understandably given the dented Eva and the fighter jet corkscrewing a kilometre overhead.

"Hi," she said, "do either of you have any water? I need to rinse my mouth out."

One of the men glanced down at his belt; a canister dangled off it, along with a walkie-talkie, telescoping baton, and spare ammo. The other didn't, and the first didn't move to retrieve his. "Say, you look like those girls the Boss keeps around. Who are you, their big sister?"

"Older twin, I think, genetically," said Chitose, and snapped both of their necks. She motioned, and a gun and the canteen floated over to her; she unstopped the latter, swigged, and spat. She tucked the gun under her arm. Clearly she was in the right place. She considered just using her capacitance attack, but she had to be sure; he might not even be inside, and if she blew it up, she'd never find the body, and would never know whether he was really dead or just in hiding. Instead, she set off for the manor.

There were marble steps, leading up to a porch and a hand-carved oaken door. The grandiosity of it irritated her; it was exactly the sort of thing the old men always did, that had let them convince themselves that they could do whatever they wanted to her and whomever else. She smashed it to bits with a thought.

Inside was a greeting-room, with two stairwells and six paintings that each cost more than Rei's apartment building; it was all covered in plush red carpet that had been immaculate until she had sprayed it with bits of door. A uniformed doorman was wide-eyed in shock, covered in dust.

"Good afternoon," she said, smiling. "Do you know if Lorenz Kihl is here?"

The man pointed at a double door.

"Thank you," she said. She raised a hand, then reconsidered and lowered it again. "Run."

Either because of the exploded door, because he recognised her the same way the guard had, or because she was holding a submachine gun, he obeyed. She pushed through the ornate double doors and into a long hallway, full of more priceless art and studded by doors to either side. She blasted them open as she passed; Lorenz Kihl was behind the eighth.

It was a dining room. There was a long table in its middle, with space for eighty but set for one. Kihl sat in an electric wheelchair at the far end, half a bowl of soup before him.

"Tamiel," he said. "I've been assured three times that you've died in the past day. You really do know how to disappoint me, don't you?"

"What," she said, her voice slowing and clearing, "because I decided not to do exactly what you and the other old men wanted?"

"A child should obey her parents."

"You're not my father."

"Your biological father is a member of my organisation, and gave me in loco parentis."

"I don't care."

"We gave you life."

"It's not really a gift if you don't let me do what I want with it."

"Foolish girl. Do you expect to be given things in this world with no strings attached? We made you into a God, and you threw it all away because you were too selfish to follow the Scenario."

"Do you expect me to put up with it if you attach strings to everything you give me? You hardly asked my permission."

"I expected you to show some gratitude for what you have, as you should."

"You really like saying that the world should be a certain way which happens to work out really well for you, but not so well for me. Or everyone who died in Second Impact. Or everyone who didn't."

Kihl laughed; a dry wheeze, accompanied by the rattle of old bionics. "Don't act like you care, child. You're every bit selfish enough to end the world for your own ends."

"No, I'm not. I don't want this world destroyed. Unlike you, I've been doing everything I could to protect it. I fought the Angels as well as I could. If I'd had the MP Evas, I would have given them to Nerv months ago."

"Exactly. Foolish, short-sighted girl. And then Ikari would rule the world. Your interference would have plunged us all into eternal darkness."

"You wouldn't have been any better," she said. "You're an insane cyborg who hasn't been young in far too long. And you're trying to become an Angel, too."

"Like you, you mean?"

"You made me this way."

"Well, at least you're right about one thing. This body has been old for far, far too long." He lifted a hand, to demonstrate the whir of an actuator. "You presume to tell me who ought to rule the world? So arrogant, like all young people. Will you tell me that because I'm old, I should be condemned to death? Without the S2 organ, my body will fail within the year."

"What? If you just wanted to live forever, you could have taken all the money you gave to Nerv and the Katsuragi Expedition and put it into anti-senescence research that could be given to everyone. You want it for yourself. You just want to rule."

"The world needs a strong hand," he said. "And he needs power, to keep rebellious children like yourself in line."

After meeting Kensuke, she had read about twentieth-century wars in detail. One event that had resonated with her was during the Vietnam War, when the Western nations had tried to conscript their young men into fighting a war they didn't believe in, and the young men had refused. Not all, but some, enough to matter.

"You can't have that power," she said, "because children like myself need to rebel."

"That you think that only proves me right. Do you really think that with fifteen years and a handful of books, you know this world better than someone who has lived in it for most of a century? Foolish girl."

"Are you trying to make me angry?" she asked. Her inquisitive, argumentative nature had stopped her from realising before, but he was only barely paying attention to their debate.

He laughed again. "No, child, I was trying to stall." He waved around, showing that four people had quietly entered the room, in the corners beside her, outside her peripheral vision, and another had snuck up behind: five Kaworim.

"Tamiel," they monotoned in perfect unison.

She snapped her gun up at Kihl; he didn't flinch. "Go ahead," he said. "They're reprogrammed to protect me from any threat. You can't overwhelm all of them at once."

"I think you're lying," she said. "I think that these ones are duds, that they can't project AT Fields at all. Because if they could, I wouldn't still be talking to you like this."

"One of the first things we found upon lobotomising them was that their AT Fields became inactive except while raised," he said. "It helps in controlling them and keeping them from killing each other; that was annoying. It would have been a terrible bluff because you're going to fight now either way, and a stupid tactic: why would I use failures rather than successes as guards? But feel free to test it. Take your best shot at me."

Chitose hesitated. He was right.

"And even if you do succeed, your fiancé will still die. The clones have a dead man's switch hard-coded in. If anyone kills me, they will wipe out that person's entire organisation. You and Tabris are both considered part of Nerv, and there are sixty-nine clones with twenty-three Evas in Tokyo-3 at this very moment. Assuming, of course, that they haven't killed him already."

Her face went blank for a while, then broke out into a true smile.

"So he made the choice," she said, and pivoted and fired. The one clone behind her was isolated, and the walls blocked it from the others' line of sight; they could do nothing as she gunned it down and bounded toward it, taking her out of their line of sight as they raised their AT Fields.

"Kill her!"

She ran ten metres down the hallway before the nearer clones blasted through it; her mind went, and she lunged at them, firing point-blank. She got through another's Field, riddling the child behind with bullets, before the other three swarmed her. Two neutralised her Field; the third belted her in the face with a full blast, knocking her off her feet and the gun from her hand. The other two knelt on her arms. They were half her age and much smaller than her, but she'd got used to using her Field as a crutch, and couldn't budge them, no matter how hard she thrashed. The third walked over.

"Disappointing," said Kihl, and then a gun fired and blew his head apart.

Tamiel was too far gone with Absolute Terror, but the three clones all swivelled their heads and saw Kaji, still wearing his flight jacket, holding a smoking pistol.

"Kaji Ryoji," they said in unison. One touched an earpiece and added, "Seele must be destroyed."

"It's not what it looks like," he said.

The three clones raised their hands to denature him; Chitose motioned, her gun flew back into her hands, and she gunned them all down.

Kaji looked around, over the five dead children, Lorenz Kihl, and Chitose.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

"I … yes." She pushed herself to her feet, then checked her gun and discarded the empty magazine.

"Right. Then, please, promise me that that's the last time you blow a hole in a plane while I'm flying it. I only just got it under control long enough to get high enough to eject and parachute."

"I didn't realise the hole would stop it from flying. I mean, it wasn't on the front of the plane. I've never read about aerodynamics."

Kaji opened his mouth, then decided to just leave it. "Are we done, then?" he asked.

"Almost. Somewhere in this building are the materials for installing an S2 organ into a human being. If a smart scientist found them, they could clone it, and someone else would use it. Not everyone can have one, because of Absolute Terror, and if anyone does, they'll try and take over the world with it, or create some sort of caste-based society or something even worse. We can't let that happen. I have to destroy all of the data and raw materials. That includes the clones, so you have to promise me you'll get Katsuragi or someone to kill them and incinerate the bodies. "

"That would also include you. Any of your sweat, hair, let alone if you ever had children …"

"Cloning doesn't work like that. You can't just take some molecules of DNA and somehow make a person out of them. You need full, live cells for nuclear transfer. Don't worry about me, though, worry about yourself."

"On that topic, there are guards coming."

"So run. Fast. In fact, if you can find a vehicle, that would probably be better. Without an Eva to help me charge, you should have about fifteen minutes. Good luck with Major Katsuragi, Kaji Ryoji. Let everyone from Nerv know that I'm sorry for everything I did wrong, I'm happy for everything that went right, and that being with them was the best experience of my life. I wish it didn't have to be this way. Tell Shinji he doesn't need to worry about getting revenge for his father. This is the last time any of you are ever going to see me. Goodbye."

"I see. It has been an … experience knowing you, Mogami Chitose. Goodbye." They shook hands, and he turned and left.

It took him three minutes to find and hotwire a car, giving him twelve minutes to peel out of the estate as fast as it would go, putting him fifteen kilometres from her and five past the lethal range of the shockwave. A giant cross of light rose over Kihl's estate.

"Yeah," he murmured, "I'll be sure to tell him that. You never were any good at lying, were you?"

…

Nine thousand kilometres away, the sixteen MP Evas all straightened, as though listening to a distant sound, and turned and ran. Four headed east; when they reached the sea, they began swimming toward America. The other twelve headed west, in three groups with slightly different bearings; someone very astute who traced their geodesic paths might possibly have put their destinations as somewhere in Russia, France, and Britain.

General Hyakutake watched them from his vantage point in the UNTMF field hospital. "Where are you going?!" he shouted into a telephone. "I order you to go down there and finish them off! Now! Get back here!"

The Evas paid him no mind, and soon were gone. Major-General Reichner repressed a smirk.

"Fine. We still have the conventional forces to finish Nerv off, once and for all."

There was a click, as Reichner cocked his gun and held it to Hyakutake's head.

"So we do. But the order for that isn't going to go through," said Reichner.

"What. Do you think. You are doing."

"Something I should have done before you sent in the first wave, sir. I hereby place you under arrest for violation of the accords of war, to wit: abduction and conspiracy to murder a fifteen-year-old girl, use of chemical weapons and incendiaries in a populated area, executing civilians, refusing surrenders, use of child soldiers, and, oh, endangering the continued existence of the human race, I'm sure there's a by-law against that. I'll let you know if I think of any more."

"You cannot be serious," said Hyakutake, staring him down, but Reichner held his gaze.

"You made two mistakes, sir. You confused my disagreements with Nerv for hatred. I know that men died during their operations; that's what happens during a war. I fought with them every step of the way, because they were careless and they could have done better, but they're only human, doing the best they could. They tried to save us all, and, most of the time, they succeeded. That has to count for something.

"And second? You didn't have to fight like you did. You could've sent in those Evas as a first wave. You didn't, and that needlessly got my men killed." His façade of deference vanished; he narrowed his eyes to slits. "An officer's first duty is to his men, and I take my duty seriously. I should shoot you where you stand, you festering piece of scum."

They exchanged glares of pure hatred.

"But, unlike you, I am a real soldier and a real man, and I know how to uphold the honour of my uniform. Mizrahi!"

His second-in-command walked in. "Sir?"

"Take this man into custody." Mizrahi's eyes glinted. "Then, order our men to form a cordon around the Geofront, facing outward. If those scumbags send anyone else to attack Nerv, they're going to have to come through us. Nerv protected us from the Angels; now we're going to protect them from these lunatics. Send some engineering crews down there with white flags, to help any survivors."

"Yes, sir." Mizrahi took Hyakutake's gun from its holster.

"I'll see you court-martialled for this," Hyakutake said.

"I didn't tell you to stop," Reichner told Mizrahi. The colonel nodded and prodded the general out of the tent. Reichner let out a heave of air and fell back onto his bed.

…

As the last of what was left of her mind unravelled, Yui smiled down at her son. She hadn't been able to build a better world for him, but he'd managed to do it himself. He'd do just fine. Her work was finally finished. Her core finally disintegrated, and Unit-01 was no more.

…

AN: The Angels' names are all derived from actual theology. I got them from Wikipedia's list; this also served as inspiration for most of their powers.

Raguel: the Angel of Revenge. Pretty obvious: I gave him an attack that can only be used in retaliation.

Lailah: the Angel of the Unborn; her name also means 'night', and the only angel with feminine characteristics (-ah suffix rather than -iel). Originally she was just going to be a clam which released ink as an obscuring tactic, but the birthing theme made for a much more interesting enemy. I decided this quite late on, and had to go back and insert the fights against her sons, kind of jarringly, into the earlier chapters.

Zadkiel: the Angel of Mercy. Notably, the only one which doesn't even try to hurt anyone, using disabling goop on Asuka and Shinji and merely shoving Chitose away.

Muriel: the Angel of the Zodiac sign of Cancer. He sounds an awful lot like a giant enemy crab, with two extra legs co-opted as claws and with a gratuitous energy cannon.

Ophan Akzar: the Cruel Wheel of God. This was a tough one to name. I'd had the idea for a rotary artillery attack like an ancient slinger from a sci-fi novel I abandoned awhile ago, and thought it could work here, with a few modifications. However, there was no obvious angel name. I considered one of the angels of fire, but eventually found out about the Ophanim, the angels who served as the wheels of God's chariot. Unfortunately, Wikipedia didn't list any by name – not even Ophaniel is said to be an Ophan, go figure – so I had to break the naming convention. Oh well.

Kerubiel: the Flames which Dance around the Throne of God. His description was lifted basically verbatim from Wikipedia. Except that I don't think the original could shoot lasers, and might have been a bit taller. A lot of the traditional angels are ludicrously tall, as in measured in AU.

Azrael: the Angel of Destruction. His description was also lifted from Wikipedia, where he is stated to have four faces, and to have one tongue for every person still alive. At the time, the surviving Angels were himself, Lailah, Ambriel, and Lucifer.

Ambriel: the Angel of the Zodiac Sign of Gemini. This was originally based on Ditto – Pokémon is a great source for inspiration/plagiarism – and was going to be Asuka, and try an elaborate 'no, I'm the real Asuka' game, and copy other people's shapes too. Eventually I decided this was dumb, and a much smarter strategy would be to blitz in under the security, kill the Nephilim who were the only plausible threats, and then race to the Seeds before the other pilots arrived.

Lucifer: the Light-Bringer. The idea of a continually exploding atom bomb was about the most powerful weapon I could think of that wasn't literally unbeatable. Originally he was called Michael, the chief of God's army, because Lucifer is a pretty pretentious name; but I had to admit that The Light-Bringer fits his powers like a glove.

Tamiel: the Angel of Perfection. Originally, all I wanted was a second Naphil, who would rebel against Seele, and shake the cast up to justify character developments different from canon; I hadn't decided anything about her personality. She had to be a girl, for the thematic contrast with the all-male Seele, and so I looked through the list of rebel angels for one with what could be a mellifluous girl's name. (I considered having her be called Lailah, the only traditionally feminine angel, but the name was taken and Lailah wasn't a rebel; rebellion is more important to her character than her gender.) Tamiel sounds nice; nicer than Kokabiel or Armaros, anyway. I chose to run with it.

Tamiel was the lord of the deep, and he taught humans how to perform abortions and about snakebites. Those were referenced, but the main character inspiration was that when Tamiel fell to Earth, he taught humans about astronomy, in contrast to his peers Kokabiel and Baraqiel, who taught astrology; I took this as meaning Chitose would be a personification of science. This dovetailed neatly with wanting contrasts with the mystical Seele. Her entire personality is based upon this idea. I deliberately chose to make her double-edged, partly because she'd be really boring if she were a super-powered purely good heroine, and partly because scientists gave us both penicillin and the A-bomb.

There's a lot of subtext to her dialogue, especially with Kaworu. If you didn't pick early on that she was like him, you may want to reread the earlier chapters. Bear in mind that as heavy as I am on exposition, there are a few lies and other loose ends left dangling. I was going to clear them up with an epilogue, but then I remembered Harry Potter.

The story honestly wasn't named for her. Everyone rebels against other people's expectations; she's only the most obvious case, and in one sense the least interesting, because she begins that way, rather than developing. Rei rejected Gendo's Instrumentality; Asuka refused to pilot, until she understood that it was on her own terms, not merely the terms of her five-year-old self; Shinji showed that he piloted to protect the ones he loved, that his father's wishes were ultimately irrelevant; and Kaworu defied Seele outright.