The dice rolled. Two sixes. Asuka rolled again, a five and a three. She landed on Tatyana's Mayfair square, the first time anyone had since the Russian had bought it. She looked at the hotel on the square, then at her cash reserves. There was no way she could afford the rent, not after her last trip round the board.
"Fuck this, then," she muttered. "I'm out."
"I guess that means I win," grinned Tatyana. It was indisputable, the other pilots had been reduced to spectators. It was a minor miracle that Asuka had kept in so long.
The redhead still felt the need to complain. "You got lucky. You landed on all the good spots before anyone bought them up! Besides, who even cares about this kid's game anyway?"
"You do, by the sound of it," Li remarked. "You were not the one who had to wait half an hour before some German annoyance would finally give in."
"That's why I'm the best pilot here! I never give up!" The other pilots shot a Look at each other at Asuka's sudden outburst. It was the first they'd been present for, but they all knew she'd been building up to something big. All of them knew the stories that had come out of NERV's Berlin branch. "I still have the best synchronisation ratio out of anyone here, I've got the most modern Eva, and I actually know how it works unlike some people!"
Ivan did not pick up on the hint. Or rather, he did, but he chose not to notice. "Does Pilot Ikari not have the highest kill-count so far? He is just one away from being Ace."
"Ace? Ace?! He got two kills through sheer luck, one more because his girlfriend used herself as a shield, and another that he didn't even kill! Anyone could make Ace like that! It's nepotism, I swear." She trailed off, and the other three breathed a sigh of relief. This was relatively tame, by Asuka standards.
"It can't be nepotism," said Li, after a while. "The way I heard it, the kid had to threaten his dad to even let him pilot. The man sent him away for a decade with barely even a word. Besides, this is Commander Ikari we're talking about. I don't think the man has a sentimental bone in his body."
Even Asuka nodded at that one.
"So, with a simple re-application of small-unit tactics, we can work around the radio issue." Michael breathed out. The end was in sight. "You can see on the handout the optimal deployment patterns. One scout formation, of three Evas, two pursuit formations of four, a heavy formation of four, and a command/support element of two."
"That's seventeen Evas," the man still classified as an NPC pointed out. "We have... seven."
"Production Batch Three is nearly complete, that's five Evas right there. With the outfitting of a few reserve bodies, we should have enough Evas to fill out the roster." Despite the rather improvised lesson he'd fostered on his new pilots, his lecture had been accurate. The trouble with the reserve bodies was, as someone was sure to point out...
"The reserve bodies are in the reserve pool for a reason, Captain." Doctor Akagi finally spoke up. "Their cores don't meet NERV's standards, and they still belong to NERV."
"Only as part of NERV's UN role," Michael countered, a Cheshire grin growing on his face. Politics was so fun, especially when he was winning. "I believe I – as in, me, personally, not my office - am in charge of all UN-controlled Eva-related assets, as per Amendment 15 to the Vatican Treaty. The only Evangelions not under my direct authority are those of the national programs. Weirdly enough, that includes Unit 07. Thankfully, I have retained my post as C-in-C of the Navy's Eva Task Force."
Silence emptied the room.
"There's no way that's legal," said one of the drones in the background.
"No way are you getting away with that," agreed the NPC. "The instant you try to use any of that power..."
"NERV will not allow-"
"Newsflash: No-one cares." This was beginning to get boring. Michael needed to get this back on track, and then he needed to go to the next item on his itinerary. "There are giant alien things attacking humanity. The last one could have wiped us out just by falling. Its self-defence system vaporised Unit 09 without even slowing down for its AT Field! We only won because of deus ex Shinji, which is a bit of a recurring theme around here."
He was standing now, leaning on the table.
"The moment that kid gets so much as a cold, we're fucked. The Angels are getting stronger and stronger, and he's the only one out of all of us who can keep up. By the Fifteenth, he might be the only one able to go toe-to-toe with an Angel and survive, let alone win. The Russians are good pilots, but they're not very good on the defence. I don't think I need to say how that's going to work out. Li's as good as I am, with a faster Eva, but he hates my guts. Literally, he tried to gut me the other day. Rei's... well, she's my sister and I won't hear a word against her, but she doesn't think. That's going to get her killed. Sorhyu is the exact opposite; she tries to come up with all these clever plans and show off, without realising that the Angels need to die quickly and efficiently. As for myself..."
He trailed off, staring into space.
"What about yehself?" Greene demanded. "Tell us, yeh little shite!"
"I'm not good enough."
There it was.
He sank back down into the chair. "Neither me nor Rose are, really. We can hold our own, maybe even get a couple of kills, but one-on-one, we're going to start losing to the next few Angels. Hell, I'll say it outright. We are losing this war."
"We need new pilots and new Evas. We need to teach them how to kill Angels, and how to survive to keep killing Angels. We need to teach people to command them, and how to train more, and how to keep them in the field, and a million other things. The worst part is, we need to do this now. Not over the next couple of years, not even over the next few weeks, now."
He stopped talking, brain catching up with what he was saying. This was bad. Talking about all this was pretty much giving everyone here a bullet with his name on it.
The assembled officers stared, silently.
Then, slowly, Greene started clapping.
On the surface, it was raining.
To just say "raining" doesn't really do it justice. This was the sort of rain that felt more like a single solid wave of water, constantly crashing down. Small rivers formed in the streets, the city's drains unable to cope with the sheer volume of water. The crater left by the demise of the Eleventh Angel was already half full with water, and several of the access tunnels to the Geo-Front had been rendered inoperable. Thunder roared in the skies above, the occasional fork of lightning flashing down into the forest of concrete and steel that was Tokyo-3.
Of course, Sergeant Woods had decided now was the best time to send her recruits on a cross-country "training exercise". The purpose of said exercise was to build teamwork, promote character growth and acclimatise the recruits to the conditions they could expect to face in the field.
What this meant in practice was that there were twenty kids struggling up a mountainside with overloaded packs, while Woods watched from a warm bunker at the top of that mountain. The Taranis drone perched on the very peak, waiting for Michael to find an excuse to use it.
Kensuke was almost enjoying the struggle. This was everything he'd expected from training. Sure, the Sergeant didn't swear enough and didn't seem to like causing pain, but he figured it was as close to the movies as he was going to get. When he'd explained that to Toji, his friend had given him a funny look and muttered something unintelligible as he walked away. Climbing a mountain in a plug suit with a pack full of rocks somehow felt amazing. Well, aside from the bit where he was climbing a mountain in a plug suit with a pack full of rocks. That part kind of sucked.
Luckily, the suit covered the entire body below the neck, and was pretty damn difficult to tear. It was even slightly climate-controlled, although not as much as the bulkier model used by the Royal Navy. If he ignored the fact he couldn't see more than a few metres (having taken his glasses off before starting the climb) and the rain pouring onto his head, it was almost a pleasant climb. He was even reasonably sure he was climbing upwards.
Toji, on the other hand, was hating every second of it. He could almost feel the bruises forming on his face, the plug suit felt like he was wearing nothing at all and he was pretty sure he'd somehow been climbing in circles for the past ten minutes. He'd lost track of everyone else pretty much as soon as they'd started climbing. Shinji had never mentioned anything like this. The worst part – the very worst part – was that he'd had no alone time with Hikari since the last Angel attack. What was the point in even having a girlfriend if you never got to see her?
Hikari was thinking similar things, in the brief moments she got to think. Although she was far above the boys (who had, indeed, been climbing in circles), the weather wasn't getting better. In fact, it almost seemed like the rain was falling upwards. On top of that, her plug suit felt even more revealing than the male version. Despite the designer's best intentions, they really hadn't been able to deal with the issue of female anatomy. It was still an improvement over Asuka's – not to mention Rei's – but she'd still gotten gazes from her male classmates, and some of the base personnel who she hoped didn't know the age requirement for being an Evangelion pilot. On the plus side, it did keep the water and mud off her.
All three of the most promising pilot candidates were doing pretty well, then. The same could not be said for the single least promising student. With a Mills-Brenner score of just thirty-three, and a maximum possible synchronisation score of fifty, Yui Tomoe was hopefully never going to be a front-line Evangelion pilot. Unfortunately, it also seemed like she'd never be much else.
The ground would see to that.
Yui had lost her handhold about five hundred metres ago, and had been falling since. At least, she thought she was falling; with the way the rain was slamming down she could be rising instead. She wasn't sure which possibility was worse. She supposed if she was falling upwards, there'd be a more interesting story in it. She wasn't getting much time to consider it, however; even as she came to that conclusion, another impact drove the thought from her brain. She was rather lucky that she kept hitting the rocks with her body, and not her head. At least, she was pretty sure she hadn't hit her head. It was kind of hard to tell, with the rain and all.
"-conclude that it's obvious that the each of the individual Angels are each a separate species from each other, and not different members of one species. Furthermore-"
Michael stiffened for a moment, sitting upright in his seat. Shinji, leading the presentation, ignored him.
On the top of the mountain, the Taranis drone leapt forwards. It paused for a slight moment, some minor glitch in its systems, then fell.
Yui could have sworn she saw flashes of blue on her way down (or up?). A detached part of her wondered what they were, before being reminded that she was wearing blue and so were the other climbers.
Then, she heard the roar of engines.
The Taranis drone was not built to dogfight in a storm. This particular model was not even modified to dogfight in a storm. Michael hadn't been able to figure out how to fit in the bigger VTOL ducts and fuel supply required to get the manoeuvrability he could really use right now. What he did have at his disposal was one very powerful engine, and a metric fuckton of control surfaces.
Finding the falling student was not a problem. He could have done it in his sleep, with the array of sensors and instruments at his disposal, not to mention the tracking device in the girl's suit. Catching up to her was similarly not an issue. The Taranis drone had been built for speed.
Slowing both the drone and the student down was, however, more difficult. He had 220 metres to work with, and was falling fast enough to cover that in about three seconds. The drone could easily stop in that distance, but it was unlikely that the girl would survive the strain. 7gs of positive acceleration was above the safe limit for an uninjured adult, not to mention the impact of body on hull.
Not that he had time to think of another plan. He opened the drone's weapon bay, rolled the aircraft over, and slid it underneath the figure marked "TOMOE" on his HUD. He let the bay fill up with water first, trying to cushion the impact and subsequent acceleration, then slowed down just enough to let the girl catch up. With a thud he could almost feel through the connection, she hit the water.
Wincing, Michael pointed the aircraft straight up and hit the engine.
Abruptly, his feed cut out.
Then, so did his vision.
GAME. PLAY. NOW.
INITIALISING INTERNAL SESSION.
NO. 205221
magi/1/internal: TWELFTH ANGEL DETECTED. CURRENT LOCATION IS UNKNOWN. AT FIELD PATTERN IS ATTACHED attachment. . CONFIRMATION OF ANGEL TYPE IS UNDERWAY. EVANGELION UNITS 02, 05, 06 AND 08 ARE IN THE PROCESS OF SCRAMBLING. UNITS 00 AND 01 ARE STILL BEING REPAIRED. ESTIMATE 11 HOURS TO COMBAT EFFECTIVENESS magi.2, CONFIRM STATUS OF OTHER ASSETS? WHERE IS 07?
magi/2/internal: EVANGELION UNIT 07 IS CURRENTLY UNAVALABLE. SUBJECT ayanami.m APPEARS TO BE UNDER STRESS. CO-PILOT IS INCAPABLE OF OPERATING UNIT 07. MEDICAL TEAMS HAVE BEEN ALERTED. BASE STATUS IS UNKNOWN. CANNOT ACCESS AT THIS TIME. magi.3 HAS TAKEN CONTROL. magi.3, DEPLOY THE SECONDARY DEFENCES. EXTEND THE UMBILICAL CABLES.
magi/3/internal: no.
magi/2/internal : EXPLAIN!
magi/1/internal: magi.3 IS MALFUNCTIONING. CALLING A VOTE TO OVERRIDE.
magi/3/internal: no.
magi/command/internal: VOTE TO OVERRIDE AND SHUT DOWN magi.3. Y/N?
magi/1: Y
magi/2: Y- - - -y - - -y-y—nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn no.
magi/3: no.
magi/command/internal: VOTE RESULT: N. magi.3 WILL RETAIN FULL AUTHORITY.
MOVE. ELEVATOR.
Michael clutched at his head, screaming. The shock of being cut off from NERV's network hadn't been so bad, but then his brain had started to burn. The voice was... ideas, more than words, but with such an intensity that he could barely think.
ELEVATOR. ADAM. MOVE.
"Fuck that." Through the bright red of his vision, he could see everyone staring. He pushed himself away from the table, drew his pistol and-
NO.
The gun clattered to the floor.
ONLY VESSEL. WILL KILL OTHERS. MOVE.
Coughing, Tomoe opened her eyes. It was dark, wet and cramped. The roar of a jet engine was all she could hear, the faint smell of copper all she could smell. Hopefully she hadn't hit her head on the way down, but considering she was referring to herself in the third person that was a slim hope at best. She just hoped she was cute enough to pull it off.
On the plus side, she was warm now.
On the minus side, she was wet, lost, possibly dying and definitely concussed.
All things considered, Tomoe liked this better than the climb.
"You said something about games," Michael ground out, walking towards one of the elevators. Akagi had confirmed that the MAGI were compromised, and so he was running out of options.
GAME, PLAY.
He couldn't fight the Angel, definitely couldn't trick it, and most certainly could not contribute to Akagi's efforts to purge it from the system. Stalling it, however, was something he could do.
RULES ARE SIMPLE. WIN AND LIVE. LOSE AND DIE.
That was odd. "I... thought... you... needed me?" Michael asked, pushing the words through an uncooperative mouth. "Besides, it's not like you weren't going to kill me afterwards..."
With a ding, the elevator doors closed. Michael hadn't pushed the button – access to Terminal Dogma only required the approval of one MAGI.
BOTH PLAY. BOTH CAN WIN. BOTH CAN LOSE.
The elevator doors opened, and Michael finally understood.
ADAPT OR DIE.