I didn't forget, I was just unexpectedly swamped with real life immediately after work yesterday, and didn't get done until past bedtime. Sorry y'all. Still I'm here now, to provide you with yet another installment in this meandering epic of too many subplots and not enough resolutions.

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Chapter 28

The Siege of Hakone: Exterminator

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The white pseudoneoprene of Rei's plugsuit was marred by a series of neat, raised lines where the exotic polymer had been cut and fused. It might not have drawn the eye of a less attentive pilot, but Asuka knew a plastic weld when she saw it.

They're replacing overloaded parts with salvage from junked plugsuits... Asuka suspected the only reason her own plugsuit didn't bear similar repairs was because of her time off duty. We can't take any longer under constant fire. The siege will break, or Tokyo-3 will.

"Ready, Squad Leader."

Asuka looked up, meeting Mari's eyes. Even after several deployments, it was still weird to hear military deference from the mouth of an older sister, especially when said older sister was trying and mostly failing to conceal an amused smile.

Scheisse, of course I was staring at Rei again.

For her part, the First Child was standing at attention by the elevator door, having been the first to finish suiting up.

"Alright, pilots," Asuka said, pushing herself up off the bench. "Let's move out."

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This body is 10.65 years old and its heart has beat 448,488,475 times.

Usually, the Evangelion Corps faced down angels alone. It was thus a strange experience to hear booming thunder behind their column, as howitzer fire and airstrikes took up the responsibility of destroying the small groups of seraphs that had been constantly harassing Tokyo-3's defenses.

The terrain beyond the urban boundary was already a barren, cratered wasteland of pulverized rock and mud. There was little doubt that this latest, hopefully last, bombardment would tear up the land even further.

Systems check

Pilot: Synchronized at 49.6%

Fuel: [89%]

Heart Temperature: 162.2°C [Green]

Armor Integrity (structural sensor assay): [98%]

Evangelion Body Integrity: Fully Functional

Ammunition: [15/15] magazines racked, [15/15] magazines fully loaded (weight assay)

AT Array (receiver function): Fully Functional

AT Array (amplifier function): [97%]

Optics: Fully Functional

Sensors: Fully Functional

Motor Nerves (dry-run test): Fully Functional

Rei pulled her mind back out of the systems display. It didn't seem like she had missed anything; the other pilots were quiet, focused on the task ahead.

I do not like this tension.

It was not lost on her that, a few short months ago, she wouldn't have cared to speak or be spoken to while marching into combat.

I did not feel like part of a team, then. I did not... feel at all, then.

On the side of her HUD, the faintest movement drew her eye. She looked over at the Squad Leader's comm window and saw Asuka looking directly at her - but then a heartbeat later those bright blue eyes, washed a dark indigo by the LCL, were focused on the battlefield once more.

It wasn't the first time Asuka had looked at Rei; in fact, Rei had noticed it become something of a habit. But it was the first time the gesture had made Rei feel more at ease than before - this time, it brought a feeling of partially restored normalcy.

This body is 10.65 years old and its heart has beat 448,489,823 times.

Rei took a deep breath of LCL, shifting back her shoulders, and tightened her grip around Unit 00's control yokes.

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"Hold up, I got contact."

"What do you see, Baal?"

"Looks like a big boil in my next valley over. Shit, that's a lot of them." Mari's voice was strained. "I wonder if maybe they were all clustering up because they saw us coming."

"That would explain why we saw so few scattered ones," Shinji muttered.

"Yeah, and why the median perimeter defences have been mostly quiet." Asuka dug her heel into the ridge of her brow. "Scheisse, well, I guess this is better than being flanked by the swarm and seeing Tokyo-3 destroyed while all the cats are away."

"Orders, Leader?" It was Rei.

"Baal, hold position, but fall back if they move on you." Asuka pulled up her tactical map, marking positions on the terrain display. "Asherah, here. Ishtar, here. The game plan is to draw them out through this pass, got it?"

"Acknowledged."

"Acknowledged."

"Acknowledged."

"Good. Go."

Unit 05's green and khaki paint was surprisingly good camouflage against the war-torn mountains, but to anyone who knew she was there, it was impossible to miss the shape of an Evangelion lying prone against the mountainside.

Rei moved up beside Mari's position, and ran a quick visual double-check over her rapid-fire gauss slugger. The first of the Evangelion program's electromagnetic guns to be true fully automatic, the slugger - a recent addition to the armory - could launch nearly two rounds a second, but its high performance made it prone to failure. This would be its first battlefield test.

Likewise, Mari had deployed with a prototype heavy railgun. A miniaturization of the titanic positron cannon, it might even have a chance to kill a fully fledged Angel on a direct hit - but it was a slow, cumbersome weapon, and even more unproven than the slugger.

Misato shouldn't have let JSSDF-A cajole her into field tests. Not on an op this important! Those guns had better hold up...

Asuka and Shinji had, fortunately, been allowed to stick with trusty MkIII pallet rifles, repeatedly proven effective against the spiderform seraphs of the swarm.

"Baal, get ready to hit their middle; don't fire until they column up. Asherah, get ready to open fire around the corner on my mark. Ishtar and I will hit them coming out."

"Aye."

"Yes."

"Mmhm."

Asuka closed her eyes and took a deep, slow breath of LCL.

"Mark."

The relative quiet of the mountains was shattered by the booming of the gauss slugger. A heartbeat later, chittering shrieks filled the air as the seraphs swarmed towards their attacker.

Unit 00 stepped back, retreating at a measured pace from the mouth of the valley. An even louder shockwave of sound rang out as Mari's heavy railgun split the air.

Coming, coming... three two one -

The seraphs streamed out of the valley, and Asuka opened fire.

Blue blood and insect chitin splashed before her eyes. The world quickly flooded with seraphs, dead or dying or scurrying forward over the corpses of their wretched siblings to keep coming.

The pallet rifle clicked in her hands. Cursing incoherently, she ejected the spent magazine and slapped in a new one, but in the time it took to draw the bolt the seraphs had closed even more ground.

They just wouldn't end. For every spiderling blasted into gore, another two took its place. By the next reload, they'd be overrun.

Boom.

"Ishtar, fall back!"

Boom.

"Baal, cover us!"

Boom. The bolt locked open.

"Asherah -"

"Yes."

Asuka didn't waste any more time, ejecting the second spent magazine as she turned.

Time - and noise, and flashing light - seemed to blur together. It must have taken more than a few seconds to fall back, but Asuka could have sworn she was skidding to a halt beside Unit 00's crouched form a mere heartbeat later.

Perhaps the thermobaric bomb Mari had thrown had clouded her senses somewhat.

"Baal to squad leader. They're falling back."

"Agreed." It was Rei's soft voice. "We are clear here."

Asuka stood from the crouch. Once, the sensation of rising to stand as tall as a multi-story building might have made her feel powerful. Now, she merely appreciated the higher vantage point.

"Status?"

"Acid spit hit my vambrace, did a little damage." Shinji rolled his shoulders. "That's about all."

"Asherah is down three percent of fuel and one-and-a-half magazines of ammunition."

"Same boat. No damage, down a few bullets."

"Good. Let's move."

Units 00 and 01 fell in behind Asuka, and Unit 05 kept to the left wing, leveraging greater mobility and range to act as scout.

Asuka narrowed her eyes as she looked at the tactical map. JSSDF bombers had been running their ordnance thin tearing apart groups of seraphs all over the region, but their targets were rapidly growing scarce. Orbital AT scans showed the seraphs falling back, clustering tighter and tighter around the point where the MAGI claimed was the nexus of their den.

It meant there wasn't going to be much in the way of ground resistance before reaching the target. It also meant that breaching the den itself would be much harder.

Maybe even impossible. Mein Gott, there are thousands of them. Maybe tens of thousands. Far and away beyond what we have the ordnance to deal with, even if we throw all our belt bombs...

"Control," she commed. "What is the number estimate around the nexus?"

Maya's face appeared in the Central Dogma channel. "The MAGI are counting approximately sixteen thousand seraphs, give or take. They're too clustered to scan clear individual AT signals."

Asuka raised her fist, halting the column. "That's... much more than we planned for. We can't strike that head-first. They'll tear us apart." She shook her head. "Even attacking downhill on all sides, we just can't unload ammo fast enough. They'd overrun us in less than a minute. That plan is no good."

"I'm listening."

"Remind me again why you can't get planes over?"

"As you know, the nexus is in a valley. The surrounding ridges are higher than the rest of the range." A topographic map of the battlefield filled the comm screen. "At that altitude, the bombers would have to skim the ridges to get over, putting them low enough to be easily struck by the seraphs' low-energy AT lances."

"Okay. Could you, umm... do you think you could get a missile over?"

On the teamcomms, Mari gave Asuka a sharp look.

"... Depends. A guided missile would have similar problems. A ballistic missile could go higher and faster, so it would have a better chance."

"Great. Okay. May I requisition a short-range ballistic missile with a light N2 warhead for this mission?"

"... Give us a moment."

The comm went to static. Asuka glanced over her teammates' faces on the other channels, then looked away.

"Ballsy move, princess. Oh, uh, I mean squad leader."

"Psh, it isn't bravery," Asuka muttered. "I'm just not interested in getting ripped apart by alien spiders. No suicide missions on my watch."

"It is highly irregular for a warrant officer to requisition nuclear ordnance," Rei piped up. "It is not wrong to call this bravery."

"What? I - hey, no ganging up on me! We're on duty here."

The Central Dogma comm crackled again, and this time, the face it showed was commander Ikari himself. "In light of the unexpected resistance, we are open to considering a nuclear offensive," he stated, his tone clipped. "State your plan, squad leader."

Asuka nodded rapidly, looking back over at her tactical map. "Here - uh, on the northern approach, the inner slope is steeper. The seraphs will be slowed and clustering tightly if they try to come up at us from that angle." She highlighted four coordinates, then synced her display with the control room screen, hoping inanely that her nervousness wasn't somehow visibly manifest through the cerebral control interface. "My team will circle around the mountains to approach at these points. If we can draw all of them, or even most, northwards, than a missile should have an easy angle of descent to air-burst while still out of range of enemy point defense fire."

"This plan puts all four Eva units in front of the ridge. How do you justify directly exposing your forces to a nuclear blast?"

"The light tactical payload is - is significantly smaller than a strategic N2 warhead," Asuka replied, drawing two circles on the map. "And none of us will be within the complete-destruction bubble. Simulations, and some experimental results, indicate that a prepared AT shield can mitigate incredibly intense impacts, comparable to nuclear shockwave... and we know evangelion flesh blocks neutron and gamma."

'It's all I've got' hung unsaid in the air. Commander Ikari was an arrogant, uncompromising man, but he was not stupid. A direct assault would result in the near-certain destruction of all four of the most expensive warmachines ever built.

The control room comm went static again. Asuka took a few deep breaths of tepid LCL and tried to steady her shaking hands.

"Are you sure about this, Squad Leader?" Shinji looked nervous. "We've never used N2 weapons before, and we -"

"No I'm not sure, Ishtar," Asuka snapped back. "But if you don't have a better idea, I don't want to hear it."

Shinji frowned and looked away. He didn't press any further.

I hate waiting. Herr im Himmel, I hate waiting...

The control comm hissed again.

"Your proposal has been approved, Squad Leader. Advance to first positions and await further instruction."

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This body is 10.65 years old and its heart has beat 448,506,549 times.

Waiting was something the Eva corps did a lot of. Hours, days, weeks of training, sync tests and battlefield maneuvers frequently came to a head in clashes that lasted just a handful of minutes.

"How long until civilian air traffic is clear?" It was Lt. Hyūga this time. The control comm had been flickering rapidly, cutting to staff as they reported and back to relevant command figures. Rei watched with a detached sort of fascination.

"Relevant control towers have received our notifications. It should be no more than 45 minutes before we have a clean aerospace footprint."

Soon, perhaps? That was good. The Eva corps had already spent hours in the field; not long enough to have any serious concerns over link circuit strain, but the other three had difficulty dealing with boredom.

"NERV-R has confirmed both departures from Vladivostok." Lt. Ibuki. "Their comm operator advises that only one 9K720-Iskander is tipped with an N2 tactical. Due to the rushed nature of the order, they were not able to procure a backup missile with a ready N2 payload."

"They only sent one? Why two departures, then?" Dr. Akagi.

"The backup Iskander is equipped with a pre-impact thermonuclear warhead. Comparably effective. A lot dirtier."

"I see. How soon will they land?"

"Expected flight time to Tokyo-3 Airport is about a hundred minutes. Moving them into firing position will be harder to predict."

Not soon, then.

On the teamcomm, Asuka did not look pleased. She wasn't snapping at anyone, but her face was set in a deep frown.

This body is 10.65 years old and its heart has beat 448,507,501 times.

The quiet was broken by a loud boom, and every pilot flinched. A second shot followed almost immediately.

"Baal, contact, two. Clear."

Such, of course, was the overlaying fear of the tedium. This close to the nexus of the Swarm, there would be no emergency extraction if they were suddenly overrun. The seraphs hadn't rushed them yet - most contacts had been stragglers from the apparent recall earlier - and their position was good to avoid getting snuck up on, but currently their enemies were only on the defensive because they felt defensive.

Hopefully, Matarael does not think much of the lilin's nuclear weapons, after they failed to seriously harm Sachiel.

Asuka suddenly leaned forward, her eyes widening rapidly, almost as if she were about to leap through the teamcomm screen. Three pallet rifle shots echoed over the mountains.

"Moloch, contact, three. Two down, one got away. Clear."

Rei felt the beginnings of a smile twitch at the corner of her mouth.

This body is 10.65 years old and its heart has beat 448,507,583 times

This body is 10.65 years old and its heart has beat 448,507,584 times

This body is 10.65 years old and its heart has beat 448,507,585 times...

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