Creation began on 06-14-20
Creation ended on 09-01-21
Neon Genesis Evangelion
A New Cause: The Pale Titan
A/N: I can't believe I had forgotten to create a new chapter to this story!
Unlike regular people, Death couldn't feel physical fatigue; all of his muscles never wore down or even understood the meaning of the word "quit". None of the Horsemen of the Restorative had the luxury of calling it a day with the majority of Japan being overrun by demonic giants unleashed from the depths of Hell. Even if he felt he needed to stop and take a break, the Grim Reaper couldn't and allow countless innocent people to die if these wandering behemoths decided to go smashing into buildings. And now, as he stood in the middle of the streets before the remaining behemoths that continued to walk down the road he was on, he couldn't allow himself to stop and give up, even after slashing away at least eighty-seven of them and sending them back to Hell.
"Come on!" He yelled at them, raising his kama up. "Is this the best you can do?!"
From behind the head of one of the behemoths, the demonic Pestilence appeared on the right shoulder and raised his bow and arrow at the Pale Rider.
"At present, all they can do right now is wander around the street," he told Death, "until I give the order for them to ravage the land, that is. For now, I think this order will suffice: Destroy the Restorative Horseman of Death with extreme persistence."
"Grr!" The behemoths growled, looking down at Death.
"Uh-oh," went Death as he ran towards a car and jumped up into the air, swiping an arrow from Pestilence with his kama away. "Aaaaurgh!"
So far, these demon giants, despite being fierce and fifteen meters, were as vulnerable as regular humans when hacked away at the chest or neck. The only real advantage they had against human adversaries…were their numbers and size. Even if humans were to call for an aerial assault, they couldn't authorize an attack in a civilian center due to people residing inside their homes or taking refuge in whatever buildings they could get into just to avoid them.
Not that Pestilence cared; his concern was the Restorative horsemen, particularly Death. The boy that had come from a broken home that held no future for him had caused him, a demon with no humanity and devoid of any chance of being persuaded by a damned soul to be merciful, to feel an instant of fear…and he couldn't allow him to get away with that.
-x-
"…I think the brimstone air is starting to dissipate," said Mordecai to his family, seeing them a little better than earlier.
"Yeah," agreed his wife.
Within a minute, the smoke around them lessened more, until it resembled a thin smoke that usually lingered in a room after something was burned extensively.
Mana looked out the window in the living room and pointed at the sky.
"What is it, Mana?" Himeko asked her daughter as she came over to see.
"The sky," she uttered. "It's blanketed by darkness."
Mordecai and Miroku came over and looked out the window with them…and Mordecai thought of an old passage he read somewhere in his grade school years. It was how a demon reached up to the heavens…and cast a great shadow across the world below.
"A plague of darkness," he expressed, feeling like things were affecting the world on a biblical level because of one aspect he understood due to witnessing it was how a young man condemned to death for a multitude of murders was walking among the people…and had no heartbeat or any skin or muscles on his right arm, usually covered in metal plates and scales that formed a gauntlet up to his shoulder.
"All we're missing are the other nine plagues," Himeko stated, holding onto Mana.
-x-
Pyre floated above the dark sky and looked down at Death, the Endgame, seeing him get swatted out of the air by one of the demonic giants like a fly; even without wings, the Pale Rider was more of an annoyance than he was a hindrance. It almost made him want to smile, except he found this incarnation of the fourth horseman to be persistent and unwilling to step aside. And it was this very same persistence that reminded the fiery deity that all of Gaia's horsemen were the same as she, no matter what era, place and generation they were each removed from after they became damned souls: Enduring. The endurance of the soul, long after the demise of the flesh, it was like a garden full of weeds because the gardener slacked off…or a murder of crows that gathered to a field of carcasses after a slaughter.
Stop resisting, he thought as he watched the dead boy rise back up, setting his head back in place on his shoulders as the same behemoth prepared to attack again. Just give up. It doesn't matter how strong you are, you are only one horseman. You're vulnerable and defenseless against this legion of destruction.
But Death, despite his disadvantage against these giants from Hell, refused to surrender. Even with the odds against him, he chose to stand his ground and face the madness in front of him, behind him, beside him, and within him. This…made Pyre almost want to praise him for his persistence and reward him for refusing to back down.
Almost.
"Haaaaurgh!" He heard the horseman's roar of refusal as he managed to decapitate at least five of the demonic giants.
Where did he channel such strength? Pyre wondered; he had seen previous incarnations of the horseman fight with a limited degree of strength to face beings of greater power, but this one appeared than his predecessors and possessed a power to him that not many other horsemen possessed. What are you really, Pale Rider?
-x-
The smoke had dissipated, leaving the air clear, and Mana could see the dark skies better.
"Is there anything on the news about this?" She asked her father as he was scrolling on the television. "Anything at all?"
"It looks like everyone's baffled by this," he responded, "but it seems to be isolated to just Japan. It's not being experienced anywhere else in the world."
"Hey, wait," Himeko went, grabbing onto Mordecai's right arm. "Go back to the last channel. There's something going on."
He scrolled back and saw a news helicopter was in the air over what remained of Sendai, filming what appeared to be…fire giants, some less than fifteen meters, others almost twenty-five meters, either walking towards people on the streets that were fleeing…or damaging some of the buildings for some reason.
"…It is mass mayhem here in Sendai, people," uttered a male reporter near a microphone. "Not just here, but these strange, giants have been reported appearing in Fukuoka and Namegata! If they're appearing in these cities, there's a chance they're going to spread across the nation! They all appear to be anywhere between thirteen-twenty-five meters in height and look like burn victims! If someone said this can only be a movie, they're wrong! This is like Attack on Titan, only worse than ever imagined!"
"My God," Mordecai expressed as the camera panned up on one of the giants. "What are they?"
"Probably demons," Mana suggested. "They're horrible."
The camera then shifted over to a building.
"Hey! On that building right there!" Someone else, probably the cameraman, yelled. "Who is that? There, right there!"
The camera zoomed in on the lone figure on the roof of the building…and the Asagi family saw the possibility of a chance that the giants would be dealt with.
"The dead really do walk this plane of existence," someone in the helicopter uttered. "It's that kid everyone's been talking about. The one that got released from the nuthouse and went on a killing spree that ended with his old man biting the dust before he did. He calls himself Death."
"Oh, man, he just sliced that giant's head off," the reporter announced as the cameraman caught it on the camera. "He is not normal. He isn't normal in any sense of the word."
-x-
"…What the Hell is this?" Yui heard someone say as there was a news broadcast going on in Sendai. "The Horseman of Death's facing giant burn victims?"
She looked at the TV screen and saw the Restorative Horseman of Death being attacked by giant humanoids that rivaled the Evas, only these beings weren't armored and there were more of them than there were Evas. And the horseman had jumped from the building he was standing on and into the air, towards the giant that had been beheaded.
"Oh, Susanoo, this dead kid can fly," the reporter expressed.
"Unbelievable," a woman uttered, "and this guy is beyond crazy."
"He's fighting giants on fire," said a man beside her, "how is that crazy?"
Yui watched as Death landed on the falling, headless body…and then watched as he jumped high into the air, just in time to evade a hand belonging to another giant.
"Not even people can do what he can do," another man behind Yui expressed.
And yet, Yui thought, he doesn't do what he does to aid us. He serves that woman that claimed to have brought them both back…and whatever it is she's up to. Whoever unleased these beings must have access to technology rivaling that of NERV and SEELE.
-x-
The only things these giants had working for them were their size and numbers, but Death was not one to back down, raising his kama up again to show his conviction to dispose of them back to Hell. To him, these behemoths were no different from the other criminals he had gone after in the time he had decided to focus his attention on the dark side of human behavior that ended up sending people into the domain he frequents. Men of brutality, women of deception, dealers of wicked substances, purveyors of flesh, obtainers of ill-gotten goods, and of these could've been presented to Death…and he would send them to Hell to suffer for eternity.
Swat! He felt an arrow pierce his back, and he looked up at a building nearby, seeing Pestilence, taking up another arrow and aiming it at him.
"What will it take for you to fall?" He demanded.
"Metaphorically, I've already fallen, demon," Death responded, but knew that wasn't what he meant in the slightest.
"You can't win on your own."
Slam! Another giant fell to the ground and revealed Mako with his halberd.
"He's not alone, demon horseman," he expressed. "I'm here with him."
How could Pestilence forget about the twin brother of the fallen mortal that befell countless more lives than one could be responsible for taking?
"You will both suffer," he uttered, and then fired on Mako.
Ding! Mako deflected the arrow with his halberd, sending it falling to the street below.
"You can't succeed on your own, Pestilence."
"I do better alone than with partners. The standards in Hell have dropped astronomically if the damned sent there are so mediocre that they have no idea what it means to be a horseman for the infernal masters that give them the opportunity to serve something greater than they could ever be. Humans are just so…inefficient to have in the ranks of the underworld."
The twins looked at each other and wondered the same thought: Our former father is inefficient to be a horseman?
"Don't play dumb, you two!" Pestilence yelled at them. "You know how pathetic humans are when they serve Hell!"
"What they do to deserve their place in Hell is on them," Death expressed. "Your masters choosing them to be horsemen is on them."
Death then leapt up into the air again, this time intent on making the demonic horseman go back to Hell.
"Back to Hell with you," he told Pestilence.
Pestilence simply took out eight arrows and fired them at the Pale Rider, sending him flying backwards through the building behind him
"After you, boy," he uttered in response. "After you."
-x-
He went through more than one building after being shot with eight arrows. With such force put on him, Death went through eight buildings and was now laying on the ground in a maintenance building, his limbs either mangled, severed or crushed. But despite his injuries, he was still conscious, still looking around and listening, thinking about his predicament.
What does it take? He thought, trying to move his mouth, but his jaw was dislodged. What does it take…to defeat the Apocalyptic Horseman of Pestilence? Whatever it takes, I will do it. I am Death, the Endgame. I take the lives of the guilty to preserve the lives of the innocent. I kill…to end the killing, so that the innocent may live without the fear of being hunted by the guilty for their own deviant amusement.
Slowly regenerating, the Grim Reaper felt mobility return to his mouth and limbs, but he was still laying on the ground.
What will it take to take down the Horseman of Pestilence? He was still wondering.
-x-
Thud! Another of the behemoths from Hell fell at the end of War's sword in Namegata.
"This is insane," the Violent One expressed as he started to lose count over how many giants he had slain; he thought it was forty-two, but it was starting to feel like eighty-nine…and counting. "Where's backup when you really need it?"
He suddenly heard a metallic whizzing sound striking concrete and the sound of clothing flapping in the wind. And then he smiled; Mother Gaia had informed him of the group of people that had been trained in her forest to fly with blessed blades and developing the means to propel themselves through the air with a biogas power source. Now, he was going to see these men and women in action.
"Rrrrraaurgh!" One of the behemoths roared as they fell to the ground below, revealing that a section of its neck had been carved out.
In the air, a man in his early-thirties was soaring towards his next target, wielding a large blade, wearing a strange harness with an apparatus of some kind on the back.
"Yo, War, the Violent One!" War heard a woman call out to him, and he saw a handful of people dressed in similar attire, wearing the same harness as the man, hanging on the sides of the buildings nearby. "The Flying Spider Monkeys of the Restorative are here to assist!"
"Bring it!" He yelled back, brandishing his sword at the next giant from Hell.
-x-
The Flying Spider Monkeys of the Restorative, also known as the Auxiliary Spider Monkeys to a lesser extent, were a group comprised of men and women from what remained of the world, before and after Second Impact, that were tasked with dealing with large threats such as demonic giants. As Conquest continued to shoot down several of these behemoths in Fukuoka, he was backed up by thirty of these people that took their name from the genus of ape that belonged to the planet.
Snap! The bowstring on his longbow broke after firing three more arrows at his targeted giants, and he frowned at the fact that his primary weapon of choice had been disabled.
"I don't believe this," he uttered as he had leapt into the air when he fired, landing gracefully atop another building. "I have less force with my hands."
Shine! Something caught his eyes as he looked across the street at another rooftop where three Spider Monkeys were stationed, and one of them was reflecting light off of something to get his attention, and he leapt over to ascertain what it was.
"I take it you have something of mine?" He questioned when he slammed down on the roof.
A woman with brown hair held up a smaller bow with recurve limbs.
"Mother Gaia instructed us to make sure you had a spare bow to use," she told him, handing over the bow to him.
"Many thanks," he praised, and then took out another arrow from his quiver and fired into the left eye of an incoming behemoth. "I hate…demon giants."
The Spider Monkeys could sympathize with him as they leapt from the building and into the air, firing grapple hooks to propel themselves to their next target whilst the Poison Master took to the behemoth behind the one he had just blinded in one eye.
-x-
"…What is this?" Pestilence questioned, looking down at the pile of rubble where the Restorative Horseman of Death had once lain in an injured state. "Where the Hell did you run off to in such a short time?"
Even if he had managed to get away, the behemoths would continue to follow their order to go after Death with extreme persistence, making escape just a short-lived maneuver for the Grim Reaper. But Pestilence, due to his newfound hatred of the damned soul that invoked fear in him for an instant, knew that he couldn't afford to let the Pale Rider for Heaven to surprise him again. The sooner the giants found him, the better the operation Hell's masters had for the mortals remaining on this maimed, dying world…and he intended to get a good seat to watch the beginning of the end.
"You can't hide from me, Death, the Endgame!" He yelled as he walked out of the building and onto the streets. "You think you can hide?! You can't escape from the minions of Hell! I'll find you! I'll tear your soul apart and feed it to the damned!"
But there was no response from the Restorative horseman. Either he was not here…or he was just not going to allow himself into being goaded into speaking.
-x-
Mako wasn't feeling his brother's nearby in the city at all. It was as though Death had just…disappeared. One moment, he felt him, and in another, he was just gone.
Where did you go, Death? He wondered as he swung his halberd across the face of another behemoth. We got troubles.
Jumping from the shoulder of another behemoth towards the torso of another nearby, the Restorative Horseman of Unity used his halberd to cut open the demon's chest as he descended down the body towards the ground.
Slam! He landed on the streets and ran past a leg before he could be stepped on.
Come on, Death, it's not like you to just go missing and allow sinners to persist in their rampage. Where are you?
-x-
Mana was double-checking everything she had looked over in the Book of the Restorative and found a chapter that spoke volumes over what was happening across Japan. It felt like a part of history repeating itself as she read the chapter. There were these giants emerging from the fiery abyss, people forced to flee or cower, and these warriors of the damned fighting against the giants in defense of the innocent. Yes, to Mana, it was as though history was repeating it, just in a different way from the previous interpretation.
The horsemen have done this before, but not every incarnation, she concluded as she turned a page in the book. But they've prevailed each time, no matter how the enemy advances, either with allies or their own wits and will to see that the light prevails over the darkness. The giants from the underworld are kept from spreading across the land. Huh? What's this here?
She had found something that had been previously marked. Something about a…titan of some sort. She put a bookmark where she found it and turned to face her grandfather.
"Did you find something in the book, Mana?" He asked her.
"Something about a titan that wasn't stated to be affiliated with the giants on the news," she explained. "But I haven't gotten to it yet."
"A titan? The only ones I'm familiar with are the ones from Greek mythology."
On the TV, the helicopter over the city where Death was located continued to broadcast the scene of visual carnage over the fact that large demons were walking the streets.
"Where is the dead boy? There's no sign of the dead boy!" The reporter announced as the cameraman surveyed the city for signs of where Death had gone, but no such luck.
"Death, where are you?" Mana wondered.
All they could see were a glimpse of Mako with his halberd and the demonic Pestilence on opposing sides atop a roof. They knew it was Mako on account of his halberd and his clothes not being the type you'd see at a traditional Japanese funeral or memorial. Watching as Mako swung his weapon around whilst Pestilence fired six arrows at him, Mana sighed and returned her focus to the book.
"'In the midst of the agony and confusion,'" she read to herself, "'the enemy from the inferno heard a voice call out to them. It was the voice of a maternal deity as she rose from the ground in front of them. Her voice, filled with compassion for the innocent, but masking a dread reserved for the guilty, uttered to the smoldering giants, "Come and bear witness to the inevitability of your own defeat." Behind her emerged the adversary that promised only pain for them. We looked and beheld…'"
"Mana?" Her mother broke her from the book, holding a bottle of water in front of her. "You need to stay hydrated."
"Oh, yeah," she was reminded that she and the rest of them needed to stay hydrated because of the brimstone smoke, and accepted the bottled water from her mother.
"Oh, my goodness," her father went, and her attention was returned to the TV.
"Kami, have mercy on those living there," her grandfather expressed.
The helicopter's cameraman was recording the sudden appearance of something that was beyond what they had learned about from either Mana or the Restorative Horsemen twins. Way beyond all of what they knew.
"Beholden upon the hordes of the underworld, a bone-colored behemoth stood before them," thought Mana as she used both her hands to hold the bottle in her possession, reciting in her head what she looked at in the book. "A giant as pale as bones stripped of flesh. Its name was embraced as the Pale Titan…and it unleashed Hell upon its demonic foes."
-x-
Sporting a gash on his chest, Mako was surprised to see this new behemoth appear on the streets of the city. Even Pestilence couldn't believe that it was here…and he'd seen this thing before in the past…but not like this. It stood almost thirty meters, appeared somewhat muscular, but more on the lean side, as though it demonstrated more sense to be maneuverable than tough, with a pair of arms with elbow spurs and talons, making them appear to be its weapon of choice. But it was its head that gave the most displeasing sense of understanding; its eyes were ghost-white and had hair that was salt and pepper-colored, disorganized and obscuring the rest of its face from being perceived.
"The Pale Titan has returned," the demonic horseman uttered, enraged by this turn of events. Damn you, Death, the Endgame. Damn you back to Hell!
"Grrr!" The behemoth, this Pale Titan, growled, flexing its claws.
"Attack!" Pestilence ordered his horde. "Attack the Pale Titan! It's only one against a legion! It's not invincible! Tear it apart!"
The legion of demonic behemoths obeyed and began to approach the Pale Titan, but the bone-colored giant hunched forward and charged towards them.
"Rrrrraarugh!" It shrieked as Mako jumped out of the way on the streets and watched from the safety of an alleyway as the behemoth started knocking down the other behemoths that were like rag dolls strung up by thin strings.
Pestilence jumped up to another rooftop and watched as his legion of giants were being knocked over, dismembered and disemboweled by the Pale Titan. It was just like before with the last time it had been encountered; it never showed up until after a larger threat was unleashed and the Restorative Horseman of Death disappeared. There was no denying it, not even a single thought of doubt in his ancient and cruel mind; this behemoth was none other than the Restorative Horseman of Death, tapping into some primordial power that went past dealing with the mortal scum of the Earth.
Mako couldn't believe what he was seeing, watching as a demon giant's head was sent flying while its body fell before the Pale Titan. It was a scene from a horror movie that promised hope to the hopeless and retribution to the people at fault for some misfortune that had been committed not too long ago.
This giant…is a representation of a grand rage, he thought as he looked up and saw a fire escape in the alley and climbed it.
But Pestilence, the demonic horseman didn't see the giant as a representation of rage. No, he saw it as a representation of how far the heavens would go to restore their precious order on Earth, including offering a damned soul the position of the Grim Reaper in order to put them on the path to their redemption. And the worst thing of it was how those celestial cretins demonstrated the craziest sense of giving hope to those that did in life and turned their previous flaws into acceptable defects of humanity's revival, and this new Death was just another example of despair and suffering being changed to accommodate something entirely different from what hadn't been previously offered to the damned.
All my legion, he sent his command to the others scattered across the nation, converge upon the Pale Titan. Kill him. Destroy him. Send him to Hell!
To be continued…
A/N: Many more apologies for taking so long to update this story. So many ideas to throw around, but never enough point to use them all. Tell me what you think of this and I'll get back to you on the next chapter. Stay safe, healthy and full of inspiration. Peace.