Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ Eterntities Wars ❯ Partus I-VI ( Chapter 1 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Eternities Wars

Umm...Would you believe that I got bored? ^^;;; Well, I did. And I've gotten a few emails over the past year requesting that I actually do some more of this story. But before I could do that I had to re-write a few parts of it. To fit what I want the story to be as I see it now.
A note for the creatures in the story: All of these creatures are baised on or used from Wizards of the Coast's Dungeon And Dragon's Role Playing Games. If you want to see a picture of what I am attempting to describe, all you need do is find the corresponding name in one of Wizards Books for D&D. All the Creature names are the same.
This is the second revision of Eternities Wars. The original six chapters are still posted on Darkscribes.org today. The first draft is still on FF.N under the name of "Asuka, My Love." You can find this story by going to "The Seldon Planners Favorite Stories" and then clicking on the link there.
These all nighter's are killing me.
Seldon.

"NO, NO DON'T LOOK INTO MY MIIIIIIINNNNNNNNDDDDDD!"
Shinji gripped the handles inside Eva Unit 01's entry plug until he felt sure that his knuckles were white from the force he exerted. "FATHER! LET ME GO UP AND FIGHT!" He pleaded with the remorseless man who sired him.
"No, apparently this Angel has the ability to contaminate a pilot's mind. We cannot risk exposing Unit 01." Gendo Ikari. As cold a bastard as there ever has been and ever will be. Perhaps he was Caine re-incarnate; but no, Caine at least had the grace to be passionate about his murdering of Able.
"And what about Asuka?" Misato Katsuragi asked from lower down on the command bridge.
"Send Rei to retrieve the Lance."
'A spear? What the hell is a spear going to do to help Asuka?' Shinji's thoughts echoed wildly in his mind; he had to protect Asuka, because even though he never showed it to anyone, even her; he cared and dare say--loved the temperament and feisty girl more than anything else in the world. His head dropped to his lap and that echoing litany repeated once more in his mind. For he needed it now more than ever to help gather his meager amount of courage and strength.
Gather it to do one, last, thing.
'I mustn't run away. I mustn't run away. I MUSTN'T RUN AWAY!!......................................................I won't...I will not run away when Asuka needs me the most.' Shinji opened his eyes and stared through the holoscreen at his guardian and friend for the past seven months of his life, and he smiled. Out of all the people gathered on that bridge, she was the one who deserved to hear him once more before he left. "Misato."
The sudden calmness of Shinji's voice caused everyone on the bustling command bridge to stop their frantic efforts and stare at the steely-eyed boy who carried the weight of humanity on his shoulders more than once. They peered into the ocean of his soul and found themselves thirsty. "Y...yes, Shinji?" Misato shakenly asked.
"Goodbye, my friend. I will miss you. Tell Asuka...tell her that I love her." The signal cut off and Unit 01 activated within its steel prison. The walls shattered with its roar.

Asuka curled herself up within the entry plug, she had tried to block the intrusive probes into her past and memories; but she couldn't stop the attack. She felt violated, filthy, unclean and soiled. No, this was no attack--this was rape. RAPE! She was being raped.
"...help me...please, Kaji help me..." Silent tears rolled off her cheek and landed in her lap as she rocked back and forth, their shape slowly diluted by the LCL that filled her lungs and the metal case around her. She didn't know what was left for her to do--except wait for death.
But death did not come; Unit 01, however, did.
With a crash that rocked her brain and left her body with the feeling of having a dagger pulled free of her temple, Asuka looked up to find herself out of that horrible beam of light and in the soft rain coming from the gray clouds above. She cried harder when she saw what now occupied her place in that light. The light of a vengeful God. Shinji stood there, bathed in that soft light within the cold shell of Evangelion Unit 01.
"Sh--Shinji...you came...came to s-save me." Tears poured forth as if from a fount within her eyes as she stared at the motionless from of the one she silently loved.
Then without warning, the light disappeared from the sky; leaving Unit 01a hunched, dark, and menacing silhouette in the rain that poured down on it from above. Her systems flared to life, and Misato's face and voice appeared in one of her comm lines.
"...Asuka!...Asuka! You're alive, thank God! Are you alright?"
"I-I'm fine...What about Shinji? What happened to him and the angel?" She asked, a faint glimmer of regret and concern appearing in her eyes. Misato saw these feelings as clearly as one could. You would have to place illuminated signs around her to show it much clearer. Her head dropped, and she sobbed. Her body shook heavily with the pain of her sorrow.
'I kept one, and lost the other.'
"Misato! What happened to him?"
"He's gone," Misato brokenly choked out, "everything; him...and even his plugsuit. Ritsuko says that the analysis of the LCL reads negative. I'm so sorry Asuka."
Fresh tears of sadness and regret flowed down her cheeks, and she made no attempt to hide them as she sobbed aloud in the entry plug. 'He's gone. He's not Invincible Shinji, here to save us all anymore.'
"Asuka..." Misato waited until the sobs abided and those ice blue eyes of the German girl raised up enough for her to see them. "He told me something before he left...he said...Tell Asuka that I-I love her..."
She could only weep for the lost.
"Retrieval crew are coming for you Asuka...I'm so sorry."
The plug went dark as the entry plug shut down in preparation to be ejected. And all Asuka could think about was all the times she had scorned him, rejected him, insulted him. Her tears felt never ending as she let loose another torrent of salty droplets of anguish and pain.

Shinji felt his body ripped apart, his core shattered into a trillion tiny particles that he guessed would never assemble again. He felt pain, he felt sadness. He felt the suffering of his soul increased a hundredfold. And then he felt nothing. And soon after, he felt Everything.
Pain, suffering, hate, love, fear, courage, remorse, joy, happiness, sadness, elation, pride, greed, guilt, lust, gluttony, depression, elation, agony, estcasy.
Everything.
Then a white light came over him. Shinji gasped as he realized he had his eyes. Marveled as his fingers scraped lightly over his skin. Delighted as he felt his neural synapses fire off at the light touches of air gusting past his body. A laugh. A smile.
Then the white light disappeared, and a wave of noise and a sea of smell rushed across his remade senses. Deafening his ears and making his chest heave and gag with revulsion, forcing him to double over and clutch the ground as his mind whirled.
The sound finally sorted out, but it was a weird sound. As if a person was beating a piece of iron against a steel bar. The smell was more identifiable however. Something that he had forced his body and mind to become acquainted with over the past seven months.
That smell was blood.
"Deth~nal! Tabris-chal kathu meina bauwatsa te nebroths!"
The voice was scratchy but throaty, yet making Shinji's skin crawl and sending a shiver down his spine. He tried to stand, but fell again. Weakly he pushed with his left knee and palm and rolled to his back.
He regretted looking up.

"Asuka...it's been nearly two months...please, talk to me?" Misato Katsuragi stood outside the door of what used to be Shinji's room. Ever since the last Angel disappeared with Shinji, Asuka had taken up sleeping in his room, moving nothing and touching very little.
Sometimes Misato could hear her crying in the deep hours of night, it hurt a lot for her to listen then. Not that she hadn't had her own problems too. A week after he had left, she became so drunk that her body was actually poisoned by the alcohol. Only Asuka's quick thinking and fast driving had saved her from an untimely death. Misato had been sober for a month and a half now.
Still going strong.
"Asuka, I'm coming in...alright?"
The door slid back, letting a thin sliver of light that revealed Asuka sitting on the side of Shinji's bed, looking at a small picture in a silver frame. The once-neat covers were now twisted and warped in a spiraling pattern of anarchy as she sat there, rimmed eyes studiously examining the picture. A small glint of light fell from her face to land quietly on the glass cover of the picture.
'She's crying again,' Misato thought with pity.
"Why?"
"Asuka, why what?"
"Why didn't he tell me sooner...why didn't he TELL ME?!" Asuka shouted the last two words and looked at her friend and guardian. Misato grimaced slightly as she saw the dark rings under her fifteen year old ward's eyes. Soon those eyes teared over again, and she collapsed inward shaking with sobs. Misato quickly rushed over to her side and wrapped her in a warm embrace. The pair stayed that way for nearly two hours; slowly rocking back and forward.

Shinji retched at the horrible sight before his eyes.
Demons, the only thing his mind could attach as a name to these abominations, of all shapes and forms raged in the air, on the ground. Some in the form of hideous half-woman, half-bird beasts. Some in a more familiar but decidedly outerworldy forms of western dragon kind. Still others with no form at all, composed of whatever seemed to come to mind. Amorphous blobs of putrid flesh with thousands of bloodshot eyes that roiled and boiled in and out of cavernous maws filled by sharp, yellowed teeth. Still others in different forms, but nearly all alien to him. Though there were a few that resembled humans; it was these that made him lose anything still contained in his stomach. For one was likened to a man, but with his innards turned out to face the world.
Horrible.
As he looked up he found several more, different monsters, armed with coal- black swords of many shapes and designs. Nearly all dripped a black-red fluid.
Every single one looked dangerous.
"Khal! Starbrin khalthi!" Screeched one again, its taloned finger thrusting at Shinji's pained and weakened body.
"Nebt, catlrhact dkssral nebt das Abethull!" ordered another. This one was half- man, half-horse; dressed in armor that seemed to absorb the light of where ever they stood. In his hands rested an ebony bow, on his flank: a quiver of arrows that gleamed with a foul crimson light.
At his command several of the beasts leapt forward, eager gleams of hatred glowing bright in their eyes. "St-STAY AWAY!" Shinji desperately shouted, scrabbling backwards. Flailing around for someone, something to protect himself from the foul monstrosities he faced.
"Hegin tsallne'th farw ye'yuth!" Crowed one tall, horned, and scarlet skinned creature. "Ca-cathe daspretha." A mocking coo came from the perverted lips of whatever evil now laughed at him. The rest cackled with perverse delight.
"Retha al cha'a," the first said, reaching his claws forward. "Vimmis Tabris-chal manalia des...bratha mvunn ne'nalta des cha'a."
Shinji didn't understand what the creature was spouting at him. But one glance at the thick slobber that foamed by the corners of the surrounding creatures mouths and he knew that whatever was said: wasn't going to be a pleasnt aspect for him.
"NO!"
He curled up, willed the horrible things to disappear.
The smell of blood remained.
"Se-sai neth la destea Meinia!" Cried a golden voice of honey and wine. But Shinji did not hear it, his mind frozen by fear of death, pain, and torture by the hands and claws of the foul monstrosities that lurked above him. He remained curled in his ball, praying to whoever he could remember to save him and wake him from this nightmare. It was worse than anything he had experienced in Eva.
Worse than the Twelfth Angel.
Worse that the month long imprisonment after the Fourteenth.
The sounds stopped.
Shinji slowly lifted his head and gazed out on a small troupe of men dressed in armor that was caked by a dozen layers of black ichor and some powerdery film, the armor must have been silver at one time, tiny glints reflected the light of a sun that Shinji could not see or feel. Each held a sword in their hands, similarly coated as the armor, and all breathed heavily.
But soon Shinji was concentrating on something else. He was focused on the wings that each of the warriors had sprouting from two slits in the back of their armor.
"Setsai...valthet nie gatho aved heldes ao thade vel-outhern flank. Hrothgar, go and find Egcthow and relieve him. The rest of you go to help Achilles on the center. Shore up that hole."
"Sir!" The rest saluted the one giving the orders, they drew their curved swords up to their chest, bladetip pointing downward, then leapt into the air and sped off.
Small white feathers drifted down behind them.
Shinji stared at the remaining man. Then curled tighter as he saw the shoulders droop with a sigh. He felt fear, now a familiar fiend in his stomach, grip tighter as he turned to face him. Twist nauseatingly in his stomach as he saw the thick ichor drop off the sharp tip of the being's sword.
Then he heard the honey words drip into his ear.
"Well, well...I do wonder how you managed to end up here."
"Wh-who? What?" Shinji stuttered, his eyes shifting to the bloodied bits of bodies laying in a pool of dark fluid. The man, no, boy...of barely nineteen years of age it seemed, glanced down at that pool. He sniffed derisively, stepping forward to avoid the spreading blood from getting on his boots. Not that it would matter much, they were already covered in several coats of his enemies' blood.
"We've no time to waste here," The boy said suddenly, snapping his eyes up and on Shinji's shivering frame. "Come, I will not harm you."
Shinji didn't believe that, but then again--who would? Yet as he sat their, instinctively curled in his birthing position, he heard a faint cry in the distance. The clash of metal on metal. The roars of men--or some beast. And they were getting closer.
The boy impatiently cast his eyes around, spying several dark shapes approaching from the south of them. Approaching fast. "Come on damn it! We haven't much time!" He practically shouted at Shinji, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
"Wh-where am I?" Shinji said, his mind slowly numbing itself into shock. The boy sighed and sheathed his sword, the first time he had done so since he had arrived on this plain of death.
"I'll make this simple then. Do you want to live?"
"I don't understand?" Shinji really didn't. The noise, the sights, the smell; it was all too much for him to comprehend. He couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions written on the heel if he had to. Seeing this, the boy finally growled in frustration and rushed over, picked Shinji up, and ran. He ran several meters before he leapt high above the ground.
Shinji gave a cry of alarm, fearing that this person might fly high into the air and then drop him to his death. He shut his eyes tightly and held on to the stained breastplate of the man for several long moments. His throat gagged as the slick feel of hot blood rubbed into his skin, but he could empty nothing from his stomach. Every so often he would feel his bearer dip and sway, as if to avoid some unseen obstacle. Well, unseen to Shinji, who's eyes remained tightly clenched together.
"D-do ya hafta hold onto my chest so tightly?" The boy croaked out, one hand grasping at his sword and the other tugging at the wiry arms that clenched hard upon his lungs.
Shinji opened his eyes, and felt dizzy. The wind rushed past him at a furious rate, whipping his bangs about with the tidal rush of air. He almost let go completely, an apology on his lips, then he remembered that he was probably several hundred meters above the ground.
A quick glance down showed this to be true.
"Aaugh!" The boy cried for a moment as Shinji's grasp tightened around his chest, further restricting his breath.
The view was, spectactularly morbid, to say the least.
High above the plain of endless, for it seemed to stretch for infinity, white they were. Giving them a clear and unobstructed view of the battle taking place below.
A battle of Heaven and Hell.
As he watched, Shinji found himself attracted to the fighting, or rather: slaughter, taking place so far below him. Shapes in silver, some with wings and others without, surged forward to meet a line of black, crimson, and midnight blue. The lines clashed. Flashes of light, glints from sword and armor, gleamed brightly into his eyes even at his height. Gushes of scarlet and deep crimson flooded the plain's floor, marks of where another had fallen and died. The soul fleeing to who knows where.
"God..." Shinji breathlessly mouthed, his arms going slack at the sight of it all. For the lines stretched the length of the plain, going out of sight several miles away in either direction. A massive war of cataclysm and apocalypse. A war that sweeps all before it as the Reaper in a field of ripe wheat.
Enough blood to quench a desert.
"No, he's not here at the moment," Shinji's bearer wryly commented, happy to be breathing again. "He and Lucifer and most of the Angel Spirits promised never to directly involve themselves in the fight here. Too easy to win I suppose."
"What? I-I didn't mean that as a question!"
"Oh!" The boy replied hastily, embarrassed at his gaffe. "Sorry, been long since I had a real conversation." Shinji was about to ask him a question, for many raged through his mind; but before he could the boy peered intently ahead and silenced him with a hiss. "Dragons."
"What! DRAGO-O-O-ONNSSSSSSSS!!!" Shinji's last word became a half-word, half-cry of alarm as his bearer banked sharply to the left and began to climb swiftly. The sheer force of the maneuver had the younger man pressed hard against the metal plating of the winged boy's chest. They continued to climb and Shinji desperately tried to force air down his lungs. Then he caught sight of them.
Dragons.
Dragons of evil.

It had been three months since Shinji Ikari had passed on to whatever lay beyond the veil of death. Three months since he had saved her once again from the fires. Three months in which Asuka Langley Sohryu lived a life of pain and torment. She still cried at night. Though no longer for her mother. Now she cried for the one person who truly loved her. Even if she didn't love him back at the time. That was her source of pain. The one thing that kept her awake at night.
"Asuka?"
Hikari frowned as her friend didn't respond. Normally the Eva pilot would be a ray of optimistic sunshine, clouded over by the occasional fit of pique that often lashed out at one of the three stooges. Hikari's frown traveled further south as she remembered that there was only one stooge left now.
"It hurts, you know." Asuka said, absently chewing on the food Hikari had brought to her.
She blushed at that, remembering how Asuka had showed up without any food, her own cooking skills poorly inadequate for her picky taste. Hikari always did make extra food, and so now she gave it to Asuka. Even though it had been intended for Touji.
"Losing a loved one always does."
They rarely tread this ground. It was hard for both of them. Touji in the hospital, missing his leg. Shinji...well, perhaps he was the best off out of all the world. But he was still gone.
"I keep hoping Hikari...dreaming that he comes back..."
"Hope keeps you alive." She helpfully added, seeing a small spark of emotion rise and bob from the depths of Asuka's eyes. Then that spark died. Diminished by a swelling wave of despair and shadowy pain.
"...but then I wake up." Asuka finished in a small voice.
They lapsed into silence.

"We have to go down!" The boy shouted in Shinji's ear, the wind nearly sweeping the words away.
"WHAT!?" That was heard loud enough. But the boy paid no mind, instead he leaned forward and went into a power dive. Shinji screamed.
'Madness, insanity!' he rapidly thought, images of him broken and dying on that field of battle flashing before the mind's eye. "We're going to die!" he finally shouted instead, his fear forcing him to release. His breath was sucked away, and he could not breath again.
The white ground rushed up, the forms took shape, and still the bearer dove. Shinji felt a calm wash over him, he latched on to it. Rode it. Felt his mind relax, and instead of fastening on his impending doom, he concentrated on the figures he approached.
The sheer scale of the melee made his head spin wildly, or perhaps that was the rapid loss of altitude. Men: tall, short, broad, lanky, fat, and thin, all covered in silver armor of many kinds, stained deep with scarlet blood pushed valiantly against their foes. Foes that made natural creatures seem like a naive child's rendition of the world.
Wolves of black and arctic white lashed out with blood foamed mouths, rending through steel and flesh like an axe through paper. Serpents with the heads of intelligent men and women, slithered forward and in a flash of motion entwined their lengthy body around one of their enemies. Crushing him without mercy. Giant Minotaurs, one of the creatures Shinji could readily identify, charged forward with their horns lowered. Giant axes with double head held at the ready should the foe survive the feared gorging. Skeletal horrors swarmed enmass at clusters of sliver-steeled men, their hands of bleached bone scrabbling and gouging whatever they ran into.
Creatures wrapped in tattered robes of black and red were at the rear of these clusters, directing with gentle sweeps of the hand. Their skin was a pallid gray, and bone showed through in some places. In others the skin was merely peeled away to reveal worm-riddled flesh underneath.
An explosion nearby drew Shinji's eyes. Three men, all with white hair sticking up in shocks charged forward at a gap in the evil forces assault. They had crazed looks in their eyes, and carried several smoking beakers of an archaic design in their hands. One turned, and Shinji gasped seeing that the entire left side of this creature had been peeled away until black bone could be seen, and threw forward one of these smoking containers. It burst and exploded with a loud roar and a noxious cloud of brown smoke, intermittent with blue flames.
Shinji had to turn away as he saw the men inside that flame crawl out, the steel of their armor running in little rivers as it melted from the heat. "I'm gonna be sick." He muttered breathlessly, feeling the calm ebb and twist into a small black pit. He felt hollow courage pulse from that pit.
"HANG ON!" Shouted the boy, pulling his back and shoulders above his legs as he spread his wings wide to catch the air. The pair's descent slowed, but they landed hard anyway.
"AAUGH!"
"Oumpfh!"
Shinji found himself launched forwards, his arms flailing wildly as the white, barren plain rushed to meet him. Then he hit and rolled forward, ending his journey back down. The boy also rolled forward and onto his back. But was quickly on his feet with his sword out and gripped tightly. He rushed to the unmoving Shinji and gave him a small shake.
"Hey, HEY! Get up...GET UP!" His voice lowered to a growl, and he shook the motionless boy underneath him harder. "GET UP!!"
Shinji opened his eyes and blinked once. Then he saw the monster. "BEHIND!" He shouted quickly, jabbing his finger past his rescuers face.
"NGGHHHAAAY!" The boy snarled as he whipped himself around, only to get a spearpoint through a greave in his armor for the trouble. Bloody foam exploded in a wide arc as the impact forced out the boy's lungs. The sword clattered beside Shinji's hands with a metal clang.
Shinji stared, 'H-he's gonna die...Its my fault...ITS MY FAULT THAT HE'S GONNA DIE!!!!!!'
The creature, a thick thing that looked something like a tall human with straw hair, one eye, and muscles that rippled with power underneath fire- red skin; flung his spear aside with contemptual ease. The body made a sick gooshing slurp as it tore free of the pitted iron haft.
"Ds'carrth dast thuu," the creature mumbled contently as it slowly leveled its spearpoint towards Shinji. The world receded, then went black.

"Tadamia." Her voice was unenthused. She knew that Misato wasn't home, just as it had been for three months. Her three months of regret and pain. "Shinji.." Asuka slumped against the door, sliding down and pooling at the bottom. "Why did you have to do that baka...why?"
Tears fell.
"I-I could have h-handled it my-self-" The Katsuragi household has had its share of tears. But these past months have been too much for even its stoic walls to handle. If it was possible, the walls would have cried with her.

Shinji blinked.
He was standing in a position that seemed--familiar. His legs were evenly spaced apart with his shoulders, his right foot faced forwards with his left pointing out ninety degrees. Body was hunched over, his arms were extended out, holding...a sword?
'Where..?' He felt a gush of heat flow across his hands, his eyes lifted and stared at the paling face, contorted with shock, of the monster that stood above him.
'What...how? Where?' he asked himself rapidly, trying to remember why he was thrusting this sword into the chest of another being. And with that thought he shoved the blood-slicked handle away from his hands. As if he would catch an incurable disease from that weapon of death.
Yet he felt something inside him as he watched the beast fall to the ground and slowly start to create a pool of red death. He felt reassurance, pride, dignity at killing this creature. His blood thrummed and his mind went into warp drive as adrenaline surged through the system.
He felt at peace. Calm. Totally collected and all intact. He had just killed that creature, 'But how?!' His calm was soon shattered by a shout from behind him. "LOOKOUT! MINOTAUR COMING IN!"
The shout, though in an unfamiliar tongue, was understood plainly by the fourteen-year-old Japanese boy. He suddenly found himself spear in hand, facing the charging beast of myth and wondering: 'What the hell am I doing?' "What...in the HELL am I DOING?!!" Shinji shouted as the beast of legend rushed forward. He cried it again as it closed in with him, so close that he could see the blood that caked its horns. He could see its every detail, the dried rivulus of red. The bubbles and bits of rotted flesh that was trapped inside of its yellowed teeth.
And then the time for questions was over.
Shinji sidestepped desperately, letting the Minotaur fly wildly by him. The spear in his hand twirling around with a blinding swirl of blue-black iron, then he threw himself backwards; thrusting down with his full weight on the spearhaft. Diseased flesh parted under the edge of cold iron, letting the lifesblood spurt out in a waterfall of warmth.
The beast crashed into the ground, squealing in pain and fury as it felt its corrupted soul slipping free. With a final heave it died, white foam dripping freely from its mouth as the thick tongue black with pestilence flopped loose. Shinji only stared at the dead thing, then shifted to his hand. He didn't even remember how he got behind the creature, let alone how he killed it.
"STOP STARING AT THAT DEAD THING AND HELP FIGHT YOU!"
Shinji dumbly looked away from his limp hand, a hand that had done a feat that only battlehard warrior experts or deathloving fools would try, to watch a man hack and beat towards him. The man was fighting his way through a line of small, gnarled creatures with tall black spears. He spun wildly, the blade of his weapon cutting deeply into that line killing several and causing the rest to flee in pain. With a quick glance around he then focused on Shinji.
Suddenly, Shinji felt the weight of a sword in his hands again.
Struggling forward, the man approached Shinji and then stopped, taking a blow meant for his head with the flat of his sword. Then driving the tip of that blade into the chest of his assailant. The fount of blood washing over his hands and forearms before he ripped it free.
"Come boy! You knew what you joined for! So get to it and stop-...My God!" The man stopped in front of Shinji, his face paling as he studied the boys pale and shaken face, his slanted eye line, the deep blue eyes that reflected out a torrent of emotions.
"You, you haven't got the mark! What the hell are you doing out here?!"
The fighter grabbed Shinji's hand and roughly dragged him into a swirling mass of death and blood. For in the short amount of time it took for the two sides to rejoin themselves in conflict they had shifted and swayed around the motionless boy, totally surrounding his position. The pair headed away from a trio of men with wings. Who, as Shinji saw, were pulling the body of the boy who bore him into this battle away from it.
Seeing this, he wrenched his hand free, earning a stern look from his new guardian. "I'm going with them. Either come with me or not at all."
The man looked at the fallen fighter and his guardians, then back to Shinji's face. "Then we shall go. But I will say this: Strike at any foe who attacks you...for if ye show it mercy then you shall find yourself dead...for real."
Shinji felt his eyes widen, his hand go slack and his stomach churn at the prospect of killing another person. even if it was one of these apparitions of evil and cruelty that churned around him. Shinji hardened his resolve, tightened his slack grip on the handle. "I-I shall do what I can."
"Good," The man said, giving Shinji a push. "That is all that can be expected from a new one."
And so they entered the fight.

"Asuka? I'm home!"
Misato stepped past the automatic door and slipped off her shoes. Slipping the plastic grocery bags to one hand she walked down the foyer of the apartment and lithely glided into their living room. Asuka was there, absently flipping through the channels on the T.V., not paying attention to her friend and guardian.
"Hello? Hellooooo, Asuka?" Misato said, waving a hand in front of the redhead's face.
Asuka blinked once, jerking backwards in surprise. "M-Misato?! When did you get here?"
Misato frowned, seeing the puffy eyes and the red bags lined underneath her crystal blue eyes. 'She's been thinking about Shinji again,' she thought to herself. "Not to long ago," Misato said with a smile, pulling back and heading off to the kitchen. "I'll fix dinner now so you just go back to watching."
In short order she was preparing a meal, not a very pleasant smelling one, but one that could be deemed better than that first disastrous meal she and Shinji Ikari shared, so long ago. She stopped for a moment, reflecting on that day. Remembering the moment it marked in her past, how many changes he had forced her to go through with him living with her.
A drop of water hit her hand.
"Shinji..."
Misato heard the microwave ding, and the television shut off. Slowly Asuka entered the room, and moved to give a sobbing Misato a hug. "It still hurts us both doesn't it?" Asuka asked, her tone gentle.
"Yes," She answered, turning and hugging Asuka back. "It does still hurt...I don't think it will ever go away."
The pair slowly parted, each regaining control of their raging emotions. Then in a flurry of motion they shuffled about the kitchen, setting out food and plates. Water and soda, linen and chopsticks.
The food was better than anything else she had made before.
"Misato.." Asuka asked quietly between mouthfuls of food.
"Yes?"
"Tell me about Shinji? Before I got here."
She laughed a bit, reaching for her glass. "Well, his first day here he managed to show me his birthday suit-"
"WHAT?!"
Pen Pen cuckled in his fridge, remembering that day.

Shinji knew fear, but he also knew the face of battle. He was the pilot of Evangelion Unit 01 after all. He had faced some of the most terrifying creatures known to man...and killed them. Of course, he had a giant purple robot to help him out in those occasions. As well as a thousand highly trained personnel to back him up and tell him what to do.
This was a bit different than that.
"Hhhhyyaahhh!!"
The sword flashed, bit deep, robbed the flesh of its life and dropped it shapelessly to the ground. Only to be raised and flash down again. He wasn't perfect with the sword, it being slightly too large for his size and too heavy for his thin body to wield and use properly but you made do, or you died. His hair stung his eyes, sweat running in rivulus down those brown locks and into his blue eyes. He blinked through it, and swung again.
The sword served it served its purpose, and the man who guided him through the fight to some unknown destination protected him from the worst of blows. His hair was easily brushed aside, and so was only a problem a portion of the time. Now they faced a line of skeletons, guided apparently by the half-flesh less being with pinpoint red lights in its black eye sockets near the rear.
"STRIKE THE HEAD! THE REST WILL DIE WITH IT!" Shouted the man in Shinji's ear. Then he charged off to take on three of the undead bones.
Shinji barely had time to nod and shout back that he understood before he faced three of them himself. Following the mans instructions, he aimed his first blow to the yellow-white death's grin to the right. The swing went wide. And the skeletal grins appeared to widen with glee at the apparent inexperienced of their opponent became clear. A slight, dry chuckle like the rustling of old paper in a wind emitted from the robed creature near the back. The skeletons pressed forward.
"MOVE LAD! FIGHT! STRIKE THE HEAD!!" Shouted his protector, having dispatched two of his foes. But his shout had consequences, for the remaining skeleton lurched forward with a burst of speed and raked his claws deeply into the mans sword arm.
He gave a cry of pain and slipped in a pool of stagnant blood, falling to his backside. His sword hit the ground, its squeal of protest one of many in that merciless slaughter. His cry of pain lost amongst the clamor around him.
Shinji, though, heard both as clearly as he would hear a whisper in a library.
Blood rushed to his head. His vision narrowed, the sides turned black. The noise around him died away...fading as he focused on that one clarion call, the ringing of steel as it connected with a solid floor. He could hear the beating of his heart. Time slowed.
Then speeded.
The blade flashed brightly in the light of a sun that was not seen. Down chopped its edge. Once. Twice. Three times it made the downstroke. The bones clacked together and disintegrated to dust as they fell, no longer held together by the binds of their skulls. The master gasped out an unintelligible string of words that caused Shinji's skin to crawl with disgust and revulsion.
With a snarl he approached him as well, his blood boiling with rage and desire to kill anything that harmed those who were trying to save him from this hell hold.
The cold hit him like a wave from the sea.
Frigid air chilled him to the bone--or was the coldness coming from inside? Shinji couldn't tell, and to him it did not matter. So with a heave of his legs with what strength left to him he flung himself away from the demon.
Shinji landed hard on his back and elbow. The sword dropping easily from cold and pain numbed fingers. Then the cold returned to him. The creature approached, speaking in its dry parchment voice.
"Da'tsssassna Tabrisss-chal dacthsssdna bssdreazadzz," the voice hissed out, fear sweeping over Shinji as it spoke out words with a voice dryer than a salt flat. Now he could feel his body shake, could feel his lips turn blue from the cold.
"H-help me," he breathed out, fearing his end. His eyes shut and in the darkness he saw the most beautiful image he had ever beheld. He saw a red- haired, flamboyantly tempered German girl. A girl he loved. A girl he would never see again. The calm returned to him, he felt his dry throat suddenly wet. The calm tasted like sweet water after months without drink.
He was ready.
The cold vanished.

Asuka stayed awake long into the night.
It was the four-month anniversary of Shinji's death. Misato, Ritsuko, Hikari, Kensuke, Pen Pen, and her had a small party in his honor that evening. It was quiet. Somber.
Misato was crying. Ritsuko was quiet and reflective, telling stories occasionally about Shinji. Hikari and Pen Pen sat together one enjoying the company of the other. Kensuke--Kensuke wasn't the same person. He almost never brought his camera anywhere anymore, and he almost never spoke in class or in public. In short he was turning into another Rei Ayanami.
Rei.
She had also been invited. But something had come up apparently at NERV Headquarters. Another test or something that the Bastard had scheduled for her. He certainly didn't care for his lost son. Though Unit 01 had rejected all of his current pilots.
There was one bright point to all of this gloom. No Angels had yet to attack. Four months and not a glimmer of a blue pattern. "Perhaps Shinji is fighting them in Heaven, or wherever the hell he is now." Asuka concluded bitterly. "Once again, Invincible Shinji is taking all the g-glory..."
She clasped a hand over her mouth and cried. She had tried to let go, but she couldn't. It just wasn't possible. Not possible for her while her memories of him, his face, his voice, little inflections of his hands; she could not forget him so easily while his death was so near.
"I miss you...and...I-I love you. Wherever you are, Shinji."
She went to sleep shortly after. Her tear stained eyelids too heavy to keep open.
Her heart to heavy to think anymore.

Shinji opened his eyes, halfway through the short prayer he was thinking.
His mouth fell agape at the sight he beheld.
Most of the men fighting around him had silver armor. This could be easily seen. And most wielded swords the length of three feet. A few, as could be seen, were swinging axes of all shapes and forms. Some even, though far to the back, had bows slung across the shoulder. Giving up their range for close in support, fearing to hit their own men.
The man standing over the headless corpse was none of these.
His armor was golden bronze, worked with emblems of lions and roses, with a short leather skirt pierced through with studs of shined silver. His weapons, and he carried them with one in each hand, were of the ancient Roman Gladius design. Though of a refined work with exquisite detailing the likes of which could never have been achieved in his times. A helm of polished silver sat on his head; its design likewise coming from an elder time, perhaps as far back as Greek times. A high tuft of Black horsehair coming down from its holder high above the head, whipping wildly in the air currents of the field.
"So," Boomed the golden warriors deep voice. "You are the one that has the enemy whipped to a frenzy." "Yes Achilles. He is...alive?" came a confused answer.
Shinji whipped his head around, spying his protector coming forward, clutching his wounded arm tightly to his breast, the blood streaming from in between his fingers.
"Tend to yourself, Master Robin. This is no place to bleed to death; not when a warrior's death is much more attainable."
"Yes , I go to take our live boy here to the rear," the man Robin stepped forward and lifted Shinji to his feet.
"Good. I will follow and protect you," Achilles pointed with his gladius and Robin started off, gently dragging Shinji behind him. "LEGIONNAIRES FALL BACK! CIRCLE FORMING ON ME!!" Achilles shouted suddenly before turning to slice a charging wolf in a blur of steel.
The beast fell to the ground, blood flowing and spurting from its body as it twitched out its last moments. he men, still fighting the creatures of evil, gave a roar of acknowledgment and began to shuffle backwards. Backwards along with Shinji.
He took a moment to study the battle from his position, the area he was entering beginning to thin out with both man and beast.
Even though they retreated, the fighting was still as fierce as before. Turning even bloodier as the demons pressed their newfound advantage against the men. Centaurs rode forward through the ranks, bows nocked and ready to let fly an arrow at the chance opening. Many men fell, finding several black feathered hafts of ebony laced with crimson light sprouting in their chest.
Shinji watched with horrid fascination as one brave fighter rushed to protect another. His sword slicing deep into a shorter creature like an axe through a watermelon. Shinji averted his eyes as the same brave soul was rushed by a tall, foul, and ugly beast who crushed his head in with a heavy war hammer. The brains and blood flushing out over the fallen warrior nearby; who found himself swarmed by evil creatures shortly after.
Shinji couldn't block out the screams however.
A roar drew his unwilling eyes upwards, and unnatural fear crushed his chest as winged dragons swooped down on the lines. Fire, acid, ice, and lightning spewed forth from their gaping maws. Some sweeping the massed ranks of both foe and friend. Others gouging out flying warriors from the skies around them.
Blackened husks of charred flesh fell to the ground, landing with wet but crispy thuds. One fell close to the fleeing pair. Robin took a look at it and hustled on, roughly pulling Shinji away from the sight of it. Somehow, the image remained--burned into his mind's eye.
"I'm gonna be sick again." Shinji said, stumbling over his feet as Robin urged him into a run. Feeling his calm sink away.
"No! Now there's the lad, come on! Keep moving, KEEP MOVING!" Screams resounded. The cries of the dead dying. Cries of the damned being destroyed. "Come on! There's the gate lad! We're almost there!" Indeed. Before them was a portal of white, wreathed in wisps of fog. Standing guard over this portal were rows and rows of winged archers. Their duty a long and unwanted one of boredom. Though now they would see the fight.
The Eternities War.
Now they took up their long unused bows. Setting white, goosefeather arrows into their taught sinew bowstrings. Pulling back hard on those stings, taking careful aim at the reviling dragons. Who continued to breath their deadly exhaust on the men and monsters below.
A horn sounded, clear and golden.
As one, the arrows left their holds and sped onwards up through the air, flying straight, true. They found their marks, though more than a few bounced off the hard scale of the dragons flanks. Some sank in deep, however, and several found killing marks. More than one dragon fell to the ground. Falling into the ranks of the melee, crushing man and monster as though he was a can caught underneath a ton of rock. It was one of these that landed near the golden Achilles. And with its dying strength it lurched forward and bit deeply around his body.
"Wait!" Shinji shouted, using the heavy sword in his hands to point back towards the fallen Achilles. "We have to help him! He's trapped!" Robin stopped his rush for only a moment then shook his head and tugged Shinji a little harder.
"He'll be fine!" He shouted, his words barely sounding over the death wails of thousands of beasts and men.
"But--" Shinji took one look back. Calm, that cloying feeling that came and went for him here rushed through him again as he watched Achilles free himself from the maw of the beast, hacking away at the creatures surrounding him. Taunting them with his loud voice that could be clearly heard even at this distance. Slicing them with abandon with his two swords, his hands a whirling blur of dulled steel.
"Don't worry about him lad! Achilles is protected by powers that you and I never had! Just as he was in ancient times!" Robin shouted, dragging Shinji through the front ranks of archers.
The horn sounded again, the bows sang their tune of death, and the arrows hissed through the air. Only to be stopped and hurled back towards their shooters, skewed from their original directions by the sudden blast of air emanating from the far end of that field of death.
To a man, every living being was thrown to the ground by the shockwave. Those in the air, dragon and man alike, found it hard to maintain their precarious grip on the sky. Some landed hard into the ground, unable to regain enough speed for flight. Wet snaps of bone and torn sinew sickened the air.
Then, darkness began to seep across the endless plain of light. Creeping forward...and rapidly. "What's that?" Shinji asked flatly, having long ago lost any amazement at this strange new place he was in.
"God, protect us now! A DEVIL! ONE OF THE SEVENTEEN COMES!!" Robin lurched to his feet, struggling against the hard winds that rushed back towards the vacuum of night that was spreading like a poison across the white and red of their present reality, pulling Shinji along behind him as he tried to reach the portal. Wisps of fog curled around Shinji's feet as he stared at the approaching blackness, staring helplessly at the approaching unknown thing.
Then he saw it.
A being of light, familiar in its form.
Arael.
The Fifteenth Angel.
Achilles roared his approval with arms outstretched.



"Tabris..."
The gray haired, red eyed boy turned to face the hissing, slippery whisper. Why the creature who uttered the whisper did so was beyond understanding. For he was as bright as a lightbulb, his entire body a shaft of light amidst a sea of dark chaos. The brightness emitting from this creature illuminated nothing however. Leaving the darkness with its own as he glided through clouds of scalding steam and small pillars of dull red flame.
"Armisael," the Seventeenth Oni-Shoti greeted, though his voice was cased in ice. "So good of you to join me."
Armisael stopped short of the smaller boy, wary of making him angry. The leader of the Oni-Shoti had a nasty temperament when amongst his own kind; he preferring to be roaming amongst the humans below on Earth infinitesimally more than to be seen or even look down upon his own kind. For a moment of eternity Armisael again pondered why the leader of The Morningstar's armies would do such a thing as wander destitute amongst the humans--and then he realized that doing so let Tabris escape, literately, from the hell that was his eternal home.
"I assume you heard." Tabris turned away from the glowing Armisael with his featureless face to stare down at the rippling pool of water by his feet.
Armisael started at the prompt, then moved round to face opposite Tabris as he stared down. Armisael glanced down briefly, saw the familiar visage of the Eternities Plain with its bloodthirsting war raging in the black waters of the device. Saw Arael emerge from a rift of coal black flames and speed to the direction of Heaven's Gate, darkness heralding his arrival to that plane of death.
"It's a waste."
"Indeed," Tabris replied. "But one that both our Master and God seem willing to compromise on. As long as the Eternities War rages, neither side gains in power through force of arms."
Armisael scoffed, "Perhaps. But now we have lost fourteen of our number...and today perhaps another. Achilles is no foot soldier, he will be hard to defeat in order to gain Ikari. How is that keeping a balance when our own are destroyed?"
"There is something else for you to think upon. The Khaglessi has appeared on the plain." Tabris cooly watched a small dot of a man founder and stare across the deepening plain of twilight and crimson.
"W-What?! The Khaglessi, here? Did Arael actually--" Armisael flinched as the twin red eyes shifted up and locked on his body, cutting his queries short.
"Look and see fool."
With a sweep of his palm the pool rippled, shifted down upon the plain and showed a struggling Shinji Ikari being manhandled through the iron arches of Heaven's Gate. Several temporal portals opened around the stationary gate and in poured wave after wave of men and arms. Their songs faintly simmered in the black, oily waters of the pool.
"We cannot reach him now." Tabris leaned back on his heels and wrapped an ebon cloak of human skin tightly around his fine form. Armisael noted the small outjut of the Oni-Shoti's sword peek out from a side flap. He nervously turned back to the pool.
"So that is why you sent Arael?"
The view shifted into a dragon's eye view. Darkness crept swiftly across the plain, spreading rapidly to either side of infinity as Arael's perverse, angelic-shaped form flew across the battlefield.
"He failed. He was supposed to destroy the mind and heart of Sohryu. He was supposed to clear the way for me to gain control of their Unit 02...So I give him this last chance to redeem himself."
"You still tell me nothing...how?" Armisael pressed.
Once more he found himself under Tabris' glare. "Their lines have faltered since the Khaglessi arrived, something is wrong on the Plain. We are closer to Heaven's Gate more now than ever." His pale visage twisted its thin, bloodless lips into a grotesque smile, "I sent him to press that advantage."
"To kill Achilles..." Armisael's head bobbed in realization.
"Yes...as you said, difficult--but, achievable." Tabris opened his mouth as if to say more and then the portal went dark.
"What in Hell?" Armisael mumbled softly.
Tabris quickly shut his mouth and turned away. Walking quickly through the darkness. Leaving one being alone with his radiance.

"NO..NO!" Shinji shouted, falling to his knees at the sight of his last foe. "WILL I NEVER BE FREE OF THEM?!!"
"Lad...Lad! Come on! We 'must' go! NOW!" Robin shouted into Shinji's ear, though it elicited not a flinch from his face or body. "God..." Robin hissed, wrapping an arm around the boy's waist; using the other to hold onto Shinji's right wrist, draped across Robin's back.
With a grunt the pair stood and began to walk to the white outlined door. Archers rushed forward and circled around the struggling fighter and his burden. Protecting them as best they could. Arrows whizzed close by. One found a mark and sprouted out of the skull of one forward facing archer, who gave a quick yelp before falling to the ground. His hand still clutching the wooden shaft as bubbling life erupted from fissures around it.
"Come on...COME ON!" Robin shouted at himself for motivation.
His foot bumped against a step. Slowly he lifted one, then the other, dragging the limp form of Shinji up those pearly steps and into the doorway that made Heaven's Gate. Arrows landed near his feet. Cracks formed in the stone where a few managed to strike with enough force to stick in. He broke one of these by a vicious kick, its radiance disappearing with its shaft.
And then they were there, and going though the light--wait, no! Flying backwards! Being sucked backwards by a fury of winds. Some devilry trick of nature! Robin had no more time for thoughts before his head landed hard against the stone.
Agony.

Asuka flinched at the sudden burst of lightning nearby. Outside the window, rain continued to pour unabated. Streams of water seemingly pouring straight from the pitch black clouds above. Misato looked questioningly at the overhead flourescents as they flickered several times, then turned to look at her roommate.
"Is your computer off?"Asuka nodded. "Good. Go get the candles. Turn off the lights as you come back." Asuka nodded again and moved to a kitchen drawer. Reaching inside she pulled out several small bath candles and two thicker ones. They had been used well recently. They had been needed every night that week.
It had been raining all that time.
"Geez," Misato said as Asuka returned, hand cupped around the flame so as to not let it sputter out. "Where the hell did all this rain come from?"
Asuka knew the speculative question, having asked herself and Hikari that question many times in the last seven days. Yet chose to answer it all the same. "Dunno...forecast said that it would have been sunny today-"
"They've been saying that for the past week. Does that look like sun to you?" Misato gestured forcefully at the patio door.
"Nope, not one bit."
The pair remained silent for a few seconds, then burst out into a few lighthearted chuckle. It wasn't meant to be a joke, but sometimes the circumstances and the people make it turn out like one. Such as now.
"..oh, oh God..." Misato attempted to re-compose herself in-between laughs, "I...really needed that." "I think we both did Misato," Asuka felt a small sigh escape her softly smiling lips.
"Yeah, yeah...though, I think Shinji would...have..." Misato fell silent as she saw Asuka's face drop. Her smile falling like a sack of potatoes. Not that she herself was feeling any better off.
Lightning crackled again.
The rain fell.

And above the War raged on.
Shinji found himself awake in a world without sound. He could clearly see sword clash with axe. Could sense that final, biting blow that found another's lifeline, cutting them neatly across the seams. Knew, when he saw the mangled bodies of several on both sides die and slump to the ground, that he should hear their death knells.
He should hear something!
Shinji did not however.
He nearly lost his skin when Robin jumped before his view, blood streaming down from a wicked gash across his eye and along his temple. Robin shouting something and pulling his arm upwards at the elbow, he glanced back at the melee, which was creeping forward ever so slowly, then back at Shinji.
His face was tight, his actions urgent, his grasp on Shinji's elbow nearly painful. The pair stood again and shuffled back to the steps, carefully moving up their white expanses. Mists from the gate once again swirling across the pairs of tennis shoes and old journeyman's boots alike. Shinji then heard the cry. The first thing he had hear for a while.
...ikari....Ikari....IKARI! YOU CANNOT HIDE! WE SHALL FINISH WHAT WE STARTED FIVE MONTHS AGO!!
Shinji flinched as the voice boomed. Though Robin seemed not to mind that loud, scratchy voice that echoed around Shinji. A wet pop sounded, sounded in his skull it seemed! Agony made his throat tremble with pain as he screeched in anguish. A wet stickiness flowed like molasses down his jaw.
I WILL KILL YOU! IKARI!!
Shinji glanced around in a daze and found that no one seemed to hear that voice. No man slowed and covered his ears. No man rushed to protect him and Robin as before. Not even Achilles seemed to notice the voice. His eyes drooped and raised sluggishly as the pain clouded him with darkness.
Because they can't hear it you fool.
Twilight swept up the steps, 'How long have we been on them?' and washed over the gate, still bright with its own inner luminescence. Shinji glanced back to the battle once more. Fear paralyzed him, shock numbed his legs, memory burned in his mind.
Arael loomed over the dark battlefield. A wrathful devil of white, in a room as black as Satan's soul. With a final heave Shinji was through Heaven's Gate, the fighter Robin heaving and puffing beside him. All Shinji felt was cold, unrelenting, fear.
A cry of anguish, a clamor of many suffering aloud, echoed through the gate. The white floor felt tears for the first time in many eons that day. The sounds of sorrow wrenching both mortal and dead alike.

"Tabris...TABRIS?" Armisael shouted before running forward, chasing his commander. In a few minutes he caught up to the hurrying boy, who paid him no mind. "Where are you going?"
"I am being recalled once again. Those fools are trying to confine me to those organisms on Earth again." "Why haven't you destroyed them yet?" Armisael tiredly asked, having covered some of this ground with his leader before.
"Because we need one to complete 'our' scenario...of course, their plans and mine find themselves at opposing angles at times."
"I still think that this plan will end badly for us," Armisael shook his head back and forth, illuminating small patches of gray hair and pallid skin on his companion as they strolled forward. "We risk much with it. Already fourteen of our number lay captured or dead by the hands of the enemy."
"They were fools to think they would survive...though I had hope in a moment that Zuriel 'might' complete his mission. I, and you as well, should have known that most of us would die before the dream came to pass."
A boom echoed through the dark world laced with blood-crimson flames and hot sulfuric vapors. Then followed a cry of exuberance, a demonic rattle of hoarse joy burning the throats of many in the sulfur caverns of Dis. The two stopped and lifted their heads upwards, carefully examining the eddies of air and gathering what information they could.
Tabris and Armisael remained silent for some time before speaking again.
"Arael has killed Achilles...impossible." Armisael slowly breathed out, his bright eyes blinking rapidly; not that anyone would know it. Tabris remained silent, then a small smirk spread across his face. Armisael withdrew a step.
'I've seen that smile before...right as he slaughtered a city with that favorite disease of his back in the 1300's. Now is definitely not the time to hang around and see what he is amused by,' Armisael thought rapidly.
"So he has...excellent! I will have to let him live, but...he has won a great victory for us," Tabris turned his eyes to Armisael. "Now then, go and greet him. And tell the Bautezuu to release the Sai-Toujh into the War."
The lighter being blinked again as his leader softly swept away from him. "And you will be where?" Tabris stopped short and glanced back, impatience creeping into his face. "S-so I may tell the Master should he ask..?" Armisael answered nervously.
The Seventeenth Angel waited a moment of eternity before he answered. "Tell him I have gone. If I want to...then I will return." For the fourth time that day, Armisael was shocked enough to blink his eyes. Tabris smiled and turned away, striding though the pitch darkness and muted mist-enshrouded flames to some unknown destination. "You, have command of Arael now...Datsuran-geii."
He stood alone in the dark of his home.
Waiting.
Watching his leader disappear.
Watching his future head off.
"This will finish it then," Armisael turned away, heading for his own battlefield.

Shinji knelt on the cold, white marble floor. He felt a burning in and around his eyes as drops of salt-impregnated water fell through the still air around him. He could almost swear that he hear the sound of his tears hitting the floor.
Such a lovely floor.
Drops of blood marred that beauty; falling in steady drips from his ruptured ears. The sudden explosion burst his eardrums, and the fires of pain were only now fading into the cobwebs of his mind. Even so: his blood still ran red and freely onto the ground beneath him.
It hurt. A cool feeling washed across him, tightening his chest around his lungs and forcing him to gasp from the suddenness of it all. It felt like he had stepped through a waterfall of freezing liquid, but it felt good. Hearing returned to him in a rush: labored breathing, cries of pain and shouts for help. Many strange and foreign tongues that mixed and mashed and blended together like a boiling soup. The grind of armor, the scrape of steel on stone, the wet splurts of life falling down to the white marble earth.
Death sighs.
Ahead of Shinji, the portal through which he was so brusquely thrown shone black and cloudy. The white wings of the Fifteenth Angel dipping slowly into view and then out again as it circled the Plain below. Bursts of orange fire and blue-white lightning lanced down upon the swarming masses that still fought and struggled for dominance. Tsunamis of acid and clouds of diamond-ice swept along the ranks of men and monster, slaying thousands. The ranks of archers continued to fire their goosefeathered arrows high into the sky. The white specks raining down to pierce through steel, flesh, bone, skin, life. Arrows of glowing scarlet returned and ripped through their ranks like an axe through cheese.
Soft hands.
Shinji lurched away from those hands, drying blood cracked along his skin as it stretched and flexed along his body. He landed facing whatever had touched him, and stammered out a question: "W-who are you?"
The man smiled, his pearl teeth shining straight and narrow. "I am Morpheus, an Angel."
"What? Angel!" Shinji felt a sudden surge of nausea bile and boil in his stomach at the thought of the things that had tried so hard for the past year to kill him and humanity looking so harmless as the thing afore him.
Morpheus smiled, "No, Shinji Ikari, I am not one of those Oni-Shoti that have attempted to xenocide your world from existence. I am a Virtue--"
"A virtue? How..?"
The being ponderously closed its eyes and in the same slow drawl, opened them again. "Virtues are a choir of Angels my young mortal, but we are not here to talk about status and file. I am the Virtue of Change, and I have been sent here, for you."
"Me?" Shinji balked at the statement, "Why me?"
"Because you are special." Morpheus rose and extended his palm away from the portal that lead to that white plain of death and chaos. "You have two choices before you now, Shinji Ikari," his other palm rose and gestured back towards the battle, "you can choose to remain yourself, to stay as you are and probably die as you are on the Eternities Plain...or: you can follow me into the rabbit hole, and see what lies beyond the darkness."
A roar of scorching flame seared through air close-by the portal to the Eternities Plain, a shattering eruption nearby echoed through Shinji's ears. Another cry of anguish arose from inside the portal. Shinji stood to face the portal's darkened visage.
Liquid Nitrogen would freeze on his blood now.
Shinji nervously backed away when he saw what was happening outside that man-sized oval. He backed up until he tripped over his own shoes, falling awkwardly onto a rising Robin. The pair fell to the ground and stood rapidly up, throwing their arms out for balance as blood rushed about their bodies.
"N-No..." Robin choked out.
Shinji merely shuddered. The plain was midnight black, making the patches of crimson blood stand out painfully clear to the observer as he watched. Flames and pools of green acid consumed the bodies of the dead, erasing them from eternities resting place. Lightning scorched and spurted between hundreds of steel-clad and iron-wielding bodies, causing water deep within their blood and skin to boil and spew out like grease from a hot pan, smoke the color of pink curling up from their blackened orifices. Icy shard rained down amongst these and found their targets. The ten-foot long and two wide shards lanced through armor, flesh, and bone like a white hot knife through butter. Other blasts consumed entire ranks of men, freezing them solidly into one giant glacier. Entombed for an eternities length as the ice melted slowly. Painfully dying as the heat became robbed from their fragile coils.
Steel and iron flashed and clashed against each other, sometimes finding a mark and letting loose a fount of red. Other times bouncing off or stopping cold, causing nothing more than an unsightly bruise. Above it all hovered Arael.
Waiting above the dead corpse of Achilles, his golden breastplate cloven cleanly in two pieces; along with the breast underneath it. Close at the dead legend's hands lay the twin swords that had, only a moment ago, flashed fast and furiously against the abyssal hordes set against him and his fellows.
Now they lay, soaking in the pool of blood that came from their master. Who grew cold and pale under the light of an unseen sun.
The lines of men were thinning. Several dozen died in the moment of eternity that it took for both Robin and Shinji to look through Heaven's Gate. And now a small group of the monsters were breaking through the likewise thinning archers. Cleaving them left and right with their wickedly curved swords and axes, their knives and daggers. Letting go of all remaining caution in an abandon of frenzied bloodlust.
They were approaching the gate.
Robin lurched forward, knocking Shinji awkward as he charged through the small gate and launched himself into the first row of creatures, these a twisted mockery of humans and pigs with long shafts of coldforged iron pikes with pitted blades set to the ends; they all tumbled and rolled down the stairs, their steel and iron ringing like bells on the stone beneath.
The air seemed to ripple and shimmer as a wave of invisible, yet highly tangible, force collided against the portal's face. The view of the Plain seemed to bubble, distort outwards like a concave piece of glass. The roar of scorching flame sounded again as the bubble collapsed back against itself. Sparks erupted along the metal frame of the Portal's door; little jolts of lightning that struck out at random to burn thin lines in the floors around them.
Outside the portal, the stone steps cracked and flew apart from whatever had forced itself against the wards of Heaven's Gate. The stairs were in ruins, and both demon monster and angelic man fought hard among their rubbled ruins. Robin himself led the center of the fray, slashing out at ebon-skinned creatures with pointed ears and almond eyes just as quickly as he disemboweled minotaurs and goblins and thick creatures with no head but many mouths. Then he disappeared under a surge of the wartide.
Shinji couldn't see him anymore.
"You must decide soon Shinji Ikari," the Virtue Morpheus quietly mentioned. "You can either go and help them, or you can go and see if you can help yourself."
Shinji never turned away from the raging maelstrom of bloody rain and ringing steel, "Help...myself? Help, them?" He felt worry and anxiety gnaw a pit through his gut, worming its way down to his bowels. They felt like water dammed behind a paper wall: soon to give way with a messy result. He was surprised he hadn't pissed himself yet.
This was much the same way he felt when Asuka was in that hell of a volcano, oh so long ago.
"Yes, Asuka Langley Sohryu...you miss her don't you?" Shinji let his head fall and stared at his feet. He started a bit as his bangs fell around his eyes, blocking off his vision, letting sweat run onto the eyelids. "I make no guarantee's's, no promises about what lies beyond the darkness...but whatever change comes about for you may also help change the lives of those you once knew. You may see them again, you may not. Unpredictable is the darkness and beyond, but a chance there is."
"And if I stay here?" Shinji closed his eyes and listened to the sickening crunch of wet bone and soft skin. Morpheus was silent for a moment before he answered in his thick and quiet voice of satin. "Then you will most likely be a great warrior. And like most great warriors, you will die."
Shinji squared his shoulders and looked through the mess of his hair at the plain, littered with the broken and twisted bodies of the once-living and the near-dying. "Show me your darkness."
Morpheus' eyes seemed to glaze over, turning silver and mirrored as his skin darkened to a midnight pitch. His robes, once white linen, turned as black as his skin. Two wings ripped through the imprisoning cloth, each a deep grey that shimmered like velvet. His lips pressed into a thin line before he spoke his words. "Follow me."

Armisael stewed and fumed at Tabris.
Though he hid it very well.
"Now what am I supposed to do?" He asked himself out of frivolent desire, "I can't show up on Earth to fight...not with Arael still alive. Tabris has gone to do his 'mortal' wanderings...and I am left to deal with this, situation."
Armisael stared gloomily into the murk of his own scrying pool, set deep within his own lair. Hidden well away from all but the most trusted, if any in Hell could be called so, servants. He bemusedly cheered as he saw the forces of Heaven break and scatter for the first time in many millennia. He held his breath as he closely observed the leading element of Hell's armies close to the third step away from Heaven's Gate, only to curse as one brave warrior charged out and slammed headlong into his foes, slaughtering several before his friends rallied to his plight.
Still, he had to applaud the courage of that man. Surrounded by minotaur, goblins, and a smattering of twisted human-like creatures named voors; he refused to give up and give in to the call of sweet oblivion. "Impressive, for one who isn't protected by divinity himself."
With a small tendril of his thought, Armisael pulled back the waters view and shifted it over to Arael. The only being of white other than the First and Second, and himself, to be found within the ranks of the Seventeen. They were an unusual group, as all four were directly related, supposedly the reason they were all white to begin with. Armisael and Arael were the elder of the pair, Armisael older than Arael himself. The others were Lilith and Adam, the twins.
The first pair of humans.
The first to be corrupted and tainted by Armisael's master after he fell from heaven.
The being of white snarled as he clearly and painfully remembered that day. He could easily recall it in an instant, remembering the suffering, the torment, the agony at being newly separated from the grace of divinity.
Slowly a smile crept across the face of light. It would have put Gendo Ikari to shame with its subtle nuances of cruelty and malicious intent. Any other human it would have them soon pissing their pants and rocking, coma- like, in a dark corner. He had practiced it for several aeons to get it just right. He was proud of it.
'The plan will come to fruitation for us...if Tabris manages to pull it off,' Armisael waved a finger in the direction of the pool, letting the image ripple away. 'Finally we shall have what we always longed for...what we've dreamed of since the fall...' The smile widened. "Yes..."

Shinji rubbed his hand roughly against the dried black blood that ran in a thick line down from his ears. Skin burned and fell away as he pulled away the attached dead tissue. "How can I hear again?" he brusquely asked, feeling a shadowy mood fall upon his mind as he trailed beside the suddenly foreboding Morpheus.
"Many things are possible to one of God's servants. Especially in the realm of the unlived." Morpheus made no sound as he shuffled away from the portal that he named Heaven's Gate. Shinji warily looked about him, sensing a feeling of dread close around them as they went on.
"Unlived?"
Morpheus gave a tight smile to the air, "Where we are is a place of stasis. Where nothing occurs except the movements of one soul from one place to another. From here to there; hither and yon; forwards and back--"
"Forwards to where? And back from what?" Shinji interrupted.
Flashes of unseen light flowed across the silvered mirrors of the Virtue's eyes. "Forwards to their life on Earth, or back from dying once again. The warriors fighting the Eternities War live in a state of unlife. As long as they live, they have sworn themselves to fight on the Plain. Yet when they die, they have a second choice: return once again to Earth, or leave for something else."
Shinji gave a sidelong look at his guide, "What is this something else? And where were my choices?"
A thin, dry chuckle fell richly from the midnight lips of the Guiding Virtue. "But how can we give a choice to one that has not died yet?"
Goosepimples erupted along his cold flesh. The twilight around them seemed to writhe and fall behind and aside them like a hungry creature about to pounce its prey and feast until naught but bleached bones were left.
"Is this the Darkness?
"Yes. And soon you will find yourself beyond. Where Fate is put aside for the moment, and Change rules the Future."
"Are," Shinji found his throat suddenly dry, "are you that Change?"
"Once in the beyond, we will soon know."
The darkness closed and soon all light was gone. Shinji felt nothing, and then--
He felt Everything.



When the darkness faded, Shinji was on a hill sitting in the small shade of a wilting sakura tree. The blossoms had long since passed, but their cloy scent still aeromated the breeze around him. Dark clouds rumbled far in the distance; their low underbellies brushing against the tips of grass-green mountains in the distance.
The damp feel of rain soaked the air. The humidity clung to his glistening, naked frame. Droplets of salt and water rolled across his sides and brow.
"Where am I?" he quietly asked.
"You are in Japan, near the town of Shisenkimi; precisely one hundred kilometers from the Tokyo-3 city limits."
Shinji rolled away from the high, squeaky voice and came up in a kneeling crouch with one hand held out low; ready to grasp--what he held in his other hand. 'A sword?' Shinji only glanced briefly at the weapon he held in his left hand, a single-bladed sword of Japanese make, a fine weapon who's sheath lay between Shinji and the squealing voice.
He wasn't sure what amazed him more. The katana in his hand, or the speaker who greeted him so unexpectedly.
The boy, he could be nothing else, looked to be around the delicate age of ten. He had a mop of dark chocolate hair, hanging thick and rich in a somehow appeasing way. His face was smooth with childish innocence and naivete' and unmarred by the future horrors that adolescence and adulthood would soon bring it. And his eyes--swirling tidal pools of grey and black that spun opposite one another. Those eyes never blinked.
Those eyes frightened Shinji.
"Welcome, Shinji Ikari." The boy's voice was now something else. The deep, rough words conjuring images of tall, thick muscled foresters clad in plaid shirts and full beards. "I'm sure you have many questions, but please...you should dress before anyone spies your current status."
With narrow eyes, Shinji crept up to a small pool of dark fabric that the boy had helpfully pointed out to him. With extreme caution, Shinji thrust the point of his sword into the earth and stood to slip into the dark, almost robe-like pants. A loose shirt of deep blue followed.
There were three more items on the ground; socks, a wide belt with two large diagonal cuts running through on the left side, and heavy, black leather boots. Shinji took his time with all of these, his eyes always watching the boy as he stood by the sakura tree.
"Who are you?" Shinji finally asked.
The boy laughed, this time in a thin, whispery voice as he answered. "An unimportant question, I am merely an incorporeal tangibility sent here from the Library of Stantioch. A Principality of Observation if you will." Shinji frowned before he stood and freed the sword. He quickly marched up to the abandoned sheath and slipped it through the two slashes made in his wide belt. It fit perfectly, as did the sword fit the sheath perfectly. Shinji felt something nag at the corner of his perceptions, a certain familiarity rung his head as he went through the motions of sheathing the razor-edged katana.
"And what are you here to do for me?" was his next question.
"I am here to watch, and listen." The boy turned away and looked out across towards the gathered storm clouds in the distance. His voice was now that of a withered man about to die, hoarsely whispering out his dying breath. "And to start you on the path to end your Age..."
"Excuse me?" Shinji's brow wrinkled as his eyebrows came together. "End my age..?"
The boy smiled at him, a sunlit and joyful smile that seemed to plead innocence at any wrongdoing. "A beard does not suit your face Shinji Ikari." The voice was of a child, sweetly begging for candied apples.
The boy in question felt his cheek twitch. A hand soared up from his waist and prowled about his face; feeling the thick hairs that lined his cheeks, jaw, and lips. "H-how?"
"The question should really be when," another voice, "you left this world in the year twenty fifteen. To your mind, it is still that year; twenty fifteen. But in reality: it is the year twenty nineteen."
A gust of wind sucked the breath from Shinji's mouth. "Four...years?" The stinging wind made his eyes water and tear. 'Asuka?'
The boy smiled. "If you want to find her, all you need to do is head...there," his stubby finger stabbed out at the thundering clouds of dark stormy grey. "But it won't be easy."
"What do you mean?"
"An unfortunate side effect of sending you back to your world, Shinji Ikari," the voice was light and filled with hidden laughter, "opening the doors for one means opening the doors for all." The boy started laughing, the voice changing to a shrill, maniacal voice of madness and insanity. Shinji felt anger surge.
"Who followed me!?" he grabbed the front of the boy's shirt and hefted him off the ground, jerking his eyes up to Shinji's. Teeth ground together in his mouth.
The perfect white ivory of the boy shone back at his own, "Why, anyone who could...except the ones who could do anything about it."
A hollow grunt came from the boy as he landed hard on his back by the tree. Shinji growled in angry frustration as he whirled and stalked away from the strange boy and his useless answers. A shout from above brought him short though.
"You'll need this if you intend to live long enough, Shinji Ikari."
Something mildly heavy smashed into his back, a sharp crinkle of new leather, then the gentle rush of sighing grass as whatever the boy threw at him landed behind his feet. Shinji spun, the katana suddenly a solid weight in his hand as he readied himself to scare off the impetuous boy--but the boy was gone. Shinji harrumped as he put the sword away and bent to his feet. What lay there was a large suit of armor, made of thick scales of overlapped leather sewn together on a blue cloth backing. Once on, the suit hung just loosely enough that it really didn't affect his movement at all.
As if it was hand-crafted specifically for him.
"Why not?" Shinji asked as he stumbled down the hillside. "Why should I be surprised after all that I've seen." He felt a small ball of black fear, the same he had felt on the Eternities Plain, pulse and ebb in the center of his gut as he reached a small footpath. 'What did he mean, "the door is open for all"? What followed me through?'
As the boy strode off, two figures watched him go from underneath the wilting sakura tree.
"How much he has changed since the darkness," the boy with swirling eyes of black and grey turned to watch his companion for the passing moment of eternity. "Was that your doing, or someone else's from the Beyond?"
Silvered eyes reflected a flash of blue-white lightning from the distance. "Strange things can happen in the Beyond. None but the highest can see what will come of whomever steps through the darkness. What has happened, happened for a reason."
Honeyed laughter from the boy, "He will certainly need it if he wishes to see the ending of this Age. The door is open, and everyone is coming through."
Lightning flashed as the pair watched. A sudden voice jolted both out of their silent guard over the receding Shinji while he trekked down the dusty woodspath. The pair turned to see a ghostly figure clad in shining plate of mail barrel through a thin line of brush, with a slighter and smaller figure following behind him.
"--hurry, before they catch us!"
"Go William! I'm behind!"
The faint cries slowly faded into the wind, vanishing as the ghosts vanished into fading curls of colored smoke and mist.
"What was that?" Morpheus asked, his mirrored eyes reflecting all he saw. The boy arched his eyes as he noticed that all the reflections in the Virtue's eyes seemed to grow, fall apart, expand, burn, explode, Change, as he watched. "That looked like Shinji Ikari when I lead him through the darkness."
"Oh, don't mind them Morpheus...just some Ghosts of an abandoned Age." The slow drawling voice was the Virtue's own. A shudder ran down the back of the ebon Angel as he watched the small boy beside him smile and hum out a tune.
Beethoven's 9th.

The rain never stopped over Tokyo-3.
That was tolerable though, for the rain served its purpose well.
The rain washed all the blood away.
"Today, we're going to begin our secondary counter-assault. Operation Redwing will begin at thirteen hundred today and continue until the operations callback is sounded. Flight wings Crimson Star and Eye of Death will be the vanguard units. All other FF-221D's will fan out afterwards, followed by the ground transports--"
Asuka tuned the operations briefing out. She knew it by heart already, hell, she practically made the entire damn operation out by herself. One of the downsides to being a high-ranking commander of any flight wing in Tokyo- 3. It didn't help either that she was a former Evangelion pilot.
They always looked up to Eva pilots. Expected them to know all and take charge.
That was part of the reason she was a wing commander. The other part is that she actually was good at what she did. No other F-fighter pilot had ever taken down as many creatures as she had.
"The ground assault team will form a perimeter around the Starhole, then push outwards with air support and heavy vehicle cover. Our objective is to destroy or destabilize these three encampments here," the man pointed out three red blotches that spanned nearly three blocks of Tokyo-3 each, "here," his hand moved on to another blotch; the picture they were superimposed on was taken three days ago, " and here."
It showed a city of steel and glass. Shattered, twisted, and bent.
'All I have left in this world...'
"Flight Commander Langley will be in charge of Air Suppression," the man quickly glanced at her, then back to the rest of the room. "Flight Commander Nagisa will be in charge of Ground Suppression."
Asuka smiled at the grey haired, red-eyed boy across the room from her. He sat deeply in his chair, one arm thrown around the back of one of his flight crew and the other drumming out an absent beat across his clipboard. Even after four years of knowing him, she still felt something bordering on resentment whenever she looked at his placidly calm facade.
She just couldn't let the feeling go.
'Because he came to take my Eva. Mine was the only one he could take. No one can pilot Unit 01 again...no one.'
She couldn't let it go. Even though piloting the Eva's didn't even matter these days. For two years, the Eva's didn't matter. Two years since the rifts opened all over the world. Two years since Hell itself had visited its fiery wrath on the gentle green surface of the World.
She remembered a picture that doctor Akagi had been staring at a few months back. Half the Earth had turned black from fire, destruction, and death.
Now they were working on the other half.
"Flight crews can expect heavy resistance from the air. We have reports of M-class targets, as well as the smaller J- and D-class targets all within the Tokyo-3 limits. AA flak will be directed against the M-class targets, but the other two will be left for you to deal with. Armament is as standard for all crews--"
In two years they had been on the Earth, she had been waging war against their hellish powers. Flight training, physical training, military techniques--the list went on for a while. Her kind was a highly demanded commodity, one of only four Evangelion pilots left to the world.
Actual combat experience against otherworldly creatures isn't something that everyone can get.
The NERV symbol glared bleakly in the white incandescent light from the flourescents overhead. They were still here, those merchants of a child's death. They were about the only unified militaristic force able to resist them when they arrived on Mount Asuma that one hot day.
Ever since that day, there had been nothing but rain from the once-clear sky above.
"--with that said, I wish you all luck." The man, dressed in a sharply creased military shirt and thickly starched military slacks that hung only slightly above his mirrored military shoes glanced about the room one last time. Taking in all the faces, the names, the ranks. Trying to remember them all before he sent them out to fight brimstone and sulfur once again.
He was probably wondering if he would see any of them again.
"Two hours preptime begins now," the man looked over to a standing man by the door. "Five minutes for the Padre."
Many people stood and shuffled for the door. More than half stayed behind though, to listen to the balming words of the Catholic Priest. Asuka never stayed, even though some who had faith in things other than Christianity did. Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, Shitos, and more that she had never heard of before all littered the room.
'Man must have faith in something beyond himself,' Asuka could recall Misato saying that. She couldn't remember when though.
"You ready for this?"
Asuka barely looked at the trailing Kaoru Nagisa before snorting in contempt. "Since when have I never been ready for it. Why? Are you feeling ready for this?"
Kaoru chuckled in his weird, light way, "No. I'm not ready for it." Asuka looked back at him as he trailed behind, grinning like a fool, "But I might as well do it."
She scoffed, "You're such an idiot."
Kaoru merely laughed.

Shinji walked several kilometers following that path, following the dusty wind and twist until he felt burning in his feet with every step he took. The rough boots were hard on his soft feet, murderously treacherous on their uncallused skin. By the time the path's end came into view, Shinji was sure that his feet were going to be covered by blisters.
He took a seat in an old, sun blasted wooden bench. The shade of a sprawling oak tree sheltered him from the scorching summer sun. Ahead of him lay the town of Shisenkimi; a deserted and ruined town from his small view of it. A ghost town.
Three gunshots sent him lurching into the streets.
'Gunshots? Who? And at what?'
Dust kicked up behind him as his heavy boots sounded on the cracked, bleached asphalt roads. Thin streams of dirt clouds whipped around his legs as a fast wind breezed through the low houses and destroyed stores.
Two more gunshots.
'Close.'
Shinji skidded around a corner and raced forward, sword clenched in his hand as a scream of pain shattered through his labored breathing. Ahead of him, three creatures turned away from their two human prey and glared fitfully upon him with their four inhuman eyes.
"Calkdlssa' Ne!" ordered one. The two to its sides leveled their weapons, and charged at Shinji with their maws open. Foamy white spittle fell from their lips, pushed out by their long, thin tongues from between sharp rows of sickly-green teeth. Scaled skin rippled with powerful muscles the size and texture of old, knotted rope as clawed feet dug deep into the road beneath them.
Shinji slowed only to judge the size of their weapons, long poles with wickedly twisted spikes set in the ends, then he hastened to join them.
Their screeching cries sounded hideous in his ears as he tucked himself into a roll and came up behind their weapon's barbed tips. The katana swished out and flashed across the thin knobs that were the joints of the creature's knees. Popping tendon and ripping flesh echoed in the quiet streets of Shisenkimi as the two creatures fell, clutching their ruined legs as they screamed in disbelieving agony.
Shinji fell forward and followed through with his roll, coming to a shaky stop a few meters ahead of the motionless creature left.
The one of the humans it stood over groaned with muffled pain.
"Das'tsuana dndackch fhvall," a thin line of pale-brown ribbon streamed from behind the creatures back. Shinji narrowed his eyes and in that second the creature struck.
The ribbon lashed out with blinding speed, snapping loudly beside Shinji's ear as he fell ungracefully to his right as he tried to move away. A small sting was all he could feel from where it sliced neatly through his skin and his cheek. A crimson waterfall began to bubble out.
"Ne-nedda ghatha'netlane. Tabris-chal dsak dffrts al vebra."
'Tabris-chal,' Shinji thought before lurching up and running to the side, dodging another blazing whip with the razor-fabric. 'What the hell is that?' Then he was rushing forwards, his sword slicing the ribbon neatly down the middle before burying itself edge-up into the things stomach.
Thick, almost syrupy-like blood, Shinji assumed it was blood, ran across the blade and dripped down through the shimmering waves of heat to hiss against the faded surface of the road. The creature said nothing before falling backwards, dragging itself across the blade as it fell.
The two on the road already lay silent, the ichorous goo that made their body run, jump, and breath already pumped out onto the old asphalt and tar of the street. Shinji sniffed at the foul odor.
"Hey, kid! I need some help here."
Shinji walked cautiously up to the two humans lay on a building, what once used to be a bank that now lay gutted by fire. Ripping cloth; a man with long, dark hair wound a shred of his shirt tightly around a deep gash in his companion's arm.
"Come on," the man said urgently before he tied off the bandage. Already the dark red of blood soaking through the stained white cloth. "We need to get back to my place, I can help her there."
Shinji picked up one side of the girl, a pretty person with shoulder length hair the color of raven black. Together, they stumbled through the broken streets and into a shoddy, run-down housing complex.
"Thank you for saving us," the man said as Shinji kicked open the door that the man pointed out. "The Kaotri would have killed us for food if you hadn't come along."
"Kaotri?"
The man pointed at a couch that had splotchy patches of a dried, dark crust covering it. Shinji gently laid the girl down, the couch squealing as rusty springs were tested and compressed. Creaking wood sounded dangerously as the man hastily crossed to worm-riddled cabinets.
"Those lizard-things out in the street. NERV calls that kind of monster Kaotri; always labeling that which makes man fear, thus--defeating fear of the unknown before it begins...or so those bastards tell us."
Shinji crouched by the girl, gently holding her hand while the man rifled through his cabinets. Metal clashed against metal and tin pots clattered on the floor as useless clutter was tossed aside. The girl whimpered at the loud noises, and her hand clamped down tightly.
"NERV..."
"Here it is," the man rushed over to the girl's side, brushing Shinji aside as he dropped down with a large white box in his hands. "Hold this," he shoved the box into Shinji's arms and threw open its battered cover. A few bandage packages tumbled out as the man's thick, callused hand lifted free a pair of rust-spotted scissors. "We may be in time..."
Shinji silently watched the girl die.

The world as Asuka knew it was ablaze with the light of man.
Neon green, electrum purple, magneto red. All the colors that a bored man created to brighten and enliven his world. Now, they were the lights to her weapon of death, mayhem, destruction, and war. Her machine of power and strength.
The FF-221D was a hybrid mix of gunship and single-pilot attack jet. It was made by Nergal Heavy Industries during the first months of the war that was raging all across the world today at the demand of NERV and the JSSDF for a light, powerful fighter jet that could both attack flying targets and support ground troops in a conflict.
Nergal gave them what they asked for. The FF-221D was a lighter, stronger version of NERV's older F-002A's, which served both them and the JSSDF in a rather dubious role. Cannon fodder. All those jets and helicopter hybrids flying around, trying to stop or slow down the advance of any one of several Angels that assaulted Tokyo-3 all those years ago. Much good it did them. Most were slaughtered as they attempted to do something, anything to the Angels with their weapons.
"Only an Evangelion could fight an Angel."
That was their motto, the pilots of those hulking F-002A's. They never once forgot it.
The new models were based on those old relics. Indeed, the main bodies of the first FF-221D's and their troop-transport equivalents were made from retrofitted F-002A chassis'. Most of the fuselage remained the same, with two engine pods set on rotating ball-and-socket servos at the ends of two short, thick wings. Underneath these wings were what made the gunship truly powerful. Four sets of minimissile rocket launchers, with thirty six missiles in each launcher, four to a wing; five HE Sturkbeck heat-seeking missiles to each wing, any one large enough to vaporize a good fifty meter diameter and anything damned to be within it; two Gatling guns, .50 caliber each, set underneath the nose of the cockpit and keyed to the motions of the pilot's head and hands; another four .50's set two to a pair in rotating gunner's pods set into the open-air middle of the craft, the crew using them were strapped into gyro-controlled spheres of a special, heat- resistant plastic. Most of the jet was heat resistant, but that did little to help against the electricity, acid, or cold that came their way too. It destroyed their jets and killed their crew just as easily.
And then there were the smaller flying creatures with swords and axes. Those were the worst in her opinion.
"Hey, you okay?" her forward co-pilot asked.
Asuka nodded, "Un-hun. Just thinking." Her co-pilot handled most of the missile weaponry on her jet. Most of the time she had him handle the two gatlings underneath her. Pilots needed to pilot their craft if they wanted to live long enough to get their next meal and shower; and no one could both pilot and shoot creatures at the same time long enough to do that.
Not here anyway.
"You know," her co-pilot began in that mocking tone of his, "thinking at a time like this means that something's distracting you. If there is something like that, I want to know."
"Why? So you can tell me to forget about it and don't let it worry me?" Asuka hit a flashing diode and read the screen that flashed across her HUD. 'All ready and clear to go.'
"Nope." The co-pilot grabbed his pilot's arms, two extendable attachments that ran two separate signals down to the jet engines. The independent systems function allowed for tighter maneuvers and slippier dodging and juking when things turned nasty. At the moment though, these were connected to the gatlings below him; he put them through their paces quickly, and got a green light on his status board. "I just want to know if my insurance is finally going to pay out on something for me."
Asuka chuckled at the corny joke.
"Attention, attention, sixty seconds to lift off. Good luck." The comm crackled into static that was drowned out by hundreds of surging thrumms and high whines of twice as many engines and turbines. A small shiver ran through Asuka's own jet as she threw the ignition switch on. Her two gunners checked in and the flight director on the ground threw her a hasty thumbs up before dashing away to the safety of his runway bunker.
"Alright boys," Asuka keyed into her comm system and broadcast to the waiting fleet of attack craft. "Let's go and win some bloodmoney today. Bets anyone?"
"I'll take three."
"Five here."
"Ten will be mine," the confident voice of Kaoru Nagisa calmly cut in.
"Confident aren't we?" her co-pilot said as he marked down the tallies.
"Always Lieutenant, always."
Asuka rolled her eyes, "Last call. Bets are in. Liftoff in 10...9...8...7...6," she slipped her gloved hands into her own pilot's arms and slowly lifted them up from her knees. Another trembled rocked through the steel skin of her craft as the jet slowly lifted off of the tarmac. "..5...4...3...2...1. Commence operation!"
Engines and turbines whined and shrieked as their craft tore across the sky of the underground Geofront. Slowly rising to where a kilometer wide hole let in a torrent of rain fall through to the ground below. Two hundred fighter jets and troop transports scorched across the sky, each angling for a quick exit through the Starhole and for the sky above.
Their small bit of Hell was about to blaze bright once again.



Lightning flashed and thunder rocked the grey sky as Shinji threw on the last shovelful of dirt. Both he and the man were covered with the grave soil, streaks of brown staining their faces and clothes from the mixture of sweat and grime they were covered with. Shinji tossed aside his cracked and rusted shovel and picked up the single, thick stake of wood that leaned against the sprawling oak tree that loomed over the grave.
The pointed end pierced through the loose black earth easily enough. Shinji held the marker steady whilst the man beside him hit the top sharply with his shovel.
"Should we say anything?" Shinji asked, slinging the shovel across his shoulder as he lifted his katana from the ground beside him.
"I dunno...doesn't matter," the man said while he wiped at his eyes with browned fingers. "I didn't know her. I was just trying to save her."
Shinji sighed. Lightning flashed, thunder rocked the sky, and then rain began to whisper down from the clouds above. Large, fat droplets of clear and shining water fell upon the upturned ground of the girl's grave. Soon it was a mush of mud and clay.
"We should get back to shelter." Shinji turned and found the man already walking off back towards his home. Or what served him as such. He followed without a word, his boots squelching in thick mud as he walked.
The inside of the man's house still reeked of the girl's death. She had lingered for nearly three hours before finally giving over to the tide of darkness. Her end had not been pretty or glamorous; just a strangled choke and a thin trickle of bubbled blood to mark her passing from one world into the next.
'May she find more peace and happiness fighting on the Plain than she did here,' that was Shinji's prayer for her.
She was only sixteen.
"I've got the tea ready." Thick, bitter smells drifted from the dark brew inside the two chipped and worn cups that the man brought in. Shinji took a small sip and burned his tongue. A few cooling breaths across the surface and he took another sip. The burning on his tongue waned in persistence for the time, the tea was as bland as he remembered it.
It tasted like the honey of Heaven.
"Who are you?" the man asked.
Shinji sipped his tea again, feeling it warm his teeth down to their core. "Just a wanderer trying to reach Tokyo-3." That seemed a safe enough answer. He didn't know if this man knew who the Shinji Ikari of four years ago was--best not to chance it.
"Tokyo-3? Would anyone want to go there now?" The man drained his and poured himself another from the kitchen while Shinji downed half of his tea in a thick gulp. When the man came back he carried a beaten aluminum kettle with him.
A droplet scalded Shinji's fingers as the tea sloshed out.
"A bad place to visit for vacation then?" Shinji carefully asked.
His host's eyes frowned at him, even if his lips didn't. "You really don't know, do you?" Shinji shook his head and sipped again. "Tokyo-3 is a home to demons and devils now, no rightfully sane man would go there except to die."
His katana felt warm suddenly, as if it agreed with the man. Shinji furrowed his eyebrows and propped the sword against the couch. One of the cushions was still matted with sticky sweat and crusting blood. "NERV still fights there though...am I right?"
Shinji's fingers were cramping on the thin handle of his teacup. "Yes, NERV still fights there...though how they are still alive is a mystery to all the world." The man looked away to his windows, the grey rain fell straight and thickly outside; like thin waterfalls cascading off of the cliffs of Heaven to rain their glories upon the waterlogged soil of Earth below. "For two years NERV has managed to hold Tokyo-3, while the rest of the world dies and retreats before the armies of those creatures. South America is scorched earth last time I heard of it, Europe is nearly taken, Siberia is Russia's last hole of refuge. China is a massive graveyard..." defeat and hopelessness lay thick across the man's voice.
Shinji placed his empty cup on the floor and hefted himself off the couch with strange ease. "Tokyo-3 was my home once," the man looked like he was about to cry, "and if it will have me back, Tokyo-3 will be my home again. One does not let their home die without trying to save it."
"You think you can save it? Folly."
"It may be folly," his sword felt hotter than before as he slid it through the slices in his belt. "But others are fighting that folly, and I do not want to let them die alone and unremembered like that girl out there." The windows rattled as lightning scorched the sky.
"I...I've got an old motorcycle in a garage nearby," the man shakily confessed. "You can use that to get to where you want."
"Thank you."
Shinji spurred away from the rotting garage shortly after, the instructions on how to make the rusty bike that deserved a home at the nearby scrap yard running fresh in his mind. Soon, he left the town and rushed up to the broken remains of the highway that ran mell-pell around the hills and mountains towards Tokyo-3. The man watched him go, shielding his eyes from the blinding torrent of rain with his hands. Trying to see the small red specks of the bike before it roared out of sight behind a curtain of water.
He died watching Shinji go, a spear erupting through his chest. The rain fell red to the gutters of a broken and ruined town that lay soaked in mud and memory.
Armisael followed the lights of the bike as far as he could too. Then turned to the ruined body below him. Bone snapped and flesh rent as he wrenched his spear free of the man's body. He held it straight in the rain for a minute, watching the blood run off in runnels to the oily street below.
"Another for the Plains."

"BANK LEFT BANK LEFT!"
"Watch out! Three from below."
"I've got trouble her--ah! AHHHHA--"
Static and explosions crackled all across the comm, hotly contesting the thick screams and cries for help that everyone and no one seemed to shout. Everywhere there were flying creatures of red, black, blue, indigo, and battleship grey. Rockets, missiles, and white-hot tracers flew like thousands of fireflies across the watery sky and ruined ground of Tokyo-3. Men and monster shouted war cries of red-rage fury as they charged their foes, screaming out for the heads and death of whomever they faced at the present.
Elsewhere: men pleaded for death and monsters begged for the kind mercy of a wandering man's lead bullet to end their suffering and agony.
A man cried in horror and tortured pain as wicked goblins with green skin and yellow fangs flayed his skin free of his bones inch by inch, only to have them all consumed by a fiery explosion that glowed brighter than the sun and lights of man. Destroyed by the smallest of small weapons of murder and mayhem that man had created in his time as ruler of the World.
Asuka cursed as her jet was tossed like a leaf in a fall wind by the N2 mine explosion. Half of a mountain glowed amber red through the drizzling sheets of water and flying shards of edged glass. A gurgling shout across her internal comm lines was all the hint she needed to learn that one of her gunners had died. From the explosion or something else, she could not say.
"I've got a flight of three M-class coming down the street," her co-pilot calmly relayed to her. Asuka snarled and threw her hands forward on the pilot's arms. Her jet rumbled and her engines whined in strained protest as they rocketed the small craft of steel forwards. A thick belch of gatling fire ripped out from one side of the gunship, smashing through a thick column of advancing creatures as they attempted to attack the thin lines of NERV resistance.
'Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker,' was Asuka's mantra as she charged the three flying dragons. Lightning flashed across her eyes and exploded through the steel skeleton that used to be Nergal's regional headquarters building. Flame boiled out from the mouth of another dragon, raining down as a crashing wave of blinding heat and agony to the roiling melee beneath her.
She saw a sudden explosion at the same moment she heard the thin, wailing cry screech across the comm. 'Fourteen.'
"Fire in the hole!" Two missiles streaked out from her wings, homing in on the mouth of that scarlet-red dragon who belched out fire like bad gas. The missiles wove across the sodden sky to slam head on into the dragon's mouth and nose.
Asuka pulled up sharply before the fireball could reach her jet, soaring up with the drafts of superheated air to escape an uncertain death. Then she gave the arms a twist and flipped her jet on its side. Of the dragon the missiles hit, there was no sign but small bits of burning debris that rained down to the street below; of the others she saw one limping away to the south, and another streaking down towards the Starhole; thin, greasy smoke billowed across the sky in its wake.
"I've got it!" shouted one of her eager pilots. Another flash of blue-white lightning and a thin flame of ruptured gases and metal marked his death.
'Fifteen.'
Asuka whipped her gunship around; engines roared with rough, raw power as they shot the light craft down upon the unsuspecting dragon below.
"Out of missiles and rockets," her co-pilot sang out the moment before he slid his hands into his own pilot's arms. Her ship shuddered and jerked back a bit as the two gatlings beneath the nose of her craft opened up on the exposed back of the scorched dragon.
The creature of death screamed its death, wings folded up and the body twisted belly-up. Men below shouted in shock as the azure dragon slammed into another of the ruined, skeletal skyscrapers that littered Tokyo-3's surface. Thick chunks of twisted and broken steel and blocks of hard concrete rained down with the water to squash and maim and kill those unfortunate enough to be below.
'Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker--"
The battle had been raging for well over five hours now. And no end to the madness and chaos was yet in sight.
It had gone well at first. Air superiority had decimated the slumbering dragons and flying devils before they even had a chance to glance up from their nauseating stew of human flesh and seasoned skin. The ground forces had been competently deployed and easily supported by Nagisa's task force and by their own troop transports. They had penetrated deeply into the enemy's encampment and had wreaked havoc upon their troops.
The rain started to fall then, as did their plans.
A sudden surprise attack consumed the ground force's flanks, driving them back with a heavy abandon as a sea of blood drenched them as thoroughly as the falling rain. Nagisa's gunships were suddenly overwhelmed by flying devils and gigantic, winged demons. Two score of his men and craft were lost in the first five minutes.
NERV launched its first N2 mine to buy some time.
It made everything worse.
Asuka's jets were called in by frantic ground commanders to cover for them as they tried to run for their transports. And for a time, it seemed that they would all be quickly and efficiently evacuated.
Then the first wave of dragons descended upon the slow, lumbering transports. They stood no chance. And died with screams in their throats. A few transports managed to escape that inferno, and they were now scorching the air with their engines; rushing furiously back and forth across Tokyo- 3, trying desperately to carry all the remaining troops to safety.
All of the tanks had to be abandoned; or they were already destroyed.
The guns of her ship churned and raged again, spewing their thin streams of white-hot lead across a drenched sky of grey at one target or another in this hell of battle--no, not a battle anymore. A routing massacre.
"I'm running low on ammunition!" her last gunner cried.
"Same here," the co-pilot calmly said in his unfazed way.
Asuka opened her mouth, her fingers brushing across the keyed diode that linked straight to headquarters ready to ask permission to return and reload; and at that moment, the recall sounded.

The rain made it hard to see, yet see he did.
A battle raged through, that much he could see. A perfect transplantation of the war that raged on the Eternities Plain, except now there were no angelic hosts to combat those monstrosities. Only men and women. And man is weak.
Shinji silently watched the glow of a thousand suns flash through the rain, briefly clearing a hole in the ever-present clouds of mourning grey to let a ray of warming light shine through. That lasted only a moment though, and by foul craft of evil sorceries, the hole closed again and the sun was gone. Hidden from Evil by Evil's design.
The mud Shinji crouched in was littered with dead and washed away grass. Killed by months, years without the glorious, life-giving light of the sun above. The trees below and above him were bleak skeleton arms of withered limbs and rotted wood scattered across the steeply sloping mountains. A few broken trunks and thin limbs had fallen across the roads, making it difficult but not impassible with the ancient motorcycle he clumsily road for an hour and more to reach the hill.
The same hill that Misato had show him Tokyo-3 from after his first battle.
'How scared I was then...and how scared I am now.'
The dull weight of his sword leaning against his shoulder as he squatted in the tan mud was comforting. Reassuring Shinji with its warm weight and solid presence as he gazed down upon the hell that his home was become.
Lightning flashed across the city, and fire burned a shimmering wave through the air. An explosion compounding an explosion following an explosion rocked the dead trees that lined the valley walls. The rustling reminded him of dry bones rattling in a box.
Click, click, clacking against one another.
A dragon with emerald green scales swooshed down from behind Shinji, the drag and buffet of air that followed in its wake ripping trees free of their clawing grasp on the mountain's muddy sides and throwing them like child's toys through the ranks of their silent, dead brothers. Shinji's shirt of deep blue, akin to the color of his eyes, rippled and swished in the buffet of air as his lips pursed together and frowned. A thin shudder racked his soaked body, briefly showering the soil around him with dewed water collected from his body.
He lowered the clear visor of his borrowed helmet with a clack, thin streamers of rainwater flowing down across it, and squelched his way through the mud to where his bike lay in the broken and cracked highway lanes. His arms strained and the visor briefly fogged over as he lifted the heavy vehicle from where it lay to its wheels, but in the end: it was done.
Shinji looked back down the mountain and into the valley before he left, breathing out one last sentence before he let the motorcycle thrumm to life and rocket him further along his path to the city.
"I'm home."
The wheels kicked up a rooster's tail of water as Shinji sped down the road.

Tabris struggled to keep the pathetic, and ill-crafted jet alive and airborne amidst the chaotic mess that the skies of Tokyo-3 had morphed into. Wind and water whipped through the gaping hole that used to be his co- pilot's seat and pelted him into a bone-soaked, wet, weariness. His arms ached from the effort of guiding the lumbering craft through battle after battle, and his legs cramped at the effort of doing nothing more than pushing down upon the steel flooring in the moments of tense anxiety.
He had been through many anxious battles today.
No whirring streams of flame erupted from his sides either. Having been blackened and melted out by a square-on blast from a passing dragon near the middle of the battle that now spun wildly and hopelessly out of control. He only had the two gatling's underneath his own ass.
And they were running low.
"Why are you doing this?"
Tabris smiled grimly at the hissing whisper of Armisael, sparing the small mote of blinding white essence behind him a cautious glance before he returned to the broiling mess of the street below him.
"I'm doing it because I want to!" Tabris shouted before he opened up with his guns. Lead punched through steel and flesh and ceramics alike. Killing man and beast, destroying street and weapon, slaying dozens at a time and none in others. "I'm doing it because I feel like it!"
Armisael's mote flickered bright before it waned to a dull glimmer. "And how goes the completion of our scenario? The Master is wondering if destroying the Earth is worth it...he's getting bored, and he has been asking after you."
Tabris laughed as he wrenched the gunship around in a tight arc, then quickly pushing it upwards with a quick blast from its engines to escape a fast moving dragon that had been sweeping down to take him. His guns flashed out quickly across the shadowy scales of the flying beast, deeply penetrating its skull and back and chest.
Its horrible scream shattered windows, just as its broken body shattered fighters and street as it crashed to the Earth. Tabris snarled in exuberance as his engines pulsed with power. His comm lines crackled with a hesitant tune that blared out a grinding tune.
"Why are you here?" Tabris asked as he hoisted his pilot's arms to clear a squat shell of a building. "I told you never to come to me until you felt the moment."
"I have news you should hear. The Khaglessi has arrived, and is now entering the outskirts of the city." The mote's voice was toneless and flat, but Tabris could imagine the frightened voice of Armisael well enough. It sickened him. "He's already killed three of our Daits'orb as they tried to take care of a healer in Shisenkimi."
"The healer?"
"He's been handled, but not before he supplied the Khaglessi with a transport." The mote flickered again as Tabris spun the shambling wreck of his gunship through a tight arc and down into the depths of the Geofront. Shattering glass was the only herald to a glowing crimson arrow before it flashed across the grey-haired boy's face and out through the metal side across the way. Wind whistled through the hole as Tabris quickly guided his craft down to its landing pad.
Armisael calmly noted that the wound was healing shut before any blood could seep out. 'Always protective of your face, weren't you?'
"No matter, I will handle the Khaglessi just as I handled that old fart of a man and all of his minions with their plans. It will be of no matter to us at the moment."
"And if he does...pose a problem?" Armisael delicately put.
Tabris' jet landed with a jolt, the engines shrieking out loudly before slowly grinding down to silence. His grin set shivers running down Armisael's back. "Then I will deal with him, in my own due time. Our plans must come first. Soon we will be victorious."
The mote slowly faded into dim nothingness, leaving Armisael only one thought as he returned to his own imprisoning body.
'Soon.'



Twilight had fallen over Tokyo-3 when Shinji first started threading his way through the ruined skeletons of buildings that jutted out like grey bones in the never-found elephant's graveyard. The rain was finally slackening, changing from a straight, bitter cold downpour to a gentle, almost warm misting.
Shinji shivered from time to time though, all the warmth driven out of him from three hours of continuous, drenching rain. His eyes warily scanned from corner to corner, down alleyways and up rising streets; into darkened entrances and into black holes that gaped in the sides of buildings.
From time to time he would stop walking and guide his motorcycle into some of the deeper shadows that lurked beneath the towering skyscrapers, listening for the subtle rumble of devilish voices; or the soft scrape of leather or skin on rubbled concrete.
Once he even heard a raucous laugh, coming from inside a building that lit up red from a dozen campfires inside. He looked once at the menagerie inside that building before quickly rushing through the intersection and down another street. The monsters inside were cooking something, and whatever that something was: the flesh was pale white, and its foot had hairy ankles and five toes.
It was over another of these campfires that Shinji now crouched. He watched with nauseated fascination as the creatures below him, cruel looking creations of greenish-grey skin that rippled and bulged with rolls of fat. Boils and pustules covered them from head to toe it seemed, even so far as to the ends of their over-large, hooked noses. One of these creatures was ripping into the nude and soiled body of a man, then tossing each limb she wrenched off into a steaming iron pot that resided over a fire; the creature was a female judging from the small and misshapen swells that poked almost shyly from her chest, but she didn't lack from any strength that Shinji could see.
'Definitely don't want to have her shake my hand,' he wryly thought as he watched the corpses leg being ripped free with a sound like wet silk ripping. The smells wafting from the pot were horrible, sickening, and yet-- tempting.
Shinji nearly emptied his stomach at that thought, bile nearly reaching so far as his tongue before he choked it back down.
He sat there though, watching the ghoulish feast with rock-solid eyes and iron will. From time to time he would glance around to the other campfires he had spotted long ago. An entire ring of them, stretching around the gaping wound that opened into the Geofront below Tokyo-3's surface skin. He had wandered from camp to camp, picking his way through the twisted steel ruins of building, aircraft, and tank alike as they all blocked his path. Searching for a weak joint, a way in.
He had wondered why there weren't as many bodies as he expected littering the streets. After that first building, he had hoped he was wrong with that suspicion.
'Why does that pot have to smell so damn tempting?' Shinji's stomach roiled and groaned for food that it had not tasted in four years and a day. He could only grimace and look on.
The other campfires were completely surrounded by the monsters that had followed him from the Plain. Jackals dressed in fine clothes, gilded robes and suede gloves bleached white, standing on their feet like so many humans they had slaughtered. Their eyes glowed a pale yellow in the night, more than enough reason to move on from their fires. The other reason had been the dozen or so jackals that were with them; like the other, more lordly ones, but dirtier and rougher. They fought amongst themselves for treats of meat from their lordly commanders, begging and biting for the smallest morsel of boiled manflesh from their lord's gloved hands.
Their scimitars looked deadly sharp in the glow of campfire light. And the wicked growls and nerve-wracking laughs from their lips as they sharpened the steel were enough to make Shinji press on to another of the ringing fires.
Four more fires he passed by before he stopped at his present one. Each ringed with their own horrible and disgusting creatures. Bald, pale men who's knees were bent backwards like a goat's, their eyes covered by heavy goggles that held midnight-black panes of smoked glass. Dyed black leather shoulder guards encircled their necks and dipped low across their shoulders and back. A thick, slick set of matching coat and pants completely covered the rest of their bodies from neck to wrists. Weirdly shaped boots that rose to their knees and click-clacked strangely over the broken stones near their fire. As Shinji watched, one of these strange beings lifted up a heavy hammer from beside him, and smashed it down against one of the larger chunks of concrete. Lime dust rose and twisted steel clattered across the ground as the rock exploded into fine powder.
The next camp held more of those reptile Kaotri beings that the healer had told him about. Shinji knew that he could take them on and win three-to- one, but there were nearly thirty of them there. He had to move on. So it went for several fires, each revealing creatures of a different sort and nature. One campfire even proved to be alive itself, a man-like creature composed entirely of flames. The heat of his body had seeped deeply into the rocks around him, shrouding the entire area in smoky fog as the misting rain fell upon them. Shinji didn't even want to get near that one.
So here he was left, with four of these--things, whatever they were. Two of them were grotesque lumps of lard, but that lard had sharp pointy teeth and they carried large stone axes with them. The other two, the female and one other, were whipthin and lanky creatures armed with spears and heavy clubs made totally of iron.
'Maces...and axes for the big ones. Four of them and one of me. Can I risk it?'
Shinji crawled away slowly from the overhanging lip that jutted out over the creature's fire, taking care not to disturb any of the small rocks lest they sound out against one another and force him to fight sooner than he wanted.

Below that overlip, the four Fensir's laughed raucously around their campfire as they ripped and worried their tough pieces of human leg and arm. The meat was always tough and stringy, their mother Ganl'dralll always cooking it overlong and salting it overmuch.
But that didn't matter now. What mattered now is that the rains were lifting, their stomachs were full, and their fire was warm. And for a change, the Datsuran-geii and his hound Datsuran-gaii weren't forcing them to attack their foodmeats in the dead of night whilst they brewed up a storm.
It was a welcome relief.
"I've heard tell that a party of Kaotri were sent off to deal with the healer." The speaker gnawed at his haunch of thigh, spitting out a chewed hunk of gristle before burying his face up to his prominent nose back into the dry meat.
"Non' came back I hear," the high pitched whine of the youngest brother Ganl'dreeel set all of the family to grinding their pointed teeth together. The brother pointed a joint at their mother, "Some of the Kaotri says tha' some 'uman kill 'em."
Ganl'dralll smacked the offensive joint away with an old, handcrafted spoon of beaten silver. Then she whelped Ganl'dreeel hard across the hand, bending the spoon back on itself. The boy yelped in pained surprise. "Speak correctly! Or I'll have Ganl'druuu set on ya!"
The middling brother glared spitefully around his small, withered arm at his fatter brothers. The middle brother was the thinnest of them all, and the meanest one. His eyes had a hungry, lean look about them--as though he wouldn't mind seeing how their arms and legs tasted in a pot of stew. They both reminded themselves to speak properly once again.
"Besides that, I've heard tell of the Khaglessi...they say he's come back." The oldest said, wiping a greasy hand across his greasy cheeks and chins.
His mother gave him a condescending and simpering look, "Oh, yeah...and pray tell did you hear this from the Datsuran-geii hisself?" None of the brothers dared to correct their mother's err. "Now stop being such an arse of yourself and eat your leg before it goes cold!" she pointed hard with the bent spoon. The brothers quickly set themselves to their mother's command.
The first rock caught Ganl'dreeel full in the face. His head burst like a ripe watermelon falling off a thirty foot cliff. Misty blood and wet, red brains flecked with bits of ivory skull splattered across the rocks behind him. His body slumped quickly as the others in his family shot quickly to their feet, even the eldest brother moved rapidly despite the impressive amount of fat that giggled and wiggled around his stomach as he rose. A second rock hurtled at Ganl'dralll; quickly she flung aside her bent silver spoon and thrust out her arms at the offending chunk of granite. Her forced whoosh of air was all the other two heard before she rocked back off her feet and fell into the blazing fire.
The rich odor of flaming hair and the piercing scream that was soon cut off by a gurgling rush of boiling stew echoed through the misting night. Their mother died painfully as the great iron pot dropped off its holds and followed the path of the stew it once held. The brothers licked their lips at the tantalizing odor of brain stew.
It was their favorite.
Chipped stone axe whirled end-over-end as iron mace flashed blackly in the night. The two brothers backed up until they were both flush against the rocks of the small cul-de-sac that sheltered them and their fire. Muscle tensed, breath was rushed, eyes darted to and fro across the lip that jutted over their fire. They were prepared for anything that came their way. Anything.
Wind rushing over linen and a whistling cut of air was all the eldest brother heard before pain erupted like a volcanic pimple in his face. His screeching shout was mercifully short, as was the last image he saw and the last fleeting sensation of pain that he felt. His arms flew out wide as blood erupted in a jet from the straight slash that cleaved straight through the soft bone of his skull.
His axe broke against the rocks as it landed.
Ganl'druuu came out of his side roll with his mace grasped tightly in both of his hands, both shaking badly as they held the cold iron weapon out. Its familiar weight was of no solace to him as his brother slumped bonelessly to the ground. In the sputtering light of his family's fire, he glimpsed the being that had so easily killed three of his family.
"W-what are you?" he shouted at the small, shadow engulfed creature in thin leather armor. "Why were you sent? We didn't do anything!" Ganl'druuu had heard of this happening before. The Datsuran-geii's secret force of assassins and spies. Dopplegangers who could change shape, appearance, and race with the merest of thoughts. They were rumored to even be able to steal thoughts and memories if they stayed with a creature long enough.
'But why is it here!'
Ganl'druuu wasted no more breath on it. It he was to survive, he needed to rush this doppleganger and kill it now! He charged over the broken landscape, small rocks kicking up and flying into the walls as he twirled the heavy mace before him. The doppleganger twisted to the side right as Ganl'druuu reached him, easily ducking underneath the mace's skull splitting blow. Ganl'druuu let himself move with the mace, whipping around to the right and all the way back to face his assassin as it stood before his mother's body. Her head was mostly bubbling skin and melting fat now, but she still smelled delicious.
"I'll feast on you too, as this morning draws near!" he growled to his killer. Ganl'druuu's eyes narrowed in confusion as the assassin tipped its head to the side, as though it didn't understand what he was saying to it. 'Doesn't matter. It will die anyway!'
He charged again, mace held high and ready for his family's killer, waiting for the right moment to strike down and break the face of whomever was sent. Once again the creature ducked, then rolled forward and past Ganl'druuu. He skidded to a stop and twisted to see where the assassin was now.
A wet plop sounded by his feet.
Ganl'druuu looked down and the world spun around him. A heavy, wet warmth was spreading across his loins as he stared down past his mace and to where his intestines were trailing freely from his stomach. Limply, he rolled his head and eyes back to his assassin.
Shinji quickly thrust his sword through the throat of Ganl'druuu and put an end to it. His hands and knees felt weak from hunger as Shinji bent and wiped his blade clean on the ragged wool shirt of the creature he killed. "Alright..."

Asuka looked up from her coffee and wanly smiled at the annoying smirk she had become so accustomed to lately.
"Now let's see..." Kaoru started, gently shifting his cup from one hand to the other. "This is the fifth time in a row that I've won a bet."
Asuka slurped down a large jolt of coffee and gagged on it. She coughed a bit up and choked the rest down and growled at the grey haired annoyance, "So what do you want now, a medal? You know as well as I that most of the other partakers never came back this time. A hollow prize if you have no competition, eh?"
Kaoru nodded, "Yeah. Hollow. But still my victory. And since we have no one else to dole out due rights..." Asuka flippantly gestured to the chair across from her. Kaoru acquiescently smiled and slipped easily into the proffered chair, taking a sip of his black coffee as he did.
"What do you want?"
"Well, since I've lost all of my crew, I need another one."
"So why don't you just draw some out of personnel." Asuka rolled her eyes and leaned back to watch the nightly news, well--propaganda really--NERV's very own doling out false info to the poor shmucks that actually fall for it.
"Are you yanking me?" Kaoru scoffed, setting his cup aside. "Those morons are second rate, first class screwups. I need people who know how to react 'with' me. Not work against me."
Kaoru's reputation for being a pilot who lived and breathed jet fuel was becoming legendary. In the first few weeks of the war he had nearly fifty confirmed kills alone. His less savory reputation for going through his crew members was overshadowed and hushed up by NERV's own propaganda corps, to keep up morale they would tell her.
It didn't help that he was picky about who would crew with him.
She sighed, "Alright, I'll see if I can scrounge up some people for you--"
"I want Him."
The table shook as Asuka slammed her coffee cup down. Her eyes blazed like blue fire as she burned a hole in the pallid skin of Kaoru's forehead. "No. You will never get either of Them. Ever." She jabbed a finger out at his breast, "That I will damn well grantee."
Kaoru screwed his face up into disgust and shook it back and forth in disappointment before answering that. "I don't understand you Asuka. You told me yourself three years ago that you didn't much care for either of them...why care so much now?"
"Because they are all I have left. Three years ago is not now Kaoru. A lot has changed since then." Asuka stood and stalked out of the lounge, mumbling a feeble excuse as she went.
Tabris waited in the white room a moment longer. Sipping his black brew and listening to that chattering mouthpiece spout how great of a victory NERV had won over the massed forces of the enemy in the skies of Tokyo-3 this day.
'How hollow a victory indeed, Asuka.'

Shinji quickly stumbled through a deserted alleyway and stopped at the shadowed mouth that egressed to the street beyond. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the street for any guards or surprises that would inevitably turn sour for him. Seeing none, he darted across the dark breadth of the broken pavement and flattened himself on the brick wall across from the alleyway's exit.
A thick whoosh, whoosh, whoosh sound beat out unfalteringly across the night air, a small whirlwind tornado rippled down the street and across Shinji himself as he crouched low against the wall. Dust and debris kicked up and surged across his crouched form; a rippling eddy of air that some monstrous creation of hell stirred up as it passed overhead, searching for food late in the eve.
Shinji slowly uncurled from his hunched poise and unsteadily glanced about at the darkness surrounding him. The pitch dark of night made things hard to perceive, and the ever-clouded sky above let neither star nor moon gaze down upon Tokyo-3's ruined surface anymore.
'Where the hell am I?'
"A good question, Shinji Ikari."
The stale echo's of ringing steel and the solid mass of his sword were the only indications that he had draw the blade at all. The figure that detached itself from the black shadow sounded amused in its mumblings as it carefully elected a path through the refuse that cluttered and clogged the street. Shinji snorted and re-sheathed his katana when the speaker drew near enough for him to spy his face.
"You. What are you doing here?"
"Another question with little meaning." Morpheus stopped close to Shinji and held out a single hand, palm up, to him. Shinji took the proffered hand and used it to lever himself up. His knees screamed in protest as their veins and arteries expanded and pulsed. "Like so many questions, it has nothing to do with the moment. And like so many, it is the one that having answered...would solve many things."
Shinji turned and started picking his way through the sidewalk. "Are you saying that you're here to solve all of my problems?" Shinji jerked up suddenly as Morpheus walked out ahead of him from the shadows.
"No. I am here to help you solve one problem." The Virtue walked heedlessly of where his foot would fall next, but made no sound despite himself.
"So, what?" Shinji asked, hesitantly turning to watch the angel. "What's the problem that I have?" "One that you will come to face soon enough."
Shinji growled in frustration and darted forward down the street. A few clicks and clacks was all that announced his presence, but that may be all that was needed. After charging a few dozen meters, Shinji slowed down and crouched again. His ears heard nothing but a lonely chirping cicada in the street.
Suddenly, a heavy thick breath was upon his neck. "You rush forward to meet it even now."
Shinji bit his tongue to stop from shouting and spit the thin coppery taste from his mouth. "What the hell are you trying to do?! Kill me?" he furiously whispered to the ebon Virtue. Shinji couldn't see the smile, but he felt it, hot upon his back.
"You would have died a thousand pains in the Darkness had I chose so."
"Then what are you here to do?" Shinji patiently watched the darkness around them. Wary of any silent predator that may chance upon him and his unhelpful helper. Morpheus let his grin fade into a thin-lipped smile as he stepped through Shinji and into the street. Shinji felt very cold after that. "Could you please not do that again?"
Morpheus ignored the plea, "Before you is the open sky of stars. To reach the earth you must succumb to the forces that God imposed on nature, but if you do this...it is certain that you will die."
"Please make some sense."
"You have seen the hole?"
Shinji waited a moment before he answered, his mind working out the riddle that Morpheus had presented to him, "Yes...I've seen the hole that leads to NERV." Morpheus waited, his smile still plastered to his face as he waited. "You're saying that I'll have to...to 'Jump'? I have to jump into that hole to get to NERV?"
"The way is long and hard, that out of darkness--leads to light."
"Milton," Shinji hesitantly said, "Paradise Lost."
Morpheus was on him again, his face bare inches apart from Shinji's own. The young man didn't flinch a bit, though he very nearly yelped with surprise once more. "Your path is narrow, and very dangerous. Should you move an inch to left or right, the razor's edge will slice you deep. Other paths will meet or diverge from your path, but stray not to them...for they will kill you as sure as Satan is sin."
Shinji reached out beneath him and gently eased his ass to the ground. It was cold on his backside, but it felt good to rest a moment. He had been running since the motorcycle ran dry of petrol. Tokyo-3 was a large city, and many ways were now blocked to him. "How will I know which path is mine?"
"The path is ever-changing, but a clear eye and a cool mind will see through. Let despair or rage consume you..."
Shinji nodded ponderously, his eyes drooping jerkily as he sat there propped against the cold facade of a ruined building. The mist was almost gone now, leaving a thick and muggy heat behind it. It felt so good to rest. So--good.
Morpheus stood a stolid and silent watch over the exhausted boy. He had worn himself ragged his first day back to the world, too exhausted to know that he was about to fall down asleep. Slowly the world faded into a dark grey, then a bleak light. A new day was dawning over Tokyo-3, and with every new day brought new disasters.
And new hopes.



"Hey Asuka!"
Asuka turned from storming down through the ever-winding labyrinth of hallways to glare at the approaching man. He was stoutly built, thick all across his body with swarths of muscle that rippled smoothly as silk on water when he moved. His face was narrow but strong, his nose a thin type that spoke of genteel European breeding. Long hair as fair as summer sun bounced in and out around his ears in their regular curls. A hand gently removed a few strands from the corner of his emerald eyes as he drew even with Asuka.
"I heard you got into some sort of argument with Kaoru again."
Asuka groaned and twisted away, the man followed. "Yes, yes...I had another argument with Kaoru." They turned one corner and headed for a suite of elevators at the far end. "He wanted me to transfer Touji to his unit again."
"And..?"
Asuka glared at him before stepping around a tech that emerged from one of the many lab doors that littered the hall like so many holes in Swiss cheese. "I said no Petyr. That boy has lost three flight crews in as many engagements; now I'm not about to risk Touji or even Kensuke to that kind of danger--!"
Petyr gently grabbed her arm and pulled her about to face him as the tech rounded the corner. Asuka's protest fell apart to the firm kiss that the taller man planted on her lips. The two pulled apart hastily as one of the lab doors opened up the hall from them, and with a quick glance they turned and resumed with a quicker step to the elevators.
"You shouldn't be so hard on Kaoru," Petyr said to Asuka as they waited beside one of the chromium plated doors. "I know guys that have lost five times as many crewmembers these last few engagements."
"Yes," she started again with a harried voice, "but those guys aren't asking for Touji or Kensuke!" Petyr's eyes looked slightly mortified. "Just what is it about those two guys that makes you so damn protective of them anyway?" Asuka held her answer as a ding announced the elevator's arrival. She held it still while all the occupants offloaded and then a while longer as Petyr and herself stepped in. "Well?" he asked as the doors clanged shut.
"I just...look." The ominous ticking click of the indicator started to wear a hole in her patience. "They are the last connection that I have left on this world. The last people that I can talk to about..." Asuka looked away to her reflection and studied the neat creases of her one-piece flight suit of light grey. "I can't lose them, I just can't."
Petyr slid a protective arm across Asuka's tight shoulders, pulling her close into a tight, warm hug. Asuka sighed against his firm chest and twined her arms about his waist. She burrowed into his dry, warm clothes as deeply as she could, trying to seek a moment's freedom from the painful reality that was her life.
Her thumbs twitched in involuntary annoyance as the indicator click-clacked along.

Shinji awoke from a night full of daemons and haunts that prowled through the abyss of his mind only to see that his nightmares were now reality. Broken streams of daylight peered quickly through the ever-overcast skies of granite; only to disappear again as the stormclouds shifted like a thing alive, breaking the single, solemn flow of golden sunlight before it could reach the earth below.
The world around him was greyer still. With wet slabs of concrete and soaked beams of twisted steel scattered across his vision like so many broken child's toys. He fought away the shadow of grog that lingered across his mind and eyes like a gritty blanket and rocked himself forward on the balls of his feet.
"You don't have much time."
Shinji didn't flinch at the sudden low growl, instead moving his gaze steadily over the many nooks and crannies that lined the street up and down, all the way. The sword burned warmly into his hands, settling there like a content kitten wanting to roll over and burrow deeper into its master's warm side.
Morpheus moved silently across the broken street just as Shinji passed over him. "They know you're here, and they will be looking for you after they find the Fensirs. You should hurry if you want to reach NERV."
Shinji straightened, his legs groaning and his back whining with cramps and sores from their uncomfortable rest the night before. "Wonderful, I get to be chased by monsters to a big giant hole in the Earth; only to have to jump from the edge when I get there. Pardon me...but how in hell is this supposed to get me to NERV?"
Morpheus smiled a toothy white grin.
"Right...I'm supposed to jump," Shinji started to pick his way through the warren of rocks, carefully setting his feet before putting any weight on it. "What a wonderful way to die. Fucking splatter myself all across Kaji's watermelon patch...heh, wouldn't that be a great way to go?"
Morpheus watched the boy pick his way cleverly through the street until he reached a clear patch. The Virtue smiled as the boy's soft boots made hardly a sound as their owner dashed across the pavement and through the hollow skeleton of a building. Then even those muffled, almost silent sounds ceased.
Frowning a frown that didn't quite become his face, Morpheus glided across the street and into the war torn building. A quick search found the boy studying a beaten and battered door set into the solid side of the next building facade. After a moment of short contemplation, Shinji set himself to scattering the small pile of heavy rock that blocked the metal hatch.
"What is this?" Morpheus calmly asked.
Shinji didn't pause from shifting the rock, "An entrance to the Geofront. I guess that they don't know about it, just as you don't know about it. And since I don't much relish the idea of dying in a crockpot or in a watermelon patch; I intend to see if I can find a third way." The patch finally cleared, Shinji twisted the wheel lock to the hatch sharply to the side. Flakes of ferrous red rust showered off the wheel as a twisting screech of old metal grinding sounded across the empty vista. The hinges of the door did no better, whining in lusty protest as Shinji flung his body against the door. Soon he had enough of an opening to slip inside with the ebon Virtue a trailing shadow in his wake.
"Damn," Shinji intoned, "darker than the Darkness in here."
Morpheus smiled at that, but held his peace. He knew there was only one way back to NERV; but man should always be given a choice. It was this choice that made them men, that made them something more than mere extensions of a higher power. So even as it was the wrong choice, Morpheus let Shinji take it. 'He will learn soon enough, or he will die and the world with him.'
"I don't suppose you have some nifty little light trick for me?" Shinji asked almost lightly to the angel behind him. When he saw Morpheus shake no, he sighed and pulled out his katana. 'Best be ready in case those demons "have" found these tunnels down.' As the pale blade schinked free of the scabbard, something happened that Shinji didn't expect. The world of darkness around him receded, or seemed to jerk back as though the sword in his hand was burning it. The whole tunnel writhed and spasmed with shadow and darkness, and the pale blade of the katana shone brightly with a dim glow. Like moonlight. "W-What the hell is this?"
Morpheus felt more than a little stunned. Shinji had been carrying that since he returned from the darkness, and he never felt it in all that time. 'How did he get that from the darkness without my knowing of it? And why can't I feel it?'
"Morpheus? What is this?" Shinji sounded uncertain as he held the katana at arm's breadth away from his body. He didn't want to give up the only protection he had in this city of monsters. Not yet at least.
"That..." his shaky breath was unnerving to Shinji, "is the Shadowsbane. H- how..?" Morpheus quickly shook his head, "No, I will worry about this another time. If you intend to go on, do so now. Otherwise go back and head for the hole."
Shinji cautiously watched the twitching and writhing shadows as he held Shadowsbane before him in a ginger grip. The pale light from the even paler blade seemed reluctant to move with him, just as the shadows seemed reluctant to recede as the light pushed forward against it. The passageway was surprisingly clear of debris, which was a delightful treat to Shinji who was sick and tired of the slow, picking movements he had been forced into on the streets above.
Slowly the tunnel sloped down, with occasional branches and Y-intersections and sometimes even another intersecting passage running across or splitting off of Shinji's chosen path. Once he had to double back and chose another passage, as his own started to slope upwards once again. The pair walked for an hour or more in silence, with no more than the velvet whisper of quietly laboring breath and the gentle scrape of soft leather on steel flooring to give them away.
"Do you know where you are going?" Morpheus asked suddenly, sending Shinji's heart racing through his stomach, bowels, and then back up through his intestines and into his throat.
"Could you give me a little warning first?" Shinji nearly shouted at the seemingly-hovering Virtue. "No I don't really know where I'm going, just that if I keep following the down passages they will eventually connect with a main line heading to NERV Headquarters."
The Virtue seemed passively complacent with Shinji's explanation, and gestured for him to continue on. The arch of his eyebrow seemed to belie the easy-going follower routine Morpheus was acting out, but Shinji couldn't care less right now. The important thing was that he wouldn't have to jump into that damn hole in the Geofront.
"Now if you don't mind, I would like to walk the rest of the way in silence. So please don't disturb me." Shinji didn't hear any response, not that he really wanted one. The pair walked on in near silence for another hour or so into the darkness below Tokyo-3.
The shadows never did stop writhing as Shinji passed.

Asuka woke suddenly, gasping for breath as her mind reeled from one of her many night terrors that plagued her dreams for the past four years. Like all night terrors, she had a hard time remembering them; only recalling enough to shiver and dread the next night she would have to endure under their grasp. Her palms felt wet and clammy as she rubbed some sense into the bridge of her nose, her shift clung to her supple body like a second skin. A very uncomfortable second skin.
"Asuka?" Petyr stirred from where he slept beside her, stirring from beneath the thin sheets of her bed. "Dreams again?"
Asuka nodded, her eyes staring blankly off to the distance; staring through the thin wall that separated her small officer's suite from the rest of her barracks. Petyr coughed aside lightly, brushing his hands up and down her petite arm in a comforting attempt to reassure her.
"Why don't you go see the doctor? I mean, I know you don't want to run the risk of getting grounded from flight status...but you're suffering at night, I can see that much Asuka. If you get caught in a fight with as little sleep as I've seen you going at..." Petyr trailed off with a hanging silence, as if he was waiting for her to agree with his proposed solution.
"I'm not going to see a psych."
Petyr rolled away from her then, seeing the hard face that suddenly masked all of her thoughts and feelings. He knew that face well enough after seeing it for the better part of a year; that was the sort of face Asuka put on when she was feeling particularly stubborn about one issue or another. Every time he had tried to break through that impassive masking face he had been turned back, roughly he might add.
"Okay, okay, don't look like that," Petyr soothingly stroked along her spine and shoulders, hoping to calm her down enough to go back to much- needed sleep. She didn't go back to sleep, but she did lie back down; curling up against his warm frame as much as she could without touching more of him than she really needed. Petyr sighed at this familiar position, the one she would go into when she was remembering the worst parts of her life.
He made the mistake of asking about it once. What he heard wasn't pretty; he never made the mistake of asking what she was reminiscing about again. It was a much safer alternative. They lay there for the better part of half an hour, listening to each other breath, patiently waiting in drowsy wakefulness until one or the other would suddenly move to a more comfortable position and wake the both of them up.
Then the alarms started to sound.

'Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit--'
Shinji chanted mindlessly as he fled down long corridors of inky shadows that jerked like living things burnt with hot iron when the pale gleam of light emanating from Shadowsbane chanced into their once-quiet domain. Morpheus was gone again, disappeared down one shaft or another when Shinji wasn't watching him or asking him questions about what all he might encounter in Tokyo-3. And then they had attacked him. They were really small creatures, easily slain and tossed off to one side or another. The problem was: there were too damn many of them! He must have butchered a good two dozen of the first group he encountered, and then a whole new group poured in from behind the first.
Given no choice, Shinji ran.
He took any tunnel that loomed up out of the darkness. Side branches, Y- intersections, randomly picking on of any offshoots that were presented to him. He fled the gibbering, mindless creatures that scampered and scurried after him. Following him with their dog-like snouts that protruded from their leathery face with its stubby horns and flappy ears with beady red eyes set thinly in the middle. Shinji knew they were following him closely, he could hear their yips and yaps and that subtle scratching of sharp nails on hard steel. They were very close, and he was gaining no distance on them no matter how fast he ran.
Then, down one randomly picked tunnel, he saw the comforting shimmer of a hatch outlined by light from beyond. 'Yes! A hatch! I'm going to make it, I'm going to make it!' Shinji poured on the last of his speed, ignoring the protesting cramps in his already stressed legs to bull rush the last stretch and slam hard against the doorway. The wheel barely covered the growing sounds of his pursuers as Shinji hastily spun it first one way and then another, frantic to escape the clutches of those dog men that scarcely came higher than his knee.
A spear clanged hard against the hatch just as Shinji whirled the wheel around the last time to unlock the door. He jerked away just in time for another spear to smash headlong where his head was. The force of it however, slung the door wide open.
"Mother of God..." Shinji didn't know whether to start vomiting out obscenities to all the cruel injustices of the world--or to thank the two creatures that had tried to kill him. The hatch opened into windy nothingness. A straight drop from nearly the top of the Geofront straight down to a wide swatch of forested land below. Nearly a full mile between him and the ground--too bad he wasn't an angel. 'Then I could just fly down and escape this madness.'
That single thought seemed to bring Shinji back to his reality, which consisted of nearly fifty little goblinoid monsters-and him alone. He lurched himself up and spread out his legs wide to keep a good footing on the floor, no need inviting the creatures to fling him out after all, and steeled himself for what would be a painful end.
There was nothing left in the hall he could see. And though the wind masked most sounds, he couldn't hear any nails scraping along the floors as dozens of creatures should have made as they charged him down.
'Are they getting something to shoot me from far away? Or are they playing some other game?'
"No Shinji, they are not."
Shinji fell of to one side in horrid startlement and then gave a wordless sigh of relief when he realized that it was only Morpheus who was talking. "What the hell are you trying to do!? I've told you, never do that to me again." The Virtue had the good graces to look slightly sheepish about startling the young mortal so badly, but lost it soon enough as Shinji gaped and pointed at him. "Y-Yo-...air, no feet..."
"Yes, I am floating in the air Shinji. But is that really so strange to you now?" Shinji snapped his mouth shut. "Good. And if you're wondering, Kobolds don't like strong light, so they won't attack you while the sun is at your back...you won't be so fortunate against the other creatures though."
"Others?" some of Shinji's old voice squeaked back into that worried question. Morpheus only nodded.
"Yes, they know and they are swiftly approaching. I doubt that even armed with so formidable a weapon as Shadowsbane that you would be able to defeat these attackers. Let alone get away from them."
'Oh...shit...' Shinji gripped the warm hilt tightly, his knuckles felt like they would punch through the skin if he held on any tighter. "You said I would have to jump to get to NERV...right?" Morpheus didn't answer, just stood calmly in the rippling air. As dark and mysterious as any could come. "How much longer do I have?"
A caphanopcy of roars sounded in the hollow bowels of the Geofront as hundreds of winged demons poured through the gaping wound of its sky. Winged harpies and other creatures mounted on winged, horselike abominations of black hair wreathed in manes of fire and breaths of sulphur charged down an unseen ethereal rampart. Each and his brethren intent on killing all and any that they found amongst the small, forested plains below. Below, men and machine stirred to life as klaxon alarms brazenly whined through the long halls and listless dormitories; waking those it was placed to warn to the dangers that fell from the sky above.
Suddenly the sky was awash with the screaming whistle of lead and the brapps of explosive shells that flew high and far and deep into the oncoming ranks of enemies from on high. Vibrant orang-gold burned searing lines into his mind as they streaked across the bleak and dim Geofront, one for every five shots fired off from their belts of ammunition. They punched hard through whatever flew into their path; instantly dropping those it caught when it did not immediately kill them. Occasionally whatever was hit instantly vaporized into large clouds of scarlet mist, if their blood ran red that is. But those were few and far between; and there were more than just a few coming into the Geofront.
A green sea of boiling bile was vomited down at one battery of weapons. Shinji faintly imagined that he could hear their horrid screams and see their almost invisible bodies writing and twisting as their skin and what lay underneath was melted off faster than gasoline could burn. The dragon gave a short, choked caw in triumphant delight as he soared higher into the air--only to be brought down by a thick, concentrated barrage of explosive flak that caught the beast square against its chest and eye. The dragon plummeted into the crystal waters of the small lake beside NERV's pyramidal Headquarters. But others soon took its place, soaring down to wreak havoc and death upon those below. Dragons of emerald green spewing clouds of sickly colored vapor, ones of flaming red vomiting fire hot enough to melt steel, ones of deep blue beaching forth bolts of white lightning, ones the color of snow spreading clouds of ice as they went, and more of those night black ones with their bile.
"You have reached your crossroads. Two choices. One will see you dead, the other might do the same. But only one way will grantee that you reach NERV." Morpheus said in that suave, mellow voice of his.
Shinji balked at the thought of jumping. Hell the thought of doing it when it was calm was frightening enough, but now he would be jumping through a bunch of attacking monsters while NERV shot at him from below! How in hell was he going to live long enough to even hit the ground in one piece?!
"You don't have much time," Morpheus was slowly hovering away from the open hatch, exposing himself to fire from parties all around. A small winged creature with horns like a ram and wings like a raven and legs like a sheep slashed past the Virtue's face, but took no more notice of him than he did of Shinji. "Any minute now a Klurichir will come around that last corner and kill you. Make a decision."
Everything slowed. Time began to mean nothing to reality as Shinji's overwhelmed mind struggled to understand what he could do next. Behind him he could see a gloomy form start to move forward in the shadows, a figure that was so large it had to hunch over nearly at the waist to fit through the small passageway that lead to the hatch--and Shinji. It was perhaps the most cruelly bizarre creature he had seen so far; a thing with four arms as thick as his thigh and longer than his entire leg from the hip down that ended in a hand that could wrap around his head with room to spare. Massive legs the width and thickness of a goodly aged oak tree made the passage tremble and quake while it stomped down to kill the uncertain Shinji at the end.
And most bizarre of all, and the most horrid, was the gaping mouth set within its stomach. Three rows of nasty teeth that slobbered with drool and saliva gnashed and chomped against each other as two pinchers that looked like ant's pinchers, if you could find an ant twenty feet long that is, writhed and slashed through the air beside them.
Those beady eyes that glowed in the shadows held no remorse or even simple hatred for him though. Just a plain mission. Those eyes said that the creature would kill him and eat him, but have no pity, remorse, guilt, hatred, or even discomfort at the act. This creature was bred to kill, and he would do it.
Efficiently, effortlessly, willingly. It would do it.
Shadowsbane was radiating heat so hot that Shinji would swear that his flesh was being baked, he didn't release it though; if he was to live long enough in this mess he would need every weapon he could get. 'Jump or stay? Jump or stay?'
The creature started growling, a earthy rumble that reminded him of a landslide clashing rocks against one another. That decided for him. Shinji jumped.

"Goddamn this shit!"
Asuka screamed in a fury born of frustrating rage as she furiously banked, twisted, rolled, dove, climbed, and made her F-Jet writhe in the air like a fish squirming in water. The sky around her had a life of its own in a sort. Filled with creatures both small and large; dying, killing, attacking, retreating, hundreds of them and all of their friends. Then there were her own friends. All of NERV's remaining aircraft, everything with a gun or a rocket attached to it, was up and flying through a shitstorm of bullets, acid, lightning, fire, toxic gases, and lead. Then there was the occasional rocket or missile that would scorch across the sky but those were easily seen and avoided.
"Kaoru! Where the hell are you?" she screamed into her comm before flipping her jet belly over top to avoid the dreadful maw of a diving red dragon. Bullets rocketed out from her side gunners and scored a telling blow on the enormous beast, sending it on to crash into a long row of recently planted trees. Her co-pilot grunted with annoyance as he swivled his own gatlings around to fire at an approaching harpy. Luckily, nothing could be heard in the jet but their own engines. Soundproofing was a requirement for these things.
"I'm here, what do you need?" Kaoru was alone in his tattered jet, but unconcerned as he sounded off over the radio. His blackened and torn F-Jet flew across the top of Asuka's own as she righted hers. A short blast from his gatlings ripped through a small gaggle of flying creatures, dropping at least eleven of them with one pass. The rest split up quickly enough.
"I'm getting calls from the guys higher up. You're lead, I'll follow you up there!"
"Rodger."
The two jets banked and screamed with pulsating power as they climbed higher and higher across the sky filled with the deadly dance of death and fire. A sudden ping! ping! ping! rattled through the metal skin of Asuka's craft that set her gunners to shouting and her co-pilot to cursing softly.
"What is it?" she called back.
"Fucking morons on the ground shot at us!" her left gunner replied, a long unbroken bwrrrrmap sounding through his headset as he took a shot of opportunity. "Bastards nearly holed my bubble!"
"Stop worrying about it. Those things are bullet resistant!" she sent her craft into a higher angle of ascent and tucked in tight and low behind Kaoru.
"Bullet 'Resistant' ma'am! Not 'Proof'!"
Then the comm crackled alive with a piercing call that echoed in the cramped cockpit of the jet. A call that meant almost certain death for anyone it was called for.
"MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY! WE'VE GOT A MAN IN THE OPEN! MAN IN THE SKY!"
The distress call for anyone falling from their aircraft in a battle.
It would be a kindness to shoot him before they hit the ground.
Or were taken.