The Black Hands of NERV Chapter 27

[bissek]

Disclaimer: I do not own Evangelion or Noir. The actions of any referenced historical figures in regards to Les Soldats are entirely fictitious.

The Black Hands of NERV
By Bissek
Chapter 27
The Light of a Black Soul

“I don’t get it.” Toji said to Kaworu, after the white-haired boy had been rebuffed by Chloe yet again. “You’ve known that that girl doesn’t like you from practically the day that you first met. You’ve known that she doesn’t even like boys for two weeks now. Why do you keep going after her? Why not go after some girl who might actually consider going out with you? It’s getting embarrassing to watch you get shot down every single day.”

“How could I possibly seek another when none of them is anywhere near as fascinating as Chloe?” Kaworu replied. “Never before have I seen a soul that shines with such a brilliant light.”

The class stared at the mystical gibberish that Kaworu had just spouted. While they were wondering what in the world the boy had meant by that peculiar string of gobbledygook and whether or not Chloe should be flattered by her possession of that unspecified trait or the rest of them insulted by the implication that none of them had it in nearly as great an amount, Chloe walked over to Kaworu.

Whatever reaction Kaworu was expecting from his bizarre compliment, it wasn’t what he ended up getting. Before he could say another word, his breath was taken away by a swift and brutal punch to the gut. He doubled over with a groan and collapsed to the floor. Chloe looked down at the boy as if he was some particularly disgusting species of vermin.

“There is no light in my soul.” She snarled.

As Kaworu gasped for breath, Kirika walked over.

“Congratulations, Nagisa,” She said sardonically. “I can’t think of a single think you could have said that would have offended her more.”

“I-I d-don’t understand.” He gasped.

“That’s right. You don’t understand her at all. Let me help you understand one simple thing about her: If she had been holding a knife when you said that, you would be dead now. Leave her alone if you value your health.”

Nobody else in the class had the slightest idea as to why Chloe had found Kaworu’s comment to be insulting. As Kaworu painfully climbed back to his chair to await the next teacher, they decided it probably had something to do with her religion. Though what strange religion would find having a brilliant soul (whatever that meant) to be an abhorrent concept, none of them could hazard a guess.


“So why did you find your stalker’s compliment to be so offensive?” Asuka asked her cousin as the group headed home. “I know it was weird, but there wasn’t anything insulting in it.”

“Asuka, if someone tried to compliment you by claiming you had some trait that would automatically disqualify you from being a pilot, how would you react?” Kirika countered.

Asuka wondered what that had to do with anything, and then it clicked. Noir were described as having black souls. By claiming that Chloe had a soul more brilliant than any others, he had described her as having a trait diametrically opposed to what Noir was supposed to be.

Kirika had pegged it: Chloe considered being Noir to be an essential part of who she was, just as Asuka did with her status as the Second Child. In an effort to hide from the pain from Chloe’s apparent abandonment, her mother’s… illness, and her father’s infidelity, Asuka had buried herself in the one thing that made her stand out, centering her entire life around her position as the pilot of EVA-02. Chloe had similarly centered her life on her being chosen as a Sapling. Years of being raised by the very people who trained to take on the position of Noir, with her surrogate mother figure being the leader she was expected to eventually serve, she had probably gone months or possibly even years without meeting a single person who wasn’t involved in guiding her to the eventual goal that Les Soldats wanted her to reach. Even after rejecting the organization that had raised her, Chloe still held on to that one part of her indoctrination (The hope that Kirika would be alongside her as the other Noir might have something to do with it). Kaworu had effectively told her that her lifelong dream was forever unattainable for her, and that everything she had gone through to achieve it had been for nothing.

When Kirika had made a comment to that effect (among other things), Asuka had had to keep Chloe from killing herself. Coming from the mouth of someone who had no apparent authority to judge over Noir, it was simply an unforgivable insult.

“I see what you mean.” She said.

“At least one good thing came out of this.” Chloe said.

“What would that be?” Shinji asked.

“Nagisa isn’t following me today. Maybe he’s finally decided to leave me alone.”


Chloe was right. Kaworu might have been persistent to a degree that his classmates considered to be sheer idiocy, but he understood that he had accidentally crossed a line with Chloe that he should never have approached, even if he didn’t have the slightest idea as to the nature of that line or why his comment had crossed it. Because of that unintended transgression, his pursuit of the girl had been rendered futile. Acknowledging defeat, he turned his thoughts to the task that had originally brought him to Tokyo-3: The search for Adam.

Kaworu stood at the place where his brother Armisael fought the Evangelions. Then he turned and started walking in the general direction that his brother had headed when Adam revealed himself. It was a long process. With the city not in fortress mode, what would have been a straight line journey became a winding path at least three times the length he would have traveled had he dared to use his powers and simply fly there. Unfortunately, he couldn’t risk advertising his presence to NERV until he knew where Adam was. There was nobody left to follow in his footsteps should he fall, and therefore he had to succeed.

It took three hours, but Kaworu eventually reached the place that Armisael landed when he fell from the sky. An additional hour and a half took him to the place where his brother finally died. Further travel in that direction took him to the outskirts of the city, the area which Armisael had presumably been trying to reach. Hours of fruitless searching revealed no trace of his father, only the access point of one of the emergency shelters.

As Kaworu caught the last subway train back to his residence, he decided that the only way that Adam could have suddenly appeared and then just as suddenly disappeared during the battle was if somebody in NERV had brought him out through that shelter entrance and then returned him to that shelter, and from there wherever he was kept locked away once the battle ended. That meant that Adam was hidden within the GeoFront beneath the city.

Unfortunately, getting into the GeoFront wasn’t a simple task. Every entrance was known to NERV and carefully guarded. Even the shelters could not be accessed by civilians from the surface except when a state of emergency was declared. Had he known of Adam’s location earlier, the solution would have been obvious: He would have waited for one of his brethren arrived, enter the GeoFront through a shelter, and then leave the shelter and search for Adam. Unfortunately, there was no was no one to start such an emergency other than himself. And as the only one of his kind capable of being in two places at the same time was his deceased sibling Israfel, he could either create the diversion or search the GeoFront, but not both.

The next possibility was to enter the GeoFront through the massive breach that Zeruel had created. Months after his demise, that breach still existed. However, that effort could prove to be too risky. The breach might still be around, but that wasn’t because of any incompetence on the part of NERV. They had people working on that breach at all hours. It had literally taken them the better part of a month just to get the scaffolding in place to even attempt to repair the breach, and the sheer size of it, combined with the cost of the materials, made actual repairs a very time consuming process. There was no way he would get to the breach without being noticed, and there was also no way to exploit the breach without flying, which would announce his presence as the final Messenger to NERV before he was ready to move. That option was out as well.

Judging by what had happened to his classmate Kensuke, it was possible to be ‘invited’ into the GeoFront by annoying Section 2 sufficiently. That was semi-viable, but not exactly ideal. He didn’t have the skills needed to get himself arrested for the same reason that Kensuke did, and he didn’t know what else he could do that would get him considered dangerous enough to lock up but not dangerous enough to shoot out of hand. In addition, he would be watched continuously in such a method, which interfered with his need to search the underground facilities. He also didn’t care for the idea of being locked into the brig for a week to keep up his façade as a common Lilim until he was ready to act.

The next possibility was that he could use his contacts within SEELE to get one of the local agents to smuggle him in. That plan made sense to him. Many NERV employees drove to work, and apparently had their vehicles transported from the surface to the GeoFront and back at shift change. If he could get himself concealed within one of those cars, he would be taken straight to the general area he needed to start his search in, with none of his adversaries the wiser.

Kaworu resolved to contact a local SEELE operative about hiding in the trunk of his car the next day.


Concealed within the trunk of the SEELE operative’s car, Kaworu managed to enter the GeoFront without much trouble. After waiting an hour to reduce the odds that there would be somebody in the parking garage to see him emerge from the trunk, he slipped out and proceeded into the GeoFront.

The winding, maze-like corridors of the complex known as Central Dogma were enough to confuse anyone not familiar with their layout, but Kaworu had an advantage that most newcomers did not have. He could sense the presence of beings with discrete AT Fields, and as such knew the exact location of the places he wanted to go, even if he didn’t know the shortest path to get there.

There were only two places inside the GeoFront that were of any interest to him. One of them was deep below ground, even when considering Central Dogma to be ‘above ground’, and the other was not. Kaworu decided to go after the second area first.

It took him some time to find the correct path, but with his innate ability to tell when he was getting closer to his goal, he eventually made his way to his destination. There he found a set of hangers where the false child of Lilith and the two false children of Adam rested, waiting for their next battle with Adam’s true children.

This was not what Kaworu had been looking for. But looking at the wall, he noticed a lift sized to fit the Evangelions. Something about the lift gave him the impression that he was not at the lowest level it could go to. If that was the case, then he could use it to approach the place where his father had to be resting. And since an EVA sized lift had to have EVA sized corridors leading up to it on all floors, that meant that he could take the perfect weapon to counter any efforts NERV could make to stop him along.

Looking at the sky-blue form of EVA-00, Tabris reached out with the light of his soul and took control of mankind’s ultimate weapon.


The pilots were in their locker rooms. They had taken the day off from school to participate in yet another set of synchronization tests, trading hours of dull lectures on Second Impact for hours of sitting in an overgrown tin can filled with orange goop that smelled of blood in the hopes of preventing a Third. Having just finished their tests, the Children were looking forward to being able to get out of the plug suits and showering the LCL off of their bodies.

Their hopes of being able to stop smelling like blood for a time were dashed by the scramble alarm. The pilots promptly turned around and ran back to the hanger bay. There they were greeted by the absence of EVA-00.

“Was die Holle?” Asuka yelled. “Where’s Unit 00?”

Acting Commander Fuyutsuki’s voice came over the intercom. “Pilots, the 17th Angel has appeared inside Central Dogma. It has somehow hijacked Unit 00 and is attempting to breach Terminal Dogma. We’re not sure how. As far as we can tell, there isn’t even an entry plug in place, let alone a pilot. Shinji, Asuka, you are to intercept and destroy the Angel immediately.”

The two named pilots ran to their entry plugs. Kirika, left without an Evangelion to pilot, headed for the bridge. She didn’t like not being in a battle without being able to fight, but being in a battle without even knowing what was going on was worse.


Tabris floated down the empty shaft, his stolen war machine following close behind. He could feel the power of the AT Field trapped deep within the bowels of the underground fortress calling to him. Soon he would be reunited with his father. Soon his mission would be complete.

At the bottom of the shaft, he found a pair of enormous sealed doors blocking his path. While they might have been useful at stopping a conventional force, they stood no chance at stopping the brute strength of an Evangelion prying them apart. Smiling, Tabris floated into the room where his destiny laid waiting for him.

He heard two metallic crashes behind him. NERV had noticed his presence and sent the remaining Evangelions after him. No matter. He sent EVA-00 to delay them while he travelled further into the sealed chamber.

Within the chamber, Tabris saw a literal lake of blood, above which was suspended the crucified form of a captive Messenger. As he saw the oozing wounds were spikes affixed the Messenger to the cross, Tabris realized that all of the blood in the lake had come from those wounds. The Lilim had dared to treat his father so?

But even through the anger he felt as he gazed upon the Messenger’s form, something felt wrong. As he approached it, he realized what it was.

“T-This isn’t Adam.” He gasped. “This is Lilith!”

But if Adam wasn’t held by NERV, where was he? He knew that Adam was somewhere in Tokyo-3, but where? The only place he had found discrete AT Fields outside of NERV was…

And with that thought, Kaworu knew exactly where his Father was hidden.


The bridge crew watched in silence as their remaining Evangelions were lowered into Terminal Dogma. They watched as Asuka engaged the hijacked EVA-00 in close combat, allowing Shinji to run past in pursuit of the Angel. The silence continued until EVA-01 got close enough to the Angel to make out its form.

“The Angel’s a kid?” Shigeru wondered.

Kirika looked at the image on the screen. “Nagisa?” She gasped.

“You know him?” Fuyutsuki asked.

“His name’s Kaworu Nagisa. He’s in my class at school.”

Fuyutsuki mentally noted to have intelligence backtrack the history of this boy once he was dealt with. They had had an Angel concealed as a human in the city, in regular contact with the pilots and the key to Third Impact for an indefinite period of time and nobody had noticed. They needed to know where he had come from and how he had come up with an identity that allowed him to do so in order to prevent a repeat performance. They also needed to figure out how he had gotten into the GeoFront in the first place.

“Of course.” Kaworu’s voice rang out over the speakers. “How could I have been so foolish? She has Adam.”

With that, Kaworu flew out of the reach of the grasping EVA-01 and flew back out the door. A somewhat battered but still functioning EVA-00 flew after him, knocking EVA-02 over in the process.

Looks were exchanged across the bridge.

“Well, the secret’s out.” Hyuga said.

“What’s the battery status on EVA-02?” Misato asked.

“Two minutes remaining.”

“That’s not enough time. Shinji, your Eva has an independent power source. Get in the elevator and up to the surface. We need you to get to Chloe before the Angel does. Aoba, sound an alert. Get everyone off the streets. We’re going to have an Eva running down them in a few minutes and I don’t want anyone getting stepped on.”

“Right.” Two voices responded.

“Should we be getting people to the shelters?” Hyuga asked.

“It wouldn’t do much good. The Angel knows exactly where he’s going, so crowding more people around his target would only get more people killed.”

“Crank the conveyers up to maximum speed and open access point 521.” Kirika cut in.

“What?”

“I’m going after Nagisa. I might be able to pin him down long enough for the Evas to arrive and deal with him.” Before anyone could object, the girl left in a dash.

Misato remembered seeing Kirika’s first simulated battles. Back then, she had thought that if they ever encountered an Angel that could be fought on foot, the Fourth Child would be able to handle it without any problems. It was apparently time to test that theory.

“Do it.” Misato ordered. “Then get me a phone line to Tokyo-3 Municipal Junior High. I need to get the principal to understand that an Angel is heading straight for his school, and that he needs to get his human students out of the line of fire. And have Section 2 send a car there to evacuate Chloe. The last thing we need is an Angel battle inside a crowded school.”


There were two possible definitions to the term ‘maximum speed’. There was the maximum safe speed, which was the greatest speed the conveyers could take where there was no risk of injuring the people using them so long as the practiced proper care, and then there was the actual maximum speed, which was the greatest speed they were physically capable of going. The bridge crew had taken the literal meaning of the term ‘maximum’. Kirika hit the conveyer belt at a run and kept on going, not slowing until she reached the escalators, where she had to stop for fear of breaking an ankle on the moving slope. The moment she reached the surface, she started running again, sprinting through the open entrance and yanking the machine gun held by the Section 2 guard at the entry point out of his hands as she passed him.

Access point 521was the closest access point to the school. Even any advantage of speed Nagisa might have with his ability to fly, he still had to leave Central Dogma, make his way to the breach in the armor, fly to the surface from there, and then head to his destination. Kirika had a considerably shorter distance to travel.

Her oldest friend was in danger. Kirika might not have truly understood what friendship meant until meeting Mireille, but that didn’t change the fact that she and Chloe had known each other virtually their entire lives (Almost literally so in Chloe’s case, given that the current Chloe was technically less than a year old). Had the person Kirika had been in her True Noir persona not been almost totally incapable of recognizing bonds between people, let alone forming them, she probably would have grown up thinking of the other Sapling as a sister.

Kirika had lost Chloe once because she hadn’t realized how important she was to Chloe before she had done something that made Chloe think that she had been completely rejected. She had no intention of losing her friend again. She ran on, racing to beat Nagisa to his goal.


Chloe was sitting in class, waiting for the bell to ring. Her friends were all working at NERV today, so there wasn’t anything of interest at school today. On the other hand, Nagisa wasn’t in school either, so one of the continual downsides of school had gone away for a little while.

As the history teacher lectured about the Meiji Restoration (A welcome change – hearing about events 150 years in the past was far preferable from hearing about the events of the previous 15 years for the umpteenth time), Chloe amused herself by comparing the official version of those events against what had been recorded in the Soldat archives of how they had changed the shape of the world. The description of the early years of that period were fairly accurate, so long as one honestly believed that the acts of the Western merchants that devastated the Japanese economy were caused by a large number of individual speculators rather than an orchestrated attack, and that the selection of a large number of officials to the foreign consulates in Japan who would be willing to resort to armed force in response to anti-foreigner incidents were due to chance rather than design.

The first real inaccuracy came when the topic of the Shinsengumi came up. Chloe idly wondered how Kensuke (who had been released by Section 2 the week before) would react if she let the class know that the greatest feat of the Shinsengumi was not their preventing the razing of Kyoto in the Ikedaya Incident in 1864, but the death of Noir at the hands of Hajime Saito a year later. Not only did the man slow the advance of Les Soldats into Japan for an additional thirty years (As the agents of the time all took excessive care to avoid the notice of the only person to ever defeat an entire Noir team single-handedly, for fear of sharing their fate), but the implications of his victory had shaken the power structure of Les Soldats in ways that were still felt a hundred years after his death.

Creating Noir was a very expensive process in both time and manpower, and the loss of Noir brought with it the loss of all the resources used to train and test them. Les Soldats could literally not afford the expense to replace Noir more often than once a generation. That one man could destroy Noir and remain in good enough condition to continue his duties cast a poor light on the High Priestess who had selected and trained that generation of Noir. Other factions within Les Soldats were able to use that leverage to begin to wrest power away from Les Soldats, beginning the corruption which had brought Les Soldats to the state it was in now.

When she had first heard that story from Altena as a child, she had hated Saito for what he had done instead of simply dying like he was supposed to. From her current perspective, Chloe found the man’s position to be more sympathetic. Saito had probably never even heard of Les Soldats. He was simply doing his job as part of an elite police force. He had found that men in his unit had been subverted by an outside agency, and he eliminated them. Later on, two women tried to kill him, and he defended himself. Had she been in his sandals at the time, she likely would have done the same thing. Actually, thinking of her actions starting from when she learned that Les Soldats had been corrupted beyond redemption, she had done almost exactly the same thing.

Before Chloe could start taking apart the next statement the teacher made, Chloe felt the semi-familiar and highly unwelcome sensation of a large AT Field.


The class turned to stare as Chloe jumped out of her seat.

“Is something the matter, Miss Langley?” The teacher asked.

“There’s an Angel coming.” She said. “You need to get out of here, now.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Miss Langley, if there was an Angel coming, we would have heard the alarms going off by…” The teacher stopped and gaped as she saw EVA-00 flying towards the school. The class watched through the window as the flying war machine approached the school with a floating boy standing in front of it. Chloe recognized the boy immediately.

“Nagisa.” She spat.

EVA-00 dropped to the ground, landing with a crash onto a car filled with Section 2 agents, smashing it flat. Kaworu floated closer to the school, and then smiled slightly. A translucent hexagonal barrier appeared in the air, and then rushed forward, smashing into the windows. The students screamed as shards of broken glass flew through the air, slicing into anyone in their path. But there was one area completely clear of glass. A second field had appeared in front of Chloe, stopping all the glass coming at her and those behind her.

“You may denounce the light of your soul with your words, Chloe, but you seem to have no problem with calling upon it.” Kaworu said.

Kaworu drifted into the class, ignoring all the people he had injured.

“I know that you hold Adam, Chloe.” He continued. “It is time that we became one.”

Before he could come any closer, the door was kicked open by Kirika, who raised her machine gun and emptied the magazine at the Angel. Once she was out of bullets, she threw the empty weapon at him. The distraction she provided allowed the students time to make their way to the side of the room, out of the immediate line of fire. Kaworu sent his AT Field at Kirika, shattering several desks in its path. Kirika rolled out of the way, and then scrambled to her feet, grabbing two pieces of a ruined desk and holding them like disproportioned tonfa.

Under ordinary circumstances, the sight of one of their female classmates engaging in a martial arts duel while wearing a skintight black bodysuit would be something most of the boys would cheerfully pay money to watch. This was not an ordinary circumstance. The students (With the exception of Kensuke, who was recording everything, oblivious to the personal danger involved) all started creeping to the door.

“Do you think you can best me with such toys, Lilim?” Kaworu asked. “You forget what I control.”

The enormous form of EVA-00 stomped closer to the school. It raised its arm to smash into the school, a blow that could kill everyone in the room, along with everyone in the adjacent rooms and on the adjacent floors in that area of the building. Then the sound of a pair of enormous feet crashing into the earth came rushing towards them. EVA-01 had arrived, knocking Unit 00 away from the school.

Taking advantage of the distraction, Kirika took the offensive, one makeshift nightstick striking for Kaworu’s head, the other sweeping around to knock his legs out from under him. The higher blow bounced of an AT Field, but the other landed, knocking him to the ground. The follow up blows both struck Kaworu’s AT Field as he levitated off the floor and returned to his feet. Undeterred, Kirika continued to attack until her weapons started to crack and break from continual impacts with the AT Field.

Looking around, Kirika ran to a lamp and yanked out the extension cord. Turning around, she leapt over Kaworu and out the window. Kaworu smirked at the apparent retreat, right before a noose made of insulated wire looped around his neck and he fell backwards, pulled out of the window by the weight of the girl at the other end of the cord. As he struggled to regain his breath, the remaining students in the class took advantage of the lull in the battle to get out of the room, carrying their injured classmates with them.


Shinji faced off against EVA-00. This was the second time that he had to fight another Evangelion in a serious battle. This time, however, he didn’t have to worry about harming a colleague. There was nobody piloting the Eva, Kaworu was somehow controlling it by remote. There was nothing to cause him to hesitate as he initially did when facing the 13th Angel. An additional advantage he had was that Kaworu apparently hadn’t had much in the way of combat training, which Shinji had, even if he wasn’t at Asuka’s level, let alone Kirika’s.

Shinji wasn’t entirely certain about his feelings for Chloe. When she first arrived in Tokyo-3, he had first seen her as a connection to his sister, who had been rather distant to him at the time, and a clue to her mysterious past. Over time, he started to see her as a person in her own right. He hadn’t actually thought of her in any kind of romantic context until he had inadvertently relived her previous incarnation’s final attempt to win his sister’s heart from his sister’s perspective (Something that Asuka took far too much pleasure in teasing him about). But even if he didn’t know what Chloe meant to him on a personal level, he did know what she was to him on a professional level: The person he had been ordered to protect at all cost, on pain of global armageddon. And he wasn’t about to fail that duty.

A particularly brutal combination of attacks knocked EVA-00 to the street. To Shinji’s surprise, it returned to its feet immediately. Shinji realized that Kaworu had one advantage on his side as well: Since he wasn’t actually synchronized with Unit 00, he wasn’t feeling its pain. That meant he could cause the Eva to ignore the damage done to it and keep coming at him so long as it was intact.

This fight would be tougher than he thought.


Kensuke Aida was perched at the ruined window of his classroom, watching the battle through his camcorder. This was so cool! He was actually seeing an Angel fight in person! He wasn’t watching from a distance or through a computer like the previous times, he was less than a hundred meters away and could make out every detail. And to top it off, he was watching a pilot fight the Angel without an Evangelion.

He watched as Kirika launched a flying kick at Kaworu. The kick struck his AT Field. Kirika then braced herself against the field and kicked off, bouncing off of Kaworu in a graceful back flip. Landing in a crouch, she scrambled to her feet and darted forward, seeking another angle to attack from.

Kensuke stared avidly, thinking that this battle was even more impressive than the one that had gotten him into so much trouble with Section 2. He was so intent at watching the fight that he overbalanced and fell out of the hole where a window had been a few minutes previously. Fortunately, the shrubberies lining the school wall broke his three story fall.


Kirika looked around for her next weapon. Nagisa had snapped her noose shortly after she had pulled him out of the school, and she didn’t have anything else substantial enough to do serious damage at hand. The amazing thing was that her attempt at hanging him almost worked. It had taken him several precious seconds to form an AT Field inside the tightening cord and force it open. Kirika had thought there was a good chance that she’d only snare an AT Field to being with when she had attempted the maneuver. It was as if his AT Field wasn’t always up for some reason.

A possibility occurred to Kirika. Between fighting Shinji by proxy and fighting her in person, Nagisa was being forced to focus on two battles at once. Perhaps the need for two-way initiative was diverting some of the mental focus he needed to maintain the AT Field. Kirika had gone through years of training on how to keep track of a battle against multiple opponents; most other people hadn’t.

If that was the case, then she had a chance. If she happened to launch an attack when he was focusing on stopping EVA-01, she could take him out. If Shinji launched an attack when he was focusing on her, then her brother could disable the rogue Evangelion and come over to deal with the Angel. And if neither of them got that opening, they still had a good chance of keeping him occupied on two fronts long enough for Asuka to get EVA-02 recharged and to the surface, after which she could deal with the Angel.

As she searched for a new weapon, Kirika spotted something that would help her keep the Angel occupied for a time. She launched a new series of attacks, carefully herding Nagisa to the area she needed him to be. Once he was in position, she flipped over him and backed away, hoping to goad him to try to strike her with his AT Field again. She was not disappointed. She just managed to roll out of the way as the barrier rushed forward, crashing into the object that was behind her.

Kirika gave a triumphant smile as the damaged telephone pole fell in the direction in which it had been struck, landing on top of Kaworu Nagisa.


The students were gathered in the gymnasium, huddling in terror. Witnessing a battle first hand was nowhere near as exhilarating as watching one on a screen. Many of the students were moaning in pain from shrapnel wounds gained from the destruction wreaked by Kaworu’s entrance. The class representative was one of the wounded. Looking down on the girl he had carried out of the wrecked classroom, Toji reached for a particularly ugly shard of glass embedded in her side.

“Don’t.” Chloe interjected.

“What?” Toji asked.

“That piece of glass is the only thing holding that wound together. If you pull it out, she’ll start bleeding uncontrollably. Leave it in place until the paramedics arrive. Just have her lie still. Moving around will just make her injuries worse.”

Toji looked at the other girl. On any other day, the revelations of this day would trigger a new cycle in the rumor mill. Kaworu was an Angel. Chloe had super powers. Said powers were the reason that Kaworu had made his highly unwelcome courtship and then attacked the school. And the only reason that Chloe’s unwelcome suitor hadn’t seized her was because the person she wanted to be courting her had showed up and was now trying to beat the Angel to death with broken pieces of the classroom’s furniture. But today felt more like a scene from a rather gory war movie than the soap opera feel of the previous incidents surrounding the pilots and their close associates. Right now the main thing going through Toji’s mind about Chloe was that half the class was seriously hurt and that it was because of her.

“What would you know? She wouldn’t be hurt at all if it wasn’t for you!”

“You’re right.” Chloe sighed. “I knew something was odd about Nagisa from the day he showed up. But I never did anything about it because he never did more than act as a constant nuisance. Killing people for purely personal reasons is highly unprofessional. Had I acted on my instincts and eliminated him earlier, this day would not have happened.

“It’s time I corrected that mistake.”

Chloe removed her vest and tossed it aside. Beneath it was an odd harness of black leather across her lower back, which was studded with pieces of grey metal. She pulled one of them out, revealing it to be a knife, and slit her skirt in the front and back for greater freedom of movement. Then she strode away, leaving behind students gaping at the announcement that the only reason she hadn’t killed her unwelcome suitor weeks before was due to professional ethics (Though of what profession, they didn’t know), and that said ethics were no longer protecting the Angel.

Said students were suddenly very glad that none of them had ever tried hitting on the girl.


Between having ten meters of wooden post landing on him and getting tangled with the broken power cords, Nagisa had not taken Kirika’s trap well. Had he been a fraction of a second slower in bringing his AT Field up, he would have ended up either flattened or cooked. He had effectively thrown the pole back at her once he managed to pry it off of himself. This was followed by several attempts to smash her against something with his AT Field.

As Kirika was slowly backed into a corner by the sudden offensive, a third party entered the battle. A throwing knife flew through the air, embedding itself in the Angel’s AT Field.

“Get away from my partner, Nagisa.” Chloe demanded.

“Chloe, get out of here!” Kirika called out. “You’re the one he’s after!”

“There’s no way I’m letting you go into this fight alone. Remember, your fate is tied to mine by a thread as black as death.”

Kirika smiled as she picked up a length of piping broken off of a wrecked bicycle rack. “Indeed, Death itself wasn’t enough to sever it. Alright, let’s go, old friend.” Kirika moved to interpose herself between Chloe and Nagisa, swinging her improvised quarterstaff as she did so.

The two fought in perfect unison. However dismal Kirika might have been at understanding Chloe at an emotional level, when it came to combat, the two knew each other so well that they didn’t need to consciously think about what the other would do next. Kirika knew exactly when and where Chloe would throw her next knife, and moved out of the way just enough for the blade to pass before resuming her blocking movements, striking at any point Nagisa left exposed the whole time.

As the battle raged, Kirika noticed that Chloe’s knives were partially penetrating the AT Field. Taking a chance, on the next knife, she swung her staff not at the Angel, but at the hilt of the knife, driving it further into the AT Field. The knife pierced the barrier far enough to actually injure its target, causing Nagisa to cry out in pain and rage. The Angel pushed out with his barrier again, this time at an angle. Kirika was caught in the attack and was thrown aside, her staff falling from her hand. Fortunately the blow was only strong enough to knock her away instead of smash her into the wall of the school.

As she climbed painfully to her feet, Kirika desperately looked around for a new weapon. Nagisa had cleared her from his path, and now he was attacking Chloe, AT Field struggling against AT Field for dominance. She was running out of time. If he won that struggle, the world would end. But with all his attention on that struggle, he might not be able to defend himself from an attack from a different angle. She needed to make one last strike, and she needed to make it count.

Seeing Kensuke filming the battle from the bushes she had landed in, she reached out and grabbed his glasses off of his face. She sprinted towards the Angel, pilfered glasses in hand. Two swift snaps and the ear hooks were broken off and the frame discarded. She came up behind Nagisa, one hook in each hand, and forced them into his ears, piercing the eardrums and driving into his brain.

The Angel of Free Will barely had the time to cry out once before his brains were scrambled by a crude and lethal lobotomy.


The battle was over. Ambulances came and took the injured students to the hospital, while work crews arrived to evaluating the damage done to the building. The school would be shut down until repairs were completed. A medical team came from NERV and collected Kaworu’s corpse. He was the single most intact Angel specimen they had ever managed to secure, and of a size that could be easily examined, and they planned to perform a full autopsy.

There was a great deal of complaints about NERV’s handling of the battle. They ignored the fact that trying to get the population to the shelters at the same time that Evangelions were on the surface would only cause them to be (literally) underfoot. They also ignored the fact that having a person who was effectively Angel bait around wasn’t that significant when you considered the fact that the entire city was ultimately Angel bait – a detail that had been public knowledge for nearly a year.

EVA-00 was carted back to the GeoFront. Thanks to Kaworu’s total disregard of the damage inflicted on his puppet, Shinji had been forced to inflict a massive amount of damage in his efforts to subdue it. A thorough assessment would be needed in order to figure out whether or not repairing the damage would even be feasible.

As the cleanup effort commenced, everyone at NERV heaved a sigh of relief that the Angel had been stopped. This one had gotten much too close to success for comfort. It was the first time since the 11th Angel that the Angels had attempted anything resembling subtlety, and they hadn’t recognized the threat until it was almost too late. They wondered if the next Angel would attack in a similar way.

They had no way of knowing that the attack of the 18th and final Angel would be anything but subtle.


OMAKE: The Mireillequarium (suggested by gunman and James Axelrad):

The group in the laboratory watched as the horde of Reis dissolved in the tank and Ritsuko laughed hysterically. One of the observers shifted nervously at the unsettling image and hit a switch on a control panel by accident. This caused a concealed doorway to open in the wall. Walking through the door, the group discovered a second lab, similar to the first, but instead of a tank full of Reis, this room contained a tank full of Mireilles.

They gathering stared at the tank, wondering why Gendo had felt the need to mass-produce copies of a Section 2 bodyguard. Then Kirika noticed the expression on Kaji’s face as he stared at the naked figures of several dozen Mireilles.

Kaji was smacked by virtually every female in the room. As he moaned on the floor, Kirika disposed of the copies of her partner.


OMAKE: The Black Hands and their Fanboy (Inspired by gunman):

Kirika and Chloe looked upon the fallen body of Kaworu Nagisa.

“Thanks for the help, Chloe.” Kirika said.

“How could I not help? Noir is a name meant for two, after all.” She replied.

Unfortunately, Chloe hadn’t noticed that Kensuke had been watching the entire fight, and had heard that last statement.

“Oh my god… You two are Noir?” He gasped.

“This is cool! I actually got to see Noir in action! And to think they used my glasses to take out the Angel! I’m going to mount these glasses on my wall!” He gushed.

The two assassins looked at each other silently as their groupie continued to go on and on. It was clear that trying to get the boy to understand the concept of discretion was a futile effort. By the time he got around to asking for their autograph, they had agreed to a plan of action without any need for words.

The authorities would later find Kensuke’s body hidden behind the bushes, a piece of paper with the word “Noir” scribbled on it in his hand.


A/N: I’ve been looking forward to this fight for two years now. I hope you all enjoyed it.

I think it’s likely that Asuka found her way to her canon mindset on her own, seeing as the events that brought her to that point could only be partially orchestrated by an outside party (Unless somebody could predict the nature of Kyoko’s madness and her suicide was actually a murder – the latter being scarily possible). Once she got there, however, there were undoubtedly subtle actions on the part of SEELE to make sure she stayed there.

The only kill Chloe has ever done in canon that could be considered purely personal was the death of the drug dealer in episode 12. Every other kill she made or attempted that could be considered personal could be justified professionally, even if her ultimate reason for the act was personal.