"AAAAAH~~~~"
The fourteen-year-old boy hanging upside down inside Evangelion Unit-01 clutched his head and whimpered.
In that shattered, empty, pitch-black space just moments ago, Shinji Ikari had desperately spread his AT Field to protect himself and Evangelion Unit-00, yet his brain still felt like it was being wrung apart.
It felt as though his brain had been forcibly stuffed into a blender, turned into mush, then glued back together like a clay sculpture. The pain was unbearable.
The fourteen-year-old girl inside Evangelion Unit-00 was not doing much better. She was suffering a different kind of pain, but she seemed to have a higher tolerance for it. Even though her body had curled up like a shrimp, she forcibly held back any cries of pain and was nearly unconscious.
But before the crushing pain in his head had even faded, the violent physical impact of EVA's head-first fall made it even worse. At the same time, it reminded the boy that he was no longer trapped in that empty space. His feet could touch solid ground again.
For eighty-meter giants, even a slight turn was enough to shake the earth, let alone two of them at once. The mountain beasts, already thrown into chaos, were startled into fleeing in even greater numbers by the movements of the two EVAs.
Yet after finally pulling himself out of the upside-down position, Shinji Ikari stared at the blazing sun overhead with a bewildered expression, even forgetting the pain in his head for a moment.
"Daytime? How could it be daytime?! Where is this? I clearly remember fighting the Sixth Angel—"
Shinji Ikari's words stopped abruptly, because he had spotted a swarm of small flying saucers crossing the sky, something that should only have appeared in science fiction movies... No, they were clearly flying straight