Shinji's face had remained tense the entire way to the Special Unit's hangar. His brow had not relaxed once since yesterday.
He stepped onto the steel bridge reserved for the Special Unit and looked up at its enormous head.
With its vicious mouth and sinister eyes, the newly rebuilt Special Unit felt unfamiliar to Shinji as he stood below it...
"This is the third time... You didn't change after the last rebuild, so why wasn't it the same this time... Forget it. Zhetian-kun isn't here anymore." Shinji lowered his head in sorrow. Now he did not even have anyone familiar to confide his anguish to.
Zhetian-kun was gone, and his weapon was no longer what it had once been, either. It merely bore the same face as Zhetian-kun. No matter how much it resembled him, it was not him.
What should I do now, Zhetian-kun? If you were still here, everything would be fine. But what good does thinking about this here do? Should I tell Kaworu Nagisa about the current Huang Zhetian?
Shinji turned and left the Special Unit's hangar. He had only come because he felt lost, with an emptiness inside him that he had nowhere to fill.
The surface above NERV Headquarters
The defensive city on the surface had yet to be cleared of the devastation left by the Special Unit's self-destruction.
Several enormous lakes had formed in the wake of the Special Unit's explosion. Along their shores and in their shallow waters, the remains of high-rise buildings still stood at crooked angles.
A utility pole had miraculously remained standing near the shore of a lake, as though offering anyone who came here proof that this area had once been prosperous.
Thousands of households had depended on it for electricity. It had kept the entire city running.