Smoke and the sickly sweet tang of LCL filled the battlefield in the Underground City.
Asuka piloted Unit-02 · Integrated Form, viscous Angel blood still dripping from its cracked red armor.
She had just driven Victor's black unit back with her particle cannon when he suddenly stopped attacking.
His vicious stance froze, and then he stiffly raised his head to stare at the shattered rock overhead.
"What the hell? Trying to pull something?"
Asuka cursed with a scowl. Unit-02 · Integrated Form tightened its grip on the particle rifle Chang had supplied, ready to counter a surprise attack at any moment.
But Rei Ayanami spoke softly beside her, the white body of Unit-00 trembling slightly:
"It's not the enemy. It's an energy signature above us-an abnormally massive one."
Before she finished speaking, Torwart also stopped moving. Together with Victor, he remained staring upward, seemingly cowed by the shadow blotting out the sky.
Asuka and Rei Ayanami exchanged a glance, then instinctively tilted their EVAs' heads upward. Following the two enemy units' gazes through the gaps in the rock, they looked toward the sky over Tokyo-3.
At that moment, all the noise fell into deathly silence.
The sky had been torn open into an enormous breach in its dome, through which a dark red continental plate descended, wreathed in raging flames and the pitch-black aura of the void.
Like a falling inferno, it was hurtling toward Earth.
Its immense bulk obscured half the sky. Scalding magma flowed along its edges, blazing brilliantly as it scraped through the atmosphere.
The air warped under the searing heat, and the rock beneath them began to shake violently and uncontrollably, as though the entire world would collapse under this apocalyptic impact.
"Yomotsu Hirasaka!?"
A rare tremor crept into Asuka's voice as the Integrated Entity's sensors