Nono suddenly understood.
The loser wasn't trying to jump into the lake. He was measuring its depth, checking whether there was nothing beneath the surface, or whether it really held something he cared about.
Unfortunately, Lake Ashi was only a lake. There was nothing at the bottom but silt, weeds, and fish.
In Lu Mingfei's memories, armor plating and hydraulic rods had long since replaced this lake. Unit-01 was submerged in a dim underground shaft, rows of system lights flickering on. Unit-00 stood next door, and Ayanami watched him from beside it. Asuka grumbled that even a loser like him could pilot an EVA, all while impatiently helping him put on his neural connectors.
But now, beneath his feet, there was only cold water, emptiness so vast it made him panic.
He slowly bent his knees, kneeling on the shimmering surface, and covered his face with his hands. He neither cried nor shouted, only curled into a ball. Like a little dog that had spent half its life trudging through a desert, finally finding an oasis only to taste nothing but sand.
"Lu Mingfei..." An immense, absurd sorrow slammed into Nono.
Hummm-!
Nono's eyes flew wide. She saw a miracle.
Layers of dark-gold hexagonal light screens lit up, spreading outward one after another, as though the winter lake had frozen into amber ice in a single second.
The waters of Lake Ashi, which had been churning in the night wind, seemed pinned down by the invisible hand of God!
A suffocating despair spilled outward, almost freezing her soul.
"What... have you been through..."
With a thunderous crash, bloody water flooded her vision.
Ruins.
The ruins of a city.
Buildings had been uprooted by inconceivable brute force, fragments of steel reinforcement and concrete piled into sprawling gray mountain ranges. The sky hung oppressively low, its murky clouds like a rotting sheet of old felt. The air reeked of scorching and ozone, along with a lingering, sickly sweetness like rust.
Then she saw the dragons.
A pack of white dragons without eyes, their broad mouths split from one side of their faces to the other, like eternal smiles carved open with knives. They were pale as corpse wax, their bodies elongated and malformed, enormous teeth jutting unevenly from their jaws, with a pair of atrophied wing stumps.
They were devouring the corpse of a red dragon in a sea of blood.
The red dragon lay in the blood sea, its entrails scattered in mountainous heaps, a crimson spear piercing its body and spanning heaven and earth.
Nine white dragons were tearing it apart piece by piece and swallowing it. Red liquid gushed from the gaps and dribbled down their pale jaws.
Just then, the white dragons all raised their heads and looked into the distance.
The earth split open.
An even more enormous purple dragon rose from the far end of the ruins.
The nine white dragons bore it high into the sky, its posture like a martyr nailed to a cross, yet also like a natural disaster about to devour everything.
It was the black dragon that gnawed at the roots of the World Tree, the final prelude to Ragnarök.
The being in the sky broke free of the constraints of form altogether, becoming an immense tree woven from light and bones. Its roots pierced the earth, and its crown stabbed into the clouds. The white dragons coiled around its trunk, opening their vast mouths and crying out in a chorus that shook the soul.
Nine blood-red spears hovered around the immense tree, their tips pointing downward at everything on earth that still breathed.
Nono felt the boundaries dissolving.
Life was being torn from its form, souls emptied from their vessels. This was Ragnarök, the will to destroy everything once more after everything had already been destroyed, a force unsatisfied with ending things, intent on erasing the end itself.
The world began to dissolve!
Starting at the horizon, every color faded and ran as though doused in sulfuric acid, revealing the scarlet beneath.
The ground became a red sea.
The sky became a red dome.
The air became a red mist of blood. Its stench flooded Nono's nostrils, suffocating her with the sensation of slowly drowning.
This was the collapse of the laws of existence, the dissolution of all life, the final wail of a planet.
The sea of blood receded in a ring, exposing the dried-out ruins beneath.
Lu Mingfei sat at the very center of those ruins, holding a girl in his arms.
Nono couldn't make out her face.
All the light in the world slanted in another direction. That face remained forever in shadow, hidden by Lu Mingfei's arms, by the mist rising from the blood sea, by that immense sorrow she could not reach.
But Nono saw the hair.
The sea of blood had dyed everything red, but that particular shade-
That was her own color.
Red hair fanned out in the blood sea. The girl seemed to be asleep. Lu Mingfei hung his head, the red water already rising past his knees and dissolving the girl.
He was the last being in the entire apocalypse who still retained human form.
Someone had broken in.
Lu Mingfei raised his eyes numbly. A sweep of long red hair drifted through the air.
For an instant, he thought Asuka had come back to life and was strangling him, calling him an idiot. But when he lowered his head, all he saw was LCL covering his hands. The whole world was dead, utterly and completely. He simply sat beneath the scarlet setting sun, like a swordsman who had drawn his blade and looked around, only to find his heart lost.
"Aah-!"
Nono let out an agonized scream.
The psychic backlash churned through her brain like a red-hot steel blade. Her knees buckled, and she fell hard onto the cold, wet soil beside Lake Ashi.
"Urgh-!"
She sprawled on the ground, vomiting uncontrollably. The bitterness of stomach acid and bile mingled, scorching her esophagus, while tears spilled helplessly from her eyes.
But those weren't her own tears.
They were a drop of Lu Mingfei's sorrow that had accidentally clung to her during her profiling.
As hyperventilation brought on alkalosis, the world began to darken before Nono's eyes. In the final second before she lost consciousness, she saw the boy standing on the water slowly turn and walk toward her.
Drip. Drip.
The sound of water dripping into a copper basin.
Nono opened her eyes.
Her gaze moved down from the wood-grain ceiling. A paper lamp glowed softly beside the tatami. Bedding covered her, and a cold towel rested on her forehead.
She turned her head.
Lu Mingfei sat by the window a short distance away. He had changed out of his lake-dampened clothes and was quietly watching the moon outside.
Nono pushed her weak body upright, and the damp towel slipped from her forehead.
The boy before her was a broken god. A fragment of a shattered myth lay buried within his body. He had witnessed the true end of the world, then dragged the wreckage of his soul back alone into this human world with its facade of peace.
"You're awake?" Lu Mingfei didn't turn around. His voice was light and distant.
A sudden, vicious pain clenched Nono's heart.
She wanted to ask him what that world had been, what those white monsters were, what that enormous being rising into the sky was. She wanted to ask about the red-haired figure in those blood-soaked ruins...
The instant Lu Mingfei turned his head, Nono spread her arms and hugged him fiercely from behind.
Thud.
They collided with the window frame.
Nono buried her face in his rigid back.
"Lu Mingfei." She clenched her teeth, her voice trembling. "If you can't find it, let it go. Stop looking."
Her arms tightened of their own accord, holding the boy who carried the apocalypse even closer.
"Now that you're back here... live a good life."
Outside the window, Lake Ashi flowed quietly beneath the moonlight.
Nono closed her eyes, tears falling one after another.
"From now on, I've got your back."