After the fact, she realized she remembered every little detail preceding the event, and those following it once her senses cleared. The way the one inspector held the container in his hands, watching the contents bob and dance inside its crystal harness. She remembered how Giraud dashed across the lab space far too quickly for a regular person, not-quite shouting for the other man to put that thing down you don't know what it is!
Ritsuko didn't know what it was either. No one did, not even Shinji.
She also did not have the tools or instruments needed to measure exactly how much energy was contained in that glowing point of light. Much later, after examining the aftermath, she would learn.
The inspector broke the seal and unleashed a burst of raw potential. It rapidly transformed into an undirected shockwave of light, warmth and concussive force, equivalent to roughly one tenth of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, more than half a century ago.
Every window, monitor, door and vent in the laboratory block exploded.
* * *
The office floor polarized in an instant, fighting against the all-encompassing flash of light. The sudden flare completely eclipsed Central Dogma, Something from far below made the glass floor of his office hum, like someone was playing a wet-rimmed wineglass. Gendo even felt his glasses vibrate, resonating faintly with whatever had happened below.
Moreau held a two fingers to his temple, as did his three cohorts. He let out an exasperated sigh that did nothing to change his frozen expression, letting his arms fall along with his shoulders. "It looks like there's been a complication. Nothing personal, you understand?"
The inspector reached into his jacket, and that was when Gendo hit the panic button on his desk. Fuyutsuki followed the call, charging through the safe room door with a combat shotgun braced against his shoulder, finger on the trigger.
* * *
After the ringing in her ears, the only thing Ritsuko could focus on was that movies were lying liars that lied. She knew better, in her head, but some small Misato-esque part of her railed at the indignity that a giant explosion was ugly, uncomfortable, and painful. It didn't even have the decency to kill her and be done with it.
Instead, her glasses were ruined and she felt her skin being caked with dust from the ceiling tiles, the wall panels had all burst from their mountings, and nearly every table and console in the converted showroom had been tossed away from the blast. She survived, if one were charitable, by apparently being behind one of those aforementioned consoles. She coughed harder and clamped a hand to her mouth, tasting the grit and wishing she hadn't.
Blearily, she tried to stand, dimly aware that her stockings had been shredded by the blast. Shredded and bleached white. So had the rest of her- and every other bit of the lab- not one surface no matter how hidden escaped the scouring light, it bounced and burned and scoured everything to it's utmost. Ritsuko stared at her bare hand, utterly befuddled by the dark Okinawa tan. Frowning, Ritsuko dredged from her mind the countless experiments she and Shinji conducted over the past year.
Every surface detail was lost in the sea of pale tones. As her eyes adjusted, Ritsuko started picking out shadows through the billowing clouds of dust and worse. The inspectors couldn't cough- their lungs were aesthetic at best. Obviously whatever had been in her container inherited the same traits as Shinji's coronal display- otherwise she would have been flash-dried to the bone under that much concentrated sunlight. She was surprised the fire systems hadn't gone off.
Then by some cosmic mandate, the finally did, valves winding open and showers drenching everything.
That was when the dust cleared, and Ritsuko found something near enough to lean on. Movement out the corner of her eye made her wipe wet hair aside to get a good look. One of the inspectors was sprawled out against a pile of mangled tables, his suit a tattered, desert-bleached mess.
And the spiked, over-engineered limbs cuddled against his chest were not quality-of-life prosthetics. His head jerked and those lethal arms unfurled like leaves.
The glue and stitching in her low heels had given up seconds ago, and Ritsuko found herself stepping out of ruined footwear onto wet paved floor. Her head whipped around, hearing the whirr of a pump sucking in a simulated lungful of air, or the hiss and whine of servos and pneumatic muscles. Two more of the inspectors stood up, their faces ruined by sun exposure and flaking away like burnt makeup. Her eyes flicked down to the red-edged blades clipped to their thin mechanical torso, confirming her earlier prognosis.
Ritsuko ran, beating a line of splashes into the floor as the inspectors shared a faceless look and charged after her. The slipped and spun, tripping over debris or their own eroding crew shoes. She barreled out of the lab and slammed into the opposite wall before pushing off, feeling her heart pumping so hard it might burst. A massive shape slammed into the where she'd just been, someone so big it could have only been Giraud.
Adrenaline mixed with an icy clarity as Ritsuko's legs pumped for her one chance at victory. If she never ran that fast again in her life, she'd be content- if she survived she'd let Sorhyu put her through daily drills, if only to make her burning lungs hurt less. Charging through the narrow hall with a cyborg hot on her heels, Ritsuko swore she'd give up smoking, if she could just make it another twenty feet intact.
Rounding the last corner, Ritsuko juked left then right on some long forgotten playground instinct, sending her pursuer stumbling and moving just that one second slower. She slipped, skidding forward across the floor on wet clothes before tumbling inside the small room lined with monitors and a wired cage. Outside and down the hall, Giraud stood smoothly. Now she could see him properly.
As a man he was six feet tall. As a machine clad in the scraps of a suit and tie, he was closer to eight, unfurled carbon-fiber bows of muscle-springs. He was the first and best display of combat cybernetics in the world, and he was stalking right towards her. A purposeful hand reached up to loosen the remnants of his tie, an all-too-human gesture like some overworked company man, before snapping it cleanly from around his mechanical neck. It had not even touched the floor before he brought up his knees and started to run, stomping the floor so hard she felt each impact shoot into her thighs from where she sat.
Ritsuko reached up and slammed the emergency alert button, slamming the armored door closed and locking herself in the security room. The inspector slammed into the barrier and bent the frame- it wouldn't open again without being cut apart.
Pushing her hair out of her face, Ritsuko stood up on shaky feet and stumbled over to the security station. Her fingers etched an easy command into the keyboard, running more on autopilot than anything. She licked her lips and leaned down to the nearby microphone. "Attention Geofront- this is Akagi Ritsuko- We are under attack."
She repeated the message and slumped back into the seat, then Ritsuko brought her knees up to her chin and hugged her shins. That was about when she decided it was time for a good cry.
* * *
Moreau moved, and Fuyutsuki squeezed the trigger.
A booming cough of fire and the smell of cordite flooded the office. From the shotgun barrel came a spread of buckshot that pelted the incoming inspector, riddling his suit with holes and punching out the back to speckle his companions. Muted taps and metalic tones followed as the shots bounced off hardened organ cases and armor. Gendo whirled, slamming a gloved hand on his desk and demanding the drawer spring open. His pistol was there waiting for him, and he dragged it out and readied it in an instant.
Squeezing off two shots, he missed Moreau but clipped one of the other attackers in the neck, crumpling a strut and forcing the man's head to cant at an awkward angle. For all of that though, it was too little and too late. Moreau vaulted Gendo's desk and lashed out with one disguised hand, striking Gendo's right wrist so hard it folded around the blow. Fuyutsuki turned and aimed down the sights, roaring even as Gendo reeled away from Moreau and cradled his broken arm.
That was when the far wall and door exploded, and Ikari Shinji tackled two of the hostile inspectors from behind.
Gendo and Fuyutsuki stumbled back as the Third Child stepped away from the point of impact, leaving them crumpled against the Commander's desk. The boy turned to glance at Moreau and the other inspector, waiting. The hot pain in Gendo's arm was a distant concern, compared to the glowing gold brand that hovered over the boy's brow.
Moreau and the other inspector-soldier leapt to either side, flanking the pilot. They circled him, arms raised and intent, and while Moreau's face was utterly impassive, his cohort's face spoke volumes. Gendo grit his teeth and forced his heartbeat to slow with a sheer act of will- there was no room for mistakes anymore.
Shinji for his part became the anchor and center of the wary invaders, and his eyes flicked from side to side. By some unspoken signal, Moreau and his second surged forward, hugging the floor. The unnamed one went high while Moreau planted his hands and whipped himself around from the back and shoulders, throwing all his weight into his leading legs, aiming to transect with the boy's shin.
The cyborg's lunging sweep would have broken a man's thigh and crippled him for life. It slammed into Shinji's waiting limb with a bone-jarring crack. A spiderweb of fractures raced out from beneath the boy's feet across the floor, but the pilot himself had not moved. In that same instant, Gendo watched Shinji not quite pluck the other attacker out of the air and toss him over his shoulder and past the lead inspector. Moreau's frozen face betrayed nothing, but he slid back toward his ally with an oily, inhuman motion.
Shoving against the desk, the male and female cyborgs righted themselves despite the labored whine of their joints. They wrenched their kinked spines back into place, and one of them spilt a hail of wasted buckshot from the folds of their jacket. Blurring into motion they charged for Shinji while Moreau and his fellow recovered. There was an interplay that Gendo could see, where both sides evaluated each other even as they lashed out.
The boy raised his hand, knife-edged and meeting an incoming strike with the heel of his palm. A knee or elbow shifted, slamming into incoming attacks hard enough to fold joints on their weakest points, draining them of needed momentum. Every move Shinji made proclaimed genius at this art. Objectively, Gendo had known this, but now less than ten feet away, he truly saw it first hand. Blows that would have pulped tissue and shattered bone were turned aside. He rapidly matched them to lines in reports and hours of archive footage.
It was then that Gendo was given the proof that the boy was not just a master of unarmed combat, but a monster. The earlier exchanges had evidently given the boy the measure of his opponents. Shinji moved with a pankrator's efficiency, his arms raised and snaking around the nearest inspector and digging into strut and synthetic muscle. Gendo could tell the inspectors had come prepared to deal with bullets and little else. He did not disbelieve, but not even the pain of his broken wrist could make him misunderstand what he had just seen.
In the face of twenty years of material science and the Committee's bottomless coffers, Shinji's fingers left gaping rents in cloth, plastic and alloy.
Dropping his opponent at his feet, mangled into helplessness, the boy turned to stare the remaining invaders down. There was certainty in those eyes, and a commitment to something that transcended filial piety or crippled loyalty to some greater whole. The boy was there, present entirely in the moment with that arcane brand glowing on his brow, better and more true than any hologram Gendo had ever seen. There was a dire overestimation.
The boy was long gone, transformed into something else- something more than human. Gendo felt his heart pound in his chest, making the broken bones throb with each beat. There was no reason for boy to be there, surrounded on three sides by SEELE cyborg commandos. No reason save for whatever value he invested in the act.
Shinji defended NERV, and Gendo saw him cast off the last of the controls in that same action.
Fuyutsuki pressed his back against the desk, reaching out to tug Gendo down with him. "He's always taken after his mother, hasn't he."
Right at that moment, Gendo began to truly reevaluate his plans.
Then three attackers shared an unreadable look. Moreau's was inscrutable twice over. As one, they moved to abort, jumping for the gaping hole in the wall Shinji had made coming in. The boy though was faster. Gendo saw it unfold in utter clarity, despite the fact that it took a mere handful of seconds. Shinji raced forward, catching one of the inspectors by the ankle and pulling. The boy curled, spinning once and drawing the cyborg up and into an improvised bludgeon that caught Moreau and the machine-woman around the middle. They were flung bodily into the wall, throwing up plumes of dust and debris on impact.
Now Shinji stalked toward the pair of crumpled forms, dragging his living weapon along the glass floor. The cyborg in Shinji's hand struggled, kicking at the boy's wrist with spiked heels and bladed toes. As far as Gendo could see, it did little more than annoy. Riddled with growing pinpricks, Shinji roared and swung the man up over his head then down, slamming into the floor so hard the desk shook, some twenty feet away. The dust from the wrecked wall sprang up in new curling clouds. Then Shinji reared back and swung the man down again.
Fuyutsuki grabbed Gendo by the collar and pulled him back. That was when the Commander heard it. The sharp, percussive click and grind of glass shards.
On the third and final impact, the glass shattered, sending all four inspectors and Shinji free-falling more than a kilometer straight down.
* * *
The pyramid of Central Dogma was about a kilometer away, and some random bit of trivial fluttered through Shinji's mind. He'd stop accelerating around sixty meters per second, assuming he went spread eagle. Sorhyu had drilled him in Eva-scale aerial drop, which was somewhat similar to free-falling without a parachute. At the moment he was quickly picking up speed, and if he was right, he had about nineteen seconds before he slammed into the ground.
Shinji made a note right then to get violently sick after he landed, assuming he survived. He had bigger problems at the moment.
The air whipped at his shirt and pants, tugging his hair back hard enough to not-quite sting. Shards of glass surrounded him on all sides, some no bigger than his fingernail, others large enough to count as tables. Past them and getting further away by the second were all the retracted armory buildings and their maintenance cage- so far away as to be across the ocean. For all his skill and magic, Shinji couldn't fly.
A flash of black out the corner of his eye reminded him of the original problem. Three of the invading inspector-cyborgs had fallen along with him, and he watched them windmill, flailing their arms while their ill-fit suits caught the air like ragged leaves. One managed to orient himself and aim his hips towards one of the armory buildings. A muted puff of white gas and something sharp ripped through the coat from around the man's middle, trailing a rapidly uncoiling cable. The grapnel fell short, and it was reeled in almost too fast to see.
On some unspoken signal, the three inspectors changed their tactics. They ripped up parts of their jackets, revealing silk inserts and memory-alloy ribs, unfurling into serviceable wingsuits. Considering they didn't have things like skin, muscle or organs, Shinji figured they stuffed themselves full of other interesting things. They didn't have guns at least, or things would have happened a lot differently. There was a surprising calmness to the impending clash, something Shinji could feel coming seconds away even before the invaders banked hard, diving toward Shinji himself.
He had no traction on air, no way to apply his proper ground-fighting advantages. Kicking against the unresisting sky, Shinji had to wait, timing his actions at that critical moment. It felt so easy on some level, even moreso than dealing with Yakuza. There wasn't any rage, and his only fear was of the rapidly approaching ground. Instead, Shinji opened his hands and kept them ready, with the only thing he felt was a cool sense of rightness, of defending what he valued.
The first attacker swept in, holding their arms close and picking up speed. It was a diving tackle, depending entirely on the cybernetic frame and sheer velocity to land a strike. The bald man dove forward headfirst, plowing through a cloud of glass shards without pause. It was a target that got bigger and bigger in Shinji's eye, so big that he couldn't miss it. Except he did. Sheer bad luck sent him overbalanced and tumbling, letting the divebomb attack clip his legs hard enough to make his knee pop.
Tumbling and wasting a precious two seconds, Shinji clawed at the air, for something to hang on to, but there was nothing. The leader cut in next, spearing Shinji from behind with one alloy shoulder. Sent into a twisting spiral, Shinji flexed and kicked one last time. It was enough. He caught the third attacker by midsection with one limb and folded her up, doing more damage by the sudden deceleration than the strike. Her wingsuit frame exploded from the shearing stress, splitting apart and falling away in ruin. Scrambling around her half-broken body, Shinji willed himself upright, feeling the power flow out into the familiar centering stance.
Standing right-side up atop the falling inspector, Shinji jumped straight up, back into the cloud of falling floor glass.
Looking down, he watched the two mobile inspectors share an expressionless look before they turned and dove straight down, only to snap their wingsuits open again at the bottom of their arc. They rode the wind up, angling toward Shinji once more. Coiling up and pushing one foot down toward the nearest falling shard of glass, Shinji folded his hands and soul into a newer metaphysical arrangement.
When the two inspectors circled him, Shinji couldn't help but wonder what they thought of him standing upright in midair on something smaller than his toes.
Suddenly, the falling cloud of debris was a stairway to any number of interesting directions. Dashing up the shards, Shinji reached out to the nearest table-sized piece and punched, shattering it into vertical plume of glittering shards. Hiking along air with glass pebbles as hand and toeholds, Shinji ran toward the leader, Inspector Moreau. Halfway there, the bald cyborg with the grapnel darted in, crashing through Shinji's path of platforms and throwing his arms wide. The wingsuit canopy caught the air and pulled him alongside, forcing Shinji to backpedal and redirect. Moreau banked off toward the hanging railway, leaving Shinji to contend with the one left behind.
Standing and gliding respectively, Shinji squared off with the large man. Wind rushed past him, popping the buttons of his shirt off and pushing his hair vertical as he fell. The pilot-Exalt had about eight seconds before he hit the ground.
Folding one arm in, the cyborg cut and banked before diving forward, using his feet as control surfaces. This time, Shinji was ready. Standing astride two bits of glass no bigger than his palms, the Solar met the attack and caught the man in both arms. For a split second, the cyborg was stunned at the sudden shift in momentum and apparent gravity. It was enough. Shinji heaved the man up into the air and away before following, leaping into open air and slamming into the pinwheeling cyborg with both knees.
Metal and plastic groaned under the impact, and the pair tumbled for what felt like an eternity. Shinji saw the Geofront interior spin and blur into a mix of colors. Below, he saw a white and blue swatch appear next to a familiar pyramid, dripping with emergency alert lights. He could see men and women through the myriad windows, dashing through halls with weapons and asking for instructions. Then a pair of steel-boned hands clamped around Shinji's neck and squeezed.
Shinji's record for holding his breath was somewhere around three minutes, but he wasn't sure about arrested bloodflow. Flexing his inner reserve, he flared his corona to full, wreathed in wire-tracery arms and immaculate mandala. For a split second, the whole of the Geofront dome was tinted gold, and what remained of the cloud of glass in the air sparkled on its way down. Shinji's extra ghostly limbs reached up alongside his flesh and blood fingers, clamping around synthetic wrist bones to pull them from his throat, crushing them utterly. Simulacra-skin boiled and flaked away in the face of the burning sunfire, and the man's suit bleached to white.
At the end of their tumble, there was a moment of silence, and Shinji stared into the sensor strip that served as the man's actual eyes. A plume of icy gas bloomed between them, and Shinji felt something hard and hot drive its way into and through his ribs. He stared down at the harpoon that speared through his side. Then the hooks deployed. A ribbon of blood spouted out behind him, splattering into Shinji's white shirt. In that same moment, the cyborg went completely rigid, locking articulation beyond human strength. Shot through the side with a grapnel and connected to another two hundred pounds of dead weight, Shinji's mind raced for a solution. Two seconds before he hit the reflecting pool outside Central Dogma, he found one.
His hand slashed down and cut the cable, ignoring the harpoon for the moment. Hiking up, Shinji braced his legs against the machine-man and pushed, shoving himself skyward and buying precious seconds. The cyborg shot downward, splashing and tumbling along the water before sinking, sliding along the angled pool walls. Shinji twisted in mid-air with perfect balance, despite the steel spike shoved through his side. Drops of blood lingered behind him, but he didn't have time to care.
With no debris to walk on and nothing to grab, Shinji braced for the inevitable.
Impact threw a plume of water ten meters high into the sky, shining solid gold. a radial tidal wave followed, rushing out to beat against the sides of Central Dogma's decorative pool. In the center, Shinji stood on rippling water. A beat later, he let himself sink, if for no other reason than to take the weight off of his throbbing legs.
In hindsight, beating a cyborg against a glass floor might not have been the best of ideas.
There is no such thing as FUBAR only the glorios rays of the sun shining and bleaching everything of color. You have to remember that no matter what happens, its going to be good. And funny when Kihl possibly trips and breaks his hip and is sent home without 
