Evangelism
Leet
It really was a hurricane out there. The downpour and uneven winds lashing at Brockton bay... and half a California up and down the coast... would've been plenty of reason to call out a state of emergency. A brief glance out the rain-slicked window confirmed what he was seeing through the lens of the Snitch; in this weather, even a military drone would've been cartwheeling into buildings, if not fried from water damage. Thankfully his ultimate streaming camera had a gravity drive. ...Maybe. Probably.
Uber was out at one of the forward strongpoints, while he'd decided to stay back in their lair. Not that he wasn't helping in his own way. He'd given Dragon access to their streaming/gaming/EWAR setup and was now troubleshooting the incredibly complex bot she'd left behind to manage the majority of combat intel. Even Dragon couldn't be everywhere at once.
Briefly he wondered just how much water Leviathan had scooped up out of the Atlantic to seed this monster storm. He glanced again at the big clock on the main monitor. Less than a minute to go before it would break the surface. He saw the system send Legend, Purity and their cloud of flying Blasters the signal to-
"
MACRO-SCALE SPATIAL FOLD DETECTED." An image accompanied the warning: A completely featureless black disc, 40 meters across. Leet briefly frowned.
"Meters?" Then he realized: "Ah yeah, DragonTech." He toggled a few hotkeys he'd memorized in the anxious wait for the Endbringer, trying to analyze what the hell had just appeared in the sky above the Bay. Then something emerged out of the portal, crashing feet-first into the water. "HOLY SHIT!" He screamed, and from the sudden cacophony on the (incoming, unprocessed) armband comm lines, he wasn't alone.
A red...
thing, stood ankle-deep in the shallows of the bay.
"It's a giant robot." He thought that was Clockblocker he heard over the din of incoming messages, but the absolutely flat inflection didn't fit. The automated system installed on Leet's computer directed his Snitch toward the decals on the enormous [60 Meter] machine's shoulder wing. It read "NERV Evangelion Unit-02" among some smaller scribbles.
He felt a twinge deep in his brain. Some part of him wanted to build something as amazing as this insanely sleek though angular machine, but that same part sneered at the ludicrous impracticality of that same gaunt, hunched-over monstrosity. Giant robots were cool. Avatars of human badassery… But this thing looked like someone took a Sangheli…
an Elite from Halo, and electroplated it. After starving it to death. Then added wingy bits here and there.
But everyone's awe (and Leet's vague revulsion) were short-lived as a dome of overlapping hexagons seemed to materialize all around Brockton Bay's eponymous inlet, mere feet
(HA!) from Legend's face as he and his posse were getting into position to bombard Leviathan.
Speaking of the Endbringer, it seemed to have stopped moving. Only its face, and at times it shoulders were visible through the waves as it peered at this "Unit-02" that had apparently sealed off Brockton Bay for a one-on-one cage-match with the Endbringer.
Leet idly noted that the Snitch had also just barely been out of the forcefield dome when it came down. Strangely enough, the snitch was flying over the bay not half a minute earlier. "...How... good are that giant robot's sensors that it can detect-" Suddenly a brilliant ruby-red two-pronged spear fell out of the black featureless portal. With a quickness which
should not have been possible, the giant mech snatched it out of the air just before it could hit water.
"So...
exceptional situational awareness... Impossible speed..." Leet wasn't dumb enough to start rooting for whatever mad Tinker had built this thing, that way lay only disappointment. (A Tinker named
Evangelion? Sounded southwest-y) ...But he was thinking that Leviathan would certainly be pretty softened up from fighting a giant mech three times his size, and possibly almost as fast as he was.
Leviathan seemed to agree. For the first time in over half a minute, the Sinker of Cities moved. He stood up on his hind legs, and roared for effect as all the water inside the Bay swirled around him. Leviathan's infamous water-shadow was normally an impossibly fast extension of the Endbringer's will. Always vaguely shaped like the Endbringer itself, but sweeping and moving and slashing and dancing in ways faster than even the quickest of the three avatars of death slowly devouring Earth Bet.
This, however, was new. In an application of power Leet had only really seen Eidolon do once or twice with glowy green energy, Leviathan was now completely enveloped in swirling opaque high-pressure water and puppeting the [60 Meter] simulacrum from its chest.
"Heh." That was a girl's voice, transmitted at [100 decibels]… From...
Click, tab...
...Vibrations made by the shield?! Wait, wait... Yeah, all sound, even Leviathan's roar was just being generated by the giant shield dome. Not reverberations from
inside, deliberately projected sound. So this girl (Tinker named Evangelion?!) was putting on a show?! A shiver went up Leet's spine, while at the same time the giant mech went into a combat stance, deliberately twirling its two-pronged spear in a flourish.
[Warning, heat haze detected behind HEXAGON DOME]
Click, return...
The air was rippling around the red robot, estimates from Dragon's bot and his own 'Fun Facts' streamcaster bot put the thing's outer temperature at over 700 degrees and rising.
Leviathan didn't seem to notice or care, the Endbringer's water-shadow dashing on all fours toward Unit-02. Despite his size, Leviathan didn't seem to have lost any of its trademark speed.
Incidentally, Dragon's bot had by now pinged over two dozen new maximum-on-record expressions of power from the Middle Endbringer.
Nevertheless, Brockton's eponymous bay was still surprisingly large, even at 30x human scale. It took the Endbringer two seconds to get up to speed and lunge at Unit-02. Its response was swift, brutal and equally fast.
An explosion of light bounced off the inside of the absurdly powerful shield as the red mech slashed diagonally upward with its gemstone lance toward the careening Endbringer's chest. Though as the Snitch's camera polarized faster than any human eye could, Leet saw something almost everyone watching outside the dome missed. It wasn't the contact between the weapon and the Endbringer inside the water-construct that caused the bright white flash. Instead a halo of light and eight luminous wings had sprouted from the giant machine. With a lazy flap of its wings and an eerily limber motion, it leaped after the Endbringer it'd sent rolling through the mud toward the city.
Landing on Leviathan's compressed-water body, the red mech stabbed into the Endbringer's chest, and-
The water-shadow, which was so impossibly compressed Leet had an inkling it
had to have been dimensionally folded somehow, exploded. Gray-tinged water blasted outward and smashed into the dome-shield like a 30x sized garden hose on a window pane. When the water crashed back into the bay, the only thing visible was Unit-02 stabbing something under the water.
To Leet's sudden horror, an Unit-02-sized Leviathan arm stabbed out of the water, attempting to grasp the Evangelion-mech's throat. With a flick of its wrist that seemed almost dismissive, the anorexic robot slashed the tip of its lance upward and Empire-Strikes-Back'd the suddenly 3-times-as-big Leviathan's arm.
The red machine's lumiferous wings flapped once, twice and carried it lazily into the air, seemingly content to see what the Endbringer had cooked up. Meanwhile, Leviathan groggily scrambled to its feet...
---END ROUND 1---
And then two more disc-shaped portals appeared on either sides of the supersized Endbringer. Leet noted with amusement that Leviathan actually still looked punch-drunk from getting pounced and ravaged. Nevertheless, the two void discs disgorged a 3x scale Behemoth, still encased in half-molten rock (which sizzled fiercely, sending a haze of steam into the air.) A quick playback had Leet grinning at the bewildered look on the Simurgh's face as it (also at 3x scale) was apparently yoinked straight out of orbit by whatever abili-
ERROR ERROR UNAUTHORIZED CODEC CORRUPTe-
~5u2947awda592MAGI: YUIKARI2343~342jn4k;sftg9239rada424FOLDOUT2oar052f
/DIRSENDTO 24go9aw89r8aqrt
UNINSTALL C://ELVARG
UNINSTALL C://STREAMBOTWILLY
INSTALL C://YUIKARIRootHack
PROGRESS 34%
A panicked Leet tried in vain to stop the near-instant usurpation of his and Dragon's bots by... if he read the code right, a virus written in a completely alien programming language.
PROGRESS 100%
"SORRY KID"
The DOS command line that had taken over all his monitors suddenly winked out... And not two seconds later his main monitor once again displayed a feed from the Snitch, this time seemingly unmoving and with no user interface at all.
Unless this was a Simurgh plot, Leet could guess what had hollowed out his rig like a pumpkin and was now essentially controlling the entire Endbringer communications array. On the monitor there were two more shrinking black disks in the sky. These other two had deposited an additional two giant mechs.
[EVANGELION PROTOTYPE UNIT-01] A purple-and-green abomination, arguably even more menacingly angular than Unit-02, with a comically large horn on its helmet. Leet found that its clashing colors added to its demonic visage rather than making the thing look silly like it really should have.
[EVANGELION TEST-TYPE UNIT-00] A more muted design, a more rounded form, carrying itself like an upright ape, with a single almost Geth-like eye for a head. It was painted deep blue over white, and in contrast to its original design, a gargantuan cannon seemed to have been bolted to its left shoulder and was currently hanging on its back, undeployed.
The YUIKARI-virus-thing had helpfully labeled the two new behemoths, and had apparently given Leet control of his mouse back. Tentatively, still wondering if he should grab the fire axe and cut his system off from the internet the foolproof way, he hovered his cursor over Unit-00's gun. "RAIDEN Positron Sniper Rifle" It noted, along with a few numbers which seemed to signify refit dates.
"UNIT-01 SOURCE OF YUIKARI PROBE. NON-HOSTILE. HAVE HIJACKED COMMUNICATIONS TO MINIMIZE CASUALTIES." The text scrolled onto a side monitor, and Leet stopped looking nervously at the fire axe in the corner.
And then, with dual flashes of light, first Unit-01 and then Unit-00 gained the same wide halo, seraphim energy-wings and heat haze that Unit-02 had already conjured up. Was this some kind of powerup? Battle mode? Probably, from what Leet had seen.
"400% SYNCH RATIO BETWEEN PILOT AND EVANGELION UNIT." 'YUIKARI' typed out.
It took Leet a while to parse that sentence. When he did, something unexpected happened. The little kid in him, that curious, energetic, attentive soul that had slowly been getting crushed thanks to his damn stupid defective Tinker power... That had always stayed locked-away during Endbringer battles and gang wars and other Serious Shit... That feeling was back. Against his better judgement he clenched his fists and bit his lip as the three Evangelions floated above the boiling-off waters of Brockton Bay. Through the steam he could see the gaunt Hellmouth-looking giants glancing at eachother, probably the aforementioned pilots (like the girl he'd heard chuckle earlier?) doing a bit of the ol' nonverbal communication.
And then, without warning, the Simurgh dashed forward with a telekinetic pulse that sounded almost like a shriek. Cool as a cucumber, Ascendant Unit-00's Positron Rifle snapped into place, and a point-blank bar of anti-electricity crashed through the Simurgh.
While the Endbringers were made of exotic matter, it still contained its fair share of electrons.
The Simurgh was cored, head-to-tail, the beam actually entering her open mouth and exiting just above her tailbone.
Insensate, she flopped into the sea.
"THAT WILL NOT DO. SHINJI; ARAEL-KNOCKOFF IS PLAYING POSSUM, BUILDING SOMETHING WITH TELEKINESIS AND BOAT REMAINS UNDER THE WATER."
"What?!" Leet exclaimed, and Unit-01's glowing eyes seemed turn and look at the Snitch camera.
"WHOOPS, NOT TALKING TO YOU, SORRY."
Aaaaand the last two lines of text promptly vanished. Unit-01 seemed to turn its focus on the spot where the Simurgh faceplanted into the water. It clenched a fist which glowed with blinding light, and a
second shield, this one far smaller, appeared around Unit-01. Water suddenly started flowing into the shield and as soon as it hit the edge of the tessellating hexagons,
vanishing into nothing. Like a Minecraft Water Trashcan, Leet dumbly noted.
Meanwhile, Leviathan was still a little dazed, not really noticing the water being pulled away from him. Behemoth however, had puffed himself up and wound up to throw a lightning bolt, Zeus style, at the Evangelions.
Unit-00 lightly tapped the trigger of her sniper rifle and... Well. Dancing electrons in the palm of Behemoth's hand met a stream of positrons, and the two energetically neutralized eachother. Behemoth's hand exploded. So did half of Behemoth. Leviathan was only lightly singed, but the impossible thunderclap seemed to have finally woken it out of the Endbringer equivalent of spinlock.
But one four-eyed monster deserves another, and as Leviathan moved to cover its mangled siblings, the [LANCE OF LONGINUS, NO NOT THAT ONE]'s two prongs are sunk deep into the Second Endbringer's face by an impossibly fast Unit-02.
A brief scuffle ensues as Leviathan tries to employ its greater mass to envelop and crush the thin Evangelion. However with practiced ease, Unit-02 draws what looks like an outsized boxcutter knife, which ignites in unnatural orange-white fire, the same kind its wings and halo are made of. The PROGRESSIVE KNIFE is pushed deep into the Endbringer's grey flesh, and the Evangelion seems to be
looking for something
inside Leviathan's body.
"CORE NOT YET FOUND" ...A core? Oooo
kay? Leet really didn't know what to make of that. Then again, these people had giant robots so they probably knew what they were doing. Right?
"CORE? CORE?! COME ON YOU DAUGHTER-IN-LAW-TORTURING PILE OF WINGS! SING FOR ME!" A deep snarl emerges from Unit-01 as it lifts the Simurgh off the now-dry ground, seemingly clawing at its flesh and occasionally wing-slapping the floating gun-shaped origami shipwrecks being aimed around the Evangelion.
It would seem the Simurgh is a Tinker.
It'd seem the Simurgh didn't get any prep time.
Well shucks. Leet grinned viciously as two out of three Endbringers were being vivisected in front of him while Behemoth was writhing on the floor in apparent agony with half its body blown apart, as Unit-00 slowly walked through the mud toward it, gun aimed at its face.
---END ROUND 2---
This time, something...
weird happened. Space inside the battlefield seemed to buckle and fold, as three new Endbringers seemed to suddenly come into existence.
"ONE-WAY SPATIAL DISTORTION DETECTED. THAT WON'T BE HAPPENING AGAIN. MODULATING AT-FIELD DOME." Leet gulped. It seemed whatever was inside Unit-01 was
angry. Indeed, the Evangelion chucked the Simurgh at the ceiling of the dome, which sounded what Leet imagined a chicken slamming into a wall wound sound like. But, y'know, x30! Then the Evangelion raised its hand into the air and its fingers began to twitch in seemingly random patterns.
True to 'YUIKARI's word, the shield dome made of tessellating hexagons seemed to shimmer like a fish's scales for a brief moment, and the three new Endbringers that had been deposited onto the battlefield briefly froze in their tracks, before reorienting themselves.
This was also when Eidolon blacked out and fell from the sky. Thankfully he was watching the ginormous cage match with Legend and Alexandria, who caught his fall with practiced ease.
The first of the new Endbringers was a giant reptilian horror-movie man with a giant grey ball for a stomach taking up half its mass.
The second, an utterly enormous spire. ten times the height of the Evangelions and other Endbringers, with teeth and eyes and jaws stuck haphazardly along its length.
And finally, a tiny thing, no larger than the original Endbringers, a wretched-looking bundle of floating wires. Lots and lots of wires, like a head of hair. To Leet it vaguely looked like Cousin Itt from the Addams Family. But infinitely more murderous.
"BULLSHIT BEGETS BULLSHIT. THIS ENDS NOW." YUIKARI ominously declared. Then the screen winked out.
Leet could just about catch three more disks of blackness forming in the air opposite the three new Endbringers, and then his screen was black. With the passion of a man wanting to see the greatest beatdown in the history of Earth Bet, he raced out the door. The sun was starting to break through the clouds and only a light drizzle remained. Looking out into the bay, amidst the old Endbringers getting torn limb from limb by red, purple and blue giants, he could see the new arrivals.
In black and purple, Unit-03, incredibly muscular, with four arms. It immediately kicked into a sprint toward the building-Endbringer, which in turn seemed to spew a web of coiling tendrils at the burly Evangelion. The black Eva of course achieved '400%' and its 'AT-Field' bashed clear through the Endbringer's many woven traps.
In bone-white on pale yellow, Unit-04. It had the text "ADAM & Mari" and "MAGE-TYPE BEST TYPE" scrawled lazily on its billowing cape in what looked like blotchy orange ink. The Evangelion in question was floating in the air, even before its halo ignited, and as that occurred, its shoulder pylons seemed to fold open to reveal cooling vents. The ball-of-hair Endbringer started shooting blasts of energy, while simultaneously growing larger and larger. He recognized both Purity's concussive solar blasts and Legend's snaking bullshit-lasers.
All the white Ascendant Unit-04 did was raise its arms and a terrifying array of black portal discs appeared in the air, intercepting and devouring all of the Endbringer's beam spam. With another conductor-like wave of its arms, the portals then moved to surround the now-full-size Endbringer and unloaded its own attacks back onto it.
With resilience Leet guessed the Endbringer had copied from Fenja and Menja, it pushed through the attack and charged at the squishy-looking 'mage-type Evangelion' in a move that reminded Leet of Garrote.
The last Evangelion present was something special. Its shoulder-number was TYPE-07. It was venom-green on grey metal, a triangular head, and had eight blade-like metal wings on its back. When
it went to 400% synchronization, the whole AT-field dome rippled.
TYPE-07 had taken over dome duties from Unit-02. The scarlet Evangelion immediately channeled the Light of its Soul through the Lance of Longinus and stuck the oversized cheese fork into the core at the base of Leviathan's tail.
What Leet would never find out was that the impossibly compressed mass that made up Leviathan's core was forcibly shoved through the dimensional connection to the Endbringer Shard-cluster, destroying the tiny wormhole in the process. Upon arrival, the Endbringer mass expanded so explosively it rent the giant crystalline nexus into pieces (and in the process
almost generating a singularity), obliterating the entire weapons-grade Shard complex.
The fat Endbringer never really got a chance to do much of anything. While TYPE-07 stretched its wingblades in preparation for tackle-shredding it, Unit-00 had already lined up a Positron shot to the center of its massive orb. Just like with the Simurgh, it went through-and-through, splashing on the AT-field dome.
But with the destruction of the Endbringer Shard, Khonshu and all the other Endbringer avatars simply folded up and died. Just as Unit-01 had found the Simurgh's core, just as Unit-04 was about to use its ADAM-given strength to crack space like a mirror in order to tear Tohu into shredded pieces...
Five Endbringers unspooled their physical forms. Unlike with Leviathan, the spatial folding architecture that kept the multiple planets's worth of mass within the Endbringer bodies stable was still intact here. So five simultaneous explosive expansions of matter sitting on the edge of singularity are simply unmade.
Five multi-megaton explosions still rock the inside of the Brockton Bay dome as the Endbringers's outer layers cook off. All is light, followed by fire, followed by thick brown smoke and dust.
When, about five minutes later, the smoke clears and the AT-field collapses with a sound of shattering glass, all that's visible is one final black portal on the cracked, blackened Bay floor, and the silhouette of Unit-04 stepping into it. The portal shrinks to a point and vanishes, as the Atlantic ocean rushes into the gap, the water hisses as it hits hot patches, blackens as it absorbs soot and ash...
---END ROUND 3---
All the capes, all the reporters in Brockton Bay are struck silent. Leet doesn't even notice a shuddering Snitch, now freed from being hacked, nesting in his hair.
"Welp." Tattletale eventually exclaims faux-nonchalantly in the deathly silence. "
Someone miscalculated."
On the horizon, a golden glow.
---
Sorry that I kinda futzed Kaworu and Type-07's look and made up Mari and Unit-04's abilities. It's all either canon-inspired or drawn from some of the most popular fanfics that stay within the bounds of Eva physics. I had to 400% all of them, because unAwakened Evas might berserk and
beat the Endbringers
(might!) They wouldn't be
stomping them.
I also let the Endbringers hulk out a bit. Levi was actually trying to fast-track that trick (which is why when his water form exploded, it was tinged grey) but he had to do it the old-fashioned way and stockpile mass on its Shardworld because, well, it was getting cut to pieces by the Lance of Longinus.
See Levi-tan learning moves from Daddy Eidolon? (Not that it did diddly )
Round 3 was a bit... silly, but that was intentional. We're in the story, Leet's a goof, Yui's an axe-murderer...
I'm aware Tohu isn't supposed to be able to copy powers from males, but I'm handwaving it as another bit of jobbing because that's the best explanation I can come up for it anyway.
Impossibly dense Endbringers! They're a thing! They're planet-crackers! Muhuhahaha!
And yes that's Scion at the end there.
It's my headcanon that ADAMs/White Moons from the Evaverse are meant to ward planets with naturally occuring life from roving Independence-Day style alien fleets or, y'now, Entities.
I wanted to use my multiverse-munchkin OC for this, but I put that story on hiatus after half a dozen parts, so he can't telekinetically rip planets in half yet.
The grand finale to that story may or may not involve what's basically doing a Space Cops Sting Operation on the entire setting of Worm, though, so hope I get back to it at some point.