Kaiju Slaying For Death And Profit Ch 31
Good evening y'all. Sorry for the late upload, got delayed because my dog had a nightmare, and was exceedingly clingy and demanding of attention all day.
Blegh.
ANYWAYS! Here is chapter 31! Where we get an update on what Hikari has been up to!
Honestly, it has a scene I've been dying to write, but that kept having to be pushed back again and again because other stuff came up that was more immediately necessary. You'll see what I mean.
Here is chapter, lemme know if you liked with a comment, I really enjoy those.
=][=
Horaki Hikari sat on her bed at NERV’s infirmary and hugged her legs tighter against her chest.
She’d heard that Shinji’s mind had come back, he’s gotten better from the…the animal that he’d turned into thanks to her.
She wanted to apologize, but what do you say to the literal savior of mankind who seemingly accepted a fate worse than death, because you asked for his help?
All the nurses said nobody blamed her, but Hikari knew the truth. Moreso, she deserved to be blamed for it. If she had been stronger then maybe…
She sighed and wiped new tears off her cheeks.
Besides—
The door banged open, making Hikari jump.
“Goooood morning, VIETNAM!” Shinji shouted something in English, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.
“What?” Hikari asked, and then Shinji was just there, lifting her easily out of the bed, clicking his tongue.
“Okay, Hikari, you are one of those few people who can do the whole ‘pretty crying’ thing, which honestly, as far as superpowers go, it’s kinda top tier.” He said, holding her up by the armpits as if she were a child. “But you can only take that so far, mmkay?”
Hikari blinked.
Twice.
“What?”
“Rei! Asuka! I got her out of bed, now come in and do your part!” Shinji shouted to the door.
Rei and Asuka walked in, the latter scowling. “That…That’s not what we meant when we said getting her out of bed!”
“Hello, Hikari.” Rei said in her usual monotone. “I’m glad you are feeling better.”
Hikari stared. “What?”
“Anyways come on!” Shinji said, plopping Hikari down on the ground, not unkindly, but still hard enough for her to feel a jolt from her ankles all the way up her back. “We’re on a schedule and I won’t be late to the race because she’s dilly dallying!”
He then walked out.
Asuka sighed. “I swear, I don’t know how you keep up with him, Rei.”
“I quite enjoy it when he takes my hand and pulls me along.” Rei said, pulling a set of Hikari’s clothes from the bag she was carrying.
“I knew we shouldn’t have let him pick the activity.” Asuka said as she pulled Hikari’s hospital gown over her shoulders.
“He won rock paper scissors.” Rei said with finality as she and Asuka began to dress Hikari.
Hikari was too surprised to feel embarrassed as she was gently manhandled into her clothes.
“What?”
=][=
“THOSE ARE MY BOYS!” Shinji shouted, his exuberance making other people begin to shout. “MY BOYS! I KNEW THEY HAD IT IN THEM!”
Shinji’s ‘boys’ had a rough time at a tight turn, others passing them and leaving them behind, to the combined delight and despair of various people.
Hikari could barely hear the click-clack of the marbles as they ‘raced’ down the elaborate racing track full of various traps, twists, turns, and elevators.
“I don’t understand.” Kaworu said, pinching his chin as he studied both the moving marbles and the excited people. “People seem to get especially loud whenever the marbles get stuck, but they’re just little spheres of glass. This is merely the result of placement and momentum.”
He was interrupted by Shinji screaming. “MY BOYS!” again.
“They don’t exactly have a personality or rivalries.” He continued without acknowledging the interruption. “Yet everyone is acting as if they did.”
“Dunno about not having ‘personality.’” Asuka said, scowling at the ‘racetrack.’ “How did he even get his face onto a pair of marbles!?”
“MY BOOOOOOOYS!”
“Shinji has his ways.” Rei said, licking an ice cream cone, she then turned to Hikari, and pressed the ice cream sandwich in her other hand into Hikari’s mouth. She sighed and obediently took a bite of the admittedly delicious treat.
“There…is something of an appeal I guess.” Kaworu said, his eyes following a blue marble near the back of the bunch, it had lasted through three ‘survival stages’, always being the last to fall in line, barely skirting past elimination. But it had always survived nonetheless. The marbles reached the final checkpoint, both of Shinji’s ‘boys’ were in the group, making him the only contestant who still had two marbles to his name, with the blue marble Kaworu had his eye on just barely skirting into place, there was a short pause, then the container with the final six marbles tilted, and they began to ‘race’ down the incline. “If one were to imagine these marbles as having struggles, and wishes, and desires. Then I can…see how one might become emotional about their successes and failures.”
A green and red marble got stuck in a pair of holes that Shinji’s ‘boys’ tumbled over. The brown marble hit a pinball…bouncy thing, bounced off into another one, and got stuck in a loop bouncing between a set of three pinball machine parts.
Kaworu’s blue marble lagged far behind Shinji’s, some flaw in its surface stopping it from easily gaining momentum.
He smiled and said. “I think…I think I understand now.”
“What…What do you understand?” Hikari asked.
He waved at the marbles, and paused for Shinji’s agonized, panicked shriek to end as his ‘boys’ were going so fast they shot off into a more complex winding path, a path Kaworu’s marble, going slow and steady, missed, and rolled down a straight incline even if it was so far behind, that Shinji’s marbles were two thirds of the way down their own path before it had even gotten started.
“These marbles are like Shinji’s story, about the boy throwing starfish into the ocean. They are stand-ins for the struggles that people face.” Kaworu said.
“GO GO GO! YOU CAN DO IT! BOYS! YOU CAN STILL WIN IT! BOYS! DON’T FIGHT! BOYS!? BOOOOOOOOOOOYS!” Shinji shouted his encouragement at the two marbles with his face on them. Then screamed in despair as they got stuck seemingly ‘vying’ to be the one to exit first.
“People can project their own trials and tribulations onto these spherical pieces of glass. Bonding with them.” Kaworu said as the little blue marble that couldn’t sailed right past Shinji’s ‘boys.’ And rolled into first place, Shinji’s two marbles rolling languidly into second and third. The room erupted into cheers and boos. Shinji screamed and fell to his knees melodramatically, half the room happily ‘mourning’ with him. “And use them as a form of catharsis…fascinating.”
Hikari wasn’t sure about any of that, she thought that Shinji and everyone who was here for ‘marble racing’ were just weird.
Then again, Hikari was an Evangelion Pilot, even if not a very good one, and she and Asuka had established that only weird people became Evangelion Pilots.
“WHY!?” Shinji wailed. “WHY BOYS!? YOU HAD IT!”
Well…there were levels to everything.
Rei once again shoved the ice cream sandwich into Hikari’s mouth.
And hey, at least he paid for the ice cream.
=][=
“Stop parrying the Hadouken!” Asuka shouted.
“Skill issue!” Shinji shouted back.
On the screen, Asuka played a brown-haired man in a white gi, firing blue fireballs at a huge man in a pink shirt and pink pants. Shinji used his enormous character to absorb damage and slowly push Asuka’s character to the corner, eventually grabbing the smaller character and doing a lot of over-the-top wrestling moves, much to Asuka’s extremely vocal displeasure.
“First to fifteen!” Asuka screamed, putting another coin into the machine.
Shinji laughed like a cartoon villain. “It matters naught how often thou challengest the DAEMON! Thoust defeat is but a certainty!”
“HUGO IS A SHIT-TIER CHARACTER AND I WILL PROVE IT!” Asuka shouted back.
“There is more to characters than tier lists!” Shinji shouted back with glee. “For you keep losing to this shit-tier character!”
Asuka made an incoherent sound of rage but didn’t say anything back as the next match started.
Hikari sighed and turned to the other pilots, both of whom were huddled around a Pac-Man machine. Rei steered the little yellow ball around expertly, dodging the ghosts as it gobbled up pellets.
“But its drive to consume merely leaves the stage barren before it moves on to the next one.” Kaworu was saying. “The ghosts can be seen as attempting to protect their home’s natural resources from a monster that seeks only to consume them in their totality.”
“We cannot be certain which of the two factions was there first.” Rei countered. “Not to mention, the ghosts do not seem to require the dots, they merely wish to stop Pac-Man from eating them and are willing to use violence to ensure this. It could be that they are the aggressors.”
“But to be trapped in a constant cycle of death and birth, driven to consume until forced to look for a new location and strip that barren, it seems a cruel fate.”
“Life is often cruel. But it is the nature of all living things to persist even through that cruelty. As shown by Pac-Man, who pushes on even after being hurt.”
“I can agree that persistence can be admirable.” Kaworu said. “But to strive endlessly toward a pointless unending goal? Such Sisyphean cruelty is incomprehensible.”
“What’s to say that pushing the boulder up enough times, he won’t find a way to break past the seemingly endless curse?”
“But this can only end one way, we have proven this. The levels do not stop, it is merely a continuation until you make enough mistakes that the game ends.”
“Perhaps so. But if there is something I have learned while watching Shinji, it is that it is not over until you give up.”
Hikari…was not interested in getting in the middle of that. She put their conversation out of mind and made her way to the store area to buy some food.
=][=
Hikari stumbled into her house, exhausted. She tried to make as little noise as possible, because it was late enough that Nozomi had to have already been put to bed.
Normally, the thought that she’d been foisting her little sister on Kodama, on the excuse of needing to stay at NERV for medical reasons, would make Hikari sad and angry at herself. But currently she was too tired.
Shinji had dragged her, Rei, and Asuka around every which way as the whim struck him, with Kaworu following along. And this had gone on, all day.
But…But tired as she was…it had been fun.
Weird.
But fun.
She went to the table, sat at her usual chair, and sighed.
It had been…nice. To forget the last…everything.
To just hang out with her friends, even if she felt like a fifth wheel at times. They did go out of their way to make her feel included. Rei in particular, Hikari would have to find some way to tell the girl ‘no’ if she wanted to keep her waistline where it was.
Shinji…Shinji had treated her like it was she who had had it the worst between them. He really was a big softie, once you got past his scary exterior.
And she’d nearly got him killed.
Suddenly, she was there again, helpless, the presence inside her that wasn’t meant to be there. Piercing, tearing, scraping. She screamed for help, for relief, all while that thing scraped away inside her.
Until suddenly he was there, allowing her to huddle into his shadow, her mind her own once again. But instead of walking away victorious like he had done every other time before…
“Oh, Hikari! Why are you in the dark you silly goose?” Kodama asked, making Hikari jump and taking her mind away from that thing. Kodama turned on the light. “I was so happy to hear you were feeling better! Guess Shinji and the Pilots bundling you up and ‘abducting’ you was for the best after all.”
Hikari blinked. Abducted? So he hadn’t secured permission for them all to take a day off? That…That sounded just like Shinji, actually.
“I…I…Y-Yeah.” Hikari said slowly.
Kodama’s eyes dimmed, and she made her way over to Hikari. “Oh, baby sis.”
“I’m.” Hikari swallowed thickly. “I’m…It’s so scary!”
Kodama hugged Hikari’s head and pressed her face against her chest, again. And just like last time, Hikari did not fight it all that hard. “There is no shame in being afraid.”
Hikari hiccupped. “But everyone else is fearless! And Shinji—!”
“Honestly, I should have been more attentive.” Kodama said, rubbing gentle circles on Hikari’s upper back. “But things have been so hectic that I ended up neglecting you. I’m so sorry.”
Hikari found herself crying harder, struggling to keep quiet so as not to wake Nozomi.
“Okay! I know you’re tired, but we are going out!” Kodama said happily.
Hikari sniffled and looked up to her sister. “Out?”
“Yep! To NERV!” Kodama said.
“NERV? Why? It’s Asuka’s turn to be on standby at night.” Hikari said.
“Becaaaaauuuuse some of the people at NERV have made a support group, you know, for those of us who are…struggling.” Kodama said, her hands absently making a thin braid with Hikari’s hair. “And I feel like you’ll get a lot out of meeting this support group. We don’t have to if you don’t want to though.”
“N-No, I’ll go.” Hikari said. Truthfully, she just wanted to go to bed, but who knows, maybe it would be good for her. “But how will we get there? It’s gotten pretty late.”
Kodama chuckled and pulled Hikari up to her feet. “Of course we’ll get there by bus, silly.”
“But…But it’s dark out.” Hikari said, an entire life of being told ‘women should not be out after dark unescorted’ making her lose some trust on Kodama’s risk-assessment capabilities.
“Oh Hikari, we’ll be perfectly safe!” Kodama said, putting her outdoor shoes on and manhandling Hikari into stepping into her own.
“What? But crime rate in Tokyo-3 isn’t zero you know!” Hikari argued as Kodama dragged her out the door, locked it, then dragged her down the street.
Kodama sighed and looked back at her. “Would you feel better if I got us transport to NERV?”
Hikari blinked. “Uhh…yes? But any taxi services running this late will be expensive…”
Kodama rolled her eyes and shouted down the street. “Excuse meeeee! Could you guys get us a ride to NERV!?”
Hikari whipped around just in time to see a car start, turn on its lights, and drive slowly up to them. Her heart hammered in her chest until it stopped next to them, and a man in a suit that she recognized instantly as NERV ‘plainclothes’ security personnel stepped out and opened the back door, gesturing for them to step inside.
“Thank you very much!” Kodama said in sing-song as she pulled Hikari into the car. The door was closed behind them, and the man sat in the passenger seat.
“You said to NERV headquarters?” The driver asked.
“Yes please!” Kodama said.
“Very well.” The driver answered and took off sedately.
Hikari felt her worldview quivering. “How…How long has…what?”
Kodama tilted her head. “What? You’re a Pilot, silly, of-course you have a protection detail. And out of fear that some unscrupulous villain might get to you through us, both Nozomi and I have one too!”
Hikari digested that before saying. “So I can just…at any time turn around and ask for a ride anywhere?”
“Within reason.” The driver answered.
“Then why do I keep walking to school!? I’ve been a Pilot for months!” Hikari demanded.
“Walking is good for you!” Kodama answered.
Hikari opened her mouth to argue.
Then closed it.
Because, well, she wasn’t wrong.
=][=
To her mild surprise, nobody had batted an eye when Kodama and Hikari had walked through the gates at NERV. The base was more sparsely manned during the night shift, but there were nonetheless quite a few people.
Kodama led her deep into NERV’s headquarters, to level B-09, past the post office, a little bit beyond the data center. Into a series of rooms that were used as briefing rooms, meeting rooms, classrooms, and generally ‘whenever people needed to get together for some reason’ rooms.
Only, to her probably illogical surprise, said rooms were in use by NERV staff. And there was a surprising number of them. They were from just about every level of NERV too, custodians, nurses, doctors, security personnel, analysts, etc.
Some were sat in a circle, talking, she saw a group of eight, sitting around a table with a bunch of cardboard cutouts and a speaker making pinging noises she recognized from a movie about a submarine, others were giving a class on…sandwiches?
“What…is this all about?” Hikari asked.
Before Kodama could answer, one of the crew women from the operations room called out. “Oh! Kodama, I didn’t think you were coming today!”
“I wasn’t!” Kodama said. “But I figured my little sister might fit in!”
The woman turned to look at Hikari, her eyes widening. “Oh! Yeah okay, that makes sense. Nice to have you!”
“R-Right.” Hikari said awkwardly.
“Don’t mind her.” Kodama said happily. “She’s shy.”
“Siiiiis!” Hikari whined, to the amusement of a few people.
“Well, enjoy yourselves!” The woman said, moving into one of the rooms.
“What even is all this?” Hikari asked.
Kodama turned to Hikari. “It’s just this thing that kinda popped up. I’m not one of the founding members or anything, but I joined up pretty early. We have games, classes on various subjects such as astrophysics and self-defense, debate teams, you name it. It’s pretty neat! It’s nothing official or anything, though you do have to have an invitation from someone who is a member, but you’re here with me, so it’s okay!”
“R-Right.” Hikari said. “Do you mind if I just…look around?”
“Are you sure?” Kodama asked.
“I’m sure.” Hikari said.
“Okay! I’ll be around!” Kodama said, happily going off to one of the rooms where she was greeted with surprise and warmth.
Hikari walked around sedately, listening in, but soon became concerned. On the surface it looked like a perfectly ordinary gathering of highly intelligent people. Like the computer club at the school.
Except, the more she walked around, the more she realized that there was one largely common topic of discussion.
“The last time he was indisposed for two months, this time a month. He’s always bounced back from injury too quickly to be entirely normal, but halving the time it took for him to heal? He must have gained some form of quick healing or resistance!” Argued a man with thick glasses in one of the rooms.
“Correlation is not causation.” Argued one of the many female analysts. “Not to mention, that in order to truly check that theory, we’d have to see how he recovered from the same kind of injury. A coma is very different from the type of damage that resulted in his cognitive faculties being compromised.”
In a different room, the sandwich making class actually was an analysis of the various types of sandwiches with which Shinji had shown up regularly. Apparently, one of which had had a vegetable thought extinct as an ingredient, a subsequent search had found it in a farmer’s market being sold by an elderly woman who grew it on her windowsill.
Yet another room had a doctor debating with other doctors about the exact density of Shinji’s bones as measured when they had to operate on him when he got shot.
Which, apparently, Shinji had gotten shot!
Why didn’t anyone ever tell Hikari these things!?
Flickering lights from one of the rooms drew her, and she saw a group of analysts watching a drone video of what looked like a fight between Evangelions. Hikari’s blood ran cold when she realized that it must have been the day Kensuke died.
On the screen, Unit 01 stood armless, its teeth clamped around the neck of an Evangelion that looked like her own Unit 04, but with the colors of its armor reversed.
[I’m sorry. Pilot.] Shinji’s voice panted as Unit 01 twisted and drove Unit 03 into the mud. The armless Evangelion rose painfully to its feet and raised its right foot to hover over the downed Evangelion’s head. [I’m sorry…I’m sorry I wasn’t able to save you, after all. Your death will bring about a better world.]
[They will resent You.] Kensuke said, but his voice was wrong, it was almost as if it were overlaid, two voices speaking at once, one human, the other…Other, close but missing something vital. [They cannot understand You. They will come to fear and hate You. Yet You would sacrifice for Them still?]
Shinji chuckled, then brought the Evangelion’s foot down on Unit 03’s head, crushing it.
Hikari felt sick. She hadn’t been shown what happened the day that she was stuck inside Unit 04 for hours. She hadn’t been told exactly what had happened.
And she hadn’t asked.
Hikari was brought back to the present by the conversation that was getting a little loud in the room.
“Clearly it was because of the melancholic acceptance that He will sacrifice Himself for us.” Said the crew woman from the operations room. “He has already sacrificed so much, and is always willing to sacrifice more, this is proven by the fact that, no matter how hurt He becomes, He is always ready to get back into the fight before the next Angel arrives.”
“I disagree.” Kodama said. “I feel like he was chuckling in sadness, because the Angel couldn’t see that humanity is better than what it assumed. The Angel couldn’t see that we won’t turn on our savior, it’s too…selfish to see that, as a whole, we are better than the worst examples of our kind.”
“See, I think that he was actually sad at how narrow the Angel’s point of view was.” Said a ‘plainclothes’ NERV security man. “Earlier, when it said that it was illogical that Shinji put himself in danger for humanity. It called it illogical and based all of its analysis on how logic dictates that Shinji’s actions should all be for self-gain. I think that this means that all Angels are inherently selfish, this is why we haven’t seen them act together.”
The debate continued, all of the very highly educated adults, and several of the not-so-highly educated, discussing what Shinji might have meant with, of all things, a chuckle before he killed Ken…before he killed the Angel that had taken over his classmate.
“Oh my God.” Hikari whispered. “My sister joined a cult.”
A cult based around Shinji, the big doofus who somehow painted his face into a pair of marbles and sulked for an hour that he didn’t win the marble race.
Did he know? No, Shinji couldn’t possibly know, not with how he acted whenever the delinquents deferred to him.
But what could Hikari do about it? Shinji may be…weird, and he was good at killing Angels, but he was too much of a dork to be some messianic figure!
…
Hikari needed to talk to someone. She needed to talk to Rei; she was always very good at analyzing things because she was so calm and levelheaded.
Rei would know what to do.
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