Fanfic / Strategic Cyborg Evangelion

aka: Ascension

43 years after the Black Mesa Incident and 23 years after the Combine's loss of control over Earth, New Transfer Student Kaworu Nagisa is starting high school in Tokyo-2 when just a few days after his arrival, giant alien entities begin attacking his city. He's quickly forced, via An Offer You Can't Refuse, to join the efforts to repeal this new threat to humanity using giant combat Cyborgs built by the Artificial Evolution Laboratory, the research efforts of which happen to be led by the mother of Kaworu's Mysterious Waif classmate Rei Ikari...

...except things are further complicated by both the government and the Angels, the latter of whom one is seemingly possessing Kaworu himself, having their own respective agendas, to say nothing of Yui Ikari seemingly harboring a Dark Secret involving Kaworu himself. And the G-Man is naturally lurking in the shadows as well.

Compared to the original TV show, Strategic Cyborg Evangelion treats the Evas in a more Real Robot Genre way while simultaneously scaling up the setting into a proto-Space Opera, changing more than a few character relationships and dynamics along the way while remaining true to the original's habit of raising more questions than answering them.

Available at:

• Spacebattles
• Sufficient Velocity
• Fanfiction.net
• Archive Of Our Own
• Alternate History Forums (registered users only)

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Strategic Cyborg Evangelion has examples of:

• Action Prologue: The first chapter opens with a massive space battle in Earth orbit, ending with a Class 4 apocalypse via Orbital Bombardment. How it factors into the rest of the story is yet to be revealed.
• Adaptational Badass: Pretty much the entire Evangelion cast received this treatment.
  • Rei is a considerably deadlier combatant both inside and outside an Eva, having picked up Waif-Fu, Gun Fu and Improbable Aiming Skills alongside Super-Strength and Super-Reflexes. While no longer an Apocalypse Maiden, the only thing really holding her back from handling most Angels by herself is Unit-00 being a Flawed Prototype.
  • Kaworu, in some ways. Although he's seemingly no longer an Angel and tends to lag behind the girls in terms of combat performance, he's more than capable of holding his own in a fistfight against multiple people at once if he's forced to.
  • While Asuka was already a fairly good combatant in the original series and even more so in Rebuild, here she earns her Badass Normal credentials after only two battles, the second of which saw her hold off two Angels at once by herself.

• Alien Geometries:
  • The Spear of Longinus has a Diegetic Interface that combines this with Matrix Raining Code. Just looking at it turns out to be physically harmful for a human brain, as Kaworu finds out the hard way.
  • Israfel and Sarafiel briefly create a volume of space with extreme Gravity Screw that acts as a Logic Bomb for Unit-01's AI and actually causes Kaworu to throw up a little from the disorientation.
• All Planets Are Earth-Like: Averted. Although several other planets have been colonized since Second Impact, only Earth has native life. Case in point is Polygonus: while being warm enough to sustain liquid water, it has no natural water supplies and no atmospheric oxygen.
• AM/FM Characterization: Rei is occasionally seen quietly listening to heavy metal.
• An Arm and a Leg: Unit-01 loses an arm and both legs in a Curbstomp Battle against Zeruel. Unit-00 also loses a forearm.
• Apocalypse How: Second Impact was a Planetary Societal Disruption for much of Earth and Continental Total Extinction in North America.
• Artificial Gravity: Averted. All space scenes have the characters free-floating in zero G.
• Attack Drone: Ramiel has these. Tabris also confirms that the Ramiels themselves are drones.
• Axes at School: Rei routinely keeps at least one combat knife on her person while attending school, hidden in her boots.
• Badass Fingersnap: Rei does one at one point, killing Ramiel in the process.
• Beam Spam: Ramiel, Israfel, Sarafiel, Zeruel and the Spear of Longinus all have some variation of this, some of it Roboteching.
• BFG: Unit-00's assault cannon, a hip-fired weapon whose barrel alone is 22 meters long. Caliber-wise, it packs shells roughly equal in size of those used by the main guns of real-life Iowa-class battleships, with a lower muzzle velocity to make the recoil manageable.

• Binary Suns: One of the human-inhabited systems is a binary system with all the planets orbiting one of the stars^note which is actually possible if the stars orbit each other far enough. Also a case of Alien Sky, as every planet's night side experiences a midnight red glow from the smaller star for a full half year.
• Boom Stick: The Spear of Longinus operates like this in the battle against Shamshel, first launching a Roboteching Beam Spam then a Wave-Motion Gun.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Kaworu's musings about a sleeping Rei.
  Almost like that fairy tale he once heard as a kid: the one about the Sleeping Beauty, the brave resistance fighter and the Civil Protection officers keeping her locked up and sedated in their guard post. Although he had his suspicion that it wasn't the original format of the story...
• Buxom Beauty Standard: A source of envy by Asuka towards Mari and Rei.
• Captured Super-Entity: The AEL has the corpse of the Nihilanth stashed away in Terminal Dogma and based the Evas off of it.

• Chest Blaster:
  • Unit-00 and Unit-01 both have a pair of autocannons built into their chest and put it to use against multiple Angels. Rei even kills Sachiel with it.
  • The white Eva has an energy-based one with a sizable area of effect.
• Combat Pragmatist: Asuka, all the way. Dodging out of sight to attack from an unexpected direction, ripping off construction cranes to clobber her opponent with, redirecting one opponent's attack into another and ambushing Shamshel from behind to bodily toss her into Lake Ashi to trigger a massive steam explosion with the Angel's superheated tentacles are all in her repertoire.
• Crapsack World: Let's see... we have a World Half Empty ravaged in the past by two Type 1 alien invasions and ravaged now by the occasional Negative Space Wedgie, all of it run by an authoritarian One World Order that cracks down on anyone not sharing their views, as well as yet another Type 1 Alien Invasion on the horizon.
• Curbstomp Battle: Kaworu vs. the bullies in chapter 2. He took all three down in a matter of seconds.
  • Rei vs. Sachiel, in the former's favor. Sachiel barely manages to damage the Eva at all before Rei kills him with only a pair of knives.
  • Kaworu vs. Shamshel, in both ways. Shamshel completely and utterly dominates the Evas, only ever taking damage from sneak attacks... but as soon as Unit-01 acquires the Spear of Longinus, she's swiftly blown away.
  • Ramiel vs. Evas, as usual. The author even confirmed that the only reason why the Evas stood a chance in the first place is because Ramiel downgraded their threat level when they failed to meaningfully hurt it and wasn't seriously trying until it was too late.
  • Zeruel delivers an utterly brutal one to Unit-00 and Unit-01 when he unexpectedly shows up in chapter 40, leaving both Evas crippled and missing multiple limbs.
• Disaster Democracy: How the Confederacy of Man started off before being covertly overtaken by SEELE.
• Door Stopper: On the way to becoming one. The story is already over 200,000 words and according to Word of God, we're only about one-third into the plot.
• Dynamic Entry: Zeruel pulls one in his introduction, airdropping into the Israfel battle at relativistic speeds.
• Earth That Used to Be Better: Earth's population is barely half of what it was before Second Impact, the ecosystem is in shambles due to the introduction of several invasive alien predators, the surface is being ravaged by Negative Space Wedgies... as usual for something set in the source universes.
• Establishing Character Moment
  • In the second chapter, Kaworu saves a boy from bullies. Later that afternoon, the bullies try to retaliate after school... only for Kaworu to wipe the floor with them and tell them to not try that again because he's not interested in teenage power plays.
  • Chapter 6 has Rei's debut as a pilot. Unlike in canon where Rei's mediocre pilot skills result in her only ever taking down a single Angel via Heroic Sacrifice, here she deploys the Waif-Fu and solos Sachiel in a spectacular display of acrobatics with only a pair of knives.
  • Chapter 16 gave one to Zeruel, of all people. When Sahaquiel insults a heavily injured Shamshel for running away, Zeruel comes to his sister's defense by challenging Sahaquiel to a duel.
    • Another one is delivered in chapter 39 when Zeruel suddenly shows up in the middle of the Israfel battle and casually throws Israfel away at suborbital speeds for not getting out of his way on the first warning.
  • Asuka's moment came in chapter 32 when she not only held a proper conversation with Kaworu whom she had been constantly berating and talking down to so far, but picked holes in his ideology and expressed approval when he admitted being wrong - all while she was hungover, yet without raising her voice even once, demonstrating considerable maturity over her canon counterpart.
    • And her combat debut in an Eva in chapter 39 had her hold off Israfel pretty much solo for an extended period, in addition to tactically adapting to the Angels' moves and improvising effective countermeasures on the fly to the point where the Evas were holding the upper hand by the end of the battle.
• Extended Disarming: Rei of all people does this trope as part of her Xenafication. She produces two customized revolvers, two Micro Uzis, over three dozen knives, a sword, four shurikens, two chakrams, a grenade launcher and all the assorted ammunition in the form of speedloaders, drum magazines and HE grenades. Above all that she possesses a .50cal anti-tank rifle but doesn't usually carry it with her because it's impossible to conceal.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Humanity has access to this in the form of Waygates, although it's anything but casual. Whether the Angels are also capable of it is not clearly established, although at least Zeruel is capable of space travel at relativistic speeds.
• Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: Most human-made military spacecraft have spinal-mounted coilguns. As usual, they don't quite work against Angels.
  • Established to be the main armament of Mark II battleframes.
• Flash Step: Zeruel can pull this despite his size, causing a powerful shockwave of displaced air every time.
• Flawed Prototype: Unit-00 still has this distinction, revealed in chapter 15 to have a structural problem inside its cartilage tissue that causes the joints to degrade if subjected to high-strain activities like close combat.
  • The Mark I, humanity's first attempt at building a giant robot, resulted in a Master of None that kept breaking down all the time due to excessive mechanical complexity, forcing Gehirn to fall back to the Boring, but Practical Mark II.
• Flight - Evas with A-type equipment have a limited capability of doing this.
  • So do all of the Angels, to varying levels. In particular, Zeruel is capable of flying at sub-lightspeed.
• Four-Philosophy Ensemble: Kaworu is the Optimist, Shephard is the Realist, Yui is the Cynic. Rei is somewhere between the Cynic and the Apathetic.
• Framing Device: According to the first chapter, the story is based on memoirs Kaworu wrote specifically to ensure the actual events will be known to later generations, not a version Shrouded in Myth.
• From Bad to Worse: As if the Evas' battle against Israfel and Sarafiel was not difficult enough already, Zeruel suddenly enters the battle himself.
  • And a few days later, Sarafiel comes back for seconds while all Evas except Unit-02 are still down of the count. With Shamshel in tow..
• Full-Frontal Assault: The famous Rei-exiting-shower-to-find-someone scene is repeated with a twist: Kaworu is on the receiving end and Rei attacks him when he asks her about her tattoo.
• Fuuma Shuriken: Rei has a collapsible one.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: When Kaworu bemoans his uselessness against Zeruel, Asuka decks him hard enough to knock him off his feet before giving him a Dare to Be Badass pep talk.
• Hand Cannon: Rei has two Mateba Model 6 Uniqa revolvers chambered for .454 Casull.
• Heavyworlder: Averted. Children born on Polygonus are mentioned to have a noticeably higher risk of developing skeletal deformities, as even 10% higher gravity than Earth's is still 10% more than what the human body is naturally adapted to.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Kaworu, upon immobilizing Shamshel by stepping on her head while she's lying on the ground to keep her from getting up. Shamshel immediately coiled her snakelike body around the Eva to ensnare it in a stranglehold, turning the tables.
  • Asuka later returned the favor by shoving one of Shamshel's tentacles into Sarafiel's core, injuring the latter enough to force a hasty retreat.
• Homeworld Evacuation: Invoked. Millions of humans were relocated to self-sustaining colonies in other star systems so that another Combine invasion cannot find and kill them all.
• Homing Lasers: The Spear of Longinus is capable of firing these, as does Israfel, Sarafiel and Zeruel.
• Humongous Mecha: Aside from the Evangelions themselves, the setting also has conventional mechas in the form of battleframes. These vary from assault guns on legs to Mo-Cap Mini Mechas.
  • Meta Mecha: F-type equipment is a powered armor for Evangelions
  • Mini-Mecha: The Mk-III/B Durandal, designed for urban combat. A Fragile Speedster in that it can shrug off small arms fire... but not much else, preferring to avoid being hit in the first place instead.
  • Walking Tank: The earlier Mk II, stated to be nothing more than an armored howitzer on legs. Interestingly, it is explicitly stated that it did not replace tanks when it was introduced, merely supplemented them.
• Imported Alien Phlebotinum: Humanity salvaged and figure out quite a lot of abandoned Combine technology, giving them a major technological boost, In particular, the Evas themselves run on dark fusion reactors, the same technology that powered the Citadel's top reactor in Half-Life 2 - and sure enough, Yui confirms that they can be rigged to blow in the same way.
• Impossibly Graceful Giant: Despite their size, Evas are extremely agile. Unit-00 in particular pulls acrobatic maneuvers like mid-air flips, somersaults and barrel rolls, something Asuka (who has had experience with mechas before) lampshades.
  • Israfel and Sarafiel raise the bar further, explicitly pulling maneuvers anatomically impossible for human joints.
  • Zeruel and the white Eva then proceed to raise that bar even further, with the former outright doing a Flash Step and the latter dodging Homing Lasers and kicking off the former's Combat Tentacles during their aerial duel. Even Rei is unsettled by the latter, stating that even the Evas couldn't possibly do that due to neural interface lag.
• Insistent Terminology: The author specifically writes the designations of all Evas with a dash (eg. "Unit-00") to distinguish them from their canon counterparts, written without a dash ("Unit 00").
• Ironic Echo: Kaworu taunts Shamshel about not paying attention at one point during their battle. Mere seconds later, the Angel regains the upper hand and taunts him right back.
  Shamshel: Now who wasn't paying attention...?
• It Can Think: All of the Angels except Ramiel have human-level intelligence, something the AEL is only beginning to realize. Shephard begins to suspect it after re-watching footage of the battle against Shamshel and notices her trying to keep Unit-01 away from the Spear of Longinus. Even during the battle itself, he immediately recognized Shamshel's use of the city buildings as hard cover against Rei's sniping for what it was.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: The human military use kinetic weapons and missiles exclusively, both on the ground and in space. When the first energy weapon finally appears in chapter 40, Asuka explains that while it has superior armor penetration, it has inferior stopping power against organic tissue unless it hits something vital due to going straight through the target and exiting on the other side while transferring minimal kinetic energy.
• Lighter and Softer: While the Half-Life universe is even more of a Crapsack World than the Evaverse, the characters themselves don't have as much of an emotional baggage.
• The Little Detecto: Gravimetric sensors. They detect the minuscule spacetime distortions caused by the presence of mass and therefore cannot be confused by stealth. Lots of tightly-packed objects however WILL make them ineffective, hence the need for radars. AT-fields and dark energy are instantly spotted from a VERY long distance due to their spacetime warping properties.
• Magnetic Weapons: Spinal coilguns are standard armament on Confederate warships.
• Mecha Expansion Pack: The Evas have several. The ones mentioned so far:
  • A-type equipment: Jet Pack for atmospheric Flight.
  • B-type equipment: for high-mobility ground combat, using big versions of the Durandal's harpoons and leg-mounted wheels.
  • C-type equipment: shield, heavy armor and shoulder-mounted gatling turrets for averting Point Defenseless.
  • E-type equipment: active camouflage.
  • F-type equipment: Powered Armor for Evangelions, loaded with More Dakka.
  • G-type equipment: advanced targeting sight and recoil absorber.
• Mind Rape: The Spear of Longinus accidentally inflicts this on Kaworu the first time he uses it. He spends three days in a coma afterwards.
• Minovsky Physics: Xenium, AKA the crystals from Xen in Half-Life.
  • It is a Period 8 transuranic element that cannot fit onto the periodic table of elements due to being exotic matter.
  • There are four known isotopes, all of them solid at room temperature. The base isotope is a yellow crystalline material used in various ways. The second isotope and the only other one occurring naturally is a light blue fluorescent crystal. The third is a chemically inert violet crystal. The fourth is the only one to have received its own name (xenite) and is being researched as a possible power source.
  • It reacts violently to being bombarded with high-energy particles by releasing gravitational waves. Only a few kilograms of the material can generate waves powerful enough to damage steel and concrete structures and open microfractures in the fabric of space-time.
  • It has an atomic mass of over 300 but due to the adverse reaction to mass spectrometers, its exact mass and atomic number cannot be determined.
  • Waygates generate wormholes by using specially prepared crystals of the first isotope that contain artificial impurities of certain superconductors. These are capable of near-instantaneous wormhole generation across interstellar distances when electrically charged.
  • The second isotope can destabilize interdimensional portals to the point of implosion.
• More Dakka: The usual military response to Angels. Naturally, they tend not to work.
• Morph Weapon: The Spear of Longinus appears to be capable of shapeshifting into multiple forms.
• Mysterious Protector: When the Evas find themselves on the receiving end of a Curbstomp Battle courtesy of Zeruel, a white Eva shows up out of nowhere and engages him in battle, allowing Asuka and Rei to grab an unconscious Kaworu and retreat. Hints are dropped that time travel is involved.
• Mysterious Watcher: The G-Man, as usual. Shortly before the battle against Israfel, two unnamed teens also start observing Kaworu and Asuka.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The US government nuking Black Mesa is what started Second Impact this time around.
• Nigh-Invulnerable: The Spear of Longinus, having "ruined over three dozen diamond saws, shrugged off shaped charges and plasma cutters, completely ignored every single acid and solvent it was subjected to and not even industrial-strength lasers could heat it even a millionth degree above ambient room temperature".
• Not of This Earth: Ditto. Yui outright confirms it.
• Not Quite Dead: Shamshel.
• Not Worth Killing: Zeruel declares Kaworu as such after brutally tearing Unit-01 limb for limb.
• Obligatory Swearing: Averted, Yui and Hikari being quick to reprimand anyone who swears in earshot of them.
• Offscreen Teleportation: The G-Man simply loves doing this, casually walking into and out from behind objects too small to hide behind.
• Off the Rails: As if the story's background wasn't off the rails enough for Evangelion canon, Zeruel interrupts the Israfel battle to fight the Evas himself, with devastating consequences.
• Oh, Crap!: The bullies' reaction in chapter 2 upon finding out that the weird albino-looking guy voicing his displeasure at what they're doing was expelled from his previous school for fighting.
  • Sachiel gets this reaction upon seeing Unit-00.
  • Shamshel also loses it when she realizes the Spear of Longinus is within arm's reach of her opponent, but it only really kicks into gear once she finds herself on the receiving end of the Spear's full firepower.
  • Tabris all but says it out loud when Zeruel suddenly shows up in the middle of the Israfel battle.
    • Kaworu and Asuka both have this reaction in the next chapter when Zeruel proceeds to justify Tabris' reaction.
    • Then a few days later, pretty much the entirety of Tokyo-2 has one when Shamshel and Sarafiel suddenly appear in the city without warning while the civilian populace are out and about, with an extra one by the AEL due to two of their three Evas being out of action long-term for repairs.
• Omniscient Council of Vagueness: SEELE, as usual.
  • The Angels, as well.
• Off with His Head!: Unit-00 gets messily decapitated by Zeruel stomping down on its neck.
• Oneesama: Rei's attitude towards Lilith.
• Organization with Unlimited Funding: Averted. The AEL had to briefly cryofreeze Unit-01 so that they can redirect its maintenance costs to finishing Unit-02's development. Played more straight once SEELE got involved, as the consequences of failure are too much to cut corners over.
• Paper Fan of Doom: Hikari has one and whacks anyone with it if they act out of line. Which usually happens to be Toji.
• People's Republic of Tyranny: Heavily implied that the Confederacy of Man is actually this: authoritarian government plus a not-so-Secret Police composed of Political Officers.
• Portal Network: The Waygate network, linking an unspecified^note at least five number of systems together. It's pretty slow (less than a parsec per day) and can't operate in gravity wells, an issue the Sol gate dodges by being anchored inside the Earth-Moon L1 Lagrangian point).
• President Evil: although Lorenz Keel is being actively helpful to the AEL for now, Yui still has a bad feeling about him due to how he doesn't bat a single eye at the Eva pilots being underage and how he increasingly leans on the AEL to produce results at all costs.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Aside from the usual Asuka-Rei dynamic, several new ones were introduced.
  • Kaworu is the Unskilled, but Strong New Meat to Asuka's Weak, but Skilled Ace Pilot.
  • Shephard is the emotional and forgiving Red to Yui's professional and goal-oriented Blue.
  • Mari is the extroverted and sexually liberal Red to Hikari's rule-abiding "good girl" Blue.
• The Reveal
  • Chapter 8: Not only are SEELE still around, Wallace Breen was a member.
  • Same chapter: There's something about Kaworu's DNA that the AEL and Yui were already aware of.
  • Chapter 16: The Spear of Longinus was the Borealis' cargo.
  • Chapter 20: Kaworu and Rei have a mutual past but neither remembers the other.
  • Chapter 26: Kaworu and Rei are siblings.
  • Chapter 35: Leliel is up to something involving a pair of time travelers and a white, winged Eva.
• Rollerblade Good: The Durandals are users of this trope, Code Geass-style. B-type equipment has a larger version with a spiked circumference for greater traction... not that it actually does much good in the battle against Israfel and Sarafiel, where Unit-01's set quickly gets clogged with snow and jammed.
• Schmuck Bait: Subverted. Yui tells Kaworu where Unit-01's self-destruct switch is located and upon insisting that he is not to touch it, Kaworu asks back why is she even telling him where it is if she doesn't want him to touch it? Her answer is so that he doesn't find and activate it without knowing what it does.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Zeruel threatens to kill his direct superior if said superior sends Shamshel on a potential suicide mission again.
  • Shephard also defies both Yui and Sanada by taking the pilots home after the disastrous first battle against Zeruel before their medical checkup, standing his ground as looking out for their mental state even after being warned that he'll be replaced if he compromises the AEL's operations via violating safety protocols. And despite her vocal disagreement with him over the matter, it convinces Yui to return the favor by risking imprisonment for treason against the state to inform him of the Evas' origins to gain his trust.
• Sibling Team: Israfel and Sarafiel.
  • Kaworu and Rei.
• Square-Cube Law: Lilith invokes it by name in her explanation about how Sachiel cannot be of natural origin and in fact shouldn't even exist.
  • So shouldn't the Evas, for that matter, as Kensuke cites professional opinions after Unit-02 is caught on camera fighting Shamshel and Sarafiel and the video makes it online.
• Super-Speed: Zeruel's first physical appearance has him approaching Earth at 0.8% the speed of light. And once he actually engages in battle, he does so with a Flash Step right in Unit-01's face.
• Swiss-Army Weapon: The Spear of Longinus turns out to be one, being capable of shapeshifting between its canonical bident shape and a six-pronged "Bombardment Mode" that can unleash devastatingly powerful ranged energy attacks, in addition to already possessing Deflector Shields.
• Technician Versus Performer: A strange three-way dynamic is present between the pilots.
  • Kaworu is a Performer, going through battles with just basic knowledge and a heaping help of improvisation; this is ultimately why he becomes the meat shield for the girls.
  • Asuka is a Technician, becoming a pilot with lots of prior training and knowledge. Her aptitude for mobility warfare and exploiting enemy weaknesses is reflected by her tactical use of flight and ranged weaponry to flank the opponent while Kaworu keeps it distracted.
  • Rei's status depends on who she's being compared to. She's the Technician to Kaworu's Performer, having far more skill and expertise; at the same time however, she's also the Performer to Asuka's Technician as Rei pulls off far more flashy stunts which she backs up with Improbable Aiming Skills.
• The Quiet One: Tabris.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: In The present, Rei headshots a thug with over a dozen bullets.
• Translation Convention: Averted. Non-English dialogue is deliberately left unsubtitled - and in the case of Japanese, non-romanized. The latter part is excused with Kaworu not knowing Japanese himself.
• Universal Universe Time: Averted. Upon arriving from another system via FTL, the CSS Odessa is asked to synchronize their chronometers by local flight control. Also, Shephard specifically tells Asuka to set her clocks to a 24-hour day.
• Vigilante Man: Kaworu was expelled from his previous school because he helped a younger boy being bullied by the principal's son. As in, sent the bully to the hospital. And he almost did it again in the second chapter, until his would-be victims realized who they're dealing with and backed down.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Zeruel makes an early appearance in the Israfel battle and pounds the Evas into the ground, which prompts the AEL to realize how outmatched they really are against the Angels and start making arrangements to remedy that.
• Wave-Motion Tuning Fork: The Spear of Longinus in Bombardment Mode.
• We Wait: SEELE's up to no good, as usual.
  • Averted in chapter 14: Shamshel is dispatched to find out where Sachiel disappeared to. After which the Angels proceed to probe the Evas' capabilities.
• Yakuza: After Rei mentioning early on that Tokyo-2 is the local criminal underworld hub, she and Kaworu acquire money from a yakuza-affiliated loan shark in chapter 34.
• Zerg Rush: The military tries it against Shamshel. She massacred over half of them before the rest ran away.
  • Shamshel gets to be on the receiving end of it again down the line - but this time around, being distracted by them allows Asuka to get the drop on her from behind.

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