After the significant achievements of the initial joint training, the coordination exercises between Nexum base and the Legio Canis entered a more profound and regularized phase. On the training ground, the crimson Unit-01, the purple Unit-02, and the blue Unit-03 were no longer merely demonstrating their staggering individual performance, but began to truly attempt...
Morning light like a blade cut through the heavy cloud layers above Neo-Tokyo 3. The rainwater on the blast-proof dome had long since evaporated, leaving behind mottled water marks, as if last night's torrential downpour had never truly fallen. The city awoke in silence; pedestrians were few on the streets, and the lights of self-navigating vehicles sliced through the chilly air. No one spoke, as if the entire world was waiting for an echo.
In the seventh basement level of NERV, the quantum core chamber had come to a complete standstill. The waveforms on the monitoring screens flattened out, like the heartbeat of a sleeper. The chamber doors slowly opened, and silver-white steam poured out, interlaced with faint arcs of electrical sparks. Asuka took the first step, her gait unsteady yet firm. Her left arm hung limply, and the silver patterns beneath her skin were still pulsing slightly, like something living moving through her bloodstream. Rei followed closely behind, her breathing shallow and steady, with what looked like shifting stars in the depths of her pupils.
Osiris stood at the end of the corridor, gripping a broken data pen with white knuckles. He wanted to step forward but stopped hesitantly. "You've... returned," he said softly, as if afraid to disturb something.
"We brought it back," Asuka looked up, her gaze piercing through the dim lighting. "Not victory, but responsibility."
Rei raised her hand, and a soft blue light emerged from her palm—the "Fire of Memory" retrieved from the depths of the library. It was not a physical entity, but an information core condensed from countless fragments of consciousness. It hovered quietly, occasionally flashing the face of a child, a muffled sob, or an unfinished farewell.
"It will self-replicate," Rei said. "As long as someone is willing to listen, it will continue to grow."
Osiris's throat moved. "Do you know what this means? Every sealed memory will see the light of day. SEELE's secrets, the truth of the Embryo Project, the souls devoured by Unit-01... it will all be exposed. The government won't allow it, and the military certainly won't stand by."
"Then let them come," Asuka sneered. "I'm not afraid anymore. They can delete records and destroy evidence, but they can't kill the act of 'remembering.' As long as there is still one person who remembers the name Rei Ayanami, or the smile of Embryo Type #42, their 'Order' will never be complete."
Just as the words fell, the entire building vibrated slightly. No alarm rang, but all screens lit up simultaneously—the locations of the thirteen buried EVA prototypes across the globe flickered with faint signals once more. This time it wasn't a chaotic fluctuation, but a rhythmic beat, unified like a pulse.
"They are responding," Rei whispered. "Not just the units... but the souls within the cockpits."
Osiris snapped his head up. "You mean the candidates who were judged dead long ago? Impossible! The neural links were cut, and biological brainwaves stopping for more than seventy-two hours is considered permanent extinction!"
"But they didn't truly die." Asuka walked to the console, her fingers lightly brushing the cold interface. "Their consciousness was trapped on the edge of the silence layer, like sleepwalkers wandering between waking and sleep. The door we opened didn't just lead to the past; it connected all 'incomplete' lives."
She pulled up an encrypted spectrum, and the audio analyzer restored a whisper:
"...Can you still hear me? I'm still here... please don't turn off the light..."
The voice was childish and trembling, belonging to a twelve-year-old female candidate, designated E-117. Three years ago, a synchronization runaway led to brainstem dissolution, officially recorded as an "experimental accident."
Rei closed her eyes, and tears fell. "They are crying for help. Not with words, but screaming with their very existence."
Osiris finally stumbled back, leaning against the wall, his voice raspy. "If this is true... if what we are hearing now is just the tip of the iceberg... then throughout the history of all EVA operations, just how many of these 'ghosts' have been created?"
"One hundred thousand, three hundred and sixty-two," Rei opened her eyes and said calmly. "That is the number I read from the last page of the library. Including failures, substitutes, and residual consciousness from emergency termination projects. They have no tombstones, no names—only file numbers and the phrase 'disposal complete'."
The air grew stagnant.
After a moment, Osiris smiled bitterly. "What do you plan to do? Wake them up one by one? Let them be reincarnated? Or simply transform reality into a world of soul-data?"
"We aren't playing God," Asuka turned to stare at him. "We are only acting as a bridge. To let the living hear the voices of the dead, and to let the forgotten be remembered again. From this day forward, every time an EVA is activated, a 'List of Remembrance' must be played—naming at least one departed candidate. This isn't a ritual; it's atonement."
Rei added: "We also demand the establishment of 'Empathy Corridors'—a non-invasive neural interface that allows ordinary people to briefly access the collective subconscious and see the covered-up history with their own eyes. Not forced, but voluntary participation."
Osiris's eyes widened. "You are shaking the very foundations of human rationality! Once the masses are exposed to such a gargantuan stream of painful information, social structures will collapse! Panic, the fall of faith, large-scale mental imbalance... do you understand the consequences?"
"I do," Asuka nodded. "That's why I'm doing it. True stability is not the calm built upon lies, but the posture of choosing to stand even after experiencing the storm."
She took a step closer, looking directly at Osiris. "Do you remember the oath you took when you first put on the NERV uniform? 'To protect the future of humanity.' But did you ever ask what kind of humanity deserves a future? Is it the puppets who forget the price and sing of victory? Or real individuals who dare to face their scars, even if they tremble and refuse to retreat?"
Osiris's lips moved, and he finally lowered his head, his shoulders shaking slightly. "I... I always thought I was protecting the world," he murmured. "But it turns out I was just helping them continue the lie."
Rei gently placed her hand on his shoulder. "It's not too late. You can choose to be the first high-level commander to publicly admit the error. You can stand up and tell everyone: we were wrong. But we are willing to change."
Outside the window, the sun had fully risen. A golden beam of light passed through the glass of the observation gallery, falling precisely on the six-winged hairpin on the central console. it lay there quietly, as if it had been waiting for a thousand years.
At the same time, anomalies began to appear around the world. At the Siberian base, an EVA-09 prototype that had been sealed for twenty years suddenly activated on its own.
The cockpit was empty, but it slowly raised its right hand toward the sky in a "peace" gesture before quietly shutting down. In the South Pacific undersea research institute, incinerators originally used for disposing of failed clones opened automatically, and hundreds of blurred faces emerged from the flames, humming that ancient nursery rhyme in unison.
Nearby fishing boats recorded this audio, which spread rapidly online and became known as the "Lullaby of the Dead." In a Tokyo University affiliated hospital, a girl who had been in a vegetative state for eight years suddenly opened her eyes; her first words were: "Sister Rei, thank you for coming to find me."
And in the lunar space station, the masked man looked toward Earth, gently placed an old-style six-winged badge into a drift capsule, and pushed it into the atmosphere. He wrote in his log:
"Gendo Ikari pursued divinity, SEELE craved unity, and I once thought inheriting a will meant continuing control.
Only today do I understand—the true legacy is letting go and letting the next generation walk a different path.
My children, may you never repeat our tragedies."
On Earth, the UN emergency meeting convened as scheduled. The atmosphere in the meeting room was suffocating. Representatives from various countries looked grim, and the projection screens scrolled through footage of the anomalies. The US representative slammed the table.
"This is out of control! We must immediately lock down all NERV authority and arrest the two pilots! They are triggering a global cognitive crisis!"
The German representative slowly stood up. "Gentlemen, have you noticed a detail? Since yesterday, the global suicide rate has dropped by 47%, extreme violent incidents have decreased by 61%, and the emotions of psychiatric patients are trending toward stability. Even data shows that newborn brainwaves are displaying an unprecedented tendency for empathy." He paused, his voice low but powerful. "This is not a disaster. This is evolution."
The French representative nodded. "We can no longer measure new reality with old logic. Human civilization has reached today not through flawless order, but through the courage to constantly correct errors. I support the public disclosure of archives and the establishment of the foundation."
After ten hours of debate, the resolution finally passed:
The remnants of SEELE are to be disbanded immediately, with all members facing trial in international court;
All taboo archives related to EVAs are to be fully declassified, and the "Human Diversity Protection Foundation" established, with Asuka and Rei as honorary consultants;
An annual "Remembrance Day" is established, with the list of candidates' memories broadcast globally;
All new EVA units must be equipped with "Empathy Modules," and pilots must undergo regular psychological empathy training.
The moment the voting results were announced, a song suddenly broke out on the streets of Neo-Tokyo 3. It wasn't a broadcast or a sound system, but sung spontaneously by countless ordinary people gathered together. They stood hand-in-hand in the center of the plaza, singing the soothing nursery rhyme that once only existed within the Embryo Project. Children joined in, old people sang through tears, and even the voice systems of mechanical patrol cars quietly switched to chorus mode.
Rei stood on the top terrace of NERV, listening to the melody that crossed classes and borders, and asked softly, "Do you think they will adapt?"
Asuka lit a cigarette—her first in years—the flame reflecting the fine lines at the corners of her eyes. "Adapt? Of course not. They will be afraid, they will deny it, and they will try to suppress it.
But as long as this song is still being sung, it means someone refuses to forget." She exhaled a puff of smoke, watching it rise into the clear sky. "Just like it was written in that book: be ordinary people who can cry, be afraid, and make mistakes. That is the meaning of being alive."
A few days later, in a classroom of an ordinary middle school, a young teacher closed the textbook and said to the students, "Today we won't have an exam, and we won't talk about tactical theory. I'm going to tell you the story of two girls."
The classroom fell silent.
"One had red hair like fire, proud and stubborn; the other had blue hair like water, silent and gentle. They were meant to grow old and die alone in their cockpits, becoming a mere footnote in history books. But they chose another path—they walked into the darkness and brought back the light."
A little boy raised his hand. "Teacher, what happened to them later?"
The teacher smiled. "No one knows the exact answer. Some say they vanished; some say they became legends. But every spring, two more rocks appear by the seaside, with two blurred figures sitting on them, holding a dirty cat in their arms."
"I believe they are still alive," a girl whispered. "Because when I'm dreaming, I can always hear them talking."
The wind blew through the window, fluttering the open pages of the book on the podium. The cover read: The Story of Two Sisters.
And in the depths of space, that floating signal beacon flashed again. This time, it wasn't a lonely three seconds. It stayed lit for a full minute, its frequency precisely corresponding to the band closest to "hope" in human brainwaves. Then, a new signal came from the other side of the galaxy—faint but clear, like a response crossing time and space.
The door remained half-open. Outside the door were no longer frightened children, nor lonely warriors. Instead, it was countless hands, clasped together, facing the unknown. They knew the real war had only just begun. The era of fighting Angels was over. Now, they had to fight against time, against oblivion, and against the deep-seated indifference in human nature.
But as long as someone is willing to open a book, hum a song, or remember a name—humanity still has a future.
Asuka stood by the sea, the wind tossing her red hair. Rei stood beside her, clutching the six-winged hairpin.
"Whose turn is it next?" Rei asked.
"I don't know," Asuka looked into the distance. "But I know that as long as we don't stop, there will always be another child who picks up this book and says: 'I want to go see that white plain too'."
Rei smiled. They took each other's hands and turned to leave. Behind them, the waves churned, washing over a line of writing on the sand:
"WE ONCE EXISTED."
The writing would eventually vanish. But those who remember will make it live forever.