Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The heat over Angel Grove shimmered like a bad TV signal. Park sprinklers hissed behind the band shell; somewhere, a car alarm hiccuped and died. On the grass, five color-coded blurs carved lines through a monster that looked like someone had glued a sewing machine to a praying mantis and dared it to be mean about it.

"Left flank! Trini—needle volley!" Jason's voice carried over the screech of metal-on-chitin as he slid under a serrated forearm and brought his blade up in a clean rising arc. Sparks skittered. The thing—Rita's latest, all bobbin eyes and threadbare laughter—reeled and spat out a hail of silver pins the length of javelins.

Trini was already moving. "On it." She stepped into the pattern, wrists turning, Yellow's daggers catching needle after needle with ringing snaps that traced a metronome through the chaos. A pin punched into the oak behind her with a deep, ugly thunk.

"Kim, eyes up!" Zack called because the monster was rearing back for another spray, and Kimberly was halfway through a vault between two picnic tables, pink elbow and knee pads flashing as she flipped, landed light, nocked, and loosed. The Power Bow sang; a volley of energy arrows stitched a line across the mantis's neck. It gagged, stumbled, and laughed.

"Your couture's… off the rack," she said, and then winced. "I'm workshopping it."

"Acceptable quip," Billy said, ducking a slashing limb so close it polished the top of his visor. Blue's spear found a seam at the joint and levered hard. "However, its tensile strength appears—ah—nontrivial."

"Translation?" Zack skidded past, heel kicking a fallen pin back into the monster's face with a grin that felt bigger than he was, because that was the point.

"Thick hide," Billy managed, "and the pins are cobalt alloy with micro-serrations."

"Cool," Zack said. "Hate that."

Above them, the sky had that too-clean California blue, the kind that made you think nothing truly bad could happen under it. Then the light changed, like someone had put a gray film over the sun. A shadow fell that wasn't a cloud.

On the Moon, Rita Repulsa's laugh rolled out of her palace like spilled marbles.

Her telescope was a brass thing the size of a bus, undecorated except for the gouges her nails had left over the years. She pressed one eye to it, saw the five little helmets moving with infuriating coordination, saw her monster's threadbare luck unraveling, saw—lower, smaller—a city by a sea she didn't recognize. Tall seawalls. Folding towers. A road that split and swallowed a car whole. She sniffed, once, and smiled without humor.

"Oh, how I love a theme clash," she said, voice sing-song with malice. "Let your colors fade where gods make war."

The wand came up, a star at its tip that was really a nail, really a needle, really a weapon for unpicking seams. She drew a crooked circle in the vacuum. Power gathered like static before a storm. The spell she wove wasn't one of her usual "grow-big" tantrums. This one reached sideways, hooked something that hummed under everything the Rangers did—the song of coins and suits and great old Zords—and tugged.

On the grass, Jason's coin went hot.

He didn't drop it. He'd sworn not to, long ago, alone in his room with promises no one had heard. But the heat snapped through his glove, up his arm, into the base of his skull where the Grid lived for him like a steady hum. It blared. His HUD stuttered—petals of static blooming across the inside of his visor. Somewhere, Alpha's voice said something like "ay-yi-yi" and then turned into a long, flat line.

"Jason?" Kimberly's voice is tight. "I'm getting—"

"Interference," Billy said, and then the word stretched like gum. Inteeeerf— and then everything was a pull.

The mantis monster cranked back for a triumphant strike and froze as if someone had hit pause. The park fell away. The city fell away. The team fell through a seam only the spell knew how to open, a slit in the world sewn with thread the color of sick moonlight.

Jason's stomach flipped. The morph wasn't gone, but it was being unstitched. Red bled toward gray, not in color but in feeling, in the clean rightness that came with a roll call. His hands were still hands, but the gauntlets were… paper? Ash? He saw Trini's outline snap and reform; Zack's visor bloom with cracks that weren't; Kimberly's bow flux into a dozen little squares of pink light and then fall apart like confetti, like feathers, like regret. Billy tried to speak, and numbers fell out and spun away into the dark.

They hit sand that wasn't sand.

It had the grit and bite of pulverized concrete. Jason tasted salt, old iron, the sharpness of ozone. His ears rang. A siren cried close and far at once, a pitch he didn't recognize, neither Angel Grove's firetrucks nor the Command Center's sweet, rising alert. Something deeper under it throbbed, slow and massive: WHUM… WHUM… WHUM.

He pushed himself up. Red was gone. His gloves were his own skin. His knuckles had a new scrape on them he didn't remember getting—pink under the dust. The morpher lay against his wrist, coin dull as a dead eye.

"Roll call," he said, because habit was a rope in rough water. "Kim?"

"Present," Kimberly said from behind a toppled street vendor's cart that smelled like fish and industrial cleaner. She was in her tank top and denim shorts, hair half-out of its tie, bow gone. Her palms were raw.

"Billy?"

"Here," Billy said, blinking hard behind his glasses. No visor. Just lenses and a smear, he kept trying to swipe clean and making worse. "Possible concussive episode. I am operational."

"Trini."

"I'm good," Trini said. She was already standing, shoulders squared, scanning, measuring. The buildings around them were tall and pale and unfamiliar, lines too precise, windows too evenly spaced. A low sea wall bulked behind them, and beyond it, there was water gleaming like a blade.

"Zack."

"Woo," Zack said weakly, from the shadow of a bus stop with a map on it. The map was a tidy maze of symbols, none of them English. "Present and… confused."

They were in a city, but not theirs. The air smelled different. The pavement had hairline seams that looked like they wanted to open. A speaker overhead barked, and a woman's voice poured out fast and clean in a language none of them spoke.

Shinji Ikari didn't exist for them; he was somewhere else, looking at a payphone. For the Rangers, there were only flares and long shadows and that siren. The voice repeated. A second speaker picked it up farther down the block. Somewhere, a shutter rattled closed like a jaw.

"Anyone see Rita?" Jason asked, though he already knew the answer.

"No palace," Kimberly said. "No moon cackle. Just… this."

Trini tilted her head. "Listen."

They listened. Beneath the siren, the slow bass thump kept coming, dependable as a heartbeat. WHUM. A tremor rolled through the street; pebbles in a cracked planter chattered against each other.

"Alpha, come in," Jason said, touching his morpher in a gesture that lived somewhere between prayer and muscle memory. "Zordon, do you copy?"

Static. For a second—less—a shape like a face in frost. Then nothing.

"Try anyway," he said, because you always tried. "It's Morphin Time!"

He raised his arm out of reflex, waiting for the answer he'd felt a thousand times—the coin's bright assent, the weightless rush, the world resolving into colors and lines that made sense. The morpher hummed, almost. The coin warmed. A ring of light snapped halfway into place and then shattered like a soap bubble in cold air.

"Pterodactyl!" Kimberly called, as if not giving it room to refuse would make the difference. The air flickered around her in a halo that cut across her shoulders and hitched, as if something larger were trying to press itself into the world and finding nowhere to stand.

"Mastodon!" Zack's grin was pure stubborn. The ground under the bus stop thudded once, a low subsonic cough, as if something under the city had answered and then changed its mind.

"Saber-Toothed Tiger!" Trini's coin flashed, swallowed itself, went dull.

"Triceratops!" Billy flinched when his own call stuttered into a glitch. "Diagnostic: morph pathway obstructed—"

"—by what?" Kimberly snapped, more scared than angry.

Billy pushed his glasses up with a shaking knuckle. "Unknown. The Grid is… still present. Attenuated. Possibly refracted through an environmental field."

"You mean the whole place is messing with us?" Zack said.

"Yes," Billy said, and then: "Probably."

WHUM.

They looked toward the seawall together. A shape moved beyond it—not big, not really, except that it ate distance when you looked straight at it. It had the sort of outline that made your head insist on church words no one had taught you. Parts of it were wrong angles that shouldn't meet. Parts were the shoulder and arm, and something like a mask. When it turned, the air between them pinched and sang.

"Okay," Jason said, breathing a little shallow because his body knew scale even if his eyes didn't. "New monster?"

"Not hers," Trini said. There was a flat certainty in her voice that made Zack turn and look at her. She shook her head once. "Rita's are loud in a different way."

"Evacuation," Billy said quickly, as if the mathematical step were what held panic off. He pointed down the block where doors were slamming, shutters were rolling, and metal teeth closing over glass. "We need to get inside. Find a shelter. Regroup and—"

A car whipped around the corner, tires screaming, a hatchback with a roof rack and a sun-faded sticker on the bumper that Jason couldn't read. It fishtailed, clipped a trash can, straightened, and shot by. The driver's face was white with effort. In the mirrored slice of the window, Jason saw five kids he knew too well and didn't recognize at all.

"Stick together," he said. The words were a hinge; the team swung on them without thinking. "No heroics until we know the rules. Billy, troubleshoot on the move. Trini, route. Kim, spot high ground. Zack, keep eyes on… that."

"Got it," Zack said, and then, softly, because it helped, "We're good at learning new dances."

They moved. The street had a rhythm even with people gone—flag lines snapping in a wind that came from nowhere, a delivery bike hung crooked on its stand, a crane parked with its arm slanted like a question. Ahead, a set of stairs dropped to a subterranean corridor. People poured down it in a neat line, shoulders hunched, clutching bags, eyes on each other's shoes. The loudspeaker voice hit another sweep, and everyone took the next step in unison.

Kimberly touched Jason's shoulder and pointed up. Between two towers, one block over, a panel slid down the face of a building. Metal shutters rolled. The tower itself sank a few inches into the ground as if it had always intended to.

"Whoa," Zack breathed. "Our city does not do that."

"It's designed," Trini said, tracing the seams with her gaze, "to hide."

The stairwell was tight; heat moved in it like a living thing. As they pushed into the flow, a woman reached to steady the elderly man in front of her. He looked up, saw Jason's red tee, and flinched as if color were a threat. Jason lifted his hands, palms out, let his face be plain. The man nodded once and looked at the floor again.

"Excuse me," Billy said gently, in a voice that always softened strangers. "Is this a shelter?" Then realized how ridiculous the question was and shut his mouth. He looked at the sign above the door instead, a blue pictogram of a person under a house with lines coming down on it. "Yes," he answered himself, thanks to pictures.

A child stared at Kimberly's scraped knees and whispered something to his mom that had the sloping cadence of asking why. The mom smoothed the kid's hair and didn't look at the Rangers at all.

They were halfway down when the stairwell shook.

Not a tremor. Not the crack of a bad explosive. A lift. A punch from below that translated up through rebar and flesh. The lights flickered. Someone stumbled, caught themselves on a stranger's shoulder, and mumbled an apology. The slow bass thump changed tempo, picked up. WHUM whum whum.

"What's doing that?" Zack breathed.

"Something big moving through a retractable infrastructure," Billy said, out of breath, exhilarated, and terrified in equal measure. "Possibly the—"

Another voice cut across the PA, tighter, lower, a different timbre Jason didn't have a name for, issuing orders that came out as clean as blade edges. Doors thudded along the corridor in sequence, a machine closing an eyelid.

The team flattened against a wall near a branching hall. Jason steadied his breathing, counted four in, four out, the way his first sensei had taught him when the world tried to talk louder than the thing you had to do.

"Plan," he said, quiet but firm. "We get our feet under us. Billy, see if there's a way to piggyback whatever that… grid is here. If we can't morph, we still have hands."

"Hands and a Jason," Kimberly said, half a smile even now.

"And a Kimberly," he said back.

Trini glanced toward the upper entrance. The light out there had gone red. "If that thing comes closer," she asked, "do we break cover?"

Jason answered without looking away from the sign picturing a family under a roof. "We help whoever's in front of us first," he said. "Then we find a way to hit it that doesn't get all of these people killed."

WHUM.

The sound crawled into their bones. Out past the stair mouth, beyond the sea wall, something moved again, taller than cranes, older than their names for monsters. The five of them stood in a country that didn't know them with coins that wouldn't answer, listening to a heartbeat that belonged to a city built to fold up and pray.

Jason touched the coin on his wrist one more time because he had to. It was cool. It did not answer. He swallowed, nodded once, and led them deeper, where the concrete was thicker and the air tasted like metal filings and hope held together with tape.

Cicadas buzzed like loose wiring. A hot wind shoved grit down empty streets and made the yellow evacuation banners slap their poles in clipped, angry beats.

Shinji set his suitcase down by the payphone and wiped sweat off his upper lip with the back of his hand. The handset was sticky. The coin slot refused to take his first try, then swallowed the second with a clack that sounded too final. He pressed the number from the postcard anyway.

It rang. And rang.

"Come on," he said to the dial tone, barely a voice at all. He glanced down at the postcard. A woman with sunglasses and a too-bright smile threw a peace sign at the camera, a coastline behind her like a brochure. The caption in ink at the bottom had hearts bracketing his name. He couldn't remember anyone ever drawing hearts around his name. He couldn't stop looking at them.

The ring cut. Static breathed into his ear, then an automated voice he didn't know: something about service areas and congestion. He hung up and tried again, a little harder. The handset knocked against the cradle and made a lonely sound.

A public address speaker crackled overhead. A woman's voice slid out as smooth and calm as glass: "Emergency level one. All residents proceed to your assigned shelters. Repeat, emergency level one—"

Shinji looked along the boulevard. The shutters on a tea shop rolled down like a chain curtain. A delivery trike took the corner too fast, rattled over the lane markers, and vanished. The city had decided to be empty without consulting him.

He dialed again. The coins were gone. He didn't have more. He pressed the numbers anyway. The ring came back and bounced off the metal walls of the booth. "Mother," he said after the fourth ring, because it had been in his mouth and now it was out there, stupid and wrong. He flinched and swallowed. "Mis—Katsuragi-san. It's Ikari." He left space in case she could hear him through time or the tower or his own embarrassment. "I'm at South Gate East Payphone 04." He checked the sticker on the booth twice to make sure he'd read it right. "I… I'm here."

He lowered the receiver a little and let it hang against his shoulder. The cicadas tunneled back in. The woman's voice finished another loop above him. In the distance, low over the seawall, something moved.

He lifted the receiver to his ear without remembering telling his hand to do it. The line had given up and gone flat. He hung up. The phone immediately began ringing all by itself, a cheerful, insistent trill like a toy that refused to die.

He jolted, snatched it back to his ear. "Yes?"

Dead air. A noise like someone breathing into a paper bag. Then a tiny voice far away: "…—j—sh—r—" It wasn't a language he knew. It might not have been a language at all.

He leaned against the glass and looked along the street. A group of five teenagers half-jogged across the intersection three blocks down, clothes bright even in the washed-out heat—red, blue, pink, yellow, black like someone had spilled a children's paintbox onto a magazine spread. Not school uniforms. Not any uniform. They moved together without talking, hands at the same heights, feet hitting the asphalt in cadence. A woman holding a child pressed herself into a doorway to make room for them. One of the five—red shirt, hair damp with sweat—lifted his hand in a little apology, turned his head like he was listening to something only he could hear, and the group vanished down the steps to an underground corridor with the rest of the people who had somewhere to be.

Shinji blinked. The phone in his hand piped an operator tone that sounded like a shrug.

He set the receiver back on the hook with both hands, as if it might bite him. His suitcase felt heavier than it should have when he picked it up. He took two steps out of the booth and stopped because the world beyond the seawall stood up.

At first, it was just an angle where there shouldn't be, like a building trying on the idea of being an animal and getting it wrong. Then the angle turned into a shoulder, and that shoulder pulled a long black arm out of the sky as if it were water. White sparks crawled over something that looked like bone but moved like poured steel. Its face was a blank plate with eye slots that suggested eyes the way a mask suggests breath.

The air between it and him quivered. He felt the pressure in his sinuses and the hinge of his jaw. He pressed his teeth together out of pure reflex. They clicked.

A convoy of trucks howled down the boulevard at his back—green paint, antennae flicking, tarps snapping. UN roundels flashed on doors and sleeves—this wasn't JSDF.

Shinji stumbled out of the lane as the lead truck jumped the curb and skidded, the driver's hands locked at ten and two like prayer. Soldiers spilled off the rear like beads shaken loose from a string. Shinji pressed himself against the payphone glass and tried to make himself thin.

One of the soldiers shouted at him—words he should have been able to understand, but the blood in his ears made it a rope of sound. The soldier saw his face, saw the suitcase, and jerked his chin toward the stairs. The gesture was universal. Down. Now.

Shinji nodded. He didn't move. His knees refused.

The trucks braked in a row and unfolded into launchers with practiced convenience. A man with a cigarette that had gone out barked at a microphone and pointed two fingers at the sky. The sky obliged by filling with helicopters. He hadn't heard them over the sirens and the city's machinery, but now they were here: gunmetal dragonflies with teeth, latticework legs tangled with missiles. They beat the air, whipped Shinji's hair into his face, and bent the evacuation banners almost flat. Down at the stairs, the five teenagers were gone.

He felt for the postcard in his shirt pocket. It was still there, edges soft now where his fingers had worried them, the ink at the bottom smudged but legible. He took it out and stared at the sunglasses and the coastline and the hearts bracketing his name. He didn't understand why his chest hurt.

The cigarette man's radio spat and squealed. The words climbed the scale one by one, clipped and precise. Somewhere ahead of them, across the seawall, something answered those words with a pulse.

"Fire!" the cigarette man shouted. That word, Shinji understood.

The launchers coughed smoke and fire. The air turned to nails. Missiles angled into the blue and then down, thin white lines unspooling behind them, an afterimage that wrote and rewrote itself on the inside of Shinji's eyelids when he blinked. The first strikes detonated against the thing's shoulders. Dust lifted. The thing looked over its shoulder the way a person looks at a fly: a little curious, a little annoyed.

The helicopters loosed a second wave. The water beyond the wall jumped like something had punched it from below. Shinji forgot to breathe until the second launcher cycled. He remembered to breathe only because his body demanded oxygen. His throat hurt going in.

He heard himself ask the payphone, the soldiers, the thin woman on the speaker, the thing beyond the wall, "Am I supposed to be here?" No one answered. The speaker above gave him the same calm advice it had given him all afternoon: proceed to a place he didn't know how to find.

A sound he had never heard before climbed out of the city's chest. It wasn't a siren. It wasn't a helicopter. It was a long metallic inhale, a hunger through pipes. The ground under his feet shivered. A block away, a glass tower knelt. It sank a story, then another, as if embarrassed by the sky and trying to get away from it. Panels slid across its face like shutters. A street segment to Shinji's right split at the seams and yawned open along a hinge he would have sworn wasn't there ten seconds ago. He stepped back, and his suitcase wheels fell into a crack. He yanked. It stuck. He yanked harder. The handle came away in his hand with a squeak and a tiny funeral for a spring.

"Great," he told the handle, because talking to an object was simpler than talking to the air. The handle didn't answer.

One of the helicopters dropped below the seawall and locked its nose down, guns steady, the barrel pulse strobing light over the water. The thing in the water raised its arm, and the bullets slurred sideways like rain hitting glass in the wrong direction. Shinji felt the pressure again in his jaw. He rubbed just below his ear and felt the small, exactly circular bruise he always had but never looked at. He wanted very badly to pretend he hadn't touched it.

"Evacuate," the speaker pleaded, and somehow it still sounded patient. "Evacuate now."

The cigarette man lit his dead cigarette with someone else's lighter, took one long drag, and didn't exhale. He looked like a man watching a dog he'd just yelled at run into traffic. He lifted the mic. "N-two mine," he said. He looked at the kid in the blue button-down shirt holding the wire and nodded once. The kid looked like he should be at cram school, not here. He swallowed and nodded back.

Shinji had just enough time to think: mine? Before the light near the seawall became a single color and then no color at all. For a heartbeat the blast wrote a burning cross into the sky. Inside the bubble, the Angel knelt—mask fractured—then extruded a new 'face' as if the wound were an inconvenience.

The pressure hit him in the chest like a thrown door. The world delayed a second before agreeing to move, then tried to do it all at once. The payphone booth became an instrument. It rang in every panel and rattled every screw.

He didn't fly so much as find the ground somewhere else. His shoulder hit, then his hip, then the breath came out of him in a raw bark he didn't recognize as his own. The postcard left his hand and skated over the asphalt, face down now, hearts hidden.

Glass gusted down the boulevard and did its best to be sand. He tasted it. The evacuation banners came loose at one edge and thrashed, then tore entirely and went laughing down the empty lane. A bus shelter flexed forward, considered collapsing, and decided against it with a groan.

He sat up on his palms and felt little knives in them and tried not to think about them being glass. The seawall was gone as a line; it was an outline in dust. The helicopters were distant smear-shapes wobbling, forcing themselves to hold air that didn't want to be held. The thing at the center of the blast knelt there intact inside a bubble where nothing else had survived and unfurled an arm like a slow, offended blessing.

He noticed, belatedly, that he was shaking. He told himself to stop. His arms did not care what he told them.

The phone behind him started ringing again. Ring. Ring. Ring. A very normal sound. He almost laughed because it was so stupid. He crawled to the booth and put the receiver to his ear because, obviously, this time it would be different.

"—ji?" A woman's voice, close enough to step into the booth with him. The line hissed around her syllables. "Ikari-kun? Can you hear me?"

He closed his eyes. "Yes," he said. He had to swallow twice to get it to sound like a word.

"Stay where you are," the woman said, and there was a smile inside her voice he could feel more than hear. The smile took the edge off the tremor that wanted to reduce his hands to useless things. "And maybe… crouch a little. It's going to be bumpy."

"Who—?"

"Blue car," she said. "You'll know it when you see it."

"Do you know my—"

"Shinji," she said, like they'd already met and he'd forgotten.

He heard tires, a horn, a too-cheerful jingle from a convenience store that had no business being open. He turned his head and saw the blue out of the heat first, metal flake winking even under a sky still recovering from being all blast. It fishtailed, corrected, came straight at him without slowing enough to be polite about it. He didn't move. He couldn't have, even if he'd wanted to.

The car slid in a long S and stopped a breath too close to his knees. The engine complained. The door kicked open, and a leg swung out—black heel scuffed, stockings laddered, the hem of a skirt that had lost a fight with a parking brake. The woman from the postcard stood up, shoved her sunglasses up into her hair, and grinned at him like they were both about to get away with something.

"Hi!" she said, louder than the cicadas, bright enough to be its own siren. "Get in!"

Behind her, beyond the seawall, the thing turned its mask toward them and raised its arm again. The air between it and the city shimmered like sugar over a flame. The loudspeaker overhead told the empty street to evacuate. The cigarette man finally exhaled. The blue car idled, impatient and alive, door open like a promise.

The engine ticked itself quiet. Misato's door slammed; cool air rushed in like a secret. Shinji followed because staying in the car felt like drowning.

"Left," Misato said, and he matched her pace without realizing it, suitcase bumping his knee. Their footsteps sounded too loud on paint-striped concrete. A red warning lamp rotated in slow circles across the far wall, painting a moving wound on steel.

A lab-coat figure jogged down a ladder with printouts clamped under one arm. "Katsuragi! MAGI's new projections—"

"Show me later," Misato said, not unkind, not stopping. "He's here."

The woman's eyes flicked to Shinji, weighed him, then away. "The Commander is waiting in the cage."

They passed through an iris door with hazard chevrons. The room beyond breathed cold. Lights banged on one after another into a ceiling so high it tricked your sense of scale. Cables draped like black muscle from gantries. For a second, Shinji thought he was in an empty warehouse.

Then the dark admitted it had been hiding something.

A face—no, a helmet—no, something that had decided to be both. Violet plates with sickly green lines. A jaw that wasn't one. An eye lens catches the rotating red and gives it back in a steady, inhuman glow. It was too big for the room and somehow fit anyway, like a nightmare that remembered your house.

"Evangelion Unit-01," Misato said, but she was watching him, not it.

His throat worked. He had the stupid thought that it should be dusty; nothing that size should be clean. "This is… real?"

"Very." A new voice, hard as handrails, came from the catwalk above. Shinji looked up. Glasses. A white glove on a rail. A posture like a math problem written in bones. "Shinji."

The name hit like a cupboard door slamming shut.

"Father," he said, and then wished he hadn't said anything. The word sounded wrong in his mouth.

Gendo Ikari didn't nod. He didn't do anything as human as that. He let silence do the work for a heartbeat, then: "Pilot it."

It didn't sound like a question. Shinji's fingers tightened on the suitcase handle until the cracked plastic creaked.

Misato stepped in, shoulders angling like a shield. "Commander, that's—he just got here. We haven't even—"

"Ritsuko." Gendo didn't look at Misato when he cut her off; he looked past her. Ritsuko Akagi was somehow already there at Shinji's left, clipboard in hand, lab coat crisp, pencil behind one ear. She tapped a box with the end of the pencil.

"Unit-01's current readiness is within tolerance," she said. If there was judgment in the words, it hid under technical sufficiency. "Pilot accommodation is calibrated for his biometrics."

"You expect—" Misato rounded on her. "He's a child."

Ritsuko's look slid over Misato and found Shinji. "So is the pilot we prepared," she said, less gently.

Gendo's hands tightened on the rail. The lenses of his glasses made him a constellation of hard points. "If he won't pilot," he said, and Shinji knew what would come next seconds before the room made it true, "use Rei."

A phone somewhere above clicked to life. Orders ricocheted along catwalks. "Retrieve the First Child from medical." Feet clanged on steel. A door unlatched with a hiss like someone's opinion of the plan.

"No," Misato said, voice dropping to something with a tremor in it that only existed when she was furious. "She's in no condition—"

"Her condition," Gendo said, "is manageable."

"Commander," Ritsuko said, quick and low, an attempt at a parachute on a rock. "There are risks if we—"

A tremor ran through the floor, a big animal rolling over in its sleep. Dust trickled from a seam in the ceiling like flour. Somewhere far up, something groaned. Shinji flinched. Unit-01 didn't move.

"Pattern Blue remains outside the perimeter," someone called from a mezzanine—Maya, badge said, headset crooked with haste. "Seismic coupling from surface strikes. No breach."

Misato's jaw reset. She turned to Shinji and tried to make her voice a hand he could take. "Listen," she said, steady. "We're asking a lot. I know. You don't have to—"

Gurney wheels squealed somewhere in the maze of metal. The sound cut through machinery like a violin string. Shinji's eyes followed it before he told them to.

They came in fast, two techs in scrubs pushing from the back, a third guiding the front like a tugboat. The girl on the gurney wore a hospital gown and blood. Bandages webbed her shoulder and wrapped her head; one eye was a red-wept slit under gauze. Her mouth was set, not because it wanted to be but because she'd told it to be.

"Rei," Misato breathed, the furious part gone all at once, replaced with fear she didn't have time for.

Rei's head rolled fractionally on the pillow. Her good eye slid to Shinji as if it had found the one new thing in the room and then forward again, as if it didn't matter. One of the scrubs adjusted her IV with hands that wanted to shake and didn't.

Gendo's voice came down like weather. "First Child. Can you pilot?"

Rei blinked slowly. Her lips made the smallest movement that could be called a nod. When she tried to sit up, pain picked her up instead. The tech on the left caught her shoulder. She made a small sound and strangled it halfway. Shinji felt it in his teeth.

"No," Misato snapped, moving to the gurney, bracing the metal with both hands like she could hold the world still by force of grip. "She shouldn't even be out of bed."

Rei, teeth pink now where something had opened under the bandage, found Misato's sleeve with her fingers as if she needed a reference point on gravity and let go again. The good eye slid up to Gendo. "I… can pilot," she said, quiet and flat and stubborn as a nail in wood.

Shinji's breath found places to stumble. He didn't know why his feet moved forward one step and then another, except that the step after that would have been toward the gurney, and he stopped it with an effort that made his knees feel strange. He looked at her and wanted to say something complicated and human, like "don't," or "I will," or even "I'm sorry," but the words lined up wrong in his mouth.

"She's hurt," he told Misato, as if Misato couldn't see.

"I know," Misato said, and for a second, her face wasn't a joke or a grin or a performance; it was a person who was scared.

"Commander," Ritsuko said again, pencil arrested a centimeter above paper. "Evaluation protocols—"

Alarms cut her in half.

They weren't the city horns; they were deeper, closer, part of the concrete like arteries. Red spilled across panels. The speaker over the nearest console coughed and found a voice running too fast to be calm.

"Target approaching southern sector. Pattern Blue at close range. Confirm—" A second voice overrode it like a glitch stacking on top of a song: "Additional detection—Pattern Blue negative; unidentified anthropoid unit on the surface—"

Maya's hands leapt to a keyboard; the screens along the far wall stuttered and began to wake like eyes in the dark. "Bringing up feeds!"

"Define 'unknown,'" Ritsuko said, eyes hard.

"Unidentified megastructure," the voice said, choosing nouns by elimination. "Composite. It—combined."

Misato's head snapped toward the monitors. Shinji looked at her, then at the Evangelion, then at Rei's hand still half-curled on the sheet, the tape over the back of it stained where the IV bit in. He could feel the room lean toward the screens the way people lean toward a crash.

Gendo didn't look at the monitors. He didn't move at all. "Shinji," he said, and for the first time, he put a weight in the name that might have been need or calculation or both. "Pilot it."

Dust ticked out of a seam in the ceiling like rain starting. The first camera feed clawed its way out of static into a wash of gray street and skewed horizon. Misato's fingers hovered over the console switches, knuckles white.

"Commander?" Ritsuko asked, not turning. "Orders?"

The room held its breath.

And then the lights dimmed a fraction, just enough to notice. The alarms kept talking. The screens began to resolve into shapes moving toward a seawall and a city that didn't want them. Misato's eyes cut to Shinji, wide for one beat, a question and a plea in one.

The speaker shouted over itself: "Pattern Blue—confirmed! Unknown—confirming—"

Shinji swallowed. He didn't answer. He couldn't. The word "pilot" hung between him and the machine like a bridge he could not see the far end of.

Somewhere above, something massive struck. The whole cage shivered like a heart skipping. The red lamp kept its slow, idiotic circle.

"Shinji," Gendo said again, and the world lurched toward an answer—

—and the screens flared.

Wind knifed down the stairwell and turned the evacuation line into a wavering ribbon of people—hands on shoulders, heads down, the murmur of shoes on concrete. The siren's pitched wail climbed, clipped, restarted. Above, the ceiling dusted itself down in a fine powder.

"Move, move," Jason urged, one palm out, keeping the flow steady, not shoving, eyes flicking between faces and the black square of sky at the top of the stairs.

The sky turned white.

A sheet of light rippled over the seawall and peeled across the boulevard like a thrown curtain. It hit a parked delivery truck. The truck kinked, sobbed metal, and folded wrong. The people at the top of the stairs saw it happen and froze because they were human and it was impossible. That half-second of freeze meant the back half of the line piled up against the front, and the whole neat stream of bodies became a stuck knot of elbows, bags, and fear.

"Back up—back up!" Trini shouted in Japanese and English both, cutting the two frontmost families loose from the knot with her hands like a blade. A toddler cried; the mom's grip on him whitened; the boy's shoe skittered away, upside down.

"Jason," Billy said, voice thin with speed. "Target is aligning a repeat discharge—projected angle intersects this stairwell aperture."

"English," Zack snapped.

"Laser. Here. Now."

Another ripple came off the Angel's arm, a soft, hateful glow building where any sane thing would have had tendons. It turned its mask toward the stairs like it had heard Billy say, "Here." A man in a suit tripped on the third step from the top and took three people with him. A suitcase burst and vomited clothes.

Kimberly's breath went sharp. "We can't watch that happen."

"Alpha," Jason tried automatically, touching his dead coin like a reflex. It sat cold in his palm. Silence. The boy on the steps stared past Jason with new, terrible comprehension. Jason tasted iron. He swallowed it.

"Jason," Trini said, low. No time left.

He looked up into a sky he didn't know. The world tasted like hot metal. The Angel's arm brightened. The people stalled at the top of the stairs were one second from being a statistic.

"Now," Jason said. "Together."

He brought the morpher up, coin flashing as if from a memory.

The five of them stood on the landing in a line, instinct snapping them into formation so fast it felt like breathing. Cars were still ticking in the heat; the banner above still flapped. Kimberly shook her hair off her eyes and lifted her chin like a dare.

"It's Morphin Time!" Jason barked, full throat, the word hammering down the shaft like a struck bell.

Zack's hand hit first, voice cracking into a grin he didn't feel.

"Mastodon!"

Light snapped around his waist, then his shoulders, black folding into being like a fast eclipse—boots, gloves, the diamond that was a promise more than a shape. The Mastodon sigil roared up behind him in a wash of cold breath, steam curling white off the stairwell walls.

"Pterodactyl!"

Kimberly's call carried high, bright, a silver thread above the siren. Pink fire feathered out from her coin, wingbeats in the air—helmet unfurling with a dove-smooth click, visor locking, the chest diamond finding its place like it had been waiting for her all along.

"Triceratops!"

Billy's came like a solved equation punched into the world. Blue flared; armored gloves washed down his forearms in segmented, sure lines; the Triceratops ghosted out of nowhere over his shoulder and stamped, cracked concrete spidering away under phantom weight.

"Sabertooth Tiger!"

Trini's voice was a blade too, yellow splitting the gloom, the tiger's specter flicking its tail as her helmet sealed with a soft hiss. Her stance settled lower, ready.

"Tyrannosaurus!"

Jason's coin burst radiant red, the stairwell suddenly a throat of heat and lightning. The T. rex bellowed behind him, huge and right and old. The suit poured over him—gauntlets locking, boots slamming home, the chest diamond flashing once, hard. The helmet sealed; the world knifed into focus through the red visor.

"Power Rangers!", they all said in unison.

Five suits, five visors, five breaths in unison. The world knew them again.

"Field dip—seventy-three hertz window through the local interference. We threaded the Grid handshake just then," Billy said.

The Angel's arm finished its line toward them.

"Go!" Jason kicked up the last steps, Grid-light still dancing on his gloves. The beam came like a pane of glass laid down at speed. He threw his forearms up and the Grid's field flared around him—not strong enough to stop it, but enough to bend it. The shock slammed him back against the stairwell lip; his boots scraped paint. Blue and yellow were already there, braces locking, spreading the field.

"Keep moving!" Trini barked to the civilians, voice turned into metal by her helmet but still human under it. "Down! Down! Do not look!"

Zack shot past her, black a blur, scooping the fallen toddler and handing him into a stranger's arms without breaking stride. He planted himself like a hockey defenseman and took a suitcase to the shin without complaint to free the jam. "C'mon, let's go, let's go—no pics, dude!"

Kimberly slid up onto the rail and walked it, pink boots delicate on metal, Power Bow snapping into her hands from a motion so practiced it was a magic trick. She drew and released into the beam's edge, arrows burning into the light, disrupting the edge, buying heartbeats.

"Jason," Billy grunted, helmet HUD blooming with translucent petals of data. "Grid interlock stabilized for twenty-three seconds. After that—"

"We won't be up here," Jason said. He shoved forward, field straining. The last handful of evacuees broke free and started down. A woman looked back with wide eyes; Kim's hand was on her back; the woman turned and went.

The Angel cocked its head, curious. Its arm drew back.

"Clear!" Trini shouted, and the team dove as one. The second beam scythed the top three stairs and turned them to glass that steamed, then cracked.

Zack dropped into the stairwell, knees bending to take the drop, and set the kid down with a thumbs-up too big for the world. He looked up, exhaled hard. "We're not repeating that."

"Agreed," Billy said. He tapped the side of his helmet, instruments singing. "We have a window. A short one."

Jason's chest moved once, twice. "Then we make it count." He looked up, the Angel's blank mask haloed against a sky doing its best to be blue. "We need Megazord power. Now!"

"Jason—" Billy's hands flared open, imploring, scientific panic lacing his tone. "We don't know if the Zords will answer. The morph was—statistically improbable—perhaps environmental resonance—it could have been a one-time—"

"We try," Jason said, not looking away from the thing that had almost erased a staircase full of people. "Because they need us. Call them."

There wasn't time for a plan. There were only the five coins burning like hot glass against their wrists and the old names that had gotten them out of bed, the names that were older than the moon.

"Dinozord power!" Jason's shout bounced off buildings. "Now!"

The city answered with its own language.

"The spell's side-band bridged the Morphin Grid into the city's retractable plates—those aren't bays, they're portals. We're phasing the Zords through, not pulling them from here," Billy explained.

Deep under steel, locks tumbled. Somewhere far along the shoreline, a plate the size of a stadium tore free of its moorings and slid aside, birth-cry a mix of hydraulics and air. From the black below rose a roar older than rooftops. The ground thumped like a heartbeat when the Tyrannosaurus trudged up a ramp that could not have existed ten seconds before—smoke blowing hot out of vents along its back, eyes lit, every step the punctuation mark to a promise. It crashed through a rolling shutter, red plates scraping sparks, and bellowed at the Angel from the middle of a four-way like it had been grown there between traffic lights.

A kilometer away, the river coughed up fog. Frost crawled along the edges of a drainage canal, breath billowing from the black mouth of a culvert not rated for miracles. With a howl that iced the stairwell air, the Mastodon shouldered out of the vapor, tusks wet with cold, legs punching through steam. It shook itself and trundled toward the plaza, pavement trembling under its weight, vapor trailing like a winter cape behind it in the summer heat.

The boulevard peeled back a seam nobody had drawn on any map. Sand—real or remembered—poured up the seam in a shimmering slope, and the Triceratops burst out nose-first, horn cutting a line, treads biting. Its tail whipped once, contempt for the geometry of the street, then it gunned forward, a low rumble beneath. It bulldozed a barricade as gently as something that big could and took its lane like it had been waiting for traffic clearance.

A green belt of park split along a precise cutline no gardener had planned, jungle mist curling out of space like a shy ghost. The Sabertooth Tiger leapt the gap, landed cat-soft on concrete, and ran—low, fast, head down, yellow blazing, claws clacking. It wove between panic-stopped cars with predator grace and snapped a look up at the Angel that said nothing and everything.

The sky squinted, too bright for a heartbeat. High over a heliport, heat miraged into a column, and the air blew outward like applause as the Pterodactyl screamed down along its own contrail. It skimmed the seawall, pink wings gleaming, then pulled hard, climbed, and banked over the boulevard, casting a blade-shaped shadow across the Angel's face.

"Zords!" Zack shouted, joy cracking through the fear, honest and loud. "We got 'em!"

"Form up!" Jason's hand lifted, two fingers cutting toward the threat. "Megazord sequence!"

The five machines moved as if someone had taught the city to dance.

The Tyrannosaurus took point, its roar a throat-rattle you felt in your ribs. The Mastodon slid into place, back plating splitting in a practiced unfurl. Triceratops ground into position, treads locking, tail docking with the sled geometry that would become legs. The Sabertooth paced alongside, then sprang, spine stretching, torso folding; its head snapped down into a shin-guard with feline disdain. Above, the Pterodactyl tucked its wings, angled, and arrowed down, plating yawning to accept it.

"Megazord sequence has begun," Billy reported, breathless, uselessly, wonderfully precise.

"Powering up!" Kim cried, palms braced, the cockpit around her translating motion into intent.

"Legs locked!" Trini called, her harness biting across her shoulders as the Sabertooth and Triceratops slammed into their housings with a satisfying jackhammer thunk.

"Arms engaged!" Zack whooped, Mastodon plating slotting into the Tyrannosaurus's shoulders, cable bundles flaring with fresh current.

"Cranial unit ready!" Billy said, pushing data that had no path straight into the feeling part of his brain. He didn't know how he knew. He knew.

"Megazord activated!" Jason finished, and the city cheered with the sound of plates slamming home and cables tightening.

The world shifted as five cockpits became one.

Walls flickered, slid, and became a single chamber—bigger, brighter, its walls lined with status columns like ribs, a front viewport that caught the light and ground it into something sharp. The grips under their gloved hands warmed. The suits hummed. The floor thrummed with the big machine's heartbeat. A low tone sounded like an old friend clearing its throat.

"Let's do this," Jason breathed, and it didn't matter who heard. He set his feet and felt the Megazord set its, a city's skeleton becoming knees.

Outside, the Angel turned fully toward them, curious again. The blank plate of its face made no expression, but the line of its body said: try.

"Advance," Jason said.

They went forward. The first step made pedestrians flatten against walls even thirty stories down. Debris shivered along asphalt seams. Overhead, shutters half-lowered made nervous little tremors on their tracks.

"Field reading," Billy warned, visor data painting the air. "It's projecting a persistent barrier—density off our charts. Expect—"

"Resistance," Trini finished, flexing her hands around her controls. Her jaw set.

"Kim," Jason said. "Cover cross."

"I've got it." The Megazord's right arm came up, and as it did, the Pterodactyl wing structure fed into stabilizers; the elbow joint hissed. Kim's hands split on the grips; the arm angled, elegant even now.

"Zack—left," Jason snapped.

"On it." The left arm—Mastodon armor thick and ready—rotated, cables shifting.

The Angel lanced forward.

"Incoming!" Billy snapped. A quicksilver spear of light and bone extended out of the Angel's arm and met the Megazord's crossed forearms with a sound like a tuning fork big enough to sing mountains in half. The impact drove the mech back a full step; plates groaned; sparks snapped off the guard points in snapping, pretty fountains.

"Hold!" Jason's voice was a wire holding the five of them tight. "Hold!"

They did. The spear slid down their braced guard and bit concrete instead, carving a trough through the boulevard. The shock ran up their arms into their teeth. Kim grunted. Zack laughed and swore at once.

"Counter!" Trini barked, and Jason was already moving. He dropped the guard and brought the Megazord's right fist up in a torqueing, short-range punch that rocked the Angel's core and made its rib-seams ripple like pond water under rain.

"Power Sword!" Jason shouted. The command-seat flared a familiar symbol, and a hundred meters up the city stuttered an answer it hadn't been designed for: a panel snapped aside on nothing, and the sky itself disgorged light into a descending handle. The Megazord reached up and caught the Power Sword as if it had been falling for a million years just for this.

"Get ready to be disappointed," Billy said, but it was half hope.

Jason raised the sword. The blade threw a long, jittering reflection across the Angel's mask. "Now!"

They swung. It was a beautiful strike—clean, diagonally through imaginary planes that Jason's body remembered from gym floors and nightmare training and every fight that had given him that scar on his knuckle. The sword met the Angel's invisible skin and screamed against it—sparks, no bite, like steel on glass that refused to be cut. Then the A.T. Field stiffened and refused to be a thing like "cut."

"Again!" Jason roared.

Again. The blade slashed; the teeth on the comb of light sang; the field held like thick glass. The Angel didn't move backward. It simply existed there, unimpressed, bringing its other arm up.

"Jason," Billy warned, tighter now. "We cannot penetrate at the current resonance."

"Suggestions?" Zack asked, not because he expected to like the answer.

"I could use… an Evangelion," Billy said, so quickly it might have been a joke if his voice hadn't been bare.

"Not an option," Jason said, jaw set. "Adjust. Kim—feint high. Trini, low gut. Zack, brace. On three."

"One," Kimberly breathed. The Megazord's shoulder dipped; the Angel's head tracked, curious, predatory.

"Two," Trini said. The left leg came in hard, stomp stepping through broken street, loading hips and knee.

"Three!" Jason shouted, and they layered the moves—high draw, low sweep, torque, push.

For a breath, the lattice of field and blade made a new shape—edges married, sparks caught. The sword slid an inch deeper. The Angel's arm went back.

"Brace!" Zack yelled, and the spear came in from the side like a car you didn't see.

It hit the Megazord's shoulder plate and jolted them all to the ribs. The cockpit buckled. Lights spiked red. A warning symbol flashed up in every visor at once, identical and unhelpful.

"Jason!" Kimberly snapped, urgency, not fear.

"I see it." He yanked the guard up, swaying them into a hard pivot that made the spear glance off instead of tearing straight through. Sparks spat off a building face as the point raked steel. The Megazord groaned. It sounded like a ship wishing for new weather.

"Grid window closing," Billy said, wincing. "Morph stability dropping to—"

"Hold together," Jason said through his teeth. "We hold. We don't run."

Outside, the Angel's arm flexed again, gathering light. The seawall shimmered in its wake. The city below them held its breath like a living thing. Somewhere, deep under concrete, something else started to wake and listen.

"Jason?" Trini said, very calm.

"Yeah."

"That wasn't a bite at all," she said. "It's pure deflection."

Jason's hand tightened on the control grip until the leather creaked. In the viewport, the Angel's mask tilted, blank curiosity sharpening. The spear twitched, drew a line aimed straight at their chest crest.

Somewhere far beneath and away, a violet silhouette uncoiled a cable and leaned forward.

"Everyone—" Jason began.

The Angel struck.

—and the scene ripped itself toward an answer that hadn't arrived yet.

Banks of monitors bled from snow to image: a seawall shivering, an avenue combed into grooves, and an unknown giant braced behind crossed forearms. The room leaned toward the glass without moving.

Maya's fingers rattled over keys. "Surface cams three through nine online. Telemetry feed to MAGI… now."

On the center screen, the bright, block-colored machine—red, blue, black, yellow, pink—took the Angel's spear of light, skidded a full step, threw sparks like shaken stars, and held anyway.

Makoto nudged his frames up with a knuckle. "Unidentified asset is anthropoid, forty to fifty meters. Composite modules combined. Primary armament: close-combat sword. Heat signature inconsistent with JSDF platforms."

Aoba's voice drummed under the alarms. "MAGI classification: Pattern Blue negative. Unidentified anthropoid unit detected. Field phenomenon detected. Stable—but not A.T."

"Show me the boundary," Ritsuko said, not looking up.

A waveform unrolled at the bottom of the feed: the Angel's A.T. field as interlocking hex panes; the newcomer's field as a prismatic lattice that hummed at a different chord. The two touched and refused.

Ritsuko's mouth tilted, not quite a smile. "Coherent projection. Similar exclusion behavior. But it doesn't resonate. No penetration. Only an A.T. Field neutralizes an A.T. Field. Whatever that thing is, it needs Unit-01's field to breach."

Misato's hands had already found the rail; she didn't remember putting them there. "It's still buying us seconds."

"Not many," Makoto said. "Unknown's armor is delaminating at the shoulder and left pectoral. Stress fractures propagating."

On-screen, the sword came down in a clean diagonal; the Angel's invisible skin said no. The blade bit a finger's width, no more. Light gathered at the Angel's forearm again, patient and cruel.

Fuyutsuki stepped near Gendo without admitting it. "Strangers with a miracle, or a complication?"

Gendo didn't blink. "They are not Angels."

"Nor are they ours," Fuyutsuki murmured.

"Prepare Unit-01 for launch," Gendo said.

Misato turned. "Commander—"

"If the boy will not pilot," Gendo went on, "we will use the First."

Ritsuko's pencil hovered above her clipboard. "Medical still lists her as… unsuitable."

"Then we will make do with what we have," Gendo said, eyes on the Angel drawing a white line across the sky toward the city.

The floor trembled, not a quake but a near strike; dust hissed out of a ceiling seam. No one on the bridge flinched. Shinji did, just a little. He watched the unknown machine take the hit on a crossed guard and slide back, boots cutting twin trenches. The pink wing module banked overhead and was useless.

Maya's voice narrowed. "Pattern Blue increasing field density… Unknown asset's field cohesion dropping—twelve percent… fifteen… twenty."

Misato looked at Shinji; the grin she wore like armor wasn't there. "We're out of time."

Gendo didn't look down. "Shinji."

Shinji's mouth answered before the rest of him did. "Yes."

"Pilot it."

The syllables sat heavy in his ribs. He looked at the glass—at violet plates sleeping in the dark—and at the monitors, where strangers in bright suits fought like people with no other choice.

Misato stepped close enough that her voice could be only his. "Listen," she said, steady. "You don't have to prove anything. But if you don't move, somebody else will bleed for it."

Ritsuko didn't lift her eyes. "Unit-01 readiness is within tolerance. Pilot accommodation calibrated to your biometrics."

Shinji stared at his hands. They belonged to a boy who should be at a different phone in a different city. "I…"

A bolt shrieked, high and ugly. A brace let go somewhere above them—metal tearing out of habit—and a catwalk beam swung free, paused at the top of its arc, and dropped.

Shinji didn't move. The rectangle of falling steel widened and found him.

It didn't hit.

The world rang as the beam slammed into something that wasn't there a heartbeat ago: a purple forearm plate raised like a parent's hand. The impact dented the bracer and skidded off, clanging across the floor in a spray of orange sparks. Alarms jumped a pitch and settled.

Ritsuko's voice came out small because the room had become large. "Spontaneous response? Primary power is still offline."

"Reading actuator spike on shoulder groups only," Maya said, breath quick. "No pilot signal. No control bus traffic."

Fuyutsuki's mouth made a thin line that might have been a prayer. "It guards."

Misato didn't look at the commander. She looked at Shinji. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to.

Shinji put a hand against the rail because the floor felt like a boat. He looked up at the giant hand between him and the piece of the world that had decided to fall on him. He looked at the monitors where the unknown machine took another spearing blow and slipped again. He looked at the violet plates that were not a statue.

"Okay," he said. The word was small. It rearranged everything. "I'll pilot it."

Ritsuko moved like a switch thrown. "Get him to the cage. Prep the entry plug."

"Roger!" Maya slid into command cadence. "Coolant purge complete. LCL mix stable. Sync test bypass engaged."

"Hatch and locks?" Misato barked.

Makoto: "Cage locks armed. Umbilical ready."

Aoba: "Pattern Blue still at the perimeter. Unknown asset's efficiency—minimal."

Misato caught Shinji's shoulders, squeezed once. "We'll be in your ear. Do what I say. If he says something that contradicts me—" she jerked her chin, just enough, toward the catwalk "—don't."

He nodded because he didn't know how not to. His feet found the choreography NERV had made for them: platform, catwalk, threshold. The plug irised open with a wet, careful noise.

Ritsuko walked beside him, voice even. "You'll be submerged in LCL. Don't hold your breath. It will oxygenate. Yes, it smells like blood. You'll acclimate."

"That's…" He swallowed. "Fine."

"It isn't," she said. "But you'll live."

"Comm check," Maya said, voice in the plug even before he sat. "Ikari-kun, can you hear me?"

He lowered himself into the seat that felt like a dentist had designed a cradle. Harness straps came home across his chest and thighs with a too-gentle certainty. "I hear you."

"Beginning LCL fill," Maya said. "Breathe normally."

Amber climbed his boots, his shins, his knees. He gripped the seat when it reached his ribs. It touched his chin like a held breath and then took his mouth and nose. His lungs panicked. He choked once, coughed up liquid, tried to inhale, and found he could.

Misato's voice edged in, bright with practice. "Good. Just like that. In. Out. Don't fight it."

"Sync start," Maya called. "Pulse check—green. Nerve link—yellow… green. Initial ratio within safe band."

Ritsuko leaned toward the mic. "Let it meet you. Don't force it."

On the wall, the unknown machine raised its sword again. The Angel's field shone like slick glass. The blow skated, hissed, failed.

Makoto: "Cage locks releasing. Umbilical connected. External power routed."

Aoba: "Target's charging."

Misato's knuckles went white on the rail. "Launch him."

Fuyutsuki's eyes cut to Gendo; Gendo didn't waste the breath of assent.

"Eva-01," Maya said, and Shinji could hear the grin she didn't mean to have. "Move out."

Hydraulics bellowed. The catapult track lit green in a marching line under Unit-01's feet. Shinji felt the cradle's muscles tense like an animal.

"Shinji," Misato said, soft but carrying through steel. "You're up."

The platform punched him into motion. The cage fell away; the door above became a bright slit rushing to meet him. The speaker crackled in a different cadence—Aoba over images flickering: "Unknown asset bracing—field failing—Pattern Blue striking—"

The catapult hurled Eva-01 toward the surface, toward a seawall and a street where five strangers in too-bright suits were holding long enough for him to get there.

"Again!" Jason's voice bit through the cockpit, breath rough, grip white on the master sticks. "High-low—now!"

The Megazord's shoulders twisted; the sword cut from crown to hip while the left arm hammered for the seam under the rib-lines. The blade kissed something invisible and hissed like steel down glass. No cut. The invisible wall bent and sprang back. Light crawled over it in hex-like ripples that made Jason's teeth hurt.

"Pressure's spiking," Billy warned, visor streaming with petals of data. "That… wall's density just duplicated."

"Call it whatever you want, it hates our sword," Zack grunted. He braced, taking the countershock into the left arm; the Mastodon plating screamed complaint through the frame.

"Feint high, kick the knee." Trini's hands flicked a combination that the Megazord translated into a short, savage low sweep. The street buckled under the heel; the Angel didn't care. It pivoted on that impossible not-joint and lifted its arm again.

Kim's breath hitched. "It's drawing… look at that."

The air around the Angel's forearm gathered itself into a neat edge. The spear came in silence first, then the sound hit—like a fork on crystal the size of a building. Jason crossed the Megazord's forearms. Impact turned into a long, ugly note. They slid back another step, boots plowing twin trenches through the boulevard.

"Hold!" Jason's voice was a wire sinched tight. "Don't give."

"Battery draw—" Billy started, swallowed it. "We can't do this forever."

"Not asking for forever." Jason leaned into the controls the way you lean into a promise. "Just long enough."

The Angel slid its point away and down so smoothly it felt like a lesson. The spear angled for the Megazord's chest crest.

"Angle!" Trini snapped. Jason twisted the torso just enough that the spear slid along the plate instead of through it. Sparks skittered, pretty and useless.

Kim's hands moved in a reflex. The right arm snapped up; the sword flashed again. The blade chewed three inches into emptiness and went no further.

"Again!" Jason demanded.

They didn't have time. The Angel backhanded. The spear slammed the Megazord's right shoulder. The whole world jolted left. Buildings flickered past too close, reflections of their own red and black racing along glass. Sirens bled into the cockpit, thin and tired and everywhere.

"Watch the—" Zack began.

The second strike came from low and left, clever, mean. It hit the inside of the left elbow. The shock hammered bone through steel. Zack hissed. The cockpit lights jumped a shade toward red.

"That's a ligament pop," Billy said, unhelpfully, because he could see the force translation numbers stack up.

"Stay with me!" Jason barked. "Reset stance!"

He dragged the Megazord back into guard. The Angel's blank mask tipped as if curious, and the arm cocked again.

"Jason," Kim said, quiet in that way that meant louder than a shout, "we're running out of—"

Something moved behind the Angel, a violet shape rising on a surge of air from a door the city tore into itself at the last second.

"What is that?" Zack breathed. "New friend? New problem?"

The newcomer lurched into sunlight with a sound like a cathedral remembering it had knees. It was purple and wrong and right and alive in a way the Megazord was not. A thick cable trailed from its spine, spooling and whipping across asphalt. It raised both arms, too high, elbows out—wrong guard, rookie posture—and the Angel's head tilted as if amused.

"Whatever it is, it's not one of hers," Trini said, low, certain. "Her toys don't move like that."

"Don't assume it's friendly," Jason said. His knuckles were still white. "Eyes front."

The purple giant took its first step and almost fell. A foot slid across a seam and knocked a traffic light from its mount; the cable snapped taut and jerked it back into balance. It straightened, arms up again, hands wide open like a boy bracing for a ball he'd never caught before.

"It's… new," Kim said softly.

The Angel did not care about either machine's learning curve. It shone a light along its forearm and fired.

"Brace!" Jason crossed the Megazord's forearms again. The blow landed and pushed them backward. The purple giant raised one forearm too late; the blast took it on the plate and spun it sideways. It pinwheeled two steps and pancaked through a building's corner, glass and rebar and dust geysering. It flailed, found its feet, breathing like a living thing—shoulders hitching, head twitching toward the Angel in a way that said fear.

"Rookie," Zack muttered, and couldn't keep the pity out of it.

"Jason," Billy warned, data streaking. "Wall density increasing again. Adaptive response to our attack vectors."

"Then change the language," Jason shot back. "Low stabs. Now!"

They slid in, weight low, blade barking along the barrier's curve like a skater testing thin ice. It wasn't enough. The Angel's spear arm snapped out a courtesy jab that hammered them back into their own pit.

The purple giant—righted now, quivering—took a staggering half-lunge that wasn't clean enough to be a charge and wasn't careful enough to be a feint. Its hands were too open. The Angel let it come in, then rapped its forearm up with one neat smack. The giant's left arm bent at a sick angle near the elbow. Shinji's scream bled through the city, faint and real and too human, barely caught by their mics.

"Arm damage—" Billy started.

"We're not alone here," Kim whispered, as if the boy could hear her through brutalist concrete.

The purple giant cradled its broken arm, shoulders drawn up, cable humming. It took a breath like a sob and reset its stance, sloppy and stubborn.

"Jason," Trini said, "if we can make it, give us a window—"

"On it." He feinted high again. The Megazord's right arm flashed; the Angel lifted to parry, and the left leg came through hard into its knee-line. Impact rippled up the weird body; the barrier bubbled. "Kim!"

"Got it!—" The blade dropped for the seam. The invisible wall hummed its refusal.

The Angel got bored with defense.

It flowed sideways in that physically wrong way and was simply there, too close, spear already moving. The point punched into the Megazord's right shoulder and skated down the plate, ripping a seam. Sparks spit into the cockpit's perception like angry bees. Jason choked back a shout. Zack took the shock with a grunt that turned into a laugh he didn't mean.

"Left side's sluggish," Billy warned, fighting the controls to compensate for drag on the arm. "We're way out of spec."

"Keep the chest clear!" Trini snapped. "It wants the crest!"

The Angel obliged that desire with a clean, mean thrust to their heart. Jason rolled them hard right, and still the point licked the edge of the crest and carved a bright wound there. The cockpit shuddered. Kim bit down on a curse. The city line tilted, untitled.

"Okay," Jason said through his teeth. "We need a miracle or we make one."

As if it heard in a language older than radios, the purple giant lunged.

It wasn't elegant. It stumbled on the first step and nearly paid with its other arm. It bull-rushed anyway, shoulder-down, cable dragging a white line across the asphalt. It hit the Angel full in the side, and the two of them skated in a screaming spray of pulverized concrete. The spear missed the Megazord's chest crest by the width of a glove and punched a crater into a bank facade instead.

Jason didn't waste the gift. "Push!"

They drove in blind, shoulder to shoulder with a thing that bled breath and anger. Steel sang. The Megazord's blade bit a hair deeper, then stopped again. The purple giant got both hands under the Angel's spear arm and heaved like it had picked up too many groceries and was pretending the bags didn't hurt.

"Whoever you are," Zack breathed, "thanks."

No answer. The giant didn't have a voice here. Its chest heaved. Its head turned fractionally as if the pilot inside had remembered to look to the left and discovered he wasn't alone. The giant flinched when the Angel twitched and tightened and held.

A cable alarm warbled in the distance; the purple thing's tether reeled slack and snapped tight again as it shifted footing. It overcompensated, causing the knee to buckle, and almost dropped the weight. Shinji's "nnnh—" was a child's noise caught in armor mics and flung across a city.

"Jason," Billy said quickly, "that wall hates two vectors at once less than one—it's… not additive. Our push plus its push equals net—"

"Less wall," Trini translated, already moving.

Jason didn't need the numbers to feel the moment open. "On my count—cross. Kim takes high. Zack brace. Trini—cut in on the knee-line again. Billy, ride the resonance."

"One," he said. The Angel bucked. The purple giant's left arm dangled, limp. Its right hand clawed for purchase on alien anatomy and found it.

"Two," he said. The blade came up, heavy, breath syncing across five lungs. Across from them, the purple giant's chest hitched—someone trying to line breath to motion without knowing how.

"Three!"

They cut. The sword slid two inches deeper than any cut all night. Sparks flooded the street like fireflies, panicking. The Angel's barrier jittered. The purple giant shoved with its shoulder and, clumsily, with its forehead. The edge of the wall stuttered and slipped.

"Again!" Jason roared.

The city stank of ozone, dust, and something chemical underneath. The cable hummed like a plucked string. The purple giant's knee drifted; the pilot yanked it back in line. The Megazord's left leg absorbed a shock and translated it into muscle memory—weight, counterweight, and balance—and passed that lesson on to the next step. They were, for a half-second, two kids in different gyms learning the same move simultaneously.

The Angel didn't appreciate choreography. Its free hand opened like a flower, and the air itself flexed. The backhand came out of nowhere and hit the Megazord across the face.

Light. Noise. A tilt that wanted to be a fall. Kim held the horizon with both hands and hissed, "No, you don't." Jason's teeth clicked; copper flooded his mouth; it wasn't real, and it was.

"Faceplate's fine," Billy panted. "Optics—stabilized—ah—barely."

"Where's our rookie?" Zack demanded.

The purple giant had gone down to one knee and one hand and was shoving itself up with the silent insistence of a person who had decided the alternative was unacceptable. Its broken arm hung like an afterthought. Its single glowing eye found the Megazord's face and then snapped back to the Angel with the ghost of an apology in the motion. It squared its shoulders like someone had told it to do that once, and they'd been right.

"Trini," Jason said, very calm, "I think he just said 'together.'"

"Finally," Trini murmured.

They moved, not as one—yet—but as if they could borrow the shape of that phrase. The purple giant came in low and grabbed the Angel's spear at half-length with its good hand, using its whole back and hips the way someone once taught it was correct for moving furniture. The Megazord brought the sword down at the same angle that had begun to work. The barrier screamed. It failed the exact amount a scream fails when you stop it in your throat.

"Keep going!" Kim cried, voice breaking into fierce laughter.

The Angel's mask slits flared—the eyes burned cross-bright—and a white lance ripped out from the forearm bone like a grown spear.

"Uh," Zack said. "New trick."

Billy's voice was too thin: "Energy discharge—vector unpredictable—"

"Don't wait for it," Jason snapped. "Forward!"

They committed. The purple giant surged clumsily and bravely. The Megazord's sword kissed the edge again and slid. The chest-light tightened.

"Jason," Trini said, and he knew the word meant a hundred things.

"I know," he said, and meant them.

The Angel fired.

The world narrowed into white and force. The Megazord's guards shot up; the purple giant turned its bad shoulder into the blast because that was what you did when you were out of options. The impact took them both. For a hideous second, they were skidding in locked agony together, boots carving one long wound down Tokyo-3's perfect boulevard, the barrier between them and the world a thin, shimmering thing.

"Hold!" Jason's voice was hoarse. "Hold—!"

"Grid stability—" Billy's readouts did something ugly. "We're at… Jason, we're at—"

"Shut up and hold!" Zack yelled, laughing in a way that hurt.

The blast tapered. The purple giant swayed, then planted its foot like it remembered it had one. It didn't look at them—it couldn't—but its posture said it all: again?

Jason grinned under his helmet, wild and tired. "Again."

He raised the sword.

The Angel's mask snapped to them. It raised both arms.

Somewhere far below them, a steel cable sang. Somewhere far above them, a door the size of a city block began to open. The purple giant took a step that was almost sure.

"On three," Jason said, finding breath from somewhere that did not exist.

"One—"

"—two—"

"Three!"

Jason drove the Megazord forward, and the street came with them, buckling in a wave. The sword carved a bright diagonal across nothing and made that glassy, hateful hiss. The invisible wall flexed, held. Sparks hopped like startled fireflies and died against the Angel's blank mask.

"Keep pressure!" Jason barked. "Left brace, now!"

Zack shoved the left arm into the spear's shaft and took the shock through his shoulders. "I'm a human bumper!"

"That wall's doubling again," Billy warned, visor showering petals of unreadable math. "Whatever it is, it learns."

"Then we learn faster," Trini said, and dipped the Megazord's shoulder low enough that the Sabertooth's paw kissed asphalt. "Cut the knee!"

The Angel didn't step. It slid—a fraction, a lie of physics—and the spear found the gap under their guard with polite cruelty. It raked the shoulder plate. The cockpit bucked; alarms chirped, and the pilot thought better of it.

"Right's spongy," Kim said, breathing hard. "We've got to play in the joint."

"Hold together," Jason said, and the team did because the words were the shape of what they knew.

A wind like a door opening rolled down the avenue. The purple giant—cable humming, breath hitching—hauled itself out of the gash in the city and stood too tall, arms up wrong, knees locked wrong, everything wrong except the part where it refused to fall again.

It looked at them for a half heartbeat like someone looking for a word in a language they barely knew. Then it looked at the Angel and the low sound it made—not through a speaker, but through the way the plates moved on its chest—wasn't quite a growl and wasn't not.

The Angel didn't care about introductions. Light pleated along its forearm. The spear lanced out and the Megazord took it, skidding; the purple giant tried to parry too late, caught the rebound on its bracer, and staggered two stupid, human steps.

"Rookie's in the deep end," Zack muttered, jaw set.

"Still swimming," Kim said, and she sounded like she'd decided to like him.

The Angel stepped—or the world moved under it; it didn't matter—and the Megazord's chest crest filled its view. Jason raised the guard—too slow.

The spear didn't hit home because something violet and furious slammed the Angel's elbow high with a two-handed shove that had more heart than technique. The point skipped across the crest and stabbed the bank facade instead, carving stone into steam.

"Window!" Jason shouted. "Push!"

They went. The Megazord's shoulder jammed into the Angel's rib-line; the sword dug another inch and sang a brighter note against emptiness. The purple giant's cable snapped taut; its knee dipped; it made an involuntary noise and leaned harder.

"Whoever you are," Zack grunted, "I owe you a soda."

No answer. No time. The purple giant clawed for purchase on geometry that didn't want hands on it, found some anyway, and held.

"Jason," Billy said, voice fast. "It hates two pushes at once less than one. The—ah—barrier loses coherence under offset pressure."

"Plain English," Zack pleaded.

"Together works," Billy said. "More than separate."

"Copy," Trini said. "Call the beat."

A burst of static peeled across their ears, then a voice, clipped and tense, cut in with a hiss of harmonics. "Unknown asset, this is NERV control. If you can hear me, respond." Not a question, exactly. A bridge thrown.

"Routing real-time translation through MAGI," Maya explained.

Reading you loud—and bilingual," Billy said in response.

Jason's visor HUD flashed a symbol he'd never seen: a little speaker cracking open. He flicked the external channel on with his thumb because his body knew a lifeline when it was offered. "We hear you," he said. He didn't add who they were. He didn't know if that mattered.

The voice exhaled on the other end like it had been holding something. "Thank God. This is Misato Katsuragi, NERV operations. We've got a—" a half-beat like she changed words mid-air "—pilot in the purple unit. He's… new. He can hear me. I'm patching you together."

A second line, noisier, stumbled into their helmets like a kid running into a room. "H-hello?" Young, winded, trying to sound braver than he felt. "I'm—this is Unit One! Where do I—what do I do?"

Jason didn't have time to be surprised by how young the voice was. He heard their own voices at that age when Zordon had put coins in their palms and said they could. "Red Ranger," he said, because the name was useful. "We're going to cut it while you hold its arm."

"O-okay," the boy said, and the giant's right hand adjusted under the Angel's spear the way a kid adjusts their grip on a bat: awkward, correct enough.

"Shinji," Misato's voice tumbled into the shared channel, hurried and bright, "draw your knife. Right shoulder. Release is on the grip; squeeze and pull. Breathe."

"I—knife—" A click, the wrong motion, another click, the right one. A shoulder pylon snapped open like a mouth. The giant's right hand fumbled, found the hilt, and dragged the Progressive Knife free. The blade flicked alive, chatter running invisible down its edge. The purple hand turned it clumsily, pointing forward. He was holding it, at least.

"On my count," Jason said, and his voice flicked into the rhythm he used when he needed five hearts to beat like one. "Three… two…"

"Wait!" Billy blurted. "Hold on—if we match breathing to forty—no—seventy-three beats per minute. That's where our field stabilized earlier."

"Seventy-three," Misato repeated into her own room. "Shinji: match your breath to the count. In two, out two. Don't think about the rest."

"O-okay!" Shinji said, too loudly. He dragged a breath into lungs full of something too thick and exhaled it anyway. The purple giant's chest rose. The Megazords did too, stupidly and perfectly.

"Three," Jason breathed.

They moved.

The Megazord's sword bit at the barrier with the sound of someone sawing through pride. The purple giant jammed its shoulder into the Angel's joint and, with an inelegant grunt, shoved the spear aside. The knife stabbed—not at the core, not yet, but at the seam where the forearm's light kept gathering. For a heartbeat, the two weapons made a cross in the air.

The barrier shrieked. Just for a breath, it wasn't a wall; it was a net—and nets have holes.

Unit-01's A.T. Field overlapped the Megazord's lattice—two pressures at one rhythm—and for the first time, the wall gave.

"Again!" Jason said, already swinging. Kim took the wrist; Zack held the angle; Trini moved hips and feet like a dancer who happened to weigh hundreds of tons.

Shinji didn't talk. He made small noises in the back of his throat that weren't words and kept stabbing. The knife chattered against the "nothing" and made sparks where there shouldn't be any.

The Angel pushed. It didn't like this. It dragged its arm back with an impossible, polite strength and whipped the spear around for the purple giant's chest. Shinji flinched—not Unit-01, Shinji, his breath punching—brought the knife up too slow.

The spear hit anyway. The giant folded around it, screaming not through any speaker but through the posture of plates and the hitch of its head. The cable snapped tight, and for a second, the boy inside forgot every instruction he'd heard because pain shouted louder.

"Up!" Misato's voice was a hand under a rib. "Back on it! You're okay!"

He wasn't. He moved anyway. The knife came up again.

"Red," Trini said, "we need its arm high."

"Shinji—lift!" Misato translated. "Get under its wrist!"

"Under—" The giant jammed its shoulder into the angle and heaved like a kid moving a couch he'd been told he couldn't. The Angel's forearm came up an inch.

"Now!" Jason roared.

They cut. The sword scythed through the slack in the barrier as the knife punched the same seam. It wasn't grace. It was stubborn. It worked.

The Angel didn't stagger, because it didn't do human things like that. But the point of its spear dipped, and that was enough.

"Target field integrity down—" a new voice in their ears—Maya, clipped, worshipful—"eight percent—twelve—!"

"Again," Misato said, and Shinji did because the voice left him nowhere else to put his fear.

The Angel adapted. Lights climbed its torso like someone lighting candles in chapel rows. Its chest opened like a patient wound. The pattern there made Jason's head try to think math he didn't own.

"New attack," Billy said. His voice was too calm. "Vector unknown."

"Don't wait for it," Jason snapped, and threw them forward.

The chest-flash hit, everything white under the wall they'd made between them and the world. The lattice they'd hacked together out of breath, stubbornness, and a prayer held just enough. It shoved all of them backward in one long scream. Their teeth clicked. The cockpit lights jittered and grabbed steady again out of hard habit.

"I'm still here," Shinji said, so surprised it sounded like someone else.

"Good," Misato said. "Try not to leave."

"Seventy-three," Billy reminded nobody and everybody. "Keep the beat."

They did. Their fields—one neat panes of force, one a messy prismatic weave—stumbled into each other's rhythm and, to everyone's surprise, held.

"Jason," Kim said softly, "we can do this."

He believed it long enough to say it out loud. "We can."

The Angel didn't. It gathered light into its spear, the gesture almost impatient. It snapped the spear in with a fencer's precision for the Megazord's throat.

"Left!" Zack snarled. They brought the guard up too slowly. The spear skated. The world lurched.

Shinji didn't think. He rammed his whole giant body into the Angel's flank with a sound Unit-01 made that wasn't mechanical. The spear missed the throat by inches and sheared off a streetlight. He drove his knife up again and found—by accident or grace—a seam in the not-wall that had been hit twice before. The blade slid one inch farther than physics would have allowed five minutes ago.

"Now!" Jason shouted, voice raw.

The Megazord's sword came down like a taught lesson, clean and mean. It crossed the knife's line. The two edges met at the exact wrong angle for the Angel's pretense of a skin.

The barrier failed there.

It didn't shatter; it sighed in the way a held breath does when someone you trust says you can let it out. The sword and the knife punched through and found flesh, alien and wrong and exactly where it had to be, only where the two fields meshed and pressed—Grid weave and A.T. pane—did the Angel's wall fail.

For a heartbeat, with their feeds open, every person in NERV and every Ranger heard the same sound: not an explosion; a break in a song that had been true too long.

"Drive it!" Misato shouted, as if shouting could make physics kinder.

"Drive it!" Jason echoed, and they did, together.

The knife was buried to its half-guard. The sword bit deeper, teeth singing ugly. The Angel threw its head back. Its free hand opened and closed on air, a gesture so human it made Jason want to apologize.

Then the light in its chest turned inward.

"Back!" Billy yelped, readouts spiking into nonsense. "It's—something—building—"

"Self-detonation," Ritsuko's voice cut across like a scalpel. "Pull out! Now!"

Jason yanked them away, and their hands found the controls like parts of the same person because for one critical second, they were. Shinji ripped his knife free the way a kid rips a bandage wrong; the Megazord dragged the sword back, angle careful, feet already moving.

The light consumed the Angel, then the street, and finally most of the air in a gout that sounded like a storm raging against a church. The blast reached them in a flat-faced shove.

"Field! Field!" Misato was no longer operations cool; she was the voice you wanted telling you where to stand in a lightning storm. "Shinji—spread your—"

"I—" He didn't have words. He had the motion. Unit-01's hex-pane A.T. Field bloomed; the Megazord's prismatic Grid lattice soldered itself along the edges. The purple giant's hands came up and out. Hex panes bloomed, honeycomb steady as the giant could make them.

"Grid!" Jason snapped, and didn't need to say more. The Megazord's chest crest burned; the prismatic weave unfurled from armor seams and met the panes like stained glass, soldering itself along the edges.

The dome held. The blast washed over their combined wall in a shimmering roar and broke around it. Heat rolled under the lattice; pressure made bones complain; alarms went hoarse and kept trying. A building to their right slumped to the ground. A bus shivered, then flattened, then decided against being a bus.

"Hold," Jason said through his teeth, and it wasn't to his team now; it was to the whole cage of field and suit and kid and city. "Hold."

They did. It felt like holding the lid on a boiling pot with both hands and no towel. It felt like being nineteen and telling your fear to shut up because you weren't done yet.

The light left the world. The roar downgraded to a long, exhausted hiss.

Rain fell. Not water. Gold and red glimmer in a fine mist that tasted like pennies and salt. LCL vapor, breathing out of the wound in the day.

The dome trembled. Then, like a muscle unclenching, it sagged. Hex panes went translucent and slid into nothing; prismatic threads let go like harp strings cut in slow motion. The Megazord's knee buckled; Jason caught it instinctively, thanks to a hundred drills. Unit-01 stayed upright because it didn't know how to admit it was allowed to do otherwise.

"Status," Misato said, voice rasped raw.

"Alive," Shinji said, equal parts wonder and apology.

"Same," Jason said, letting the sword rest point down into the broken street. He drew a breath and felt all five of them do it with him. "Unknown unit—thanks for the save."

There was a pause like a boy waiting to be told what the adults say now. "…Thank you," Shinji said, softly. "I don't—this is my first day."

"Could've fooled me," Zack said, sincerely. "You push like a natural."

"Zack," Trini said, and her voice had that almost-smile in it.

Billy exhaled so hard his visor fogged for a second. "Our… system is still online. I would like very much to sit down, nevertheless."

"You're sitting," Kim said, laughter shaking out, shaky and bright. "Technically."

Maya's voice slid in with a professional cough. "NERV confirms target destruction. Pattern Blue… lost. Residual energy signatures are decreasing."

"Copy," Misato said, and tried to sound like she hadn't just been chewing her own heartbeat. "Unknown asset—Rangers?—hold position. Do not approach military cordons. We're… going to have to talk."

Jason glanced at the purple giant. It didn't move. The heavy power cable trailed from its back and swayed as if in a wind that didn't exist. A lens glowed like an eye and then dimmed a fraction, not sleep but something like after.

"We hear you," Jason said. He didn't promise anything. He didn't know what he could promise.

Shinji didn't say anything. He didn't have to. The giant's head tipped two degrees in their direction and back, a thank-you you might miss if you weren't looking at the right time.

Sirens remembered themselves and started up late. The city sighed under damaged steel. Rain that wasn't rain ticked on broken glass.

"Team," Jason said, and he heard his own voice echo in the big room under the red lights in a way that would haunt him later. "We're done here."

"For now," Trini said.

"For now," he agreed.

Above, on a ruined facade, a camera's little red light winked awake. In the control room under a mountain, five different people leaned forward without meaning to. Between two giants that needed each other to stand up to the blast, a line hummed open that none of them had meant to draw and all of them had used.

"Unit One," Jason said, one last thing, because he felt the door closing already. "Good work."

"Thanks," Shinji said, very small in his big machine.

The cable tugged. The purple giant staggered one step, then remembered how to be led and let the city pull it home. The Megazord straightened, sword point ringing against concrete, and turned its face toward sirens and questions. The rain like blood kept falling, steady and soft.