Leliel

What looks like Leliel's body, a levitating orb painted in warped bands of black and white, is really a kind of optical byproduct. The Angel's actual form is the enormous shadow beneath it, a manifestation roughly 680 meters across yet only three nanometers deep, holding a Dirac Sea within and explicable only through higher-order physics. An inverted A.T. Field lets this shadow swallow any material from ordinary space into the void inside it.

Face-like patterns repeat across the sphere itself: stripe arrangements suggesting a pair of bulging eyes above a small, sharp-jawed mouth.

Leliel stands apart from the other Angels for showing what looks like curiosity about people. While Unit-01 is trapped inside it, Shinji undergoes a strange internal dialogue with a childhood version of himself; assistant director Kazuya Tsurumaki later confirmed this figure was the Angel itself speaking through a borrowed shape, an approach adopted after an early draft in which the Angel conversed openly was judged too anticlimactic. Even the child's striped shirt mirrors Leliel's own markings. When SEELE afterward pressed Misato on whether the Angel had reached into Shinji's mind, she could offer no definite answer.

Leliel materializes above Tokyo-3 in Episode 16, and all three Evangelion Units sortie against it. Assuming the floating orb is the target, Shinji rushes in firing and is dragged down into the shadow, severing all communication. Asuka scrambles onto a building and barely escapes the same fate, while Rei's shots from Unit-00's sniper rifle accomplish nothing beyond wrecking the surrounding blocks.

After NERV pulls its forces back, Ritsuko explains the Angel's bizarre nature and proposes a brutal remedy: Units 00 and 02 would use their own A.T. Fields to cancel Leliel's while the JSSDF dropped the remaining 992 N2 bombs into the shadow, killing the Angel and recovering Unit-01 whether or not Shinji survived the process. Misato protested and was overruled. Sixteen hours in, just as Unit-01's life support reached its limit and the plan was about to begin, the Eva went berserk despite a completely drained battery and tore through the Angel from within, erupting in a spray of blood as the shadow body on the ground shattered.