Rei Cinq

Among the Ayanami sisters Cinq stands out at a glance. She is the tallest of the group and keeps her hair cut shorter than the others, despite the clones having left the vats at the same time. Extra time maturing in the artificial womb gave her a more developed frame than Trois or Quatre, and beside the student body she reads as roughly a year older than her classmates. Her physical age corresponds to seventeen.

Cinq works harder at being a person than any of her sisters. She handles social situations with unusual grace, once turning down a younger student's confession gently because leaving him without a clear answer felt unkind, and she plays the responsible elder, scolding Rei Six for embarrassing Shinji. Asuka observes that the effort is deliberate: sometimes Cinq is genuinely easy to talk to, other times she seems to simply drift along with the current.

In her last moments she confesses her own theory of herself to Asuka, wondering whether she is merely the public-facing mask of Ayanami given a body of its own. Asuka's answer, that a starting point is not a destiny and they could work out who Cinq really was together, is the reassurance she carries into her sacrifice.

After SEELE's assault on the NERV base, fresh Ayanami clones are grown in artificial wombs, and researchers discover that the soulless bodies mimic the motions and brain activity of the ensouled original. This mental mirroring lets Rei Trois pilot her sisters by remote. Cinq is never meant to develop a will of her own, yet after Rei Quatre's mind contamination she begins forming a distinct personality and soon outgrows both Trois and Quatre, with NERV expecting her to eventually exceed even Deux, long considered the ideal Rei. She fights at Asuka's side repeatedly, saves her life more than once, and settles into the role of big sister for the childlike Rei Six.

During the lunar campaign against Armaros, Cinq escorts Asuka, flying her Unit-02 Type II Allegorica, on a run to breach the Longinus Curtain. When the Spear of Longinus swings toward them, she overdrives her external S² engine to force Asuka's progressive knife deeper into the barrier, but the salvaged engine spirals out of control and a Mass Production Evangelion's head erupts from it, clamping her entry plug in its jaws so she cannot eject. Trapped, she channels her Eva's laser barrel into a concentrated A.T. Field blast that tears an opening in the Curtain, shoves Asuka's unit through it, and dies as both machines detonate in a huge cross of light. Her mirror link to Trois reconnects at the end, flooding the original with her pain and her conviction that the trade was worth it. A version of Cinq later greets Shinji inside the Apple's Core in Volume 3. She addresses Asuka as Soryu-san, a formality Asuka notes the original Rei needed two years to drop.