Shamshel

Shamshel is a cephalopod-shaped creature on the scale of an Evangelion, able to swap between a horizontal configuration for flight and an upright stance for combat. The change reworks more than posture: its two large front limbs, pressed together in flight, separate and physically alter their shape for battle. Purple skin covers most of the body, broken by pink patches under the head, and a pair of false eye spots, black circles ringed in yellow, mark the head's crown.

Eight small legs like an insect's cluster beneath the head, just below the core embedded in its torso. From the two main arms extend its signature weapons, long pink tentacles of energized light. These whips are solid structures charged with power rather than pure energy, still physically present after the Angel dies, and they can hoist an Evangelion into the air, hurl it across kilometers, or punch through its torso with ease.

Compared with Sachiel, Shamshel fights with far greater aggression. Where its predecessor fell back on defense once the damaged Unit-01 turned berserk, Shamshel keeps pressing: it cuts the Eva's umbilical cable, flings the machine onto a distant mountainside, and immediately moves in to continue the assault.

Arriving over the ocean a mere three weeks after Sachiel signaled the Angels' return, Shamshel comes ashore at Odawara and slides past every defensive line on the way to Tokyo-3. Shinji meets it in Unit-01 and opens fire with the pallet rifle, but the shots never breach the A.T. Field and only wrap the target in smoke. Striking out of that haze, the Angel's whips wreck the rifle, drive Shinji into panic, and tear through buildings, severing the Eva's power cable in the destruction before one tentacle snares its leg and launches it onto a mountainside.

Shinji answers by seizing the whips with the Eva's bare hands, taking severe burns, and throwing the Angel clear. With his battery draining and orders to retreat ignored, he charges down the slope and rams his progressive knife into the core while Shamshel spears Unit-01 on its tentacles. The core splits and the Angel dies almost exactly as the Eva's power gives out.

The nearly whole carcass becomes a research prize for NERV. Though the flesh soon rots and is discarded, work on the damaged core and S² Engine eventually produces the S² organs installed in the Mass Production Evangelion series; an attempt to fit one such engine to Unit-04 instead erases the unit along with the surrounding facilities and everyone in them. Yoshitoh Asari, the artist behind Sachiel and Zeruel, created Shamshel's design; its mid-air transformation is depicted only in the manga, and the Japanese term for its weapons, hikari no muchi, translates as whips of light.