Tenth Angel

Standing roughly eighty meters, more than double an Evangelion's height, the Tenth Angel pairs a fleshy body of arthropod character with a huge dark green cowl woven from rippling prehensile ribbons. It arrives with the cowl wrapped tightly around itself, looking almost mummified. Two ribbons dwarf the rest, propping the Angel up when it stands and coiling into piercing drills of adjustable width in combat. Behind its face, a light rework of the original Zeruel design, sit a pair of red eyes and a mouth built around a three-part jaw with a tongue-like organ that can swell to enormous size. Rows of interlocking teeth flank the core on either side and can clamp shut to armor it.

Consuming Unit-00 rewrites the Angel's whole anatomy. Holding the Eva's core inside its own and broadcasting the Eva's pattern in place of its native one, it reshapes into a warped female humanoid with ghost-pale flesh marked in gray, arms stretched abnormally long and thin, and lower legs that end in stumps, possibly reflecting the pilot Rei Ayanami, since her Eva's lower legs escaped absorption. The new arms take over from the primary cutting ribbons yet can revert in an instant, and two additional ribbons join the fight against the reactivated Unit-01. After Unit-01 cripples it, the humanoid portion of its body dissolves without explanation into a uniform mass of ribbons. Unlike its fellow Angels it never displays a halo, and a rainbow forms well ahead of its death, at the moment the crippling blow lands.

No Angel in the Rebuild film series projects a stronger A.T. Field. Point-blank missile strikes wash over it without effort, and it can push the field outward in stacked layers that shove attackers away while making any breach attempt far more energy-intensive. Its energy weapons outdo Zeruel's on every axis: a single cross-shaped blast punches through all twenty-four protective layers over the Geofront, and it can pour out such blasts in rapid volleys almost beyond counting.

Its physical armor is just as forbidding. When Unit-00 delivers an N² missile after Unit-02 helps strip away the field layers, the Angel simply extends its chest over the core and emerges from the explosion unharmed, looming over the shattered Unit-00 in the Geofront's ruins. Devouring an Evangelion lets it take the machine's core into its own and adopt its pattern, a trick that lets it slip past the automated self-destruct guarding the path to Lilith's chamber.

The Angel appears above Tokyo-3 in Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance and dismantles the city's defenses in minutes, boring through the Geofront in a single stroke before unfurling its body and dropping inside. Mari Illustrious Makinami meets it in Unit-02, cycling through paired Pallet Rifles, a Thunder Spear, and the shoulder pylon's Needle Gun without leaving a mark, then unleashing the Eva's Beast Mode. Even that added strength cannot crack the A.T. Field, and the Angel's counterattack leaves Unit-02 wrecked.

Unit-00 charges in carrying an oversized N² missile, and with Unit-02's help the field finally gives way, yet the warhead accomplishes nothing and the blast tears off both of Unit-00's arms. Its pilot offers no resistance as the Angel extends a feeding appendage from its mouth and swallows the Eva. Now wearing a humanoid body and Unit-00's pattern, it walks through NERV's automated defenses, levels the headquarters pyramid, and descends the main shaft, nearly wiping out the command center before Shinji arrives in Unit-01. When the Eva's power runs dry the Angel skewers it and flings it onto the pyramid's wreckage, but Unit-01 restarts on its own and begins Eva Pseudo-Evolution, regrowing its lost arm out of A.T. Field, absorbing everything the Angel throws at it, and finally cutting the Angel down with beams of optical energy. Shinji retrieves Rei from within the Angel, and its liquefied blood-red remains flow into Unit-01 just as Near Third Impact begins.

Yoshitoh Asari, who created Zeruel for the television series, returned to design its Rebuild successor, with the elongating arms and the Eva-devouring concept added to set the two apart. A two-form premise existed early in development, though Hideaki Anno later insisted the second form be feminine; Takeshi Honda finalized that design around a mane-like cowl drawn by director Kazuya Tsurumaki, and elements of Armisael were folded in as well. Beyond the films, the Angel supplies the last three battles of the rhythm game Evangelion New Theatrical Edition: 3nd Impact and headlines the Shironeko Project collaboration as its central threat.