Zeruel

Bulk defines Zeruel. Slightly taller than an Evangelion, the Angel carries a heavy, vaguely humanoid frame dominated by an unusually large core, and the black and white pattern across its front faintly suggests a sideways human face with that red sphere as the eye. A lid-membrane can slide over the core when danger threatens.

Its signature weapons hang folded against bony shoulder ridges: segmented, ribbon-like arms that unspool to at least triple the Angel's height and cut like blades, though production art shows they can also form fists. The face changes consistency at will, hardening enough to throw sparks on impact or softening until it can be lifted away like a mask, and it rides a sinewy neck normally retracted inside the body. Two eyes sit buried in deep sockets. The legs are stubby and footless yet fully functional; paired with the folded arms they let Zeruel walk on all fours, though it usually travels by A.T. Field levitation.

Firepower and durability set Zeruel apart even among its kin. Its cross-shaped energy blasts dwarf Sachiel's: a single shot punches through eighteen of the twenty-two armor plates shielding the GeoFront, and it can fire four such blasts in quick succession. After a few seconds of charging, focused beams lance directly from its eyes.

Defensively it may be the toughest Angel on record. An N² bomb detonated in direct contact with its shielded core leaves the sphere and the body around it entirely unmarked. The whip-arms serve as its melee arsenal, severing Eva limbs and heads in single strokes, and its outsized core may house a correspondingly outsized S² Engine, one proposed explanation for the gulf in power between Zeruel and similarly sized Angels.

Zeruel strikes while NERV is still reeling from the Bardiel incident, plunging through the GeoFront's armor too quickly for any surface interception. Unit-02 meets it below and loses both arms and then its head to the whip-arms without landing a meaningful blow. Unit-00, still one-armed from its last battle, charges in cradling an N² bomb; the point-blank blast costs the Eva its remaining arm while Zeruel walks away untouched.

The Angel bores into NERV Headquarters and reaches Central Dogma, breaking through the wall of the command center, where only Unit-01's arrival prevents a massacre. Their fight rides a launch catapult to the surface. Unit-01 loses its left arm to an energy blast yet batters the Angel to the edge of defeat, nearly tearing its face off before the Eva's power runs out. Zeruel smashes open the paralyzed unit's chest plate and hammers the exposed core, each shock threatening the entry plug within. Then Unit-01 goes berserk: it rips an arm from Zeruel to regenerate its own, opens crippling gashes with an offensive A.T. Field, crushes the Angel's face mid-attack, and devours the corpse, absorbing the S² Engine.

Yoshitoh Asari designed the Angel, whose segmented arms fans affectionately compare to toilet paper. Its Hebrew name translates as arm of God, a pointed allusion to both its weaponry and the limb Unit-01 harvests from it, and angelology casts Zeruel as the Angel of Strength dispatched to aid David against Goliath. In the manga Neon Genesis Evangelion: the Iron Maiden 2nd, it joins Shamshel, Matarael, Ramiel, Israfel, and Adam in a combined assault on Tokyo-3.