Sahaquiel

Few Angels look as alien as Sahaquiel. Its immense, stretched-out body carries three eye-like markings, one at either extremity and a central one ringed by six lash-like protrusions, with the Angel's core sitting where that middle eye's pupil would be. Clusters of stem-like growths fan out radially from both ends of the body, faintly suggesting hands.

Sahaquiel fights like an artillery spotter walking shells onto a target. Rather than gamble everything on one strike from orbit, it sheds portions of itself as ranging shots, each impact landing closer to NERV than the last, reserving its full mass for the killing drop only once its aim is proven. The approach reveals a coldly systematic intelligence willing to spend its own flesh on calibration.

The Angel announces itself from low Earth orbit, where its jamming blankets satellite communications and cuts NERV headquarters off from Commander Ikari and Fuyutsuki in Antarctica. Reconnaissance satellites sent to study it are crushed by its A.T. Field, though not before completing their scans, and a barrage of N² bombs fails completely against a barrier strong enough to absorb them. Sahaquiel then begins its bombardment, hurling fragments of itself downward as kinetic weapons. The first strike lands harmlessly in the middle of the Pacific, but every subsequent impact creeps nearer to Tokyo-3, and analysts realize the finale will be the Angel's entire body, a blow violent enough to replace the city with open ocean.

NERV's answer is a three-Eva interception with almost no margin for error. Unit-01 reaches the falling Angel first and arrests its descent bare-handed; Unit-00 then cancels the enemy A.T. Field while all three units strain against the mass, and Unit-02 finishes the fight by driving a Progressive Knife into the core at the heart of its central eye.