Archive of Our Own ^beta

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 22: 13 PM… 

“Ugh.”

The page lay pristine beneath the steady glow of the desk lamp, its vellum surface unmarred by ink or sigil, a quiet accusation in its emptiness. An hour had passed—he knew that without checking the clock, could feel it in the faint stiffness of his shoulders and the slow cooling of the tea forgotten at his side. The Norwich Dormitory had long since settled into its nocturnal hush, the old building breathing softly around him as stone and warding alike adjusted to the absence of movement. Somewhere down the corridor, pipes ticked as they contracted; outside, the distant city murmured in a language too diffuse to intrude.

He was alone. Or rather, as alone as one ever was in a place like this.

Shirou leaned back slightly, the chair creaking in protest, and let his gaze drift to the darkened window. Most of his classmates would be asleep by now—or performing the convincing imitation of it that passed for rest among magi. Misaya, he was certain, was curled up beneath her blankets with one of those scandalously sentimental novels she pretended not to own, the sort whose spines cracked too easily from rereading. Izcalli would be absent altogether, his bed a formality as his real presence threaded through encrypted calls and ritual circles as he reported to the unseen hierarchies of the Heaven’s Foundation. Sion, relentless as the march of time itself, had likely sealed her workshop behind a lattice of bounded fields, drowning herself in calculations until dawn forgot to come. ‘ And Shinji…’

“Hmm.” His mouth twitched despite himself.

He was almost certainly online, fingers flying across a keyboard as he antagonized strangers who had made the mistake of existing in the same digital space as him. Or worse, prowling those dubious forums where the mundane brushed too close to the arcane, where rumors metastasized into half-truths and dangerous curiosities. The memory surfaced unbidden: Shinji’s grin as he’d triumphantly displayed his last acquisition, an object that should not have been for sale, much less shipped in padded packaging. The actual sting of a manticore, preserved and humming faintly with residual venom

“The amateurs on those forums are practically begging to be parted from their treasures. They post their little 'cursed' trinkets, all shivers and ghost stories, and I simply... Provide a solution. For a price, of course.”

Shirou shook his head, as if the motion alone could dislodge the image.

‘I’m stalling.’ He knew it, and the knowledge sat heavy in his chest.

If this had been an assignment, there would be no problem. An analysis of thaumaturgical substitutions in Esoteric Gastronomy, tracing how symbolic ingredients altered a spell’s output? Tedious, perhaps, but manageable. Maintenance reports on the General Fundamentals’ Faculty’s golems, noting stress fractures in enchanted joints and recalibrating their control matrices? Almost comforting in its straightforwardness. Tasks had edges. They demanded focus, and focus was something he could provide without hesitation. He had built an entire life around that principle.

This was different.

The quill rested between his fingers, perfectly balanced, its tip hovering just above the page. He could feel the potential of it, the readiness to translate thought into form, will into record. And yet nothing came. Not because there was nothing to say, but because there was too much.

It was his diary.

Not the usual entries, not the careful transcriptions of dreams and half-remembered visions that demanded cataloging before they dissolved under scrutiny. This was something else entirely. A memoir, perhaps. The word felt too grand, too final, but it was the closest approximation he had. A letter—no, not that either. Letters implied recipients, expectations of being read and understood.

‘I don’t know who this is for.’

Maybe no one. Maybe a future self, distant enough to regard these words with a stranger’s detachment. Maybe someone who would one day stumble across this page by accident or design, fingers brushing against ink that carried more weight than it had any right to. The uncertainty gnawed at him, an itch beneath the skin of his thoughts.

“It can’t be helped.” Shirou closed his eyes.

Immediately, the world shifted.

Men screamed as cavalry thundered past, hooves churning mud and flesh alike into indistinguishable ruin. Lances splintered on impact, the sharp crack of breaking wood punctuating the chaos as shields rang and buckled under relentless force. Banners were torn from their poles, trampled into the earth they had once claimed. 

A shield loomed in his mind’s eye, battered but unbroken, its surface scarred by history. He had read it yesterday, traced its lineage back through the War of the Roses, through hands that had gripped it in desperation and defiance. The memories clung to him, not as images but as sensations, as echoes of resolve and fear that refused to fade. For a heartbeat, he was there, standing amidst the carnage, every instinct screaming to move, to act, to endure.

“No.” He murmured to the empty room, the word barely audible.

His eyes snapped open, and the vision receded, leaving behind only the steady lamplight and the blank page. He drew in a slow breath, then another, grounding himself in the present. That was not what he was here to write. Those memories, borrowed and preserved, had their place. This was about something far more difficult.

This was about him.

He wanted to set it down, to give shape to a life that too often felt like a series of reactions rather than decisions. He wanted to be honest in a way that did not require an audience.

And that was precisely why he could not begin.

The quill trembled, just slightly, as his grip tightened. He lowered it to the page, felt the faint resistance of vellum beneath the tip—and froze. Words gathered at the edge of his mind, unformed yet insistent, each one demanding to be the first, to set the tone for everything that would follow. Any of them could open the door. Any of them could condemn him to saying too much or too little.

‘What am I going to do?’

He exhaled, the sound slow and weary, and let the quill lift once more from the untouched page. He leaned back, shoulders slumping as the tension he had been holding finally found release, and sighed again.

No matter how many times he brought the pen close to the paper, hovering a breath away from committing to motion, he could not picture a single word upon it. Not a letter, not even the ghost of a sentence. The page remained stubbornly blank, an immaculate field that refused to yield under his gaze. Eventually, the tension in his hand grew too noticeable to ignore, and he let the pen rest against the desk with a soft, hollow tap. His eyes drifted away, wandering his room in search of anything—anything at all—that might offer a drop of inspiration, or at least an excuse to breathe.

All the rooms in the dormitory were the same size. The uniformity of it had been a point of contention since the very first week, much to Luvia’s very vocal indignation.

"Such plebeian constraints! A single pane of my stained glass is worth more than this entire concrete shoebox. I must make do with... Concentrated elegance."

Space, after all, was a statement, and she had never been subtle about the statements she wished to make. Shirou had seen her room only once, and even that brief glimpse had been enough: opulent drapery, polished wood, crystal accents placed with deliberate care. A lavish stage constructed with the express purpose of spitting Rin, who had responded in kind by making her own room elegant in a far quieter way—functional to the core, her finances diverted not toward spectacle but toward raw materials, catalysts, and experimental apparatus.

"Some of us prefer a functional workspace to a gaudy trophy case. At least my 'elegance' doesn't scream 'compensating for something.'

Luxury, to Rin, was something to be justified by results.

‘And then we have the movie theater.’ Ayush’s room was an entirely different beast. Silk and wool layered over every available surface, colors warm and rich, as though she had transplanted a fragment of another world into that square of the dormitory. Her bed alone was nearly three times the size of a regular one, a fact that had become something of an unspoken agreement among them. On rare occasions—when exhaustion outweighed caution, or when nostalgia demanded something simple—they all crowded into that room to watch old films, fourteen bodies fitting more comfortably than logic suggested. It was preferable to risking the common room and drawing Waver’s ire, and there was something quietly reassuring about the shared closeness, the way laughter softened the sharp edges of their days.

Others leaned toward simplicity. Caules’ and Ayaka’s rooms were modest but warm, the kind of spaces that felt lived in rather than displayed. Bookshelves lined their walls, filled with dog-eared volumes and annotated texts. A couple of potted plants thrived despite the erratic schedules of their caretakers, stubbornly green and alive. And there, inexplicably yet proudly displayed in both rooms, was the same poster: their class’s pet, Shinji the caracal, captured mid-pose with an expression so unbearably smug it bordered on majestic. Shirou had never quite figured out who had commissioned it first, only that it had spread like an inside joke made tangible.

His own room on the other hand…It could hardly afford to be as spartan as it would have been, once. Not anymore. Beyond the closet that held his clothes and the second table that doubled as a miniature workshop—its surface scarred by careful use, etched faintly with containment circles and scorch marks—there stood a bookshelf. It held a modest collection of tomes and scrolls, texts he found himself returning to for reasons that were not always academic. Alongside them rested a handful of small tokens and mementos, objects whose value had nothing to do with mystery or magecraft.

His desk, the one before him now, bore the quiet clutter of a life in motion. A globe sat near the corner, its surface marked with inked symbols, ley intersections, and hastily attached notes that threatened to peel away with age. Beside it stood a simple lamp, almost innocent in design, crowned with a softly glowing crystal of Albion that bathed the room in steady, gentle light. And arranged carefully along the back edge, as though forming a silent audience, were several picture frames.

Shirou’s breath caught almost imperceptibly as his eyes fell upon the first.

Kiritsugu. Taiga. And himself.

He looked impossibly small in that photograph, no more than eight years old, standing between them with an awkward, toothy grin. Kiritsugu’s hand rested on his shoulder, casual but grounding, while Taiga leaned in far too close, her smile wide and unrestrained. It was from before everything—before the full weight of the World of Magecraft had settled onto his second life, before ideals and obligations had sharpened into something painful. A time when laughter had been easier, when the future had not yet demanded to be carried.

His gaze shifted to the next frame.

Paper lanterns glowed softly in the captured moment, their light reflected in familiar eyes. Kohaku stood beside him, her hand in his, the connection frozen in a way that memory alone never quite managed. The air that night had been warm, filled with the scent of street food and distant music. He could almost hear it now, feel the press of the crowd, the quiet comfort of shared silence amid celebration. A phantom of a smile touched his lips, fleeting and fragile, before fading as his eyes moved on.

And then—

His heart dropped.

The third frame held a medium-length red-haired woman with green eyes, smiling gently at the camera. The resemblance was unmistakable, etched not just in features but in something deeper, something that tugged painfully at his chest.

‘Mom.’

His gaze drifted next to the drawer beneath the desk, the one he rarely opened without purpose, the one he knew—without needing to check—held her diary. It rested there wrapped in oilcloth and layered wards, sealed not out of fear that it might be damaged, but out of a quiet reverence that bordered on superstition. ‘This is probably the reason why I wanted to write in the first place.’ 

Elza Saijou had written constantly.

Not just within the confines of magecraft, though she had moved through that world with a practiced ease, camera in hand, eyes sharp and curious. She had worked as a photographer there, capturing events of one side or another. But she had written just as much about the mundane world. About cities and deserts and ports and nameless villages whose names she recorded phonetically because she never learned how to spell them properly. She filled page after page with descriptions of light and shadow, of people she met only once yet remembered vividly enough to grant them permanence through ink.

And woven between those observations were her thoughts. Unpolished, honest but sometimes uncertain.

‘And I have read them all.’

He felt, often, that those pages were the closest he would ever come to speaking with her. Because the truth was brutal in its simplicity: he had almost no memories of her. Not really. Only a phantom impression that lingered at the edge of his consciousness. 

“Luca… Be strong.”

He did not know if that memory was real or if it had been shaped by repetition, by longing, by the act of reading her words until they felt like echoes of a presence rather than records of a past.

“How did you do it?” His fingers curled against the edge of the desk as he murmured under his breath, the question aimed nowhere and everywhere at once. How had she taken the chaos of her thoughts, her impressions, her doubts, and shaped them into something coherent? Something that endured? He knew, with an almost painful certainty, that this difficulty of his was not limited to writing. He could speak well enough. He had friends—trusted ones, people who stood beside him without question. And yet there had been countless moments when he had retreated inward, choosing solitude not because he wanted it, but because he could not find the words to make others understand his reasons.

‘I really need to change that.’ 

He had walked too far alongside them long enough to keep insisting on going alone. And Kiritsugu had warned him once, voice calm and tired, that loneliness suited him. That it came easily. He had understood what he meant—but he had also known, even then, that it was not a fate he would ever learn to appreciate. He had not been molded for it. The writing had been on the wall long before he had been able to read it.

“Do remember that I asked you to never become like me.”

The words surfaced unbidden, sharp in their gentleness.

“Strenght, Shirou.” Touko’s voice followed soon after, equally impossible to ignore. She had taught him ruthlessly, methodically, ensuring he would survive the paths he insisted on walking. And yet she had been unequivocal about one thing: The Mistress of Puppets would never want him to become another solitary wanderer, untethered, incapable of staying or fitting anywhere. “Does not excuse isolation.”

His gaze dropped again, heavier now.

‘What would my mom think of me?’

It was a question he had asked himself more times than he cared to admit, and not only in the privacy of his thoughts. Jean Rum had regarded him with a serious, appraising look when he had voiced it aloud, and her answer had come without softness. “She would probably not have approved of your fighting prowess. Skill of that caliber… Rarely speaks well of peace within the mind and the heart.”

That had stung.

“Tsk.” Meilan’s response had been different, predictably so. She had scoffed at first, annoyance flickering across her features as though the question itself offended her sensibilities. But later—much later—she had spoken again, her tone stripped of mockery.

“Elza would have seen the bleeding heart that you are.” She had said. “And she would have been proud that you never turned it into steel, despite your life.”

The incarnated Elemental had many flaws. Her irritability. Her pride. Her occasional blindness to her own contradictions. But she would never, ever utter a lie.

The tightness in Shirou’s chest loosened just a fraction as his eyes shifted to the final picture on his desk.

His classmates. And himself.

It had been taken only a few weeks ago, in Turkey, during the preparations for the Grand Affair. Someone—he could not remember who—had insisted on a serious photograph. The attempt had failed spectacularly. The image captured Doris in the act of strangling Shinji, Izcalli standing behind Misaya and Svin with his fingers raised in unmistakable horns, Gray quietly stealing a kebab with an expression of utter innocence, Flat pointing enthusiastically at a passing plane, and the rest of them staring in various directions as though none of them quite knew who the others were in order to ward off the collective embarrassment.

‘Waver wanted to kill us.’ Shirou snorted softly as he looked at the picture, a sound halfway between a laugh and a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. ‘But if that photograph had been taken an hour later…’ He thought, every single person in it would have needed superhuman effort not to grin straight into the camera. Around that time, after all, they had stumbled into yet another altercation with the Norwich class—still thoroughly unamused by their loss during the contest in Ilium, still nursing bruised pride and wounded egos. Some of their more volatile members, Gut and the Istorre siblings foremost among them, had been practically vibrating with the need for payback, much to Julian’s very vocal dismay.

The endgame result had not been pretty.

It had begun, as these things often did, with words. Sharp ones. Barbed ones. Julian’s attempt at mediation had lasted precisely twelve seconds before someone—no one ever quite agreed who—crossed an invisible line. The next moments blurred into a spectacle that would be whispered about in corridors for weeks.

Julian’s voice rose first, cracking into a full-throated howl of indignation as he watched his classmates suffer yet another comprehensive trashing at the hands of the El-Melloi Class. “THIS IS A FORMAL COMPLAINT WAITING TO HAPPEN—!” He shouted, only to be drowned out by the sounds of impact, explosions of prana, and at least one wet, comedic splat.

Faldeus, ever the amiable backstabber, had attempted what could only be described as a tactical retreat. Flat against the ground, he crawled inch by inch toward what he clearly believed was safety, his expression carefully schooled into one of injured innocence. He almost made it. Almost. A shadow fell over him. He looked up slowly, swallowing as Luvia smiled down at him, sleeves already rolled up as she cracked her knuckles.

“Mercy?” He offered weakly.

Luvia’s smile merely widened.

Elsewhere, Beryl let out a string of creative curses as he found himself abruptly embedded into a wall, pinned there by a wobbling, translucent mass of unholy jelly. The thing pulsed obscenely, quivering with malicious enthusiasm. Shinji stood a short distance away, holding an empty jar and looking deeply offended.

“I told you not to touch it.” He mockingly snapped. “It’s temperamental.”

“JAJAJAJAJA. ¡ORALE!” Izcalli, under the perfectly respectable guise of Francisco, had taken a more direct approach. He hoisted Avi Dikhail into the air with alarming ease as his smug composure finally cracking as his feet left the ground.

“Now, now wait just a moment—” Avi began.

But Izcalli did not wait.

With the practiced motion of someone who had watched far too much professional wrestling, he spun once and hurled him bodily across the courtyard. Avi flew through the air with a strangled yelp, landing directly in front of a very murderous Ayush who grinned, hefting a spoon that was far too large to be reasonable before swinging it like a baseball bat.

THWAAAAACK!

“HROAAAAAAAAAR!” Doris, meanwhile, had fully committed. In her mutated form, she barreled across the battlefield, jaws snapping inches from Gagam Istorre’s flailing limbs. The hulking bully’s earlier bravado had evaporated entirely; he shrieked in a pitch no one would ever let him forget, scrambling away as she tried repeatedly—and enthusiastically—to chomp down on him like some sort of unholy scraped footage from Jurassic Park. 

Amidst the chaos, a small island of sanity existed.

Rin stood with her arms crossed, pinching the bridge of her nose. Beside her, Wisteria watched with the expression of someone mentally drafting apologies.Gray hovered nearby, mortified but resigned and Julian stood among them, staring at the scene as though questioning every life choice that had led him here.

“This can’t possibly be this ridiculous.” Rin muttered.

Then they all turned.

“Perish.” Sion stood at the far end of the courtyard, face perfectly calm, as she fired a low-caliber magical energy cannon at Daybit. The blast struck home with a crackling hiss of prana as the projected shape was unmistakable.

A giant, glowing hand.

Doing the flip.

Shirou chuckled quietly as the memory finished settling, the sound warm and genuine as it slipped free before he could stop it. Oh, Julian had been completely murderous afterward—eyes blazing, voice clipped into something dangerously polite. His classates, on the other hand… Well. Only Wisteria and him had been spared the consequences.The rest had been confined to the palace’s medical ward for an entire day, mostly nursing wounded pride rather than actual injuries. Thankfully, no one had been hurt too badly. Beryl had remained trapped inside the jelly-like monstrosity for hours, suspended like some grotesque dessert no one wanted to look at, let alone imagine tasting. Doris, mercifully, had refrained from biting anyone; she had instead used her massive tail to sweep the Istorre siblings off their feet again and again, sending them skidding across the ground like a pair of particularly loud bowling pins.

And Avi—

“Pfft.” Shirou’s smile crooked just a bit.

Caules’ annoying cousin had reinforced himself at the very last second, right before colliding with a stone pillar that had already been ancient when the Ottomans had conquered the city. Not a single bone had cracked. Not even a hairline fracture. That, however, had done nothing to soften the venomous glare he’d leveled afterward at Izcalli—still grinning like he’d won a prize—and at a rather cheerful Ayush, who had waved at him with a perfectly ordinary spoon. The threat had been entirely implied.

‘It was fun.’

The realization lingered longer than he expected, settling into him with a strange mix of warmth and clarity. Fun. Not victory. Not justice. Not even satisfaction. Just the simple, undeniable fact that he had enjoyed being there, amid the noise and absurdity and shared exasperation. His gaze drifted from the picture at last, coming to rest on the globe atop his desk.

He blinked, then he leaned forward slightly while something clicked into place.

“The world itself…” He murmured with barely audible words. ‘Of course.’

He rose from his chair and stepped closer, the floor cool beneath his feet. The globe turned easily under his touch, spinning with a faint whisper as the lamplight slid across oceans and continents. Small posted notes and colored pins dotted its surface, each one marking a place, an incident, a moment that had mattered. Most of them clustered within the past two years—a constellation of movement and consequence that traced a life lived in motion.

‘Now there’s an idea.’

His index finger brushed against the Iberian Peninsula, lingering briefly over Spain, before gliding northward to two distinct marks in France. From there, it traveled across the Channel to Great Britain, pausing as though acknowledging the weight of familiarity. He turned the globe back toward mainland Europe, tapping lightly at the heart of Italy, then letting his finger drift eastward over the Aegean Sea. The motion slowed as he guided it north, over mountain ranges and borders, until it came to rest against the Carpathians.

The path told a story.

Not of battles or victories alone, but of movement. Of people met and lost and found again. Of places that had shaped him, however briefly. ‘Bingo.’ Shirou felt the tension that had gripped him for hours finally ease, replaced by a quiet certainty.

‘I finally know what to write.’

He returned to his desk and sat once more, the chair giving a familiar, muted creak beneath his weight. The pen rested between his fingers, warm now, no longer an alien object. He hovered it over the blank page for a few seconds longer than necessary, then let out a slow, measured sigh. His shoulders eased as he closed his eyes, drawing in a breath that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his lungs. He held it there, suspended, as though listening for something—an echo, a rhythm, a voice that was not quite memory and not quite his own.

When he opened his eyes again, they were steady.

The pen touched the paper.

“To whoever finds this. Or to no one. Just the page, let me tell you about the silence after the scream.”

He paused, just long enough for the ink to settle. The words looked heavier than he had expected, as if they had always been meant to exist and were merely waiting for his hand. Shirou exhaled softly through his nose while his eyes drifted shut again as he leaned back a fraction, searching for the thread he had just grasped.

That silence—he knew it well.

“That’s where I’ve been living. in the hollow echo that follows the breaking of a world you thought you knew. I stepped into the hidden one as I wanted to see how heroes were made. Instead, I saw the bones of our own—the old, forgotten parts that are supposed to stay buried.”

His hand slowed after the final word, pen hovering as his thoughts overtook the motion. Ignorance, he reflected, had never truly been a blessing—only a soft place to rest before the fall. There was a fragile comfort in not knowing what waited in the dark, in believing that the shadows were empty simply because they had never moved. But the darkness did not need witnesses to exist. It did not need belief. Not knowing what lurked beyond the threshold did nothing to blunt its teeth, nor did it stop it from reaching out when the time came. The danger was not the revelation. It was the thought that the absence of knowledge was the same as safety.

“I’ve walked places where mysteries out of time linger in the air like mist, like dust on a forgotten shelf.”

xXx

‘Garden of Iram’ - Reverse Side of the World. 

April 8th, 2002, 17: 25 PM… 

“I… I reject…” The air shimmered with hostile intent, thick with the cloying scent of crushed jasmine and ozone. At the heart of the maelstrom, Sion trembled, a fine sheen of sweat glistening on her pale brow as her etherlite filaments, gleaming silver threads, lashed and wove through the air before her. They were not attacking, but probing, a frantic neural interface attempting a brutal, real-time hijacking of the ward’s foundational code. The keystone before her—a pulsating obelisk of black basalt inlaid with gold and silver sigils that twisted the eye—hummed with a corrupted symphony of traditions. It was a grotesque fusion; Greco-Egyptian geometries, strained through an Islamic philosophical lens and bound with Hebrew lettering that felt all wrong, a magecraft of arrogant, syncretic heresy. Each character she deciphered sent a jolt of dissonant data back through the etherlite, a psychic feedback that felt like chewing glass. Her teeth were gritted so hard her jaw ached, and a thin trickle of blood escaped her nose, ignored as her mind, her precious, logical mind, fought against the chaotic logic of the spell.

“Hurry it up, Atlasia!” Misaya’s voice cut through the din, sharp as a scalpel. She stood to Sion’s left, her posture regal even as she flung a volley of cursed darts that intercepted a hail of crystalline shards mid-air, shattering them into harmless dust. “We’re not your permanent shields!”

“Don’t pressure her, you idiot!” Rin snapped from the right, her voice tight with concentration. A prismatic barrier, hexagonal and shimmering, flared to life before her just in time to deflect a searing bolt of amber magical energy that screeched against it, the impact forcing her back a step, her heels grinding into the ornate tile. “Unless you want to try untangling this mess yourself!”

“Do not distract her!” Luvia commanded from behind them, her voice carrying the iron-clad authority of a field marshal. Twin giant gemstones orbited her, their facets glowing ominously as they absorbed and refracted smaller, nuisance spells meant to disrupt Sion’s focus. “And that goes for you too, Reiroukan!” The necromancer merely sneered as she traced a runic array in the air, causing a spectral, wolf-like shade to erupt from her shadow and pounce on a cluster of animated, venomous vines snaking towards them.

The three formed a desperate, bickering bulwark around the struggling alchemist, a triangle of defiance against the storm. And at the storm’s calm center, a dozen meters ahead, stood their tormentor.

Caster observed the fray with the detached, lecherous interest of a connoisseur. He was an old man, his face a map of wisdom and cunning etched deeply around eyes that sparkled with unnerving vitality. He was dressed in flowing robes of midnight blue and silver, a mystic sage’s attire that spoke of deep contemplation under desert stars. Yet the way he stood, the possessive gleam in his gaze, betrayed a soul steeped in pride and a ceaseless, hungry appreciation for beauty. His spellcasting was almost lazy, gestures fluid and economical, conjuring barrages from the very atmosphere of his bounded field, this illusory pocket of the lost realm.

“Such vigor! Such captivating fury!” His voice was a rasp of silk, carrying easily over the crackle of discharged energy. “In all my studies of the celestial spheres, I rarely calculated the confluence of so much charming talent in one generation. You are all… Most pleasant to look upon. A truly worthy addition to my collection.” He leered openly, his gaze sweeping over Rin’s defiant scowl, Luvia’s icy glare, and Misaya’s venomous sneer with equal delight.

The reaction was instantaneous and unified.

“You repulsive fossil!” Luvia hissed, one of her orbiting gems firing a laser-precise beam that Caster deflected with a casual wave, creating a curtain of iridescent mist.

“I’m going to blast you straight into the Mediterranean Sea before we’re done here.” Rin growled, feeding more prana into her creaking barrier, her eyes promising inventive violence.

“A collection?” Misaya echoed, her laugh a silver bell of pure malice. “I’ll have you mounted as a cautionary tale.”

The Servant’s leer only deepened, captivated by their spirited defiance. “The feisty one holds particular promise.” He mused, his eyes lingering on Rin. “The fire in her spirit is a rare constellation—”

His poetic ogling was interrupted. From the flank, Francisco had been working in silence, his hands pressed to the earth, his will attempting to commune with the very land beneath the false Garden, to summon the granite bones of the real ground to rupture this gaudy illusion. His face was strained, devoid of its usual detached amusement, etched with a solemn, desperate focus. 

“Oh?” Caster’s head tilted, his expression shifting to one of mild, academic disappointment. With a flick of his wrist, the connection was severed. The tremor died instantly. “The land scorns your begging, young man.” He stated, his voice losing its lustful tone and turning coldly didactic. “You approach it as a slave begs a master. It feels your weakness. This earth remembers my name, my covenant. It will not heed your fumbling commands.”

“Is that so?” Francisco recoiled as if struck, the failed spell’s backwash leaving his palms smoking. He snarled, clenching his fists, the bravado rushing back to cover the sting of the truth. “ Well, I’m offering you a date with these fists, gilipollas  and you’ve just bought yourself the front-row tickets!”

It was empty courage, and they all knew it. The air hung heavy with the unspoken truth. Misaya’s runic spells, Rin and Luvia’s refined jewelcraft, Francisco’s earth manipulation—they were brilliant, but they were scratches on the hide of a Servant, stalling actions in a battle they could not win through force. And with the rest of their classmates lost somewhere in the labyrinthine deception of the garden’s replica, their only hope rested in the shuddering, bleeding figure of Sion and her agonizingly slow digital assault on the ward’s heart.

“... I can’t…” Her breath came in ragged gasps now. Her etherlite was a frenzied silver sun around her head, processing data at a suicidal rate. The permutations are a red herring, her mind raced, partitioning the pain. ‘The geometric lock is the gate, but the animating principle is the key… Reverse the polarity of the seventh sequence… ‘Her vision swam with overlapping diagrams and catastrophic error messages. She was so close. She could feel the monolithic code of the bounded field, a towering wall of light, and she had chiseled a crack in its foundation. ‘Just a little more…’

THUD.

Then, a monumental crash echoed through the garden, a sound of shearing metal and fracturing stone that dwarfed the noise of their battle.

Every head, magi and Servant alike, whipped towards the source.

The colossal bronze automata that had stood as silent, ornate guardian over the main tower—a magnificent figure of a moorish spearman, ten times the height of a man—was toppling. It fell in a slow, graceful arc, hitting the mosaic ground with a world-shaking impact that sent cracks racing through the illusory earth. And standing atop the ruined head of the automaton, amidst the settling dust and dying magical hum of its mechanisms, was Shirou.

He was panting, his clothes torn and smudged with dirt and soot, his amber eyes blazing with a focused intensity that cut through the haze. But he didn’t look at his classmates, his gaze was locked solely on the stunned figure of Caster.

“Hey, ‘Alibaba’.”

“Who dares?” The Servan’s eyes widened, a flicker of confusion and dawning outrage at the impudent, storybook nickname.

Shirou raised his right hand, revealing a short, stout bronze spear, its shaft thick and sturdy, its leaf-shaped blade glowing with a deep, ancient light. But it was the shaft that commanded attention, for it was covered from tip to hilt in meticulously engraved cuneiform script—Chaldean markings that pulsed with a rhythmic, golden radiance, each character burning with an authority that seemed to challenge the very air of the veiled paradise.

“Guess what I just found digging around in your fake treasure vault.”

“You… Jackal…” The astrologer took an involuntary step back as the leering confidence, the academic pride, the possessive lust—all of it evaporated from his face, replaced by pure, unadulterated shock. His eyes, those windows to a mind that charted stars and shaped kingdoms, were fixed on the glowing spear, reflecting its holy, dismantling light. The color drained from his features, leaving behind the ashen pallor of a man who has just seen a fundamental calculation of his universe prove catastrophically wrong.

xXx

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 22: 27 PM… 

The pen came to a halt, leaving a small stretch of untouched paper beneath the sentence. Shirou stared at it for a moment, recognizing the weight of what he was choosing not to say—yet. Some things demanded patience, even from oneself. He let the silence remain, deliberate and unbroken, before moving on.

“And that dust is wisdom that was left behind, heavy and silent, asking a price for its remembering.”

xXx

Carpathian Mountains - Romania.

December 14th 2002, 21: 41 PM…

The air in the ruined courtyard crackled with the stench of ozone, burnt stone, and the deeper, more primal odor of shed blood and warped flesh. It was a symphony of ruin, and the most persistent, yelping note in it was Shinji’s voice.

“Gah! Damn it all! Stay back, you overcharged freak!”

The Matou heir was less fighting and more performing a frantic, undignified scramble for survival. He dodged behind a crumbling stone column just as a whip-like tendril of blue-white lightning lanced through the space his head had occupied, scorching the ancient masonry and filling the air with the smell of superheated silica. He didn’t even attempt the rudimentary energy deflection he’d painstakingly learned; pure, animal panic had hijacked his higher functions. His world had narrowed to the next patch of cover, the next piece of rotten timber to vault over, the next deafening crack of thunder that meant another bolt was seeking his flesh. He stumbled over a sunken flagstone, arms pinwheeling comically before he caught his balance on a jagged wall, his heart hammering a frantic tattoo against his ribs. This wasn’t glory, this wasn’t the respect he deserved—this was a nightmarish game of tag where the penalty was instant electrocution.

At the epicenter of the devastation, the real fight raged, a brutal ballet of clashing powers.

“GAH! STAY STILL, YOU…!!!” Doris was a vision of ferocious, self-inflicted metamorphosis. Her usual brash demeanor had been consumed by a bestial rage, her magecraft twisting her form into something both terrifying and potent. Her hands had elongated into vicious, razor-sharp claws of bone and keratin that gleamed wetly in the erratic light, capable of shearing through stone. A thick, segmented tail, tipped with a serrated, knife-like barb, lashed behind her for balance and lethal strikes. Her face was pushed forward into a fanged snout, rows of needle-like teeth bared in a perpetual snarl, and her skin was sheathed in an armor of iridescent, overlapping scales that hissed where stray sparks landed. Wreathed around this monstrous form was a corona of furious orange magical energy, a fiery aura that burned with her wrath and intensified every lunge, every swipe she made at their shared enemy. She moved with a predator’s terrifying grace, a zig-zagging blur of scale and flame, her claws seeking purchase on dead flesh, her tail stabbing for joints and eyes.

Meeting her fury head-on, a gritted counterpoint to her wild assault, was Shirou. He wielded a sword that was not a product of his usual tracing, the hefty, brutal falchion was perfect for hacking through armor and bone, sang through the air as he parried not the axe, but the arcs of lightning summoned and the kinetic blasts of compressed air he flung like invisible hammers. Each deflected strike sent a jarring shock up Shirou’s arms, and he let out pained grunts through clenched teeth, his body already littered with burns and lacerations from near-misses. He was the anvil to Doris’s hammer, a solid, unyielding presence trying to create openings, to pin the monster down, but every time he saw a gap and lunged, the battlefield itself seemed to shift against him.

Their enemy was the source of the courtyard’ ruination. The Dead Apostle was a haunting specter of dried, leathery flesh visible through rents in its moldering, ash-gray rags. It moved with an unnerving, flowing silence, its most vocal feature being the silver axe it wielded—a weapon that crackled with captive storms, each swing releasing not just the deadly blade but forks of directed lightning. Its sorcery was not of fire or ice, but of flow and pattern; with a twitch of its free hand, it would weave the very air into concussive ribbons or sudden vortices that sought to trip Doris or deflect Shirou’s blows. It held them both at bay with a contemptuous, economical power, its hollow eye sockets fixed on them with ancient malice.

“KILL IT ALREADY!!” Shinji yelped, scrambling on hands and knees as another lightning bolt spider-webbed the ground where he’d been. In his blind panic, he collided with a solid, crouching form behind a low wall.

“Watch it, Matou!” Caules snapped, not taking his eyes off the fight. His face was pale but set in a look of intense concentration, several small, bestial familiars—ferret-like creatures with glittering eyes—scurrying at his feet, waiting for an order, for any opening that wasn’t immediately sealed by lightning or twisted air. He was trying to analyze, to find a weakness, but the Dead Apostle’s defense was a seamless, rotating wall of elemental violence.

“Well, get out of the way then! What are you, a garden gnome?!” Shinji shot back, his fear manifesting as aggression.

Before Caules could retort, a deafening impact shook the ground. Doris, in a furious overhead leap, had been caught mid-air by a concussive blast of patterned wind, a telekinetic hammer-blow that shattered her fiery aura and sent her hurtling backwards like a scaly cannonball directly toward their makeshift cover.

“Incoming!” Shirou’s warning shout was lost in the collective scream of panic from Shinji and Caules.

“AHHHHHHHH!”

THUD.

There was no time to dodge. The monstrous, scaled form of  their classmate crashed into the low wall, pulverizing it, and plowed directly into the two boys in a tangle of limbs, tails, claws, and pained shouts. They landed in a groaning, dusty heap against the far wall of the courtyard.

“Ugh… Get your claw out of my ribcage, you lizard!” Shinji wheezed, pushing at a heavily armored forearm.

“You’re the one whose elbow is in my stomach, you useless fuck!” Doris snarled back, her voice a guttural rasp from her bestial throat, already struggling to untangle herself, her tail thrashing and knocking more debris loose.

Caules, crushed at the bottom, simply groaned in profound suffering. “Could everyone… Please stop moving… I think something’s cracked…”

For a moment, it was just a pile of injured, bickering students—a moment of absurd normalcy in the midst of the supernatural carnage. The bickering was cut not by the Dead Apostle’s advance, but by Doris.

She froze, her snout lifting, her slitted nostrils flaring. The rage on her distorted features melted away, replaced by a sudden, ice-cold clarity, a primal dread that cut through her battle-high. Her head swiveled back toward the center of the courtyard, where the vampire stood, not pressing its advantage, but waiting.

“Oh, hell.” She breathed, the words human and terrified.

“What now?” Shinji spat, finally extracting himself and brushing dust from his ruined jacket, following her gaze. “What could possibly be worse than this?”

The Dead Apostle slowly, almost ceremoniously, raised its free hand. Clutched in its leathery fingers was not a weapon, but an object of breathtaking, ominous beauty: a bridle. It was wrought of what seemed like solid, pale gold, intricately engraved with spiraling patterns that pulsed with a deep, internal light. The air grew heavier, thicker, as if the courtyard itself was holding its breath.

“That’s…” Doris’s scaled shoulders tensed. “That’s not good.”

“What, why?” Caules asked, pain forgotten, his voice hushed as he felt the gathering pressure in the atmosphere, a pressure that had nothing to do with the vampire’s earlier sorcery. This was older, wilder, sleeping just beneath the skin of the world.

Shinji opened his mouth, likely to offer another sarcastic quip, to deflect the creeping terror with bravado and he never got the chance.

“VROOOOOSH-KAAN!”

A deep, thunderous, earth-shattering roar that spoke of mountains being moved, of horizons of scale and power beyond their comprehension. It was a sound of limitless fury and ancient, shackled strength, now hearing the call of the golden bridle.

The roar of a dragon.

xXx

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 22: 30 PM… 

“That’s the trap, you see? It’s not ignorance that kills you here. It’s that loaded weapon placed in the cradle of a new age, wrapped in the pretty ribbon of ‘tradition.’”

His fingers tightened slightly around the pen as his gaze unfocused, drawn inward. Magecraft was hardly just a tool rather than a slow seep into the soul—a beautiful toxin, refined over generations, administered in careful doses until the damage felt natural. And the society built upon it was worse still: a structure that taught the mind to accept corrosion as tradition, to confuse decay with heritage. It rewarded obsession, sanctified isolation, and called it progress. It did not simply poison what you were—it taught you to defend the poison, to pass it on, smiling.

The pen slowed for the final line, the ink pressing slightly deeper into the page as if he needed the paper to feel it too.

“An inheritance of ruin, fit for a world that has no courts. Only scales. The right of the strong is enforced—a silent, gravitational truth. It bends everything toward a single, inevitable point.”

xXx

Île de Ré - Pertuis d'Antioche

August 13th 2002, 16: 39 PM…

The cavern was not a place but a wound in the world, a glittering abscess filled with the stolen marrow of empires. The air, thick with the cloying scent of gold dust and myrrh, was poisoned by a deeper, fouler presence—a sweet-rot miasma of smallpox blankets, tainted wells, and souls broken on the anvil of a god they did not recognize. This was the treasure hoard of Jean Fleury, and it had become the arena for a vendetta five centuries in the making.

“¡¡¡......!!” Izcalli’s rage was a silent, white-hot star within him, a core of incandescent hatred that burned away the last vestiges of  his disguise. Every muscle in his wiry frame was a coiled spring, every breath was a promise of violence. He did not see the mountains of pearls or the chests of emeralds; he saw the ghostly reflections of shattered stones, the phantom screams from the temples now silent forever. His macuahuitl hummed in his hands, its rows of obsidian teeth blacker than the cavern’s depths, each shard thirsting for the conqueror’s soul.

It met the filth-slick cutlass of Rider with a sound that was less a clash of arms and more the cracking of a continent.

The Servant before him was not a hero, not even a man. He was the embodied calamity, the walking Pestilencia that haunted the darkest verses of Nahua laments. His conquistador’s plate was a bloated, distended carapace over flesh that pulsed with a life of its own—a tapestry of weeping buboes, suppurating ulcers, and cyst-like growths that throbbed with vile luminescence. Where a face should have been was a cavern of corruption: eyes drowned in pools of yellow pus, a nose collapsed into a snorting void, and a multitude of blackened, worm-like tongues that lashed from every crevice, tasting the air with a hungry, reptilian malice.

“El gazapillo sangrante descubre los colmillos.” The thing that was Rider gurgled, its voice a chorus of death rattles and breaking glass speaking an archaic, jagged Spanish that scraped against the mind. “Gime, aúlla. Tu saña es vino dulce.” The cutlass, forever dripping with a condensation of spiritual gangrene, pressed down, its inherent corruption seeking to seep into the obsidian, to rot the very memory of the weapon.

Izcalli screamed back with no words, only the raw, tearing sound of a people’s grief given throat. He pushed, the muscles in his arms standing out like cables, his magic flaring to reinforce the ancient wood. For a glorious, straining second, he held. Then, with a wet, explosive bark, the heart of the weapon shattered. Not into pieces, but into dust, annihilated by the conceptual weight of the plague-bringer.

The backslash came instantly, a blur of tainted steel. He twisted, but it was not enough. The cutlass tip carved a fiery line of agony across his chest, and the pain was not merely physical; it was the cold burn of foreign fever, the weakness of introduced sickness crawling into his veins. He spat, the saliva sizzling where it landed on the polluted floor, and threw himself backwards, his boots churning through rivers of doubloons.

His retreat was not a flight. It was the gathering of a storm. He bounded up the glittering slopes, a specter of vengeance moving through the plunder of his own history. Each piece of gold he kicked was a tooth from a melted god, each jewel a stolen eye. From the highest mound, he turned, and the world narrowed to the bloated monstrosity below. His gunblades, heavy and cold in his hands, were not tools but vessels. He poured into them every stolen sunrise, every silenced song, every child who never learned the true names of the stars.

“¡TRAGATE ESTO HIJO DE LA GRAN PUTA!” His voice shook the cavern, dislodging a shower of gold dust that fell like bitter rain.

He fired.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM-KRAK-THOOOM.

It was not gunfire. It was the eruption of a volcano given form. The projectiles were compacted hatred, shells of spiritual obsidian inscribed with glyphs of absolute ruination. They struck Rider and did not merely pierce—they unmade. Each impact was a localized apocalypse, blasting craterous wounds in his swollen form, tearing away great gory chunks of pestilential flesh that splattered against the gold and burned with acrid smoke. The Servant bellowed, a sound of genuine shock and pain, staggering as black and green ichor fountained from the voids.

‘Now.‘ The star of Izcalli’s rage reached supernova. He descended, a screaming avenger, both gunblades raised for a single, terminal arc. This was the moment of reclamation, the severing of the serpent’s head.

And the corruption of the New World itself rose to defend its butcher. From the gaping wounds Izcalli had inflicted, from the very miasma that hung in the air, a new horror coalesced—a massive, shapeless pseudopod of concentrated malice, the visible manifestation of the invisible killer as the weeping sore of a hemisphere and it slammed into him  with the force of a tidal wave of death.

“... Ugh.”

The impact was catastrophic. Ribs screamed in protest, his vision whited out, and he was hurled across the cavern like a broken doll, crashing through a teetering pyramid of gold in a cacophony of ruin. He lay buried, gasping, the metallic taste of blood and despair flooding his mouth. The triumphant fire was extinguished, smothered under the physical and spiritual weight of the enemy’s legend. He was just another broken body on the pyre.

The wet, squelching footsteps approached. Rider loomed, a continent of festering triumph. The wounds were already closing, knitting with scabs of moving shadow. He leaned close, the chorus of tongues clicking and slurping. “Yo conozco esa catadura. La vislumbré en los ojos de Cuauhtémoc, cuando su ánima entendió su fin en la soga.” A pistol, its flintlock mechanism clogged with a viscous, living pus, was produced. The cold, weeping barrel pressed into the center of Izcalli’s forehead. “Todos partieron al mismo averno.”

He could not speak. His body was a prison of pain. But his eyes, burning with an unquenchable fire, held the monster’s gaze. With the last of his strength, he gathered the blood and spit in his mouth—the last offering of his body—and hurled it forth, a final, defiant sacrament of loathing.

The many tongues hissed in unified fury. “Perece, alimaña.”

But the shot that rang out was not from the plague-pistol.

It was a shrieking beam of condensed moonlight, a perfect arrow of severing prana. It crossed the cavern in a line of pure, silent light and struck the Rider’s pistol-hand. There was no mere puncture. The arrowhead detonated in a micro-storm of a thousand slicing vectors, utterly annihilating the hand from the wrist down in a spray of vaporized corruption. The pistol clattered away, useless.

Rider reeled back, releasing an earth-shaking, guttural roar from his multitude of throats.

The respite was a phantom. It vanished as the very air around the Servant screamed into flame. Six shafts of crimson light, hotter than a forge’s heart, materialized and spear-charged into his body—through the shoulder, the gut, the thighs—not as weapons but as fiery stakes, anchors of purifying agony that punched through spiritual corruption and pinned him to the very concept of the earth he had defiled. They sizzled and smoked, holding the shrieking monstrosity fast.

And then, like the vengeance of a silent god, Shirou was in the heart of the chaos. His face was a mask of focused wrath, teeth bared in a feral snarl that mirrored Izcalli’s own. “You don’t get to win.” He growled, the words low and seething. In his hands was a katana of flawless, deadly grace. He did not stab. He drove the blade, a two-handed thrust of monumental force, straight into the epicenter of the largest, most pulsating abscess on Rider’s chest. The steel sank to the hilt into the spiritual tumor, and a geyser of black putrescence erupted.

Usumidori flashed, shearing through a black tongue as a brutal Frankish scramasax that hacked deep into the side of a swollen knee, superseded in turn by a Chinese zhanmadao that whirled in a decapitating arc, forcing the pinned Servant to contort wildly to avoid it. Each sword was a perfect, momentary existence, a thought given lethal form, and the barrage was relentless, a hailstorm of steel that chipped away at the legend of invincible conquest.

Speared and blindsided, Rider flailed against the fiery stakes, his cutlass swinging in wild, desperate parries that were always a breath too slow. “¡Engendros! ¡Sabandijas!” He howled, his archaic curses lost in the storm of steel.

And from the wreckage of gold, rising on a second wind of pure, undiluted wrath, Izcalli emerged. His body was a symphony of pain, but his spirit was a clarion call. He saw his opening—not the one he’d made, but the one forged for him. With a roar that seemed to draw power from the very stones of the plundered earth, he lunged, his remaining gunblade held like a sacred axe. 

The reinforced, magically-charged barrel connected with Rider’s temple in a blow that echoed with the finality of a closing epoch. It was the sound of a god falling, of a plague meeting its cure.

“¡MUERETE!” Izcalli screamed the old title like a curse.

The Conqueror of Betrayal’s many eyes rolled back in a synchronized spasm of agony. A ululating shriek of pure, world-ending fury erupted from every orifice, a cacophony that made the cavern walls weep stone dust. “¡MALDITA SEA VUESTRA ESTIRPE!” The fiery spears holding him began to crack, the very corruption of his being swelling in a cataclysmic, final release.

xXx

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 22: 30 PM… 

The pen lifted. He did not rush to fill the space that followed. The empty stretch of parchment breathed quietly beneath the lamp’s glow, a deliberate pause that mirrored the way battles always ended—not with triumph, but with a suspended stillness where no one yet dared to move. Shirou’s gaze lingered on that absence, letting it exist without correction, without explanation. Some silences were not gaps to be closed. They were wounds left open on purpose.

He lowered the pen again.

“That point is a clash for the ages where the very air screamed with the cost of winning and the ground remembers the pain.”

xXx

 Hastings - Sussex.

October 14th 1066, 17: 29 PM…

“Flat, stop playing around! This isn’t a game!”

Svin’s voice was a guttural snarl, shredded by exertion and fury. He moved not as a boy, but as a phantom—a monstrous, semi-translucent wolf of rippling muscle and spectral fangs, a product of his magecraft. He was a blur of silver and destruction, tearing through the press of Saxon huscarls and Norman knights with abandon. His claws sheared through chainmail as if it were parchment, his jaws snapped spines with horrifying ease. But for every memory of a warrior he unmade, two more solidified from the misty edges of the battlefield, their blank, determined eyes refilling with the borrowed purpose of the loop. They did not fear him. They did not truly die. They simply… Reset. He was a spectacular, ferocious cog stuck in a grinding, eternal machine.

“But it is a game, Svin! A puzzle!” Chirped the irrepressible voice of the blonde menace, his tone one of delighted analysis amidst the slaughter. While Svin fought the tide, Flat fought the rules. He had knelt, pressed his hands to the blood-soaked earth, and with a giggle and a flash of impossible color, had rewritten a ten-meter circle of ground. The mud and grass became a giant, trampoline-like surface of elastic, rubbery force. As a wedge of bellowing Normans charged him, he simply gave a cheerful wave and jumped straight up.

The lead knight’s warhorse hit the transformed ground and launched into the air with a terrified whinny, followed by its rider and the ten men behind him in a comical, screaming arc. They sailed over the fray like a grotesque fountain of men and metal before crashing down elsewhere, causing delightful chaos. Flat landed with a soft bounce, clapping his hands. “See? Momentum redistribution! The local reality is really quite flexible if you ask it nicely!”

“I am not asking it nicely, I am telling it to die!” Svin roared, bisecting a spearman only to see the man’s outline begin to fuzz and re-knit at the edge of his vision. A desperate growl rumbled in his throat. This was unsustainable.

A tired, measured huff cut through the din nearby. Ayaka leaned heavily against a weathered boulder, her glasses slightly askew, her breath coming in sharp pants. Her practical clothes were smudged with dirt and soot, but around her, in a neat radius, lay two dozen Norman and Saxon warriors, not dead, but locked in profoundly deep, enchanted slumber, snores rising above the battle’s clamor. A complex, shimmering magic circle etched hastily into the earth at her feet pulsed with a gentle, soporific light.

“Good job, Ayaka.” Svin managed, his wolf-form flickering slightly as he acknowledged her work, the most efficient solution any of them had managed.

She offered a weak, wry smile, pushing her glasses up her nose. “It… Only lasts until the loop resets. Then they’ll wake up angry.” Her eyes, sharp behind the lenses, scanned the chaotic tableau. They all saw it at the same time. On the opposite rise, a familiar, burly Norman knight—a memory they’d seen shattered a dozen times—let out a booming cry and began his predetermined, doomed charge up the Saxon shield wall.

A collective, soul-deep groan escaped the three modern magi.

“There he goes again.” Svin muttered, the fight bleeding out of him, replaced by grinding frustration.

“Which means the Saxon counter-push in three… Two…” Ayaka counted softly.

With a sound like a crashing wave, the Saxon line surged forward, cutting down the knight and his companions. A familiar, sickening lurch gripped the world. The light warped, the sounds stretched and inverted, and the fallen bodies on the field dissolved into motes of light, while new ones solidified from the mist at the starting positions. The loop had been recycled. They were back at the opening clash, the same screams, the same charges, the same mud.

“We have to find William.” Svin snarled, shaking his wolfish head as if to clear the temporal disorientation. “If he wins the battle, the loop’s purpose is fulfilled. It should collapse. Right?”

Flat tapped his chin, his blue eyes sparkling with improbable academic interest. “Ah, but that’s the historical twist! You see, at a key point, Duke William faked his death to rally his troops! So he’s technically not on the field as ‘William the Conqueror’ for a little while. He’s a ‘dead man.’ Therefore, to end the loop, we have to ensure the perceived victory condition is met, which logically means we have to take care of King Harold Godwinson ourselves! He’s the lynchpin!”

Two hands, one clawed and spectral, one small and feminine, simultaneously bonked him

“We are not assassinating a king, you idiot!” Ayaka hissed.

“We can’t even find him in this mess!” Svin added.

Their debate was cut short by a sound that froze the blood of everyone on the field, real or memory: the distant, massed twang of hundreds of bowstrings, followed by the rising, fiendish whistle of incoming death.

The sky darkened as a black cloud of arrows reached its apex and began its deadly descent directly towards their position.

Ayaka paled, Svin crouched, and Flat simply grinned. “Ooh, parabolic assault!” He clapped his hands together, and the air in front of them warped. A giant, invisible, concave lens of distorted space materialized. The arrows struck it and, instead of piercing through, were violently refracted, shooting off at wild, harmless angles back into the ranks of the advancing Normans, causing satisfying confusion. The barrier flickered and died, Flat wiping his brow with a theatrical sigh. “Phew! But the battle’s started again. We’re still stuck.”

Their predicament was mirrored across the hellscape.

“Damnit!” Misaya flicked a wrist as a snarling Saxon housecarl charged her. A rune blazed in the air before her, releasing a torrent of sapphire flames that immolated the man without touching his furs. “This is beneath me.” She stated coldly to no one in particular.

“Have at you!” Nearby, Luviag caught a knight’s lance-thrust on a glowing gem-shield and responded by launching the man and his saddle twenty feet into the air with a concussive blast of raw prana. “Uncouth barbarians, the lot of them!”

Further down the line, a scene of pure, prehistoric chaos unfolded as Doris, having shed any pretense of human form, had become a sleek, scaled terror the size of a wagon—a creature of dagger teeth, powerful hind legs, and a sinuous, whip-like tail. She moved like a giant, feathered crocodile from a lost world, lunging from the mists to snap at the legs of Norman destriers, sending knights tumbling into the mud with panicked shouts of “Dragon!”

“Why is it always boiling oil? Why not rocks? Rocks I could deflect!” Rin was yelling while she ran alongside a harried, shrieking Shinji  as a primitive catapult on the Saxon line lobbed a steaming clay pot toward them. It shattered at their heels, spraying scalding water and fat.

“Just run faster, you miserable peasant!” Shinji screamed back with pure, undiluted terror.

And through this maelstrom of anachronistic magi and looping history, one figure moved with a purpose that felt less like strategy and more like the tightening of a screw. He wore the rough-spun, sweat-stained tunic and cloak of a Norman archer, a costume taken from a fading memory he had helped erase. The fabric chafed, a constant, gritty reminder of his own displacement. The garron beneath him was no traced phantom, but a real, terrified animal, its sides heaving, its mouth frothing, responding to the clumsy, earnest pressure of his knees and the desperate grip of his thighs. His riding was competent, born of small, practical lessons long ago—enough to stay mounted, to guide, to not be a liability. It was not grace, but grim persistence.

‘Just move. Don't think about the horse, think about the path. The gap will close. The loop will reset. Move.’

He wove through the churning press of the Norman rear lines, a single droplet trying to flow against the current. The shield on his arm was a lead weight, the spear in his other hand an awkward, unfamiliar length. He used them not with skill, but with the brutal, pragmatic logic of a survivor—bashing a shield into the flank of a riderless horse to create a momentary barrier, jamming the spear butt into the mud to pivot his mount around a heap of broken bodies. Every action was muscle and will, not inherited talent. His amber eyes, stinging with sweat and rain, scanned not for immediate threats but for patterns in the chaos, for the telltale slackening in the Saxon line, for the fleeting glimpse of a banner that wasn't just a repeating backdrop. He was looking for the flaw in the record, the crack in the eternal nightmare.

‘There. The left flank recoiled. A pocket of chaos. That's the door. Go.’

He found his gap, a moment of violent reprieve as a Saxon sortie was hacked down, and drove his heels into the garron's sides, urging it up a rocky, rain-slicked draw that bypassed the main slaughter. The climb was agony for the beast, its hooves scrabbling for purchase on loose stone. Shirou leaned forward, his weight over its neck, whispering harsh, encouraging nothings, feeling its fear as a tangible vibration through the saddle. He was betraying the animal's trust for a chance at freedom, and the guilt was a cold stone in his gut. They emerged not into safety, but into a terrifying liminal space—behind the Norman advance, yet exposed on the slope leading to the Saxon ridge. For a breathtaking, silent moment, he was a solitary, impossible rider suspended between the roaring halves of history. Confused shouts, Saxon and Norman alike, reached his ears, muffled by the drumming of his own heart.

Then he saw it: the famed shield wall, a bristling, overlapping wall of oak and iron, and just behind it, the glitter of the dragon standard of Wessex. And then, he saw him. A tall, powerfully built man in fine mail, standing like an oak himself, his crown-helm gleaming dully under the grey sky as he rallied his housecarls with broad, commanding gestures. Harold Godwinson. Not a legend, not a historical footnote, but the living, breathing lynchpin of this entire tortured reality.

‘That's it. That's the anchor. He's why today never ends.’

A cold clarity washed over him. Charging the wall was not just suicide; it was meaningless. The loop would simply rewind the charge. He had to change the story, not join it. With a sharp tug on the reins and a pained grunt from the garron, Shirou wheeled around, presenting his back to the Saxon king. It was an act of supreme provocation. He was a lone Norman rider, daringly close, and now fleeing. He became a target. A handful of Saxon skirmishers, younger, faster men without the heavy armor of the housecarls, broke from the wall with guttural cries, giving chase down the slope.

‘Good. Follow me. Look at me, not at him.’

He thought of the samurai, of course—the yabusame, the solemn ritual of shooting from a galloping horse. But that was a ceremony, a test of precision under duress. He needed something born of war, not ritual. Deeper then, into the dusty archives of his soul. The image of a mighty warrior, a titan of the Three Kingdoms known as the Flying General, whose bow could pierce a hundred men. Strength, overwhelming force. But that wasn't it either. He needed deception, not dominance.

Another ghost surfaced. A different Flying General, one who rode not with personal might, but with a whirlwind strategy, whose arrows were a plague upon the barbarian hordes threatening the empire of the Han. A defender who used the horse as a mobile platform to control a battlefield. Closer, but still not the precise, intimate trick he needed.

Then, he felt it—the true echo. Not from the settled lands, but from the endless sea of grass. The riders for whom the saddle was a throne and the curved bow a beloved companion. They did not meet charges; they dissolved before them, like mist before the wind. Their greatest weapon was their retreat, a feigned weakness that was the hook in a trap. They would gallop away, a picture of flight, and then, with a twist that defied the very logic of their momentum, they would look back. The bow, already drawn in that fluid, impossible motion, would speak, and a pursuer would fall, his charge ended by an arrow shot from a man who seemed to be running for his life. It was the art of turning one's back to become more deadly, of making the enemy's confidence the vector of his own demise.

‘That's it. The shot that is born from the retreat.’

 The kill disguised as flight.

He wasn't tracing a Noble Phantasm. He was embodying a timeless, gut-level tactic—the ultimate betrayal of a pursuer's expectations. He led the Saxons down, away from the ridge, towards a skeletal copse of trees. He would not dismount. To dismount was to admit the chase was over, to become a stationary target. The shot had to be the culmination of the flight itself. He felt the garron's rhythm, the four-beat cadence of its gallop. He needed one beat of perfect, contradictory equilibrium.

He guided the terrified animal not deeper into the copse, but across its edge, using the sparse trees to momentarily baffle the closest pursuers. His right hand released the reins, which he looped hastily around the saddle horn. The garron, trained only for basic direction, sensed the lessened control and began to veer, its stride breaking. This was the moment. Chaos.

Shirou's left hand, still holding the crude Norman shield, shoved it behind him, a blind, desperate block against the expected thrown spear. His body twisted at the waist, a painful, wrenching motion that went against every instinct of a fleeing rider. For a heart-stopping second, he was balanced precariously, his lower body clinging to the horse's heaving side, his torso facing backwards, the world a tilting, swirling nightmare of rain, mud, and screaming Saxon faces.

In that suspended, impossible second, his right hand completed its motion. Not from a quiver, but from the forge of his soul, a simple yew longbow was already there, drawn. The arrow, grey-fletched, existed between his fingers and the string, a manifestation of necessity. He did not aim with his eyes. He aimed with the entire line of the chase, with the geometry of the hill behind the pursuers, with the ghostly imprint of the king's standard burned into his mind from moments before.

The skirmishers saw it. The fleeing rider was no longer fleeing. He was a statue of contradiction balanced on a panicked horse, a bow bent in a direction no bow should ever point. Their cries shifted from triumph to startled alarm.

‘Farewell, King Harold.’

The thought was not a sentiment, but the final calibration. He released.

The arrow vanished from the string. The act of shooting destroyed his precarious balance. The recoil, slight but catastrophic to his unstable posture, slammed him backwards. He lost his stirrups, his grip on the saddle, and tumbled from the garron's side, hitting the churned earth with a force that drove the air from his lungs and splattered him with cold mud. The last thing he saw, from his back in the filth, was the grey-feathered shaft, a mere speck against the roiling sky, tracing its unwavering, paradoxical arc back up the hill, towards the shield wall, towards the gleaming crown-helm, a piece of the retreat now returning to its source with fatal interest.

xXx

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 22: 33  PM… 

Again, he stopped. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. The memory was not a single battlefield but many layered atop one another, compressed into a sensation rather than a scene—the way the earth seemed to recoil underfoot, how even the wind carried a pressure that made breathing feel like trespass. Places remembered. They always did. Magecraft only made that truth harder to ignore.

“But an age is just a series of moments where someone decided to be a wall instead of dust.”

This time, the pause came with motion. Shirou’s eyes drifted from the page to the shelf beside his desk, settling on a small, easily overlooked object among the books and trinkets. A broken arrowhead, its edges warped and blackened, the metal scarred by heat intense enough to cauterize what it tore through. He reached out but stopped short of touching it, fingers hovering in the air as if the thing might still be hot. He remembered the moment it had struck, the force of it, the smell—iron and ash—and how the wound had burned even after the blood refused to flow. It had not killed him. It had chosen not to. Or perhaps it had failed. The distinction mattered more than it should have.

“And what breaks doesn’t always die. It lingers when resentment takes root in the ground along with the dead, it festers as the unquiet restless grudges crawl in defiance of their end, clinging to places and people.”

xXx

Salt Tower - Tower of London.

August 17th 2001, 3: 47 AM…

The silence was deeper than quiet, broken only by the whisper of ancient stones and the faint, phantasmal drip of unseen moisture. Then came the sighs, the rustling of formless cloth, and the pale, swirling shapes coalescing from the shadows of Traitor’s Gate.

“Persistent filth!” Luvia’s curse was a sharp, clear note of aristocratic disdain. She didn’t retreat; she advanced. Twin gems on her knuckle-dusters flared with a hard, grey-white light—the pure, conceptual weight of the Imaginary Element, Ether, coating her fists in an aura of nullifying force. Where a wraith, a mere fragment of residual sorrow and malice, swept towards her, she did not weave a spell. She threw a perfect, devastating cross. The punch landed with a sound like shattering glass, the Ether-unraveling the spectral form in a burst of dissipating mist. It was magecraft refined into brutalist pugilism.

She was not alone in her direct approach. Caules’ face was pale but he stood in grim determination with his hands extended. From the earth at his feet, shadows stirred and solidified into ghosts of his own; a wolf of swirling darkness, a hawk of condensed night, a boar of solid gloom. These were the limits of his necromantic aptitude, spiritual projections with more presence than power, but they served his purpose. They harried, nipped, and herded the sighing wraiths, boxing them in, driving them towards Luvia’s waiting fists or into the paths of others.

In contrast, Doris had her hands permanently altered into vicious talons that gleamed with their own coating of borrowed Ether, tearing through the specters with feral glee. Beside her, Svin was a phantom wolf made manifest as his own claws sheared through spiritual tethers while Gray moved with an eerie, silent grace, Add twirling in her grip not as a weapon of death, but of severance; the scythe’s blade passed through the wraiths not to kill, but to cut the threads of lingering attachment, her expression hidden beneath her hood but her movements sure and sorrowful. Not so far, Shirou fought with a longsword of cold, dark iron he had projected, its core a vein of shimmering Ether, each swing a careful, precise bisection that unmade the entities with a quiet hiss.

It was efficient, a grim choreography of elimination under the watchful eyes of the ravens.

“Adequate for a scouting party.” Misaya’s voice cut through the aftermath, cool and analytical as she observed the last wraith dissolve under a precise hex of banishment from Rin. She stood apart, her arms crossed, her gaze not on the defeated, but on the deepening shadows of the surrounding towers. “But that was merely the vanguard. A minor swarm. There are more. Can you not feel it? The pressure is not lessening. It is… Gathering.”

“More?” Shinji, who had been hovering near the back, trying to look as if he was strategically observing, let out a derisive scoff. “How the hell can there be more? The wards on this place are supposed to be among the strongest in the world! They’re literally woven into the bedrock!”

“They are intact, you idiot.” Rin snapped, wiping a strand of hair from her face, her brow furrowed not with anger, but with profound unease. She held a glowing gem in her hand, its light pulsing erratically. “The containment fields, the boundary layers… They’re reading as operational. But something is bypassing them. Or… Feeding them.”

“Feeding them?” Caules, dismissing his spectral constructs with a weary sigh, looked between the two. “What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t know!” Rin’s composure cracked, the frustration of the inexplicable warring with her pride. “The diagnostics are contradictory! The wards are active but the spiritual pressure is increasing exponentially from inside their own perimeter! It’s a paradox!”

“Perhaps your family’s magecraft is simply too blunt an instrument for such delicate diagnostics, Tohsaka.” Luvia snorted, the elegant sound dripping with contempt as she flexed her fingers, the light on her gems dimming. “A true artisan could discern the flaw.”

“She has a point.” The spark hit the tinder. Misaya’s lips curled into a cruel smile.”Your approach has always been one of overwhelming force with discounted materials. Subtlety was never your strong suit.”

“You think you could do better, Reiroukan?” Rin shot back, her eyes flashing. “Your ‘subtlety’ usually involves cursing people’s bloodlines! Maybe save it for the actual problem!”

“The actual problem.” Shinji interjected with a sneer. “Is that we’re listening to a bunch of girls arguing about whose magic is prettier while we’re surrounded by ghosts!”

“And what profound insight is the Matou heir offering?” Caules found himself retorting, his own patience worn thin by fear and the incessant bickering. “Aside from stating the obvious from a safe distance?”

The air, already heavy with the leftover buzz of magic and fear, turned sour. The fight was over, but a worse tension was building—a sharp, nasty feeling of everyone turning on each other. Shirou could feel it happening, like a switch being flipped.

Next to him, Ayaka was stiff, her fingers clenched so tight around her paper charms her knuckles were white. She wasn't looking at the shadows anymore, but at their classmates. Her whisper was almost too quiet to hear, full of a dread that felt personal. "They're tearing each other apart… This is how it starts."

On his other side, Gray flinched, just a little. It wasn't the cold. It was the shouting. The angry voices in this old, silent place seemed wrong to her, like a stain on something sacred. She held Add a little tighter.

“Idiots.” Doris just snorted, her clawed hands shrinking back to normal with a rough, scraping sound. She looked bored by the drama. Svin, though, let out a low, unhappy whine in his throat—the sound of a dog upset by yelling in the house.

Francisco wasn't cracking jokes anymore. He leaned against the wall, watching the argument with tired, serious eyes. This wasn't a fight he could punch. And Sion… Sion was perfectly, eerily still. Her glasses flickered with silent, rushing numbers, but her face showed nothing. She was trapped inside her own head, solving a horrible problem alone.

‘This is it.’ Shirou thought, the realization cold and solid in his stomach. ‘The real danger isn't the ghosts. It's this. This place wants us to break. ‘The Tower's old, stone sadness was getting inside them, turning fear into anger and then worse.  He could see the crack forming in their group, getting bigger with every nasty word.

"Enough!"

His voice cut through the noise, not the loudest, but firm. He stepped forward, putting himself right between Misaya and Luvia, his hands coming up like a wall. He looked at Rin, then at the others.

"We can't do this. Not here." His words were plain, direct. "The wards are fine, but there's something else here with us." He meant the anger, the suspicion. "Fighting each other won't help. It just leaves us open to—"

The sound that came then stole the breath from Shirou’s lungs and the words from his mouth. It was not a London sound. It was not the sound of cars or crowds or even distant sirens. It was the sound of the city’s bones groaning, of its deepest, buried wounds tearing open.

It started as a howl, but wrong—a wet, tearing howl stitched together from too many voices. You could hear the choked gurgle of a beheading in it, the dry rasp of a final breath in a lightless cell, the weak cry of a child dying of fever in the straw. It was every bad death that had ever happened in the shadow of these walls, all stirred together into one long, sickening scream. It didn’t just hit your ears; it slid inside you, cold and thick, wrapping around your heart and squeezing.

Then came the drums.

THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.

Not drums you could march to. This was a sick pounding from under the ground. It was the sound of something huge and rotten beating in the earth’s guts, or a giant fist punching up through the clay and bedrock, trying to get out. Drums in the deep. The old, forgotten words popped into every head, bringing a cold, animal fear with them.

All the arguing, all the anger—it just vanished. Snuffed out. Every single one of them turned, slow and stiff, like puppets on the same string, pulled towards the southern wall. They didn’t speak. They just moved, a line of pale faces and wide eyes, stumbling up the worn stone steps to look over the battlements, down to where the river should have been.

The Thames was gone.

There was no water. No reflection of the city lights. Where the river had flowed for a thousand years, there was now a hole. A pit of pure, boiling black. It wasn’t empty. It was full. It churned like a tar pit, but what bubbled up wasn’t tar. It was black, glistening stuff that looked like melted bone marrow and chunks of half-formed, spongy flesh. It pulsed in time with the wet drumbeat, alive and wrong.

And things were crawling out of it.

Not one or two. Not the pale, sighing wraiths from before. This was an army. A tide. You could see them—the pale, headless shape of a woman in a rotting dress, a small boy with eyes like dark holes, a man clutching his own severed head under his arm, soldiers in rusty armor, ravens with broken necks, and countless more, just shapes of ragged shadow and misery. They weren’t separate. They were clambering over each other, tangling together, sticking. Arms fused into legs. Faces pressed into backs, mouths still screaming silently. They were piling up, faster and faster, building something out of themselves.

A mound. A tower. A huge, shuddering shape of packed-together ghosts. It rose out of the black pit, a terrible sandcastle made of souls. It was taking form—a giant, clumsy battering ram, a siege tower of pure hatred. Its sides were a moving wall of grasping hands and open, wailing mouths. It grew taller, and taller, until its ragged top was already level with the high windows of the White Tower. It wasn’t coming for them yet.

It was still being made. Right in front of them. The ancient wards around the Tower of London shone with a brittle, feverish blue light, holding strong. But they weren’t keeping the horror out. They were just… Circling it. Making a lit-up ring around the stage where this nightmare was building itself, piece by tormented piece.

For a long, stretched-out second, nobody made a sound. The only noise was that wet, underground pounding and the faint, collective moan coming from the thing in the riverbed.

The horror that gripped them wasn't hot or panicked. It was cold. It was the kind of cold that sinks deep into your bones and freezes you solid from the inside out. It emptied your head of every thought except one: this cannot be real.

Shinji’s sneer was gone, his face slack and pale, mouth slightly open like a fish. All his clever insults were just… Gone. Rin’s mind, always racing with theories and plans, was a blank, white sheet. Everything she knew about bounded fields and spiritual phenomena meant nothing against that. Misaya’s sharp, calculating eyes were just wide, her brain refusing to process the numbers, because the numbers would all just spell ‘death’. Luvia stood perfectly straight, but the usual proud lift of her chin was gone. Her pride felt like a little glass ornament in her chest, something small and fragile that had just cracked.

The silence broke with a whisper from right beside Shirou. Ayaka’s voice was tiny, stripped of all her careful analysis, reduced to the simple, terrible truth a child would see.

“Oh no.”

It was all she could say. It was all any of them could think.

xXx

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 22: 38 PM… 

The words sat heavy on the page,the silence thickened now by implication. Sanctified battlefields turned cursed, of houses where no child slept soundly, of names that refused to fade no matter how thoroughly they were erased from records. Endings were suggestions at best. Hatred, once born, learned how to wait.

He wrote again, slower, more deliberate.

“In the silence after battle, you can hear it—a shriek against oblivion is heard, and it doesn’t fade. It echoes. It stains and it says “I was here, and it hurt.”

xXx

Tel Megiddo - Israel. 

March 21th 2003, 21: 49 PM…

It towered over the desert, a blasphemy of form that scraped the underbelly of the night sky. Thirty meters tall at the barest minimum, it was an anthology of atrocity, where every contour told a new story of ruin. The forgiving moonlight offered no solace; with his ocular reinforcement still active, Shirou perceived the full, dreadful clarity of it. The night’s earlier horrors now seemed like mere preludes. This was the crescendo.

Each of the Rephaim had been a chilling spectacle of distorted souls, hollowed out until only a core of rampant misery remained. Their forms, he guessed from the echoes in a dispelled dagger, were shaped by the brutality of their ends and the corruption of their legends. But this… This was different. It was a magnitude of wrongness that rendered those other spirits quaint by comparison.

Its legs were not limbs but monuments to violent industry. A grinding amalgam of shattered polearms, splintered swords, and notched axes was fused together with the carcasses of hundreds of wooden wheels—chariot wheels, charred and splintered, identical to the relics in the museum. It did not walk; the concept of a battlefield had simply begun to stride.

The torso was a cathedral of suffering. A latticework of innumerable, interlocking ribcages stretched in a grotesque parody of chainmail, forming a cage of yellowed bone. This structure was braced and punctuated by beams of rotten timber, driven deep like stakes. And within this cage, something seethed: a thick, oily black substance, alive with half-glimpsed, pulsing shapes that pressed against the bony bars, their silent screams evident in the slow, viscous drip of tarlike ichor.

‘People... Are trapped inside.’

The arms hung like felled trees, each telling a different parable of damnation. The right was a necrotic landscape, its blackened flesh a breeding ground for worms as thick as pythons, which coiled and bored through muscle and ancient, corroded bronze plating. The limb ended in a jagged claw of the same green-tinged metal, clutching a broken sword whose serrated edge seemed to chew on the very light around it, sending a stab of psychic pain through Shirou’s skull. The left arm was a gilded lie. Sheathed in burnished gold, its surface was a meticulously detailed fresco of anguish—countless tiny figures writhed in eternal, silent torment amidst depictions of opulent palaces and treasures. This golden narrative of agony spiraled down the arm, warping and stretching until it culminated in a magnificent, clawed hand. This hand held not a weapon of war, but a shield of cracked, hollow clay, its face inscribed with sigils so fractured they spoke of a fundamental, cosmological brokenness.

But it was the heads that truly unraveled the mind.

They sprouted from a single, trunk-like neck, a twisted symbiosis of despair. The right head was a flayed testament to decay. Stripped of skin, its muscular tissue was a pitted, trypophobic nightmare, each hole weeping a slick mixture of congealed blood and phosphorescent marrow. Where eyes should have been were deeper sockets, swirling not with emptiness but with a disturbing, sentient movement. Its lower jaw was entirely missing, and from the throat, one of the massive worms from its arm emerged, hissing, a crude golden crown stapled to the flesh above it.

The left head was a perverse opus of metallurgical torture. Molten gold had been poured over a shattered skull, fusing with bone in a partnership of agony. Barbed metallic growths and bubbling blisters erupted from its surface. Upon this ruined dome sat a crown, not of jewels, but of long, iron-black spikes hammered directly into the cranial plate. A band of bronze was soldered over where its eyes should be, set with two flawless discs of obsidian—a darkly humorous mockery of vision. And within its gaping, silent mouth, the pale, swollen forms of humanoid shapes could be seen, arms forever outstretched in a fruitless plea for deliverance.

"… Sion?" Shirou’s voice was tight. He already knew, but needed the confirmation to make the nightmare official.

“Saint Graph Confirmed.” Her response was a single, grave nod, her gaze locked on the abomination as she trembled."Heroic Spirit of the Enigma."

The symbol that crystallized on her terminal screen was the final verdict: a stylized, grinning death-mask, reminiscent of a court jester’s mocking leer. The sigil of a Servant Class that defied normal categorization.

"Alter Ego…" The name left Shirou’s lips like a curse. He took an involuntary step back as the colossus took a ground-shaking step forward. Then it spoke. The sound was not a voice but the aftermath of a cathedral window shattering—a cacophony of grinding glass and splintering stone given sentience.

"̶̦̹͙̘͔̤̘̘̹͋̃̅͘Ẅ̶̛͔̲́̅̿̌ẹ̷͇̳̬̆̽̀̈́̄͗̏͆͝ ̴͓̉̈́̈́̃̇͐͌̒͐͆̍̆̕W̸̢̙̠̲͓̜̰̓̈e̶̼̣̤̭̙̠̬͕̫̫̩̠͂͆̀̾͛͐̆͘̕͝͠͝r̶͔͂̃͠ͅë̴̮̓̏͒͛̎̋͘̚͘ͅ ̷̡̛̬̬̣̤̈́̍̾̊̒̀̇͛̂͑̚͝Ḳ̷̢͕̟͈̲͈͙̝̫͖͔͍̣̭͔̔̌̀͋̋́̔́͌͑̄͜͝ĭ̶͉͚͕̼͍͕̳̦̮ņ̵̳͕̞̗̼̱͎̟̳̬̾̎̉̓̾̇͆̓̓̒͒̕͝ͅͅg̴̨̨͙̦̪͈̳̬͔̘̙̹͍͒̔̇̅̆́̾͂̈́̀̋̌̍̕s̸̢̡͈̝̳̝̠̣͎̗̙̱̳̟͌́́͆̏̽̓̓͜ ̷̨̢̛̠̝̫̙̊̾̀̀̍͝ͅO̸̱͑̿n̸̠̭̩̜͕̔̆̽͌̈́͆̈́̄̉̄́̇̓̕c̴̗͖̻̩̮͍̀̽̇͛͝e̵̢̘͙͖̩̻̗͕̗̣͚͎̮͙͌̃̀̍͆̈́͐̕̚.̴̤̗̭̹̆̑͛͆̔̚"̷̢̡̛̞̟̝͈̹̫͇̭̍͆͒͗͋̆̚͠

The words were comprehensible, yet each one felt misaligned, forced through a filter of infinite spite. It was the speech of a being for whom communication was itself a form of violence.

"̷̩̬͇͚͔̟͇̥̃͊̔̇͜G̷̨̛̯̯̰͔̺̩̝͚͓̩̰̭̦̭̤̾͒̉̈́̾̎̉̒̿͌̒̈̇̈͘ō̷̭̜̗̊̈̇̀͘̚l̸̠̖̼̺̰͛̾́͊̅̿͑͂̊̓̚͠ḏ̸̢̥̟̘͓̯̬̜̆̐̈̿͝͠ ̵̛̛̘̮̻̗͍̹̻͓͎̩̃́̄͐̀̀̈́̎͑̓i̶͇͐͌̈́̀̓̕͠͝ͅş̸̨̭̯͕͈̫̰͙͕̤͙̝͓̀͊̊̒̒͗̃͜͝͝ ̸̼̤͔̫͕͙̹̺͇̪͈̦́͜ŝ̵̛̛̙̊̿͒͐̉̓̒́̓͊̚͘͝͠õ̷̙̯̻͉̂f̸̻̙̳̬͚̻͎̍͛̐̈́͑̂̑̊̈̆̄̐͂̕͘ͅt̸̢̧̢̨̢̬̞̤̙̝̙̯̰͕̳͐̌̊͆̄̇̄͛̔͘̚͜ ̵̟͓̜̗̥̮̒̃̇ȁ̶̧̞͔̪̺̳̠̟͍̔͘̕ǹ̷̰̠̎̆̅̍̿̈́͌̽̒̉͋̕͝d̵̪̱̘͇͇̙̺̤̪̣̻̮̼͔̤̣̰͒͑̎̈́ ̵͉̗̺̙̻͍̞͉̞̻̭͓͖̪̭̻̣̒̍s̸̬̬̫̹̰̙̞͊͋́̊͆́͐̑̾͌͛̉̆͘͝͝ͅͅǫ̵͕̰͎̠̤̰̳̓̃̎͊̎͝ ̶̢̧̨͇̖̥̺̱͕̳̖̟̙̂̂̈́̐̆̀̽̓͊̔̌̔̈̋̈́͝͝ͅi̴̛͈̺̲̹͚̣͔͔̙̠͉̲͍͐͊̂̂̔̂̉́͋̈́̋͜ṱ̵͈̲͙̪̪͒̑̈́̇̀̿͂̑͐͘š̴̭͈̮̜̬̭̥̲̖͈͕̞͇̾̂̈́̾̾̃̂̌̈́̌͂̇̚ ̷̨̧͇̫̖̗͓̬͍̓́̒͠F̸͕͖͇͈͊́̀͂̽̋l̸̡̢̤̣͓͓͙̬̈́̋̀̃͐̓͜ě̵̡̛͔͉̳͚̺̦͍͚̲̲͊͆̀͐̈̈̈́̀̒͗̾̚͜͝͝s̵̪͎̱̦̙̮͎͂̈́́̏͐̇̑̕h̵̛̯̭̥̠̣̥͍̞̖̭͙̥̆̌̃̾͜͜ͅ.̵̛͚̹̞͚̮̙̞̥̐̃̀͌̋͂̍̾̃͑̑̚͝"̴̡̧̡̪̰̞̜̤͕͎͓̗̄̾͗̽̄̆͘̕͜

Worse than the sound was the intent that rode upon it. Both felt it simultaneously—a psychic miasma, sharp as rusty needles, that sought the pathways of their Magic Circuits. It was an invasive pressure, trying to inject their consciousness with corrosive, alien imagery, to make them feel the truth of its statements in their very marrow.

Its language is a direct-attack magecraft. The realization was chilling. To imbue mere speech with such a tangible, corrupting influence spoke of a vessel of profound and monstrous nature.

"̸̡̤͈̬͈͇̜̦̘̪̞͈͎̫̑͌̓́̈̒̒͜T̶̢͕̲͖̣̱̪̥̠̏̓͛͗̈́̈́̍͑ͅh̵̻̭̝͚̐̑́͂̒͑̈́͘͜o̶͖͂̂̂́ ̸̧̧̛̹̹͙̣̦̽͌̓͑̈́̍̿̌̓̚͜͜ş̶̺̣̩̤̗̬̲̗̜̬̜̽̄̈́́̈͊̃̋̐͗̔͘͝h̶̢̨̛͕̮͙̺̩̣̰̘̖̖̜̹̼͛͛̀̅̕̕͝a̸̧͔̮̭̲̺̳̍̃̐̈́̋͘̚ļ̵̨̨̢̩̫͍̞̥̭̭̿ͅṭ̷͖͍̝̙̪͇̠̐̿̇͜ͅ ̸̤̺͎̺̩͊̉̆̽̀́̃͛̈́̚͠b̵̧̪̬̳̰̺̅̑̀̓̑́̅̅̎̋̋̑̋͝ȩ̵͈̹͍͇̬̣̲̪̹̬̦͂̇̀͒̾́̏͐̚̕͝g̸̨̱͙̠̜͐̈̒̇́̎̅ͅ ̷̨̡̢͇̰͊̓͘f̷͇̻͕̯͂̎̚ơ̶̢̺̳̞̜̫̝͎̼̼̻͎̣͉͑̽̿͋͗̐ͅŗ̷̨͍̟̫̦͐͋̏̌̇̅̌̚͝ ̷̗̱͚͊̈́̀̂̂̅̌̆̃̂͋̚͝͠t̶̢̡̺͙̘̬̜͕̣̗̬͍̗͉̝̮̹̐̋͑͐͆̐͐̾͛͑̂̓h̷̡͇̻̯̰̽̃̌̌̎̀͌͒̽͆̂̈́́̔̚͝e̸͍̲̖͎͗̂̒̎̑̅̓͒̈̈́̌̕ ̵̡͈͉̓̂̌͌͊̒͐̄̀̊̏͋͠͠͠Ş̸̝̅̇̐̀̓́̔̋̔͜w̶̢̛̤̥̤̹̰̿̀̍̓ǫ̸͙͎́̊r̵̡̨̧̛͈̰̖̰͓̼̟̅͌̎̊̐̃̂̓͛̒̐͆͋̈́̐̕ͅd̷͍̰̈́̈̀̾̓̽̿̾͆̀͗͒͘ ̶̣̜͎͉͉̝͕̥̋͛͆̎͂̓̉͋̀̎͘̚̚͘͝b̶̡͈̼̞̯͎͉̹̰̻͈̀̆̓̈́̃̎̌́̀e̶̙̱̟̦͍͗͛̑͆͊̌͋̓̎̿͘͜͝͝f̷̧̧̛̛̯͇͉̜̞̲͇̰̫̦͇͎̜̀̍̀͆͊͛̎̓̌͝ơ̷̮̲͎̾̍̎̈͑̾͊ŕ̴̦͇̩̰̭̞́̊̀̀̋̌̈́̃̆͒͘e̴̻̱͇̯̦̣͎̝̥̙̖̙̫̋̀̒͂̈͋͊̃̕ͅͅ ̴̡̛̜̗̫̹͕̞̝́̐̓̐̊̈́̂̌͝ͅF̶̧̜͕̟̖̈́ȁ̵̡̦͙̰͚̰̟͓̏̋̒̔͘͝m̶̧̮͙͓͓̱̙̖̫͍̅̔̊̆̈́i̸̝̓͋͛̊̈́͌͘͠ņ̸̨̹͍̠͕̤̫̗̱̱̺͚͗̈́ę̶̭̬̥͉̱̼͓̮̱͂̓̈͐̎́͑̐́̿͒̍̐̕͜͝.̶̨̢̭̖̖̏͑̊̔̿̐̓͘͝"̴͓̠͙͈̺͇͍̀̾͊͜͝͠ͅͅ

It moved. The broken sword in its right claw lifted, and the air screamed. It didn’t swing; it commanded the atmosphere to part. The resulting vacuum tore a furrow through the desert before the physical impact even landed—a meteoric descent that didn’t just hit the ground but replaced it with a crater. The shockwave was a physical wall, shredding the space between them.

"Gh—!" Shirou grunted, digging his heels in, Sion bracing against him. The tactical error was instantly clear: they had not put nearly enough distance between themselves and it.

From the colossal plume of sand and shattered earth, secondary fire erupted. Dozens of projectiles—pulsing orbs of corrupted magical energy in a sickly, ultraviolet hue—streaked out. They moved with predatory intelligence, seeking to hem them in, each leaving a sizzling scar of defilement on the landscape. The attack forced them apart, breaking their shared position into isolated points of vulnerability.

Sion’s response was a silent, calculated fury. Her etherlite filaments connected to her rifle in a flash, feeding it a torrent of alchemical formulae spun from half-a-dozen concurrent magic circles. The weapon hummed, glowed, and then roared. The shot it released was a voracious singularity of calculated energy, a devouring line that erased the incoming projectiles before slamming, unadulterated, into the center mass of the Alter Ego, which was now emerging, undeterred, from the settling storm of its own making.

xXx

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 22: 42 PM… 

The pen stilled. Shirou swallowed and  listened—not to the room, not to the distant hush of the dormitory—but to that imagined sound, the one he knew was not imagined at all. The cry that followed violence like an afterimage burned into the world itself. The kind no bounded field could fully erase.

“That’s the raw sound of a thing that refuses to be unmade, it is their declaration of war against the end given shape by pain and perpetuated by loss. A fossil, screaming.”

His pen scratched more harshly now, the strokes heavier, almost abrasive against the parchment. His jaw set as old lectures, forbidden treatises, and half-whispered truths resurfaced in his mind. History, in the World of Magecraft, was never a record. It was an active substance—reactive, corrosive, alive. He had learned that lesson not from books alone, but from places that remembered him back.

“Do not believe in time as a line. It is a wound and the Past bleeds into the Present, a transfusion of old poison into a new vein that doesn’t seep; it floods, and we build our homes in the red water.”

xXx

Hisarlik - Turkey.

July 29th 2003, 16: 24 PM…

The sand was no longer sand but a gory paste of black ichor and ground bone, and upon this wretched stage, the dead of the Iliad performed their endless, savage pantomime. Skeletal Achaeans in corroded bronze clashed with translucent Trojans whose wounds still wept spectral fire, a cacophony of clattering bones, silent screams, and the ghostly echo of breaking shields. These were the Biothanatoi—the violently slain who refused the peace of Hades. They were a tide of spectral rage locked in an eternal, mindless slaughter as their forms flickered between the glory of myth and the grim reality of rotten bone and rusted bronze like a poison that had ripped a hole in the present.

‘Faster…’ Shirou within that poison. A phantom in Mycenaean garb lurched at him, its jaw unhinged in a soundless roar while wielding a kopis raised high. He didn’t parry; he stepped inside the arc, his own spear lancing upward. The point took the shade beneath the chin, punching through spectral vertebrae and erupting in a burst of dissipating darkness. He had no time to savor the minor victory. A hiss to his left was his only warning—a serpentine neck, slick with black brine, snapped from a bubbling tidepool. Razored teeth gaped where Laocoon’s sons had been consumed. His golden round shield came across his body just in time, the impact jolting him sideways as the monstrous jaws clamped on the bronze facing with a screech. He kicked out, his boot connecting with a muscular coil, and wrenched his shield free, the creature recoiling back into its foul nest.

‘Not enough.’ The rhythm of his existence had narrowed to this: a lunge to spill a shade’s essence, a twist to avoid a rusted spear, a shield-bash to create a half-step of breathing room. Each motion was efficient, brutal, born of necessity, not style. He would gain a precious meter of clear ground, a momentary island in the chaos, only for the sea of hatred to surge anew. From the shimmering, blood-soaked air, another warrior would congeal, its hollow gaze not empty, but full—crowded with the final, frozen moment of a killing blow it had suffered or delivered three thousand years ago. Every space he carved was instantly reclaimed, every phantom felled replaced by two more, as if the battlefield itself was breathing them in and out, and he was merely a temporary obstruction in its wretched, eternal lung.

The horror was not confined to the ground. The sky was a torn tapestry of shrieking metal. The Stymphalian Birds filled the air. Their feathers were rusted iron plates, their cries the sound of grinding machinery, and their droppings sizzled where they hit, etching pits into the earth. They dove in jagged flocks, forcing everyone below into a frantic, dual-fronted war. And through it all flowed the wolves—not of flesh and blood, but of solidified solar malice. These familiars of cold hatred moved as liquid light, their forms blazing haloes that mauled anything in their path, leaving scorched footprints on the spectral and the real alike.

Three skeletal warriors advanced in a ragged line with their rust-pitted xiphos swords held high. He met the first with his shield, knocking the brittle arm aside. His own spear shot forward in the opening, piercing the hollow ribcage of the second. As it crumpled into dust, he used the momentum to pivot, the edge of his shield catching the third across where its jaw would have been, shattering the skull into fragments of spectral bone and dispersing malice.

“Hah… Hah…” He stood, chest heaving, in a small circle of settling ash. The air burned in his lungs, each gasp tasting of salt and grave-dirt. His fingers ached where they gripped the spear shaft, the muscle memory of a hundred minor parries and thrusts singing in his tendons.

‘Just a moment. Just need a second.’

“Still on your feet, Shirou?” Misaya looked like a ghost of herself. Her shirt was torn and drenched in unspeakable fluids—the cloying mud of a phantom river and the sticky, dark residue of disintegrated curses.  Her face, usually a mask of cruel poise, was drawn and ashen, her eyes hollow from the strain of wrestling with the death-energies of a Daemon. She had forced a river of corpses to swallow itself, and the cost was etched into her every trembling breath.

“Barely. You?” Shirou gave her sharp nod, as his gaze scanned her for mortal wounds. 

Her lips parted, but an answer was preempted by a grey blur impacting the ground beside them, sending up a spray of blackened sand. Svin rose from his crouch as his phantasmal state dissolved into frayed threads that retracted into his sleeves. Slung across his back was Ayush panting with soul-weary exhaustion.

“Light-wolf pack.” Svin grunted by way of explanation, gently lowering her. “She blasted a dozen of them into prismatic dust before the last three got close. Dislocated her shoulder throwing one into the sea-worm pit.”

“They… Did not enjoy the swim.” Ayush managed a weak, pained smile that didn’t reach her eyes.”The others?”She mused. “Last I saw, they were making a stand by the broken wall. They were holding… More or less.”

As if to provide a definitive answer on the “less” part, a very familiar, tenor shriek of pure, undiluted terror pierced the general din, rising above even the metallic shrieks of the birds.

“YOU COWARDLY, WORM-EATEN EXCUSE FOR A MAGUS! STAND YOUR GROUND OR I WILL USE YOU AS A LIVING PROJECTILE!”

This was followed by a deep, resonant crack and the rapidly fading  wail of Shinji yelling “WAITNOOOOO—!” As he pinwheeled into the distance, vanishing into the chaotic haze near the largest chasm to the Reverse Side.

A profound, shared silence descended on their little group as they simply stared in the direction of the vanished scream.

“…Holding.” Svin repeated, his tone utterly deadpan.

The moment was broken by the squelching arrival of two more figures. Gray and Rin stumbled into the temporary clearing, both coated from head to toe in a viscous, iridescent slime that glowed with a sickly internal light and smelled of rancid honey and ozone. Rin was trying to scrape it off her face with her sleeve, only making it worse. Gray simply looked miserable, Add held loosely in a slime-slick grip.

“Don’t. Ask.” Rin preemptively snapped, seeing their look. “The curse-spirits near the old gates… They burst. Sion and Caules are fine. Busy, but fine. They’re dealing with a… A concentrated stream of Arai near the main chasm.”

“Ayaka and Flat are with them.” Muttered Gray, throwing a glance at Shirou as she shivered.”But it’s like a waterfall of dying curses.”

‘Okay, four more.” Shirou’s mind, trained for triage, did a rapid count. “Doris? Has anyone seen Doris?”

“A mile that way.” Ayush used her good one to point east along the ravaged coastline. “Maybe less. She had one of the big sea-serpents in a… Well, it looked like a Full Nelson. She was using its face to pulverize a rock formation.”

“”Which means.” Misaya said as a flicker of her old dryness returned. “She is having the time of her life.”

‘At least she is fine.’ Shirou let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. They were scattered, battered to the brink, and fighting a war against a collective nightmare, but they were, against all logic, there. “Alright.” He muttered, the word a concession to a fragile hope. “Alright. If we can consolidate, we might be able to—”

Then, he froze as he caught an absence. The loud, chaotic, irrepressible presence that was as much a force of nature as the horrors around them was missing. 

“Izcalli.” His voice dropped, sharp with a new alarm. “Where is he?”

The answer came from the heavens, not in the form of words, but in a blistering torrent of outrage. A stream of incendiary, creatively blasphemous Spanish curses tore across the sky, growing rapidly louder as they all looked up.

High above the dogfight of rust-metal birds, a human-shaped comet was descending, trailing smoke and the shattered remnants of earth-laced magical energy. His form a blur of motion and fury, spinning wildly as he fell. His diatribe, aimed at the heavens, the earth, and every god that had ever forsaken his people, was uninterrupted even as the beach rushed up to meet him.

“—¡PINCHES PÁJAROS DE MIERDA, Y TU TAMBIÉN, CIELO DE MIERDA! ¡TE VOY A ARRANCAR LAS—!”

The impact was spectacular. He hit a cluster of weathered boulders at the edge of the fighting with a sound like a siege weapon striking stone and sand, rock fragments alongside the petrified wood of an ancient ship’s rib erupted in a cloud.

Silence returned, save for the ever-present background roar of the phantom war.

Then, from the heart of the fresh, dusty crater, a single hand emerged. It was dust-caked, one finger clearly broken, and it trembled with the effort. It raised itself with agonizing slowness, and extended a grimy, defiant thumbs-up.

A voice, raspy with inhaled dirt and undeniable pain, wheezed out into the air.

“Estoy… Bien…”

xXx

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 22: 45 PM… 

The pen lifted. The empty space that followed felt deliberate, almost accusatory. Shirou stared at it, aware that any attempt to fill it would cheapen what it represented. Time did not politely move forward. It ruptured, folded, reopened scars thought long healed. Magecraft did not study history so much as prod it, reopen it, drain it for power and then act surprised when it screamed.

“And from that tide, our oldest dreams and newest nightmares wade ashore. Fantasy encroaches reality. The things we imagined, for good or ill—our stories grow tired of the page, of being told.”

xXx

Marrbury Fellgate - Dartmoor. 

December 27th 2001, 23: 57 PM… 

The world had become a throat, and it was screaming her name. Not the landscape, not the sky bruised purple and green by the unholy storm, but the very air between them, vibrating with a hatred so specific it felt like fingers of ice tracing her spine. The gnarled trees were no longer trees but arthritic, blackened hands, their twig-fingers clutching at the hem of her cloak as she stumbled back. The ground, a sucking, swampy mire, seemed to pull at her boots, whispering stay, stay, we have been waiting.

Gray’s shivering was a violent, uncontrollable thing, a tremor that started deep in her marrow and rattled her teeth. Add’s frantic, metallic clatter in her grip was a distant alarm bell heard from underwater—a sound that meant nothing, solved nothing. Her vision tunnelled, the desperate fight at the barrow—Luvia’s diamond-bright flashes, Rin’s barked commands, the bestial snarls of Svin and Doris—receding into a blurred, silent pantomime. She saw Sion, a statue of concentration with etherlite whipping around her like a silver halo, trying to suture the bleeding wound in the world, but the sight was a flat image, devoid of meaning.

Even the memory of the dark hunter, the one who moved like a jaguar and fought with the fury of a plundered temple, brought no anchor. She saw him shred a ravenous hound with obsidian claws, a shadow against shadows, but the sight was swallowed by the yawning pit inside her.

And the light… The stubborn, frustrating, warm light she associated with him… She tried to grasp it, to imagine the feeling of his unthinking, self-sacrificing stance at her side. But the memory slipped away like smoke, extinguished by the suffocating cold creeping up from the earth. The warmth wouldn’t come because the cold had a source, and it was coming for her.

Then the sky split.

It wasn’t a crack of lightning. It was a silent, wet rip, like rotten canvas tearing under its own weight. The air above the battlefield bloomed into a wound, edges frayed and weeping streams of phosphorescent decay. The thunder that followed was not sound but a pressure, a deep, sub-audible groan that vibrated in her jaw, in the hollows of her eyes. Gray’s breath stopped. The violent shivering locked into a terrifying rigidity. Every muscle clenched, a prey animal sensing the hawk’s shadow.

They poured from the tear.

Horsemen first, but not of flesh. They were congealed tempest, jagged silhouettes astride nightmarish shapes that were part steed, part swirling vortex of emerald flame and bruise-purple smoke. They brought a silence with them, a dead zone where the sounds of battle were strangled. Behind them, spilling forth in a ceaseless, wretched cavalcade, came the host—a flowing river of elongated limbs, antlers fused with bone, faces that were smears of hunger and regret. Their dance was a sinuous, awful contortion, a celebration of everything that had ever died badly.

And at the heart of it…

His mount was carved from the heart of a cliff, basalt and obsidian given a terrible, snorting life. Upon it, he was a spire of jagged shadow and barbed iron, a crown of fractured lightning and thorn fixed upon a head that had no face, only a deeper darkness. In his grasp was the lance. Her lance. But wrong. Twisted. A weeping, sickly parody that pulsed with a nausea that had nothing to do with the stomach and everything to do with the soul. Its very presence was unmaking.

His gaze swept the field. It passed over the struggling lights of her classmates, over the raging dark of the hunter. It did not stop. It did not hesitate. It landed on her, and in that moment, Gray ceased to be. She was a thing seen, a marked thing, a morsel laid upon a plate. The feast was here. The main course was her terror, her life, her fragile, borrowed self. There was no running. There was only the inevitable, rushing cold of that lance-point, the end of every story she’d ever been part of.

A touch.

Not a grab. Not a shake. A hand. Solid. Warm. Real. It settled on her shoulder, its weight a paradox—heavier than the crushing sky, yet gentler than a breath. It burned through the icy rigidity, a brand of humanity against the mythic chill.

A voice, quiet, frayed at the edges from exhaustion, but iron-certain, cut through the symphony of doom.

“He won’t have you.”

Four words. A statement, not a challenge. A law laid down.

The frozen lock in her chest shattered. Air, sharp and shocking as broken glass, tore into her lungs in a ragged, sucking gasp. She convulsed with the force of it, her head whipping around, silver hair sticking to a face wet with tears she hadn’t felt falling.

Shirou stood beside her. He wasn’t looking at the King of Storms. He was looking at her, his amber eyes holding hers for a fleeting second, and in them was no pity, no fear—only a ferocious, protective certainty, as if his mere will could rebuild a wall between her and the abyss. Then his gaze lifted, and his whole body turned, placing himself squarely in the path of that descending gaze.

In his hand was a sword she did not know. It was not glorious. It was not beautiful. It was brutal and simple, a thick, dark length of metal that looked less forged and more hewn from the concept of defiance. It held no light of its own, but seemed to gather the chaotic, sickly glow of the storm and the hunt and choke it into darkness around its edges. He held it not with the grace of a knight, but with the grim, two-handed readiness of a man who has found the one piece of ground he will never, ever yield.

“I’m here, Gray.”

xXx

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 22: 47 PM… 

His thoughts ran parallel to the ink. The Theory of Textures had always struck him as less theory and more reluctant confession. The world was layered with belief, with narrative sediment pressed into reality by repetition and reverence. Gods, monsters, miracles—none of them were lies. They were drafts. Revisions overwritten by newer ages, buried but never erased. Magecraft did not chart these layers because it sought truth; it did so because it feared what would happen if it didn’t.

“They desire to breathe, they crave to taste, they want a world to walk in.”

A breath escaped him then, low and weary. Merlin’s voice echoed unbidden in his memory, infuriatingly gentle, impossibly old. Old gods do not die, he had said. They dream. And dreams, given enough time and belief, always look for a way to wake. Shirou’s grip on the pen tightened as he remembered that smile—fond, distant, and entirely unconcerned with the cost.

“I have stood on the crumbling shore where human history ends, and something older looks back. When the horrors of memory and soil awake. The worst are not the ones with fangs, but the ones with reasons. The ones born from our own turned hearts, or from the deep, dark patience of the land.”

xXx

Dis Pater - Rome.

April 15th 2003, 20: 39 PM…

The noise did not just fill the cavernous space—it was the space. It pressed in from all sides, a hot, wet wall of sound: the raw-throated roar of the crowd, a thousand voices harmonizing in savage delight; the sharp, piercing shrieks that cut through the din only to be swallowed by laughter; the low, guttural snarls of beasts and the wet, tearing sounds that followed. It vibrated in the teeth, hummed in the bones, a ceaseless, pounding pressure that left no room for thought, only reaction.

Above the crimson-sanded pit, the audience hung like a grotesque tapestry. A senator, the purple stripe on his toga now a muddy brown with old wine and newer stains, slammed his fist on the marble rail, his face contorted in ecstatic fury as he screamed for the kill. Beside him, a matron with hair coiled into an impossible tower of curls and jewels leaned forward, her painted mouth a perfect ‘o’ of delight, her silk fan fluttering not to cool herself but to better savor the coppery mist that wafted up from where a gladiator, entangled in a net, was being methodically opened by a man with a short, cruel knife. Each shallow, precise slash drew a fresh, shuddering cry, and with each cry, the crowd’s roar swelled, a wave of appreciation for the craftsman’s technique, for the perfect red lines appearing on tan skin, for the artistry of the suffering itself.

And rising from the sand, as fundamental to the scene as the columns supporting the vaults, were the crosses. They stood in a ragged forest of splintered wood, each one a centerpiece. Upon them, figures twisted in a silence that screamed louder than the mob. One bore the faint, shimmering halo of a saint, the nails through his wrists weeping golden light that sizzled on the polluted air. Another held the stern, defiant posture of a philosopher, his mouth moving in soundless rebuttal against the madness below. They were the fixed points in the chaos, the eternal dissenters whose punishment was the main exhibit, the revered icons of this inverted cathedral. The dying gladiators and the torn slaves were merely the fleeting, beautiful offerings laid before their agonized altars.

At the very lip of the carnage, where the sand met polished marble, the feast unfolded. It was not a separate event, but the logical conclusion of the spectacle. On low silken couches, courtesans reclined, their mouths smeared not with cosmetic rouge but a deeper, wetter crimson. They plucked grapes from silver bowls, but the fruit they pressed between a senator’s lips was swollen, dark, and burst with a sound that was less a pop and more the muffled crack of a small bone. The senator chewed, his eyes rolling back in a parody of gustatory bliss, dark juice, thick as syrup, tracing a path through the stubble on his chin.

Nearby, a group of tribunes raised their goblets high, the vessels not of gold but of tarnished, blood-blackened silver. “To Macedon!” One slurred, his voice thick. “To the sweet yield of Corinth!” Laughed another. They drank, and the liquid that poured into their mouths was impossibly dark, clinging to the sides of the cups as it fell. Their throats working with desperate, greedy swallows, as if they could consume not just wine, but the very wealth, the very life-force, of the nations they had crushed. Their feasting was a silent, ravenous ingestion of ghostly plunder, their laughter the digestion of stolen history.

A path, thin and temporary, was being hacked through this living monument to consumption. Shirou’s gladius was a blur of dull iron, its movements efficient and brutal. It didn’t clash against other swords; it severed clutching, skeletal fingers that reached from the shadows of a couch, it sheared through the drunken, grasping arm of a phantom patrician who tried to pull him down into the revelry. These weren’t opponents seeking a fight—they were embodiments of a single, overwhelming hunger, a need to pull all things down into the same bottomless feast.

Beside him, Rin carved space with explosions of pure, concussive force. A gem flew from her fingers not with a beam of light, but with a sharp crack that blew apart a knot of laughing courtesans, their forms dissolving into mist and the echo of their mirth. Another detonated at the paws of a spectral lion, its snarl cut short as its substance was shredded into nothingness. Her jaw was clenched, her every movement a violent negation, a refusal to let the pervasive gluttony touch her.

In their wake, steps unsteady, came Caren. The serene, placid mask she usually wore was gone, stripped away. Her face had the pallor of the moon, her wide golden eyes fixed on a middle distance, seeing not the individual horrors but the colossal, blasphemous tapestry they formed. Her lips moved, shaping the silent syllables of a familiar prayer, but no sound emerged. The words themselves seemed to curdle and die in the poisoned air before they could leave her mouth. The concept that this—this symphony of sacrilege, this marriage of pain and pleasure—lay festering beneath the Vatican’s own foundations, beneath the tombs of saints and the halls of piety, was not just a shock. It was a violation of reality’s order, a putrefaction seeping up from the world’s darkest memory.

“Eyes forward, Hortensia!” Rin’s voice was a whip-crack, strained and sharp with her own revulsion. She didn’t look back, her focus on blasting a path through a wall of stumbling, chanting slave-shades. “Don’t give it the satisfaction! There’s a way out of this! There has to be!”

They came not in a wave, but in a slow, seeping tide—the slaves. Their bodies were walking testaments to hunger, ribs etched sharply against translucent skin, limbs like brittle sticks. They did not wield blades or spears. Their weapons were their open, imploring palms and their voices, a dry, rustling chorus that rose above even the crowd’s roar, yet felt whispered directly into the ear. “Join us… The table is laid… You are empty, you are wanting… Taste… just a taste…” Their hands, when they brushed against an arm or grabbed at a cloak, were corpse-cold, and their touch left not a mark of dirt, but a slick, invisible film that made the skin crawl with a phantom sense of fullness, of cloying, unwanted satiation.

And threading through it all, a silver needle in the coarse fabric of noise, was the laughter. It was a thin, reedy sound, constantly breaking into wet, gurgling coughs, as if the one laughing was drowning on dry land. It dripped down from the highest, most lavishly draped box, a nest of Tyrian purple hangings now dark and stiff, the color of a vicious, weeks-old contusion.

Within that bruised bower, propped on a mountain of stained silk cushions, was the laugh’s source. He was a parody of imperial grandeur. His face was a shocking, swollen purple, the veins standing out in black relief, his eyes bulging with a manic, unblinking delight. Every wheezing cackle shook his frame, and with each convulsion, fresh, dark blood would trickle from his nostrils or bubble at the corners of his grinning mouth, as if his joy were literally tearing him apart from the inside. The magnificent purple cloak pooled around him was not just stained; it was crusted, a second skin of dried gore. One hand, adorned with rings that dug into puffy flesh, lifted from the cushions, a weak, fluttering gesture that beckoned towards the three figures fighting their way below. His head lolled on his neck, a puppet with cut strings, but his fever-bright gaze tracked them with possessive, hungry amusement.

“Come!” He rasped, the laughter subsiding into a series of bloody coughs. “Come, little strugglers! The performance is for all! But the main event… The main event is in my den! You must see… You must witness!”

His feverish eyes, glowing with a sickly crimson light, locked onto them. He pointed a trembling, jewel-encrusted finger not back into the arena, but towards a great archway behind his box, shrouded in deeper shadow. The archway led away from the noise, into a part of the hollow that thrummed with a different, more visceral pressure.

“It is here!” Caligula crowed, a fresh trickle of blood painting his chin. “It dreams! It calls! It wants to embrace you too! To pull you into its warm, red cradle!” He broke into another fit of laughter, this one raw and tearing, as he slapped his thigh, leaving a bloody print on the rich fabric.

From the darkness of that archway, a deep, rhythmic pulse became audible, felt in the floor more than heard. It was the slow, mighty heartbeat of something vast and wet. And with each pulse, a wave of nauseating, metallic sweetness washed out over the arena, a scent of amniotic fluid and deep ocean trenches and something impossibly, primordially alive. The crimson thing nesting was not just an object. It was an invitation to an ending far more profound than mere slaughter on the sand. It was the promise of being dissolved, welcomed, consumed by a source older than Rome, older than sin, waiting in the silent dark just beyond the emperor’s deranged, bleeding smile.

xXx

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 22: 50 PM… 

His eyes unfocused, recalling presences that did not announce themselves with roars or claws, but with justification. Things that spoke of necessity, of balance, of inevitability. Evils that believed themselves correct were far more difficult to oppose than beasts that simply hungered.

“And beyond even that dread… A deeper stillness, for in the perfect, star-stitched black, the ones beyond the stars simmer. They do not hate. They do not love. They are. And their mere existence is a solvent, dissolving the meaning of our little dramas under a gaze as old as void itself.”

xXx

Nemo Point - Pacific Ocean.

July 30th 2002, 22: 22 PM…

The world had become a lung, and it was breathing something other than air. A warm, viscous dampness filled every inhalation, coating his  throat with the taste of salt and something older—the taste of stone forgotten at the bottom of time. It condensed on his skin, not as sweat, but as a film of eager moisture that seemed to seep inward, whispering of simpler shapes, of softness without bone.

“The stars… They’re singing in the wrong key…” Doris mumbled, her voice a wet rasp. But she wasn’t looking at the sky; her head was tilted back, mouth agape, as if drinking from an invisible rain. Her eyes had lost all iris and pupil, becoming perfect, glossy mirrors that reflected not the ship, but a vista of swirling, nebulous gases lit by a sickly, greenish sun that pulsed like a festering wound. A long strand of viscous saliva, the same iridescent grey as the deck-slime, connected her chin to her chest. Beside her, Svin’s body was a theater of involuntary transformation. His spine arched and crackled, not in pain, but with a dreadful elasticity. His fingers, pressed against the softening wood, had webbed, the skin between them a translucent membrane pulsing with veins of that same alien green. A sound escaped him—a low, chittering keen that rose and fell in a rhythm that mimicked, with hideous accuracy, the clicking of colossal, chitinous mandibles.

‘Their minds are gone…. Eaten from the inside.’

“The Fifth Sun… It drowns…” Izcalli was a monument to a losing war. He had driven his own obsidian knife into the deck, clinging to its hilt as if it were the last root in a crumbling world. “ The water is black… It drinks the light…” His voice was guttural, each word fought for and mangled. The vibrant, solar glyphs of his tattoos were blurring, their sharp lines melting and running like wet ink, as if the concept of light itself was being diluted by a deeper, colder dark. From his throat came not a growl, but a gurgling, hydro-thermal vent sigh, the sound of a tectonic plate settling on the ocean floor.

“G-Get… Up” Misaya’s declaration was a ghost of itself, the words slurring as her tongue felt swollen and foreign. She had one hand tangled in Luvia’s golden hair, not for comfort, but to keep the other girl’s head from lolling completely backward into the muck. Her famous composure was a melted mask. Her eyes, usually sharp as cut gems, were cloudy marbles, fixed on nothing. “The vintage… Is spoiled…” She whispered, a faint, confused frown on her lips, as if trying to identify a foul note in a once-fine wine.

“Nononononono it’s in my ears it’s in my ears it’s growing in my ears—” Shinji’s voice was a rising, hysterical screech. He was scratching frantically at the sides of his head, his fingernails leaving bloody trails on skin that had taken on the waxy, pallid look of a drowned corpse. His sobs hitched with a liquid, drowning sound.

“A-again… Again…” Rin was shaking, her whole body trembling with the effort of a mind trying to build a dam of calculus against a tsunami of raw chaos. “That’s… that can’t… It reverses when you look away…” She clutched her head, a thin, agonized whine escaping her. The familiar, comforting structure of theory was not just collapsing; it was inverting, showing her glimpses of an anti-logic where cause followed effect and two plus two equaled a silent, screaming void.

‘We’re not standing on a ship. We’re standing in the throat of something. And we’re being digested.’

The dome of light sheltering the last few was a dying star. Ayaka’s voice, once clear and firm, was a reedy warble. “We should—ack!” She choked as the chant triggered a reflex to vomit, bringing up only a mouthful of the salty, thick fluid. The paper in her hands turned black and crumbled to sludge. Gray was silent, tears streaming down her face, not from sadness, but from the sheer, overwhelming pressure against her spirit. Add felt like a dead weight in her hands, the usual low-level consciousness within the scythe reduced to a faint, terrified pulse, a child hiding under the bed. “It’s too big… We’re too small…” She breathed, the words lost.

“Integrity at twelve percent…” Caules intoned, his voice stripped of all emotion, a broken recording. His familiars were gone, dissolved into puffs of mist that were immediately absorbed by the hungry air. Ayush had stopped chanting. She was simply rocking, her arms wrapped around herself, her eyes wide open but seeing nothing, a low, monotone hum the only sign she was still present.

“Wonderful…” Flat’s observation cut through the despair with cheerful, clinical horror. “The molecular bonds in the railing are displaying quantum uncertainty states! Is it wood or is it flesh? It’s both until observed! Sion, the predictive algorithms for this must be wonderful!”

Her response was not a scream, but a system crash given voice. A short, burst-transmission of pure static erupted from her, and she violently tore the glasses from her face, hurling them overboard. They didn’t clatter; they were swallowed by the viscous sea with a soft glorp. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, her body wracked with dry heaves. “It is a lie… It is a truth. It denies, it accepts…”

‘She’s staring at the cracks in reality, and it’s killing her.’

Shirou’s own mind was a battleground. He commanded his arm to lift, to trace a sword—any sword. But instead of their clean curves, he saw them melt into each other swirling into a grey, formless ooze that sprouted minute, wriggling cilia. He flinched back, the mental recoil physical. In his palm, a pressure formed, then a warmth. For a second, he felt a hilt. Then the warmth turned feverish, the hilt squirmed, and the projected form dissolved into a handful of warm, briny slurry that dripped between his fingers.

The world around him was no longer merely alien; it was actively hostile to his perception. The ship’s railing didn’t just look bent; it seemed to throb, its line warping in and out of focus, delivering a sharp, nausea-inducing pain behind his eyes if he stared too long. The mast wasn’t a mast. It was a dark, vertical smear against the heavier dark, and at its peak, something that might have been a crow’s nest pulsed softly, like a cyst. The wetness he’d inhaled was no longer just in his lungs. He felt it behind his eyes, a cold, pooling pressure, and with it came visions.

An Earth where the continents were unrecognizable, slimy masses beneath a bloated, greenish moon. In skies choked with ammonia and methane, things with leathery wings the size of castles circled lazily, their passing blotting out the feeble sun for years at a time. The seas were not blue, but a boiling, soupy black, and from them rose not cities, but vast, organic reefs of pulsating stone that sang in ultrasonic frequencies, driving the few nascent, worm-like things on land to frenzy and self-cannibalization. And in the deepest trench, under pressure that would crush mountains, It stirred. Not sleeping, but dreaming. And Its dream was the world—a wet, screaming, chaotic world of endless, meaningless change and hunger. A reign of a aeons, where the only law was the law of the maw and the melting pot.

‘This… This is what ruled. Before us. Before Gaia.’

The pressure in his mind intensified. It was not a thought, but a tectonic shift in the bedrock of his sanity. A knowledge, vast and cold as the interstellar void, deposited in his consciousness: The journey ends. The dreamer’s larder opens. The outside was the inside.

All sound was vacuumed away. The slosh, the moans, the crackle of dying magecraft—gone. The silence was absolute, a physical weight on the eardrums, a suffocating blanket. In that void, the ragged, wet sound of Rin trying not to whimper was a thunderclap.

His head jerked up, his neck vertebrae popping with the violence of the movement. The implanted dream-memory erupted—not an image, but a sense-memory: the silhouette of a mountain that walked, beneath drowned stars arranged in mad constellations. 

‘No. Not again.’

Then, the sea performed its blasphemy.

It did not recede. It unfolded. Like a great, black flower of rotten petals peeling back from its own corrupted heart, the ocean drew away from a central point, revealing not the sea floor, but an absence of world. A wound.

And in that wound, it festered.

His reinforced sight, burning the last dregs of his magical energy, forced reality upon him. It was not a sight to be seen, but a poison to be injected.

A cancerous geometry of impossible scale. Monoliths of stygian, seaweed-slick stone rose in spirals that defied the very idea of ‘direction’—they coiled inward, downward, and through themselves simultaneously. Towers, not built but grown in agonized contortions, leaned at angles that caused a lancing pain in the visual cortex, their pinnacles not piercing the water-ceiling but merging with it, stone bleeding into liquid. Every inch of the titanic, sunken sprawl was carved—no, infested—with bas-reliefs. They hinted at shapes: vast, membranous wings folded over mountainous forms; forests of tentacles thicker than skyscrapers; clusters of eyes, not in pairs, but in seething, intelligent clusters that stared from every plane and curve. This was not a city. It was the idea of one—the fossilized scream of a universe where this architecture was not madness, but the only possible truth. And it was not dead. It was dreaming.

From the spiraling, nonsensical heart of that sunken blasphemy, the call finally came. It made no sound in the air, for the air was gone. It resonated in the fluid of their inner ears, in the cerebrospinal fluid bathing their brains, in the very electrons of their atoms. It was a vibration that was the antithesis of language, of music, of any ordered signal. It was the sound of chaos given a name.

And as the last vestiges of his human mind dissolved in that cosmic broadcast, the words did not form in the silence. They were the silence. They etched themselves into the crumbling walls of his consciousness, the final, inevitable, and utterly damning scripture of a truth too terrible to bear, yet too vast to deny:

̸̺̗͌P̸̥͛̀ḩ̷͑'̶̡͍̅n̴̞̠̓͝g̷̗̓l̴̮̄u̷͚͗͘ī̸͍ ̶̱̪̒͒m̷̪̯͊̉g̸͉̒l̴̥̩̅ẉ̸͓͂'̷̤̰͝n̵̦̓ă̵͓͍̅f̸͇͔̈̕ḧ̸̻́ ̸̦̽͆C̸̢̫̓̓t̷͎͛͝h̴̼͌̀u̸̠̩͐l̷͕̖̇h̷̬͎͂̆u̷̺̹͋ ̶͍͔́R̴̝̳̕'̵̨̣́l̶̙̗̋ÿ̸͇̩́̓ḙ̵͝h̶͔͒̈́ ̷̳͓̾w̴̟̙͛g̶̬̭͑â̶̢̠h̵̝͆̕'̵̰̣̍ṅ̸͕͖a̸̢̪̾̚g̸̩͖̔l̷͇̟̂ ̷̙̿͋f̵̫͉̊͝h̸̺̰̑t̸̲͇̄a̷͕͑ģ̷̺́ň̸̪͝

xXx

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 22: 56 PM… 

The pause that followed was heavier than the others. His lamp hummed softly, the crystal of Albion glowing with steady indifference. Shirou felt, for a fleeting moment, very small—not in fear, but in scale. Humanity’s struggles, magecraft’s feuds, even the wars of gods were motes of dust drifting through an uncaring infinity. Not judged. Not opposed. Simply… irrelevant.

He finished the thought with careful precision.

“This is the architecture of the real. It is vast. It is deep. It grinds with the sound of forgotten names.”

Shirou let out a long, weary sigh and leaned back in his chair, the sound rougher than the ones before it. He reread the last lines, jaw tightening slightly. Too heavy. Too absolute. It felt honest, yes—but honesty did not always have to be a descent. He raised a hand and scratched at his cheek absently, ink-stained fingers brushing skin that still carried faint scars of other, older days. His eyes drifted from the page, wandering the room once more, until they inevitably returned to the photograph on his desk.

His friends.

Frozen in a moment of chaos and laughter, of poorly concealed affection and mutual tolerance sharpened into trust. They were ridiculous. They were loud. They were flawed and difficult and impossible to fully predict. And yet—there they were. With him. Always with him. The thought settled something in his chest that had been aching for longer than he cared to admit.

He lowered his gaze back to the parchment and began to write again, the pen lighter now, the strokes less burdened.

“But…

There are seconds, sometimes, where you feel it. Where the weight of the World is felt. Not as something crushing you, but as something precious you suddenly have to hold.”

xXx

Sævarstaðir - Reverse Side of the World.

January 9th 2002, 20: 00 PM…

The stolen sword came in a whistling arc, aimed to cleave him from shoulder to hip. Nidung’s laughter was a wet, ragged thing, spraying spittle and old blood. But Shirou didn’t parry with his own weapon. Instead, he pivoted, turning the dodge into a controlled sacrifice, letting the edge kiss his shoulder in a shallow, burning line. Blood welled and flew in a crimson spray, but the momentum was his now. He used the turn, driving off the ball of his foot with a force that seemed to crack the air, and launched a rising thrust that aimed not for the body, but for the base of the king’s horned helmet. The point missed the skull by a hair’s breadth as Nidung wrenched his head back, the mad laughter choking into a grunt of surprise.

“Yes! That! That is the taste I sought!” Nidung bellowed, and the berserk charge began anew.

Their next clash was a detonation of force. The concussion snuffed the surrounding spectral flames in a single, silent gasp, plunging the battleground into a deeper, more intimate gloom lit only by the erratic gleam of their weapons. And in that sudden darkness, Shirou found himself ensnared.

The Mad King’s brutality was not mindless. It was a predatory cunning honed over countless brawls and massacres. He had maneuvered Shirou perfectly, herding him into a position where the geography of the ruins worked against him. Now, with a final, twisting step, Nidung brought both his weapons to bear from opposite angles—the stolen sword high and to the left, the crude knife low and to the right. They scissored in, a pincer of certain death aimed at Shirou’s neck and chest. There was no room to deflect both. No space to retreat.

Shirou’s amber eyes, however, held no panic. They held calculation. In the split-second eternity before the blades met his flesh, he made his choice.

He did not attack the sword. He attacked the knife.

The crude, brutal blade was the king’s original weapon, the extension of his will. The sword was a borrowed tool, a temporary prize. And it was connected to Shirou by the faintest, most fundamental thread—the trace of his own projection, the ghost of its creation still lingering in its form.

As he swept down in a golden arc to meet the ascending knife, Shirou, with a thought as sharp and final as a guillotine’s drop, unmade the stolen sword. It did not shatter. It dissolved. The iron lost cohesion, the edge blurred into motes of light, the entire structure collapsing inward like a sandcastle in a sudden wind as the psychic thread connecting it to him snapped back, reabsorbed into his being.

The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic for Nidung’s balance. The resistance he expected from the left vanished. His scissor-strike became a lurch. In that moment of shocking, weightless discontinuity, Shirou  had completed its arc.

A dry thunderclap echoed off the ruins. The sacred blade met the crude iron knife, and there was no contest. The king’s weapon did not break; it was erased. It burst into a shower of dissipating prana, the spiritual energy scattering like dying fireflies, as if it had never been more than a stubborn illusion.

Nidung stumbled, his remaining momentum carrying him forward into empty space. He blinked, a flicker of genuine, childlike confusion crossing his ravaged face as he stared at his now-empty left hand. Then his gaze dropped to his right, where the hilt of his knife was gone, and only a searing line of golden light remained across his forearm.

The scream that followed was not human. It was the sound of a mountain cracking, of a beast realizing it was fatally wounded.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!”

Pure, undiluted rage tore from his throat, a bestial howl that shook dust from the crumbling stones. He tried to recoil, but it was too late. The line of light bloomed into a fountain of dark, ichorous blood. Shirou’s edge had passed through his guard and through his wrist. The hand that had held his beloved knife, the instrument of his butchery, clenched once in a final, spasmodic grip, then tumbled to the scorched earth with a dull, final thud.

The Mad King staggered back, his balance gone, his world reduced to the agony of the stump and a fury so profound it seemed to burn the very air around him. His eyes, wide with a pain that transcended death, found Shirou.

“VOLUNDR!”

The name was a thunderous curse, a plea, a summoning all in one. It rolled across the desolate plane, and the earth itself shuddered in response, as if the word were a spike driven into the heart of reality. It was the cry of a king for his smith, for the maker of his doom, a howl of betrayal against the very concept of creation.

Shirou heard it. He felt the weight of the legend in that name. And he did not stop.

The sword answered its wielder’s resolve. The sword’s gentle gold ignited, transforming from precious metal into solidified glory. Filaments of white-fire and dawn-light erupted from its blade, illuminating the ruins with a harsh, sacred clarity, casting long, trembling shadows that danced like fleeing spirits.

And he raised it overhead, both hands tight on the hilt. The world seemed to hold its breath. The king’s roars, the distant groan of the unstable reality, even the pounding of his own heart—all faded into a profound, pressurized silence. There was only the sword, the enemy, and the single word that needed to be spoken.

It was not a shout. It was a decree, spoken in the language of the weapon’s birth, a whisper that carried the weight of a falling star.

ᴳᵒˡᵈᵉⁿ ᔆʷᵒʳᵈ ᵒᶠ ᵗʰᵉ ⱽⁱᶜᵗᵒʳⁱᵒᵘˢ

“Caliburn.”

The world broke.

The ground beneath Shirou’s feet did not crack; it opened, a localized crater of pure force. The atmosphere shattered like strained glass, unable to contain the concentration of triumphant light. What erupted was not merely an attack, but an event—a miniature sun blossoming in the heart of the desolation, a cascading tsunami of gold that consumed sight, sound, and shadow.

Within that annihilating brilliance, Nidung’s final roar rose—a vortex of hatred, despair, and shattered pride that vibrated the very light attempting to erase him. Then it was gone, swallowed whole.

The king did not simply die. He was unmade from the point of impact. The golden light consumed his chest, then his shoulders, his neck, his screaming head. His form burned and fragmented, the upper half of his body dissolving into swirling ash that glowed for a moment before winking out. His crown liquefied, dripping like wax. His armor crumpled inwards, consumed not by heat, but by the sheer, purifying intensity of the light.

And as the last of his substance faded, in the final microsecond of his existence within that divine storm, he spent his last shred of will not on a curse for Shirou, but on a final, desperate cry to the only artisan he had ever acknowledged, a scream hurled into the void as if it could reverse time and restore his hand.

“VOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNDRR!”

xXx

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 22: 59 PM… 

He paused, breath catching softly. He remembered then—countless moments layered atop one another. Hands reaching for him when he stumbled. Voices calling his name, not in command, but in concern. Arguments, laughter, shared meals eaten at odd hours, wounds tended without questions asked. He had never been alone here. Not truly. And whatever this weight was—whatever terrible, beautiful burden the World demanded—it was not meant to be carried by one pair of shoulders.

“And in that second, everything gets clear. And Fate itself… It is seen. Just for a flash. A single path through the dark against the inertia of a monstrous, magnificent universe, the decision to be a splinter in the flesh of destiny.”

xXx

Krasnovodsk Gulf - Turkmenistan.

July 27th 2001, 19: 13 PM…

The cloying stench of spilled intestines and ozone was a physical presence, thick enough to taste with every ragged breath. ‘F-Fuck this.’ Besides him, the cracked, salt-encrusted earth of the Caspian shore, littered with the wreckage of his previous projections was now slick with ichor and fluid from things that had never been meant to live. And he moved through this nightmare garden with a desperate, calculating grace, his world narrowed to the next three seconds of survival.

A fleshy vulture, its wings a tattered tapestry of skin and vibrating cartilage, dove at him with a sound like tearing silk. He didn’t slash, he’d learned. Instead, he dropped into a crouch and thrusted Gáe Bhuidhe upward, not aiming for a killing blow, but letting the yellow spear’s curse-laden tip graze the creature’s distended belly. Where it touched, the furious process of unnatural regeneration stuttered and necrotized as the wound wept black inert sludge instead of knitting together. The creature shrieked, veering away, but its sacrifice bought time for three others to swoop in from his blind spots.

‘Can’t get surrounded. Not again.’

At the same time, a droning cloud composed of fist-sized orbs of chitin and angry light, descended.  ‘Borzak would kill for those…’ Cancerous mockeries of bees that sought to latch onto his skin and inject something worse than poison. In response, Gáe Dearg was already in his other hand, becoming a crimson blur as he didn’t swat, but threaded it through the heart of the swarm. The property of the spearhead didn’t destroy the swarm, it unwove them. Each bee it touched simply… Ceased, as its sustaining energy pattern was severed and dissolving into motes of harmless dust. The movement was efficient, but costly. Each precise thrust and parley burned stamina and focus he couldn’t afford to waste, and for every cloud he dispelled, two more vultures gathered on the currents rising from the sun-baked ground.

Then the ground itself heaved. The lumbering giants stitched together from the entrails of camels and who-knew-what-else, lurched forward. They had no eyes, only weeping sockets, but they reached for him with dozens of grasping, rope-like intestinal tendrils. ‘I hate this magecraft…’ One stream of consciousness tracked the diving shadows of the vultures, another calculated the sweep of the grasping tentacles. He became a spinning pivot point between the two spears, Gáe Bhuidhe lashing out to wither a questing tendril that got too close, Gáe Dearg’s shaft intercepting a vulture’s talons with a shower of sparks. He jumped, twisted in the air, landed on a crumbling salt pillar, and used the height to drive the yellow Rose of Mortality down into the shoulder of a cyclops. The flesh didn’t just pierce; it spoiled, the area around the wound turning a gangrenous grey and sagging.

‘Don’t kill. Wound, cripple, deter. If you kill too many, he’ll just use their deaths as fuel for the next atrocity. Have to draw him out. Have to make him commit.’

“A delightful dance! Truly! But you look so terribly… Lonely out there!”

The voice, rich with mocking amusement and an archaic, melodic cadence, washed down from above. Bai observed from a cliff as he gestured languidly, and a new drone, this one with a single, blazing orb embedded in its chest, detached from the flock.

‘Mystic Eye.’ Shirou saw the air around the orb waver. ‘ Flame.’ He was already moving as the blistering stream of white-hot fire erupted, searing a glassy trench in the salt flats where he’d stood a heartbeat before. There was no time for finesse. He planted his feet, muscles screaming in protest, and threw Gáe Dearg like a javelin. The Crimson Rose of Exorcism became a line of cutting logic that pierced the drone’s core, and the magical construct detonated in a silent burst of unraveling energy. But the action left him exposed. From three other drones, now hovering at the edges of the clearing, beams of compressed prana—sickly green, venomous purple—lanced toward him.

‘Too many!’

Gritting his teeth, Shirou called Gáe Dearg back to his empty hand even as he fell into a desperate, whirling defense with Gáe Bhuidhe. He wasn’t Diarmuid of the Love Spot. He had none of the Fourth War’s Lancer ingrained, lifelong mastery. What he had was a blueprint of the hero’s skills—the footwork, the angle of the wrists, the economy of motion—burned into his soul from tracing the spears themselves. He channeled it, forcing his body to obey the phantom muscle memory and became a storm of yellow and crimson, deflecting one beam so it vaporized a vulture, ducking under another that scorched his hair, using the shaft of Gáe Bhuidhe to redirect the third into the chest of an advancing cyclops. It was a brutal, unsustainable ballet. Every parry sent jolts of pain up his arms; every dodge burned precious Od.

And still, they closed in. The cyclopes formed a shambling, groaning wall of offal. The vultures circled lower, a ceiling of claws and beaks. The space around him shrank to a few meters of bloodied ground. The trap, meticulously baited with his own defensive movements, was sprung. He was pinned, the spears’ specialized abilities useless against the sheer, overwhelming mass.

A cold, clear focus cut through the fatigue. The pre-emptive strategy, the last-resort gamble he’d prepared in the frantic minutes before Bai had unveiled this horror-show.

‘No other choice. I have to clear the board.’

He stopped retreating. He planted his feet in the muck, the twin spears held crosswise before him. His voice, when it left his throat, was a raw, grinding command that held no trace of invocation, only execution.

“TRACE BULLET, FULL BARREL!”

Above him, the air screamed. Not with sound, but with the violent birth of a massive, intricate magic circle. It was not the soft glow of his usual projections, but a harsh, industrial construct of interlocking geometric lines that ground against reality itself, like the internal gears of a colossal, unseen engine engaging. It spun once, a deafening metallic shriek that drowned out the cries of the horrors, and then it released.

The sky rained not with water, but with forged death.

They were not Noble Phantasms. They held no legends, no names to carry weight. They were weapons stripped to their pure, brutal essence—thought-forms given temporary, devastating substance. Near a hundred of them. A storm of steel.

Broad, cleaving Frankish axes tumbled down, shearing through vulture-wings and embedding in cyclops-skulls with meaty thunks. Spinning flails of spiked iron balls on chains whipped through the air, pulping clusters of the magical bees and wrapping around limbs to tear them from sockets. Heavy, ornamented maces descended with the finality of falling anvils, crushing and bursting. Halberds, their combined spear and axe-heads gleaming dully, pierced multiple targets in a single, vicious descent. Scythes, more tool than weapon, carved wide, whistling arcs that disemboweled the reaching intestinal monsters. Daggers fell like lethal hail, pinning flapping membranes to the ground. And swords—simple, unadorned swords of a dozen different eras and makes—fell among them all, a squall of sharpened steel that stabbed, sliced, and impaled with anonymous, democratic violence.

“A-Agh…” Shirou’s mind burned. Three of the pre-formed “rings”—the concentrated thought-containers of projected forms he’d prepared and held in reserve within the specialized structures of his Circuits—shattered. The psychic recoil was a white-hot knife dragged across the inside of his skull, the cost of unleashing such volume and force at once. He felt the conceptual “weight” of those stored weapons evaporate, leaving aching voids behind his eyes.

The explosion of metal and carnage that followed was apocalyptic within the confines of the shore. It was not a blast of light, but a cataclysm of physical disassembly. Flesh horrors were shredded, bisected, crushed, and pinned to the trembling earth. Ichor, black blood, and clear hydraulic fluids geysered, painting the white salt flats in a grotesque new palette. The droning ceased. The shambling stopped. For a radius of fifty meters, nothing that had been moving still did.

Silence rushed in, broken only by the drip of fluids and the soft ping of a cooling piece of shrapnel.

“Hah… Hah…” In the center of the freshly created abattoir, Shirou stood, chest heaving. He was splattered from head to toe in warm, reeking gore, his clothes sodden with it. The twin spears, still clean and gleaming amidst the ruin, felt unbearably heavy in his hands. He lifted his head, blood tracing paths down his grimacing face, and snarled up at the rocky height, his gaze seeking the architect of this madness. 

A slow, mocking clap echoed from the marble platform. Bai Ruolong leaned forward, his earlier amusement now tinged with a disdain so profound it was almost academic. “Such… Vulgar force.” H mused, his voice carrying effortlessly over the field of carnage. “A bludgeon where a scalpel is called for. It lacks the elegance, the cleanliness of what Koyanskaya is attempting at the Altar. But I must concede… Brute force has its own, crude danger. It is the danger of the collapsing cliff, of the stampeding herd. Unsubtle, but effective in its sphere.”

Shirou straightened, wiping a sleeve across his blood-smeared face, succeeding only in smearing it further. The twin spears felt like anchors in his hands, but he kept them raised. “If you admire subtlety so much.” He called back, his voice hoarse but clear. “Then come down here and show me some. Or are you afraid your new toy will break if you fight me?

‘Come on. Take the bait.’ The memory was a cold, hard stone in his mind: Shinji, of all people, panicked and flailing, had somehow triggered a dormant trap that had momentarily, infuriatingly, tangled Bai’s own elaborate web of spells. The false demigod had been livid, his perfect composure cracked. He could be provoked. He could be distracted. And every second Shirou kept him focused here, talking, sneering, was another second they got closer. He could feel the distant, familiar pressure now, like a change in the barometer, still miles out over the desolate landscape but closing fast.

The perfectly sculpted expression soured, the theatrical amusement draining away to reveal something colder and more ancient beneath. “Sully these hands with your offering? Do not flatter yourself, Emiya. You should be prostrate with gratitude that I deign to entertain your struggle at all, that I do not simply turn my attention to the rabble you scuttled here.”

A cold trickle of relief, instantly buried, ran down Shirou’s spine. ‘Good. Keep looking at me.’ The mental image of Misaya, Sizhen and the others—thrown into this meat-grinder was a swift, stomach-churning horror. They were clever, powerful in their own ways, but against this mamgecraft? It would be a slaughter. 

He clung to the taunt, sharpening it. “Entertainment? Sounds like an excuse. Maybe you just don’t want to admit you’re looking for a way to run this show from a safe distance.” He paused, letting the insult hang in the ichor-tainted air, then drove the knife home, twisting it with a precision born of desperate strategy. “Again.”

He didn’t elaborate, he didn’t need to.The memory of Bai running away in the snowy mountain range was clear enough in his head, and he knew it was mutual. 

The change in the atmosphere was instantaneous and terrifying. It wasn’t a sound. It was a cessation. The faint moan of the Caspian wind died. The drip of fluids from the wreckage seemed to slow. The very air grew heavy, thick with a killing intent so dense it felt like standing at the rim of an active volcano, feeling the ground tremble with pent-up, annihilating rage. Bai’s face, for a fleeting second, was no longer that of a smug adept of the Wandering Sea, but something carved from forgotten stone, eyes burning with a cold, divine wrath. The rage-bait had hooked deep.

    ᵀʰᵒᵘ˒ ᵁⁿʷᵒʳᵗʰʸ ᵒᶠ ᴸⁱᶠᵉˑ ᵀʰᵒᵘ˒ ᴮᵉᵍᵒᵗᵗᵉⁿ ᵇʸ ᴰᵉᵃᵗʰˑ

“Άξιος θανάτου… παλίμφημα τῶν θεῶν…” The words that dropped from Bai’s lips were no longer melodic, but guttural, foul, a stream of ancient Greek that sounded less spoken and more vomited forth, each syllable corrosive to the modern air.

‘I see.’ Shirou knew what was coming. Not the drones. Not the mobs. ‘The big ones.’ He braced himself, his grip tightening on the two spears as the field of carnage responded to the chant. The mountains of torn, steaming viscera—the shredded cyclopes, the punctured vultures, the lakes of ichor—began to tremble. They did not simply reassemble. They were called, drawn together by a terrible, centripetal force. Two distinct vortices of offal and sinew formed, swirling and coagulating with a wet, sucking sound that defied the silence.

On the left, the mass elongated, sprouting vast, tattered wings of stretched intestinal membrane supported by bones of solidified gristle. Multiple spikes, beaked and blind, thrust forth from a central knot of muscle, letting out a chorus of ragged, silent shrieks. It was an eagle, but one born in a slaughterhouse nightmare, a grotesque parody of the divine bird that had once feasted on the chained titan, reborn in blasphemous flesh.

On the right, the vortex compacted, surging upward into a towering, multi-limbed horror. Arms, dozens of them, sprouted from its central mass—arms of braided muscle, ending in claws of fused bone and shrapnel. From its shapeless upper body, disfigured heads, their features smeared and unfinished, pulsed and gibbered. And then, from the sides of those heads, more arms sprouted, a forest of grasping, crushing limbs. A Hekatonkheire, the Hundred-Handed One of myth, resurrected not from Tartarus, but from a charnel pit.

“You cleared the stage. Admirable.” Bai’s killing intent was now a tangible frost radiating from his platform, as he raised his arms in a presenter’s flourish.” Now let us raise the stakes. It seems.” He declared, his voice dripping with venomous satisfaction. “It is three on one.”

‘You really love the sound of your voice.’ Shirou’s instincts screamed. He had fought the echoes of those things before, in fragmented, separate manifestations within Bai’s other traps. Fighting one had pushed him to his limit. Fighting two, with their creator joining the fray directly? It was a quick and gruesome end. He allowed himself a single, calculated step back, not in fear, but in realignment.

And then he felt it—the twin surges of familiar, massive spiritual pressure breaking into the distorted space of the battlefield. He allowed a grim, internal smile to touch his mind.

From the bank of roiling, unnatural clouds Bai’s magecraft had summoned, a shadow fell. It was vast, blotted out the sickly light, and was accompanied by a screech that was not organic, but the sound of grinding, golden metal under immense stress. Kinshi descended. The golden crown-puppet, now scaled to the size of a prehistoric terror bird, its wingspan casting the entire shore into deeper shadow. Its body was a masterpiece of lethal, articulated clockwork and shining orihalcon, every feather a razor-edged plate, its single, cyclopean lens-eye burning with a cold, vengeful light. It swept over Shirou, the downdraft from its metallic wings clearing the stench of blood for a moment, and let out another challenging screech aimed directly at the fleshy aerial abomination.

Simultaneously, the waters of the Caspian shallows behind him erupted. Not with water, but with serpentine necks—nine of them, each as thick as an ancient tree, sheathed in scales of dark jade and volcanic glass. The heads that rose upon them were draconic, their jaws lined with teeth like shattered obelisks, and they hissed with the sound of a boiling geyser. Xiangliu had risen. Its colossal body remained half-submerged, but its presence was a tidal force, the water around it churning and steaming.

“... What.” Bai’s sneer faltered for a microsecond, his eyes narrowing as they flicked between the two colossal puppets now flanking the bloodied young man on the shore. The calculus of the battle had just been violently rewritten.

“Heh.” Shirou didn’t look at his reinforcements. He kept his gaze locked on his opponent as his body thrummed with exhaustion and renewed, desperate hope. He adjusted his grip on the spears, the weight of them now shared by the titanic forms at his back and the air crackled, heavy with ozone, ichor, and impending, colossal violence as he tilted his head slightly, a faint, defiant echo of Bai’s own earlier theatrics.

“Shall we?”

xXx

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 23: 02 PM… 

“The road is weary, and paved with ghosts and shadows.

But to see that path is to know you can walk it. To feel that weight is to know what you’re believing has meaning.”

The pen did not stop now. It moved with certainty, guided by something steadier than resolve—conviction, perhaps. Or acceptance.

“It is to remember that hope isn’t just in the sunlight. It’s in the stubborn, worn-out hands that keep building shelters in the storm. It’s in the walking itself, in the stubborn, bloody-minded act of holding that, and listening even to the screams, because they, too, are proof that something was here.”

xXx

Department of Modern Magecraft Theories - Slur Street.

August 5th 2003, 18: 34 PM…

“I’m telling you,” Svin declared, his fist coming down on the  table with a force that made the cutlery jump, his voice brimming with the fervor of a natural philosopher who had glimpsed a fundamental truth. “If you fuse two hot dogs, it becomes a super hot dog. It’s a matter of structural integrity, not taxonomy.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.” Caules, who had been attempting to enjoy his soup in peace, set his spoon down with a weary sigh and rubbed his temples.”Two buns make it a sandwich. That’s literally the definition.”

“But you’re thinking in boxes, Caules!” Flat interjected, his arms sweeping through the air as if conducting an invisible orchestra of ideas. “You fail to see the transcendent potential! It’s a fusion lifeform, a new order of being that surpasses its components! A sandwich is static, but a super hot dog… It's becoming.”

Rin leveled a glare that could frost glass directly at him.“Flat, stop trying to apply alchemical theory to lunch.”

“But Riiiiiiiiiiin.” Flat countered, his expression one of genuine, earnest revelation.” All sandwiches are alchemy. Bread plus meat equals transformation.”

“A hot dog isn’t even food in the first place.” Luvia sniffed disdainfully. “It’s a cry for help bathed in grease.”

“You still ate four.” Doris pointed out without looking up from her plate, a few stray crumbs clinging to her lips as she spoke around a mouthful.

“That was for research purposes!” Luvia’s composure cracked by a single, imperceptible degree. “I was studying the texture transference.”

“You mean you were hungry.” Doris retorted, a wicked grin spreading across her face. “Don’t get all high and mighty on us, goldie. Your stomach growled louder than Svin.”

“Hey!”

The fork in Luvia’s hand hit the table with a sharp clack. “Do not call me that, you wyvern-chewing barbarian!”

Doris’s chair screeched back as she leaned forward, her own grin turning feral. “And don’t you call me a barbarian, you muscle-bound moneybag!”

“Muscle-bound—! I am the very picture of refined, athletic elegance!”

“Yeah, with a left hook!”

The air between them began to hum, a palpable thickening of magical energy that made the salt shaker tremble. They were now practically nose-to-nose, the space between their chairs charged with the promise of imminent, gloriously petty violence.

“Should… Should we stop them?” Caules whispered, leaning toward Shinji, his eyes wide with a mix of apprehension and morbid curiosity.

“Who’s we, brother of mine?.”

“Do not intervene.” From the head of the table, Misaya observed the brewing storm while sipping her tea, her expression one of a satisfied sovereign watching vassals duel for her amusement. “The strong will survive the confrontation, and the weak will learn a valuable lesson about picking fights over processed meats.”

“Ah…” Gray, seated next to Shirou, frowned in concern, her gaze fixed on the now-vibrating table. “They’re going to break it again…”

“Meh, let them.” Izcalli shrugged. “That’s tradition now.”

“I’ve already placed a bet on Luvia.” Sion didn’t even look up from her datapad. “The odds are currently 2.3 to 1 in her favor, accounting for Lusendra’s unpredictable ferocity but weighting Luvia’s technical precision higher

“You’re betting on our own classmates?” Ayaka asked in disbelief.

“Investment opportunity.” Sion said flatly.

“Is it too much to ask for just one single meal where we don’t inevitably circle back to either metaphysical debates or outright brawling?” Rin finally abandoned all pretense of staying out of it, massaging her temples as if physically pushing back an oncoming migraine. “ Just one?”

“Yes.” Came the unanimous, weary, and yet somehow fond chorus from around the table.

“Every single time.” Shirou murmured to his plate. “Every time we try to have a normal meal somewhere, it turns into this…”

“Don’t complain so much, darling.” Ayush, leaned back in her chair with an expression of lazy amusement, smirking at his despair. “You know, deep down, you love the chaos.”

“I tolerate it.” Shirou corrected her sharply, though the lack of real heat in his voice undermined the statement. “There’s a significant difference.”

“Is there, though?” She chirped, her cheerfulness undimmed by the magical tension.

From his other side, Gray gave a timid tug on Shirou’s sleeve, her voice a soft whisper. “… Should we really be having such a serious debate about… Um… Sandwiches?”

It was Shinji however, who turned to Gray, his face set in an expression of grave, academic solemnity. “This debate could determine the foundation of magecraft’s culinary classification

Gray blinked. “…How?”

“Don’t question the process.” Shinji stated,  dead serious. “Just respect the sanctity of the argument.”

“Besides.” Flat added, his eyes sparkling with unrestrained inspiration. “This is vital research! Who’s to say the legendary Philosopher’s Stone isn’t just a perfectly crafted grilled cheese sandwich waiting for the right magus to realize its potential?”

A stunned silence fell over the table, broken only by the low, threatening hum still emanating from the Doris-Luvia standoff.

Then Misaya said, “You know, that’s disturbingly plausible coming from you.”

“Exactly!” Flat said proudly.

xXx

Norwich Dormitory - Slur Street. 

August 11th 2003, 23: 05 PM… 

“Something mattered. It’s in the sheer, ridiculous, defiant act of caring in a reality that demands indifference.”

His pen slowed for the final line, pressing just a little harder into the parchment, as if he wanted to anchor the words there.

“The world might be awful. And beautiful. And worth it.”