Once the energy subsided and the image of the golden Saber card vanished, a figure in armor was standing in front of Taylor and the others.
"I, Gawain, have now pledged myself to your cause!" the woman declared, and upon seeing the expressions of her Master, continued. "What's with that face, is my face that strange?"
Taylor shook her head.
"Not me, but my name? I see. Well, that is fine, but..."
She could hear the Saber-class Servant's thoughts after that.
Could it be, that the real Sir Gawain is here?
***
"I may not be a real knight of the Round Table," the Saber-class Servant declared as her sword of swirling red blazed with her determination, "but my loyalty to my Master is unquestioned! You will fall by her orders, and I will see it through without fail! Prepare to witness the walls of domination!"
Flaming spectral heads of hounds appeared as she swung her blade, cleaving homunculi apart in her wake as she tore through the battlefield.
"Now, perish! PREDATORY HORN OF THE SUN!"
The battlefield briefly turned into an inferno, and when the flames died away, there stood Taylor's servant, standing tall.
"So much for a normal trip to fetch dinner for Master," she said, right before returning to Chaldea.
***
Servant summoned: Fairy Knight Gawain AKA the Black Dog Barghest. Also the catalyst for this summoning is Taylor's bad experiences with people whose mentality is "survival of the fittest" cough Sophia cough
Also, it would be absurdly hilarious if Taylor's Servant roster are members of the Chaldea Kitchen Squad, and all of them are a bit concerned about Taylor's thinness. Besides, Fairy Knight Gawain, while she might have a philosophy Taylor doesn't like, she's still best doggo waifu and will serve her Master faithfully.
Taylor could feel the pull of mana from her body, like a heat flush across her whole body as the summoning circle in front of her lit up.
She was doing the summoning here back in Chaldea, hopefully the better set up as well as the magical energy surply would allow her to summon a servent.
It ended just as fast as it started, a quick flash and before her stood a figure, black bodysuit with white armor, it stared at Taylor as it started to crack and quickly turned in to crystallised dust.
"well that was interesting." she heard the voice behind her, Da Vinci.
She could still feel it tho, the connection.
Suddenly it tighten and a new yet familiar feel bloomed. The crystallised dust in front of her moved and twisted in to a shape, human, as the detail formed it quickly became clear who it was ment to be. It left her with question why use that form and why was it naked. It didn't matter much as she felt the words as much as she heard them.
"HOST!" as the figure in front of her bowled her over in a hug, in the background she could hear someone say, "since when did you have a twin Taylor."
Just the idea of QA showing up at Chaldea is amusing, could you image what she could do if she got access to fates magic.
Romani Archaman sighed and leaned back in his chair.
"Resting peacefully, for now," he said.
The girl in the bed was swaddled in bandages, asleep. The equipment monitoring her condition beeped slowly and lowly, utterly unconcerned with the fact she looked like death warmed over. Thick gauze was wrapped around her head, stained red in two coin-sized splotches in the middle of her forehead that made Olga Marie sick just thinking about. The stump of her right arm was wrapped just as much, stained an even starker red from where the surgeons had had to carefully pick at the raw flesh so that what was left could heal properly. Her neck was shiny with a cream to reduce the swelling of her bruises.
It wasn't the extent of her injuries, but they were the most obvious and visible ones.
The fact that she was even alive at all… She didn't look like a girl who had gone toe to toe with what was basically a god. In fact, her wounds spoke all too clearly of enemies who were human, who had mauled her to send a message or who had tried very, very hard to kill her and almost succeeded.
If Laplace hadn't recorded the events themselves as part of an alternate timeline, Olga Marie wasn't sure she would have believed it at all. Even still, it seemed far too fantastical to be true.
Alien parasites forming contracts with compatible humans? Superheroes and supervillains like something out of a cheesy plebeian comic book? A golden man with enough power to casually erase entire continents out of existence? And something that terrifying had been beaten by a slip of a girl, so tall but so lean and willowy that it was hard to believe she could even throw a proper punch?
It sounded outlandish. Impossible, even.
"And her injuries?" asked Olga Marie.
Romani frowned and looked back down at his patient.
"We've done what we can for her, for now," he said. "She's stable, but we're going to need to contact a few specialists to handle some of the more difficult parts. Some parts of this are just too far outside of my skill set."
Olga Marie swallowed and forced herself to look at the girl's forehead, at the splotches of red that sat in the middle of it like some parody of a third eye. Just imagining the internal damage those splotches hinted at turned her stomach.
"The bullet wounds?"
"It's a miracle, really," Romani said, combing a hand through his hair. It got tangled in his ponytail, so he had to extricate himself carefully. "The damage is actually minimal, all things considered. I'm not a neurosurgeon, so I'm not sure what sort of damage has been done to her memories or anything like that, and I can't imagine that kind of trauma won't leave some kind of mark. But the scans we've taken of her brain actually show normal brain activity, similar to REM sleep."
A miracle… The fact that she wasn't either dead or a vegetable after taking two bullets to the head definitely qualified.
Olga Marie's lips pursed. "Are we going to need to contact a physical therapist?"
Romani shrugged helplessly. "I honestly can't tell you. I'd like to get a second opinion from an actual neurosurgeon, but if I had to make a guess? I'd say it really depends on how long she's out for. We've got her in a medically induced coma for now, but I don't want to keep her like that for more than a couple days."
He sighed and looked down at the empty space under the sheet where the rest of her right arm should have been.
The original amputation hadn't been clean. Olga Marie had seen the wound for herself, and although there wasn't any sign of the damage she would have expected of cauterization, it had been so raw and inflamed that the only reason she could think of why the girl hadn't screamed herself hoarse or convulsed whenever it was touched was because the nerves had been fried by whatever had burned it down to a stump.
She wasn't sure whether it had been intended as a deliberate cruelty to cause as much pain as possible, or if the amputation had been such an emergency procedure that the only way the girl had been able to make sure the wound was at least closed was by cauterizing it. What that said about the situation this girl had been in… That wasn't anything good, either.
"Her arm, on the other hand, there's nothing we can do about it. Fixing soft tissue damage is one thing, even stimulating bone growth to close up those holes in her skull is something that can be done with magecraft, but I don't know of anyone who could do something as incredible as regenerate her arm."
Olga Marie nodded. She'd been expecting as much.
In the first case, healers were a rare enough breed among magi. In the second place, someone capable of perfectly regrowing limbs and organs was the kind of person who received a Sealing Designation by the Association, and would therefore be out of reach, anyway, as a carefully guarded secret.
"I've already had Lev get in contact with a specialist. We're going to commission the best prosthetic we can."
Romani gawked. "That's going to be incredibly expensive! If you're getting it from who I think you are, you could buy a whole estate with what she's going to charge!"
"You don't think I know that?" Olga Marie snarled. "I'm perfectly aware of what it's going to cost me to commission a limb of such quality that it's indistinguishable from the real thing! I'm not an idiot, Romani Archaman!"
That woman was notorious for her exorbitant prices, after all.
"I didn't mean to imply that you were!" Romani said hastily. "But, Director… I just don't understand. By all accounts, this girl isn't a magus. She's got no unique magical attribute that I can tell, and even her Magic Circuits are basically average in quantity and quality. Investing this much money and effort into a nobody who was dropped at our feet is just…"
Did he think she didn't know that, too? When the Association found it, they were going to throw a fit, and they might just call her up to a tribunal and start throwing accusations around about her fitness to lead an organization as critical as Chaldea, especially considering the amount of money and resources that had been dumped into it by her father and the other contributors.
By that metric, it would be better to cut her losses and dump the girl in a hospital somewhere to recover in obscurity.
"Are you saying I'm wrong?"
"Don't misunderstand me," said Romani. "From a moral perspective, this is absolutely the right thing to do. As a doctor, when I don't have to be concerned about prices and budgets, I would absolutely agree with doing the utmost possible to help her get as close to back to normal as I can."
Because Romani Archaman was a bleeding heart. It made him good at his job, and Olga Marie appreciated that much, at least, but it was also considered a liability by the magi from the Association who looked at things in terms of human calculus.
For the life of her, she couldn't imagine how her father had agreed to hire him, nor why Romani had decided to stay on once he found out about the experiments with Mash.
"But?"
"As a member of Chaldea's staff, especially as the head of medical, I do have to consider things like budget and prices," Romani said. "Director, the treatments to fix all of this girl's injuries are going to cost a fortune. Forgetting the top of the line prosthetic, just dealing with her other problems and the therapy she's probably going to need to get back on her feet are already going to eat into a significant portion of my department's budget."
All of those were also things Olga Marie had taken into consideration.
"Do you have a point in all of this, Romani?"
He shook his head. "I just… I don't understand, Director. Why go through all of this trouble for a girl you don't know who by all accounts can't hold a candle to someone as talented as Kirschtaria or Ophelia?"
Because it didn't make sense, looking at it from the outside. The right decision from the point of view of the Association would be to ship this girl out. Spending so much time, money, and effort to get her back into working order was nothing more than a waste, better funneled elsewhere to more important projects and more promising Master candidates.
The difference was, Olga Marie knew what everyone else didn't, and she'd gone to great lengths to make sure that the data never made it into any official records. Even Lev himself didn't know all of the details, she'd been that careful about who knew what and how much.
"Do you know how this girl came to us, Romani?" Olga Marie asked lowly.
Romani looked at her, brow furrowing, confused. "I… No, Director. I can't say that you've told me who she is or how she got here."
Olga Marie met Romani's eyes. She searched them for any hint of deception or mistrust, but like always, Romani was an open book, earnest to a fault. It wouldn't be accurate to say he couldn't hold a secret — there was a lot about him that didn't make sense, and he'd never offered her an explanation that satisfied all of the question marks — more that he wasn't the scheming type.
In that moment, for a reason she couldn't properly explain, she trusted him, more than she trusted Lev, or at least in this one particular area, she did. Maybe it was because Romani was one of the rare people in Chaldea who took every part of his job seriously, especially his Hippocratic Oath, above and beyond every temptation for self-advancement.
Or maybe it was because she couldn't bring this girl back from the brink of death by herself, and the only person she could trust who was both willing and qualified to help her was sitting right in front of her.
"A woman appeared in my office," Olga Marie began slowly. "She used some kind of spatial transference magic. It might even have been a fraction of Lord Zelretch's Second."
"What?" Romani squeaked. Olga Marie shot him a glare and he swallowed whatever question he'd been about to ask.
"She was carrying this girl," she went on. "She told me that this girl is Taylor Hebert, a native of an alternate timeline calling itself Earth Bet."
"Wait," Romani interjected. "Hold on a second. An entire alternate timeline aware enough of itself and its place in the Greater History of Man to make its own label?"
"Yes, apparently," Olga Marie said irritably. "Are you going to let me finish or not, Romani?"
He mimed zipping his lips and she sighed.
Sometimes, his clumsy nature and tendency towards such overstated reactions really was a nuisance. Well, but if he was more like a traditional Clock Tower magus, she wouldn't even have been having this conversation with him, would she?
"She said…" Olga Marie hesitated, and eventually settled on, "She told me a wild, outlandish story about heroes and villains and monsters and a golden god, and she told me this girl's place in that story."
She looked down at the diminished, weakened form lying in the bed, so weak and frail that she could snuff the remaining life out with her own hands, if she had been so tempted.
"She said…"
You have a choice, Olga Marie Animusphere.
Olga Marie closed her eyes, and for a moment, she was back in her office, standing up from her desk, as that woman stood in front of a portal to another world and sat a half-dead corpse in one of the office chairs. Like it was an ordinary business meeting, rather than a complete stranger invading one of the most secure facilities on the planet.
You can save this girl's life, and you will gain the staunchest ally you can imagine in your mission to preserve mankind, as powerful a Master as there ever was.
As she did now, Olga Marie had thought then that the tall, willowy girl couldn't possibly have done all of those things. Not someone her own age. Not someone who looked so vulnerable. True, she bore the terrible sorts of wounds someone might expect of a person who had waged a great battle and come out of it by the skin of her teeth, but that had been the only really believable part.
The rest was just too ridiculous.
Or you can save her body and use it as a catalyst to summon the Heroic Spirit she has left behind.
But when she looked at it analytically, when she tried to think of it from the perspective of a magus — all about the goal, all about the end result, all about what she could use and how she could use it — it felt like she'd been handed the key to all her dreams and ambitions. Laplace's confirmation had only made it feel all the more like the providence of fate or some higher power, finally telling her that she could do something of worth.
Olga Marie had never had the capacity to be a Master. She couldn't Rayshift. She was, by all accounts, a failure as Marisbury Animusphere's daughter and heir. Being told that she couldn't participate in her father's greatest work had been the greatest blow she had ever taken, eclipsed only by the news of his suicide.
How proud of her might he have been if she recruited a Heroic Spirit who had managed to ascend in the modern day? Someone who had done the impossible and made such a mark on history in a world so bereft of mystery that she had been exalted into the halls of mankind's greatest legends?
How much praise might she have received? How much adulation? How much acclaim? How many of her former detractors might be forced to applaud her? How much respect would be heaped upon her, day after day, for managing something that should have been beyond her wildest dreams?
And Olga Marie…
"That I had a choice."
"A choice?" asked Romani.
"I could let her die and gain all the secrets of her body," said Olga Marie, hiding the critical detail, "or I could save her life and gain the most powerful Master possible for my Chaldea."
…had chosen instead to save this girl's life.
Romani looked down at the girl, at Taylor Hebert, and his expression softened. His arm came up and reached out, as though he was going to stroke her hair or take her remaining hand, but he apparently thought better of it, because his arm dropped before it could go anywhere.
When he turned back to her, his expression was far more compassionate than it had been before.
"You chose to save her life."
"Don't say it like that's such a strange or unusual thing, Romani!" she huffed. "I'm not a monster, you know! Do you think, after everything that happened with…with M-Mash, that I'd be so heartless as to let a girl my own age die, just like that?"
Romani laughed a quiet little laugh. "Sorry, Director, I didn't mean to insult you or anything."
She didn't reply, she just glared.
Because he wasn't exactly wrong to think that about her, was he? No, if Olga Marie had been a little bit more like her father, there was no doubt she would have let Taylor Hebert bleed out in her office, instead of calling Romani to come and help the instant that strange woman left. A Heroic Spirit so capable as this one would supposedly be would be a boon of an entirely different sort, a trump card the likes of which Chaldea could never turn down.
But Olga's decision wasn't entirely altruistic, either. Deep down, where she was honest with herself and no one else, she could admit that she relished the idea of her own ace Master. Her father had selected Kirschtaria, his own apprentice, a genius of unparalleled talent whose theory of Astromancy would have been revolutionary, if only it could be proven, and Ophelia Phamrsolone, who had a Jewel rank mystic eye that had been passed down her family for generations. He had recruited talented up and comers like Kadoc Zemlupus and mysterious loners like Hinako Akuta. Team A was a who's who list of rare and unusual specialists.
All of the other potentials on their lists? Fodder. All of them fodder, and all of them picks from Olga Marie's Chaldea. None of them could compare at all to the shining stars her father had hand selected to be the organization's vanguard.
And now…now, an ace Master had been dropped practically in her lap. An ace Master whose accomplishments put the rest of Team A to shame.
And Olga Marie could tell no one about them. Not if she wanted to keep the Association's grubby paws off of Hebert.
"Romani," she said suddenly.
"Yes, Director?"
She stared him straight in the eyes, unblinking, to convey how serious she was. "This is our secret, understand?"
He blinked at her. "I'm sorry, Director?"
"I've already deleted the records confirming her history from Laplace," Olga told him, ignoring his squawking protest ("Wait, you used Laplace for something like that?"). "Her medical history, her treatment, any abnormalities in her condition — all of that is for your eyes only, got it? No one else in Chaldea gets to see who she is or what she's been through."
"D-Director, there's such a thing as patient confidentiality, but this is going to break a whole bunch of UN regulations!"
"I don't care about that!" she burst out, and that shocked him into silence for a moment. "I'm not giving anyone any excuse to come and take her away! That's why, Romani. You can't tell anyone about anything strange you find out about her. We treat her quietly, we treat her confidentially, we treat her in secret. The rest of Chaldea doesn't find out she even exists until she's made a full recovery."
"I don't understand, Director," Romani said. "Who is this girl that you're going through so much trouble? You've said something about some strange woman, but you never explained what makes this girl so special."
It was on the tip of her tongue. She was tempted to say it. Oh, so very tempted. She wanted to see his expression when he finally heard the words, just to watch his eyes widen and his mouth fall open. She killed a god, Romani.
But this was the secret Olga Marie had to keep. Everything else, she could have told him. Everything else, she could have explained. Everything else was tame enough that it would get some surprise, maybe an eyebrow raised here and there, but the most unbelievable parts were always the circumstances, the world this girl had come from and lived in, not really the things she'd done in it.
Except this one thing.
Olga Marie looked back at Taylor Hebert. Still frail and defeated, still weak and clinging to life so narrowly. It was still so hard to imagine what she must have looked like in battle, waging war.
"She's Taylor Hebert," Olga Marie eventually said. "Master Candidate Nine, the final member of Team A."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Decision time, everyone. I'm going to be taking a short-ish break after chapter 10 regardless, but you've got a choice, right now. I can release chapter 10 tomorrow and take 2 weeks after that, or I can keep to the schedule and release chapter 10 next Saturday, then take my break. Either way, chapter 10 is the "official" end of Singularity F.
In any case, I hope this clears up some of the mystery behind Taylor's relationship with Olga Marie. Olga Marie was the first person in Chaldea to believe in her, her sponsor, perhaps the closest thing in the organization she had to a friend. And Taylor doesn't give up on people, not once she's decided to care about them.
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out, and especially to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best, and your continued support is invaluable. If you like what you're reading and want to support me as a writer so I can pay the bills, I have a Patreon. If Patreon is too long term, I have a Ko-fi page, too. If you want to commission something from me, check out either my Deviantart post or my artist registry page for my rates. Links in my sig. Every little bit helps keep me afloat, even if you can only afford a couple dollars.
Her body was carried inexorably across space. I didn't even think about whether it was a good idea, I just broke into a sprint, chasing after her, the instant I realized what Lev Lainur intended.
"That's right, Olga!" he laughed. "Come, touch it! Lay your hands on your Chaldeas! Reach out and grasp the treasure you've coveted for so long!"
"Director!" I shouted after her. "Hang on!"
"No!" the Director screamed desperately. "No, no! Someone, help me! Help! I-I don't want to die here! I can't die here!"
Lev continued to cackle. "Yes! It'll be like falling into a black hole! A moment suspended in time, stretched out into eternity! An infinite, living death!"
I ran. My legs pumped. My muscles burned. My lungs took in gasps of air and let them out again. I wasn't sure how much distance I must have crossed, but the Director never seemed to get any closer.
"No one's ever praised me! No one's ever cared about me! Everyone hated me, from the very beginning!"
"Director!"
"Haha…hahaha…haha!"
The sound of Lev's laughter echoed in my ears. The Director's screams and begging drilled into my head.
I kept running. I ran and ran and ran as fast as my legs would carry me. Faster. Faster than I'd ever run before. But no matter how fast I was, I couldn't keep up. I couldn't reach her.
"No! Stop! No, no, no! Let me go! I haven't done anything, yet! I haven't accomplished anything, yet! No one's accepted me, no one's loved me! I can't die, yet!"
"Director!"
She crossed the threshold of the portal, through the event horizon of the breach that connected the cavern with the Rayshift chamber where Chaldeas spun, glowing.
She was already past the point of saving.
"Please, don't let me die!"
"Director!"
She turned to me at the last second, reaching out with her hand as though to grasp mine. The terror on her face twisted something in my gut.
"Taylor!" she shouted back. "Save me! Save me! You have to save me!"
"MARIE!"
There was too much distance between us. I could never have made it. I was only human, and I couldn't teleport or fly or run faster than a car.
But my prosthetic didn't have those limits. When I reached out with my right arm, my grasp extended, and I felt the ghostly touch of her fingers on mine —
Right as she slipped beneath Chaldeas' glowing surface, and her screams fell silent.
And with a gasp, I jerked up, heart racing, forehead drenched in cold sweat, lungs seizing as I gulped down oxygen. My right arm reached out into empty air.
I wasn't in the cavern.
What?
"Finally up, huh?" a familiar, lilting soprano asked me fondly. "And so the hero of the story awakens at last… or something like that, yes?"
I blinked. The sleek, white-paneled walls of Chaldea's medical wing, a place with which I was very familiar, finally registered in my brain, and my arm fell slowly back to my side as I turned to the person sitting next to my bed and met a perfect, smiling face.
"Da Vinci."
Calling it perfect wasn't an exaggeration. Everyone had their tastes and their preferences, but the woman looking back at me with that secretive little smile was perfect from every angle and in every conceivable sense, from the smooth, unblemished skin to the exactly balanced ratio between her eyes, nose, and lips and the little, carefully chosen imperfections that kept her from stretching into the uncanny.
I'd come to terms with my own appearance a long time ago, or more like, I'd just stopped caring about whether or not I was all that pretty, but even so, I couldn't help feeling a little jealous every time I looked at her.
"Good morning, Taylor," Da Vinci said warmly. "You pushed yourself a little farther than usual, during that Singularity, so you're the last one to wake up. The others have already gone to see Romani."
Others? My stomach squirmed.
"The Director?"
Here, Da Vinci's smile finally fell, and she sighed. "Yes, I should have expected that would be your first concern, wouldn't it? Ritsuka and Rika asked shortly after they woke up, too. I'm afraid I told them the same thing I'm going to tell you: it's complicated, and I want to wait to explain until I can explain it to everyone at once."
I scowled. "Da Vinci —"
"You can glare at me with that scary face all you want," she told me plainly, "but I'm afraid I won't budge on this one. I'd prefer if I only had to give the details about it once."
Damn it.
It wasn't like there was any way for me to threaten her, either. No Command Spells would work on her, if I had any to begin with — I checked, and wasn't surprised to see the ones I'd gained upon contracting Cúchulainn had vanished — and I wouldn't be surprised if she had some method of circumventing them anyway. Nobody knew who or what her Master was, if she even had one, so there was no way of leveraging that, either.
And I shouldn't be thinking like that. I was trying to be better than that person.
I took a deep breath.
"Just — tell me: is she alive?"
"She's not dead," Da Vinci answered cryptically.
She gave my thigh a pat.
"Come on. You should be rested enough that you don't need to worry about any weakness, so there's no reason for you to stay in that bed. The sooner you get out of it, the sooner we can go and see the others, and that means I can explain the Director's predicament for everyone."
My lips pulled into a grimace, and I flung the thin sheet covering my legs off as I swung them around and planted my feet on the floor. A shiver went down my spine; the floor was cold.
Duh, right? We were sitting in the middle of Antarctica. No matter how thorough the heating systems were in Chaldea, the floor was always going to be chilly when it was made of metal paneling.
"Your shoes are right there," Da Vinci said mildly before I could even ask.
Sure enough, they sat next to my bed, like they were waiting for me. I tugged them on quickly, did the bare minimum needed to lace them up and tie them off, and then stood, looking at Da Vinci expectantly. She sighed and shook her head.
"So impatient! Sometimes, you know, it's better to do things thoroughly instead of doing them fast."
I wasn't in the mood.
"Da Vinci…"
"Alright, alright. Come, come, let's go."
She pushed herself to her feet, and as it always did, there was a sense of complete incongruence with the fact that this larger than life figure, this legend so famous that everyone in the modern era knew her name, barely came up to my chin.
"They should be waiting for us in the Command Room," she explained.
I didn't wait for her to elaborate. The instant she told me where they were, I turned to the door of the infirmary and left, ignoring her indignant huff as I strode with quick, clipped steps down the hallways. She joined me a moment later.
True to her word, Rika, Ritsuka, Mash, and Romani were all waiting together in the Command Room, chatting about something amongst themselves, with Fou perched on Mash's shoulder. The instant the doors opened to admit me, they all looked up, and their faces brightened.
"Senpai!" the twins said together. Rika gave me an energetic wave.
"Miss Taylor!" Mash echoed them.
"Taylor," said Romani, "it's good to see you awake."
"Romani," I returned the greeting. "Ritsuka, Rika, Mash. It looks like everyone made it out okay. Right?"
Romani's smile faltered. "Ah, well… About that…"
"We asked, too," Ritsuka informed me with an air of exasperation, "and, well…"
Rika crossed her arms and huffed. She side-eyed Romani with a narrowed glare. "Doctor Roman won't explain anything, either."
"Fou, fou!"
"It's not that I don't want to!" Romani hurried to explain, holding up his hands as though to ward them off. "It's just that this is really something Da Vinci understands better than I do!"
"The three of us are okay, Miss Taylor," said Mash, "and it looks like you're doing well, too."
"The Director?" I asked pointedly.
The other three immediately turned to Romani, who coughed awkwardly into one fist. "Yes, well… Now that Da Vinci is here, too, maybe she'd like to explain everything?"
We all turned expectantly to Da Vinci, who sighed.
"Good grief," she said, shaking her head. "Well, if my audience really wants to hear it, I guess I have to indulge, don't I? Very well. Do you remember what was happening at the last moment, as the Singularity was beginning to unravel and Lev Lainur appeared?"
Of course. Did she think I could forget that? That any of us could? That was the sort of thing that left scars.
Rika made a weird gesture with one hand. "Professor Lev used Force Pull!"
Ritsuka groaned.
Da Vinci's smile twitched, while Romani's took on a fond edge.
"Yes, of course," Da Vinci continued smoothly. "Lev was using a form of telekinesis — although, strictly speaking, actual telekinesis is a different thing entirely from a mystery of remote locomotive manipulation like he was using — to draw Director Animusphere into Chaldeas itself. An unpleasant ending, let me assure you, and one she'll thank you to have avoided. Heroically, although perhaps somewhat foolishly, the rest of you attempted to stop the Director from being sucked in, and through your efforts, managed to stall the process long enough for Romani to begin the retrieval process."
I crossed my arms impatiently, frowning.
"The point, please."
Da Vinci shook her head. "So impatient! Very well. Do you remember me pushing Romani to the side, when he was trying to tell you that the Director wouldn't survive the return trip?"
"That was you?" Ritsuka asked.
"Yes," I said shortly. I'd been too focused on the Director to make the connection, at the time, but it was obvious in hindsight.
"You recall I said I had an idea, yes?" Da Vinci asked impishly. "Well, earlier, Romani confessed to me his concerns about the Director, so I had something of an inkling about the situation. I'd had a few hours to consider the problem, by the time we were faced with confronting the issue. The solution I came up with was a bit rushed, I'll admit, but also very much inspired, if you ask me! Why, some might even call it genius!"
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, reminded myself that Lisa could get like this, too, and that only made me miss her in that moment all the more.
"Is she alive or not, Da Vinci?" I asked.
"Yes and no," Da Vinci answered cryptically. "You see, without a body to return to, the Director's consciousness would disperse, once it was Rayshifted back to Chaldea. Her soul would depart the material world and return to the cycle of reincarnation. Fortunately, Chaldea is equipped with a system that is designed for the sole purpose of capturing the pattern of a Spirit Origin and recording it for future use. That is to say, the FATE system that we use to summon Heroic Spirits from the Throne."
I blinked once, twice, as the implication started to dawn on me. "Wait, you can't mean —"
Da Vinci grinned and spread her arms wide. "Esatto! Yes, you're thinking correctly! I used the FATE system to record Director Olga Marie Animusphere to an Unregistered Spirit Origin!"
"H-hold on a second!" Romani spluttered. "The Director's a normal human being! Something like that shouldn't be possible, should it?"
"Hehe!" Da Vinci grinned smugly. "The human soul really isn't that different from a Heroic Spirit's Saint Graph. It's just a matter of magnitude and data volume. When you look at it that way, it was a trivial problem to overcome!"
"The Director's saved!" Rika cheered as she threw her arms around her brother's shoulders.
"We can get her back!" Ritsuka agreed, smiling.
Da Vinci's grin faltered. "Ah… Well…"
The beginnings of the smile tugging at my lips faded. "You can get her back, can't you?"
"O-of course!" Da Vinci said, but it didn't sound reassuring. "Naturally, I can recorporate the Director, once I have the necessary materials to build her a replacement body! H-however…"
"Oh," Mash said quietly. "With the state Chaldea is in, you don't have the materials you need."
And there, as the Bard would tell it, lied the rub.
Da Vinci sighed and gave her a sad smile. "And there you've arrived at the problem, Mash. W-well, it'll also take a little work to figure out how to move her soul out of the FATE system, but the larger problem lies in the fact that I'd have to construct her a new body from scratch, and I don't have the supplies for it, right now." She coughed, and under her breath, added, "And forgetting the fact it isn't designed for her, I don't think the Director would appreciate having to use the one we actually do have."
I swallowed around the thick disappointment in my mouth.
"How long?" I asked.
"It's hard to say for sure," Da Vinci admitted. "We might be able to gather supplies from the Singularities themselves as we go, and to begin with, this isn't something I'd like to attempt until we can fix a few more of Chaldea's systems more completely. Even without those concerns… It will be a minimum of three months, I'm afraid."
Three months. The Director was going to lose at least three months of her life.
It was better, I supposed, than dying, or worse, being sucked into Chaldeas like Lev had been trying to do to her. But I'd been in the position of waking up to find out weeks or months had passed and the world had kept on spinning without you. It wasn't an easy pill to swallow.
"Do we have to worry about degradation?" Romani asked.
Da Vinci's hair rippled as she shook her head. "There's no way to be certain, but I don't think so. FATE recorded her perfectly at the time of the Rayshift, and it's designed to hold patterns for resummoning as a sort of data backup. However, what I did is already stretching the purposes of the system, so there's no way to be absolutely certain until we bring her back."
"Degradation?" Ritsuka asked curiously.
Da Vinci turned to him. "Everything degrades with time, Ritsuka," she said patiently. "Unfortunately, this includes the human soul. Think of it sort of like the aging process — the longer you live, the more your soul is weathered. It's not something you'd normally notice on the scale of a human lifespan. In the Director's case, without a body to age, it would normally be a much bigger concern, but this entire situation is abnormal, no matter how you slice it."
Rika gasped. "Is the Director going to be an old woman next time we see her?"
"Even in the worst case scenario, nothing that extreme," Da Vinci answered with a slight smile. She turned back to Romani. "In any case, Romani, there's nothing we can do about it, either way. At this point, we just have to hope for the best."
"You can't use the body we already have?" I asked.
Da Vinci's expression froze. "Ah… You heard that, did you?"
"Can't you?" I pressed.
Da Vinci refused to meet my eyes. "Ah, well… No, the thing is…" She gave me an awkward smile. "The replacement body we currently have is… not so much a replacement body so much as it is…" She coughed into her hand, and then quietly admitted: "I'm using it as my Master."
None of us quite knew how to take that. Romani blurted, "You can do that?"
"Of course I can!" Da Vinci said with exaggerated brightness. "After all, I'm a genius!"
"So?" I said shortly. "Stick Marie inside it, make her your Master. I don't understand the problem with that."
Da Vinci sighed. "It's not that simple, I'm afraid. Ignoring the fact that the body itself is already a poor fit for the Director, I designed it for maximum compatibility with… Well…"
She gestured down at herself.
"Still not seeing the problem."
"Do you think the Director would appreciate being stuck looking like a twelve-year-old version of me?" Da Vinci asked smartly.
No, she wouldn't. But better that than losing three months of her life, especially if the body could be tuned before or after putting her into it. Being twelve years old again would suck, but it would be better than losing all that time.
"There's also the matter of rejection to consider," Romani put in. "A 'blank' body made by someone like Da Vinci or Touko Aozaki is one thing. Even if the 'fit' isn't perfect, things will eventually adjust. A specially constructed body, however, would be like receiving a badly matched donor organ. The body and soul will reject each other."
"I didn't realize you knew so much about puppetry in magecraft, Doctor Roman," Mash commented with a hint of awe.
"Ah, well…" Romani ducked his head. "I don't really know all that much, but you can't go anywhere near the Clock Tower without hearing about that particular woman. There's a reason she was Sealed."
"Even if a miracle occurred, the Director can't be a Master, it's a part of her karma," Da Vinci added on. "So not only would she probably die in agonizing pain, but you'd lose my magnificent self, too! Wouldn't that just be awful?"
And then, with a false cheer that was entirely at odds with the grimness of her words, she said, "On the other hand, if we leave her alone, she might start to degrade as her soul withers, and the person we see once we get her settled is a shell of her former self!"
Dead silence met this statement.
I think all of us were each imagining not only how bad off things would get if we lost both of them, but also our own version of the worst case scenario, of what it would mean if the Director's soul withered away while she was waiting for a replacement body to be readied. Was she even conscious in the FATE system? I didn't think so, but the thought itself was troubling.
People had gone mad from solitary confinement lasting just a week. How horrible would it be to suffer that for three months, or even longer? The person who came out of that would be entirely different from the Director Olga Marie Animusphere who had gone in.
That thought troubled me the most. All the more so because I couldn't do anything about it.
"What now?" I asked, changing the subject.
The entire group turned to me. Romani grimaced. "Now, we get Chaldea back on its feet," he said.
I shook my head. "I meant about the Singularities. Singularity. Now that we fixed it, have things gone back to normal?"
"Hey, yeah!" Rika said brightly. "That place being so weird was the problem, right? So everything should be better again, right?"
Romani and Da Vinci shared a dark, complicated look, and Romani beckoned us over to what must have been the terminal he'd been using to contact us during our Rayshift to Fuyuki. The rest of the Command Room was so busy that no one even bothered to look up at us.
"I think you four need to see this."
Rika turned to Ritsuka, who shrugged, and I pretended I didn't see them when they turned to me instead, like I had any better an idea of what he meant. Together, we crowded around him, looking at the screen as he opened what could only have been a recorded video file. An instant later —
"That's…!" Rika gasped.
"Professor Lev," Mash murmured.
"Are you still watching, Romani Archaman?" the man on screen asked, grinning at the 'camera.' Static clung to the edges, like the connection was wavering even as he spoke. "Of course you are. I helped to build some of the systems that you are even now using to observe this altered spacetime. I must commend you, you and that ridiculous Servant you have with you. You managed to retrieve that whole pathetic lot before they could be killed. Then, as one who happened to be a colleague of yours, allow me to reintroduce myself."
He slung one arm across his abdomen and one arm over the small of his back and bent at the waist. A bow.
"My name is Lev Lainur Flauros. I was the one charged with the year 2015 and disposing of you humans. There is no path forward available to you, now. Both Chaldea and mankind are finished. Yes — the moment of the human race's destruction is now at hand."
He smirked, staring menacingly at us as though he could see us through the screen.
"This is the end. Your future has already been incinerated. That is the meaning behind why Chaldeas has turned red. It is not that you have lost communication with the outside world. It is that the outside world no longer exists. Chaldea, protected by Chaldeas and its magnetic field, is truly humanity's last bastion, and even you will disappear in due time. The instant the year reaches 2017, you will be erased, just like everyone and everything else."
He spread his arms, and his smirk widened into a manic grin.
"You have already lost, Romani Archaman! Mankind was destroyed neither by its own hubris nor by its own inability to advance! You did not die to infighting or to ceaseless war! You were obliterated because you lost the grace of our King! You were killed by incompetence and your own foolishness! And like the worthless trash you are, you will all be burned away!"
And then, with a flash of light, he vanished. The screen flashed "CONNECTION LOST" a second later, and an unsettled silence stretched on for a few seconds after the video ended.
"Professor Lev," Mash muttered sadly, "all this time…"
Fou licked at her cheek as though to cheer her up. I leaned over Romani's shoulder, watching the screen more closely.
"Play it again," I told him.
Romani looked at me, and then to what I had to imagine was Da Vinci, but played the video again.
"…name is Lev Lainur Flauros. I was the one charged with the year 2015…"
"Stop. Go back a few seconds."
Romani rewound the video, just like I'd asked.
"…Lev Lainur Flauros…"
Flauros. That stuck out to me. The primers and crash courses I'd been given over the last two years had covered a lot of topics, but of the high level Heroic Spirits that had featured, there were a few in particular who had gotten a lot of attention.
Flauros. If that was who I was thinking it was…
"Keep going."
The video played on, going through the whole speech, until —
"You were obliterated because you lost the grace of our King!"
"Stop."
The video stopped, right as the words "CONNECTION LOST" were about to flash across the screen again. I frowned down at it thoughtfully.
"Senpai?" Ritsuka asked.
"Did you notice something?" Romani asked.
"What does the name Flauros mean to you?" I said pointedly.
Romani's eyes went wide, and I thought I could hear Da Vinci let out a smug huff under her breath.
"It's the name of one of the seventy-two demons King Solomon was said to command with his rings," Mash answered. "It was said to be a duke of Hell whose name was recorded as part of the Ars Goetia."
"Wait," said Romani, "you don't think that has some kind of connection to this, do you?"
"Maybe not," I allowed, "but you don't think it's strange that Lev spent so much time and such a large part of his life helping to build Chaldea, only to tear it down, in the end? I mean, I'm not an expert, but a shift that huge only has a few explanations I can think of."
On Earth Bet, we'd have been talking about Master-Stranger protocols and drawing up a list of the different capes who could cause that dramatic a change or exert that level of control. But this wasn't Earth Bet, and instead of Masters in the sense of parahumans capable of twisting people's minds, here it was —
"Demonic possession, you think?" Da Vinci said approvingly. "Yes, that was one of the conclusions I had drawn, as well. I don't think the usage of the name Flauros was an accident, and there aren't many who are desperate enough for the power of a connection like that to invite the attention of a high level demon by using it without a basis."
I nodded. "Which means the king he's talking about has to be —"
"King Solomon," Romani concluded.
Well, I was actually thinking "Satan" or "Lucifer," but that was the other possibility, wasn't it? Giving it another thought, he'd said we had "lost the grace" of his king, hadn't he? Which would mean we'd had it, at some point, and the Biblical stories always told of the Devil as hating mankind essentially from the get-go. Hard to have the grace of a nigh-omnipotent being that hated your entire species and didn't have to worry about the trappings of mortal politics.
"The guy from the Bible?" Rika asked.
Romani grimaced. "Well, yes, but also no. It's said that King Solomon is the one responsible for the existence of magecraft as we understand it today. His one, true miracle was to separate magic from the gods, giving it to the common man. That's why he's called the King of Magecraft."
"Which would make him a Caster of the highest order, right?" I said.
Romani gave a grim nod. "He qualifies for the Grand station. Something as complicated as incinerating human history or throwing it off course by unpinning the staples that formed the most important turning points… Here, look at these."
His fingers flew across the keyboard, and a moment later, another image appeared on screen, a flattened globe, like the surface of the Earth had been unwrapped and laid down. Seven spots glowed brightly: one in America on the northeast coast, one in England, one in France, one in Italy, one in the middle of the ocean, and then two more in the Middle East.
"After you resolved Singularity F, seven more appeared at various points throughout history, and they vastly outclass it in terms of distortion. SHEBA found them, once we got it up and running, again," Romani explained. "We haven't resolved the exact time and location for all of them, but the first two are already pinned down."
Another couple keystrokes, and the one in France and the one in Italy were highlighted.
"They're centered around Orleans and Rome," he said. "The first is a relatively minor deviation from the year 1431 AD, near the tail end of the Hundred Years War. The second is a deviation from the year 60 AD, about halfway through the reign of Emperor Nero."
"Seven more Singularities…" I muttered.
Because of course there were. It couldn't have been as easy as just taking care of Fuyuki and everything being fixed, could it?
"Seven more?" Ritsuka asked tightly.
"This… This is a joke, right?" Rika asked, looking around with an uneasy smile. "Like, haha, let's pull one over on the last Masters, it'll be a gas? Because okay, you got us, joke's over!"
No one jumped up and laughed. Romani's face remained solemn and drawn. Rika's smile slowly cracked and fell.
"We don't have to try and handle them all at once," Da Vinci began gently.
"In fact, we shouldn't," I added.
"But this is no joke, Rika," Da Vinci went on as though I hadn't spoken. "This is very real. The world is in very real danger, and the three of you are very much the only ones who can save it."
"No." Rika shook her head wildly back and forth, and slowly, she started backing away, like Da Vinci was a dangerous animal she was trying not to spook. "No, no, no, this is crazy! I-I'm just a kid! We're just kids!"
"Rika," her brother started, but he was pale and shaken, too.
"You see it, don't you, Onii-chan?" she demanded. "This… This is insane! We already almost… We almost…"
"You almost died," I said to her bluntly, and she turned to me, wide-eyed, like she was expecting me to lunge at her and try to tear out her throat. "I almost died. Mash almost died." I paused a moment for effect. "But you didn't. You're here. Ritsuka's here. Mash is here. I'm here. We're all still alive and kicking. We made it through."
I made a show of looking around the Command Room. The observation windows were still blown out, and several places were charred or stained brown with dried blood. I swept an arm around.
"They didn't," I said simply.
She glanced where I'd gestured, stricken.
I pointed out into the Rayshift chamber, where debris still cluttered up the floor. The coffins containing our fellow Master candidates had been removed, but I think what I was trying to convey still got across.
"They almost didn't, either. In fact, a lot of them still might not. If what Lev, what Flauros said is true, then we might never get the help we need to save their lives. Do you know what the difference between them and you is, Rika?"
Slowly, she shook her head. I saw Ritsuka watching us out of the corner of my eye, his mouth falling open.
"It's not talent," I said. "Ophelia, Kirschtaria, Kadoc, they all outstripped you a dozen times over. It's not pedigree — Wodime alone was more qualified than the rest of us, if that was what mattered. It's not courage or wisdom or anything like that. You just happened to be at the right place at the right time to do the right thing."
Just like I had, that first night against Lung. And afterwards? Afterwards…
"That's what it means to save the world," I went on. "The first time, it's just luck. The second time? You have to choose it. You have to decide, I'm going to be there. I'm going to step up. I'm going to do the right thing, because if I don't, then no one else will. I'm going to be the one to do it, and I'm not going to let anything stop me."
The story of my entire career, from Lung to Bakuda to the Slaughterhouse Nine, all the way to Scion. Sometimes, the only thing that had kept me going was the sheer, bull-headed stubbornness to keep going, and the knowledge that, while my methods might have been somewhat questionable, my goals were just and righteous.
Rika shook her head, face drawn into a rictus of fear. "I'm not like you, Senpai. I'm just seventeen."
I didn't even need to think about it, because I already knew the only thing I could say to that.
"So was I."
When it all fell apart, when everything started to crack, when all the holes finally started showing —
When the world ended and it seemed like I was the only one trying to save what was left of it.
"I didn't let that stop me."
Because no one and nothing that had come after me and tried to kill me had cared that I was only fifteen, that, by Gold Morning, I was barely eighteen. Not Lung, not Bakuda, not Jack, not Coil, not Scion.
Rika looked down and refused to meet my eyes; her head fell, and her shoulders quivered as she hugged herself, as though to hold in whatever she could to keep herself from shattering into a thousand, broken pieces.
"I…"
She froze, and slowly, she extended her arm out, turning the palm downwards to stare at the stark, red marks of her Command Spells that were emblazoned so boldly on her skin. Her hand was trembling.
"It has to be us…doesn't it?" she asked in a small, quiet voice. "Mash needs us, and you need Mash."
To the other side, Ritsuka looked down at his, too, brow furrowing.
"I'm sorry," Romani told her. "If the rest of Team A was awake and in good health… But you, your brother, and Taylor are the only Masters we currently have, and we can't afford to say no to another able body, especially someone who's already proven herself capable. Not when we're already down so many people."
"In the end, we're basically forcing you," Da Vinci said solemnly. "Romani and I are aware that we're not giving you much of a choice. Even Taylor, here… This isn't exactly what she signed up for."
My lips twitched and I had to fight a wry smile. This was exactly what I'd signed up for: saving the world. Again. The circumstances might have been a bit different than I expected, but they weren't unfamiliar, either.
"Even still, we have to ask this of you," Romani went on. "Rika, Ritsuka, Taylor, can the three of you do it? Can you Rayshift to these seven Singularities, right the wrongs of history, and restore the proper course of mankind's future? Can you three, together, shoulder this impossibly heavy burden?"
"Of course," I said matter of factly.
There'd never been any other choice. Not for me.
Ritsuka looked back down at his Command Spells, and then clenched his hand into a fist. His mouth drew into a determined line.
"If it has to be me," he said, "then yes."
Rika didn't answer immediately.
"I-I don't know," she admitted at length. She looked to her brother, at his fist, at his Command Spells, and then back down to hers. "But… I-I have to try, right?"
Romani let out a long sigh and combed a hand through his hair.
"I'm sorry to put this on you three," he told us compassionately, "but hearing you say that… It makes me feel a bit better about this. For now… I think you've all earned some rest. We're going to make sure a few more systems are repaired before we even think about sending you into any of these other Singularities, so you should have about two weeks to prepare yourselves in whatever way you need."
Nobody said anything, and he blinked at us awkwardly for a few seconds, and then his face lit up with comprehension. "Oh, uh… Ahem. As Acting Director of Chaldea for the duration of Director Animusphere's incapacitance, I'm dismissing you. Officially. I'll see you later, okay?"
The group stood still a little uneasily, until Mash reached out and grabbed both twins by the hand and said, "Come on, Senpai. Let's go get something to eat!"
Rika glanced back at me one last time, and then let herself be pulled away by Mash. A moment later, they'd left the Command Room.
"Well," said Da Vinci, "there's still much to do, and there's no one more qualified to do it than me! I'll see you later, Romani!"
She turned away and strode off. I gave Romani a quick nod and a short, "Director Archaman," that did interesting things to his face, then took off after her and managed to catch up to her in the hall.
"Da Vinci, wait."
She stopped and turned back to me curiously. "Yes?"
"Are you sure?" I asked her lowly. "That there's nothing else you can do to help the Director? You couldn't recalibrate that extra body you're using? Tune it up for her?"
Da Vinci blinked at me, bewildered, and then her face broke out into a gentle smile as she chuckled to herself. "My, you and the Director were much closer than I thought, weren't you?" she said ruefully. "I'm a bit surprised. She's always been so prickly, and you always struck me as the loner type who didn't make friends easily."
"She didn't give up on me," I said by way of explanation. "I'm not giving up on her."
Da Vinci's smile grew, and she reached out to place a hand on my shoulder. My right one. I wasn't sure if there was supposed to be a message in that.
"Don't worry, Taylor. The Director is fine. Have faith, yes? She'll be back before you know it, good as new."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Let me establish a few things real quick:
If it's done, release it tomorrow.
It's been done. This chapter was ready over a month ago. I'm currently about ten chapters ahead of the public release. I started writing chapter 20 on, like, Friday.
What? Why are you holding onto all of those chapters?
They're my safety net. They exist for if or when I hit a rough spot and have trouble finishing 1 chapter per week and fall behind schedule, or in case of an emergency that results in the same.
Why are you taking a break at all, then?
Because I want to ease up a little for 2 weeks, take a breath. I have two private commissions that I'd like to finish and I want to paint a cover picture for this story. Chapter 10 felt like a good place to insert that pause, and I don't want to start diminishing my buffer for something that isn't an emergency. To make it up to you guys, I'll post 11 and 12 back to back, just like I did this chapter and yesterday's OMA interlude.
If you really can't wait and absolutely have to read as far as possible right now, well, you know where you can go. Just be sure you realize pledging so close to the end of the month means you'll be charged again August 1st.
let's get back on topic
News and Politics is that way if you'd like to talk about the US government seizing catalysts important historical artifacts from Hobby Lobby.
tl;dr: Taylor summons the Servant with the greatest compatibility with her.
EDIT: Parts of this story were redacted before the release of LB6. Now that it is out, I have removed this restriction.
***
Master candidate #9 stood back up, the command seals on her right hand finally appearing, in the form of a stylized scarab.
"No... this cannot be..."
"It is. It was where all the roads led to. It was why I could only summon temporary Servants up until now."
She raised her hand, and the cursed swarm formed itself in front of her... and laughed.
Loudly.
"YOU HAVE LONG BEEN IN DENIAL ABOUT WHAT YOU REALLY ARE, TAYLOR HEBERT," the swarm chittered in a deep, demonic voice. "Tell me, did you ever stop to think why all those dreams of yours seemed too real?"
She gasped.
"Oh, yes," the swarm replied, billowing in mirth as it let out a laugh of genuine amusement. "The one where you gained the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, and your two twin friends... got their own powers, that was pretty gruesome. Or the one where you were actually an interplanetary defense system, that was also fun to watch. The one where you became a dinosaur... well, that one meandered on and on a bit, but it was still entertaining. That, and the innumerable ones where you go back in time to try and undo your wrongs...! There are also the ones that even I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, though... anyway, I've been rambling. One I particularly like is the one where you became the architect of a new age, and built G■n■■ms, gah! Er... robots that came from another fictional mega media franchise. The Taylor there reminds me so much of you, it's uncanny. It's also great!"
Why was the swarm telling her the dreams she'd been having, down to the last detail?
"That look on your face is asking me why..." the swarm said, lowering its voice reassuringly. "Because Taylor, all of those? They are... stories. As is this one. And the moment you realized and understood it completely... that was the moment when your bond with me was finalized."
The insects gathered and took on a familiar form, wearing a familiar face.
"S̶̱̾e̷̦͆r̶͠ͅv̷̡̫̎á̵̡͔̚n̸͓̣͐t̵̪̤͋͂:̶̡̛͎̇ ̸̬̙̔̈́P̵̤͋ṟ̶͗e̸͉̤̓t̸͙͋e̶̜͒ͅṇ̵͊̐d̷̻̼̾e̸̟̱̋͠ŕ̷͖̚. True Name: Ó̸̢̰̻͔̻̮̩͚̫̠̭̲͑̉̆̑̈͜͠͝b̶̧̘̖̜̣͎̝͖̙͉̺͈͓̣̣͉̭̗̞̣͒͂̀̓͑̂͒͊̅̓̃̌͘͜ẹ̶̡̹͙̪̥̹̯̤́̑̆͛̄̒̅͛̄̓̏̋̽̉͠͝r̵̬̦͓̣̫̼̘͕͈̝͔̣̯̀͑̃͛͂͒͋̑̏̽̏͆͑̈͌͜͜͝ö̴͉͉͔̘͍̳̺̻̞̬̅̀͂̋͋̑ͅǹ̵̨̘̣̭̙͇̮̲͚̩͎̥̰̺̝͇͔̝̬͒̔̈̔͋̏͑̈́̀̎͗͐̐̓͂̐̾́̕̕͠ͅ-̵̧̡͎̰͎̫͎̘̗͈͈͍̱̳̳͙͓͆̀̽̊͐̑̈͒̈́̔̋̎͐̿̕̚V̷̛̘̘̗́̃͋̐͐́͋̌͂͗̉̄̔͆́̄͗̄̚͝o̸̢̎̀̓̿̌̽͑r̶̡̧̛͖̾̐̔͜͝͝t̴̨̻͇̪̬̹͛͆̿͆̋̅̏͌̏͑̅̀͌ī̷͚̈́̒̐̌̈́̒̌̓̓̏̐̽͜͠g̸̨̡̛͉̗͈̤̰̘̯̤͚̞̖̲̤̠͓͙̅̈̐͊͂͆̽̃͋͒̈́͒͑̿͝͝͠ͅę̷̧̢̱͇̫͔͇̫̦͗̾͂̍̈́̅r̵̡̧̩̥̮̬͈͓̙͍̳͚͈̓͗͑̎̐́͊̋̆͑̽̀͘ͅͅn̷̛͔͍̬̭͚̝̥̞͙̝̺̖͊̽͌̄̾̊͂̌̀͑̑̊̎̊̂͂͘͘͝ͅ. From the sea of stories, I have come upon your summoning. I ask of you..."
As the swarm of insects around her began to buzz in anticipation, Taylor Hebert clenched her right hand... and then she made her decision.
Oberon-Vortigern's knowledge beyond the fourth wall (i.e. understanding that everything is a story and a product of the imagination) may perhaps be even stronger than his abilities as a Servant. And yes, he ripped off Artoria's summon quote, because he's a bit of a dick.
And yes, I do believe Oberon-Vortigern has the highest Servant compatibility with Taylor, both class-wise and skill-wise.
Bug control? Check.
One arm missing? Check that, too.
Has a particular insect familiar that they feel kinship with? Present and accounted for.
Pragmatic to the point of cynicism? Also check.
Had to become someone they were not to fulfill their objectives? CHECK.
Was the harbinger of destruction for countless lives? OH, SO VERY CHECK.
A character in a fictional divergence of a fictional story? Definitely, CHECK.
Here's another take on how it went, except this time, Taylor somehow summons Oberon either in part 1 or 1.5. And yes, this is a reference that Oberon can't help but make; as he is a Servant that has a close association with stories.
"Say my name."
"You what?" the Mage's Association flunky asked, before shaking his head. "I don't have a damn clue who you are."
"Yes, you do," the Servant said proudly. "I'm the one who killed the Lion King."
"Bullshit," the flunky replied. "Fujimaru got the Lion King."
The Servant smirked. His Master couldn't help it, she smirked, too.
"Are you sure?" he asked, and the faint buzz of insects far away began to grow louder and louder.
His smile only grew wider as the buzz of insects slowly subsided.
"That's right. Now," he told the Mage's Association officer, "say my name."
"You're V̷̧̳̩͎̟̘̭͍̮͇͚̭̥̆͂̆̎̋̽͌͑͘͠ǒ̶͍̃̅͆͂̏̒̌̋͂͐͆͑̽͑͝͝r̶̬̘͇̞̮̤̮̯͚͍͈͕̘̝͗̀̎͐̏̃̀͗̆̈̂̕̕̕͝ẗ̶͓̥̟͇̖́̇̂͆́̌̈̈́̏̋͝i̵͖̫̪̗̖͙̭͚̺͔̔ͅg̵̖̦̣͍̱̝͙̭̪͋̾̈́̉̚ę̶̝̩̪̥͍̱̬̭̲̀̑̈́̈́̄̌̑́͜ř̴̯̭͎̻̘̾̃̏̆͌̉͘͝ͅn̶̢̡͇̘̮̲͇͍̤̱̫̟̱͖͙͉͈̔̐͌," the officer said, fear creeping into his voice.
The Servant's smile was triumphant, as was his Master's.
The first of the two weeks Romani had allotted us to rest, relax, and recuperate passed by in a flurry of activity, and I had no part in any of it.
It made me feel antsy and anxious, having to sit on the sidelines and watch our skeleton crew of less than thirty people rush about as they tried to fix as much of the damage as they could as quickly as they possibly could. I got the sense that everyone knew we couldn't solve everything in a fortnight, even if Chaldea's systems were brought back up to where they'd been before the sabotage, but everyone treated it like we would if only they managed to repair everything as soon as they possibly could.
Naturally, as the most critical of Chaldea's assets, the twins, Mash, and I were relegated to just watching. If I was asked, I would have said it was overkill, but Romani fretted about any of us so much as pulling a muscle, and when Romani fretted, he tended to go a bit overboard.
Well, it wasn't like I would have been much help even if I'd been allowed to contribute, and that rankled in its own way, because I had always been more of a fighter than a technician, and what little knowledge of electrical repair I did have was woefully inadequate to the task of fixing basically anything in Chaldea. Although if the coffee machine broke down, maybe I could be useful then. Or if a lightbulb needed changing.
There wasn't much else for me to do, in the meantime. I wanted to get up, be active, actually do something that wasn't sitting on my ass reading any one of the novels I hadn't touched before because they weren't the kind that interested me, but the fact of the matter was that there wasn't really anything else to do. Even the combat simulator Masters were trained on was down for repairs, which meant any appreciable level of practice I could've gotten was out of the question.
I'd tried looking up information on King Solomon and the Ars Goetia that listed the seventy-two demons he controlled, but the data in Chaldea's servers was either too sparse to be useful or locked behind the Director's access permissions.
Access permissions that only Olga Marie Animusphere had or could give, which meant it was a dead end until we got her back.
The only thing really left to me that might actually have been meaningful was connecting with my fellow Masters, with Ritsuka and Rika, but I was socially awkward at the best of times and everything seemed to have hit them harder than I'd expected. Neither of them seemed in the mood to talk the entire week.
Not even Rika.
It felt like living with a distant roommate, like things had been with Dad during the bad times after Mom's death. I saw them every day, and we exchanged empty pleasantries if we ever got within arm's length of each other, but they were both subdued and quiet and didn't seem to know how to talk to me or even what to say.
I wasn't much better. They seemed to be taking the thing with the Director pretty hard, and the burden of the task ahead was dragging their shoulders down, and I just didn't know how to make them feel better or cheer them up. What was I supposed to tell them? That it got easier? Telling a lie like that wouldn't help anyone. Even if I said they'd get used to it all, that probably would've been more troubling than comforting.
A full week since the resolution of Singularity F, I strode into the cafeteria, one of the few places in Chaldea that had gone relatively untouched by Lev's sabotage. As usual, Rika and Ritsuka were already awake and sitting quietly at a table together, with Mash sitting between them. She looked up at me as I stepped through the doors and offered one of her gentle, characteristic smiles.
"Good morning, Miss Taylor."
"Morning, Mash," I replied, and then to the twins, "Ritsuka, Rika."
Both of them looked over at me sluggishly, bleary-eyed and sagging, and gave a weak, mumbled, "Morning, Senpai."
And then they turned away, looking down into their mugs of what I could only assume was coffee. Dark circles rimmed Rika's eyes, and Ritsuka kept blinking slowly, like he was struggling to stay awake. Mash, sitting next to them, sighed quietly.
My lips drew into a thin line, an expression Beryl had once told me made me look like a disappointed schoolteacher, but my stomach rumbled and I retreated away from the confrontation again.
I think they needed gentle understanding, and I didn't really do gentle understanding. If push came to shove and being gentle wasn't an option anymore… Well, there was a bridge I might have to cross, but until it came to that, there wasn't much else I could do but give them space.
I picked up a tray and a plate and made my way through the morning buffet line, scooping up a helping of scrambled eggs, toast, and a few strips of bacon. There was a machine for hot water, a kind of electric kettle, but I passed it by and filled myself a mug of the brown sludge they called coffee instead.
Tea was my preference, and I actually had a good selection of breakfast teas that Marie had requisitioned for me when she found out I liked it (when she heard I had "good taste," as she put it), but since we couldn't resupply in the foreseeable future, I was trying to ration those as best I could. There was no telling how long I was going to have to make them last.
With my tray loaded down, I walked over to an empty table and took a seat, hyperconscious of exactly how sparse the entire place was. Just a few weeks ago, at this time of the morning, I wouldn't have been able to find more than a few empty places to sit, and Wodime would've been insisting I eat with the rest of the dysfunctional Team A. I would've been surrounded by noise, people, life. Now? The cafeteria that could house up to three hundred people was all but deserted, and I ate alone.
I stabbed my fork into some of my eggs and took my first bite, grimaced, then grabbed the condiments tray and added some seasoning, a little salt and some pepper.
"Relatively" was a misleading term. Chaldea had lost some one-hundred-and-eighty of its two-hundred or so staff, and that included most of the senior cooking staff. What was left was doing their best, but their best wasn't exactly gourmet, and it showed very much in how bland and uninteresting most of the meals I'd had for the last week had been.
While I chewed, I peered over at Mash and the twins, using the spot I'd chosen to surreptitiously spy on them. They had food, but it looked only half eaten, like they couldn't stomach the rest. Only Mash looked like she'd done more than nibble around the edges.
…Intervening might wind up being inevitable. If they skipped out on eating for long enough, then things would get bad when we had to start repairing the other Singularities. We couldn't afford for them to starve themselves every time something bad happened, because inevitably, a lot of bad things would.
In hindsight, Singularity F in Fuyuki had gone extraordinarily well. We technically lost the Director beforehand and afterwards (and that was a complicated bunch of tenses to explain to anyone who didn't know what had happened), but of the people who went in alive, we'd all come out unharmed, and we'd successfully repaired the Singularity. Mission accomplished, with flying colors, even.
I wasn't under any illusions that things would go that smoothly the whole way through. I'd count it a minor miracle if none of us lost at least one limb by the end of it.
My appetite suddenly soured, but I forced myself to finish my food, even if my stomach didn't want it anymore. I was going to need my energy just as much as the twins were, in the days ahead. When I was finished, I drained as much of my coffee as I could make myself drink, then stood and returned my tray.
Mash gave me a little wave on the way out of the cafeteria, but the twins didn't even seem to notice me leaving. They were still gazing down into their mugs like they could find the answers to all their problems there.
Out in the hallway, I found myself unsure of where I should go and what I should do. I felt like I should practice my magecraft, do something productive with my time, but Gandr was something I'd always done in the simulator, where I had room to fire it off and targets to aim at. When it came to the other bits of magecraft I had picked up…frankly, I hadn't had a breakthrough with my puppets in months, and Marie was the one who had supervised my training in runes.
Without her to tutor me, what was I supposed to do? Again, the simulator was the best place for training something that could get fairly destructive. I wasn't about to sit in my room and play with the literal explosives.
I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. When the only other thing left for me to do was read a bunch of novels I didn't care for…
"Guess I'll go and practice with my puppets, then."
A pivot on my heel, and I was heading back towards my room, accompanied only by the clack of my shoes on the smooth tile beneath my feet. I'd just felt the emptiness of Chaldea in the cafeteria, but out here alone as I walked the halls only drove it home all the more. The last two years, I'd seen at least a dozen people on the way to any place in the facility, no matter the time of day or where I was going.
Now, it was a veritable ghost town, and all I had were the same useless, vague regrets that I hadn't gotten to know each and every one of those who were no longer there.
A hundred and eighty people. So small compared to the billions who had perished in Gold Morning, and the billions more who had been incinerated by Flauros and his cadre of demons, and yet it felt all the more personal to have lost them than the faceless masses.
A sigh hissed out of my mouth. Lisa probably would have had something to say about that. I wasn't sure I would have appreciated the humor, just then, but I wanted her there to say it all the same.
"Fou!"
I blinked, stopped, and looked down to find that thing staring up at me, its large ears pointing straight into the air and swiveled in my direction. Its beady little eyes were locked, unblinking, on mine. I would almost call it expectant.
I didn't know what it was about this thing, but something about it had always put me on edge. It wasn't just that it was smarter than any regular animal should be, no, it couldn't have been that simple, but whatever it was that unnerved me, I couldn't put my finger on it, either. It was like an itch that I couldn't reach, a long buried instinct that told me not to trust it, not to believe it, not to show my back to it.
Like it was the most dangerous, most feral beast in the world, and if I gave it a single opening, it would rip out my throat.
Keeping my eyes on the thing, I took one step to the side and tried to go around it, but it bounded back instantly and once more placed itself in my path. Waiting. For what, I didn't know.
I took one large step to the opposite side and tried to pass it a second time, but it bounded back again and stopped in front of me. Its beady eyes pinned me, and it sat there with unnatural stillness, unblinking, without so much as a twitch of its nose or ears.
"Fou!" it declared imperiously in that high, squeaky voice.
I could have stepped over it, except that a shiver swept down my spine at the very thought. I could have picked it up and moved it, except that the skin of my hands crawled even thinking about it.
It seemed like the only thing I could do was indulge it.
"What do you want?" I asked it tersely.
It jutted its chin up into the air and walked around me, and I watched it the entire time. It stopped a few paces away and looked back over its shoulder at me.
"Fou!"
Of course. I sighed.
"Right, you want me to follow you."
"Fou!"
Taking orders from a squirrel… cat… thing, now. Imp would have been cackling like a loon.
Turning away from the path to my room, I followed behind…Fou as it started trotting down the hallway, and I wondered at my irrational response to the thing. It had never done anything to really warrant my suspicion or concern, and it was perfectly well-behaved around Mash and the twins. In fact, it had taken a shine to Ritsuka and Rika in record time, by all accounts. Even Romani and Da Vinci got pestered for pets and shoulder rides, on occasion, like it was some affectionate housecat.
So then why did I feel like it was the most dangerous thing in the whole facility?
Fou led me off past the cafeteria and further on down the hallway to the Command Room, where it came to a stop next to the door, turned back around to face me, and in that same, imperious tone, barked, "Fou!"
My lips pulled into a frown, but I opened the door and stepped through, trying to ignore the prickling of the fine hairs on the nape of my neck raising when it put my back to Fou.
Two years of this shit, I swear. Why was it only me, anyway?
Romani and Da Vinci looked up as I entered, huddled as they were over his terminal.
"Taylor," said Romani. "Good, you're here. There's a couple of things we needed to discuss with you."
"So you sent Fou?"
The little gremlin came as though summoned, and with an agility that could have gone either way, it bounded up to sit on top of Romani's terminal. Romani grimaced.
"Well, we didn't want to bring the twins in for this," he admitted.
I shifted, crossing my arms over my chest. "You didn't?"
He sighed himself, raking a hand through his hair. "They need a bit of a break," he said. "I didn't want to overwhelm them by pushing this decision off onto them, so I figured, as we're the most senior staff left, in a way, we'd handle it on our own."
"What Romani's trying to say is that he doesn't want to put them on the spot, considering the state they're in right now," Da Vinci interjected. "It's better if the three of us take the burden, yes? Romani is the Acting Director, and you're our most experienced Master. We'll shoulder the weight, for now."
I pursed my lips. As much as I didn't think we could afford to baby them forever, I didn't disagree that pushing them to take on too much too soon might be a bad idea. "What decision are we talking about?"
Romani reached over and tapped something out on his keyboard. A moment later, the image on his screen depicted the map of the world he'd shown us in the aftermath of Singularity F a little over a week ago.
"You remember what I said last week, right?"
"You've got data on two other Singularities, so far."
"France and Italy, yes," said Romani. "Well, Rome, specifically. We still haven't managed to get a higher resolution image of the other five, but these two, at least, we've got at least some idea of what they look like. Naturally, we won't be sending anyone into the others until we have a better idea of what we're looking at. For a lot of reasons, but the obvious one being that we can't confirm your existence if we don't know where and when it needs to be confirmed."
Which would mean we could unravel mid-Rayshift or simply cease to exist inside our own coffins, having never made it to our destination. Yes, I could see the problem with that.
"And?"
"We've been trying to determine which of these two we should deal with first," Da Vinci said. "As an Italian myself, I admit I'm partial to Rome. However… 60 AD was a bit of a tumultuous time for Rome. That year, Boudicca, an Iceni queen, rose up in open rebellion against the empire, so it might be a little more problematic to try handling that first."
She shrugged.
"On the other hand, it's entirely possible that the moment in history that the Singularity is trying to untether is exactly that rebellion. The deviation from the proper course of human history might simply be that Boudicca never rebelled, or even that she died before she could do it, allowing Rome to fully conquer Britain. It's also possible that Boudicca's rebellion was a success and Britain conquered Rome."
"And if that's the case, correcting it would be a lot more difficult," Romani pointed out. "Trekking across a city was one thing. Asking them to walk the breadth of the Roman Empire in search of the deviant influence is a bit much."
"As opposed to having them search the French countryside?" Da Vinci countered. "Orleans in 1431 only had one major, important event that changed the course of history, and that was the execution of Jeanne d'Arc. You want to send them on a mission that might require them to kill a girl their own age who just wanted to protect her own people?"
My stomach curled in on itself.
"Do we know that for sure?" I asked before they could get going again.
Killing Joan of Arc… That… No, that would be rough, even for me. I… I thought that I could probably do it, knowing that it would be essential to restoring our incinerated humanity, but I didn't really like what that probably said about me.
Asking the twins to do it… That might break them.
The two of them glanced at me, then shared a look, and then turned back to me.
"We simply don't know what to expect, going into any of this," Da Vinci admitted. "It's entirely possible that the deviation is some other thing utterly unrelated to either of those scenarios. It's also entirely possible that both could be true, or even that the Roman Singularity will require you to kill a victorious Boudicca in order to set things right."
"I think the one thing we should be able to expect is the presence of some form of Holy Grail," said Romani. "Frankly speaking, you'd need a miracle of that power to unmoor history from its natural position, and given that we retrieved one from Singularity F when you defeated Saber, completely independent from Fuyuki's Grail system —"
"We can expect that the one responsible for the deviation will be the one…Flauros gave a Holy Grail to," I concluded. "Just like Saber."
Romani nodded. "Theoretically, you might not even have to worry about personally correcting any mistakes. History is resilient like that. It should heal and fix itself on its own. As long as you can retrieve or destroy the Holy Grail responsible for pinning the deviation in place, the Singularity should dissolve without any other action from us."
The knot of tension in my gut slowly unraveled. So we probably wouldn't have to brutally murder the most famous saint in history who didn't have a holiday named after her.
"I think that's an incredibly optimistic outlook," Da Vinci said bluntly. "Even if all you technically need to do is remove the Holy Grail from the equation, by itself, that's going to require you wresting it from whoever has control of it. An enemy with possession of a powerful wish-granting artifact like the Holy Grail —"
"Isn't going to be one we can just flick on the nose and be done with it," I agreed. "So we should always go into a Singularity expecting a tough fight."
Romani shot Da Vinci a grimace, but held his tongue and turned to me instead.
"This is all our best guesses," he admitted. "The reality of the situation is that we just don't know anything for sure. We could be entirely wrong about everything, or we could both be some degree of right."
"We can use some simple common sense, though," Da Vinci said pointedly. "Destroying the lynchpins of history is itself an inherently violent act. At the very least, we have to assume they will also violently resist being corrected."
Romani let out a long, tired sigh and gave me a wan smile. "As you can see, we can't really agree about anything on the subject. As Acting Director while Director Animusphere is, ah, indisposed, I could make the decision unilaterally, but I figured that since you'll be the one the ground leading the twins and Mash, it's really a decision that you should be making. Cast the deciding vote, if you want to think of it that way."
Leadership. Of a small, elite team, in fact, pursuing a mission of vital importance. It was strange how unfamiliar it had become over the course of two short years. In other ways, it was like putting on an old jacket I hadn't worn in a while.
Either way, since it was apparently up to me… When the choice was between fighting a single woman with a Holy Grail and fighting a woman with a Holy Grail who had an entire empire's worth of soldiers between us and her, the answer was a fairly obvious and simple one.
"We'll handle Orleans first," I said.
Romani smiled the smile of the vindicated. "I agree. I think, considering what little we have to go on, it's the safer choice to pick at this time."
Da Vinci sighed and shook her head, smiling ruefully. "Well, I can't say I don't know when I'm outnumbered. Okay, then. Since you two have made up your minds, it's settled. We'll deal with the Orleans Singularity first."
"I'll make our preparations going forward under that assumption," said Romani. "In the meantime, Taylor, there's one other thing I wanted to handle, today."
I cocked my head to the side a little, uncertain. "One other thing?"
He nodded. "We managed to get enough systems back online to properly restore functionality to FATE, as much as we ever had, at any rate." My heart skipped a beat. "We'd like to test it and see if we can actually manage to summon someone, this time."
"You want me to try again?" I managed to ask. He shook his head.
"Not you, specifically. If we get anyone at all, I'm not sure they'll be deployed into the Orleans Singularity with you when the time comes, depending on which Heroic Spirit answers. For now, we just want to test a hunch and see if it works. We can wait to attempt a more serious summoning until you've already got boots on the ground, so to speak."
Some of the tension in my gut eased.
"Why?"
Da Vinci answered. "If this works, then the next step is to try and hook up the Holy Grail you retrieved from Singularity F to Chaldea's power grid. If we can do that, we should be able to support at least three more Servants, whereas right now, we can only support Mash and two others."
Wouldn't it be better to wait until later, then? But I could see the sense in testing to make sure summoning more later would even be possible, too.
"We're just trying to see if we even can summon a Servant?"
"That's right."
"That's fine, then. I don't see a problem with that."
"Alright." Romani leveraged himself out of his chair. "Let's go, then."
I blinked. "Now?"
"No time like the present." He turned to Da Vinci. "Could you go and get Mash and the twins? We'll meet you there."
Da Vinci grinned and offered him a sarcastic salute. "Roger that, Director Archaman!"
Romani groaned as she left. "Acting Director," he mumbled after her. "Acting. The minute we've got Director Animusphere back, I'm just the head of Medical, again."
My lips tugged to the one side. Romani was one of the few people I'd ever met who was so allergic to the idea of having power.
"Fou," Romani said, turning to look at where it had last been, "are you —"
It was gone. Romani blinked. "He must have gone after Da Vinci to get the twins. I swear, sometimes, Fou scares me with how sneaky he can be." He turned to me. "Ready?"
"As I'll ever be."
He typed a few things on his terminal — logging out, if I had to guess — and then started towards the door. I fell into step beside him and let him lead the way towards the summoning chamber. The empty halls echoed back at us in the silence.
It was only once we were out of earshot of the command room that I spoke up.
"You can't baby them forever," I told Romani quietly. "Eventually, they're going to have to make real, hard decisions, and the longer we put that off, the less prepared they're going to be for it."
"I know," Romani admitted, equally as quiet. He sounded resigned. Tired. "But if we just start dumping it on them all at once… I don't want them to break under all that pressure."
"I didn't."
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I expected him to say something trite, like pointing out that the twins weren't me. What he actually said killed any retort that I might have been mustering.
"I'm not so sure about that."
I didn't know what to say to that, not when my response to losing a battle against a god was, as Alec might have put it, to leak my brains out of my ears until I landed on the winning strategy, so we made the rest of the trip in silence, our footsteps clacking off the floor.
Eventually, we made it to another room behind another set of bland, white doors that slid open as we approached, and we stepped into what looked kind of like a teleporter room from either some 80s scifi show or some Tinker's attempt at making one of his own, with a strange machine mounted to the ceiling in the middle above a raised sort of circular platform. Arrayed around it were consoles and terminals for keeping track of the whole thing.
Back when Marie had first shown me the summoning room, there had been half a dozen technicians monitoring Chaldea's FATE system. Debugging, chasing down error codes, running simulations, whatever was necessary to make sure that it would be ready to go when the time came. It had all looked fairly impressive.
The summoning chamber of the current Chaldea had one man at its consoles, a single, slightly pudgy blond with glasses who looked like he hadn't slept since the sabotage. When I thought about it that way, it was entirely possible that he hadn't.
It seemed like everywhere I went, I was faced with reminders of exactly how thoroughly and tragically Chaldea had been gutted.
"Are we ready to go?" Romani asked.
The technician looked up at us, adjusted his glasses with one extended finger, and gave a slight nod. "Everything is back online. We're back up to where we were before…"
He trailed off uncomfortably.
Romani sighed. "Yeah."
An awkward silence fell, and after a moment, the technician went back to his monitors and Romani and I stepped off to the side, out of the way of the doors. Neither of us tried to strike up more conversation.
A few minutes later, the doors opened, and Da Vinci walked in, smiling brightly. "We're here!"
Rika and Ritsuka followed behind her, looking rough and exhausted, and Mash brought up the rear. It, Fou, was perched on her shoulder.
"Miss Taylor, Doctor Roman," Mash greeted us politely.
The twins startled a little when they realized we were there. "Senpai! Doctor Roman!"
"Hello, Rika, Ritsuka, Mash," Romani said kindly. "Good morning."
"A-ah, good morning!" Ritsuka stuttered. Rika tried to echo him, but she broke out into a yawn before she could get the words out.
"So!" Da Vinci clapped her hands. "Let's get this show on the road, shall we? Signor Meuniere, I realize this isn't your normal position in Chaldea, but I hope my instructions were clear enough on how this works?"
"Ah, yes, of course!" the technician, Meuniere, apparently, said.
Da Vinci turned back to us. "So! Who would like to do the honors, this time?"
I affected indifference. "If neither of you is up to it, I'm perfectly willing."
The twins shared a look, and in that single look, seemed to have an entire silent conversation, because after a few seconds, Rika nodded and stepped forward. "I'll do it!"
Da Vinci stepped to the side and gestured to a small dais in front of the circular summoning platform. After a moment's hesitation, Rika walked forward and climbed up onto it.
"This is going to be a little different from Taylor's attempt in Fuyuki. Ah, but first — Mash? If you would be so kind, please place your shield in the center of the summoning platform overtop the formula, would you?"
"Of course," said Mash, and in a flash of light, she had transformed back into the form of the Servant she'd taken in Fuyuki. Once again, she hefted her enormous shield like it was weightless, and she did exactly as asked and set it down so that the round base was situated at the center of the platform, and then she stepped back.
"I didn't realize Mash's shield was so important it was part of the summoning ritual, too," said Ritsuka.
"It's not supposed to be," Da Vinci answered. "After all, the summoning ritual and Chaldea's FATE system have been around for years, and yet last week was the first time Mash had successfully manifested the powers of the Servant bound to her body. However, the number of successful Servant summonings in Chaldea is less than five."
"Really?" said Ritsuka.
"Really," said Romani. "Technically, you're looking at two of them right now. No one knows what happened to the first, but Da Vinci and Mash are the only ones we managed to make work right, and even then, I'm not sure you can properly count Mash, since she's a Demi-Servant."
It made me wonder how they had intended for us Team A members to properly summon our own Servants, if the system had struggled to get just three.
"Wow."
"I have a hunch, however," Da Vinci said, grinning a grin just this side of manic. "If I'm right, then every summoning from here on should work perfectly, as long as we have the energy to support them." She stepped forward. "Meuniere, are we ready to begin?"
"Set up and ready to go, Da Vinci."
Da Vinci smiled. "Now, Rika, I want you to repeat after me."
Rika's hair bobbed as she nodded. "Got it."
"Heed my words."
"Heed my words!" Rika said loudly, thrusting her arm forward. She was almost certainly mimicking me.
"My will creates your body, and your sword creates my destiny."
"My will creates your body, and your sword creates my destiny!"
The circle beneath Mash's shield began to glow, and then the symbols seemed to lift off of the ground and into the air.
"If thou accedes to my will and reason, then answer me."
"If thou accedes to my will and reason, then answer me!"
The floating circle glowed brighter and brighter until it became hard to look at. Like some great gear lurching into motion after years and years gathering rust, a grinding noise filled the room as an unseen wind swept out from the center.
"I hereby swear —"
"— that I will embody all the good in this world and punish all evils!"
"Thou the Seventh Heaven —"
"— clad in the three great words of power!"
"Come forth from the Ring of Deterrence —"
"— Guardian of the Heavenly Scales!"
The grinding noise reached a fevered pitch. The glow of the circle became too bright to watch, and I had to shield my eyes against it to keep from being blinded. The wind rushed out, whipping back my hair — and then, just as suddenly, it all died away.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to blink the spots out of my vision, and slowly, I let my arm fall to look at the figure now kneeling atop Mash's shield. Red was the first thing I saw, red and black and a shock of white, and as my eyes readjusted, the rest of it slowly came into detail.
My stomach clenched as the man stood.
"Servant, Archer."
His low, deep baritone sent shivers down my spine, and as he opened cool, steely gray eyes, he smirked at the group of us.
"You've summoned me, and I've come at your request. Nice to meet you, Master."
Rika, Ritsuka, and Mash all gasped.
"You!"
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Guess who? Yes, this chapter title is actually a reference to Emiya as a "Dog of Alaya."
Ironically, Emiya is actually kinda sorta Rika's compatibility summon, which will make a whole lot more sense after Ritsuka makes his later on, and even more sense once you really start thinking about the twins' dynamic. But that's for later.
Chapter XII will be out tomorrow, to give them both a little space. For now, I hope you enjoyed this one.
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out, and especially to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best, and your continued support is invaluable. If you like what you're reading and want to support me as a writer so I can pay the bills, I have a Patreon. If Patreon is too long term, I have a Ko-fi page, too. If you want to commission something from me, check out either my Deviantart post or my artist registry page for my rates. Links in my sig. Every little bit helps keep me afloat, even if you can only afford a couple dollars.
"I've got my eye on you!" Rika promised for the thousandth time.
Across from her, Archer — Emiya, as we'd found out his name was, and finding a Heroic Spirit whose legend wasn't in our databanks had surprised everyone, Romani most of all — let out an exasperated sigh.
"I've already told you, Master," he said tiredly. "Whatever that version of me may have done to you or against you, I have no memory of it."
I wondered if that was really true or just a lie he was telling to avoid embarrassment. In theory, Heroic Spirits were outside of time and space, beings who existed independent of past, future, or present, and so every memory they would ever or had ever had would be recorded at the moment they ascended. That was how it had been explained to me. In practice, how that worked with summonings whose events they should already know, I couldn't figure out.
But if some alternate version of me had done something I couldn't condone, like joining the Slaughterhouse Nine or whatever, I definitely would've tried to pretend I didn't know she existed.
"You say that," Rika said, and it was good to see at least a little bit of her old energy back, "but you aren't fooling me, Mister! I can see right through your dastardly plans!"
Emiya just sighed again. "Seconds?"
Rika shoved out her tray and plate. "Yes, please!"
Without comment, he piled up more food onto her plate until he'd matched her original portions, and she giggled like a bride on the morning of her wedding day as she watched. There was even a line of drool that dribbled down from one corner of her mouth, and she sucked it back in as she licked her lips. Probably the only reason she wasn't bouncing on her heels excitedly was because it would dislodge her meal. She wanted to be eating it, not wearing it.
Emiya finished with a flourish by pouring another glass of orange juice for her. "Enjoy it, Master," he said wryly. "After all, I made more than enough for you to eat it to your heart's content."
"This still doesn't mean I forgive you!" she shouted back over her shoulder as she walked as quickly as she could back to her seat. Behind her, Emiya just shook his head, an exasperated smile on his lips, and busied himself with tending the kitchen.
An extraordinary stroke of luck, it seemed, that the first Servant we'd successfully summoned turned out to be a deft hand at the stove. I still had no idea what to expect of him as a combatant — the battle simulator was still undergoing repairs, so while I could practice my Gandr, Servants were forbidden using it — but even if he was barely middling, his skill with cooking was already an incredible boon.
He wasn't what I'd been expecting, but then I hadn't really been expecting much of anything, during that test. I think I'd actually half-expected the summoning to fail, just because that was the sort of thing I was used to having happen.
Rika slid back into her chair, and immediately, she grabbed her utensils and started shoveling her food back into her mouth. You might have thought, watching her wolf it down so quickly and with such abandon, that she hadn't eaten in a week.
"So good!" Rika moaned, like she was having an altogether different experience. Ritsuka smiled fondly and shook his head.
I watched her from a little further down the table, sipping at a mug of surprisingly good coffee while I tried to think of something to say, but nothing was coming to mind.
I was supposed to increase unit cohesion, Romani had said. Well, the way he'd put it had been more like, 'open up to them so that they can trust you,' but it amounted to the same thing that my instructors had tried so hard to instill in me back when I was in the Wards. The goal of any squad leader was to have the respect of her squadmates while also being friendly and approachable enough to keep the squad from ripping itself apart.
You didn't have to be everyone's big sister, but they should at least trust you.
Admittedly, I hadn't really followed through on that. It had been more like I was racing towards a goal, and the Wards had been caught up in my wake, carried along by sheer momentum. Becoming a close knit unit, making friends, being that gentle authority all of the classes said I was supposed to be? That was something I'd never managed to figure out, and at the time, hadn't really cared to.
What would Lisa have said, at that moment? To me or one of the Undersiders, not someone she was trying to tear down?
"You know, if you keep eating like that, the first thing that's going to balloon is our food budget, followed shortly by your waistline."
"Miss Taylor!" Mash gasped.
A snort tore out of Rika's nose, and she doubled over her plate, slapping a hand across her mouth to keep from spitting out her food. Visibly, audibly, and very noticeably, she swallowed what was eating, and then rasped, "W-worth it…"
"Are you okay, Rika?" her brother asked.
"T-this is the food of the gods," Rika proclaimed hoarsely. "I won't let a single bite go to waste!"
To punctuate this, she speared another bite of her pancakes and shoved them into her mouth, chewing with large, exaggerated gnashing of her jaw. It was actually kind of gross.
"Senpai has a bit of a point though, Rika," Ritsuka said. "I know Emiya's food is really good, but you're eating way more than you usually do."
"Don't ruin this for me, Onii-chan," Rika said. "This might very well be my last meal. I'm going to enjoy every bit of it I can."
And just like that, any hope of further conversation died a swift and brutal death. I sighed into my coffee as Mash's brow furrowed with worry and Ritsuka looked down into his own mug.
There was nothing I could have said to encourage her that wouldn't have been a lie. If I was a more inspiring hero, maybe I could have told her something like, "I promise you that I'll make sure we all come back," or, "No matter what, we're all making it out of this alive," but I wasn't good with happy little lies like that. The reality was that one or all of us could be dead by dinnertime, if things went wrong or if we screwed up at any point. There were no guarantees.
How quickly our second week of downtime had passed us by.
Today was the day we began our mission into the Orleans Singularity, with the goal of correcting the deviant history and bringing it in line with the proper course of events.
Unfortunately, we still didn't have a good idea of what all that entailed. Romani and Da Vinci hadn't been able to get any higher resolution scans of the situation on the ground, so there was no way of knowing just what had caused the deviation, what that deviation even was, who or what we could expect in terms of opposition, or even whether there were still living people there.
Would it just be another burning wasteland, occupied only by Servants? I wasn't sure which I preferred: a desolate landscape bereft of people, or a thriving countryside filled with bystanders who could get caught in the crossfire. I guess the former. There was something kind of liberating in not having to worry about anything except bringing the enemy down, and that was something you didn't have when you had to think about collateral damage to a human population.
My mood soured, I stood from my seat and drained the last of my coffee, then went to return my tray and plate. Behind me, I heard Ritsuka mumble to his sister, "Good going, Rika."
Emiya arched one white eyebrow at me as I approached him, but whatever serious effect he might have been going for was ruined by the bright pink apron he was wearing, with "#1 Chef" printed on the front in bold. It had, quite obviously, been owned by someone a lot smaller with a lot brighter a personality who was also quite female.
"Here for seconds?" he asked in that rumbling baritone that had no business being quite as sexy as it was. "Or are you going to threaten me against even thinking of betraying you?"
Did he expect me to blame him? Cúchulainn had explained the concept clearly enough, I felt. The Servants of the Fuyuki Grail War had been changed, corrupted. Even Saber, the noble King Arthur, apparently hadn't been immune to the effects, such was her oppressive, malevolent presence, back in the cavern. Whatever had attacked us in that ravine might look close enough on the outside, but there was no telling exactly how messed up he'd been on the inside.
"Do I have reason to?" I asked him mildly.
He blinked, brow furrowing, because that apparently wasn't what he'd been expecting.
The best comparison I could think to make was to a Master power, the Master power, the most insidious and dangerous of them all. Heartbreaker wasn't a bad line to draw, but what my mind leapt to was the Simurgh, how she could twist you up inside without you ever realizing you'd been twisted, how she could turn your greatest pleasure into your worst agony, your best friend into your most virulent enemy, and even an ordinary man into homicidal radical.
The Hopekiller… It was an appropriate moniker.
"I've seen you at your worst," I told him as I set my tray down. He took it to be washed almost on autopilot, his hands moving as his eyes stayed locked with mine. "I've seen the oppressive tyrant King Arthur could have become. I've also seen things that make both of those pale in comparison. Walked through hell."
I felt my lips tug to one side as his eyes narrowed on me. The port where my real arm met my prosthetic was so seamless that you couldn't tell where the real deal ended and the replacement began, but the stump still ached with a phantom pain. I could even feel the twin divots in my forehead, scars that had long since healed as to be almost unnoticeable.
"Didn't come out the other side entirely intact."
He grinned. It wasn't a nice smile. "Sounds like quite a story."
One that I didn't plan on telling him anytime soon. Or ever. There was a difference between trusting him not to kill me and trusting him with my deepest, darkest secrets.
"Point is," I said, dragging the topic back, "I don't find you very threatening. And, frankly, if you wanted all of us dead? We'd already be dead."
"Ha!" the bark of laughter burst out of him, and it seemed to catch even Emiya by surprise. "Well, now. You sure are an interesting person, aren't you? It's almost a shame you aren't the one holding onto my Command Spells. A woman like you sounds like the kind of Master I'd get along with just fine."
That was what I was worried about. It was true that I didn't blame him for what his counterpart had done in Fuyuki, but if that counterpart was just all of Emiya's priorities inverted and a few of his inhibitions loosened, then what little I knew of his tactics and thinking really were the worst sort of matchup for me, because they were the best sort of matchup for me.
Emiya and Khepri probably would have gotten on like a house on fire.
I gave him an empty smile. "Sorry. I have a prior commitment with an Irish guard dog."
And then I turned and left him on that note, blinking and gaping incredulously at my back. I didn't bother returning to the twins and Mash — I still didn't quite know how to address their fears and concerns in a way that wasn't just "buckle up and move on," and my last attempt at humor had died in a fire.
I felt like a broken record repeating this over and over again in so many ways, but they needed something different than a force of personality, and force of personality was the only way I'd ever really known how to lead. From the Undersiders to the Wards and all the way up to becoming Khepri, that was all I'd ever needed, all I'd ever used, and for Earth Bet, it had worked just fine.
This wasn't Earth Bet. Ritsuka and Rika weren't my Undersiders, weren't my Wards, and weren't hardened by a world constantly on the brink, and I couldn't treat them like they were.
Strangely, I missed Glenn Chambers, just then.
I took in a deep breath and I held it, waiting until the cafeteria doors slid shut behind me before I let it out in the empty corridor. The sigh that hissed out of my mouth was positively gust-like in its intensity.
How the fuck was I supposed to do this? We, quite literally, came from two different worlds. I'd spent two years fighting, bouncing from one conflict to the next, preparing for the end of the world, and then I'd spent another two years preparing for the next world-ending catastrophe, which may or may not have pulled a stunt that made Scion's tantrum seem tame by comparison, because I still wasn't clear on whether "all of mankind" meant "all of mankind," or just this particular world's.
Before all of that, I'd had to live with the knowledge that any day, a sea monster from Hell, a walking nuclear holocaust, or HP Lovecraft's twisted vision of an angel could decide, gee, didn't the place I was living in look like it needed a good remodeling?
Rika and Ritsuka… by all appearances, had led relatively normal lives in a relatively normal world, or at least one where they never had any reason to suspect it wasn't. A life without gangs whose power was enforced by a man who transformed into a dragon or a pair of women who could make themselves thirty feet tall. A life without capes or Endbringers or doomsday scenarios.
Until now, that was.
How the fuck was I supposed to lead them through a gauntlet of seven Singularities with enemies who could do things they only recently discovered weren't limited to comic books?
"Poorly, apparently," I muttered to the air.
Mouth twisting, I stormed off, mood fouled, and I tried to keep the frothing sea of my restless frustration from boiling over. The simulator was back up, if not completely repaired; maybe it was time to see if I could finally put my puppets into action.
It wasn't the first time over the last two weeks that I'd had the thought that I might be better off doing this solo. I didn't think I would have said no to having Mash on board, not with that shield of hers being so sturdy and useful, but having it just be the two of us taking on whatever Flauros and his king could throw at us? It would have been so much easier.
But however pragmatic it was, I would've been an idiot to think it would happen. Not now, not after Fuyuki. Da Vinci and Romani might have sided with me, but Mash would pick the twins and dig in her heels, without a doubt. And a contract, especially between Master and Servant, needed the consent of both parties for it to work properly.
And that meant I couldn't just leave them here to be babysat by the staff while I went and saved the world. Again. They had to go with me, and that meant that I had to lead them.
If only I just fucking knew how.
"Oh, Taylor, there you are."
Halfway back to my room, however, I was met by one of the last people I wanted to see, just then. In my head, I imagined a release valve, and I let my anger and frustration drain out of it as I forced myself to calm down.
"Da Vinci," I greeted her as politely as I could manage, just then. "Was there something you needed?"
"In a way, it's really more like something you needed," she replied, grinning, and then she reached into some pocket or compartment that I didn't quite see and pulled out a familiar knife resting in a sheath. "Here."
My brow furrowed as I took it gingerly. "This is…"
The nanothorn dagger Defiant had given me. My lips pulled to one side in a sort of half-grin.
"Even you couldn't figure it out in the end, huh?"
But Da Vinci kept grinning.
"Oh, it certainly took me a lot longer than I was expecting it to," she said smugly. "The black box that fudges some of the internal mechanisms really was quite the frustrating conundrum, so I had to work backwards from the basic principles to figure out how to do it properly, but it was only a matter of time until I had it solved."
I blinked. Stopped. Had to go back over that in my head to make sure I heard it correctly.
"You figured out Tinkertech?"
"Well, perhaps only this specific piece of it," she admitted. "Oh! And that delightful flight pack of yours, too! Ah, I'm sorry to say, it's… Erm, it's in a few too many pieces to put back together properly."
Da Vinci offered me an apologetic smile.
Ah. So I wasn't getting that back, was I?
"You can't fix it?"
"Strictly speaking, it arrived broken," she said. "I managed to piece together the mechanism it uses for flight, but without knowing the original configuration when it was in working order, it's a bit harder to put it back together again. Oh! That reminds me. I upgraded that delightful little knife of yours."
She gestured to my nanothorn dagger.
"I fixed the maintenance issues, so it should restore itself to its default state while it's sheathed. No more tedious cleaning process!"
I blinked at her again. "You what?"
"I got the idea from a couple of myths and legends," Da Vinci explained, "spruced up a bit, of course, with more enlightened, modern sensibilities. The sheath keeps a 'blueprint' of how the dagger is supposed to look and function, and whenever that knife is sheathed, it's restored from that blueprint. Naturally, there are some limitations, but no more muss and fuss, no more maintenance!"
"That's…"
Incredible.
I looked down at my nanothorn dagger. Defiant would have given his left arm for this.
My cheek twitched.
If he still had the original, that was, and hadn't replaced it with cybernetics.
And if he hadn't been wiped out with the rest of humanity. I clutched the dagger tighter, because it might very well be the only thing left of him and Dragon, now.
"Thank you for this, Da Vinci."
She waved it off. "I'm just returning what belonged to you, now that I no longer need it."
"Still. This means a lot."
She gave me one of her rare, gentle smiles, the genuine kind that really brought out the image of the painting this body of hers was based on, like she understood exactly what I was thinking.
"I'm afraid that's all of the good news I can give you," she said. "It wasn't just returning that knife of yours that brought me to you; I was heading towards the cafeteria myself, because I need to retrieve Rika, Ritsuka, and Mash."
My heart jumped into my throat.
"Now?"
She nodded.
"Romani wants to get the briefing out of the way, so that by the time it's over, breakfast will have settled well enough that we can Rayshift you with all haste. I'm afraid the two week break is over, now."
I took a deep, steadying breath.
"I understand. I'll go get ready."
"No rush," Da Vinci told me. "The others will need time to get ready, as well, so don't feel like you have to race to your room and grab anything that might be even vaguely useful. Take your time."
She stepped around me and gave me a wave as she passed me by, walking back the way I'd come toward the cafeteria. Her footsteps on the floor echoed long after the curve of the hallway blocked her from sight.
Another short sigh huffed out of my nostrils, and dagger in hand, I continued my journey to my room until I came to a nondescript door alike to every other door in the facility, set apart only by the placard proclaiming, "TAYLOR HEBERT" above "MASTER CANDIDATE 9." The door whooshed open, and I stepped into a room much like every other residential room in Chaldea: bland white walls, bland white ceiling, fluorescent bulbs that lit everything in a stark, white light.
Like every room, it had a frankly spartan and vaguely uncomfortable looking bed, a communications console set into one wall, and a closet where I kept my clothes and my puppets. My understanding of the situation was that I could have requisitioned a space for a workshop, but I wasn't a magus by any stretch of the imagination, so I'd never seen the point.
There was also a desk with a laptop I'd requisitioned and a small sort of rack where my tea supplies were stored, but the real sign of personality was the bookcase Marie had gone out of her way to get for me. It was fairly basic and rudimentary, with copies of all my old favorites sorted neatly in no particular order, but the thing that made it special was that Marie had gotten it for me, for no other apparent reason than that I wanted one.
She'd actually apologized for not being able to find an appropriately aged antique, like that even mattered more than the fact she'd gone through the trouble of getting one at all.
I grimaced and looked away. This wasn't a time to go getting sentimental over furniture.
The first thing I pulled out was the uniform that doubled as a mystic code. Someone had tried to put me in a skirt for it, but I hadn't been amused at the suggestion that I go gallivanting through any form of combat zone in a pencil skirt and sheer hose, so pants it was. Next, I grabbed the comms device akin to the ones the twins had been wearing during Fuyuki, because I wasn't going to be caught without that again, and slipped it onto my wrist.
Last… I looked down at the puppets I'd been trying to make work for the better part of the last year, and I left them in storage.
If I was a better mage, I might not have had any issues. I'd heard there were forms of magecraft that let you split your consciousness into partitions, and each partition could perform its own set of tasks simultaneously, but I didn't have the first clue how to do that, and I just couldn't leave the things on any form of autopilot. Controlling them all manually was too strong an urge to shake off, because I was just too used to that absolute control.
Without my passenger, however, splitting my mind along a dozen or more different paths just wasn't possible.
With everything settled and ready and all my gear in place — including the newly reacquired knife now fastened to my belt — I shut the door to my closet and left my room, striding with purpose to my next stop.
I arrived at the Command Room without meeting anyone else in the hallway, and the door slid open to admit me, revealing the skeleton crew that was hard at work preparing for our next jump. Romani stood in the spot that belonged to the Director, where Marie should have been, poring over something on the tablet he held in one hand.
"Romani," I greeted him.
He looked up.
"Oh, Taylor," he said. "Good morning. You're the first one here. Did you sleep okay?"
"Well enough."
We fell into an awkward silence.
After a moment, as though to justify it, he said, "We're waiting on the others to get here. We'll go over the mission details when they do."
"Right."
We fell into another silence, and rather than try to fill it again, Romani turned back to whatever he was doing on his tablet. I didn't bother, either, and just leaned up against the massive and needlessly oversized console, settling in to wait.
It didn't help with the lingering frustration I was still carrying around, so I tried not to focus on the fact I was going to be leading two floundering newbies into what might very well be a warzone and instead think up different ways to handle the possible scenarios that might crop up in Orleans. Who we might wind up fighting, why, who might be our allies, and what to expect from the major powers in the area, at the time.
On second thought, scratch that. The longer we could avoid catching the eyes of either the French king or the British commanders, the better off things would be. My knowledge of the circumstances of the time was a bit spotty, but it wasn't called the Hundred Years Teaparty. Neither side would take kindly to interlopers in strange clothes claiming to be from the distant future, not when witchcraft was one of the accusations that had been slung against Jeanne herself.
Of course, depending on who wound up in possession of the Holy Grail or what the deviation from proper human history was, confronting or collaborating with either side might wind up being unavoidable.
At last, the door slid open again, and in walked Ritsuka, Rika, and Mash, all suited up and ready to go themselves.
"Good morning, Mash, Ritsuka, Rika," Romani greeted them warmly. "I hope you all had a good night's sleep and ate breakfast, because we're jumping right into things from here."
Ritsuka glanced around. "We're not bringing Emiya along?"
"For the time being, Emiya is staying here," Romani answered. "Our position being what it is, we'd prefer not to overstress our systems, and we're expecting Taylor to attempt a summon shortly after you arrive in Orleans. Nonetheless, he'll be on standby, so if an emergency occurs, we can send him to join you as reinforcements. If you don't have any other pressing concerns…?"
Nobody said anything. Romani nodded.
"Let's get right into the briefing, then."
He set his tablet down and turned to the console he stood in front of. His fingers danced across the touchpad keyboard, and a few seconds later, the three transparent panels that jutted up from the top of the console lit up, showing the map of the world in the center and two streams of unintelligible data on either side. A tap zoomed the map into the glowing dot planted in the middle of France.
"As I mentioned to you after Singularity F, we currently have data on seven more anomalous points in history. Of those seven, only two can be observed with high enough resolution to safely Rayshift the four of you. Since its deviation appears the mildest and its fluctuations are relatively stable, we've decided that the first Singularity we're going to have you investigate takes place in Orleans during the year 1431. With me so far?"
A round of nods answered him.
"Good." He went on, "The main goal of your expedition is to investigate the deviation itself and attempt to correct it. What exactly that means, we won't be able to say until you've figured out what's happening on the ground. However, considering the events of Singularity F, there's a distinct probability that the deviation itself is the result of a Holy Grail, which means your secondary objective should actually coincide with your first. After all, strictly speaking, unless you're the Lord Second, time travel is impossible without a Holy Grail."
"What about Rayshifting?" Ritsuka asked. "Isn't that time travel?"
"This and that are two different things," Romani said. "Rayshifting might appear similar, but it's not time travel in the conventional sense. I'd explain it further, but if I'm entirely honest, the exact mechanics of it make my head hurt, so just take my word for it, okay?"
Da Vinci chuckled quietly.
"Now," he continued, "as I said, we don't know it for certain, but it's the best guess we've got. Having said that, you can't just do one or the other, here. If you don't either retrieve or destroy the Grail, then any efforts you make in correcting the distortion are meaningless. You have to do both in order to fix the Singularity."
"Understood, Doctor Roman," said Mash.
"I'll need you to establish a summoning circle, too, using Mash's shield," Romani added. "The instant you get your bearings, I want you to set that up. Not only should Taylor attempt a summoning right away, but without it, we won't be able to send you any supplies you might need in the field. Establishing that connection is going to be your first priority."
"Why doesn't Senpai just try before we go?" Rika asked. "I mean, we got Emiya just fine, didn't we? Couldn't she try summoning here, too?"
"A couple of different reasons," Romani answered. "Primarily, it's because I want to make sure the system will work outside of Chaldea's very controlled setting, but equally as important, you're very likely to summon a Servant related to the situation. Having someone who knows the lay of the land is going to be very useful for your mission. Now, if there are no other questions…?"
The twins looked around, but no one spoke up. Romani nodded.
"Excellent. I know it's sudden and we're moving really fast, but we're going to Rayshift you immediately. We've managed to get four coffins in working order for this, so I'd like you to please head down to the Rayshift chamber now."
"This way, boys and girls," Da Vinci said, and we filed in behind her as she led us out of the Command Center and in the direction of the Rayshift Chamber.
If I'd looked back, I was sure I would have seen Romani watching us leave, brow furrowed in that sort of constipated expression he got whenever he was worried.
A few minutes later, and the massive doors to the Rayshift Chamber slid open to admit our ragtag group.
"We didn't quite manage to get everything cleaned up, but the parts that need to be clear are clear, so please bear with it, for now," Da Vinci said, and indeed, there were still marks and scars from the sabotage, still debris and fallen ceiling tiles. My eyes, on their own, searched out the spot where I had been pinned two weeks ago, waiting to die a slow death as the fire choked me, and my stomach did a funny little flip.
The intercom crackled to life, and Romani's voice called down to us. "I know I'm repeating myself, but I'm going to go over this one more time for you all. The instant you get your bearings, establish a summoning circle and try to summon another Servant. Without the convenient framework of a Holy Grail War, there's no telling what sort of enemies you might wind up facing, so you need to bring in backup immediately. If we have no other choice, we'll send Emiya as reinforcements."
I craned my neck to look up at the Command Room, but the angle was all wrong and the windows had apparently been one of the first things repaired.
"That Romani," Da Vinci chuckled lowly, amused. "He's such a mother hen, isn't he? Don't worry, everyone. It's not that he thinks you've actually forgotten, but this is the only way he knows how to say that he's really nervous about this."
If he heard her, Romani didn't respond, and the floor beneath us opened up like a series of torpedo tubes. Four cylindrical devices rose up through them, things of metal with futuristic-looking designs and panes of what looked like glass over the front. The panes slid off the tubes and rose, showing the cushioned insides big enough for a grown man and then some.
"We managed to get these four coffins in working order," Romani's voice said again. "We've already tested them, and they've got full functionality, so don't worry about it. Just step inside so we can start the process — properly, this time. Da Vinci, if you don't want to be dragged along, I suggest you leave the Rayshift Chamber."
Da Vinci grinned and waved him off. "What Romani isn't telling you is that I fixed those up myself, so there's nothing to worry about! They're as good as new!"
"So we just…climb in?" Rika asked uncertainly.
"They were designed for someone much bigger and taller than you, so there's plenty of room," Da Vinci answered. "Don't worry, they're no more crowded than a subway car in Tokyo! It's fine!"
"I'm not sure that's as reassuring as you think it is," Ritsuka mumbled, but he stepped into his a moment later anyway. Rika and Mash followed his lead, and I…
I eyed the metal tube and tried not to think of being squished into a high school locker, shut in with the muck and the grime, left to rot for over an hour. Before, when we'd been rushing to get ready to go to Singularity F, I hadn't had time to think about it.
Now…
Me and tight spaces didn't agree so much.
"Claustrophobic?" Da Vinci muttered sympathetically, so that the twins and Mash didn't hear.
"Something like that," I replied quietly.
There really wasn't anything for it, was there? I wasn't about to be beaten by a metal tube, not after everything.
The world didn't end when I stepped inside my own coffin (and didn't that sound morbid, out of context). The walls didn't close in. I wasn't crushed. Bugs and blood and shit didn't bubble up from the bottom and drown me.
Now if only I could actually convince myself none of that was going to happen.
"Good luck, everyone," Romani's voice came. "Come back alive."
The pane of glass slid back into place, and with a click, it locked. Da Vinci gave me a little smile and a wave and left, and I had to close my eyes and swallow against the panic starting to well up in my belly. I forced myself to take long, slow breaths, even as my heart pounded away in my ribcage and the world seemed to compress down to me and that tube, growing ever smaller.
It made me feel weak. Pathetic. All I'd done, all the steps I'd taken, all of the things, great and small, that I'd accomplished, and I was being brought low by a fucking piece of Tupperware.
The intercom crackled back to life and a neutral, computerized voice announced:
UNSUMMON PROGRAM START
SPIRITRON CONVERSION START
A cool sensation swept down my body, starting at the very top of my head and traveling all the way down to my fingers and toes. The glass of the coffin suddenly turned opaque, and I had to fight to keep my breathing under control so that I didn't hyperventilate right then and there.
Could they even call the whole thing off, at this stage?
I just had to hold on, hold on, hold on until it was over. Less than a minute. Thirty seconds, tops. I could do that.
RAYSHIFTING STARTING IN 3…
2…
1…
Light rushed up the coffin interior, streams of light, and the world fell away as I was pulled through a canal of stars, out into infinity. I looked out as my body was drawn along and gazed upon the cosmos, so grand, so vast, a symphony of wonder and majesty that made me feel so very small, so very humbled.
For an instant, I thought I saw something gaze back.
ALL PROCEDURES CLEARED
GRAND ORDER COMMENCING OPERATION
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
I couldn't find a good reference for whether or not Taylor still had that knife with her at the end of Gold Morning. She has a knife, but there isn't a clear enough indication about whether or not it's the nanothorn one, so I'm just going to use some authorial fiat to say it was.
Also, even if she's gotten over large parts of her earliest traumas, Taylor still isn't fond of tight, enclosed spaces.
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out, and especially to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best, and your continued support is invaluable. If you like what you're reading and want to support me as a writer so I can pay the bills, I have a Patreon. If Patreon is too long term, I have a Ko-fi page, too. If you want to commission something from me, check out either my Deviantart post or my artist registry page for my rates. Links in my sig. Every little bit helps keep me afloat, even if you can only afford a couple dollars.
You two might be arguing around each other instead of arguing two sides of the same point.
Regardless, I didn't think overhard about the fine print of "how did the Entities not get squished by Mama Earth" or anything like that. I kind of just assume that their species in general tends to look for those species who "broke the cycle" of the local Age of Gods equivalent, precisely because their cycle is about breaking out of their original cycle of "eat, multiply, cannibalize, decimate, repeat," and as a result, they have methods of avoiding smushing by the local planetary consciousness.
I didn't think overhard about it because it's not super relevant to the story. The events of Worm are canon insofar as they are "things that happened." By and large, however, they are not incredibly relevant to Goetia's "Incineration of Human History," because it was an issue that "handled itself." Even if Goetia looked at the Entities and went, "Well, fuck, that's a problem," his Clairvoyance is also bullshit enough for him to immediately conclude, "but it works itself out, so I don't need to worry."
As for the Entities, they undoubtedly would have had a solution to the issue of, "But what if Goetia tries to burn everything away?" If they didn't just quarantine Goetia's timeline to keep it from affecting their petri dish (if that even worked in the first place), then the Thinker would have had a possible solution — and never got to implement it because she got into a distracted driving incident and died on the operating table.
It's not really a question of "who would have handled the other better" as it is "did either side really see the need to get involved to fix the problem." Both sides are incredibly bullshit, but both sides would have had legitimate reasons not to try getting into a pissing contest with the other.
If you want to keep debating the point, though, I won't stop you.
There was a strange moment of weightless nothingness. An eternity passed in a second. A second passed in an eternity. I hung, blind, deaf, deprived of everything, including the sound of my own heartbeat, suspended between one thought and the next, completely disconnected from my own body.
I was the void, and the void was me.
And then gravity reasserted itself. I slammed feet first into the ground, staggering under the return of everything I'd been missing as light, sound, taste, touch, smell, they all returned at once. The food in my stomach threatened to violently pull itself up my throat, and I had to slap a hand over my mouth as my head spun and my thoughts were pulled in a thousand different directions.
Nearby, there were a pair of miserable groans that told me the twins had made it, too, relatively unscathed.
Fuck. If that was what Rayshifting was like normally, I was suddenly thankful that I'd been unconscious the first time it happened.
"I'm really regretting having an extra helping of Emiya's pancakes," Rika said queasily.
"I'm regretting eating any breakfast at all," Ritsuka agreed faintly.
I closed my eyes for a long moment, trying to settle my own stomach, but the disorientation from the Rayshift was proving difficult to shake off. I still didn't feel entirely there, in fact. There was a strange disconnect between my head and my body, a thinness to my thoughts, like both I and my very essence were spread out through the land around us, into the soil, the air, the trees in the near distance.
To the side, Mash let out a tired sigh. "We managed to make it here safely, Senpai, and we're all intact. Rayshift successful. I'm glad it still worked properly, now that it was an intentional Rayshift instead of the accidental one that took us to Fuyuki."
"Fou, fou!"
I blinked, trying to steady my thoughts, and looked at the little creature perched on top of Mash's shoulder.
"Fou?" Mash asked. "Did you tag along, again?"
"Fou!"
"I guess that answers the question of whether Fou can Rayshift," Ritsuka said as he walked over to Mash. He held out a hand, finger extended, and Fou nipped at him playfully.
"He must have snuck into one of our coffins." Mash reached up and gave it a scratch behind the ears. "Fortunately, that means he'll come back with us when we Rayshift out of this Singularity, so as long as we keep him safe, we shouldn't have to worry."
The world spun, swinging wildly from right to left and up to down. Rika didn't seem any more bothered than her brother as she joined him, petting Fou a little herself.
"He's a little troublemaker, isn't he?" she asked. "I guess he must really want to get out of Chaldea, too. Maybe he got a little restless, having to look at those white walls every day."
"Maybe." Mash's smile disappeared as she looked over my way, and her brow furrowed with worry. "Miss Taylor? Are you okay?"
"F-fine," I managed to say, but my lips felt weird saying it. I tried to stand up straight, but I almost pitched over sideways before I caught myself.
"Senpai!"
"Miss Taylor!"
Naturally, the others didn't take me at my word, and they rushed over, fussing over me, just close enough that they could catch me if I fell.
"Is something wrong?" Rika asked.
"Maybe she's having a reaction to the Rayshift," Ritsuka suggested.
"She was fine in Fuyuki!" Rika said.
"We don't know how she was when she arrived," Mash pointed out. "After all, we didn't see her immediately after we landed. She might have been like this last time, too."
"Is there anything we can do?"
Mash's helpless grimace wasn't the answer she probably wanted.
"I'm…"
I closed my eyes, and the galaxy spun under my eyelids. It only made my disorientation worse.
"I…"
My head tilted and wobbled. My center of gravity was off, skewed. No, my proprioception, because I still felt like I was extended out into the world around me. I was stretched too thin, pulled in too many directions, and my body couldn't figure out how to handle that.
The twins exchanged a helpless, frightened look.
"We need to contact Doctor Roman," Mash said.
Something flitted in the periphery. I tried to follow it with my eyes and turned my head, but it was already gone, spinning around and swerving around behind me before I could find it. Whatever it was, no one else had apparently seen it.
"Right," Ritsuka agreed. "He'll know what to do."
The something flitted past again, and my head swiveled as I tried to watch it, but it was moving too fast and too erratically, and when I tried to focus my eyes on it, there was nothing there.
But there was. I knew there was. I could feel it, see it, even if my eyes couldn't quite pick it out. It flitted past again, and I caught it out of the corner of my vision as it moved past me again. Whatever it was, it was fast.
"I need to establish a summoning circle," Mash said. "But — oh, we need to find a ley line for that, don't we?"
"I don't think Senpai's up for walking," said Rika.
"There has to be somewhere we can put her while we look. Maybe if one of us stays behind?"
"That's no good, Master. What if you get attacked while I'm away? There's no one to protect you, and Miss Taylor isn't in any shape to help."
If I just waited a moment, waited for it to pass by, I should be able to — there.
My hand whipped out, lightning fast, and closed around the something I'd been seeing. The others cut off and turned to me, and they watched as I twisted my wrist around, uncurled my fingers, and revealed my target.
A ladybug.
My stomach twisted.
"Miss Taylor?"
"Senpai?"
No. No, it wasn't possible. Was it?
The ladybug on my hand stayed, utterly still and completely motionless. I gave it a mental prod, both akin and not to the way I'd talked to Caster when I was his Master, and the ladybug fluttered its wings once, then returned to placidity.
"Miss Taylor? Are you okay?"
There was no way. We were almost six hundred years in the past. It was still five hundred some years too early. There was absolutely no way this could be what I thought it was. Could it?
Passenger?
There was no answer. But then, there never had been, had there? The closest thing we had ever gotten to communicating with each other was at the end, where the line between us had blurred until even I wasn't sure which of us had been in control and which was the passenger.
I relaxed my mental grip on the ladybug, and it unfurled its wings and took off now that I was no longer controlling it directly. I watched it go, first with my eyes, and then when my eyes lost track, with that familiar new other sense, that extended proprioception.
"I'm more than okay, Mash."
It made sense, now, the disorientation. I was spread out into the soil and the grass and the trees — into the plethora of bugs inhabiting them, the worms and the ants and the beetles and the bees. It was just that I'd forgotten what that felt like, being just one part of a larger whole. Having a swarm to disappear into.
"I'm better than I have been in over two years."
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, and the galaxy behind my eyelids took on new meaning now that I knew exactly what each point of light was. If I reached out, I could touch each and every single one of them, could know them down to their most intimate details, no matter how gross or weird. They were all under my control, were I merely to flex my will and command it so.
And so I took an iron grip on that galaxy, and I forced it into a familiar shape, weaving the mental position of each star and each planetoid and each and every part until I was at the very center, inevitable, inexorable, like a black hole.
When I opened my eyes again to the concerned faces of my comrades, I realized I was smiling.
Rika and Ritsuka both looked unnerved, like they hadn't seen anything like it on my face before and they weren't sure how to deal with it. At that moment, I didn't particularly care.
I'd spent two years trying to escape the trap of being a "normal" human again, and I'd just been handed a part of me I'd lost. Of course I was happy.
My legs straightened and I rolled my shoulders as I stood properly. I was still a little disoriented, but that would pass as I got used to my expanded proprioception again.
"We need to find a ley line to tap into, right?" I asked. "We need to perform that summoning as quickly as we can. There's no telling whether or not we were noticed on the way in."
Mash jolted. "R-right! Yes, Miss Taylor! U-um, give me a moment, I'll try and find a direction, at least."
I turned to the twins. "What do you two know about the Hundred Years War?"
They shared a somewhat panicked look, like a pair of students who hadn't realized there was going to be a quiz and they hadn't studied.
"Um…" said Rika.
"It's a war that lasted a hundred years?" Ritsuka ventured.
I bit back a sigh.
I had to be patient, I reminded myself. They were just kids, kids in over their heads, and they had none of the experience or the formal training I and the rest of Team A had gone through. It wasn't like I could expect a Japanese high school to teach about a complicated political quagmire in faraway France from six hundred years ago, either.
"The war itself wasn't actually fought nonstop the whole hundred years," Mash told them helpfully. "1431, the year we're in, was actually one of the lulls in the fighting. Which isn't to say there wasn't any fighting at all, only that it wasn't as intense as it was at other points of the war. It wasn't uncommon at times like these for captured knights to be ransomed back instead of kept prisoner or executed — Senpai?"
Ritsuka was no longer paying attention; something had caught his eye, and he was staring up into the sky, head tilted back and mouth slightly open. There wasn't anything I could feel with my bugs, so I looked up to see —
What?
"Something wrong, Onii — whoa."
What the fuck was that?
"Oh," Mash said faintly.
"Senpai," Ritsuka began slowly, "what is that?"
It was probably supposed to be flattering that he thought of me as so knowledgeable.
"I don't know," was the only response I could give him.
A ring of light hung in the sky, utterly massive and impossibly distant. It looked like the storm wall of a hurricane, seen from the eye of the tempest, and with how far up it was, it had to encircle the entirety of the Singularity. Outside of it was normal sky, everyday blue dotted with clouds, but inside of it was dark, like all of the light that should have been there was being sucked into the ring, repurposed into…whatever it was that ring was supposed to be doing.
Nothing good, almost certainly. It reminded me of Phir Se's attack, the one he used against Behemoth in India. Not in shape, but in scale and function. How devastating would it be if all of the energy bound up in that ring were unleashed at once?
Another thought occurred to me.
"Was this in Fuyuki, too?" I wondered.
There was no way to be sure, because the clouds had hidden the sky the entire time, but it was possible, wasn't it? Something that enormous, that high up, that was obviously not natural, so it must have been related somehow to these Singularities. Was it the cause? Or did it form the boundary of the altered spacetime, encircling everything that had been twisted out of its proper shape?
Beep-beep!
"…and we're connected!" Romani's voice said brightly. "Mash, Ritsuka, Rika, Taylor, it looks like the Rayshift succeeded without any problems, you're — is something wrong? What's everyone looking at?"
"Just a moment, Romani," I said, "I'll send you a visual."
I lifted one arm up and over my head, taking aim with the comms device on my wrist, and then pressed a button on the band, like I was streaming a video from a camera. I couldn't say I understood how it all worked or why he could get a look at our faces but needed one of us to see anything outside our immediate vicinity, but it was probably one of those limitations that the technicians understood and I just had to pretend I did.
He was observing us in an altered spacetime from six hundred years in the future. This was already pretty miraculous.
"Whoa," said Romani, eyes wide.
"Any idea what we're looking at, here?"
"Some form of magecraft cast over satellite orbit?" he guessed. "There's no record of a phenomenon like that in historical 1431, so it's definitely related to the Singularity somehow, but without a better read on it, I don't have the first clue how. In any case, it's absolutely massive. I think it's big enough to cover North America entirely."
"That's…"
Way bigger than I thought.
The Simurgh, maybe Leviathan or Behemoth, Scion, they all could have probably done something like that. Capes, though? This was way beyond them. Magi, too. Just going by what I knew, making something on that scale at that distance, there was no magus alive with the raw power needed to pull it off.
Thinking back to that fount of magical energy in Fuyuki, though…
"Do we think it's related to the Holy Grail, somehow? A sign of its manifestation?"
"It's possible, but I doubt it," said Romani. "I'm sorry, there's just not much I can tell you about it. We'll have to analyze it further from our end and see if we can't determine more about its purpose or origins."
I grimaced. Yeah, I hadn't been expecting much. It was worth a shot, at least.
"Thank you, Doctor Roman," said Mash.
Romani chuckled in that self-deprecating way of his. "It's literally my job now, so don't worry about it. Speaking of jobs, though. I hate to be pushy, but you guys should get moving. Things are safe for now, but there's no telling what attention your Rayshift might have drawn, and standing around out in the open just makes you huge targets."
"Good point," I agreed.
"There are no Servants nearby, right?" Rika asked suddenly. There was a tightness to her voice.
Ritsuka glanced at her, brow furrowed. Romani shook his head.
"The only Saint Graph I can detect within a mile of you is Mash. You're all in the clear, for now, at least as far as I can tell. Still."
"Yes," said Mash, nodding. "First, we have to find a ley line. Then, Miss Taylor will attempt to summon a Servant to assist us in this Singularity. From there, we should begin our investigation of this Singularity."
"Be careful," Romani cautioned. "I shouldn't need to tell you guys, but there's no way of knowing who or what your enemy will wind up being. Don't go picking fights you don't have to, but don't expect everyone you meet will be happy to see you."
And with that happy bit of advice delivered, his image vanished.
"So, where do we find a ley line, exactly?" Ritsuka asked.
"We're looking for a terminal, a place where magical energy converges, like we did in Fuyuki," Mash explained. "It's not always the case, but most cities are built atop at least one, because strong ley lines tend to result in prosperity for those who live atop them."
Ritsuka nodded. "So if we want to find one of these Ley Line Terminals, we have to find a city first, right?"
"We'll need to scout it out, first," I put in. "If we go rushing in without any idea of who's where, we could get mistaken for an enemy patrol by whichever side is quartered there."
Ritsuka looked at me. "Whichever side?"
"The English controlled large parts of France throughout the latter half of the Hundred Years War," said Mash. "It was only after Jeanne d'Arc helped to turn the tide and Charles VII was officially crowned that the tide began to turn and England lost some of its grip. Even at this point, however, the English still had large numbers of troops and mercenary contingents stationed in various parts of France."
"Do we have any idea where we are now?" I asked her.
Mash pursed her lips and brought up her wrist; I couldn't see the hologram clearly enough to read what must have been a map.
"The geographical map Da Vinci made for us shows that we're a few miles north of Domrémy, close to Vaucouleurs. That might be a good place to start."
Mimicking her, I brought up my own map, an exquisitely detailed thing that looked more like a picture taken by a satellite than something that had been drawn by hand, with settlements labeled in bold, stark letters and our own position denoted by a bright, red dot. Sure enough, we weren't all that far from Vaucouleurs, although it wasn't like it was just over the hill, either.
I nodded. "Then that's where we'll start."
"Based upon our current position, it should take us about an hour and a half to reach Vaucouleurs."
Ritsuka's face twisted into a tight grimace, and Rika let out a long, miserable groan. I pretended I hadn't heard it.
"We'd better get going, then."
"Senpai is a slave driver," Rika muttered.
I pretended I didn't hear that, either.
Despite their complaints and their grumblings, the twins didn't try to drag their feet when we started walking. Maybe Fuyuki had impressed upon them the severity of the situation, the true weight of the stakes we were playing for, or maybe they just didn't want to be thought of as weak or incompetent compared to the tall, skinny American girl.
Maybe the little speech I'd given them at the base of the mountain had stuck, or maybe I'd struck a chord two weeks ago. There wasn't a way for me to be sure, and I wasn't about to just come out and ask if they'd grown up between then and now.
"What do we know about Vaucouleurs?" I asked Mash as we went.
She frowned thoughtfully. "It should be French-controlled, at this point of the War. Jeanne stayed there briefly, while she was waiting to receive an audience with Charles VII. A garrison of the French levies should be stationed there."
It was tempting to think of that as "friendlies." Especially as an American, the States' somewhat biased view of English aggression made the French the "good guys" of the Hundred Years War. The reality of it was that we weren't likely to be well-received, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because the French would be suspicious of strangers showing up out of nowhere for any reason, let alone something as ludicrous as correcting historical inaccuracies.
The fact that America wouldn't exist for another three-hundred years wouldn't make convincing anyone any easier. The fact it was another five-hundred before a concept like the UN would even be imagined, let alone convened, wouldn't help, either.
We could pretend to be travelers, maybe, but it was going to be hard managing it, when we were decked out in our fancy mystic codes and carrying nothing but the clothes on our backs. Of course, the biggest problem might wind up being the one that had nothing at all to do with any of that.
"And if the deviation from proper history is that Jeanne never left home to seek out Charles VII?"
What if the English won the Hundred Years War?
Mash grimaced. "In that case, restoring events to how they were supposed to be might be much more difficult."
"It's that bad?" Ritsuka asked.
"Jeanne d'Arc almost single-handedly turned the war around for the French," I said. "If she was delayed for some reason and the English gained too much of an upperhand, or worse, if Jeanne died before she could make it to Charles VII's court…"
Would we have to take her place?
My lips twitched. Taylor Hebert, the Maid of Orleans? What a thought that was. Even if my last name had French origins, trying to say I had that strong a connection to the land of my ancestors was stretching it by a country mile, wasn't it?
"Or maybe," Mash said lowly, "Jeanne was never captured, and the only way to restore the proper course of history is to ensure she's executed."
The twins both gasped. "W-what?"
"That's a distinct possibility as well," I said with an impossible nonchalance. The agitated buzz of the local insects would have given away how much that thought bothered me, if anyone here knew to look for it.
"S-Senpai!" Rika said. "You can't mean — !"
"Our job is to correct history gone awry," I told her. "The form that takes isn't always going to be pretty or palatable."
"You want us to be murderers," Ritsuka accused me hotly.
I thought, for a second, of one of my greatest regrets, staring down an innocent toddler and knowing, knowing that I could be wrong, knowing that she might have been entirely unrelated to the prediction that Jack Slash would cause the apocalypse, knowing that there wasn't any certainty her kidnapping fit into all the predictions…
And pulling the trigger anyways, because whether it was true or not, whether she was related to the end of the world or not, it was a kinder fate than letting Jack sink his claws into her and raise her as one of his Nine.
But calling it a mercy didn't make it any less of a murder.
"We are whatever we need to be to restore humanity, Ritsuka, Rika, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us. That is what it means to be a Master of Chaldea."
"Senpai… No. Master," Mash said. "If we don't do this, then humanity itself will be erased. Everyone in the entire world will be incinerated."
"Mash…" Ritsuka said, voice raw.
I took pity on them.
"We don't know what we'll need to do, anyway," I said. "You heard Romani. The likely cause of the deviation in the first place is a Holy Grail, like the one Saber had in Fuyuki. Throwing history off course without one simply isn't possible. Retrieving that should be our first goal, and once we have it, things might return to normal on their own."
The twins…didn't seem reassured by that, exactly, but some of the tension left them. I didn't tell them that it wasn't going to be that easy, and frankly, after how many close calls we'd had in Fuyuki, they should have already known that. The fact we'd all come away uninjured didn't mean Medusa hadn't been incredibly close to killing all of us, before Cúchulainn had stepped in to lend a hand.
Talk of having to kill Jeanne had murdered the conversation, though, so we kept walking mostly in silence. The only thing I could do was hope that it wouldn't come down, at the end of it, to having to personally kill a celebrated martyr whose only crime was wanting to help her country push out an invading nation.
Some part of me hoped that our final enemy would be a living person, someone we could simply take the Grail from by force without too much trouble. Failing that, have it be a Servant, someone who was already dead and had no future to speak of. Killing a Servant might have been harder, but it would be easier on everyone's consciences.
I had a niggling dread that it wasn't going to be that clean, though. Maybe I was being a pessimist, but nothing in my career had ever been so simple and easy.
Another hour passed mostly in silence as we traversed the French countryside, with the sun shining down on our backs and the ring of light hanging above like the watchful gaze of some distant god. With nothing else to hold my attention, I found myself thinking wistfully about what a shame it was that we couldn't enjoy the simple beauty of the land around us, the lush grass, the beaten dirt road, the fields of flowers and the clear sky.
What little girl hadn't wanted to visit Paris when she grew up, if she had the chance? To see the old world in all its majesty, where so many important, historical events had occurred? Who wouldn't want to walk through and glimpse the hamlets and little villages whose buildings still hadn't quite caught up with the times, almost perfectly preserved snapshots of yesteryear, like a bee trapped in amber?
Here we were now, in a time when those places were still young and new, and we just couldn't take the time to see them, not with the threat of an unknown enemy looming in the distance.
I guess even I still had that little girl inside me somewhere.
Unprompted, Mash lifted her wrist and brought up her map again. "There's a small forest up ahead," she said quietly. "Once we've passed through it, Vaucouleurs should come into view."
"And then we get Senpai a Servant," Rika mumbled.
I swallowed.
I was still nervous. If I got someone like Cúchulainn, that would have been fine, I think. A great hero who could really lend us a hand, that would be best, both for my own sanity and for very practical reasons. Perhaps not King Arthur, now that I'd seen her dark side, but Achilles or Heracles or some other great name, any of those would work well.
Summoning an Assassin was what I dreaded.
Calling the forest we entered a forest was a bit of a misnomer. The beaten path we were walking along was broad, likely having been cleared for the purposes of troop deployments or trade routes, and the trees around us were sparser and further spaced than, say, a tropical rainforest, with far less underbrush. The only wildlife in the vicinity was mostly birds and a few small mammals, and they were all keeping far away from us.
And then, as the other end of the forest came into view, we heard it.
A roar.
We all froze. The twins shared a look, and then turned to me and Mash. "What was that?"
Another roar, clearer this time, louder. My brow furrowed, because I was sure I must have been mishearing it.
"That…"
"Senpai?"
"It doesn't match anything I've ever heard from documentaries," Mash said slowly.
Because it wouldn't, would it? I'd watched documentaries, too, heard lions, tigers, bears, all sorts of different animals yip, yowl, snarl, and growl, and they were all distinctive in their own way. You could mistake one big cat for another, but never a lion for a bear or a tiger for an elephant.
This… I'd heard this from only one thing before.
"There's no way. Not here."
"Senpai?" Rika asked nervously.
I took off at a dead sprint, racing towards the edge of the woods, and as I went, I gathered up as much of a swarm as I could, pulling them forward with me. I didn't have time to grab whatever spiders lurked in their hiding places, and my collection wound up eclectic and mostly harmless, because there just wasn't much to choose from in terms of dangerous or venomous bugs.
One nest of wasps would just have to do.
Up ahead, I was already sending whatever fliers I could into the air to try and scope things out, to try and prove my worst instinct wrong, but my hand still went to my knife, the very knife that now might be the only real weapon I had against the kind of enemy that I was definitely not prepared to be facing in mid-fifteenth century France.
I cleared the forest, and further on down the road, a small town with a fortified garrison came into view as I jolted to a sudden stop.
"Senpai!"
"Miss Taylor!"
The others came up behind me.
"Senpai, what's wrong?" Ritsuka asked. "Do you know —"
Mash gasped.
My lips pulled into a grimace, and I glared ahead at our enemy as though I could set it alight with my stare alone.
An enemy I'd fought before, from a certain point of view. Not the genuine article, but one that managed a decent enough imitation that he'd named himself after the word for it in a different language. A creature of myth and legend, the epitome of power and strength, a symbol of avarice and evil.
Once, my swarm had emasculated him. Once, I'd carved out his eyes. Once, he had burned off my ruined arm, because the alternative was to let it cripple me for the rest of the fight.
"Dragons."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
This is the part where people start going, "Wait! I know what you're doing now, James!" And I have to tell you, "No, I can almost guarantee you don't." This is definitely related to Taylor's first failed summoning, but not in the way or for the reason I'm sure a lot of people are going to assume. There might be further hints, but this is a long game plan that won't get revealed until the very end.
Apropos of that moment, though, with the ladybug, my editor is convinced Taylor is now a Disney princess.
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out, and especially to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best, and your continued support is invaluable. If you like what you're reading and want to support me as a writer so I can pay the bills, I have a Patreon. If Patreon is too long term, I have a Ko-fi page, too. If you want to commission something from me, check out either my Deviantart post or my artist registry page for my rates. Links in my sig. Every little bit helps keep me afloat, even if you can only afford a couple dollars.
