Omake
Fate/Worm Extinction Intervention
Micro-Singularity Detected
Location: United States, North-East Coast, precise location in flux, alternates along the coast from Maine to New Hampshire
Time Period: 2011
Humanity Preservation Ranking:???
For once in their lives the transition into a micro-singularity from spiritron particles to flesh and blood was accurate enough that the quartet weren't rayshifted in the middle of the air. Ridiculously so at least.
"Stupid coffins, stupid Sheba, stupid rayshifting. I demand that da Vinci makes us cushions for our butts when we get back to Chaldea. And parachutes! We shouldn't expect that friendly servants will be able to catch us every time we fall out of the sky!" The orange-haired girl complained as she stood back up, one hand rubbing her sore butt.
"Unh! I'll second your request sempai! My heart stops every time it happens and I can't be there to catch you!" As if to punctuate the statement the armor-clad violette sets down the third member of their party, a black-haired boy who sheepishly blushes as he unlocks his grip on his rescuer's neck with a muttered "Thank you Mash."
The three turned to their final member, and leader, waiting for her input on the half-sincere, half-joking topic, only to see her frozen in shock. Her wide eyes stared emptily at the city around them, her face pale. That was enough to worry them as well, Taylor had been nothing but reliable over the course of their adventures, cool and unflappable, striding through their battlefields with tenacity that drove them along her side. She had an air around her that stated she'd 'been-there-done-that', even in the face of the monsters their team had fought again and again.
"Umm, Senpai?" The black-haired twin started.
"I'm sorry." Taylor interrupted. "I just...didn't want you to find out about this. I thought...this was over. In the past." She closes her eyes for a deep breath, and when she opens them, they are clearer, focused and intense. It's a far more familiar look to the three juniors, but it's still more than what they're used to from their leader outside the most intense fights they've been a part of.
"So, you know where we are?" Rika asked. They had all seen the looks Taylor and Olga Marie had given each other in the control room during the briefing and the silent conversation the two had shared before Taylor had nodded and turned away.
"I do. This place is Brockton Bay. It was my hometown, where I grew up. And as for when..." She looked up into the cloud filled sky, a roiling storm that looked more like the hurricane at the center of the Okeanos' Singularity than any other storm the twins had ever seen, just in time for a ferocious downpour to begin falling.
"May. The fifteenth." She continued, her tone dead. "The day Brockton drowned. Mash! Ready Lord Chaldeas! Rika, Ritsuka! Heavy hitters! Quick, follow me to the shoreline! Aife!" With a final call, her magic energy was poured into a vessel of shadows which formed the shape of the Celtic warrior-queen, sister of Scathach, and took off.
The trio fall in behind her without a word but take one last moment to share looks as they take off.
"Siegfried!" "Jeanne Alter!" The twins' magic form and fill two more vessels of shadows, coalescing as two of the most powerful Servants that Chaldea had under their contract, the legendary heroic figure of Siegfried, Germanic dragon-slayer, and the corrupted war-maiden made in the image of Jeanne d'Arc form and fall in with little fanfare and only a little snark.
"Have things gone so bad to summon me so soon Masters?" The sneering mockery of Jeanne's evil twin bites out.
"You're lucky I still haven't come up with a good name for you yet. Evil Witch is too on the nose I think." Rika snipes back.
"As if calling me 'Jeanne Alter' is so much better. As if I'm just a copy of that sniveling little girl."
"Well if you want something original, maybe we should start calling you something like Jenny, how's that sound?"
The armored woman chokes on her breath, at the name or the audacity it was hard to tell. Thankfully the two's conversation is stopped before its escalation by Taylor's interruption.
"There's a lot you need to know, but there's not a lot of time so I'll keep things brief. There's going to be a monster called Leviathan that's going to attack the city. It's fast, strong, and tough. True phantasm level. Think Fafnir or the Demon Gods but faster. It controls water, but it only uses it in big ways, like massive waves to flood the city, or the massive rainstorm to blind people and chill them to bone. Don't focus on trying to kill it."
"Do you think we can't?" Aife asks, the challenge piquing her interest.
"..." Taylor glances over the party before giving a small smile. "Maybe we could. You three are more firepower than almost anyone else is going to bring to the fight. Faster and stronger too. But no. There's more at..." She stops herself mid-sentence, a sudden realization sparking in her eyes.
"Did you figure something out Taylor?" Ritsuka prompted.
"This is a Singularity, small or not. Abnormal space-time. I...don't know what's going on here. I don't know what's at stake." As if the admittance of weakness was a physical force, Taylor was driven to a halt, catching herself with one hand on the corner of a building.
"If there's a monster threatening people, we should do what we can to drive it off or slay it. Sorry but that's just what I think." Siegfried announced, as if slaying a monster like this Leviathan was just a daily chore to be taken care of.
Rika giggled at the thought. Wake up, cook breakfast, wash the laundry, slay the dragon threatening the city, do your homework, eat lunch. Somehow, after everything else she and her brother had been through, it didn't sound as absurd as she felt it should.
"Do you ever worry that our sense of normalcy is warping into something so strange, it'll never recover?" Her brother, as always on the same wavelength as her, chimed in.
"The two of us will go back to school after we've saved the world and get asked about our career assessment sheets and we'll literally die out of the boredom."
The two share a smile. And try not to think that it might be an if they save the world.
"It's just a question of if Leviathan is the only monster in this Singularity."
Taylo's grim statement is enough to drive the humor out of the twins.
"There are more monsters like this Leviathan, Senpai?" Mash asks.
"There's two others active, or at least, there were in my time's equivalent. There's three more that showed up after one of them was killed. But this day is something from my past. I don't know...it might only be the one, but maybe the rest will show up too. Or worse. Heh, of course, he should still be playing hero right now. Maybe all we'll have to do is wait for him to drive off Leviathan. Now come on, hesitation will get us all killed."
With that, Taylor took off running again, the rest of her team following her through the empty streets, Taylor's mysterious 'Worse' 'playing hero' keenly added to everyone's "questions to ask later" category, alongside the myriad almost bursting from the twins and Mash about Taylor's mysterious past come to life in front of them.
"Where is everyone? It's like a ghost town." Ritsuka huffed out between breaths.
"In the shelters. The sirens went off before we showed up and now everyone who couldn't get out of the city will be hiding in the Endbringer shelters."
"Endbringer?" More than one team member muttered. It was actually impressive how the same word said at the same time could carry so many different meanings, from the derision coming from the cursed witch, to the distaste of the dragon-slayer, and the lost horror of the demi-servant.
"Not important. We're here."
The seven spread out as they took in the coastline of the city's bay. The rough crescent of the city's coast, the boardwalk, the boat graveyard, the Protectorate's floating HQ, the wide-open bay itself, and...
"Oh. That's a big wave."
A massive wall of water flying across the surface of the water.
"Mash!" Three voices call out at the same time, and the girl rockets forward, her chant on her lips.
"Deploying pseudo-Noble Phantasm! Lord! Chaldeas!" The large cross-shaped shield slams into the ground as she lands and the massive glowing blue framework of a castle wall unfolds out of itself at lightning speed, racing across the breadth of the coastline.
It's almost fast enough to catch the entirety of the wave.
The weight of millions of tons of water slam into the ephemeral brickwork with a thunderous crash. Taylor knows from experience that any mortal wall would be hard pressed to hold back the force of the tidal wave. But Mash's shield was far more than mere brick and mortar.
Water flies through the air, carried over the hastily erected wall by the sheer force of its own speed, but's it's a mere fraction of the intimidating wave. More sweeps into the city, slinking around the edges of Mash's wall, but again, most of the momentum has been bled away. The streets will be swamped, and the first floors of city blocks will be soaked or flooded, but the first wave of the fight has been soundly stopped.
And knowing it's only the first wave is half the reason Taylor is the only one not surprised when the water recedes down and everyone sees a second wave already following up the first.
"Mash! Second wave!" Ritsuka calls out, even as Mash twists to look back at them.
"Sempai! I don't have enough energy to set up..."
"Excuse me."
Siegfried stepped forward with a calm stride, his massive longsword manifesting itself in one hand as the other comes and rests around Mash's shoulders. "Masters, you'll want to hold onto something sturdy."
Ritsuka immediately stepped forward, forming a triangle with the two linked servants, as Aife casually reached down across Taylor's back and locked her arm under Taylor's.
Jeanne Alter and Rika share only a single grimace. "Not on your fucking life!"
"Same!" And with that the orange haired master took off after her brother, quickly linking herself into the block at the front.
The second wave is halfway across the bay but the eyes of the six are on the visible magical energy being channeled into Siegfried's blade, a hot blue-white flare running up the length of the blade as he draws it back.
"Balmung!"
The second Noble Phantasm in as many minutes flashes forward as a beam of light and in an awesome display of power and accuracy cuts the incoming wave nearly in half, a massive chunk of it immediately vaporized into steam, and everyone watched as the top half of the wave fell limply into the swell behind the half still rushing forward, its momentum halted.
The remains of the second wave was still coming however, it's mass and speed cut down as it was, and everyone braced themselves as it rolled onto the shoreline and rushed over the seawall, made more for defining the edge of city and ocean than trying to stop a wave any caliber greater than what was naturally brought by the tides, and finally crashing into the team from Chaldea.
"Hold on!" Their leader cried just as the water swept into them.
Had it been the water alone, the three human masters would have been bracketed by the force of the wave but anchored by the strength of the two legendary heroes and Mash, they would have been more than fine and ready to confront what came next.
But what came next had decided not to wait, and the water was not the only thing that swept into the city of Brockton Bay.
The Servants saw it first naturally. Their mystical strength and toughness paired with the speed of their senses were hardly thrown off by the wave, but the three humans were quick to spot it as well through the curtain of rain and saltwater.
At thirty feet tall, it wasn't the biggest monster Chaldea had the privilege to fight against, but the five asymmetrical eyes on its head and its near-reptilian body framed by the deluge of water they knew was under its control was enough to impress even the venerable warriors and monster-slayers of Aife and Siegfried.
There's barely a moment to breath between the wave and the appearance of Leviathan, nothing more than enough to half-form a shout before the beast strikes.
It's first blow catches Mash on her shield, the force and angle driving the girl into the air and sent flying into one of the buildings with a crash and at the same time it follows through its motion and the tail is whipped into Jeanne Alter, who manages to ground herself and avoid her own flight, though is shoved back by meters.
Taylor doesn't hesitate. "Rika, Ritsuko, go to Mash, stay on the defensive, everyone else focus on pinning it down!"
Perhaps she should have.
The light in Leviathan's eyes flicker and shine in her direction, singling her out as its water clone followed in its steps, viciously scything through the air trying to cut down Siegfried and his two charges, luckily to little avail in the face of the Saber's skill.
Taylor wasn't afraid though. She had faced down Leviathan before with nothing more than a stolen spear. This time, she knew she had more going for her than ever before. Especially as Aife sauntered between the two of them.
It still galled her that she couldn't fight her own battles. From her time as Skitter and Khepri to her current days as a Master of Chaldea. But the possibility of seeing one of the Endbringers be taken apart by the combined strength of three of humanities' strongest heroic spirits was a soothing balm to her irritated soul.
The two monstrous fighters jump into action at the same time. Aife weaving out of the way of Leviathan's swipes of claw and tail, countering with blows powerful enough that the beast prefers to dodge out of the way of the warrior woman's spear strikes. And when it doesn't dodge large scratches are drawn up the arms and down the legs and across the chest. A tinge of annoyance filters through the bond between Master and Servant, but Taylor knows even that much damage is a testament to Aife's power. Leviathan was as tough as its siblings.
The dance between monster and slayer lasts for a minute, a brilliant display fit for a stage-play written by Shakespear himself, and who would be begging for the retelling on hands and knees.
But Leviathan is clever for all its seemingly mindless destruction. It's macro-hydrokinisis is not dependent on hand gestures or vocalizations and if it wanted to, it could attack using it with no warning. Its unfair power was balanced however by a twisted sense of fair play brought about by a need or want to appear like a seemingly impossible, but surmountable challenge, and so the light in its eyes shift once more to Taylor, just long enough that the eagle-eyes of Aife to notice and start to move.
It's just enough to reach the girl as a wave spontaneously forms and shoots forwards, seeking to smash the driving will of the magic projection into a wall, either crushing her or driving her away. Instead Aife takes the weight of the slam, and more water is merely added to the wave in an attempt to drown the two.
"Hey Fucker! Forget about us?" A burst of black and purple fire punctuates Jeanne Alter's return to the fight as Siegfried simply sprints into the fight himself, Rika and Ritsuka safely transferred into the protective range of Mash Kyrielight, who stands drenched and weary, but also with a fire in her eyes that promises that she won't take being sucker punched again lightly.
It's a small relief for Taylor, as she and Aife are swept away by the furious current.
***
And I think I'll call it and name it part 1. I don't like having this tab sit open for x weeks as I try to churn out the rest of it.
This is a fun little idea I had where Taylor and company enter a micro-singularity like the Fate/Accel Zero event, where it's (I guess) a parallel universe that's similar enough to a character's past that the exact specifics don't really matter that much. Because let's be honest, it's just an excuse to explore Rika, Ritsuka, and Mash finding out about Taylor's past and experiencing Brockton Bay at its height. Right as it's about to be Leviathan's personal waterpark and the events soon after. Really drive home her Heroic backstory, ya know.
And if you're wondering where Arash, Emiya, and communications with Chaldea are... something, something, entity-based chrono-magical interference that doesn't play well with the magic-tech Chaldea uses and doesn't play nice with typically summoned Servants being rayshifted in. Because let's be honest, it's not that strange for events, so I'm not going to let it bother me.
