I mean if you want to trap Ritsuka somewhere away from any allies or help a dream is a pretty awful place to do it given who his allies include.
Hereafter [Worm x Fate/Grand Order]
- Thread starter James D. Fawkes
- Start date
- Crossover
Finagle007
[Verified Great Old One]
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Except he hasn't made those allies just yet.
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
Big Bro Merlin is always watching.
He's just like us, except instead of reading a fanfic he's watching this all go down like a reality TV show.
Finagle007
[Verified Great Old One]
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Yes, but Merlin alone can only do so much as he hasn't been summoned yet. There are others who help protect Ritsuka's dreams, but they haven't met Ritsuka yet either.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Merlin isn't really a summon. He's still alive. He's just determined enough and skilled enough (and powerful enough) to figure out how to "summon" himself if he really wants to. For fun.
Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
Actually, I feel a bit embarrassed to have forgotten him up until now, but another excellent candidate for a Heroic Spirit for the America Singularity would be Samuel Whittemore himself.
Dude managed to rise up the ranks of the British Army as a 48-year old Massachusetts colonial up to Captain by sheer merit (at a time when officers were nigh-universally aristocrats who had paid their way to a commission), then gone to fight in the French and Indian War at the age of 58 (when the average life expectancy at the time was 60), then fought in the Potomac Rebellion, before becoming embroiled in the revolutionary cause from outrage at the Stamp Tax.
On the day of the Battle of Lexington, at the ripe old age of 78, he went out with his musket, two dueling pistols and an officer's sword he had looted during his first war against the French, shot three Redcoats and charged 500 more by himself with said sword. Survived getting shot in the face and being stabbed 6-13 times with bayonets, and proceeded to live for another 18 years after that, survived by five generations of descendants totaling 185 people.
Dude managed to rise up the ranks of the British Army as a 48-year old Massachusetts colonial up to Captain by sheer merit (at a time when officers were nigh-universally aristocrats who had paid their way to a commission), then gone to fight in the French and Indian War at the age of 58 (when the average life expectancy at the time was 60), then fought in the Potomac Rebellion, before becoming embroiled in the revolutionary cause from outrage at the Stamp Tax.
On the day of the Battle of Lexington, at the ripe old age of 78, he went out with his musket, two dueling pistols and an officer's sword he had looted during his first war against the French, shot three Redcoats and charged 500 more by himself with said sword. Survived getting shot in the face and being stabbed 6-13 times with bayonets, and proceeded to live for another 18 years after that, survived by five generations of descendants totaling 185 people.
I mean, that makes a good story, but the problem is... I don;t really think he was notable enough? Like yes, he had a wild life, but he's not the sort of person that a significant portion of the place where he originated in would know off the top of their heads. (Unless I'm really divorced from Massachusetts culture.) Honestly, I think Hamilton, or Washington himself would be more likely to show up as heroic spirits in the America singularity.
- Pronouns
- He
I once more come to suggest saberface genderbent Berserker Lincoln.
- Location
- Quebec
I just want an American Heroic Spirit to have GOD BLESS AMERICA as a Noble Phantasm or the text above the Noble Phantasm or skill. It's very thematic. Also what's going on with Canada and Mexico.
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Chapter CXX: Perils of Uncertainty
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way...
Chapter CXX: Perils of Uncertainty
I was given as clean a bill of health as could be expected. Neither Romani nor Da Vinci could find anything wrong with me, nor any sign of the curse that had afflicted Ritsuka — not, as Da Vinci had grudgingly admitted, that it necessarily meant anything, considering how much trouble they were having figuring out what was going on with Ritsuka in the first place — so the best either of them could give me was a solid "maybe."
Unfortunately, it seemed like that would be the best I could expect anytime in the near future, so while it wasn't exactly a definitive answer, neither of them could find any reason why they should shack me up in Ritsuka's already crowded room like another patient in an epidemic. I was, for the moment, free to go about my day like normal and sleep in my own bed.
Privately, I thought half the reason they didn't want me in Ritsuka's room, sleeping on a spare mattress for the duration, was because they were worried I might bully Shakespeare into putting me into that prison the instant I had a minute alone with him. The frustrating thing was that they weren't entirely wrong to think so.
Arash had, though, been given a sternly worded command from Marie — backed up by Romani — to alert someone if it seemed like I, too, was falling victim to this curse in a more obvious manner.
I had to admit, I wasn't sure what "more obvious" looked like in this case, except with Ritsuka's current state as an example. Ritsuka had been acting a little bit weird in the waning hours of the night before this all happened, but looking back on it, nothing of it really jumped out as particularly unusual. It was all easily written off as fatigue, which was half the reason no one had caught this before it reached the point of actually snaring him.
So there wasn't much else for me to do. By the time I had been given a full and thorough look-over by both Romani and Da Vinci, the morning had waned, and so my first meal of the day was much more like an early lunch than it was a late breakfast.
Obviously, a lot of stuff remained on hold for the time being, too. Emiya continued to cook and serve us breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but El-Melloi II's lessons, Aífe's lessons, and all of the daily things the twins got up to were still called off until Ritsuka was awake and cleared to return to normal activities. Even the investigation into the next Singularity had been put on the back burner while Da Vinci and Romani tried to puzzle out what was going on and how to fix it.
But as the day wore on, they didn't seem like they were having any better luck than they'd had yesterday. There was no notification to the whole facility that Ritsuka had awoken, no frantic Marie arriving to tell me that the situation was resolved (or on the flipside, worsening), and no Mash knocking on my door to let me know that everything was okay again.
Neither did I see any change watching through Muninn's eyes. Every time I checked in on him, the only thing that was ever different was the position of the people inside of the room, who was staying in the room with Rika — usually Mash, and almost always Da Vinci, since she didn't need to eat or sleep — and whether Rika herself had let go of Ritsuka's hand long enough to eat something or use the bathroom.
Unfortunately, another thing that hadn't changed was my inability to do anything about it. I was no less helpless to do something than I had been before — I could only, as Marie had said yesterday, wait and hope. She and Da Vinci were right: knowing that the one ultimately behind all of this was Edmond Dantès, the Count of Monte Cristo, hadn't made any difference whatsoever.
It wasn't the first time I'd faced an enemy like this, of course. I'd come up against more than one foe who liked to shift in and out of dimensions and across realities to either protect his one weakness or to avoid attacks altogether. Usually, however, there was still some kind of weakness to exploit, a chink in the metaphorical armor. Shadow Stalker being vulnerable to electric currents, for example, although they weren't all as easy to take advantage of as carrying around a taser.
The trouble with Dantès was that there didn't seem to be any weakness to his Noble Phantasm at all. Not one we could exploit from the outside, at least. It had become something of a refrain at this point, but it really did seem like the only way to beat it was for Ritsuka to conquer the challenges himself.
Worrying about that seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Ritsuka wasn't incompetent, but there was a difference between that and running a gauntlet of Servants with no one to fight beside you except a belligerent ally who hadn't earned your trust and the wolf in sheep's clothing who had trapped you there in the first place.
Things remained the same throughout the evening and into the night. By the time my energy started to flag and my usual bedtime snuck up on me, I'd spent the entire day waiting for something that never came, a moment that never arrived, and in the absence of anything else to do, the only thing left for me to do was to climb into bed and hope I woke up to either a better plan, or to find Ritsuka had broken the curse on his own.
Four Singularities, each one where I spent most of the time sitting in the back and tossing out orders, and never in all of that had I felt as useless and helpless as I did then. It stuck in my gut like poison, but the nature of helplessness meant that all I could do was lie there and stew in it until I fell into a restless sleep.
That night, there was no Birdcage to welcome me. No fruitless chase waiting for me. No having to sit and watch as my body was used to kill everyone I cared about even a little bit. If I dreamt of anything at all, then I couldn't remember it come the morning.
In some ways, it was disappointing.
It made it easier to pull myself out of bed that morning, at least. There was no sweaty mess plastering my back to my mattress or horrifying images playing on repeat on the backs of my eyelids, so the only thing dogging my steps as I got ready to start my day was the same thing that had been on my mind the night previous.
So as I peeled off my pajamas and started to pull on something more appropriate for an early morning workout, I let my body move on autopilot and pushed my mind down the thread connecting me to Muninn's senses — only to find both El-Melloi II and Bradamante loitering about the room, speaking in hushed, quiet tones to Da Vinci. If that hadn't been enough on its own, the agitation in their postures and the undercurrent of urgency in their voices would have told me the tale.
Muninn's beak opened. "Again?"
The three of them stopped and turned to face Muninn, then each of them glanced in the direction of Ritsuka's bed, where a lightly snoring Rika was sprawled across the free space of his mattress, just like she had been for the last two days. I noted the greasy hair in a distant sort of clinical way — that she might have eaten and used the restroom as needed, but she hadn't taken the time or effort to keep up with her hygiene in other ways.
Losing him really would wreck her. More, I think, than losing Emiya a hundred times ever could.
"Yes," Da Vinci said, pitching her voice softly to avoid waking Rika. "It seems that Bradamante and El-Melloi II are the victims latest in line for this curse. They were just informing me about their experiences, and it appears to match up with what Emiya and Aífe reported yesterday."
"I'm sorry, Master," Bradamante said, just barely above a whisper. "I tried to resist it, I really did, but it was like someone else was in control of my body!"
El-Melloi II grunted. The stick of an already eaten lollipop sat between his fingers, thoroughly and disgustingly chewed, such that the paper was frayed and soggy and it was entirely possible that he'd swallowed some of it in the process.
"Same," he murmured sourly. "At least whatever was doing the controlling didn't have the finesse to make proper use of my Noble Phantasm. Small mercies."
Bradamante nodded. "Yes! It really was quite inelegant! In fact, it's quite embarrassing just thinking about how clumsy I was!"
So that brought it up to four. I noticed that Siegfried and Arash hadn't yet been amongst them — a coincidence, or did the fact that they were contracted solely to me have something to do with it? The part that muddled things on that front was the inclusion of Emiya, who was Rika's Servant, not Ritsuka's, so if it had anything to do with who was contracted to who, why had he been dragged into things first? Was this curse going to go through our entire roster one by one — or two by two, I guess — or was it just going to keep to Servants whose contracts were shared between the three of us?
God, I missed Lisa. She could at least have given me something to work off of. All of these uncertainties and guesswork were really starting to get under my skin.
"At least this confirms that Emiya and Aífe weren't outliers," said Da Vinci. "However the inner mechanisms work, Château d'If seems to prefer pulling from the Servants currently within Chaldea itself. It might be safe to assume that it either can't summon Servants of its own, or that doing so may be cost prohibitive."
It might be safe to assume that it had those sorts of limitations?
"You don't think the choices it's making have more to do with familiarity than with a limitation like that?"
"That's possible," said Da Vinci. "But in that case, it could make use of any of the Heroic Spirits the four of you encountered during your deployments, and we would have no way of knowing — except that we've established a measure of consistency now, haven't we? After all, this is the second time in a row that Servants within the facility were used, and that seems to be a pattern."
"So we just have to wait for everyone to finish doing their Mister Hyde cosplays?" a new voice interjected suddenly.
Da Vinci paused and took the time to turn and offer Rika an apologetic smile. "I'm sorry, Rika, we were trying not to wake you."
"Yeah, sure, whatever." Rika didn't even take a second to appreciate the apology for what it was. "So is that it? This will all be over after Onii-chan and Jalter get through kicking out the…what, nine ghosts of Christmas past?"
I stopped for a second halfway through pulling on my shoes. Nine ghosts for nine Servants. Ten, if we included Mash, and eleven, if we added Da Vinci. Mash might not count since she was a Demi-Servant instead of a regular one, and Jeanne Alter was already with Ritsuka, which would neatly leave nine, if Da Vinci really did count.
Could it really be that simple, though?
"It's…a possibility," Da Vinci hedged.
El-Melloi II grunted. "That count referred to me as the fifth Lord of Judgment, for whatever that's worth. If we're right that it can't summon Servants independently and has to make use of the ones already here, then he's already made it about halfway through — and handled two of the more challenging opponents that could have been thrown at him, too."
But not all of them. Aífe and Emiya were one thing, because if you turned them into entirely different fighters, then a lot of the threat either of them posed disappeared. Siegfried, however? He didn't need any of his skills or his normal mindset to be a brick wall. Getting around his Noble Phantasm might wind up being the hardest part of Ritsuka's journey through Château d'If.
And if Da Vinci was thrown into the mess like I thought she might be… Well, I wasn't sure what that would look like. It wouldn't be easy for him, that was for sure.
"It was quite impressive!" said Bradamante. "He handled the battle against my, um, e-evil self? I-I'm not sure what to call it…"
"If ever there was an appropriate time to call something a shadow Servant," El-Melloi II said wryly, "this is probably it."
"Jung would have a field day," Da Vinci agreed.
"Ten," I said, dragging things back on track. "You're miscounting. Even if Ritsuka makes it through the rest of our team without getting hurt too badly, Dantès is still there at the very end. Whatever role he's playing, we can assume that he'll shed it once it's outlived its utility."
Da Vinci's mouth drew into a tight line. "Two Avenger class Servants clashing at the very end of this all… I suppose it's appropriate, when you consider that the both of them are constructed almost entirely of grudges." She sighed. "And I'm going to miss the chance to observe such a thing! How unfair is that?"
No more unfair than the fact that we had to sit on the sidelines like this.
"If we're right, then you'll at least get to see Dantès and what he's capable of," I told her. "Do you think you'll be able to keep your wits about you enough to look closer at things, if you do get snared at some point?"
"I'll do my best," Da Vinci promised, but she didn't sound particularly confident. "Depending on how it manifests me in his dream… Well, if I don't get pulled in until the exact moment it's time for Ritsuka to confront 'me' as one of these Lords of Judgment, I may not have time to do much observing. Less so if the fight begins immediately and I have to fend off two Servants simultaneously."
Somehow, I thought that she would still manage to catch more than all of the rest of our Servants had so far. That was Da Vinci for you.
"And in the meantime? Do we still intend to send someone in to rescue him if this goes on for much longer?" I had to ask.
"It may not be necessary," she said. "True, Ritsuka is still in very real danger, but if he continues at this pace, then it shouldn't take him more than another three days to reach the end of whatever game Edmond Dantès is playing with him. Provided everything works the way we're theorizing it does, and the more data points we receive from those caught up in its web, the more we can narrow everything down."
It took me a second to realize the spider pun hidden in her statement, and in the privacy of my room, where none of them could see my face or hear my voice unless I projected it through Muninn, I let my face fall into my hands and groaned softly. Was that on purpose, or had Rika just rubbed off on me so much that I was seeing the puns now, regardless of whether they were intentional or not?
"When," Rika began, "when will it be 'necessary,' Da Vinci?"
Da Vinci grimaced. "Romani will likely notice himself soon, but Ritsuka's body isn't just sleeping, it's slowed down all of its metabolic processes, almost like he's hibernating."
"Hibernating?" Bradamante asked, incredulous.
"Ritsuka isn't a bear, Da Vinci," El-Melloi II pointed out.
"He isn't," she agreed, "and we can help replenish his fluids to push things out even further and more safely, but at the rate he's going now, he could last the rest of the week before his physical health was in any danger of deteriorating."
"A week?" Rika squawked, her voice cracking.
"That's too long!" Bradamante agreed.
Romani had given it two days, not a week. There was no way I was going to agree to sitting on my hands doing nothing for another five days.
"Da Vinci —"
But she cut across me before I could finish.
"I know," she said, "no one likes that idea. Frankly, just because it's possible doesn't mean it's the best idea either. Having said that, we still don't know anywhere near as much as I'd like to about this curse and what Château d'If looks like on the inside — because I very much doubt it resembles the real thing in any way except superficially — so I'd like to give it one more day to see if the pattern holds."
In my real body, my lips pressed into a thin line. Muninn's beak clacked. "One more day?"
Da Vinci nodded. "So that we can see if another pair of our Servants is pulled into things. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a pattern."
The version of that saying that I was familiar with called it "enemy action," but either fit here, I guess.
Marie and Romani would be happy about that, at least. Neither of them wanted to send anyone in after Ritsuka, so the longer the moment could be put off, the better.
"One more day?" Rika echoed me. "And then we can go in and get him?"
"If nothing changes?" said Da Vinci. "Yes. That's why, Rika, I need you to make sure you eat well and get a good night's sleep tonight. If it comes down to it and we have to send you in, you need to be at your best."
Rika's brow furrowed and her mouth drew into a tight line. She nodded. "Right!"
At that moment, the door chose to slide open, and Mash walked in, carrying a tray in her hands and a smile on her face. "Good morning, Senpai! I brought you some breakfast!"
And then, she saw El-Melloi II and Bradamante.
"Ah!" she said. "El-Melloi II! Bradamante! G-good morning to you, too! Was…there something you needed from Senpai or Miss Da Vinci?"
Da Vinci sighed again and smiled a lopsided little smile. "Good morning, Mash. They were just here to tell me about the little jaunt the two of them took last night."
Mash gasped. "They were forced to fight Senpai, too?"
"Yes," said Da Vinci. "It seems they had a similar experience to Emiya and Aífe. It's looking like it may be how this curse Ritsuka is under functions."
"Mash!" Rika said, holding out her hands. "Food!"
Mash blinked, and then hurried over to her. "R-right! Here you go, Senpai!"
She presented the tray with its breakfast platter, and Rika almost ripped it right out of her hands, setting it across her lap and digging into the meal laid out on it with gusto. Mash watched it, bewildered, because she hadn't been privy to the rest of the conversation that had just taken place.
On her shoulder, the little gremlin's ears twitched like a rabbit listening for a predator, and its head turned almost a full hundred-twenty degrees to pin Muninn with a beady-eyed stare.
Fuck you, too, I thought irritably as my stomach rumbled. An inconvenient time for Muninn's senses to be so close to the human norm.
"Da Vinci," I said, "I'll bring the Director up to speed and leave Romani to you."
"Of course," she agreed.
And I withdrew from Muninn, leaving her on autopilot as I put her in the back of my mind. Dressed and shoes neatly tied, I stood up from my bed, walked over to the door, and left.
After smelling the food Mash had brought for Rika, it was tempting to head straight for the cafeteria and eat a meal of my own, but I'd just a moment ago promised to let Marie know what was going on, so I headed that direction instead. Despite my stomach's opinion on the matter, food could wait a little while.
When I got there and explained the situation, Marie was happy to hear the news and also very much not.
"Two more Servants were trapped by this curse, at least for the duration of their role in it," she murmured thoughtfully. She had taken up her standard thinking pose, one arm cradling the elbow of the other as she held a hand up to her chin. Her urge to chew on her thumbnail was almost palpable. "Da Vinci thinks another two might become wrapped up in this tonight?"
"She wants to see if it happens," I said. "If it becomes a pattern, then that might tell us more about how Château d'If works. If it needs specifically to draw on our roster of Servants or if it's just coincidence that four of ours were already pulled into it."
"And if it goes through our entire roster, she thinks it might be broken after that." Marie hummed. "It's…not an unsound theory. But without more to go on, it's going to be hard to prove even if things play out like she expects them to."
Again, to have someone with a power like Lisa's on hand… I'd groaned to myself at the idea of Sherlock Holmes, but he might have been incredibly useful, just then. Da Vinci was a genius, but that could only carry you so far in a field that you had no training in. Hand her a wrench and a technical problem and I'd bet on her any day. Hand her a mystery and I wasn't quite so confident.
"Which is why she's committed to sending someone in tomorrow."
Marie grunted, and her nose wrinkled and her brow furrowed as she grimaced. "Yes, there's that, too, isn't there? Honestly, I don't know what she's thinking!"
"We can't afford to put it off forever," I told her. "Sitting around and twiddling our thumbs while Ritsuka fights for his life doesn't sit well with any of us, and the only one who believes unconditionally that Ritsuka will pull this off on his own is Mash."
"I know that!" Marie snapped. "But we've already gone over the risks involved, and while I can acknowledge that we might not wind up with any other choice, you understand why I don't want to take risks like that, don't you?"
Because you're a decent person, I thought, and I'd thought so before, that if she wasn't, the person standing across from her might have been an entirely different Taylor Hebert.
"And our normal Rayshifts aren't just as dangerous every time we get sent into a Singularity?" I asked pointedly.
"It's different," she insisted. "At least then, we know something about what we're sending you into! This… If it even is Château d'If, then we don't have the first clue what it looks like or how it works, just that it attacks the mind and soul and can conscript our Servants for whatever it does. I can't accept sending anyone into that completely blind!"
"Anyone," I said, "or just me?"
Her brow furrowed. "Anyone. As the Director of Chaldea, you're all my responsibility, which means if something happens and we send you into a trap, it's my fault first and foremost!"
"Except this really isn't all that different from those Singularities, is it?" I said. "We know that this curse plays on karma and sins and punishes your regrets, and that's already more than we know about any situation we Rayshift into normally. We didn't know Drake was a part of Okeanos or that she had her own Grail until we met her ourselves, we didn't know that Jason was the one behind everything — and Forneus was pulling the strings on him — and we didn't know Davy Jones was involved either."
Marie winced with every point I brought up.
"We didn't know Aífe and Lancelot were in Septem," I went on. "We didn't know Romulus had created his United Empire in opposition to Nero's Rome. We didn't know we were going to land so off course that we wound up on the other side of the continent. We didn't know Stheno had been summoned as a kind of botched response to Romulus suppressing his own Divinity.
"In fact," I concluded, "we know more about what's going on inside Château d'If than we did any of the Singularities we were sent to before."
"I get it," she said sourly. "I get your point. The difference is, the things we do know are just more reasons we should be really cautious about this. This is a trap, not a Singularity we're going in to solve, and we've already discussed the reason why you should be the last person who takes any risks on it. And Rika and Ritsuka's contract with Mash is just as important. In fact…" She looked like the very idea frightened her. "M-maybe the person who should be sent in to help him…should be me."
With how much guilt she was carrying around about what happened to Mash? With how much she still blamed herself for the sabotage, as though she should have read Lev's mind and realized he had been possessed by one of these Demon Gods? With how harshly she judged herself for every tiny mistake she made? Now I was the one who refused to let that happen. Not as a matter of competency, but just because her personality would make it all the harder for her to face the sins she carried, real, imagined, or exaggerated.
Besides, there were several very good reasons why that idea had originally been shot down before anyone could even suggest it. Those hadn't magically vanished in the past two days.
"We'll figure it out when the time comes," I promised her.
She didn't look reassured. I didn't think she would be until this entire thing was over.
A part of me wanted to stay and make sure she was okay, just keep an eye out on her, but as I'd said before, being so blatant about it would just make her withdraw and try to hide her problems, so the best thing I could do was to go about my day and offer her support more blatantly when it looked like she desperately needed it. To that end, I left her office once everything had been covered, with the promise that I would be back with breakfast after my morning workout.
Arash? I asked as the door whooshed shut behind me.
You don't even need to ask, he told me. I'll stick around and keep my eye on her.
I wondered if it said something that I'd gotten so used to having him in my metaphorical — and maybe literal — shadow that I didn't even bat an eye at the idea he had been hanging around enough to know what I wanted before I could even finish asking for it. Rika might not have been the only one who had gotten too used to the idea of having her Servant around to help out.
The gym was the first place I went after Marie's office, and I made sure to go through my morning workout at a normal pace. After that, I took a quick shower, dried my hair, got dressed in something a little more workplace friendly, and made my way down to the cafeteria, where Emiya was once more serving breakfast.
"Two, again," I told him as I approached the counter.
"Two it is," he agreed, and he stacked the trays up again as he started to prepare a pair of plates. "I'm assuming you're the one most in the loop about what's going on, so… Any news on Ritsuka?"
"El-Melloi II and Bradamante were drawn in," I said without ceremony.
He paused for a second, then continued dishing up food.
"The way I was?"
"Yeah. Da Vinci thinks we should expect it to go through our entire roster before this is all over."
He hummed. "Our entire roster, huh? Well, thankfully, it's already gone through the two scariest Servants in the facility, although I do worry a little bit about what happens when they have to face Siegfried. If they have to face Siegfried. That guy…he just doesn't have a mean bone in his body."
That didn't mean that Château d'If couldn't give him one, at least for the duration of his stay in it.
"If it comes down to it, Jeanne Alter isn't a proper hero, so her Noble Phantasm should be more effective against his Armor of Fafnir," I said. "Dantès isn't either, so that puts them at something of an advantage."
Which wasn't at all the same as saying they wouldn't have any trouble, but if they had to face him before we could mount a rescue, that was all I could hang my hat on.
Emiya grimaced. "I guess hoping it works out in their favor is all we can do for now. It's tempting to go to Shakespeare and have him put me back in, but… Well, I'm not in a rush to let that curse do what it did to me a second time. I don't imagine Aífe is either. There are some things that give even fearless Heroic Spirits pause."
It must have been really bad to make even Emiya hesitate like that. If it was anything like that nightmare of mine, then it would have been its own unique kind of torture.
When he was done loading up the plates, he pushed the tray over my way and smirked. "Compliments of the chef."
I looked down at his apron. 'I AM THE LADLE OF MY SOUP,' it said in big, bold letters. Given it seemed to be a pun on the incantation he'd used when he fought Herakles, it was all but certain now that he was making these himself. I made sure my face told him exactly how unimpressed I was.
"If you're fishing, you'll have better luck casting your line in a different pond."
He chuckled and shook his head, shrugging. "Can you blame me? With everything that's been going on, my poor master has been neglecting me. At this rate, what little pride I have will wither away from lack of attention." Almost immediately, he sobered and heaved out a sigh. "And with this happening so soon after everything else, I haven't had the time or the chance to patch things up with her. What rotten luck."
Funnily enough, it felt familiar to me. So much had happened so quickly in my career that it was the downtime that threw me off the most.
"You can't put it off forever," I told him, "but you're right to leave it alone for now. I don't think Rika's in the right headspace to try and deal with that, too."
"Exactly my thinking," he agreed. "So I guess, for now, I'm just Chaldea's humble chef." He tapped his apron. "I'll take what I can get until that changes."
I guess I couldn't blame him for that.
Tray in hand and food in tow, I made my way back to Marie's office and saw myself in. Marie didn't quite salivate when she saw what I brought back with me, but it was far closer a thing that she would ever have liked to admit.
Nothing to report, Arash told me as I set her food down at her desk. This time, she was fine on her own.
A slight pause was the only sign to give away that I'd heard him at all, and once I was sure that Marie was comfortably distracted with her breakfast, I replied, Good. Thanks for keeping an eye on her again.
Even though that might have made her sound more like an unruly toddler than a grown woman. There wasn't much of a better way to put it, though.
No trouble, said Arash. I'd rather be doing something useful than twiddling my thumbs and staring at the wall.
He really was my compatibility summon, wasn't he?
The rest of the day meandered on. Morning passed, lunch was eaten, then the afternoon crawled by like a snail. Every time I checked in on Ritsuka's room, it was to find that the only thing that had changed was the people inside or the positions they took. Romani came and went, stopping in a few times throughout to check in on them the same way I was with Muninn, but with Da Vinci snugly ensconced in her chair and the situation as firmly in hand as it could be, considering the circumstances, he had other responsibilities to see to in the meantime.
When I saw him at dinner, he looked tired and sluggish, like he was carrying an extra weight on his shoulders. He was practically slumped over his plate, and by the way he was playing with his food, he didn't seem to have much of an appetite.
Physician, heal thyself, indeed.
Evening drew out into night, and after another long day of waiting and hoping and sitting around doing nothing, nothing had changed. There were no updates from Da Vinci and no reason to suspect anything had gone awry, but also no reason to believe anything would be any different tomorrow either. By the time I was ready to climb into bed, there was an air of surrender about the whole thing, like everyone had resigned themselves to the reality that the only thing we could do was take our chances on a rescue mission.
Da Vinci's almost omnipresent smile had fallen into grim acceptance. Whatever hope she might have harbored that this would resolve itself without interference seemed to have died a slow and terrible death.
Before I went to bed, I practiced a few arguments in my head. Reasons why it should be me who was sent in and not Rika. Counterpoints to the issues that had been brought up before and which I knew would be brought up again the instant I offered to be the one to go in. The hardest one to convince was going to be Marie, and even the couple of things I had reluctantly chosen to hammer at her weak points might only wind up strengthening her resolve, but that was a chance I had to take.
I went to sleep determined to face whatever Château d'If could throw at me. I was going to rescue Ritsuka no matter what it cost me. If I had to face down specters of my regrets and put them all in the grave, then I would just have to harden my heart and do it.
The next morning, Ritsuka woke up.
Next — Chapter CXXI: No Worse for Wear
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way...
Chapter CXX: Perils of Uncertainty
I was given as clean a bill of health as could be expected. Neither Romani nor Da Vinci could find anything wrong with me, nor any sign of the curse that had afflicted Ritsuka — not, as Da Vinci had grudgingly admitted, that it necessarily meant anything, considering how much trouble they were having figuring out what was going on with Ritsuka in the first place — so the best either of them could give me was a solid "maybe."
Unfortunately, it seemed like that would be the best I could expect anytime in the near future, so while it wasn't exactly a definitive answer, neither of them could find any reason why they should shack me up in Ritsuka's already crowded room like another patient in an epidemic. I was, for the moment, free to go about my day like normal and sleep in my own bed.
Privately, I thought half the reason they didn't want me in Ritsuka's room, sleeping on a spare mattress for the duration, was because they were worried I might bully Shakespeare into putting me into that prison the instant I had a minute alone with him. The frustrating thing was that they weren't entirely wrong to think so.
Arash had, though, been given a sternly worded command from Marie — backed up by Romani — to alert someone if it seemed like I, too, was falling victim to this curse in a more obvious manner.
I had to admit, I wasn't sure what "more obvious" looked like in this case, except with Ritsuka's current state as an example. Ritsuka had been acting a little bit weird in the waning hours of the night before this all happened, but looking back on it, nothing of it really jumped out as particularly unusual. It was all easily written off as fatigue, which was half the reason no one had caught this before it reached the point of actually snaring him.
So there wasn't much else for me to do. By the time I had been given a full and thorough look-over by both Romani and Da Vinci, the morning had waned, and so my first meal of the day was much more like an early lunch than it was a late breakfast.
Obviously, a lot of stuff remained on hold for the time being, too. Emiya continued to cook and serve us breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but El-Melloi II's lessons, Aífe's lessons, and all of the daily things the twins got up to were still called off until Ritsuka was awake and cleared to return to normal activities. Even the investigation into the next Singularity had been put on the back burner while Da Vinci and Romani tried to puzzle out what was going on and how to fix it.
But as the day wore on, they didn't seem like they were having any better luck than they'd had yesterday. There was no notification to the whole facility that Ritsuka had awoken, no frantic Marie arriving to tell me that the situation was resolved (or on the flipside, worsening), and no Mash knocking on my door to let me know that everything was okay again.
Neither did I see any change watching through Muninn's eyes. Every time I checked in on him, the only thing that was ever different was the position of the people inside of the room, who was staying in the room with Rika — usually Mash, and almost always Da Vinci, since she didn't need to eat or sleep — and whether Rika herself had let go of Ritsuka's hand long enough to eat something or use the bathroom.
Unfortunately, another thing that hadn't changed was my inability to do anything about it. I was no less helpless to do something than I had been before — I could only, as Marie had said yesterday, wait and hope. She and Da Vinci were right: knowing that the one ultimately behind all of this was Edmond Dantès, the Count of Monte Cristo, hadn't made any difference whatsoever.
It wasn't the first time I'd faced an enemy like this, of course. I'd come up against more than one foe who liked to shift in and out of dimensions and across realities to either protect his one weakness or to avoid attacks altogether. Usually, however, there was still some kind of weakness to exploit, a chink in the metaphorical armor. Shadow Stalker being vulnerable to electric currents, for example, although they weren't all as easy to take advantage of as carrying around a taser.
The trouble with Dantès was that there didn't seem to be any weakness to his Noble Phantasm at all. Not one we could exploit from the outside, at least. It had become something of a refrain at this point, but it really did seem like the only way to beat it was for Ritsuka to conquer the challenges himself.
Worrying about that seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Ritsuka wasn't incompetent, but there was a difference between that and running a gauntlet of Servants with no one to fight beside you except a belligerent ally who hadn't earned your trust and the wolf in sheep's clothing who had trapped you there in the first place.
Things remained the same throughout the evening and into the night. By the time my energy started to flag and my usual bedtime snuck up on me, I'd spent the entire day waiting for something that never came, a moment that never arrived, and in the absence of anything else to do, the only thing left for me to do was to climb into bed and hope I woke up to either a better plan, or to find Ritsuka had broken the curse on his own.
Four Singularities, each one where I spent most of the time sitting in the back and tossing out orders, and never in all of that had I felt as useless and helpless as I did then. It stuck in my gut like poison, but the nature of helplessness meant that all I could do was lie there and stew in it until I fell into a restless sleep.
That night, there was no Birdcage to welcome me. No fruitless chase waiting for me. No having to sit and watch as my body was used to kill everyone I cared about even a little bit. If I dreamt of anything at all, then I couldn't remember it come the morning.
In some ways, it was disappointing.
It made it easier to pull myself out of bed that morning, at least. There was no sweaty mess plastering my back to my mattress or horrifying images playing on repeat on the backs of my eyelids, so the only thing dogging my steps as I got ready to start my day was the same thing that had been on my mind the night previous.
So as I peeled off my pajamas and started to pull on something more appropriate for an early morning workout, I let my body move on autopilot and pushed my mind down the thread connecting me to Muninn's senses — only to find both El-Melloi II and Bradamante loitering about the room, speaking in hushed, quiet tones to Da Vinci. If that hadn't been enough on its own, the agitation in their postures and the undercurrent of urgency in their voices would have told me the tale.
Muninn's beak opened. "Again?"
The three of them stopped and turned to face Muninn, then each of them glanced in the direction of Ritsuka's bed, where a lightly snoring Rika was sprawled across the free space of his mattress, just like she had been for the last two days. I noted the greasy hair in a distant sort of clinical way — that she might have eaten and used the restroom as needed, but she hadn't taken the time or effort to keep up with her hygiene in other ways.
Losing him really would wreck her. More, I think, than losing Emiya a hundred times ever could.
"Yes," Da Vinci said, pitching her voice softly to avoid waking Rika. "It seems that Bradamante and El-Melloi II are the victims latest in line for this curse. They were just informing me about their experiences, and it appears to match up with what Emiya and Aífe reported yesterday."
"I'm sorry, Master," Bradamante said, just barely above a whisper. "I tried to resist it, I really did, but it was like someone else was in control of my body!"
El-Melloi II grunted. The stick of an already eaten lollipop sat between his fingers, thoroughly and disgustingly chewed, such that the paper was frayed and soggy and it was entirely possible that he'd swallowed some of it in the process.
"Same," he murmured sourly. "At least whatever was doing the controlling didn't have the finesse to make proper use of my Noble Phantasm. Small mercies."
Bradamante nodded. "Yes! It really was quite inelegant! In fact, it's quite embarrassing just thinking about how clumsy I was!"
So that brought it up to four. I noticed that Siegfried and Arash hadn't yet been amongst them — a coincidence, or did the fact that they were contracted solely to me have something to do with it? The part that muddled things on that front was the inclusion of Emiya, who was Rika's Servant, not Ritsuka's, so if it had anything to do with who was contracted to who, why had he been dragged into things first? Was this curse going to go through our entire roster one by one — or two by two, I guess — or was it just going to keep to Servants whose contracts were shared between the three of us?
God, I missed Lisa. She could at least have given me something to work off of. All of these uncertainties and guesswork were really starting to get under my skin.
"At least this confirms that Emiya and Aífe weren't outliers," said Da Vinci. "However the inner mechanisms work, Château d'If seems to prefer pulling from the Servants currently within Chaldea itself. It might be safe to assume that it either can't summon Servants of its own, or that doing so may be cost prohibitive."
It might be safe to assume that it had those sorts of limitations?
"You don't think the choices it's making have more to do with familiarity than with a limitation like that?"
"That's possible," said Da Vinci. "But in that case, it could make use of any of the Heroic Spirits the four of you encountered during your deployments, and we would have no way of knowing — except that we've established a measure of consistency now, haven't we? After all, this is the second time in a row that Servants within the facility were used, and that seems to be a pattern."
"So we just have to wait for everyone to finish doing their Mister Hyde cosplays?" a new voice interjected suddenly.
Da Vinci paused and took the time to turn and offer Rika an apologetic smile. "I'm sorry, Rika, we were trying not to wake you."
"Yeah, sure, whatever." Rika didn't even take a second to appreciate the apology for what it was. "So is that it? This will all be over after Onii-chan and Jalter get through kicking out the…what, nine ghosts of Christmas past?"
I stopped for a second halfway through pulling on my shoes. Nine ghosts for nine Servants. Ten, if we included Mash, and eleven, if we added Da Vinci. Mash might not count since she was a Demi-Servant instead of a regular one, and Jeanne Alter was already with Ritsuka, which would neatly leave nine, if Da Vinci really did count.
Could it really be that simple, though?
"It's…a possibility," Da Vinci hedged.
El-Melloi II grunted. "That count referred to me as the fifth Lord of Judgment, for whatever that's worth. If we're right that it can't summon Servants independently and has to make use of the ones already here, then he's already made it about halfway through — and handled two of the more challenging opponents that could have been thrown at him, too."
But not all of them. Aífe and Emiya were one thing, because if you turned them into entirely different fighters, then a lot of the threat either of them posed disappeared. Siegfried, however? He didn't need any of his skills or his normal mindset to be a brick wall. Getting around his Noble Phantasm might wind up being the hardest part of Ritsuka's journey through Château d'If.
And if Da Vinci was thrown into the mess like I thought she might be… Well, I wasn't sure what that would look like. It wouldn't be easy for him, that was for sure.
"It was quite impressive!" said Bradamante. "He handled the battle against my, um, e-evil self? I-I'm not sure what to call it…"
"If ever there was an appropriate time to call something a shadow Servant," El-Melloi II said wryly, "this is probably it."
"Jung would have a field day," Da Vinci agreed.
"Ten," I said, dragging things back on track. "You're miscounting. Even if Ritsuka makes it through the rest of our team without getting hurt too badly, Dantès is still there at the very end. Whatever role he's playing, we can assume that he'll shed it once it's outlived its utility."
Da Vinci's mouth drew into a tight line. "Two Avenger class Servants clashing at the very end of this all… I suppose it's appropriate, when you consider that the both of them are constructed almost entirely of grudges." She sighed. "And I'm going to miss the chance to observe such a thing! How unfair is that?"
No more unfair than the fact that we had to sit on the sidelines like this.
"If we're right, then you'll at least get to see Dantès and what he's capable of," I told her. "Do you think you'll be able to keep your wits about you enough to look closer at things, if you do get snared at some point?"
"I'll do my best," Da Vinci promised, but she didn't sound particularly confident. "Depending on how it manifests me in his dream… Well, if I don't get pulled in until the exact moment it's time for Ritsuka to confront 'me' as one of these Lords of Judgment, I may not have time to do much observing. Less so if the fight begins immediately and I have to fend off two Servants simultaneously."
Somehow, I thought that she would still manage to catch more than all of the rest of our Servants had so far. That was Da Vinci for you.
"And in the meantime? Do we still intend to send someone in to rescue him if this goes on for much longer?" I had to ask.
"It may not be necessary," she said. "True, Ritsuka is still in very real danger, but if he continues at this pace, then it shouldn't take him more than another three days to reach the end of whatever game Edmond Dantès is playing with him. Provided everything works the way we're theorizing it does, and the more data points we receive from those caught up in its web, the more we can narrow everything down."
It took me a second to realize the spider pun hidden in her statement, and in the privacy of my room, where none of them could see my face or hear my voice unless I projected it through Muninn, I let my face fall into my hands and groaned softly. Was that on purpose, or had Rika just rubbed off on me so much that I was seeing the puns now, regardless of whether they were intentional or not?
"When," Rika began, "when will it be 'necessary,' Da Vinci?"
Da Vinci grimaced. "Romani will likely notice himself soon, but Ritsuka's body isn't just sleeping, it's slowed down all of its metabolic processes, almost like he's hibernating."
"Hibernating?" Bradamante asked, incredulous.
"Ritsuka isn't a bear, Da Vinci," El-Melloi II pointed out.
"He isn't," she agreed, "and we can help replenish his fluids to push things out even further and more safely, but at the rate he's going now, he could last the rest of the week before his physical health was in any danger of deteriorating."
"A week?" Rika squawked, her voice cracking.
"That's too long!" Bradamante agreed.
Romani had given it two days, not a week. There was no way I was going to agree to sitting on my hands doing nothing for another five days.
"Da Vinci —"
But she cut across me before I could finish.
"I know," she said, "no one likes that idea. Frankly, just because it's possible doesn't mean it's the best idea either. Having said that, we still don't know anywhere near as much as I'd like to about this curse and what Château d'If looks like on the inside — because I very much doubt it resembles the real thing in any way except superficially — so I'd like to give it one more day to see if the pattern holds."
In my real body, my lips pressed into a thin line. Muninn's beak clacked. "One more day?"
Da Vinci nodded. "So that we can see if another pair of our Servants is pulled into things. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a pattern."
The version of that saying that I was familiar with called it "enemy action," but either fit here, I guess.
Marie and Romani would be happy about that, at least. Neither of them wanted to send anyone in after Ritsuka, so the longer the moment could be put off, the better.
"One more day?" Rika echoed me. "And then we can go in and get him?"
"If nothing changes?" said Da Vinci. "Yes. That's why, Rika, I need you to make sure you eat well and get a good night's sleep tonight. If it comes down to it and we have to send you in, you need to be at your best."
Rika's brow furrowed and her mouth drew into a tight line. She nodded. "Right!"
At that moment, the door chose to slide open, and Mash walked in, carrying a tray in her hands and a smile on her face. "Good morning, Senpai! I brought you some breakfast!"
And then, she saw El-Melloi II and Bradamante.
"Ah!" she said. "El-Melloi II! Bradamante! G-good morning to you, too! Was…there something you needed from Senpai or Miss Da Vinci?"
Da Vinci sighed again and smiled a lopsided little smile. "Good morning, Mash. They were just here to tell me about the little jaunt the two of them took last night."
Mash gasped. "They were forced to fight Senpai, too?"
"Yes," said Da Vinci. "It seems they had a similar experience to Emiya and Aífe. It's looking like it may be how this curse Ritsuka is under functions."
"Mash!" Rika said, holding out her hands. "Food!"
Mash blinked, and then hurried over to her. "R-right! Here you go, Senpai!"
She presented the tray with its breakfast platter, and Rika almost ripped it right out of her hands, setting it across her lap and digging into the meal laid out on it with gusto. Mash watched it, bewildered, because she hadn't been privy to the rest of the conversation that had just taken place.
On her shoulder, the little gremlin's ears twitched like a rabbit listening for a predator, and its head turned almost a full hundred-twenty degrees to pin Muninn with a beady-eyed stare.
Fuck you, too, I thought irritably as my stomach rumbled. An inconvenient time for Muninn's senses to be so close to the human norm.
"Da Vinci," I said, "I'll bring the Director up to speed and leave Romani to you."
"Of course," she agreed.
And I withdrew from Muninn, leaving her on autopilot as I put her in the back of my mind. Dressed and shoes neatly tied, I stood up from my bed, walked over to the door, and left.
After smelling the food Mash had brought for Rika, it was tempting to head straight for the cafeteria and eat a meal of my own, but I'd just a moment ago promised to let Marie know what was going on, so I headed that direction instead. Despite my stomach's opinion on the matter, food could wait a little while.
When I got there and explained the situation, Marie was happy to hear the news and also very much not.
"Two more Servants were trapped by this curse, at least for the duration of their role in it," she murmured thoughtfully. She had taken up her standard thinking pose, one arm cradling the elbow of the other as she held a hand up to her chin. Her urge to chew on her thumbnail was almost palpable. "Da Vinci thinks another two might become wrapped up in this tonight?"
"She wants to see if it happens," I said. "If it becomes a pattern, then that might tell us more about how Château d'If works. If it needs specifically to draw on our roster of Servants or if it's just coincidence that four of ours were already pulled into it."
"And if it goes through our entire roster, she thinks it might be broken after that." Marie hummed. "It's…not an unsound theory. But without more to go on, it's going to be hard to prove even if things play out like she expects them to."
Again, to have someone with a power like Lisa's on hand… I'd groaned to myself at the idea of Sherlock Holmes, but he might have been incredibly useful, just then. Da Vinci was a genius, but that could only carry you so far in a field that you had no training in. Hand her a wrench and a technical problem and I'd bet on her any day. Hand her a mystery and I wasn't quite so confident.
"Which is why she's committed to sending someone in tomorrow."
Marie grunted, and her nose wrinkled and her brow furrowed as she grimaced. "Yes, there's that, too, isn't there? Honestly, I don't know what she's thinking!"
"We can't afford to put it off forever," I told her. "Sitting around and twiddling our thumbs while Ritsuka fights for his life doesn't sit well with any of us, and the only one who believes unconditionally that Ritsuka will pull this off on his own is Mash."
"I know that!" Marie snapped. "But we've already gone over the risks involved, and while I can acknowledge that we might not wind up with any other choice, you understand why I don't want to take risks like that, don't you?"
Because you're a decent person, I thought, and I'd thought so before, that if she wasn't, the person standing across from her might have been an entirely different Taylor Hebert.
"And our normal Rayshifts aren't just as dangerous every time we get sent into a Singularity?" I asked pointedly.
"It's different," she insisted. "At least then, we know something about what we're sending you into! This… If it even is Château d'If, then we don't have the first clue what it looks like or how it works, just that it attacks the mind and soul and can conscript our Servants for whatever it does. I can't accept sending anyone into that completely blind!"
"Anyone," I said, "or just me?"
Her brow furrowed. "Anyone. As the Director of Chaldea, you're all my responsibility, which means if something happens and we send you into a trap, it's my fault first and foremost!"
"Except this really isn't all that different from those Singularities, is it?" I said. "We know that this curse plays on karma and sins and punishes your regrets, and that's already more than we know about any situation we Rayshift into normally. We didn't know Drake was a part of Okeanos or that she had her own Grail until we met her ourselves, we didn't know that Jason was the one behind everything — and Forneus was pulling the strings on him — and we didn't know Davy Jones was involved either."
Marie winced with every point I brought up.
"We didn't know Aífe and Lancelot were in Septem," I went on. "We didn't know Romulus had created his United Empire in opposition to Nero's Rome. We didn't know we were going to land so off course that we wound up on the other side of the continent. We didn't know Stheno had been summoned as a kind of botched response to Romulus suppressing his own Divinity.
"In fact," I concluded, "we know more about what's going on inside Château d'If than we did any of the Singularities we were sent to before."
"I get it," she said sourly. "I get your point. The difference is, the things we do know are just more reasons we should be really cautious about this. This is a trap, not a Singularity we're going in to solve, and we've already discussed the reason why you should be the last person who takes any risks on it. And Rika and Ritsuka's contract with Mash is just as important. In fact…" She looked like the very idea frightened her. "M-maybe the person who should be sent in to help him…should be me."
With how much guilt she was carrying around about what happened to Mash? With how much she still blamed herself for the sabotage, as though she should have read Lev's mind and realized he had been possessed by one of these Demon Gods? With how harshly she judged herself for every tiny mistake she made? Now I was the one who refused to let that happen. Not as a matter of competency, but just because her personality would make it all the harder for her to face the sins she carried, real, imagined, or exaggerated.
Besides, there were several very good reasons why that idea had originally been shot down before anyone could even suggest it. Those hadn't magically vanished in the past two days.
"We'll figure it out when the time comes," I promised her.
She didn't look reassured. I didn't think she would be until this entire thing was over.
A part of me wanted to stay and make sure she was okay, just keep an eye out on her, but as I'd said before, being so blatant about it would just make her withdraw and try to hide her problems, so the best thing I could do was to go about my day and offer her support more blatantly when it looked like she desperately needed it. To that end, I left her office once everything had been covered, with the promise that I would be back with breakfast after my morning workout.
Arash? I asked as the door whooshed shut behind me.
You don't even need to ask, he told me. I'll stick around and keep my eye on her.
I wondered if it said something that I'd gotten so used to having him in my metaphorical — and maybe literal — shadow that I didn't even bat an eye at the idea he had been hanging around enough to know what I wanted before I could even finish asking for it. Rika might not have been the only one who had gotten too used to the idea of having her Servant around to help out.
The gym was the first place I went after Marie's office, and I made sure to go through my morning workout at a normal pace. After that, I took a quick shower, dried my hair, got dressed in something a little more workplace friendly, and made my way down to the cafeteria, where Emiya was once more serving breakfast.
"Two, again," I told him as I approached the counter.
"Two it is," he agreed, and he stacked the trays up again as he started to prepare a pair of plates. "I'm assuming you're the one most in the loop about what's going on, so… Any news on Ritsuka?"
"El-Melloi II and Bradamante were drawn in," I said without ceremony.
He paused for a second, then continued dishing up food.
"The way I was?"
"Yeah. Da Vinci thinks we should expect it to go through our entire roster before this is all over."
He hummed. "Our entire roster, huh? Well, thankfully, it's already gone through the two scariest Servants in the facility, although I do worry a little bit about what happens when they have to face Siegfried. If they have to face Siegfried. That guy…he just doesn't have a mean bone in his body."
That didn't mean that Château d'If couldn't give him one, at least for the duration of his stay in it.
"If it comes down to it, Jeanne Alter isn't a proper hero, so her Noble Phantasm should be more effective against his Armor of Fafnir," I said. "Dantès isn't either, so that puts them at something of an advantage."
Which wasn't at all the same as saying they wouldn't have any trouble, but if they had to face him before we could mount a rescue, that was all I could hang my hat on.
Emiya grimaced. "I guess hoping it works out in their favor is all we can do for now. It's tempting to go to Shakespeare and have him put me back in, but… Well, I'm not in a rush to let that curse do what it did to me a second time. I don't imagine Aífe is either. There are some things that give even fearless Heroic Spirits pause."
It must have been really bad to make even Emiya hesitate like that. If it was anything like that nightmare of mine, then it would have been its own unique kind of torture.
When he was done loading up the plates, he pushed the tray over my way and smirked. "Compliments of the chef."
I looked down at his apron. 'I AM THE LADLE OF MY SOUP,' it said in big, bold letters. Given it seemed to be a pun on the incantation he'd used when he fought Herakles, it was all but certain now that he was making these himself. I made sure my face told him exactly how unimpressed I was.
"If you're fishing, you'll have better luck casting your line in a different pond."
He chuckled and shook his head, shrugging. "Can you blame me? With everything that's been going on, my poor master has been neglecting me. At this rate, what little pride I have will wither away from lack of attention." Almost immediately, he sobered and heaved out a sigh. "And with this happening so soon after everything else, I haven't had the time or the chance to patch things up with her. What rotten luck."
Funnily enough, it felt familiar to me. So much had happened so quickly in my career that it was the downtime that threw me off the most.
"You can't put it off forever," I told him, "but you're right to leave it alone for now. I don't think Rika's in the right headspace to try and deal with that, too."
"Exactly my thinking," he agreed. "So I guess, for now, I'm just Chaldea's humble chef." He tapped his apron. "I'll take what I can get until that changes."
I guess I couldn't blame him for that.
Tray in hand and food in tow, I made my way back to Marie's office and saw myself in. Marie didn't quite salivate when she saw what I brought back with me, but it was far closer a thing that she would ever have liked to admit.
Nothing to report, Arash told me as I set her food down at her desk. This time, she was fine on her own.
A slight pause was the only sign to give away that I'd heard him at all, and once I was sure that Marie was comfortably distracted with her breakfast, I replied, Good. Thanks for keeping an eye on her again.
Even though that might have made her sound more like an unruly toddler than a grown woman. There wasn't much of a better way to put it, though.
No trouble, said Arash. I'd rather be doing something useful than twiddling my thumbs and staring at the wall.
He really was my compatibility summon, wasn't he?
The rest of the day meandered on. Morning passed, lunch was eaten, then the afternoon crawled by like a snail. Every time I checked in on Ritsuka's room, it was to find that the only thing that had changed was the people inside or the positions they took. Romani came and went, stopping in a few times throughout to check in on them the same way I was with Muninn, but with Da Vinci snugly ensconced in her chair and the situation as firmly in hand as it could be, considering the circumstances, he had other responsibilities to see to in the meantime.
When I saw him at dinner, he looked tired and sluggish, like he was carrying an extra weight on his shoulders. He was practically slumped over his plate, and by the way he was playing with his food, he didn't seem to have much of an appetite.
Physician, heal thyself, indeed.
Evening drew out into night, and after another long day of waiting and hoping and sitting around doing nothing, nothing had changed. There were no updates from Da Vinci and no reason to suspect anything had gone awry, but also no reason to believe anything would be any different tomorrow either. By the time I was ready to climb into bed, there was an air of surrender about the whole thing, like everyone had resigned themselves to the reality that the only thing we could do was take our chances on a rescue mission.
Da Vinci's almost omnipresent smile had fallen into grim acceptance. Whatever hope she might have harbored that this would resolve itself without interference seemed to have died a slow and terrible death.
Before I went to bed, I practiced a few arguments in my head. Reasons why it should be me who was sent in and not Rika. Counterpoints to the issues that had been brought up before and which I knew would be brought up again the instant I offered to be the one to go in. The hardest one to convince was going to be Marie, and even the couple of things I had reluctantly chosen to hammer at her weak points might only wind up strengthening her resolve, but that was a chance I had to take.
I went to sleep determined to face whatever Château d'If could throw at me. I was going to rescue Ritsuka no matter what it cost me. If I had to face down specters of my regrets and put them all in the grave, then I would just have to harden my heart and do it.
The next morning, Ritsuka woke up.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
I got so caught up in Da Vinci's theory that I actually forgot what the original structure was supposed to be for a minute.
The last few chapters have obviously felt a bit interminable to a lot of you, especially everyone who isn't on SV or SB, where I could post the sidestories without having to either smush them onto the end of another chapter or put them in their own listing. That feeling was a bit intentional, but I didn't think as much as I probably should have how this would feel stretched out over weeks. It'll be easier, I imagine, reading it all in one go, though.
The editor smiled at that one joke and laughed at the end, so everything came out the way I wanted it to.
The last few chapters have obviously felt a bit interminable to a lot of you, especially everyone who isn't on SV or SB, where I could post the sidestories without having to either smush them onto the end of another chapter or put them in their own listing. That feeling was a bit intentional, but I didn't think as much as I probably should have how this would feel stretched out over weeks. It'll be easier, I imagine, reading it all in one go, though.
The editor smiled at that one joke and laughed at the end, so everything came out the way I wanted it to.
Stahor
BookWorm
- Location
- Russia, Moscow
Tofu is my body and stock is my blood
I have created over a thousand dishes
Nitramy
Love! Snow! Really Magic
- Location
- Home of Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage
Unknown to fast food
Nor known to instant meals
Have withstood heat to create dishes
Yet this mouth will never eat anything
So as I pray
Unlimited food woks
- Location
- Tennessee
I suppose it's moot now because it's going to get wrapped up, but did I miss something? Everyone focuses on there being 4 Servants called in so far, but El-Melloi says that he was called the fifth, and while everyone is focusing on the numbers... no one thinks about it? Like I said, I could have missed something, but to me I would expect Taylor or at the very least Da Vinci to think "wait, does that mean someone else was pulled in and said nothing, or that our hypothesis is wrong and it can pull other Servants??"
No Taylor. Your compatibility summon, at least the first one, failed, and shortly thereafter you got insect powers back. Arash was your second.
Honestly, these last few chapters were pretty awful. Lots of repetition and redundancy, lots of no one doing anything and Taylor sucking her thumb accomplishing absolutely nothing, not even taking advantage of the void of time she has to train or practice, let alone prepare for the next singularity properly, or even improve her strategic prowess. Hell, ask Shakespeare for shit, Taylor, rather than this warped caricature would have done that the moment he arrived, because the stakes means she'd use all available methods to improve their chances of victory, as seen with Khepri, that's a fact. There's not even a good self-examination scene in these chapters, somehow, it's just massive amounts of nothing, and utterly hollow filler dialogue, no real heart-to-heart moments or anything of actual meaning or emotion, just talking and acting in circles like they're roleplaying Endless Eight. I skimmed the text lightly and missed nothing, this chapter was essentially identical with the same beats as well to the last few.
Even the theme of the arc is terribad and goes directly against the core of Taylor's character, to not be a bystander, regardless of the risks, while Olga is acting 1:1 akin to the PRT in rationale to not fix BB, the mentality that Taylor detests from the bottom of her heart. Sure, she's her friend, but since when were friends ever a reason for Taylor to not do what she thinks is right, anyway, for better or worse? This entire arc is a constant reiteration of the narrative saying, 'nuh-uh, never think about exercising your own agency again, always be a bystander Taylor!' It's just taking a big heaping shit on one of the few core aspects of Taylor that even still exists in the fic.
A far superior version of this arc would have had Taylor actually act like herself and jump into Chateau d'if at the beginning, despite Olga's pleas, only to suffer numerous challenges and barely get out with both her and Ritsuka's life, leaving her heavily wounded, thus delaying their departure to the next Singularity and making it far more difficult due to it. At the same time, there remains the possibility Ritsuka would have died without her immediate intervention. Taylor acknowledges both the risks she assumed, and the risks of her continued inaction, coming to a conclusion that they (Olga and Taylor) should have come to a compromise and worked together instead of her being forced to go off half-cocked, thus treating both perspectives with actual respect. That took me like, 10 minutes to come up with and write out, and could easily be significantly improved.
The whole arc is just abysmally executed, that's not even mentioning how Taylor has been unnaturally warped by OP to become 1:1 clone of Ritsuka in terms of character, ability, methodology, mentality, and passivity. She may as well not exist as a unique character perspective, since she arbitrarily lost all her defining aspects, she barely resembles Worm Taylor in the slightest capacity at this point, and could easily be a rando OC or flat out Ritsuka. If you aren't bringing her prowess over, if you aren't bringing her mindset or mentality over, if you aren't bringing her character over, if you aren't bringing her proactivity or munchkining over, if canon Taylor's ethos is going to be disparaged and disrespected as a pure negative and is unnaturally stripped away at the first possible opportunity, then why exactly is this Taylor even here, and why exactly is this a Worm crossover?
Should have used an OC, or just Ritsuka, instead of blatantly artificially limiting your protagonist in pretty much every fashion that could give her agency and actual relevance beyond existing as a battery and inferior tactician/strategist to most of the entire Servant roster, all for entirely arbitrary reasons. She grows and acts ever the more blatantly OOC and unnatural every chapter that goes by because of how much she's been lobotomized by the narrative, not only intellectually, but her lobotomy also made it so she never attempts to actually grow or improve, let alone take advantage of the HS she has in absolutely any capacity. All despite Taylor being someone who was always clever and used and improved her skills in everything she could. Fuck, she even got Panpan to make shit like repeater bugs, and she was in a far less criticial situation than a literal apocalypse. She's just been gutted of every single character trait that made Taylor so compelling, interesting, and popular.
Even the theme of the arc is terribad and goes directly against the core of Taylor's character, to not be a bystander, regardless of the risks, while Olga is acting 1:1 akin to the PRT in rationale to not fix BB, the mentality that Taylor detests from the bottom of her heart. Sure, she's her friend, but since when were friends ever a reason for Taylor to not do what she thinks is right, anyway, for better or worse? This entire arc is a constant reiteration of the narrative saying, 'nuh-uh, never think about exercising your own agency again, always be a bystander Taylor!' It's just taking a big heaping shit on one of the few core aspects of Taylor that even still exists in the fic.
A far superior version of this arc would have had Taylor actually act like herself and jump into Chateau d'if at the beginning, despite Olga's pleas, only to suffer numerous challenges and barely get out with both her and Ritsuka's life, leaving her heavily wounded, thus delaying their departure to the next Singularity and making it far more difficult due to it. At the same time, there remains the possibility Ritsuka would have died without her immediate intervention. Taylor acknowledges both the risks she assumed, and the risks of her continued inaction, coming to a conclusion that they (Olga and Taylor) should have come to a compromise and worked together instead of her being forced to go off half-cocked, thus treating both perspectives with actual respect. That took me like, 10 minutes to come up with and write out, and could easily be significantly improved.
The whole arc is just abysmally executed, that's not even mentioning how Taylor has been unnaturally warped by OP to become 1:1 clone of Ritsuka in terms of character, ability, methodology, mentality, and passivity. She may as well not exist as a unique character perspective, since she arbitrarily lost all her defining aspects, she barely resembles Worm Taylor in the slightest capacity at this point, and could easily be a rando OC or flat out Ritsuka. If you aren't bringing her prowess over, if you aren't bringing her mindset or mentality over, if you aren't bringing her character over, if you aren't bringing her proactivity or munchkining over, if canon Taylor's ethos is going to be disparaged and disrespected as a pure negative and is unnaturally stripped away at the first possible opportunity, then why exactly is this Taylor even here, and why exactly is this a Worm crossover?
Should have used an OC, or just Ritsuka, instead of blatantly artificially limiting your protagonist in pretty much every fashion that could give her agency and actual relevance beyond existing as a battery and inferior tactician/strategist to most of the entire Servant roster, all for entirely arbitrary reasons. She grows and acts ever the more blatantly OOC and unnatural every chapter that goes by because of how much she's been lobotomized by the narrative, not only intellectually, but her lobotomy also made it so she never attempts to actually grow or improve, let alone take advantage of the HS she has in absolutely any capacity. All despite Taylor being someone who was always clever and used and improved her skills in everything she could. Fuck, she even got Panpan to make shit like repeater bugs, and she was in a far less criticial situation than a literal apocalypse. She's just been gutted of every single character trait that made Taylor so compelling, interesting, and popular.
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- Location
- United States
And thank goodness too. Because you going in would have killed the Ritsuka.
With the Arc effectively over I'm gonna say that it was a mixed bag of an event. I like the idea, but I feel the execution was a bit too dragged out. There's still the payoff for the arc though which I do look forward to. If Ritsuka explains the final challenge and Taylor comes to the correct notion that her rushing in would have led to her or more likely Ritsuka's death, then she'd be forced to address an inner flaw she almost acted on. Forced frustration is understandable if the character gains something from it afterall. That said, I'm absolutely certain someone is gonna put this arc in the "Broken Base" trope. It's inevitable.
As an aside, I feel that you should probably upload the Ritsuka sidestory chapters to FanFiction version. Their experience is notably worse then SV's due to lacking that breath of fresh air.
- Location
- U.S.
I'm going to go against the grain and say I really liked this arc. The stress and frustration was really felt, and I think it went on just long enough to explore the characters reactions to an extended period of helplessness and walking in circles without going on quite long enough to actually be repetitive.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Going to largely echo this. While the initial part of the arc was really good--how Taylor and Marie reacted to this and interacted with each other on this--everything after that was basically a big lot of nothing.
Literally nothing. I could skip over all of the parts after Taylor and Marie's first day of reactions and miss nothing. The short bits from Ritsuka's perspective were infinitely more meaningful and interesting, because at least we got to see a character doing things, growing, and giving us a different perspective.
If you wanted the audience to feel frustrated like Taylor, then sure, except that it vastly overstayed its welcome and dipped into apathy. I had to fight the urge to just skim and see if anything actually happened, and frankly, the only part in this chapter where something happened was the last sentence.
I could change this chapter into "Two days later, Ritsuka woke up." and lose nothing, and use that as the start of a chapter where things actually happen and my frustration doesn't slip into total apathy.
Taylor being unable to really do anything or grow much as a person isn't interesting, especially because the premise for this story is completely contrary to a theme of Taylor learning how to live rather than devote her life to fighting. The entire world is at stake and there is nothing for her to do other than to fight, except that she is prevented from fighting or making any real difference other than giving the occasional order to the people with the power to actually do anything (who are actually summoned spirits of the long dead, making the people who are actually alive feel somewhat superfluous). In such a situation, Taylor cannot learn to live her life and move on--there is no world beyond this little island of a facility in Antarctica, and almost everyone left is too busy to do anything beyond preparing or working towards efforts to save the world.
There is a fanfic I read that does an incredible job of showing a Taylor that has to learn how to live a peaceful life and grow as a person instead of escalating into greater conflict with a world full of dangerous superhumans and Endbringers, and that was a crossover with Nanoha, in which a crippled Unison device basically bounces off Earth-Bet while grabbing Taylor as a host/unison partner to give her the energy to escape the collision, eventually reaching TSAB space and ending up living with Nanoha. It's a beautifully done story that died way too soon, but it really does pull off that growth and slow blossoming of Taylor from a survivor of abuse and loss and fear into a person who gradually tries to chart her own course in a peaceful life.
Since that can't happen in this premise, at least give Taylor the chance to actually do things and make a big difference without becoming an inhuman monster in the process. And no, I don't just mean "pulls it out of her ass near the end", because that would also go against the prospect of character growth.
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- Location
- Southern California
Lol LMAO
Sorry Taylor we all know how much you were looking forward to brazenly go into a dream and rescue poor Ritsuka from the Count of Monte Cristo
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
If there's enough interest, maybe I should make a lineup of "Emiya's aprons" merch.
I wonder if Marie would have been this meek, timid and risk-adverse if it were Taylor caught in the Curse and not Ritsuka?
As it is, I am not surprised that canon Chaldea got along just fine without her when she's holding this version back so much. The only thing they've managed so far is identifying who is behind it, otherwise, a grand total of absolutely nothing.
As it is, I am not surprised that canon Chaldea got along just fine without her when she's holding this version back so much. The only thing they've managed so far is identifying who is behind it, otherwise, a grand total of absolutely nothing.
- Location
- Some City
i mean, you can say that, but similar figures like Chevalier D'eon and Mata Hari are not known for being particularly impressive figures either. Hell, Mata is mostly known for how she got caught rather than achieving anything of note.
not all heroes are created equal, and not all of them have the star power that figures like Arthur or Herakles or Gilgamesh...but that doesn't stop them from ending up on the Throne of Heroes anyway. What actually lands someone recognition by the Throne in-universe...is vague, because it's really just an excuse to put them in the game. but practically speaking...it's what makes them worth telling stories about, during their lifetime and long afterwards. That and whether the author wants to add them to the story.
I'm not going to sit here and claim that Samuel Whittemore is going to be some kind of juggernaut...but he IS the official state hero of Massachusetts (which if there is anything to be said for the US it's that it is less one country and more many countries stacked in a trenchcoat) and was a prime example of what America was and what it was fighting for in its earliest days. His legacy is not the grandest...but he embodied the early American spirit, and he did fight in multiple wars as an old man even before taking what should have been multiple mortal wounds and surviving.
and sure, it gets harder and harder to qualify as a Servant the closer to the modern day you get...but Billy the Kid, Mata Hari, hell even Napolean are younger than Whittemore is
I dunno. he's not gonna be a worldbreaker by any stretch...but I can certainly see it
I'm going to chime in with my own 2 cents and have to agree with the complaints on this one. This was NOT a good arc at all. In fact I'd say you came dangerously close to the dreaded words that haunt the nightmares of every writer, "I don't care what happens to these characters." This arc was simply put; boring, annoying, frustrating, and all around a tedium to read. None of which are things that a good writer wants to put their audience through. That you did anyway, despite several readers warning you early on in the arc that this was how they felt about your work, absolutely reeks of self-indulgence. It's your story, tell it how you want and all that, but this was absolutely a case wherein you should have listened to those early warnings from your audience and changed course, possibly scrapping the arc as a whole and shortening it to something far more manageable such as a few paragraphs of Taylor outlining the several days of frustration everyone felt as they were unable to help and then ruminating on the lesson she learned throughout.