Talyor: *Disappointed sigh* I wanted to be one to the one to you rescue.
Hereafter [Worm x Fate/Grand Order]
- Thread starter James D. Fawkes
- Start date
- Crossover
Talyor: *Disappointed sigh* I wanted to be one to the one to you rescue.
It is kinda getting noticeable. Back at the start of the Fic, Taylor had spent years learning to walk, to fight again, to catch up with a world of magic she was unfamiliar with. The first two singularities she spent carefully observing both fights and her environment, finding the right moment or leverages to contribute in a fight however little it sometimes was. Spent all that time training the twins, explaining things she had insight or experience with. And that's increasingly fallen away. At least half of all fights in Okeanos had her suddenly caught of guard when the situation changed, when battlefield awareness and coordination are literally her specialization. Which is like superman losing fights because he keeps running into people who can fly away, or as if Mash was not able to block any attacks or defend anyone consistently. Which sort of made sense with Hektor's skill or Heracles's sheer speed, except Taylor didn't even try to adapt. The servants did so, eventually, on their own. Being forced to wait and hope, to be a bystander unable to help, should hit Taylor right in some of her worst trauma. And it does. To the point that her not cutting the knot or upending the gameboard just to do anything to help, is immense character development. Or at least it should be normally. Would be in vacuum, except for the previous narrative. I understand there is a plan, a narrative, for Taylor to follow, but by imposing it like this you've kinda accidently created a different one. Instead of a traumatized and obsessed former villain/hero learning to trust people again and mentoring the next generation, Taylor's been increasingly just a bystander in her own story, without the twins really stepping up enough to justify this. At least as far as I can see it.
The big difference between everybody's feelings on this arc seem to boil down to how much 'wait and hope' they can tolerate. Something that the weekly release schedule definitely did not help with.
I'll say this, I'm fine with how the arc is turning out, but I'm glad it's wrapping up now because another chapter of riding the Sideline Express would've started feeling like Endless Eight territory.
If I could offer a suggestion, as of the end of this arc going forward only upload your chapters weekly on the forums and upload the whole arc on ffn when it's done. Put it up in an announcement post here and an Author's Note on ffn. That way those who want to marathon arcs can do it on ffn, and those of us that can take it in breadcrumbs can come by weekly to peck at you.
I'll say this, I'm fine with how the arc is turning out, but I'm glad it's wrapping up now because another chapter of riding the Sideline Express would've started feeling like Endless Eight territory.
If I could offer a suggestion, as of the end of this arc going forward only upload your chapters weekly on the forums and upload the whole arc on ffn when it's done. Put it up in an announcement post here and an Author's Note on ffn. That way those who want to marathon arcs can do it on ffn, and those of us that can take it in breadcrumbs can come by weekly to peck at you.
Prison Tower - Part Four
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
Part Four
Jeanne's words — the original Jeanne, who had somehow reached out to him here in this place, however she'd accomplished it — stuck with Ritsuka for a long while afterwards. They stuck with him when he "woke up" in his prison cell and was greeted by kind words from Mercédès and sarcasm from Jeanne Alter, when Avenger came back and somewhat tersely insisted that it was time to face the next Lord of Judgment, and all throughout the walk to the next Hall.
They even stuck with him through the next fight, who turned out to be El-Melloi II, ranting and raving something about a king. It was good, then, that Jeanne Alter was so competent and was fighting the enemy more than his orders now, because Ritsuka's head wasn't in the game as much as he thought it should have been, although the fact that the enemy was El-Melloi II might have had something to do with it, too.
It was a bit of a relief, and also kind of a let down, actually. Emiya and Aífe had both been incredibly tough fights, and it had taken a lot of energy and effort to bring them down. El-Melloi II wasn't weak…
Well, no. In a head to head fight, he was terrible. Those spells and the tricks he pulled would have been more than enough to trip up a regular human, Ritsuka thought, but for Avenger and Jeanne Alter, it was easy enough to take him down and deliver a fatal blow.
Avenger. Or rather, Edmond Dantès. An ordinary man whose tale was etched into history because of a great betrayal, and whose story of revenge lived on even centuries later. The Count of Monte Cristo. The resident of Chateau d'If who had escaped after fourteen years of suffering and torture and inflicted despair on those who had done him wrong.
It was almost impossible… No, the problem was the exact opposite. It was far too easy to see that man in Avenger. He was composed and even-tempered most of the time, but when he was moved to anger or his temper frayed, he became a demon of vengeance. How horrible it must have been to be trapped in the worst days of your life, and worse, to be forced to relive the pain you suffered through for fourteen long years.
It was no wonder Avenger was the way he was.
"Hey."
A finger prodded Ritsuka, and he realized they'd been walking back to the cell while he thought.
"You done spacing out?" Jeanne Alter asked him. "What, wasn't that nap earlier enough for you? If you fall asleep and break your neck on the floor, don't come crying my way."
"I'm fine," Ritsuka said, offering her a small smile. It didn't seem to convince her. "Just… Can you dream within a dream?"
The lack of an Inception joke immediately afterwards made Ritsuka's stomach clench.
"What?" Jeanne Alter asked, sneering. "Is that some kind of joke? What, like one of those ridiculous proverbs that everyone pretends is hot shit and means some super important thing or whatever?"
"No, just…"
Ritsuka's eyes found Avenger's back. There was more than one reason not to explain everything, wasn't there? Avenger probably wouldn't appreciate it, and Jeanne Alter would probably be livid if he said her "real" self had talked to him while he was sleeping earlier.
"Nevermind. It was nothing."
Jeanne Alter scoffed. "If you say so. Dweeb."
Ritsuka laughed a little. "I'm going to hazard a guess and say you learned that one from Rika."
"What," she said, "like I couldn't learn it on my own? Who knows, Master, maybe I got it from that orientation package thing when I was first summoned. It's common slang, isn't it?"
Maybe in middle school. Ritsuka wisely chose not to say that either.
The door to his cell came into sight, and Avenger opened it without prompting or hesitation.
"Welcome back," Mercédès greeted them as they entered. Avenger ignored her entirely.
"Do you need to rest again, Master?" he asked instead.
Ritsuka blinked at the abruptness, but shook his head. "I'm fine. That last fight didn't take much, so I'm good to keep going. The faster we get this done, the faster I can go back to Chaldea, right?"
"Then we shall waste not a second longer," said Avenger, and less than a minute after they'd made it back to the cell, he turned around and left again. "Come. The sixth Lord awaits."
Ritsuka shot Mercédès an apologetic look, but she waved it off, seeming just as surprised as he was, and he had to jog to catch up so that Avenger didn't leave him behind. Avenger didn't seem to notice or care either way.
"He's sure in a fucking rush," Jeanne Alter muttered to him.
"Yeah."
He had no idea why, though. Nothing El-Melloi II had said seemed to have affected Avenger while they were fighting. Was he still upset about whatever had bothered him earlier, or was he just anxious to finally get things over and done with?
Ritsuka could definitely understand the latter. Even if, in the grand scheme of things, he hadn't actually been there that long, his time in the prison felt much longer. Every battle wore away at him in some way, although it wasn't nearly as bad as it probably could have been. Especially if they'd had to fight all the Lords at their best instead of their worst.
Whatever the case was, Avenger didn't say. In fact, he was downright silent as he led them through the hallways of the prison, saying nothing at all and simply marching towards the end destination. As before, of course, it looked all the same to Ritsuka, but he trusted Avenger not to lead them astray. It wasn't like he hadn't had plenty of opportunities to do it before, after all, so why would he bother to do it now?
"What you have faced up to this point is five Lords of Judgment," Avenger finally said, brusque and humorless. "The Envious Phantom, the Slothful Gilles de Rais, the Greedy Emiya, the Gluttonous Aífe, and the Lustful El-Melloi II. What awaits you now is the avatar of Wrath, the most powerful emotion."
Most powerful? Ritsuka eyed Avenger. Well, considering who he was and what class he'd been summoned into, maybe that made sense.
They'd never actually faced Phantom, though. Avenger must have been making a rhetorical point, so that probably didn't matter.
"It can be a private rage carried within," Avenger went on, "or an outward fury that scorns the entire world. Righteous fury — justified or not — draws in the most people. Stories of wrongs corrected, even outside the system of justice, are praised and lauded by the masses, even if they bring about great tragedies. Even if the target is nothing more than a scapegoat."
At last, he looked back at Ritsuka over his shoulder.
"Such a thing still exists in living memory for you, does it not?" He glanced meaningfully at Jeanne Alter, too. "And you have a personal example following you around like a lost puppy."
"Fuck you, too," Jeanne Alter sneered. "You gonna get to the point anytime soon, or are you just flapping those gums of yours for the fun of it?"
"The point," said Avenger. "Indeed! The point! The point is, Master, you must take care against the avatar of Wrath, for their fury makes them the most dangerous foe in this prison! If you let your guard down…"
The door to the next Hall loomed.
"…you will most certainly die."
Avenger reached for the handle and threw the door open wide, revealing another room much like all of the rest they'd fought in before. The same layout, the same shape, the same brickwork on the floor and walls, and the same torches lighting it all. Like before, the only difference was the person inside, and standing there —
"You!" Avenger snarled.
— was Bradamante.
"Hello, Avenger," she said, and it was her voice and her face, but the tone and the diction were someone entirely different. "Or should I say, hello, Edmond Dantès."
"That's not my name!" Avenger roared furiously. "What are you doing, you useless holy maiden? You unnatural wretch! You would stoop so low, just for your chance to spout your nonsense to my face?!"
Bradamante nodded. "It's true, this is a bit of a stretch for me. I'll have to apologize to Bradamante the next time I have the chance for using her Spirit Origin in this way. She deserves that much for helping me to defend France in its hour of need."
Wait. Defend France?
"Jeanne?" Ritsuka asked tentatively.
"Say fucking what?" Jeanne Alter snapped. "That bitch is in there?"
"That's right! Jeanne d'Arc is the avatar of Wrath!" said Avenger. "Look at how she has debased herself, Master! She has even stolen the form of another Servant so that she could appear before you! Make no mistake, though, she is still a Lord of Judgment! Which means —"
"If we want outta here, we have to kill her," Jeanne Alter concluded, grinning a vicious, bloodthirsty grin. "Fine by me! Hell, first time you and I are agreeing on something!"
"I'm glad to see you have a second chance," Bradamante said to Jeanne Alter. "It does my heart good to look at you and see you thriving and happy…even if it's in a strange and unusual way."
"I don't need your fucking approval!" Jeanne Alter barked.
Bradamante nodded. "No, you don't. I just wanted to say it, while I had the chance." She closed her eyes briefly, and when they opened again, they were fierce and determined. "But I'm not here for you. I'm here for him!"
She pointed her small lance at Avenger. Avenger only laughed.
"Are you here to offer me salvation?" he mocked. "You, who were denied it at the very last! You, who should be equally as consumed by the black flames of hatred as I am! You, who were abandoned and betrayed and cast aside by those you trusted, just the same as I was! You unnatural wretch, who still stands there so serenely!"
"Indeed, for those were all the things I had to give up in order to save my country," said Bradamante. Jeanne? Was she really Jeanne in there? "I could not be vengeful, I could not be wrathful, and that is why I've come here to save you. To rescue you from your hatred, Edmond."
"That's not my name!" Avenger said again furiously. "That man is a man who has already lived and died! That is the name of a man who has already been saved! I am an Avenger, fueled by my rage and hatred, bound by my thirst for vengeance! I exist beyond the horizon of love and hate, a creature of killing and violence, far from the tender mercy of even the most merciful God! There is no beloved Haydée or noble Abbé Faria to offer balm to my soul! The only person I could ever be is the Count of Monte Cristo!"
His hands glowed with a black light, the curse of his fury made manifest.
"Master!" said Avenger. "Let's go! I shall rip apart this false saint and tear her kindness to shreds! Her salvation is meaningless to me — and useless to you, for she is one of the last things standing in your way to escaping this place!"
"Like hell!" Jeanne Alter bit at him. "If that bitch really is in there, then you better get in the fucking line, pal, because I'm gonna be the one to put her down!"
Ritsuka looked back and forth between the two of them. "Guys…"
What? What was he supposed to do? If Avenger was right, then they really didn't have a choice, did they?
Bradamante took it out of his hands. "It seems you refuse to resolve this with words. Fine." She brandished her lance. "Then if violence is the only path forward, violence is the path we'll take!"
Jeanne's words — the original Jeanne, who had somehow reached out to him here in this place, however she'd accomplished it — stuck with Ritsuka for a long while afterwards. They stuck with him when he "woke up" in his prison cell and was greeted by kind words from Mercédès and sarcasm from Jeanne Alter, when Avenger came back and somewhat tersely insisted that it was time to face the next Lord of Judgment, and all throughout the walk to the next Hall.
They even stuck with him through the next fight, who turned out to be El-Melloi II, ranting and raving something about a king. It was good, then, that Jeanne Alter was so competent and was fighting the enemy more than his orders now, because Ritsuka's head wasn't in the game as much as he thought it should have been, although the fact that the enemy was El-Melloi II might have had something to do with it, too.
It was a bit of a relief, and also kind of a let down, actually. Emiya and Aífe had both been incredibly tough fights, and it had taken a lot of energy and effort to bring them down. El-Melloi II wasn't weak…
Well, no. In a head to head fight, he was terrible. Those spells and the tricks he pulled would have been more than enough to trip up a regular human, Ritsuka thought, but for Avenger and Jeanne Alter, it was easy enough to take him down and deliver a fatal blow.
Avenger. Or rather, Edmond Dantès. An ordinary man whose tale was etched into history because of a great betrayal, and whose story of revenge lived on even centuries later. The Count of Monte Cristo. The resident of Chateau d'If who had escaped after fourteen years of suffering and torture and inflicted despair on those who had done him wrong.
It was almost impossible… No, the problem was the exact opposite. It was far too easy to see that man in Avenger. He was composed and even-tempered most of the time, but when he was moved to anger or his temper frayed, he became a demon of vengeance. How horrible it must have been to be trapped in the worst days of your life, and worse, to be forced to relive the pain you suffered through for fourteen long years.
It was no wonder Avenger was the way he was.
"Hey."
A finger prodded Ritsuka, and he realized they'd been walking back to the cell while he thought.
"You done spacing out?" Jeanne Alter asked him. "What, wasn't that nap earlier enough for you? If you fall asleep and break your neck on the floor, don't come crying my way."
"I'm fine," Ritsuka said, offering her a small smile. It didn't seem to convince her. "Just… Can you dream within a dream?"
The lack of an Inception joke immediately afterwards made Ritsuka's stomach clench.
"What?" Jeanne Alter asked, sneering. "Is that some kind of joke? What, like one of those ridiculous proverbs that everyone pretends is hot shit and means some super important thing or whatever?"
"No, just…"
Ritsuka's eyes found Avenger's back. There was more than one reason not to explain everything, wasn't there? Avenger probably wouldn't appreciate it, and Jeanne Alter would probably be livid if he said her "real" self had talked to him while he was sleeping earlier.
"Nevermind. It was nothing."
Jeanne Alter scoffed. "If you say so. Dweeb."
Ritsuka laughed a little. "I'm going to hazard a guess and say you learned that one from Rika."
"What," she said, "like I couldn't learn it on my own? Who knows, Master, maybe I got it from that orientation package thing when I was first summoned. It's common slang, isn't it?"
Maybe in middle school. Ritsuka wisely chose not to say that either.
The door to his cell came into sight, and Avenger opened it without prompting or hesitation.
"Welcome back," Mercédès greeted them as they entered. Avenger ignored her entirely.
"Do you need to rest again, Master?" he asked instead.
Ritsuka blinked at the abruptness, but shook his head. "I'm fine. That last fight didn't take much, so I'm good to keep going. The faster we get this done, the faster I can go back to Chaldea, right?"
"Then we shall waste not a second longer," said Avenger, and less than a minute after they'd made it back to the cell, he turned around and left again. "Come. The sixth Lord awaits."
Ritsuka shot Mercédès an apologetic look, but she waved it off, seeming just as surprised as he was, and he had to jog to catch up so that Avenger didn't leave him behind. Avenger didn't seem to notice or care either way.
"He's sure in a fucking rush," Jeanne Alter muttered to him.
"Yeah."
He had no idea why, though. Nothing El-Melloi II had said seemed to have affected Avenger while they were fighting. Was he still upset about whatever had bothered him earlier, or was he just anxious to finally get things over and done with?
Ritsuka could definitely understand the latter. Even if, in the grand scheme of things, he hadn't actually been there that long, his time in the prison felt much longer. Every battle wore away at him in some way, although it wasn't nearly as bad as it probably could have been. Especially if they'd had to fight all the Lords at their best instead of their worst.
Whatever the case was, Avenger didn't say. In fact, he was downright silent as he led them through the hallways of the prison, saying nothing at all and simply marching towards the end destination. As before, of course, it looked all the same to Ritsuka, but he trusted Avenger not to lead them astray. It wasn't like he hadn't had plenty of opportunities to do it before, after all, so why would he bother to do it now?
"What you have faced up to this point is five Lords of Judgment," Avenger finally said, brusque and humorless. "The Envious Phantom, the Slothful Gilles de Rais, the Greedy Emiya, the Gluttonous Aífe, and the Lustful El-Melloi II. What awaits you now is the avatar of Wrath, the most powerful emotion."
Most powerful? Ritsuka eyed Avenger. Well, considering who he was and what class he'd been summoned into, maybe that made sense.
They'd never actually faced Phantom, though. Avenger must have been making a rhetorical point, so that probably didn't matter.
"It can be a private rage carried within," Avenger went on, "or an outward fury that scorns the entire world. Righteous fury — justified or not — draws in the most people. Stories of wrongs corrected, even outside the system of justice, are praised and lauded by the masses, even if they bring about great tragedies. Even if the target is nothing more than a scapegoat."
At last, he looked back at Ritsuka over his shoulder.
"Such a thing still exists in living memory for you, does it not?" He glanced meaningfully at Jeanne Alter, too. "And you have a personal example following you around like a lost puppy."
"Fuck you, too," Jeanne Alter sneered. "You gonna get to the point anytime soon, or are you just flapping those gums of yours for the fun of it?"
"The point," said Avenger. "Indeed! The point! The point is, Master, you must take care against the avatar of Wrath, for their fury makes them the most dangerous foe in this prison! If you let your guard down…"
The door to the next Hall loomed.
"…you will most certainly die."
Avenger reached for the handle and threw the door open wide, revealing another room much like all of the rest they'd fought in before. The same layout, the same shape, the same brickwork on the floor and walls, and the same torches lighting it all. Like before, the only difference was the person inside, and standing there —
"You!" Avenger snarled.
— was Bradamante.
"Hello, Avenger," she said, and it was her voice and her face, but the tone and the diction were someone entirely different. "Or should I say, hello, Edmond Dantès."
"That's not my name!" Avenger roared furiously. "What are you doing, you useless holy maiden? You unnatural wretch! You would stoop so low, just for your chance to spout your nonsense to my face?!"
Bradamante nodded. "It's true, this is a bit of a stretch for me. I'll have to apologize to Bradamante the next time I have the chance for using her Spirit Origin in this way. She deserves that much for helping me to defend France in its hour of need."
Wait. Defend France?
"Jeanne?" Ritsuka asked tentatively.
"Say fucking what?" Jeanne Alter snapped. "That bitch is in there?"
"That's right! Jeanne d'Arc is the avatar of Wrath!" said Avenger. "Look at how she has debased herself, Master! She has even stolen the form of another Servant so that she could appear before you! Make no mistake, though, she is still a Lord of Judgment! Which means —"
"If we want outta here, we have to kill her," Jeanne Alter concluded, grinning a vicious, bloodthirsty grin. "Fine by me! Hell, first time you and I are agreeing on something!"
"I'm glad to see you have a second chance," Bradamante said to Jeanne Alter. "It does my heart good to look at you and see you thriving and happy…even if it's in a strange and unusual way."
"I don't need your fucking approval!" Jeanne Alter barked.
Bradamante nodded. "No, you don't. I just wanted to say it, while I had the chance." She closed her eyes briefly, and when they opened again, they were fierce and determined. "But I'm not here for you. I'm here for him!"
She pointed her small lance at Avenger. Avenger only laughed.
"Are you here to offer me salvation?" he mocked. "You, who were denied it at the very last! You, who should be equally as consumed by the black flames of hatred as I am! You, who were abandoned and betrayed and cast aside by those you trusted, just the same as I was! You unnatural wretch, who still stands there so serenely!"
"Indeed, for those were all the things I had to give up in order to save my country," said Bradamante. Jeanne? Was she really Jeanne in there? "I could not be vengeful, I could not be wrathful, and that is why I've come here to save you. To rescue you from your hatred, Edmond."
"That's not my name!" Avenger said again furiously. "That man is a man who has already lived and died! That is the name of a man who has already been saved! I am an Avenger, fueled by my rage and hatred, bound by my thirst for vengeance! I exist beyond the horizon of love and hate, a creature of killing and violence, far from the tender mercy of even the most merciful God! There is no beloved Haydée or noble Abbé Faria to offer balm to my soul! The only person I could ever be is the Count of Monte Cristo!"
His hands glowed with a black light, the curse of his fury made manifest.
"Master!" said Avenger. "Let's go! I shall rip apart this false saint and tear her kindness to shreds! Her salvation is meaningless to me — and useless to you, for she is one of the last things standing in your way to escaping this place!"
"Like hell!" Jeanne Alter bit at him. "If that bitch really is in there, then you better get in the fucking line, pal, because I'm gonna be the one to put her down!"
Ritsuka looked back and forth between the two of them. "Guys…"
What? What was he supposed to do? If Avenger was right, then they really didn't have a choice, did they?
Bradamante took it out of his hands. "It seems you refuse to resolve this with words. Fine." She brandished her lance. "Then if violence is the only path forward, violence is the path we'll take!"
- Location
- Elsewhere
"When we are summoned, we are given sufficient knowledge to function in modern society."
"Like what?"
"Mostly cuss words."
"Fair warning Master, I've got a lot of 90s slang rolling around in this noggin, and I don't know how to use it!"
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Oh hey, character development, action, and plot progression! Something actually interesting and worth reading!
Actually enjoyed this update. Wasn't expecting Jeanne, but it was a nice callback, and it was also nice to see Jeanne be glad for Jalter and also acknowledge that Jalter doesn't need Jeanne's approval, but has Jeanne's gratitude for letting Jeanne express it nonetheless. A nice touch.
Actually enjoyed this update. Wasn't expecting Jeanne, but it was a nice callback, and it was also nice to see Jeanne be glad for Jalter and also acknowledge that Jalter doesn't need Jeanne's approval, but has Jeanne's gratitude for letting Jeanne express it nonetheless. A nice touch.
Yes, but not piggybacking on Bradamante (who wasn't even a glimmer in Nasu's eye at the time the event came out).
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- Location
- Philippines
Don't worry, the thing with 90s slang is that nobody really cares if you know how to use it - you get people groaning either way.
In the original event, the Avatar of Wrath should've been Jeanne Alter, except regular Jeanne hijacked the summoning and came into Chateau D'if that way. Here, considering regular Jeanne hasn't been summoned in Chaldea yet and Jalter is Ritsuka's companion, I imagine that this was the only way Chateau D'if could summon another Jeanne - by using the Spirit Origin of another French Servant.
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Finagle007
[Verified Great Old One]
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Ingame, Pride is a Giant Ghost comprised of a multitude of obsessions, followed up by Dantés himself.
Chapter CXXI: No Worse for Wear
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 CXXI: No Worse for Wear
"I feel fine," Ritsuka said.
"I'm sure you do," Romani replied patiently. Fittingly, it carried the air of a doctor who had heard this sort of thing from patients who most certainly weren't. "But we're still going to make sure you actually are, okay? Breathe in."
Ritsuka obeyed, taking in a long, slow breath, and then letting it out just as slowly. Romani held the knob of his stethoscope in place for the duration, and once Ritsuka had gone through his first breath, moved it.
"Again."
Again, Ritsuka obeyed, although the expression on his face told the tale of his impatience and frustration.
Several more times, Romani repeated this cycle, and Ritsuka acquiesced each time. He didn't seem to be having any trouble breathing at all — or sitting up for the tests, or standing and walking, which he'd done on his own to get here to Romani's office. In fact, he seemed so entirely unaffected by his ordeal that it was like he'd gone to bed the night before, gotten a normal night's sleep, and gotten up in the morning like nothing had happened.
Romani did a few other tests, checking things like Ritsuka's blood pressure, his reflexes, his vision, his hearing, and generally anything it seemed he could think of that didn't require specialized equipment, all the while Da Vinci hung in the background, running her own tests through some combined function of her staff and tablet. Ritsuka passed each with flying colors, and by the time he'd run through the entire gamut, Romani's brow was furrowed, his mouth was pulled into a line, but he looked confused and frustrated, not concerned.
"Well," he said, "at least medically, I can't find anything wrong with you. A little anemic, somewhat dehydrated, and your electrolytes are low, but that's to be expected after you spent three whole days completely unconscious. Other than that, you're perfectly healthy."
"I didn't notice any lingering damage spiritually, either," Da Vinci noted. She sounded somewhat puzzled by it, too. "Nor even remnants of that curse in your Magic Circuits. It's just as Romani said, Ritsuka: you're perfectly healthy, and frankly speaking, I don't have the slightest clue as to why or how."
"Great," he said. He slanted a look over in our direction. "Is this really something everyone needed to be here for, though? I thought there was that thing called doctor-patient confidentiality."
"In civilian circumstances, you might be correct," Marie said sternly. "However, Chaldea isn't a strictly civilian organization, which means anything about your health that can affect your performance in the field is directly my concern!"
"And mine, as your team leader," I added.
Even if I'd been shooed out of the room, I would've asked Marie about it at the first possible opportunity, and she would've told me herself.
"If you think I was going to just wait outside after what you put me through, you've got another thing coming, buster!" said Rika, and although it came out with her usual humor, there was an underlying shakiness to her voice.
If she let him go anywhere but the bathroom alone for the next week, I would be surprised.
"I…guess I didn't need to be here," Mash admitted reluctantly. "But… Senpai…"
She had been worried, too. Even if she'd had every confidence that he would manage to make it through everything on his own and come out the other end alive and well, it didn't mean she hadn't been at least a little concerned. I had to wonder how much she'd buried it and how badly it had burned to know that there was something so dangerous that she couldn't protect him from with her shield.
Ritsuka sighed.
"Are there any more tests you need to run?" he asked, resigned.
"Without getting invasive?" Romani asked.
"If we were going to find something, we should have found it by now," Da Vinci said. "At this point, any test we could do to look deeper would be essentially pointless."
Ritsuka's shoulders sagged a little, and some of the tension left his body.
"So… So that's it, then?" Rika asked hesitantly. "He's… He's okay? There's nothing wrong?"
"Against all expectations," said Da Vinci, "yes, Rika, he's okay."
"Thank goodness." Rika sighed, and putting on a trembling smile, said, "H-he's the only brother I've got, you know! I've spent almost eighteen years breaking this one in, I don't want to have to break in a new one!"
None of us missed the fragility of that smile, but none of us commented on it either. The last few days had been rough on all of us, but Rika most of all.
Ritsuka grimaced. "So does…that mean we're done here?"
Romani shrugged. "I don't see why not —"
"Hold it!" Marie said. "The examination might be over, but there's no reason we should waste any time getting through the debriefing!"
"Debriefing?" the twins echoed.
"Director," Romani began, "don't you think we could cut them some slack and maybe do this someplace a little more —"
"We've already lost precious time!" Marie insisted. "Now that you've confirmed he's in good health, we need to find out what happened to him while the memory of it is still fresh!"
Her stomach chose that moment to growl loudly, and her cheeks flushed pink.
"None of us has had a chance to eat yet," Romani said reasonably, "maybe we should all get some breakfast first and —"
Jeanne Alter suddenly appeared in the room with us, startling a shout out of everyone. "Sup, bitches!"
Marie shrieked. "I've told you to stop doing that!"
"Yeah, and I've ignored you every time," Jeanne Alter replied, grinning, and then ignoring Marie's indignant snarl in turn. She looked over to Ritsuka. "There you are, Master. Looks like you managed to make it out of there just fine. That's too bad."
Ritsuka smiled. "Thanks to you, yeah. You really pulled my butt out of the fire there."
"Ha!" Jeanne Alter barked out a laugh. "Goddamn right! You would've been toast without me!" She gave an irreverent wave. "Anyway, I'm gonna get out of here before I catch something. Try not to get into any more life or death situations anytime soon, okay? I won't always be there to rescue your sorry ass!"
And as suddenly as she appeared, she left.
"Stop doing that!" Marie shouted at the door.
"She's already gone, Director," Da Vinci said.
Marie huffed. "It's the principle of the thing! Ugh, that Servant is more trouble than she's worth!"
"I'm not so sure about that," I said, and I turned Ritsuka. "I'm guessing we were right and Jeanne Alter wound up inside Château d'If with you?"
"Yeah," he said. "She really did save me."
And evidently cared enough about him to come and check on him afterwards. He must have made some kind of impression upon her during their time together in there.
"She did?" Marie and Rika said simultaneously.
"So she fought beside you, Senpai?" Mash asked.
"Until the very end," he confirmed.
Romani looked to Da Vinci, who could only shake her head, and then back at Ritsuka. "I think you'd better start at the beginning, Ritsuka."
Rika nodded. "Forget breakfast! Story time now!"
Ritsuka grimaced and leaned back on the table he was sitting atop. "Alright," he said. "So I thought I was just really tired at the time, but I guess this whole thing started that night we watched a movie together…"
And he told us all about his time in Château d'If. About how he'd started having hallucinations that night while we were on our way to our beds, and when he'd laid down to go to sleep, he'd woken up in a prison cell. About the man in the hat and cloak with the flyaway hair who called himself an Avenger Servant and explained the situation to him. About trying to contact Chaldea and summon shadow Servants to help him, only to find out none of it worked. About agreeing to forge a temporary contract with Avenger — Edmond Dantès, it must have been — and fight his way out. About the so-called Lords in the Halls of Judgment who were there to test him, and how the first one had already been killed by Jeanne Alter when they arrived.
"Phantom of the Opera?" Marie asked. "Not Emiya?"
Ritsuka shook his head. "Emiya wasn't until later. The Phantom of the Opera was supposed to be the first Lord of Judgment, according to Avenger."
"Then our numbers might have been off, too," Da Vinci said thoughtfully. She sighed. "Well, it was only ever a guess to begin with, so I suppose I can't feel too bad about it."
"Keep going, Ritsuka," I told him.
"Well," said Ritsuka, "things almost broke out into a fight, at first, but I managed to keep them from trying to kill each other, and with the first Lord of Judgment dead, we went back to my, um, cell…"
Where he'd taken a rest for a while until it was time to face the next Servant that had been dragged into things — Gilles de Rais, or as Rika had called him a while back, Mister Starfish.
"And Jeanne Alter didn't take his side?" said Marie, brow furrowed.
"She didn't even seem tempted," said Ritsuka. "She, um, actually seemed to have a lot of fun setting his starfish monsters on fire. From the way she was laughing, I mean."
Of course she did. Although she might have been built on the original Jeanne as a core, Jeanne Alter also seemed to be her opposite in a number of different ways. Fitting, seeing as she was Gilles de Rais' edgy revenge fantasy made flesh.
"I'm curious, though," said Da Vinci. "Was he acting abnormal in any way? Did he seem stronger or weaker than he was when you fought him back in Orléans?"
"About…the same, I guess?" Ritsuka answered uncertainly. "If he was any different, I didn't notice it. And Jeanne Alter and Avenger didn't have any trouble fighting him, but then, he wasn't all that impressive when we fought him back in Orléans either, so…"
So they'd beaten him without too much of a fight. Between Jeanne Alter's flames and Dantès' concentrated curses, they made short work of all of his summoned monstrosities, and Gilles himself hadn't been able to put up too much of a fight, not as a Caster, although more of one than a Caster should have been capable of.
Probably because he'd been a knight earlier in his life. Those skills didn't just vanish into thin air, even if his Caster form put more of an emphasis on his descent into madness and the occult.
Nonetheless, they'd still beaten him, and then they'd gone back to Ritsuka's cell to rest again before facing the next Lord of Judgment. According to what Dantès had told him, they had to start from there each time, even if the path they followed through Château d'If was different for each of the Lords of Judgment.
On their way to the next fight, however, and the third Lord of Judgment, they'd found a woman there in the prison with them.
"A woman?" Romani asked, bewildered.
"And you didn't think that she might have been an enemy Servant?" Marie demanded.
Ritsuka shrugged and smiled a little awkwardly.
"She was alone and she sounded so scared," he answered a little sheepishly. "Maybe she really was playing us from the very start, but… When I talked to her, she seemed genuinely confused and frightened. She didn't even remember her name or how she got there."
My lips drew tight. On the one hand, there were plenty of people who could lie that easily with a straight face and tell a convincing sob story without giving anything away, and in a world like this, there were even people who could hypnotize themselves into believing they really were helpless and weak until the moment came for them to put their plan into action and stab you in the back. Especially in a place like Château d'If, or Dantès' Noble Phantasm version of it at least, being suspicious of anyone in there was the safest thing to do.
On the other hand… That willingness to help a random stranger out of the kindness of his heart was the thing that had convinced Mash to make him and his sister into her Masters, hadn't it? In a very real sense, it was the only reason the twins were still alive, and without that trait, neither of them would have made it this far.
"You said she might have been playing you from the very start," I chose to focus on. "Does that mean she turned out to be an enemy later on?"
Ritsuka winced. "Ah. Yeah, about that… U-um, so, before we get to that, there's some other stuff that happened first, and we should probably keep going in order…"
Marie sighed. "Fine," she said sourly. "We'll get to that when we get to that. If we start jumping around, then things will just get confusing, so you might as well just tell us everything in the order it happened."
The tension in Ritsuka's shoulders eased a little. "So we decided to bring her along, and since she said she couldn't even remember her own name, Avenger gave her the name Mercédès —"
I couldn't stop myself from snorting. Dantès hadn't even really tried to hide it, had he? He might as well have waved a giant flag with his identity emblazoned across it. It would have been more subtle.
"— and made me responsible for her," Ritsuka went on, either not noticing or ignoring my reaction. Then again, not everyone had a literature professor for a mom, so maybe it was more obvious to me than it had been to Ritsuka. "Then, we went on to fight the next Lord of Judgment…"
In other words, Emiya, who apparently went on and on about the selfishness of trying to save everyone you could and tried as much to browbeat them into submission as he did actually trying to kill them with his weapons. As Ritsuka described it, nothing Emiya said to them was necessarily wrong, but it had felt like those words were designed for and aimed at someone else.
Considering how tight-lipped he'd been about it a few days ago, I somehow doubted that he'd be willing to admit who that person might be.
Through the combined efforts of both Avengers, they managed to beat Emiya — made easier, or so Ritsuka claimed, by his erratic behavior — and returned back to his room to rest again. Time moved strangely in Château d'If, according to Dantès, so it was hard to tell exactly how long they spent doing anything, but after relaxing for a little while to regain some energy, they left to fight the next Lord of Judgment. This time, it was Aífe, as expected.
Also as expected, Aífe had acted just as strangely as Emiya. Ritsuka said that she'd held back to a massive degree, trying to prolong the fight, and cackling like a madwoman every time they landed a solid blow. She was louder and more deranged if they drew blood, and uncharacteristically sloppy, and that combination had made it easier to beat her than if she'd been fighting normally and taking them seriously the whole time.
"Even like that, though, Avenger had to use his Noble Phantasm to beat her," said Ritsuka.
Immediately, half the room perked up.
"Wait," said Romani, "his Noble Phantasm?"
Ritsuka blinked. "Um, yeah? Like I said, even if she was holding back and fighting so weirdly, it was still Aífe. She's way too tough for us to beat without going all out ourselves."
Marie's brow furrowed. "Were we wrong, then?"
"Maybe," I said, although I was the one who originally suggested the theory that the curse was the result of his Noble Phantasm. I could have been wrong, of course, but… Ritsuka hadn't corrected us when we referred to the place he'd been trapped as Château d'If.
Ritsuka looked around at us. "Wrong about what?"
"We were under the impression that the place you were trapped inside was a manifestation of a Noble Phantasm," said Da Vinci. "The Château d'If of Edmond Dantès, to be more specific. The Count of Monte Cristo."
"Oh," said Ritsuka. "No, I don't think so. At least, he never gave me any reason to believe he was the one behind it. Avenger might not have told me everything, but he never actually lied to me, as far as I can tell."
So maybe my first guess had been more correct, and Dantès had been drawn in because of his connection to Château d'If. The prison itself, then, would have just been a construct to give shape and form to the curse itself. A shell it used to strengthen its structure by borrowing the name and identity of a famous prison.
"You said he used his Noble Phantasm," I said. "Did you get a good look at what it did?"
Ritsuka nodded.
"He called it Enfer Château d'If," he answered. "And it was, um… Well…"
"Well, what?" Marie asked impatiently.
Ritsuka hesitated. "It was…like something out of an anime. Like Dragon Ball or something."
"Ha!" Rika blurted out abruptly. She slapped her hands over her mouth, cheeks blossoming with pink.
"How do you mean?" asked Romani.
"He created afterimages," said Ritsuka. "He moved so fast that he was… I think he was actually attacking from multiple places at the same time. It was like there were six or seven Avengers all firing blasts from all around Aífe, that was how fast he moved."
If I ignored the ridiculousness of that — and on the face of things, maybe it wasn't quite so extraordinary compared to things like Herakles and his Godhand that gave him twelve lives — then that would — somehow — be a Noble Phantasm based on Château d'If. Since a Noble Phantasm was the crystallization of a legend or a deed into a weapon, armament, or a blessing that somehow reflected that legend, he shouldn't have another one related to the same part of his myth.
In that case, it really would seem that Dantès had been dragged into the curse because it had borrowed the structure of the original prison as a base. The name of the Noble Phantasm even confirmed that it was Dantès, and I…could deal with the implications of that later, on my own time.
"Ultra high speed movement," Da Vinci murmured. "Perhaps related to his escape from the inescapable? A conceptual Noble Phantasm rather than one with a more physical basis? Interesting."
At least one of us had some theories for how that could work out.
"Well," said Ritsuka, "it was enough to defeat Aífe, and that made four Lords of Judgment, so we went back to my, um, my cell again…"
And while he was resting with the mysterious Mercédès, Dantès went off on his own for a while with the excuse of "scouting." Ritsuka didn't seem particularly suspicious of that idea, but I doubted Dantès was actually off doing any such thing. Maybe he'd gone to prepare the stage for the last few Lords of Judgment, or maybe he'd gone to try and investigate how and why Jeanne Alter had been pulled into things without being twisted the way our other Servants had been.
Whatever the case, Dantès eventually returned and they went off to tackle the fifth Lord: El-Melloi II, who reportedly spouted something about taking the entire world for himself so that he could fulfill the dream of his king. That one, I admit, threw me off a little, because as far as I knew, the current ruling monarch of England was a queen, and more than that, he'd never struck me as particularly patriotic. Never so much as a "God save the Queen!" had passed his lips in the entire time I'd known him.
Motivations aside, he'd fought them tenaciously, like a man literally possessed (and in a way, I guess he was), but they brought him down, too, and went back to the cell again, which was getting deeper and deeper into the prison with each "day," according to Dantès. I took that to mean that Ritsuka was getting closer and closer to the end, although I hadn't ruled out the possibility that the whole thing was a farce and Dantès had misled him into fighting in order to pull him deeper into the trap.
Either way, of the Servants we knew about, that only left Bradamante, who, it turned out, was indeed the next Lord, only instead of being some strange, twisted version of herself…
"It was like we were talking to a different person," Ritsuka told us. "The way she spoke, the words she used, even, um, no offense to Bradamante, but the confidence in her voice, too, it was all really different."
"How so?" asked Da Vinci.
"Well…" Ritsuka hesitated. "She honestly sounded…more like Jeanne than herself."
"Huh?" was Romani's eloquent response.
"But, like," said Rika, "wasn't Jalter right there with you?"
Ritsuka shook his head. "I mean the original Jeanne. The one we met in Orléans. It, um, also pissed Jeanne Alter off pretty badly, too, because she noticed it as well."
"That's…" Marie began. "That…shouldn't be possible. If there was some kind of connection between them, then maybe something like that could be done, but aside from being over six hundred years apart, they wouldn't even have spoken the same language."
Da Vinci hummed. "In the broadest sense, they're both French, but the Director is right, that's a very tenuous connection. Are you sure it wasn't just a coincidence?"
Ritsuka shrugged helplessly. "Some of the stuff she said about anger and hatred," he said, "it reminded me of what she said to Jeanne Alter in Orléans. That's why I said she sounded a lot like Jeanne."
Or at least enough to convince him that she was, somehow. I had to admit, it sounded a little out there to me, too, but maybe I was too used to people using projections and puppets and human minions — considering I'd fought a number of such people over my career — to care all that much about the how and the why.
"There's a lot we don't know about how Château d'If works," I said, metaphorically waving it all off, "so I don't think the mechanics of it really matter. She said she still fought you, Ritsuka, or the person possessing her body did."
Ritsuka nodded. "Yeah. She was, um, a little clumsy, honestly. Like she wasn't used to the weight of her lance. Maybe she was expecting it to be longer and heavier?"
Rika snorted and slapped a hand over her mouth. "N-no," she mumbled from between her fingers, sounding like she was fighting down a laugh, "I won't. That one's too easy!"
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes, even as Ritsuka's expression became pinched and pained.
"It made the fight easier," he went on, as much to move past that as anything else, it seemed. "She didn't even use her Noble Phantasm."
"Perhaps because she didn't know how," Da Vinci thought aloud. "Or maybe because she didn't have permission."
Romani sighed. "Alright. I guess we're just going to assume that it really was Jeanne d'Arc using Bradamante's Spirit Origin then."
Marie looked like she agreed and didn't like it one bit.
"A-anyway," said Ritsuka. "That made six Lords of Judgment, so we went back to take a rest before the last one…"
And along the way, since Jeanne-in-Bradamante's-body had already revealed so much of it, Dantès had laid his identity and his story bare. How he considered himself a separate person from the Dantès who lived, achieved his revenge, found love and peace again, and died. The Avenger Servant in that prison, that mockery of Château d'If, was not Edmond Dantès, but the wrathful Count of Monte Cristo, because he could never let go of his anger and hatred so long as he existed. It defined him — and so, he could not be Dantès, because Dantès had moved on long before his death.
I guess I understood his logic better than anyone else in the room. In his position, if I had made it to the Throne, been summoned as Skitter, in my worst moments, I didn't think I would have considered myself the same Taylor Hebert that I was right now. The person I'd become after everything was over.
If that made any sense.
When they arrived back in the cell, it was to find the woman, Mercédès, gone, and no trace of her left behind inside the room.
Marie sighed. "She was the last Lord of Judgment, wasn't she?"
Resignation made her voice heavy. Ritsuka nodded sheepishly.
"We never did find out her real name," he said, "but yeah, she was waiting for us in the last Hall of Judgment, and we had to fight her. She didn't use a Noble Phantasm, but, um, she did summon all of the restless wraiths in the prison to fight beside her, so I guess that was kind of like a Noble Phantasm in a way…"
"But you still beat her," said Mash. "Right, Senpai?"
"It was harder than I was expecting," Ritsuka admitted, "and she said a lot of similar things to Avenger as Jeanne did while she was possessing Bradamante, but yeah, we beat her. After that…"
He hesitated. I thought I knew why, because if it was just as simple as defeating the seventh Lord, then there was no reason for him not to just say 'and then I woke up.' The fact that he hadn't told me that my earlier hunch was right.
"You had to fight Dantès."
Ritsuka grimaced. "…Yeah. He was the last obstacle. Only one living human had ever escaped Château d'If, he said, so of the two of us, one had to win and escape, and the other had to stay behind and become the next Abbé Faria."
A shiver went down my spine, unnoticed by anyone else. Only one could escape. So if I had given into my frustration and forced my way into things, would that have meant that it really would have come down to one of us having to kill the other to make it out? Would I really have to have either killed Ritsuka, soak my hands in his blood, or let him kill me in order for just one of us to escape?
In going to rescue him, would I have doomed at least one of us to end up dead? The answer to that was a frighteningly possible 'maybe.'
Romani rubbed at his brow as though warding away a headache. "The next Abbé Faria?"
Ritsuka shrugged. "I didn't really understand it either," he said, "but I knew that it meant we had to fight, so… We fought. And it was hard, but together, Jeanne Alter and I managed to defeat him, although…"
Ritsuka looked away and trailed off, leaving the thought hanging.
"Although…?" Romani prompted.
Ritsuka shook his head. "It's nothing. After we defeated him, Dantès told us it was all a trap laid by the King of Mages, and I was just the one unfortunate enough to have been caught up in it. He reached through the Demon God at the end of Okeanos and… Honestly, I didn't get all of the details, but since I was the Master who summoned Jeanne Alter and she delivered the final blow, I guess I was the one who got affected."
And that lined up neatly with my own theory on the issue. It would even explain why Jeanne Alter wound up pulled along for the ride, since she was the one who actually did land that final blow on Forneus. Maybe, since she was already technically dead, she hadn't counted as someone who could 'live and escape,' and that was why she'd been able to leave at the end without consequence.
"And since the curse took on the structure of Château d'If, it was only natural that it acted as a catalyst to summon the Count of Monte Cristo," said Da Vinci. She nodded. "Yes, that makes sense, doesn't it?"
It did. That part also lined up with one of the theories I'd had running, back before I'd come to the conclusion it had to be Edmond Dantès who was tagging along with Ritsuka. Everything tied up together in a little bow — and with the Lords of Judgment vanquished and Dantès himself defeated, Ritsuka could wake up and return to us, none the worse for wear.
But only because I hadn't gone in after him. Only because I had listened to Marie's and Da Vinci's and Romani's judgment for long enough for him to save himself.
"And that was it?" asked Marie. "That was all the more there was to it? There weren't any other tasks you needed to complete before you were free?"
Ritsuka shook his head. "None. After Avenger was defeated and faded away, Jeanne Alter started to disappear, too, and I woke up."
"Took you long enough!" Rika said, still a little shaky. "If I'd been the one in that stupid prison, I'd have done it all in one night!"
Ritsuka laughed a little. "I'm sure."
"At least everything turned out okay." Mash sighed. "I knew you could do it, Senpai."
Ritsuka's cheeks burned red, and he ducked his head. "Thanks, Mash."
"Well, it answered most of our questions." Marie grunted. "But still! That we all got so careless we didn't even consider the idea the enemy would cast curses on us as they died!"
"To be fair, Director," said Da Vinci, "I'm not sure we could have done anything even if we had thought of it. After all, we couldn't detect this curse, could we? Not even after it had already sprung into action, so to speak, and taken Ritsuka hostage."
Marie didn't look happy to admit that she had a point. Her face had pulled into a sour, disgruntled expression.
"We still don't know if the enemy can do this more than once," I said, "let alone what it might have cost them to do it this time. At the very least, we can be on guard for something like this happening in the future."
It didn't mollify her, exactly, but some of the tension left Marie's body.
Romani, however, looked troubled.
"Ritsuka," he began, "you said that Dan…that Avenger referred to this all as a trap laid by the King of Mages, right?"
Ritsuka nodded. "That's right. I tried to ask more about that, but he told me that it was dangerous to use his True Name so casually, so he wouldn't really tell me much more than that."
Romani's lips drew into a tight line.
"And between that and the Demon Gods, I suppose that confirms the identity of our ultimate enemy, doesn't it?" said Da Vinci.
It did, come to think of it. Not that we'd had a plethora of candidates who fit the bill before, but that particular title kind of narrowed it down. The only one it could be was —
"King Solomon," Romani murmured, "but… Why on Earth would a Heroic Spirit like that do something like this? It just doesn't make any sense at all."
"Maybe he was summoned by a Master somewhere else who made him do all of this," Ritsuka suggested.
Romani's wasn't the only expression to twist. It was Marie who said, "If you knew anything at all about just how powerful a Heroic Spirit he was, the idea that he would obey a Master to do anything he didn't want to would sound just as ludicrous to you as it did to the rest of us."
"Yes, the why of it does present us with a mystery of its own, doesn't it?" Da Vinci mused. "Unfortunately, we could sit here for days, and I'm not sure we would have any better idea than we do right now. It might be prudent to put that off until we can try and look back into that era with SHEBA and determine just if and how these so-called Demon Gods are connected to him."
Several stomachs — including my own — chose that moment to rumble, as though to remind all of us that we had put off eating breakfast to hear Ritsuka's tale.
"And those of us still living have yet to eat breakfast," Da Vinci added. "I think we can put this discussion off for a little while, yes? Why don't all of you go and get something to eat? It won't do any of us any good if you all collapse from hunger — especially if our resident physician happens to be one of them!"
Marie grimaced. Faint splotches of pink still decorated her cheeks. "A-a good idea! For now, as Director, I'm officially adjourning this discussion!"
"Time for food!" Rika cheered. She leapt out of her chair.
"I wonder what Emiya made for breakfast this morning?" Mash thought aloud. Some of Rika's cheer evaporated immediately.
"Y-yeah! I bet it's really good!"
Mash turned to Ritsuka. "Do you think he would make something special to celebrate your safe return, Senpai? Maybe he might cook something Japanese again, like okonomiyaki or oyakodon."
Ritsuka hummed thoughtfully as he slipped his shirt back on and hopped down from the impromptu examination table. "I don't know. I think I'm in the mood for something different, right now. Maybe he could make me some French toast?"
My cheek twitched. I had to fight down a smile.
"I'm certain he'd be all too happy to, if you asked," said Da Vinci.
We started filing out of the room, the twins and Mash first, Marie and Da Vinci following behind, and me behind them. Romani, however, lingered, brow furrowed, staring intently at the wall as though it held the answers to the meaning of life. Breakfast looked like the last thing on his mind, just then.
I hesitated at the door. "Romani?"
He blinked, and like a drowning man surfacing for air, pulled himself out of whatever hole he'd dug or whatever spiral his thoughts had led him down. He plastered on a painfully fake smile.
"Coming!" he said with false cheer. "Yeah, I think some food would be great, right now!"
I didn't call him on it. Something about what we'd learned troubled him. Maybe, given how much he seemed to know about King David, he was a big fan of King Solomon. There were certainly worse people to hero worship, or at least I would have said so before all of this started, so finding out that the guy you looked up to was a genocidal maniac couldn't have been a good feeling.
"It can't actually be true," I heard him whisper to himself on our way out, "can it?"
Unfortunately, it seemed like Romani, just like I had, was having to learn the hard way that your heroes were rarely as heroic as you liked to believe they were.
Next — Chapter CXXII: Parole Party
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way...
Chapter CXXI: No Worse for Wear
"I feel fine," Ritsuka said.
"I'm sure you do," Romani replied patiently. Fittingly, it carried the air of a doctor who had heard this sort of thing from patients who most certainly weren't. "But we're still going to make sure you actually are, okay? Breathe in."
Ritsuka obeyed, taking in a long, slow breath, and then letting it out just as slowly. Romani held the knob of his stethoscope in place for the duration, and once Ritsuka had gone through his first breath, moved it.
"Again."
Again, Ritsuka obeyed, although the expression on his face told the tale of his impatience and frustration.
Several more times, Romani repeated this cycle, and Ritsuka acquiesced each time. He didn't seem to be having any trouble breathing at all — or sitting up for the tests, or standing and walking, which he'd done on his own to get here to Romani's office. In fact, he seemed so entirely unaffected by his ordeal that it was like he'd gone to bed the night before, gotten a normal night's sleep, and gotten up in the morning like nothing had happened.
Romani did a few other tests, checking things like Ritsuka's blood pressure, his reflexes, his vision, his hearing, and generally anything it seemed he could think of that didn't require specialized equipment, all the while Da Vinci hung in the background, running her own tests through some combined function of her staff and tablet. Ritsuka passed each with flying colors, and by the time he'd run through the entire gamut, Romani's brow was furrowed, his mouth was pulled into a line, but he looked confused and frustrated, not concerned.
"Well," he said, "at least medically, I can't find anything wrong with you. A little anemic, somewhat dehydrated, and your electrolytes are low, but that's to be expected after you spent three whole days completely unconscious. Other than that, you're perfectly healthy."
"I didn't notice any lingering damage spiritually, either," Da Vinci noted. She sounded somewhat puzzled by it, too. "Nor even remnants of that curse in your Magic Circuits. It's just as Romani said, Ritsuka: you're perfectly healthy, and frankly speaking, I don't have the slightest clue as to why or how."
"Great," he said. He slanted a look over in our direction. "Is this really something everyone needed to be here for, though? I thought there was that thing called doctor-patient confidentiality."
"In civilian circumstances, you might be correct," Marie said sternly. "However, Chaldea isn't a strictly civilian organization, which means anything about your health that can affect your performance in the field is directly my concern!"
"And mine, as your team leader," I added.
Even if I'd been shooed out of the room, I would've asked Marie about it at the first possible opportunity, and she would've told me herself.
"If you think I was going to just wait outside after what you put me through, you've got another thing coming, buster!" said Rika, and although it came out with her usual humor, there was an underlying shakiness to her voice.
If she let him go anywhere but the bathroom alone for the next week, I would be surprised.
"I…guess I didn't need to be here," Mash admitted reluctantly. "But… Senpai…"
She had been worried, too. Even if she'd had every confidence that he would manage to make it through everything on his own and come out the other end alive and well, it didn't mean she hadn't been at least a little concerned. I had to wonder how much she'd buried it and how badly it had burned to know that there was something so dangerous that she couldn't protect him from with her shield.
Ritsuka sighed.
"Are there any more tests you need to run?" he asked, resigned.
"Without getting invasive?" Romani asked.
"If we were going to find something, we should have found it by now," Da Vinci said. "At this point, any test we could do to look deeper would be essentially pointless."
Ritsuka's shoulders sagged a little, and some of the tension left his body.
"So… So that's it, then?" Rika asked hesitantly. "He's… He's okay? There's nothing wrong?"
"Against all expectations," said Da Vinci, "yes, Rika, he's okay."
"Thank goodness." Rika sighed, and putting on a trembling smile, said, "H-he's the only brother I've got, you know! I've spent almost eighteen years breaking this one in, I don't want to have to break in a new one!"
None of us missed the fragility of that smile, but none of us commented on it either. The last few days had been rough on all of us, but Rika most of all.
Ritsuka grimaced. "So does…that mean we're done here?"
Romani shrugged. "I don't see why not —"
"Hold it!" Marie said. "The examination might be over, but there's no reason we should waste any time getting through the debriefing!"
"Debriefing?" the twins echoed.
"Director," Romani began, "don't you think we could cut them some slack and maybe do this someplace a little more —"
"We've already lost precious time!" Marie insisted. "Now that you've confirmed he's in good health, we need to find out what happened to him while the memory of it is still fresh!"
Her stomach chose that moment to growl loudly, and her cheeks flushed pink.
"None of us has had a chance to eat yet," Romani said reasonably, "maybe we should all get some breakfast first and —"
Jeanne Alter suddenly appeared in the room with us, startling a shout out of everyone. "Sup, bitches!"
Marie shrieked. "I've told you to stop doing that!"
"Yeah, and I've ignored you every time," Jeanne Alter replied, grinning, and then ignoring Marie's indignant snarl in turn. She looked over to Ritsuka. "There you are, Master. Looks like you managed to make it out of there just fine. That's too bad."
Ritsuka smiled. "Thanks to you, yeah. You really pulled my butt out of the fire there."
"Ha!" Jeanne Alter barked out a laugh. "Goddamn right! You would've been toast without me!" She gave an irreverent wave. "Anyway, I'm gonna get out of here before I catch something. Try not to get into any more life or death situations anytime soon, okay? I won't always be there to rescue your sorry ass!"
And as suddenly as she appeared, she left.
"Stop doing that!" Marie shouted at the door.
"She's already gone, Director," Da Vinci said.
Marie huffed. "It's the principle of the thing! Ugh, that Servant is more trouble than she's worth!"
"I'm not so sure about that," I said, and I turned Ritsuka. "I'm guessing we were right and Jeanne Alter wound up inside Château d'If with you?"
"Yeah," he said. "She really did save me."
And evidently cared enough about him to come and check on him afterwards. He must have made some kind of impression upon her during their time together in there.
"She did?" Marie and Rika said simultaneously.
"So she fought beside you, Senpai?" Mash asked.
"Until the very end," he confirmed.
Romani looked to Da Vinci, who could only shake her head, and then back at Ritsuka. "I think you'd better start at the beginning, Ritsuka."
Rika nodded. "Forget breakfast! Story time now!"
Ritsuka grimaced and leaned back on the table he was sitting atop. "Alright," he said. "So I thought I was just really tired at the time, but I guess this whole thing started that night we watched a movie together…"
And he told us all about his time in Château d'If. About how he'd started having hallucinations that night while we were on our way to our beds, and when he'd laid down to go to sleep, he'd woken up in a prison cell. About the man in the hat and cloak with the flyaway hair who called himself an Avenger Servant and explained the situation to him. About trying to contact Chaldea and summon shadow Servants to help him, only to find out none of it worked. About agreeing to forge a temporary contract with Avenger — Edmond Dantès, it must have been — and fight his way out. About the so-called Lords in the Halls of Judgment who were there to test him, and how the first one had already been killed by Jeanne Alter when they arrived.
"Phantom of the Opera?" Marie asked. "Not Emiya?"
Ritsuka shook his head. "Emiya wasn't until later. The Phantom of the Opera was supposed to be the first Lord of Judgment, according to Avenger."
"Then our numbers might have been off, too," Da Vinci said thoughtfully. She sighed. "Well, it was only ever a guess to begin with, so I suppose I can't feel too bad about it."
"Keep going, Ritsuka," I told him.
"Well," said Ritsuka, "things almost broke out into a fight, at first, but I managed to keep them from trying to kill each other, and with the first Lord of Judgment dead, we went back to my, um, cell…"
Where he'd taken a rest for a while until it was time to face the next Servant that had been dragged into things — Gilles de Rais, or as Rika had called him a while back, Mister Starfish.
"And Jeanne Alter didn't take his side?" said Marie, brow furrowed.
"She didn't even seem tempted," said Ritsuka. "She, um, actually seemed to have a lot of fun setting his starfish monsters on fire. From the way she was laughing, I mean."
Of course she did. Although she might have been built on the original Jeanne as a core, Jeanne Alter also seemed to be her opposite in a number of different ways. Fitting, seeing as she was Gilles de Rais' edgy revenge fantasy made flesh.
"I'm curious, though," said Da Vinci. "Was he acting abnormal in any way? Did he seem stronger or weaker than he was when you fought him back in Orléans?"
"About…the same, I guess?" Ritsuka answered uncertainly. "If he was any different, I didn't notice it. And Jeanne Alter and Avenger didn't have any trouble fighting him, but then, he wasn't all that impressive when we fought him back in Orléans either, so…"
So they'd beaten him without too much of a fight. Between Jeanne Alter's flames and Dantès' concentrated curses, they made short work of all of his summoned monstrosities, and Gilles himself hadn't been able to put up too much of a fight, not as a Caster, although more of one than a Caster should have been capable of.
Probably because he'd been a knight earlier in his life. Those skills didn't just vanish into thin air, even if his Caster form put more of an emphasis on his descent into madness and the occult.
Nonetheless, they'd still beaten him, and then they'd gone back to Ritsuka's cell to rest again before facing the next Lord of Judgment. According to what Dantès had told him, they had to start from there each time, even if the path they followed through Château d'If was different for each of the Lords of Judgment.
On their way to the next fight, however, and the third Lord of Judgment, they'd found a woman there in the prison with them.
"A woman?" Romani asked, bewildered.
"And you didn't think that she might have been an enemy Servant?" Marie demanded.
Ritsuka shrugged and smiled a little awkwardly.
"She was alone and she sounded so scared," he answered a little sheepishly. "Maybe she really was playing us from the very start, but… When I talked to her, she seemed genuinely confused and frightened. She didn't even remember her name or how she got there."
My lips drew tight. On the one hand, there were plenty of people who could lie that easily with a straight face and tell a convincing sob story without giving anything away, and in a world like this, there were even people who could hypnotize themselves into believing they really were helpless and weak until the moment came for them to put their plan into action and stab you in the back. Especially in a place like Château d'If, or Dantès' Noble Phantasm version of it at least, being suspicious of anyone in there was the safest thing to do.
On the other hand… That willingness to help a random stranger out of the kindness of his heart was the thing that had convinced Mash to make him and his sister into her Masters, hadn't it? In a very real sense, it was the only reason the twins were still alive, and without that trait, neither of them would have made it this far.
"You said she might have been playing you from the very start," I chose to focus on. "Does that mean she turned out to be an enemy later on?"
Ritsuka winced. "Ah. Yeah, about that… U-um, so, before we get to that, there's some other stuff that happened first, and we should probably keep going in order…"
Marie sighed. "Fine," she said sourly. "We'll get to that when we get to that. If we start jumping around, then things will just get confusing, so you might as well just tell us everything in the order it happened."
The tension in Ritsuka's shoulders eased a little. "So we decided to bring her along, and since she said she couldn't even remember her own name, Avenger gave her the name Mercédès —"
I couldn't stop myself from snorting. Dantès hadn't even really tried to hide it, had he? He might as well have waved a giant flag with his identity emblazoned across it. It would have been more subtle.
"— and made me responsible for her," Ritsuka went on, either not noticing or ignoring my reaction. Then again, not everyone had a literature professor for a mom, so maybe it was more obvious to me than it had been to Ritsuka. "Then, we went on to fight the next Lord of Judgment…"
In other words, Emiya, who apparently went on and on about the selfishness of trying to save everyone you could and tried as much to browbeat them into submission as he did actually trying to kill them with his weapons. As Ritsuka described it, nothing Emiya said to them was necessarily wrong, but it had felt like those words were designed for and aimed at someone else.
Considering how tight-lipped he'd been about it a few days ago, I somehow doubted that he'd be willing to admit who that person might be.
Through the combined efforts of both Avengers, they managed to beat Emiya — made easier, or so Ritsuka claimed, by his erratic behavior — and returned back to his room to rest again. Time moved strangely in Château d'If, according to Dantès, so it was hard to tell exactly how long they spent doing anything, but after relaxing for a little while to regain some energy, they left to fight the next Lord of Judgment. This time, it was Aífe, as expected.
Also as expected, Aífe had acted just as strangely as Emiya. Ritsuka said that she'd held back to a massive degree, trying to prolong the fight, and cackling like a madwoman every time they landed a solid blow. She was louder and more deranged if they drew blood, and uncharacteristically sloppy, and that combination had made it easier to beat her than if she'd been fighting normally and taking them seriously the whole time.
"Even like that, though, Avenger had to use his Noble Phantasm to beat her," said Ritsuka.
Immediately, half the room perked up.
"Wait," said Romani, "his Noble Phantasm?"
Ritsuka blinked. "Um, yeah? Like I said, even if she was holding back and fighting so weirdly, it was still Aífe. She's way too tough for us to beat without going all out ourselves."
Marie's brow furrowed. "Were we wrong, then?"
"Maybe," I said, although I was the one who originally suggested the theory that the curse was the result of his Noble Phantasm. I could have been wrong, of course, but… Ritsuka hadn't corrected us when we referred to the place he'd been trapped as Château d'If.
Ritsuka looked around at us. "Wrong about what?"
"We were under the impression that the place you were trapped inside was a manifestation of a Noble Phantasm," said Da Vinci. "The Château d'If of Edmond Dantès, to be more specific. The Count of Monte Cristo."
"Oh," said Ritsuka. "No, I don't think so. At least, he never gave me any reason to believe he was the one behind it. Avenger might not have told me everything, but he never actually lied to me, as far as I can tell."
So maybe my first guess had been more correct, and Dantès had been drawn in because of his connection to Château d'If. The prison itself, then, would have just been a construct to give shape and form to the curse itself. A shell it used to strengthen its structure by borrowing the name and identity of a famous prison.
"You said he used his Noble Phantasm," I said. "Did you get a good look at what it did?"
Ritsuka nodded.
"He called it Enfer Château d'If," he answered. "And it was, um… Well…"
"Well, what?" Marie asked impatiently.
Ritsuka hesitated. "It was…like something out of an anime. Like Dragon Ball or something."
"Ha!" Rika blurted out abruptly. She slapped her hands over her mouth, cheeks blossoming with pink.
"How do you mean?" asked Romani.
"He created afterimages," said Ritsuka. "He moved so fast that he was… I think he was actually attacking from multiple places at the same time. It was like there were six or seven Avengers all firing blasts from all around Aífe, that was how fast he moved."
If I ignored the ridiculousness of that — and on the face of things, maybe it wasn't quite so extraordinary compared to things like Herakles and his Godhand that gave him twelve lives — then that would — somehow — be a Noble Phantasm based on Château d'If. Since a Noble Phantasm was the crystallization of a legend or a deed into a weapon, armament, or a blessing that somehow reflected that legend, he shouldn't have another one related to the same part of his myth.
In that case, it really would seem that Dantès had been dragged into the curse because it had borrowed the structure of the original prison as a base. The name of the Noble Phantasm even confirmed that it was Dantès, and I…could deal with the implications of that later, on my own time.
"Ultra high speed movement," Da Vinci murmured. "Perhaps related to his escape from the inescapable? A conceptual Noble Phantasm rather than one with a more physical basis? Interesting."
At least one of us had some theories for how that could work out.
"Well," said Ritsuka, "it was enough to defeat Aífe, and that made four Lords of Judgment, so we went back to my, um, my cell again…"
And while he was resting with the mysterious Mercédès, Dantès went off on his own for a while with the excuse of "scouting." Ritsuka didn't seem particularly suspicious of that idea, but I doubted Dantès was actually off doing any such thing. Maybe he'd gone to prepare the stage for the last few Lords of Judgment, or maybe he'd gone to try and investigate how and why Jeanne Alter had been pulled into things without being twisted the way our other Servants had been.
Whatever the case, Dantès eventually returned and they went off to tackle the fifth Lord: El-Melloi II, who reportedly spouted something about taking the entire world for himself so that he could fulfill the dream of his king. That one, I admit, threw me off a little, because as far as I knew, the current ruling monarch of England was a queen, and more than that, he'd never struck me as particularly patriotic. Never so much as a "God save the Queen!" had passed his lips in the entire time I'd known him.
Motivations aside, he'd fought them tenaciously, like a man literally possessed (and in a way, I guess he was), but they brought him down, too, and went back to the cell again, which was getting deeper and deeper into the prison with each "day," according to Dantès. I took that to mean that Ritsuka was getting closer and closer to the end, although I hadn't ruled out the possibility that the whole thing was a farce and Dantès had misled him into fighting in order to pull him deeper into the trap.
Either way, of the Servants we knew about, that only left Bradamante, who, it turned out, was indeed the next Lord, only instead of being some strange, twisted version of herself…
"It was like we were talking to a different person," Ritsuka told us. "The way she spoke, the words she used, even, um, no offense to Bradamante, but the confidence in her voice, too, it was all really different."
"How so?" asked Da Vinci.
"Well…" Ritsuka hesitated. "She honestly sounded…more like Jeanne than herself."
"Huh?" was Romani's eloquent response.
"But, like," said Rika, "wasn't Jalter right there with you?"
Ritsuka shook his head. "I mean the original Jeanne. The one we met in Orléans. It, um, also pissed Jeanne Alter off pretty badly, too, because she noticed it as well."
"That's…" Marie began. "That…shouldn't be possible. If there was some kind of connection between them, then maybe something like that could be done, but aside from being over six hundred years apart, they wouldn't even have spoken the same language."
Da Vinci hummed. "In the broadest sense, they're both French, but the Director is right, that's a very tenuous connection. Are you sure it wasn't just a coincidence?"
Ritsuka shrugged helplessly. "Some of the stuff she said about anger and hatred," he said, "it reminded me of what she said to Jeanne Alter in Orléans. That's why I said she sounded a lot like Jeanne."
Or at least enough to convince him that she was, somehow. I had to admit, it sounded a little out there to me, too, but maybe I was too used to people using projections and puppets and human minions — considering I'd fought a number of such people over my career — to care all that much about the how and the why.
"There's a lot we don't know about how Château d'If works," I said, metaphorically waving it all off, "so I don't think the mechanics of it really matter. She said she still fought you, Ritsuka, or the person possessing her body did."
Ritsuka nodded. "Yeah. She was, um, a little clumsy, honestly. Like she wasn't used to the weight of her lance. Maybe she was expecting it to be longer and heavier?"
Rika snorted and slapped a hand over her mouth. "N-no," she mumbled from between her fingers, sounding like she was fighting down a laugh, "I won't. That one's too easy!"
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes, even as Ritsuka's expression became pinched and pained.
"It made the fight easier," he went on, as much to move past that as anything else, it seemed. "She didn't even use her Noble Phantasm."
"Perhaps because she didn't know how," Da Vinci thought aloud. "Or maybe because she didn't have permission."
Romani sighed. "Alright. I guess we're just going to assume that it really was Jeanne d'Arc using Bradamante's Spirit Origin then."
Marie looked like she agreed and didn't like it one bit.
"A-anyway," said Ritsuka. "That made six Lords of Judgment, so we went back to take a rest before the last one…"
And along the way, since Jeanne-in-Bradamante's-body had already revealed so much of it, Dantès had laid his identity and his story bare. How he considered himself a separate person from the Dantès who lived, achieved his revenge, found love and peace again, and died. The Avenger Servant in that prison, that mockery of Château d'If, was not Edmond Dantès, but the wrathful Count of Monte Cristo, because he could never let go of his anger and hatred so long as he existed. It defined him — and so, he could not be Dantès, because Dantès had moved on long before his death.
I guess I understood his logic better than anyone else in the room. In his position, if I had made it to the Throne, been summoned as Skitter, in my worst moments, I didn't think I would have considered myself the same Taylor Hebert that I was right now. The person I'd become after everything was over.
If that made any sense.
When they arrived back in the cell, it was to find the woman, Mercédès, gone, and no trace of her left behind inside the room.
Marie sighed. "She was the last Lord of Judgment, wasn't she?"
Resignation made her voice heavy. Ritsuka nodded sheepishly.
"We never did find out her real name," he said, "but yeah, she was waiting for us in the last Hall of Judgment, and we had to fight her. She didn't use a Noble Phantasm, but, um, she did summon all of the restless wraiths in the prison to fight beside her, so I guess that was kind of like a Noble Phantasm in a way…"
"But you still beat her," said Mash. "Right, Senpai?"
"It was harder than I was expecting," Ritsuka admitted, "and she said a lot of similar things to Avenger as Jeanne did while she was possessing Bradamante, but yeah, we beat her. After that…"
He hesitated. I thought I knew why, because if it was just as simple as defeating the seventh Lord, then there was no reason for him not to just say 'and then I woke up.' The fact that he hadn't told me that my earlier hunch was right.
"You had to fight Dantès."
Ritsuka grimaced. "…Yeah. He was the last obstacle. Only one living human had ever escaped Château d'If, he said, so of the two of us, one had to win and escape, and the other had to stay behind and become the next Abbé Faria."
A shiver went down my spine, unnoticed by anyone else. Only one could escape. So if I had given into my frustration and forced my way into things, would that have meant that it really would have come down to one of us having to kill the other to make it out? Would I really have to have either killed Ritsuka, soak my hands in his blood, or let him kill me in order for just one of us to escape?
In going to rescue him, would I have doomed at least one of us to end up dead? The answer to that was a frighteningly possible 'maybe.'
Romani rubbed at his brow as though warding away a headache. "The next Abbé Faria?"
Ritsuka shrugged. "I didn't really understand it either," he said, "but I knew that it meant we had to fight, so… We fought. And it was hard, but together, Jeanne Alter and I managed to defeat him, although…"
Ritsuka looked away and trailed off, leaving the thought hanging.
"Although…?" Romani prompted.
Ritsuka shook his head. "It's nothing. After we defeated him, Dantès told us it was all a trap laid by the King of Mages, and I was just the one unfortunate enough to have been caught up in it. He reached through the Demon God at the end of Okeanos and… Honestly, I didn't get all of the details, but since I was the Master who summoned Jeanne Alter and she delivered the final blow, I guess I was the one who got affected."
And that lined up neatly with my own theory on the issue. It would even explain why Jeanne Alter wound up pulled along for the ride, since she was the one who actually did land that final blow on Forneus. Maybe, since she was already technically dead, she hadn't counted as someone who could 'live and escape,' and that was why she'd been able to leave at the end without consequence.
"And since the curse took on the structure of Château d'If, it was only natural that it acted as a catalyst to summon the Count of Monte Cristo," said Da Vinci. She nodded. "Yes, that makes sense, doesn't it?"
It did. That part also lined up with one of the theories I'd had running, back before I'd come to the conclusion it had to be Edmond Dantès who was tagging along with Ritsuka. Everything tied up together in a little bow — and with the Lords of Judgment vanquished and Dantès himself defeated, Ritsuka could wake up and return to us, none the worse for wear.
But only because I hadn't gone in after him. Only because I had listened to Marie's and Da Vinci's and Romani's judgment for long enough for him to save himself.
"And that was it?" asked Marie. "That was all the more there was to it? There weren't any other tasks you needed to complete before you were free?"
Ritsuka shook his head. "None. After Avenger was defeated and faded away, Jeanne Alter started to disappear, too, and I woke up."
"Took you long enough!" Rika said, still a little shaky. "If I'd been the one in that stupid prison, I'd have done it all in one night!"
Ritsuka laughed a little. "I'm sure."
"At least everything turned out okay." Mash sighed. "I knew you could do it, Senpai."
Ritsuka's cheeks burned red, and he ducked his head. "Thanks, Mash."
"Well, it answered most of our questions." Marie grunted. "But still! That we all got so careless we didn't even consider the idea the enemy would cast curses on us as they died!"
"To be fair, Director," said Da Vinci, "I'm not sure we could have done anything even if we had thought of it. After all, we couldn't detect this curse, could we? Not even after it had already sprung into action, so to speak, and taken Ritsuka hostage."
Marie didn't look happy to admit that she had a point. Her face had pulled into a sour, disgruntled expression.
"We still don't know if the enemy can do this more than once," I said, "let alone what it might have cost them to do it this time. At the very least, we can be on guard for something like this happening in the future."
It didn't mollify her, exactly, but some of the tension left Marie's body.
Romani, however, looked troubled.
"Ritsuka," he began, "you said that Dan…that Avenger referred to this all as a trap laid by the King of Mages, right?"
Ritsuka nodded. "That's right. I tried to ask more about that, but he told me that it was dangerous to use his True Name so casually, so he wouldn't really tell me much more than that."
Romani's lips drew into a tight line.
"And between that and the Demon Gods, I suppose that confirms the identity of our ultimate enemy, doesn't it?" said Da Vinci.
It did, come to think of it. Not that we'd had a plethora of candidates who fit the bill before, but that particular title kind of narrowed it down. The only one it could be was —
"King Solomon," Romani murmured, "but… Why on Earth would a Heroic Spirit like that do something like this? It just doesn't make any sense at all."
"Maybe he was summoned by a Master somewhere else who made him do all of this," Ritsuka suggested.
Romani's wasn't the only expression to twist. It was Marie who said, "If you knew anything at all about just how powerful a Heroic Spirit he was, the idea that he would obey a Master to do anything he didn't want to would sound just as ludicrous to you as it did to the rest of us."
"Yes, the why of it does present us with a mystery of its own, doesn't it?" Da Vinci mused. "Unfortunately, we could sit here for days, and I'm not sure we would have any better idea than we do right now. It might be prudent to put that off until we can try and look back into that era with SHEBA and determine just if and how these so-called Demon Gods are connected to him."
Several stomachs — including my own — chose that moment to rumble, as though to remind all of us that we had put off eating breakfast to hear Ritsuka's tale.
"And those of us still living have yet to eat breakfast," Da Vinci added. "I think we can put this discussion off for a little while, yes? Why don't all of you go and get something to eat? It won't do any of us any good if you all collapse from hunger — especially if our resident physician happens to be one of them!"
Marie grimaced. Faint splotches of pink still decorated her cheeks. "A-a good idea! For now, as Director, I'm officially adjourning this discussion!"
"Time for food!" Rika cheered. She leapt out of her chair.
"I wonder what Emiya made for breakfast this morning?" Mash thought aloud. Some of Rika's cheer evaporated immediately.
"Y-yeah! I bet it's really good!"
Mash turned to Ritsuka. "Do you think he would make something special to celebrate your safe return, Senpai? Maybe he might cook something Japanese again, like okonomiyaki or oyakodon."
Ritsuka hummed thoughtfully as he slipped his shirt back on and hopped down from the impromptu examination table. "I don't know. I think I'm in the mood for something different, right now. Maybe he could make me some French toast?"
My cheek twitched. I had to fight down a smile.
"I'm certain he'd be all too happy to, if you asked," said Da Vinci.
We started filing out of the room, the twins and Mash first, Marie and Da Vinci following behind, and me behind them. Romani, however, lingered, brow furrowed, staring intently at the wall as though it held the answers to the meaning of life. Breakfast looked like the last thing on his mind, just then.
I hesitated at the door. "Romani?"
He blinked, and like a drowning man surfacing for air, pulled himself out of whatever hole he'd dug or whatever spiral his thoughts had led him down. He plastered on a painfully fake smile.
"Coming!" he said with false cheer. "Yeah, I think some food would be great, right now!"
I didn't call him on it. Something about what we'd learned troubled him. Maybe, given how much he seemed to know about King David, he was a big fan of King Solomon. There were certainly worse people to hero worship, or at least I would have said so before all of this started, so finding out that the guy you looked up to was a genocidal maniac couldn't have been a good feeling.
"It can't actually be true," I heard him whisper to himself on our way out, "can it?"
Unfortunately, it seemed like Romani, just like I had, was having to learn the hard way that your heroes were rarely as heroic as you liked to believe they were.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
This one wound up being...a lot of summary of what Ritsuka went through inside of Chateau d'If. I was surprised and a little frustrated that so much time was spent on that, but I tried to make it more engaging, and I think that was what made it balloon a little bit past my expectations.
Well, the big event is passed, so maybe now that things aren't falling apart, the team can finally get a chance to relax before London. They should be so lucky, right?
I do have a few things I want to get through before we hit the next big main plot section, so there're still a few chapters left before we get to preparing and deploying into the next Singularity.
There are, of course, still one or two more Prison Tower sidestories to go, so expect those on the SV and SB threads, as well as AO3, but the next two weekends are vacation time for Christmas and New Year's. The story will return at its regularly scheduled slot on January 6th.
Well, the big event is passed, so maybe now that things aren't falling apart, the team can finally get a chance to relax before London. They should be so lucky, right?
I do have a few things I want to get through before we hit the next big main plot section, so there're still a few chapters left before we get to preparing and deploying into the next Singularity.
There are, of course, still one or two more Prison Tower sidestories to go, so expect those on the SV and SB threads, as well as AO3, but the next two weekends are vacation time for Christmas and New Year's. The story will return at its regularly scheduled slot on January 6th.
- Location
- Canada
Imagine if Romani accidentally blurted out "But I'm not an genocidal maniac!" in front of everyone.
fishsicles
ate a calculator to gain its power
- Location
- Alexander Horned Earth
- Pronouns
- They/Them
The fact that he didn't give the game away in canon is more down to Guda and Mash's... I wouldn't call it naivete, exactly, but they definitely aren't thinking to push him on stuff. With Taylor's eye on him even a little bit, there's no way that secret's making it all the way to the Temple.
Hey on the plus side, Taylor has a good record with misunderstandings resulting from teammates or allies keeping major earth-shattering secrets until the worst possible moment, right? Right? Right?
- Location
- Elsewhere
"I'm not treating you. I'm treating all these nervous wrecks."
"Not having to put up with Rika's terrible jokes made the fight a lot easier."
"Hey!"
No, bad Touch Dom. Do you know how long it took to lobotomize and train Taylor to stare at walls instead of being proactive, engaged, useful, driven, or even vaguely in-character? That's not even mentioning the brainwashing so her ethos, mentality, and experiences were entirely overwritten by Ritsuka's? These are expensive, time-consuming processes!
God, if only Taylor was treated with respect in this fic, and not unnaturally forced into a shape OP wanted, it's getting almost as bad as AEoSaS became at it's absolute worst. It really feels like OP has an outline and a bunch of extremely artificial, arbitrary restrictions slapped onto Taylor otherwise she'd run against it, and he's sticking to it despite it being fucked from the get-go, while also warping her to fit the equally dumb character objectives he laid out no matter how little sense it actually makes. Like, seriously, if you wanted Taylor to learn how to live and 'pass down to the next generation' (god why!?), why the flying fuck would you bring her to FGO of all places to do so when there's literally nothing to do but fight, it's the worst possible choice for that. Literally any setting would be multitudes better for that objective, even fucking 40k would be better. A real post-GM Taylor should have been taking all advantages, having extra servants train Ritsuka and co. while burning herself from both ends to get better herself, especially after France, not this OOC caricature. This Taylor continues to barely even feel like herself in the slightest. I'd seriously abandon that absurdly terrible plot-thread and play the fic straight, instead of sticking to crap for reasons.
I hope this arc is forgotten and never brought up again. I'm still hoping London will be the saving grace here, but given OP doesn't even see these as issues... I don't have much faith in it improving. She'll wind up even more twisted to fit the shitty outline, you see, and then she'll get equally shitty bug versions of shadow servants at her absolute best, because post-GM Taylor is Ritsuka with slightly different flavoring now. Maybe she'll even be allowed to order some big, strong, powerful Servants to do things they'd do already because her tactical prowess is equally dogshit as her usefulness in combat, compared to basically every Servant! It truly is wonderful being Taylor.
Just CTRL-F Taylor to have a different name, or make her an SI, because whoever the hell she is, she really, really doesn't feel like Taylor, let alone a post-GM Taylor with a stronger personality and even stronger views. She doesn't act like her, she doesn't have the same ethics or core moral drives, she doesn't have the same flaws, she has a will of cardboard, she doesn't improve herself, she exercises absolutely zero agency, and so forth. The conclusion is obvious, she's not Taylor.
I wish we were back in France, I thought the wyvern failure was going to be impetus for her to improve, blinging herself up with Shakespeare, learning from and acquiring stuff from Servants, and trying to minmax what she has. You know, like canon Taylor did regularly, and would do in a heartbeat during an ongoing apocalypse where she's become useless (AS SEEN BY GOLDEN MORNING) instead of devoting all her time to training the pair of all things for reasons, a role easily filled by pretty much anyone, and has otherwise been sitting around sucking her thumb since the end of France. I mean, christ, would she even buy that bullshit about non-Servants being completely helpless against Servants from heresay, given her entire fucking career was about running up against impossible odds against enemies and foes that utterly outstrip her in power in every way, whether it was gangs, the PRT, Alexandria, Lung, Levi-chan, the S9, or fucking Zion? Instead, she learned to do nothing and have no agency. Gj, terrible character direction.
The only way to salvage this mess is to toss her several massive bones and let her improve rapidly to make up for so much time improving the narrative forcefully pissed away, maybe have her practice in singularities. She was supposed to be practicing runes in the past, but nah, too useful, retconned, because Taylor literally is prohibited from any and all nice things, talent, or self-improvement on any level that Ritsuka can't also do. I seriously don't have much hope for the fic, as neither of which is going to happen given how stubborn and myopic OP is to keeping to an arbitrary outline and forcing the characters to adhere to it, even if it means warping Taylor heavily, rather than changing the outline or plot direction as per the characters want to act.
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UARTman
Flat Snark
- Location
- Russia, unfortunately
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Not to spoil anyone's fun or anything, but I'm not sure why anyone would look at a fic, think "wow! it sucks a lot and doesn't at all work with my vision of characters/setting!", and then proceed to stay in the thread, loudly complaining about the fic and/or offering unsolicited critique every time it does something they don't like (which is basically always) instead of, like, dropping it and blissfully forgetting about its existence to hopefully find something better. Especially if the subject of your displeasure is something established pretty early on in the story and reiterated repeatedly.
I gotta say, this feels wayyy too presumptive. Like, offering up the idea of hero worship as a potential reason for Romani's behavior is fine, but the way this whole section is phrased, particularly the last line, conveys a degree of confidence in an assumption that is already kind of absurd.
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Because the initial concept was interesting enough to get us this far, but things have steadily been getting worse.
Raiseth
I Find Your Lack of Memes Disturbing
- Location
- Russia
I'm tempted to make a copypasta out of the comment before your to answer, but I
I mean, the actual answer is kinda insane and wouldn't really come up to Taylor as a possibility in the first place, not with her current understanding of the world. She still harbors illusions that something might be actually impossible in Nasuverse, so she uses Occam's razor to come to the most plausible explanation given available facts.
Maybe Emiya could come up with that, if he actually has recollections from his other lives.
Wow, Ritsuka.
The worst thing is, it applies both to the Count and Jeanne. Who taught them to make awful dad jokes? Their parents?
Finagle007
[Verified Great Old One]
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Yeah, I'm hoping someone brings up the Denial of Nothingness at some point.