Zalgo's Collected Drabbles Thread

[Zalgo Jenkins]

Oh lol, Kariya/Yume.

xD
That made me curious to see how it would develop now.

One way or another, I'm guessing Zouken finds himself bathed in Yumie's light after the war ends.

Sekirei don't treat their mates' enemies very kindly. Especially if they're widowed Sekirei, which Yumie might end up being.

[Zalgo Jenkins]

Contents, Part III





So Far From the Root, So Close to Berlin [Hellsing / Heaven's Feel #3. Hellsing's canon makes a disturbing amount of sense when you cross it over with Nasuverse. This will definitely remain a oneshot. Partly because I don't fancy writing a longer story from the "protagonist's" POV.]

Spoiler:

1939

Berlin Headquarters, Special Department, Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft das Ahnenerbe e.V.

It was snowing as I approached the Special Department. Fog swirled through white tree limbs. I could feel fingers of cold wheedling their way through cracks in my cravat and frock coat, and I clutched my collar more tightly.

I flicked open my pocketwatch. A glint of gold in a gray world -- two minutes late. Tch. The curse of the heretical magus: to live in a world of punctual men.

Crunch.

Crunch.

And the snow kept falling.

I struck the door with my cane -- once, twice, and it opened with a wave of warmth. A figure towered in the doorway. Even a duck’s bill cap and greatcoat couldn’t conceal his red eyes. The lids opened ever so slightly.

I eyed the officer’s cap more closely. So...Hans. A Hauptsturmführer now, are we? How your new petsitters spoil you.

A thing, really. No longer a man. Not for a long, long time. Closer to a werewolf. He had been my family’s grandest creation – an animal spirit grafted onto what had once been human, in the days when Descartes was still polluting the universities with his atomist shit.

“Hans,” I said. “Still talkative, I see.”

He nodded.

With time, my little Hans would rival the Burial Agency’s own monsters. His silence, I’m told, was an improvement on the first few years of screaming.

He lead me to a room with green wallpaper.

They’d gathered around a table – three men and one woman. The four had only one thing in common: golden sword-and-rune lapel pins of the Ahnenerbe organization. My own design. A poor joke.

Sievers sat at the head, with his pointed mustache, goatee, and laughable attempt at a velvet peasant’s coat. I felt my nose wrinkling. A first generation magus foisted upon us by that four-eyed nonentity who funded our operation.

Sievers smiled, and the waxed mustache jumped like a cat’s whiskers.

“Welcome, Rudolf! Sit! Please, sit.”

I assumed my proper place – at the other end of the table. My fingers curled around the carved griffons’ feet on the armrests.

The Puppet-Maker sat at Sievers’s right hand. Blond, long-haired, and sharp-featured. He wore a labcoat, but kept his midriff bare for reasons best known to himself. His tastes were singular. I saw my own face reflected in the six lenses of his glasses. It was like looking into a spider’s eyes.

And on Sievers’s left sat a pest.

“Rudi! So glad you could join us. Eventually.”

I glared at the blond ball of dough wrapped in an SS uniform. He’d drawn his belt too tightly across his waist to compensate, and the fat pillowed out on both sides. The man’s smirk had always reminded me of a schoolhouse bully – the son of a sausage vendor, perhaps.

And not even a magus.

“Maximilian,” I said.

His last name did not escape me. It just wasn’t important enough to merit mention.

He pushed aside a strand of straw-blond hair that never seemed to stay out of his eyes, smirked again, and dug back into his steak. The fork and knife clinked on his plate. I could hear the juices squishing in his mouth.

The final member was still standing. Female. She had black hair and freckles, and loitered by a Renaissance tapestry – a boar at bay, agony woven into its eyes as the huntsman's dogs tore it apart. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and smiled at me. Dimples formed.

“Hull-o-o-o-o-o, Rudi…”

Her voice had a singsong quality. Lilting. Childlike.

A pity that inbreeding had taken a such a toll. Junker family, too. Shame. A traitor to her class and the community of magi, like the Puppet-Maker and I were. Though I suppose she had a better excuse. One heard rumors that she was calling herself Rip Van Winkle these days, of all things. It is never pretty to see an old family in its dotage.

Well. As long as she owned the bullet they’d dug out of Katchen’s body, I’d tolerate her.

I slapped a folder on the desk.

“The third Heaven’s Feel ritual is almost ready,” I said. “We can't delay further. I need those men, Sievers.”

He frowned. The mustache slumped in solidarity with its owner’s sentiments.

“The Reichsführer-SS—“

“Is a pettifogging schoolteacher in uniform. You seem very forgetful these days, Sievers. Who tracked down Waffen-SS with magic circuits for our own Enforcers? Hm? Who trained them? Who told your precious Reichsführer-SS the facial and body proportions necessary to synchronize with the Root’s preferred geometries for his breeding programs? Get me those men.”

“The war effort needs them.”

“Fuck the war effort. What part of ‘any wish granted’ is a difficult concept?”

The fat little Sturmbannführer across the table chuckled.

He knew the reason for Sievers “concerns” as well as I did. The war effort? Ha! For all his oh-so-cultivated eccentricity, Sievers knew better than to be left alone with the Sturmbannführer as his second in command.

“And when the Hellsing organization comes knocking after you die, Rudi?” the Sturmbannführer said.

“That will not happen.”

The Sturmbannführer burst into a gale of laughter, clutching his sides as they jiggled. It cut off instantly. He slammed a hand on the table, and the silverware clinked. The smile remained.

“The Hauptsturmführer stays with us,” he said.

An irritation in many ways, this regime. The Russians were trouble enough with their secret police, but at least they didn’t believe in magecraft. These Nazis, though…Trust a party of shopkeepers and gutter-rats to look for salvation in the occult. They believed in us. All too much for comfort.

“He is mine.”

The Sturmbannführer waggled a finger.

“Tsk. Tsk. He is the property of the German state now, Rudi. Just like that crow’s foot you’ll use to summon the King-Under-The-Kyffhäuser. Quid pro quo.”

“The State already has my research notes for the Ancestor victim. That’s repayment enough.”

A stupid project, incidentally – I’d warned them already that artificial vampires would bring Section XIII and the Burial Agency down on their heads. (Assuming that those organizations could keep away from each other’s throats long enough to do so.) The lure of vampiric armies had won out over sanity. Nazis had a knack for making all the mistakes that a human and a magus would.

“And now the State wants more,” the Sturmbannführer said.

I gripped my walking stick, but could not quite convince myself that it was thin enough to be the Sturmbannführer’s neck.

“I will be back, Maximilian,” I said.

“Bonne chance, Rudi.”

So Far From The Root, So Close To Berlin, Snippet 2 [Well. I figured after the long discussion of possible story directions, I owed Imperial at least one more snippet. Still Indiana Jones and the Third Heaven's Feel from a pretty unsympathetic German point of view. With Hellsing characters]

Spoiler:

So Far From The Root, So Close To Berlin, Snippet 2

A fascist, I’ve always thought, is nothing but a disillusioned romantic who refuses to let go. The dragons he slew as a boy now sound only too human in their death throes. Princesses are not so eager to bestow a chaste kiss upon him. Or to be rescued. And our hero is no longer content with a chaste kiss.

So, what to do? Reality will not cooperate.

The solution is as easy -- and as naïve -- as the question. Reality must be beaten into acquiescence.

Obersturmführer Katte kept staring at the piece of the raven that I would ultimately use as a catalyst. He’d spoken of nothing but Frederick Barbarossa in the past few days.

There is no need to describe the Obersturmführer in detail. I’m sure you’ve already guessed. He was very “hygienic”, was Obersturmführer Katte. High forehead, blond hair, strong jaw. Blue eyes, of course. He’d probably shaved the sides of his head to better display that perfect Aryan cranium. Or something like that. Doubtless he was very popular with the pedantic and anthropometrically inclined subspecies of spinster, of whom Germany must have boasted at least four.

It was evening, and the last day of peace.

Our mission to Japan had not been wholly unpleasant. The nights were warm, and one almost admired the paper lanterns and walls. The clogs and dresses conveyed a certain modesty that Berlin had lacked since the Weimar years. One could have sooner reinstituted the Inquisition than forced the women of Berlin back into their mothers’ dresses.

“Kommt ein schlanker Bursch gegangen,
Blond von Locken oder braun,
Hell von Aug' und rot von Wangen,
Ei, nach dem kann man wohl schauen.
Zwar schlägt man das Aug' aufs Mieder
Nach verschämter Mädchen Art—“

“Shut up, Anna.”

My other Obersturmführer flipped back her ankle-length braids and huffed. Her interpretation of “aria” was infuriatingly literal.

“My name is Rip Van Winkle,” she said. “Ruuuudiiiiiiiiieeee.”

She’d popped the “p” in “Rip”. Anna looked at me with that cat’s smile, and I noticed again how she’d arranged her hair so that it almost seemed like she had sideburns.

“Obersturmführer,” I said.

‘Rip’ clicked her heels and twirled her musket once, twice, three times between her fingers. A dancer with her baton. She stiffened to a parody of attention.

“Jawohl, Rudi!”

“Shut up, Obersturmführer.”

“Jawohl, Rudi!”

I knocked on the church door. It was old wood, and thick, like something the Portuguese Jesuits might have built for the earliest churches in this part of w—

“Doch verstohlen hebt man's wieder,
Wenn's das Bürschchen nicht gewahrt.
Sollten ja sich Blicke finden,
Nun, was hat das auch für Not?
Man wird drum nicht gleich erblinden
Wird man auch ein wenig rot.
Blickchen hin und Blick herüber,
Bis der Mund sich auch was traut…”

My life is a succession of such moments. I held my tongue for now, and imagined clubbing Fraulein “Van Winkle” over the head with her musket.

I also had more important things to worry about.

The Kempeitai had been kind enough to inform Ahnenerbe about two flies in the ointment: an Englishman and his raven-haired “ward”. The girl, they said, had arrived in Tokyo dressed in white fur like a tiny porcelain doll. Those who’d managed to stop leering at the girl for long enough to notice her companion said that the Englishman had looked a stoat, and smiled like a wolf.

Sir Arthur Hellsing had arrived in Tokyo with his pet abomination. I’d received the Kempeitai’s assurances that the binding experts in Special Unit 108 had cordoned off the intruder’s apartment. As if silver canister rounds and landmines could stop that thing. I’d probably face the alchemist and his vampire eventually.

After the War, though. Grant me that much, at least.

The church door creaked open.

It’s odd, the things we recollect. I first noticed a lacquered screen. The screen’s doors had a Japanese yellow-and-black floral design, and opened to reveal a European portrait in the center. Two winged creatures had been painted hovering over an altar. A Japanese lord in European armor knelt before them. The juxtaposition struck me as grotesque.

The church’s air was thick with body heat and evaporated sweat. Six Masters and their companions sat in the pews.

Tohsaka was dressed in his khaki Kempeitai uniform – armband, jodhpurs and all. A sword rested on his legs. His companions were dressed in the same way. Lean-faced young men. They were Ryougis: a family that apparently passed for demon hunters in this backwater. The woman on Tohsaka’s right in a white kimono was an Asagami, judging from the prickling field around her. Psychic. Tch.

Well. At least our intelligence reports were accurate for once.

The Matou master lounged against a wooden column with his own group of hired killers. His men lacked the Kempeitai's white armbands, and I saw a few with cloth strips wrapped around their legs. Nanaya siblings on the Imperial Japanese Army’s payroll. This, then, was the Demon Hunter Organization – the IJA’s answer to the Kempeitai’s Unit 108.

Let the internationalists say what they like about fascist dictatorships. Let them spin schemes for Esperanto and the rest. They’ll never experience the pure sense of recognition – of brotherhood across cultures – that a fascist citizen feels when he sees another country’s bureaucrats feuding with the same relish as his own.

The priest – Kotomine Risei, he’d called himself – approached the pulpit and began discussing security arrangements. I’d heard most of it before. Secrecy and more secrecy. He looked in his twenties, and was built like a strongman who’d abstained from beer. His smirk didn’t quite match the square jaw. A dried vase of flowers drooped to his left.

I looked beyond the Japanese contingents.

St. Germain sat among his puppets, silhouetted against the church’s white walls. He and his puppets all wore the same drape suits – pinched waists, broad shoulders, and puffed trousers. Moonlight from the windows glinted from their Thompson guns. Like a Hollywood gangster and his thugs.

I smiled. Too bad that St. Germain’s long curls ruined the effect. Like a young Louis XIV as a burlesque act.

“Any questions?”

Risei had spoken. It was a deep, baritone voice. Silence followed.

The Edelfelt twins sat alone. They were what I’d expected, more or less: blonde and dressed in frills. Jewels glittered on their clothing.

My breath caught when I saw the fifth Master.

She had the same delicate features I remembered, and covered her hair with the same white kerchief. The rest of her dress was black and white, like a life-sized domino. All except for the ribbon she’d tied around her neck in a bow. Blood-red, like her eyes.

That hole in my chest hadn't been there a moment ago.

“You’re staring, Rudi. Tsk. Tsk.”

“She’s…”

“Not the homunculus the Einzberns gave you,” ‘Rip’ hummed. “No, afraid not. Sorry. Condolences. That one’s looong dead.”

“I advise you to shut your mouth now, Anna,” I whispered.

‘Rip’ crossed her arms and gave this cloying, disgusting little pout. She stuck out her tongue.

“Stupid,” she said. “If you’d wanted to keep your concubine alive, you shouldn’t have run off to the Na-a-a-a-zis.”

Someone asked a question. Kotomine droned on, and on, and on. He was smirking at me. I know it. Grinning and sticking his cleft chin at me like a fucking Karl May hero.

“Psh. But ickle Rudi wanted to get to the Root, so he cheated the Einzberns. And now he’s angry they switched his toy off.”

“This is your last warning, Anna.”

“Rip. Van. Winkle.”

“You’re a magus from a family of magi, and you’ll answer to that name,” I snapped. “Degenerate bloodline or not.”

“Ohhh,” she hummed. “Degenerate, is it now? Well. Doesn’t that neatly explain your dead little homunculus? Figures that Rudolf Trevisanus and his pure, pure bloodline wouldn’t fuck anything less than a magic circuit in human form…”

My fingers clenched. The metal head of my cane began to yield like squeezed putty.

She inched her hand up my neck like a mother playing “spider” with a child. I pushed it away.

“…And it’s such a shame, Rudi, that I’m all you’ve got. Really. No more courtships at the Clock Tower for you. Or Atlas, or the Wandering Tomb. Just our little club at Ahnenerbe. Lucky that I’m the only lady.”

“Nominally, perhaps.”

She smiled, and the dimples formed. There was always something androgynous about that face, despite the high cheekbones and traces of baby fat on her cheeks. Eyebrows a little too thick. Jaw a bit too pronounced. Too many freckles. I don’t know. Something.

And the body was tall, flat, and lean – like copulating with a bag of twigs. She’d sung Da geh' ich zu Maxim in bed the first time.

“You wouldn’t make it past the Office of Racial Policy’s euthanasia boards, ‘Rip’,” I said. “What’s the phrase your Nazi friends use for the congenitally insane? Lebensunwertes Leben?“

“Our Nazi friends,” she said. “And that’s part of the fun, Rudi. To see you skulk out of the bedroom afterwards like a guilty boy. Can’t pollute your bloodline. Your pure, pure Trevisanus bloodline. Hnh hnh…”

“Just so.”

“Ooh! What if I’m pregnant?” she said. “Wouldn’t that be funny? If I didn’t take the necessary measures, and I’ve got a cute little Trevisanus bastard—“

A queasy rush of coldness shot through my stomach. Prana almost flared to impolitic levels. Without meaning to, I gripped her arm.

“You did not.”

Another grin. She had a large mouth, and her grins were always too wide. Always with closed eyes, too – like a cat yawning.

“No,” she said. “But you should have seen your face. Heh. Heheh. Eheheheheheheheh.”

One of the Edelfelt sisters looked over. I hissed my less-than-satisfactory Obersturmführer into silence.

She shrugged.

“…Peh,” she said. “I’ll have you eventually. I’ve got the circuits, and you’ve got nowhere else to go.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“‘Sides, you’re a fun enough lay in the meantime. ‘Course, you could always try to fuck our good Doctor instead. Sure he’s got a spare female puppet body somewhere …”

I gritted my teeth and waited for the meeting to end, to the accompaniment of “Rip’s” quietly hummed selections from Das Rheingold.

So Far From The Root, So Close To Berlin, Last Snippet [Final installment. Still Hellsing / Nasuverse. Rudi gets his showdown.]

Spoiler:

Four Days Later

Two Servants left now. And one interloper.

The vessel glowed above us, bathing the city in pale yellow light. But not pure. There was something…off. Small quantities of black sludge simmered in the chalice. The bubbles made wet slopping sounds when they popped.

The surviving Edelfelt stared with empty eyes. It was like looking at a corpse. She’d buttoned up her dress to her neck, like a schoolteacher.

Tohsaka placed his hand on her shoulder. “Partners” now. I did not miss the way she flinched at his touch.

One of her Servant’s “facets” was still alive, thanks to the Ore Scales. Saber. A white-haired man in gauntlets, dressed in black. He wielded a two-handed sword large enough to give a landsknecht pause.

Siegfried. The greatest of German heroes.

Obersturmführer Katte was almost salivating when he saw him. Like a little boy who has received a box of chocolates.
Tohsaka’s men stood at his side. Kempeitai, mostly, but a few remnants of the IJA had joined Tohsaka after Matou’s death. Wiry men with Japanese swords. The demon-hunters leered at the Edelfelt sister. Their master’s newest acquisition.

And finally, the vampire himself. Or herself.

Alucard had shed its female form in favor of a man in a black straightjacket. The creature hefted a Thompson onto its shoulder and smirked at all of us.

“Releasing Control Art Restriction Systems Three…Two…One…Zero. Approval of situation A recognized; commencing the Cromwell Invocation. Ability restrictions lifted for limited use until the target has been silenced…”

I took comfort in the warmth of the Enforcers at my back. Two dozen SS, armed with alchemical wires that writhed between their fingertips like snakes. Rip Van Winkle fiddled with her musket, still humming that infernal tune she’d been butchering all day. Wagner. Something from Götterdämmerung.

Frederick Barbarossa watched Siegfried. Lancer’s red beard billowed in the wind, his eyes like coals. The Spear of Destiny glowed with a hungry light. He spoke in a reedy voice, dry and thirsty.

“Well,” he said. “Let’s begin.”

Nothing happened at first.

I thought I could hear the roll of distant thunder. And something else. Fluttering. The sound became more frenzied as the sky darkened. I looked up, and saw a cloud of ravens drawing across the sun like a black sheet. It was an endless ocean of claws, and wings, and blue eyes that looked almost human.

They began cawing. Millions of them. Every voice blended together like an electric horn, and the sky thundered with that single, sharp note.

Other voices answered them from underground. Voices not quite human. They sang in minor key – the cold, monophonic thrum of Gregorian chant. Spurs and armor jingled. Lance points grew out of the ground like stalks of grass. Spectral banners fluttered in time with the chords.

Mors et vita duello
conflixere mirando…

An army. The King-in-the-Mountain had summoned an army – one that would cleanse the world on Doomsday. Bridles and mail clinked, and warhorses snorted. Ravens fell from the sky like feathered rain. And the wave of empty-eyed men in armor rolled forward, crushing the birds’ corpses underfoot.

…sudarium, et vestes…

No horns had sounded. Just the leaden chant.

Obersturmführer Katte clicked his heels, and raised his arm in that ridiculous Nazi salute. Tears were in his eyes. Babbling “My king! My king!” or something of similarly stupid.

Frederick smiled down at him.

The Emperor placed a hand on Obersturmführer Katte’s head.

The Obersturmführer’s skin paled. The blush was leached out, and turned into a sickly yellow. Obersturmführer Katte gave a strangled yelp. Frederick’s hand tightened. Wrinkles spread across Katte’s face, and his body started jerking like a fish on a lure. He pulled. Squealed like a spitted pig. Blond hair turned white.

His voice withered with the rest of him. A body honed by gymnastics at the NS-Ordensburg Sonthofen shriveled into a dry sack of bones.

The corpse crackled when it dropped.

Frederick Barbarossa stepped over the husk. The bones crunched to powder. He looked at his hand with a small smile.

“Well, pagan,” he said. “Too bad. That blood you worshipped tastes like the Steppes after all.”

The SS Executors stared at my Servant with slack jaws and wide eyes. Their hands’ tremors pulsed along their alchemical wires.

Alucard laughed. The sound boomed through the battlefield. Other voices joined him from the inky field forming behind him, and millions of eyes stared out from the darkness. Madness crawled out of that pit like a swarm of cockroaches seeking warmth.

“Stall him!” I screamed.

The Executors’ wires tensed, and the battle began.

Spectral knights charged knee to knee. They thundered toward Tohsaka and his demon-hunters with a wail, spitting Nanayas and Ryougis on their translucent lance-points. The Nanaya clan’s head jumped onto one of the phantom horses with a snarl. He stained his mop of hair red as he lashed out with his sword. Left-right-left-right until the wave of bodies buried him, and he disappeared.

Servant Saber – Siegfried, Sigurd, son of Sigmund and last of the Volsungs, beau ideal of my employers – cut his way through the horde. The two-handed sword sang. Armor, shields, and the ghosts of the men hiding behind them dissolved into mist and blood when his greatsword touched them. Nothung. Balmung. Its blaze left orange afterimages with each swing. The jewel in its hilt glowed green.

Sigurd carved, and was carved in turn. Sigismund’s son dripped blood from a dozen cuts when he finally reached his quarry.

Frederick Barbarossa met him with the Spear of Destiny. The Emperor descended in a vortex of mist and lightning, each coil of his beard writhing in a serpentine motion. The spear snapped out like a scorpion’s tail. It was white-hot. The edge cauterized the wound it left on Sigurd’s cheek.

Frederick struck again. Sigurd’s greatsword rose to meet it. Sparks flew. The impact sent a thunderclap across the battlefield.

“Now,” he said. “Show me how a pagan dies.”

The two exchanged blows faster than even I could follow. Reinforced eyesight could only slow them down to a blur.

The way was clear.

I sprinted for the Chalice.

It bubbled in earnest now. Mud seeped from its center. Why, I didn’t know. But I would get my wish. I would have to. Prana rushed through my legs, burning as I ripped up the paving in my rush.

Faster. Faster. Just a bit closer—

The vampire blocked my path.

He, too, was bleeding. Red holes pockmarked his straightjacket. The remains of my Executors’ razor wire dangled between his teeth.

Alucard’s army flowed around him. Vast. Vast beyond my nightmares. Ghouls and decaying horses were stacked for six or seven stories. They moved like a single organism – a body and limbs, like a monstrous jellyfish made of animated corpses. Tendrils reached out for me, and each tendril was a knightly retinue.

“Come on, alchemist!” he growled. “You’re Ahnenerbe’s trump card, aren’t you? Fight me.”

Very well.

The air warped as I activated my wunderkammer. The gates opened in mid-air.

Clang!

Clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-clang!

An iron army jumped down between me and Alucard’s familiars. A legion of rusted faces scowled. They lowered their spears, and formed into a wedge.

We charged. The soldiers thrust and beat the ghouls aside. The wedge shredded through them. It was like watching a mechanical harvester.

“Yes! Yes!” Alucard said. “Summon all of it, alchemist! Hahahahaha! Show me! SHOW ME!”

Alucard’s Thompson submachine gun chattered, and silver bullets sprayed through our ranks. An iron soldier’s head exploded. Again. Again. Rust clouds formed as each dissolved.

He was different now. The vampire wore black armor, and carried a sword.

I raised my hand. A hundred fairy familiars flitted into the army. Their stinger-heads punched through plate armor. Bisected janissaries. They streaked through the ghouls’ legs like cats racing through a wheat field. The fairies left a hundred trails of hamstrung ghouls behind them.

A few ghouls rallied and slashed at the glimmers of light near their feet. I felt the fairies’ existences winking out. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight….Seventy…

A giant janissary broke our line. He crushed two iron soldiers with a fist. The others swarmed over him. Brought him down. Stabbed, and stabbed. But he wouldn’t die.

I drew an arquebus from the wunderkammer, and fired. The bullet buzzed around the monster. It hit him over and over again, until he finally collapsed on the ground, swatting ineffectually. Still intact. But it would do.

We were close, now – the vampire and I. Behind him hovered the Chalice.

The iron soldiers had formed a square. They hadn’t silenced the maelstrom so much as butchered their way through it. We were an iron island in a sea of ghouls.

“Is that all, alchemist? That’s the best you can do?”

I threw a needle at Alucard. Threads spread from the needle’s eye as it flew, like silk from a spider’s spinnerets. When the needle passed, the threads wove themselves into a forest of ropes. They pushed the ghouls aside. Tangled. Wrapped. Garroted.

The way was clear.

The vampire fired his submachine gun again, and I raised my razor wires in a shimmering shield. It caught the bullets with a scraping tish sound. I drew the Sword-That-Severed. Cut the barrel in half. Hot silver ricocheted near my eye.

Alucard thrust with his own sword. I parried. His eyes burned red.

“FASTER, alchemist!”

I pulled a phial from my sleeve and threw it in his face. Alucard snarled in pain – and enjoyment of pain. His features froze in place, and they turned into gold. Alucard’s face slid off and fell to the ground with a clang.

I stared at the golden death-mask for a moment too long. Alucard’s face regenerated.

It was smiling.

He slammed a spear-hand into my chest. The impact sent a shockwave through my body. Shattered my ribs. I sliced off his feet with my wires and pulled free. My vision faded. The curse on Alucard’s glove opened the wound to the air, intensifying the pain. Regeneration failed. I was blacking out.

“Get up, magus! The night is so young!”

Oh, I’d oblige him.

I stuffed three snake-leaves into my mouth. They were dry and oily at the same time, and I winced at the taste – strange, you might think, in light of the wound pulsing with black light where my heart should have been. But they were foul.

The curse dissolved. Muscles, blood, and organs regenerated at a frantic rate. Faster than the greatest healer at the Clock Tower could manage. Better than Hans. Better than Alucard. Steam rose from my body. My core heated near two hundred degrees. More than human.

And I felt…empty.

Alucard’s teeth gleamed as he snarled. He was shaking.

”No,” he said. “No, no, NO! Coward. To betray your humanity for a cup!”

I glanced back at the iron soldiers. The ghouls had closed in on the ever-shortening cordon of rust and spears.

“Three lives left,” I said. “Let’s see if you can take them before my Servant kills Saber.”

Alucard howled and threw himself at me. The sword skittered across the street – far away. Too far. My vision swam as the vampire’s fingers tightened around my trachea. It regenerated, and he crushed it again. Regenerated. Collapsed.

He bit and clawed. I stabbed with my dagger. Wet thumps sounded as I embedded it up to its hilt in his back. Over and over again.

“Die, can’t you?” I shrieked.

He threw back his head and laughed. Laughed despite the dagger I thrust into his jaw muscles.

“Oh, I will,” he said. “But you won’t be the one to kill me. Not anymore.”

“Errkkhh...”

“How many deaths is that now, alchemist?”

My eyes bulged. I could hear my neck muscles snapping and squishing together again. Every nerve ending contributed to the chorus.

No.

No, wait.

The heart. The head and the heart! His familiars had left him, hadn’t they? He was vulnerable. Still vulnerable. If I could just—Yes!

My wunderkammer rippled, and I pulled a weapon free.

I forced my neck to regenerate once more. The last sickly drops of sap from the snake leaves sizzled in my throat. I gargled the aria.

My mother slew me
My father ate me

…And I drove the juniper branch into his heart.

The vampire cried out. Roots grew out of the branch. They thrust themselves into his veins and out his throat and eyes. They burst from his hands, and his grip slackened. The roots even slurped up the blood he’d dripped on me. Like watching tube worms.

The head. That’s all I needed now. Cut off the head.

I looped the alchemical wires around his neck and wrenched as hard as I could. Beads of blood ran down the metal. I could feel Alucard's heartbeat. It slowed. Slowed…

Yes.

I felt something probing my mind, and shut off the passages that lead to motor functions. No. Not this time. You can only have my memories, vampire. Watch those. With my compliments. Get to know the man who will kill you…

Alucard’s face melted.

It bubbled and reformed like candle wax. Pure and white. Unblemished, like—

"You knew what the Einzberns would do to me, Rudi."

“No…” I whispered. “I—"

"You made a choice."

Red eyes looked at me through long white hair wrapped in a kerchief. Stately. Beautiful. Such delicate features. A thrill ran through my dying body as I saw her, with the same dress she’d worn when the Einzberns gave her to me. My little homunculus, back in the flesh with--

My fingers loosened for a moment. The wires went slack.

And something cracked in my neck.

“Rudi!”

How…odd. To hear Rip Van Winkle's voice across such a distance. To see her staring at my death from the edge of that crowd of ghouls. She clutched her musket so tightly. The bullet hit the ghouls again and again. Over and over. An endless scrawl.

Huh. Anna. Rip. Whatever you call yourself…

Her body shook. She was crying.

That’s…

I looked up at the homunculus.

A jab in my neck. A bite...Warmth covered me like a blanket. Like falling asleep. Every muscle relaxed, and every part of my body tingled with pleasure. The world dimmed as the creature suckled my neck. Her saliva mixed with my own blood.

So relaxing…

“Three million souls will be waiting to instruct you,” the homunculus whispered. “Drink from the well of knowledge, alchemist.”

And I could feel them. See them through a red haze. Turkish and Romanian faces wafting through a fine red mist. I could hear their voices…

…No.

Wait.

Wait. Wait.

The screaming. The cries for help. There was pain here – pain like hot irons, and stakes driven through the body, and burned-out circuits. Everything smelled of blood and sulfur. Mutilated things keened and wailed in the dark. Clutched. Grabbed. Pulled me in and under a crowd of stinking, seething bodies. I could not—

For the love of—please. Please.

The voices. Make the voices stop—

War of the Three Shikis [Shiki Tohno, Shiki Ryougi, and SHIKI Ryougi do Heaven's Feel. May or may not end up a oneshot. If not, I'll continue it in its appropriate thread.]

Spoiler:

Author Notes: This was more an experiment than anything. Even accounting for the extreme AU-ness, I’ve probably bungled canon at several points. Still, I thought I might as well post it. It’s split into three perspectives: both Ryougi personalities, and Shiki Tohno.

And it’s very, very alternate universe. Not sure if I’ll continue it in the future.





---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------







Shiki Tohno (originally Shiki Nanaya)

Shake.

Shake.

“Oi! Tohno!”

Everything was foggy. The radiator was talking to me, calling my name. I decided not to concentrate; he could take a ticket and wait like everyone else.

Shake.

Shake.

“Wake up!”

I shook my head and rolled over. The haze stayed there. It was like tumbling through a cloudbank, so your insides feel weightless, but in a good way. Floating.

Though on reflection, that didn’t sound like the radiator. They don’t talk, usually.

“TOHNO!”

My upper body started swaying forward and backward so fast that I could feel whiplash. I blinked. Light glared in my eyes. I squinted.

Ugh.

“Mrglff?” I asked.

“Two in the morning,” SHIKI said. “Awesome time for hunting, don’tcha think?”

I wiped the sand from my eyes. Everything was still white. My eyes hurt when they tried to focus.

There was a weight on my chest.

“Grflflfk bvvrrm…”

“Yeah, Ciel wants our help again. She found a job for us. Lucky, huh?”

I fumbled on my bedside table for my glasses. Because really, waking up to Lines of Death isn’t how I like to spend my “mornings”…assuming a 2 A.M. wakeup call even qualifies. I put on my glasses. They felt too solid on the tender skin around my eyes.

My adopted “brother” sharpened into view as my eyes adjusted.

Yeah, the quotes are intentional. SHIKI Ryougi was a lot of things: a carefree bundle of lunacy, a cold-blooded killer, a depressed kid, the last living descendant of the Ryougi clan, and one of the closest things I had to family. He just wasn’t a guy.

Okay, it’s actually a little more complicated than that.

SHIKI Ryougi was looking down at me with a girl’s face. Very thin. Pale. She had black hair – cut short, and just messily enough to avoid looking clearly masculine or feminine. Her outfit was also a collage: she’d dressed in a blue kimono, Western jacket, and black boots.

But forget all that: the eyes caught your attention first. The irises were so dark that they might as well have been black. It was like looking into a shark’s eyes.

The body was female. The personality was male. For now. It would switch later.

SHIKI Ryougi and Shiki Ryougi were two halves of the same coin: a male and female personality who shared a body. They called themselves brother and sister.

I sighed.

“Who’s the target this time?” I said.

SHIKI Ryougi replied with a weird string of consonants, followed by “Chaos.”

“Say again?”

“Nrvnqsr Chaos.”

“Nuruvinaq—huh?” I said.

“Nrvnqsr.”

“You…wait, what?”

SHIKI held up one of Ciel's Burial Agency files. Written in English, for her superiors. And there it was. “Nrvnqsr”. Huh.

“There’s got to be a better way to pronounce it.”

SHIKI shrugged.

“Hey, I’m just repeating what the file says. Guy’s apparently named ‘Nrvnqsr’.”

“Bless you,” I said.

“You’re a riot, Tohno.”

I sighed and looked again at my adopted brother. He was smiling. The body he’d borrowed from his “sister” was almost shivering in anticipation of the kill.

Which reminded me…

There was still a female body lying on top of me. It was a little bony, but not enough to be uncomfortable. And it had softer areas, here and there…

“Hey, what the…Are you blushing?” SHIKI said.

I felt my ears heating up.

“Wh—um…I…Yeah, sorry. You’re kinda lying on me.”

“I’m your brother, dude.”

SHIKI sat back, arms crossed. His right hand inched uncomfortably close to the dagger sheath in the kimono’s sleeve.

“H-Hey! You’re in my sister’s body,” I said.

You could eventually learn to tell the difference between the two Ryougis. The male personality made bigger gestures. Stood differently. Opened up more.

He also glared differently.

It was like walking on eggshells sometimes. SHIKI would get into one of his moods – a few more snippy comments, a look, an extra twitch or two. The tension would thicken, and sometimes…yeah. It was like a disease. I knew that. And it’s not like SHIKI knew anyone else to rely on.

But still.

“Adopted sister’s body,” I clarified.

“Yeah, that’s still pretty messed up.”

“…Okay, you have a point.”

SHIKI re-sheathed the dagger with a snick and slid off me.

“Yup,” SHIKI said. “I do. And you’d better remember it, Tohno. Because lemme tell you something: I am not waking up naked next to your sorry ass some morning. “

...Aaaaand my face warmed up about a hundred more degrees.

“Gyah!” I said. “What are you even—“

SHIKI yanked me out of bed. The hand was soft and warm as he pulled me down the double staircase.

“C’mon, Tohno,” he said. “Ciel’s already waiting for us. We’ve got an Ancestor to kill.”

“Wait, Ancestor?”

SHIKI clamped my arm more tightly and escorted me to my nightly dose of PTSD.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Three hours later…

The night’s “fun” officially ended at around five in the morning.

I lay flat on my back, and tried to ignore the cold from the courtyard’s cobblestones. Trees rustled. My breaths came out in clouds. Every muscle felt like a wrung-out dishrag.

SHIKI leaned against the stone pavilion.

“Hey, Tohno,” SHIKI said.

“What?”

“Don’t you have a history exam this morning?”

I groaned and rubbed my eyelids. Like the rest of my body, they registered my touch as dull and tingly at the same time. I needed a shower.

“…Because it would be pre-e-e-tty irresponsible to go Ancestor hunting on the night before an exam,” SHIKI added.

“Shut up, Ryougi.”

“Just sayin'.”

Cleanup went pretty smoothly, considering. The guys in black robes arrived, and they’d been covering this stuff up for a while.

Ciel said her thanks as usual, and we shared a couple minutes of conversation. I promised to meet her after classes the next afternoon. Ciel would be moderating some kind of ritual in Fuyuki in a few days, and she wanted to catch up before she left.

SHIKI sat on a pile of sliced bamboo, head resting in his hands. A couple fibers stuck to his kimono.

The Executors left. I listened for a little while to the early-morning bird songs.

“Hey,” SHIKI said. “Tohno. C’mere.”

There was something about the way he’d said it. He'd avoided eye contact.

I frowned.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

SHIKI waited for a little longer, and I dutifully pulled my battered carcass up and sat beside him. He relaxed a couple degrees.

“About…um, what Ciel said,” he said. “The thing in Fuyuki.”

“Yes?”

“We need to talk.”











************************************************** ***************












Shiki Ryougi – Female Personality

Makihisa Tohno was a collector of rare and broken toys. I don’t know what first attracted the demon hunter to Pure and Mystic Eyes. Maybe the way they glow like precious stones held up to the light – my own concentric rings of turquoise, amethyst, and black; or my brother’s light blue irises when he sees Death.

I said brother. In doing this, I only echo Makihisa’s imposition. I call my adopted brother “Shiki Tohno” because he considers the Tohno family to be his own. He calls me Shiki Ryougi because I don’t.

The Nanayas are gone. Dead.

The Ryougis are gone. Dead.

And the last true Tohno heirs are buried in the cellar, thanks to a fight between children that Makihisa really should have seen coming.

The air is cold. Back in the driver's seat of my own body. Everything looks more real than usual, as it always does after a switch. As if the room is watching me.

The Tohno clan that butchered the Ryougis and Nanayas only lives on because of the children it stole. Shiki Nanaya and Shiki Ryougi. We're the last of the Tohno line. My adopted brother says that there’s a punchline in there somewhere.

He sits on his bed, staring through the window as the snow falls. Wind rattles the panes. I’ve flopped beside my adopted brother, adjusting my legs inside my kimono to try to get into a more comfortable position. It’s hard. The slashes in the fabric are always too narrow. Floorboards creak with my tosses and turns.

My enabler; the reason I can’t quite get in synch with SHIKI. He tries so hard to satisfy my male personality’s hunger for murder with Ciel’s Burial Agency jobs, and me with whatever passes for sanity in our lives. It’s a losing battle.

He’s fiddling with his collar.

“Spit it out,” I grumble.

“Wh—huh?” he says.

I look at him and see an ordinary college student with glasses: thinner and frailer than average, maybe, with messy black hair.

I look at him and also see a thicket of Lines that show his body’s many weaknesses. They’re everywhere. Glowing red scrawls crisscross his skin like he’s made of molten lava. He sometimes flickers in a procession of visions: Shiki Tohno beheaded; Shiki Tohno disintegrating into a slush of fluids and blood; Shiki Tohno in his bed.

He’s dying. I know this.

His Eyes glow like red lamps in his skull when I look at him through my own Eyes. The origin of the wrongness that’s destroying his body. Shiki Tohno has seen things that a human mind shouldn’t be able to process, and he’s paying for it.

He doesn’t care, and that infuriates me. It’s not normal. It spoils the illusion.

His right hand drums on his thigh, faster than a human hand should be able to. It’s the Puppet-Maker’s work. A replacement limb. SHIKI Ryougi – my true brother, my male personality – has cut off several trophies from Shiki Tohno over the years. His right arm, severed at the elbow. An ear. His jaw. Anything Shiki couldn’t protect quickly enough when SHIKI’s mood snapped. He’s a patchwork of replacements.

It’s a race at this point. Whether I like it or not. I’m competing with Shiki Tohno’s Mystic Eyes to see who can kill him first.

I once asked my adopted brother if he was willing to die for me. I meant it as a joke, and a rebuke. He just shrugged.

He’s such an idiot.

“You want to say something,” I say. “You always stare out the window with that stupid look when you want to say something.”

“What stupid look?” he says.

“Like you’re about to write a song.”

He scratches the back of his head and tries one of his smiles. The bedside lamp reflects in his glasses. Like everything else about him, those black rimmed glasses look so frustratingly normal at first glance.

It’s as if he’s one of those nested Russian dolls.

Shiki Tohno won’t look for meaning in the Lines of Death as Shiki Ryougi tries to; won’t search for beauty in a thing’s destruction. That illusion of normalcy – I want to kill him. It’s an insult every time he comes home from his part-time job. It’s a slap in the face every time he gives me that soft, understanding smile. That he can live on the boundary of the unnatural and feel normal. Be normal. To enjoy life and accept death.

A false hope.

“Aren’t sisters supposed to be a little more respectful of their brothers?” he says.

I’m not buying his act. I sink my face into the pillow.

“I’m not your sister,” I mutter through the pillow. “And I’ll do what I want to, anyway.”

I want to carve the Nanaya out of him. I can sense the killing instinct there, hiding in him almost like SHIKI does in me. It’s like a splinter under my thumbnail.

And if I did manage to cut the Nanaya out of Shiki Tohno…sometimes I wonder if I could crawl into the hole I just carved, and be warm forever.

SHIKI’s personality must be bleeding through more these days.

My adopted brother shrugs. He leans back and taps the coffered wood in the wall with his replaced fingers. His other hand rests near my side, and I let it. He smiles.

“If you’re not my sister, then we really shouldn’t be in the same bed.”

“Shut up.”

I reach for Shiki’s Gameboy on the bedside table and come up three inches short, as I knew I would. I don’t feel like stretching, either, so I lounge over just enough to grab it.

He leaves it there for me every evening, as he’s done since we were kids. I always play the same game, and always win; my adopted brother teases me that I’ll wear out the cartridge. I barely need to look at it these days to complete the chore.

“It’s about Heaven’s Feel,” he says.

I feel my shoulders tighten. Eventually, I’ll kill someone meaninglessly. It will be easy. It won’t matter. And as much as I will enjoy it, I hope that it’s not Shiki Tohno at the other end of the knife point. He’s…not suitable.

“What about Heaven’s Feel?” I say.

“SHIKI wants to win it. I think he’s picked a catalyst already.”

I roll away from him. The little character on the Gameboy’s screen stumbles over a cliff, and the system chimes a sad peeeewt-deeeewt.

“Do what you want,” I say.

“SHIKI said he wanted you to find peace,” he says. “That’s his wish.”

“And you want to help him.”

“I do.”

I reach out and grab him, pushing him onto the bed as I straddle his waist. He yelps. My fingers tighten until he shuts up. My adopted brother breathes more rapidly now; warm puffs of air that should feel like something other than an annoyance.

I withdraw the knife from my kimono, and place it near his throat. I can hear the blood flowing in his veins. The knife glistens. It’s mesmerizing.

But my heart really isn’t in it.

“Is this a goodbye present for me, Shiki Tohno?” I ask.

He looks away. Doesn’t speak. I hate him sometimes.

I pull myself off of him.

“…Idiot.”










************************************************** ************









SHIKI Ryougi – Male Personality

I’d finished the summoning circle. A blade that looked like the bastard kid of a scalpel and a butcher’s knife glinted in the center.

FINALLY.

The circle had taken ages. Too many squiggly lines. Tohno had brought a ruler from Hisui’s dresser drawer after I’d screwed up the six-pointed star for the millionth time.

Except that the circle was just sort of sitting there.

“Isn’t it supposed to do something?” I said.

Tohno unfolded the instructions again. I spent a little while listening to crinkling paper. The guy always refolded the thing after using it. Why? I don’t know.

“Okay,” Tohno said. “We’re supposed to recite something called an ‘aria’. It’s basically a poem, except you do a few extra things like we practiced before. It’s formalcraft, so there’s not much to it. It’ll feel like activating your Eyes.”

He folded the paper again, and then unfolded it.

Crinkle.

Crinkle.

My temples were tingling. It’s the small stuff that sets you off. You can usually see the major problems coming a long way away, and prep for them. Ancestor hunt? Yeah. You’re gonna want to kill somebody. Bet on it. It’s a lot harder to be ready for your brother FIDDLING WITH THE FREAKING PAPER A THOUSAND TIMES AND YOU CAN SENSE THE NANAYA PERSONALITY AND JUST WANT TO CARVE OUT HIS EYES WITH AN ICEPICK—

I bit my thumb. Hard. The pain snapped me out of the loop long enough to think. That’s the only way you can learn from it – because that’s much, much better than sitting in your room afterwards and feeling like shit for chopping off another body part. Breathe, Ryougi. Guy’s your brother.

Tohno was looking at me funny again. I’d seen it before. It’s this weird expression like he wants to hug you and run away at the same time.

“What?!” I said.

Tohno shrugged and mumbled “nothing.” I rolled my eyes.

“So about the summoning circle,” I said. “Does it actually do anything, or did we just make another mess on the carpet?”

“I’m reading Ciel’s directions now.”

“Because Kohaku’s gonna be pissed if she thinks I’ve started fingerpainting in blood again,” I said. “I’m not messing with somebody who keeps that many syringes in her medicine cabinet.”

Tohno looked up from the paper.

“…‘Again’?” he said.

“Hey, don’t worry. I told her it was you. You know how she’s sweet on you and all.”

Tohno opened his mouth like he was going to say something. He paused, and closed it.

“I don’t think she believed me, though,” I offered.

Still nothing.

“And my food did taste kinda weird for a couple days afterward.”

Silence.

I snatched the paper.

Ciel had attached a post-it next to the right aria, where she’d written “Idiot proof: Use this one if the knife nut does the summoning.” It was five times longer than the other one.

I rolled my eyes and started reading out loud. It did feel like using the Eyes. Same rush of energy, like running a sprint on caffeine. It took awhile.

Shut. Shut. Shut. Shut. Shut.
Five perfections for each repetition.
And now, let the filled sigils be annihilated in my stead…

While I read, sparks snapped along the circle’s edges. The blood glowed. The design started floating up like a 2D neon sign. The room filled with red mist.

Wind started blowing, even though we were inside.

When smoke hissed off the blade in the center, I started to wonder whether I should duck behind the couch or something. Shiki just stood with his hands behind his back, hair flapping in the breeze. And I bullshit you not: the guy looked bored.

I noticed lightning reflect from his glasses, and looked back at the summoning circle in time to see a tornado made of light. A couple windows cracked. The air howled.

The Servant appeared in a flash of light.

A couple seconds later, Tohno’s face got bright red.

Our “Servant” was a five-foot-nothing chick in trashy lingerie and stockings. She had white hair in a bob cut, and freakishly pale blue eyes. They must’ve taken up half her face. Scars ran down both of her cheeks, but I guess she looked pretty cute otherwise. Her panties were basically a single triangle of nylon with strings on either end.

“Hold up,” I said. “You’re not Jack the Ripper.”

The Servant’s huge, headlight-looking eyes narrowed, but she’d have to wait in line. My brother was glaring at me as well.

“What now, Tohno?” I said.

“You summoned Jack the Ripper as our Servant?” he said.

Sigh. And again with the stupid questions. It’s like Tohno got a kick out of asking obvious stuff at the weirdest times: Why d’you keep staring at me when you’re sharpening that, SHIKI? You mean you’re kicking me out of my room to accommodate another knife collection? Do you really think that threatening to shank that guy was the most diplomatic solution? It got old quick.

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“WHAT MADE YOU THINK SUMMONING JACK THE RIPPER WAS A GOOD IDEA?!”

“...Because awesome?” I said.

He ran a hand through his hair.

“Or…You know what? Forget it,” Tohno said. “First thing’s first. For all we know, maybe she is Jack the Ripper. Ciel said that some Servants turned out to be girls in the past.”

I pointed at the thong.

“Tohno, look at her. Does she look like the Terror of London to you?”

“I mean, I thought you’d be more understanding about gender…um…issues,” he said.

I gave Tohno a hard, long look. Now that I thought about it, the guy had lots of extra death lines sitting around. Little known fact: the average person is born with several more fingers than he absolutely needs to help his younger brother with 99% of tasks. Including magical deathmatches.

Tohno sighed and massaged his eyes.

“…Or not,” he said. “Never mind. Shutting up now.”

The Servant interrupted us by rubbing her knives together, which gave off a metallic shiing. Okay, they were pretty cool: like Bowie knives with an extra barb and some teeth on one edge. She had several more in sheaths. I could smell the bloodlust on them.

“I am Servant Assassin,” she said. “And I ask: are you my Master?”

Right. Time to clear this up.

“So where is he?” I said.

The Servant tilted her head to one side.

“I don’t know what you’re—“ she said.

“Where’s our real Servant?” I said. “And don’t tell me you’re one of the hookers he killed.”

Our so-called ‘Assassin’ gripped her knives a little more tightly. The killing aura thickened. It was like a really humid, sticky fog. The buckles and scabbards clinked when she shifted.

“Uh, SHIKI?” my brother said.

“Speaking.”

“I…think she’s getting annoyed,” Tohno said.

“Yes,” said Assassin. “I am.”

“What’s she gonna do, lapdance me to death?” I said.

“…Very, very annoyed…” Assassin said.

…Because I swear,” I said, “if I summoned a hooker by accident, I’m gonna be so pissed o—WHATTHEFUCK!”

Assassin flew at me. I caught a glint of steel out of the corner of my eye, and ducked the first blade. She’d swung wildly. Blindly, almost. The second almost kebabbed me, but I turned that aside with my own knife. Sparks flew.

The blades swished when they cut through the air. Two against one. It was like trying to fight somebody on fast-forward. Worse, even. Parry-duck-retreat-parry, over and over. She cut. I deflected. Each step brought me closer to the wall—

Shit.

I saw it too late. I’d moved right into the crosshairs, and Assassin’s blade rocketed for my heart—

Her hand stopped on a dime. Assassin’s thrust went from sixty to zero, and then sped up again in the other direction.

She deflected Tohno’s Nanaya blade, and flicked her wrist. The teeth caught it, and twisted the blade around. I heard a crack. Tohno hissed as his wrist bent at a nasty angle. He hadn’t let it go in time.

Assassin spun on her heel and thrust at Tohno’s head. Adrenaline burst in my stomach. The knife looked like a streak of light. Insanely fast.

"Look out--!"

Tohno’s legs got all rubbery, and he bent straight backward until he was parallel to the ground. It’s actually pretty cool to watch – like Ninja Gumby or something.

Not that I had time to sit and watch.

I rolled and grabbed the knife he’d dropped. She wanted to try dual wielding? Fine. I could play that game.

I launched myself over the sofa – just high enough to avoid a thrown knife. It tore through the cushions, came out the other side, and embedded itself three inches into the wall. It stuck there and vibrated.

Assassin looked up with those freaky pale eyes and grinned. But I could see her Lines now. They were tiny, tiny red lines, like hairline cracks.

I aimed for the head. Nope. Feinted at the heart. Her blades arrived just as if I’d done the real thing, and I realized something: she didn’t know the first thing about hand to hand combat. She might have been faster than the fucking Roadrunner, but she didn’t have the skill to back it up.

Fake low. Wait for her to bite. Yup.

Say goodbye to your face.

I gouged the knife into her cheek. I licked my lips when I felt it slice through her teeth, popping them off like biting corn on the cob. Assassin screamed. She sounded more angry than hurt.

“Yo Tohno!” I said. “It bleeds! This is fucking awesome!””

I disengaged. Assassin reached up to her jaw. Blood and saliva dribbled through, but she was already regenerating.

And the repair job was draining my energy. Shit.

I barreled toward her. Feint-feint-step-LUNGE! I stabbed the wrist this time. She’d tangled her feet with a stupid cross-step, and all the speed in the world couldn’t save her. Assassin donated a few more pints of blood to the carpet.

“Everybody just stop!” Tohno shouted. “Let’s all calm down and talk about—“

“YAHAHAHAHAHA! LOOK AT ALL THE BLOOD, TOHNO!”

And the chick agreed with me.

Assassin licked the wound with a smile, and went for me. She did this spinny-pirouette thing where the blades whistled over my guard one after another, like a rotating fan. Deflecting them was a bitch. One of them jarred my wrist hard enough that I had to jump out of the way.

Something sharp stung my arm. I heard muscles sever, and flinched. Warmth and stickiness pumped down my kimono’s sleeve.

I went for her with the other knife.

Cut the Line...

“DIE!” I screamed.

Assassin’s jaw clenched, and she gave me the most hate-filled look I’d seen this side of a couple Phantasmal species. The world went into slow motion.

She moved her weapon. It would arrive too late. I had her. I had her. Assassin was moving in the wrong direction, though. She lifted the knife and…cut her own throat?

It sawed through veins, tendons, and finally bone. Like butter. Blood sprayed and dissolved into glowing mist. It would have been awesome on any other day, but—seriously?

What was this bullshit?

My own blade hit Assassin in the heart. She gasped, and choked. A second later, her head ripped free from the last pieces of her neck and clomped onto the ground.

I felt a burning sensation in my chest. She’d cheated me of the killing blow. The rest of her body dissolved into some kind of golden pixie dust shit.

“What the fuck!?”

And she was gone.

This was stupid. She’d cheated me. Why did she—It’s almost as if she was listening when I told her to die, but nobody could be that cooperat—Hm.

I looked at my Command Seals. All two of them.

Oh.

Ohhhhhhhh.

Whoops.

“So that could have gone better,” I said.

“You think?”

“Imma stab you in a minute, Tohno.”

“I’m just saying that it would’ve been nice if you hadn’t provoked our Servant into trying to kill us,” he said.

“What can I say? I’m a creature of impulse,” I said.

“My wrist hurts, incidentally,” he said.

“My arm’s bleeding. Suck it up, pussy.”

Tohno slumped onto the sofa, which had been reduced to a bunch of splinters and cotton fluff. I sat on the floor below him, cross-legged.

“Oi, Tohno,” I said. “You’re the long-term planner. You figure something out.”

He massaged his wrist for a minute or two.

“Um….okay,” he said. “We don’t have the Servant anymore—“

“Duh.”

“Do you want my help or not?”

“Stabbity-stabbity-stabbity-stab…”

“Fine!” he said. “Just wait a minute. Let me think.”

Pause.

“What about…um…Okay, I think I have an idea.”

I rolled my eyes.

“What?” I said.

“Maybe we didn’t need this Servant,” he said. “Didn’t Ciel say that Masters are allowed to make contracts with other Servants?”

“Do I look like somebody who pays attention to rules?”

“Fair enough,” he said.

Tohno’s wrist was a mess. Limp and bent. An impulse of…something came from my sister. I bit my lip and looked out the window.

"...I fucked up, didn’t I?”

“Yeah,” Tohno said. “Just a little. Let’s see about that arm.”

Tohno cut his uniform into bandages with one hand and peeled off my jacket. The blood wasn’t pumping quite as quickly now, but the fabric still stuck to my arm. It was soaked.

Tohno tightened the bandage, and I felt constriction. The pain numbed a little.

“So we have to fight this War on our own now?” I said.

“Yeah. Until we can make a deal with another Servant, anyway.”

“Or gank one off a dead Master,” I said.

“…Or that, I guess.”

“You still want to do this?” I said.

He shrugged.

“She deserves our help,” he said. “That’s all there is to it.”

I put an arm around his shoulder, and crammed as much enthusiasm into my voice as I could. We had a long War ahead of us.

“Tohno, my man,” I said. “After everything heals up, we are going Servant-hunting.”

Sometimes, it was nice to see my brother smile.

Sour Grapes [Very AU. Shinji finds a different solution to his little sibling rivalry problem. And he even manages to be less of an evil bastard in the process.]

Spoiler:

It had been two weeks since the old geezer had “offered” Sakura to me.

Yep, my “sister”. The same girl with purple hair and creepy dead eyes who’d stolen the only thing I’d ever wanted: the Matou lineage.

Apparently, even that slight hadn’t been enough. Not by a long shot. Now I was supposed to play gigolo for her worms as well.

I stared at the corpse of Zouken Matou.

The old man’s head stared through white pupils in otherwise black eyes. The body looked like a colony of maggots had infested a dried apple. Worms had broken through the skin in half a dozen places. Their rubbery tissue had dried out with their master’s corpse. Vestigial lips had receded. So many little teeth…

Dead.

Genuinely dead.

It’s not easy growing up useless. That’s the word they’d always used. To give the dead their due, I guess Dad had probably done it to “protect” me from dear grandpapa. Zouken, though? Yeah, no. He’d meant it.

Every.

Fucking.

Time.

See, magecraft doesn’t care whether you know your rituals A to Z. Or that you can explain every single nuance of Matou wormcraft. I could have written books on the subject from memory. Nope. No good. Magecraft only cares about one thing: how many circuits you have.

I didn’t have any.

Then again, my years of devouring every book in the Matou library had helped in the days after Gramps had “offered” Sakura to me. Days that I’d spent in a fugue of writing letters to every Clock Tower magus I could locate, and scanning metric tonnes of pages from our more…interesting books.

And now it was gone. Everything. Centuries of Matou tradition down the tubes.

Sakura returned from school an hour later. I heard her usual “I’m home,” and the equally gentle clomp of shoes on the threshold floor. For the first time in ages, she pattered down the hallway like a girl her own age instead of a walking corpse.

Her worms had dropped out days ago. Wrinkled gray blobs – like mummified fingers. By that point, the old man had sunk too far into his death throes to care.

Sakura froze when she saw gramps lying there, giftwrapped in his ancient silk robes.

“B-brother, I…” she said. “What happened to--?”

I smirked.

“Seems the old geezer’s magecraft hasn’t been working recently,” I said. “Shame he was on magical life support, huh?”

“I-I knew that. But how did it happen?"

“Ever heard of the Conservation of Mystery?” I said.

She stared for a minute or two, and then nodded slowly. It was a careful movement, like she was performing surgery or something.

“Nifty little factoid,” I said. “Apparently – and I’m just speaking from theoretical knowledge here, since I’m not one of you super-fucking-special magi – magecraft gets less effective if more people know about it.”

“And you—“

“Sent the Matou research notes to pretty much every magus in the Clock Tower.”

Her eyes widened. It might have just been me, but her pupils and irises looked a little less monochrome now. And…moist?

“So much for wormcraft,” I said. “Sorry, ‘sis’, but it looks like you’re going to have to reconsider your little plan to take my…um…are you--”

Sakura sank to her knees. Even now, she couldn’t seem to keep her eyes off the old bastard. And she was shuddering. No, crying. I…didn’t think I’d ever seen her cry. Not even --

“Thank you,” she whispered.

I fiddled with my collar. Looked away.

“It wasn’t for you,” I said.

Sakura’s hand curled around mine, and I allowed myself to notice her fingers’ warmth. For the first time in years, she gave me a soft smile.

My sister always had a knack for that. Seeing through people, I mean. And the good manners not to call you on it.

The Winner, and Still… [Shamelessly stupid crack, written purely for my own amusement. The Fate / Zero Masters all summon heavyweight boxing champions.]

Spoiler:

The Winner, and Still…


Kiritsugu scuffed his heel over a spent cigarette. His sixth. Or seventh. He couldn’t remember. Iri had been drawing the summoning circle for the last two hours. She’d already spoken the Aria. Now they would wait.

They didn’t wait long.

A circle of glyphs burned red in midair. Lightning flashed. The air swirled with motion and dust. With an almighty crack, the magic circle flashed one last time.

Their Servant had arrived.

The man was tall and thin, with a large, rounded jaw. African-American, according to the file. Though there was supposedly Cherokee in there somewhere. He wore shiny white trunks and athletic shoes. He had gloves.

Kiritsugu could swear that the man looked bored. And not just moderately bored. No, this guy looked like he’d lost a fight against somebody with Botox syringes.

The Magus Killer sighed. He flipped the photograph over again. Yep. Same guy. But just to be sure…

“And you are?” he said.

The man gave Kiritsugu another expressionless look.

“Joe Louis,” he said. “Heavyweight champion of the world.”




--------------------------------------



Kayneth Archibald, First Lord El-Melloi, fussed with the chain around his robe’s neck. The thing seemed tighter than usual.

“Problem, Master?”

Master.

The Servant always said it with that mocking lilt, and Sola-Ui always backed the Servant’s insolence with her own sneer. Kayneth wondered again how Sola’s family had roped him into summoning an “Irish” hero. Note the quotation marks. This Servant was about as Irish as Rocky Marciano was Italian.

At least their first relic would have given him somebody useful. But no. Waver had stolen that, and Kayneth had been left with “Gentleman” Jim Corbett.

…Who was currently playing footsie with his fiancée.

Kayneth glanced again at the photograph. Something was off. The man looked more like a movie star than a bank-clerk-turned-prizefighter.

“Weren’t you supposed to be…er…uglier?” Kayneth said. “Big nose, horse face, that sort of thing?”

Corbett grinned and flounced his pompadour hairdo. Kayneth gritted his teeth when he saw Sola blush. She was practically salivating at Corbett’s biceps.

“Funny thing,” Corbett said. “They made a film about me. Seems it became part of my legend.”

“Film?”

Corbett waved his hand airily.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “The one with Errol Flynn.”



----------------------------------------------------------------------




It had been a night of firsts for Tokiomi Tohsaka:

The first time he’d summoned a Servant.

The first time he’d used a Command Seal to order that Servant to shut up.

And worst of all, the first time he’d learned that a Command Seal could fail. Miserably.

“His” Servant was dancing around with that insufferable smile. The man practically floated across the basement’s floor. Weightlessness in motion. If the Servant hadn’t been in the middle of the world’s longest boasting session, Tokiomi might have even deigned to admire that impossible athleticism.

As it was, though…

“They’re all bums. I’ll whip ‘em all! You’ll see! Make ‘em all look like Wepner with cement shoes! This’ll be easy. I already beat the Mummy, and the Bear, and—Ooohhh…I wonder if Frazier’s here….Hey! You! Monte Cristo! Do you think Frazier’s—“

“My name,” the Tohsaka heir said, “is Tokiomi Toh—“

“That’s it! I’ll clobber the Gorilla prime for prime. Once and for all. And then nobody can question that I’m Theee Greatest! Champion of Champions! KING OF THE WORLD…”

Tokiomi wondered whether the Tohsaka Code of Elegance permitted him to take a few non-magical aspirin for his growing migraine.



---------------------------------------



Waver coughed on the remaining smoke.

A shape loomed in the trees. The Servant was vaguely refrigerator-shaped – not short, but definitely broad for his height. Five ten or so. Not the giant Waver had expected.

Then again, the man’s forearms looked like they could snap baseball bats by twisting. The Servant stared down at Waver with coal-black eyes.

“Um…h-hi,” said Waver.

The Servant’s mustache bristled. It was stiff and angry, like a cat’s whiskers before pouncing on a rodent.

“My name,” said the Servant, “is John L. Sullivan, and I can lick any son-of-a-bitch in the War. Now take me to the nearest bar.”

“B-but…”

“NOW.”



---------------------------------------------




Uryuu lay on the basement floor, still shuddering from the magical light-show and explosion. He squinted. The smoke had cleared a little, and Uryuu had enough presence of mind to realize that somebody else was in the room.

Now if only he could see who it—

Wait.

What?!

The supernatural visitor grinned, and the gold-capped teeth glinted. Uryuu glanced from the boxing gloves, to the black trunks, to the shaved flat-top with a growing sense of the surreal. Not to mention the tattoo of Chairman Mao…

“D-didn’t you come to Tokyo a couple years back?” Uryuu said.

This, evidently, was the wrong thing to say. The man scowled. His muscles-on-muscles-on-muscles tensed.

“Buthter Doughlath cheated!” he growled. “He shoulda gotten a ten count!”

The lisp.

Even the freaking lisp matched.

This…

Well, actually, this was kinda cool.

“So you’re—“

“Iron Mike Tython.”



-----------------------------------------



Many blocks away, Kirei faced a very different golden smile.

He’d expected to summon a punch-drunk, musclebound idiot in boxing trunks. He’d received a man in a Panama hat and one of the crispest white suits he’d ever seen.

Like other Japanese magi, Kirei would admit to an insular streak. He suspected that the man before him was African-American, since he didn’t look much like Lennox Lewis or Teofilo Stevenson.

The Vessel, after all, only summoned heavyweight champions. It had done that since time immemorial. Or at least, ever since the First War’s founders had gotten drunk and started chanting “Arias” from Pierce Egan’s Boxiana.

"Parlez-vous français?" the Servant said.

“I…er…”

The golden grin widened. He slapped Kirei on the shoulder.

“I’m joking, of course,” he said. “The ritual seems to have given me enough knowledge of Japanese to get by. Though I speak French, too.”

It was subtle, but Kirei noted that the Servant’s deep voice had inflected the “too”. And he wasn’t measuring Kirei up like a dementia pugilistica sufferer would, either. Not by a long shot. There was intelligence there. And mischief.

The man grabbed his hand, and shook.

“Name’s Jack Johnson,” he said.

“Ah…Kirei. Kirei Kotomine.”

Another slap on the back. Another smile.

“Lighten up, Kirei,” he said. “We’re going to have fun in this War.”



----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Kariya coughed.

More blood, and the War hadn’t even started. He felt like retching most of his innards onto the floor. He could feel the worms as they slurped around his organs. Occasionally, they’d nip. And he’d try to stop himself from screaming.

A man in green boxing trunks and sideburns stepped out of the smoke. He wasn’t exactly a colossus. Oh, he towered over Kariya pretty handily, but he still carried a little extra fat here and there. And he wasn't a giant like the Klitschkos or Lewis.

It was only when Kariya saw the man's eyes that he realized he’d chosen correctly. He knew that face. Most reporters who covered foreign news had seen it once or twice.

This is a man who would die standing up.

Another worm wriggled. Kariya winced.

“My name’s…Kariya Matou,” he gasped. “And you’re…Joe Frazier.”

The man set his jaw. Fists clenched in his boxing gloves.

“Where’s the Butterfly?” he growled.

Despite the pain, Kariya forced himself to smile.

[YeOfLittleFaith]

Awesome. 8D

[Zalgo Jenkins]

Awesome. 8D

Rip as a vampirized, somewhat loony magus with a mystic code from Der Freischutz's original folktale seemed to fit better than most other explanations I could come up with. Not to mention the Doctor as a puppetmaster creating the Major's dieselpunk-cyborg body.

[YeOfLittleFaith]

I really like the interpretations. ^c^

Though I thought Hans was an immortal werewolf from birth?

[Zalgo Jenkins]

I really like the interpretations. ^c^

Though I thought Hans was an immortal werewolf from birth?

I wouldn't put it past Rudi's family to mess around with an embryo in the womb, with subsequent "adjustments" after he was born. Or did I inadvertently miss a part of Hellsing canon that prevents this?

[Tiresias]

I never remembered the wolfman getting much backstory, if any.

[Zalgo Jenkins]

I never remembered the wolfman getting much backstory, if any.

That was my recollection as well, but it's always possible that I missed something.

[Lycodrake]

On the subject of Kouta Hirano's works...have you read Drifters, Zalgo?
Because that one definitely has an interesting Jeanne. by interesting I mean extreme pyro

[YeOfLittleFaith]

I wouldn't put it past Rudi's family to mess around with an embryo in the womb, with subsequent "adjustments" after he was born. Or did I inadvertently miss a part of Hellsing canon that prevents this?

Nah, you didn't miss anything, far as I remember.

I was just under the impression that he'd been around for much, much longer than the other villains of Hellsing. Or possibly even longer than Alucard, given how his reaction to finally being released from his immortality was.

[Siriel]

Here's what we know of the Captain's backstory:

"..."

[biigoh]

Ah... that WOULD be an amusing Holy Grail War with Artificial Vampires, Nazi in World War 2 fun times.

[Imperial]

What a shame it's a one-off

You have a lot of interesting ideas being bandied about here, such as the US apparently researching True Ancestors, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I as a Servant, Rip's entire schtick, et cetera. I also happen to like your protagonist's pragmatic, scathing POV. Like so many one-shots, your story could go in a lot of interesting directions, but I suppose we're lucky to see even a sliver of these ideas put to a word processor. Looking forward to more

[Zalgo Jenkins]

What a shame it's a one-off

You have a lot of interesting ideas being bandied about here, such as the US apparently researching True Ancestors, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I as a Servant, Rip's entire schtick, et cetera. I also happen to like your protagonist's pragmatic, scathing POV. Like so many one-shots, your story could go in a lot of interesting directions, but I suppose we're lucky to see even a sliver of these ideas put to a word processor. Looking forward to more

It's still probably going to remain unwritten, but this WOULD be a very fun Heaven's Feel to write from a purely action standpoint.

Arthur Hellsing would send Alucard to Japan as soon as his alchemist friends told him that Ahnenerbe Special Branch's second-in-command (and most powerful magus) just entered Heaven's Feel. Can't have a Hellsing crossover without everyone's favorite vampire.

The War itself would be insane. Expanding on the hints from canon (and adjusting for the Hellsing-verse), you'd see mass deployment of landmines while the IJA's magus corps and Nazi ersatz Enforcers duked it out. Add the Edelfelt twins with their two Sabers, Avenger making his first appearance, Dwarf!Assassin, killer puppets, and Alucard lurking in the background, and you're all set for cataclysmic destruction. With Risei Kotomine sitting back and showing where his son got his talent for deadpan snarking.

The Servants could actually kill Alucard as well, which might create some semblance of conflict rather than Alucard's effortless victories in canon. Even Rudolf would pose a credible threat. He may be a pathetic, bitter sellout of a human being, but the guy's an excellent combat magus with an entire nation's worth of relics. There's a reason the Enforcers and Executors chose not to track him down. He's like a much scarier Kayneth with a huge budget and the Spear of Destiny.

The final showdown might end up looking like an unholy combination of the last episodes of Fate:Zero, Hellsing's battle of London, and weaponized Grimms' Fairy Tales stuffed into a blender and set on puree.

Anyway, I suppose it has some promise. Might be interesting to see from multiple viewpoints. I dunno.

- - - Updated - - -

Here's what we know of the Captain's backstory:

"..."

Yeah, this is basically what I figured. Also, kudos for tracking down his original quote on the issue.

- - - Updated - - -

Nah, you didn't miss anything, far as I remember.

I was just under the impression that he'd been around for much, much longer than the other villains of Hellsing. Or possibly even longer than Alucard, given how his reaction to finally being released from his immortality was.

Rudolf did say that his family had Hans for a long time. His snide comments about Cartesian science put the werewolf's birth/creation at least in the middle of the 17th century. That fits your proposed timeline pretty well, actually.

[Imperial]

It's still probably going to remain unwritten, but this WOULD be a very fun Heaven's Feel to write from a purely action standpoint.

Arthur Hellsing would send Alucard to Japan as soon as his alchemist friends told him that Ahnenerbe Special Branch's second-in-command (and most powerful magus) just entered Heaven's Feel. Can't have a Hellsing crossover without everyone's favorite vampire.

The War itself would be insane. Expanding on the hints from canon (and adjusting for the Hellsing-verse), you'd see mass deployment of landmines while the IJA's magus corps and Nazi ersatz Enforcers duked it out. Add the Edelfelt twins with their two Sabers, Avenger making his first appearance, Dwarf!Assassin, killer puppets, and Alucard lurking in the background, and you're all set for cataclysmic destruction. With Risei Kotomine sitting back and showing where his son got his talent for deadpan snarking.

The Servants could actually kill Alucard as well, which might create some semblance of conflict rather than Alucard's effortless victories in canon. Even Rudolf would pose a credible threat. He may be a pathetic, resentful sellout of a human being, but the guy's an excellent combat magus with an entire nation's worth of relics. There's a reason the Enforcers and Executors chose not to track him down. He's like a much scarier Kayneth with a huge budget and the Spear of Destiny.

The final showdown might end up looking like an unholy combination of the last episodes of Fate:Zero, Hellsing's battle of London, and weaponized Grimms' Fairy Tales stuffed into a blender and set on puree.

Anyway, I suppose it has some promise. Might be interesting to see from multiple viewpoints. I dunno.

WHY MUST YOU TEMPT ME?

Actually, I've been toying with a Third Grail War fic for years now, having written out the first chapter, but I tend to shelve it for lack of time and not having actually read Hollow Ataraxia, which is where most of the juicy tidbits come from. It would be like writing a F/SN fic with only some hearsay and wiki trolling under my belt instead of, you know, actually reading it. It seems foolish to write about something I've only heard about through other source.

Of course, Rudi getting his paws on the Spear of Destiny (assuming the crow catalyst is used for Freddie after all) makes me laugh at the mental image of another Master summoning Longinus as the War's resident Lancer, prompting an uncomfortable moment of Lancginus getting butthurt the Nazis are using playing with his favorite toy.

[Zalgo Jenkins]

WHY MUST YOU TEMPT ME?

I'm spending too much time writing Kirei, probably.

Actually, I've been toying with a Third Grail War fic for years now, having written out the first chapter, but I tend to shelve it for lack of time and not having actually read Hollow Ataraxia, which is where most of the juicy tidbits come from. It would be like writing a F/SN fic with only some hearsay and wiki trolling under my belt instead of, you know, actually reading it. It seems foolish to write about something I've only heard about through other source.

There doesn't seem to be that much information available on the Third War, for what it's worth. I think it's discussed here in some depth: http://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread...Holy-Grail-War

Of course, Rudi getting his paws on the Spear of Destiny (assuming the crow catalyst is used for Freddie after all) makes me laugh at the mental image of another Master summoning Longinus as the War's resident Lancer, prompting an uncomfortable moment of Lancginus getting butthurt the Nazis are using playing with his favorite toy.

Yep, the crow's used to summon Freddy (who has some of the other sleeping kings lore to draw upon as well for NPs). The Spear of Destiny is one of Rudolf's many anti-Servant weapons, though it could probably do well against something like Alucard as well. (As Anderson's secret weapon presumably would have in Hellsing canon). It would actually be interesting if the Viennese Lance wasn't the "real" one, but a powerful relic nonetheless -- in keeping with the fact that it's obviously not Roman. 7th century, I think.

As far as his collection goes, he's got every other weapon that the Nazis scavenged with their world tour of weird archaeology, plus traditionally German folklore weapons like Walther's semi-sentient bullets, iron soldiers, swarms of rats, absurdly sharp swords, fairy familiars, et cetera.

Half the fun would be watching his armory go up against Alucard's Level 0.

[Mattias]

The final showdown might end up looking like an unholy combination of the last episodes of Fate:Zero, Hellsing's battle of London, and weaponized Grimms' Fairy Tales stuffed into a blender and set on puree.

You could also end it in the Apocrypha timeline with The Major stealing the Grail site, leading to Seras in the Team Battle War.

[Zalgo Jenkins]

You could also end it in the Apocrypha timeline with The Major stealing the Grail site, leading to Seras in the Team Battle War.

Hm...The Major is the true winner of Heaven's Feel #3. He wished for a really awesome war in about fifty years.

This would help explain Hellsing as some AU version of Nasuverse.

[Imperial]

Damn, man

Rudi and his Nazi handlers aren't messing around if he's carrying that kind of magical firepower.

Still, even if it did turn into an Apocrypha prequel, the Nazis don't get the Grail in the end. They steal it away at first, but then Darnic pulls a vanishing act to ensure that no one gets what they want.

Whatever the case, now I'm wondering what kind of Servant Freddie would be.

[Zalgo Jenkins]

Damn, man

Rudi and his Nazi handlers aren't messing around if he's carrying that kind of magical firepower.

They looted Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia barren for this stuff. Like everything else about the Nazi war economy, it was unsustainable. Running on fumes. The Clock Tower was horrified when they found out how much irreplaceable stuff the Nazis were planning to throw into the meatgrinder.

It was the magical equivalent of the Nazis taking all the art they stole from across Europe and building a gigantic bonfire of the vanities instead of giving it to Goering.

Still, even if it did turn into an Apocrypha prequel, the Nazis don't get the Grail in the end. They steal it away at first, but then Darnic pulls a vanishing act to ensure that no one gets what they want.

And therein lies the bitter irony. All that effort for nothing. Despite making a deal with a pack of lunatics and stealing millenia worth of supernatural artifacts, Rudi's walking into the hangman's noose just like the other six Masters.

Whatever else happens, we know that the Third War didn't end well for its participants. And we know from Hellsing canon that Rudi didn't come back.

Whatever the case, now I'm wondering what kind of Servant Freddie would be.

Ironically, Frederick would probably consider Rudi's "allies" a bunch of pagan scum.