Fate/strange fake (Free-Range Spoilers)

[Comun]

Chapter 21: Beings shaped in man's image (part 3)

Snowfield, central street

The best way to describe the creature was as a torrent of power.

A huge clump of energy, like a Heroic Spirit but somewhat different.

Like a living tornado of Elements, repeating the cycle of compressing the Elements of its surroundings, accelerating them, and immediately bursting them back out.

Taking water as a metaphor, it could be described as a hydraulic jet cutter shaped to a specific form.

Its amount of water is nothing compared to a giant waterfall, but with enough speed, its spray becomes a fluid blade capable of splitting rocks.

Likewise, a torrent of magical energy whirled in the skies above Snowfield, circulating with enough intensity to crush souls.

The otherworldly creature did nothing but circulate magical energy at high speeds. Like a momentary glimmer turned permanent. The "specific form" it was shaped to was none other than the human form.

A grotesque humanoid figure, close yet distant in shape to what once was Flat Escardos.

The young Master of Jack the Ripper's clothes were stained with his blood and had a large rifle bullet hole in the chest.

Nothingness and light could be seen from the gaps in the red fabric.

The bullet hole in the chest revealed an open scar composed of crack-like lines, reminiscent of punched glass.

An elongated slant ran through the hole, and jet-black darkness could be seen from inside it.

It was like a mass of dark, dim shadows sucking in all light.

Despite being in the center of a human body, the hole felt deep as an infinite corridor. Its apparent absorption of light made it the most prominent part of the entity.

And a giant light source can be seen from the gaps of the hole, assumedly the final destination of all the absorbed light.

It was a light source, but the darkness in the hole wasn't illuminated by it.

The light source emphasized only its own existence - a Core resembling a giant eyeball, covering only its own body in radiant light.

A third party has no way of knowing if this "eye" too massive to be a real human eye is the Core controlling the darkness or a Core domesticated by the infinite hollow enveloping it.

And what was above this hole and eyeball?

A head. The most important part in the composition of a humanoid figure. Contrary to the grotesqueness of the center of its body, its head looked quite peaceful.

Like a young human's head, at first glance.

But anyone who knew Flat Escardos could tell from a distance that that was not him.

Short protuberances appeared on the sides of its head, barely visible from the gaps of its hair, which is longer than Flat's.

Bizarrely shaped horns or antennae, like a mix between the luminescent crystal wings of an insect and the leaves of a tree, wiggled upwards, in a struggle against gravity.

It might look like a boy dressed as some kind of mystical creature for Halloween, but the almost arcane harmony of its design let anyone tell at first glance that what they were seeing was real.

The face on it looked perfectly human, molded as a more refined version of Flat's now blown-off face.

But contrary to Flat's peaceful, innocent, and boyish eyes, the figure had the lonely eyes of someone who disdained, pitied, and detested all in the world. Around those eyes, there were marks that could be interpreted as either scars or tattoos.

Its face looked even younger than the already babyfaced Flat.

Its body was also quite deaged. The clothes that fit Flat perfectly rapidly became too big for the new body, and the holes in them started to expose skin.

But what was inside the clothes is still as hollow as before.

Like a broken ball-jointed doll, it was missing most of its hip and elbows.



The shot portions of Flat's body could be seen crumbling in real-time.

The hollow shadows leaked out of the cracks in an attempt to prevent that and hold the human body in place.

Its limbs floated in the air despite the lack of knees and elbows, making the world assume its silhouette was one of someone with a complete body.

Despite taking the appearance of a young boy, the otherworldly creature had a mature figure and grotesque shape. It set foot at the tallest peak in Snowfield -the Crystal Hill rooftop- and took a slow look at its surroundings.

It no longer showed any interest in the folded cadavers atop the other buildings' roofs.

Instead, it borrowed one of their sniper rifles and gracefully placed its finger on the trigger.

But instead of pulling it, it just stared at the gun with uninterested eyes before tossing it away.

With a loud metallic noise, the gun hit the heliport floor without ever going off.

The otherworldly creature in the shape of a boy in his midteens mechanically spun its head to observe the city's sceneries.

It found the central park where Flat Escardos first summoned Jack the Ripper.

Next, it turned its eyes to the police station where the Executor fought the bloodsucker.

The motel they were using as a base, the opera house where he was called for a TV interview...

Its eyes eventually passed through the hospital where they fought that powerful Archer... and locked at its final destination, the spot where Flat was ultimately shot.

Once his eyes were done tracing the steps of the young Master in this land, the boy close them and stopped moving as if it was making a silent prayer.

It's possible he was indeed making a silent prayer.

Though he will never tell what he prayed about in this silence.

The boy opened his eyes and saw a fast-moving figure.

Richard the Lionheart, a Heroic Spirit with a Saber Saint Graph.

The otherwordly boy's eyes sharpened when he saw what Saber was carrying.

The special Magic Circuits connected to these sharpened eyes understood everything.

He knew what the Ayaka Sajou in Richard's arms was.

He knew the tremendous size of the magical energy swirling inside Ayaka.

He didn't learn it now. He understood it the second he first looked at Ayaka Sajou through Flat Escardos's eyes.

Ayaka was the opposite of him. A vast still lake of magical energy.

Massive amounts of unmoving magical energy. It will never go active of its own volition, but in exchange, it can become a giant source of power without needing to make any moves of its own.

Knowing that, he had to accept a fact whether he wanted or not:

Ayaka Sajou was not one of his own kind, but she was exactly as otherworldly to human society as he was.

"That creature... will be a problem later."

The words he whispered could have been his true opinion, but they could also have been part of his farewell ritual to Flat. The boy didn't know.

And without looking for the answer, the boy circulated magical energy in his hand.

With the sound of grinding gears, shadows seeped out of the hole in his chest and enveloped his arms.

Magic circles appeared where his missing elbows should be and his chest started sending magical energy through his floating forearms to their focal points in his fingertips, amplifying the energy throughout the travel.

The shadows enveloping his arms form further magic circles as they expand, adding second and third layers to the elbows and in front of his palms.

Furthermore, the shadow stretching from his back collected crystalline shards from the atmosphere to grow into a pair of wings, then started drawing a tridimensional emblem in the air.

Flueger, a mage observing the scene from a distance, reported it to his employer as follows:

Common sense tells me I'm probably wrong
But I think that thing was... Magic Circuits... no, an externally expanded Magic Crest
This thing's on a level beyond those monstrous Magic Crests from ancient houses
The Magic Crest broke out and is now one... no, countless independent living beings
Real-time Magic Crest growth... Nah, sorry man, I gotta be jumping the gun with these theories

A report that made its sender question his own sanity.

Magic Circuits and Magic Crests are two very important substances to mages.

Magic Circuits are an essential "organ" for the use of magecraft, spread through the body in the form of a fixed number of pseudo-nerves. One reason behind the mages' jus sanguinis doctrine is that they strive to increase this number, even if by just 1.

Likewise, the Magic Crest is a symbol of the accumulation of experience in a mage's bloodline. However, normal Magic Crest are not provided with biological functions like the one you're currently seeing. Instead, they are "artificial hearts" designed by each family to be passed from parent to child.

The Crest's creation is supposed to span centuries or millennia with each holder adding their own contribution to it. It suddenly proliferating outside the holder's body is normally unthinkable.

But the boy immediately figured out what was this thing constructing himself around him and what was it for.

The magical energy in the city's rich air, or perhaps the land's dragonvein resources allotted to the Holy Grail, were assembling themselves together around the boy in a frantic speed.

Borrowing Holy Grail War terminology, the sheer of magical energy concentrated in one place could plainly be described as a "Noble Phantasm".

The boy's sharp glare aimed his arms and the magical energy they controlled at Ayaka and Saber, ready to shoot.

And then, at the moment of the fallout...

"Hi."

A soothing voice echoed, dissipating all tension.

After the boy stopped his movements, he skillfully put the concentrated magical energy to circulate around himself and turned back.

There he saw someone appeared behind him before he noticed it. They spoke, still in the same soothing voice.

"Nice to meet you, friend."



He saw a forest, an ocean, a mountain, a city... one world standing before him.

The boy's special "eyes" made him more aware of what he was facing than any other person.

A being unlike himself or Ayaka, who did nothing other than blend their power with the world's.

They weren't concealing their presence.

They were assimilated into the wide world with no efforts to hide their powerful presence.

Mother Nature in human form. Confronted by the questioning eyes of this being somewhat similar to Divine or Natural Spirits, the boy opened his mouth.

"A Heroic Spirit...? The protectors of Human Order are here to erase me?"

"Right now I'm just a Servant walking the land with my Master. Besides, the planet doesn't seem to have decided its opinion on you yet."

"Then what are you here for?"

The boy spoke with maximum caution, but not out of suspicion. He decided from the first moment that he was talking to an enemy.

The Heroic Spirit, this beautiful figure with green hair flowing in the wind, responded with a soothing smile.

"You know this girl you were just trying to obliterate?" Still with no hostility in their smile, the Heroic Spirit -Enkidu- gushed magical energy around themself with the elegance of vegetation fluttering in the wind. "I'm on an alliance with her team. I can't ignore the signs of an attack when I see one."

" 'this girl'? You're seriously counting that as a person, Servant?"

"Yeah, she's a person. Just like you are."

The boy glared and grit his back, displeased with Enkidu's unpretentious response.

"Fine... This is a good time for a test.", whispered the boy. In the next instant, he skillfully manipulated the high-speed energy circulating around him and started forming a whirlpool of raw magical energy with Enkidu at its center. "To test how big of a hole I can bite in the world now that I'm not with Flat."

Magical energy manipulation bypassing chants, formulas or any kind of procedure.

This image alone would be enough for the Lords of the Clock Tower or the high-ranked engineers of the Atlas Institute to figure out what the boy was.

No matter how outlandish the answer may seem to them, nothing changes the fact that he exists.

Perhaps one of the Lords, a lecturer who observed Flat's abnormalities for a a long time, already knew about the creature for years.



"You want to compete against me? Heh, that would have been so enjoyable, had we met in a different place under different circumstances..."

"..."

Enkidu silent spread their arms opens at the same time the boy activated his magecraft.

The violent whirl of magical energy around them twisted space.

But almost at the same instant, countless chains sprouted from the floor Enkidu was stepping on, drawing a spiral spinning in the opposite direction as the space distortion to fill up all the space that would have been dislocated away.

With a bursting noise, the dense magical energy in the area dispersed.

However, it was immediately absorbed into the Hole open in the boy's body. The eyeball visible from its gaps scowled at Enkidu.

Enkidu flashed a smile to that eye while they continued their previous sentence.

"Sorry, but protecting Master is my priority now."

Next, Enkidu grabbed a chain they sprouted from the ground.

The chain entangled them and permeated, as if being absorbed by their body, until it was assimilated into their clothes.

"A serious battle between us would take this whole area as collateral damage. I'd like to avoid that."

Enkidu slowly approached the boy, still with the chain in hand. With a slightly lonely smile.

"I had this ready, but it was for round 2 with Gil..."

With the elegance of a bloomed flower, Enkidu was holding their open arms above the ground.

And with powerful words, they started chanting the name their Noble Phantasm.

Now is the time to sing of the scars and splendor that marked the planet.

The boy tried to make his move before they could finish the sentences, but noticing the massive magical energy approaching from the building floors below him, he redirected all the accelerated energy toward defense.

Wisdom of the people

Age of Babylon

This was the Noble Phantasm Enkidu was regularly using without a chant.

An equivalent to Gilgamesh's Gate of Babylon. It uses chains to connect to the planet and reproduce Human Order's creations from the ground.

This Noble Phantasm can be considered Enkidu's basic weapon, the primary form of attack they're always using, but since they placed a fragment of their Saint Graph into the words they spoke to exercise it, the Noble Phantasm shows signs of its true nature for the first time.

At first, Enkidu's usual blades -swords and spears- spawned out of the rooftop floor in large amount along with the chains, charging at the boy's body in quick succession.



Faced with the tyrannical attack of a thousand blades, the boy was deep in thought.

What can his perfected form do?

Now that he's freed from Flat Escardos, his beloved shackles, he fully became what Messara Escardos wished for.

Everything past this was uncharted territory.

But he already the knowledge he needed.

Everything was recorded in the Magic Crest passed down through generations of the Escardos family, in a form only him could comprehend.

For that reason, the boy didn't feel threatened.

He could see countless blades coming in his direction.

Each of them was a reproduction of the greatest weapons in Human Order and could erase a poorly built Saint Graph with a touch.

One or two hundred of edges that sharp approached him faster than a falcon flying after its prey.

The boy calmly watched the glimmers in the flock of blades.

He accelerated his own consciousness to the limit and stagnated his subjective perspective of the world's flow, just like he did to the snipers before.

Naturally, time wasn't truly stopped, so the boy's movements were slowed down accordingly, making the air around him feel viscous like an ocean of tepid muck.

But the boy accelerated the od running through all his Magic Circuits, propelling the mana around him into sudden acceleration and putting it in circulation.

Magical energy accelerated ludicrously, as if it had an external rocket engine placed in addition to its own internal combustion engine.

And yet, the magical energy flowed with perfect artistic elegance, spreading to its surrounds in the shape of a pair of shadow wings and drawing magical formulae that couldn't be found in any paper about magecraft.

What the boy did may have looked a brand new form of magecraft created on the spot, but in reality, it wasn't.

It was an impromptu orchestra of numerous magecrafts, from basic to advanced.

This was Flat Escardos's preferred form of magecraft. A most troublesome system that could improvise ideal results but made it nigh impossible for the user to faithfully reproduce them a second time.

What the boy was doing is essentially the same.

By combining numerous magecraft systems, the boy can explosively accelerate his nerves and limbs and constantly regenerate the cells and joints destroyed by this sudden bursts of speed.

He applied layers upon layers of magecraft on his own body with no signs of burdening it, seeming as if the boy's very body was a form of magecraft.

If Flat Escardos and this boy here use the same kind of magecraft systems, what makes them different?

The answer couldn't be simpler.

Frame and engine.

The difference in their specs was simply the difference between heaven and earth.

If Flat was a minicar with the latest digital controls, the boy was a fictional mobile weapon: a never seen before drive machine with the resistance of a tank, the energy reserves of a battleship, and the propulsion of a jet.

Working backwards from this "fictional weapon" example, Flat's geniality could be described as what would happen if a computer built for the sole purpose of processing a simulated object was suddenly able to operate this object.



The world of humanity lost a man of genius insight, and the advent of a catastrophe that loss incite.

All concluded as Messara Escardos dreamed.

As Enkidu's blades approached, the boy displayed his ability.

The magical energy in high-speed circulation around the boy expanded, repelling them all.

Not literally repelling. The boy created a mana barrier that pulverized the weapons on contact, turning the products of Enkidu's power and Earth's ground to dust.

By immediately reading and hacking the magical energy in Enkidu's Noble Phantasm, he absorbed it into his circulation of energy.

Not only that, he also manipulated the magical energy in some without destroying them, sending them flying back to Enkidu's body.

But the barrage of counterattacks didn't reach Enkidu.

The rampart floating in front of Enkidu blocked all of them.

Laced with powerful magical energy, this golden wall could serve as a strong boundary.

Each brick in the three layers of the wall had the words Nabû-kudurri-uṣur engraved in cuneiform.

The wall was only about two people tall, but it could effortless defend against the magically propelled weapons.

But the otherworldly boy didn't lose his calm.

He flew higher and kneaded his energy in the form of the attack he tried to use earlier on Ayaka.

The black shadows once again spread behind the boy's back and from around them, beams of energy in high-speed rotation were shot.

There is a power limit to a raw beam shot by a human mage, but through some kind of process, the beams he shot were hundreds, thousands of times above this ceiling.

But in response, the rampart changed into a dome, protecting against attacks from above.

But this was trivial to the boy now that he finished preparing his attack.

Countless beams of light converged instantly to the space in front of the boy, forming a monster made of magical light. The monster charged at Enkidu.

Two bites was what it took to open a hole in the seemingly impregnable multilayer rampart, and after few rounds it was completely taken apart.

"...!"

But the boy flinched at the sight of what appeared behind the bricks and the cloud of dust.

Enkidu's soothing face was surrounded by objects completely misfit with their expression and what he fought with thus far.

"What...? What the hell are you...?"

Still floating in the air, the boy dropped a shocked question out loud.

Any modern mage knowing Enkidu's True Name would have reacted the same way.



The objects deployed around Enkidu were clearly associable with ancient Babylonia due to the symbols engraved on them and the mixture of clay and shining gold.

But those weapons clearly didn't exist back in the days of ancient Babylonia.

Flat Escardos was an avid fan of movies and manga. Through him, the boy gained the knowledge necessary to understand what they were. Though not to accept his conclusion.

A past memory the boy had seen through Flat's eyes flashed back.



It was a memory of Flat taking an acquaintance's Mystic Code - Trimmau, a mercury maid- without permission to watch a movie.

The boy didn't have the movie's title memorized since that wasn't an important memory for him, but it was about a giant mantis monster coming out of an iceberg, attacking an American city, and fighting against the army.

One scene in the movie.

The army started attacking the giant flying mantis from the ground. Flat was commenting the scene as they watched.

ーThis is so freaking cool! See if you can transform into it, Trimm!
ーAn application for a new shapeshift pattern requires an official name.

Flat had an "I was waiting for this moment!" reaction to the mercury maid's mechanical response.

ーDon't worry! I imagined this would happen and made sure to ask my gun nerd friend what it's called!

The boy extracted the weapon name from the file in his memory.

ーThis weapon is called a...

Remembering Flat's words, the boy let the the formal name slip out of his mouth.

"...M1... 120mm anti-aircraft gun..."



8 units.

The number probably wasn't much of a factor in this, but it's a cold, hard fact that the boy needed to recheck his vision in other accept that the image before his eyes was real.

Albeit inorganic, their form was dignified enough to resemble a guardian statue with an over 7 meters long barrel.

While they were indeed repainted in the style Enkidu's home Babylonia, what they were was plain to see.

Modern weaponry from this American land, discontinued only 5 decades ago.

Enkidu's eccentric line-up dominated the space of Crystal Hill heliport.

The beautiful rows of anti-aircraft artillery around Enkidu filled up with golden energy, in a display of color that harmonized surprisingly well with Enkidu's own.

It looked as if they were defensive weapons installed on Babylonia's walls.

Or perhaps as if even this modern weaponry was part of the planet's natural decoration.

Something as central to the current civilization as modern weaponry could be made to resemble a great beautiful tree. This powerful scene manages to resemble a painting of a historical moment, despite the inherent irony of its composition.

Wisdom of the people

Age of Babylon

.

This Noble Phantasm has the special property of constantly "updating" with Enkidu's every summon as a Heroic Spirit.

The ability to draw from the planet's memory and produce various objects.

The very act of copying human history.

Therefore, the longer time passes, the denser, higher, and deeper is the data they gain.

The Heroic Spirit Enkidu can expand the range of civilization they can replicate by connecting themself to many different eras.

Think of a hypothetical situation where someone could summon Enkidu to multiple different eras. If Enkidu was summoned to the ancient Babylonia from their lifetime, they would be limited to reproducing only the weapons they came to know in life or other weapons men had already created in that era in that land.

Conversely, were they summoned to a future beyond the Holy Grail War in Snowfield, they would be summoning numerous that can only be considered impossible fantasies nowadays.

Although that's not necessarily a good thing.

Much like the greatest modern firearm can't compare to the radiance of a Holy Sword, in a battle of Noble Phantasm newer doesn't necessarily mean stronger.

It is known in the world of magecraft that the closer something is to the Age of Gods, the more pronouncedly arcane it is. And even on more realistic terms, it's inadvisable to face a 16th-century grapeshot cannon with a 21st-century pistol.

However, this Noble Phantasm belongs to Enkidu, whose very foundation is already arcane.

Every individual bullet in a Gatling gun would be boosted with magical energy to destroy enemy Saint Graphs. The latest model of fighter jet would be empowered enough to compete in a flying race against a mid-level dragon.

Gilgamesh collected the peaks of human potential in his Gate of Babylon. One of the articles stored there is Vimana. Replicating that would, needless to say, require being summoned either in a far distant future, the era when humanity reaches its peak, or in the opposite extreme, the era when humanity was ruled by the star-crossing gods. And replicating key elements such as the bodies of these alien gods or the planet's Holy Sword would require using parts of world itself or treasures of equal value from Gilgamesh's treasury as ingredients.

Nevertheless, there's a reason why this Noble Phantasm is comparable to Gate of Babylon: the number of weapons Enkidu shapes from dirt is the number created by Human Order after parting ways with the gods. That means they use the land as a means for mass production.

Enkidu managed to create numerous weapons considered state-of-the-art half a century ago, just one step below the current standard of weaponry.

One of those is this giant anti-aircraft gun and its every shot is boosted by Enkidu's magical energy.



And now is the moment the weapons started their operation.

Enkidu mercilessly unloaded the anti-aircraft artillery on the boy watching them from above.

With loud explosions, the arcane gunpowder made of earth rhythmically detonated inside the cannons.

"...!"

The boy judged it would be easy to dodge cannonballs that flew in a straight line after looking at their trajectory, but this naive thought didn't survive being put to the test.

Even after being fired, the shells are still Enkidu's arcana.

They may not be able to make full turns, but they still could take tricky trajectories that defied the laws of physics. The boy immediately determined this was the case and chose not to dodge but to completely neutralize the projectiles with his defenses.

He accelerated his mind once again until his vision was in slow motion and search for a gap he could attack from.

However, in this slowed-down scene, the cannons' firing speed hadn't decreased as much as the speed of everything around it. It was out of pace. Mismatched.

He knew from Flat's knowledge that one anti-aircraft gun can normally fire 12 shots per minute, but those were getting gradually faster than that.

"They're... accelerating?"

The 8 anti-aircraft guns had reached the pace of 1 shot per second.

The advantage provided by the boy's thought acceleration was being mitigated by the unfair power of a Servant's Noble Phantasm.

Below the boy, there was a curtain of cannonballs capable of exterminating the average phantasmal beast in one hit.

But the protective wall created by the peacock wing-like shadow symbol behind his back was equally on the level the laws of the world would deem unfair. Enkidu's arcane ammunition shattered against it.

"I see... I didn't think a temporary being would be able to sink its roots that deep into the planet.", dispassionately whispered the boy. "Great learning experience. Show me more."

He quietly took control of his breathing and coldly kneaded his magical energy while defending with precision.

He fully grasped the rhythm of the barrage and switched to an offensive spell that would pass through the gaps in the firing pattern. That instant, the moment the blast's flame dissipated, Enkidu appeared by surprise directly under him.

They had merged with a bundle of countless chains sprouting from the floor and fired themself as a high-density magical energy shell.

"I saw that move coming.", the boy declared dispassionate as ever. He unleashed his magical energy as a counter to Enkidu's main body.

High-density magical energy adjusted for the sole purpose of destruction.

If Enkidu dodged it, the tallest building in Snowfield would have been reduced to bricks in an instant.

The boy, fully aware of that, shot without hesitation. He had zero reasons to care about the concealment of magecraft. Enkidu also temporarily dropped their principle of arcane concealment.

Not that Enkidu's Master, a silver wolf, ever put any thought into the arcane concealment in the first place.

Countless chains rose from the ground below, enveloping the whole building.

It didn't stay that way for more than a few seconds, so a civilian watching from a distance could assume they saw Crystal Hill testing a special light setup for some event. And every mage watching the situation would make a face begging for mercy.

That is because they would know they're dealing with a Heroic Spirit, someone who requires a fair deal of power to stop.

After reaching the rooftop, the swarm of chains kept stretching higher to the skies, becoming a gigantic heavenward tree.

"Haha..."

Verifying that the attack he fired was absorbed into the great tree of light, and its energy used to stretch the chains even further, the boy sneered.

"I wish Flat could see this. He would have loved this over-the-topness."

Enkidu approached from below for a chop, which he blocked with a pitch-black blade extending out of the Hole in his chest and countered with several blades that pierced the divine doll's abdomen.

Even then, the Heroic Spirit maintained their pressure, pushing the boy's body further up and above.

Crystal Hill and Snowfield City were disappearing further and further into the distant background below.

Somewhere along the way, the boy and Enkidu noticed their energy scraped on a blimp under concealment magecraft, partially destroying it.

But neither of them had the time to care.

The great tree of chains involving the building had already disappeared and its energy was all poured into Enkidu's body.

Enkidu morphed their arms and part of the clothes into bird wings and kept rising higher with bursts of magical energy from their feathers.

This is not how real birds fly. Enkidu did this to incessantly attack amidst their powerful flight, perhaps imitating the flying phantasmal beasts of their time.

To counter that, the boy spread his own "wings" further and gathered the vestiges of mana in the skies above the planet.

The boy caught a random glimpse of a giant something swimming in the sky but was too busy to identify what it was.

Enkidu, pushing his body further up, opened their mouth.

"I knew you were a threat to my Master."

Their words expressed concern but still had a soothing tone to them.

As proof, Enkidu's next words were spoken with a tranquil smile.

"But I'm glad you were born. If no one else will celebrate your birth, I will."

"...? Oh... Thanks..."

The boy thanked before thinking, flustered by the unexpected words.

His words and expression showed confusion, but he never left his battle stance.

The same goes for Enkidu. With their body overflowing with magical energy, they took a look at the land expanding below them and spoke with heartfelt relief.

"It's proof that our planet still hasn't given up hope."

After trading remarkably powerful blows, the two opened up the distance between each other as they kept flying higher.

"Pretty late to this question, but what should I call you?"

Their surroundings suddenly grew dark and the stars above them more prominent.

Both the boy and Enkidu knew that the sun wasn't setting ahead of time.

Until this moment, the boy's eyes were filled with suspicion, but now they had a hint of the curious tone of Flat Escardos's eyes.

"Thia. Thia Escardos. My friend named me that. I won't go by any other name."

And so, the boy who used to be Flat Escardos a few moments prior spoke his name.

In this place dozens of kilometers above the ground, this altitude past the stratosphere but still not yet in the mesosphere, the boy spoke his name.

The air was 10 times thinner than it was on the surface.

Regardless, the two of them remained as capable of holding a conversation as ever, either because they loaded magical energy into their voices or because their hearing is abnormal. Enkidu heard his name clearly.

But their conflict didn't end there.

The lack of oxygen and the cosmic radiation didn't matter to the Heroic Spirit and the otherworldly boy.

The surveillance satellite registered their extended battle as gorgeous aurora lights... but since the data satellite observed only Snowfield for management purposes in Faldeus's organization, the footage never went public.

Though perhaps it would be safe to let it go public.

Any non-mage would dismiss it as a sensationalist video heavily edited to provide a made-up justification for what happened later.

Even the mages unaware of the Holy Grail War would come to the same conclusion.



Light.

Pure, overwhelming light contrasted with hollow shadows extended around Thia.

Another light shared the space of the stars and another shadow shared the space of the dark sky.

If Enkidu was the embodiment of nature, the boy had now become the embodiment of light and shadow.

With the spell that put the high-density magical energy in circulation, he twisted space, bending the light of the sun to form a new magic circle with it.

Meanwhile, the completely light-absorbing shadows produced a different spell, forming a multi-layered magic circle around the boy.

Enkidu was surprised at the image of the boy's Magic Crest seemingly starting to corrode the world itself.

"Are you trying to connect yourself to the world...? You really can see everything, huh..."

"..."

With this silent confirmation, the boy launched himself up with a sudden burst of speed. He placed himself precisely above Enkidu as he activate his new magecraft.

"...

Modding

Cheat on

."

His short words contained faint hints of grief and homesickness.

These words seemingly in tribute to Flat Escardos caused the boy to temporarily rewrite the laws of the world around him.




Unlike a Reality Marble, this was an attempt to permanently overwrite the real world. The rules of the world around him grew unstable.

With that momentum, he permeated himself into the world using magically compressed words that could be interpreted as either a chant, a confession, or a manifesto.

I am without the protection of Human Order.

Earth!

I support the current prime species' right to hate, pity, forgive, scream, and pray to its Counter Force

People!

In this crevice, I shall ingest all good and all evil to demonstrate who I am.

Sing! Dance!

My eyes sing praise to all human creation and for that very reason I take the challenge to overcome the human intellect.

Eternal doom comes.

Through this destruction, I'll be celebrating the prosperity of human intellect until the time the planet withers completely.

Do your best to survive!

These final words triggered an explosive expansion of the space distortion, taking Thia even higher as his magical energy spread to cover the area above the entire United States.

And the distortion started producing its own gravity, gathering together the objects above the planet's skies.

"Those things are human creations, huh.", Enkidu whispered.

The remains gathering around Thia are called space debris.

Dangerous fragments of dreams, sweat poured from steps in humanity's walk toward the sea of stars, floating in the skies at ferocious speeds.

By the year of Snowfield's Holy Grail War, the amount of space debris in the sky is estimated to be over 2000 tons.

From discarded satellites to detached spaceship implements to iron microfragments scrapped off with the attrition between two objects. Pieces of many different metals are drawn into the swirl, gathering and compressing around Thia.

The vortex also drew minuscule meteors and the microparticles left behind by comet trails. Those all combined into numerous tiny planets rotating around Thia.

Spheres of varying sizes orbited Thia like he was the sun in the Solar System.

He covered them in dense mana to make them as energetically large as they could be. Their rotation accelerated as abruptly as their magical energy circulation.

"...!"

Predicting what would happen next, Enkidu explosively unleashed the magical energy they brought with them from Earth's surface and prepared to intercept the attack.

The next instant... In an attempt to activate his magecraft before Enkidu had the time to deploy their Noble Phantasm, Thia yelled powerful words.

"

Hollowed Hearsay/Oblivion turns to festivity

A Clockwork Abbadon

!"

Numerous "moons" with masses ranging from 500 kilos to dozens of tons rained on Enkidu and Earth much beyond the speed of sound.

Due to a spell to ignore air resistance, the projectiles he continuously fired with the high speed of a railgun shot would never burn or slow down. It was clear that if they reached the surface, they would cause major harm to the land and all the life on it.

At that moment, the energy levels in Enkidu's body skyrocketed. Thia couldn't tell where all this power was coming from but all of the Heroic Spirit's parameters got a temporary boost.

"

People, let us bind the gods

Enuma Elish

!"

Enkidu unleashed their Noble Phantasm without a moment's delay.

The power to turn their Saint Graph into one all-piercing lynchpin weapon by borrowing power from the planet and Human Order.

Enkidu charged with the golden chains deploying around them, forming a spiral in attempt to crush all the numerous approaching malignant stars.

They collided.

And then there was a flood of light.

An enormous flower of magical energy bloomed in the upper limits of the stratosphere, with each of its petals holding the shattered asteroids.

The impact's rebound reached the Kármán line, which represents the border between the planet and the universe, where it became a pseudo-aurora gaudily decorating the space above Snowfield.

Thia's greater magecraft was possibly perceived as a threat to the planet or Human Order.

Through the power of the Counter Force poured into their Noble Phantasm, Enkidu managed to block the massive attack on Snowfield.

Which doesn't mean they perfectly neutralized the whole attack, however.

Its shockwaves were tremendous.



Quite a few star pieces slipped through the magical petals and landed on Earth, although scattering during their fall.

The smallest fragment slipped east, in Washington D.C's direction, falling where the Anacostia River meets the Potomac River.
The impact of the fragment falling in the center of a 1 km wide river instantly sent its water flying and was felt in the White House as an earthquake accompanied by heavy rain.

Another fragment pierced the ground of Yellowstone National Park, almost giving some geologists a heart attack by temporarily exciting the dormant magma.

Another fragment flew far west, crossing the Pacific Ocean and falling on Japanese maritime territory.
The fragment's uncontrollable magical energy generated heat, instantly evaporating a large volume of water on the oceanic surface.
The kilometers-tall splash and evaporation pillar was witnessed from the nearby coast and ships, generating online speculation about an underwater volcanic eruption, a long-ranged missile landing, or an alien invasion.

Another fragment fell on Russian land, raising an alert for an attack from another nation, which left the whole world in a tense state.

But it was the second large fragment that caused the biggest worldwide impact.
The fragment flew north preserving all of its tremendous magical energy, making the impact of its fall to physically obliterate its surroundings.
It didn't cause visible geographical changes, but its mental shock on humanity was large.
As the observation satellites suddenly showed that

12% of the Arctic ice caps vanished from one footage clip to the next.

Had this happened to Antarctica's ice, it would have had a tangible effect on Earth's oceanic levels.
Eventually, it was discovered that the fallen fragments were pieces of space debris, artificial satellite parts, leading to rumors that a space station fell off or that something caused all satellites around Earth to drop, but that was only many hours after the fact.

From a mage's point of view, the most significant fragment was the largest one.
It was less of a fragment and more of an asteroid still in its original form.
Thia used all other asteroids as decoys as he sent this one in a different trajectory with concealment magecraft hiding it from sight and magical energy detection. It was set to fall on Snowfield.

Did he do it for the sole purpose of eliminating the girl Ayaka Sajou?

Or maybe he was planning to take down Enkidu indirectly, by destroying either their Master or the land the Holy Grail was rooted on?

The answer was yes for both, but while they were correct answers, they weren't THE correct answer.

(Don't try to fool yourself. I hate the Holy Grail War. I hate this ritual and the guys who killed Flat for it. Humans... Human cities... Honestly, I quite liked London... But I don't care about this city. ... Flat, there's one thing I never told you about. The reason why you summoned that serial killer. That Heroic Spirit... couldn't possibly be brought out by a toy knife. It was because of me. Because I have the potential to be a serial killer for humanity... and I'm not anyone yet.)

This inner monologue was just a fraction of a second in the real flow of time, done amidst the fluid movement of dropping this asteroid on Earth.

But it didn't escape Enkidu's Presence Detection.

The tactic of perfectly concealing its magical energy backfired. In this space Thia and Enkidu made so turbulent with magical energy, one neutral spot becomes too conspicuous to go unnoticed.

Enkidu stretched their chains in an attempt to apprehend the egg-like asteroid of magical energy but Thia followed up his magecraft to prevent that.

This resulted in the magical asteroid flying toward Earth almost intact, although Enkidu managed to shift its trajectory.



Instead of Snowfield, it went to the largest city on the West Coast, Los Angeles.
Goodbye, City of the Angels.
Goodbye, Long Beach.
Goodbye, Griffith Observatory.
Goodbye, Hollywood.
Once he finished calculating the mark of the magecraft he fired, Thia noticed Hollywood was there and felt sad about it, remembering it was a place Flat wanted to go to, while simultaneously canceling the sadness with resignation, as he didn't care because there was no Flat in him anymore.
Direct contact with the malignant star's destruction and atomic decay spells would return the city named after the angels to light.
The magical energy contained in it could erase all life within a few kilometers' radius. And the decay that comes after the destruction would cause a chain of cataclysms by stimulating the land, the dragonveins, and the underground magma.
Not even Thia himself was able to stop this. This impact would define the future direction of humanity, on a physical level far beyond the arcane concealment.

Keyword: would.

Thia line of sight took him to a dense swirling cumulonimbus.

Supposedly a western hurricane that passed Los Angeles on its way to Nevada.

The giant cumulonimbus might seem like just a grotesque mass of giant clouds taking up space on Earth's troposphere but Thia always felt an unpleasant presence inside its dense clouds.

It felt like all the magical energy of the land and air around the cumulonimbus was trapped inside the cloud.

Some major unknown threat was inside it but he knew he was in no condition to do anything about it.

That's why he didn't give it any attention until now.

His magecraft would activate on impact, regardless of what was inside the cloud.

The boy wondered if the malignant star would get to ravage America's west metropolis.

But then something abnormal happened.

"..."

Thia was taken aback by what he saw.

Part of this over 500-kilometers-diameter swirling cumulonimbus wriggled like an animal raising its head, and from it, a pair of tornados grew pointing up.

The tornado system operated with a clear disregard for the laws of physics. It extended its whirls with beautiful symmetry, looking almost like the horns of a giant beast.

No.

Thia was sure.

They weren't "almost like horns".

Those were the real horns of a real colossus.

His magical energy sight could precisely confirm its arcanely concealed figure.

The pair of whirlwinds covered a deep yet lustrous blue.

The sea and the sky combined into a solid mass of azure made from pure lapis-lazuli in seemingly larger amounts than all minerals on Earth combined.

Adorned gold bones could be seen between the rifts of the giant typhoon cloud.

Each bone in the golden and blue beast was the size of a large city. It roamed the world with violent winds as its flesh.

(Its magical energy levels spiked...? I didn't see it draining the energy from the planet. Is that creature from... somewhere else...?)

Thia's mind was full of questions, but the biggest one was why it moved.

He immediately learned the answer.

The malignant star of atrocity and destruction zooming across the troposphere was going to hit one of its peninsula-sized azure horns.

The horn wriggled.

More precisely, the vast magical energy covered in divine aura gushing out from deep inside the horn did.

Unlike Thia's magical space distortions, the horned colossus used its divine aura to crush and swallow space, breaking the concepts of range and direction.

With its energy vector distorted, the malignant star began falling long before it hit Los Angeles, plunging in a straight line towards the colossal cumulonimbus face.

An egg of ruin and destruction, charged with enough power to cause a widespread earthquake when it hit the ground.

Is it more powerful than the hurricane then?

Obviously, comparing different forms of calamities is comparing apples and oranges, and cataclysmic earthquakes are inherently more damaging to the world than giant tornados, but looking only at their energy numbers, the bulky hurricane had the power of a hundred magnitude 9 earthquakes.

What would happen if all this energy walked like a beast?

The answer is what he sees.



A large hurricane made of dense cumulonimbus.

It was the textbook image of a typhoon, a beautiful rift separating the clouds from the sky. Almost a perfect circle when seen from above.

Nonetheless, for someone capable of seeing the dense magical energy it contained, it was a typhoon-sized colossus slowly walking in his direction.

Its bellows are gales.

Its veins are torrents.

Its huffs are lightning.

The dense cumulonimbus is its very meat while also the armor guarding the whole divine beast.

Not a zoomorphized cyclone. The opposite of that, in fact.

This appearance is the direct result of attempting to make a beast of the gods descend to the world without changing its shape. Thia knew exactly what the monster truly was.

The beast with the golden skeleton visible inside the cumulonimbus slowly raised its head.

No, it only seemed slow to Thia and Enkidu because of the distance between them. Considering its massiveness, the speed its chin opened and closed should have been amazing.

The malignant star slipped straight into the colossus' mouth, which closed soon after.

It would have immediately formed a dust cloud of destruction had it reached the ground.

But it never happened.

He waited for it, but it showed no signs of happening.

Gold and azure light shone in the hurricane's interior, explosively increasing its energy level without changing its size.

The 50m/s winds became 80 m/s, momentarily approaching the historical wind speed world record of 100 m/s.

The colossus could easily break the record if it dedicated all of its power to raise the wind speeds.

Was it just coincidence or did the divine beast has a reason not to do so? Maybe someone ordered him not to do it.

But these questions were trivial to Thia and Enkidu.

They were sure of it.

That this colossal cumulonimbus beast with a length in the triple digits of kilometers was looking at them.

And that this colossus hosting enormous calamity mocked them.



The boy reacted with a curious smile... while Enkidu lost his smile and gazed at the divine beast with a sad expression.

X X

West Snowfield, forest region

The duo flying high above had no idea that someone on Snowfield was observing the colossus' behavior.

The observer was Filia... Ishtar. Feeling what happened to the divine beast that is her property, she sighed.

"Oh, my boy never learns, does he?"

She wasn't bothered by the sudden power increase nor worried about the land's destruction.

She merely shrugged at her divine beast's appetite.



"Don't go complaining to me if the trash you ate gives you a stomachache."

- - - Updated - - -

All of chapter 21 compiled in a single post for indexing purposes and for the reading pleasure of whoever prefers this format.

Chapter 21: Beings shaped in man's image

Those who saw the creature or learned of its existence by detecting its magical energy reacted in several different manners.

However, while some considered it a problem that could be saved for later, none of them could completely ignore it.

They realized something "extraneous" brought to the land.

Something equal in rank to a Heroic Spirit manifested.



The team closest to it at the moment of its birth was Saber Richard the Lionheart and his Master Ayaka.

"A-aaaaah... No... NO..."

In face of the brutality she just witnessed, Ayaka fell to her knees, covering her eyes so she wouldn't have to look at the blown head of the young man's corpse.

"..."

While Ayaka screamed in rejection of that reality, a different emotion welled up in her heart.

(It happened again. Someone died because I stood there doing nothing. Again.)

She felt this emotion akin to resignation, and the fretfulness and fear that formed to hide that under.

When confronted with the fact that the man she just met suddenly died before her eyes, she was assailed by several different emotions. So many that another version of herself showed up as a mental defense reaction to get her to calm down.

(Tell me, why was he killed?)
(He seemed like he knew me... But I don't know him.)
(Wouldn't that because I am a Master.)
(Then you mean he's also a Master? That's why he was killed?)
(In that case, who is the next target?)

"...!"

Having immediately understood the situation, Ayaka raised her head and tried to stand up.

She was still startled and unable to put strength in her legs. The shiver in her spine consumed all other sensations.

Before she noticed it, Saber was embracing her.



He carried her straight to a nearby building. Inside, he placed Ayaka back on the ground, at a spot that wouldn't be visible from any of the surrounding buildings.

"Ayaka. Are you alright?"

"...!"

(Right. Now is not the time to be shaking.)

"Yeah, thank you."

What stopped her trembling was her memory of the contract she formalized with Saber.

ー"Answer me. Are you my Master?"

She had answered Saber's question.

Not with the formal response nor with anything clever.

Just a nod.

She simply moved her chin down. No other gesture could have been simpler. And yet, the amount of resolve contained in this gesture made it feel like the first time she took action in her life, as far as she could remember.

(Becoming a Master was a path I chose of my own will.)

With this reconfirmation, she regained the resolve she had at the moment of her choice.

Her shaking stopped and her loaded scream sunk back to the depths of her throat.

She still didn't have any clear idea of what the relationship between a Master and a Servant was like, but she knew that her whining about how she was an outsider roped into the conflict wouldn't cut it anymore.

She figured out that she wouldn't be able to escape the spiral of fate no matter what.

She would be pressured into making a choice, whether she wanted it or not. Her life was being targeted by someone she couldn't reason with.

But she wasn't alone.

If she let herself be crushed without a fight, Saber would be dust.

(I can't let that happen. I haven't repaid anything I owe to this King... No, this isn't about owing him. I'm doing what I want because I want it.)

She was thrown into a life-staking battle when she couldn't find a solid answer to the question of "why am I alive?".

If she wanted to surmount her grievances, if she wanted to walk side by side with Saber, this uninhibited busybody who was nothing like her, she couldn't run away screaming.

Her whole body regained strength as her blood started circulating again and she recovered her lost sensations.

She didn't know if this stir all over her body was that "magical energy" she heard so much of or pure bravado.

(Besides... It's not the first time someone I know dies before my eyes...)

After that out-of-place self-derisive thought, she was hit with confusion.

(Wait...? Who died the first time again...? No, now is not the time to think about it.)

A stir formed in Ayaka's heart, but she didn't give it enough attention that it would prevent her from standing up.

And then she assessed her situation to plan the next step.

"..."

A tragedy occurred less than a minute ago. Flashbacks to the color and smell of the blood left her nauseated, but she pushed it back down and questioned Saber about the situation.

"What happened?"

"A sniper attack. We're surrounded by numerous shooters. Normal bullets don't work on us Heroic Spirits, so they'll be aiming for Masters."

"Huh? You mean... that wasn't a Heroic Spirit attack? It was all guns?"

Ayaka gulped and ran her eyes across her surroundings.

She didn't think she would find any assailants, much less the snipers, but she couldn't go without checking.

"The guy who talked me is..."

The Holy Grail War was a bloodshed without rules. She could believe that enemies would attack in broad daylight in a populated district.

Saber told her about the spirit of arcane concealment, but the same Saber responding to a TV interview didn't make it look like this law was taken seriously. The intensity of the battle in front of the hospital told her everything she needed to know about the safety of the masses in the city.

"I see... If they kill people with normal guns, that would even touch that arcane concealment thing."

"That's the idea. There should be a precedent set for that in past Holy Grail Wars. Well, any mage prioritizing efficiency would endorse that thought. And that's why you need a Servant."

She knew the city was ridden with armed mercenaries due to Sigma and the group surveilling the mansion in the marsh. In any other situation, John's squad of policemen with swords and spears would be a more concerning image, but when the firearms are trained on her, who can blame her for not thinking anywhere was safe?

With a chill running down her spine, Ayaka questioned Saber.

"So, they could blow this whole building up with a bomb if that's what it takes?"

"Perhaps. If killing was all that mattered, modern science has those missiles and chemical weapons to do the job. But one reason not to use them is their potential to destroy the city's ritualistic foundations. In other words, if the enemy didn't mind botching the ritual, they could blow a hydrogen bomb on the city and call it a day. This means they're trying to win the ritual and, well, even then, one or two buildings is not enough of a loss to get them to think twice."

After this whole preamble, Saber looked at Ayaka with a quite serious expression to deliver the final part.

"A colosseum full of people would be not a big deal for them."

"Gh... This is a literal war."

With a snide comment to lighten the burden of reality, Ayaka calmed down her mind and asked Saber the next question.

"Do you know what happened to his body?"

The boy knew something about her. More precisely, he knew about Sajou Ayaka, a girl with the same name and face as her.

In a mix of a wish for any crumbles of information she could get and the guilt from potentially getting the boy shot because he came to see her, Ayaka wanted to at least learn his name.

But with a sullen expression, Saber shifted his attention to the entrance he came from.

"? What's wrong?"

"Nothing... I was curious about the same thing, actually... Loxley told me the boy got up after the shots..."

"What...?"

Loxley was the name of one of the companions Saber carried as part of his Noble Phantasm.

He received a telepathic report, but Ayaka couldn't understand the meaning behind it.

"Huh, but he got shot in the head... Did he survive? Don't tell me magecraft can do that?"

"I can make quite a few guesses... provided I was right in assuming he wasn't a Heroic Spirit."

Saber listed his hypothesis, raising one finger at a time to count them.

"The first is that an illusion or a familiar took the bullets instead of him. That is possible, but if it's true, there's no point in him getting up immediately. The second is that he used the power of magecraft to revive his blown head... In the words of advisers more well-versed in magecraft, it'd take a considerably powerful Magic Crest or an arcanum close to magic, but it's not impossible to bring someone nominally 'back from the dead'. Let's keep this one in mind for later. Third. He's something other than a person. Perhaps a high-level vampire or Natural Spirit, a mythical being from the Inner Sea of the Planet, or a Foreigner from beyond the stars. If that's the case, things won't be pretty."

"How bad are we talking here?"

"His presence would be a bigger concern than the arcane concealment. Non-humans care about toppling a human city as much we would care about toppling a sand castle."

Saber had a complex expression, mixing drive and excitement with fear and curiosity as he was reminded of "something" he saw in the past.

But receiving a further report, he turned to Ayaka with a stern expression.

"The boy's shooters were... already eliminated."

"What do you mean, eliminated?"

Ayaka knew exactly what the word meant, but the situation was hard to swallow.

"Ayaka, what's our plan? I personally would like to continue the battle, but without knowing if he's an enemy or an ally, I recommend prioritizing your safety. You're still fine in terms of magical energy, but your mental exhaustion could hamper our continued battle capabilities."

Saber's instincts let him pull through multiple battlefields and family conspiracy.

And those instincts were telling that the presence outside the building was more dangerous than the average Heroic Spirit.



"It's possible this building will already be flattened by the time we decide if he's an enemy or an ally."

X X

The ones standing second closest to the incident were the policemen who returned from the Reality Marble together with Ayaka.

A few minutes earlier.

John and Vera heard the air razing and the asphalt shattering, and immediately realized it was a sniper attack.

They looked around and found Flat bleeding from the chest not too far away from them.

Next, they saw the moment Flat's head burst. Without waiting for Vera's orders, the group hid behind the nearby cars and buildings.

"What about Ayaka Sajou? Oh, it's fine, Saber will protect her."

John worried about Ayaka since she was a civilian but to his relief, he saw Saber carrying her away, raising walls of water along the way. At the same time, indescribable anger and sorrow dominated his brain.

(Shit, why Flat Escardos... Who did this?! Another Master?!)

His first suspect for the sniper was a member of the Scladio Family, Bazdilot Cordelion's team.

But they were on Central Avenue.

Not only it's blocked off to prevent attacks on the police, but it's also directly under the jurisdiction of the Grail War's management.

(It couldn't be someone from management, could it? Does the Chief know anything?)

Some of his teammates had the long-range Noble Phantasm necessary to be the sniper, but what he saw looked more like a physical shot from a regular gun than a Noble Phantasm.

(Then who did this?)

He couldn't take his time to speculate.

Vera was trying to call the chief, but the situation changed again before she could.



They saw movement close to their ally's destroyed head.

An eldritch monster was born next to Flat Escardos, almost ridding everyone who saw it of their sanity, and jumped to the nearby buildings.

It was Heroic Spirit Jack the Ripper's last stand.

However, the Heroic Spirit let his emotions get the better of him and overexerted his power, crumbling to light dust before he could reach the building's rooftop.

His magical energy path was severed, so he couldn't maintain his form.

They didn't know if he was completely terminated or forced into spirit form.

Either way, with his Master dead, he was bound to die out unless he formed a new contract.

John's team only had one brief conversation with the boy in the church, but that alone gave them enough of an understanding of who Flat Escardos was.

His personality was not like a mage's, but it was far from an ordinary person's either. Regardless, they understood that he was not a bad guy.

Another factor to consider is that, although they were a group of mages, their unique position as magecraft-practicing police officers gave them values very separate from the Clock Tower norm.

ー"You are justice."

That's what their Chief declared when the Holy Grail War started. Those words circulated their bodies like blessings and curses.

That made it difficult for them to accept the sight of their ally, a very young man, losing his life like it was nothing.

The members of Clan Calatin had the resolve to put down the child Kuruoka Tsubaki if that was what justice demanded but when this brutal murder happened without giving them time to gather any form of resolve, they were furious.

Except said fury turned into confusion the next second.



"What...?"

John wasn't the only one to say it.

Vera opened her eyes wide and hung up her call before connecting with the Chief.

The other policemen also reacted with a varied range of bewilderment.

After all, when it looked like Flat Escardos's head was blown off, his body was encased in shadow, only to stand up the next second, with its lost head recovered.

For an instant, they were reminded of the "mud" worn by the bowman they fought, but they knew it was something else.

The "mud" they saw was a dark red that burned all to cinders. And the Kuruoka Tsubaki Servant that swallowed them later was a chilly gloom that dragged all inside it.

In contrast, what enveloped Flat was a perfect hollow.

A pure jet-black, seemingly sucking all light in. This black started converging to the bullet holes in Flat's abdomen until a person appeared deep in the hollow's interior.

Upon processing the image of the individual inside the hollow, many policemen screamed. Even John and Vera were covered in cold sweat.

They knew that wasn't Flat Escardos.

That it wasn't even human.

X X


The highest floor of Crystal Hill

Tine Chelc could feel the creature's birth. She mistakenly assumed the sensation was poison being poured all over her body, but despite this misunderstanding, she didn't slow down the magecraft preserving her Servant, Gilgamesh's body.

That's because she knew that if she lost focus for one instant, the Saint Graph body in front of her would crumble.

She kept hearing confused voices from her tribe subordinates gathered at the window to see what was happening outside.

Regardless, Tine wouldn't move.

Next, her subordinates' voices were filled with fear and panic.

"What's that?"

"A monster."

They exchanged dubious words across the suite room.

Despite the numerous yells, all too vague to be the words of mages, she didn't think her subordinates went crazy.

Her magecraft drew energy from the land's dragonvein.

Therefore, she had a clear feel for what was happening.

Something not of this world was born on the land.

It was the advent of something beyond reason, with a power that wasn't that of a mage or a Heroic Spirit.

However, aware of all that, she didn't take her hands off her magecraft.

This signified that what was happening was simply trivial to her.

While she poured her magical energy, she continuously questioned her own way of life.

What did she lack?

What must she do?

Who is Tine Chelc?

The regretful girl searched for answers.

Gilgamesh.

What would make her worthy of being this exceptional Heroic Spirit's Master?

What would make her worthy of being the great Hero King's subject?

X X

West Snowfield, forest region

"..."

The one inhabiting Filia's body turned around, letting her silver hair flutter beautiful like a winter lake's surface.

She looked in the city's direction. Haruri, Berserker Huwawa's Master, asked her about it.

"What happened?"

"Hm, nothing huge."

She tried to say it casually but just hearing her words already agitated the magical energy in Haruri's body.

She was looking at a homunculus hosting a Saint Graph claimed to be Uruk's god of fertility Ishtar.

To be more exact, the personality in her body was a "blessing" the goddess Ishtar left in the world, but those details made no difference to Haruri. Talking to her was the same as talking to Ishtar's Divine Spirit.

Without paying much attention to Haruri, the homunculus possessed by the Divine Spirit's echo looked at the tall Crystal Hill at the center of the city and let out an intrigued mutter.

"Heh. So this kind of thing can be born even in this era."

"?"

"Well, whatever. For now, I still don't need to decide if I should bless its birth or eliminate it. Getting things ready for Gugalanna's arrival is the bigger priority! It's boring work, but I can't go back on my word after I declared to him that I wouldn't lay a finger on the two before we were together."

The Divine-possessed was interested, but changed subjects, indicating she would deal with it later.

Her words puzzled Haruri.

("The two"? She probably means those two people she mentioned a while ago as "the causes of her manifestation in this place". And I think I already saw one of them, that Archer in golden armor from the battle in front of the hospital. But Huwawa already killed the Archer. What does she mean by "not laying a finger on the two" when she already got rid of one? I can't understand the mind of a Divine Spirit. Is she glitching, or...)

"That's a pretty nice land. It's going to waste with that bunch of junk on it, so I gotta show how to use it more effectively!"

Her next words sounded like a joke, but the Divine Spirit voice being used to deliver them shifted the tone to that of a divine message being relayed through an Oracle.

"I'm gonna make this land into the new Mount Ebih!"

"Excuse me?"

Haruri couldn't help blurting out a reaction despite Filia/Ishtar's overwhelmingly arcane voice.

(Mount Ebih... like the Jabal Hamrin from the Zagros Mountains? The one goddess Ishtar destroyed in Enheduanna's epics?)

In response to Haruri's confusion, the beautiful homunculus showed a smile loaded with divinity, containing a charm the common people were unable to resist.

It was her way of emphasizing she was not joking.

"I'm going to build a temple here before my boy Gugalanna arrives... I'm counting on your help!"

X X

Snowfield's industrial district, meat factory

"..."

A meat factory is being used as a workshop for Bazdilot's team.

Large chunks of it were destroyed by Haruri's Berserker Servant and patched together by Prelati's illusions, but the process to restore its functionality without illusions made a lot of progress in the past 24 hours.

During it, the Archer in spirit form, known as Alcides, manifested in front of Bazdilot, who was amidst the process of absorbing magical crystals to interact with the Mud.

"What?", Bazdilot kept his question at the minimal word count.

"The mage who outwitted me... The man probably from a land related to me, he seems to have flipped inside-out."

"Is that a problem?"

"I won't know until I see it. But judging by the quality of his presence... he might be one, not for us but for humanity."

Bazdilot responded to Alcides's dispassionate words without slowing down his procedure or even looking in his Servant's direction.

"Then do what you think is necessary."

After giving an equally dispassionate answer, Bazdilot regurgitated his magical energy and emotions to the interior of the rampaging Mud trying to corrode him from the inside.

It was as if he was trying to raise this pack of human malice as a cherished son.

"The enemy of our enemy isn't always our friend, but the more failures we can exploit, the better."

X X


North Snowfield, strath

"Are you okay, Master?", said Rider Hippolyte in a concerned tone.

Through the magical energy link that connects Masters and Servants, she could feel her Master intensely unsettled.

She didn't ask why.

That was because she already had a pretty good idea of their reason.

A natural workshop was built by altering the very land and space in part of the ravine.

Inside it, one could see a broad image of what was happening outside. Nonetheless, the space was sheltered from all external interference, as it was highly removed from the world.

While she was impressed by how advanced the technique was, Hippolyte braced herself and focused her attention on the cause of her Master's disarray: the otherworldly presence that appeared in the city.

"I can go whenever you're ready. I'm here as a Servant, but even if I were here as the queen of the Amazons, I still wouldn't hesitate to risk my life for the sake of a friend and equal."

"Oh, I'm fine... Sorry for worrying you, Rider."

Deep inside the workshop, a young man's voice reverbed.

Hippolyte believed his words and didn't pry any further.

Her Master was trustworthy.

There was one thing she was sure about, as a Servant, as the queen of the Amazons, and as Hippolyte the individual: she was lucky to have what was probably the best Master in this Grail War.

X X

I considered "me", Flat Escardos, to be a lovely neighbor.

I'm hearing... something.

We're not exactly siblings.

Much less split personalities.

Flat and I have different souls and different foundations of existence, after all.

What am I hearing?

It's like the sound of gears grinding.

Something inside my body is breaking, tearing, and snapping.

I was the first of the two to become conscious, apparently.

But I can't say for sure.

Well, since Flat's brain activity was a stepping stone for the development of my consciousness, it's pointless to ask who came first, I guess.

The sound, the sound, my body, I can't mo- Ah, it's me.

The sound, inside me. My spine. It's hot. It hurts. It's cold.

What's? Happening? To my body?

At the moment the Magic Crest is inherited, the consciousness of the provisory proprietor... Flat's consciousness concludes its role and is supposed to vanish from inside me completely.

That was the plot written 1800 years ago.

Flat's ancestor, Messara Escardos, was a proper mage, despite his romanticism.

He was a mage like the ones you know.

Does that give you some peace of mind?

A v-v-v-voice voice. Whose voice?

I can't see anything. Who where? Where?

Flat was an unwanted child, a soul despised by his own parents. He was meant to be deleted, as needless data I wasn't going to absorb anything from.

But guess what? Flat noticed me.

He found me in there. Can you believe that?

Ever since he was conscious, he could tell I was living under the circuits that composed him.

His genius has nothing to do with me... I think.

He had my body in its perfected state but it was through his own sharpness that he managed to manifest my abilities, even if only my eyes. And that's not even the most amazing thing about him.

Where did my eyes go?

Remember. My finger. That monster. The monster plucked my finger off.

Flat, Flat.

Right. Flat Escardos.

That's the target's name.

The brat I, the brat we shot dead.

Faldeus said he was regular mage.

Then why we couldn't kill him for real?

Did the Heroic Spirit do this? No.

I was incomplete until the start of the transplant of Magic Crest, which contains my program.

So he could have erased me if he wanted to.

I've heard of this one vampire who can reincarnate by printing his soul into others, but unfortunately, my existence isn't as firm as his.

I was arranged to first reach completion when combined with the Magic Crest Messara designed.

If I was discovered before this stage, I'd be the one deleted. When that happens, whoever had my perfected body would be running Messara's Magic Crest instead of me, giving a chance to the next generation. That's his idea of settling for the second-best outcome, I guess.

Expect Flat didn't erase me.

Not even when he was old enough to understand what I was. Not even when he gained the means to eliminate me.

Flat extended a friendly hand to the one who was planning to delete him.

Fully aware of everything.

Perhaps a mage who understood of what his ancestor was trying to accomplish would offer themselves, but... Flat wasn't like that.

Well, I'm also sort of special... or I should say Messara was. The data recorded in the Magic Crest contained no algorithm demanding that I be like a proper mage.

Messara only demanded that I stayed alive. That I kept existing.

He didn't want his continued existence, only the continued existence of his creation.

He wanted me to, if possible, find a way to stay alive on this planet after the end of Human Order or after humanity detached itself from the planet.

What is this voice?

Is it talking to me?

Oh? You're conscious of me? Took you long enough.

Or is it that your mind finally got used to the situation?

I guess it was weird of me to expect you to zone in any sooner.

After all, it only has been three seconds since I accelerated your thoughts, if I had to count in terms of this planet's standard time flow axis.

Accelerated thoughts? What have you...?

It's too dark, I can't see anything.

Is this telepathy? What's going on? I can't move!

It's not dark at all.

Our world is brimming with radiant light... It's really a place worth living in.

Flat told me it was. If he said it's bright, it can't be dark.

It's just... not visible to you right now.

Might be because I gouged your eyes out.

That said, Flat wasn't talking about light in the visual information sense. He meant it in the emotional sense.

Well, you won't be able to sense that light either, considering you're about to die.

Unless death is a source of hope for you.

Ah, that reminds me, Flat always dreamed of having something called the Mind's Eye.

Gouged my eyes? My eyes, eyes?

Who? Who are you? What are you?

The last thing I saw...

Was like...

Flat's... other personality?

That's not what I am. Did you already forget the first thing I told you?

I am... hmm, let's see.

I believe the answer is too complex for you, so just think of me as something like a devil.

Not a devil. Something like one. Important distinction.

Nowhere near as major of an entity as the True Devils lurking on this planet.

Think of a more abstract kind of devil. The kind that appears in your human society allegories.

The kind that appears in the cartoonish hell invoked by Jack the Ripper's Noble Phantasm. Yes, that might be the closest analogy.

After all, that's the exact idea Messara Escardos was going for when he created me.

Messara? Who? What are you talking about?

Aaah, Aaah, eyes! My EYES!

That Heroic Spirit... The man calling himself Dumas knows I exist.

But he ignored me.

He avoided my domain almost completely when he mixed Flat and Jack the Ripper.

I have nothing but praise for his finesse, but it disturbs me a little how I have no idea why he did that.

Still, I couldn't exactly take my time to ponder his objective while the process was happening.

While my emotions have no real equivalent in human emotions, I guess it'd be somewhat accurate to say I was jealous.

Oh yeah, that's right, I envied that serial killer Heroic Spirit.

His soul was mixed with Flat's in a much truer sense than mine.

If it was me instead of him, I wouldn't have let Flat die.

I could easily have reflected your lead bullets.

This very Holy Grail War could have been...

...

No, forget it.

The Grail War was Flat's, not mine.

It's not a place for someone like me, who doesn't have a wish for the Holy Grail.

I just helped him do his analyses sometimes.

Flat is enough of a genius to do it on his own, but he's lazy, so I'm often helping.

Think of me as his navigation system.

What are you talking about?

What are you making me listen to?

Sorry, I've gone off-topic.

I didn't mean to get this emotional.

Flat had a mostly positive view of everything, but I'm more of a negative person.

I'm a fan of poetry and melodrama.

That's the reason.

This is why I'm accelerating your thought channels and taking turns talking to you one by one.

Flat would never do something like this. He's too efficiency-minded for it. If he were in my place, he'd have laughed this whole thing off.

But I can't be like that.

I've existed for a long time, but this is the first time I can go out and talk to people.

I wished I knew how to talk like Flat's mentor.

What a fascinating teacher, that man is.

His speeches are clever but clear, irresolute but strong-willed.

And most of all...

...oh, sorry. Off-topic again.

The most relevant and important thing here is the first thing I said.

I considered "me", Flat Escardos, to be a lovely neighbor.

Everything I said about myself so far has been a preamble to emphasize this main point.

After he recovered the whole Magic Crest in the Casa and I gained all of my knowledge, I became sure of my mission and tried to delete Flat. When I did...

That hopeless genius smiled at me.

Flat saved my heart.

Flat swore the two of us would live together.

And you killed him.

A, ah!

I remember I remember I remember.

M-m-my bod-d-d-d-dy-y-y-y.

He fol-ded-ded me.

I heard the creak. It was my spine.

Crushed? Torn? No, which? No, no, NO.

Don't get me wrong.

This is not revenge. My goal is not to extend your suffering.

Well, me killing you is obviously your just deserts for killing Flat and also a means to fulfill the mission engraved in me.

But this part about accelerating your thoughts to get this whole telepathic speech across is because I wanted you to know the motive behind your gruesome deaths.

I don't think Flat would kill you if you killed me.

One time, I told Flat he needed to kill someone. His answer:

"I won't say murder is NEVER okay, but if you have to kill someone, I think you should tell them your reasons first. I'm sure both of you will feel better about it that way. Even if you can't get them to agree with you, the fact that you took your time to tell them is important."

What an idiot, don't you agree?

Why waste a chance to kill for a parting rant?

You'd think someone who refuses to kill because it's inefficient wouldn't advise me that not carrying any hard feelings when I kill is a long-term benefit.

Even in his last minutes, he was wasting his time with concern for that thing.

He made his excuse that the thing looked like Sajou Ayaka, but why should we care? Our eyes can tell at first glance that it was someone else... Not even human.

That's why he died.

You ended Flat and I began.

And I told you the whole story, as a tribute to Flat.

That's all I wanted to say.

Sorry for wasting your time.

There's no stopping what's happening to you, so I'll turn off the mental acceleration.

Sto

He lp

My bad. One thing I said was a lie.

You have no idea how much I'd love to make you suffer for a long, deep, hollow, and eternal time.

You should be grateful that I'm not.

Not to me but to Flat Escardos.






...

...





Ah, ah.

Look at how easily a human dies just from being folded to the size of a kitten.

You people need sturdier souls.

The Holy Grail could fix souls into a material state, was it?

...Well not with the Grail here.

Snowfield's vessel doesn't have the Third's essence.

But what about the real one?

Could Fuyuki's Holy Grail do it?

Does the famed land still have the Holy Grail? Its vestiges? Its corpse?

...

No, don't get any stupid ideas.

It's too late to materialize his soul. It won't turn back time.

That's the domain of another magic. One far distant from the third one.

I'll just do what I must.

Human malice took Flat Escardos away from me.

It was an attack against my reason to live. Against my very life.

Then I'll strike back.

To prolong my survival.

To continue my survival.




I'll live the long life my friend couldn't. This is for the only one who understood me... The sole human I meant to protect.

X X

Snowfield, central street

The best way to describe the creature was as a torrent of power.

A huge clump of energy, like a Heroic Spirit but somewhat different.

Like a living tornado of Elements, repeating the cycle of compressing the Elements of its surroundings, accelerating them, and immediately bursting them back out.

Taking water as a metaphor, it could be described as a hydraulic jet cutter shaped to a specific form.

Its amount of water is nothing compared to a giant waterfall, but with enough speed, its spray becomes a fluid blade capable of splitting rocks.

Likewise, a torrent of magical energy whirled in the skies above Snowfield, circulating with enough intensity to crush souls.

The otherworldly creature did nothing but circulate magical energy at high speeds. Like a momentary glimmer turned permanent. The "specific form" it was shaped to was none other than the human form.

A grotesque humanoid figure, close yet distant in shape to what once was Flat Escardos.

The young Master of Jack the Ripper's clothes were stained with his blood and had a large rifle bullet hole in the chest.

Nothingness and light could be seen from the gaps in the red fabric.

The bullet hole in the chest revealed an open scar composed of crack-like lines, reminiscent of punched glass.

An elongated slant ran through the hole, and jet-black darkness could be seen from inside it.

It was like a mass of dark, dim shadows sucking in all light.

Despite being in the center of a human body, the hole felt deep as an infinite corridor. Its apparent absorption of light made it the most prominent part of the entity.

And a giant light source can be seen from the gaps of the hole, assumedly the final destination of all the absorbed light.

It was a light source, but the darkness in the hole wasn't illuminated by it.

The light source emphasized only its own existence - a Core resembling a giant eyeball, covering only its own body in radiant light.

A third party has no way of knowing if this "eye" too massive to be a real human eye is the Core controlling the darkness or a Core domesticated by the infinite hollow enveloping it.

And what was above this hole and eyeball?

A head. The most important part in the composition of a humanoid figure. Contrary to the grotesqueness of the center of its body, its head looked quite peaceful.

Like a young human's head, at first glance.

But anyone who knew Flat Escardos could tell from a distance that that was not him.

Short protuberances appeared on the sides of its head, barely visible from the gaps of its hair, which is longer than Flat's.

Bizarrely shaped horns or antennae, like a mix between the luminescent crystal wings of an insect and the leaves of a tree, wiggled upwards, in a struggle against gravity.

It might look like a boy dressed as some kind of mystical creature for Halloween, but the almost arcane harmony of its design let anyone tell at first glance that what they were seeing was real.

The face on it looked perfectly human, molded as a more refined version of Flat's now blown-off face.

But contrary to Flat's peaceful, innocent, and boyish eyes, the figure had the lonely eyes of someone who disdained, pitied, and detested all in the world. Around those eyes, there were marks that could be interpreted as either scars or tattoos.

Its face looked even younger than the already babyfaced Flat.

Its body was also quite deaged. The clothes that fit Flat perfectly rapidly became too big for the new body, and the holes in them started to expose skin.

But what was inside the clothes is still as hollow as before.

Like a broken ball-jointed doll, it was missing most of its hip and elbows.



The shot portions of Flat's body could be seen crumbling in real-time.

The hollow shadows leaked out of the cracks in an attempt to prevent that and hold the human body in place.

Its limbs floated in the air despite the lack of knees and elbows, making the world assume its silhouette was one of someone with a complete body.

Despite taking the appearance of a young boy, the otherworldly creature had a mature figure and grotesque shape. It set foot at the tallest peak in Snowfield -the Crystal Hill rooftop- and took a slow look at its surroundings.

It no longer showed any interest in the folded cadavers atop the other buildings' roofs.

Instead, it borrowed one of their sniper rifles and gracefully placed its finger on the trigger.

But instead of pulling it, it just stared at the gun with uninterested eyes before tossing it away.

With a loud metallic noise, the gun hit the heliport floor without ever going off.

The otherworldly creature in the shape of a boy in his midteens mechanically spun its head to observe the city's sceneries.

It found the central park where Flat Escardos first summoned Jack the Ripper.

Next, it turned its eyes to the police station where the Executor fought the bloodsucker.

The motel they were using as a base, the opera house where he was called for a TV interview...

Its eyes eventually passed through the hospital where they fought that powerful Archer... and locked at its final destination, the spot where Flat was ultimately shot.

Once his eyes were done tracing the steps of the young Master in this land, the boy close them and stopped moving as if it was making a silent prayer.

It's possible he was indeed making a silent prayer.

Though he will never tell what he prayed about in this silence.

The boy opened his eyes and saw a fast-moving figure.

Richard the Lionheart, a Heroic Spirit with a Saber Saint Graph.

The otherwordly boy's eyes sharpened when he saw what Saber was carrying.

The special Magic Circuits connected to these sharpened eyes understood everything.

He knew what the Ayaka Sajou in Richard's arms was.

He knew the tremendous size of the magical energy swirling inside Ayaka.

He didn't learn it now. He understood it the second he first looked at Ayaka Sajou through Flat Escardos's eyes.

Ayaka was the opposite of him. A vast still lake of magical energy.

Massive amounts of unmoving magical energy. It will never go active of its own volition, but in exchange, it can become a giant source of power without needing to make any moves of its own.

Knowing that, he had to accept a fact whether he wanted or not:

Ayaka Sajou was not one of his own kind, but she was exactly as otherworldly to human society as he was.

"That creature... will be a problem later."

The words he whispered could have been his true opinion, but they could also have been part of his farewell ritual to Flat. The boy didn't know.

And without looking for the answer, the boy circulated magical energy in his hand.

With the sound of grinding gears, shadows seeped out of the hole in his chest and enveloped his arms.

Magic circles appeared where his missing elbows should be and his chest started sending magical energy through his floating forearms to their focal points in his fingertips, amplifying the energy throughout the travel.

The shadows enveloping his arms form further magic circles as they expand, adding second and third layers to the elbows and in front of his palms.

Furthermore, the shadow stretching from his back collected crystalline shards from the atmosphere to grow into a pair of wings, then started drawing a tridimensional emblem in the air.

Flueger, a mage observing the scene from a distance, reported it to his employer as follows:

Common sense tells me I'm probably wrong
But I think that thing was... Magic Circuits... no, an externally expanded Magic Crest
This thing's on a level beyond those monstrous Magic Crests from ancient houses
The Magic Crest broke out and is now one... no, countless independent living beings
Real-time Magic Crest growth... Nah, sorry man, I gotta be jumping the gun with these theories

A report that made its sender question his own sanity.

Magic Circuits and Magic Crests are two very important substances to mages.

Magic Circuits are an essential "organ" for the use of magecraft, spread through the body in the form of a fixed number of pseudo-nerves. One reason behind the mages' jus sanguinis doctrine is that they strive to increase this number, even if by just 1.

Likewise, the Magic Crest is a symbol of the accumulation of experience in a mage's bloodline. However, normal Magic Crest are not provided with biological functions like the one you're currently seeing. Instead, they are "artificial hearts" designed by each family to be passed from parent to child.

The Crest's creation is supposed to span centuries or millennia with each holder adding their own contribution to it. It suddenly proliferating outside the holder's body is normally unthinkable.

But the boy immediately figured out what was this thing constructing himself around him and what was it for.

The magical energy in the city's rich air, or perhaps the land's dragonvein resources allotted to the Holy Grail, were assembling themselves together around the boy in a frantic speed.

Borrowing Holy Grail War terminology, the sheer of magical energy concentrated in one place could plainly be described as a "Noble Phantasm".

The boy's sharp glare aimed his arms and the magical energy they controlled at Ayaka and Saber, ready to shoot.

And then, at the moment of the fallout...

"Hi."

A soothing voice echoed, dissipating all tension.

After the boy stopped his movements, he skillfully put the concentrated magical energy to circulate around himself and turned back.

There he saw someone appeared behind him before he noticed it. They spoke, still in the same soothing voice.

"Nice to meet you, friend."



He saw a forest, an ocean, a mountain, a city... one world standing before him.

The boy's special "eyes" made him more aware of what he was facing than any other person.

A being unlike himself or Ayaka, who did nothing other than blend their power with the world's.

They weren't concealing their presence.

They were assimilated into the wide world with no efforts to hide their powerful presence.

Mother Nature in human form. Confronted by the questioning eyes of this being somewhat similar to Divine or Natural Spirits, the boy opened his mouth.

"A Heroic Spirit...? The protectors of Human Order are here to erase me?"

"Right now I'm just a Servant walking the land with my Master. Besides, the planet doesn't seem to have decided its opinion on you yet."

"Then what are you here for?"

The boy spoke with maximum caution, but not out of suspicion. He decided from the first moment that he was talking to an enemy.

The Heroic Spirit, this beautiful figure with green hair flowing in the wind, responded with a soothing smile.

"You know this girl you were just trying to obliterate?" Still with no hostility in their smile, the Heroic Spirit -Enkidu- gushed magical energy around themself with the elegance of vegetation fluttering in the wind. "I'm on an alliance with her team. I can't ignore the signs of an attack when I see one."

" 'this girl'? You're seriously counting that as a person, Servant?"

"Yeah, she's a person. Just like you are."

The boy glared and grit his back, displeased with Enkidu's unpretentious response.

"Fine... This is a good time for a test.", whispered the boy. In the next instant, he skillfully manipulated the high-speed energy circulating around him and started forming a whirlpool of raw magical energy with Enkidu at its center. "To test how big of a hole I can bite in the world now that I'm not with Flat."

Magical energy manipulation bypassing chants, formulas or any kind of procedure.

This image alone would be enough for the Lords of the Clock Tower or the high-ranked engineers of the Atlas Institute to figure out what the boy was.

No matter how outlandish the answer may seem to them, nothing changes the fact that he exists.

Perhaps one of the Lords, a lecturer who observed Flat's abnormalities for a a long time, already knew about the creature for years.



"You want to compete against me? Heh, that would have been so enjoyable, had we met in a different place under different circumstances..."

"..."

Enkidu silent spread their arms opens at the same time the boy activated his magecraft.

The violent whirl of magical energy around them twisted space.

But almost at the same instant, countless chains sprouted from the floor Enkidu was stepping on, drawing a spiral spinning in the opposite direction as the space distortion to fill up all the space that would have been dislocated away.

With a bursting noise, the dense magical energy in the area dispersed.

However, it was immediately absorbed into the Hole open in the boy's body. The eyeball visible from its gaps scowled at Enkidu.

Enkidu flashed a smile to that eye while they continued their previous sentence.

"Sorry, but protecting Master is my priority now."

Next, Enkidu grabbed a chain they sprouted from the ground.

The chain entangled them and permeated, as if being absorbed by their body, until it was assimilated into their clothes.

"A serious battle between us would take this whole area as collateral damage. I'd like to avoid that."

Enkidu slowly approached the boy, still with the chain in hand. With a slightly lonely smile.

"I had this ready, but it was for round 2 with Gil..."

With the elegance of a bloomed flower, Enkidu was holding their open arms above the ground.

And with powerful words, they started chanting the name their Noble Phantasm.

Now is the time to sing of the scars and splendor that marked the planet.

The boy tried to make his move before they could finish the sentences, but noticing the massive magical energy approaching from the building floors below him, he redirected all the accelerated energy toward defense.

Wisdom of the people

Age of Babylon

This was the Noble Phantasm Enkidu was regularly using without a chant.

An equivalent to Gilgamesh's Gate of Babylon. It uses chains to connect to the planet and reproduce Human Order's creations from the ground.

This Noble Phantasm can be considered Enkidu's basic weapon, the primary form of attack they're always using, but since they placed a fragment of their Saint Graph into the words they spoke to exercise it, the Noble Phantasm shows signs of its true nature for the first time.

At first, Enkidu's usual blades -swords and spears- spawned out of the rooftop floor in large amount along with the chains, charging at the boy's body in quick succession.



Faced with the tyrannical attack of a thousand blades, the boy was deep in thought.

What can his perfected form do?

Now that he's freed from Flat Escardos, his beloved shackles, he fully became what Messara Escardos wished for.

Everything past this was uncharted territory.

But he already the knowledge he needed.

Everything was recorded in the Magic Crest passed down through generations of the Escardos family, in a form only him could comprehend.

For that reason, the boy didn't feel threatened.

He could see countless blades coming in his direction.

Each of them was a reproduction of the greatest weapons in Human Order and could erase a poorly built Saint Graph with a touch.

One or two hundred of edges that sharp approached him faster than a falcon flying after its prey.

The boy calmly watched the glimmers in the flock of blades.

He accelerated his own consciousness to the limit and stagnated his subjective perspective of the world's flow, just like he did to the snipers before.

Naturally, time wasn't truly stopped, so the boy's movements were slowed down accordingly, making the air around him feel viscous like an ocean of tepid muck.

But the boy accelerated the od running through all his Magic Circuits, propelling the mana around him into sudden acceleration and putting it in circulation.

Magical energy accelerated ludicrously, as if it had an external rocket engine placed in addition to its own internal combustion engine.

And yet, the magical energy flowed with perfect artistic elegance, spreading to its surrounds in the shape of a pair of shadow wings and drawing magical formulae that couldn't be found in any paper about magecraft.

What the boy did may have looked a brand new form of magecraft created on the spot, but in reality, it wasn't.

It was an impromptu orchestra of numerous magecrafts, from basic to advanced.

This was Flat Escardos's preferred form of magecraft. A most troublesome system that could improvise ideal results but made it nigh impossible for the user to faithfully reproduce them a second time.

What the boy was doing is essentially the same.

By combining numerous magecraft systems, the boy can explosively accelerate his nerves and limbs and constantly regenerate the cells and joints destroyed by this sudden bursts of speed.

He applied layers upon layers of magecraft on his own body with no signs of burdening it, seeming as if the boy's very body was a form of magecraft.

If Flat Escardos and this boy here use the same kind of magecraft systems, what makes them different?

The answer couldn't be simpler.

Frame and engine.

The difference in their specs was simply the difference between heaven and earth.

If Flat was a minicar with the latest digital controls, the boy was a fictional mobile weapon: a never seen before drive machine with the resistance of a tank, the energy reserves of a battleship, and the propulsion of a jet.

Working backwards from this "fictional weapon" example, Flat's geniality could be described as what would happen if a computer built for the sole purpose of processing a simulated object was suddenly able to operate this object.



The world of humanity lost a man of genius insight, and the advent of a catastrophe that loss incite.

All concluded as Messara Escardos dreamed.

As Enkidu's blades approached, the boy displayed his ability.

The magical energy in high-speed circulation around the boy expanded, repelling them all.

Not literally repelling. The boy created a mana barrier that pulverized the weapons on contact, turning the products of Enkidu's power and Earth's ground to dust.

By immediately reading and hacking the magical energy in Enkidu's Noble Phantasm, he absorbed it into his circulation of energy.

Not only that, he also manipulated the magical energy in some without destroying them, sending them flying back to Enkidu's body.

But the barrage of counterattacks didn't reach Enkidu.

The rampart floating in front of Enkidu blocked all of them.

Laced with powerful magical energy, this golden wall could serve as a strong boundary.

Each brick in the three layers of the wall had the words Nabû-kudurri-uṣur engraved in cuneiform.

The wall was only about two people tall, but it could effortless defend against the magically propelled weapons.

But the otherworldly boy didn't lose his calm.

He flew higher and kneaded his energy in the form of the attack he tried to use earlier on Ayaka.

The black shadows once again spread behind the boy's back and from around them, beams of energy in high-speed rotation were shot.

There is a power limit to a raw beam shot by a human mage, but through some kind of process, the beams he shot were hundreds, thousands of times above this ceiling.

But in response, the rampart changed into a dome, protecting against attacks from above.

But this was trivial to the boy now that he finished preparing his attack.

Countless beams of light converged instantly to the space in front of the boy, forming a monster made of magical light. The monster charged at Enkidu.

Two bites was what it took to open a hole in the seemingly impregnable multilayer rampart, and after few rounds it was completely taken apart.

"...!"

But the boy flinched at the sight of what appeared behind the bricks and the cloud of dust.

Enkidu's soothing face was surrounded by objects completely misfit with their expression and what he fought with thus far.

"What...? What the hell are you...?"

Still floating in the air, the boy dropped a shocked question out loud.

Any modern mage knowing Enkidu's True Name would have reacted the same way.



The objects deployed around Enkidu were clearly associable with ancient Babylonia due to the symbols engraved on them and the mixture of clay and shining gold.

But those weapons clearly didn't exist back in the days of ancient Babylonia.

Flat Escardos was an avid fan of movies and manga. Through him, the boy gained the knowledge necessary to understand what they were. Though not to accept his conclusion.

A past memory the boy had seen through Flat's eyes flashed back.



It was a memory of Flat taking an acquaintance's Mystic Code - Trimmau, a mercury maid- without permission to watch a movie.

The boy didn't have the movie's title memorized since that wasn't an important memory for him, but it was about a giant mantis monster coming out of an iceberg, attacking an American city, and fighting against the army.

One scene in the movie.

The army started attacking the giant flying mantis from the ground. Flat was commenting the scene as they watched.

ーThis is so freaking cool! See if you can transform into it, Trimm!
ーAn application for a new shapeshift pattern requires an official name.

Flat had an "I was waiting for this moment!" reaction to the mercury maid's mechanical response.

ーDon't worry! I imagined this would happen and made sure to ask my gun nerd friend what it's called!

The boy extracted the weapon name from the file in his memory.

ーThis weapon is called a...

Remembering Flat's words, the boy let the the formal name slip out of his mouth.

"...M1... 120mm anti-aircraft gun..."



8 units.

The number probably wasn't much of a factor in this, but it's a cold, hard fact that the boy needed to recheck his vision in other accept that the image before his eyes was real.

Albeit inorganic, their form was dignified enough to resemble a guardian statue with an over 7 meters long barrel.

While they were indeed repainted in the style Enkidu's home Babylonia, what they were was plain to see.

Modern weaponry from this American land, discontinued only 5 decades ago.

Enkidu's eccentric line-up dominated the space of Crystal Hill heliport.

The beautiful rows of anti-aircraft artillery around Enkidu filled up with golden energy, in a display of color that harmonized surprisingly well with Enkidu's own.

It looked as if they were defensive weapons installed on Babylonia's walls.

Or perhaps as if even this modern weaponry was part of the planet's natural decoration.

Something as central to the current civilization as modern weaponry could be made to resemble a great beautiful tree. This powerful scene manages to resemble a painting of a historical moment, despite the inherent irony of its composition.

Wisdom of the people

Age of Babylon

.

This Noble Phantasm has the special property of constantly "updating" with Enkidu's every summon as a Heroic Spirit.

The ability to draw from the planet's memory and produce various objects.

The very act of copying human history.

Therefore, the longer time passes, the denser, higher, and deeper is the data they gain.

The Heroic Spirit Enkidu can expand the range of civilization they can replicate by connecting themself to many different eras.

Think of a hypothetical situation where someone could summon Enkidu to multiple different eras. If Enkidu was summoned to the ancient Babylonia from their lifetime, they would be limited to reproducing only the weapons they came to know in life or other weapons men had already created in that era in that land.

Conversely, were they summoned to a future beyond the Holy Grail War in Snowfield, they would be summoning numerous that can only be considered impossible fantasies nowadays.

Although that's not necessarily a good thing.

Much like the greatest modern firearm can't compare to the radiance of a Holy Sword, in a battle of Noble Phantasm newer doesn't necessarily mean stronger.

It is known in the world of magecraft that the closer something is to the Age of Gods, the more pronouncedly arcane it is. And even on more realistic terms, it's inadvisable to face a 16th-century grapeshot cannon with a 21st-century pistol.

However, this Noble Phantasm belongs to Enkidu, whose very foundation is already arcane.

Every individual bullet in a Gatling gun would be boosted with magical energy to destroy enemy Saint Graphs. The latest model of fighter jet would be empowered enough to compete in a flying race against a mid-level dragon.

Gilgamesh collected the peaks of human potential in his Gate of Babylon. One of the articles stored there is Vimana. Replicating that would, needless to say, require being summoned either in a far distant future, the era when humanity reaches its peak, or in the opposite extreme, the era when humanity was ruled by the star-crossing gods. And replicating key elements such as the bodies of these alien gods or the planet's Holy Sword would require using parts of world itself or treasures of equal value from Gilgamesh's treasury as ingredients.

Nevertheless, there's a reason why this Noble Phantasm is comparable to Gate of Babylon: the number of weapons Enkidu shapes from dirt is the number created by Human Order after parting ways with the gods. That means they use the land as a means for mass production.

Enkidu managed to create numerous weapons considered state-of-the-art half a century ago, just one step below the current standard of weaponry.

One of those is this giant anti-aircraft gun and its every shot is boosted by Enkidu's magical energy.



And now is the moment the weapons started their operation.

Enkidu mercilessly unloaded the anti-aircraft artillery on the boy watching them from above.

With loud explosions, the arcane gunpowder made of earth rhythmically detonated inside the cannons.

"...!"

The boy judged it would be easy to dodge cannonballs that flew in a straight line after looking at their trajectory, but this naive thought didn't survive being put to the test.

Even after being fired, the shells are still Enkidu's arcana.

They may not be able to make full turns, but they still could take tricky trajectories that defied the laws of physics. The boy immediately determined this was the case and chose not to dodge but to completely neutralize the projectiles with his defenses.

He accelerated his mind once again until his vision was in slow motion and search for a gap he could attack from.

However, in this slowed-down scene, the cannons' firing speed hadn't decreased as much as the speed of everything around it. It was out of pace. Mismatched.

He knew from Flat's knowledge that one anti-aircraft gun can normally fire 12 shots per minute, but those were getting gradually faster than that.

"They're... accelerating?"

The 8 anti-aircraft guns had reached the pace of 1 shot per second.

The advantage provided by the boy's thought acceleration was being mitigated by the unfair power of a Servant's Noble Phantasm.

Below the boy, there was a curtain of cannonballs capable of exterminating the average phantasmal beast in one hit.

But the protective wall created by the peacock wing-like shadow symbol behind his back was equally on the level the laws of the world would deem unfair. Enkidu's arcane ammunition shattered against it.

"I see... I didn't think a temporary being would be able to sink its roots that deep into the planet.", dispassionately whispered the boy. "Great learning experience. Show me more."

He quietly took control of his breathing and coldly kneaded his magical energy while defending with precision.

He fully grasped the rhythm of the barrage and switched to an offensive spell that would pass through the gaps in the firing pattern. That instant, the moment the blast's flame dissipated, Enkidu appeared by surprise directly under him.

They had merged with a bundle of countless chains sprouting from the floor and fired themself as a high-density magical energy shell.

"I saw that move coming.", the boy declared dispassionate as ever. He unleashed his magical energy as a counter to Enkidu's main body.

High-density magical energy adjusted for the sole purpose of destruction.

If Enkidu dodged it, the tallest building in Snowfield would have been reduced to bricks in an instant.

The boy, fully aware of that, shot without hesitation. He had zero reasons to care about the concealment of magecraft. Enkidu also temporarily dropped their principle of arcane concealment.

Not that Enkidu's Master, a silver wolf, ever put any thought into the arcane concealment in the first place.

Countless chains rose from the ground below, enveloping the whole building.

It didn't stay that way for more than a few seconds, so a civilian watching from a distance could assume they saw Crystal Hill testing a special light setup for some event. And every mage watching the situation would make a face begging for mercy.

That is because they would know they're dealing with a Heroic Spirit, someone who requires a fair deal of power to stop.

After reaching the rooftop, the swarm of chains kept stretching higher to the skies, becoming a gigantic heavenward tree.

"Haha..."

Verifying that the attack he fired was absorbed into the great tree of light, and its energy used to stretch the chains even further, the boy sneered.

"I wish Flat could see this. He would have loved this over-the-topness."

Enkidu approached from below for a chop, which he blocked with a pitch-black blade extending out of the Hole in his chest and countered with several blades that pierced the divine doll's abdomen.

Even then, the Heroic Spirit maintained their pressure, pushing the boy's body further up and above.

Crystal Hill and Snowfield City were disappearing further and further into the distant background below.

Somewhere along the way, the boy and Enkidu noticed their energy scraped on a blimp under concealment magecraft, partially destroying it.

But neither of them had the time to care.

The great tree of chains involving the building had already disappeared and its energy was all poured into Enkidu's body.

Enkidu morphed their arms and part of the clothes into bird wings and kept rising higher with bursts of magical energy from their feathers.

This is not how real birds fly. Enkidu did this to incessantly attack amidst their powerful flight, perhaps imitating the flying phantasmal beasts of their time.

To counter that, the boy spread his own "wings" further and gathered the vestiges of mana in the skies above the planet.

The boy caught a random glimpse of a giant something swimming in the sky but was too busy to identify what it was.

Enkidu, pushing his body further up, opened their mouth.

"I knew you were a threat to my Master."

Their words expressed concern but still had a soothing tone to them.

As proof, Enkidu's next words were spoken with a tranquil smile.

"But I'm glad you were born. If no one else will celebrate your birth, I will."

"...? Oh... Thanks..."

The boy thanked before thinking, flustered by the unexpected words.

His words and expression showed confusion, but he never left his battle stance.

The same goes for Enkidu. With their body overflowing with magical energy, they took a look at the land expanding below them and spoke with heartfelt relief.

"It's proof that our planet still hasn't given up hope."

After trading remarkably powerful blows, the two opened up the distance between each other as they kept flying higher.

"Pretty late to this question, but what should I call you?"

Their surroundings suddenly grew dark and the stars above them more prominent.

Both the boy and Enkidu knew that the sun wasn't setting ahead of time.

Until this moment, the boy's eyes were filled with suspicion, but now they had a hint of the curious tone of Flat Escardos's eyes.

"Thia. Thia Escardos. My friend named me that. I won't go by any other name."

And so, the boy who used to be Flat Escardos a few moments prior spoke his name.

In this place dozens of kilometers above the ground, this altitude past the stratosphere but still not yet in the mesosphere, the boy spoke his name.

The air was 10 times thinner than it was on the surface.

Regardless, the two of them remained as capable of holding a conversation as ever, either because they loaded magical energy into their voices or because their hearing is abnormal. Enkidu heard his name clearly.

But their conflict didn't end there.

The lack of oxygen and the cosmic radiation didn't matter to the Heroic Spirit and the otherworldly boy.

The surveillance satellite registered their extended battle as gorgeous aurora lights... but since the data satellite observed only Snowfield for management purposes in Faldeus's organization, the footage never went public.

Though perhaps it would be safe to let it go public.

Any non-mage would dismiss it as a sensationalist video heavily edited to provide a made-up justification for what happened later.

Even the mages unaware of the Holy Grail War would come to the same conclusion.



Light.

Pure, overwhelming light contrasted with hollow shadows extended around Thia.

Another light shared the space of the stars and another shadow shared the space of the dark sky.

If Enkidu was the embodiment of nature, the boy had now become the embodiment of light and shadow.

With the spell that put the high-density magical energy in circulation, he twisted space, bending the light of the sun to form a new magic circle with it.

Meanwhile, the completely light-absorbing shadows produced a different spell, forming a multi-layered magic circle around the boy.

Enkidu was surprised at the image of the boy's Magic Crest seemingly starting to corrode the world itself.

"Are you trying to connect yourself to the world...? You really can see everything, huh..."

"..."

With this silent confirmation, the boy launched himself up with a sudden burst of speed. He placed himself precisely above Enkidu as he activate his new magecraft.

"...

Modding

Cheat on

."

His short words contained faint hints of grief and homesickness.

These words seemingly in tribute to Flat Escardos caused the boy to temporarily rewrite the laws of the world around him.




Unlike a Reality Marble, this was an attempt to permanently overwrite the real world. The rules of the world around him grew unstable.

With that momentum, he permeated himself into the world using magically compressed words that could be interpreted as either a chant, a confession, or a manifesto.

I am without the protection of Human Order.

Earth!

I support the current prime species' right to hate, pity, forgive, scream, and pray to its Counter Force

People!

In this crevice, I shall ingest all good and all evil to demonstrate who I am.

Sing! Dance!

My eyes sing praise to all human creation and for that very reason I take the challenge to overcome the human intellect.

Eternal doom comes.

Through this destruction, I'll be celebrating the prosperity of human intellect until the time the planet withers completely.

Do your best to survive!

These final words triggered an explosive expansion of the space distortion, taking Thia even higher as his magical energy spread to cover the area above the entire United States.

And the distortion started producing its own gravity, gathering together the objects above the planet's skies.

"Those things are human creations, huh.", Enkidu whispered.

The remains gathering around Thia are called space debris.

Dangerous fragments of dreams, sweat poured from steps in humanity's walk toward the sea of stars, floating in the skies at ferocious speeds.

By the year of Snowfield's Holy Grail War, the amount of space debris in the sky is estimated to be over 2000 tons.

From discarded satellites to detached spaceship implements to iron microfragments scrapped off with the attrition between two objects. Pieces of many different metals are drawn into the swirl, gathering and compressing around Thia.

The vortex also drew minuscule meteors and the microparticles left behind by comet trails. Those all combined into numerous tiny planets rotating around Thia.

Spheres of varying sizes orbited Thia like he was the sun in the Solar System.

He covered them in dense mana to make them as energetically large as they could be. Their rotation accelerated as abruptly as their magical energy circulation.

"...!"

Predicting what would happen next, Enkidu explosively unleashed the magical energy they brought with them from Earth's surface and prepared to intercept the attack.

The next instant... In an attempt to activate his magecraft before Enkidu had the time to deploy their Noble Phantasm, Thia yelled powerful words.

"

Hollowed Hearsay/Oblivion turns to festivity

A Clockwork Abbadon

!"

Numerous "moons" with masses ranging from 500 kilos to dozens of tons rained on Enkidu and Earth much beyond the speed of sound.

Due to a spell to ignore air resistance, the projectiles he continuously fired with the high speed of a railgun shot would never burn or slow down. It was clear that if they reached the surface, they would cause major harm to the land and all the life on it.

At that moment, the energy levels in Enkidu's body skyrocketed. Thia couldn't tell where all this power was coming from but all of the Heroic Spirit's parameters got a temporary boost.

"

People, let us bind the gods

Enuma Elish

!"

Enkidu unleashed their Noble Phantasm without a moment's delay.

The power to turn their Saint Graph into one all-piercing lynchpin weapon by borrowing power from the planet and Human Order.

Enkidu charged with the golden chains deploying around them, forming a spiral in attempt to crush all the numerous approaching malignant stars.

They collided.

And then there was a flood of light.

An enormous flower of magical energy bloomed in the upper limits of the stratosphere, with each of its petals holding the shattered asteroids.

The impact's rebound reached the Kármán line, which represents the border between the planet and the universe, where it became a pseudo-aurora gaudily decorating the space above Snowfield.

Thia's greater magecraft was possibly perceived as a threat to the planet or Human Order.

Through the power of the Counter Force poured into their Noble Phantasm, Enkidu managed to block the massive attack on Snowfield.

Which doesn't mean they perfectly neutralized the whole attack, however.

Its shockwaves were tremendous.



Quite a few star pieces slipped through the magical petals and landed on Earth, although scattering during their fall.

The smallest fragment slipped east, in Washington D.C's direction, falling where the Anacostia River meets the Potomac River.
The impact of the fragment falling in the center of a 1 km wide river instantly sent its water flying and was felt in the White House as an earthquake accompanied by heavy rain.

Another fragment pierced the ground of Yellowstone National Park, almost giving some geologists a heart attack by temporarily exciting the dormant magma.

Another fragment flew far west, crossing the Pacific Ocean and falling on Japanese maritime territory.
The fragment's uncontrollable magical energy generated heat, instantly evaporating a large volume of water on the oceanic surface.
The kilometers-tall splash and evaporation pillar was witnessed from the nearby coast and ships, generating online speculation about an underwater volcanic eruption, a long-ranged missile landing, or an alien invasion.

Another fragment fell on Russian land, raising an alert for an attack from another nation, which left the whole world in a tense state.

But it was the second large fragment that caused the biggest worldwide impact.
The fragment flew north preserving all of its tremendous magical energy, making the impact of its fall to physically obliterate its surroundings.
It didn't cause visible geographical changes, but its mental shock on humanity was large.
As the observation satellites suddenly showed that

12% of the Arctic ice caps vanished from one footage clip to the next.

Had this happened to Antarctica's ice, it would have had a tangible effect on Earth's oceanic levels.
Eventually, it was discovered that the fallen fragments were pieces of space debris, artificial satellite parts, leading to rumors that a space station fell off or that something caused all satellites around Earth to drop, but that was only many hours after the fact.

From a mage's point of view, the most significant fragment was the largest one.
It was less of a fragment and more of an asteroid still in its original form.
Thia used all other asteroids as decoys as he sent this one in a different trajectory with concealment magecraft hiding it from sight and magical energy detection. It was set to fall on Snowfield.

Did he do it for the sole purpose of eliminating the girl Ayaka Sajou?

Or maybe he was planning to take down Enkidu indirectly, by destroying either their Master or the land the Holy Grail was rooted on?

The answer was yes for both, but while they were correct answers, they weren't THE correct answer.

(Don't try to fool yourself. I hate the Holy Grail War. I hate this ritual and the guys who killed Flat for it. Humans... Human cities... Honestly, I quite liked London... But I don't care about this city. ... Flat, there's one thing I never told you about. The reason why you summoned that serial killer. That Heroic Spirit... couldn't possibly be brought out by a toy knife. It was because of me. Because I have the potential to be a serial killer for humanity... and I'm not anyone yet.)

This inner monologue was just a fraction of a second in the real flow of time, done amidst the fluid movement of dropping this asteroid on Earth.

But it didn't escape Enkidu's Presence Detection.

The tactic of perfectly concealing its magical energy backfired. In this space Thia and Enkidu made so turbulent with magical energy, one neutral spot becomes too conspicuous to go unnoticed.

Enkidu stretched their chains in an attempt to apprehend the egg-like asteroid of magical energy but Thia followed up his magecraft to prevent that.

This resulted in the magical asteroid flying toward Earth almost intact, although Enkidu managed to shift its trajectory.



Instead of Snowfield, it went to the largest city on the West Coast, Los Angeles.
Goodbye, City of the Angels.
Goodbye, Long Beach.
Goodbye, Griffith Observatory.
Goodbye, Hollywood.
Once he finished calculating the mark of the magecraft he fired, Thia noticed Hollywood was there and felt sad about it, remembering it was a place Flat wanted to go to, while simultaneously canceling the sadness with resignation, as he didn't care because there was no Flat in him anymore.
Direct contact with the malignant star's destruction and atomic decay spells would return the city named after the angels to light.
The magical energy contained in it could erase all life within a few kilometers' radius. And the decay that comes after the destruction would cause a chain of cataclysms by stimulating the land, the dragonveins, and the underground magma.
Not even Thia himself was able to stop this. This impact would define the future direction of humanity, on a physical level far beyond the arcane concealment.

Keyword: would.

Thia line of sight took him to a dense swirling cumulonimbus.

Supposedly a western hurricane that passed Los Angeles on its way to Nevada.

The giant cumulonimbus might seem like just a grotesque mass of giant clouds taking up space on Earth's troposphere but Thia always felt an unpleasant presence inside its dense clouds.

It felt like all the magical energy of the land and air around the cumulonimbus was trapped inside the cloud.

Some major unknown threat was inside it but he knew he was in no condition to do anything about it.

That's why he didn't give it any attention until now.

His magecraft would activate on impact, regardless of what was inside the cloud.

The boy wondered if the malignant star would get to ravage America's west metropolis.

But then something abnormal happened.

"..."

Thia was taken aback by what he saw.

Part of this over 500-kilometers-diameter swirling cumulonimbus wriggled like an animal raising its head, and from it, a pair of tornados grew pointing up.

The tornado system operated with a clear disregard for the laws of physics. It extended its whirls with beautiful symmetry, looking almost like the horns of a giant beast.

No.

Thia was sure.

They weren't "almost like horns".

Those were the real horns of a real colossus.

His magical energy sight could precisely confirm its arcanely concealed figure.

The pair of whirlwinds covered a deep yet lustrous blue.

The sea and the sky combined into a solid mass of azure made from pure lapis-lazuli in seemingly larger amounts than all minerals on Earth combined.

Adorned gold bones could be seen between the rifts of the giant typhoon cloud.

Each bone in the golden and blue beast was the size of a large city. It roamed the world with violent winds as its flesh.

(Its magical energy levels spiked...? I didn't see it draining the energy from the planet. Is that creature from... somewhere else...?)

Thia's mind was full of questions, but the biggest one was why it moved.

He immediately learned the answer.

The malignant star of atrocity and destruction zooming across the troposphere was going to hit one of its peninsula-sized azure horns.

The horn wriggled.

More precisely, the vast magical energy covered in divine aura gushing out from deep inside the horn did.

Unlike Thia's magical space distortions, the horned colossus used its divine aura to crush and swallow space, breaking the concepts of range and direction.

With its energy vector distorted, the malignant star began falling long before it hit Los Angeles, plunging in a straight line towards the colossal cumulonimbus face.

An egg of ruin and destruction, charged with enough power to cause a widespread earthquake when it hit the ground.

Is it more powerful than the hurricane then?

Obviously, comparing different forms of calamities is comparing apples and oranges, and cataclysmic earthquakes are inherently more damaging to the world than giant tornados, but looking only at their energy numbers, the bulky hurricane had the power of a hundred magnitude 9 earthquakes.

What would happen if all this energy walked like a beast?

The answer is what he sees.



A large hurricane made of dense cumulonimbus.

It was the textbook image of a typhoon, a beautiful rift separating the clouds from the sky. Almost a perfect circle when seen from above.

Nonetheless, for someone capable of seeing the dense magical energy it contained, it was a typhoon-sized colossus slowly walking in his direction.

Its bellows are gales.

Its veins are torrents.

Its huffs are lightning.

The dense cumulonimbus is its very meat while also the armor guarding the whole divine beast.

Not a zoomorphized cyclone. The opposite of that, in fact.

This appearance is the direct result of attempting to make a beast of the gods descend to the world without changing its shape. Thia knew exactly what the monster truly was.

The beast with the golden skeleton visible inside the cumulonimbus slowly raised its head.

No, it only seemed slow to Thia and Enkidu because of the distance between them. Considering its massiveness, the speed its chin opened and closed should have been amazing.

The malignant star slipped straight into the colossus' mouth, which closed soon after.

It would have immediately formed a dust cloud of destruction had it reached the ground.

But it never happened.

He waited for it, but it showed no signs of happening.

Gold and azure light shone in the hurricane's interior, explosively increasing its energy level without changing its size.

The 50m/s winds became 80 m/s, momentarily approaching the historical wind speed world record of 100 m/s.

The colossus could easily break the record if it dedicated all of its power to raise the wind speeds.

Was it just coincidence or did the divine beast has a reason not to do so? Maybe someone ordered him not to do it.

But these questions were trivial to Thia and Enkidu.

They were sure of it.

That this colossal cumulonimbus beast with a length in the triple digits of kilometers was looking at them.

And that this colossus hosting enormous calamity mocked them.



The boy reacted with a curious smile... while Enkidu lost his smile and gazed at the divine beast with a sad expression.

X X

West Snowfield, forest region

The duo flying high above had no idea that someone on Snowfield was observing the colossus' behavior.

The observer was Filia... Ishtar. Feeling what happened to the divine beast that is her property, she sighed.

"Oh, my boy never learns, does he?"

She wasn't bothered by the sudden power increase nor worried about the land's destruction.

She merely shrugged at her divine beast's appetite.



"Don't go complaining to me if the trash you ate gives you a stomachache.

[XoJIJIoY]

Holy shit that's a big one

Thanks for the translation, Comun.

[Hermitfold]

Awesome as usual, Comun! Thanks so much for this!

[Rafflesiac]

Narita goes hard. Quite a few contrasts between Thia and Enkidu, I dig it.

[Kirishima]

Just looking forward to Morii Shizuki drawing this in the manga.

[Exhaunted]

I wonder if the reason Thia looks like he's in his mid teens/younger than Flat is because that's the age when Flat reclaimed the Magic Crest or something. Also, is that an implication that Thia learned how to connect to the planet from Enkidu's Noble Phantasm?

[pinetree]

Comun I know you don't intend on permanently taking this translation over but is there any chance you can make a different thread for this volume?

Browsing this thread while being behind is hell.

[asterism42]

Are you complaining about spoilers in the spoiler thread

[pinetree]

Yes, because it also happens that the spoilers thread is the only thread with full translations of the books.

[CO9p5JMGv!p9]

What's with the wall with Nabû-kudurri-uṣur written on it? Is it the Median Wall? I tried googling anything else related to Nebuchadnezzar but that's the only one I came up with that has a name.

[Rafflesiac]

Yes, because it also happens that the spoilers thread is the only thread with full translations of the books.

Just check the OP when you notice the thread gets activity.

[pinetree]

Welp, did not realize the OP was still being updated with his translations. Makes sense, he's a mod duh

[RCM9698]

Thanks for your work on the translation, especially for this chapter. Fights with Gilgamesh or Enkidu are always awesome. Still really hoping for a final fight between them.

[mami-kouga]

And there continues to be bigger fish to fry, wow. Honestly I think Enkidu going "Even if no one celebrates your birth, I will" might be my favourite part of this whole exchange.

[Samuka]

Arigatto Commun san. The fight was insane though i was confused about the comparison of flat's specs and thia's. Also, the flasback of Flat watching the movie reminds me of when Flat asked El melloi to take the maid on a movie date in the apocrypha manga and was given 20 times more homework lol. Great fact to note is that Thia was the catalyst for Jack. It kind of reminds me of fate kaleid where shirou was the catalyst for the no name archer (emiya). Made me wonder what would happen if pale rider had Thia as a master

[BHP]

No volume in January. He tweeted a few days ago that he finished the volume and said it will be released by the end of winter(?)

It's the 5th anniversary of his Dead Mount Death Play manga and it's been leaked that it's getting an anime.
Also 20th anniversary of Baccano next year.

[raemun]

Comun, what is the original japanese when Ishtar calls Gugalanna "my boy"? Ano ko?

[Comun]

Comun, what is the original japanese when Ishtar calls Gugalanna "my boy"? Ano ko?

Perfectly guessed.

Interlude: Audition (part 1)

The past, in a certain country

"Sigma, have you ever thought about living a different life?"

When Sigma was asked this question by a girl in the same class of the same training facility where he was being raised to become a spellcaster spy -a girl assigned the name Tau- he couldn't come up with anything.

He had the will to give her a response, but couldn't think of any.

No matter how seriously he tackled the topic of a different life, he didn't have a reference pool to pull any ideas from.

His head contained only what he had seen with his own eyes. He lacked the bare minimum knowledge and experience necessary to imagine the world unknown.

While waiting for Sigma's answer, Tau continued.

"See, the teachers made a promise to me. If I'm the number 1 in this drilling grounds, they'll give me a dad and a mom. People very important to the country will take me as their daughter!"

"Important people?"

"They said they're 'seniorstaffs' on the factory that makes our food. People who make food must be the second most important in the country, only behind the sovereign!"

"Are they? ...yeah, sounds right."

Tau and Sigma were children who didn't even know the meaning of "senior staff" at the time.

It was before his 10th birthday.

They spent their days training to forcibly run their Magic Circuits and learning how to use basic Mystic Codes, handle weapons such as knives and firearms, and survive in harsh environments.

The children were thoroughly drilled with the knowledge and experience necessary to be a spellcaster, aside from being sometimes forced to take practical lessons on how to kill a living being.

Although the instructors' way of talking was always kind, the training was always brutal.

A large number of children, Sigma included, learned to read their situation like machines, but sometimes they had someone like Tau, who still had a sparkle in their eyes.

"They say that when you have a dad and a mom, you can sleep tighter. They sing you this thing called a lullaby, make you good food, and take you to parades to celebrate the sovereign!"

"What's a lullaby?"

"When you hear it, you sleep tighter. Can you believe it? It makes mom and dad guard you during your sleep!"

"Now I'm a little jealous."

Sigma finally found an emotion he could verbalize.

Sleep was the greatest pleasure in the boy's life. He was indifferent even to the flavor of food, but to him, the moment he fell asleep, the sensation of falling into the giant night's embrace was not only his one hobby but also the one source of hope that kept him going.

"Oh, Sigma, you really only think about sleep. Your magical energy path switch is the only one different from everyone else."

"Is it?"

Most mages use the mental image of an on/off switch to open and close their Magic Circuit paths to circulate magical energy. Almost every child in this drilling facility forces theirs open with this mental image as instructed. Sigma, however, is the only one that uses the moment he falls asleep as his mental image.

"I bet you want to believe that the world is a dream. Both when you're using magecraft and when you aren't."

"..."

Sigma couldn't answer.

Because he didn't know if what she said was right or not, but beyond that, because he didn't think finding the answer would amount to anything.

He thought only about how Tau sounded so much more mature than him despite being a year younger.

He was sure she would become the best student in the facility and accomplish her dream.

Confident things would go well, Sigma felt a hint of envy over how she would get to hear a lullaby.

He didn't take long to forget this minor emotional instability.

Eventually, Tau was gone.

She was seriously injured during training, damaging what little Magic Circuits she had.

He didn't know what happened to children who had to leave the facility.

The only concern in his mind was whether not she was able to sleep well after leaving.

It didn't take long before she was replaced by a new Tau... and so the life-threatening training uneventfully resumed.



This past didn't hold any greater meaning to Sigma.

Tau's name and face sunk always deeper into his pile of accumulated memories.

The process was identical to how the memories of a dream fade away after one wakes up.

X X

The present, in a Snowfield back alley

While a Servant was fighting a mysterious demon in the skies far above the city

Sigma, still unaware of what was happening, suddenly remembered a past conversation.

The babyfaced mercenary thought further about the memory, an attitude he considered unlike himself.

He was now enough of an adult to understand it.

Senior staff in a food factory was far from the position of social authority she thought it was, and the whole story about her adoption was a trick the instructors were employing to evolve her further.

Regardless, the timing of the memory resurfacing might be tied to how much Tau resembled Kuruoka Tsubaki.

ーI'm going... to destroy this system, the Holy Grail War.

Minutes ago, he made his decision in the Kuruoka residence and announced it to the Shadows serving Watcher. Remembering that, he thought about his words as he checked his surroundings.

(No... I think the one that looked like Tsubaki was the new Tau that came after her...)

His memories were no longer clear.

Nonetheless, the significant refrain repeated in his brain.

(Having parents doesn't make a difference, Tau. Is there anything we people born as mages can do...? Yeah. I admit. My goal in destroying the Holy Grail isn't saving Kuruoka Tsubaki. That's the means, not the end. Is it because the red-clad Elemental entrusted me with Tsubaki? No, that's another secondary reason. Can saving Tsubaki even free her from her fate? Would changing the world for Tsubaki make any difference if she's trapped in her fate to sleep forever? And most importantly, will I be satisfied with this in the end? I don't think I can change the whole world. I'm not important enough for that. I only want to know if I can change my and Tsubaki's subjective worlds. Yeah, I just want an answer. It's for that selfish reason that I started my Holy Grail War.)

Sigma's thoughts were interrupted by a voice coming from the osteophonic transceiver in his ear.

--Cattle calling Famine.--

"..."

--Cattle calling Famine. Famine, do you copy?--

In this back alley unlit by the sunset, Sigma heard the voice of his superior on the transceiver.

Faldeus Dioland.

Only a temporary superior, but still one of the masterminds of the Holy Grail War. A dangerous man with heavily armed forces under his command in addition to his skills as a mage.

Yet Sigma wasn't responding to the transceiver.

Since the transceiver was magically converted into a Mystic Code, he didn't need to worry about being wiretapped.

But long-range telepathy is obviously beyond what it can handle, so Sigma thought Faldeus wouldn't know his circumstances as long as he ignored the call.



He came all the way from the Kuruoka residence to this back alley by using the Shadows' information to choose the paths unobserved by any cameras.

But the timing of this call was still worrisome.

(Did he notice I escaped the isolated world? No, actually, did Faldeus even know I was dragged inside it?)

Regardless, the question now was whether or not to take the call.

His idea of destroying the Holy Grail War ritual was something Francesca might like since she enjoyed unpredictable developments, but Faldeus was guaranteed to oppose it.

Feigning obedience to gain Faldeus's trust is a valid strategy, but if Faldeus knew how Sigma neutralized the Kuruoka couple, Sigma could be jumping into a trap.

Sigma was a mere spellcaster with no real ancestry. He had no Magic Crest capable of resurrecting him from a fatal wound.

(I'm laughably powerless in comparison to Faldeus.)

This thought naturally crossed Sigma's mind despite his awareness that he never had an honest laugh in his life.

What he meant to say is that someone else would laugh about it.

But his path was already chosen.

He wasn't following anyone's orders. If anything, his client for this job was himself.

He lived thus far completing life-threatening missions because his life had no meaning.

It took him long enough to start his first reckless fight.

(But...)

The faces that crossed his mind were Kuruoka Tsubaki, who sacrificed herself to stop Rider's rampage, and the nameless Assassin, who reacted to that fact with genuine rage.

(Now it's my turn to choose to be reckless. I don't want any regrets after this fight.)

Now, more than ever before, any missed move would seal his death.

But Sigma has grown devoid of impatience.

He was immersed in his own world with more calm and depth than ever, slowing down time to search for the best move.

(Faldeus. Should I take the call and probe his intentions?)

While Sigma thought, a considerably emotionally charged voice reverbed from his transceiver.

--Famine, do you copy? Answer me, Sigma--

(?)

The radio transmitted his standard designation instead of the codename chosen for this operation.

Sigma was puzzled by Faldeus's uncharacteristically fretful delivery.

In reaction to his doubt, a Shadow appeared behind his back. A man wearing an old-fashioned captain outfit let out a jolly giggle before addressing Sigma.

"I won't tell you whether or not you should pick up this call, but I'll give you a hint."

"...?"

"If you play your cards right, this is your chance can fake your death to that Faldeus fellow. Ever thought about that, kid?"

"What do you mean?"

Sigma asked him to explain his logic upon confirmation that he didn't press the pick-up button. Another silhouette took the captain's place to answer this question -a knight with the appearance of a child.

"It means the board changed. You can't afford a shred of carelessness moving forward."

Faldeus's cold voice echoed in the transceiver, as background noise for the boy knight's words.

--...from this moment onward, this line is frozen. We are cutting our support to you. Over.--

"!"

After a short static cut, Sigma's transceiver went fully silent.

(Did I confirm my betrayal to him?)

The boy knight shrugged as he denied Sigma's thought.

"Not really... He concluded you were eliminated by the monster."

"You mean the Cerberus in the dream world?"

In reaction to Sigma's question, a boy with a snake staff manifested and answered pointing at the sky.

"Wrong... A completely different kind of monster. Although I'm struggling to describe it in words because it's a kind Watcher is not used to detecting."

This indecisive silence was rare for the Watcher's silhouettes.

After sorting out his thoughts, he eventually nodded and slowly delivered his carefully chosen words.

"He... or it... is probably the scar resulting from an ancient mage's struggle to sink their claws into the world. At the same time, he's something with the potential to be new prime species... born too late into a planet that can break down at any moment."

"Wait a second. Who is this 'he or it'?"

His question caused the boy with the caduceus to disappear, and a woman with an aviator suit to appear above the alley, sitting on an emergency exit handrail.

"You were lucky, Master. If you were in the main avenue, you would have been collateral damage."

"What avenue?"

Presumably the central street in front of Crystal Hill.

Sigma felt a chill down his spine, considering how close he was to whatever was it.

Most of the time with the Shadows, they only warned Sigma of danger of their own initiative when he was one step away from death. Sigma still hasn't pieced together what Heroic Spirit Watcher was, but he had a great deal of trust in the information provided by her silhouettes.

But even then, the next piece of information he received made him doubt his ears.

"Your coworkers were exterminated. All 38 members of the 3rd squad... By what once was Flat Escardos.

"... That's that Heroic Spirit's power... Jack the Ripper?"

"No, the Heroic Spirit didn't do anything here. He tried, though."

"..."

It was getting hard to believe.

He never interacted with these so-called coworkers, but he knew they were a team of very individually capable combatants under the leadership of Faldeus, a strategist far more clever than Sigma.

He could understand if they were taken down by a Heroic Spirit.

He had no doubts after witnessing the extraordinary abilities of Assassin and Tsubaki's "Mr. Black". But here she said they were taken out by Flat Escardos, the young Master instead of the Heroic Spirit.

(Flat?)

Hearing that name, Sigma reviewed his information about the young man involved in the battle in front of the church. One of the jokers in the El-Melloi Classroom deck, although that deck has more than a dozen jokers shuffled into it. Epithet: The Unwanted Blessing.

Sigma saw him as a person that demanded special caution, although not as much as the Red Evil or the World's Most Elegant Hyena.

Most Clock Tower mages studying in the El-Melloi Classroom are famously remarkable, countless of them serving as subjects of horror to a mere spellcaster like Sigma.

One Japanese Bajiquan fighter formed a pirate organization of allegedly tremendous magical and military power in the Singaporean coasts, and in response to it, a noble lady created a private military company of rivaling magical strength and remarkable capital strength. Those two risk figures are known by the two monikers above.

And one rank below them on the scale of absurdity, there were Flat Escardos and the equally dangerous "Beastclad" Svin Glascheit.

It's common knowledge among spellcasters that they must never fight Flat with magecraft, they have to hit him physically. And for Svin it's the opposite, they must never fight Svin physically, they have to kill him with a trap. So the standard tactic for when Flat and Svin are together is retreating immediately.

(Actually, many spellcasters go beyond and say "attacking Clock Tower people is not always a bad idea, but never lay a finger on someone from the El-Melloi Classroom".)

After a few seconds of running the compressed information in his head, Sigma asked a question to reconfirm something with the silhouette.



"Are you sure Flat Escardos did it? He wasn't using the Heroic Spirit's power?"

Sigma's question was like double-checking a map. He didn't doubt it was the case but needed to make himself sure.

At that point in time, Sigma no longer held any suspicion for the Shadows. He trusted them as a reliable combat tool he'd be dumb not to use.

But naturally, even the most regularly maintained gun can still jam.

Sigma already saw discrepancies with reality coming from the most accurate informant, and betrayal coming from a spellcaster who grew up eating from the same pot as him. To him, it never hurt to be cautious.

A mage's battlefield is a crossfire of illusions and Charm magecraft. Not even his own eyes and ears are trustworthy there.

But even then, entrusting his life to them had more value than trusting the magecraft he can do with the little magical energy he has or the conveniently selected information he received from Faldeus.

Sure enough, he already stepped into the battlefield at this point, so it was already too late to think about trading the cards in his hand.

Those circumstances led to Sigma's semi-rhetorical question, but...

The old captain silhouette returned with an answer he wasn't expecting.

"No. Pay more attention to what you hear, don't miss the keywords. This kind of mistake can be fatal sometimes, got it?"

"?"

"She said 'what once was Flat Escardos, did you forget? Flat is dead. This a completely separate individual."

[CO9p5JMGv!p9]

"He... or it... is probably the scar resulting from an ancient mage's struggle to sink their claws into the world. At the same time, he's something with the potential to be new prime species... born too late into a planet that can break down at any moment."

Is this referring to the planet breaking or Thia breaking?

[Comun]

The planet.