X // Standard-Bearer in the Mist
X.450122@1889
Beyond the hotel window, the rain pattered across the rooftops and the cobblestone streets, painting the metropolis in grey.
"You'll have to let it go, eventually."
Resting the back of his head upon his folded palms, Emiya continued to stare at the ceiling from where he lay.
"Distancing myself from the work emotionally doesn't change its nature," he said. "It would just be denial."
The packed cotton mattress beneath him shifted slightly, and under the sheets, the warmth of his partner's skin pressed against his torso.
"There is no Hell in this world that isn't paved of our own convictions," she said, "and it thrives wherever there lies an insistence that reality cannot possibly meet. What have you to gain from endlessly reviling yourself for wrongs beyond your power to circumvent?"
Emiya gave no response, and the two of them lay for a time in a simple half-embrace, merely breathing and listening to the noise of the rainfall.
"Perspective," he said, finally. "I reaffirm who it is I am, and ascertain the distance that I've yet to travel before I can rest."
The girl sighed softly.
"Someday, even the contracts we bear will be laid to rest," she said. "Our sufferings and regrets should have no place in the world that comes to be inherited by those who follow. I'll ask only that you keep in mind the difficulty of fully accounting for the things we leave behind, intentionally or otherwise."
"If Alaya permits," he said; but he privately doubted that the vestiges of his passing would so much as meet the innocuous significance of the rosewood box that his father had left him, so long ago.
There was another movement in the bedding, and he felt the press of a kiss upon his cheek.
"Alaya has never given me anything I didn't truly desire," the girl whispered.
XI // Prometheus Unbound
X.999999@2909
The superstratum upon which the 'Origin Bullets' could take effect were limited to those of conceptual organization lower than or equal to a priority of E, given the scaling provided by the 726th Grail. Had the Magus Killer directed his Thompson Contender at the Servants of the Fuyuki Wars, he would've dealt at best a flesh wound -- supposing that he hit his mark at all. Conceptual Weapons of so meager a standing were of no matter to the native 'mysteries' of Heroic Spirits, even at the arbitrary circumscription of the latter by the Einzbern servant containers.
For similar reasons, the 'Origin Bullets' would have normally been of negligible detriment to the Yield Andrographic known as Jack the Ripper -- who bore within her fabricated corpus the aggregate existential impression of the countless orphans of Victorian London. In utilizing an already extant 'concept' in the place of a soul, Jack had been a significant innovation over Frankenstein's first monster, and a direct prototype to the subsequent RAY series -- far surpassing at the time of her activation the prominence of any contemporary personages that came to be exalted as Heroic Spirits.
It was, therefore, almost inconceivable to Emiya that the adolescent girl that lay now dead and cooling upon the floor could be an analogue to Jack the Ripper the original. The fact that his improvised strategy had worked at all confirmed a number of his suspicions.
All that remained was --
-- twenty-four throwing knives that had suddenly pierced his traveling mantle, burying themselves deeply into the flesh of his back. Stumbling and collapsing to his knees, he vaguely wondered why he bothered to engage nociception during missions.
"Oho! Survived that as well, did you? Splendid!"
Emiya managed to turn his neck, visually locating the speaker on the roof of the hypostyle: Overlooking the rectangular courtyard, a monocled Caucasian man in an Inverness coat and top-hat rested his hands upon the ornate silver knob of a cane. Accompanying him, twenty-four physically exact replicas of Jack the Ripper stood themselves at roughly equal distance along the sides of the roof.
"Victor Frankenstein ..."
"I'm honored that you would recall my name after so many centuries, Fakir!" said the elderly man, bowing with dramatic flourish. "On behalf of the Research and Development Division of Atlas Genomics, I formally bid you welcome to the Archduchy of Alexandria!"
Externalizing the blades from the surface of his skin with a push of Unlimited Blade Works, Emiya removed the beige mantle, allowing the ceramic knives to clatter to the obsidian floor.
"Tell me," said Emiya, standing and casting aside the blood-weighted canvas, "you /are/ aware that those exaggerated child-bearing hips you've given to 'Jack' can't naturally occur in an adolescent of her superficial age, yes? It's honestly quite grotesque."
Frankenstein made an apparent effort to suppress his smile, initially -- but in moments, he'd surrendered to a deep, bellowing laughter.
"Superb, my good man!" he said, between chuckles. "I don't believe I've heard such a typically puritanical slight to my hebephilia since the mid-twenty-first century! The freshness well-inclines me to excuse you even of your obviously destitute aesthetics!"
In every world-line that Emiya had traversed within the attractor field of [Overcount 1,999], the circumvention of Alaya's threat-recognition mechanism had eventually been engineered by the man now standing above him -- operationalized in the identification of loopholes through which extreme prominence could be clad in the justifications of 'human understanding.' It was somehow always galling to realize that a man who bore such an 'instrument' as a basic tool of trade could be so lacking in the mores and sensibilities of a common man.
Common men, for that matter, generally didn't teach serial killers to perform surgery for kicks; or engage in carnal relations with the pubescent incarnations of the natural philosophies.
"Why are you here, Victor?" asked Emiya. "Is it vengeance?"
"No, no, no," said Frankenstein, waving his hand. "I give that my heart did admittedly flutter in great animosity when I learned that the Counter Guardian here deployed was poor Maria's executor -- but my intention is nothing so brutish and uncivilized as revenge, regrettably. I'm here tonight strictly in an official capacity -- to see to it that natural selection runs its course without undue interference. Science has long consigned the Old-Types to the inevitability of obsolescence and extinction, and we can't be having such irrational existences as yourself rendering them aid at this juncture. If there sleeps in this Necropolis some artifact of crucial benefit to our enemies, I shall seize it in the name of Humanity -- for the advance of the Queen's Grass Game!"
"Seeing as you now have drones that can operate beyond an Alaya Frontier, you could've just had me assassinated," said Emiya. "That's pretty much what you did anyways."
"You misunderstand the mindful consideration of a Genovese gentleman of breeding, mine ancient enemy," replied Frankenstein. "Assassination is too utilitarian and inhumane -- wielded only by uncultured lowlifes of no refinement or imagination. For the deathless Arcadia that awaits the patient, we at Atlas Genomics pride ourselves in providing ergonomically friendly solutions with a personal touch! What you experienced was no assassination! It was entertainment!"
"And so your scout was meant only to 'amuse' me, then? With lethal force?"
"Yes, indeed -- and though your part in the performance has been rather underwhelming thus far, I had unwavering faith that you would unfortunately survive! You are, after all, bound to make worthwhile the effort that I put into arriving here in person -- to resist me with as much might as you exercised in the slaying of my Old-Type iteration!"
Emiya permitted himself a harrumph. He'd long suspected it, but it figured that it would take a witness immune to the Counter Force to supply evidence that there might be another Counter Guardian Emiya running around somewhere. He was fairly certain that he'd never personally eliminated any version of Victor Frankenstein; and it was highly improbable that he would be 'returning' to the current world-line or its antecedents in the future.
Were the functioning of the Egregore not bound by resource limitations and the rules of banality, there would be no reason or need for her to approach any potentially useful Alaya terminal with explicit contract. An undying composite drone could simply be generated with the features and skills to resolve any imaginable catastrophe; or, barring that, mindless reproductions of heroic spirits could be thrown endlessly at threats without permission by the originals.
Neither of these were the case; and contract and consent were in fact matters of real and definite meaning. Where normal Counter Guardians could indeed be freely exchanged between the world-lines of a given attractor field, they were ultimately finite, mortal existences bearing independent consciousness and freedom of will -- to a degree empowered by their own singularity. Removed of Alaya's protections, they could generally be killed with relative ease; and outright 'replication' of a particular terminal was contractually denied -- in part because it would be to the detriment of conceptual priority.
Assuming that Frankenstein's word held any validity, though, something similar might have been covertly pursued in the contraction of redundant analogues. The thought of it vaguely annoyed Emiya.
"I'm afraid that you might've gotten the wrong impression about a few things, Victor," he said.
"What would those be, pray tell?"
"First off, I'm no longer a Counter Guardian," he said, extending his arm outwards. "Second, I didn't come here tonight intending to save anyone. If your so-called 'Old-Types' truly desire to survive, they'll have to dirty their hands and fight off the selection pressures on their own. They're better off not relying on me anyhow."
Four oddly shaped blades traced into existence, hanging unsupported.
"And is there a third?" asked the Caucasian man, making a hand-gesture to the Jack replicas. Concertedly, they tensed, drawing their blades in anticipation of combat.
"Yeah," Emiya replied. "It's that my 'underwhelming performance' just now was meant to keep you from getting a good read on my capabilities. Trace Parallel; Orbital Mode."
The air filled with knives -- twenty-four copies of the initial set of four, revolving about his body in a spherical formation.
"Cursecraft," he stated, "Maria the Ripper."
Maria the Ripper -- the Holy Mother of Dismemberment.
In the end, this was the full elaboration of what precisely was given flesh in the entity known as Jack the Ripper: The undreamt dreams of the innocents forsaken to the machinery of London, whose first and final memories were of their mothers' betrayal.
Reformulated as a cursecraft technique, there was a significant gain in the priority of effect if a designated target superficially matched the characteristics of the exemplary 'women of the night' -- the eighty thousand who had worked the smog-ridden streets of British capital at its imperial height. To some irony, the Jack replicas perfectly qualified -- corresponding to the image by the fetish gear in which Victor Frankenstein had them outfitted; and by the mist that had yet to entirely dissipate into the subterranean night.
Had the girls been of the same substance as their archetype, Emiya's slightly degraded attack would've amounted to throwing fire at fire -- but as it were, the counterfeits were incapable of withstanding even a rank E Conceptual Weapon. At Emiya's utterance, consequently, the sphere of floating blades vanished from his vicinity, and lines of ochre inexplicably appeared across the replicas' exposed flesh. With no other portent, the shapes of their bodies collapsed beyond recognition, spilling bloodily across the rooftop in chunks of meat and viscera.
Amidst the carnage, Victor Frankenstein stood steadfast and alone. The twenty-fifth set of knives had been caught harmlessly between the fingers of his left glove -- and his good humor had all but evaporated.
'Cursecraft Negation?' thought Emiya, drawing a Kanshou and Bakuya from the air. 'No. He's asserting an innate field of law at high enough priority to block structural analysis ...'
"A man of science has nothing to fear from a few articles of baseless superstition," said Frankenstein, "but if their propagation is to the injury of me and mine, I shall entreat to debunk them as necessary. My little girl would suffer nothing less." With a finger-snap more crisp than Emiya might have expected of a gloved hand, he called, "Besides me, Prometheus!"
The field of law underwent cytokinesis.
Like an image losing focus, a humanoid shape of aquamarine 'gas' separated from the outline of the scientist's body. Resolving into the transparent form of a 'robot' bound in chains, it stepped forward and dropped from the rooftop -- fracturing the obsidian floor with an inexplicable weight it really shouldn't have possessed. Recovering almost instantly from any inertia, the ghostly figure flew at Emiya from the point of impact at a ferocious charge, swiping at him with a sharp open claw.
'Prometheus' wasn't quite so nimble as the Jack replica overall, but its attack, which should have only been of sufficient force to knock the Kanshou and Bakuya from Emiya's grasp, shattered the blades at no discernible plastic strain to the composite lode-metal -- or really any application of pressure to the hilts. Bypassing Emiya's guard in his moment of incomprehension, the robot plunged its fingers at his jugular -- failing at the last moment to the double-reinforcement of a hastily-traced Kanshou Overedge.
'Man of science, indeed,' thought Emiya, backstepping and half-permitting himself to be carried along the thrust of the robot's limb. 'How many times did he violate Newtonian mechanics just now?'
The bizarreness of the attack was a product of a 'trick': The robot's manner of movement predicted its body to be of a certain density and mass -- but all viable predictions were of no congruence to the pressure it could exert upon the solid objects it came into direct contact with. Given that there weren't obvious irregularities in air displacement, Emiya supposed that the phenomenon came of some inconsistently-applied force exaggeration, mandated by law.
Peculiarities aside, though, Prometheus looked and behaved like a relatively normal familiar; and in the absence of grounds to suspect a deception, it didn't seem as if attacking it would serve any real purpose. Arriving at his slightly mist-eroded mountain bike, Emiya took ahold of the rear wheel and lifted the frame from the ground.
"Gaia Synthesis," he said, enclosing the hypostyle and court in an unbounded spherical domain. "Phantasm Break."
Boosted disproportionately in priority, the frame of the bike distorted with the decoherence of its conceptual matrix -- twisting out of shape and protruding with sharp crystalline spikes where the metal came to be warped. Emiya applied a quick reinforcement to his limbs, and swung and released the deformed mass, targeting Frankenstein's vantage-point.
The Broken Phantasm detonated in the air, five meters short of its intended destination.
Prometheus -- having bodily shielded Frankenstein from the explosion -- was tossed by the force of the blast to base of the pillar immediately below its master. It was able to land on its feet without apparent debilitation, but Emiya noted that its body had at numerous points been pierced with crystalline shrapnel and debris. More importantly, the field of law beneath its surface wasn't eroding the substance in the manner of the Jack replica's plundering field.
'Disallowance rather than consumption,' thought Emiya, 'and he isn't of strong enough authority to reject the baseline of Unlimited Blade Works.'
Pressing a button on the rim of his monocle, Frankenstein narrowed his eyes.
"For one who purports to bear no investment in the fate of Humanity, you certainly are trying very hard to obstruct my work as a humble servant to the inevitable," he said. "And so as a scientist, my dear Fakir, I'm compelled to inquire: If not to contradict the carriage of Natural Law, what drives you to raise arms against me? Do you desecrate this place in pursuit of a wish, perhaps? Maybe a desire for world peace?"
"Sounds like the sort of wish somebody incredibly shallow would make over a birthday cake," replied Emiya. "And as for why I'm resisting you -- I don't know. Maybe it's because you're trying to kill me?"
"You haven't answered my question."
"Stab first, and ask questions later, hum?" Emiya asked, planting the Kanshou blade-first into the floor, and tracing out a copy of the Hrunting. "It's personal business, really. There's something I've wanted for a very long time, and I'm here to collect my due. If you think I'm obligated to tell you any more than that, you've got worse problems with ego boundary failure than I do."
Lifting the pommel of the sword so that the blade was level with the floor, he held left hand forward in a mock grip, drawing the hilt backwards as if nocking an arrow on an invisible bow. Prometheus shifted its posture, apparently readying itself for defense.
"Trace Parallel," said Emiya. "Artillery Mode."
A hundred and seven duplicates of the Hrunting materialized in the air alongside the first, lining the width of the hypostyle. As he released the pommel to the one he held, the blades shot forward in synchroneity -- arching chaotically about the space of the court. The mysteries of the Hound of the Plains weren't fully realized in the present implementation of Gaia Synthesis, and as such, they remained bolts of jet black bronze rather than thaumaturgical projectiles. It was, however, a failing that suited Emiya's purposes just fine.
The fact of their mere physicality meant that Frankenstein's field of law couldn't cancel their existence.
Almost as the swords were loosed, Prometheus had bounded to intercept their flight -- catching the blades in the substance of its arms and torso. Standing temporarily immobile, Emiya watched its movement -- waiting just until the robot was occupied at sufficient distance from its master to place it out of immediate reach. Then, drawing his sword from the obsidian, he began his actual offense.
With an odic burst pressing him to his upper threshold, it took Emiya two seconds to cross the court. At three, a Bakuya Overedge had joined its partner at Frankenstein's throat -- crossed blade to blade for the finishing move of a modified Kakuyoku Sanren. Emiya followed through, separating the man's head from his body.
It took Emiya a moment to realize that something had pierced the skin of his own abdomen.
From the front of scientist's suit, a small, pale hand had burst outwards in a spray of blood, puncturing Emiya's body armor with an antique glass syringe. As the clear fluid within was emptied, Frankenstein's field of law flowed along the arm, enveloping the whole Emiya's body.
With a surprised grunt, Emiya jerked himself free and lost footing, falling backwards into the dismembered flesh of a Jack replica. Somehow unable to combat the rapid loss of sensation in his limbs with Unlimited Blade Works, he could only stare as a second hand thrust from Frankenstein's ribcage, tearing a hole in the man's flesh from the inside.
Covered in blood, a prepubescent albino girl close in appearance to Jack the Ripper pushed herself forth from Frankenstein's remains.
"Amat Victoria curam," she said, smiling cherubically once free.
"Wh- What is this?"
"Nanomachines, Fakir," the girl replied. "I'm deconstructing your body on a molecular level, and there's nothing you can do about it. Sufficiently advanced science is, after all, inherently superior to magic. In the first place, the forging of human understanding is what made magic possible."
But Emiya could no longer respond. Control of his voice had been lost to the horrible, painless sensation of discontinuity.
"In your last moments of sensation, ancient enemy of mine," said the girl, "allow me to reintroduce myself. I was once the man known as Victor Frankenstein, but I stand before you now in a different flesh -- under a different name."
Walking to Emiya's side, she leaned, dripping blood upon his face.
"I am a Yield Andrographic -- the third eldest of my race," she said. "My name is YA-03, 'Victoria.' Please remember this, for it is the name of your vanquisher."