Hashimoto Arata
Day 0 - Afternoon (Phase 2/3)
Nishi Ward - Kagamihara University
Arata returns to the storage chamber, quiet and lonesome now.
When the cleaner stirs from his stupor, he will only be pleased that his job has been taken care of so quickly. Another has already been assigned to the task, after all. The cleaner's job is done, and he can continue on. A seamless thought process, like two strips of film cut and put together to make one reel.
This time, Arata locks the door behind him.
Why did he come back? He already obtained the information he needed from the corpse.
It's because he was going to come here all along, for a different reason.
Arata'd hoped his precautions would have led to this relic room to stay under the radar, to go undetected from any attention and activity until he was done.
But it looks like it wasn't the case. It's already contested ground, and there's sure to be more yakuza to follow up.
Eventually his little cleaner friend would run into the truth of the matter; or rather, it would be more accurate to say that his fellow yakuza would realize the problem in his story.
Once that happens, they'll rush back here and secure the place, and his hopes of returning to this chamber for his goal would vanish like tears in the rain.
Which means time is scarce, and Arata has to act now. It isn't how he'd have preferred to do things, but sometimes a developing situation demands new plans.
What he wanted to do here, in this place drenched in history...
...is conduct his summoning.
It just so happened to be bad luck, a twist of fate, that someone else got here first.
What's more, the room had been sullied by the killing. Summoning here now, with such a powerful act left amidst the ritual, could ruin everything. A misfire here would cost him his life, at worst, or conjure a particularly unpalatable Servant given the nature of the slaying.
Luckily, he came prepared. Withdrawing something from the innards of his coat, he holds up a peculiar object to the light.
A blood red piece of steel, coiled around itself in a perfect mobius strip. Twisted in such a way, it resembled the twistings of a tree branch.
With this, he could still salvage the day. What he held in his hands was a powerful catalyst; a material component for the ritual that directly linked the summoning act to the Heroic Spirit being called forth.
It's one of the most powerful occult concepts; the concept of sympathy, of resonance. Like attracts like. It is for the same reason that the bloody corpse here would have stained the entire process, drowning it in blood like a food overly soaked in too much sauce.
Pulling up an unopened, unstained storage crate, Arata empties it before placing the blood red strip of metal atop the box like a pedestal to house the ritual's prime ingredient.
There was something alluring about it, something that drew the eye to it, something that filled one instinctively with the premonition that there lay something deeper behind its bizarre shape and form.
Laying out the magic circle with powdered silver, Arata draws out the four encircling patterns of departure within erasure inside the summoning circle.
“Shut.
Shut.
Shut.
Shut.
Shut.
Five perfections for each repetition."
Arata spread the silver as he chants the incantation, a melody rising all across the city by many magi.
"And now, let the filled sigils be annihilated in my stead!”
It was a procedure he'd practiced countless times.
The first test posed to every magus seeking to become a Master.
He'd done it so much he could see it with his eyes closed, he would dream of it as the time neared.
"Let silver and steel be the essence.
Let stone and the archduke of contracts be the foundation.
Let red be the color I pay tribute to.
Hear me in the name of our great ancestor, ████."
All across the city, the same ritual played out in countless ways.
Each Master came here with a goal, a desire that burned so fiercely in their breast that it pushed them to the desperate act of entering an occult death match where only one would succeed.
A wish.
"Let rise a wall against the wind that shall fall.
Let the four cardinal gates close.
Let the three-forked road from the crown reaching unto the Kingdom rotate."
A desire had brought Arata here, too. One that beat in his chest, coiled in his stomach, and dominated his thoughts like a demon's possession.
To realize his aim, for anyone to do so here, required trampling over the dreams of others.
Every defeated Master becomes a stepping stone forward to grasp just a bit closer to the everdistant ambition out of reach.
What drove one to act with such abandon, such determination?
Every Master must have a powerful reason behind them to enter this contest.
Arata could only hope his was just as powerful.
Could his dream truly be worthy of a wish...?
"Set--
-- Set
Let it be declared now; let thy flesh rest under my dominion, let my fate rest with your blade.
If thou submitteth to the call of the Holy Grail, and if though wilt obey this mind, this reason, then shou shalt respond."
Prana ripped through Arata's body, his circuits working overtime to channel the magic necessary to activate the summoning.
At this point, it would have been child's play for the cleaner to return and run him clean through.
He was so intensely focused on the ritual, that he had become the very extension of it.
As he chanted, sweat beaded his brow, and his muscles spasmed from exertion.
Acting like a machine, an automaton through which the World would act and bring about the miracle of granting shape to a Heroic Spirit in a container called a Servant.
Thunder boomed and arcs of lightning tore through the room, a hurricane kicking up and sweeping everything into disarray.
In the intensity of that pressure, a weight so heavy that it would cause any normal person to collapse to their knees, Arata stands unmoved.
And in that whipping gale, the professor's mind wandered, so lost in focus was he that it was as if another person had taken over.
"An oath shall be sworn here.
I shall attain all virtues of all of Heaven; I shall have dominion over all evils of all of Hell."
A child.
A living sacrifice.
A mummy interred by other living corpses.
Moving, acting, but dead in all but name.
The bandaged cadaver reaches out for the light of the sun——
"From the Seventh Heaven, attended to by three great words of power——"
"——come forth from the ring of restraint, protector of the holy balance!"