Jayr POV - Nasuverse, Moon, SE.RA.PH, Tsukumihara Academy - 2030 AD
I stand in front of the AV Room door, hands buried in my pockets, posture loose enough to look careless.
Appearances matter in SE.RA.PH, not because anyone is watching, but because the system itself reacts to intent, tension leaves impressions, hesitation leaves data traces, and I make sure to give it neither.
Beside me, Nero lingers in Spirit Form, an invisible warmth pressed lightly against my side, not quite touch, not quite presence, but enough that I can feel when her attention sharpens.
To anyone else, this is just another sealed facility door, locked, inactive, unimportant, forgotten. One of hundreds scattered through Tsukumihara Academy's lower layers, each with a purpose long since overwritten or abandoned. It isn't.
The wrongness registers the moment my focus brushes against it, not a spike, not an alarm, just a subtle dissonance, like a note played half a tone off.
The door exists too cleanly, too confidently.
It is not trapped in the crude sense, not booby-trapped or warded the way most Masters would attempt, it is a lie, a carefully constructed one which makes me narrow my eyes and murmur under my breath, "This isn't it."
The corridor around me is silent, but it isn't empty, SE.RA.PH never truly is.
Data hums beneath the floor in steady, regulated pulses, like a distant heartbeat.
The walls carry the faint afterimages of past access permissions, ghosts of students, Masters, and automated routines that once passed through here and no longer matter.
Everything feels orderly, clean, too clean.
Julius never trusted places that looked untouched; order was something you maintained, not something that simply existed.
I let my gaze drift across the door again, taking in details I'd ignored the first time.
The material composition reports standard alloys, standard reinforcement, and standard Codecast density.
It's aggressively normal, the kind of normal that invites you to stop thinking.
A trap for anyone who relies on assumptions.
Nero shifts beside me, her presence tightening slightly, attention sharpening, even without words, I can tell she feels it too.
Then she muses, her tone light but edged with disdain, [So this is the face he chose to show the world. How dreary.]
I reply through our bond, [Deliberately so. Julius didn't hide things behind grandeur. He hid them behind boredom.]
She hums softly, amused, [A coward's trick, perhaps. Or a clever one.]
I answer, [Both. Depending on who you ask.]
I reach out, not with my hands, but with my awareness, brushing the outermost layer of the door's reported permissions.
They respond instantly, eagerly, like a servant too quick to reassure its master, access logs pristine, no irregularities, no anomalies.
Lies don't like scrutiny; they fracture under patience.
I let my breathing slow, syncing myself with SE.RA.PH's rhythm, and begin to listen, not to what the door claims to be, but to what it refuses to acknowledge.
The gaps, the absences, the places where data should flow and doesn't.
There, a hesitation, barely perceptible.
Julius always hesitated before committing to a solution, just enough doubt to keep his options open.
I smile faintly and whisper, "Found you."
Nero doesn't speak aloud, but her presence tilts, clearly amused while she comments through our bond, [Already? How disappointing.]
The AV Room Julius B. Harwey claimed for himself, the one he never relinquished, the one he never replaced with a Private Room, does not exist on the surface layer of SE.RA.PH's architecture, at least not anymore. If it ever truly did.
What stands before me is a decoy, a carefully constructed one. A fake shell meant to satisfy cursory scans, casual intruders, and automated oversight.
A room that reports itself as complete, functional, unremarkable, exactly the kind of thing administrators and casual passers-by stop questioning.
A room built to look convincingly mundane while hiding the truth several layers deeper.
As expected of Julius, he never trusted surfaces.
If I wanted to, I could erase every protection here in an instant, I could overwrite the Codecasts, brute-force the locks, burn through the digital magecraft like damp paper.
SE.RA.PH would allow it, it always does, as its most important objective in the end is simply to observe.
But Julius is not foolish; he is cautious, paranoid, and obsessive to a frightening degree. A broken man who assumes betrayal as a constant state of the world and prepares accordingly.
A man who would absolutely rig his sanctuary to erase itself, its contents, and its intruder if breached the wrong way.
So I don't force anything.
I close my eyes and let my senses widen, drawing on the abilities I inherited from my Digimon Incarnation to fully exploit the digital nature of this reality.
Nero settles closer, silent now.
We listen to the door lie.
I let my awareness widen, sinking deeper into the digital substrate of this place, where intent leaves clearer fingerprints than code ever could.
The Codecasts unravel themselves not as spells, but as thoughts frozen into logic.
Then I start with the outermost layer.
I let my perception sink past the surface layer, deeper than the door's declared permissions, deeper than its reported structure.
The deeper I go, the more personal the defences become.
These aren't generic safeguards copied from SE.RA.PH's templates are tailored, revised, rewritten dozens of times over.
I can see where Julius changed his mind mid-design, where he added redundancies after imagining new threats, where he layered contingencies on top of contingencies until the structure resembles a maze built by someone afraid of their own shadow.
Some of the Codecasts aren't even meant to activate; they're decoys for decoys.
I pause briefly when I encounter one particularly elegant construct: a self-correcting logic loop designed to appear flawed.
Any intruder who "fixes" it would trigger a cascade elsewhere, flagging them as both knowledgeable and impatient.
All this makes me smirk while thinking, 'Clever.' At the same time, I wonder out loud, "Were you trying to catch me or someone worse?"
Nero's presence brushes against mine, thoughtful, [You almost sound disappointed.]
I admit, [Maybe a little. He would've loved to know someone like me existed.]
That earns a soft laugh from her, [How tragic.]
I dismantle the loop without correcting it, preserving its illusion, then move on.
Each successful removal leaves no trace behind, no alerts, no logs; the system will believe everything remains exactly as Julius left it.
Which feels appropriate.
At one point, I hesitate, not because of danger, but because of a realisation.
Julius never built these defenses expecting to survive this war.
This isn't a fortress meant to be reclaimed; it's a time capsule, a final archive of intent, paranoia, and devotion.
Everything here exists to endure him, not protect him.
For Leo, always for Leo, the son of the only person who truly cared for him.
That thought lingers as I disarm a curse that would've attached itself to my existence and waited weeks before triggering; the sheer spite of it is almost impressive.
By the time the last hostile trace fades, the silence feels heavier, as if the room itself has noticed it's been declawed.
I straighten slowly before I say quietly, "Alright. Now let's see what you were so afraid of losing."
The shift is subtle. SE.RA.PH doesn't resist, not exactly; it yields, the way a well-trained system does when approached with the right authority and intent.
As a result, the false door unravels first, not shattering or opening, but quietly dissolving into inert data once I follow the correct access rhythm.
Not a password, not a key, but a habit.
Julius always favoured patterns over static locks, things that made sense to him, that reflected the way he thought the world should behave, rigid, orderly, but never simple.
Beyond the shell lies the false AV Room.
It's convincing enough at a glance, rows of chairs, a large viewing screen, terminals humming softly with just enough activity to look occupied, obsolete monitoring systems running pre-recorded diagnostic loops, everything placed with deliberate mundanity.
A trap designed to waste time and deceive rather than kill, to lull intruders into thinking they've succeeded.
I dismantle it piece by piece, resisting the urge to rush; each layer I peel away exposes another beneath it, denser, more intricate, and far less forgiving.
Detection Codecasts keyed to hesitation, conditional triggers that only activate if the previous layer is tampered with incorrectly, recursive fail-safes designed to punish assumptions.
Julius built this place like a paranoid would build a fortress, not to stop the ignorant, but to destroy or, at the very least, maim the clever.
Nero's presence sharpens again, faint approval bleeding through our link as she says, [How tedious. Yet how very him. Our unfortunate opponent was just like you described, my Praetor.]
Hearing that, I smile wryly as I can easily imagine the figure of Julius sitting here, spending long hours refining contingencies no one asked for, imagining formidable enemies that might never come, and preparing for them anyway.
He likely never believed in absolute safety, only in buying time, only in forcing the enemy to make a mistake.
Several of these Codecasts are delayed, not alarms, but watchers; they record intrusion patterns, compare them against stored models, and only act later.
He may have taken hours, maybe even days, to design these curses that cling quietly to an existence and bloom when vigilance has faded.
That alone tells me he expected someone able to easily bypass such defences, maybe a Servant, or maybe something even worse.
I dismantle them anyway, carefully, quietly.
One by one, I rewrite their conditions, collapse their loops, and let them dissolve without ever realising they were seen, no ripples, no alerts, nothing for the system to remember.
Only when the last hostile trace fades do I allow myself to move forward.
Somewhere in this layered madness, hidden beneath overlapping obfuscation and self-modifying logic, the truth is waiting.
And Julius knew exactly how much effort it would take to reach it.
Finally, beneath overlapping obfuscation and self-modifying logic, I find it.
The real door.
It isn't physical in any meaningful sense; it exists as a convergence point where permissions, authority, and identity intersect.
I slip through the convergence point as quietly as a thought, and let the true AV Room open before me.
I take one step inside and stop.
My senses flare, sharper now, parsing layers that never needed to exist.
The whole room is saturated with dormant Codecasts, hundreds of them, woven into the walls, the air, even the floor's data substrate. They rest like sleeping insects, sensitive to motion, intent, identity.
Some are simple alarms, some are weapons, and a few are far worse.
Curse-type Codecasts cling to the concept of an intruder rather than their location.
They wouldn't trigger immediately; they'd wait, hours, days, long enough for someone to believe they'd escaped cleanly before unravelling them from the inside out.
I almost whistle out loud at the excessive yet totally justified level of paranoia displayed.
Almost.
Instead, I focus back on the more pressing matter and start to dismantle them all.
It takes time, more than I expected. Julius didn't layer these spells redundantly; he layered them argumentatively, each one assuming the previous had failed for a reason, each one attempting to compensate for that imagined failure.
To dismantle them without setting off even an echo and starting a massive chain reaction means understanding not just how they function, but why he placed them there.
By the time the last hostile trace fades, my respect for his diligence has grown despite myself.
Only then do I really look around.
The room is barren, no decorations, no personal indulgences.
Rows of chairs face a massive screen, large enough to observe entire battlefields at once; a handful of terminals sit dormant, their data storage suspiciously shallow, almost certainly decoys.
In the corner, there's a sleeping area, a barely used one.
The bed is neatly arranged, untouched by the subtle entropy that comes with habitation, no personal markers, no signs of rest.
Looking at the real AV Room makes me immediately realise, 'This isn't a living space so much as a command post. Julius didn't come here to rest. He came here to watch. To plan. To track probabilities and prune outcomes that threatened his brother's victory. Every inch of the room reflects that singular focus.'
I don't judge him for it.
If anything, I understand him better than I'd like to admit.
Nero manifests faintly, just enough for me to sense her presence more clearly now that the room has been pacified.
She observes the surroundings before she comments softly, "Single-minded to the end. How very human."
I don't respond; my attention has already shifted because my senses pick up something in this room that doesn't belong here.
And Julius, for all his paranoia, never hid anything without reason.
Together, we start to search the room, and it doesn't take long to find what Julius tried hardest to hide.
Behind the main screen, concealed within a narrow compartment that only exists when specific permissions overlap, rests a sealed data cache.
It's isolated from SE.RA.PH's systems are entirely shielded behind redundant encryption layers and nested authority checks that don't correspond to any official hierarchy, very in tune with Julius' style.
I smile faintly and mutter, "Found it."
After taking the data cache, I once again focus on my senses to ensure that we are not missing anything, and once I'm done, we calmly return to our Private Room to safely examine what we have recovered.
Back in our Private Room, I take my time before interfacing the data packet with my terminal, after all, Julius' patterns have been quite consistent, and rushing is how Julius kills people.
Sure enough, the moment I establish a connection, the traps surface.
Logic bombs disguised as indexing routines, recursive loops meant to lock an intruder's perception in place, delayed erasure protocols that would wipe the files the instant unauthorised curiosity crossed an invisible line.
Malware-like Codecasts coil beneath it all, waiting patiently, ready to unleash untold destruction the moment one makes a careless move.
But I remove them one by one before they ever have the chance to wake.
Then I open the files.
The first directory I notice is a list of names.
Naturally, they are all Masters; any of them is marked with a simple cross, the meaning of the sign easy enough to guess; they are those that are already eliminated.
Some through combat, some through circumstances that Julius clearly did not fully understand, and others labelled more coldly with "confirmed removal." Likely the result of his own handiwork.
A second group bears a single exclamation mark. These are the ones he considered dangerous: Rani, Rin, Dan, Shinji, and several others who mattered in the original timeline.
Each file contains meticulous observations of behavioural patterns. Servant compatibility theories, tactical speculation, and threat assessments are updated obsessively after every encounter.
Julius truly believed information could tilt fate itself, and he wasn't wrong at the very least in this kind of setting.
Then I see them, seven names, each marked with two exclamation points.
My breath stills looking at that familiar number and even more so seeing my own name among them, making me reach the only possible conclusion, 'Seven. The same number... These seven names are the Champions.'
While reaching that conclusion, there it is, I notice my own name among them.
The files are thinner than the rest, sparse, fragmented, incomplete.
Julius' notes repeat the same frustration again and again.
[No background data.]
[No reliable patterns.]
[Access denied through all channels.]
[Harway network returned null. As if this individual does not exist in our reality.]
Each of us appears in his records as a blind spot. An anomaly the system refuses to resolve.
He doesn't know who or what we are, but he knows we matter, that we're dangerous.
I take another look at my own name before curiosity wins, and I open my own file first.
The file contains cautious observations, nothing more; it almost sounds cautious. Julius never managed to piece me together.
[Subject displays repeated inconsistencies.]
[Unexplained combat outcomes.]
[Repelled Li Shuwen twice without Servant interference.]
[Servant behaviour does not align with known parameters.]
He suspects I'm a dangerous variable, but not how, and not why.
He never managed to piece me together, just enough data to confirm I was a variable he couldn't control and easily get rid of, which means that my strategies and restrains are working as intended.
Then I move on.
Aletha's file is brief, notes on her apparent friendship with me, her opponents dismissed as "non-noteworthy," though Julius still flags the results as highly abnormal, as she is a complete unknown variable.
Helena's end abruptly, but he also noticed her use of a strange "summoned creature", her Pokémon, and then the trail stops likely because she has been eliminated by me.
Ledram's file is longer, not because Julius understood him better, but because he was seen many times wandering around with different women.
Several women are mentioned, always unnamed, always described in careful detail, strength, presence, and abnormality.
Enough to circle the truth without ever grasping it.
Some descriptions trigger recognition immediately thanks to my Panmesia and immense meta-knowledge.
The first ones I recognise are obviously Elsa and Sara Pezzini, as I already know of them, so I quickly ignore them, but there are a few that are also quite easy.
[A charming Asian woman, around 1,70 meters tall, with brown eyes and black hair styled in ox-horns hairstyle, but her buns are unadorned and her bangs are more kempt and out of the way of her forehead, she also wears a qipao that resembles a cheongsam with the short sleevea of her dress, as well as her leggings, being blue, which enhaces even more her very muscular thighs, and black Chinese toe shoes. Design patterns of the sky, clouds, birds, and water run all along her dress, with the sky blue being the main colour on the outside of her outfit, gold serving as the primary colour for the inside of the woman's cheongsam, almost inverting the outside colours of the Chinese dress. She emanates a very strong martial aura similar to Li Shuwen.]
The keywords "ox-horns hairstyle", "very muscular thighs", and "martial aura" make me immediately think of the THICC Goddess herself, the one and only Chun-Li, the main female protagonist of the Street Fighter series and a true Martial Arts Master.
She is the first playable female fighter in a one-on-one fighting game and one of the earliest female video game protagonists to achieve widespread popularity; basically, she is one of the very first "Waifu" in existence.
Another description I can easily discern is.
[A young woman with glasses, she has gold-colored eyes and lightly messy brunette hair tied into braids on each side. She walks around while casually reading disturbingly perverted manga and casually calculating a male's "manhood" size just by looking with uncanny precision.]
This one can only be Aika Kiryuu, likely one of the first members of Ledram's Peerage, considering the fact that she originates from his home universe, the High School DxD Universe.
The ability to calculate a male's "manhood" size just by looking is a dead giveaway.
The last one I can identify is.
[A dark-skinned woman of average height. She has narrow red eyes with long, defined eyelashes, and straight white hair reaching her thighs with bangs that extend to the left of her face. While slender and curvaceous in frame, she also sports a lean, athletic, and well-defined build, especially in her arms and legs. Cusiosily, she has long white rabbit ears pointing upwards above her head, along with a small, white, round tail, giving her an overall resemblance to an albino rabbit. It makes me wonder if she is some kind of new Phantasmal Species Demi-Human.]
There is only one person I can connect that description to, Rumi Usagiyama, also known as the Rabbit Hero: Mirko, the No. 5 Pro Hero of the My Hero Academia Universe, who has the aptly named Quirk, Rabbit.
The descriptions of the other women seen beside Ledram are way too vague to clearly identify them.
I mean, "young woman with long blonde hair and blue eyes" is way too generic in anime alone; there are 1380 of them, then if one adds light novels, manga, books, and movies, the number jumps up exponentially.
Anyways, Julius never names them, but his frustration bleeds through the notes.
He knew Ledram wasn't operating within the regular rules; he just couldn't prove how or why.
The files of the remaining Champions are even worse.
Kang Yaling. Age Svenson. Biol.
Almost nothing on them, just absence, failure, dead ends. The only good news is that I've at the very least found out the name of the last Champion taking part in this Holy Grail War.
But then, one note freezes my attention. Biol. I read the description slowly.
[Biol. A young man with distinctive cyan, spiked hair and bright blue eyes. His skin tone is fair. He always wears a slight, confident smirk on his face. His attire consists of several stylish layers. He wears a black turtleneck or close-fitting shirt under a bright yellow V-neck sweater or vest. Over this, he has a cyan and white cropped hoodie-style jacket. The jacket has white sleeves and a cyan body with ribbed cuffs and hem. He has a glowing-green device that looks almost like a watch attached to his wrist. He wears baggy, dark red pants with large side pockets, giving them a cargo-pant feel. A gold belt with decorative star buckles cinches the pants. Attached to the belt are two rainbow-colored ribbons with star-shaped weights at the ends. His hands are adorned with red fingerless gloves, and he sports bright yellow socks that are slightly bunched at the ankles. He has on white sneakers with red and cyan accents.]
[He is Leo's next opponent. Every Master matched against him was eliminated before the Elimination Battle. Multiple assassination attempts were carried out by Li Shuwen and me. All failed. No damage inflicted. No contact made. All attacks are unnaturally stopped and fade away before hitting the target.]
Julius doesn't know why, but I do have an idea.
I scroll back through the Champion list again, slower this time.
Seven names. Seven blind spots.
Julius annotated them obsessively, but there's a difference in his tone here compared to the other Masters, less certainty, less confidence.
His usual sharp assessments soften into speculation, then frustration, then silence.
He wasn't just threatened, he was unsettled.
I linger on Aletha's file longer than I need to. Julius never outright calls her dangerous, but he flags her proximity to me repeatedly, as if expecting something catastrophic to happen simply because we share space.
Smart man.
Helena's truncated notes do not bother me as much. Sure, Julius hated unfinished threads, but the fact that she had been eliminated in combination with the danger that Leo faced explains his dismissive attitude toward it.
Ledram's file feels almost voyeuristic in comparison. Julius catalogued the women around him like unknown weapons, circling them with clinical detachment while clearly grasping that they weren't meant to be here at all.
He stood at the edge of a multiversal truth and never quite stepped over it.
Biol's file is different.
There's fear in it, not panic, but something colder, the kind of fear that settles when every tool you possess fails without explanation.
Julius doesn't rant here; he doesn't speculate wildly, he simply records outcomes.
No contact. No damage. No escalation possible.
I lean back, staring at the ceiling of our Private Room, letting Nero's presence ground me before I say quietly, "He knew. Not the full picture. But enough."
She nods, visible now, arms crossed loosely, "Enough to understand that the game was no longer theirs."
That's the part that hurts the most, I think. Julius did all of this believing he was buying his brother a future. Instead, he was documenting the moment the board stopped belonging to them at all.
I close the file at last.
I lean back, exhaling slowly while thinking, 'This isn't a war progressing toward a climax anymore. It's a quiet purge. Champions are removing variables before the board can even form. And Julius, the brilliant, relentless Julius, saw the cracks forming but never understood what lay beneath them. Which means whatever comes next… will be faster, sharper, and far more dangerous than anything SE.RA.PH was never designed to contain.'