These Tragic Souls and a Sword Reborn
in an Intergalactic Space Opera
Story Intro: "Welcome! I'm an evil god, though not that evil of a god!" is what they woke up to. Join our heroes and heroines, having just met their demise, displaced by an extradimensional event."
Story Starts
-=&
Book 1 - The Empty Twin
Ch 3.5 Into the Deep
The fourth petal of the new shield held. For now.
The Emiya Crest—the network of magical circuits inherited from the store, refined by decades of use, embedded in his spiritual core rather than his physical body—was overclocking. He could feel it. A heat that started in his chest and radiated outward, cooking him from the inside. His internal temperature was climbing. Sweat evaporated before it reached his skin's surface. The prana flowing through his circuits had taken on a feverish quality, each pulse carrying more energy than his body could safely conduct.
"No. I'm staying." Ryuu's voice, behind him. Closer than before. She'd fought her way through the swarm to reach his position, her blade dripping ichor, her enchanted flames guttering low—almost spent. "We are getting out of this together."
"I second that motion." Rose dove into the swarm of lesser monsters below, dodging one as it leapt for her broom—the creature sailing past and tumbling into the abyss.
Their tone permitted no argument.
"Mipsy, order one of the brownies to call for backup! Grackle, do you have any healing salves that can help Shirou?"
Panic threaded through Ryuu's voice now—the composure cracking like the petals of his shield, fracture lines spreading through the professional calm she'd maintained for the entire fight.
Another petal shattered. The fifth.
Shirou had been too focused on the Weapon to look at himself. The sustained Quadruple Accel, the continuous projection, the repeated summoning and destruction of Rho Aias—each one extracted its price from his body, and the prices had been accumulating.
He felt hot air flowing inside him. Not around him. Inside. As though his lungs had been replaced by bellows stoking a forge that occupied his chest cavity.
He looked down.
A large section of his left side was gone.
Not wounded. Not cut. Gone. Blown away in the moment between shields—the fraction of a second when Rho Aias had shattered and the replacement hadn't yet formed—the flesh simply absent, replaced by a cavity that exposed everything a human body was supposed to keep hidden. His heart hung from a strip of pericardium, beating—still beating, impossibly beating—each contraction visible, the muscle red and wet and working despite having no business doing so.
And around the wound, in the space where flesh should have been: blades.
Microscopic swords. Thousands of them. Filling the cavity like crystalline growths, grinding against each other with every heartbeat, against the remaining organs, against the exposed ribs. The sound was not something ears should process—metal on metal on metal, a grinding whisper that came from inside his own body. Each tiny blade damaged whatever it touched. And then the damage healed—not with flesh, but with a mesh of even smaller blades that knitted the gap shut in a lattice of interlocking metal. Which then, slowly, agonisingly, was replaced by actual tissue as his body fought to reassert its biological nature over the sword that was his Origin.
A cycle. Damage. Metal repair. Flesh repair. Damage again. The eternal argument between the man and the concept that defined him, playing out in real time in the open wound of his torso.
Another petal shattered. The sixth. One remained.
Something wet hit his boots. He didn't look down again. He didn't need to. He could feel his intestines pressing against the remaining wall of his abdominal cavity, could feel the moment that wall gave way, could feel the slick heat of his own viscera spilling onto the stone beneath him.
"Mistress Ryuu, I be not knowing what to give Mister Shirou." Grackle's voice was high, thin, stretched taut as wire between panic and duty. "He be healing quickly but the healing is also be harming."
"HOLY SHIT!" Rose's panicked voice came from behind him. She'd landed. She was right there. "And your back is glowing!"
Shirou heard them moving. Grackle and Rose, panicking, knelt beside him—Rose reaching for the loop of intestine that had slipped free of his abdominal wall, instinct to fix overriding any rational assessment of the situation.
"Argh!"
"Bloody fuck! My hands! Why the fuck are there blades in your intestines?!"
Both screamed. Rose jerked her hands back—her palms bleeding from a dozen tiny cuts where she'd gripped tissue that was more steel than flesh.
"Mistress Ryuu, Lucksy be splinching—he be leaving left foot, but he be successful with leaving." Mipsy's voice, shrill, from somewhere behind the sword-forest. Splinching. One of the brownies had pushed their apparition too far and left a piece of himself behind.
"Argh." The grunt was Shirou's own. Frustration, not pain. Pain had become background noise—a constant that his brain had simply stopped processing in favour of more actionable data.
Rose conjured cloths to wrap around her bleeding hands.
"Rose, don't touch any part of my body. Your current priority should be helping Ryuu. I'll hold the line."
"But—"
"Go!" Shirou roared.
He surveyed the battlefield. Bleak didn't cover it. Ryuu behind him, holding the swarm but losing ground—her enchantment nearly spent, her movements still precise but slowing by fractions that only a trained eye would catch. Rose, who begrudgingly took to the air again, circling lower as her curses grew more desperate—her reserves draining, her accuracy maintained only through sheer stubbornness. The brownies scattered across the stage, splinching when they pushed their apparition range, burning through healing salves on each other. The Weapon in front, pouring fire from its crystal, its beast-face charging another beam, its wounds healing, its sword ready.
One petal remaining.
"Fuck it." The words were quiet. Almost gentle. The calm that came after you'd already accepted the worst and found it boring. "Brownies, I rescind all orders regarding the limitation of your use of magic. Go all out and support Ryuu and Rose as much as you can. Destroy all our enemies."
"Yes, Master Shirou."
No hesitation. No quaver. The brownie's voice dropped an octave and gained an edge that hadn't been there before—the difference between a servant following instructions and a warrior given permission to fight.
"Everyone, operate behind the sword I'm about to summon, and take note when it's about to break." He pushed his circuits further. The heat inside him intensified—forge-hot now, the kind of temperature that warped metal and cracked stone. "And I'll count down from five. Once it reaches one—Pockey, teleport Ryuu to the guard of the sword. All other brownies, follow. There will be an explosion that will affect the entire stage."
He did not wait for acknowledgement. There was no time for acknowledgement. The last petal of Rho Aias was fracturing, hairline cracks spreading across its surface like a windshield struck by a stone, and behind those cracks was nothing but fire and the beast and the end of everything.
He braced. He grabbed Gáe Bolg with his limp arm, forcing his muscles to hold on to the shaft despite the damage and the dislocated joint. His fingers wouldn't close properly—the tendons had been severed and re-knitted with blade-filaments that didn't quite replicate biological function—so he hooked his wrist around the shaft instead and held on through sheer structural rigidity.
"Trace on."
"Five!"
"Luminous Wind!" Ryuu, behind him. Another barrage of green-white orbs slamming into the horde. The sound of shattering chitin. The sound of victory in miniature, repeated a dozen times, meaningless against the scale of the problem.
"Four!"
The brownies screamed a collective battle cry. Crack-crack-crack—apparition displacements, each one followed by an explosion. Brownie magic, unshackled. The sounds were different from wizard spells—sharper, wilder, carrying an overtone of furious joy that had nothing to do with elegance and everything to do with beings who'd been told they could finally stop holding back.
"Three!"
"We be escaping this!" Volkey declared. The brownie's voice rang across the stage with the conviction of a general rallying troops, and Shirou felt something in his chest—not blades, not broken ribs, but something warmer—respond to the sheer bloody-minded defiance of it.
"Two!"
"Mipsy and Tripsey be joining the fight!"
Just as the countdown reached two, Shirou Traced.
The object was enormous. Not sword-enormous. This was a different category of scale entirely—the kind of scale that belonged to myths about mountains being carved by divine blades, about landscapes reshaped by the idle swings of gods.
Ig-Alima. The Mountain-Felling Sword.
The original would have been the height of a skyscraper—one of the divine constructs from the Age of Gods, a weapon that existed at the intersection of armament and geography. What Shirou projected was a diminished version—hollowed, structurally compromised, perhaps thirty storeys tall rather than the true weapon's mountain-cutting dimensions. Even so, it was the largest single object he had ever Traced. The sheer volume of prana required to materialise it burned through his circuits like acid through paper, and somewhere inside him a circuit that had been overclocking for the past ten minutes finally gave out—a bright, sharp pain behind his left eye that he filed away and ignored.
The sword appeared above them. High. A shadow that blocked out the blue-flame light entirely, casting the stage into sudden darkness. Its blade was a single edge of stone and metal, grey-white, rough-hewn, ancient. Its guard was a ring of interlocking geometric patterns that cast rotating shadows as the weapon descended. Its pommel was a sphere of compressed earth that trailed dust and debris like a comet's tail.
And then it fell.
"One! Teleport!"
A brownie grabbed Ryuu. Another grabbed Rose. The remaining brownies seized each other in a chain—tiny hands gripping tiny wrists with desperate strength. A cascade of cracks echoed across the stage as every allied combatant vanished from the impact zone and reappeared at the guard of the descending titan-sword, clustered on the massive geometric ring like sailors clinging to a ship's railing in a storm.
Shirou cancelled Rho Aias. The last petal disintegrated, and the Weapon's fire poured through—but he was already moving. He launched himself backward, the movement more controlled fall than acrobatics—certain organs shifting inside him with a wet, horrible looseness as he twisted in the air. He caught the edge of Ig-Alima's blade with one hand, the other still hooked around Gáe Bolg's shaft, and hauled himself onto the flat of the falling sword's surface with a jolt that rattled what remained of his skeleton.
The stage rushed up to meet them.
He pointed Gáe Bolg at the Weapon.
"Gáe—"
The spear left his hand. His wrist—the one he'd hooked around the shaft because his fingers no longer worked properly—released with a flick that sent pain screaming up his arm and across his shoulder.
"—Bolg."
The cursed weapon struck the Weapon's torso at the same instant Ig-Alima hit the stage.
The kinetic energy of several thousand tonnes of hollowed divine sword falling from height produced an impact that redefined the chamber's geography. The stage—four kilometres in diameter, carved from stone that had endured since the dungeon's creation—buckled. A shockwave expanded from the point of impact in a perfect circle, moving faster than sound, lifting everything in its path—stone, chitin, bodies, blood—and hurling it outward. The pillars supporting the stage groaned. Some cracked. The sound they made was geological—the voice of stressed rock giving way, of architecture designed for eternity discovering its limits.
The monster horde ceased to exist. Not defeated. Not scattered. Erased. The kinetic shockwave and the cursed spear's explosive proliferation combined into a single event that reduced every lesser creature on the stage to scattered fragments of chitin and dissolving matter.
Shirou crouched on Ig-Alima's surface, one hand flat against the stone blade, the other cradling the arm that had thrown Gáe Bolg, and watched the dust settle.
The stage survived. Barely. The upper crust had been pulverised—replaced by a field of dark rubble, chunks of stone that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. The pillars still held, though several bore cracks that ran from base to capital. The pit surrounding the stage was unchanged—infinite, patient, hungry.
And the Weapon was still alive.
It lay flat on its belly. Its enormous sword had been driven into the stage like a piton, the blade buried to its guard, and the Weapon had clearly used it as an anchor against the shockwave. Its body was riddled with wounds—gashes from the kinetic blast, punctures from Gáe Bolg's proliferating barbs, burns from Ryuu's flame enchantments. The cursed wounds wept openly, dark fluid pooling beneath the creature in a spreading lake. The non-cursed wounds were already healing, but slowly—the accumulated damage was taxing even the Weapon's regeneration.
It was struggling to stand. Its forelegs slipped on the rubble. Its hindquarters, still bearing the unclosable gash from Gáe Bolg, dragged uselessly. The dragonoid torso strained—pulling itself upward using the embedded sword as leverage—and each movement produced a growl of pain that vibrated through the rubble.
Gáe Bolg snapped back to Shirou's hand. The spear returned with the loyalty of a hound that had finished its task and wanted praise. He closed his fingers around the shaft—the ones that still worked—and felt the weapon purr against his palm, sated but not satisfied. Never satisfied.
The wounds dealt by Gáe Bolg could not heal while the spear existed. That was the weapon's nature—its conceptual truth, hardwired into its legend by centuries of belief. Wounds made by the Hound of Culann's spear were final. No magic, no regeneration, no divine intervention could close them while the barbed death that caused them still walked the world. Dispelling the Noble Phantasm would release that lock—the wounds would become ordinary injuries, subject to ordinary healing. Which was why Shirou kept it materialised. The spear was their only permanent answer to the Weapon's regeneration.
He leapt from Ig-Alima's surface and landed on the rubble-strewn stage. His body screamed objections through every nerve it had left. The wound in his left side had partially closed—the blade-mesh-flesh cycle continuing its gruesome work—but the organs beneath were still exposed, still grinding against microscopic swords, still rebuilding themselves one agonising layer at a time. His left arm hung at his side, the shoulder still dislocated, the fingers still non-functional. His right forearm was a patchwork of burst skin and metallic filament, held together by reinforcement magic that was running on fumes.
He was, by any medical standard, a corpse that hadn't received the memo.
The Weapon's dragonoid head tracked his descent. Even prone, even wounded, even anchored to the stage by its own sword, the creature's eyes burned with intelligence that had nothing to do with bestial instinct. It was watching him the way a general watched an opponent who'd committed their reserves—with the calculating patience of something that knew the battle was far from over.
"Everyone. It's time to finish this."
A chorus of voices answered him. Ryuu's, sharp and resolute—she'd apparated down from Ig-Alima's guard and landed on the rubble ten metres to his right, her wooden blade drawn, her enchanted flames reignited with what must have been the last of her reserves. The brownies', fierce and high-pitched—a chorus of defiant squeaks that would have been comical from creatures standing less than a metre tall if it hadn't been accompanied by the crackle of magic building in tiny fists. Rose's, from above, accompanied by the whistle of a broom in a power dive—she'd climbed to ceiling height and was now descending at an angle that suggested she intended to use velocity as a weapon in its own right.
Shirou sprinted toward the Weapon. The creature saw him coming. Its beast-face—embedded between the forelegs, still bearing the five intersecting gashes from Ryuu's Gokou—opened its maw. Light gathered in the back of its throat again. The beam weapon, recharging. The rainbow crystal in its left hand pulsed, feeding energy to the regeneration and the beam simultaneously.
"Oh no you don't. Enkidu!"
Golden chains erupted from the air. Not projected—Traced, which meant they were copies, diminished by the gap between original and reproduction, but still carrying the conceptual weight of the weapon that had bound gods and tamed divine beasts. The Chain of Heaven—forged to restrain the Bull of Heaven, wielded by the King of Heroes as his answer to divinity itself. The chains were tipped with spearheads that bit into the Weapon's flesh and held. They wrapped the creature's body in a golden web—spiralling around the maw of the beast-face, forcing its jaws shut, sealing the beam weapon behind a cage of divine restraint. More chains pinned its arms to its sides, lashing the humanoid torso's limbs against the beast-body's flanks.
The Weapon thrashed. The chains held. Barely—Shirou could feel the strain through the conceptual link, could feel the chains stretching, the Noble Phantasm's reproduction struggling to contain something that was neither god nor beast but something entirely foreign to the legend's context. Enkidu was designed to bind the divine. This creature possessed no divinity. The chains held not because the Weapon qualified as their intended target, but because the sheer mass of prana Shirou had poured into the Trace compensated for the conceptual mismatch.
Brute force. Inelegant. Effective. For now.
But they held. For now.
Ryuu appeared at the Weapon's flank. A brownie had apparated her—the crack of displacement followed immediately by the sound of her wooden blade striking chitin. She wove around the creature's body, her flame-enchanted sword leaving smoking trails across every surface it touched, singeing and slicing with the mechanical efficiency of someone who had been doing this for a decade and a half.
Rose swept in from above. She'd conjured something—a massive boulder, twice the size of a carriage, levitated above her broom and guided with her wand—and released it directly onto the Weapon's already-damaged dorsal ridge. The impact cracked chitin and drove the creature's belly against the rubble. Before it could recover, she followed up with a sustained Incendio directed into the cracks, superheating the interior.
Shirou stopped before the creature. Extended his right hand—the functional one—toward the darkened ceiling. And Traced.
The weapon that materialised was not elegant. It was not beautiful. It was not a work of art or a masterpiece of metallurgy. It was a slab of grey stone, roughly shaped into the outline of a single-edged axe-sword—more cleaver than blade, more monument than weapon. Its surface was unfinished, pocked, scarred by what might have been the impacts of lesser weapons that had shattered against it. Its weight was obscene.
The axe-sword of Berserker Heracles. The weapon of a demigod whose physical parameters exceeded what human mythology could accurately record. A weapon that, in its original wielder's hands, had moved like a willow switch despite weighing more than a horse.
Shirou's reinforced muscles accepted the load. His enhanced body—transformed by the transfer, strengthened by purchased aptitudes and awakened circuits—gripped the stone hilt and lifted the weapon overhead with both hands. His dislocated shoulder ground back into its socket with a sound like wet gravel shifting, held in place by blade-filaments that had woven through the joint and refused to let it separate again. Not healed. Pinned. The Sword Incarnation's answer to orthopaedic medicine.
"Get behind me."
Ryuu performed one final slash—a diagonal cut that severed the Weapon's tail and one of its hind legs in a single stroke, cauterised by the residual flame enchantment. Mipsy and Tripsey appeared in twin cracks of apparition and cast fire—not wizard fire, not enchanted flame, but brownie fire. Wild. Furious. Fire that came from a place of righteous indignation and burnt hotter for it. The flames cauterised the severed stumps before the regeneration could engage. Volkey, Grackle, and the rest screamed—a raw, wordless battle cry that would have been comical from creatures standing less than a metre tall if it hadn't been accompanied by lightning that arced from the brownies' fingers in blue-white streams, earthing itself in the Weapon's bound body with the enthusiasm of beings who had been told they could stop being polite.
"Trigger off."
The four of them vanished—brownie apparition pulling Ryuu and the others to safety behind Ig-Alima's embedded bulk.
Shirou breathed in. The air tasted of blood and iron and something that might have been ozone.
"Set."
"Nine Lives Blade Works."
Upper arm. The stone blade bisected the humanoid torso's left shoulder, severing the arm that held the rainbow crystal. The limb fell—still clutching the gem, still glowing—and hit the rubble with a sound like a chandelier striking marble.
Collarbone. The return stroke caved in the right side of the torso's chest, pulverising armour and the structure beneath it in a spray of violet-black fluid and splintered chitin.
Throat. A horizontal cut that opened the dragonoid neck from ear to ear—if the creature had ears—spraying violet-black blood in a fan that painted the rubble in glistening arcs.
Temple. The pommel, reversed mid-swing with a wrist rotation that belonged to a demigod's muscle memory rather than Shirou's own, crushed the left side of the dragonoid skull. Horn fragments scattered like shrapnel, embedding themselves in the stage around them.
Diaphragm. A downward chop that split the torso from sternum to navel, exposing the cavity where human anatomy would have housed lungs and liver—and where this creature housed something pulsing and alien that Shirou's Structural Analysis couldn't classify even mid-swing.
Ribcage. A lateral sweep that shattered every visible rib analogue on the right side, folding the torso's armour inward like crumpled parchment, the chitin cracking with a sound like a ship's hull breaking on rocks.
The beast's maw. The blade descended on the sealed jaws of the embedded face, breaking through Enkidu's chains and the chitin and the teeth and the bone beneath in a single catastrophic stroke that split the face vertically. The two halves fell apart like a fruit cleaved by a butcher's knife—symmetrical, clean, final.
The forearm's large muscle. A reverse cut that hamstrung the creature's remaining foreleg, severing the primary muscle group in a spray of dark fluid and dropping the Weapon's front end to the rubble with a ground-shaking impact.
And finally: a lancing thrust. Straight through the chest of the humanoid torso—through the split sternum, through whatever remained of the internal structures, through the back—the stone blade emerging from the other side glistening with violet-black blood and fragments of chitin that slid from the edge like water from oiled steel.
Eight strikes and a thrust. One breath. All practically simultaneous—the speed of a technique that carried the memory of killing a hydra whose heads regenerated faster than they could be severed. The technique of the greatest hero of Greece, borrowed by a man who was no longer entirely human, executed in a body that was held together by swords and spite and the stubborn refusal to fall down.
Silence.
The brownies cheered behind him. Shrill, triumphant voices raised in celebration—their joy infectious enough that even the rubble-strewn, blood-soaked, half-destroyed battlefield seemed briefly less bleak. Ryuu's voice joined them—not cheering, but breathing hard, the sound of relief so profound it was almost a sob. Rose laughed somewhere above—the sharp, disbelieving bark of someone who'd been certain they were about to die and had just discovered they weren't.
Shirou exhaled. His arms trembled. The stone axe-sword was buried in the Weapon's chest up to its crossguard, and the creature's body hung limp around it—the humanoid torso slumped forward, the beast-body collapsed, the severed limbs twitching in the rubble. The golden chains of Enkidu dissolved, their purpose served, their copied existence expiring into motes of light that drifted upward and faded.
He began to withdraw the blade.
The stone edge dragged through the Weapon's chest, widening the wound, splitting the cavity further as it came free. Internal structures parted before it. And there, exposed in the ruin of the creature's core—where the beast-body's face met the humanoid torso's base, in a space that should have housed whatever passed for a heart—lay a magicite.
Large. Larger than any core Shirou had encountered in the dungeon's upper floors. The size of his torso. Multifaceted, crystalline, refracting the chamber's blue-flame light into a kaleidoscope of colour that painted the surrounding rubble in shifting hues.
Bright.
Brightly glowing.
Not dimming. Not fading. Not transitioning to the duller colour that signified a dead monster's depleted core.
The magicite was getting brighter.
Light pulsed from its facets—not steadily, not rhythmically, but in accelerating bursts that grew more intense with each repetition. The crystal hummed. The rubble around it vibrated. The air above it shimmered with heat that wasn't heat.
'This was a mistake.'
The thought arrived with the clarity of absolute certainty. Not doubt. Not fear. Just the recognition—cold, mechanical, the product of a mind that had survived enough catastrophes to recognise the precursors of the next one—that he had broken the container without killing the contents.
"Apparate toward the guard of the large sword!"
He screamed the order. Didn't wait for confirmation. Didn't check if they'd heard. The glowing core was pulsing faster now, each flash brighter than the last, each hum deeper, each vibration stronger. The rubble around the Weapon's body was beginning to levitate—small stones first, then larger chunks, drawn upward by whatever force the magicite was unleashing.
He should have finished his chant. Should have spoken the remaining lines of his aria, pushed his Reality Marble toward deployment, and unmade this thing with the endless blades of his inner world.
Instead, he'd wasted the breath on a warning.
"So as I pray—"
The Weapon stiffened.
Every muscle in the creature's ruined body locked rigid. The severed limbs stopped twitching. The slumped torso snapped upright—pulled by invisible strings, yanked vertical with the jerking, puppeted motion of something that was no longer operating under its own power. The split beast-face—carved in half by the seventh strike of Nine Lives—opened both halves of its maw simultaneously and howled.
The sound was language.
Not any language Shirou recognised. Not Galactic Basic. Not Japanese. Not English or Latin or Sumerian or any of the tongues his Traced weapons carried in their memories. The sound was shaped—carried intention, grammar, meaning—but it was meant for something other than human comprehension. Something vast. Something that existed below them, in the darkness of the pit, in the roots of the dungeon, in whatever waited at the bottom of a spire that had been sick since before they arrived.
The magicite detonated.
Not outward. Inward. The light collapsed into a sphere of absolute density—a point of white so intense it burned afterimages into Shirou's retinas through his closed eyelids—and then expanded in a wave of force that was not physical, not magical, but conceptual. It rewrote the air. It rewrote the stone. It rewrote the Weapon's body, pouring into the ruined flesh like molten metal into a mould, filling every wound, every cavity, every gap that Nine Lives and Gáe Bolg and Gokou and every other weapon had carved.
M̸̡̪̼̝̲̫̖̟̻̟͙̖͍̦͕̞̹̟͉̲̭̟̘̘͇̦̄̑̋̃̾̎̔̊͂̆́̾͋̎́͆̍͊̎̉͐̓̿̌͂́̾̓̚̚͜͝ȩ̸̢̧̨̡͕͕̩̖͎̻̖̪̬͉̻͔̝̼̮͔̤̣̭͍̣̗͍́̈́̈́̐̔̌̌͌̈́̔̃̈́̅͊͗̿̌̍̆̎̚̚͝͝ǵ̵̡̡̧̛̘̯̥͓͎̜̰̬̫̺̟̥̮̞͉̙͎̻̠̩̞̤̩̤͚̣͇̩̖̖͇͎̽́̃́̇͆̽͆̔́̈́͐̉̂̍̅̾̾̎̀̉̕̚̕͜͜͠͠͝i̵̧͚̥̯͈̬̣̜̮̖̳̻̟̮͓̰̮͍̳̲̹̬̮̣̟͔̱̯͕̯͕̩͋͜͜d̶̛̗͉̠̜̙̰̟̒͊͛̍̏̐̓̾͒̈́̑̌̑̐̈́d̴̡̢̧̯̥̜̱̖̟͍̩̥̤̭̭̯̻̟̞͈̩̩̣̲̠̤̥͔̪̣̥̺͉̦̘͎͈̂ŏ̵̧͇̰̲̬͕̩̼͈̘͙͕̭̻͓͚̳͖͚̪̠̣̘̗͎̽̐̚͝͝͝͠ ̸̡̟̬̦̼̹̳̯̺̠͓̮̬̞͖̦͎͙̦̯̣͈̰̳͍̮́̚͜͜ͅͅͅF̵̧̧̧̲̯̼͍̯̮̳̙̜̹̲͕͈̙̰̘͓̖͓̯͎̭̙̞̌̉̌̃̿̓̐̓̏̓̎̅̂̌̕̕̚͜͝l̵̨̧̩̮̞̼̜̩̟̺͓̤͚̰͎̬̅͊̔͊́͂̂̚̕̕͜͝ą̴̨̧̙̯̖̖̞̪͈̹̠̜̗̗̱̖͓͙̭̮̜͈̮͙̻̻͚̫̝͎͓̃̑̓̄́̊͌͂̆͊̃̀̀̾̓̽̇̄̎̇̄̌̚̕͝͝͠͠ͅͅm̴̨̧̧̧̡̯͔̜̠̪̦̝̥̫͔̠̗̳̝̖̚͠ẻ̸̲͙̣̹̀̈́̋̀̅̍̓̏̇̓̈́̽̑̋̓̿̓̾̈̈́̈́̚̚̕̚͝͠s̵̡̗̤̩̞̝͉͕̣̺͈̣̳͚̽̂̃̀̇̎̎̀̐̈́̄̐̉̎̏̚͝
Pain.
Not from the wounds he'd already sustained. Not from the broken bones or the exposed organs or the microscopic swords grinding through his flesh. This was new. This was different. This came from somewhere deeper than his body—from the circuits themselves, from the Reality Marble that sat at the core of his being, from the endless field of blades that was his inner world.
The magicite was doing something to him. The light pouring from its facets was not just light—it carried information, intent, a will that pressed against his consciousness like fingers probing the seams of a locked door. The dungeon's will. Directed. Focused. Seeking. It had found the wound in his side—the exposed cavity where blades and flesh fought their eternal war—and it was pouring itself in through the gap like water through a cracked hull.
"Unlimited—"
The word left his mouth and the pain redoubled. Tripled. His vision went red. Not the grey of oxygen deprivation or the white of concussive flash. Red. The colour of his inner world's sky during a forge-cycle, the colour of the gears that turned above Unlimited Blade Works, the colour of iron heated past its tolerance.
He screamed.
The sound ripped from his throat without permission—raw, animal, carrying none of the restraint that defined Shirou Emiya. He screamed because his body was being invaded. The magicite's energy was pouring into him through the wound in his side—through the exposed cavity where blades and flesh fought their eternal war—and it was rewriting.
Not healing. Not damaging. Changing.
His circuits flared. The Emiya Crest overclocked beyond any parameter he'd ever pushed it to—beyond the limits of human magical architecture, beyond the tolerances the Crest had been designed to withstand, into a territory that belonged to something other than a magus. The heat inside him passed forge-temperature and entered territory that had no name because nothing biological survived long enough to report it.
The swords inside him sang. Not metaphorically. The microscopic blades that filled his wound, that knitted through his organs, that replaced his flesh when his flesh gave out—they resonated. Vibrated. Harmonised with something in the magicite's energy, as though recognising a frequency they'd been waiting to hear.
He screamed again. And again. And again.
Red.
Red everywhere.
The pain crescendoed—climbed beyond what his nervous system could process, beyond what Quadruple Accel could dilate, beyond what any amount of combat experience could contextualise as endurable—
And then—
Darkness.
Silence.
And from somewhere impossibly far away and impossibly close—from the sheath that rested in his soul, from the bridge between worlds, from the field where warriors who'd earned their rest awaited the call to rise again—
A voice.
Warm. Ancient. Sad in the way that only eternal things could be sad—not from loss, but from the weight of having loved too much for too long.
"Wake up… Færing."
-=&
End