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 3.2 Into the Deep
Grakkan Empire
System: Leafil | Planet: Unnamed Pair of Theta
Date: Grakkan Standard (GknS) | Local (Leafil) | Galactic Standard (GS)
'Revolution' / 'Prime Satellite' / 'Rotation' / 'Time'
GknS 34k6.rev-70% / 10.rev-53% / 259.rot-48% / 11:32:06
Local: 42k6.12.rev-58% / 8.rev-56% / 295.rot-34% / 13:24:00
GS 13k9.rev-47% / 8.rev-55% / 258.rot-48% / 21:18:23
-=&
The twelfth floor. Finally.
Syr leaned against a single-bladed greatsword Shirou had conjured—or rather, traced—for her—nothing special, just a plain slab of steel she'd requested without ornamentation—the blade driven hard enough into the floor to hold her weight. One ankle crossed over the other, she watched the slaughter unfold with mild interest.
Three days. That was all it had taken for this mismatched rabble to stop tripping over each other and start resembling something functional. Not good—not yet, not by the standards she'd once held for the warriors who drank at her table in the life she was trying very hard not to think about—but functional. The brownies had stopped flinching at the lambs' bleating. The centaurs had learned to brace for a charge without locking their knees—most of them were accustomed to fighting at range or sparring one another, a far cry from battling dungeon monsters. Even the skrattes, who'd been catastrophically eager on their first day, had settled into the kind of grim professional rhythm that turned a dungeon floor from a battlefield into an abattoir.
And Marin—
Syr tilted her head.
Marin Kitagawa threw herself at a cluster of three lambs with the gleeful abandon of someone who'd confused a dungeon with an arena. Prototype Hrunting occupied her right hand—a brutish red-black sword that looked as though it had been designed by someone who thought subtlety was a character flaw. Prototype Naegling occupied her left—Shirou called it a sword, but it looked far more like a flanged mace that someone had given a pommel and a prayer. The image was absurd in anyone's hands, let alone a girl who'd been explaining the finer points of dating simulation mechanics to a crimson-eared Lefiya not twenty minutes ago.
Hrunting cleaved through the lead lamb's shoulder and buried itself in the creature's ribcage with a wet, percussive crack. The lamb's death-cry rose in a warbling shriek before Marin wrenched the blade free, and the remaining two lambs shied back, legs scrabbling on the pale stone.
'She fights the way she talks,' Syr thought. 'All enthusiasm, no punctuation.'
After assessing her surroundings, Syr lifted her greatsword. She was still thinking about what type of weapon she'd request Shirou to make for her, though she might actually want him to surprise her.
Behind her, a group of ten-legged lambs went charging towards their rear guard—a platoon of centaurs loosing arrows at the incoming herd, the bleating joining the echoes of the other lambs. It was white noise at this point. Mind-numbing white noise.
"Pikes! On me!" she called out as she rushed past the centaurs.
With her left leg extended, her right bent at an angle, she shifted her weight and swept the blade in a single elegant arc—shearing through the majority of the lambs' legs in one pass. The herd tumbled over itself, and the centaurs charged in behind her, thrusting with their pikes, targeting the throats to stop the lambs from calling more of their swarm to arms.
"Excellent show, Lady Syr!" one of the centaurs praised.
Syr just extended her tongue through the corner of her mouth and cutely gave them the peace sign—something the people from Orario wouldn't know about.
"You can just call me Syr!" she said, giving them a wink.
The centaurs raised their pikes in acknowledgement as they formed a circle around the brownies that appeared, the brownies starting to process the dead lambs.
Syr turned back to her previous muse.
Syr caught the movement before anyone else—four of the ten-legged creatures peeling off from the herd remnant and charging straight at the harvesting cluster where Marin was still pulling Prototype Hrunting free from the ribcage of her last kill, Naegling having already crushed the throat of the lamb beside it. The lead lamb was one of the larger specimens, its wool matted with something dark and arterial from the earlier culling, mouth already opening for the bleating cry that would cascade into frenzy if it reached full volume.
Marin saw it. Reacted. Wrenched Hrunting free with a grunt and swung—
The blade connected with the lamb's skull at an angle that was enthusiastic, committed, and approximately forty degrees off-target. Bone shattered. The magicite core, buried at the junction of neck and spine, remained intact. Even with its skull caved in, the creature's vocal cords were untouched—the death-cry erupted, a warbling, harmonic shriek that sawed through the air and set every surviving lamb on the floor vibrating like struck tuning forks.
Three more lambs pivoted toward the sound. Then five. Then a dozen, materialising from alcoves and spawning hollows in the pale walls with the mindless urgency of a disturbed hive.
"Formation! Close the gap!" Lefiya's voice cut through the cacophony, her staff swinging into alignment.
Another centaur—Firenze's kinsman; it was hard to keep track of everyone's name—planted his hooves and lowered his spear. Two brownies apparated the magicite crates backwards with synchronised cracks. Haruka slid into a guard stance, her naginata sweeping a low arc that caught the nearest lamb across three of its ten legs and sent it tumbling.
The cascade lasted ninety seconds. By the time the last lamb fell—pin-cushioned by a centaur's javelin and Lefiya's binding spell in the same heartbeat—the floor was littered with fresh carcasses and the harvesting team was breathing hard.
Syr walked through the aftermath. Stopped beside Marin, who was leaning on Hrunting like a walking stick, sweat gleaming on her peach-toned skin, grinning with the particular satisfaction of someone who'd survived something exciting. Syr draped an arm around her shoulders.
"That was a solid hit."
Marin's grin widened. "Right? I felt the crunch all the way up my—"
"The magicite was three centimetres to the left. That was a close call."
The grin dimmed. Slightly.
Syr held up three fingers, demonstrating the distance. "Three centimetres. In the heat of battle, that's close enough to shatter by accident. And we need clean kills so as not to make things harder for our harvesters." She nodded toward the brownie in question, who was currently dusting himself off with an expression of deep personal affront. "Hrunting has the reach and the weight for a single decisive stroke. You're not lacking strength—"
"No?"
"Obviously not. You caved its skull like an eggshell." Syr let a smile surface. "The problem is restraint. You're swinging to destroy. You need to swing to end. One stroke. Through its vocal box. No cry, no frenzy, no thirty-lamb pileup."
Marin's expression turned serious. She nodded to herself, processing—then her face brightened. She thanked Syr, hefted both weapons, and rushed back in with the frontline.
Syr exchanged smiles and shakes of heads with Lefiya, who was currently glowing from Haruhime's enchantment.
"Less damage! More Zentetsuken!" Marin shouted to no one.
'She's going to make everything a game reference until the stars go dark.'
Syr continued her observation, as even with her unending brightness, there was something underneath Marin's bravado. Something that made Syr's gaze linger a fraction longer than idle curiosity warranted.
She'd done this in Orario.
Stood behind the bar at the Hostess of Fertility with a dishrag in her hand and a smile on her face, watching adventurers file through the door after a day in the Dungeon. Watching them eat, drink, argue, flirt, mourn. Reading the shapes of their souls the way a sommelier read the nose of a wine—this one is young and sharp, this one has depth, this one has a crack running through it that will either become character or catastrophe.
Collecting.
That was what Freyja had done. Collected souls the way a magpie collected bright objects—not maliciously, not even consciously sometimes, but with the irresistible gravitational pull of a divine being whose very nature was want.
'Is that what I'm doing now?'
The thought arrived without fanfare and lodged itself behind her sternum like a splinter.
She blinked. More lambs were approaching along the walls. Syr charged alongside Haruhime—who'd once been unable to fight and maintain her enchantments simultaneously, but had pushed past that limitation somewhere between the fifth floor and the ninth. Haruhime's ko-naginata, which resembled a katana with an equally long tsuba, swept through the nearest lamb's legs as Syr took its throat.
As she hacked and slashed at the monsters, her thoughts drifted back to the day they were transported here and to that particularly annoying dimension hopper.
The diminished sight—Zelretch had parcelled out her reduced divine inheritance like a miser counting coppers, and her seidr was the first thing he'd locked away—offered nothing like the vivid soul-reading she'd possessed as Freyja. No colours. No luminous threads she could trace from a person's chest to the root of their being. What remained was more like... synesthesia. Impressions that crossed senses—tasting light, smelling warmth, feeling sound—rather than actually seeing the soul.
Syr let her gaze drift. Not searching. Just... resting. The way a cat rested its eyes on a bird through a window pane, with no particular intention of hunting.
'Liar.'
Marin first. Bright. Warm. The impression pressed against Syr's awareness like sunlight through curtains—it tasted golden, smelt diffuse, and felt impossible to ignore. But underneath the warmth, a cooler layer. Not cold. Just... faded. An ache that had lost its sharp edges through long carrying, the way a river stone lost its corners. Heartbreak, Syr decided. Old enough to be bearable. Recent enough to still be there. Marin carried it the way some people carried a favourite scar—touching it absently, using it as proof that she'd survived something.
A lamb lunged from her left.
Syr locked her blade against one of its curling horns, grasped the spine of the greatsword with her off-hand, and twisted. An audible crack echoed through the corridor. Before the creature could bleat, she drove the heel of her boot into its throat, crushing the vocal cords flat. The lamb folded. Silent.
She hadn't looked at it once.
She flicked ichor from the blade and looked up.
Haruhime's enchantment shimmered across Haruka's frame as the elf fell into step beside the fox-girl, their weapons finding a shared rhythm almost immediately—Haruka's naginata sweeping wide arcs that created space, Haruhime's shorter ko-naginata darting into the gaps to finish what her partner's reach had opened. Hooves scrabbled on slick stone, and the corridor behind them filled with the wet percussion of falling bodies.
The pair moved like something out of a woodblock print—elegant, precise, both daughters of the far east of their respective realities, though neither had seen the other's homeland. There was a grace to their coordination that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with the repetitive action of teamwork and, of course, whatever aptitude they'd bought from the shop.
The aptitude skills they'd bought didn't make them experts—nothing so generous. What they provided was the potential: the knowledge of how a blade should move, the ease with which the body adapted to the repetition, and the wisdom to recognise what the next level looked like. The rest was sweat.
Which was quite frustrating, as her previous mastery as Freyja—clorokinesis, mystiokinesis, photokinesis, ferrokinesis, cryokinetic transmutation and construction—had all been reduced to aptitudes. Knowledge without power. She knew how to bend frost into form, how to coax gold to obey, how to weave seidr through the roots of the world. She simply couldn't do any of it yet. Not without rebuilding from scratch, one humiliating failure at a time.
Syr's gaze drifted to Haruka—formerly human, now elven, her features reshaped by whatever the reincarnation store had offered. Haruka had mentioned that she'd chosen to change races because she knew her friends would do the same.
Disciplined. Studious. The impression reminded Syr of still water—clear and contained, with a deep current running beneath the surface that the stillness was specifically designed to conceal. Longing. Not the sharp romantic kind, but the diffuse, heavy kind that came from losing people who were still alive somewhere. Friends scattered beyond reach—and in a galaxy this vast, beyond reach might as well mean beyond existence.
Though according to Haruka, two of them might still remember her. Two had been included in the first batch—the ones who would reincarnate without their previous memories. Gone, but alive somewhere. She wouldn't know if they'd be wearing new faces with no recollection of the girl they'd left behind. The other two had retained their memories, but Haruka hadn't reached them in time. She'd been rushing towards them during the countdown and had barrelled into their group instead.
And wound tight around the centre of her like a thread around a spindle, something with the particular weight of a love that had never ripened. Something interrupted. Something that might have been extraordinary, given time.
Haruka held the left side with her naginata, her movements textbook-crisp—vertical cuts, lateral sweeps—each one landing with a little more confidence than the last as combat experience settled into her muscles. Her newly pointed ears flattened against her head when a lamb's charge brought it within a hand-span of her guard, then perked upright when her counter-stroke caught it cleanly through the neck. She exhaled. Reset. Her ears twitched—she still hadn't figured out how to stop them from broadcasting every thought she had.
"Take advantage of your reach—and if something's charging at you, use its momentum against it," Syr called out. Haruhime nodded along beside Haruka, filing the advice away for herself.
Syr looked up as the familiar whoosh of displaced air announced Gabrielle swooping in on her broom—something she'd adopted from Rose after watching the redhead fly during their three days of preparation.
Gabrielle was a decent flier. Nowhere near what Rose could do—Rose had spent one afternoon demonstrating exactly what a witch on a Firebolt was capable of, and it had been the kind of display that made gravity look like a suggestion rather than a law. But Gabrielle looked comfortable in the sky, someone who enjoyed the freedom of flight rather than the thrill of it.
Syr chuckled at the memory of Ryuu's reaction—the elf's eyes had gone wide, her ears had done that involuntary perk they did when something genuinely delighted her, and she'd borrowed a broom within the hour, asking Rose for tips with an intensity usually reserved for combat briefings. 'At least she found an interest.'
A fire-spitter lamb opened its glowing maw. Syr slashed through the fireball before it fully formed—the halved gout of flame splashing harmlessly against the corridor walls, hissing on the damp stone.
Gabrielle swooped in behind the diffused fireball, her wand tracing an arc. The Severing Charm caught the fire-breather at the neck—a hair's breadth from the magicite, compensating for imprecision with raw magical force. The lamb's head tumbled. The body stood for a half-second longer, legs locked, before toppling sideways.
Bright. Competent. Driven. The impression of someone perpetually leaning forward as if into a headwind. But there was an edge to it. A chip. The distinct pressure of prove it, prove it, prove it thrumming beneath every action, every spell, every volunteered task. Not proving herself to the group—they barely knew each other. Proving herself to the ghost of whoever she'd been before. The echo of a girl who'd stood in someone else's shadow and decided she'd had enough of shade.
Syr raised her blade in thanks as she moved on to the next target, the herd slowly and gradually thinning.
She borrowed a bow and a quiver of arrows from one of the centaurs assisting the brownies with retrieval. The centaur blinked at her—this grey-haired woman who'd been swinging a greatsword ten seconds ago now calmly stringing a bow as though she'd been born with one in her hands. Which, in a sense, she had.
She planted her greatsword into the floor and found a vantage point at the centre of the formation.
"Lefiya, I'll handle what gets through. You can push harder," Syr said, nocking an arrow, loosing it in a single fluid motion. A gurgling lamb fell, the arrow embedded in its vocal cords.
Then another. And another.
Now this was meditation. Each arrow found the same target—the throat, always the throat—silencing the bleating before it could cascade. Her hands moved without conscious direction. Nock. Draw. Loose. The bowstring hummed a steady rhythm, and the lambs fell in silence, one after another, denied even their death-cries.
Clean kills. No frenzy. Exactly what she'd told Marin to aim for, demonstrated at a pace that made the lesson look effortless.
And as her arrows flew, her thoughts turned to those who were back at their base.
Hermione wasn't on the floor—she was at the surface, buried in spreadsheets and stasis charts—but Syr had sat beside her at breakfast. The impression lingered. A seeker. That was the only word for it. Knowledge was her weapon, her shield, her sustenance, and her vice. She consumed information the way Freyja had once consumed worship—compulsively, and with the nagging suspicion that no amount would ever be enough. There was insecurity beneath all that competence, buried so deep that Hermione herself might not recognise it if someone held up a mirror. She had something to prove, but not to anyone with a face. To herself. To the version of herself that still whispered 'you don't belong here' in moments of doubt.
An arrow. A lamb fell.
Another. Another.
Then the corridor shook.
They emerged from ahead and behind in waves—not scattered clusters but a coordinated mass that filled the corridor wall to wall. Forty. Fifty. The smaller specimens led, their bleating creating a wall of sound that pressed against the eardrums, and behind them the fire-spitters lumbered, throats glowing a dull amber.
Syr lowered the bow. This wasn't archery work anymore.
Lefiya moved to the centre of the formation, planting Twin-Stick Fairy Dust against the floor. Magic rolled outward from its base in concentric rings. Tear Pain gleamed in her right hand.
"Archers, suppressing fire on the right flank! Marin, Haruka—hold the corridor mouth! Centaurs, two ranks deep, staggered!"
"Gabrielle, support our rearguard. Illya, reinforce it," Syr called, already moving to retrieve her greatsword from where she'd planted it.
Syr's gaze found Illya—who had materialised somewhere between Syr's last blink and this one, with birds and large daggers made of bright thread hovering around her like a crown of sharp intentions. Heavy. That was the overwhelming impression. Not the weight of a single wound but the accumulated mass of many, layered and compressed over years that should have been a childhood but weren't. The kind of damage that calcified into personality—brittleness disguised as confidence, possessiveness disguised as affection, the desperate need to control because something essential had been denied control in the formative years when it mattered most.
Illya's thread-constructs scattered outward—birds diving at the flanking lambs, daggers embedding themselves in the fire-spitters' throats before they could ignite. She directed the whole display with small, precise gestures of her fingers, her expression carrying the calm focus of someone who'd spent her entire life being underestimated and had long since stopped caring.
Syr recognised the shape of that soul. She'd presided over warriors who carried similar architectures—heroes who'd been forged too young, their edges set before the metal was ready. A tool that eventually discovered there was something beyond.
Rose wasn't on the floor either—she was somewhere below them, riding the frontline with Ryuu and Shirou. But her impression had left a mark on Syr the way a bright light left an afterimage behind closed eyelids.
Syr wrenched her greatsword free from a lamb's ribcage and drove the pommel into another's snout, buying herself a half-second to pivot. A centaur's javelin sailed past her shoulder and pinned the stunned lamb to the wall. She nodded her thanks without looking.
Rose had an interesting soul. Luminous in a way Syr had only seen a handful of times across millennia—that particular sheen of a protagonist, the same quality that clung to Lefiya, Ryuu, Bell, and Shirou. People around whom events bent, as though the universe itself had decided their stories mattered more than others. Rose was a woman tempered by expectations, disappointment, hopes, and dreams in equal measure—and yet she'd chosen, at some critical juncture, to go against the flow of what was expected of her. That choice had shaped her more than anything that had been done to her.
She was a rallying force. Not Marin-bright—not that infectious, sunlit warmth—but the kind of brightness that made people stand up when they wanted to sit down. A signal fire rather than a hearth.
And she was beautiful. Not despite the damage. Beautiful, damage included. The cracks were part of the architecture.
A fire-spitter reared behind the centaur line, throat blooming amber. Syr dropped low, swept a lamb's legs from under it, and came up with her blade already angled—the greatsword bisecting the fire-spitter's neck before the flame could form. Two kills in one motion, neither interrupting the other.
The wave was thinning. Lefiya's magic had carved great swathes through the centre, and the flanking teams were collapsing inward, driving the remnants into a shrinking pocket. Marin's voice rose somewhere to the left—"That one counts as two!"—followed by Haruka's quieter correction: "It was the same lamb that tried charging you after you thought you put it down."
"Yes, which counts as two," was the grinning reply.
Rin—also absent, working with Hermione at the surface—carried a similar architecture of old pain to Illya, but where Illya's ran deep and still, Rin's had been built over. Layer upon layer of discipline and pride, like mortar over a cracked foundation. The structure held. It held impressively. But there was something new pressing against the existing weight—a current burden, fresh and heavy, that Rin was actively managing in real time. Something she hadn't shared—or at least something she hadn't shared with someone outside of her immediate circle. Something that made the already-sharp edges of her sharper still.
Syr caught a lamb mid-leap with the flat of her blade, redirected its momentum into the wall, and finished it with a thrust through the throat. Around her, the battle was winding down for real this time—the last clusters of lambs breaking against the formation like waves against a seawall, each surge weaker than the last.
And then there was Sakura.
Syr's attention snagged. Held.
Sakura Tohsaka was back at camp—she'd be indisposed for at least a month, according to Rin. But Syr had been near her enough times over the past three days to form an impression, and it was the impression that had kept her wondering.
Two impressions. Layered on top of each other like transparencies on a lightbox.
The first was clean. Almost frighteningly so. Tabula rasa—a blank surface, smooth and unmarked, carrying the particular luminosity of something newborn. Fresh. Unwritten. The kind of soul-impression Syr associated with infants, or with people who'd undergone a transformation so fundamental that everything before it had been overwritten.
The second was—
Syr frowned.
Cracked. Scarred. Fissured in patterns that spoke of sustained, systematic damage—not the clean break of a single catastrophe but the branching fracture lines of something that had been broken, healed wrong, broken again, healed wrong again, broken again, until the very concept of wholeness had become theoretical. It was the kind of damage that should have destroyed a person. Should have reduced them to fragments.
Both impressions existed simultaneously. Both were real. The blank slate and the shattered vessel, occupying the same space, the same soul, without contradiction.
Syr had perceived thousands of souls across millennia. She had never seen anything like this.
She filed it away. Carefully. The way one filed away a question that wasn't hers to answer—not yet, possibly not ever.
Former goddess she may have been, but she'd chosen to be Syr now. And Syr didn't collect people. Syr didn't catalogue souls for future use. Syr was the warm girl who poured drinks and made conversation and kept her hands to herself.
'At least, she's trying not to.'
The last lamb fell. Silence reclaimed the corridor—not the sudden, ringing silence of the frontline's battles, but the gradual settling of an abattoir after the last animal had been processed. Blades were lowered. Breathing slowed. The brownies materialised amongst the carcasses with practised efficiency, tarpaulins unfurling before the dungeon could begin its reclamation.
Syr cleaned her blade and leaned it against the wall.
Across the floor, she could already see Haruka and Haruhime assembling the portable kitchen—magical burners set on a cleared stretch of ivory, pots and utensils appearing from expanded storage with the quiet competence of people who'd done this every day for three days and had found their rhythm. Gabrielle landed beside them, still buzzing from combat, and threw herself into preparation work with the focused intensity she brought to everything. The brownies wove between them all, conjuring water, heating surfaces, laying out ingredients with an efficiency that bordered on choreography.
It was high time for a meal. The floor was cleared. The harvesters would work while everyone else ate.
And in the settling quiet, her thoughts finally drifted to where they'd been circling all morning.
Shirou.
Even with her diminished sight, she'd caught enough of his soul in those first hours after awakening to stop breathing for a moment.
He didn't remind her of Bell. Bell's soul had been transparent—clear, pure, a single note of blinding sincerity that had made a goddess fall in love for the first time in her eternal life. Shirou was nothing like that.
Shirou's soul looked like Fólkvangr.
Her hall. Her field. The resting place she'd presided over for an eternity, where battle-hardened warriors and heroes who'd earned their place at her table came to rest. The ones who'd fought and bled and broken themselves and kept fighting anyway—not because they were unbreakable, but because breaking was simply what happened between battles. She'd welcomed thousands of them over the ages. She knew the shape of those souls intimately.
And here was a mortal man walking around with a soul that looked like home.
That was dangerous. That was the kind of resonance that bypassed curiosity entirely and went straight to something deeper. Something possessive.
And there it was. The pattern.
Observing from afar. Finding reasons to be nearby without committing. Cataloguing his habits, his rhythms, the way he moved through a room. Telling herself it was just appreciation—just the remnant instincts of a goddess who used to collect beautiful souls the way some people collected art.
She'd done this with Bell. Watched from the Hostess of Fertility. Sent him lunches. Engineered encounters. Played the long game from the shadows—and it hadn't worked. He'd chosen Ais. He'd seen through Horn. And Freyja, for all her eternity of experience with love, had been left standing in the rain.
'Am I making the same mistake?'
The thought was uncomfortable in a way that surprised her. She'd expected mortality to dull these feelings. Instead it had sharpened them. As a goddess, rejection was an anomaly—a curiosity to be examined, then overcome. As a mortal, rejection was just... rejection. It hurt.
Then there was Zelretch's warning. The old vampire had been characteristically cryptic but unusually specific on one point.
"Shirou Emiya isn't someone you can be selfish with and hog to yourself. There are only three—well, four if you count Alaya—souls that can truly selfishly hold his heart or soul."
Which was infuriating, because monopolising was what Freyja did.
Syr, however, was supposed to be different. Syr shared. Syr was the warm barmaid who poured ale for everyone equally. Syr didn't scheme.
'Liar,' she told herself, and almost smiled.
She pouted—not about the warning, but about the immediate injustice. Ryuu was in the frontline with Shirou right now, fighting beside him, building the kind of combat intimacy that made Syr's fingers itch. Meanwhile, she was here, on the lamb floor, watching Marin argue with Haruka about whether a ten-legged lamb that was down for the count and got up again counted as one kill or two.
At least if the frontline found a biome with vegetation, they'd be camping there for at least two days.
She could be patient. She'd waited millennia for warriors to earn their place in Fólkvangr.
She could wait two days for one who already looked like he belonged there.
-=&
End