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William's eyes had gone slightly unfocused.
While Dian Wei was fighting, a video clip had appeared in his interface — the kind of unlockable content Max had built into the game for players who reached a certain intimacy level with their Servant. He'd clicked it without thinking.
Fifty-seven seconds.
The clip opened on a military camp at dusk. A man sitting bare-armed in front of it, a wine barrel beside him, drinking with the unhurried focus of someone who had decided the wine was important and the teasing from passing soldiers was not.
"Still drinking, Dian Wei? We're about to move out."
"The Prime Minister gave us this wine. We don't know if we're coming back." He didn't look up. "Shame to waste it."
"Fair enough. Share some."
"Get lost."
Brief. Simple. The kind of scene that didn't announce itself as significant.
Then the confession, delivered to no one in particular, in the tone of a man stating facts he'd arrived at through his own thinking and had no need to perform:
I'm a rough man. I don't understand grand principles or historical significance.
One person can't change the world.
But the Prime Minister can. He'll make it so people can live in peace. Eat enough. Rest without fear. I can't do that — so I have no right to rule. The old emperor couldn't do it either — so he had no right to the throne.
But the Prime Minister absolutely can. The only one who can unite this world, who can hold it together — is him.
I have never been wrong about people.
"Dian Wei — it's time."
He stood, set down the wine, and walked toward the battlefield.
The clip ended.
Fifty-seven seconds total.
[Chat]:
[Can't_Talk]: .
[Same]: .
[Eventually]: loyal. that's the only word. loyal doesn't even cover it.
[New_Fan]: I'm a Dian Wei fan now. effective immediately.
[Counter]: you might as well say you're a Cao fan at that point
[Ignoring_That]: the way he said "I have never been wrong about people" — like it was the simplest thing in the world
[Girls_Present]: whoever said only men understand this kind of loyalty — we're crying too. we're right here crying.
[Realistic_Point]: wait, if they can play clips during multiplayer mode, doesn't that create an opening for ambushes while the Master is distracted watching—
[SHUT_UP]: DO NOT
[SERIOUSLY]: this is an emotional moment
[Backing_Off]: fine. fine. I retract it.
[Marriage_Announcement]: Achilles, I'm sorry. don't contact me anymore. I'm afraid Dian Wei will misunderstand.
The intimacy-unlock system had been a footnote in Max's earlier explanation — one-minute short films, triggered at specific bond thresholds, optional, skippable, available at any time including after the match. You could choose to watch immediately or save it for later. No unskippable cutscenes. Complete player discretion.
The clip that had just played unlocked at 80% intimacy with Dian Wei.
From a game design standpoint, the analysts watching Max's stream had started going quiet in a different way than the emotional viewers. The combination of Servant history as unlockable content — not exposition dumped in an opening cutscene but earned through actual relationship-building — was the kind of mechanic that didn't just make players like a character. It made them feel responsible for the character. Made them feel like they'd chosen to know this.
That was a different kind of attachment entirely.
The ranking boards had already shifted. The most-liked Heroic Spirit among tonight's viewers had dropped to seventeenth. Dian Wei, who had appeared for the first time in any mode tonight, was somewhere above that.
On the sandy plain of Iskandar's Reality Marble:
William shook his head once, clearing the footage from his thoughts.
He raised his right hand.
"Things like unifying the world — that's too far away for me. I don't understand grand principles either."
His voice was steady.
"But this battlefield, right now — I have to win it."
A crimson light flashed at his wrist.
"By Command Seal — Dian Wei. Kill them all."
The weapons hit simultaneously.
Heavy hammers, long spears, everything the army had been throwing at him in continuous rotation — all of it landed at once, the army driving every available weapon into the moment the Command Seal activated, trying to overwhelm whatever was coming with volume.
Dian Wei raised his head.
His face was mostly destroyed at this point. The structural damage from the last hour of fighting had accumulated past what could be mapped against a human face anymore. What remained functioned.
He smiled.
White steam began rising from his body — not metaphorical, not atmospheric. Actual steam, the kind produced when damaged tissue under extreme strain begins to burn from the inside. The smell of it reached Northern Star from across the battlefield. She did not move away.
The muscles beneath the steam tensed.
Every iron chain wrapped around Dian Wei's body — dozens of them, held by hundreds of soldiers pulling in opposing directions — became scrap in the same second. Not broken link by link. Simultaneously. Every chain, all at once, hitting the sand as loose metal.
Dian Wei grabbed the end of one chain before it fell.
He pulled.
The soldiers attached to the other end left the ground.
Then he started spinning.
The chain became an extension of his arm, the soldiers on the end becoming the weight at the outer edge of a radius that widened as the spin accelerated. Within ten meters in every direction, the sand stopped being sand and became something else. Anyone inside that radius was either already down or moving fast enough to get out.
No one stayed inside the radius voluntarily.
When the chain finally broke — from the force of the spin, not from anything the soldiers did — Dian Wei stopped, picked up the Mad Shark Iron Halberd from where it had ended up, and addressed the army at a volume that carried across Iskandar's entire Reality Marble:
"Where is everyone? Where are you all hiding?"
A pause, looking across the army that had been pressing in thirty seconds ago.
"Ha! It's not over! This isn't over!"
The laugh that followed was not wounded. It was not desperate. It had the specific quality of a man who has discovered, in the middle of something that should have killed him several times over, that he is having the best experience of his existence.
"I'm so fired up right now! Come on! Come on! Come ON!"
"FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!"
The roar that followed that was not a sound a damaged person makes. It was a sound a force of nature makes when it has been given permission.
[Chat]:
[SCREAMING]: SCREAMING
[COMMAND_SEAL]: he burned a Command Seal and Dian Wei just — CHAINS. ALL THE CHAINS. AT ONCE.
[Ferris_Wheel]: he used an iron chain full of soldiers as a weapon. he spun them. like a wheel.
[Physics_Objection]: I have concerns about the physics
[Don't_Care]: nobody cares about the physics right now
[Dian_Wei_Mental_State]: he's not in pain. he's EXCITED. he's been fighting for twenty minutes in a state that should have ended him in the first two and he is EXCITED.
[Army_Reaction]: look at the soldiers. these are Heroic Spirits. legends. every one of them. and they are feeling a chill.
[Iskandar_Face]: Iskandar has not attacked since the Command Seal fired. he's watching.
[Northern_Star]: Northern Star said "what kind of monster is this" and her voice was completely flat
Iskandar looked at the thing in the center of his Reality Marble.
A man. One man. Twenty minutes of being struck by the concentrated force of tens of thousands of Heroic Spirits, and he was standing in the middle of them asking where everyone had gone, annoyed that the pace had dropped.
"It's time to pull back, kid." He said it without looking away from Dian Wei. "We can't keep fighting him. Let someone else deal with an immortal."
Northern Star didn't argue.
She'd stopped being surprised by things approximately fifteen minutes ago.
The Reality Marble began to dissolve around them — sand fading back to the moonlit plain of Romania, the army stepping back through the fade, the blazing desert sun receding. The tens of thousands of Heroic Spirits retreating into wherever they went when Iskandar wasn't calling on them.
Dian Wei watched them leave.
He didn't pursue.
He turned around, walked back to William, and sat down heavily in the dirt in front of the Wancheng gate.
The injuries didn't vanish. The game didn't reset him. He was still exactly as destroyed as he'd been thirty seconds ago — which was, by any reasonable standard, completely destroyed.
He reached out and took the wine ladle from where William had set it down earlier.
Drank.
Made a face.
"Still tastes like horse piss."
[Chat]:
[Relief]: he's okay. he sat down. he's complaining about the wine. he's okay.
[William_Expression]: William's face right now
[Describe_It]: somewhere between "I knew it" and "I need to sit down too"
[Iskandar_Retreating]: Conqueror is withdrawing from Plains City. Black side holds the center.
[Map_Update]: Black side: Castle, Trifas City, Plains City. Red side: Mine. Fields TBD. Black side is winning on points.
[But]: Gilgamesh is still at the Mine. King Hassan is still unaccounted for. There's still time.
[Dian_Wei_Final_Status]: sitting in front of the gate. drinking bad wine. surrounded by a battlefield that looks like a natural disaster passed through it. completely content.
[End of Chapter 170]
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