The command center had been cleaned. That was the first thing Griswald noticed. Someone had scrubbed the floors, wiped the consoles, polished the glass panels that overlooked the rayshift staging area below. The scorch marks on the walls remained, black tongues licking upward from where the bombs had detonated, but the debris had been cleared and the blood had been washed away and the broken equipment had been removed or pushed to the margins of the room.
It looked almost normal. Almost functional. Almost like a place where one hundred and eighty-seven people hadn't died.
Griswald stood near the back with Mash at his side. Her fingers brushed his knuckles once, then withdrew. Around them, the survivors of Chaldea arranged themselves in loose clusters. Twenty-three people. He counted them the way he used to count medical supplies in the storage room. Twice, to be certain. Twenty-three living faces in a room designed to hold ten times that number.
Some he recognized. The communications technician with the crooked nose who always brought her own tea to the medical bay. The systems engineer who'd once asked Griswald to check a mole on his shoulder and then talked for forty minutes about orbital mechanics. A young woman from the cafeteria staff who stood alone near the far wall, arms wrapped around herself, eyes fixed on nothing.
Most of them looked like her. Hollow. Present in body and absent in everything else. Every staff member but Ritsuka who has still not woken up was present.
Below the observation windows, the rayshift coffins sat in their rows. Forty-eight units. The blast had torn through them like a fist through wet paper. Replacement panels covered the worst damage now, mismatched metal grafted over the wounds in the machinery. Seven coffins remained completely destroyed, their frames twisted into shapes that didn't belong in any engineering manual.
That was where it happened. Down there. Team A sealed in their coffins, waiting for the rayshift that would save humanity. The countdown running. The lights dimming. And then Lev's bombs turning everything into fire and shrapnel and screaming.
Romani stood at the front of the room. He wore his white lab coat, freshly pressed, the teal uniform beneath buttoned to the collar. His salmon-pink hair was pulled back neatly. His hands rested on the console behind him.
Da Vinci stood two paces back and to his left. Her staff was absent. The mechanical bird on her shoulder sat motionless, its jeweled eyes dark. She wore her usual elaborate outfit of red and blue and gold, but something about her posture stripped the flamboyance from it. She stood still. Watching. Her amber eyes moved across the assembled survivors with the quiet precision of someone cataloging damage.
Romani cleared his throat.
"I wrote something." He held up a folded piece of paper, then looked at it. His fingers trembled. He put the paper back in his coat pocket. "I wrote something and it wasn't good enough. So I wrote something else, and that was worse. I've been writing eulogies for three days and none of them say what needs to be said."
The room waited.
"One hundred and eighty-seven people." Romani's voice found its footing. Steadied. "That's the number. I know every name. I signed their intake forms. I approved their medical clearances. I ate lunch with some of them and argued about scheduling with others and I never once told most of them that they mattered."
He touched the ring on his finger. Twisted it. A habit Griswald had observed a hundred times in the man's office, always when the conversation veered somewhere Romani didn't want it to go.
"Dr. Kenji Matsuda. He ran our spectral analysis lab. He had a daughter in Yokohama who sent him drawings every week and he pinned every single one above his workstation. Elise Fournier from the cafeteria. She baked lemon cake on Fridays because she said Fridays needed something worth getting to. Thomas Hendricks. Senior rayshift technician. He could recalibrate a coffin's spiritron alignment in nine minutes flat, which was four minutes faster than anyone else, and he never let anyone forget it."
Name after name. Romani spoke them into the quiet room, and each one landed with weight.
Griswald's throat tightened. He remembered some of them. Brief intersections in corridors and examination rooms. Faces attached to charts. Voices attached to complaints about headaches or pulled muscles or the persistent cough that circulated through the facility every winter.
He had treated their bodies and never learned their lives.
Mash's hand found his. Her grip was firm.
"The bodies we recovered are in cryo storage on sublevel four." Romani's voice dropped. "Forty-three. We couldn't find the rest. The blasts were... there wasn't enough left."
Someone near the front made a sound. Small. Broken. The cafeteria woman against the far wall slid down until she sat on the floor, knees drawn up.
"I'm not the person who should be standing here. Director Animusphere should be giving this address. Or Professor Lainur, who we trusted. Or any of the A-Team Masters who trained their entire lives for the mission that was stolen from them." Romani pulled his hand from the ring. Set both palms flat on the console. "But they're gone. And I'm here. And you're here. Twenty-three of us in a building meant for hundreds, with the entire timeline burning outside our walls."
He looked at them. Every one of them.
"I can't promise we'll fix this. I can't promise we'll survive. But I can promise that every name I just spoke will mean something. Their deaths will not be the end of their story."
Romani stepped back. Da Vinci's hand settled briefly on his shoulder. He exhaled, and for one unguarded moment, the man behind the performance was visible. Exhausted. Terrified. Grieving.
Then it passed, and he straightened, and Acting Director Archaman looked out at what remained of Chaldea.
Romani allowed the silence to settle for exactly three seconds before he pressed a key on the console behind him. The main display flickered to life. CHALDEAS filled the screen, its once-blue surface now a roiling sphere of crimson and black, continents reduced to smears of ash beneath an atmosphere of fire.
"This is a live feed from the CHALDEAS observation chamber. What you're seeing is not a malfunction." Romani's voice shifted. The grief receded behind something harder. Clinical. "As of seventy-two hours ago, every recorded period of human civilization across the entire timeline has been incinerated. The year 100 AD. The year 1000 AD. The year 2017. All of it. Burning."
The room reacted. A sharp intake of breath from the communications technician. The systems engineer gripped the railing in front of him until his knuckles blanched. Meunière, standing near the middle of the group, pushed his glasses up his nose with a finger that wouldn't stay steady.
"We survive because Chaldea exists within a quantum-state bounded field that places us slightly outside the normal flow of causality. As long as that field holds, we remain. The moment it fails, we join everything else."
Romani tapped the console again. The display split. Seven points of light appeared along a horizontal timeline, each one pulsing an angry red.
"Our SHEBA analysis has identified seven Singularities embedded across human history. These are massive distortions, orders of magnitude larger than Singularity F in Fuyuki. Each one represents a point where the timeline was deliberately altered to facilitate the Incineration. If we can locate and resolve all seven, we restore the Foundation of Humanity and reverse what's been done."
"If." The word came from Marcus, the Spiritron Engineering lead. He stood near the left wall, arms crossed, his blond hair catching the overhead light. His pale blue eyes were fixed not on the display but on Romani. "You said if."
"I did."
"Who's going into them?"
Romani didn't look at Griswald. Didn't glance. Didn't shift his weight or telegraph the answer in any way. But the room was small and the survivors were smart and they'd been briefed on enough operational protocols to understand what a Master candidate shortage looked like.
Heads turned.
Griswald felt the attention land on him like a change in air pressure. The systems engineer. Marcus. The communications technician. One by one, gazes swiveled from Romani to the tall, blond figure standing near the back of the room with his glasses slightly crooked and his Chaldea uniform wrinkled from three days of unconsciousness.
The cafeteria woman on the floor looked up. Her red-rimmed eyes found him and stayed.
Meunière stared openly, mouth working around a question he couldn't quite form.
Mash's hand tightened in his. Her thumb pressed against the inside of his wrist, directly over his pulse. He felt her shift half a step closer, her shoulder touching his arm. The contact was small. Deliberate. A wall being placed between him and the room.
Griswald held his ground. His heartbeat slammed against Mash's thumb, and his instinct screamed at him to look at the floor, to hunch his shoulders, to make himself smaller. He didn't. He kept his eyes forward and his spine straight and he breathed through the weight of twenty-two people calculating his worth and finding the sum insufficient.
Duston, the senior engineer who'd been at Chaldea longer than anyone except the machinery itself, broke the silence. His angular face carried an expression that Griswald couldn't quite parse. Not hostility. Not contempt. Something closer to a man staring at a lifeboat and realizing it was made of paper.
"The Von Garmisch kid." Duston said it like he was reading it off a requisition form. Flat. Factual. "The medical assistant."
"Griswald Von Garmisch is the sole remaining individual at this facility with Master compatibility." Romani cut in before the murmur could spread. His voice carried authority Griswald had never heard from the man. Sharp as a scalpel. "He successfully contracted with a Demi-Servant, survived engagement with two corrupted Heroic Spirits, and resolved Singularity F. Those are facts, not opinions, and they are not open for discussion right now."
The murmur died.
Romani pressed forward. The display behind him cycled through data readouts, damage assessments, projected resource expenditure curves that climbed at angles no budget committee would have approved. His voice maintained that unfamiliar edge of command, each sentence delivered with the precision of a man who'd rehearsed in front of a mirror until the tremor in his hands stopped showing in his words.
Griswald heard the briefing. Understood it, even. Structural damage to sublevels three through seven. Partial restoration of the FATE summoning system. Da Vinci's projected repair timeline for the remaining functional coffins. Power grid status. Food stores. Water recycling capacity.
He processed none of it.
The stares hadn't stopped. They'd simply learned subtlety. The systems engineer studied him through peripheral vision while pretending to examine the damage report on-screen. Marcus tilted his chin down but kept his pale blue eyes angled upward, measuring. Meunière kept glancing over, then snapping his attention back to Romani with the guilty speed of a child caught reaching for something he shouldn't touch.
Octavia Sylvia stood three rows ahead and to the right. She turned her head a fraction. Just enough for Griswald to catch the flick of her blue eyes before they darted back to Romani. Clock Tower trained. He remembered that from her intake file. She'd carried herself through the corridors of Chaldea with the particular brand of spine-straight confidence that came from spending formative years surrounded by people who believed bloodline determined worth. The arrogance had softened over time, or so he'd been told. Right now her expression held something more complicated than disdain. She glanced again. Her jaw worked like she was chewing on a sentence she couldn't swallow.
Tomarin stood beside Octavia, her reddish-brown side ponytail draped over one shoulder. She wasn't looking at Griswald. She was looking at the seven red points on the timeline display, and her fingers curled slowly into fists at her sides.
Duston hadn't moved. Arms folded. Face unreadable. The kind of stillness that belonged to a man who'd spent fifteen years watching Chaldea's machinery cycle through crises and had developed the patience to wait for the full picture before rendering judgment.
Another glance from Octavia. This one lingered a half-second longer. Griswald felt it scrape across the side of his face like a physical thing.
They were all doing it. Every person in the room performing the same calculation behind their eyes. Medical assistant. A Von Garmisch. Third-rate mage This is the man standing between humanity and permanent extinction.
All except one.
Cerejeira Elron stood near the center of the group, and she was looking at nothing. Her icy-blue-to-pink hair fell in loose waves around a face that had been emptied of expression. Her green-gray eyes were glassy, unfocused, aimed at a point somewhere beyond the display, beyond the walls, beyond the room entirely. She stood perfectly upright in her orange-paneled uniform with her hands loose at her sides and her lips slightly parted and absolutely nothing behind her gaze.
Griswald recognized that look. He'd seen it in the medical bay during training exercises that went wrong. The body standing where the mind had fled. Cerejeira was Chaldea's record keeper. She remembered everything. Every moment. Every detail. Every name Romani had just spoken aloud, she would carry in perfect fidelity until the day she died. The explosion. The screaming. The silence after. All of it catalogued in crystalline resolution behind those vacant eyes.
She blinked once. Slow. The kind of blink that looked like the body remembering it still needed to perform basic functions.
Romani's voice pulled Griswald back.
"We took a wound that should have killed us." Romani gripped the edge of the console. His knuckles whitened but his voice held. "One hundred and eighty-seven people who trusted this organization with their lives. Systems destroyed. Leadership eliminated. Our enemy revealed himself as someone we ate breakfast with for years." He let those words sit in the air. "But we are breathing. Every person in this room is breathing. That is not an accident and it is not luck. That is because Chaldea was built to endure the impossible, and the people in this room are proof it succeeded."
He released the console. Straightened.
"We have been hurt. We have not been defeated."
Something shifted in the atmosphere. Barely perceptible. Not hope. Nothing so generous. More like the moment a drowning person stops flailing and starts swimming.
"Effective immediately, all remaining resources of the Chaldea Security Organization are hereby reallocated to a single operational priority." Romani's green eyes swept the room. When he spoke again, every syllable landed with the finality of a door closing. "The Grand Order."
The room went rigid.
Griswald felt Mash's grip spasm against his hand. Beside him, he heard Meunière's breath catch. Octavia stopped glancing at Griswald entirely, her attention snapping to Romani with her spine locked straight. Duston unfolded his arms. Marcus dropped his hands to his sides.
They knew the term. Every Chaldea staff member had been briefed but it was always a worst case scenario. The Grand Order: the supreme preservation protocol for Proper Human History, to be enacted when the continuity of mankind faces existential collapse across the full span of the timeline. It was theoretical framework, a contingency doctrine that they hoped then to enact.
Tomarin's fists tightened until her knuckles went pale against the dark fabric of her sleeves.
Cerejeira blinked again. Her eyes remained glass.
"This is no longer a research facility." Romani's voice filled every corner of the room. "This is no longer an observatory. From this moment forward, Chaldea is a wartime operation, and every person standing in this room is a soldier in the last war humanity might ever fight."
Romani's voice carried the briefing to its conclusion with military precision. Operational schedules. Duty rotations. Sleep mandates enforced by medical oversight. Resource rationing protocols that would cut caloric intake by twelve percent across all personnel. A maintenance priority list that ranked every damaged system in Chaldea by criticality, with the FATE summoning array and the rayshift coffins occupying the top two positions.
He dismissed them with a final instruction to report to their assigned stations within the hour.
The room emptied in silence. Not the silence of conviction. The silence of people who had received too much information and not enough reason to believe any of it would matter. They filed past Griswald and Mash without acknowledgment, eyes forward, shoulders carrying the particular slump of individuals walking toward duties they no longer understood the purpose of performing.
Meunière paused at the door. His mouth opened. Closed. He pushed his glasses up, shook his head once, and left.
Marcus followed without looking back. Octavia's stride hitched as she passed Griswald, her blue eyes cutting sideways for a fraction of a second before she straightened and disappeared through the threshold. Tomarin walked close behind her, one hand touching the wall as though she needed something solid to confirm the corridor still existed.
Duston was last. He stopped directly in front of Griswald. Studied him the way an engineer studies a load-bearing wall in a building that's already started to lean. His gray-brown eyes held no warmth and no hostility. Just calculation.
He said nothing. Walked away.
Cerejeira drifted past like smoke. Her green-gray eyes still looked at nothing. Griswald watched her go and wondered whether her perfect memory was a gift or a sentence.
The room emptied. Romani sagged against the console. Da Vinci caught his elbow before he could slide further.
Griswald stood in the silence of a command center built for hundreds, holding the hand of the only person in the building who truly believed he could do this.
The book was called Myths and Heroes of the Ancient World, Volume Three: Mesopotamia to the Hellenistic Period.
Griswald sat cross-legged on his bed with the thick volume balanced against his knees, a second book open face-down beside him, and a tablet propped on his pillow displaying a digitized translation of Sumerian funerary texts. His room in Chaldea was small and functional. Single bed. Desk. Chair. A wardrobe he'd never filled past the third shelf. The walls were the same sterile white as every other surface in the facility, though he'd taped a periodic table of magical elements above the desk during his first week, two years ago, because the blankness made him feel like he was living inside an eggshell.
Romani's suggestion had been practical, delivered with the casual tone of a man assigning homework rather than survival preparation. "Read up on legends and myths. The Heroic Spirits you'll encounter in the Singularities are drawn from human history and mythology. Knowing their stories might be the difference between negotiation and failure."
Simple enough. Griswald was accustomed to dense reading. Medical textbooks had trained him to absorb dry information through sheer repetitive exposure. He could parse pharmacological interactions and thaumaturgical circuit diagrams without his eyes glazing over. Mythology was, if anything, more engaging. The stories had narrative momentum. Characters with motivations. Beginnings, middles, and endings that resolved with satisfying violence.
He turned a page. Gilgamesh. Two-thirds divine, one-third human. King of Uruk. Builder of walls. Tyrant who softened into wisdom through friendship and loss. The illustrations showed a figure crowned in gold, standing atop a ziggurat with the world spread beneath him.
Griswald read three paragraphs about Enkidu's creation from clay and realized he'd absorbed none of it.
He closed his eyes. The page blurred.
Fuyuki replaced it. Fire. The weight of Mash's shield vibrating through her body into his arms. The sound Excalibur Morgan made when it fired. Not a sound, exactly. More like the moment before a sound. The air compressing into something too dense for human ears to interpret.
He'd gone back there. To a place where Servants fought and people died and buildings collapsed and the sky tore itself apart. He'd gone there as a medical assistant with a healing spell and a handful of condoms and he'd somehow walked out alive.
Seven more. Seven Singularities, each one larger than Fuyuki. Each one filled with corrupted history and hostile Servants and dangers he couldn't begin to calculate from the safety of a textbook.
His stomach clenched. The words on the page dissolved into meaningless shapes.
He was going back.
Not hypothetically. Not as a contingency plan. He was going back because there was no one else, because humanity's last functioning Master was a man whose greatest magical achievement was refilling bodily fluids.
The tablet on his pillow dimmed, its screen saver activating. A small rotating model of CHALDEAS appeared. Still blue in the rendering. The programming hadn't been updated to reflect the current reality.
Three knocks. Light. Precise.
Griswald blinked. Visitors were not something his Chaldea experience had prepared him for. In two years, exactly four people had knocked on his door: Romani, to retrieve forgotten files. A maintenance worker, to fix a ventilation issue. Mash, once, to return a pen he'd left in the examination room. And a cafeteria worker delivering a meal he hadn't ordered, which turned out to be intended for the room next door.
"Come in."
The door slid open and Leonardo da Vinci stepped through as though she'd been personally invited to a gallery showing. Her chestnut hair fell in loose waves past her shoulders, catching the sterile overhead light and turning it warm. The mechanical bird on her shoulder was active again, its jeweled eyes blinking in slow intervals. Her outfit caught the eye the way it always did. Red and blue panels layered over gold trim, the short skirt flaring at her hips, the asymmetrical gloves drawing attention to the elegant curve of her bare arm. Thigh-high blue stockings traced the length of her legs, gold diamond accents glinting with each step.
She smiled. The Mona Lisa smile that captivated millions.
"Griswald. I hope I'm not interrupting your studies."
"No. I mean, you are, but it's fine. I wasn't retaining anything anyway." He fumbled the book closed and shifted the tablet aside, suddenly aware of how small his room was with another person in it. Especially this person. "Is everything all right? Did something happen with the systems?"
"Nothing catastrophic. For once." She glanced around his room with those amber eyes, cataloging the space in a single sweep. The periodic table. The stack of mythology books. The unmade bed. "I wanted to check on you. The past few days have been... considerable."
"I'm fine."
Her smile deepened. In a way that meant she'd heard his answer and filed it under fiction.
"I'm managing," he corrected.
"Better." She crossed to his bed and sat on the edge with the unceremonious confidence of someone who considered all surfaces equally valid seating. The mattress dipped under her weight. Her thigh pressed against the spine of his open book. "Romani tells me you've been reading. Mesopotamian mythology?"
"Started with Greek. Moved to Mesopotamian. Planning to hit Celtic next, but I've already got some background there after..." He trailed off. After Cú Chulainn.
Da Vinci nodded, sparing him the need to finish. "Good. Preparation matters more than people credit. The Singularities won't announce their contents in advance, but pattern recognition saves lives." She tilted her head, the mechanical bird adjusting its perch with a soft click. "Mash has been training in the simulation chamber. Fourteen hours in the last two days. She's refining her shield techniques against projected enemy patterns that I've been generating from our historical databases."
Something shifted in Griswald's expression. The tension in his jaw softened. The crease between his brows eased by a fraction. The corners of his mouth moved upward without his permission.
He didn't notice. Da Vinci did.
"She's pushing herself hard," she continued, watching him. "Her synchronization rate with Galahad's Noble Phantasm has improved by eleven percent since Fuyuki. She's also begun voluntary physical conditioning. Running laps in the lower corridors at five in the morning."
The smile stayed. Warm and unguarded and completely unconscious. The expression of a man hearing about someone who mattered to him doing something that made him proud.
"That sounds like her," he said. "She doesn't know how to do anything halfway."
Da Vinci let the moment breathe. Then she shifted her weight on the bed, crossing one stockinged leg over the other, and her tone recalibrated from casual to purposeful.
"Speaking of Mash. I've reviewed the operational reports from Fuyuki. All of them. Including the sections regarding mana transfer methodology."
The smile vanished. Color flooded Griswald's neck, climbed his jaw, and settled across his cheekbones with the subtlety of a signal flare.
"I see."
"The data is quite thorough. Romani documented everything from the initial oral transfer through to the emergency intercourse during the Excalibur Morgan event." Da Vinci spoke without embarrassment, her tone carrying the same clinical warmth she might use to discuss circuit board diagnostics. "I have questions, but they can wait. What I want to know right now is simpler. Are you and Mash together?"
The blush intensified. He pushed his glasses up his nose. Down. Up again.
"I don't... we haven't exactly..." He exhaled through his teeth. "We haven't talked about it. What happened in Fuyuki was, it was survival. Emergency protocols. She needed mana and I was the only source and we did what we had to do to not die."
"That doesn't answer my question."
"I know it doesn't." He stared at the mythology book in his lap. Gilgamesh stared back from the cover illustration, golden and certain. "I don't know. We held hands after. She kissed my cheek. But we haven't... there hasn't been a conversation about what any of it meant. We got back to Chaldea and she went into medical evaluation and I was unconscious for thirty-one hours and then there was the funeral and the briefing and now I'm reading about Sumerian kings instead of talking to the person I..." He stopped.
"Hmm." Da Vinci's hum carried the weight of a complete diagnostic. "I would advise you to have that conversation with her sooner rather than later."
Griswald looked up.
"The coming Singularities will require sustained mana output far beyond what Fuyuki demanded. You won't be operating with a single Demi-Servant. There is no doubt that there will be other servants like Cú Chulainn that you will be able to ally with but this time they may need you to supply them mana. Which means that each one will require replenishment." Her amber eyes held his without flinching. "Mash will not be the only Servant who needs your mana, Griswald. She needs to understand that before you deploy, not after."
The color drained from his face as fast as it had arrived.
"Right." His voice came out flat. "Other Servants."
"Multiple, potentially. Depending on the Singularity's demands."
He nodded. The motion was mechanical. His hands found each other in his lap and his fingers interlaced, knuckles pressing white.
"What's wrong?"
The laugh that escaped him was thin and humorless. "It's stupid."
"Tell me anyway."
He pulled his glasses off. Cleaned them on the hem of his uniform. Put them back. The stalling tactic bought him four seconds of not meeting her gaze.
"I have almost no experience with women. With anyone, really. Before Fuyuki, I'd never kissed a person. Never been on a date. Never held someone's hand unless I was checking their pulse." The words fell out of him in a rush, as if speed might strip them of their humiliation. "In Fuyuki, Ritsuka guided everything. She showed Mash what to do. She talked us through it. She made it feel less like I was drowning and more like there was a procedure to follow. Without her, I don't know how bad it would have been. For me or for Mash."
He forced himself to look at Da Vinci. Her expression held no mockery. No pity. Just attention.
"And now I'm supposed to do that with Servants. Heroic Spirits. Legends who've lived lives I can barely comprehend, and I'm expected to be their mana source through methods that require..." He swallowed. "I know it's insignificant compared to everything else. The Incineration. Seven Singularities. The survival of the human race. But I can't stop being nervous about the part where I have to be intimate with people I've never met, and that feels selfish and pathetic and I hate that I can't just be practical about it."
The mechanical bird on Da Vinci's shoulder preened a wing. The soft click of its joints filled the pause.
"It's not selfish." Da Vinci's voice carried no inflection of reassurance. She stated it as fact. The way she stated all things she considered obvious. "Nervousness about intimacy is one of the most fundamentally human responses in young men. Believe me I saw it a lot of it when I was alive. You would concern me far more if you felt nothing."
Griswald exhaled.
"That said." She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, elbows resting on her knees, amber eyes level with his. "You cannot rely on Ritsuka to guide you through every encounter. Her situation remains uncertain. We still don't fully understand her transformation, and until we do, I cannot guarantee she'll be cleared to accompany you into the next Singularity."
His stomach dropped. "She might not come with us?"
"She might not. The possibility exists and you need to plan for it."
He nodded. Slower this time. The mechanical nod of a man adding another weight to a pile already too heavy. "Then what am I supposed to do?"
Da Vinci's smile shifted. The clinical composure softened at the edges, curving into something warmer. Playful. The kind of expression that belonged on the face of someone holding a card they hadn't yet revealed.
"There are many subjects in this world that you can master through books and solo practice alone." She raised a finger, her posture straightening with the unmistakable pride of someone about to reference themselves. "I know this better than anyone. I am, after all, a master of nearly every discipline humanity has produced. Painting, sculpture, anatomy, engineering, architecture, optics, hydrodynamics, cartography, geology, botany." She ticked them off on her fingers. The mechanical bird on her shoulder bobbed its head with each count as though keeping score. "I taught myself the principles of flight three centuries before the Wright brothers stumbled into it. I mapped the human circulatory system from cadavers and candlelight."
She let the list hang in the air for exactly the right duration. Long enough to impress. Short enough to avoid tedium.
"Sex is not one of those subjects."
Griswald's throat constricted.
"It doesn't matter how many anatomical diagrams you memorize or how thoroughly you understand the hormonal cascade of arousal. Testosterone, oxytocin, vasopressin. Because of those chemical, you can study all you want it will mean absolutely nothing the moment another person touches you." Her voice held no judgment. Just the steady certainty of someone presenting empirical findings. "The first few times, your body will override your brain entirely. Hormones and adrenaline will reduce your carefully studied techniques to pure instinct. You will act before you think. You will forget everything you read. This is not a failure of preparation. It is biology asserting primacy over intellect, and no amount of reading will circumvent it."
She turned on the bed. The motion brought her closer. Not dramatically. Not with theatrical intent. She simply pivoted her hips and angled her torso toward him, and the distance between them shrank from comfortable to something else entirely.
Her knee brushed his thigh through the bedsheet.
The scent of her reached him. Warm, like sun-heated parchment layered with something floral he couldn't name. Her hair fell forward across one shoulder, chestnut waves catching the sterile light and rendering it golden. This close, the details of her face sharpened into focus. The precise arch of her brows. The faint dusting of warmth across her olive cheeks. The curve of her lower lip, full and unhurried in its smile.
Her amber eyes watched him from less than a foot away. Deep amber. The color of resin preserving something ancient and priceless. Calculating everything they observed while revealing nothing of the calculations themselves.
Heat bloomed beneath Griswald's collar. It crept up his neck in a slow tide, pooling at his ears, spreading across his cheekbones. His pulse kicked against the inside of his wrist. His fingers twitched against the mythology book still balanced on his knees.
She was beautiful.
He'd known this objectively since the first time he saw her in the Chaldea corridors, the way one knows the sun is hot or water is wet. An observable fact filed under irrelevant data. Leonardo da Vinci had chosen to manifest as their personal ideal of beauty, modeled after the Mona Lisa itself, and the result was a woman whose appearance registered on some primal frequency beneath conscious thought.
But knowing it and feeling it with her face eighteen inches from his were two fundamentally different experiences.
Da Vinci laughed. Small. Warm. The sound of a hypothesis confirmed.
"This proves my point." Her eyes sparkled with amusement, amber facets catching the light like cut gemstones. "You have already kissed a woman. You've done considerably more than kiss, in fact. You've been intimate under combat conditions with hostile Servants bearing down on you. And yet right now, with me simply sitting close to you in a safe room, you are panicking."
His mouth opened. Closed. His hand went to his glasses. Pushed them up. Pulled them off entirely. Cleaned them on his uniform. Put them back. The lenses fogged from the heat radiating off his face.
She was right. He hated that she was right. In Fuyuki, with death pressing in from every direction, his body had acted because there was no alternative. No space for hesitation. No room for the crushing self-consciousness that currently had its hands around his windpipe. The urgency had burned away the awkwardness like fire clearing undergrowth.
Here, in the quiet of his room, with no enemy to fight and no crisis to override his fear, there was nothing between him and the full weight of his inexperience.
"I see your point," he managed. His voice cracked on the last syllable.
Da Vinci nodded. The amusement didn't leave her expression, but something more serious settled alongside it. Her chin tilted down, and she studied him with the focused intensity she normally reserved for circuitry that wasn't behaving as expected.
"In the field, you will encounter Servants who require mana replenishment in circumstances where hesitation is not survivable. You need to be more confident. More comfortable with intimacy as a tool and as a connection." She paused. Let the words land. "Which is why I am volunteering my services."
The room went very quiet.
Griswald's brain stopped processing input. The signal from his ears reached his auditory cortex, was parsed into recognizable language, forwarded to his prefrontal cortex for interpretation, and was immediately rejected as corrupted data. The system rebooted. Reprocessed. Arrived at the same conclusion.
"W-what?"
One syllable. He poured his entire cognitive capacity into producing it and still it came out fractured.
"As a world-class genius and polymath," Da Vinci began, her tone carrying the same matter-of-fact confidence she applied to discussing gear ratios or mana circuit architecture, "and as someone who has experienced sexual intimacy as both a man and a woman, I am uniquely qualified to provide comprehensive instruction."
His brain snagged on the second half of that sentence. The gears turned. She had sex as a woman. Who had she...? When had she...? He opened his mouth to ask, but the question collided with seventeen other questions in his throat and none of them made it past the wreckage.
Da Vinci continued without pause, filling the space his silence left.
"I understand your hesitation. You are not the first student I have guided through unfamiliar territory, though I'll admit the subject matter is more specialized than what I typically taught." Her fingers touched her chin in a gesture of theatrical consideration. "You may not possess the natural elegance of my Francesco Melzi, who could charm a duchess with nothing but a sonnet and a well-timed glance. Or the raw enthusiasm of Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, who approached every lesson with an intensity bordering on mania." A flicker crossed her face. Something between fondness and exasperation. "Or even the particular... creativity of Salaì, who was infuriating in every conceivable way but possessed an instinct for pleasure that I have rarely seen equaled."
Griswald's blush had transcended mere coloration. His face felt like it might ignite.
"But I am confident," she pressed on, "that my skills as a teacher will compensate for any gap in raw talent. By the time I'm through with you, Griswald Von Garmisch, you will be a modern Don Juan." Her finger rose. "Without the divine punishment."
His mouth worked. Sound emerged. Barely.
"I... I'm not sure I can..."
He got no further.
Da Vinci's hand settled on his knee. Light. Deliberate. The contact sent a jolt through his nervous system that short-circuited the remainder of his objection. Her amber eyes held his, and the playfulness in them deepened into something steady. Reassuring.
"We don't have to go all the way. Not at first." Her voice gentled without losing its authority. The tone of a teacher who understood the distance between the first lesson and mastery and had the patience to walk every step of it. "All great education begins with fundamentals. You build the foundation before you construct the tower. I would never throw a student into advanced techniques without ensuring they've mastered the basics."
His heartbeat filled his skull. He could feel it in his temples, in his fingertips, in the soles of his feet pressed against the cold floor.
"Basics," he repeated. The word tasted foreign in his mouth. "What... what basics?"
The smile changed.
The warmth remained but it sharpened. The analytical precision behind her eyes softened into something liquid and inviting, her lips parting just enough to catch the light along their lower curve. Her chin dropped a fraction. Her lashes lowered. The transformation was seamless and devastating, the shift from teacher to something else entirely executed with the confidence of a woman who understood exactly what her face could do and had five centuries of perspective on the mechanics of desire.
Her fingers hooked the neckline of her bodice. The layered red and blue panels that structured her outfit were held in place by clasps and ties that Griswald had never paid attention to before. She tugged downward. The fabric yielded. The structured panels parted, blue underlayer pulling away from skin, gold trim catching the overhead light as it fell.
Her breasts spilled free.
They were perfect. Of course they were. She had designed this body from a painting that represented her ideal of beauty, and she had been the greatest artist in human history. Every curve was deliberate. The weight of them settled as the fabric released, round and full against her slender frame. Her skin was smooth olive, warm-toned even under Chaldea's sterile lighting. Pink nipples sat at their centers, soft and slightly peaked from the cool air of the room, the areolae just a shade darker than the surrounding skin.
Griswald's mouth fell open.
His glasses slid down his nose. He did not push them back up. His hands had forgotten how hands worked. The mythology book tumbled off his knees and hit the floor with a thud that neither of them acknowledged.
Da Vinci sat on the edge of his bed with her top pulled down and her bare chest exposed and that seductive smile resting on her lips like it had always belonged there.
"Lesson one," she said