The word landed like a struck bell, and the whole ruin seemed to flinch from it.
The girl froze with her hand still extended. The soldier had drawn the breath up out of the bottom of himself to spit it, and there was nothing in it but hatred. No fear of the wyvern that had nearly killed him. No gratitude for the iron banner that had grounded the thing. Only that single word, scraped raw out of a throat half-crushed by terror, aimed at the one person who'd knelt down beside him in the blood.
Griswald felt the hair rise along his arms. He'd treated this man's eye not ten minutes ago. He'd felt the soldier's pulse skitter under his fingers, watched him weep with relief when the swelling eased. And now the man's good eye was wide and fixed on the girl in silver like she was something crawled up out of the earth.
"Witch," the soldier said again, stronger this time, the rattle clearing. "Witch. Murderess. You—you dare—you dare touch me with those hands—"
"You're bleeding," the girl said. Her voice stayed even. She did not pull her hand back. "Please. Hold still and let me—"
"Don't." He scrabbled at the rubble, heels digging, trying to push himself further into the broken stone, away from her, into anything that wasn't her. "Don't touch me. God, don't let her touch me, she burned them, she burned all of them, the whole village, the children, I saw it, I saw her standing in the fire and laughing—"
"That wasn't—" The girl's composure cracked, just slightly, a flinch at the corner of her mouth. "That was not me."
"Liar." Spittle on his lips now. "Liar, witch, you'll burn for it twice, you'll—"
Beside Griswald, Ritsuka made a low sound in her throat. He glanced sideways and saw her jaw set hard, her amber eyes gone flat and furious, her weight already shifting forward onto the balls of her feet.
"Hey," Ritsuka said, low. "Hey. She just saved your stupid life—"
She took a step. She had her shoulders squared and her hands half-raised, and Griswald knew that look, knew she meant to march over there and haul the man up by his collar and shake the gratitude into him, save-your-life-or-not, and he opened his mouth to stop her—
A wall of pale violet light dropped between them.
Mash had moved without a word. The great cross-shield came around and planted itself crosswise, its broad face turned not toward the wyvern's stain, not toward any threat outside the fort, but inward, between Griswald and Ritsuka and the kneeling girl in silver. Mash stood behind it with her boots set wide in the ash, her body angled to keep all three of them in its shadow, and her violet eyes flicked from the cursing soldier to the silver-armoured stranger and back, cool and watchful and entirely unreadable.
"Mash?" Griswald breathed.
"We don't know who she is, Master," Mash said quietly, not turning her head. "He called her a witch." The shield did not waver. "Until we know who that really is, I want something between her and you."
Ritsuka stopped short against the edge of the shield, the light of it washing across her scowl. "She fought beside us."
"That doesn't mean she's on our side," Da Vinci's voice came clipped and steady through the comm, threaded with the faint hum of distant machinery. "Mash is right. A Servant who just happens to arrives the instant you're in trouble. Be careful, Griswald. Gratitude is cheap and it gets people killed. Learn what she is before you decide what she is to you."
Griswald swallowed. The shield's pale light lay across the rubble in a long cold bar, and behind it the soldier still raved, his words slurring back down into babble now that the silver girl had stopped reaching for him. Ritsuka stood with her fists clenched at the shield's edge, vibrating with the urge to do something, anything, and not quite able to argue with a voice that calm.
The girl in silver stayed kneeling a moment longer. She tried again, once more, hand half-lifting toward the wounded man, and he shrank from it with a thin animal whine, and Griswald watched something in her shoulders give way by a fraction. She tried a third time, just fingertips, just an offer, and he turned his ruined face into the stone and wept.
She closed her eyes.
For a long beat she knelt like that, eyes shut, golden lashes still, her banner planted in the ash beside her like a thing she'd forgotten she was holding. Her lips moved. Griswald couldn't hear it, but he read off her lips the words of prayer. Then she breathed out, and stood.
She came toward them slowly. Her armored greaves whispered against the broken ground, and she kept her hands open and away from the banner's grip, palms turned a little outward.
When she saw the cross-shield turned inward, when she understood that the great pale barrier was raised not against the dead thing rotting in the courtyard but against her, she stopped.
And Griswald saw it.
Just for an instant, before she could school it away, something crossed those wide blue eyes. Not anger. Not the flat contempt of a Servant insulted by a lesser creature's caution. Something quieter and worse than either. A flicker of hurt, swift, bright and than immediately ashamed of itself.
It was gone before he could be sure he'd seen it.
What replaced it was serenity, smooth and complete, settling over her features like still water closing over a dropped stone. She inclined her head, the silver of her circlet catching the strange ringed light from above.
"I understand your caution," she said. "These are not days that reward trust freely given." Her voice had gone gentle, level, the steel of a moment ago folded back away out of sight. "Still. I thank you. For standing with me against that creature, and for tending the wounded when so few would." Her gaze touched the weeping soldier, then lifted to take in the three of them ranged behind the shield. "Whatever you believe of me, you fought to save lives today. That is no small thing."
Nobody answered. Fou shifted on Griswald's shoulder, a low warble in its throat, and the small animal warmth of it was the only thing in the ruin that didn't feel coiled tight.
Mash didn't lower the shield. She didn't even glance back. But her chin tilted a half-degree toward Griswald, and that was the whole question, laid plain and silent in the line of her body. What do we do, Master?
Griswald looked at the girl in silver, and at his own decision sitting in front of him like a thing he could pick up or refuse.
This was it. This was the part nobody had warned him about in any of the briefings, the part Romani couldn't reduce to coordinates and Da Vinci couldn't teach with diagrams on a tablet. Not how to summon. Not how to transfer mana. This. Standing in the ash with a wounded man cursing at his back and a stranger's open hands held out toward him, and being the one who had to choose whether those hands meant harm.
He thought of Cú.
He thought of the blue fire that had come out of nowhere in the ruins of Fuyuki, the mocking voice and the absurd swaggering walk, a Servant nobody had asked for who had appeared at the exact moment Mash was bound in iron chains and about to die. They could have refused him. Every cautious instinct in Griswald had wanted to. And Cú had carried him across rooftops and carved runes into his arms and bled for them inside a burning Wicker Man, and the only reason any of them were alive to stand in this French ruin at all was because somebody had decided, in the field, with no certainty whatsoever, to trust the stranger who'd helped them.
His circuits weren't strong. His judgment was the only weapon he had that worked.
Griswald stepped out from behind the shield.
"Master—" Mash's voice went taut.
"It's all right." He put his hand flat against the cold violet surface, not pushing it down, just touching it, telling her he'd heard her and chosen anyway. "It's all right, Mash. I've got it."
He came around the edge of the barrier into the open. The girl watched him approach with that smooth still-water calm, but he saw her eyes track him, weighing, and he made himself meet them and not look away. His heart was going hard enough that he was sure she could hear it.
"You saved us," Griswald said. "That wyvern would've torn through me before Mash could reach it." He swallowed. "So. Thank you. Really. I'm sorry about the shield, she's—we've had a hard few days, and the last person who smiled at us tried to kill everyone we knew."
For a moment the girl simply looked at him. Then the serenity on her face warmed into something real, something with a person actually behind it, and she let out a breath that seemed to take a long-held weight with it.
"You needn't apologies," she said. "Caution kept you alive. I would not undo that in you." A small, rueful smile. "And these days a kind word from a stranger is rarer than I'd like. I will not waste mine pretending offence I do not feel."
Behind him, Griswald heard mash's shield be moved. Not all the way. Mash brought it down to rest against her shoulder, its broad face angled to the side now instead of straight between them, and he felt the change in the air like a window cracked open in a stuffy room.
"I'm Griswald," he said. "Griswald Von Garmisch. We're—we're a long way from home." That was true enough in every direction that mattered. He gestured behind him. "This is Mash and that's Ritsuka."
Ritsuka stepped up beside him, and her scowl had already softened into the easy crooked grin she is know to have. "Hey. Sorry I almost decked your patient. He was being a jerk."
"He was afraid," the girl said simply, without reproach. "Fear makes monsters of us all, eventually." She straightened, and the banner came up in her grip, no longer a weapon now, just a standard held the way a thing is held when it means something. "My name is Jeanne. Jeanne d'Arc."
The name dropped into the ruin and sat there.
Griswald felt Mash go very still behind him. Ritsuka's grin froze in place. Even Fou stopped its warbling, ears pricking up off Griswald's collar.
Joan of Arc. The soldier's voice rang back through his memory, hoarse and certain. Burned at Rouen, returned from death with a monstrous army. She killed King Henry. She's burning France in revenge. The witch. The murderess. The one they'd come here to stop, the corruption at the heart of the whole shattered Singularity, and she was standing in front of him with her hands open and her eyes clear, having just bled to save his life.
"You're—" Ritsuka started.
"I know what you have heard." Jeanne's jaw tightened, and there it was again under the calm, that flicker of old grief pulled close. "I have heard it too. From every mouth in this country. That I rose from the fire and turned my hand against the people I died to save." Her grip whitened on the banner's haft. "I swear before God it is not true. There is another wearing my face and my name, and she is burning France to ash, and I cannot make a single living soul believe that she is not me."
She looked at the three of them, at the shield half-lowered, at the boy who'd stepped out from behind it to thank her.
"You are the first who have not run," she said quietly. "Or reached for a blade. Perhaps that is foolish of you. But it is the first kindness I have been shown since I woke in this ruined world." The faintest, careful hope crossed her face. "Will you hear me? Before you decide what I am?"
Griswald glanced back. Mash met his eyes. After a long moment, she gave a single small nod and let the shield's edge settle fully against the earth.
Griswald nodded.
"We'll hear you out," he said. "But not here. We've been fighting since we landed, and—" He gestured vaguely at the fort. At the wounded soldier still pressed against the rubble with his face turned away. "We need a place to sit down. Somewhere with walls and a door."
Jeanne's shoulders dropped a fraction, relief she couldn't quite hide. She scanned the horizon beyond the broken fort, her blue eyes sweeping the patchwork of fields and tree lines to the south, and pointed.
"There is a farmhouse. Half a league through the orchard." She paused. "The family fled weeks ago when the burnings reached Meung. I passed through it two days past. The roof holds, and there is a well."
"Works for me," Ritsuka said. She was already rolling her neck, working out the stiffness of combat. "Lead the way."
They gathered what little they had. Mash lifted her shield onto her back, and the great cross settled between her shoulder blades with a dull clang that echoed off the fort's broken walls. Jeanne planted her banner and walked, and after a beat Mash fell into step beside her.
Griswald started to follow, bringing up the rear.
"Boy."
It came out wet. The man hadn't moved. He lay exactly where Griswald had left him, spine pressed into the rubble, his bandaged eye weeping through the gauze, his good eye fixed on Griswald with the absolute clarity of someone who has used up everything except the need to be heard.
"You walk with her." Not a question. The soldier's cracked lips barely parted around the words. "You'll burn with her. Same as the men who marched behind her banner to Orléans. Same as the English who stood against her and found out what her God thought of them." A sound that might have been a laugh scraped out of his chest.
Griswald stopped. He didn't speak. He stood in the ruin with the wyvern's blood drying on his shoes and the strange ringed light pouring down through the broken roof, and he looked the man in the eye. The silence between them filled with the distant sound of Mash's greaves crunching through gravel, growing fainter.
The soldier held his gaze for a long time. Then whatever scaffolding of rage and terror had been propping him upright gave way, and his head settled back against the stone, and his voice went very small.
"She burned." he whispered. "But was she the one that was punished or us…"
His good eye closed. His chest fell once, shallow, and did not rise again.
Griswald stood over him. There was nothing else he could do here.
"Senpai?"
Mash's voice floated back through the gate, gentle as a hand on his sleeve. He straightened, adjusted his glasses, and walked out of the fort without looking back.
The farmhouse was small and solid, built from pale stone with a slate roof that sagged at one corner but held. Dust covered everything. A family's life sat frozen mid-departure: a half-eaten loaf gone to green fur on the table, a child's wooden horse kicked under a chair, a woman's shawl draped over the back of a bench as if she'd meant to grab it on the way out and simply forgotten.
The four of them sat around the farmhouse table in the amber light of a candle Mash had found in a cupboard. Fou dozed in a curl on Griswald's lap. The wooden horse lay on its side by his boot, and he kept his eyes off it.
They had told her everything.
The Singularities. The Incineration. The burning of all human history across every era, and the fact that the three people sitting across from Jeanne d'Arc in a dead family's kitchen were among the last human beings in existence capable of doing anything about it.
Ritsuka had done most of the talking. She had a gift for making the apocalypse sound like a problem you could punch, and she'd laid out the situation with the blunt economy of someone who'd already grieved and moved past it into action. Mash had filled the gaps, her voice steady and precise on tactical details, occasionally glancing at Griswald for confirmation before continuing.
Now it was done. The candle guttered. Ritsuka sat back with her arms folded, waiting. Mash had her hands flat on the table, and Griswald noticed with a small bloom of warmth she seemed to have relaxed towards the future saint.
Jeanne sat perfectly still across the table. She had not interrupted once during their account. Her banner leaned against the wall behind her, and the candlelight caught the silver of her circlet and the impossible blue of her eyes. Those eyes were distant now, turned inward, processing the weight of what she'd been told with the quiet intensity of someone accustomed to receiving impossible information and finding a place to put it.
"The whole of history," Jeanne said at last. Not to anyone. To the air, the candle, the empty house. She pressed her palm flat against the table's scarred wood. "Every age. Every soul who ever lived and died."
"Gone," Ritsuka said. "Unless we fix it."
Jeanne's hand curled against the grain. Her eyes refocused, came back from whatever vast interior landscape she'd been surveying, and settled on Griswald with a directness that made him sit up straighter.
"And you are the one," she said. "The Master."
"Barely," Griswald said before he could stop himself.
Mash's boot found his ankle under the table. A gentle kick. He shut his mouth.
Jeanne studied him for a long moment. Whatever she found there, she did not share. She looked at Mash, at Ritsuka, at Fou sleeping in Griswald's lap, and something shifted behind her expression.
"Then I will tell you what I know," Jeanne said, "and you will tell me how we stop her."
Jeanne folded her hands on the table, and the candle threw her shadow long across the stone wall behind her.
"I woke three weeks ago," she began. "In a field outside Domrémy. The village where I was born." Her gaze drifted to the dusty window and the strange ringed light beyond it. "I did not understand at first that I had died. I remembered the fire at Rouen. The smoke. The English soldiers, and the bishop's voice reading the sentence. And then I was simply standing in the grass under that ring of light."
"You were summoned," Mash said quietly. "As a Servant."
"So I have come to understand." Jeanne nodded. "Though I had no Master. No voice in my head, no command pressing on my will only knowledge of a future that goes on long past this date. I was simply here." She turned her hands over, looking at the gauntleted palms as though they belonged to someone else. "I walked to the village. I thought to fine answers to what is going on. Instead I found ash." Her jaw tightened. "I knelt to pray for the dead, and a man who had survived crawled out of a root cellar and saw my face, and he screamed."
Griswald felt Fou stir in his lap, ears twitching against his sleeve.
"He called me what your soldier called me," Jeanne went on. "Witch. Murderess. He said I had come back through the village at the head of an army of dragons not two days before, and burned everything that breathed, and laughed while I did it." Her voice stayed level, but Griswald saw the cost of keeping it that way. "I thought him mad. I went to the next town. They tried to kill me with pitchforks. The town after that, a company of soldiers nearly ran me through. Everywhere I went, the same story. Jeanne d'Arc has risen from the fire. Jeanne d'Arc is burning France."
"But it wasn't you," Ritsuka said.
"It was not me." Jeanne's eyes flashed up, fierce and sudden. "I died for this country. I gave my life so that the Dauphin might be crowned and the English driven out. Whatever wears my face and carries my name, it is not me, and I have spent three weeks watching it unmake everything I bled for." She drew a slow breath, and the fierceness banked itself back down. "Forgive me. It is a wound that does not close."
"What happened to start it?" Griswald asked. "The corruption. Do you know how it began?"
Jeanne was quiet a moment, marshalling it.
"After I burned," Jeanne said, "the story did not end where mine ended."
She turned the candle a quarter-turn against the table, watching the flame lean and right itself, and Griswald understood she was choosing where to begin from a thing too large to begin anywhere.
"At Rouen, in the world that was, I died and that was the close of it. The fire took me, the English scattered my ashes in the Seine so that no relic might remain, and the war went on without me until France was whole again." Her hands settled flat. "But here, in this broken thing your masters call a Singularity, something reached into the moment of my death and would not let it be an ending. The fire that consumed me became a womb instead of a grave." Her mouth tightened around the word. "From my own ashes, something rose in black armor wearing my flesh. My face. My name. My memories, I think, or some twisted copy of them. But where I went to God, she rose hating Him."
She lifted her gaze to the ringed light beyond the window, and her voice changed register, slipping into the cadence of someone reciting what she'd pieced together from a hundred terrified mouths in a hundred ruined villages.
"They say her first act was to look upon the men who had burned me and smile. Then she called the sky down on them." Her jaw worked. "A host of wyverns, more than any army of men could number. Rouen first. The very city that condemned me. She left nothing of it but cinder and the screaming."
Griswald thought of the single wyvern that had nearly torn through him at the fort. The way it had filled the broken courtyard with its bulk, the way Mash's shield had rung and rung under its weight. An army of those.
"Nothing could stand against her," Jeanne went on. "The English fought. The French fought. It made no difference. Walls did not slow the dragons, and steel did not slow her." She closed her eyes. "Town by town. Field by field. They say she does not tire and does not sleep and does not stop, and that wherever she rides the wyrms blacken the sky behind her like smoke."
"Henry," Ritsuka said. "The soldier at the fort said she killed Henry."
"King Henry the Sixth of England." Jeanne nodded slowly. "The boy-king, in whose name I was tried and burned."
Griswald shifted Fou gently against his arm. The little creature had woken and gone very still, ears flat, violet eyes open and fixed on Jeanne.
"She killed Charles as well," Jeanne said. The words came out flat, stripped of everything except fact. "The Dauphin. The king I crowned at Reims with my own hands."
The candle flame held still in the dead air. Nobody breathed.
"With both crowns shattered, both armies fell apart within days. English and French alike scattered like sheep without shepherds. Meat for the wyverns." Jeanne's fingers pressed white against the tabletop. "She was free then. No organized force remained between her and the whole of France. She burns it at her pleasure now, village by village, and there is nothing left that can stop her."
Silence filled the farmhouse kitchen like water rising in a well. Ritsuka's folded arms had gone rigid, her knuckles pale where they gripped her own sleeves. Mash sat perfectly still, her violet eyes fixed on a knot in the table's grain, seeing something far past it. Fou's ears lay flat against Griswald's forearm, and the small body had gone tense as wire.
The child's wooden horse lay on its side by Griswald's boot. He thought of the family that had left it behind. Wondered if they were still running.
No one knew what to say. The silence stretched until the candle guttered and the shadows on the wall lurched sideways, and still no one broke it.
Griswald broke it.
"She's the Singularity." he said. His voice came out rough, unsteady, but the thought behind it was solid. He'd been turning the pieces since Jeanne started talking, fitting them against what Da Vinci and Romani had briefed him on, and the shape they made was ugly but clear. "The fake you. She's the corruption. The thing anchoring this whole distortion in the timeline." He pushed his glasses up, a nervous habit, but his eyes were focused. "Which means she has the Grail. Or she is the Grail's instrument. Either way, she's the source. Remove her, and the Singularity collapses."
Ritsuka unfolded her arms and nodded, sharp and certain. "Makes sense. Everything traces back to her. The wyverns, the ring in the sky, the corruption spreading through the land. One source, one solution."
Mash lifted her gaze from the table. "The pattern matches Fuyuki. A corrupted Servant empowered by the Grail, warping the era around a single point of failure." She looked at Griswald. "If she holds the Grail, destroying her should release it. We secure the Grail, the Singularity corrects itself."
Jeanne watched the three of them pass the assessment between them like soldiers reading from the same map, and something shifted in her posture. The rigid set of her spine eased by a fraction.
Jeanne's gaze swept across their faces, reading the assessment they'd built between them, and she gave a single measured nod.
"I have heard no account of her possessing a Holy Grail," she said. "Not from any survivor, not from any soldier who watched her armies pass. She carries no vessel, no artifact that anyone has described to me." She paused, turning the thought over with visible care. "But I agree with your reasoning. The power she wields far exceeds what any Servant should possess without an external source. If a Grail anchors this Singularity, she is the most likely vessel for it, whether she carries it openly or whether it resides within her Spirit Origin itself."
Griswald nodded. The confirmation settled the last piece into place, and the shape of their mission in this Singularity crystallized into something he could hold. Find the false Jeanne. Defeat her. Secure the Grail. Simple enough to say. Suicidal enough to attempt.
He adjusted his glasses and leaned forward across the table.
"Then we have the same goal," he said. "You want to stop her. We need to stop her. We should work together."
Jeanne looked at him, and the careful reserve she'd held throughout her account softened. The candlelight caught the relief she couldn't quite suppress, a subtle easing around her eyes, the faintest exhale through parted lips.
"I would welcome that," she said. "Gladly. Three weeks I have fought alone against something that wears my own face, and I will not pretend the solitude has not worn on me." She straightened in her seat, and her voice took on the crisp, practical cadence of a woman accustomed to organizing campaigns. "However, I must be honest with you about my limitations. I was summoned into the Ruler class. A mediator, meant to oversee and adjudicate. My Saint Graph should grant me abilities befitting that station: True Name Discernment, resistance to most Noble Phantasms and stronger physical and magical abilities." Her hands turned over on the table, gauntlets catching candlelight. "None of it works."
She said it plainly, without self-pity, the way a soldier reports a broken weapon.
"I can fight as I am still a servant. But the Ruler privileges that should define my class are sealed. Locked behind something I cannot reach." Her brow creased. "I believe it is because I have no Master. A Servant without an anchor exists in a diminished state. Contracted to a Master, supplied with proper mana, I might be able to access my full authority."
The words supplied with proper mana landed on the table between them, and Griswald felt the air in the room change.
He looked at Mash. She looked at him. They both looked at Ritsuka. Ritsuka's mouth pressed into a thin line and she rubbed the back of her neck.
All three of them grimaced at the same time.
Jeanne's hopeful expression froze mid-formation. Her eyes moved between the three of them, tracking the shared wince the way a tactician tracks an unexpected flanking movement, and confusion settled visibly across her features.
"Have I said something wrong?"
"No," Griswald said quickly. "No, not at all. It's not—you haven't done anything wrong." He scrubbed a hand through his messy blond hair, pushing it off his forehead, buying seconds he didn't have. "I would be more than honored to form a contract with you. Genuinely. Having a Ruler-class Servant with us could change everything about how we approach this Singularity."
"But," Ritsuka supplied helpfully from behind her folded arms.
Griswald shot her a look. She raised her eyebrows and gestured at him with one hand. Your show, boss.
He pulled his shoulders back. Faced Jeanne across the table. Made himself hold those clear blue eyes.
"You need to know something about me first," he said. "My magical circuits are... bad. Not weak in the way that most mages mean when they say weak. I mean structurally insufficient." The old shame crept into his voice despite his efforts to keep it clinical. "I don't generate enough passive mana to sustain a Servant through a standard contract bond. Not even close. The drain would hollow me out within hours."
Jeanne's brow furrowed. "Then how does your Shielder—"
"The only way I can sustain Servants," Griswald said, pushing through it before his nerve failed, "is through direct mana transfer."
The farmhouse went absolutely silent.
Jeanne's smile remained exactly where it was. Fixed in place like a painting. Her blue eyes stayed on his, but something behind them had gone very still, the way a pond goes still when the temperature drops past a certain threshold and the surface doesn't know yet whether to freeze or keep flowing.
"I'm sorry," she said, her voice perfectly even. "Could you repeat that?"
He repeated it. Every word. Slower this time, because she'd asked, and because she deserved clarity rather than mumbling. He told her about his healing magic, about the unique property of his circuits that allowed fluid replenishment, about how the transfer worked and why it worked and why there was no alternative that could sustain a Servant through prolonged combat operations.
He pulled himself together. Sat up straight. Met her eyes.
"Will you allow me to perform mana transfer with you," he said, "so that together we can save France?"
Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orléans, the saint who had burned for her country and her God, looked at him across a this kitchen table in the amber light of a guttering candle.
She said nothing for five full seconds.
Then, with the same calm, measured clarity with which she had described the destruction of her homeland:
"No."