I watched the woman scramble back, hurriedly adjusting her collar before clearing her throat twice. Then she tilted her chin up by forty-five degrees and clasped her hands behind her back.
"I-I am Olga Marie Animusphere, Director of the Chaldea Security Organization." Her voice shook, and she pressed her lips together, chin lifting another degree like it could compensate. "Preserv—we preserve the Human Order from threats to its existence. Now, if I can have your—"
An unsteady breath. "Your name."
Glancing down, I noted her quivering legs even as she straightened her back further, pupils flickering between my face and the empty space above my shoulder. "You can refer to me as Izuru Kamukura."
"Oh. Izuru, okay." Olga shifted on her feet, a hiss escaping her lips from the bleeding scratch on her knee. "Ow—ignoring that. How are you here, Izuru? I haven't seen another human since I woke up here. Ow, that's—that's really starting to sting."
My hands rose in answer, closing around both of her shoulders, body leaning forward, face dipping toward her.
Her face flushed crimson, frame locking rigid, eyes widening before darting away. "W-Wait—wait, wait! Isn't this a little forward for a first meeting!? I mean, it's too fast, we've barely known each other, we—we can't, I'm the Director, I have responsibilities—"
I pulled her sideways, and a blur of rusted steel tore through air right where her head had been, the blade slicing beside my cheek before sinking into the street behind us with a shrr.
Stumbling forward, she lost her footing, wrapping her arms around my waist again, and for the second time, I confirmed what my senses had concluded after scanning her.
Olga Marie didn't have a heartbeat.
"You'll have to excuse me, my knee makes it rather hard to stand properly." Olga's fingers tightened briefly on my back, like everything was only now catching up to her. "And what was that, just now? Beside my ear?"
A second of silence, then she continued. "...Paper tearing, maybe. Not that there's any reason there should be paper lying around here."
My brows furrowed slightly at her insistent chattering and constant physical contact. Even the bracelet of silver threads on my wrist gave an imperceptible twitch at her actions.
Peeling her away from me, I took a step back, putting an arm's length of distance between us.
The warmth of where she'd pressed against me lasted a moment longer before fading. My shoulders had drawn in slightly without instruction, my heel tipping another fraction away from her. I filed that new reaction as data to analyze later.
"Some distance is appropriate for a first meeting." Echoing her own words back at her, I looked past her to that cluster of skeletons. "Director."
"Ah! Sorry about that! I hadn't even noticed until just now!" Olga shook her head frantically, wrapping her arms around herself, the tips of her ears tinting pink, face jerking down to lock on asphalt.
A few seconds passed.
Then I asked, "Director, tell me about this Chaldea and the Human Order you claim to protect. I've not heard of either, only of the Animusphere family, from the Clock Tower."
"You don't know?" Olga's brows shot up, and she snapped her head back at my face, patting her chest once with a closed fist like the question had personally offended her.
She didn't wait for an answer and began. "Chaldea, as I said, is a security organization, we observe every possible future for threats to humanity's survival and neutralize them before they happen."
Her hands rose, resting on her waist. "In short, it's preemptive protection of the Human Order. And it's headed by the current head of the Animusphere family. Me."
I nodded once and gestured for her to continue. But she didn't seem inclined to do so. "Izuru, now it's your turn, how did you end up inside this Singularity—"
A low whistle cut through her words, and I was already closing the distance to Olga in a single stride. My arm hooked around her waist, lifting her off the ground. She yelped, fingers clutching at my collar, and my legs were coiled, body unfolding in an ascending line.
The world inverted.
Asphalt spun beneath us, then sky, then the silhouette of an abandoned storefront, all of it smearing into vertical lines as my body wheeled upward. Olga's weight registered as a minor vector that was accounted for before the jump.
Her hair whipped across my face as the road ripped open in two widening curtains of dust and tar over the space we'd just vacated, a naginata grinding past for dozens of meters before burying itself in the ground around that cluster of skeletons. More than half of them were wrenched up and launched away by the weapon's leftover momentum alone.
My feet found the top of a broken street pole. An impact traveled up from the pole's base to its crown, absorbed into my ankles, distributed through my calves, and cushioned by my spine, each layer dampening the force before it reached Olga.
The pole groaned, a fracture surfacing along its length, screws bolting it to asphalt spiraling loose.
Olga's face was buried in my neck, her fingers crushing into my coat hard enough to pull its seams taut across my shoulders.
A roar erupted through the street, rattling loose glass still clinging to the windows of a few houses.
Then a person stepped out from the mouth of the road Assassin and I had crossed minutes ago.
He was built bulky and tall, bare-chested but for a cracked red breastplate set with a pale, moon-white orb at its center, a brown cloth wrapped around his head with a hard, bearded face. An olive sash cinched a tattered black robe at his waist, and he stood barefoot on broken asphalt.
A full arsenal of weapons was fixed on his back in a circle, blades, tridents, a dozen knives.
His eyes found us and locked on, empty and unfocused. He didn't speak, only his weight shifting forward onto the balls of his feet.
Then a whisper slipped out of him, low enough that Olga couldn't hear him clearly.
"Benkei...doesn't botch an entrance twice."
...
..
.
Beneath Ryuudou Temple.
A massive cavern, laced with pulsing black veins embedded between its cracks, stretched for hundreds of meters across barren soil and rocky terrain. An eerie blood-red haze floated above the ground, air dense and heavy with enough mana to make breathing exponentially harder than normal.
At its centre, a boundary of veined rocks rose up from the floor, tracing a circle around a massive, glowing pillar of pure black curses punching skyward through the ceiling, wrapped in red on both sides that bled outward into more fog.
Right before that boundary stood a knight in pitch black armour with crimson outlines, breastplate, gauntlets, leg armour and battle skirt all dark enough to swallow any light in the cavern.
Her hair was ash-blonde and tied in a royal bun, palms resting on the pommel of a dark sword etched with four successive crimson rings beneath its black cross-guard, buried tip-first into the ground.
Artoria Alter.
Particles drifted down from beyond the ceiling, falling like petals ahead of her and coalesced into the outline of armor, silver where hers was black, the red haze screeching away from where it touched that silver.
That shape solidified, piece by piece, a breastplate settling over a frame that stood identical to the other, gauntlets and greaves following in polished steel, a deep blue battle-skirt unfurling into place last, its hem coming to rest without a sound on barren soil.
Gold hair took shape next, brighter and warmer than ash-blonde, bound in the same bun as Alter's. When her eyes opened, they were green.
She stood facing the black-armored knight, a golden sword with blue accents resting in her grip rather than driven into the ground.
Neither of them moved for a second, sizing the other up from head to toe.
"I would not have let it come to this." Artoria broke the silence, speaking more to herself than to Alter.
"You never let anything come to anything." Alter's voice was cold and certain. "That was always the failure. Every sacrifice and mercy you called virtue, it cost us everything, and you dressed it up in flowers, calling it honor."
"And what has abandoning it cost you?"
For a moment, Alter remained quiet at those words, then scoffed dismissively. "Less than you'd think."
She lifted Excalibur Morgan and strode toward Artoria, sword trailing behind her. "I stopped counting a while ago."
Artoria's grip on Excalibur tightened. "You lie."
Alter didn't pause as crimson embers vortexed across her sword's length. "Excuse me?"
"'Less than you'd think.' A king learns to hear that particular lie. I invented it myself, after all." Artoria said, walking toward Alter, Excalibur already rising at her side.
Those embers across Excalibur Morgan faltered briefly. "…The cost was everything."
But then she raised her black sword overhead, its corrupted glyphs flaring with abandon. "I simply stopped letting it matter."
Artoria's boots struck barren ground, golden flakes trailing in her wake. "…Then there is nothing more left to say."
"Finally."
The distance between them shrank. A hundred paces. Fifty. Ten.
Gold ignited across the blade, light climbing its length in a rising column, and Artoria drew it overhead in a pillar of pure radiance.
Alter's answer erupted from the black sword's glyphs, a matching pillar of crimson-dark tearing skyward.
"Excalibur—"
"—Morgan."
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[15 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Musashibou Benkei]: Musashibou Benkei, Lancer-class, one of Fuyuki's resident Shadow Servants. Historically, a warrior-monk famous for absurd loyalty, legend has it a single swing of his naginata could clear a line of soldiers, and he supposedly died still standing at his post, shot through with arrows, because retreating wasn't on the table. Rumored to be the son of an Oni, which honestly explains the proportions.
Canonically, he's also a fraud, the real Benkei's name got borrowed by a guilt-ridden impersonator who abandoned the real one at their final battle, then spent the rest of his life making sure Benkei's legend got remembered instead of his own cowardice. So even the "Benkei" running around Fate isn't really him.
Here, corrupted into a Shadow Servant, there's not much of that story left operating, just the shell of a performer, the weapons, and enough leftover muscle memory to make an entrance.
...
[Author's Thoughts]
Alright, I'm trying to mix our boy's voice with Izuru's, let's see how it goes, hopefully something unique comes out. Here:
Who else wants more Artoria-vs-Alter friction? Speaking purely hypothetically: place one Artoria on each shoulder, transport both to the nearest Burger King, and administer whoppers until further hostility becomes thermodynamically inefficient. Filed as a viable de-escalation protocol.
Failing that, escalate to Phase Two, Izuru's cooking. Engineer dependency through sustained caloric superiority, until threat assessment of "each other" quietly reclassifies as "Izuru, mostly, but in a good way." Then, at the precise moment swords are drawn again, deploy the actual trump card: no Thursday BBQ. For either of them. Meanwhile, everyone else in the vicinity enjoys a fully party thrown on that same Thursday, in plain view.
Acceptable collateral: their pride. Projected outcome: ceasefire, indefinite.
...I've filed this as data to analyze later. Let's see if they still want to fight after that.
...
[Note]
Some of you might be wondering where our boy has been. Vanishing for a week straight? Good news: I was right here the whole time. Better news: I was knee-deep in Danmachi: Sword & Wheel's new release, and it drops in two to four days. Get ready, because the shenanigans are coming.
I still cackle just remembering them.