My suggestion to you all? Read the Italy sequence while listening to Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift soundtrack from Teriyaki Boyz.
A small tip from your dear author.
Anyway, enjoy.
...
Finland.
Åland Islands.
Walking across asphalt told me the soil here was thin. All the vibrations of my footsteps passed through the road, into ground, and echoed back three times faster than usual.
The sky above was overcast, grey clouds blocking sunlight as far as my eye could see. Pines and birch trees flanked the road on either side, condensation beading on their foliage from humidity.
A noble manor sat ahead. Its structure stretched hundreds of meters in both directions, with an enormous gate and a perimeter wall that enclosed its front. Carved into the brickwork of that wall were tiny gems etched with inscriptions I could read.
Each pulsed with a certain frequency at specific intervals, their collective oscillation tracing a dome around the manor, invisible to normal humans.
Master... Should I... Materialise myself?
Medusa's voice resounded in my mind as I walked toward that manor's main gate.
Stay in spirit form for now.
I had both hands buried in my pockets, shoulders relaxed and spine straight, a posture optimal for snapping out of rest instantly.
Calculating the frequencies and shape of this boundary field would have been trivial, so I didn't calculate them at all. After all, boring things remained boring even after being calculated a dozen times from different angles.
"Halt! You're on Edelfelt land! Stop where you stand and declare your purpose, or you will be treated as a hostile intruder."
From a checkpoint to the left, a guard waved his arm in my direction, his other hand gripping an MK-47 rifle.
Lines of heat spread across my face, then plunged downward, from throat to shoulders, flaring outward along my arms and the rest of my body.
"Are you deaf? I said halt. Another step and you're a corpse."
Deep within the guard's eyes, I saw my own reflection. Blank crimson eyes, long black hair, and those black tattoos, visible across my face and still emerging down my neck.
He brought his rifle up and aimed at me.
"Final warning. Halt and identify yourself, or I engage."
My steps did not pause, and asphalt parted where my next foot landed. A small cut first, merely a scratch, then that scratch expanded, racing forward in a straight path. Soil, clusters of sliced rocks, roots, and lumps of asphalt erupted upward like two curtains of debris.
That guard ducked sideways into the checkpoint, which trembled from its foundation as a deluge of debris hit it, burying it beneath tons of soil and rocks.
I continued to move forward.
A boundary field shimmered in my path next, but hundreds of cuts had already been raked across its framework. When my chest touched its surface, the barrier shattered inward like fragile glass, opening a path inside.
The wail of a siren resounded from every direction.
"Intruder! Intruder!"
Hundreds of gargoyle statues rose from stone pillars, cracking tiles in their wake as they rushed toward me. Earth parted in rectangular formations ahead of my path to reveal stairs leading down, and from their depths climbed golems with gems embedded in their joints.
The main gate swung open on its own, and that perimeter wall sank into ground, giving me a full look at Edelfelt manor.
Magic circles rotated across every window of that manor, a gem whirring within each circle. The spell being charged by them was familiar, something often used by Rin Tohsaka.
Gandr.
But that same spell was being used here in thousands for a single volley.
Cracks spread across the ground from me, creeping forward and tracing over the golems, gargoyles and surrounding terrain. Overhead, similar cracks branched across the remaining boundary field, pieces of it falling down like a rain of glass.
An entourage of people stepped out of the manor as thousands of Gandr shot toward me, blurring into a column of shifting colors. The asphalt beneath my feet began to disintegrate. Trees and foliage nearby crumbled to ash, their residue drifting away in clouds of dust.
A single step forward. My heel struck asphalt, and a line traced there, thread-thin, cutting vertically through air itself.
The column of Gandr split along that line. Two halves veered past me on either side, close enough that their light warmed my ears. Behind me, terrain simply ceased. Trees, road and soil, all of it deleted in a widening V.
My next step had just fallen when those two halves struck ground beyond me. Detonations rolled across the manor grounds in sequence, flinging dirt and shards of stone into air.
The gargoyles and golems had reached me by now.
I walked through them.
A gargoyle's stone claw swiped at my head. Lines had already been drawn across its torso and wings. My shoulder brushed its chest as I passed, and the creature came apart mid-swing, both arms separating at its elbow, head rotating slightly before toppling backward. Stone fragments clattered across tile behind me in a predictable rhythm.
Two golems flanked my path next, each three meters tall, their gem-embedded joints humming with mana. My right foot landed between them, and cracks across their frames widened.
The left golem's torso separated from its legs, its upper body sliding forward and crashing down. The right one split vertically, half falling left, half falling right, its gems popping free and skittering across ground.
More came.
Gargoyles crumbled into gravel as I passed by their lunges. Golems folded along invisible seams, their stony bodies shearing away in slabs.
One leapt from a pillar directly above me, both fists raised. I tilted my head a degree. It missed my shoulder by a hair's width and struck the ground behind me, where it immediately fractured along every line I'd drawn through it a minute prior.
None of them touched me.
I cleared the last one and continued onward. Rubble stretched behind me in a trail of debris, gravel, and dead gems whose glow had faded.
Then the windows changed.
Every magic circle across the manor's face stopped rotating, their gems no longer whirring. For a single breath, the entire building's front went still, hundreds of circles adjusting their aim in perfect synchronization, all at one point.
Me.
Mana gathered in those gems as they resumed whirring. Temperature spiked, and the rubble behind me exploded backward from sheer pressure alone.
That entourage at the manor's entrance stood rigid. One of them, a woman in a golden dress, raised her hand.
Those circles fired.
Thousands of Gandr shots converged from every window simultaneously, collapsing into another concentrated beam of cursed energy aimed at my chest. Air screeched. Ground beneath the beam's path scorched black instantly, tiles melting into slag.
Lines.
They were already there. Across every circle, gem, window and their frames. Thin invisible threads traced over the manor's entire front like fractures, connecting each circle to the next in a web I had mapped the moment those windows came into view.
I exhaled.
Those fractures widened.
All the magic circles shattered at once. Gems burst from their housings in sprays of crystalline fragments. Window glass exploded outward in cascading waves, each frame detonating into a shower of glittering dust.
The beam of concentrated Gandr lost coherence halfway to me, diffusing into stray wisps of light that faded harmlessly before reaching me.
Silence settled over the manor.
That woman in a golden-blue dress with coiled blonde hair stood frozen, her raised hand still hanging in air. Beside her, an older woman holding a cane hadn't moved either, but her eyes were already calculating.
I strode toward them until closing the remaining distance felt unnecessary.
"Luviagelita Edelfelt."
My words made her finally drop her hand.
"How—"
She stopped herself, teeth clenching tight, pride being doused by fear. Her mouth closed, then opened. "You destroyed my family's boundary field like it was nothing."
"It was nothing," I said.
Everyone froze.
The older woman composed herself first and spoke before they could recover. "What do you want?"
Straight to it. Better than outrage or wounded pride.
"A list." I pulled my hand from the pocket, clutched in my fingers was a folded paper. "I need the materials listed here, get them to me in two hours."
The older woman took it without hesitation, scanning it once, her expression unreadable. Luvia tried to glance at it, her eyebrows furrowed.
"And?" the older woman asked.
"A helicopter, and a car, both waiting separately." I turned my head to look at a matte-black Ford Mustang parked nearby.
"You just leveled our defenses and now you're placing orders." Luvia's voice cracked between fury and disbelief, her gaze flashing over to that car.
"Yes." I nodded.
She opened her mouth again. The old woman's cane tapped once against tile, landing like a command. Luvia shut her mouth.
"It will be done." A pause from the old woman. "Luvia, go bring that black car's keys."
Luvia protested with rising pitch. "But, grandma that's mine—"
"Enough." Another tap of the cane.
Stomping her foot once, Luvia surged inside, cheeks puffed to their limits.
"Do excuse that child, she's willful for her age." Luvia's grandmother said, eyes cataloguing the tattoos across my face.
"I don't care as long as you get me what I want." I tilted my head skyward. It's about to rain.
Five minutes passed in silence.
"Here, catch." Luvia stepped back outside, throwing a pair of keys toward me.
My hand came up, catching them before they could slam into my nose. The grandmother glared at Luvia, who acted ignorant, keeping her gaze locked on the floor.
I ignored them and strode toward the Ford Mustang. Its trims were pitch black, from exhaust pipe to wheels to window glass.
Putting my hand on its hood, the magic circles on my glove rotated in sequence, and that car vanished into my storage space.
Luvia's grandmother followed me with her eyes, and asked. "Are you only here in Finland for a trip, or are you taking a trip all across the world?"
I glanced back and maintained eye contact with her for three long seconds.
"I'm on a worldwide trip."
The grandmother's lips tugged upward. Even Luvia snapped her face up, a smirk spreading to the corner of her mouth.
Both of them spoke together.
"Be sure to give a 'visit' to others properly."
I didn't reply to that.
...
..
.
Italy.
Sicily.
Rain punched against Mustang's windshield at 140 mph.
Each droplet struck the glass and detonated, expanding into circles of water that bloomed and vanished in the same breath.
The wipers couldn't keep up. They whipped left, whipped right, each stroke peeling back a curtain of water only for three more to slam behind it.
Palermo's streets were tunnels of amber and black. Streetlights streaked past in horizontal ribbons, their reflections flickering across the hood in fragments: there, gone, there, gone.
Tiles and asphalt alternated beneath the tires, each surface grinding at a different pitch, and both pitches were climbing.
The speedometer needle was creeping upward.
160 mph.
Balconies blurred past on both sides, their railings merging into two continuous lines. Hanging laundry whipped sideways in my wake, soaked shirts and bedsheets snapping like flags in a gale.
A parked Fiat's side mirror exploded as Mustang's left flank clipped it, the shards already disappearing behind us before any sound could arrive.
Then, a reflection appeared in the rearview mirror.
Headlights. Two pairs. Then four. Then six. Still increasing.
They weren't following any roads; they were cutting through them, jumping intersections, mounting sidewalks, their beams lancing through rain and landing right on Mustang's rear bumper.
Each car bisected the downpour in blurs of white, illuminating curtains of rain that folded around their hoods.
Morte.
Six white sedans. Reinforced frames. Ramming bars bolted to their front ends. The closest was forty meters back and shrinking that distance fast.
"Company," I said.
On the backseat, my laptop sat alongside multiple jars of materials, each stolen from Morte after razing their base of operations.
The laptop flipped open on its own. Irisviel circled around the bench on screen, hands still hanging at her sides. "I can help you, Izuru. Let me connect to this car."
Master. Medusa's voice resounded in my head.
"Wait."
180 mph.
The engine screamed. A high, continuous wail that cut through rain's collective pattering and rattled into my own hands. The rear tires bit wet tiles, and each revolution hurled two tails of water ten meters into the air behind me.
Palermo's streets narrowed. Buildings pressed in from both sides, their walls shedding paint and concrete, open windows slamming shut ahead of us in sequence.
The first Morte sedan matched our speed.
It pulled into the left lane, its ramming bar aligning with Mustang's rear bumper. In my rain-streaked side mirror, the driver's silhouette snapped into focus, hands steady. His passenger leaned out the window with something long and—
BOOM!
A shotgun blast punched through the rain.
I wrenched the steering wheel leftward. My other hand yanked the handbrake with a click.
Mustang's front slid left. Its rear skid rightward, and our car went horizontal, tires screaming against asphalt, water spraying behind in two symmetrical curtains that hung in air for a single breath.
The pursuing Morte sedan couldn't react.
Its driver slammed the brakes, but those water curtains crashed directly into his windshield, blinding him completely.
Momentum and zero visibility carried them sideways into a shuttered storefront, the sedan's nose crumbling as they vanished inside.
Mustang straightened out. I was already back on the accelerator, handbrake released.
200 mph.
The world blurred into a stuttering film. A café's canopy flickered on my left—a rowdy bar on my right—a stall—a mall—a shop—an arc. Palermo's geometry became a colorful smear of disjointed snapshots.
A sharp right turn loomed ahead. Two more sedans were on my tail now, flanking me left and right. Windows down, rain pouring through them, yet neither driver flinched. The left passenger raised a submachine gun. The right one held something that glowed.
A Mystic Code.
The right sedan's passenger thrust a rosary forward. A lance of fire materialized from it, aimed at Mustang's tires. The left passenger tightened his grip on his weapon's trigger.
Both fired.
That submachine gun emptied its magazine in a single sustained burst. Bullets tore across tiles in an ascending line, each impact throwing shattered stone upward, tracing a path straight for Mustang's fuel tank.
The flame lance punched through air, its heat evaporating rain into steam along its entire length. Droplets that touched it simply ceased to exist, all tiles beneath its path glowing molten orange.
Two trajectories. Both closing on Mustang from opposite sides.
That right turn was twenty meters ahead.
Fifteen.
Ten.
My hand was already on the handbrake.
Click.
Mustang's nose dove right. Its rear tires skidded, swinging wide in a 200 mph drift that sent the car screeching sideways through a gap between two buildings. The side mirror scraped a wall mid-turn, shrieking, sparks erupting across dripping stone.
Those submachine gun rounds arrived where Mustang had been half a second prior. They crossed paths with the heat lance in empty air.
Both sedans were committed.
Their drivers had matched my speed, expecting Mustang to stop. It hadn't. Their trajectories carried them straight into a metallic railing, punching through into a narrow street beyond. A centuries-old stone fountain sat there.
The left sedan hit it head-on. That fountain exploded into a geyser of marble fragments and water.
The right sedan clipped that fountain's base, lost its front tire, and rode its momentum straight into a bakery's storefront.
I straightened the wheel and accelerated.
220 mph.
Seven sedans remained. They regrouped behind, fanning into a wide formation across all four lanes.
The street ahead was perfectly straight, no turns, intersections, or alleys. Just a corridor of buildings and closed windows stretching six hundred meters to a cathedral whose spire stood beneath the overcast sky.
A volley erupted from all seven at once.
Every window lit up, seven passengers firing in unison. Mana bolts from three cars arced high to my left, dropping like mortar shells. Lances of fire from two cars on my right spiraled inward. Submachine gun fire from the center two tore just above the road, straight for Mustang's rear.
No gap left to maneuver.
No path.
No dodge.
Click.
Mustang's rear tires locked. Its front tires turned, and the car spun in a half-circle. Everything outside became a smear of headlights, rain, and walls spinning in a horizontal vortex.
When the rotation completed, Mustang was facing those seven sedans, still racing toward the church, just in reverse.
Headlight met headlights.
"Now."
Silver threads erupted from the laptop, superimposing themselves across the car's components and reinforcing its gearbox, pushing it into overclock. A silver glow bled from within, sharply contrasting with its matte-black frame.
Particles coalesced above Mustang's roof as Medusa materialized on it, both hands pulled back, stake-chains in grip.
She launched her chains toward those seven headlights boring down on us. Two stakes trailed silver links, spinning end over end, their velocity tearing corridors through rain.
They crossed the gap between Mustang and the central submachine gun sedans in a single frame.
Hundreds of bullets were mid-flight, converging on Mustang's windshield. Each stake's corridor deflected dozens of rounds, shredding them into the flanking walls.
Her stakes continued.
Through one sedan's windshield. Through its driver's chest. Into its frame. Her second stake-chain mirrored that exact trajectory.
Medusa wrenched both arms sideways.
Those chains snapped taut. Both impaled sedans ripped from the road, tires screaming, and swung upward. They collided with two other sedans in a crumple of metal and glass, all four vehicles fusing into a single mass of wreckage that slid across asphalt in a shower of sparks.
Three sedans remained.
I materialised a pistol in my right hand. Left hand still on the wheel, car in reverse gear, buildings in my vision sliding backward into a point somewhere over Mustang's roof.
One shot.
A bullet left the barrel and struck a window frame of a passing house. It ricocheted at a precise angle, cutting back through a sedan's left window, past a passenger's scalp, and tearing directly into the driver's skull.
His sedan drifted left, clipped the one beside it, and both spun out of control into an offroad wall.
The last sedan's driver saw this. His foot crushed the brake, hand flying to gear shift into reverse, and that sedan raced backward, faster now than it had been chasing us.
I cranked the wheel. Mustang completed its rotation, facing forward again, and we accelerated toward the church.
Those two lances of heat and three magic bolts left far behind us now.
Medusa slid into the passenger seat through an open side window. Simultaneously, Mustang's touchscreen went static for a moment, then something new appeared on its display.
A tiny avatar of Irisviel gripped a cartoon steering wheel, racing through pixelated streets similar to Sicily, crashing whenever she pulled the handbrake, and restarting again after each failure.
"Izuru, why can't I drift like you? Is there a glitch in my operating system?"
Medusa and I exchanged a glance at those words.
What caught my attention, though, was that Medusa's clothes were soaked from standing on Mustang's roof in the rain.
Wordlessly, my arm went to the A/C, switching it on and turning its dial to heat.
She was a Servant and couldn't catch a fever.
I turned it on anyway.
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[10 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Author's Thoughts]
Honestly, I had two more places to add here, but then it would've surely gone way beyond 4k words in 4.5K. So I pulled back, should I show the last locations, or finish here? I'll see what my instinct says and you all want.
There is still one thing we need to talk about. So, the driving a car in reverse at 200 mph. Its genuinly stretching it a bit, not with Izuru's competence but a car itself cannot move that fast in reverse, its gear box would literally burst. Though we have Irisviel's reinforcement and can argue that he could do it due to that, but even that is stretching it. Anyway if you guys liked it then its fine.
Do you feel Izuru better now? Honestly the whole of yesterday went away in finding this thing that had been bugging me for a long time, and I finally found what the problem was. Do tell, do you feel more of Izuru now?