Descending from upstairs, I ran into Shirou walking back with a glass of water in his hand.
He gazed up at me, then peered past my shoulder toward the first floor, his voice dropping low. "Is she still asleep?"
"She just woke up. You can go check on her," I said, and passed him by, stopping at the entrance of the drawing room, Medea and Artoria were still lost in their argument inside.
"Oh! I'll see if she's alright or needs anything." Shirou scrambled up the stairs, wood creaking beneath his feet, and just before vanishing upstairs he abruptly halted, pivoting on his heel to look back at me.
"By the way, Kamukura-san... thank you for taking care of her until now. It shouldn't have been easy."
I gave him a wordless glance and stepped into the drawing room, leaving him there. Shirou stood still for a few seconds, chuckling awkwardly into air.
"... Guess that's your way of saying welcome." Shaking his head to compose himself, he turned and resumed climbing the stairs.
Walking over to Artoria and Medea, I stood before them, hands tucked in my pockets, eyes landing on a low table nearby. "Let's go. We're done here."
Both of them snapped their gazes up at me. Artoria shifted first, rising to her feet, fingers curling into fists at her sides. "Is it time, Master?"
"Of course it is, and just as I was starting to get bored out of my mind taking shots at you." Stretching her arms over her head with a yawn, Medea pulled herself up, giving Artoria a once-over.
"Take the keys and get our car ready. I'll be out in a bit." Bringing my hand out of my pocket with a pair of car keys in my grip, I threw them in Artoria's direction, and her hands flicked up to catch them in a single swipe.
"It shall be done, Master." Artoria nodded at me, marching toward the exit of the drawing room, her steps a fraction more eager than her composed face suggested. Medea watched her go, then raised an eyebrow my way.
I was already moving toward that low table, my other hand slipping out of its pocket, two admission letters grasped in it that I set down on its surface.
"Master, giving the last of those Clock Tower letters away? Why are you being so generous to them?" Crossing her arms beneath her chest, Medea strutted over, eyes flickering between those letters and my face.
"They're worthless to us either way."
Before she could reply, the sound of footsteps from outside made us look that way. Medusa strode in through the open glass door, Sakura right behind her, their hands intertwined, swinging a little as they moved.
Medusa's shoulders were relaxed, her free hand clutching the edge of her sweater, twisting it unconsciously, the corner of her mouth curled up.
I looked at them for two seconds and spoke, "It's time to go."
Her shoulders went rigid, next step faltering for a moment, but Sakura let go of her hand first after giving it a small squeeze, a smile easing onto her face like she'd already made peace with a goodbye.
Medusa rotated on her heels to face Sakura, her brows furrowing, hands grasping forward at empty air before going limp. "... I—"
"I know," Sakura cut her off, making her fall silent with that smile.
I let them have their moment and strode out of the room, leaving those two letters behind. Medea followed after glancing one last time at them, clicking her tongue. "You pamper Medusa too much, Master."
Ignoring her, I crossed a hall toward the main door, easing it open to step outside. Mustang waited right ahead, engine whirring. Artoria sat in the driver's seat, hands resting on its steering wheel.
"I'm taking the backseat, Master," Medea declared while pulling the rear door wide, sliding through and settling herself inside.
Simultaneously, Artoria swung her legs over Mustang's gearbox, dropping into the passenger seat and leaving its wheel for me.
I sank into the driver's seat, one hand closing over the steering, the other landing on gear shift.
"Well? Where to, Master?" Wrapping her arms around top of my seat from behind, Medea asked, her chin resting on my shoulder.
"You'll know in a bit." I finally dropped my gaze to the bracelet on my wrist. "Irisviel, connect yourself to Mustang."
That bracelet unfolded.
Thin strands peeled away from it like liquid mercury, spilling over my hand in filaments of writhing silver. They spread through the air, each string like spider silk but far stronger, multiplying as they fell. Dozens became hundreds, then more, spreading outward and crawling across Mustang's interior.
They threaded through the dashboard, slipping into gaps between panels, winding around the steering wheel, weaving into the gearbox. More slid beneath our seats, burrowing into the chassis, and silver luminescence bled from Mustang's base onto asphalt beneath.
The headlights flickered on once, and all dashboard gauges twitched, needles drifting before settling back.
Medea drew her feet up, watching a strand surface beneath her before retreating into our car's frame. "That was really unsettling, Master."
Artoria sat composed in the passenger seat, hands on her knees, watching a string trace along the windshield's edge and vanish into its frame. "It is... a lot to take in."
Mustang's center screen buzzed to life, its display projecting a background of falling snow with a pine tree providing shade, beneath which sat Irisviel.
She had her hands folded in her lap, looking straight at me. "I'm here, Izuru."
Leaning forward between the front seats, Medea studied the screen. "Irisviel... a little longer and I'd have thought we left you behind."
"Is Individual Medea trying to needle me? Did I do something wrong?" Irisviel asked, tilting her head at her.
"No, anyone who gets close to Master besides her is the problem," Artoria added, glancing between them.
"Hmph." Medea didn't bother with a reply.
The door opposite to Medea clicked open next, and Medusa stood there, waving one last time over Mustang toward Sakura, who was standing right outside the front gate.
Then she ducked in, closing that door and settling beside Medea, face angled toward me. "I'm ready... Master."
"Very well then, Justeaze, I want you to reinforce the magic circles inside our car and get ready to open a path," I commanded, pressing the accelerator slightly.
Strands escaped through my boots, thinner than the ones before, almost invisible until light from a streetlight reflected off them. They slid down into the pedals, branching through the floor panel, spreading along Mustang's frame in a widening network.
The car shook, a low quake that lasted two seconds before smoothing into silence. Beneath us, etched patterns lit up in sequence, magic circles inscribed into Mustang's internals flaring as those silver strings traced over them, superimposing, locking into place with a precision no human hand could match.
Mana seeped out of those circles, a violet-silver glow rising and casting its shade across our ankles, and the air inside coiled inward for an instant like our surroundings had been sealed in a boundary field.
Medusa drew a deep breath, her fingers sinking into the seat. Medea went still, her earlier nonchalance gone, eyes tracking the light crawling beneath her feet.
On that center screen, the snow beside Irisviel shifted.
A second figure materialized on that bench, sitting with hands folded in her lap, posture identical down to the angle of their wrists and tilt of their chins.
Justeaze looked out through the screen the same way Irisviel did, her expression neutral. "Those magic circles are reinforced and stable, and the path can be opened at your command."
Irisviel turned to look at Justeaze, her voice cracking away from its usual composure. "Ancestor..."
"Hmm." Justeaze shifted toward her and gave an acknowledging hum.
"Master, won't you say goodbye to Shirou?" Artoria asked, staring out a side window.
I didn't answer and released the clutch, sparing a single glance at Shirou's home and Sakura standing there.
She waved back at me and mouthed a sentence. 'Thank you, Kamukura-san.'
Mustang rolled forward at walking pace, tires crunching over gravel on the road, stone popping beneath its weight with a sound like knuckles cracking. That silver glow beneath the chassis dimmed, pulsing once every few seconds in tandem with the engine's rumble.
15 mph.
The front gate passed beside us, its bars sliding past the passenger window in slow frames. Each bar cast a stripe of shadow across Artoria's face, alternating light and dark, light and dark, before that gate fell behind and the street opened ahead.
Sakura stood where we'd left her. One arm raised, hand still mid-wave. Light from the house behind her illuminated her hair, and then her silhouette shrank behind us.
20 mph.
This neighborhood was quiet. It was late at night with no reason for anyone to be outside. Sprinklers ticked on someone's lawn, throwing arcs of water that caught our headlights and scattered into shards of violet light as we passed through them.
Houses lined both sides of the street, identical in their architecture. Tiled roofs, bricked walls, and nameplates on front gates. A cat curled on a mailbox, its eyes blinking at Mustang's headlights in lazy flutters before it bolted.
Medusa's reflection in our rearview mirror was watching everything shrinking behind us through the rear windshield.
"System check—" Irisviel began a report, but Justeaze finished for her. "—All magic circles are stable."
25 mph.
We reached the street's end. A stop sign stood nearby, throwing a red gleam our way. Mustang drifted through it at the same pace, and that sign's reflection slid across the hood, over the windshield, past Artoria's profile, vanishing behind us.
Medea had gone quiet, her chin still resting on my shoulder, breath even. She was watching the screen where Irisviel and Justeaze sat side by side on that snow-covered bench.
"Master." Artoria said, her eyes forward. "Shall I prepare for combat?"
"Wait."
She accepted with a nod and went silent.
30 mph.
A last row of houses thinned out. One convenience store sat to our left, its fluorescent signboard buzzing a blue-white hum, illuminating a stretch of empty parking lots and unused vending machines.
Medusa shifted in the backseat. I saw it in our rearview mirror, her body turning from the rear window, facing forward now.
The road behind us was empty.
Then it wasn't.
The front doors of Shirou's house, four hundred meters away, slid open with a sound that I could still hear. A figure burst out, feet slapping against gravel, stumbling once on the gate's threshold before catching himself and sprinting onto the street.
Shirou ran.
He ran with his collar unbuttoned and house slippers still on, the pavement rocky beneath them, one arm pumping at his side and the other raised above his head, two envelopes pinched between his fingers.
The distance between us grew. He was fast for someone in slippers on asphalt, but Mustang was already pulling away and a curve ahead was already beginning to angle us out of his line of sight.
He screamed.
"KAMUKURA-SAN!"
His voice reached us breathless, stripped of volume by the distance and night air, barely louder than our car's engine.
"THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING! AND HAVE A SAFE JOURNEY!"
Those two letters waved above his head, white against a row of streetlights, then his silhouette shrank in the rearview mirror.
And he was gone.
I felt my face twitch. Once, twice, then the corner of my lips tugged up on their own.
Medea enclosed her arms around my neck. "Haha! Master smiled, I saw it, I just saw it!"
Artoria shook her head with a small smile. "Don't distract him while he's driving with your feminine wiles."
She spoke those words, yet her own hand came to rest on mine over the gear shift.
Irisviel and Justeaze exchanged a glance on the screen, their heads tilting sideways at the exact same time and angle.
Medusa glanced between where Shirou had been moments ago and me, a smile breaking across her face. "You look good... when you smile, Master."
I closed my eyes with a deep breath.
And then opened them.
Magic circles answered before my foot touched the pedal. They spiraled in sequence, each ring surfacing through Mustang's paint in a flash before sinking back beneath its frame.
I pressed my foot down.
80 mph.
Shadows of transmission towers swung across our car's body in dark strips, from hood to roof to trunk, like a tiger surging forward on a hunt. A dog tied to a fence post lifted its head as we passed, ears twitching, and in the rearview mirror it was still lifting its head, frozen mid-motion.
Medea laughed, shaking her head side to side. "Go! Go! Go! Master, even faster!"
The first car appeared ahead. A grey sedan, law-abiding, its driver hunched over the wheel with casual ease.
I didn't change lanes.
Mustang's magic circles hummed, and air ahead coiled, compressed, and then split. That grey sedan drifted left on its own from wind displacement, its driver's hands twitching on the wheel without understanding why.
We passed him by. That driver turned his head, and in our rearview mirror his face was slack, mouth half-open, both eyebrows raised, already forgetting what he'd seen.
100 mph.
The road widened from two lanes to four, and Fuyuki's commercial district opened ahead. Three cars were spread loose across adjacent lanes meters away, drivers comfortable.
Artoria and I exchanged a glance as she shifted the gear alongside me.
The first car was a taxi. Its roof light was off, shift over, driver tapping his radio. Mustang came beside him and that taxi driver's car told him something was wrong, chassis shuddering, a vibration rising from nowhere, his hands clutching the steering with force.
By the time he glanced left, we were long gone.
The second car was a coupe, driven by someone who thought they were fast. They saw us. Their engine's note climbed, competitive instinct firing, and for exactly one second their hood held pace with our own.
Then they were behind us, headlights shrinking from columns of light to ropes, thinning further into strings that broke and went dark, vanishing to nothing.
The third car never noticed anything.
150 mph.
Temperature inside our car dropped. Medusa rubbed her arms, and Medea's breath fogged for a moment before the cabin's systems compensated, warm air rising from vents.
Outside, the world was getting colder. Moisture in air couldn't keep up with the pressure change around Mustang, and condensation formed on every surface we passed, from guardrails, road signs to the sides of other cars in thin films of water.
It looked like the road was sweating.
A bus stop shelter we passed fogged over completely, its glass walls turning white. A parked motorcycle's side mirror clouded up. The surface of a puddle froze solid, a layer of ice forming and cracking in the same instant as we passed over it.
"The pressure corridor is condensing atmospheric moisture around us." Justeaze reported from the screen.
Medea kept her arms locked around my neck, her eyes fixed ahead. "Faster, Master. We can go faster, right? Right?"
Artoria tightened her hold on mine, pushing her hand forward to shift into a higher gear.
Medusa looked at the world outside, her palm pressed against a side window's glass.
"Faster?" I asked, and pushed the accelerator.
200 mph.
The world rippled. A shimmer of heat distortion rose from the pavement, our corridor compressing atmosphere around us into something dense and liquid.
Through that shimmer, cars ahead looked submerged in water, their shapes rippling at the edges, their brake lights bleeding into red smears that trailed sideways into ribbons before dissolving.
We passed through them. Each one a ripple or a distortion that solidified into metal and glass for the instant we were alongside, then melted back into a shimmer behind us.
A woman in a convertible. Her scarf caught wind from our passage and whipped sideways, unfurling in a spiral that hung mid-air long after we'd passed.
A truck driver eating an onigiri. Some rice grains left his hand and hung in the cabin, weightless for a moment, before settling back in his lap. He looked down, then at the road ahead where nothing was.
A teenager on a motorcycle, changing lanes. He saw us, visor catching our silver glow, reflecting it back in full, and for one instant his entire helmet was a mirror showing Mustang's silhouette.
300 mph.
Fuyuki fell around us.
First glass towers went. Their windows caught the silver glow of our chassis and held it, each glass pane lighting up in sequence as we passed, floor by floor, a cascade climbing bottom to top like the buildings were blinking awake.
Then streetlight became a rhythm that matched our engine's combustion cycle, blinking in a cadence that accelerated as we did, until those blurs merged into two continuous boundaries of amber running parallel on either side of us.
Then the city ended and sky began.
One star overhead moved.
A single point of white above the horizon, pulling sideways, stretching into a thin line. Just one.
Then another moved. Then a third. Then five at once, each one dragging backward, stretching in long trails.
Medusa noticed first, and her breathing stopped entirely, glasses nearly sliding down her nose. "M—Master..."
Then twenty. Then fifty. Then every star above us broke rank, our car outrunning starlight before it could reach us, tearing the whole horizon backward toward where Fuyuki used to be. White streaks flooded the windshield, a meteor shower running in reverse, every star in the sky surging away from us.
Artoria looked up, and her hand found the dashboard, pressing on it to steady herself when the sky stopped making sense. "This..."
"Ah—" Medea started, and didn't finish. Her chin lifted from my shoulder, eyes wide, mouth open and searching for a word that didn't exist.
On the center screen, snow had stopped falling. Irisviel and Justeaze sat frozen on their bench, faces tilted upward, watching that same shower.
Irisviel's hands had unfolded in her lap, palms wide open. Justeaze's lips were parted, barely, and that fraction was the most expression her face had ever held.
Those streaks thickened. Our windshield became a river of white. For three seconds, the inside of Mustang was lit by just starlight, bent and broken, painting four faces silver.
I smiled.
"Let's go."
And punched the throttle—
All the way down.
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[15 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Author's Thoughts]
Fuyuki deserved a real send-off, not a rushed one. So we gave it the deep version, no shortcuts. And that promise from before? Still standing. I'm getting into Grand Order in a way nobody's done. Everything so far was just the coil before the strike, now it's zero to everything, all at once. Let's find out what that looks like.
I'll be honest, a full-scale fight in the middle of Fuyuki couldn't happen, too many people, too much to break that shouldn't break. But Singularity F doesn't have that problem. Out there, I don't have to hold back.
And here's the part I'm actually excited for, Dismantle's in play, and there's a Berserker Heracles waiting in Singularity F.
Think Sukuna against Mahoraga, just wearing a different costume this time.