400 mph.
"Justeaze." I said. "Open it."
Every pair of eyes inside the cabin snapped toward me. The world outside was a smear of stretching colors, long trails of light bleeding into one another until they merged into a brushstroke of white, then threaded apart into separate streaks that fused, split, fused again.
"Master." Artoria pulled her palm back from the dashboard and took a deep breath. "Is it wise to cross worlds at such a high speed?"
"She has a point, Master—" Medea swallowed, eyes narrowing after glancing at the smear outside. "—there is a high chance we crash just after passing through at this speed."
Both Justeaze and Irisviel had their gazes locked on me, postures same, waiting for a final command.
350 mph.
Her hand pressing against a side window till now, Medusa's brows were furrowed, eyes fixed on me, forehead creased with the effort to not look outside.
My foot eased back from the pedal on its own. A trivial headache building in my head since Mustang first rolled forward had vanished. "... [Ultimate Clairvoyance] has been ringing in my mind for a while, and stopped right after 250 mph."
Artoria exhaled through her nose, fingers curling into a fist. "So there is danger ahead."
Unlooping her arms from around my neck, Medea pushed back and settled in her seat, hands braced around the seat to steady herself. "And something faster than 250 mph, too."
300 mph.
"Now?" Justeaze asked one last time, palm extending skyward, index and middle finger close.
I swept my gaze around the cabin one last time. Artoria gave a firm nod, royal-blue armour shaping over her in particles of gold.
A stake-chain loomed in Medusa's grip as she coiled over herself, muscles tensing to their limit. Medea pulled her hood back up, other hand still clamped on the seat.
"Do it." I finally said.
260 mph.
Threads unfurled from beneath Mustang's chassis. From its wheels, seams of its hood, and every gap where paint met metal. They stretched forward, outlines vibrating in silver blurs that made one thread appear as ten.
They braided and merged, twisting around each other in a gate that condensed and solidified. A single portal opened ahead, the smeared world bleeding into its edges, fusing and splitting where color met silver.
On our center screen, Irisviel and Justeaze stood from their bench in unison as snow began falling around them again.
I kept my foot down.
That portal grew larger in our windshield, then filled it. Silver oversaturated past color, forcing my Servants to close their eyes, its edges spilling past our side windows next, past the rear, until even I was forced to close my eyes.
Time passed.
When we opened our eyes again, everything was white.
It stretched for as far as my vision went, mountains of white rising from the surface like frozen titans, their tops obscured by green that rippled across the sky in enormous ribbons, a dozen folds dissolving into violet at their tops, swaying gently.
Aurora Australis.
Ice ringed around us in every direction, a sheet kilometers thick, its surface flat and glazed. Fractures raced outward across ice from beneath our tires in lightning patterns that split, branched and expanded again.
300 mph.
Cold so absolute it had texture, hit our windshield and the glass fogged from inside in a layer of frost that cleared in seconds as defrost magic circles spiraled along its length once.
The screech of our engine had been deafening before; now it was eerily silent.
Three breaths. Four—
It returned in a detonation, each combustion cycle collapsing into a single echo that made Mustang quake.
Medusa's breath fogged the window she had pressed herself against. She wiped it with her sleeve and it fogged again immediately. She wiped it again. It fogged again.
"Where—" Artoria started.
"Approximate Latitude 77.8. Longitude 166.6." Irisviel reported from the screen, eyes rising upward to an Aurora behind us. "We are in Antarctica."
"Near Ross Island accurately." I was just clarifying when my whole body froze, every hair standing on end, jaw locking, veins rising along my neck in full, and for the first time in forever, my hands started trembling on their own over the steering.
"Master."
Medea's voice was too quiet. Her chin had lifted at some point, one finger extended toward the side window's upper edge.
I turned sideways gradually.
Above us, the sky was split.
A belt of white light had appeared at its zenith, curving along the earth's axis, vanishing above and beneath the horizon, bisecting sky into two halves, one left of the belt, one right, and between them where that band burned, the firmament was peeling away to reveal dark space beyond.
My eyes shrank to pinpoints.
Needle thin lines rose along the whole length of that belt, each one aimed down at everything within its scope. Antarctica's sky changed color. Blue evaporated to violet, violet charred to black, and stars that shouldn't have been visible in daylight appeared, dimmed, then appeared again.
"What is... that?" Medusa whispered, her whole body shivering, arms wrapped around herself.
The band pulsed.
Everyone in the car felt it.
Avalon inside me gave a jolt, its radiance nearly spilling out of my chest.
Artoria's hand went to her breast, teeth clenched tight, pupils shifting to slits, red scales climbing along her neck before dissolving.
Medea's face was white, her hood slipping from her head, and she didn't fix it, eyes locked on that band.
On the center screen, Irisviel had both hands over her mouth. Justeaze remained unmoving as always, but her fingers had curled slightly into her own sleeves, knuckles paling.
"That—" Justeaze began, and stopped.
"That is—" Irisviel tried, and couldn't.
"An attack on humanity." I finished.
Those lines fell.
All of them. At once.
Weight arrived before anything else, a pressure that crushed everyone into their seats simultaneously. A thermos Medea had left on the dashboard buckled. Its lid popped and tea splattered on the windshield, all of us still reacting.
I yanked the wheel left.
Mustang banked sideways. The front-left tire ground half on shattering ice and half on nothing, rubber screaming against a gap that widened as we raced along it, a dark valley opening beneath us for kilometers straight.
The rear tires skidded, Mustang's back end swung right, drifting across ice that tilted toward the valley, a whole slab under us sinking toward the edge like it wanted to fall in. I counter-steered, felt the tires bite, then slip, magic circles on them adjusting in real time to grip something that was becoming liquid.
Then sound arrived.
From the ice, through our tires, through the chassis, climbing my spine, in my teeth. Medusa's glasses launched off her face, eyes clamping shut. Both of her hands gripped the grab handle above and it snapped off in her fingers.
Another wave.
The whole cabin jolted. Magic circles along the tires wailed, then shattered into fragments of violet and shredded silver threads.
Mustang wrenched off the surface.
Airborne.
Above, a sky burned.
Below, a dark valley widened like a jaw ready to close.
We were weightless for a breath.
Tea that had frozen on the windshield unpeeled itself in a sheet of brown ice. Medusa's broken grab handle floated above her open palm, rotating slowly.
Medea's hair fanned upward from her shoulders in a curtain that touched the roof. Her body lifted from the seat, one inch, two, and her eyes found mine in the rearview mirror.
Mustang's front tipped down. That valley was still enlarging.
She screamed. "MASTER!"
"Izuru!" Irisviel.
"Master!" Artoria.
600 mph.
I slammed the pedal to floor. Mustang's exhaust howled, nose lifting, thrust launching us forward and sideways. Our car's shadow flickered across the opposite edge a second before tires touched down, chassis shuddering.
My hand went to the handbrake.
Click.
Rear tires locked, screaming against ice, flinging us sideways in a grinding drift along the edge, sparks and shattered ice peeling off in sheets until our slide stabilized.
300 mph.
The edge held for two more seconds, then three. I eased off the brake slowly as our tilted car straightened, ground beneath us widening from a knife's edge into something solid, unbroken ice stretching ahead.
That valley ran beside us now, the distance between it and Mustang broadening.
"Fuuh... I nearly had a heart attack there." Medea breathed while patting her chest.
I glanced back at her. "Compose yourself, it's not ove—"
A mountain's peak on our other flank exploded, rock and snow liquefying in a burst of orange that rolled across kilometers of ice toward us. Its glow hit Artoria sideways through her window, painting one side of her armor molten. She flinched, shielding her eyes, scales climbing along her forearm, dissolving as fast as they appeared.
Aurora combusted above. Green ribbons ignited in a line of white that raced along their length and died, leaving behind clouds of dark steam and a sky that was all charred.
Medusa's breath stopped entirely mid-inhale, eyes still shut, lashes trembling, the only thing between us and Cybele.
A geyser opened ahead. I swung the steering right. Another opened to our right. I swung left. The gap between them was two meters and Mustang fit through with centimeters on either side, heat singeing both side mirrors simultaneously.
Ice beneath us abruptly dropped three meters in a wrench that slammed Artoria's head into her window, cracks rushing outward across the glass, and pitched Mustang's frame downward. Liquified mana and silver threads scattered from the car's base.
My knuckles were white on the steering wheel, forearms quivering from the sheer kinetic force of a whole continent shifting beneath us.
I looked up.
Those lines had barely begun to fall.
But Antarctica was already on its last legs.
Someone was about to wipe out humanity.
And I was powerless to change anything.
"..."
So... this is the so called Hopelessness?
How revolting.
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[15 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Author's Thoughts]
Go, boy, show them [Ultimate Hope].