Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg was, all things considered, quite the bastard.
He was other things of course – he was a troll, a several-hundred-year-old not-quite-man, the user of the Second Magic Kaleidoscope, the inventor of the Jeweled Sword and the Kaleidosticks, and the man who single-handedly beat back TYPE-MOON. And the literal moon to boot.
But when you got down to it, all feats of godlike power and prankmastery notwithstanding, he could be a real bastard.
So, when he happened to take a stroll through an alternate reality one day, looking for something (read: literally almost anything) to do with his copious (read: very nearly infinite) amounts of spare time, and happened to walk into the middle of a Holy Grail War, the people present should have taken the time to do a few things.
The first of these was to stop momentarily and identify the newcomer.
The second of these was to pale considerably, drop everything they were doing, and get the hell out of dodge. Other options were, of course, available – but only if they didn't conflict with the third thing they should do. Or rather, should not do.
Namely piss him off.
Because as Gilgamesh, ancient King of Heroes, Heroic Spirit, owner of the Gate of Babylon and just about every Noble Phantasm to ever exist (let alone make an appearance in mythology) was about to discover, an interdimensional vampiric wielder of True Magic with a grudge is not the kind of thing you want to meet in a dark alley.
Or at all, really.
Shirou Emiya was beginning to wonder why he ever bothered to get out of bed.
Of course, that was in the back of his head – most of his focus right now was on trying to move the battered remains of his body into the space between Rin Tohsaka and the golden bastard currently moving toward her.
Rin. Sarcastic, cold, sadistic, caring, incredible Rin, without whom he would be dead dozens of times over at this point. Rin who was standing right there, right in front of the single most powerful entity the Sword Incarnation had ever seen or fought, without him.
His torn limbs and bleeding torso writhed in a gruesome parody of motion as he tried to worm his way to the two, to interpose himself between them, to keep her safe-
But he was too slow.
The adrenaline in his veins heightened his perceptions, showing him in agonisingly slow, painfully clear detail, the gold-plated hand currently descending towards his fellow magus' head. He knew the strength of a Heroic Spirit – had fought against it in person, had been on the receiving end of beatings literally beyond human comprehension – and he knew what would happen if that blow landed.
That knowledge just made what was about to happen hurt even more, and he tried to express that in sound...
But before he could, there was someone beside him, and his focus was drawn to the figure.
It was as if he couldn't focus on anything else; like the man beside him (no, not a man, can't be a man, can't be human) had such a weight of presence that reality folded like fabric around him, created a divot, a place where all things funnelled towards him.
He was tall – not inhumanly so, but impressively nonetheless. His shoulders were wide and strong, despite the years on his face and the steel-grey of his hair and beard. His features were angular and solid, as if hewn from granite, and his eyes were the red of blood.
Powerful, red-eyed, old figure apparently completely unaffected by their age. Oh, and carried themselves like an aristocrat. There was only one possibility in Shirou's mind. He might have been largely uneducated as to matters in the Moonlit World, but his father, Kiritsugu Emiya, the Magus Killer, had told him about some of the things most likely to kill him.
And Dead Apostles, specifically Dead Apostle Ancestors, (rather like the one he suspected was standing right beside him looking rather stone-faced) were right at the top of that considerable list.
"Child." His voice was baritone, rich, and carried an air of command that was unmistakeable. There was also a familiar chord – one that Shirou was well used to. Anger. This man – well, this thing in a man's shape – was very, very angry.
The Faker thanked all that was holy and sharp-edged that said anger wasn't directed at him. Yet.
"Do you want to stop him?" It was a simple question. A question, the answer to which was utterly obvious even without knowing the nature of Shirou Emiya.
The nature of a distorted human – a person whose sense of self had burned away at the age of five in an unending, torturous journey through flaming death and countless screams. The nature of someone who lived only for others, who would not hesitate to sacrifice all that they were, or ever had been, or ever could be, for the sake of a complete stranger.
The nature of Sword in a human form, a creature of Steel, a weapon that existed only for the purpose of being wielded in the pursuit of Justice.
Even without knowing all that, the conviction, the pleading, the need in those molten-gold eyes would have communicated to any being of any intelligence that the answer to that question was...
"Y..es..." Speaking with punctured lungs and very little blood was generally not considered to be within the realms of human ability...but then again, very little that Shirou Emiya ever accomplished could claim to be contained by those particular limitations.
Zelretch's dark shoulder-cape rustled slightly as he reached to his hip, where a blade seemingly composed of every gem imaginable fused together into one impossible weapon contrasted sharply with his dark suit, the kind of thing you could only pay for with the amount of money normally allocated to feeding families of four for several centuries.
"In that case, young Sword..." The vampire knelt down, took the mangled remains of Shirou's right hand in his own, and opened the fingers. "I give you the strength to grant your own wish."
And then he placed the hilt of his Jeweled Sword, the weapon of the Wizard Marshal, considered just about the ultimate Mystic Code known to the Clocktower Association, and one of the only ways to wield the Second Magic, into the hand of a man who was a sword himself – of a man whose sole ability was to know everything about a weapon at first glance, and reproduce it almost perfectly.
The fingers closed around the shining material...
And then the universe...twitched.
At this point, something fundamental must be understood about the nature of the Multiverse, the Kaleidoscope, Infinity and Shirou Emiya.
The first thing ties together with the third – and can be summarised in a simple fact:
The Multiverse is Infinite.
Only four words...but they mean something almost incomprehensible to the human mind. This is because Infinity is more than a word, more than a number, more than a construct – it is a concept. And when it comes to Thaumaturgy, concepts carry a lot of weight.
A concept can create stopping power equivalent to seven fortress walls.
A concept can reverse causality.
A concept can play havoc with time, space, life, death and everything in between, because to a concept, things like 'physical', 'metaphysical', 'spiritual' and 'magical' mean absolutely nothing. It exists – therefore, concepts can be applied to it.
And there are few concepts with the same power as Infinity.
With that established, something must be noted about the Second True Magic, as discovered and utilised by the Old Man of the Jewels, Zelretch himself. It is, fundamentally, the power to reach across dimensions and into parallel realities. That is the core of the power, but it is in its application that diversity begins to show.
Perhaps its most basic power is to step across the barriers between worlds, to visit a reality where the differences may be as minor as a grain of sand on a beach not being in the same place, to a person never having been born, to life never having evolved, to the big bang never having occurred. A more advanced power is to reach out to those realities and draw strength from them, usually in the form of Mana. The power generated by the planet itself, generally mixed with the energy of living beings (called Od) to create Prana, the source of power for Thaumaturgy, for a wielder of the Second Magic it is possible to draw this energy from sources beyond one world. Other worlds may have far more or far less power, but nonetheless, a boost can be acquired in this manner.
The most advanced ability, however, is the ability to draw on more than simple Mana. The ability to draw on alternate versions of one's self instead, to reach out across time, space and reality to parallel versions of the wielder to borrow their strengths, their experiences and, in some cases, their forms and possessions.
For one who masters this ability, or who has a focus which can aid them in doing so, 'diversification' is not a strong enough descriptor for the results. And this ties back into what was just covered – the simple, four-word fact:
The Multiverse is Infinite.
Now, the reasons why Infinity is such a powerful concept.
'To be infinite' means 'to be without limit'. It has other meanings too, but this one is currently the most appropriate for the context. Essentially, by the nature of the Multiverse, there is a world for every possible variation that could occur within the infinitely-sized universe.
That's one infinity.
Then there's all the possible combinations of those changes that could create a new world.
That's another infinity.
So, are there two infinities' worth of worlds? No. Because: The Multiverse is Infinite. This is a fact – it isn't doubly infinite or somesuch, it is Infinite.
And the distinction is important, because to be Infinite means that there is no limit. There is not just one world where a single grain of sand was shifted, there are infinite worlds where that fact is true, and there is an infinity for every change and an infinity for every combination of changes.
What this means, basically, is that when a user of the Second Magic taps into the power of all their alternates at once – as Zelretch is purported to have done at one point – the power they should gain is, also, Infinite.
Since Zelretch's original reality (probably) and the Old Man himself (his physical form at least – the jury was still out on his mind) still exist, it is safe to assume he did not release an infinite amount of energy when dealing with Crimson Moon Brunestud. After all, the complete cessation of reality is something that's rather hard to miss, and not the kind of thing even a Dead Apostle Ancestor can survive.
So the conclusion which must be drawn is that the Wizard Marshal didn't access every single one of his counterparts' power, and the reason can only be hypothesised.
The most common idea, however, is that he simply couldn't process the concept of 'Infinity'.
His mind, still rooted in humanity, was unable to conceive of Infinity in its purest form, and instead it accessed as many alternates as it possibly could. Obviously that was enough to accomplish the task...but at the same time, it could be so much more.
But of course, to make full use of the Second Magic's potential, one would therefore require the ability to process the concept of 'Infinity' – alongside knowledge of the Magic itself. But no human could possibly do that, since it's a concept so alien that it would burn their soul to ashes.
However, Shirou Emiya is not exactly human.
Stripped of memory and feeling during the fire of his fifth year. Raised by a man who once wished to be an Ally of Justice, who taught him basic Thaumaturgy. An existence so fundamentally twisted, his perception of the world was no longer human – giving him an ability thought to exist only in demons and Dead Apostle Ancestors.
A Reality Marble. A manifestation of the soul, a thaumaturgy bordering on True Magic which gifts the user unique abilities and the power to temporarily overwrite the world around them and replace it with their own.
And for Shirou Emiya, Sword Incarnation and living host of the legendary scabbard Avalon, that power took the form of Unlimited Blade Works.
A world which, at a glance from its owner, recorded everything about a weapon – from its forging to its history, everything about it became a blueprint that the magus could use in Tracing – a magecraft of his own devising – to recreate them in near-perfect detail.
And more importantly...an Infinite world.
So in summary – a Magic capable of summoning Infinite power, placed in the hands of one of the only (if not the only) existences capable of processing the concept of 'Infinity'...in the form of a sword. A form which that particular existence happened to be very compatible with.
Really, Zelretch should have seen it coming.
Everything in that particular reality – from the Types, to every sentient thing out there, to Gaia and Alaya themselves, knew when Shirou Emiya's fingers closed around that hilt.
Desperately trying to draw on power to take action, the magus' broken mind performed the supposedly impossible task of processing 'Infinity' – and then reached for all the power it could possibly detect and grab hold of.
Namely, Infinite power.
His physical form should, in all reality, have instantly been reduced to literal nothingness – his matter becoming energy, and the energy fading away into the cessation of being that was the universe before the Big Bang. Along with his host reality, as a matter of fact.
That wasn't quite what happened. Instead, Avalon, a conceptual item in and of itself, drew on that power to accomplish its mission – to keep its wielder alive. So it held together the existence of Shirou Emiya, even when it tried to come apart at a level beyond quarks and other sub-fundamental particles, using the same energy which was trying to tear him to pieces.
Unstoppable force and immovable object collided. The result? Stalemate.
Infinity cannot overcome Infinity – that is a simple fact of nature. And as a result, several things happened very, very quickly.
In less time than it takes for a photon to cross the distance of a quark's radius in empty space, Shirou Emiya's body had returned to the peak of health.
In barely more time than that, his perceptions – now so far beyond human, with his body effectively becoming living Prana – took in the arrogant Golden King about to kill someone very dear to him. Someone he had sworn to protect, even if it cost him his life.
And he acted.
"TRACE...ON!" The aria was spoken. The self hypnosis was completed. A mind which had never really been human, and which had now ascended to a level where its twisted nature was supported by an equally twisted foundation, received the instructions...
And then it carried them out.
If this had been the Shirou Emiya of five minutes beforehand, then the results of the spell would have been swords raining from the sky around Gilgamesh, falling down around him in a circle. He would have been forced to either retrieve his arm and dodge, or lose the limb.
This was not, however, the Shirou Emiya of five minutes ago. This was a being beyond any TYPE, beyond any limiter or control. This was, by most definitions, a God – and it was a God with a unique magecraft, a world which stored every weapon they had ever seen, and an intimate connection to every version of himself to ever exist.
It was safe to say that Unlimited Blade Works had a few new additions.
So when Shirou sent the mental command 'Trap him with swords', his magic responded. There was no flaring of circuits – not when his entire form conducted Prana with more effectiveness than any Magic Circuit, even the legendary Blue Blood Noble Magic Circuits of the Barthomelloi family.
Instead, Unlimited Blade Works did what was requested of it – and with great aplomb, too.
One moment there was Gilgamesh, arm moving to decapitate the Tohsaka heiress. The next, there was a cube of...just about everything.
From daggers and swords, to polearms and whips, to bows and axes, just about every type of pre-gunpowder weapon imaginable was present in that cube. Some were ordinary, some were Mystic Codes, some were Holy, some Demonic, some elemental, and some of them were Noble Phantasms, Broken Phantasms or weapons of the Gods.
The only thing they all had in common was that, somewhere in the densely-packed cube of deadly armaments, they contained what had once been a powerful and arrogant Heroic Spirit.
Now...there just wasn't. Nothing could exist within that cube of death, and so nothing did.
The King of Heroes ceased to exist in a time so small, no human could ever quantify it.
Author's Note
I finally got around to posting this just as a place for me to put random ideas. It probably won't get that much attention, but I felt like I might as well do it. Who knows, maybe it'll give someone else ideas...
Or maybe I've just re-read Dogbertcarroll's Fragments series too often...