Disclaimer: I do not own the Fate franchise it belongs to Kinoko Nasu and Type-Moon.

This Cannot End Well

Chapter 18

Rin was the first to step through the boundary into Matou Central.

As expected, there were plenty of defenses waiting for anyone who would enter. There were bounded fields that should have paralyzed her on the spot, whether by literally holding her in place or by disrupting her nervous system in dozens of ways. Other bounded fields would have stunned or incapacitated her by various means, including of all things causing runaway orgasms that should have left her a helpless and twitching mess on the ground.

There were hundreds if not thousands of crest worms waiting to just crawl of the shadows, to rip and tear into warm and living flesh, if not simply force their way through the mouth and other bodily openings. There were pig-men and flesh-constructs, in addition to insect forms born of mutated crest worms.

Soldiers in powered armor were also present, whether in firing lines or manning turrets with heavy autocannons. There were walkers with light artillery, as well as gunships armed with autocannons and missiles.

How the Chaldeans could even get in or out was a mystery, but it was no surprise their evacuation efforts had all but failed.

Not with this level of opposition.

And by all rights, Rin should have been overwhelmed. Only…she wasn't. Of course she wasn't. She was Rin Tohsaka, the Jeweled Sword Blue, who attained the rank of Brand at the age of twenty-one. And most importantly, this was still Fuyuki. The land where she was born and grew up on, and where the bones and ashes of her ancestors had been buried.

Her family had lived in and nurtured this land for centuries long before they were even magi. They were as much a part of it as the Mion River and the surrounding mountains, in a way no one else could ever be.

A single thought was all it took, a brief flicker of prana through her crest, and the land answered. In an instant, Matou lost all access to environmental prana. Crest worms rolled over and died en masse, their mysteries failing without magical energy to draw on. Pig-men and flesh-constructs collapsed into convulsions, their monstrous bodies barely able to survive on their own without magic to keep them together.

The bounded fields just shattered.

Of course, this still left Matou's thugs and hired guns, and energy flickered over Rin's palms as she brought her hands up, and clapped them once.

A shock wave erupted outward, equivalent to the explosion of a three-kiloton bomb. It simply blew everything in front of her away, metal, glass, flesh and plastic, all reduced to shattered mulch on the wind. Even buildings and the road itself weren't spared, reduced to rubble.

But Rin wasn't finished.

She held up a hand, and began to charge the fire element. At the same time, she drew the Jeweled Sword, and linked the mystery to the Second Magic therein.

"Der abwesende Herr ist zurückgekehrt," she began to cast, a pair of wings of pure energy that glimmered with all the colors of the rainbow flickering into existence behind her. "Also lass die Nacht enden, und wenn die Morgendämmerung aufgeht, lass das Böse zittern, bevor die Sonne aufgeht."

The sphere of energy in her hand flashed to blinding, before Rin tossed it into the air. It flew up, slowed to a halt, then impossibly changed direction to fly in the direction of the Matou mansion. There it exploded, with all the force and heat of a one-megaton detonation.

For an instant, there was only blinding light. Then it dimmed, before the ground and air alike shook, and a thunderous boom echoed across the city. In the distance, a mushroom cloud rose into the sky.

Rin sniffed, and looked up into the sky, the clouds blown back by the force of her oxygen-carbon fusion spell. "And that was just the opening shot." She sneered. "Welcome to Hell, Matou. Welcome to Hell."

Then placing five gems between her teeth, Rin bit down, and shattered them all at the same time. Prana exploded, causing her circuits to ignite and her eyes to blaze. "BEHOLD!" she shouted, crossing her arms and then uncrossing them in quick succession. "FIVE ELEMENTS GEMSTONE MODE!"

The amount of energy released instantly generated a storm system over the city, one which grew into a typhoon that covered not just Kyushu, but neighboring Shikoku and even part of Honshu as well. Less dramatically, it burned away all of Rin's clothing but her specially-made underwear, which glowed with lines of ether condensate, electricity arcing to transmute the carbon dioxide in the air, stripping away carbon atoms and flash-forging them into form-fitting black diamond armor.

It also affected the Jeweled Sword, adding an attachment to its blade to turn it into a proper sword, while encasing Rin's left hand with a black diamond gauntlet featuring five jagged claws, one for each finger. "LET'S GO!" Rin screamed, before vanishing with a thunderclap. Quickly speeding up to over Mach 5 in just a few seconds, her movements tore up everything in her wake, while lightning bolts arced out around her.

Crest worms were burned to ash, along with pig-men and flesh-constructs. Those spared by the lightning or the shock waves of her movements didn't fare any better…

…unless you counted being on the receiving end of the Second Magic's Multidimensional Refraction Phenomenon as 'better'. One pig-man saw Rin striking at him with her claws from twenty-seven different directions at the same time, and leaving only bits and pieces of roasted flesh and charred bone in her wake.

And then she moved on, faster than the eye could see, her passing marked by collapsing buildings and burnt-out electronics. Matou troops finally broke, no amount of money in the world enough to get them to fight what was – from their perspective – almost certainly a living god.

She started the fight off by throwing an honest-to-goodness nuclear blast.

And then followed this up by setting off a typhoon, before rampaging through the city at hypersonic speeds.

No, no money was worth it. The men fled, heading for the river to get to boats and head out to sea, the gunships already well ahead of them, struggling against the typhoon's winds in a desperate attempt to get away from an enraged god.

Well, they weren't completely wrong. Rin wasn't right now, and she didn't know either, but she was the preferred Human incarnation of Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, and of Ereshkigal, goddess of the dead.

Granted, this level of destruction was nothing compared to the devastation wrought by Ishtar's wrath at the height of her power in the Age of Gods, but…

…it was a start.

"Should I even still use the Zarathustra Cannon?" Sakura idly asked, looking on with bemusement as Rin rampaged in the distance, before looking up and squinting against the rain. Correction: rain and mud being blown by the typhoon's winds. And considering Rin set off a nuclear detonation earlier, Sakura wondered if she needed to check in with a medical specialist later on in case she was being poisoned with radioactive fallout.

Well…that depended on what Rin actually did. If Sakura's guess was right, and Rin used a pure fusion reaction, then there shouldn't be any fissile remnants at all.

At least, as far as she knew. She'd have to check…later.

"She's drawing attention her way." Little Rin replied. "Just as planned…and now it's our turn."

"Right…" Sakura sighed patting at her rain-soaked and mud-splattered clothes. "…let's go then."

Then in a flicker of shadows, she phased into Imaginary Numbers Space…

…and her portable workshop, which was warm and dry, with electrical lighting courtesy of nuclear thermocouples. No windows, though, but then again what was there to see in Imaginary Numbers Space?

"I'm going to need a change of clothes." Sakura began, already stripping out of her soiled ones. At the same time, she was telekinetically pulling on levers and pushing buttons, bringing various mystic codes to life. Little Rin also moved to help, floating over to a shelf and pulling out various things, before taking a map of Fuyuki City and putting it on a table.

Automated mystic codes began to mark and draw on the map, even as Sakura took a quick shower. It only took a few minutes, and then she was hurrying out, Little Rin handing her a quick change of clothes, along with alchemical elixirs to boost her immune system against anything she might have been exposed to.

"Let's see…" Sakura murmured while looking over the map. Narrowing her eyes, she quickly made a series of calculations, jotted them down, and then taking a compass, a ruler, and a triangle, quickly plotted out a teleportation vector to a hill from where she'd have a clean light of sight to Mount Enzo.

Another series of calculations followed, and Sakura nodded, drawing on the vast prana reserves she'd stored in Imaginary Numbers Space from her and Rin's involvement in the Trifas Incident. "Standby for teleportation…" Sakura said. "…standby…standby…mark!"

In a flicker of shadows, she simultaneously phased out of Imaginary Numbers Space while teleporting over six kilometers to the target site. She arrived with a thunderclap of displaced air, while also sending out conceptual echoes that the Matou would be picking up soon.

Faster than expected, even, as both Sakura and Little Rin sensed hundreds if not thousands of conceptual signatures headed their way. "Go." Little Rin said. "I'll take care of them."

"But…"

"Trust me." Little Rin said. "Besides, you're not the only ones who affected back there…you know. Where no other Humans existed…so I want to try something out."

Sakura narrowed her eyes, and then glancing at the peak tens of meters away, glanced back at Little Rin. Then she nodded, and squeezing her little big sister's shoulders, teleported to the summit while also phasing back into Imaginary Numbers Space.

Little Rin took a deep breath. "The Bird of Hermes is my name," she said softly. "Eating my wings, to keep me tame."

Thousands of crest worms were boiling out of the shadows, while pig-men and flesh-constructs even. More than that, Shinji Matou was there as well, many of him, in fact, some dressed for battle, others for a night out, while others yet were completely naked.

"Well, well, well," one of them said with a lecherous grin. "What have we here? It's been a while since I've tasted something so fresh."

"The Red Sea." Little Rin continued to cast. "The Red Sol. The Red Elixir Vitae."

The crest worms pounced on her, burying her under their weight, tearing at her and trying to burrow into her, only for her to dissolve, turning into a mass of metastable fluid that similarly dissolved the worms into prana and consumed them. "Red Stone. White Stone. Elixir Vitae. Luna in Crescent."

There was a blinding flash of light…

…and then Shinji gasped, as they found themselves no longer in Fuyuki. They were…

…well, they didn't know where they were. As they looked around, they found the Sun to their west, frozen against the horizon before it could dip under, while to their east there was the Full Moon, frozen against the horizon to mirror the Sun.

And before them, there was a towering cherry blossom tree, its branches bare and clawing up at the star-speckled pearl of the sky. More than that, before its trunk, Rin stood as she was in high school, dressed in a yukata like one might wear to a summer festival.

She raised her hands, one to the Moon, and the other to the Sun.

"The Sun and Moon are in perfect balance." She said softly but firmly. "Let the feast begin!"

Then she clapped her hands, and the tree bloomed. A gentle breeze flowed in from the sea, causing the tree's branches to gently rustle, and making the cherry blossoms dance in the air.

Rin sat on the ground, sighing in satisfactions before patting herself down. "Huh…" she thought. "…so…not only do I have a reality marble…I also get to grow up inside? Neat!"

Rin smiled, leaning back against the tree, and lifting the bottle of sake next to her, poured herself a cup. She raised it in a toast to the crumbling bones of the Matou, for there was no left alive in her reality marble, her Cherry Blossom Garden of the Sun and the Moon, but her alone, and raising the cup to her lips, drank delicately.

"Getting a reality marble, growing up, and killing Matou…" she said softly before smiling. "…this was a little tame, but…worth it!"

Beaming wide, Rin took another drink, while watching the cherry blossoms dance in the light of the Sun and the Moon.

"Engage the Avesta Engine."

Back in Imaginary Numbers Space, Sakura pushed a set of throttles forward, while simultaneously injecting several samples of Grail mud into the reaction chamber. A pair of ram scoops immediately began counterrotating perpendicular to each other, separated by a quantum singularity which immediately pulled in the Grail mud to form an accretion disk.

Then adjusting the graviton levels, she forced the accretion disk to differentiate, the outer disc moving at a different speed from the inner disc, the friction between them generating massive amounts of x-ray radiation. And thanks to the orientation of the singularity, the radiation was blasted in a pair of beams straight into the ram scoops.

"Come, god of evil." Sakura said softly. "Let us once again believe in miracles."

Then she smiled, as a spectral howl echoed through the ether, Angra Mainyu apparently willing to cooperate with her in causing death and destruction. Turning from the Avesta Engine, Sakura headed over the Zarathustra Cannon's controls. "Zarathustra Cannon, prepare to fire." She said firmly. "Target: Mount Enzo and the Greater Grail. Distance: twelve kilometers. Increase Avesta Engine rotations, and disengage ram scoop rotational limiters. Deploy the Zarathustra Cannon."

Outside of Imaginary Numbers Space, the Zarathustra Cannon phased into existence, a tri-pronged construct of chrome-plated molybdenum steel, bound with four rings also of chrome-plated molybdenum steel, the interior-facing side of the rings and prongs alike plated with gold polished to mirror brightness. "Energy levels rising." Sakura said in the control room in Imaginary Numbers Space. "Charge cycle engaged. Zarathustra Cannon: initial preparations complete. Safety locks released."

Explosive bolts erupted outside as Sakura flipped switches, causing physical locks made from titanium alloy to blow away from the Zarathustra Cannon's rings. They began to rotate, counter to each other, as the emitter array began to glow, elementary particles beginning to dance around it, while back inside, Sakura continued with firing preparations.

"Energy levels continuing to rise." She said with a glance at the gauges next to the control panel. "All safeties disengaged. Firing vector confirmed, locking on target. Raise the trigger."

A panel on top of the console opened, and lifted a gun-like trigger. Sakura grabbed hold, and activating a holographic targeting matrix that had the reticule zeroed in on Mount Enzo. "Contrast gauge at brightness twenty, target confirmed as Mount Enzo and the Greater Grail. Range confirmed at twelve kilometers. Energy charge at one hundred percent."

Sakura briefly paused, and narrowing her eyes made a decision. "Override emitter limitations." She said while licking her lips. "Energy charge at one hundred and twenty percent."

"Warning," a computerized voice sounded along with alarms. "Containment limit reached. Core breach imminent."

"Confirmed." Sakura said while putting on a set of visors. "Firing in ten seconds. Signal all allies: brace for shock and flash. Firing in…five, four, three, two, one. Zarathustra Cannon: fire!"

Then she pulled the trigger, and there was a thunderous blast outside of Imaginary Numbers Space. The x-ray laser crossed twelve kilometers in less than an instant, so fast Human eyes couldn't see it, but in that instant it cut through the atmosphere with such force that it left a vacuum, while simultaneously heating it to over six thousand degrees Celsius. This caused atmospheric gasses to go incandescent, the heat flash coupled with rapid displacement of the atmosphere simply devastating everything around it.

Then Mount Enzo, and beneath it, the Greater Grail exploded.

"Eh…?" Sakura briefly had time to say, her eyes widening behind her visor as somehow, the temporospatial detonation extended into Imaginary Numbers Space.

Darkness…

…but awareness!

Sakura blinked awake, blearily squinting her eyes at the harsh light of the ceiling above, a gentle hum filling her ears. Then turning her head, she spotted a familiar brown-haired figure sitting next to her, humming while reading a comic book of some kind.

The young man noticed, and then moved closer with a small smile. "Oh, good." He said. "You're awake…mmph!"

Still not fully awake, Sakura wrapped her arms around Caules' neck, and pulled him close for a deep kiss (complete with tongue). "…I must be dead if you're here with me." She said as they pulled apart, Caules looking very red and shell-shocked.

"Um…I'm flattered but…um…you're not dead…" he stammered out.

"…I'm not…?"

"No…this is…Fort Yggdmillennia…"

"Oh…you're not my Caules…"

"No…"

"…it doesn't matter."

Then she pulled him in for another kiss, Caules flailing around for a bit before pulling away. "I…I…I'm not a replacement, you know." He quickly said.

Sakura blinked, and then smiling shook her head. "No, you're not." She agreed. "Sorry…"

"It's alright." Caules said, before helping her sit up on the bed.

"What's happened?" Sakura asked. "How did we get here? What about the mission?"

"In reverse order, mission accomplished." Caules replied. "An emergency protocol engaged in response to the temporospatial…um, snapback, bringing you here along with your sisters and Enforcer Sawyer. As for what the snapback is…I'll let Lord Zelretch explain."

"Fair…wait, what about Tom?" Sakura suddenly asked. "How is he?"

"He's fine." Caules said before sighing. "Very roughed up, but fine. He's barely out of surgery, but he's already freaking nurses out while showing off that necklace he has of Matou ears and fingers he cut off…Americans and their Vietnam War hangups…"

Caules paused and shook his head before smiling down at Sakura. "So," he began. "Would you like something to eat first, or do you want to see Lord Zelretch?"

A/N

And…it's over.

I mean, there's no point dragging it out, what with Rin going positively Biblical and in such a way that'd have her divine alter-egos Ishtar and Ereshkigal cheering her on. Add to that Little Rin getting a reality marble after getting exposed to that timeframe where they were the only Humans in the world, and Sakura firing off the Zarathustra Cannon…

…you get the picture.