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

Everything and Nothing

Chapter 14

The explosion was blinding bright, literally so, with anyone who couldn't look away in time blinded for life.

They didn't have time to scream, though. They were looking through the windows, after all, right in the open. That meant when the windows exploded inward from the explosion's shock wave, they were reduced to bloody mulch by broken glass and torn metal. Even more so when the violent shaking of the ground and building both caused the chandeliers to fall, gilded brass and crystal glass falling to crash into the ground and sending more glass and metal flying to lacerate guests and family indiscriminately.

Caules struggled to his feet, his ears ringing and bleeding, more blood pouring from numerous lacerations all over his body. He'd managed to get his wife into cover, and even shielded her with his body, but all that meant was that they'd managed to avoid getting killed by the blast wave.

Then he blinked, as his mind caught up, and he realized he couldn't feel the Forvedge bounded fields anymore. "…the temporospatial rift generated a distortion wave…" he realized in horror. "…but distortion waves have both spatial and metaphysical properties…!"

Then he was tottering and then falling back to the ground, as more explosions erupted outside. No longer from the rift, which had finally sealed shut, but from the ground this time. Explosions were pluming up into the air across the landscape, not just in the Forvedge territory, but extending out of it.

For the metaphysical distortion wave hadn't simply shorted out the Forvedge bounded fields, but had also destabilized the leylines. The uncontrolled bursts of prana manifested in powerful explosions, even more so in places where the leylines had previously been tapped. These explosions leveled nearby buildings, already left unstable by the initial explosion, or reduced entire sections to rubble.

"Lord Caules…!" a retainer shouted as he and several others arrived to help. "We must evacuate immediately!"

"All magical defenses are down, and we've lost control of the leylines!" a second retainer added. "Prana is slowly saturating the air, and there's no telling if or when it might explode!"

"Reinforcements are inbound from our other forces," a third retainer said. "They should be here within the next five minutes, to escort you, Lady Cecilia, and other VIPs to safety."

"…run away…?" Cecilia hissed as her husband helped her to her feet. "…that is…!"

Then she gasped in shock and horror, one echoed by Caules as they turned to the dark and bloody ballroom below, lit only by the eerie glow of the aurora outside.

Broken glass and metal crushed audibly under her boot, as Sakura 'Murderer Blue' Tohsaka seemingly appeared out of nowhere. More than that, her circuits were glowing visibly on her skin, adding to her terrifying presence, to say nothing of the satisfied smile on her face.

"She's smiling…?" Caules thought in shock and disbelief. "She destroyed my home, slaughtered my family, walks through the ruins and over the blood, and she's smiling? Madness…! S-she's a sociopath! H-h-how could I have ever…?"

"TOHSAKA!" Cecilia shouted in rage. "YOU DARE…?"

"Hadron Formation," Sakura said, holding out both hands, fingers spread wide. "Erebus and Nyx – Cosmic Waltz!"

Mandalas flashed to life even as Icecolle and Forvedge magi cast their own spells. Then singularities were opening up, and they were screaming as they were dragged helplessly into the void, vanishing into the infinite blackness beyond the event horizons. Against all odds, though, Caules and Cecilia were able to fight against and overcome the pull of the void, and throwing their retainers out of their way, even if it meant causing them to fall into the void themselves, escaped from the grand ballroom, slamming the doors shut behind them.

With the pop of air filling vacuum, the singularities imploded. Sakura clicked her tongue, then drawing a pair of beam sabers, ignited them. Dragging them behind her and leaving a pair of molten trails across the ground, she dashed forward, closing the distance to storm the grand staircase.

Magi and retainers stood against her…

…and in a whirlwind of light and movement, she tore through them like a wrecking ball. Men and women alike screamed as Sakura cut them to sizzling ribbons, or burned their hearts out on blades of glowing plasma.

Reaching the doors, she struck at them with her beam sabers…

…and again clicked her tongue as the doors proved proof against plasma. Sparks flew as she tried the frame, again to no effect.

"Impressive," she conceded, while putting her sabers away. "But not good enough. Let's see…hmm…ah, that will do. Hadron Formation: Aion."

Reality distorted, a mandala briefly appearing over the doors before it warped and twisted into a spiral that seemed to fall into an infinite inward loop. Sakura stepped forward, walking into the spiral and following it until she reached a point where the material of the door was simply stretched too thin.

"Hadron Formation: Chaos!"

Blowing a hole through the millimeter-thin material of the door, Sakura stepped out of the spiral and through a fist-sized hole in the door, dusting her clothes off as she stepped onto the corridor beyond. She gestured, and Aion dispelled, returning the door to normal behind her, but for the small hole in a corner.

Too small for a Human to pass through?

Fuck logic and physics: she was a magus, maybe even a sorceress now.

Then she blinked, as golems lumbered to stand in her way.

"Hadron Formation: Erebus and Nyx – Cosmic Waltz!" Sakura cast, and tossing more singularities towards the golems. They opened up in the middle of their formation, swallowing them up and collapsing, Sakura sweeping past to pursue her quarry.

"Run and hide, Caules and Cecilia!" She taunted in a singsong voice. "Run and hide, because ready or not, here I come!"

In the dancing green light of the aurora, a pale, bloody hand twitched. It rose slowly, then pressed itself against the ground. A tongue licked out, at the blood pooling on the floor.

"D-devour…consume…" a voice rasped in Russian, as though through a throat torn to shreds. "…feed…drink…and heal."

Blood-red light seemed to shroud a cluster of bodies, blood beginning to stream towards them from across the grand ballroom. Slowly and fitfully at first, but faster and faster as their ruined bodies pulled back together.

Broken bone set themselves and then fused back together. Flesh knitted itself as organs again pulsed with life. Pain and feeling burned as nerves ignited with thought and instinct, then Celenike and her five captains were getting to their feet.

"And rise up!" she said with a satisfied smile.

Who said only vampires could use the blood of other Humans to heal themselves?

Not her.

"Gordes…!" she called, and then a portal into Imaginary Numbers Space opened, allowing her advisor to arrive. "What now?"

"Advancing our timetable would seem appropriate, my lady." Gordes Musik Yggdmillennia replied, and tapping his ring to dispel the metaphysical disguise he'd used to previously mask his identity. "And while it may disappoint you to not participate in the act yourself, Tohsaka does seem to be doing a fine job culling the existing Forvedge and Icecolle generations."

"I am inclined to agree on both counts." Celenike said with a nod.

Gordes tilted his head. "There are greater prizes available." He said. "Prizes we can claim with minimal difficulty thanks to Tohsaka's interference. And there is value in keeping our hands clean."

Celenike nodded again. "A fair point." She said. "Very well…it seems it's time to show our true colors."

Gordes nodded, and pressing a button on his wrist-mounted control panel, opened more portals into Imaginary Numbers Space. One for each of them, the five captains and Celenike entering only to reappear moments later in fresh dress whites. And in Celenike's case, wearing a white cape over her shoulders, and carrying a scepter-like cane with her.

"I've wanted to do this for so long now." Celenike thought with a sigh. "Ever since I found that pendant Darnic Prestone left for – but was ignored by – the family all those years ago. Now, after so many years of work, we can finally step out onto the open. And I can finally take my rightful place, not just as Darnic Prestone's successor, but as the Lord of the Tree of a Thousand Realms."

"Let us go, and claim our prize, Yggdmillennia." Celenike Icecolle Yggdmillennia said, smiling as her followers sounded their assent.

Rin huffed and puffed as she pried open the kimberlite shard left in the wake of the explosion. It wasn't just kimberlite, of course, but other kinds of rock matrices too from where the excessive energies of the temporospatial rift had somehow spontaneously caused gem formation to occur on ground zero.

Maybe this is why Jewel Magecraft has such a…profound, connection with the Second Magic?

…it would be convenient if that were the case.

Well, it doesn't matter.

A man gurgled as Rin absent-mindedly speared his heart out with a gesture. She and Sakura had made a slight miscalculation when they used space-time manipulations to pull vast amounts of prana from the Jeweled Sword.

That is, they'd assumed they could predict how much energy they could get.

They couldn't.

If it weren't for the fact that Imaginary Numbers had virtually-infinite storage space, they'd be dead now from prana overload.

Instead, they both had access to a virtually-inexhaustible reservoir of prana in Imaginary Numbers Space.

Rin huffed and puffed as she continued to pry the kimberlite open, and then gasped in awe and satisfaction as she struck an all but literal gold mine, with an entire seam of diamonds glittering seductively at her. "Finally," she said with a grin, prying diamonds from the rock and putting them away. "The world's starting to turn my way, after giving me and my sister shit for so long. And if it's only thanks to sorcery letting us give the world a giant middle finger, well, that's fine too. It's not like it doesn't deserve it, after all."

Rin laughed evilly at the notion…

…and then turned away at the sound of helicopters in the distance.

Rushing over to high ground with the help of reinforcement, Rin looked to the distance. Reinforced eyes soon picked out helicopters flying in the distance, along with trucks and armored cars on the ground. They all had Forvedge and Icecolle heraldry on them, and had Rin clicking her tongue.

"More hired guns, probably." She thought. "Spell-casters and magi, too…hmm…well, I did say I wanted to give it a try."

Rin blinked, and then chuckled while playfully knocking a fist against the side of her head. "Whatever happened to self-respect?" she asked herself. "This is all too much like that time that…thing, turned me into a magical girl…ah, fuck it."

Pulling out five gems, one for each of her elemental affinities, she placed them between her teeth…

…and then bit down.

Prana exploded. Her circuits blazed hot. Her eyes glowed.

Fighting against the soul-burning agony, Rin punched her fists together in front of her, before stretching out wide. "THIS IS…!" she roared as her clothes exploded away. "FIVE…ELEMENTS…GEMSTONE MODE!"

The prana surge generated a massive tornado with Rin at its eye, with wind speeds of over five hundred kilometers per hour. It also generated a lightning storm, lightning bolts lancing down to fry men caught in the open in what was left of the Forvedge estate.

The tornado pulled in the helicopters, men and women screaming as they were torn apart, or crushed along with their machines like tin cans. Then with a roar, Rin leapt forward, nothing but a blur of light as her body was wreathed in lightning armor, her modesty preserved only be the specially-enchanted sports bra and bloomers she wore.

She punched a truck…

…and it simply disappeared, disintegrated at the molecular level.

"It's a demon!" a man screamed.

"Let's get out of here!" another man screamed.

"God help us!"

"Please no!"

"Mercy!"

Rin roared, gone completely berserk and lost to the power flowing through her, even as their screams were lost to the howling wind.

Little Rin pouted unhappily.

"This is so unfair!" she yelled while jumping about. "I want to have fun too!"

"Then why don't you?" Sakura dryly asked through their mental link.

"Can I go wild?" Little Rin asked back.

"Yes."

"Okay!" Little Rin gushed. "The Bird of Hermes is my name, eating my wings to make me tame…"

Little Rin trailed off, clutching at her stomach, and then staggering on her feet. She coughed, deep and wet, before collapsing on all fours, vomiting up blood and bile. "…the Red Sea…" she gurgled out, temperatures dropping around her down to freezing. "…the Red Sol…the Red Elixir Vitae…Red Stone…White…Stone…Elixir…Vitae…"

"…Luna in Crescent…" Sakura finished the incantation, an unorthodox nine-count deliberately used to reflect the unorthodox nature of Little Rin and her relationship with Sakura.

Little Rin screamed, now appearing as the gaunt cadaver of a young woman, her face framed by lanky white hair matted in gore. Her eyes were pits of corposant, her mouth a vampiric maw with a forked tongue. Her clothes were the tattered clothes of the grave, covered in the dried blood of countless victims.

Her scream killed all those without magic resistance to hear it, their souls ripped from their bodies and then shaken apart into pure magical energy, drawn through the ether and down the bottomless gullet of Murderer Blue's sister.

The Forvedges and Icecolles hurled spell after spell at her, but she just batted them aside, everything short of a five-count simply collapsing in her presence, the vengeful spirit absorbing their prana. Then she was on them, clawed hands cutting through reinforced flesh like a hot knife through butter.

A man screamed as Little Rin pulled out his entrails, and sucked them up like pasta noodles. Blood and gore gushed as she crunched down on organs, terrified magi and spell-casters fleeing from the horror that met them.

But there was no escape.

Temperatures just kept on falling, and soon they found themselves frozen in place. Unable to fight back, they could only scream as Little Rin feasted on them one by one.

"…maybe you should have just used that instead of using that form of yours?" Sakura dryly asked.

There was no reply. "Oh right." Sakura thought in exasperation at herself. "In that form your consciousness is subsumed…I need to finish this quickly."

Little Rin didn't reply, too lost as she was in the sweet taste of blood flowing down her throat, and fresh meat tearing between her fangs.

The doors exploded inwards, and Sakura entered the room.

Lightning lashed out in her direction, but she caught it on her sabers. The lightning continued to flow, from the tesla coils spread out across the room, but Sakura kept on holding them back.

"Not bad, Sakura." Caules taunted, as he turned a dial and increased the power output. "But this is the end! You've broken into my house, killed my family, hounded me and my wife, and simply gone too far! It ends now!"

The intensity of the lightning surge continued to increase, finally beginning to make headway, and forcing Sakura back, had her tottering to her knees…

…almost.

Impossible as it might seem, Sakura seemed to gain a second wind, circuits glowing as she called on the nigh-infinite reserves she now had in Imaginary Numbers Space. Caules gasped and wordlessly worked his mouth in disbelief, the two one-time lovers meeting eyes for an instant.

Caules' eyes were filled with sadness, and regret.

Sakura's eyes were filled with determination.

No hatred.

Not for either of them.

Then Sakura threw back the lightning, causing the tesla coils to explode. It also caused a power surge in the voltaic lines, which flowed back to the dynamos, and setting off an even bigger explosion that brought the wing down to the ground.

For a few minutes, there was only the sound of the battle in the distance, and more rubble falling and crashing to the ground. Then with a pained heave, Sakura forced herself up to her knees, bricks falling off her back to the ground. She coughed several times, and then blinking, grabbed a beam saber.

It ignited with a sharp snap-hiss…

…and with another hiss, she stabbed herself through the torso, the beam burning through her body and out her back, to stab into Cecilia.

"W-w-what…?" she gasped in disbelief, staggering back and off the blade, before collapsing to the ground.

Sakura spat out blood, pulling her beam saber out of her herself…

…and then again as Caules tossed her aside, causing her land against a jagged piece of rebar. "You…piece of…upstart…Oriental monkey…" Cecilia gurgled out as Caules frantically tried to save her life. "…I…won't die…not like this…not to you…"

Sakura chuckled as she sensed evil spirits beginning to wake and converge around her. Then she spat out a name. It caused the bones in her left leg to shatter, and all the glass present nearby to crumble into sand.

Then she spat out another name, shattering all four of her wisdom teeth, and wilting all the plants nearby.

Finally, she spat out a third name, and causing the sculptures nearby to weep tears of blood.

"No…Cecilia…" Sakura gurgled out, feeling blood pour from her slit throat, the demons she'd summoned already tearing apart Cecilia and Caules' evil spirits. "…you…are…nothing…"

Then with a laugh, she pulled out a canister of regenerative serum, and stabbing herself in the thigh, injected the serum into herself. "…look there." She said, pointing to the distance.

The nursery wasn't far from here, considering this wing was where Caules and Cecilia had lived in. But the destruction of this wing had also damaged the nursery, allowing all three of them see what was happening inside: Celenike and her captains taking Caules and Cecilia's infant children, and walking over the corpses of the nurses, depart.

"…no…no…Fruhling and Herbst…Celenike…! Damn, you…Celenike! CELENIKE!"

Caules dashed off…

…only to be blindsided by a demon, a towering, eight-foot-tall monstrosity with a thin and spindly figure, and which howled with a fanged mouth surmounted by a trio of eyes. It crushed Caules against the floor with a clawed foot, and howling once more in triumph, proceeded to tear him apart.

Cecilia screamed at the sight, crawling to her husband…

…only to be left a bloody smear on the ground, as a hulking demon stepped on her before likewise roaring in triumph.

Sakura sighed in satisfaction, briefly closing her eyes. Then opening them once more, she steeled herself, and began to speak the demons' True Names to banish them once more.

A/N

And that's the end for Caules and Cecilia, to say nothing of their extended family. Well, Celenike is still around, but as mentioned, culling Forvedge and Icecolle was always her goal to begin with, so long as she could get her hands on Caules and Cecilia's children.

Yes, you should be suspicious at how…Darnic-like, some of her mannerisms are.

Little Rin's transformation spell references Hellsing…

…but completes the incantation from the Ripley Scroll, which actually references the Philosopher's Stone, and its ability to produce the Elixir of Life, which grants eternal youth. Very fitting, considering Little Rin's nature…and also ironic, considering in this state, she appears as a literal walking corpse.

That, or could pass as a Preta, if you go by Oriental traditions.