Despair was a feeling absolutely foreign to the last True Ancestor until now. Knives stabbed into her heart as the confirmation that she had been dreading ever since she had seen the bloody pool finally drove its hooks into her mind and refused to leave. At that moment for the first time since she had slaughtered the rest of her race she felt true regret. Regret that she had left Shirou unattended and hadn't stuck by him, regret that she hadn't been faster, regret that she hadn't told him she loved him lately and regret that thanks to Shirou's help she could no longer just give up and fade into the bloodlust.
She turned her hate filled eyes towards the goddess disregarding the fact that she was so much stronger than her. She strained against her invisible bonds that kept her down and she felt the strength from Gaia flow into her body boosting her strength far beyond her previous limits, but still her bindings would not disappear. Only now did Tiamat focus on the group and despite her inhuman appearance there was a clear look of contempt on her face. A wave of water appeared from nothingness and blasted towards Arcueid at impossible speeds and the True Ancestor felt time slow down as her unimaginable power strained against her invisible restraints while certain death barrelled towards her. It never reached as a spattering of jewels suddenly appeared in front of her forming some complex formation that Arcueid couldn't even begin to comprehend. As soon as the water approached the magical formation it evaporated without a trace.
Arcueid had only a second to look at the irritation on Tiamat's face before the surrounding scenery changed and the cave was replaced by the smoke and mist filled streets of Fuyuki.
"You failed," Narbareck said dispensing with the niceties immediately.
"We were too late," Zelretch said gravely. "She can speak the Unified Language," he said warning her.
"That's… not ideal," Narbareck sighed as she ran her hands through her hair. She looked tired and worn out upon hearing the news. "Okay," she said as determination entered her one good eye. "I'm going to try and take her down the rest of you can kill that other monster and try against Tiamat if I die before she does."
"If she so much as speaks to you, you won't be able to act against her," Zelretch said as he contemplated his ally seriously.
"The Unified Language can be resisted by those who have access to the Root and works directly against the soul of the person. In other words if a person doesn't have a soul then it will be ineffective."
"Are you really so willing to die?" Zelretch asked. "Don't sell your life cheaply."
"Don't worry I will extract the maximum value out of my life," Narbareck said brushing off his concerns. She turned away and then stopped briefly. "If you people get out of this alive and feel like doing some good in the world you might want to give the church a call. They can be very good at putting talents to use. Goodbye," she said disappearing.
"What is she going to do?" Satsuki asked curiously and for the first time Arcueid noticed that she was also her. She must have dug herself out of the dirt and stone. She needs to tell her that Shirou's de… gone. The bonds on her body were gone, she didn't quite know when she was able to move again and the tide of power from Gaia urged her to take revenge on the dragon goddess. To crush her for what she did to Shirou. But a more rational part of her brain told her that she wouldn't be able to escape from those words again.
"I'll go with her," Zelretch said to the remaining forces. "As a magician I can resist those words. In addition I have a stockpile of jewels that I have saved in the event that I ever needed to fight a Type again. If we work together we might be able to destroy her."
"Wait this Tiamat girl has revived," Satsuki said still apparently on a different page. "What happened to Shirou?"
"He's dead," Arcueid choked out. "She killed him."
Satsuki's near constant smile dropped as her face grew suddenly dark. "I'll kill her," she swore. "I'll tear her to pieces and burn the bits." She looked towards the direction of the temple as pitch black storm clouds formed above it and she turned before her shoulder was caught by Zelretch.
"You have no defence against the words," he said with a firm voice. "If you want to avenge yourself on Tiamat then slay her children that are currently killing humanity."
Satsuki looked for a moment as if she would attack the old vampire, but that moment quickly passed and then she turned her face away. "What are the locations of the beasts?" she asked Zelretch her face blank.
"Be careful," Zelretch said after a moment. He directed his hand towards Satsuki and a light enveloped the… well whatever species of being Satsuki was now.
"Memory transfer magic," Satsuki stated to herself with some slight interest before she nodded once to Arcueid with a look of sympathy and disappeared.
"I will join the fight with you," Aoko said and her voice sounded immensely hollow. Arcueid kept forgetting that she was Shirou's brother, but to be fair she had only met her a few days ago.
"Do you think you could be any help," Zelretch said eying her appraisingly.
Aoko paused for a moment and then turned to the last True Ancestor. "Arcueid, could I borrow a few decades of your life in order to avenge Shirou?"
"Ah," Arcueid said dumbly not quite comprehending the phrasing. "Sure," she said after a few seconds contemplation. She would give anything right now to see that bitch dead in the ground.
"Excellent," Aoko said stretching out a hand to the White Princess. After a few seconds Arcueid felt something leave her and Aoko... changed. Was that the right word? Something was different about her, a way of movement, an expression, something else intangible changed. Aoko nodded to her, a serious expression on her face and disappeared in a manner completely different from teleportation.
In the next instant Zelretch was also gone and Arcueid was standing there alone. Wait, not alone. There was also Heracles.
"Are you not going to join them in taking down that piece of shit," Arcueid said her face contorted in anger and frustration.
"My prana reserves are running low and I don't think that even in my best condition I would have made a large difference," the last remaining servant on their side said. "My master originally instructed me to follow the instructions of Shirou. Now that he is gone I think that I will fight to protect the citizens."
Just right then a loud thump echoed throughout Fuyuki and Arcueid tilted her head in its general direction trying to discern its exact location. Unable to see through the murky streets, she bent her knees and soared into the skies jumping above the layer of dust and water that plagued the disaster zone that was Fuyuki. A familiar form was visible to her eyes even if it wasn't in a familiar size. One of the min scorpions earlier must have been really diligent and eaten their vegetables. The creature looked almost identical to the other man-sized scorpions except its carapace was pitch-black compared to the more brown-black of the babies with red tattoos that ran the length of the creature.
"Shirou would probably make a joke about the Japanese and Kaiju," Arcueid said to herself as another wave of depression hit her. She kicked off from the air creating as a shockwave as she rocketed to wards the ground in front of the scorpion man and then rebounded off the earth to land a punch on the carapace of her enemy. The sound of cracking was heard as the carapace splintered under her fist but the creature took only one step backwards before focusing on Arcueid.
"That's not good," the last True Ancestor thought to herself seeing the results of her surprise attack. Even Primate Murder would have been damaged by that attack yet the creature didn't seem worse for wear. In fact it looked like she had only made it angry.
A moment of warning was all she got before she was forced to dodge to the left as its fist came down crushing the street on which she stood. She didn't even have a moment to react as a hypersonic tail thrust pierced her breast thrusting with such speed that she left the ground and went flying through the air, passing the river into the other half of Fuyuki and crashing through several buildings before she came to a stop in the ground floor of a building.
Standing up she felt a fatal poison course its way through her cells and so she instantly restored her body shrugging off the effects. Overwhelming power from Gaia flowed through her body in opposition to the atrocities committed by Tiamat and so she shook off the rubble from her body and stepped through the street. There was a small crowd of people around her throughout various members of the church were sprinkled. Apparently she interrupted them in the process of evacuation because there were far too many people gathered around far too few busses and other modes of transport. A few flashes of light indicated that she was caught in camera and Arcueid could do nothing but shake her head in disbelief at the priorities of the humans.
A quick set of thuds was all the warning that Arcueid got allowing her barely any time to launch herself at the oncoming mountain of flesh. The White Princess launched herself towards the scorpion man, this time launching a shoulder into his chest. Their combined momentum dropped to zero and Arcueid dropped to the floor as the thing recoiled.
"So the top half is weaker," she muttered to herself as she examined the surroundings. While that information was good to know, her current priority was getting the thing away from the humans. The shockwave from their collision had already caused havoc on the comparatively fragile humans and toppled at least one bus. Letting the power of nature rush into her Arcueid summoned a tornado in each hand and rushed forward letting off punches at the bottom carapace. While no damage was done to the hard outer shell the combined force of her punches as well as the gale force winds that were generated by each and every blow forced the creature backwards and away from the humans.
Suddenly the creature swung down with its hand in an attempt to crush its smaller opponent, but Arcueid was prepared this time and she backpedalled quickly to avoid the strike. Instantly the tail whipped forward at hypersonic speed and once again the True Ancestor was prepared. Relying on her intuition over her eyes, Arcueid dodged at the last millisecond gripping the tail with both hands and straining her muscles to the limits she ran forward and swung the creature by its appendage. Once, twice she whirled the beast around her before she let it go and allowed it to go flying onto the more ruined side of Fuyuki. She was about to leave when the sounds of cheering reached her ears and she turned back.
Hundreds of humans from the very old to the very young cheered for her. Tears flowed and yet there was a sense of joy among the collective as they got to live another day. Homes destroyed, people that they had known killed and their entire lives upturned, but they were alive and here right now and they showed their gratitude to their saviour.
"It feels pretty good," Arcueid said in barely a whisper as she turned away. "Seeing the lives that you save for a change." Her eyes couldn't see through the smoke that filled the streets but she had a general idea of where the creature was. "I'm not going to let anybody else die on my watch today." With those words she vanished, moving at speeds beyond the human eye towards the Scorpion Man.
xxx
Zelretch was not having a good day. In fact that was perhaps the worst day of his life. The day in which he had misjudged the strength of the Crimson Moon draining him of the vast majority of his youth and strength now only occupied a distant second place to these twenty-four hours. Although perhaps it was wrong to state that it was only the day which went wrong, if it wasn't for his own folly then he would have been aware of the problem at least a week in advance.
When the dimension had shuddered and started to drift Zelretch had disregarded it at first but remained vigilant. When the problem worsened he started to look outward first to neighbouring dimensions and outside these dimensions. When nothing could be found then he instead started to investigate various possible disaster sights. Nothing had been found though. Type Mercury was as docile as usual and nothing from Atlas had shown up on the radar as a red flag. He was about to give up when he heard of an extraordinary number of attacks by the Dead and their masters. A few visits to scenes of attacks and a questioning by the various exorcists provided a worrying trend. So he travelled to Aylesbury and after a thorough exploration he found nothing, no he found less than nothing. Even the prior preparations that had been in place to enact the ritual were abandoned as if they were worth nothing. It was at this point when Zelretch had begun to feel the start of a panic as the world seemed to be collapsing with him none the wiser. Without any further delay he visited Lorelei, or at least tried to. When he ventured towards her are of the Clocktower he was informed, politely as the respect due to a Wizard Marshall warranted, that the young lady was participating in the Holy Grail War.
To paraphrase Tolkien 'a flash of clarity bestowed unto him a vison of just how deep his idiocy had run.' The Aylesbury ritual could have easily used the Holy Grail as a power source and he had seen the Holy Grail War go horrifically wrong thousands of times. Immediately he had decided to go to Fuyuki and evaluate the situation, and that's when disaster had struck. Gazamy's escape was a thing of beauty from the point of somebody who yearned for destruction of chaos. The destruction of London was a swift and terrible thing and he had brought an immediate end to the Evil Spirit as soon as he saw him, rendering the creature of strife and chaos a corpse instantly.
Still it didn't bring back the lives of those who fell afoul of the creature and nor would it enable him to stop the madness. During the fight he had become aware of the fact that his Magic had weakened vastly, the effects almost certainly relating to the lack of current parallel universes. If the deviation could be fixed then his Magic would return at full strength but if it were severed completely then his Magic would entirely disappear and he would then only be a millennia old vampire and one of the strongest magi on the planet. Smiling grimly he appeared in Fuyuki and it was there that he received one of the least pleasant surprises he had ever seen.
Zelretch shook his head as he arrived at the foot of the mountain to see Narbareck finish her ritual. The rite of returning was an ancient ritual barely used by the church that returned ones soul to god in return for a minor amount of Authority, the drawbacks being unavoidable death, a five minute time to prepare, less than half an hour duration and the risk that they might not even be able to complete it correctly and thus die for nothing. When the head of the Burial agency lifted her head there was no humanity left behind those eyes and Zelretch frowned in disappointment at the loss of a young life before following her to the temple.
"What took you so long?" the Fifth Magician said as they arrived at the top of the temple steps.
"Has anything happened," Zelretch said disregarding her question. At this stage there was no time for anything else. Every second that the Mother of Dragons survived was another second where hundreds if not thousands of humans would die.
"Still as the grave," Aoko replied back matching his seriousness. "Is she okay?" she asked pointing towards Narbareck who was staring at the temple with a strong sense of deliberation. Suddenly Zelretch watched as Narbareck vacant eyes widened and then the space around them disappeared and they were in the air a hundred metres above the ground. The temple below them was gone, instantly erased along with the ground of Fuyuki. The only thing that lay beneath them was the dark murky waters that signalled the presence of Tiamat.
"Well there goes the homefield advantage," Aoko said staring down at the murky waters easily defying gravity. In the next instant arrows of black fire were aimed upwards at the trio however they were simply dodged by Zelretch and disappeared upon approaching the other two. Resting atop the blackened waters they could see a corrupted, darkened version of the previously golden servant that opposed them in the cave. Zelretch opened his mouth to announce a plan when the tainted servant immediately disappeared from the surface of the ocean, teleported right in front of them and was obliterated by Aoko in one precise blast of light that melted right through his armour and eradicated the legend of humanity in an instant.
"Since when did I become the slowest of the group," Zelretch lamented but inside he was happy that those standing with him were so powerful. Every scrap of power would prove necessary in this fight.
The black waters rippled revealing Tiamat in the form of a beautiful horned woman with an emotionless disposition. She was staring towards them but no recognition showed upon her face. Countless spires of black water rose from the ocean all angling towards them carrying immeasurable amounts of mass between them. Aoko and Narbareck disappeared but this time it was Zelretch's turn to take the attack head on and that's what he did. Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he pulled countless gems out from empty space and threw them dozens of metres away into the air where they swirled around him forming an icosahedron. Immediately upon entering the area of space surrounded by the gems the black water dissipated into the atmosphere.
"Impressive old man," Aoko said as she reappeared inside the complex sequence of rotating gems. "What does it do?"
"The gems absorb True Ether and forcibly convert it into mana," Zelretch said as he raised his hand. The gems swiftly rotated until a wall of reds faced the goddess and waves of fire blazed down onto the goddess, only to be peter out as it met the force of the waves. "As long as she is in the ocean we won't be able to defeat her. Anybody have a way of dragging her out." As he said this, the sky further blackened as the water rose up into the air to blot out the sky and encircle the three with millions of tons of water.
Narbareck shook her head but Aoko grinned and raised her right hand chanting a stream of what sounded like gibberish even to Zelretch's trained ears. The world changed on a fundamental level and the relentless onslaught of the mud ceased for a moment allowing the remains of the watery assault to fall back to the Earth. Zelretch sharply inhaled as he caught sight of the event that had disturbed Tiamat's onslaught. The city of Fuyuki stood there once again, with none of the damage that had accumulated over this vastly destructive war.
Hovering a few feet above the ground was Tiamat who was staring at the land temple which suddenly appeared beneath her. Suddenly she looked up and the look of irritation on her face was gone to be replaced by a look of severe annoyance. The distance between the two of them stretched to over one hundred kilometres as space expanded pre-emptively and Tiamat disappeared. Zelretch moved shoving Narbareck out of the way and in exchange he received a hand through his stomach that blew off the bottom half of his torso. His defensive codes had crumpled like paper for a tsunami and in that instant he was briefly exposed with the certainty of imminent death in front of him, before Tiamat retreated swiftly backwards.
"What?" he said with a profound lack of elegance as an all-powerful goddess retreated from him. His body regenerated as was normal for a vampire of his age, but at this time he had no spare attention to pay attention to it as he watched the Mother of Dragons gaze at him warily. It became pretty clear to Zelretch at this point that she had been underestimated. It was impossible to fight her head on. Narbareck seemed unable to work her teleportation directly on her and while Aoko had returned her to land it didn't seem to bother her for more than a few moments yet somehow this failed product of his somehow managed to make this goddess back off.
"Use magecraft," Zelretch said to his companions. "This mobile bounded field absorbs True Ether and converts it into mana. Black Bullet will be useless against her Narbareck," Zelretch said turning to the head of the Burial Agency. "They're both made of True Ether." He opened his mouth to further explain his plan only to be disrupted at the last moment.
"Come out," Tiamat said speaking to the three of them and Zelretch was halfway to the barrier before he even registered the words that she said. He quickly moved backwards away from the edge and swiftly found himself touching the boundary. Focusing everything on the border he wrestled with his arm that was slowly inching towards the and suddenly found himself back in the middle. Casting a grateful glance towards Narbareck he watched as Aoko was also transported back to the centre. "I'll try expanding the anti-True Ether space. Narbareck, you try catching her in it. Aoko, use your most destructive spells to harass her and keep her focused on us rather than retreat to the sea. We're the last hope for humanity. We cannot fail."
Narbareck nodded and Aoko gave a thumbs up. With that Zelretch summoned more of the thousands of gems that he had accumulated in life and bent them all towards the purpose of destroying the dragon goddess.
xxx
The saddest fact about life is that sometimes your best is not enough. It was a fact that Zelretch was intimately aware of having seen the same thing happen many, many times to many, many parallel worlds that died for no reason but poor luck. The strategy probably would not have worked he reflected, but when Narbareck's body dropped down into the mud after twenty minutes, but when Tiamat grew in size and started to fire concentrated blasts of True Ether at Aoko in response it drove the final nail into the coffin of humanity. Aoko had not long after the battle of the beams lost a lot of strength as she reverted into the state before she took Arcueids time and dropped from the sky. Seeing that she could offer no more help Zelretch grabbed her before leaving her on the ground and forced Tiamat away from the Fifth Magician by clever uses of his gem bounded field.
In the end all that was left between Tiamat and the rest of the world was one exhausted Dead Apostle Ancestor with a rapidly dwindling supply of gems and a determination to hold her off for as long as possible. He had already expended gems with a worth greater than that of a small country and he refused to stop at this point. More black water as well as blasts of True Ether assaulted his position and he relied on his only possible defence to hold off the furious goddess. His hand scraped the bottom of his bag and he tossed out the last handful of gems and he mustered all the strength in his aching limbs to straighten up.
The goddess avoided contact with the zone after the first time. It was after all a space with no True Ether in which gods could not exist. Another dozen gems shattered and he weaved countless finicky magecrafts to inconvenience and weaken his opponent but in the end he was only delaying the inevitable. First the surrounding gems decreased to a few thousand, then a few hundred, then a few dozen until eventually he had to do battle directly with Tiamat with only a dwindling force of his ten finest gems. An elite force that he owned but seldom used, each one with a story behind them he could recite off the top of his head and yet they also cracked, piece by piece until with an almost anticlimactic finish, the last yellow Citrine cracked and then with a single swipe of the giant goddess his body was mulched and his head hit the floor.
Despair flooded the remains of his body as he saw the goddess walk away from the man who was once the strongest in the world, now powerless, until he saw her pause. The world shuddered as a massive wave of True Ether, maybe even equal to that of Tiamat hit the area. The last sight that Zelretch saw was a flash of red and he died with a hopeful smile.
xxx
Far away in a place beyond time and space a beautiful woman with scarlet-streaked jet-black hair sat watching the skies. She had slightly bronze skin and a stood at 1.7 metres. Her figure despite being in no way voluptuous gave off an image of sex and danger and she possessed a wicked smile as she watched the scenes in the blue sky above.
An image of the world was reflected in the heavens, but it was by no means a dry and static globe. A genuine peal of elated laughter escaped the woman's lips as she saw blue devour black and the oceans of the water fight against the dark ooze that Tiamat had spread. With eyes that far surpassed any current satellite she scanned the cities, watching as the damaged World started to knit itself together again. Torn earth, torn buildings, torn flesh. Nothing was left out as the world was rewoven and the true power of EA, the greatest ever Noble Phantasm was released. She briefly glanced at a hole in that landscape that currently was not getting repaired, the site of the ill-fated and short resurrection of Kingu. While Kingu could not be called a pushover by any means, there was no way that a half-resurrected god could absorb the full might of that dreadful tool. The watcher clapped her hands in sheer delight as she watched him move instantly from the barren ice of Antarctica to the destroyed city of Fuyuki and she gasped as the True Ether in the atmosphere of Fuyuki soared to absurd levels.
"You're getting a lot of fun out of watching a foregone conclusion," a familiar voice said causing the entity known as Alaya to stop her watching of the big show.
"Well this is the first time I'm watching it," Alaya said with a welcoming smile. "I didn't exactly have front row seats like you must have."
"I can assure you that nothing of that sort was on my mind when that was me out there," Enki said as he sat down next to Alaya and hypocritically started watching the world. "Wow I've really grown up in the ten years since I met myself and gave me my Magic. He's going to feel real stupid in his future when he realises that he still has to go have done that."
"Somebody is going to have to really invent better time travel tenses," Alaya said almost nostalgically.
"That's not a problem for at least a few millennia," Enki said. "Three at the very least, two if we get a couple of geniuses every century. One and a half if humanity goes all in."
"It sounds like a beautiful future," Alaya said. "I wish I could be around to see it."
"How much do you have left," Enki asked his voice solemn.
"We're currently in a place beyond the simple space-time of your home dimension," Alaya said. "About half an hour," she stated after seeing Enki's unimpressed look.
"Want to watch the fight," Enki offered awkwardly.
"Yeah," Alaya said wiping her eyes clandestinely. "Let's."
Forty minutes later Enki wiped his eyes and disappeared.
Author Note: Probably about three more chapters.
Regfurby: That was one of the greatest things I've read. I wanted to try write out my first omake and you completely knocked all three of mine out of the water. You made my day, and considering that day was Christmas you did a pretty flipping good job.