Fate/first order derivative
Part I.14

⇒ restart: iteration 21, day 1, early night

FUCK!

I'm... I'm back? I'm back. The loop, it's still... what the hell. What the everliving fuck was that.

I... I need to talk to someone about this.


⇒ skip forward

"Wait... I know you, right?" Shirou hesitates. Once again, the front door. Once again, Not Actually Satan eyeing me from the rooftop. "Tomo... nagi, wasn't it?"

I sigh. "Fuck it. Just call me Tom."


⇒ skip forward

"- and then I get hit by this... I dunno... this shadow beam that came from the top of the mountain! That's what killed me. I'm not sure, but I think it kind of felt like that bounded field thing at the school. That whole tearing-the-you-out-of-you sensation, you know?" I take a deep breath. "So it's magic, right? I don't know any kind of tech that could do something like that. Besides, if it quacks like a duck... never mind, I don't know why I said that. Forget the duck. I just... yeah..."

Across the table, Rin stares into her teacup. Felt kind of weird going to her with this, considering before... but, like, I can trust her to know stuff about killing people, can't I? That makes sense, doesn't it? "... you said it came from the temple, right?"

"About there, yeah," I reply. "I couldn't really see it, though. It was probably already gone by then, what with all the napalm magma stuff flowing down from that point..."

"Right." Rin swallows. "Well... at first glance... that sounds a lot like..."

"... the Great Fuyuki Fire," Shirou says hollowly. He's the only other person in the room that seems to be as freaked out as I am - or maybe even more so. The look in his eyes makes me think he might be full-out PTSDing here.

Rin nods slowly. "Which was caused by a magical accident involving the Grail at the conclusion of the Fourth War."

"Wait, what?" Saber suddenly leaps to her feet, her eyes wide.

"It - it was?" Emiya just stares at her.

"Really?" I blink. "I thought it was an illegal chemical spill or something."

"That was just the cover story." Rin shrugs. "I don't know the full details, but... supposedly, the last war ended when one of the Masters ordered the destruction of the Lesser Grail. Which is... think of it as being like a conduit or an interface that allows humans to safely access the Grail's power.

"So when it was destroyed... I don't know why or how, but the Grail dumped this... waste material all over the old Shinto district, which set everything it touched on fire. The Church investigators called it Grail mud. I don't think they ever reached a conclusion as to why it happened. It's definitely not a part of the Grail's original design. But whatever the cause... it didn't end until over five hundred people were dead."

Saber sinks back down to the floor. Emiya slumps his head forward, but doesn't say anything.

"So... this thing that happens. Or, y'know, might happen," I finally say. "It comes from the Grail?"

"That..." Rin hesitates. "There's no way to be sure, but that would be my first guess. The temple is one of three places the Lesser Grail can manifest at the end of the war. Maybe... if it gets destroyed again like last time, without anyone making a wish..."

"Or if it falls into the wrong hands," Saber says. "This could also be the result of someone using their wish for evil ends, could it not?"

Rin shrugs again. "It's possible."

"Well... regardless of how it happened... you need to know, this wasn't like the last time," I say. "The Great Fire was, what, ten city blocks? What I saw made it look like a pilot light - sorry, Shirou. I can't even describe it. It was like - like..."

"Like hell on earth," Shirou says, his eyes a thousand miles and ten years away.

I nod. "Yeah."

After that, none of us say anything for a while. The tea goes cold.


⇒ skip forward

I tell them everything this time. And I mean everything. Kotomine, Lancer, Caster's hypnosis, the school incident on Tuesday. I even give them my Berserker-killing strategy... including how it ended. (Rin can't look me in the eye when I talk about that part. But she doesn't look surprised, either.) Every bit of information I can think of.

In the end, an exhausted-looking Shirou walks me back to the front door. "So what are you gonna do now?" he asks.

"I think..." I hesitate and scratch the back of my head. "I think I'm out again from here on, man. Sorry. It's my family, you know? I have to at least try to get them away from all this. So I think I'm just going to focus on that."

He nods slowly. "I understand. Good luck."

"Yeah. You, too."

He offers me his hand.

I stare at it. I didn't think to wear gloves this time. "You... don't want to do that, remember."

"Oh, right. Right." He drops his hand.

We just stand there awkwardly for a moment like idiots. "Yeah," I finally mutter. Then I trudge back to my house.


⇒ skip to: iteration 21, day 12, morning

It takes a solid four days of whining, some not-so-faked panic attacks, and a hunger strike before I get results. Fortunately, Mom's kind of a tiny bit superstitious - comes with being a former sailor, I guess. (Never thought I'd actually be grateful for that.) So eventually she listens when I tell her I've had an apocalyptic vision of the future (which I only resort to because it's easier than explaining the time loop.) I finally convince her and Dad to use some vacation days and book us tickets to see relatives in Kyoto. The Brat is less than enthusiastic about the whole thing, but when isn't she. I eventually get her on board by promising to tell her where Mom hid the sake when we get back.

We leave on the second Wednesday of the loop, the day before it all goes down. I didn't see a whole lot of Shirou and Rin at school this time. Whatever it is they've been up to, I just hope it works.


⇒ skip to: iteration 21, day 14, morning

It doesn't.

We see the first reports of the fire late on Thursday night, right on schedule. I stay up to watch the news. No one has any idea what's going on at first; the Internet buzzes with vague news about terrorism. By sunrise, the government announces its official position - some kind of unexpected volcanic activity in Fuyuki. Emergency crews are being shipped in from across the country. Don't panic. Everything's under control.

Shortly afterwards, the first body counts start to come in. The number is... considerable.


⇒ skip to: iteration 21, day 19, early night

There's a surprising lack of news from down south over the next few days. The fire continues to spread. Dead and missing counts keep on rising. By Saturday, the media is actively talking about the mysterious tar-like substance at the heart of the disaster, which at that point has been sighted on the opposite side of Shimabara Bay. But that's not even the top headline. Instead, the focus is on the worldwide disruption of GPS services, which brings pretty much all civilian air traffic to a screeching halt. Details are sketchy, but all of the satellite networks seem to have failed at once - a situation which should be impossible, the experts say. Government's clearly already feeling the pressure by then. The opposition party calls for investigations. Confusion abounds.

On Sunday, the first earthquake hits. Nothing to worry about, the government says. Just a blip, barely even above a 7.0, very little damage to speak of. It's fine! Everything's fine.

Then another quake hits the next day. And the day after that.

On Wednesday, as we sweep up broken glass in our cousins' living room (and as word breaks that the fire has spread to the mainland), NASA and JAXA issue a joint statement reporting drastic localized shifts in the Earth's gravitational field. They say the sudden, random increases they've observed are completely unprecedented in the entire geologic record - and, for that matter, run entirely contrary to our current understanding of physics. The researchers are at a loss to explain any of it. They appeal to the global scientific community to help them find a cause for the phenomena... because it's already having a measurable effect on tides, plate tectonics, and even the orbit of the Moon.

That's about when the television stations start to go dark. One by one.


⇒ skip to: iteration 22, day 1, early night

"... and it just kept getting crazier from there!" I rock back and forth slowly as I talk. "The last I heard on the radio was that the mud had just landed on the Korean coast. I don't even know how far it'd spread up the mainland by then - at least as far as Hiroshima. Kyushu was completely covered at that point. Same for most of Shikoku. And the rest of the news was just as fucked! Earthquakes and tsunamis all over the place - not just in the Pacific, either. Turkey, Central Africa, some place called New Madrid in North America..."

Throat's getting dry. I drain the rest of my tea. "And that's not even getting into the really weird stuff! Extinct volcanoes suddenly going active. Satellites falling out of orbit. Gravitational and magnetic anomalies by the truckload - pretty sure that's what caused me to reset in the end. Parents managed to get me and my sister on an evacuation flight to Utah to stay with one of my dad's business partners. Something went wrong along the way, I think..." Actually, I know for a fact that something went wrong. Trying real hard not to think about those few minutes of freefall. And all the screaming. Fuck. The screaming...

⇒ repression systems to maximum

I shake my head and try to focus. "So... yeah. That's the takeaway. What's going to happen here... we're not just talking about just the city, or even the frigging country. I think... I think this really might be about the entire world."

I can't think of any way to follow up on that, so I just stop talking. The room's silent for a moment.

Rin taps her fingers on the table. She seems more skeptical this time around. Can't blame her, really. Given the choice, I probably wouldn't want to believe me either. "So assuming that I choose to believe any of this... and that's a big if, by the way..."

"Uh-huh. Thanks, man," I mutter to Shirou as he passes me a fresh cup of tea. This time around, I tried to ease up on the fire-related apocalyptic imagery to avoid triggering him. I think it worked? He still looks a little freaked out, but at least he doesn't seem to be actively flashbacking.

"There's only one thing I could see causing that kind of scenario," Rin says. "And that's someone actively using the Grail to end the world."

"So in thirteen days, somebody wishes for the apocalypse." That's more or less what I figured was going on. "Why, though?"

"Hell if I know." Rin shrugs. "What would I even get out of destroying the world? I mean, bragging rights, sure. But all my stuff's here."

I blink. What does she... oh, wait. I get it. "You know, Rin, believe it or not - there is a chance, however slight, that you could actually wind up losing the Grail War here."

"Impossible." Rin tosses her head. Huh. Seems like she's extra cocky this loop.

"Putting that aside for the moment," Shirou says, "I'm more interested in how exactly we can stop all of this from happening again. Is there anything else you can tell us?"

I shake my head. "I'm sorry, man. That's all I know. In thirteen days, everything goes to hell. Don't know why, don't know how."

"And yet it seems you do know at least one thing you did not before," Saber says.

I look at her in surprise. She's been really quiet this time around. Well, okay, she's always quiet - especially so this time, I mean, to the point I almost forgot she was there. "What's that?"

"At the start of your tale, you said that you have no idea why you were cursed to repeat these days over and over again. Did you not?" Saber looks me calmly in the eye. "Well... now you do."

For the second time that night, I have absolutely no idea what to say.


AUTHOR'S NOTES

According to the Type MOON wiki, Fuyuki City is supposed to be somewhere in Kumamoto Prefecture on Kyushu, one of the four main islands of Japan. What Tom calls the "mainland" here is Honshu, the largest of the four, where Tokyo and Kyoto are. For reference, this would place Fuyuki approximately around two hundred miles / three hundred and twenty-two kilometers away from the coast of South Korea.

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