Dear Readers,
Welcome to Apothesis of God of Heroes and Justice! This will be a reboot of my original Fate Overlord as I lost the will to continue that story.
I hope you enjoy it!
ShirouKuroEmiya
Prologue Part 1
Shirou Emiya logged in. He was greeted with the familiar graphics of YGGDRASIL. Glancing to the top-right hand corner of his vision, he saw…
23:00:00… 23:00:01…23:00:02––
He walked around the familiar hallways that he had constantly passed through during YGGDRASIL decade plus operation. If Shirou had been the same person from 130 years ago, the sight of these hallways and rooms would have shocked for they looked like the interior of Camelot Castle that Chaldea had encountered during the Camelot Singularity and British Lostbelt.
Well, they were flawless replicates, but not made of matter and instead of digital data.
"One hour left until YGGDRASIL servers' shutdown…" Shirou sighed as he continued walking around Castle Camelot.
It was a shame that YGGDRASIL was shutting down, but everything had to eventually come to an end. He had first played at the Illya's insistence and somehow got hooked onto it. If he had been the same man that had been plagued with survivor's guilt and placed no value on his own life then he might have never even considered playing a video game. Thanks to his family's and friends' attempts to rehabilitate him, YGGDRASIL had become one of his favorite pastimes over the last decade.
"I still find it hard to believe that Illya had not only convinced me, but also Arturia of all people to play YGGDRASIL…" He smiled while recalling the event as if it had happened yesterday.
Arturia had gotten hooked, and then she had dragged her loyal Knights into the game. Together with the Round Table, Arturia had rebuilt Camelot and replicating the smallest details that the YGGDRASIL game engine would allow.
Then the good and enjoyable times of roleplaying came. Shirou had found the periods when Players and NPCs assaulted Camelot in an attempt to conquer it as the most enjoyable aspect of YGGDRASIL. Countless attempts to Conquer Camelot were thwarted by the Arturia and the Knights of the Round Table. Only a few times had Arturia and her Knights been defeated. Her defeats had been usually the result of Chaldea's Servants joining to play YGGDRASIL, and only a handful times had non-Servant Players emerged victorious. Normally thanks to a combination of good luck and the defenders of Camelot making foolish mistakes due to overconfidence.
Shirou chuckled as Camelot had always remained in the top ten spots ever since it had become a Guild that Arturia and her Knights had formed.
He made his way into the throne room, the center of Camelot Castle.
As he sat on the throne, Shirou saw the Knights of The Round Table standing stock-still and motionless. Standing so rigidly in the room that they didn't seem human. Well, that was the case as these were NPCs that Arturia had created in memory of her Knights.
The former Chaldea Master chuckled as he recalled what Alexender the Great, or Alexender Exairetikí as he went publically, had done. The legendary greek conquer had pulled some strings as one of the largest shareholders of the gaming company that owned and operated YGGDRASIL to allow Arturia's Knights to create avatars that when they had not logged in would operate as NPCs.
"Kneel," Arturia commanded from the throne besides Shirou.
Shirou snapped out of his thoughts when he found Arturia log into the game without him noticing.
The NPC Knights of the Round Table; all of them knelt before Shirou and Arturia in the way subjects would abase themselves before their master.
"Arturia…" He grumbled as he covered his face with his right hand in embarrassment. "There is no need to do that."
"They do as you are Mom-"
"Don't you dare say that!" Shirou snapped and Arturia chuckled in response. "Sorry, I mean please don't do that…"
Her chuckles morphed to laughter that got louder with each passing moment until Arturia collapsed off her throne and rolled around on the ground while holding her stomach.
Shirou rolled his eyes. The joke should have gotten old, like several decades ago, but Arturia and everyone that knew that joke still found it amusing. He cursed Merlin, no both the Arturia's male and Arthur's female Merlin for hypnotising the Knights of the Round Table to call him "Mommy" or "Mommy Shirou" for an entire day as a prank.
What annoyed him the most was Mordred's habit of addressing him as Mother, while addressing Arturia as Father. When clearly it should be the other way around!
"How is Arthur doing these days?" Shirou asked, wanting to change the topic immediately.
Arturia stopped laughing, but she struggled to stand up and walk to her throne. "You mean Arthur or our son, Arthur II?" She asked after sitting down.
"Our son, of course. Arthur is the last person I would worry about given he is King Arthur! And why is Arthur still wandering in our world? He has his world to worry about."
"Blame Merlin, I mean Arthur's Merlin… God, it is still so confusing that there is a female Merlin that has the same voice as me…"
Shirou groaned as he too remembered the shenanigans that male and female Merlin had caused thanks to having the voices that seemed identical to Arthur and Arturia, respectively.
"You better ask Rin to update your properties Bounded Fields. The last thing we need is female Merlin posing as you again… On second thought, also remind her to ensure its actually Arthur and not male Merlin when he visits." He sighed. "How is House Pendragon doing these days?"
"I have been very busy with the grandchildren." Arturia grumbled tiredly.
Shirou chuckled. When Arturia meant grandchildren, she was referring to the latest generation of pre-teens that had been descended from their children.
"How many generations of descendants do we now have?"
"Five generations… More than five hundred descendants…" She groaned. "I blame you, Shirou! Not only have my male descendants, but my female descendants have picked up your charms of seducing the opposite sex. They have given birth to too many children!"
Shirou started to sweat as Arturia's accusation wasn't a joke, but one that had some merit to it. Rin and Sakura had also made similar allegations. Many in Chaldea called his ability to attract the opposite sex as genetic trait, jokingly called "Harem Magnetism," which just about all his descendants seemed to have inherited to some degree.
"Hey! It's Merlin's fault, okay! I swear he blessed my descendants with the natural charms of an Incubus/Succubus." Shirou protested defiantly. The blonde haired woman snorted. "Count yourself as lucky… At least you don't have to always deal with Rin's and Sakura's descendants! That is more than a thousand descendants combined."
An alarm rung in his mind. He turned to the corner of his vision. Shirou found the final countdown begin.
"It's time," said Arturia with a smile.
"Let us enjoy the last seconds of the YGGDRASIL-" He replied.
And then… Shirou started to frown.
The world around him should have faded and turned black before being greeted by the familiar sight of his room. The server's hosting YGGDRASIL was going to be shut down, or Shirou had thought.
However, what he actually saw turned out to be something else entirely.
"...What's this?" Shirou muttered as he stared at his new surroundings.
He was no longer in Castle Camelot and surrounded by ruins. It was not just a mere one or two buildings, but on the scale of a town – no, it was greater than that. Shirou could see a building which looked like a castle in the distance, and a wall surrounding a city. These ruins had once been a fairly large city. From the various traces, it did not look like it had been conquered so much as abandoned for some reason.
"Arturia? Are you there Arturia?" He called out for his wife.
His call remained unanswered. He wondered why Arturia had disappeared too, but he wasn't too worried about her safety. She was Arturia Pendragon, the legendary King Arthur. Few creatures and situation would be outside her ability to handle. Plus, she had the abilities, skills and knowledge of her other alternative Servant selves that had appeared in Chaldea. His wife had gotten so strong after cross-training with other Servants at Chaldea that she had become a formidable mage in her own right below the likes of Merlin and Morgan as Caster.
"Arturia could probably fight a Divine Spirit without much problem, and if she is defeated then she can at least escape with her life." He muttered while glanced around at his surroundings again.
If he hadn't been logged into YGGDRASIL then he might have wondered if he teleported somewhere else.
The landscape was unfamiliar. Granted, there was no way Shirou could know what every single square inch of YGGDRASIL's game world looked like. Perhaps there was scenery like this tucked away in some corner of the game.
He wondered if the rumors were true. That YGGDRASIL's servers were going to be shutdown, but the game developers were going to reveal a huge surprise. One of the most popular rumors going around the YGGDRASIL gaming community had been that a demo for YGGDRASIL 2 was going to be available after the YGGDRASIL's server shutdown. What Shirou was experiencing right now seemed to give some credence to that popular theory.
Or maybe the rumors were wrong and the server hadn't shutdown immediately as intended? If that was the case that Shirou wouldn't be surprised. It might be 2138, but mankind was still far from creating a computer system or network that worked with zero percent error rate.
Various possibilities also flashed through his mind.
Shirou hurriedly made to open the communications function that he had shut down until now and then he froze in place. The control console did not show up.
"What happened? What is this?" He frowned while trying to activate other functions.
None of them responded. It was as though he had been completely excluded from the system.
After none of the menus refused to appear, Shirou sat back and closed his eyes. Then, he felt the urge to check out his body. Shirou didn't know why, but his instincts beckoned him too. He moved to comply as while his instincts had been wrong in the past, they were right most of the time, saving his life and others countless times.
His eyes shot open in surprise.
"Why do I have 100 more Magic Circuits…?! And these Magic Circuits far surpass the designation of A-rank quality. They are not something that a human should possess. Only Divine Spirits and their demigod children…" Shirou blurted out in shock.
He summoned a large mirror large enough to reflect his entire body via Projection. Shirou sighed in relief when the reflection showed the exact appearance that he had remembered. His body had remained…
"I could be wrong!" He shouted in alarm as he recalled that his YGGDRASIL avatar looked exactly the same as his real life appearance.
His troubled thoughts seemed to become true as Shirou made a mental command. Shirou felt his body collapse onto the ground. He grew larger and he felt his very essence change. By the time he felt the shifting stop, Shirou looked up at mirror. To his shock, the mirror was too small to capture anything but a small proportion of the body staring back at him as reflection.
The mirror grew at his command and the growing reflection only reinforced his previous suspicions.
There in the reflection was a red dragon staring back at Shirou. He sighed, and the reflection showed the red dragon let out a gentle gust of air from its nose.
"I really turned into a dragon, haven't I…" He muttered and the voice he heard was similar to his own, but a bit deeper and louder.
Shirou tried moving his body. It felt unfamiliar, and familiar at the same time. The closest he could describe it was driving a car for the first time after several years of never touching the steering wheel.
While it felt familiar to him, Shirou started to freak out that he was a dragon. His body changed back and he didn't notice he was standing on his own two human feet until he collapsed and stopped himself from hitting the ground with his two human hands.
"Am I still in YGGDRASIL?" Shirou wondered as he summoned Kanshou and Bakuya.
The married sabers appeared in his hands, but they felt drastically different. Shirou had to stop himself from looking around to see if he had deployed Unlimited Blade Works as any Projection he created were copies, no matter how close they seemed to the real deal.
"They don't feel like copies, but the original Kanshou and Bakuya…" Shirou scrutinized the weapons in his hands. "Why can I use both my powers of YGGDRASIL avatar and my real self?" He wondered in confusion.
He continued to playback everything he had experienced that had happened since Arturia had disappeared. It was a mystery that he wanted to find the answers to, but Shirou shook his head as dismissed his favored Noble Phantasms.
Right now the thing that remained his top priority was finding out where he was.
Shirou jumped up. He was surprised by how far he went. Instead of the original ten meter jump, Shirou launched himself into the air by a hundred meters. His confused mind might have focused on why he was so much stronger if it was for the details of the city gradually coming into view.
The notion he was in YGGDRASIL 2 or its demo was quickly thrown out. YGGDRASIL and any other VR game was nowhere close to flawlessly replicating every detail that existed in reality. Technology to do such a thing involved magecraft or alien technology like that found in Atlantis, none of which was available for the normal human population except for the Mage's Association and Holy Church.
The city had been abandoned for several years already given that Shirou could see signs where houses had collapsed from rot. This assumption was further reinforced when he landed on a nearby house, only to suddenly plunged down at great speed as the roof collapsed. He found himself in a fairly spacious room. The furniture after exposure to the elements they had completely rotted away.
He frowned when he saw the familiar sight of the undead. The undead had become a nearly impossible sight to see after Mana become scarce to the point that many parts of the Earth didn't possess any significant amount to allow magic spells not reliant on Od to work anymore.
Stupid mega-corporations… If it wasn't for their work then the Earth's climate and biodiversity wouldn't have ruined to the point that Mana had become nearly non-existent on the surface of the Earth… Shirou cursed humanity's greed for money.
His cursing made him realize something that he hadn't noticed until now. The Mana he detected around him was so strong that he felt that he had been transported to a time before the Industrial Revolution, where the Earth had started to suffer humanity's nature-destroying habit.
Shirou stopped cursing and focused on the undead.
It stumbled along in an unintelligent lurch. There were cloudy eyes beneath the opened lids, and there were no signs of blinking. The undead was one of the most basic forms. A lowly zombie. It did not look like it had suffered major damage or was badly rotted. It looked just like a clean corpse moving around.
This level of the undead usually came about from being brought back by an equally low level necromancer or if born through natural means then the spirit that had reanimated the corpse didn't possess a incredible strong amount of resentment otherwise it would have been born as a higher form of undead.
He summoned a copy of a Scripture that Executors of the Holy Church used to hide their presence from the undead. It was the most powerful kind that Shirou had encountered as there was no telling if he came across the more powerful types of undead.
Shirou moved on to investigate elsewhere. He got out the ruined building and continued down the road.
There he encountered more of the undead. Some of them were walking around in circles inside their houses, and others roamed up and down the streets. It looked like the entire city was under the rule of the undead.
Before long, Shirou finished his exploration of his immediate surroundings. There were many undead, but the basic type such as skeletons and zombies. The entire area was in ruins, with no survivors.
There was no way he was on Earth. In 2138, any traces of supernatural activity had disappeared without Mana to make such things possible at least that was limited to the surface of the Earth, a diverse and thriving biosphere still existed in the Reverse Side of the World. If small sections of natural landscape completely untainted by Earth's toxic atmosphere and technology existed then they would happen in closely monitored areas under the supervision of the Mage's Association or Holy Church. Shirou saw no signs of the Association's or Church's presence.
That left time travel or parallel worlds. Neither which Shirou could dismiss without gathering more information of where he had been transported to.
He turned his attention away from the undead and investigated objects around him. Shirou started with the street then went from one building to another. It was not soon before he came made some deductions. The technology here was not particularly advanced. There were no signs at all of electrical objects or its similar advanced magical equivalent. The inhabitants of this city were at best mid medieval era.
Shirou quickly jumped off the ground, roof to roof until he reached the highest building in the surrounding area. It was a five storey building where had a commanding view.
He closed his eyes and reviewed what weapon to use. Shirou possessed countless numbers of Mystic Codes and Noble Phantasms that possessed anti-undead properties. He quickly rolled out the most powerful ones as there was no telling what powerful and intelligent undead were around ready to pounce if they were to detect him.
And it didn't hurt to leave several trump cards behind.
The anti-undead Mystic Codes and Noble Phantasms that caused wide-scale destruction was quickly ruled out. Shirou would prefer to keep the city intact as much as possible for the future inhabitants that could come after he cleared the city of the undead.
Most of the Noble Phantasms were taken out of his choices as they were either too destructive or should be reserved for powerful and intelligent undead. He quickly settled with using various Mystic Codes and Holy Scriptures used by the Executors of the Holy Church.
Shirou loaded the blueprints of his desired weapons so that Unlimited Blade Works could start manufacturing them in the number that he needed.
"It's time to start." Shirou muttered as he opened his eyes. "I am the bone of my sword…"
What do you guys think about what you read? Is it good, bad or meh? Any recommendations to improve? Please let me know.
Thank you for reading!