"Really now, I figured we were in the clear since nothing had broken," Gudao commented wryly to Gudako's cheerful explanation about what had happened while she was out of Chaldea. "I was drinking with Emiya when suddenly he left to take care of 'unfinished business'."

"Ah well that's not surprising. Even when she was alive Matou had quite the, uh, preoccupation with the man," she grinned.

"I'll never understand humans," he sighed. "Seems like it isn't magically transmitted through genetic makeup. Metaphorically that is."

"Suppose that's the least of our worries," Gudako shrugged. "Though that reminds me that none of the magi we have around seem to have ever 'gotten together'. How troublesome."

"Anyway, the initial trials on those Mystic Eyes of Death Perception were very unsatisfying," he returned to more immediately relevant matters. "I suppose these things can be so powerful even on humans because they're outrageously restricted. Not unexpected for Mysteries."

"Since Sasaku's Grail record searching suggests those and Medusa's Mystic Eyes of Petrification aren't something you can gain by studying they're probably going to be out of reach," Gudako nodded. "Well, there are many good alternatives for the latter, which is more generally useful anyway, but ah, if only Shiki had kept her full power on being summoned."

"Yeah, many enemies can continue being a significant threat; losing a limb or two won't stop them. We-" Gudao stopped short, blinking in surprise.

"What's wrong?" Gudako immediately noticed the change in her counterpart. "I'm not hearing anything on the System..."

l

(? Tower)

"Welcome to the Prison Tower on the Isle of Despair, Master !"

"Hmm." Gudao looked around the abrupt change in surroundings that now surrounded him.

"This is a place beyond love and hate, thus any soul may be imprisoned here !" the enthusiastic welcome continued.

"Ah, you're the Count of Monte Cristo. Perhaps you've just been summoned to Chaldea?"

"... certainly not. You are the only one here," the presumptive Count continued as if following some sort of script.

"No, I think not." A familiar voice interrupted as Gudako tapped her foot on the stone floor for emphasis. "What sort of story is this, I wonder?"

"This is Hell, or more precisely the Chateau d'lf. As you can see, these spirits are here to ensure your permanent stay."

With the sound of creaking and wails, a number of translucent forms clutching crude shivs and sharpened sticks made their presence and animosity known to the group.

"Stand back, Master." Reacting immediately, Gudako pulled out a spellbook as neon purple markings appeared on the ground between the two parties. "This is- !"

There was a bright flash of light as a Servant was abruptly summoned into the prison cell, complete with a drawn sword, facing the ghosts. "Fufu," she chuckled as the magic circle dissipated, the residual energy being pulled into her Spirit Origin while ruffling her clothes except the part pinned to her body by the segmented swordbelt and its scabbard. She turned as if to catch the homunculus with the corner of her eye. "Perhaps, you are my Master?"

Everyone present was silent as the Servant raised her left hand, tracing a circle in the air before sweeping it forward as the attacking spirits scrambled through the bars, meeting a hail of sharped iron which they could not pass through. Flung backwards and pinned to the wall, their vengeance was swiftly denied.

"Well that was good of you, ironically speaking," the Count smirked while finally appearing. "I couldn't have handled them in my current state."

"Sasaku?" Gudako asked. "It's good to see you."

"Of course," the Ruler replied, though with a hand still on her weapon. "However, this is unexpected. Avenger, what's your game here?"

"What do you think?" The Count retorted. "First of all, I'm trapped here with you, not against you; I'm in the cell too. If you couldn't tell, the King of Mages repurposed his ex-pawn as a hook to drag you in here."

"I see, I see. So links with Chaldea can also be used to bait traps," Gudao frowned. "And by the, uh not looks exactly, but anyway - you're not Gudako, right? Nursery Rhyme?"

"Yes," Rhyme answered quickly. "I didn't pick this form, though. You did."

"Pulled some strings to get into the 'story'?" Gudao asked, receiving a nod in reply. "Well Count, shall we do it like your story or stage a breakout?"

"Wait a moment," Sasaku stopped him. "The King of Mages can't be behind this, he's with the group backing Chaldea."

"A lie masking another lie perhaps," the Count waved the issue to one side. "If we stay here too long the Master of Chaldea will suffer critical injury."

"That would be a bad end," Rhyme agreed. "So do we go out through the window or perhaps fight out the conventional way?"

"Normally you would have to do something arduous like fight through seven Lords to escape, but - hahaha ! In my weakened state, this Prison Tower is too weaker of a cage than it should be, so who knows !"

"... Jeanne d'Arc," the Count recognized their first obstacle immediately.

"The Singularity-born blackened Saint, I remember you from the Tower Singularity," Rhyme continued for him. "I see, so they were drawn in here just like you of the Mount."

"Haah..." Jeanne (Alter) tightened her grip on the staff of her pitch-night banner. "That's right. We can never escape our essence. Your foolish dream of salvation led us to this, worse than oblivion."

As if summoned by those words, gouts of flame started spouting from the ground as though in a reverse of the story of Sdom and Amora.

"Stop her," Gudao ordered no one in particular.

"Certainly; this is my matter." The Count raised a hand, flickering blue flame eagerly jumping forth.

"Cover me," Rhyme quickly spoke out while elbowing the Count to one side.

"Got it," Sasaku stepped up, raising a hand. "Hurry though." With a casual gesture summoning them, a rain of metal spears fell from the sky, smashing into the stones like a forest of metal between the groaning Jeanne and the group that stood against the rushing flood of molten heat.

"Hmph." The impromptu flame arrester only held for a second or two before even Servant-level iron, glowing an evil red, began to melt.

"Go ahead and freeze ! (Absolute Zero)" Rising upwards to a vantage point, Rhyme directed her gaze towards the line of contact. As her spell took form, spikes of magical ice started sprouting all over the hall.

"Perfect." With sword at the ready, the Ruler rushed forward, shoes crunching on the bits of ice which were constantly growing, melting, and regrowing amidst a sea of iron particulate solution. "Sorry Avenger Jeanne, but I'll need you to-"

"Suffer," Jeanne growled with a casual sweep of her banner. The Noble Phantasm's fabric whipped around Sasaku's advancing blade, snagging it and pulling its wielder off-balance. "Take this." A pitch black point was simply thrust forward into a staggering target.

Reacting quickly, Sasaku let go of her sword and pulled out a dagger to parry. Unfortunately, her right arm being drawn out to the right meant that as she tried to block right-to-left, it was too slow and she could not move her center of mass enough to avoid spinning her left side right into Jeanne's thrust.

Recovering quickly from her lunge, the Avenger extracted her now-bloodied weapon and swiftly thrust again, this time toward the Ruler's face. Sasaku hurriedly parried the attack up and to the side as Jeanne's banner, having flung its captured sword to the side like a sling, came back around from the side to sweep out Sasaku's feet from under her.

"Heh," the Ruler exhaled as she hit the ground, sliding away on the slick floor as Jeanne tried to pin her with a downward thrust and missed due to a combination of distance and timing.

"(Cone of Cold)" A number of ice shards pulled themselves out of the growing flood and flung themselves at Jeanne, who reacted by spreading her banner defensively right as a certain shadow flashed from Gudao's side to behind her, taking advantage of the distraction to fix his hands around her neck.

"Wait Count, don't kill- oh good." The Master tried to intervene before realizing both that it was too late and that, in fact, the allied Avenger had had the same idea.

"I notice that the fire isn't stopping," Rhyme commented as the hall started to fill up with water vapor.

"I think we've won though," Gudao thought aloud. "Battle Finish ! Grab her and let's get out."

"Ok, you've already got her so I'll handle Sasaku," Rhyme decided while skating over to where the Ruler had stopped her slide. Since the Caster had been the one controlling the ice magecraft, it was simple for her to lay down a smooth path over.

"Thanks." Sasaku made as if to lean on Rhyme's shoulder as she was helped to her feet, but the Caster simply lifted her up whole since the other Servant was that much smaller than her.

"I'd advise running for it," the Count advised Gudao while rapidly backing away from the center of the hall which was resembling a volcano in a rapidly melting glacier. "You'll drown in all this water vapor."

"Right." Gudao turned to see that the way out of the hall was clear, since everything had been taking place in front of him in the first place. "Let's regroup outside !"

l

(Chaldea, "Rayshifting: Implications for Chaldean Security" closed-door conference)

"That's the problem with humans, well magi specifically. You save their human history from being incinerated and they'll burn you for it. We would be so fortunate if they slit our throat and poured out our blood on the ground like water before roasting our flesh and devouring it. The tortuously few exceptions all but ensure a group like the Mages Association will perform near average."

"It's quite the catch-22," Gudako remarked after Doru had finished his turn speaking. Though he always had a notable negative view of humans, she couldn't help but think that since his mentor, or at least a version of Matou, had been summoned the purple-haired homunculus had taken a turn towards paranoia."

"Hardly," Siegfried shrugged. Though the two of them shared both mother and father, he looked alike to another homunculus, unlike the Masters. "With what we know of Rayshifts, Singularities and Grails there's a backstop even they can't ignore."

"Theoretically we could try to escape into a custom Singularity, but the investment aside, that would simply result in some other variant of Chaldea coming to do us in. Granted, anyone Rayshifting in with only a few Servants presumably wouldn't be able to actually take on all the Servants here, but any as-yet unknown systemic weakness would get us all killed provided someone had the right silver bullet, so to speak." Emet waved dismissively. "The idea of simply building out the Separation Order seems not only as, if not more, viable but also avoids dividing ourselves and other-ourselves."

"A Singularity would be a very bad idea because it would be like nuking someone to build a house. There's no reason we couldn't try to build a larger Chaldea, or multiple sub-versions that connected, unless of course Chaldea already is itself a Singularity," Sasaku agreed.

"Well, we do have a Grail and a Bounded Field, but since Chaldea doesn't connect to any historical point, it seems unlikely we would cause issues for Human History by just existing," Emet shrugged.

"I think by now we've gone from a Grail to a stack of fragments which no one would laugh at," Gudako pointed out. "Didn't you say that most stars, planets and decently-sized moons have things like Archetypes and Ultimate Ones?"

"So I've read," Sasaku said in reference to her variant of the (True Name Discernment) Skill. "But something like the Oort Cloud, an area filled with mostly empty space and a few asteroids, also has an Ultimate so potentially even the closer asteroid belt and Kuiper Belt have ones. Sadly, I have no bloody clue what is out there, as while humans have not observed signs of life, yet alone civilizations, but apparently a collection of balls of gravel can spawn an insanely powerful Ultimate One, so... at least they're an unknown and unlikely to pose more of an existential threat than the humans."

"Not a challenging bar. We need more conceptual weapons," Doru frowned. "Or better yet, new ones."

"That's a fairly dangerous way to go, though." Siegfried did not approve. "It's entirely possible that we'll have entities from the future trying to kill us for something we would do in the future."

Sasaku raised an eyebrow skeptically. "That sort of inane loop-paradox wouldn't be possible, though it would imply at least one Chaldea not only survived but actually did something to provoke such an escalation."

"You forget that whenever separated from the standard World branches it's possible to basically evade causality. Clearly whoever Incinerated human history had to have observed it was there to Incinerate it, you see where this leads..." Gudako added.

"If anything that would imply there's actually a higher level reality where causality does hold," Emet pointed out. "I suppose a likely candidate is this Root magi obsess over reaching."