Preface:

This story is a sequel of my Fate/Stay Night fic 'Tempered by Fire'. Which means you should probably check it out before getting to this one. The story might work on its lonesome, to a certain extent, but I don't recommend it.

This is an 'Incineration of Human Order Incident' fic. The rest of the material part of Grand Order or the wider Type-Moon franchise may get referenced, but this story isn't beholden to their lore. Speaking of which, I can't stress enough the fact that canon lore is just a guideline for this story. A prompt if you will. Type-Moon lore is heavy and contrived and not even a coherent whole anymore, I am under no delusions about my ability to strictly adhere to it, so I won't even try.

You don't expect a reinterpretation of a classical symphony to sound exactly the same. You don't expect the deconstruction of a dish to taste exactly the same. A fic carries the flavor of the original story, without necessarily sticking to every single detail from it.

In other words, this story is canon compliant until I find it inconvenient, then it isn't.

001 - The Last Master

Olga Marie Animusphere.

Olga Marie Animusphere is not a great magus of genius talent. She's not particularly smart or competent either. Blazing hells, she's not even a particularly decent person. A mediocre heir with mediocre talents and mediocre future, placed in a position of power by mere whims of fate. The entire world has made it clear that nobody expects anything from her except maybe hobbling along somehow without making things worse until the end of her tenure, unliked, unsung and unpraised.

Lady Director of the Organization for the Preservation of Human Order, what a joke. More like a talentless, useless and uneducated figurehead accidentally shoved into a position of actual power by a freak accident. If it wasn't for Lev…

But no, she shouldn't dwell on that. She still has her pride, after all. As pathetic as her actual capabilities are, she'll do her best to fulfill her duty. Because there's nobody else.

And it has even worked, so far! Somehow. Years of floundering about a seat too big for her rear haven't ended in everything going down in flames and her constant and desperate attempts at catching up with far too many things in far too little time even managed to teach her a thing or two.

About understanding reports and properly reacting to them, about maintaining discipline and ensuring everyone did their jobs, about dealing with outsiders trying to push their own agendas, about balancing budgets and mediating between subordinates… In other words, about directing an organization.

Maybe she isn't the best at any of that, maybe she's not even adequate, but she's good enough that she can fake it. For a time, a blissful and optimistic time where she dared to hold hope for the future, she dared to believe could actually fake it till she made it.

Then SHEBA went red in what looked suspiciously like the early stages of a First Order and everything went to s-shit. (She can swear inside her own mind if the situation calls for it, d-damnit!) It was all back to scrambling for a foothold while the world collapsed around her.

And yet, here she is. Getting ready to induct the last batch of Master Candidates, mere hours before her A Team will Rayshift into Singularity F and put an end to this nonsense. In spite of her very justified fears, the world kept spinning, the song of life trudged on. Sometimes… sometimes she wonders whether she's somehow distorting casualty so things will work out in the end through the power of sheer, ulcer-inducing anxiety.

Letting out a deep, dragged out sigh, she grabs the small bottle resting on her desk. A finely-decorated crystal flask filled with a slightly glowing blue liquid. It's beautiful, but also clearly supernatural. She doesn't even need to use her thaumaturgical senses, any magus worth their salt could tell with just a glance.

It was also a gift from the last Master Candidate, one Fujimaru Ritsuka. Japanese native in spite of her reddish-orange hair and golden eyes. Hailing from Fuyuki City, a backwater town in a backwater country whose only noteworthy feature is the fact that it hosted the Grail War that the Animusphere Family won years ago. The place is utterly irrelevant in the great scheme of things and their only moment in the spotlight has already come and gone. The girl had passed the compatibility tests with flying colors though, and Chaldea couldn't afford to look down on talent no matter their background.

Most importantly though, Fujimaru isn't supposed to have any prior contact with magecraft.

And yet… here she is, holding a bottle of magical perfume that the obnoxiously friendly girl had proudly declared of her own making. There's only one reason she hasn't sent the now very suspicious girl to the brig for enhanced interrogation. Well, besides being pressed for time and resources at the moment and not wanting to put additional pressure on operations without due reason.

But once she held back her first impulse to actually study the bottle, she got some data that made… a frustrating amount of sense.

In the first place, she couldn't identify the thaumaturgical principles behind the creation of this perfume. At all. While magus families protect their mysteries jealously so they wouldn't be figured out by others, being incapable of even recognizing them is a whole different matter.

Secondly, the perfume itself was nothing like what one would expect of a barbarian's ham-fisted attempt at sabotaging her. The thing was nearly oozing with the positive aspects of healing and life force. This thing couldn't be harmful if it tried. It couldn't even be used as a component for a two-stage poison, its very nature would rebel against it.

And thirdly, Fujimary really, truly looked and acted nothing like any magus worth their salt would. Cheerful, humble, accepting and friendly. She listened when Olga talked to her, she smiled through Olga's prickly words and poor social graces, she frowned in sympathy at all the right places, she even went out of her way to volunteer her nonexistent skills to help around. No, Olga refuses to believe such a creature could be a proper magus.

The fact that Fujimaru has magecraft potential is not strange on its own. Master candidates are chosen for their compatibility with Rayshifting and Servant Summoning and that implies at least a distant supernatural background. Even the most mundane candidates have at either a trace amount of dormant Magic Circuits or some sort of extenuating circumstance along these lines.

All that put together points at the girl being the distant descendant of a lost magus family, somehow inheriting a potion-crafting Trait that she's been subconsciously applying to her homebrewed perfumes. Anywhere else in the world, the poor girl would've been strapped to a dissection table before she could blink, for reasons as puerile as trying to steal the Trait or even trying to distill a lost Crest back into existence.

Distasteful and pointless, more likely to explode in the faces of the greedy fools than actually provide any useful results. Just a waste of resources in Olga's opinion. Here in Chaldea, they don't treat people like disposable tools to discard at a whim, but rather make sure to use them to the utmost of their abilities as the limited resource they are.

She'll make sure to squeeze every last drop of use out of this Master Candidate, just like she does with everyone else under her (protection) command.

Lifting the already verified perfume in front of her face, she takes a closer look at the softly glowing liquid, different gradients of blue gently shifting around the flask to make nonsensical but aesthetically pleasant patterns.

The exact effects of this perfume are unknown, but she knows enough to get a general idea. And something related to health and vitality in a positive way sounds incredibly tempting to her about now. She needs to look and be at her best for the new recruits, including the girl who made this perfume. She then needs to keep looking and being at her best for the old recruits during the Singularity investigation. And then… you guessed it, she needs to keep looking and being at her best for her command staff while they discuss whatever results the A Team brings back from the Singularity.

She has her own means to keep herself sharp, but they aren't exactly Sixth Magic material. They won't interfere with a vitality-based effect, either…

"Chantage, huh?" She mutters to herself, reading the label again with an amused snort. "Count on a barbarian to pick weird names for their perfumes."

After a brief, last moment of hesitation, Olga applies some of it on herself and pockets the flask. Anything less than her absolute best won't do today and at least the perfume smells nice.

Hmm… She's already feeling the effects, too. Surprisingly decent work for a hedge magus, it would even be considered passable by Clock Tower standards. Maybe she should find the time to have some private words with Fujimaru, once things settle down.

Mashu Kyrielight

During the past few months, Chaldea's main base has been growing livelier and livelier as it went from a skeleton crew to fully manned to deal with the upcoming emergency. That's… certainly not something to be glad about, but Mashu can't help but feel it nice that the place doesn't look so dark and empty anymore.

Not like she's actually… tried to join any of the groups, of course. She wouldn't know where to even start with something like that. But simply being around, partaking in the mood as the corridors liven up and the halls fill with people, as previously closed sectors of the base open up to make room for the new personnel…

Well, it certainly feels like she's livening up alongside the place.

Now, if only she could just find where Fou scampered to…

"Fou! Fou!"

She perks up at the familiar cries coming from a couple of corridors over, a smile on her face as she starts walking towards—

"Vade retro, creature!" A new, unknown voice resonates through the hallways, coming from the same direction Fou's cries had. "I deny your strength!"

Her smile turning into a worried frown, Mashu picks up the pace. Running in the hallways is frowned upon, but there's no one else around and this is an emergency. Or… well, it could become an emergency. Fou is adorable and harmless, but what if one of the new recruits stumbled into him and misunderstood something? She needs to get there before something bad happens!

With some rather gruesome scenarios in mind that nobody would ever expect such a sweet and shy girl to even conceive, Mashu breaks into a sprint, running past a couple of empty corridors and turning a last corner in a rush to find…

"Fou! Fou Fou!"

"Alas. I am slain."

… Fou sitting on the chest of an unknown redheaded girl who lies on the floor, splayed on her back with an arm covering her face in a dramatic fashion. There's an uncharacteristically smug aura radiating from the usually peaceful and affectionate creature, while the girl lets out theatrically exaggerated groans and moans of defeat.

It's at this point, while Mashu is taking a couple of tentative, hesitant steps towards the duo, that she makes a mistake. Nobody would say the Chaldea Master Uniform makes for a particularly lurid set of clothes, beyond the somewhat short skirt that's mostly offset by the black leggings worn underneath.

Mashu had certainly never looked at the many female Master Candidates -nor anyone else, really- with lustful eyes before, but there's something undeniable alluring in the way this girl is positioned. Her skirt has ridden up and the leggings are form-fitting enough to show off the entirety of her shapely legs.

What's more, it turns out that the leggings only block sight while the wearer holds a neutral stance. If the wearer bends her legs in extreme angles and the leggings get stretched out too far, they rapidly become see-through. This means that the current pose of the unknown girl is allowing Mashu a full, clear view of…

"N– No pan–?" She squeaks out without meaning to, feeling her cheeks heat up as she cuts herself off and covers her face and eyes with both hands. "Awawawawa–!"

Mashu Kyrielight is a good girl. She doesn't think bad or others nor does she dwell in dark thoughts that will get her nowhere nice. She doesn't even swear inside her own head. And yet, something important has just changed, deep within her. She has been led astray in a way she'll never fully recover from. There's no way she'll ever look at the female Chaldea Master Uniform with the same eyes after this.

"Oh, I didn't see you there!" The girl lifts her head over Fou's body to smile brightly, as if she hasn't just upended Mashu's entire worldview. "Could you talk this mighty warrior into getting off me? The floor is chilly and my butt is freezing!"

"G– Give it back." Mashu finds herself saying, a growing frown marring her face as dismayed realization slowly turns into rightful indignation.

"What?" The girl's smile dims a bit, her head tilting sideways in curiosity.

That motion makes her fiery locks slide over her face in a way that Mashu would've normally thought nothing of, but her current overexcited, misguided and t-tainted mind cannot help but view under a sensual light. Her throat tightens, mouth feeling suddenly very dry and–

"My innocence!" Mashu demands, feeling her cheeks and ears burning up as she peeks at the (alluring) girl from between her fingers. "Give it back!"

"Uh… I'm not sure what's going on here." The girl hesitates, causing Fou to jump off her when she slowly starts getting up from the floor. "But I'm afraid innocence is one of these things you cannot get back after losing. Spilled milk and all that."

"T– Then you better…" In a supreme effort of will, Mashu draws her hands away from her head so she can properly glare at the (alluring) girl in front of her. At the same time, her mind desperately gropes for something to demand, something that fits her current situation and properly conveys her feelings about it. "You better take responsibility!"

… That wasn't what she was trying to say.

"Has anyone told you that you look cute when you're flustered?" The alluring girl asks with an unfairly sensual chuckle. "That pout is absolutely charming."

Mashu isn't flustered, she's furious and indignant! And she's not pouting, she's glaring!

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