Rouen, May 30, 1431
The fire...
The stake...
Her screams...
They deafened the male as he was tied to the stake, beside him the charred remains of his beloved crumbling and falling into the flames.
He bowed his head, watching helplessly as the woman he loved suffered her fate. Wondering why she had to go through this... why she didn't do anything. His brown eyes looked out over the crowd, his mouth twisted into a furious grimace as he had to restrain himself from cursing those people who rejoiced in the misfortune of this woman burning alive.
And these so-called saints... these churchmen who accused of heresy and condemned this woman who believed in God as much as they did. This woman without whom their king wouldn't have his ass on the throne... this kingdom... this church... he hated them.
He hated this so-called god who did nothing for her, except send her to the battlefield to let greedy nobles and a corrupt bishop burn her alive once this conflict was over...
He wanted to save her, he wanted to attack the guards, take her with him and run as far away as possible. But when he went to see her in the cell, she asked him to do nothing... and he agreed. And here he was, watching the woman he loved die slowly consumed by flames.
"I'll never forgive you for what you did to her..." he growled as he stared at the fire in which burned the woman he had accompanied during these conflicts.
The fire in which Jeanne D'Arc burned.
Zawame City, October 6, 2013
"Ouch!" Complained a male voice after falling out of bed.
"Why... why do I keep having the same dream..." The boy wondered after falling out of bed.
It was a young man of about nineteen, with black hair and blue eyes. His name was Alan Forgeot.
He stood up and found himself inches from the sound of his alarm clock, whose shrill alarm went off. This made him groan before he pressed the snooze button.
"Well... I'd better get ready..." he said to himself before standing up and putting on a red t-shirt.
He soon arrived at the salon after having had a few breakfasts and watched the news.
"Hello, Zawame City!" Said a voice as a poster advertising "Yggdrasill Corporation" came into view.
"Welcome to DJ Sagara's live show!" The man to whom the voice belonged as he went live with the "Beat Rider Hotline" logo in one corner of the image.
It was a middle-aged man with a shaved head covered by a beanie and a sports shirt, as he.
During DJ Sagara's live show, on one stage, a group of dancers wearing a variety of mostly blue and white streetwear performed their choreography to a cheering crowd.
"We'll be cheering on all the Beat Riders who'll be frying themselves on the concrete today! The sky is blue and the sun is shining on the Yggdrasill Tower! Here we go! Can you feel the Zawame City beat tingling throughout your body?" Said DJ Sagara as the whole city used products labeled Yggdrasill Corpotation.
These ranged from websites to credit cards to utilities.
The group of dancers continued their choreography to the sound of the music, until someone removed the card from the speaker terminal, bringing it to an end.
As the spectators wondered what was going on, the dance group looked towards the terminal to see another group of dancers dressed in black and red with black jackets and trench coats with red trim and gold buttons. One of them was holding their card.
"Hey, what's your problem?" Asked a girl with short light-pink hair, part of her hair tied in a braid and light-brown eyes.
"From now on, this scene belongs to the Barons!" Declared the member of the opposing team, appearing to be the ringleader, causing spectators to boo them off the stage.
"The streets aren't big enough for the two of you? But that's no excuse for acting like this, man!" Said DJ Sagara as his stream showed him with a miniature screen showing the fight between the two teams. "Back home, when we want to know who's the best, who's the strongest, we let our little babies do it! Them! The Lockseeds!"
DJ Sagara then pointed to two locks with a fruit motif on them, an orange and a banana respectively.
"Do you want to fight?" Team Baron's leader asked, pulling out a Lockseed with a Pine Cone motif.
"No problem! Anytime!" replied the girl, taking out a Lockseed in her turn, this time with a black and white sunflower seed motif.
"Rinne, you might want to call Alan." said one of the group.
"He's busy right now, if you haven't forgotten." Rinne retorted.
"Unlock the padlocks and call the Inves to solve your problem in style! Keep winning, get respect and you'll be champion in no time! Ok! Let's go for the beat, Riders!" Said DJ Sagara as the two opponents unlocked their Lockseeds, creating a holographic boxing ring, and two zippered portals opened, from which emerged two holographic creatures.
Battle Start!
The two creatures, the Inves, clashed. The audience and the two groups of dancers were so focused on the fight that they failed to notice that a white-haired member of Team Baron, standing back, was aiming a slingshot at the back of Rinne's hand.
He fired, hitting her hand and causing her to drop her Lockseed.
The Inves linked to the Lockseed sensed this and stopped the fight before breaking through the wall of the arena on Rinne's side and exiting, materializing completely and becoming aggressive towards the humans.
Panic ensued and civilians kicked the Lockseed as they fled, pushing it further away from the arena.
"Silly girl, don't you know not to drop your padlock in the middle of a fight?" mocked the leader of Team Baron.
Rinne wanted to react to his mockery, but decided to concentrate on the more urgent task of recovering the Lockseed and sending the Inves back to where it came from.
She ran towards the Lockseed, but when she saw that the Inves was going to attack a child who was looking around, she rushed at it to push it out of the creature's way.
Then Alan arrived on the scene in front of the Lockseed and picked it up. He opened it, opening a new portal into which the Inves rushed before he could close it. He took one last look at the Lockseed to see that it was broken, probably due to the kicking it had received in the panic.
"You always come at the right time." Rinne joked, the tension now gone.
"A good leader always looks after his arrival." Alan joked in turn as Rinne's team approached Alan.
"You called your Inves back first!" Said Team Baron's leader, attracting their attention while recalling his own. "That means we win by forfeit, right? So the stage is ours."
You Win!
Rinne lowered her eyes in shame. Then Team Baron finally noticed Alan and stepped back a little.
"Tell me, Nash, why isn't Kite here?" he asked, glowering at them.
None of the Team Baron members dared reply as he walked towards them, climbing the arena until he was only a few centimetres from Nash.
"The preparations are ready. See you tonight, without fail. We'll take the opportunity to discuss this with the real leader of your team." Says Alan.
"O-ok..." Nash stammered.
Then he turned back to his team, while Rinne still had that ashamed look and pouty face.
"Sorry, Alan. You gave me that Lockseed, but I screwed it up... Because of me, they stole our stage and it's broken." she apologized.
"Don't be ridiculous." Alan reassured her, showing her his Lockseed. "It's a class D, he used a class C. It would have taken a hell of a stroke of luck to win. And don't worry, tonight we'll take the opportunity to give him a hard time."
"Tonight? You mean it's finally ready?!" Asked the team member who'd tried to dissuade Rinne.
"Exactly, Ryu. They've all arrived. I've already warned the others. So I want you all at the base tonight without fail."
"Got it!" The members of his team nodded.
"Perfect. On that note, I'll leave you to find a new scene. I've got to replace that Lockseed." Alan ordered.
"You're not going to see this guy, are you?" Said Rinne.
"I'd call Marie, but you know her, she'd give me a hard time if I called her during her working hours." Alan smiled before turning to leave.
"The Team Gaim player screwed up! Which means they're out! Ouch!" Said DJ Sagara before starting a vote on his stream, to which the majority of his viewers voted for Team Baron. "The Barons are blowing away the votes! And the Gaim are losing points en masse! It's going to be hard to get back up!"
One of the viewers was wearing a Team Baron uniform with a trench coat, and wasn't really happy with what he saw.
He had blond hair slicked back, blue eyes and an extremely old piece of metal tied around his neck with a leather string. This was Kite Hoshino, the real leader of Team Baron.
In the Yggdrasill Tower, a group of 6 people stood in front of a box labeled "Fragile" on each side.
There was a man in a black suit, green shirt with his hair slicked back and a pair of glasses.
A man with black hair with a white streak in a ponytail, wearing a black T-shirt and a white jacket.
A young man with light-brown hair wearing a Fédora.
A woman wearing a black suit and tie with a white shirt, skirt and dark tights.
A muscular man in a butler's uniform with a red handkerchief in his front jacket pocket.
And a man appearing to be the oldest person in the group wearing an outfit that looked like it belonged to a nobleman with an open kimono over it.
"So you managed to find the catalysts." Said the older man, looking at the one wearing glasses.
"Indeed I did. We'll be able to perform the rite tonight without any worries." replied the man.
"Why don't we do it now? Just force Sid to come here." asked the man with the white hair.
"He said he'd found a potential customer to test one of Project Armored's first prototype models. replied the woman.
"And you let him?" Asked the older man.
"I let him do it so he could be a guinea pig, while allowing us to accumulate more profits in the long term. replied the man with the glasses. "If his "client" uses it in public, it could motivate more people to buy Lockseeds, and he could look for new, more powerful ones. And so, increase our profits and use this money to finance research."
"Hmm... Good initiative, Ritsuka. We'll wait for him. In the meantime, carry on as if nothing had happened." Said the older man.
His subordinates nodded and went about their day's work.
Later, Alan entered a fruit shop called Drupers, made his way to a hidden corner room and found himself face to face with a man in a bowler hat sitting on a chair with a wheeled suitcase with drawers beside him.
"Well, look who it is. Your team's in the red, isn't it?" Says the man in the bowler hat, sipping a cup of tea.
"It's always a pleasure to see you following my team's exploits and failures, Sid." Alan replied sarcastically, pulling out the broken Lockseed. "We need a new one."
"Oh, that's okay. I'm just teasing. Besides, a good dealer should be able to sniff out bargains, shouldn't he?" Sid smiled, putting down his cup. "But you're in luck, I've still got plenty of this model's Lockseed.
"Considering it's the most common, I'm not surprised." Alan retorted as Sid placed the Lockseed in a Plexiglas box on the table.
"I've also got something you can use to reverse the trend. added the Lockseed dealer.
"A new Lockseed or a class A or B?" Alan asked, sitting down on the seat opposite Sid.
"No, this." Sid replied, pulling something out of his suitcase that Alan had never seen before.
It was a device resembling a black belt buckle with a knife-like lever on the side.
Alan looked at the object with interest.
Much later in the evening, Team Gaim and Team Baron faced each other in a large building. Alan and Kite approached each other and greeted each other with a check.
"Glad to see you saw the message. I was afraid your cuties wouldn't have gotten the message to you if you hadn't seen mine." Alan smiled.
"Oh don't worry, I got it while I was watching Sagara's stream. And before we get down to business, I think we need to remind them of a few things." Kite said, turning his gaze to Nash, who gasped.
"I told you we'd sort it out. And we've got time on our hands while we wait for Marie." Said Alan as the two leaders faced them. "You want me to remind you that we split into two 'rival' teams in order to do storytelling without hostility between the two.
"You just did." Ryu retorted, making the group laugh a little.
"That's right, make fun of it. But that doesn't change the fact that what you've done has put us in the shit. Team Gaim has fallen down the rankings, even though we were basically changing places from first to second." Alan retorted.
"So we'll only ask once, Nash: why did you play the troublemaker and steal the scene from Team Gaim?" Kite asked in a cold, firm tone.
"Well..." Nash said hesitantly. "Like you said, we keep swapping places between the two front-runners..."
"So we thought it would spice things up a bit if one of the two teams ended up in a bad way. And since Team Baron is the one who, in everyone's eyes, has the ideology of the law of the strongest... " Continued the white-haired member of Team Baron.
"You thought it was a good idea to pull this stunt and not tell us about it beforehand. Kite concluded as he and the Gaim team stared at each other.
"It's a shame, the plan was good. If you'd told us about it beforehand, we could have drawn up an action plan that went further than just 'getting the other team into trouble'." Ryu added.
"And we could have avoided creating a panic with an out-of-control Inves. Rinne added.
"This wouldn't have happened if you'd managed to keep your Lockseed in your hand!" Ren retorted, earning a glare from Kite that silenced him.
Just as tension was running high between the two teams because of Team Baron's initiative, the front door opened and a young woman with medium-length brown hair and a pair of glasses entered the meeting.
"I'm sorry I'm late, but the bus chose the right moment to take its break. She said, arriving where everyone had gathered to see the tension. "Has someone done something stupid?"
"Not just one person." Alan retorted before changing the subject. "But there's no point in getting worked up about it. And now that you're here, we can get down to business."
Then the group made room in the hall of the building, where seven ritual circles with a hotel at the center of each were set up.
Alan then took out a box containing 6 ancient-looking relics from different eras.
"Remind us why we have to be the extras? A member of Team Baron asked, pointing to the members of his team and Team Gaim, who had to stand back while Alan, Rinne, Ryu, Kite, Nash, Ren and Marie stood in front of the box.
"Because we're the seven best suited to participate because of our affinity for magic." Rinne retorted before sticking his tongue out at them.
"And then I'll be good for something other than leaking you the new lockseeds." Marie joked as she, Alan, Rinne, Ryu, Nash and Ren took a relic from the box, while Kite removed his necklace.
At the same time, in an empty room in the Yggdrasill Tower, all those present at the catalyst reception and Sid stood before ritual circles like those in the room where Team Gaim and Team Baron were located, with the catalysts placed on the altars.
"Well, let's get started. said the older man, before all seven raised their right hands to their respective altars.
Team members Gaim and Baron placed their catalysts on various altars and stood in front of the one assigned to them.
"Come on, let's go..." Alan said, before they too raised their right hands to their respective altars.
"For the elements, silver and iron. For the base, stone and the Archduke of the Pacts. The alloy conferred is 'Gold'/'Silver'." The two groups of seven began to chant, unaware that the other was doing the same, as all the ritual circles began to glow with golden light for Team Gaim and Baron, and silver for members of Yggdrasill.
"Let a wall rise for the wind to fall. Let the four doors close. Advance from the Crown... And pass the fork leading to the Kingdom!" They said as the ritual circles began to flicker, before currents of air swirled around them.
"Listen to my words. My will creates your body, and your sword creates my destiny! If you heed the Grail's call, obey my will, my reason, answer me! I solemnly swear... That I will be all the good in the world. That I will vanquish all evil in the world." They said as red marks, each different to the person but composed of the three motifs forming one, appeared on their right hands.
"You, Seventh Heaven, clothed in the three immense worlds of power, come from the circle of links, Guardian of Balance!" They said, completing the incantation as the ritual circles glowed with a blinding light, completing the invocations.
When the golden light faded, the two danceur teams and Marie could see the seven Servants they had summoned.
The one assigned to Alan was a young girl in her mid-teens with a slender physique, soft skin, green eyes and blond hair. She wore a blue dress with pieces of armor.
The one assigned to Kite was a young woman with long blond hair coupled with a crown and veil covering her face. She apparently wore a black dress that exposed her navel and abdomen.
The one assigned to Ryu was a woman wearing beautiful green clothes. She had long, unkempt hair with green dye around her face and wormlike eyes with a slit pupil containing a bestial gleam.
The one assigned to Rinne was a little girl with lavender hair and yellow-green eyes, with scars sewn into her face. She wore a black vest, black panties and black stockings with pink shoes. Both her arms were bandaged, but only her left hand wore a glove. She had a purple oval "O" on each of her shoulders. At the small of her back, she wore a number of sheaths containing her knives.
The one assigned to Nash was an androgynous-looking boy with pink hair and eyes. He was smartly dressed in a suit of armor consisting of black undergarments that ended in a robe and stockings with leggings, gauntlets and hip protectors with a central red stripe and gold accents on top. As well as black bows on either side of his head and a cape that was white on the outside and red on the inside with a fluffy white collar.
The one assigned to Ryu was the most mysterious of their team, looking very much like a witch in a fairy tale. Wearing a blue-purple hooded dress that concealed all but the lower part of her face.
The one assigned to Marie was an extremely beautiful woman. She had long violet hair and red eyes. She wore a full-body outfit that showed off her curvaceous body, with metal shoulder pads and a mask over the lower half of her face.
The one assigned to the elderly man was a blond-haired, worm-eyed man wearing clothes that looked as if they dated from the late 19th century.
The one assigned to Ritsuka was a regally dressed man, appearing as black as a shadow in the night, contrasting with his pale face, blue eyes and long, silky white hair.
The one assigned to Ryoma was a young man with a deathly pale face and not a single crease in it. He had huge, rolling eyes and black, slicked-back hair. His clothes were rather strange. He wore a luxurious robe of ancient design, with blood-scarlet patterns adorning the jet-black fabric, and an inky-black cassock. What's more, the crimson-dyed patterns on the fabric resembled bloodstains.
The one assigned to the woman was small in stature, entirely covered in thick armor with red patterns that completely enveloped her petite figure, concealing both her race and gender.
The one assigned to Sid was a woman with long purple hair. She wore a blindfold that concealed her eyes, a dress with a short, strapless skirt, exposing her cleavage, as well as a father of gloves reaching to the end of her forearms and black stockings, and a black necklace linked to a long, thin chain.
The one assigned to the man with the Fedora was a Spartan with a physique and outfit like one might see in the film 300, with his helmet creating a shadow over his face allowing only eyes without irises or pupils to be distinguished.
The one assigned to the butler was a man with golden hair rising like a fiery flame and eyes as crimson as blood. He wore golden armor.
Once all had been summoned, the servants raised their heads to look at their master with a firm, determined gaze, before all pronouncing their oaths.
"Answering the summons, here we stand. We are the Servants of Gold/Silver. Our fates are bound to our masters. Our swords are at your disposal!"
At the same time, in front of a church, a fifteenth servant appeared at the entrance to the town. She was the arbiter of the coming conflict, a Ruler-class servant.
She was a woman of a beauty that hardly seemed real. Her hair was long, blonde and braided, and her eyes were the color of amethyst. She wore an outfit made mostly of cloth, with a few pieces of armor, including one on her forehead. In her hand, she held a spear on which hung a gilded white flag.
As she looked out over the city, a strange feeling came over her. She couldn't put her finger on what it was, but one thing was certain: the feeling was extremely familiar.