Singularity F: The Flame-Contaminated City, Fuyuki
When the feeling of Fou licking his cheeks woke him back up, Ritsuka found that his hopes for relative safety had been quite thoroughly dashed.
He was in the middle of the charred husk of what might have been a city at one point. The stink of smoke and sulfur was if anything even thicker than it had been in the control room, and the dim glow of far-away fires was the closest thing to sunlight he could make out amidst the gloom.
As far as he could see, there didn't seem to be anyone else in the area."Looks like we're on our own for the moment, Fou," Ritsuka remarked to his animal companion. "Do you think we're the only living things in this place?"
"Fouuu."
"I guess I should take that as a yes."
As the young man took in his surroundings, it became clear to him that the damage to the city was far worse than it had seemed. Wrecked cars littered the streets, which were themselves cracked and broken apart as if hit by some terrifyingly powerful force. The few buildings that weren't consumed by flames were in various stages of wreckage and disrepair, and the sky was an unnatural shade of blood red. His first assumption was that some kind of meteor or earthquake or other natural disaster had just occurred…but if that was the case, why weren't there any signs of human life? No ordinary disaster could destroy a city this thoroughly and yet leave no corpses behind, he thought to himself with no small degree of trepidation.
About half an hour of fruitless investigation later, Ritsuka had stopped to rest with Fou in a mostly intact Japanese-style residence they had found. Before they could get too settled in, however, he heard a voice he knew very well.
"Senpai…no, Master! There you are! I'm so glad you're safe."
Mash had somehow fully healed from the injuries that should have killed her, and in the place of her old outfit she now wore a rather striking suit of skin-tight purple and black armor that seemed to have been built less to keep her protected and more to show off her body, with a matching set of leggings and gloves. She also seemed to have found an unusually-shaped shield that had to be at least as large as her entire body, and despite its size she held it up as easily as if it was made of cardboard.
Needless to say, Ritsuka was surprised for more than one reason.
"Mash?! What the hell happened to you? Why are you calling me Master?" While his knowledge of Servants was a little on the rusty side, he was pretty sure that he would have noticed if Mash had been one this whole time.
"It's a little complicated, but I'll explain later. For now, you need to get behind me!"
As if on cue, the clattering of something hard against the ruined roads got Ritsuka' attention as she gestured for him to stay behind her. When he saw the source of the noise, he found himself looking at a group of six animated skeletons advancing in his and Mash's direction. The largest of the skeletons, a hulking mass of jagged bone carrying a longsword, gestured menacingly at the two of them before they stumbled forward.
"Master, your orders, please!" she shouted as she braced herself for its strike.
The new Master quickly realized that in spite of her earlier rudeness the Director had a very good point about his lack of experience- the prospect of giving orders was far more difficult when you were in real danger and had to think quickly under pressure. Nevertheless, he took a deep breath to steady himself before giving what would be the first of many commands and hoping that it wouldn't end with Mash's blood on his hands. Or his own death, at that matter. He wasn't sure which would be worse, and he certainly didn't want to find out.
"They don't seem especially quick on their feet. Try and block their attacks as best as you can, then retaliate when they lose their balance. Got it?"
Mash nodded. "Understood. Engaging now!"
The first skeleton's blade hit Mash's shield head on, pushing her backwards a few inches but knocking the skeleton off-guard in the process. Before it could regain its balance, a backhanded swipe broke it into pieces with a sickening crunch and took down another of the skeletons as it tried to outflank her. Fortunately, whatever magic was keeping them animated didn't seem to work if their bodies were broken apart- the creatures simply seemed to turn to dust.
The next two skeletons proved to be no more dangerous than their kin, and the few times one of them did get a lucky swipe in it either bounced off Mash's shield or seemed to cause little more than a small scratch on her armor. A sweeping kick sent the fifth one tumbling to the ground, and before it could stand back up she charged into it with enough force to send it flying like a bowling pin before it crashed back to the ground. Only the apparent leader of the monsters was left standing now, and it rushed at Mash at a speed far faster than something so large ought to run.
Despite Mash's best efforts, the creature simply shrugged off her blows as if they were mere pinpricks and responded with one thunderous strike after the next. One of its slashes left a nasty-looking gash along his kouhai's arm, and when she briefly let her guard break it began battering her over the head with the blade's pommel until she was forced down onto the ground. Over the sound of Mash's cries of pain as she tried to drive the bone horror back, Ritsuka realized that if he didn't do something she would almost certainly die.
Even if he couldn't fight the monster directly, he had an idea of something he could do to help his kouhai. As he felt his magical energy surge through his circuits and saw the sphere of light coalesce within the palm of his hand, he prepared an incantation and envisioned his trigger: a speck of light in a great darkness that grew brighter and brighter until it filled everything.
"OLPRT!"
The sphere hurtled forward, exploding in a burst of light that dazed the giant skeleton right as it was about to perform a coup de grace. Despite not having any kind of eyes, it apparently had something similar enough to vision to be blinded by the blast. Not bad for someone who hasn't been practicing for a while, he thought to himself before noticing Mash had taken the opportunity to get back onto her feet. She needed new orders, and he didn't hesitate in giving them.
"Attack!"
Mash's subsequent shield bash struck her assailant with enough force to quite literally disarm it in a spray of bone shards. The battered remnants of the arm landed close to Ritsuka, and the young man pried the blade from the bony fingers in the hope of denying the weapon to its former owner. It didn't seem cursed or anything to him, and while Mash was holding her own just fine now he couldn't always rely on his magecraft to keep the both of them alive.
As if to remind him of that, the arm shuddered to a resemblance of life and began scuttling towards Ritsuka. Fortunately for him, being dismembered had apparently weakened the disembodied limb and it took only one swipe from his new weapon to render the arm lifeless once more.
Meanwhile, another swipe of Mash's shield through the bone horror's spine had neatly bisected the creature. The thing feebly attempted to drag itself forward with its remaining arm in a desperate attempt to retaliate, but soon went still and disintegrated.
Somehow, the Master and his Servant had made it through their first battle of many.
"Are you hurt, Senpai? Does your stomach hurt, or does it feel heavy?" Indifferent to her own brush with death for the second time in the past hour, Mash's first course of action upon her victory was to run towards the young man she now called her "Master".
"I'm okay. I'm more worried about you, to be honest," Ritsuka replied as he picked up the scabbard for his new trophy from what was left of the disintegrating skeleton and headed for a nearby home so the two of them could rest and get their bearings. Once again Mash's injuries seemed to have healed themselves with unusual speed, but he couldn't rule out the possibility of some kind of internal injury. She didn't seem hurt at least, and that was what mattered to him most right then.
"Don't worry about me. I might have struggled during my combat training, but I can fight much better than I used to now because…"
Her sentence was cut off by a pinging noise from Ritsuka' communicator, followed by a holographic image of a very harried-looking Dr. Roman. "Right, I finally got through! Hello? This is the Chaldea Command Room! Do you read me?"
"This is Mash Kyrielight, a member of A Team. At this time, I've completed the shift to Singularity F," Mash replied.
"And this is Ritsuka Fujimaru, I'm here as well," her companion added. "We ran into something nasty just a while ago, but we managed to defeat them somehow."
"I'm glad to see you're both alive- I was worried for a while that you might lose your existence."
The relieved grin on the doctor's face soon began to fade as he noticed Mash's…distinctive outfit.
"More importantly, what's up with that outfit?! I didn't raise you to dress like that!"
"I was more worried about how she managed to recover so quickly from her injuries- she was nearly dead before the Rayshift started," Ritsuka admitted as he thanked the doctor under his breath for saying what he had been thinking himself. "Mash, what happened to you?"
"...Dr. Roman. Please check my condition. You'll understand my condition better that way."
The sound of a computer's whirring could be heard over the communicator feed as Roman looked over Mash's vitals, followed by the doctor shouting with surprise loudly enough to make Ritsuka flinch.
"WHOA! Physical strength, Magical Circuits, everything's improved! You're not so much a human, but-"
"Yes, I'm a Servant." She spoke as if it was the most natural thing in the world to happen despite the decidedly unnatural circumstances she had been caught up in. "One of the Servants provided to investigate and resolve Singularity F lost its Master and was doomed to vanish. It found me as the Rayshift began and it offered me a contract at the last second. In return for the abilities and Noble Phantasm of a Heroic Spirit, he wanted me to eliminate the cause of this Singularity."
"The fusion of a human and a Heroic Spirit…isn't that a Demi-Servant? I see…looks like Chaldea's sixth experiment finally succeeded," Roman muttered to himself.
"Wait, what experiment are you talking about? I thought she said that this contract was made just a little while ago." Ritsuka had no idea what a "Demi-Servant" was, but from what he could remember about Heroic Spirits that sort of fusion wasn't supposed to be possible.
"Uh, don't worry about that right now." The doctor's dismissal was a bit on the fishy side, but Ritsuka figured he was far too guileless to actually hide anything so he chose not to press the issue further. "Anyway, does this Heroic Spirit still have his consciousness?"
Mash shook her head. "I'm afraid not. He vanished after giving me his combat abilities. So I don't even know whose Heroic Spirit I am or what Noble Phantasm this is," pointing at her shield as she finished her sentence. Now that Ritsuka looked at it, it seemed to have some kind of inscription in the center, but it was in a language he had never seen before. Perhaps it's the name of the shield, he wondered.
The newly minted Master's train of thought was interrupted by the sound of Roman speaking up again. "On the bright side, not every Servant that's summoned is cooperative. Since we can trust you completely, that's a point in our favor."
He turned back to Ritsuka with an apologetic look. "Sorry about forcing you into this without explaining more- the most important thing you need to know right now is that while you're the only one who Rayshifted here safely, you've still got one of humanity's most powerful weapons in the form of Mash."
"Um, Doctor? I don't know about "most powerful". I'm the one who gets blamed later if things go wrong, after all," Mash responded with a hint of trepidation in her voice. Ritsuka couldn't blame her; transforming into some kind of superhuman being without warning couldn't possibly be easy for her and he certainly was feeling a little anxious about the prospect of messing up now.
"I'm pretty sure Roman meant Servants in general, but you still seemed pretty powerful to me." Ritsuka was still unsure how exactly Mash could've become a Servant to begin with, but there were more important things he needed to know about first. "How exactly do you know I'm a Master, anyway? Don't I need to sign something?" What he had heard of Servant contracts made them sound like formal affairs, not something that could just happen in an instant.
Roman gestured to Ritsuka' right hand. "Take a look there and tell me what you see."
Ritsuka did so, then did a quick double take to be sure he wasn't seeing things. "Um, it looks like some kind of tattoo? Funny, I don't remember it being there before. Let me send an image of it over to you." With a push of a button and a slight ping, he sent over a picture of the mysterious symbol to Roman.
It wasn't long before the doctor got back to him. "That's your Command Spell. I'll explain the details to you later, but the short version is that it's the proof that you're a Master. Anyway, the most important thing you need to know is that Servants disappear without their source of magical energy- that would be you. Our facility has a reactor that can cover most of the magical energy cost of keeping them around, but it was badly damaged by the explosion and probably won't let you manifest more than a few of them at a time right now."
"It's a good thing I picked this up, then." The Master paused to show Roman his new blade, taking a moment to polish it before putting it back in its sheath. "I got it off one of the monsters in this place. If I end up being separated from my Servants, I guess I could defend myself long enough to get to safety and summon more."
"Er, you could, but I'd still let them do most of the fighting if I were you. If we lose you here we're not going to be able to resolve this Singularity until we get new Masters and I have no idea how long that would take." The pained expression on the doctor's face made it more than clear to Ritsuka what his stance on the prospect of contributing to battle directly would be, but at the same time he still didn't feel right about making Mash put herself in danger on his behalf any more than he had to.
He was her senpai, after all. Still, Roman had a point and he wasn't going to argue against it.
"Hopefully I won't need to do too much on my own, but it doesn't hurt to be careful. So, what do we do now?"
"You have two goals in your current mission. First, you need to-"bzzt
A burst of static filled the air as the hologram began flickering on and off. "Doctor, you're breaking up. Ten seconds until the connection is lost."
"Could SHEBA's output be growing unstable since we switched to the backup generators? I suppose I'll have to cut the briefing short then. There's a strong leyline reading about 2 kilometers away from you. If you can get there, your connection should stabilize and I can finish briefing you. Listen, don't do anything reckless, will you? I'll try to bring the power back up as soon as-"
Before Roman could finish, the hologram shut off completely.
"Looks like we don't have much of a choice," Ritsuka concluded. "We should get going before more of those skeleton monsters show up."
Mash nodded in agreement as they prepared to leave their temporary haven, her shield in hand. "Right, you're so dependable Senpai. I was actually terrified, so thank goodness we made it."
"To be honest, I was scared out of my wits as well. But we can't let that stop us now or we're not going to get out of here in one piece."
A brief flash of white accompanied by the sound of steps got the pair's attention. Ritsuka hadn't even begun to unsheathe his sword before he recognized Fou; judging by the annoyed glare it was giving him, it clearly didn't appreciate the implied threat. "Sorry, sorry. I nearly forgot you were still here."
"Kyu. Fou, fooou!" Still glaring at him, Fou leapt onto Mash's shoulder. "And now I realize I didn't tell Roman about Fou joining us. Sorry about that, Fou. Again."
"Kyu. Fou, kyaao!" The Master could only assume that Fou said something along the lines of "don't worry about it" as it jumped off of Mash's shoulder and clambered up his back to perch on his head. "We can tell him Fou's with us when we get back in touch. For now, we should proceed to that leyline before we run into any more trouble."
Mash nodded in agreement. "Understood, Senpai. I'll keep an eye out for any monsters."
After about half an hour's walk there still hadn't been any sign of enemies or human life, but that hadn't stopped him from looking over his shoulder every so often with a hand on his sword just in case something was trying to ambush him and Mash. Fortunately, there hadn't been anything other than the occasional noise from a building collapsing in the distance or some debris crumbling.
"What could've possibly happened here?" Ritsuka asked Mash. He didn't expect her to know any better than he did, but talking helped to pass the time if nothing else.
"I'm not sure," Mash answered, her shield at the ready. "It's not even close to what our data says Fuyuki should be like in 2004. It should've been an average regional city, but instead it's like…this. Even if some kind of disaster did take place back then, the mana density in the atmosphere is closer to that of ancient Earth."
Mash opened her mouth as if she was going to elaborate, but whatever she was going to say was cut off by an ear-splitting cry of terror from somewhere in the distance accompanied by the sounds of a Finn Shot striking something hard.
"That sounded close. Let's go check it out- Mash, get ready for combat!" The Shielder nodded in assent as the two of them ran towards the source of the noise as fast as their legs could carry them.