103: Black and Blue
A blue sky, choked with smoke. A green meadow, drowned in mud. At the top of that hill, I see them. Corpses, piled one upon the other. How many times?
I die. I die. I dieIdieIdieIdieIdieIdieIdieIdieIdieIdieIdieIdieIdie.
Again and again, without end, arrows stream down on me. The tower grows. The mud rises. It cannot reach him. I die eighty times.
It reached him for a moment, but after he placed that skin over his face and mounted that monstrous bird, he was out of reach. I cannot touch him. Even as the tower scrapes the heavens, even as the accursed mud fills this false world, he still evades it. I die four hundred times.
The tower is tall enough to reach the stars. The mud is deep enough to swallow the sun. We open our eyes. I die ████ ████████ times.
Unsealing the furnace. Attain a drop of truth. [████████████ ███████ █████].
Fire fills the air. The bird dies, and the mud swallows him without complaint.
I wake up screaming, and throw up.
"[Excalibur Morgaaaan]!" Arthur shouts, purple light cascading out of her sword.
"[Lord Chaldeas]!" Mash responds, and the familiar brick wall forms, breaking the tide of certain death.
"...[Cor Leonis]." Slowly, I begin to draw her exhaustion into myself, and… the wall holds. Against multiple successive blasts of [Excalibur Morgan], for five, ten, fifteen minutes, until I feel like I'm about to pass out myself. "Georgios!"
Mash's shield drops, and in the next instant-!
"[Interfectum Dracones]!" A javelin of light spears the simulated Arthur through the chest, and she detonates in a blinding flash of light, leaving behind a small silver chess piece holding a sword.
"That's… five in a row… Senpai…" Mash says through heavy breaths.
"Yeah. You… did great, Mash," I respond, grinning through my own exhaustion.
"What are these strange things…?" Georgios mutters, picking up the chess piece.
"Ah…" Who knows? "Some kind of lootbox system? She drops gold ones and purple dust sometimes too." He stares at me incredulously. "…Blame Prelati, probably. Mordred was collecting the Saber pieces, I think…"
"...Indeed, she was helping you with this previously, was she not?" He asks, wisely changing the subject away from the weird drop items.
"Yeah, she had a bit of fun at first, but at some point she just went 'Argh, this is totally undermining all of my feelings about that fight! Get someone else to do it!'" I say.
"Could you not have just changed the enemy…?" He asks.
"Well, King Arthur is both strong and predictable," Mash says. "We tried Lancelot one time, and he tried to use his Noble Phantasm to take over the simulator…"
"It didn't work, but it was way too scary!" I shudder. "But enough of that - hey, Georgios, what's up with everyone you hit with your Noble Phantasm blowing up like a sentai villain?"
"Holy power…?" He replies unconvincingly. He doesn't know either, huh…?
An unmarred blue sky, free of smoke. A peaceful green hill with no mountain of corpses on it.
(Something about this place is familiar.)
My attack is stopped not by instant death, but by something approximating a judo throw.
The blond man looks at me, a grimace on his face, breathing with some exertion. Why didn't he kill me? Even for someone as weak as him-
"As if! As if I'm going to kill you when your Noble Phantasm straight up tells me you're going to come back!" He shouts, pointing at me. "If killing you was the answer, Heracles would have handled it. Which means - the trick is to not kill you, right? Nobody else figured that out - gah, freaking idiots! This is what I get for hiring a crew of meatheads!"
I raise my blade to my throat. "...Hey," He gives a shocked noise, but his face betrays the fact that he's already figured me out. "Hey, HEY, don't you dare-!"
I die. The first body is added to the pile. The sky opens, and mud is belched forth.
"Hey, hey, hey, what the hell is this!? Ow! Ow! Why is this stuff hot!?" He hops from one foot to the other as the mud laps at his toes. Just how pathetic is this guy…?
I kill myself two more times. The tower grows. The mud rises.
"Oh come on, what the hell is wrong with you!? Don't tell me I need to restrain you? I slept through that class!" He whines, but he begins running towards me. "I hate fighting so muuuuuch!"
I wake up mildly worried, but mostly just confused.
"So about that sleep aid I asked for…" I start.
"Sorry, I've been squeezing in research where I can, but things like Dream Catchers are pretty far removed from western magecraft," Da Vinci explains. "I could make a potion if we had the materials, but obviously those are in short supply. As far as a Mystic Code to help with it goes… well, I'll need at least a month to produce a prototype that's safe to test on humans."
…Oi, Flat-senpai, didn't you say that you threw that thing together in an afternoon? You didn't just blindly hand me something that could have just as easily lobotomized me, right?
"But enough of what I can't do! Behold!" Da Vinci shouts, pulling a cover off of a mannequin. "My new masterpiece!"
"...Cosplay?" I ask, staring at what looks like a pirate outfit.
"Nope. What you've got here is the brand new Chaldea [Seafaring Mystic Code]!" She explains, and I repress a grimace. Don't tell me I'm going to have to wear this thing the whole time I'm in Okeanos… it's got a freaking cravat! "In addition to suppressing seasickness, it has integrated spells for [Water Walking], [Detect Gold], and [Emergency Citrus]," the Universal Genius (self-proclaimed) says.
"The first one sounds useful, but - hang on, no it doesn't! We have levitation Mystic Codes from France! They're all useless!" I shout, pointing at her.
"Hm? Well, [Emergency Citrus] purges some debuffs and heals the target-"
"Don't name your spells after abilities from horrifically addictive and toxic video games!" Don't do League of Legends, kids!
"-and [Detect Gold] is pretty much just a mapping spell so you don't get lost when we inevitably lose contact again."
"Don't just assume it's going to happen!" I know it's happened multiple times in both singularities so far, but that's an exception, right? Right!?
"-But I guess you might be right about the water walking being superfluous. I'll steal the [Sure-Kill Trident] from the swimsuit one Cu Chulainn was working on."
"That's just [Gae Bolg], isn't it!? That guy put Gae Bolg in a swimsuit and called it a trident!" How would it even fit?
"No, to my understanding, it's just a spell that drastically improves a Servant's accuracy for a time," Da Vinci says. "He said his teacher might have been able to work up something that imitated Gae Bolg with her runecraft, but his version is just a bad imitation of that imitation."
"I see…" I mutter.
And so it is, a week after my return from France, that I find myself in the Command room wearing a silly-looking pirate costume as Olga Marie-Sensei delivers a briefing.
"-The Second Singularity takes place in 1573 AD, near the tail end of the Age of Exploration. It's been about seventy years since the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus, and the Spanish Empire pretty much rules half of the world now." The Director says - ah, Columbus came up again? Wonder what kind of Servant he'd end up being, some cool explorer type? "-Of course, the wider historical context may be a moot point. This Singularity takes place not in a specific location like the others, but in a vague amalgamation of different locations that can pretty much just be referred to as 'The Ocean'. For that reason, we've been calling it [Okeanos].
"If France is anything to go by, we might expect a few famous figures from the era - conquistadors like Pizzarro or Cortez, pirates like Blackbeard or Bonnet, or explorers like Magellan. But it's also likely that other figures associated with 'The Ocean' and 'Exploration' will turn up. With that being such a long list, I won't recite them all here, but the consulting staff have all been provided with an informational packet."
Said 'packet' is about three inches thick, so I'm not gonna read it… is what I probably would have said if she hadn't spent the last three of our little tutoring sessions drilling me on them. Do I really need to study for the specific possibility of Hernan Cortez masquerading as Quetzalcoatl, Sensei?
"Regarding the rayshift - because we were forced to use a coffin to seal Francois Prelati, we're now down to just four functional ones," She says, and once again I clench my fist. Hey, you're really dead set on making this whole 'forgetting about you and abandoning my hatred' hard for me, aren't you, Prelati!? "With that in mind… two are reserved for you and Kyrielight, but I'll ultimately leave the pick for the last two slots up to you, Subaru."
-Or so she says, but she basically told me who to pick last night. As expected of Sensei, she's just setting things up to make her disciple look good! "If we can expect a bunch of enemies with boats and cannons, we're going to want range and defense more than anything. Georgios, Mordred, you'll be coming along to start with."
"Understood," the Rider gives a simple nod.
"Heh, smart choice, Master!" Mordred grins, stretching. It was actually the Director's idea, though.
"-Actually, I'm gonna step in here," The door to the command room opens, revealing a grinning blue-haired man leaning against the frame. "I know Mordred's a good pick for range, but aren't you forgetting someone?"
"-Cu Chulainn! Do you mean you've already recovered?" Sensei asks - uh oh, she's getting flustered.
"Yeah, I'm feeling in good shape! Oi, Master, I've been hanging out in the simulator room for the past few days, shouldn't you have figured this out?" He asks.
Olga Marie's head whips towards me, a look of betrayal in her eyes. "Why didn't you mention that last night!?" Ah, she said it. The staff are already starting to whisper among themselves… Wait, Mash, why are you going red!? I told you she's been tutoring me in magecraft! You helped me with studying the [Okeanos Doom Packet]!
Still, I guess my only response is… "Right, there was something like that, wasn't there?"
Sensei boils over. "Gandr!"
"-Anyway, sorry to get your hopes up, Mordred." I say on our way out of the command room.
"Nah, I get it. Without my Noble Phantasm, I'm pretty clearly weaker than everyone else. Assassin was the only one weaker, and since he got resummoned with that arm of his intact and under control…" She trails off, a small frown on her face.
On that note, I only had one short conversation with Hanam - or rather, Hassan - since he was summoned. It was enough to prove what I was told about Servants. He doesn't remember anything about Fuyuki. But that's really nothing new for me, at this point…
"Aaaargh, I really wish I knew there were seven more singularities back then! I definitely would have found a way other than breaking Clarent!" Mordred whines. "Well, I guess the odds are slim of Father showing up in this singularity. Just remember, you've gotta at least bring me to the English one!"
"Yeah, yeah… I'll find some way to include you there," I say.
But for now, I've got this mess to deal with. I just hope the seasickness-proofing works, and that I can find someone to deal with these nightmares…
We all enter the Rayshifting Coffins - Mash, Georgios, Cu, and myself.
"This is Director Olga Marie Animusphere. Begin rayshifting procedure. Commencing Second Singularity, Okeanos, in three, two, one…!"
The world dissolves into a tunnel of blue light.
For just a moment. I see a pair of eyes, just like my own, but tired. So unbelievably tired I think they must be dead. Then they twist in an expression of hate, and-
The sound of thunder and the chill of rain are my first greeting, as my feet find purchase on slick, desolate rock.
Four Day Deluge - Okeanos: Begin.