The ground was green and clean. Grass nestling below his feet and shadow over cascading flowers. The air weaved past him, but his gaze remained fixed on the forest surrounding them.
There would be no need for trees here, for the flowers would keep the light from falling upon their paths, giving them a warm golden glow in the early morning hours. The sun was rising, its rays painting over the world.
The sky above was a brilliant blue, with clouds that stretched all across the horizon to meet above him and laced with clouds. There were no signs of rain, yet he felt droplets brush his skin and begin to fall to the earth like some fleeting memory of heaven itself.
It reminded him of what the world outside looked like in some ways, but it still felt foreign and unfamiliar to his senses.
Angra Maniyu did not know how he got here, nor where here even was. The most he was certain of was that he'd somehow ended up with the most dangerous, infuriating, and, in some twisted way, exciting bunch in all of his existence as the greatest evil.
Behind him, people who defied simple classification as "human" wandered around; some bickered, exchanged glances, while others kept a way distance from each other.
They were all just as baffled as he was about where they came from, and why are they here.
He had no idea what brought these beings together, let alone what led them to be summoned to this place, gathered most bizarrely.
He had asked a few questions, mostly about how they came here, but they either ignored him entirely or simply answered that they didn't know as well. As far as anyone could tell, this place was an alternate reality of some sort, similar to the timeline-diverging mystery they used to call Lostbelt.
No one knew how or why exactly there was another world existing differing from the previous ones. This wasn't like the Singularities with a Holy Grail to keep them stable, for it did not reject history, or those Lostbelts with a Crypter to preserve humanity, it had not been pruned.
The sun did not blind him.
Light should burn. That was the second sign. Light always burned him. He had walked in shadow too long to mistake warmth for kindness, radiance for divinity. But here, now, it only was. Not the sun of the Age of Man. Not even the burning sky of the Grail's corrupted dreams. Pale, without wrath. A sickly gold, as though borrowed from memory.
He was lying in the grass.
No, he corrected himself. Shirou Emiya was lying in the grass. That distinction was vital, even now. Especially now.
His fingertips moved first, curling against the soil, feeling its texture with the wariness of something long ago and betrayed. It was Earth, yes, but not the Earth. He did not need the full use of his limbs to know this. He did not need magecraft, nor clairvoyance. The truth seeped through sensation alone. The leyline beneath his body was too still, too orderly, like the practiced smile of an old enemy. The od of the world, its breath, its heartbeat, its memory, ran false in his nerves.
That was worse.
His lips parted and he turned his head sideways across the ground. His gaze landed upon the next anomaly.
Her.
Depending on which face she wore for the day, she was beneath the shadow of a half-bloomed tree. She hadn't noticed him yet. Or perhaps she had, and in her usual cruelty, chose to linger in the fallacy of solitude before acknowledging him. She was barefoot, as ever, but her heel did not quite kiss the grass. She floated always slightly like even gravity found her poisonous.
She looked irritated.
That, at least, was familiar.
She had not yet changed into her grander form. No Lust Demon Queen. No Devourer of Heaven's Pleasure. Just her. A face, eyes, shape of someone familiar. The Beast that masqueraded as a girl who once only wanted love. He supposed, absently, that he should say something.
Words were not currency here. Not yet... and there were others.
Motion rippled through the glade in the sense of others pressing down upon the plane of existence. Powerful entities, one by one. Not even hostile in the way mortals understood hostility.
No.
This was disdain. Divine, ancient, innate disdain.
Even without his full senses, even weakened and torn from the core of his conceptual existence, he could taste it.
A dreadful maternal warmth, now soured by her awareness of the world. The kind of being that fed simply by being perceived. He could not see her, yet, and he could feel her presence like brine soaked into flesh. She would be nearby, and she would not be happy. She had always abhorred separations. She would be calling already. Not aloud and yet. But inwardly, to children she would never birth in this world.
Ah. There was the furnace.
A presence like star-forged will, shaped by the cruelty of necessity. The shadow of Solomon's corpse, still trying to become what it could never be: salvation. And failing again. He could feel that presence coiling. Calculating without true wisdom, only function. The King of Men Who Refused to Be. No doubt the magus-beast knew something was wrong already. He would be burning internally, less from rage, more from confusion, which was far worse for his type.
Another lustful being.
He would not look at her.
One cannot look into the abyss if one is already composed of it. Not when the abyss has lips, and breathes your name like a confession.
Instead, he pulled himself upright. Slow, unsteady. He let his human host's muscles struggle, not for lack of power, but for memory. Shirou had never stood in this world. Therefore, he had not. There was poetry in it. Cruel poetry, but he found he enjoyed such things more these days.
His shadow stretched behind him.
No anchors. No Holy Grail system to feed upon. No Counter Force to reject his breath. He was free, technically. But freedom without purpose was the same as emptiness.
And yet, he was calm. Unlike the others.
They had begun to speak.
Not with tongues, not all of them, anyway. Some did not require that primitive medium. Goetia had no voice, merely intent filtered into structured resonance that appeared verbal. Tiamat vocal without form. Kiara's laugh was predictably the first sound to truly split the air, that sweet little trill that meant she was already inventing names for everyone's suffering.
Only she, still standing beneath her tree of false bloom, remained quiet. Her gaze found his now, and for a moment there was something like recognition.
That was enough.
One thing was certain; the word Beasts.
Evil of Man, they were called.
Beasts. Calamities that exist to threaten Humanity as a whole.
They are considered some of the most powerful and malevolent beings, they are not mere monsters, but the embodiment of humanity's collective sins and existential threats. The darkest aspects of human nature Humanity tries to bury.
Each one of them embodies a specific form of human evil or disaster. Destructive tendencies, insatiable desires, and other profound negative traits.
Imagine a world where the very essence of humanity's darkest fears and desires takes physical form. These manifestations are known as Beasts.
Picture a lonesome battlefield where the sky is perpetually dark, and the air is dense with a menacing presence. Here, a towering figure emerges from the shadows, its form shifting and writhing as if it were made of pure darkness. This is an example of a Beast, a creature born from the deepest recesses of human despair and enmity.
One such Beast might be the embodiment of humanity's insatiable greed. It can take the form of a colossal dragon, with glittering scales, and its eyes burning with an unquenchable hunger. Wherever it goes, it leaves a trail of desolation, consuming everything in its path, driven by an endless desire for more.
Currently, it seemed to have been nothing but blissful ignorance from the moment they fell asleep before opening their eyes.
Now, all that's left is to figure out the puzzle behind the situation before them.
He could almost feel the very ground tremble under the weight of so much raw malevolence. The peace was fragile. A mere spark could set it all ablaze.
He did not move to join them. Nor did he recoil. He was amidst the chaos of god-monsters, of death-bearers, and world-devourers, with the borrowed face of a boy who once made broken promises. And when he finally spoke, it was not to declare authority. It was not to demand reason.
It was a murmur.
One not even they could hear.
"So," he popped up finally, breaking the silence. "What do we do about this?" Angra referred to the entire, very dangerous situation.
Said situation means a fight that can destroy the reality of existence can break out at any moment.
"What indeed," a feminine, but sensual, voice purred out amidst the crowd of inhuman. Her smile was as soft as a mother's and as wretched as sin, her eyes dipped in half-lidded satisfaction.
The desirable woman Beast III/R continued, "Perhaps a little sparring unless? It might be nice to see some muscles rippling… oh, especially on the men~"
The word was dagger-like.
Beside her, the woman with cosmos for a hair's expression soured and gritted her teeth in annoyance. Kama had heard. And when the former goddess of love moved, it was like storm clouds about to rupture.
Her bare feet struck the soil with intent now. The tree behind her had begun to wilt.
"Enough from your lips, Sessyoin," she spat out.
"Flirtation is wasted when your charms are hollow. And he doesn't entertain pests. One word out of place... I'll burn you alive."
Kiara only smirked. "What's the matter? Scared of a little bite from a woman like me~? Even after all the gods you killed to become this beautiful, you're still territorial. How curious. How small."
The space collapsed between them as her eyes flashed with something that twisted across the spectrum, bearing down like divine edict.
"I incinerate you before you show your little fangs!"
She lunged forward, form blurring between girl and goddess, sin and flame, a streak of wrath crowned in illusion. Her foot cracked the earth behind her, a shockwave following her steps, towards the Beast III/R, while the rest of the group watched in anticipation. However, before she was able to touch anything, Angra seized her wrist and threw her backward before Kama could even hiss her outrage, body twisting midair like a flung ribbon of wrath causing her body to collide with one of the trees, shattering the wood in pieces, and splintering branches as the tree toppled and fell over to face behind Beast III/L. She landed awkwardly on her stomach, completely uninjured as she stood up and brushed the dirt off of herself.
His hand tingled from the unexpected density of her Spirit Core. Even weakened, she was an idle threat. But what struck him more was how easily he had done it. How casually. That wasn't just muscle memory. That was his.
He admired his new strength. Frankly, he was glad he won over his other half when they were merging. The Other had been consumed.
For the briefest of moments, he allowed the corner of his lips to twitch upward in recognition of a truth: he was stronger now. More whole. The All of the World's Evil had sought to devour itself, and he had been the one who remained.
Angra ignored everyone's looks while he took cautious notice of Beast I, someone who was about to step in if not for the Avenger to set things in his hands.
He would've naturally just stood by and watched the bickering scene, but not when Kama was closer to arguably the most powerful being of the group than he'd like. That was reason enough to intervene.
The golden-haired Human King Goetia regards indifferently,
"Enough."
In a matter of seconds, everyone had fallen silent, as they saw who had spoken up, booking no further arguments.
It wasn't much, but it was enough to instantly stop the argument between the Beast III/L and R, and allow Goetia to address the circumstances. Goetia did not raise his voice because he did not need to. The moment he chose to speak, the air accepted it as doctrine. All things fall to entropy, and Goetia was entropy given thought.
He stepped forward with the deliberation of one who had calculated the number of steps it would take and the effect each step would have on the curvature of space-time around him.
"Cease your petty squabbles," his voice was low, and it was clear to everyone that it was unyielding. "This display is neither productive nor appropriate given the reality we currently occupy. If you are capable of thought beyond primal performance, then I suggest you employ it. Immediately."
He did not look at Kama, who had risen already with her pride unshaken but smoldering beneath the eyes. He did not acknowledge Angra, who had already returned to his leaning posture like the whole episode had been an inconvenience at most. And he certainly did not address Kiara, whose smile grew wider at being ignored as if that was specifically the seduction she sought.
"You are all aware of the aberration," Goetia continued. "This world is not ours. But more critically, it is not incorrect either."
A faint attention. Even Draco tilted her head with just enough disinterest to signal interest.
"This is not a Singularity," he elaborated. "Nor is it a Lostbelt. It does not possess the characteristics of pruning, there is no deviation point, no tree of possibility from which it broke away. Nor is it a distortion requiring correction by the Counter Force or Chaldea. Instead, it is a coherence. A fully intact and consistent worldline. Entirely distinct. Not identical to a hole in the standard temporal axis, but rather, a parity. A complete sphere of reality seamlessly integrated into the Quantum Time-Lock."
"How so? How is that even possible?"
She stood farthest from the rest, partially by instinct, partially by distaste. She had been Director of Chaldea once, and even if she had become something far beyond the frailty of a human body, the hints of her scientific pride still clung to her like remnants of a broken command seal. She did not like not knowing and she hated being corrected.
"You're saying this world is within the Lock? That it's secure, yet not from our History? That's... no, that contradicts the model. The Foundation of Humanity can't support two self-sustaining systems."
Goetia turned his gaze to her with a look akin to dissection. It was the stare of a being who saw everything she was, from her previous mortality to her divine transmutation, and judged it ultimately beneath the problem.
"You are naive, U-Olga Marie. The multiversal structure you observed as Chaldea was merely one level of interpretation. The Holy Grail War system permitted only a fraction of the true nature of reality to be perceived. Even with full access to the Root, you could not comprehend the absolute structure because the Grail itself, this time, has provided no conduit. There is no informational linkage to it. No response from the Throne. Not a single verification."
He began pacing.
"If it were the Counter Force, we would have received confirmation. If it were Gaia or Alaya, they would have anchored us to a cause. But this world contains no cause. It did not summon us with purpose. It received us, passively, as though the universe expected us. Similar to puzzle pieces already shaped to fit."
U-Olga opened her mouth again, possibly to demand a refutation, but Goetia spoke over her before the breath fully formed.
"You have been summoned here by design. That is the true horror of this place. It is whole. Functional. Defensible. But it is not our Proper Human History. We are intrusions here as parasites that should be here by a logic we cannot see."
He waited to let them process it.
"That is why there is no rejection. No force attempting to correct our presence. A time-lag degradation was not even felt. The Lock accepts us, which means this world operates on a principle entirely foreign to our former truths."
Angra snorted.
"So what you're saying," he said "is that we've been kicked into a perfect little hellscape where we don't belong, but everything around us is too polite to point that out?"
His voice was amused, but his eyes were not. They watched.
"Lovely. Here I thought I was finally going to wake up in a proper nightmare."
Goetia ignored him.
"There is no World Egg here. No Human Order Foundation we can access, Grail Registry, Throne connection, not even distortion residue to suggest an outside force at work."
"Hah," Angra exhaled, half-laugh, half-yawn. "Honestly, if I had a coin for every time some omniscient plane of existence decided to pluck me out of oblivion and toss me into another messianic mess for its amusement, well, I wouldn't be rich, but I'd have a damn good pile for the irony."
He wasn't surprised or concerned, his voice was the rasping drawl of someone who had long since ceased to be amazed by the theatre of cosmic absurdities. And beneath that tone, that bleary sarcasm, there was the grim sort of familiarity that came only to those who had seen too many beginnings, too many "first chapters" that weren't their own, always invited, never needed.
He tilted his head backward, looking up at the branches.
"It's like the universe never gets tired of using us as a metaphor. 'Look, it's humanity's original sin, again! What will he do this time? Kill a world? Birth one? Cry in a corner while his better halves clean up the mess? Every day feels like 'Let's toy with humanity's sins' day. I ought to start charging royalties."
There was the faintest scoff, one so subtle it could've been missed, but not by Angra, whose ears had always been attuned to disdain.
"If we are here by amusement, then this world has an unusually refined taste in torment. It selected not just abominations, but contradictions. You, who embody failure. That one—" she gestured briefly toward Kiara with a nod so slight it could've been mistaken for the wind, "—who embodies indulgence. And the rest of us. Icons of collapse."
She didn't smile. Draco never did. If the others postured or played, she only observed unfazed, but not unfeeling.
"Conceivably it summoned us not for spectacle, but for inevitability. Our presence is not a disturbance here. That alone implies intent. Purpose."
"Entertainin' purpose," Angra shot back with a grin, "the sort that ends in fire and little moral epilogues that no one reads. I bet the trees have eyes here, too. They always do."
Entertainment. Yes, it was something Angra could get by.
"Would you both shut up for once and actually take this seriously!?"
U-Olga scowls, arms crossed, as she looks between them, steeped in incredulity at their apathy because she demanded order as a coping mechanism for chaos. Her eyes, once trying to mirror the analytical gaze of her past human self, now burned with frustrated divinity. "Fun? Entertainment? None of you are taking this seriously. We're in some unknown world, and none of us have the slightest clue how or why. We are not in some allegory, we are not pieces on a board, and I, would rather not be someone else's plaything."
Angra turned to her, eyes half-lidded, mouth stretching into that wide, wolfish grin that wasn't quite friendly but wasn't hostile either; it was the kind of expression worn by someone who had never believed in rules, only opportunities.
"You'll forgive me, princess, if I find the idea of anyone not being someone else's plaything a little optimistic. Especially coming from someone who spent their past life as a bureaucratic meat shield for a world on life support. We're all someone's pawn, Ms. Alien. The trick is to pretend you're the hand moving the piece."
Her gaze was venomous. He chuckled at that.
"Aaaaahhhh..."
Someone else had a troubled face. Her eyes grow distant, lost in thought.
Goetia frowns, watching her intently. "You propose another theory."
"Aaahhhh..."
It wasn't a word, not in any tongue, but the sound meaning. Her children understood, and though they might feign impatience or weariness, they all turned toward her, if only slightly. Fou stepped forward beside her with a chirp, ears twitching like antennae tuned to something none of the others could yet hear.
The Mother-Beast's eyes, soft and wide and endlessly ancient, drifted toward the far edge of the forest, where the hills broke into a distant horizon, and beyond the line of trees, the faint edges of stone and steel kissed the sky in angles.
Buildings. Modern.
Overhead, the air pulsed. Not with pollution, nor electricity, nor synthetic ritual. It thrummed with mana.
Old mana. Thick, fertile, divine.
The kind that had no right to exist past the Fifth Age.
"Aahhhh," she murmured again, and the intent filtered through slowly, like light finding shape beneath water. This place... it is still the Age of Gods.
It did not need to be said outright. Her presence spoke in rhythms of nature, in the instincts buried deep within divine memory. She recognized it because she had birthed such landscapes once, long before Man began carving his name into stone.
"There's... skyscrapers. Tech. Satellites, probably."
His eyes narrowed. "Mana like this doesn't belong in a world that can Google its apocalypse."
There was no room for contradiction in Draco's mind, and yet this was one. Two realities layered like oil and water. And the surface tension hadn't broken.
Goetia hum at this, glancing around the forest.
"We should stop treating this moment as some ethereal parlor room for idle musing. We have nothing. No summoner, anchor, and directive. Whatever force, divine, profane, or otherwise, that plucked us here did not give us purpose. We were brought... and left. That in itself should be our only unifying certainty."
In his former state, such words would have manifested as fire from Heaven. Now, they simply were blunt and dry.
"And whether you wish to play the roles of sulking children or tragic icons of human vice, I do not care. But do it while walking. Don't assume our power will operate here as it does elsewhere."
He gestured toward the structures visible on the far horizon, towers of glass and steel catching dawnlight like spears of memory piercing into a world that remembered gods as fiction.
"That direction is civilization. In whatever form this world defines the term, it is where knowledge must reside, and until we determine the shape of the laws here and know what kind of system dares to house Beasts, we are blind."
His fingers curled slightly inward, as if suppressing the instinct to issue commands rather than propositions.
"We are weakened. Isolated. And though it offends you all to admit it, I know you understand the basic strategy: separation ensures conflict; unity ensures data. For now, we cooperate. Not because I demand it, but because anything else is foolish, and none of you are fools."
Angra's smile widens, amused. It was transparent to him that everyone was getting a show from Goetia's authority. "Fine, fine. Then, O mighty Human King, where do you propose we go next?"
Angra had always known when to resist and when to follow because he delighted in watching them unravel.
Goetia surveys the landscape—
"I'm sorry, he's leading?"
—as he considers the best course of action, ignoring U-Olga whose body recoiled before her mind processed the offense.
Her voice cracked with outrage at the absurd implication that had just been casually swallowed without protest. She didn't even hide it. There was no diplomacy to her tone, only sheer disbelief. Her eyes darted from face to face, trying to gauge the silent consensus, or lack thereof, and finding, with horror, that no one seemed inclined to correct the course. Not even Tiamat, who had chosen silence over sentiment.
"He just... declared we follow him? And you're all just going along with it?"
It wasn't that she expected a vote. She wasn't naïve enough to believe democratic process held sway among entities whose concept of leadership had usually been synonymous with dominion. But to her, to the Olga Marie who had clawed her way from the fractured mirror of humanity into something more, the idea that Goetia could casually step into the seat of command, that he could slip the crown back on as if no one had remembered why it was burned off in the first place, was intolerable.
She made a sound—half scoff, half exhale—and muttered something about madness and authority and hypocrisy. But no one moved to argue, and that silence itself became a reply she did not enjoy.
Goetia, for his part, did not acknowledge her. He had long since calculated her rebellion as a constant background noise. Necessary, perhaps. But irrelevant to forward motion.
"I proposed observing humans." Angra raised a hand.
U-Olga scoffs, muttering under her breath, "Oh sure, because watching humans is always enlightening."
"Don't pretend you're above observation," Angra retorts with a mocking smile. "After all, they're not exactly uninteresting creatures, are they?"
Heh. Angra snorts.
The humans in general. Race of infinite potential.
Born into a realm governed by mortality and the bounds of flesh, yet possess an inherent drive that propels them beyond the limits of the ordinary. Their fragile existence imbues them with an acute awareness of time, making each second precious and every action weighty.
Within this limited lifespan, they find ways to achieve the extraordinary. From building civilizations, exploring unknown realms, crafting art and language, and even daring to understand the fabric of existence itself.
Contradictingly, they're capable of great kindness and relentless cruelty. But it is their resilience that defines them, for humanity has proven that it can weather the harshest of storms, rising again and again from the ashes of war and disaster.
Possessing minds that seek to understand and hearts that dare to believe, humans constantly push the boundaries of their reality.
It is this unyielding spirit and potential to grow, evolve, and transform that enables them to stand toe-to-toe with even gods, challenging divine authority and forging their own destiny.
Whether the same applies to them in this world remains yet to be seen.
Will they be just like the arrogant Magi, the Crypters? Or like the foolish Master of Chaldea?
Koyanskaya's eyes glint with feral and her fox ears perked up. "I, for one, am curious to see how these humans view the world... or, better yet, how they react to us."
The Beasts, upon hearing these words, turn towards each other with an uncertain expression.
No matter whether they accepted their state, there was no point being complacent, and thus, they had agreed to follow a lead, and were reluctant to Goetia.
.
.
.
.
.
They moved, not like a group, more like a procession of separate storms, each carried on its own wind, untethered by cohesion, straying in directions only tangentially aligned. But somehow, Goetia walked first, and none challenged this, at that moment, that leadership was not about belief but initiative. And if he declared himself the tip of the spear by simply stepping forward, then so be it. No one else could be bothered to feign the interest.
Goetia did not wait for consensus. Consensus was for those who doubted. Rather, he walked in a straight line, his eyes on the pulse beneath the landscape, the silent throb of the planet's vascular system, alive beneath the crust.
"This world's structure is..."
The thought spiraled into him, folding inwards into layers of comparison, what he could observe and what was simply absent.
"...wrong."
Not in the sense of disorder or a broken leyline bleeds chaos into the fabric of magical thermodynamics, but wrong in its order. Too seamless for his liking. Almost made him think as if the world had not merely survived its Age of Gods, but swallowed it, digested it, and made it a permanent fixture of reality. In his world, the leylines were chaotic veins; interconnected yet fragile, reliant upon historical continuity and human proximity. Magecraft, thaumaturgy, even the Divine Mysteries, they were scaffolds, built atop the ruins of a discarded Golden Age.
But here...
"There is no scaffold."
It was integrated. Harmonized. No trace of segmentation between divine ley-energy and natural spiritons. The Age of the Gods had not receded here, it had never left. It lingered, not like a ghost or a fossil, but like bone marrow, intrinsic to the world's marrow. The leyline beneath his feet pulsed with confidence. An arrogance, almost. A living system that did not need humanity, nor their feeble rituals. The planet itself was closed-loop. A perfect divine circuit.
"A coherence model. No—more than that. A divine geopattern bound not by humanity's collective unconscious, but by myth as fact."
He hated it. Not because it offended his principles, but because it complicated them. Systems like this defied his capacity for intervention. There was no tilt and leverage. This world was a solid sphere of mythologically enshrined law—a law not written by the Age of Man. The Age of Gods was not past here. It was present. Simultaneous with the Anthropocene.
And it meant one thing above all else: this world had no use for the Human Order of Proper Time.
Behind him, the group unraveled further.
Angra veered off with a lazy wave of his hand, trailing toward a distant stream that glimmered between thickets of green with all the innocence of an untouched mirror. He was amused by the delusion of their temporary truce.
"I'm going for a wash," he called back, not bothering to look over his shoulder, "assuming the water doesn't try to baptize me or something poetic."
Kama followed with feline ease.
"What a tragic little creature," she purred toward Goetia's back, though she knew he wasn't listening. "Strutting like a mechanical Solomon, pretending authority was the same as relevance. Let him have his little crusade. We'll drink from the stream and mock him when he's wrong."
Her footsteps were silent. Her eyes, brighter than blood. She trails Angra for only proximity. She found his darkness amusing, because it was different from hers. It hated differently.
Tiamat wandered. The earth parted slightly beneath her, reeds curling toward her bare feet like the arms of infants. Her voice hummed, a low, rising "Aaahhhhhh—".
Elsewhere, a cry pierced the calm.
"I was dragged here!"
Koyanskaya Vitch's voice rang across the glade like a gunshot fired into a dinner party. She was not distant—no, she had made sure to remain visible. Except her posture was sharpened by irritation, the professionalism in her bearing now clashing with the wild disarray of her new surroundings.
"Dragged into some half-baked dimensional trash heap, with mud on my heels and nothing but murderers, deviants, and walking psychosexual metaphors to keep me company."
She snarled the last part like a customer reviewing a failed product, and dusted her coat with disgust. She refused to go toward the stream, though her skin prickled with the urge to clean. The look she shot at Goetia could have curdled diamond.
"If this is a boardroom," she muttered, "then you are all bankrupt. I want out of this economy."
Fou vanished.
One moment, he was pawing the grass beside Tiamat's left ankle, ears perked toward something only he could hear, and the next, the universe blinked and forgot him.
Her feet stomped deliberately over the soil, her hands gestured emphasis, slicing invisible angles into the air, as U-Olga ranted.
"Filthy. Filthy dimensional mapping! I should have known something was off the moment my own spine tried to twist in reaction to the local gravitic gradient! The curvature of spatial fold here is too exact—you can't even simulate this degree of atmospheric suspension in a low-energy field without a suppression algorithm in place, which means—which means—the whole planet is cheating!"
No one answered her. Her voice floated into the foliage and died there in the way one ignores a weather report after being caught in the rain.
Goetia kept walking.
The leyline beneath him curled in on itself, stacked, like folded lattice, recursive, embedded. He hated it.
"This world is too legible. Something designed it not for freedom, but for permanence."
He would find the source. Or the authors. And then, maybe, this world would begin to make sense.
Petals thickened, stems pulsed, and in her wake, moss darkened to purple-black, as sin had been introduced as a nutrient to the ecosystem and the flora had, reluctantly, begun to adapt.
She had lagged behind. Or perhaps she had simply drifted, she did not walk so much as she slid.
Kiara said nothing, but her smile, faint and sweet as a sleeping curse, held intent.
In the distance, a group, half a dozen of humans along a marked trail, ignorant of the presence that had already noticed them. Her eyes dilated from the presence of desire, theirs. A scent and a thought. A fantasy never spoken aloud. That was all she needed.
"Like ripe grapes, ready to ferment into something far more delicious."
One of the hikers shivered. Another paused, glancing left as if something had brushed his shoulder, though no wind stirred. The third, a woman, laughed nervously and told a joke she didn't finish. The trees behind them closed just a little tighter.
Wherever Kiara went, life learned to reconsider itself.
Not far, though removed by geography and temperament, Angra sat near the stream's bend. It was shallow and clear. He let the water trickle across his fingers. In this world, reality felt curated.
Kama lounged nearby, her legs lazily dipped into the current, her arms outstretched in catlike repose. The way her hair floated slightly on the water's surface made her seem more spiritual than flesh.
"So," she cooed, without turning, "how do you find our new prison, Angra darling?"
He didn't answer at first. His hand remained in the water.
"It's... quiet," he muttered eventually, might be because he needed to hear it. "Too quiet in something already has."
Kama rolled onto her side, kicking her feet gently, causing small ripples.
"Mmm, poetic. You mean to say it feels like someone's already won the game and now we're just playing catch-up in the epilogue?"
Angra smirked, dryly.
"Something like that. Doesn't help that this world seems designed to suppress us specifically. I've been listening and feeling, and... All the World's Evil isn't quite responding like it should."
That earned her attention.
"Oh?"
"Normally, it pulses. It's like having a scream in your chest that grows louder in certain spaces, cities, crowds, old battlegrounds, holy places... Here, it feels like the world hears that scream and just turns the volume down."
He withdrew his hand from the water, examining his palm. It was just unremarkable. Usually, the world hates him. Even when it forgets him, it remembers to hate him. That's normal and familiar.
"It's being filtered. That's the best way I can put it. Not suppressed entirely, I'm talking about repackaging. This world recognizes the concept of evil but prefers its own interpretation."
Kama laughed, long and sultry.
"One might almost think you're feeling inadequate. How unflattering."
"Misplaced," he said flatly.
The reflexive recoil he expects from the land, from nature, even from the damn water, all the emotional response, it's just... gone.
Kama didn't answer immediately. She tilted her head slightly. When she did speak, her words unspooled slowly, warmed on her tongue first.
"You're trying to feel it, aren't you? That collective loathing you wear like a skin. The sin of man turned into spiritual atmosphere."
The water whispered past their limbs, the forest continued to wrench quietly under Kiara's look elsewhere. Kama laid her cheek against her arm.
"Do you care?" she asked, suddenly.
"About being forgotten? Replaced?"
He didn't answer right away. His gaze lingered on the reflection in the water... his face, which wasn't really his. A boy's face. A hero's face. He had stopped being surprised by it long ago. But even now, he still didn't recognize it. Or maybe he just refused to.
"Not really," he said at last. "I was never trying to be remembered. Just trying to make them remember. What they did. What they buried. What they pretended didn't happen."
Silence.
"Still, I find it rather charming in its own chaotic way. This world is clearly built on myth layered over modernity, on gods who refuse to die and mortals who pretend they've outgrown them. The tension is almost erotic." She chortle at her own phrasing.
"And isn't that the perfect place for us? For Beasts who were always meant to emerge when the boundary between man and god was weakest? I think, we were summoned because this place doesn't know how to choose a side."
Angra looked away. His mouth curled. It still feels wrong. This world absorbs sin. Rewrites it and doesn't confront it from assimilation.
She knew what was running in his mind.
"You think that's worse?"
"I think it's alien. And I don't trust what I don't understand. Where would I run?" he murmured, voice low, almost gentle now. "We're not here by choice. Even if we were, this world would fold us into itself before we could fold it. That's the feeling I can't shake. That it's not a world you conquer. It's one that conquers you by letting you live inside it, long enough to forget who you are."
The stream passed between them.
"Then let's make it remember." she whispered, brushing wet fingertips through her bangs as she reclined further back. "You sound almost motivated."
His only reply was to exhale through his nose and lean further back into the grass, arms behind his head as he'd already committed to his next nap. One eye remained open, however.
"Don't get hopeful. I'm just watching the cracks. When you spend eternity being evil, you learn to recognize when the cracks in the world aren't natural. You watch where it warps, where it flinches. This place flinches because something doesn't want us to learn how to open the door from the inside." He twitched his foot, letting the stream wash the grime away from his heel.
Kama gave a half-laugh, half-moan, twisting her body to lie sideways, her elbow propping her up.
"Then shall we knock, or shall we burn the house down?"
"Neither. We wait until the owners open the door themselves."
"How boring. So typically you."
He shrugged.
"Patience is a sin, too."
He had said too much already. He knew it the moment the words left his mouth. The instant something in Kama's smile had grown too thoughtful. She was many things, whimsical, wrathful, erotic in expression and execution.
He didn't distrust her, per se. That would require the presumption of a prior trust to be broken. He simply knew what she was. What they all were. Proxies for humanity's disfigurements, shaped into walking theology. Every smile they gave, every laugh, every gesture of friendship, these were all performances on a crumbling stage, each actor waiting for their cue to decide if this play would end in fire or silence.
Before Kama could retort with another veiled insult wrapped in silk, the grass behind them rustled. Angra turned his head, and Kama already had her lips curled before the figure even breached the tree line.
Tiamat stepped into view.
Or rather, lumbered, but not clumsily. She glided while the world itself bent forward to welcome each step. Her eyes were blank in a way that suggested emotion lived behind them, in a form not easily parsed by language or reason.
"Aaahhhhh..."
A single note.
Kama tightened her eyes and sat upright, her tone clipped.
"Well. If it isn't our mother. How sweet of you to come down here."
Tiamat tilted her head.
"Aaahhhhh..."
Angra raised a brow. He understood her tone more than her words. That was the strange thing about Beasts: language was not their native form of communication. Sin, hunger, despair—those were clearer than syllables.
"She's asking if we've found anything," he muttered, barely lifting a finger toward Kama. "Or rather, if we're as lost as she suspects."
Kama scoffed. "Let her worry. She's better at brooding than strategizing."
Tiamat gave another sigh-like moan, this one deeper, more drawn out. The tone almost seemed regretful.
"Aaahh... ahhhhhh..."
"We know that." Angra answered with a joyless grin. "You didn't ask to be here either. You want your sea, your children, your silence. I get it."
Tiamat did not nod. But the tilt of her head returned to neutral.
That was affirmation enough.
Something snapped into the space between them. A vacuum made flesh.
"Fou!"
The white blur launched from the canopy and landed directly on Angra's chest. He groaned in sheer disbelief.
"Oh for the love of—what are you doing here, you little cryptid?"
Fou's tail flicked with pristine menace. He gave a chirp, no, a judgment.
"Fou."
"Very informative," Angra grunted.
Kama arched an eyebrow as she scooted backward.
"Great. Just what we needed. The moral compass with paws."
Fou growled.
"Fou..."
Tiamat leaned down slowly, cupping one hand before the creature, who allowed her presence.
"Aaaahhh..."
"Yes, yes, he's special," Kama muttered. "We all are. That's the problem."
Angra tapped his fingers against his ribs, Fou now nestled on his stomach as though having declared a sleeping claim.
"Four creatures who shouldn't coexist, lounging like it's summer vacation, in a world that probably already has a plan to sterilize us. Lovely."
Kama's voice dropped.
"And not one of us trusts the others."
Silence.
Even Fou didn't chirp.
Tiamat did not respond. Although maternally, none of them would accept her touch. Angra finally exhaled and reached up, placing one hand on his forehead like an exhausted teacher watching his worst students debate ethics.
"This is going to fall apart the moment one of us makes the first real move."
Kama flicked her hair.
"We can just make sure it's not a stupid one."
"Fou."
A warning. Or a wish.
.
.
.
.
.
The wind changed course.
That was the first thing he noticed. Goetia did not waste cognitive cycles on something so transient, but the consistency of it. It moved with patterns that had no business existing.
He had walked only forty meters from where the others had scattered, alone, as the air around him was far too alive. He stopped beside an oblong stone nestled in the roots of a misshapen pine tree and placed his hand upon it.
Leylines.
If this world was shaped by mystery, then the blood beneath its skin was divinity itself.
No. Not divinity. Integration.
Goetia closed his eyes. Within his mind, structures rose; grids of luminous latticework that had once covered the Earth in the Age of Gods. Unlike this world, leylines served as the oldest architecture, the raw algorithmic code beneath reality's skin, flowing from the Primordial Sea and branching upward like veins in a child of the planet.
They were computational. Arithmetic. Imprinted by myth, but obedient to a master system.
On the other hand...
"The logic is corrupted," he murmured aloud.
He could see it, even with his weakened clairvoyance dulled by this realm's resistant structure. The leyline grid of this world bent around settlements, not nature. The nodes coalesced near urban sprawl. Magical pressure didn't recoil from human civilization, it congealed with it through absorption.
In his world, the Age of Gods had ended because humanity rejected the Mystery. In this one, the Age of Gods refused to die.
That changed everything, because It is a preservation.
"The theological structure of this dimension has not undergone the erosion expected by anthropocentric dominance. Rather, the pantheons remained embedded in sociological consciousness, surviving and thriving as co-entities to human development."
He clicked his tongue, a rare tick of disapproval.
"I despise complications."
He raised a hand again, flexing his fingers in the air, attempting to visualize the leylines beneath them as spiritual architecture. There was no Root here. That much was certain. But that did not mean there was no origin. The power flowed in fractal spirals, not linear paths. Cyclical, ritualistic. Not logical. But powerful. Wild.
"As if the divine never ceded to man," he muttered, gaze narrowing.
He now understood, in part, why the Beasts had been summoned here in such a weakened state.
This world did not recognize the end of Mystery. To the subconscious foundation of the realm, they were not apex threats, but external anomalies. Anomalies which could not supersede the world's own metaphysical design. Beasts of the End required a proper Age of Man to be born fully into power—this place was not that.
"An open-ended fusion. This world's theological timeline operates under a multistratified continuity model," Goetia muttered as he began to walk again, voice cold, analytical. "The Judeo-Christian mythos, Hellenic deities, Norse, Hindu, Shinto—all present. Not in mythological memory. In active function. Pantheons integrated, rather than eroded. Theology embedded in political structure. Religious concept given institutional inertia."
He paused. His footsteps crunched softly over brittle needles.
"I must assume all local deities are aware of us by now."
He stared into the sky in anticipation. Calculation.
"Then the question is not when conflict will arise, but how it will be permitted to escalate."
He ran the simulations in his head.
Assuming localized gods possess direct access to leylines, they will have operational dominance within sanctified territory. Given their likely omnipresence in cultural centers, cities become pressure zones. If Beasts act without discretion, they will be interpreted as invaders and purified accordingly.
Goetia did not fear purification.
He feared inefficiency.
"No combat engagement until tactical advantage is secured," he muttered aloud, mentally categorizing each Beast's current disposition.
Kiara would destabilize any attempt at discretion, driven by her narcissistic hunger for validation through spiritual invasion. Kama would obey whims over instruction—worse if she sensed divine presence in a male form. Tiamat could not be relied upon for covert action. Vitch—useless personally threatened. Fou was already missing. U-Olga—
He winced.
As if summoned by thought alone—
"—filthy mammalian sludge!"
The shriek shot through the trees, followed by the sound of a distant rock violently imploding.
"This dimension is wretched! A static sewer of degenerate laws and unoptimized spatio-temporal currents!"
Goetia turned, expression unreadable, eyes half-lidded.
Beast VII crashed through the treeline, one hand dragging a tree branch she had clearly torn off in a fit of incoherent frustration. Her face was red, her hair disheveled, and her figure sparking at the joints as though her body itself refused to obey the laws of this world.
"Did I consent to being trapped in a 3D mudball?! Did I?!"
She threw the branch behind her and stomped toward him.
"You! You pretend not to hear me, but I know you're thinking something smug. You're always thinking something smug. Say something! SAY—"
"You are inefficient."
U-Olga froze mid-rant, mouth slightly open like a corrupted data stream receiving corrupted feedback.
Goetia continued without turning to face her.
"As we are now, combat with any local god-figure would result in fragmentary loss. Collateral damage to the environment would yield immediate theological retaliation. And you are incapable of stealth. Therefore, you will not engage. You will observe."
"I—what—YOU—"
She growled. Literally.
Goetia ignored her.
He had already begun rewriting plans. The first required identifying which faction in this world held the dominant theological infrastructure—Heaven, Hell, or something altogether stranger. The second required testing leyline compatibility through an external medium. And the third...
He paused.
"We might need humans."
This world still believed in them.
The word left his mouth like ash. Unwanted. But necessary.
If this world was alike to their own.
And Beast I was never one to underestimate belief.