Anomaly Ch. 63 (Patreon)

Shirou was used to being a pawn in a higher power’s game. It was inevitable, since his job was mostly to hunt down Sealing Designates. Usually, those Sealing Designates would have earned it through some act that warranted it.

There were exceptions, though. Sometimes, Sealing Designates were labelled as such because of the internal friction within the Association. Where a certain magus with enough power could get their rival implicated in a scandal that forces the Association to label them a Designate.

It was not often that it happened. It happened anyway.

But, a certain Archer would have said he was already a pawn long before he joined the Clock Tower.

For the longest time, he had believed in his adoptive father’s dream. To be a Hero of Justice. And yet, wasn’t that the same as being a pawn? He had believed in his father’s dream, not his own. The Shirou Emiya of the past had been drawn along by the promise of far flung happiness borne of the act of ‘saving’, never knowing that to save someone, they must be in danger.

A puppet on strings, dancing along to a dead man’s wish.

EMIYA had snapped those strings. The Archer of the Fifth War showed him the end of that path. The regrets that had piled up as that version of Shirou Emiya broke into the form of the Counter Guardian.

Shirou had fought against him tooth and nail, to prove that he was right. At the start of that battle, Shirou had almost fallen. His will broken, and his dream nothing more than a sham. That was, until his younger self had come to a realization.

That, for all that his dream was his father’s, it wasn’t necessarily just Kiritsugu’s. Nobody said that a dream is exclusive to one person. Nobody said that inheriting that dream puts down Shirou’s will to see it through.

A fake that became real. No, a fake that Shirou was determined to make better than the real before it.

The puppet that once was had proven that the strings never held him up to begin with.

Even if now, he followed the will of the powers that be in the Association, he was still his own person. With his own will, with his own dreams. 

Zouken Matou…was a black mirror to his own self. Ever since he had found out about him through Zelretch, he couldn’t help but see what he could have ended up as. If Archer was the end of the path, of becoming the ultimate ‘Hero of Humanity’, then Zouken was on the other end of the spectrum.

A desperate, ancient magus that never could achieve his own dream. A puppet whose own strings were long cut, only they had never realized it until it was too late. Had the Gate never appeared, the Matou head would have deteriorated into nothing, with no one the wiser.

However, when presented with one final chance, Zouken grasped at it with all the will of a dying man.

Had it been Shirou in his position…

But it wasn’t. And it never would be. 

Because even if he failed, even if the dream he had inherited was fundamentally impossible, he had no regrets.

…

“Your silence has been most entertaining.” Zouken’s form tilted its head sideways, the normally mundane act looking more grotesque over a body like his, “Have you finally realized what I have been achieving here? Or have I the need to elucidate my benefactor even more?”

Shirou didn’t dignify the taunt with an answer. He didn't need to.

Within his body, twenty-seven Circuits engaged with the terrifying, frictionless speed of a seasoned Enforcer. He grabbed hold of the structural blueprints of the four projected axes he had already embedded in the earth around the orcs and JSDF squad.

"Trigger, on. Trace, Overload."

The four axes emitted a shrill, metallic whine before detonating outward. A star of white-hot fire exuded towards the mass of Crest Worms. He heard a cry from one of the people behind him, but they were covered by a wall of flame that he couldn't figure out who it was. Not that it mattered, he only had eyes for the Zouken's avatar in front of him.

The outer layer of the avatar - thousands of engorged, pulsing insects - shrieked as they were instantaneously reduced to fine, gray ash. The wood-like face of the Matou patriarch sagged and then disintegrated entirely as the purifying heat washed over it.

But as the flames roared, consuming layer after layer of the grotesque mound, a sound cut through the crackle of the fire.

It was a wet, clicking chuckle.

Shirou’s eyes narrowed, his jaw tightening.

The face was gone, burned away into nothingness, but the sheer volume of the swarm meant that thousands of worms still writhed beneath the protective layer of their burning brethren. And from that shifting, boiling mass of ash and chitin, Zouken's raspy voice continued to project, completely unperturbed by the fact that he was currently being incinerated.

“So eager to clear the board, Emiya.” The voice echoed from the flames, the tone carrying the relaxed, mocking lilt of an aristocrat sipping tea, “A localized purge of magical energy. Impressive, truly. But you are striking at shadows.”

More worms popped and hissed, the stench of burning decay filling the vacuum, yet the voice did not waver in the slightest.

“Do you think this flesh matters to me anymore? In Fuyuki, perhaps, every worm lost was a tragedy. But here? In this world dripping with unrefined ether?” A patch of worms near the base of the fire shifted, briefly forming a crude, melting approximation of a smiling mouth just before the flames consumed it, “Burn this vessel. Burn a thousand of them. It is nothing but loose change from a bottomless purse. You cannot kill me with fire, boy, because you do not yet understand the true nature of what I have built in this paradise.”

“Trace, on.”

Steel screeched into existence. Dozens of blades, swords of varying shapes and lengths, all optimized for high-temperature conceptual properties, manifested in the air above the writhing mass. With a sharp flick of his wrist, Shirou sent them raining down, impaling the earth and detonating in secondary bursts of flame that tore through the deeper layers of the swarm.

Yet, the voice of the old worm did not stop. The Crest Worms around them morphed and writhed, and just as suddenly as they burned, the flames around them were smothered. Shirou did not stop bombarding them, determined to destroy as many as he could.

“In our world, the Soul requires a container.” Zouken’s raspy voice vibrated through the soil, completely unbothered by the continuous explosions, “A failing, fleshly shell. For five hundred years, I fought the rot by transferring my soul into the flesh of others. But here? The Leylines themselves are so rich, so close to the surface, that they act as a natural womb. I no longer need to anchor my soul to a singular, fragile human heart.”

"Fuck off!" Kuribayashi’s voice broke through the roar of the flames.

The JSDF sergeant didn't wait for Itami's permission, raising her Type 89 assault rifle and squeezing the trigger. A burst of 5.56mm rounds tore into a secondary cluster of worms trying to flank their position, blowing them into wet, purple chunks.

"All units, weapons free! Don't let these damn things get close to the vehicle!" Itami barked, his usual laid-back demeanor completely gone. He unholstered his pistol, firing precise, rapid shots into the creeping edge of the tide, while the driver of the HMV manned the roof-mounted machine gun, sending heavy-caliber rounds chewing through the dirt.

"Out of the way!" Ghunzul roared.

The massive orc stepped forward, swinging a heavy, scavenged iron axe with bone-shattering force. Each swing pulverized hundreds of the parasites, the impact throwing up clumps of dirt and black ichor. Beside him, two other orcs slammed their heavy shields into the ground, creating a physical barrier against the undulating wave.

Lelei raised her staff, "Glacies."

A sharp drop in temperature cut through the blistering heat of Shirou’s fires. A jagged wall of frost erupted from the earth, freezing the vanguard of the Crest Worms solid before shattering them into thousands of harmless, icy fragments. Beside her, Tuka was calling towards the lesser Spirits, a wind whipping up and fanning the flames to even higher heat.

Even Tyuule joined the fray. Armed with a pair of pilfered daggers, she moved like a blur of white and steel, slicing through any Worm that bypassed the front line, her face a mask of pure, concentrated disgust.

However, despite the combined onslaught of modern firearms, brute force and magic, the ground continued to pulse. For every thousand worms they destroyed, ten thousand more seemed to bubble up from the depths of the soil.

And Zouken’s voice continued to lecture them, sounding closer and more pervasive with every passing second.

“Yet, despite this world’s bounty, does it remove the rot that already was there? Five hundred years of rot? Of course not. In the end, should I continue as I am, I will be living as a shell of my ideal self. Unacceptable.” Zouken hissed at the end, the Worms crying out in agreement.

"Emiya! We can't keep this up forever!" Itami shouted, slamming a fresh magazine into his rifle. "Our ammo isn't infinite, and these things just keep coming!"

"Get everyone back inside the HMV!" Shirou yelled back, his voice cutting through the gunfire, "I'm going to take out the foundation!"

Shirou stood firm, his boots planted on the vitrified earth. His palms were blistered from the sheer output of his projection, but his eyes remained steady. He analyzed the structure of the soil beneath them. One good blast would destroy it-

"And so, once more, the Holy Grail will be the answer."

The words hung in the superheated air, freezing the blood in Shirou’s veins. For a fraction of a second, the roar of the JSDF’s assault rifles and the chaotic screeching of the Crest Worms faded into absolute nothingness.

He didn't see the scarred, alien wasteland of the Special Region. He saw a sea of black mud. He smelled the suffocating ash of the Fuyuki fire. He felt the hollow, echoing tragedy of a wish-granting machine that only knew how to kill.

"Do you understand now, Emiya?" Zouken was once more mocking, and this time, Shirou could feel it, "The Heaven's Feel, unbound by the limitations of our world. A Heaven's Feel that is unbound by the need for unruly familiars, petty Wars, and incompatible bodies!"

How many had died? How many people had died ever since they had crossed across the Gate?

“There it is.” Laughter from all around them, “The realization. Yes, Emiya, it is as you feared.”

The Fuyuki Grail Wars were powered by the deaths of Servants. The Greater Grail would manifest once the appropriate amount of energy was gathered. However, it only required any magical energy. The reason why Servants were summoned was because of their higher quality, and thus, would require comparatively less of them to power the ritual.

But that didn’t mean that only Servants souls could power the Grail. No, it could just take an astronomically large number of regular human souls. Somewhere along the lines of a few million, maybe. Particularly because regular humans don’t nearly have enough magical energy to give.

In a world where it was in the middle of the Age of Gods?

It would only take a few hundred thousand at most.

…How many had Shirou already killed just by himself?

…

A/N: Got a paper cut on my index finger before writing this chapter. It was not fun typing this out lmao.