Anomaly Ch. 64 (Patreon)

On the whole, the ritual for the Heaven’s Feel was incredibly simple. In fact, most of the complexity for such rituals were thrown out of the window when it came to the Fuyuki Grail Wars.

See, when it came down to other, large scale rituals, there was a lot more involved in the activation. Reagents, for instance, that would take literal years to create. Formalcraft circles, specialized materials that could only be harvested at certain points of the lunar cycle, prerequisite body modification to survive the influx of magical energy.

More than once, Shirou had bust down a Sealing Designate that had been in the midst of preparing all of those at the same time.

For the Heaven’s Feel, only one thing mattered. All they needed was a mass of power, condensed into a singular point - a Holy Grail. The three founding families were the ones that decided that souls were a suitable power source, and to their credit, it was the best option that they had.

Of course, due to several factors, regular human souls would not suffice. Well, according to the necromancers that he’d spoken with, they could suffice in high enough numbers. The problem was the lack of quality found in a modern human’s soul.

Doing so with regular humans would almost necessitate the extermination of a small country’s worth of humans. Which would have attracted even more attention than the three families wanted.

Therefore, the solution was to use souls that were from a different era entirely. Souls whose quality could be guaranteed to be high enough that they would only need a handful of them. Ghost Liners. More specifically, Heroic Spirits.

Ghost Liners were not unheard of, as they’re more or less just human souls given form. Not ghosts, and more similar to wraiths. Heroic Spirits are the pinnacle of Ghost Liners, as they’re significantly more powerful than a simple wraith. 

The summoning of Ghost Liners had been a process that has been fairly well documented. The summoning of Heroic Spirits were usually under the purview of Alaya, the Will of Humanity, as a counter balance to specific threats. Mostly in the form of the entities known as Counter Guardians.

The binding of Heroic Spirits was practically unheard of. Hence, the inclusion of the Makiri in the Heaven’s Feel. The Makiri, with their expertise in familiars, created the summoning circles that would automatically apply Command Seals to the summoner. These spells would bind the Heroic Spirit that was summoned, imposing a fundamental rule that had originally never been there: their current life was only due to the continued existence of these Seals.

Alongside that, the Makiri had also known that the autonomy of such powerful figures, some from the Age of Gods, would be cause for concern. Such was the case for the controlling properties of the Seals, where they acted as a tool to force the bound ‘familiar’ to serve their ‘master’.

And thus, came the origin of the title Servant.

A Servant bound under the will of a Master.

The Command Seals would then be used to force a suicide from the summoned Spirits, releasing the souls into a specially made container. Through that container, the Einzbern Wishcraft would be used to convert the collected energy into whatever they wanted. For some, it was the ultimate path to the Swirl of the Root. Akasha.

To others, a way to regain a lost Magic.

To others, a path to immortality.

Of course, inherent greed of magi families made it turn out as a war for the sole ownership of the Grail. Because to them, what would otherwise be the same result for all three wishes, they wanted it all for themselves and nothing for their rivals.

The knowledge of this had come from a mix of first and second hand accounts, and well before he knew that the Matou family was the Makiri. Shirou had assumed that the Makiri had long since gone extinct, and that only the Einzbern and Tohsaka remained. 

He was wrong.

And now, he was paying the price.

…

From her vantage point upon the elevated battlements of Italica, Lorelei observed the localized purge of magical energy. Thirty kilometers of distance was nothing to the long-distance observation magecraft that she employed.

The air around her remained pristine. While the plains below were choked with the suffocating stench of burning chitin and the ozone-heavy exhaust of Emiya's projected weaponry, the Vice Director existed within a self-sustaining sphere of high atmospheric pressure.

Below, the battlefield was a vulgar display of attrition. The Enforcer had ringed his fragile coalition - a motley collection of non-humans and Eastern soldiers of their world - in a star of white-hot fire. She could see Emiya, even at a distance, straining to keep both his 'allies' safe, while striking at the mass of filth he was combating. He was acting precisely as she had expected: a blunt, hyper-focused instrument of violence, throwing high-temperature conceptual blades into a shifting, boiling mass of ash and rot.

It was pedestrian. Messy. And something she expected, had he been telling the truth.

Which, surprisingly, he was. She was no fool. She had navigated the politics of the Clock Tower for far, far longer than the Enforcer. Lorelei could easily spot that the man had only been suspecting the presence of the Makiri family to lead her on.

Emiya had thrown a desperate gamble. He had used her absolute intolerance for Dead Apostles, and anything mimicking their foul eternity, as a shield to justify his insubordination. He had fed her a convenient excuse, hoping to redirect her wrath toward the encroaching army. Yet, by some twist of fate or the Enforcer's uncanny luck, the lie had been proven true.

Her eyes tracked the undulating waves of purple-black ichor and writhing flesh. Makiri was not simply attacking the Eastern soldiers and the local demi-humans out of malice. Lorelei could feel the greedy, localized suction of magical energy. The Crest Worms were acting as a massive, decentralized circuit. They were devouring life force and replacing rotting tissue, yes, but they were also acting as a crude, bloated natural womb anchored to the leylines.

These leylines were just slightly different to the ones in their world. Subtle differences, such as the sheer amount of throughput, as well as the distances wherein the energy was still capable of being used. Yet, for whatever reason, the familiar tinge of mana was similar enough that any magus worth their salt would not have any problems using it.

In short, no matter how much Emiya tried, so long as Makiri was linked with the land, the tide of Crest Worms would truly be endless.

To the Vice Director of the Clock Tower, this was an aesthetic and moral offense. Zolgen Makiri, a relic who had spent five hundred years fighting his own rot, was now engorging himself on the unrefined ether of this virgin world. He was acting as a parasite, attempting to achieve a crude mimicry of the Ancestors she so despised. Whatever grand delusion this creature harbored, whatever reason he sought to hoard such vast amounts of magical energy, it was utterly irrelevant to her. 

Heresy was heresy.

Emiya’s methodology, while effective for a common Enforcer whose entire foundation was restricted to the concept of weaponry, was fundamentally flawed. He was attempting to eradicate a symptom while ignoring the disease. He threw high-temperature conceptual blades to burn the flesh, but Makiri had already deduced that the loss of a thousand vessels was nothing but loose change. So long as the leylines acted as a natural womb, fire was merely a temporary inconvenience.

Lorelei exhaled, a perfectly measured breath that did not disturb the sudden, stifling humidity she had forced upon the courtyard moments prior, "Such a vulgar display of desperation." She murmured, the sound swallowed by the absolute silence of her localized high-pressure zone.

She raised her right hand, the silver gauntlet catching the ambient light. If Makiri had anchored his parasitic existence to the earth, then the earth itself must be rendered inhospitable. She would not grant him the mercy of an easy explosive decompression.

With a microscopic flex of her Circuits, she inverted the barometric principles she typically employed for flight and traversal. Directly above the writhing, wood-colored avatar of Makiri’s face, a column of air roughly fifty meters in diameter suddenly ceased to act as a gas. Lorelei forced the atmospheric molecules to condense, packing them together until the air itself possessed the physical density of solid lead, yet remained completely invisible.

The execution was instantaneous.

She brought her hand down in a sharp, dismissive chop.

The invisible pillar of hyper-dense atmosphere dropped from the sky.

The sound was a sickening, wet crunch followed immediately by the geological groan of shattering bedrock. Emiya’s projected axes, the roaring flames, and tens of thousands of engorged Crest Worms were instantly flattened into a micrometer-thin paste. The sheer kinetic weight drove straight through the topsoil, pulverizing the earth and violently snapping the physical and spiritual tethers connecting the swarm to the subterranean leylines.

A perfect, circular depression, fifty meters across and ten meters deep, had been stamped into the plains. The oppressive, localized suction of magical energy Lorelei had sensed moments ago was abruptly severed.

From her vantage point, the Queen of the Clock Tower lowered her arm. Not a single strand of her hair had shifted.

She had granted her Enforcer a boon. He would be a fool to waste it.

…

For a fraction of a second, the world simply ceased to exist.

There was no blinding flash, no roar of concussive force. Instead, Shirou experienced a violent, instantaneous equalization of pressure that popped his eardrums and forced the breath from his lungs.

Then came the sound.

It was the fundamental crack of the earth’s crust giving way, a geological scream that bypassed the ears and rattled directly against the teeth and bones of every living thing present. The ground beneath Shirou’s boots bucked, throwing him to his knees as a localized earthquake ripped through the plains.

Behind him, the JSDF soldiers were thrown into disarray. Itami slammed hard against the armored chassis of the HMV, while Kuribayashi hit the dirt, her Type 89 assault rifle slipping from her grasp. Ghunzul and his vanguard of orcs, as well as the other natives of this world, cried out in alarm. The situation no doubt reminded them of the earthshakes that had happened previously.

Fortunately for them, such was not the case.

This was not the first time he had experienced this, after all. It was still jarring to be this close to the source of the shaking, nonetheless.

As the shaking ceased, silence reclaimed the battlefield. The suffocating stench of burning decay was gone, replaced by the sharp, metallic tang of pulverized bedrock and crushed quartz.

Shirou forced himself upward, his Circuits flaring to Reinforce his strained muscles. He peered through the settling dust, his breath catching in his throat. Thirty meters away, the writhing, boiling mass of purple-black ichor and chitin was gone. Further beyond, a massive, perfectly circular crater had been embedded into the ground.

Slowly, he approached the crater, even if he was fairly certain that Lady Barthomeloi would not have done things in half-measures. He was proven right as the bottom of the depression was a smooth, micrometer-thin paste of crushed dirt and annihilated biomass.

"What...what the hell was that?" Itami groaned, pulling himself up by the HMV’s door handle, "Emiya, was that...?"

"That," Shirou rasped, wiping a thin trail of blood from his nose, "Was the Vice Director."

"Shit, ever heard of danger close?" Kuribayashi spoke up, opening and closing her mouth to try and pop her ears, “Still, at least she got the damn bastard.”

Shirou didn't answer. Unfortunately, Zouken wasn't dead. He was a desperate survivor who had spent five hundred years fighting his own rot. The ancient magus had merely been evicted from this specific patch of earth.

And he was close to finishing the ritual, he could feel it. The only thing he needed was a vessel to hold all the souls that had been killed. But, at the same time, Zouken would not have sent people to die had he not already had the container prepared.

Which meant-

“We’re too late, aren’t we?” Tyuule spoke quietly, “That worm’s already got what he wanted.”

Shirou’s only response was to kick a discarded helmet and scream.

…