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[MeltingDown]: HOLY MOLY JADE
[TakeOff]: A new waifu has appeared and I am REQUESTING TAKEOFF. Ace pilot status: ready.
[Control]: DENIED. NO FLYING.
[Nervous]: Oh my, kids shouldn't be looking at this.
[TooLate]: Why didn't anyone warn me sooner?? This is suggestive content and I am suggestively affected!!
[Veteran]: Okay juniors, retreat. Stand down. This requires experience. Let your elders handle this one.
[Outraged]: MAX. You are going too far. Show some restraint.
[Research]: Three minutes. THREE MINUTES. I need every piece of information on this Servant. Someone start compiling.
[Callback]: Minute Brother is back again lmaooo
[Converted]: I genuinely thought my heart was locked. I thought after Da Lei, nothing could shake me. And then Shuten-dōji walked in.
[Moral]: A bunch of absolute degenerates.
[Equality]: I formally protest the exposure disparity between female and male Servants. Let our boys show some skin too!
[AmusedObserver]: LOL Medea is TRIGGERED. This is the funniest thing that's happened all stream.
One after another, "Master"—each repetition delivered in that same slow, languid cadence, warm and deliberate and soaked through with implications that had no business existing in a rated-T game.
Max took her in from across the wreckage.
She was small. Maybe 4'9" on a good day. The purple robe she wore was more suggestion than garment—spread open at the front, draped over shoulders and arms with the architectural casualness of someone who'd never needed clothing for warmth. Two curved oni horns emerged from her short purple hair, framing a face that was foxlike and sharp and arranged into an expression of total, comfortable amusement.
She looked at him the same way a cat looks at a fish.
Max had played enough Fate GO to know exactly who he was looking at.
He'd also played enough Fate GO to know that the protective amulet currently sitting against his chest—Medea's work, crafted in the quiet hours before the stream—was the only reason his thoughts were still his own right now. Without it, the moment their eyes met would have been the last coherent moment he'd experienced for a while.
Fruit of the Wine. A-rank. Activates on eye contact. No save.
He let out a very slow breath and kept his expression neutral.
Before he could say anything, Medea moved.
Which was understandable. A bullet had just grazed her Master's cheek. A stranger had stepped on someone's head and landed in front of them with the energy of someone who thought this was all very funny. Medea's feelings about strangers who thought things were funny at Max's expense were well-documented.
The staff came up. The murderous aura that Medea radiated when she was genuinely angry was different from the one she produced when she was annoyed—quieter, colder, less theatrical and more sincere.
The woman in the purple robe showed no sign of anger in response.
Her smile didn't shift by even a fraction.
Ignoring someone is the greatest insult, the old saying went. And she'd clearly understood this at a level that went beyond instinct—she knew exactly which pressure points to press and exactly how lightly to press them. She held Medea's gaze for the duration of one breath, found it completely uninteresting, and looked back at Max.
"My~ Master is still staring so intently~" Her head tilted. "Could it be that you're trying to figure out where you've seen me before? If you actually say something like that, this humble one really will get shy."
"We have met before," Max said. "Once." He kept his voice even, informative, clinical—the tone of a man running a threat assessment out loud. "Be careful, Medea. This is Shuten-dōji of Mount Ōe. Top-tier Servant, just below divine classification. I wasn't expecting to see her in this Holy Grail War."
[FateNerd]: She's a WHAT
[Lore_Incoming]: I know a little about this. This is bad.
[NeedMoreInfo]: Can someone explain for those of us who didn't spend 400 hours on a gacha game?
Shuten-dōji pressed both hands to her cheeks in a show of mock embarrassment that was perfectly calibrated.
"Oh my~ oh my~ Master, don't praise this humble one so much. If you keep going, I won't be able to resist wanting to eat you up whole~"
Max continued the briefing as if she hadn't spoken.
The thing about Shuten-dōji, he explained for the benefit of the audience—and for Medea, who was listening with increasingly tight control over her expression—was that her apparent simplicity was the most dangerous thing about her. People looked at her and saw a small, decorative Assassin. They ran the class comparisons in their heads: Assassin, generally considered the weakest class, notable for stealth rather than direct confrontation. They underestimated.
Here was the actual picture:
Japan's mythological architecture was built on a specific foundation. Izanagi and Izanami at the top. Their most powerful son, Susanoo. Working downward from there—Yamata no Orochi, Susanoo's greatest adversary, the disaster-dragon that produced one of Japan's Three Sacred Treasures in its death throes. The Kusanagi, drawn from its eighth tail.
Shuten-dōji was the daughter of Yamata no Orochi.
Which made her divine. Not metaphorically—structurally, literally divine. Her original form, Ibuki-dōji, was an existence that nature had no mechanism to produce, and yet had produced anyway. The two aspects were related the way a person was related to their own past self: connected, but severed. Ibuki-dōji didn't remember becoming Shuten-dōji. Shuten-dōji didn't remember being Ibuki-dōji. If they met, they'd look at each other and see nothing but a stranger.
But the divinity was still there. Dormant, but present.
Combined with her innate skill—Oni Kind Demon, A-rank—the math worked out simply: when Shuten-dōji was actually fighting, every one of her stats upgraded to A or above. Across the board. No exceptions.
True 6A panel.
And that wasn't even the most dangerous part.
The most dangerous part was a skill called Fruit of the Wine, A-rank.
It allowed Shuten-dōji to render any target completely drunk with a single glance. Not "impaired." Drunk—thoughts dissolving, will evaporating, consciousness sliding sideways. No magical defense? Instant braindeath. The mind simply stopped functioning as a coherent unit.
[ProcessingSlowly]: So she's a 6A Servant who can also just turn your brain off by looking at you.
[GrimReaper]: This is actually terrifying.
[SheHasNo]: She has no business being this overpowered in this body.
[AssassinReview]: Never sleeping on Assassin class again. This class contains MONSTERS.
[GachaWallet]: I need to pull for Shuten immediately.
Shuten-dōji listened to all of this with the same warm, unruffled amusement she'd arrived with.
"My~ Master shouldn't praise this humble one so~ In this humble one's country, it's considered rude to expose someone's capabilities in front of their enemies~" Her eyes curved. "Though I suppose I should thank you for making me sound so wonderful."
Medea's initial anger had gone cold and quiet. That was more alarming.
On the other side of the equation, the Assassin's Master looked like someone had just told him he'd accidentally adopted a wolf thinking it was a labrador.
He'd been standing slightly behind Shuten-dōji since she landed, processing. He was a heavyset man in his mid-thirties, wearing the expression of someone who had opened a door expecting a storage closet and found a portal to another dimension instead. He'd known his Servant was strong—the stats looked good in the menu, the numbers were impressive—but "impressive numbers in a menu" and "top-tier divine Servant who can melt your brain with eye contact" were categories he apparently hadn't connected.
The chat had already assembled his entire personality from thirty seconds of footage.
[Profiling]: He's a kill-stealer who panicked when Max caught up with him.
[AssessmentComplete]: He immediately tried to shoot Max too and almost got lasered into paste. He's been on the back foot since he arrived.
[Betting]: This man summoned a goddess by accident and is now improvising in real time.
A strange light came into his eyes as he looked at Medea.
Max caught the look.
Oh, absolutely not.
Medea caught the look too—her lip curled with a very specific, precise disgust that could have stripped paint—and then Max was already moving.
He addressed his audience with calm, efficient delivery: "Shuten-dōji's Assassin classification isn't her default strength. It's just the slot she happens to fill here. Put her in any other class and she'd be stronger. Never count out Assassin because of the class name. Some of the most broken things in this game got filed under Assassin because it fit the paperwork."
He watched the chat spiral into immediate tier-list revision and lore panic.
Then he focused.
"One more thing—" His hand came up, showing the bracelet on his wrist, the charm at his collar. "Medea made these before we started today. I strongly recommend checking your Servant's crafting options before you assume you're going into a fight underprepared."
He showed the stat readout.
The chat, already volatile, became genuinely unhinged.
[StatCheck]: D-rank Noble Phantasm equivalent. Each one. That's his EQUIPMENT.
[Recalculating]: The Lucky Charm alone takes him to B+ Luck. That's higher than Kiritsugu.
[PhilosophyHit]: Medea turned her Master into a Servant. She literally did Hero Creation. On a living person.
[NeedMedea]: I am summoning Medea before any other Servant. This is my sworn oath.
[Rethinking]: I genuinely thought Medea was a support pick. What is happening.
Shuten-dōji had been watching the audience segment of this whole presentation with obvious enjoyment, head tilted, fingers laced behind her back.
"My~ my~" she said softly. "My Master is really so thorough. You've explained everything about me so carefully. Now this humble one has no secrets left at all." A pause. "I suppose... there's nothing to be done about it."
The killing intent arrived approximately half a second later.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't theatrical. It simply existed—present in the air the way a low hum becomes a vibration becomes a sound you feel in your chest before you hear it. Everyone in range felt their muscles tighten involuntarily.
"How about you apologize for that," she said, still smiling, "by dying right here?"
Medea's hand was already on her staff.
Their Master, across the rubble, had lost the lecherous look entirely. In its place was the expression of someone who was rapidly reassessing his life choices.
The battle was about to begin.
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