The air in the burnt world tasted of ancient cinders and something fouler—the spiritual rot of a Singularity left to fester. Min-jun moved with a pained, economical grace, every step a conscious negotiation with the ache in his side and the deeper, colder ache that lived in his bones. Beside him, Jack was a wraith, her small form a smear of white hair and bandages against the grey ruins.
Their target was a village, or what remained of one. A crude palisade of sharpened logs stood against the desolation.
"There," Min-jun breathed, his voice flat. "People. Or something like them. We go in quiet. Eyes only."
Jack nodded, her yellow-green eyes scanning. "Quiet stabbing?"
"Only if they make us. Understood?"
"Understood, Master."
They approached from the downwind side. Two human-shaped guards stood at the gate, armored in rust and fear.
"See the slits?" Min-jun whispered, pointing. "You can get through. Get in, scout. Find us a hole to hide in. Look for signs of the others, or… any Servant who doesn't seem rabid. Come back. Don't be seen."
Jack's eyes gleamed. A real job. She gave a sharp nod and melted away, slipping through a gap in the wall like smoke.
Alone, Min-jun settled into the cold mud of a ditch. The silence was heavy. He closed his eyes, but not to meditate. Just to rest them. To escape the constant grey for a second.
But inside was no better.
What else do you have? The question wasn't clinical this time. It was tired. Desperate. Tusk was a miracle, a weapon that bent reality. But it was also a hungry, spinning thing tied to his soul. When he reached for it, he felt the vast, quiet presence of Act 4, the golden spiral over his heart. It was strength, but it was also a weight. What if it wasn't enough? What if he needed to be clever, or subtle, or know something he didn't?
He was a repairman in a world of broken legends. He could fix a conduit, maybe drill a hole through a monster. But what about the rest? The strategy, the magic, the history? He felt stupid. Unprepared. A fraud built on trauma and a single, strange trick.
A more specific, galling thought hit him like a slap.
Siegfried. The dragon-slayer. Kiyohime. The one who burns. Elizabeth… God, the noise.
Names from a half-remembered game, now real people somewhere in this hell. Potential allies. Walking disasters. He'd known they'd be here, in the back of his mind. But he'd… let himself forget. Pushed them aside because remembering meant dealing with more variables, more people who could look at him and see right through the hollow man to the broken boy underneath. It was a coward's move. The shame of it was a hot coal in his gut. People could die because he wanted to avoid the mental strain.
Pathetic. You don't get to be fragile. Not here.
He forced the names to the front of his mind, making himself see them: a knight offering his heart, a girl whose love was a firestorm, a diva with a lethal scream. Problems. But also pieces on the board. He had to remember the board.
A soft shiff of air. Jack reappeared, her small face serious. "Master. Village is scared. Smells like old soup and fear. Guards inside. Big stone building in the center, like a mean church. No big magic smells. No other Servants." She frowned, concentrating. "But the ground… near the back wall. It feels thirsty. Hungry."
A dormant leyline. A potential tap for power or a way home. A small, real piece of luck.
"You found a place for us?"
She nodded. "Storehouse. Smells of dust and old grain. Hole in the roof. We can hide."
"Good." He paused, the shame mixing with his need to do better. "One more thing, Jack. Bigger area. Look for Ritsuka, Mash, the red man. Or… anyone else who seems lost, like us. Don't be seen. If you see the dragon, you run. Not a fight. Just run. Come back to me."
She took the order, the weight of it quieting her excitement. With a final nod, she was gone.
Alone again. The quiet pressed in, and with it, the memories he couldn't outrun.
He didn't mean to, but he thought of Jack's small hand in his. The trust in it. Then, like a poison spill, another touch invaded—the memory of a hand on his cheek, gentle and possessive and wrong. His skin crawled. He jerked his head, as if to shake it off. His breath came short. The ditch felt like a grave. He could almost smell her perfume under the ash.
Stop. She's dead. She's gone. She's not here.
But the ghost of the feeling was. It lived in his nerves. Hugging Jack was one thing—a small, frantic creature clinging to him for safety. Hugging his Stand, that colossal manifestation of his will, had felt strangely pure. But the idea of casual touch, of comfort that wasn't desperate… it still made his stomach turn. He was faking normalcy, building the act day by day, but the foundation was rotten.
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to find the golden spiral, the clean math of the Spin. A refuge. He found it, humming with potential. And beside it, the frozen gear. As his anxiety spiked, the gear gave a single, sharp click. Not a turn. A flinch. A vibration of warning through his soul. It was listening to his panic.
The world dissolved into absolute, silent white.
One moment, Min-jun was in the cold mud of the ditch, the gritty reality of Orléans pressing against his senses. The next, there was… nothing. No ground, no sky, no sound. Just an endless, blinding white expanse that felt both empty and infinitely full.
In the center of it, stood a boy.
He was small, maybe twelve. Wearing a middle school uniform that was too big on his thin frame. His hair was a messy, black mop. He held a neon green notebook covered in peeling stickers. He wasn't looking at Min-jun; he was staring down at the blank white floor, his shoulders hunched, radiating a quiet, profound sadness.
Min-jun's breath caught. He knew that sadness. It was his own. A fossil from the time before the hollowing, before the diary, when the pain was still fresh and felt like the end of the world.
A presence manifested behind Min-jun. He didn't hear footsteps, but he felt it—a warmth that had no temperature, a weight that felt like peace itself. The scent of dry earth and myrrh washed over him, clean and ancient.
"His heart is finally opening," the voice said. It was the same voice from the bridge, but here, in this white nothingness, it was softer. Kinder. "The path he carved in stone is changing. You are leading it to a righteous place. Not through force, but through the choice to care."
The little boy looked up. His eyes were Min-jun's eyes, but wet with tears that hadn't been shed in over a decade. He looked at Min-jun, the adult, the broken thing he would become, and there was no accusation in his gaze. Only a question.
Min-jun tried to turn, to look upon the speaker, but his body wouldn't obey.
And then he blinked.
He was back in the ditch. The cold mud was real under his hands. The grey, ash-choked sky was above him. No time had passed.
But everything had changed.
The frozen gear in his chest—the cold, mechanical counterweight to the golden spiral—turned.
A sensation like ice melting flooded his veins, but it wasn't cold. It was… clarifying. The constant, grinding calculus of survival—assess threat, calculate trajectory, conserve energy—softened. The rigid, robotic framework of his thoughts, built over years of hollow endurance, didn't break, but it bent. Something else seeped up through the cracks.
It felt like… curiosity. A spark of that old, buried wonder. The raw, unfiltered feeling of facing something immense and unknown. Not just analyzing it, but experiencing it. The fear was still there, the shame, the pain—but they were no longer the only colors. There was a flicker of the boy's vulnerability, his capacity for sheer, unguarded amazement.
He was still Min-jun. But the wall between the man and the boy had grown thin.
And with that turn of the gear, a new layer of power unlocked. He didn't understand it intellectually. He felt it. It wasn't a drill. It wasn't a path. It wasn't a hole.
It was a field. A domain. An assertion over the very turn of the world.
His head snapped up, not in panic, but in a sudden, electrifying intuition. He looked at a single, dry leaf scuttling across the dirt. He focused on the spin of reality itself.
His voice, when it came, wasn't a calculated command. It was an exclamation. A shout of pure, rediscovered will, bursting from him in a language of pure intent that echoed with the power of the Stand.
"ZA WARUDO!"
- - - - -
(3rd person pov)
The air in the French countryside was thick with the smell of smoke and fear. It was a different quality of ruin than Fuyuki's stagnant death; this was an active, burning wound. They had been walking for hours, following the trail of destruction and the faint, corrupted pulse of the Grail.
Ritsuka Fujimaru's legs ached, a dull protest that had become background noise. The theoretical training at Chaldea had done little to prepare him for the sheer physical grind of marching through a war zone. Every distant screech of a wyvern sent a jolt through him, quickly suppressed. He couldn't afford to panic. Not in front of Mash.
Mash Kyrielight walked a step ahead, her shield held not in active defense, but at a ready position. Her eyes constantly scanned the horizon, the burnt fields, the skeletal remains of farmhouses. "The spiritual disturbance is intensifying, Senpai," she reported, her voice steady but laced with tension. "The ley lines here are… screaming. It's centered ahead, in that valley."
"Where there's screaming ley lines, there's usually trouble waiting to say hello," came a dry, familiar voice from behind them.
Emiya brought up the rear, his gaze watching their flanks and backtrail with a sniper's thoroughness. He moved with an effortless, silent grace that made Ritsuka feel even clumsier. In his hands, he wasn't holding his usual bow, but a simple, stout walking staff he'd fashioned from a broken fence post. It was a small thing, but it spoke volumes. He wasn't just a weapon; he was their scout, their rearguard, the one who noticed the half-erased wyvern track they'd almost missed, who had wordlessly handed Ritsuka a canteen an hour ago. A frustrating, cynical, and utterly reliable presence. The unspoken 'dad' of this desperate little squad.
"Do you think we'll find other Servants here, Archer?" Ritsuka asked, trying to sound like he was asking for a tactical assessment and not just seeking reassurance.
"Count on it," Emiya replied. "A Singularity this size, powered by a Grail? It'll be a magnet for Heroic Spirits. The question is whether they'll be sane, and which side of 'burn it all down' they're on." His eyes narrowed. "Speaking of… we have company. Up ahead. Human. Lots of them. And they're not happy."
They crested a low rise, overlooking a small village nestled by a stream. But this was no refuge. A chaotic scene unfolded in the central square. A group of roughly two dozen French soldiers—men in battered brigandines and rusted sallets—had formed a tense, half-circle. Their pikes and swords were pointed inward, not at a monster, but at a single figure who stood calmly in the center.
She was tall, clad in pristine silver plate armor that seemed to gather the muted afternoon light. A banner of pure white, adorned with a golden fleur-de-lis, hung from the pole in her hand. Her hair was the color of summer wheat, tied back, and her face… held a sorrow so profound it was like a physical force. She was the picture of a saint from a stained-glass window, standing in a square of mud and hate.
"Witch!" bellowed a grizzled sergeant, his voice cracking with fear and rage. "You dare show your face here, after what you've done to Orleans? After you called the dragons upon us!"
"She looks just like the one leading the horde!" cried another soldier, his pike trembling. "The Dragon Witch! It's a trick!"
The woman, Jeanne d'Arc, did not raise her banner in anger. Her expression was one of heartbreaking patience. "I am not the one who besieges Orleans," she said, her voice clear and carrying, cutting through the panic. "I have come to liberate it. The one who wears my face is a corruption, a shadow cast by the Grail. Please, you must believe me. We must stand together."
"Lies! Your kind only brings fire and death!" The sergeant spat on the ground. "Men! Ready your—"
"I wouldn't."
The new voice cut through the tension like a knife. It wasn't loud. It was flat, utterly matter-of-fact, and it came from the edge of the square.
Every head, including Jeanne's, turned.
Emiya had stepped forward, past Ritsuka and Mash. He no longer looked like a weary traveler. He stood with a straight-backed, casual authority, his grey and red form a stark contrast to the grimy soldiers and the radiant saint. His arms were crossed, his eyes cool as they assessed the sergeant.
"You're making a category error," Emiya stated, as if explaining a faulty recipe. "That," he nodded toward Jeanne, "is a Servant, yes. But she's a Ruler-class. A moderator. Her very Saint Graph is designed to enforce the rules of a Grail War, not break them by leading a dragon army. The thing burning Orleans is something else wearing her skin. Attacking her is a waste of your lives and, more importantly for our purposes, a waste of a potent ally."
The soldiers gaped, confused by the jargon but cowed by the absolute certainty in the man's tone. He spoke like a general who had seen this all before.
The sergeant recovered first, suspicion hardening his face. "And who in God's name are you? More demons consorting with this witch?"
"We're not demons," Ritsuka said, finding his voice and stepping forward to stand beside Emiya. Mash instantly moved to shield his front. "We're here to help. To fix… whatever this is." He looked past the pikes, directly at Jeanne. Her blue eyes met his, and he saw the loneliness in them, the desperate hope for someone, anyone, to believe her. "My name is Ritsuka Fujimaru. We're from Chaldea. We believe you."
Jeanne's breath hitched, just slightly. The stoic sorrow on her face wavered, revealing a glimpse of overwhelming relief.
"Chaldea…" she whispered. Then, louder, to the soldiers, "These people speak the truth. They are not your enemy. I am not your enemy. The true enemy gathers at Orleans. Will you spend your strength here, on a futile fight, or will you preserve it to reclaim your homeland?"
The soldiers wavered. The sergeant looked from Jeanne's earnest face to Emiya's unimpressed one, to Mash's imposing shield, and finally to Ritsuka, who just looked tired and sincere.
Emiya let out a short sigh, the 'dad' reasserting himself over the strategist. "Look. You're scared. You have every right to be. But pointing sharp things at the one person who might actually be able to save your country is what we call 'counterproductive.' Stand down. Let the adults talk."
It was the blunt, almost dismissive practicality that did it. The sheer normalcy of the exasperation in his voice was more disarming than any magical threat. The sergeant's shoulders slumped, the fight draining out of him. He lowered his pike. One by one, with muttered curses and fearful glances, the others followed.
Jeanne let out a soft sigh, her grip on her banner relaxing slightly. She walked toward them, the soldiers parting for her like a tide. She stopped before Ritsuka, offering a small, grateful bow.
"Thank you, Master of Chaldea. Your trust… is a greater gift than you know." Her eyes then moved to Emiya, her gaze discerning. "And thank you, Archer. Your words were sharp, but they cut through the fear."
Emiya simply shrugged, his posture relaxing back into its usual vigilant slump. "Just stating facts. Getting stabbed by mistake is a pain to deal with. Now," he looked from Jeanne to the surrounding, still-hostile glares of the villagers peeking from doors. "We've secured one ally and pissed off a whole village. I suggest we move this conversation somewhere less… pointy."