The moment the three words "Counter Force" calmly left Rei Ao's lips,
it was as if he had brushed against some unspeakable taboo.
Or rather, stirred the "gaze" of the vast laws lurking beneath the skin of the world itself.
The once-clear night sky over Fuyuki abruptly changed color.
It wasn't that clouds gathered.
The entire firmament, in an instant, shifted from a deep, starry night into a churning, chaotic vista of dark red and pitch-black, endlessly roiling and twisting.
As though the sky itself had turned into the tortured viscera of some living thing.
The stars vanished.
The moonlight disappeared.
In their place came a sound that made hearts pound uneasily—
a low, dull rumbling like the very pulse of the world itself.
The air grew thick and heavy.
An invisible pressure descended from above, blanketing the entire Tohsaka estate—
and an even wider area beyond it.
This was not magecraft. Not a Noble Phantasm.
It was some more fundamental "phenomenon" at work.
The flowers and trees in the courtyard began to sway without wind.
Leaves rustled and trembled,
as if shivering in terror.
A faint vibration rose from the ground.
The waters of the Mion River stopped flowing.
Its surface rippled in unnatural patterns.
A vast, cold, inhuman, and yet seemingly omnipresent "will"
pressed down like an icy gaze, piercing every barrier and ward to focus on this place.
More precisely, on Rei Ao himself—the one who had just spoken that word.
This was the Counter Force—or rather, the warning sign of its manifestation.
A fierce reaction to someone casually naming, and seemingly intending to interfere with, its domain.
Waver collapsed to the ground on the spot.
His face went chalk white.
Under the aftershocks of that colossal will
he felt smaller than dust, his very soul trembling.
Iskandar let out a low grunt.
His massive body swayed slightly.
He clenched his fists, fighting off that primal sense of oppression that comes from facing a higher-order existence.
His eyes were filled with a shock he had never known before.
Artoria, Ishtar, Ereshkigal, Medusa… the gathered Heroic Spirits and goddesses all felt that pressure as well.
Their expressions turned extremely grave.
Irisviel pulled Rin and Sakura tightly into her arms, using her own body as a shield.
Even Gilgamesh—collapsed on the ground and horribly weakened—had a flash of doubt and alarm in his crimson eyes.
Emiya Kiritsugu and Maiya Hisau were on full alert, every nerve stretched to the limit.
This sudden upheaval of heaven and earth was on a level far beyond their understanding of "gods" or "the occult."
And yet—
standing at the very center of this anomaly and invisible pressure, Rei Ao seemed utterly unfazed.
He didn't even bother to look up at the grotesquely twisted sky.
He just let out a soft, derisive chuckle.
That laugh was full of open scorn and mockery.
"Heh… this little display is supposed to scare me?"
He shook his head, as if commenting on a particularly boring fireworks show.
"How petty."
Before the words had fully faded,
his gaze dropped again to the prone Gilgamesh at his feet, then to Emiya Kiritsugu and Maiya Hisau not far away.
The indifference in his eyes was even clearer than before.
He was merely looking at three defective products that needed to be cleaned up.
No incantation.
No elaborate movements.
Not even a surge of dramatic magical energy.
Rei Ao simply flicked his hand, as though brushing nonexistent dust from his sleeve.
The motion was light, almost casual, without a trace of effort.
But in the instant he waved—
Gilgamesh's face, still twisted with humiliation and unwillingness, froze.
The last thing reflected in his crimson eyes
was Rei Ao's utterly calm, rippleless gaze.
Then—
his body, along with that battered golden armor, began to fade from reality like a masterpiece being erased by the world's finest rubber.
From head to toe he turned transparent, blurred, and then broke apart into the most basic particles of light.
He didn't even have time to let out a groan before he vanished completely into the air.
The erroneous Servant Archer, the most ancient Hero King, was thus quietly erased without a sound.
Almost at the exact same moment,
Emiya Kiritsugu and Maiya Hisau met the same fate.
"Uh…"
Kiritsugu seemed to want to say something.
His lips moved, but before the sound could come out,
his whole being—along with his iconic black coat, and the equally resolute Maiya at his side who was bracing for a last stand—became like a sand sculpture on the beach washed over by the tide, rapidly fading, crumbling, dissolving away.
No pain.
No struggle.
Not even the slightest trace left behind to prove they had ever existed.
The erroneous Master and his partner,
along with all their obsessions, ideals, sins, and past,
were gently wiped away in a single stroke.
Three "wrong factors" that had played major roles in this warped Holy Grail War
were completely disposed of with a casual wave of Rei Ao's hand.
In the courtyard,
only the golden Holy Grail still floated in the air,
and a group of stunned onlookers whose minds and hearts were reeling.
The heavenly phenomena above
seemed to pause for a brief instant after the three of them disappeared.
The dark red and black sky still churned, the heavy pressure still lingered,
but it was as if it had lost its clear target.
It felt… stalled.
Only then did Rei Ao act like he had finished some trivial chore.
He clapped his hands lightly, then turned toward Artoria, Iskandar, and the rest.
His expression slipped back into that slightly casual smile.
"Alright, the biggest trouble and the biggest errors are cleaned up."
"As for this Holy Grail…"
He flicked a glance at the golden cup hanging in the air.
"If you're interested, you can take it and have some fun."
"Anyway, the rules are already a complete mess. Fight however you like—think of it as, mm… a special kind of mixer, I guess."
With that offhand tone,
he reduced the erasure of three major figures and an entire life-and-death, wish-granting Holy Grail War
to something on the level of kids playing house.
"As for now…"
Rei Ao stretched lazily,
his gaze once more seeming to reach toward the depths of that bizarre sky.
There was a hint of playfulness in his voice. "I should go have a proper chat with those two 'petty' landladies."
"It's not very polite to keep spying and sending little warnings like this."
When he finished,
his figure flickered once,
like a glitched image on a bad signal.
Then he vanished completely from where he had been standing.