For Early/Extra Chapters : patreon.com/scoldeyjodxd
Already 30+ Chapters Updated + Daily Updates
One red sun had set.
The other still burned.
Without the first sun going down, the coolness that should have followed evening never came. The heat simply persisted — flat, total, a ceiling that had decided to stay. People who had been managing it hour by hour were no longer managing it. The streets that hadn't been emptied by earlier combat were empty now for different reasons.
In the harbor, the dragon hadn't moved.
It didn't need to.
"Have they arrived yet?" Vritra's voice rumbled across the water, warm and anticipatory. "My heroes~?"
Medea's firework was precise, beautiful, and extremely visible against the darkening sky — a burst of arcane light in the specific pattern they'd agreed on, the signal to converge.
Max watched it bloom and looked down at the street below the crane.
The chat was not taking the Eighth Servant situation well.
[AnotherViolation]: He's doing it again. More illegal operations. I can't believe this.
[GameDev_Commentary]: A game made by a small studio having exploitable mechanics that the developer himself is exploiting. This is peak indie game culture.
[MaintenanceRequest]: Max is going to have to do emergency patch work after this session. The compensation better be good.
[HolyGrailPrice]: Wait, someone said Grail fragments are only 30 each? That's actually cheap.
[WhaleMoment]: Can someone Venmo me 50 dollars I want to go completely feral on the gacha this Thursday.
Max was not reading the chat.
He was looking at the summoning circle, which was no longer there.
The summoning had worked — he was certain of that. What had appeared in the circle was not a Servant in any recognizable sense, not a figure he could introduce to his audience or explain in his current lore-explainer format. A flame, humanoid, brief. A single extended finger that had pointed at him with the specific energy of acknowledgment before the whole thing vanished and the circle shattered.
The Holy Church's wanted system had not flagged it.
Because technically, what he'd performed was closer to necromancy than summoning — a loophole in the ritual architecture that the Einzbern family had originally used and that Medea, after two hours with the Matou family's archives, had reconstructed.
The Eighth Servant was summoned.
In a way that wasn't going to make sense until it needed to.
Max filed this under trust the plan and kept moving.
Forty-five minutes later, at the end of the street, figures appeared.
Max had expected Maverick. He had expected Chen Ge. He had, with some optimism, expected the situation to have resolved itself cleanly.
What arrived was: Maverick, Chen Ge, Astolfo, Derek, Shuten-dōji, and an atmosphere that strongly suggested the journey here had contained events.
All of them, to varying degrees, appeared to have been through something.
"Are you..." Max looked at them. At Derek specifically. At the general aura of the group. "Did you just come from some kind of membership-based restaurant?"
"A lot happened," Maverick said, in the tone of someone who had decided not to elaborate. "This is the Assassin's Master. He's in. Shuten-dōji is allied with us." A pause. "For now."
"Glad to hear it. Medea—"
Medea was already moving before he finished, her expression communicating what she thought of the situation in terms that required no elaboration. She raised her staff and produced, from the water reserves she'd been drawing on all afternoon, something between a shower and a targeted flood.
The group accepted this with varying degrees of dignity.
Derek accepted it with significant relief.
[MedeaService]: She looks disgusted the whole time and still does it because Max asked her to. Character moment.
[CleaningMontage]: The most practical magic cast all day.
[ShutenvArrival]: Shuten-dōji is here. Shuten-dōji is allied with the group. I don't know how this happened and I respect it.
Then Shuten-dōji, who had been standing precisely far enough away from Derek to communicate her position on the matter, noticed that Max had become available as a target.
She moved.
The arm that draped itself across his shoulder from behind was unhurried and completely deliberate.
"Oh my~ Oh my~" Her voice was warm against his ear. "Master pays so much attention to everyone else and ignores this concubine entirely. After everything we've been through together. It breaks my heart."
"Get off me."
"Your Servant's voice is getting higher." She directed this at Medea, who had frozen mid-water-spell. "You know, if you'd focused on your Master instead of helping those others, you wouldn't be in this position. You've left your home open."
"You vixen, I swear—"
"Medea." Max's voice was even. "Focus."
Medea refocused. With visible effort.
[MedeaFuming]: She is going to combust. She is physically going to combust.
[ShutenvStrategy]: Shuten-dōji is doing this on purpose to destabilize Medea before the fight. This is tactics.
[AlsoJustFun]: She's also doing it because she enjoys it.
[BothTrue]: Both are true simultaneously.
[ChenGeConcern]: Someone mentioned from Chen Ge's perspective that Maverick may have accidentally ingested something during the fight with Derek. I'm choosing not to think about this.
[CosmosReport]: Whatever happened, Maverick came out of it with some kind of power-up energy. He had a moment. It was something.
Astolfo, who had been looking at everyone with the bright-eyed interest of someone at a very exciting party, drifted toward Max and Medea with the specific trajectory of someone who had decided to introduce himself.
"Hello! You must be the Magician's Master — you're very handsome! Almost as handsome as my Master, though a little less."
Shuten-dōji released Max's shoulder.
She looked at Astolfo.
She looked at him the way a person looks at something they want to be far away from without having to say so.
Medea, whose Astolfo tolerance had been established definitively earlier, did not wait for more.
Even at E-rank Strength — which was Medea's actual physical stat, one of the lowest possible — the collar grab was efficient. The Circe Defeat Punch that followed was the form of a woman who had transformed people into pigs before and retained the muscle memory.
"Medea," Max said.
"He started it," Medea said.
"We need everyone functional."
"He'll be functional." A pause. "Probably."
Max looked at the assembled group — Maverick, Chen Ge, Derek, Shuten-dōji at a careful distance from Derek, Astolfo being held at collar-height by Medea, Wuai standing to one side with the expression of a creature that had accepted its circumstances.
He cleared his throat.
"I don't know everyone's names yet, and that can wait. We have a temporary alliance and we're burning time." He looked at Maverick. "I need to borrow a Command Seal."
Maverick's eyebrows went up. "You used all three already?"
"Yes. What I'm about to do requires one."
"If it's not enough, I have one too," Chen Ge offered immediately.
[LickspittleAlert]: LICKSPITTLES. Both of them. Absolute lickspittles.
[DefendingThem]: They're being generous for a joint raid! It's strategically sound!
[DerekAloof]: The Assassin's Master is watching this with appropriate detachment. Learn from him.
[ChenGeFan]: No, learn from Chen Ge, he's wonderful, stop it.
Max took one Command Seal from Maverick — with the explicit understanding it would be repaid from the Holy Church's subjugation reward once Vritra was down. Two felt excessive, and he had a principle about borrowing more than he could return.
He raised his right hand.
Medea had repaired it fully. The Command Seal Maverick had transferred sat in his palm, red and precise.
Max looked at the harbor. At the mountain-sized dragon waiting patiently in the dark water. At the second sun that refused to set. At the chat, which had been watching him do increasingly inadvisable things all day and had never once stopped watching.
"I use a Command Seal," he said clearly, "to command myself."
Show Some By Powerstones
Next BONUS CHAPTER at 200 powerstones