The portal's absence left a wound in the air. A scar where reality had been torn and hastily stitched back together, the edges still raw and bleeding residual mana.
Griswald stared at his hand. His fingers were still curled. Still shaped around a wrist that no longer existed. The nail marks on his forearm wept thin lines of blood that he could not feel.
Mash lay where the blast had thrown her, propped on one elbow with her shield half-covering her body. Her violet eyes were fixed on the space where the portal had been. Her mouth was open. No sound came out. Her hand gripped the shield's edge so hard her gauntlets creaked.
Ritsuka sat slumped against the cracked rocks. Conscious. Her amber eyes glassy. One hand pressed against her ribs where the impact had caught her. She stared at Griswald's empty outstretched hand with an expression that belonged on a corpse.
Lev Lainur straightened his cuffs.
He sighed.
It was a long sound. Luxurious. The sigh of a man settling into a hot bath after a grueling day. His amber eyes drifted closed as his chest rose and fell, and when they opened again they carried a satisfaction so deep and genuine that Griswald's stomach folded in on itself.
"You cannot imagine," Lev said softly, "how long I waited to do that."
The words dropped into the silence like stones into still water. Ripples spreading outward through the ruined chamber. Through the black sludge pooling on the broken floor. Through Griswald's hollow chest.
"All this time." Lev turned the compressed Grail sphere between his fingers, examining it the way one might examine a disappointing gemstone. "I endured that woman's voice. Her tantrums. Her desperate, grasping need for a father who never loved her enough to tell her the truth about what she was. All the hours of watching something so profoundly pathetic be permitted to draw breath and occupy space and call itself a leader."
He tucked the sphere into his breast pocket. Smoothed the green fabric with precise, manicured fingers.
"That the world allowed such a creature to persist for so long is proof enough of how far this planet had fallen. My king should have ended it so much sooner. This experiment in human civilization." His lips curved. Not quite a smile. "But patience is its own reward, I suppose."
Griswald turned toward him.
His body moved without instruction. His legs beneath him, his feet planted, his spine straightening from the crouch where Olga's departure had left him. He faced Lev Lainur across the shattered floor of the Grail chamber, and his grey eyes were dry, and his voice came out flat in a way that surprised even him.
"Why."
Lev tilted his head. The gesture was avian. Curious. His curly dark hair shifted with the movement, and for a moment the amber of his eyes caught the dying red light from the chamber's corrupted walls and burned with something ancient.
"Why." He repeated the word as though tasting it. Rolling it across his tongue. Finding it quaint. "Why. You ask me why, Griswald Von Garmisch? The third-rate healer? The boy who couldn't get into the Clock Tower with three years of applications?" A small laugh. Musical. Genuine. "I suppose you've earned an answer. For surviving this long against all reasonable expectation."
He stepped over a piece of fallen stone without looking down. His shoes were still immaculate. Not a speck of dust.
"First. It was kinder." He held up one finger. The index. Long and elegant. "She cannot rayshift back. Her physical body is ash. If she had attempted the return journey, her spiritron pattern would have destabilized during materialization. The pain would have been extraordinary. Minutes of it. Perhaps longer. I spared her that." His tone carried the warmth of genuine consideration. Of someone who believed what they were saying. "A mercy. From a colleague who shared so much of professional partnership."
A second finger. "Second. I earned it. This was my design. SHEBA. The coffins. The scheduling that ensured every Master candidate would be present in the staging area at the precise moment of detonation. Years of work. Meticulous. Perfect." Pride swelled beneath his measured words. "Her death was my reward for craftsmanship. The final signature on a completed masterwork. Every artist deserves to see their work finished."
A third finger. "And third."
He paused. Let the silence breathe. Let it fill the space where Olga's screams still echoed in Griswald's memory.
"Because I wanted to. And because I could."
The simplicity of it was the worst part. No grand philosophy. No elaborate justification wrapped in ideology or divine mandate. Just desire and capability meeting in a single moment of casual extinction.
Lev smiled at Griswald with the same warmth he had shown in Chaldea's corridors. The same professorial gentleness that had made staff trust him, confide in him, admire him.
"Does that satisfy your curiosity?"
Mash pushed herself to her feet. Her shield scraped against the stone floor as she raised it, not in combat stance but held across her body like a barrier between herself and the thing wearing Lev's face. Her violet eyes had gone hard. The trembling in her hands had stopped.
"Is that it, then?"
Her voice carried across the chamber with a clarity that made Griswald turn. Gone was the gentle hesitance, the apologetic softness that characterized her every interaction.
"All of this. The bombs. The deaths. Every person in that staging area. The Master candidates. The technicians. The staff who never had anything to do with the Holy Grail War or Servants or any of it." She listed them without flinching. "You did all of this just to kill Director Animusphere?"
Lev blinked.
The expression was so perfectly human that Griswald's chest ached. Wide eyes. Slightly parted lips. Head drawn back half an inch. The involuntary response of a man genuinely caught off guard by something unexpected. He blinked again, slower this time, his amber gaze moving between Mash and Griswald and Ritsuka with the owlish bewilderment of a professor whose students had just presented a thesis so fundamentally wrong that he needed a moment to process how they'd arrived at it.
Then he laughed.
Not the contained, musical chuckle from before. This was a full sound that erupted from his belly and bent him at the waist. He pressed one hand to his chest. The other found his knee as he doubled over, his shoulders shaking with the force of it. The laugh bounced off the cracked walls of the Grail chamber, echoing and multiplying until it sounded like a dozen Levs were all sharing the same magnificent joke.
"Oh," he gasped. He straightened. Pressed his fingers beneath his eyes where tears had gathered. Actual tears. Bright and genuine, catching the dim red light. "Oh, that is wonderful. That is truly, genuinely wonderful."
He dabbed at the corner of his left eye with his sleeve. Drew a steadying breath. Let it out through his nose.
"You really thought... you actually believed that all of this..." He gestured expansively at the ruined chamber, the cracked Grail's empty pedestal, the black sludge crawling across broken stone. "That Olga Marie Animusphere was worth this level of effort? That I spent years embedded in Chaldea, built SHEBA with my own hands, designed the coffin array, calibrated the CHALDEAS observation protocols, positioned myself as the most trusted member of the senior staff, all of that, for the satisfaction of killing one inadequate woman with daddy issues?"
He wiped his eyes one final time. Shook his head with the fond exasperation of a teacher watching children stumble through remedial arithmetic.
"You really weren't the A-team, were you."
The words landed like a slap.
Griswald's jaw tightened. Beside him, Ritsuka hauled herself upright against the rocks, her amber eyes narrowing to dangerous slits despite the pain evident in how she held her ribs. Even Mash's shield lowered an inch, the insult piercing through her composure in a way that Olga's death had not managed.
"We just killed your corrupted Saber," Ritsuka spat. Blood flecked her lower lip. "Your Archer. Your entire Singularity."
"You fought the remnants of a failed experiment in a test environment." Lev's amusement curdled into something patronizing. "The sparring dummies left behind after the real performance concluded. And it nearly killed all three of you regardless."
"We're still standing," Griswald said.
Lev looked at him. Really looked. For a breath, something shifted behind those amber irises. A flicker of consideration that might have been reassessment or might have been nothing at all.
Then it passed.
Lev's posture changed. The theatrical warmth drained from his face like water through a cracked vessel. His spine straightened further than human anatomy should have allowed. The slight smile that never reached his eyes vanished entirely, replaced by an expression of such absolute stillness that it no longer resembled a human face at all. Just something shaped like one.
"Before I end this," he said, and his voice had dropped half an octave, the melodious quality stripped away to reveal something resonant and hollow beneath, "I will allow you a small light. A kindness, if you will. So that when the darkness takes you, you will at least understand what consumed you."
"My name," he said, "is Flauros."
The word changed the air. Not metaphorically. The temperature in the chamber dropped. The black sludge on the floor recoiled from his feet.
"A name I have never used in your presence. Never spoken in the halls of Chaldea or the classrooms where I taught or the laboratories where I built the instruments of your observation. Lev Lainur was the mask. Flauros is what lives beneath."
His amber eyes burned. Literally. Twin points of molten gold in a face that had stopped pretending.
"By orders of the great and almighty father, in his infinite wisdom and his absolute authority over all that was and is and shall be, I have been commanded to bring about the end of the world."
Griswald's mind seized on the word like a drowning man grasping at debris. Flauros. The name sat wrong in his ears, too many syllables for something that should have been simple, too ancient for a man who had poured coffee in the break room and complained about grant paperwork.
"What do you mean," Griswald said. His voice cracked on the last word. He swallowed and forced himself to continue. "The end of the world. What does that mean? Whose orders? What king? You're a professor. You designed observation equipment. You calibrated lenses and argued with Dr. Roman about budget allocations."
The words tumbled out faster than he could organize them. Desperate. Grasping for any thread of the reality he understood, the reality where Lev Lainur was a respected colleague and the worst thing that could happen to you at Chaldea was a rejected Clock Tower application.
"Explain this to me. All of it. The bombs, the Singularity, the Grail, what you did to the Director. Make it make sense."
Flauros regarded him with the patience of stone.
"It is not your place to understand why." Each word fell with the weight of carved stone. Final. Immovable. "Our grand King has commanded the incineration of human history. That is sufficient. That is all. The great and almighty father whose wisdom preceded your species by millennia, whose authority extends across every age of man from the first fire to the last breath, has decreed that the experiment is concluded. The results are unsatisfactory. The world must obey because the world has always obeyed. You simply never noticed the leash."
"To hell with your king!"
Ritsuka shoved herself off the rocks. She stumbled, caught herself, planted her feet. Blood ran from the corner of her mouth and her ribs screamed with every breath she drew, but her amber eyes blazed with something hotter than pain.
"I don't care who ordered it. Some ancient demon? Some god? It doesn't matter. We'll stop you. The Clock Tower will mobilize every mage on the planet. The Association has resources you can't even imagine. Sealed designations. Enforcers. People who've spent their entire lives preparing for exactly this kind of threat."
She jabbed a finger at Flauros.
"You think killing a few dozen people in a mountain bunker ends this? You think the entire magical world just rolls over because one traitor with a god complex says so?"
Flauros looked at her.
The silence stretched. His expression held none of the theatrical amusement from before. No cruelty. No contempt. Just a vast and terrible disappointment that settled across his features like dust on a tomb.
"It seems," he said quietly, "that magic is not the only thing in which you have no talent."
Ritsuka flinched. The motion was small. A tightening around her eyes, a fractional retreat of her shoulders. But Griswald saw it, and Flauros saw it, and the knowledge that the barb had landed registered on his face as nothing more than mild confirmation.
"You were recruited off a flyer, Fujimaru. You have no circuits worth measuring. No lineage. No training. No understanding of the forces you have stumbled into. And now you invoke the Clock Tower as though it were a sword you could lift." He shook his head. Slow. Almost sad. "Did you not see it?"
He turned slightly. Gestured toward the space where the portal had been, where the image of CHALDEAS burning had hung like a wound in the air before closing.
"The model. CHALDEAS. The perfect simulacrum of Earth's civilizational development that your precious Animusphere family spent three generations and two fortunes constructing." His hand dropped to his side. "It was red. Completely. Uniformly. Every inch of that sphere burning crimson. Do you understand what that means, or must I explain that as well?"
No one answered.
"The red indicates the extinction of observable human civilization across the entire planetary surface. Not a reduction. Not a decline. Extinction. Total and complete. The plot to destroy your world is not in motion, Fujimaru."
He paused. Let the words settle into the cracks of the broken floor. Into the silence between Griswald's heartbeats.
"It has already succeeded."
The chamber felt smaller. The walls closer. The corrupted air thicker in Griswald's lungs.
"It succeeded hundreds of years ago. The incineration was seeded across every era of human history simultaneously. Every age. Every civilization. Burned from the inside. Retroactively erased so thoroughly that the present no longer has a past to stand on. The world outside your facility ceased to exist the moment the Singularities locked into place. Only now, in this final sliver of the present moment, has reality caught up to a fact that was decided long before any of you were born."
Mash's shield dipped. Her arms trembled.
"That's impossible," she whispered. "Chaldea is still operational. Dr. Roman contacted us. The systems are running."
"Yes." Flauros smiled. It was the saddest expression Griswald had ever seen on a human face. Genuine grief for something he himself had destroyed. "Because Chaldea sits inside the most powerful bounded field ever constructed by modern human hands, reinforced by a magnetic containment system that draws power from a dedicated nuclear reactor and an offshore platform. Your facility exists in a bubble of preserved causality. A snow globe on a shelf in a house that has already burned to the ground."
He spread his hands. Palms up. Open. As though offering them something fragile.
"The world outside Chaldea is gone. There is no Clock Tower. There are no Enforcers. There is no Association. There are no cities, no nations, no seven billion people going about their ordinary lives. There is only fire, stretching backward and forward through every century your species ever occupied."
The words hung in the air like ash.
Ritsuka's lips moved before sound found them. Her fingers curled against the stone she leaned on, knuckles bone-white, and when her voice finally emerged it was small. Thin. The voice of someone whose foundation had just been pulled out from under their feet.
"That can't be true."
She shook her head. Once. Twice. A mechanical denial that carried no conviction. Her amber eyes darted between Flauros and the empty space where the portal had shown them CHALDEAS burning, searching for the seam in the lie, the crack in the performance that would let her dismiss everything he'd said as theatre.
"Seven billion people. You can't just erase seven billion people. That's not... that's not something that happens."
Flauros said nothing. He didn't need to.
Mash turned toward Griswald.
Her violet eyes found his grey ones across the broken floor, and the expression on her face carved something out of his chest that he would never get back. He had seen her confused. Seen her frightened. Seen her determined and exhausted and pushed beyond every limit her engineered body was meant to hold. But this was different. This was the look of someone standing in a place where the ground should be and finding only air beneath their feet. Lost in a way that went deeper than direction or location. Lost in a way that touched the fundamental question of whether there was anywhere left to be found.
She was asking him for something. Her eyes begged for it. A word. A plan. A single scrap of certainty she could plant her shield in front of and defend.
Griswald had nothing.
His mouth opened. Closed. His throat worked around syllables that refused to form because there was no combination of sounds in any language that could make this smaller. No healing spell for a wound shaped like the entire world. He looked back at her and his silence was the loudest thing in the chamber.
What was left of the ceiling cracked.
A slab of stone the size of a dining table broke free and shattered against the floor twenty feet to their left. Dust billowed upward. The ground lurched beneath their feet, a deep tectonic groan rolling through the bedrock, and the walls of the Grail chamber began to split along fault lines that raced through the ancient stone like veins.
Griswald stumbled. Caught himself. Looked up.
"What's happening?"
"Your reward." Flauros brushed a flake of stone dust from his shoulder without urgency. Another section of ceiling collapsed behind him. He didn't flinch. "Your victory. The corrupted Grail has been neutralized. The anchor sustaining this Singularity is gone. And so the Singularity collapses." He gestured at the crumbling walls with an open palm, almost gracious. "Fuyuki 2004 is folding in on itself. Returning to the nothing it was always meant to be. Congratulations. You fixed it."
More stone fell. A fissure split the floor between Griswald and Flauros, black sludge pouring into the gap like blood from an opened vein. The shaking intensified. Rhythmic. The heartbeat of a dying world counting down its final moments.
Mash grabbed Griswald's arm. Ritsuka pushed off her wall, wincing at the pain in her ribs, and stumbled toward them. The three drew together without discussion, without plan, because there was nowhere else to go and no one else to go to.
Flauros watched them. The burning gold of his eyes tracked across their faces with an expression that was almost contemplative. The chamber shook around him. Dust coated his immaculate green suit. A chunk of rock struck the ground inches from his polished shoe and he regarded it with the mild annoyance of a man noting a spot of rain.
"It is time," he said. "My king awaits. There is much still to orchestrate, and I have indulged this diversion long enough."
But he didn't move.
His gaze swept across the three of them one final time. Ritsuka, bleeding and defiant with her back against crumbling stone. Mash, shield raised over Griswald, dust in her lavender hair. Griswald, standing in the middle with empty hands and emptier circuits and nothing to offer either of them except the fact that he was still breathing.
Flauros laughed.
Not the belly laugh from before. Something quieter. Drier. The laugh of a man finding dark humor in the punchline of a joke that had taken centuries to deliver.
"This is fitting," he said. "How perfectly fitting, for the end of the world."
His amber eyes settled on Ritsuka.
"A first-generation mage." The words were almost tender. Clinical tenderness. A doctor reading a terminal diagnosis to someone too young for the news. "So much optimism in those eyes. So much fire and conviction and stubborn, beautiful ignorance. You believed the flyer. You believed showing up was enough. A girl who walked into the moonlit world through the front door without knowing what lived in the shadows behind it." He tilted his head. "You never had a future there. You know that, don't you? The Association would have chewed you to pieces and forgotten the taste."
His gaze moved to Griswald.
"And you." Something flickered behind Flauros's expression. Not quite pity. Closer to recognition. "A Von Garmisch. Old blood. Old name. Old money. A magic crest passed down through generations of theorists who wrote papers that better mages used to accomplish better things. You had every advantage, didn't you? Family. Legacy. Resources. Everything a young mage needs to succeed." His lips pressed thin. "Everything except the one thing that actually mattered. Three applications to the Clock Tower. Three rejections. No future where it counted."
Then he turned to Mash.
The chamber groaned. Dust rained from widening cracks. Flauros looked at her for a long moment, and when he spoke his voice dropped to something almost gentle.
"And you." He exhaled through his nose. "The doll. Built in a laboratory. Grown in a tube. Designed for a single purpose, to host a Heroic Spirit and serve as Chaldea's weapon." His head tilted the other direction. Studying her. "And you couldn't even manage that, could you? The Spirit refused to wake. The experiment was declared a failure. Your creators moved on to other projects and left you sitting in a medical ward with a countdown attached to your cells."
His smile was the cruelest thing Griswald had ever seen, because it carried no malice at all. Just clarity.
"You never even had a future to lose, did you?"
Flauros paused.
His gaze dropped from the three of them to the floor. To the black sludge that crawled and pooled across the broken stone, thick as tar, pulsing with the faintest rhythm like a heartbeat too slow to sustain life. His amber eyes narrowed. His lips parted. And when he spoke, his voice shifted register entirely, pitched lower, aimed downward, directed at something beneath his feet that Griswald could not see.
"Then there is you."
The sludge rippled. A lazy undulation that might have been coincidence. Might have been response.
Flauros crouched. His tailored trousers bent at the knees without creasing. He rested his forearms on his thighs and stared into the black surface with an expression Griswald had never seen on his face before. Not contempt. Not amusement. Something closer to commiseration.
"You also deserve to be counted among this group, don't you?" His voice carried the soft cadence of a man speaking to a sick animal. "For all your grand titles. All the fear and hatred your name inspires across every age of man. The curse that blackened Saber. The poison in the Grail. The great and terrible darkness that an entire civilization poured their sins into."
He reached down. His fingertips hovered an inch above the sludge's surface. Not touching. Never touching.
"And yet you are nothing more than the weakest Servant ever recorded. A village boy who never fought a battle. Never wielded a blade. Never accomplished a single thing worth remembering except dying badly enough to ease the minds of the guilty." His voice dropped to a whisper. "You could never be a Beast. Not in a thousand years. Not in ten thousand. You lack the weight for it. The substance. You are a stain on the floor of a collapsing room, and when this Singularity folds, you will fold with it, and no one in any age will mark your passing."
The sludge did nothing.
It sat there. Black. Inert. Pooling into the cracks and fissures of the broken floor with the mindless obedience of any liquid following gravity's pull. If Flauros expected a reaction, a tremor, a surge of defiant malice from the curse that had corrupted an entire Holy Grail War, he received nothing. The sludge was just sludge. Dead matter leaking from a cracked vessel.
Flauros straightened. Brushed his knees. His expression reset to its default composure with the mechanical precision of someone closing a book they'd finished reading.
"Well then." He turned back to the three of them. His smile returned. Professional. Final. "What was it the Director called you? Your little designation." He tapped his chin with one finger. The ceiling groaned and a fresh cascade of stone dust poured down around his shoulders like grey snow. "Oh, yes. That's right."
His grin split wide.
"Team F."
The laugh that followed was bright and sharp and genuine. It rang off the collapsing walls. Bounced between the falling stones. Filled every shrinking space in the dying chamber with the sound of a man who found the joke too perfect to contain.
Light gathered around him. Golden. Clean. Nothing like the corrupted red of the Grail or the sickly luminescence of the Singularity's sky. It bloomed from behind his chest, from the space where a human heart should have been, and spread outward until his silhouette burned white at the edges.
"Farewell, Team F."
The light swallowed him. A silent detonation that left purple afterimages seared across Griswald's retinas. When it cleared, the space where Flauros had stood was empty. His footprints remained in the dust. Nothing else.
For a moment, none of them moved.
The chamber screamed around them. Walls buckling. Floor splitting. The ceiling shedding itself in pieces that shattered against the ground with the percussion of small explosions. Reality itself seemed to groan, the sound coming from everywhere and nowhere, from the bedrock and the air and the spaces between atoms where the Singularity's fabric was coming apart at every seam.
None of them moved.
Griswald stared at the footprints. Mash stared at the space above them. Ritsuka stared at nothing.
Then Ritsuka grabbed Griswald's collar and yanked him sideways as a column of stone crashed where he'd been standing.
"Move! Move now!"
The paralysis broke. All three of them scrambled over the rubble toward the chamber's entrance. Mash raised her shield overhead as fragments rained down, the impacts ringing against the metal like hammered bells. Griswald's foot caught on a crack in the floor and Ritsuka caught his arm before he went down.
"Romani!" Griswald shouted into the communicator on his wrist. Static. Dense, crackling static that ate his words before they left the device. He slapped it. Shook it. Pressed every contact point his fingers could find. "Dr. Roman, can you hear me? We need extraction! The Singularity is collapsing!"
White noise. The hiss of dead air.
"It's not going through!" Ritsuka had her own communicator pressed to her ear. She smacked it against her palm. "I'm getting nothing. Not even a carrier signal."
Mash planted her shield against a falling slab, diverting it past them. Her arms shook from the impact. "The spatial collapse is interfering with the communication channel. The spiritron wavelengths can't stabilize long enough to establish a connection."
They burst from the cave mouth onto the temple steps. The sky above Fuyuki was coming apart. Not falling. Unraveling. Strips of red-black firmament peeling away like burned paper, revealing behind them not stars or void but a blinding white nothing that hurt to look at. The city below was dissolving at the edges. Buildings flickering. Streets folding inward. The horizon eating itself in every direction.
"What do we do?" Ritsuka spun in a full circle. Every path led downward into a city that was ceasing to exist. "What the hell do we do?"
Griswald slammed his palm against the communicator again. Again. Again. Each strike harder than the last, his knuckles splitting against the casing, blood smearing across the tiny screen that displayed nothing but snow.
"Roman! Anyone! Please!"
Static answered him. The mountain beneath their feet shuddered.
Ritsuka grabbed his shoulder. Shook him. Her fingers dug into the muscle hard enough to bruise, her nails biting through the thin fabric of his sleeve.
"We need to rayshift! Now! Right now, Griswald, we need to go back!"
Her voice cracked on the last word. The temple grounds steps split beneath them, a jagged line racing through ancient stone with a sound like tearing cloth.
Griswald's mind raced. His fingers worked the communicator's surface, pressing contact points in sequences he'd memorized during orientation two years ago. Emergency frequencies. Backup channels. Last-resort protocols designed for the worse possible situations. None of them connected. The static swallowed everything.
But something else clawed at the inside of his skull. Something Lev had said. Flauros. Whatever he was now.
Ritsuka and Olga are already dead. Their physical bodies incinerated. Their spiritron patterns captured during rayshift.
He turned to Ritsuka. The words sat heavy on his tongue, awkward and sharp-edged, but he had to ask. He had to know if she understood what going back meant for her.
"Ritsuka, if Lev was telling the truth about what happened during the rayshift, then when you go back, your body is already..."
"Stop."
The word hit him like a physical blow. Ritsuka's hand flew up, palm flat, fingers splayed. Her amber eyes burned with something beyond the reflected white of the dissolving sky.
"Don't. Don't finish that sentence."
"But if he was right and you rayshift back to Chaldea, your physical body isn't..."
"I said stop!"
The scream tore out of her throat raw and ragged. It bounced off the temple columns that were crumbling to powder around them. Her face contorted, the muscles pulling tight across her jaw, her brow, the corners of her mouth that quivered with the effort of holding together. And then the tears came. Not gentle. Not quiet. They spilled from her eyes in thick lines that cut tracks through the dust and blood on her cheeks, falling fast and continuous as though a dam had finally given way inside her chest.
"Don't you think I know that?"
Her voice broke into pieces. Each word a separate shard of glass that she forced past her teeth.
"Don't you think I've been thinking about it since the second he said it? Since he looked at me and told me I was already dead? That my body is ash back in that staging area with everyone else who walked in this morning thinking it was just another day?"
She pressed both hands against her face. Her shoulders heaved. The sobs came without sound, just the violent shaking of her entire frame as the sky unraveled above them and the mountain disintegrated beneath their feet.
"Just figure out how to get us out of here. That's all. That's the only thing that matters right now. Everything else... everything else can wait until we're not standing in a collapsing reality."
Griswald swallowed. Nodded. Turned back to his communicator and pressed every combination he knew. Every frequency. Every channel. His bloody knuckles left red smears across the tiny screen that showed him nothing but snow. Nothing but static. Nothing but the empty hiss of a connection that refused to exist.
Nothing.
He lowered his arm. The communicator's screen flickered once. Went dark. Dead battery or dead signal or dead world, it didn't matter which. The result was the same.
Mash tilted her head back. The sky peeled away in ribbons above the cave's shattered mouth, white nothing bleeding through the gaps where reality used to be. Her lips parted. The words came out so quiet that Griswald almost missed them beneath the groaning stone.
"I never thought I'd prefer the Chaldea sky to anything else."
She stared at the disintegrating firmament with violet eyes that reflected the strange pale light pouring through the wounds in the world.
"That awful grey nothing hidden behind a blizzard that never stops. I used to stand at the observation window and wonder what a real sky looked like. Blue. Open. Stars." Her voice thinned. "This isn't what I imagined."
Griswald lowered his dead communicator. Looked at her. At the dust in her lavender hair and the blood dried brown on her gauntlets and the impossible steadiness of her shoulders beneath a sky that was eating itself.
He walked to her. His boots crunched on broken stone. He stopped beside her and looked up at the same dissolving sky and then back down at her face.
"We've had worse places to hang out."
She turned to him. Blinked.
"That coffin room. Back in Chaldea." He gestured vaguely with one hand. "When the explosion hit and the ceiling came down and we thought that was it. At least this place has ventilation. Sort of."
Her expression didn't change. The joke sat between them like a foreign object, so wildly out of place in the crumbling throat of a dying world that her face couldn't find the appropriate response. Her brow creased. Her lips twitched once. Nothing landed. She simply stared at him with those wide violet eyes as though he'd started speaking a language she'd never encountered.
Then she leaned into him.
Her forehead found the hollow below his collarbone. The weight of her was slight, almost nothing, the body of a girl engineered in a laboratory pressing against his chest with the careful hesitance of someone who had never learned how to lean on another person. Her shield hung loose at her side, the edge scraping stone.
"I'm sorry."
The words vibrated against his sternum.
"For what?"
"I don't know." Her voice caught on something rough in her throat. "I don't know what else to say."
He took her hand. Her fingers were cold inside the gauntlet. He threaded his between them and squeezed, and the metal bit into his knuckles and he didn't care.
"Sorry."
She pulled back just enough to look up at him. "For what?"
"I don't know." He met her eyes. "I don't know what else to say."
Mash blinked.
Her lips pressed together. Her brow furrowed. Something moved behind her eyes, some tectonic shift in the architecture of her expression, and then a sound escaped her mouth that was not a word. It was a laugh. Small and startled and completely involuntary, bursting free like air from a cracked seal. She clamped her hand over her lips but another followed it, and another, each one louder than the last, shaking her shoulders and squeezing tears from the corners of her eyes.
She couldn't stop.
The laughter poured out of her in waves, breathless and helpless and edged with something that wasn't quite hysteria but lived in the same neighborhood. She bent forward, her forehead pressing against their joined hands, and laughed until she wheezed.
Griswald watched her. His mouth twitched. The sound caught him somewhere behind his ribs and pulled, and before he could stop it his own laughter broke free. It sounded wrong. Too loud. Too thin. Completely inappropriate for two people standing in the ruins of a collapsing timeline while the sky dissolved above their heads.
They laughed anyway. Together. The sound bouncing off crumbling walls in a cave where a god had just told them the world was dead.
Footsteps on broken stone. Ritsuka crossed the distance between them with her arms wrapped around her ribs, tears still cutting fresh tracks through the grime on her face. She stopped in front of them and her lower lip trembled and her voice came out thick and wet and cracked down the middle.
"You two are really the worst at this."
Mash reached out. Took Ritsuka's hand in her free one. Ritsuka's fingers closed around hers and squeezed hard enough to shake.
The three of them stood there. Connected. The mountain dying beneath them. The sky dying above them. The world dying around them. Connected.
Griswald's vision dimmed.
The edges went first. The crumbling walls fading to grey, then white, then nothing. The dissolving sky bleeding into a brightness that swallowed color and shape and depth. He blinked. Blinked again. His eyelids felt heavy. The light was wrong, not dark but oversaturated, bleaching everything to a formless luminance that pressed against his retinas.
Then he heard it.
"Fou."
The sound cut through the white noise of collapsing reality with the clarity of a bell struck in an empty cathedral. Familiar. Impossible. Pristine.
Griswald's failing vision focused one last time.
Fou sat on top of Mash's shield where it rested against the ground. His white-pink fur was immaculate. Not a speck of dust. Not a single hair disturbed. His violet eyes gleamed with an intelligence that had no business existing in a creature that small, and his long ears stood straight, and he looked at Griswald.
Griswald tightened his grip on Mash's hand. Squeezed until his fingers ached. Until the gauntlet dug grooves into his skin. He held on with everything his body had left because his eyes were going and his legs were going and the ground beneath his feet was a suggestion rather than a fact.
The white ate the cave. Ate Fou. Ate Mash's shield and Ritsuka's tears and the sound of their breathing.
The last thing he saw, in the final splinter of sight before the light swallowed everything, was something looking back at him from the black sludge pooling across the broken floor. A pair of eyes. Not golden like Flauros. Not amber like Ritsuka's. Dark. Hollow. Ancient in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with accumulated suffering that no single lifetime could contain.
The eyes held his.
Then the white took them too.
And Griswald held on.
Singularity F Cleared