The weight was warm and soft and sat directly on his left eye.
Griswald's consciousness surfaced in increments. First came the sensation of a mattress beneath his spine. Then the hum of climate-controlled air cycling through vents. Then the specific, unmistakable pressure of something small and furry parked on his face.
"Fou."
The creature's tail brushed his nose. Griswald's hand came up on reflex, fingers closing around Fou's midsection. He lifted the animal off his face and blinked against the fluorescent light. White ceiling. White walls. The narrow regulation bed with its thin regulation pillow. The desk with its neat stack of the newest rejected Clock Tower applications he kept meaning to throw away.
His room. Chaldea.
He sat up too fast. The blood drained from his head and the room tilted sideways and Fou tumbled into his lap with an indignant squeak. Griswald pressed his palm against his temple and breathed. The fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead. The digital clock on his desk read 14:37. His Chaldea uniform hung on the back of his chair, laundered and pressed.
Normal. Everything looked normal.
Then it hit him.
The explosion. The staging area painted in blood and shattered glass. Mash pinned beneath concrete with her ribs showing through her shirt. CHALDEAS burning red. Fuyuki. The skeletons and the Archer and Saber Alter's golden eyes finding him across a burning cave. Olga's fingers slipping through his. Flauros laughing. The black sludge. The hollow eyes.
"Where." His voice cracked. He swallowed. "Where is everyone? Mash. Where's Mash? Ritsuka, are they back, did the rayshift complete, did we..."
Fou pressed his forehead against Griswald's wrist. The creature's ears lay flat.
Griswald threw his legs over the side of the bed. His feet hit cold floor and his knees buckled and he caught himself on the desk. The Clock Tower applications scattered. He grabbed his glasses from the nightstand, shoved them onto his face, and reached for the door.
It opened before he touched it.
The woman who stepped through wore a dress that was short and fitted at the torso, with a deep red skirt that flares slightly at the hips. The bodice is layered with structured panels in red and brown, accented with gold trim and decorative patterns. A blue underlayer is visible at the chest, adorned with small gold star-like motifs.. Chestnut hair fell in loose waves past her shoulders, framing a face of delicate olive-skinned beauty that belonged on a museum wall. Because it was on a museum wall. Every curve of her lips, every angle of her cheekbone, every degree of warmth in those calculating amber eyes had been rendered in oil paint five centuries ago and hung behind bulletproof glass in the Louvre.
Leonardo da Vinci regarded him with a small smile that revealed nothing and suggested everything.
Griswald's brain caught up with his eyes and he straightened. Stiffened. She'd been summoned to Chaldea barely three months ago and in that time had sequestered herself almost entirely within her workshop on the engineering level. He'd seen her exactly twice, both times from a distance, both times flanked by bewildered technicians carrying armfuls of blueprints. She had no reason to be standing in his doorway. No reason to be standing in the residential wing at all.
"Caster Leonardo Da Vinci." He inclined his head. His voice came out rougher than intended. "I apologize for the state of my quarters. If you require medical assistance, the infirmary is on the third..."
She raised one finger. The small smile widened by a fraction.
"Da Vinci."
"I... pardon?"
"Just Da Vinci. Drop the class designation, drop the formalities, drop all of it." She waved her hand as though physically dispersing his words from the air between them. "Life is too short for honorifics, and yours in particular has gotten considerably more interesting since the last time I checked."
"Da Vinci, then. I need to know what's happened. The Singularity collapsed and there was a rayshift and Mash was with me and Ritsuka, she said her body was already gone, and Olga, Flauros killed Olga, he pushed her into CHALDEAS and she just dissolved, and the Grail, the corrupted Grail is still..."
"How are you feeling?"
The question landed like a stone dropped into rapids. Griswald's mouth stayed open. Words piled up behind his teeth.
"I'm fine. But Mash and Ritsuka and everyone who was in the staging area, the Master candidates, Flauros said he planted the bombs, he said he killed all of them, and CHALDEAS was burning and humanity is supposed to be..."
"Griswald."
His name in her voice stopped him. Not loud. Not sharp. Simply precise, delivered with the same economy a surgeon applied to an incision. Her smile faded. The amber eyes that had been warm a moment ago cooled into something serious and steady and older than the face wearing them.
"I know you have questions. More than I suspect you can articulate right now." She paused. "But I'm not the one who should be answering them. Dr. Roman is waiting. He'll explain everything."
Griswald swallowed the rest of his words. They sat in his chest like a fist.
"Okay."
She turned and he followed her into the corridor. Fou scrambled up his leg and perched on his shoulder, tail curled against his neck.
The hallway stretched in both directions. White walls. White floor. The same sterile uniformity he'd walked through for two years. But the silence was wrong. Chaldea's corridors had never been crowded, but they'd carried the ambient noise of two hundred staff members going about their work. Footsteps, conversations, the distant clatter of equipment.
Now his own breathing echoed.
They passed a maintenance technician near the elevator bank. The woman stopped mid-stride and stared at Griswald. Not a glance. Not a double-take. A fixed, unbroken stare that tracked him until he turned the corner. Two floors down, a pair of engineers huddled over a tablet in an alcove. Both looked up when Griswald passed. Both watched him until Da Vinci's body blocked their line of sight.
Griswald's fingers tightened on the hem of his shirt.
Da Vinci walked beside him and said nothing. Her small smile had not returned.
The elevator descended two floors before opening onto the medical wing. More silence. More empty corridors where there should have been nurses and orderlies and the low hum of diagnostic equipment. Griswald counted the doors they passed. Seven offices. All dark behind their windows. The eighth had its light on.
Romani's office looked like a paper bomb had detonated inside it.
Data pads covered every horizontal surface. The desk had disappeared beneath stacked layers of them, their screens casting overlapping pools of blue-white light across the ceiling. More pads balanced on the examination table, the filing cabinet, the chair Griswald usually sat in during their Thursday chess games. A half-eaten sandwich curled on a napkin near the keyboard, its bread edges dry and hard. Three mugs of coffee formed a defensive perimeter around the monitor, all cold.
Romani sat in the middle of this chaos with his lab coat hanging off one shoulder and his salmon-pink hair escaping its ponytail in wild tufts. Dark crescents bruised the skin beneath his eyes. His fingers moved across a data pad with the jerky speed of someone running on caffeine and fear, and when the door opened he didn't look up.
"Give me ten minutes, I'm cross-referencing the spiritron decay patterns from the return transfer and the numbers aren't matching the baseline we established in the original calibration and if I don't figure out why before the next..."
"Doctor."
Da Vinci's voice. That same surgical precision.
Romani's head came up. His green eyes found Griswald in the doorway and something behind them broke open like a dam.
The data pad clattered onto the desk. Romani was on his feet and across the room in three strides, lab coat flapping behind him, and then his arms were around Griswald's shoulders and he was squeezing hard enough to make Griswald's spine pop. Romani smelled like stale coffee and antiseptic and the specific brand of hand soap from the medical wing dispensers. His chin dug into Griswald's collarbone.
"You're up." Romani's voice cracked on the second word. He pulled back, gripped Griswald's shoulders, looked at his face, then pulled him in again. "You're up and you're standing and you're walking and your pupils are even and your color is good and you're actually here."
"How long was I out?"
"Thirty-one hours." Romani released him and held him at arm's length, his green eyes darting across Griswald's face with clinical intensity even as they glistened. "Thirty-one hours and I checked your vitals every forty-five minutes and your brain activity was normal the entire time but you wouldn't wake up and I was starting to consider interventions that I really didn't want to consider."
"Mash. Where is Mash? And Ritsuka, Flauros said her physical body was already incinerated during the explosion, is that true? And Olga, he pulled Olga into CHALDEAS and she dissolved. And the staff, how many survived the bombing? Flauros said he killed everyone but he could have been lying. And CHALDEAS itself, it was burning red when we saw it through the portal, does that mean the Incineration is confirmed across all timelines or just the observable ones? And..."
Romani put both hands on Griswald's shoulders and pressed down. Not hard. Just enough.
"Breathe."
Griswald breathed.
"Good." Romani steered him through the maze of data pads toward the desk chair. Griswald's knees folded and he sat. The chair creaked under him. Fou hopped from his shoulder onto the desk and settled between two data pads with his tail wrapped around his paws.
Da Vinci closed the office door behind her. The soft click of the latch sealed the three of them inside with the blue glow and the cold coffee and thirty-one hours of unanswered questions. She leaned against the filing cabinet and crossed her arms, her expression settling into something patient and watchful.
Romani dragged the examination stool over and sat facing Griswald. Their knees almost touched. He started to mess with the single ring on his hand. A nervous habit. Griswald had watched him do it a hundred times before difficult conversations.
"I'm going to answer everything." Romani's voice had shed its relieved trembling. What remained was steady, quiet, and careful in a way that made Griswald's stomach drop. "All of it. But I need to do it in order, because some answers won't make sense without the ones that come before them." He glanced at Da Vinci. She gave a small nod. "And some of what I'm about to tell you is going to be very hard to hear."
Griswald's hands gripped the armrests.
"Start talking."
Romani pulled the nearest data pad from the pile and tapped it twice. A holographic display flickered to life between them, casting pale blue light across both their faces. The image showed Chaldea's organizational chart. Most of the names were crossed out in red.
"Let's begin with what we lost."
The holographic display cast its pale accusation across the room. Red lines through names. So many red lines.
"The individual operating under the name Lev Lainur planted explosive devices at seventeen critical junctures throughout the facility." Romani's finger traced a schematic of Chaldea's infrastructure, each blast point marked with an amber circle. "The staging area took the worst of it. Every Master candidate in the coffins died instantly. Team A, all of them. Daybit, Kadoc, Ophelia, Hinako, Scandinavia, Beryl, Kirschtaria." He paused on each name like a man reading headstones. "Gone."
Griswald's jaw clenched. The armrest groaned beneath his grip.
"Beyond the candidates, he targeted department heads with surgical precision. Dr. Henley in Engineering. Professor Vasquez in Temporal Analysis. Director Chen in Communications. Every single one." Romani's thumb pressed against his ring. "The only reason I'm still breathing is because I was with held back and didn't arrive on time. A little later and I'd have been in the main corridor with the rest of them." Translation he was slacking off watching idol vides and was late, which saved his life on accident.
The number formed in Griswald's mouth before he could stop it.
"How many total?"
"One hundred and eighty-seven confirmed dead." Romani's voice didn't waver, but the skin around his eyes tightened. "We have twenty-three surviving staff members. Most of them were in peripheral sections of the facility that took structural damage but avoided the direct blast zones."
One hundred and eighty-seven. The number sat in Griswald's skull like a stone. He'd walked past those people in the corridors. Nodded to them in the cafeteria. Treated their headaches and their paper cuts and their seasonal allergies. One hundred and eighty-seven lives extinguished because a monster wearing a green suit decided their existence was inconvenient.
"The physical damage to the facility compounds the personnel losses significantly." Romani swiped the display, replacing the organizational chart with a three-dimensional rendering of Chaldea. Entire sections pulsed red. "Power distribution grid is operating at thirty-one percent capacity. The secondary reactor linkage is severed. Water recycling is functional but the filtration system needs rebuilding. Half the residential wing is structurally compromised. The cafeteria is rubble. Medical wing survived barely intact."
Da Vinci shifted against the filing cabinet. A small, satisfied curve appeared on her lips.
"Which brings us to the only piece of genuinely good news in this entire catastrophe." Romani gestured toward her. "Da Vinci has already repaired the primary communications array, restored partial power to six additional sections, and fabricated replacement components for systems that our surviving engineers couldn't even diagnose. Without her, we'd be sitting in the dark drinking unfiltered water and hoping the oxygen scrubbers held."
Da Vinci examined her fingernails with studied casualness. "The oxygen scrubbers were actually the first thing I fixed. Priorities."
"That said." Romani pulled the display back to the damage overview. "Even with Da Vinci working around the clock, we're looking at weeks before critical systems are fully operational. Months for non-essential ones. The FATE summoning system is damaged but repairable. SHEBA is functioning at reduced capacity. CHALDEAS itself is..." He trailed off, his expression darkening. "We'll get to that."
Griswald stared at the holographic model of Chaldea. All that red. So much of it. The facility he'd spent two years learning to navigate, reduced to a half-functional skeleton crewed by twenty-three shell-shocked survivors and one Servant who happened to be the greatest inventor in human history.
The horror pressed against the inside of his ribs like something alive. He could feel it building, a cold pressure behind his sternum that wanted to become a scream or a sob or both. One hundred and eighty-seven people who'd eaten breakfast that morning without knowing it was their last. Team A, brilliant and ambitious, sealed in their coffins and cremated before they drew another breath.
He breathed. Held it. Released.
His fingers unclenched from the armrests.
Romani watched him with those too-perceptive green eyes, the ring turning slowly between his thumb and forefinger. Seconds passed. The hum of the ventilation system filled the silence. Fou's ears twitched on the desk, violet eyes fixed on Griswald's face.
Romani saw whatever he needed to see. He nodded once, set the data pad down, and picked up another.
"Now. What happened while you were inside the Singularity, and what happened after you came back."
He swiped the screen. A timeline appeared in the holographic display, annotated in Romani's cramped handwriting.
"Let's start with what we observed from this end."
Romani set the second data pad on his knee and let the silence hold for a moment. His thumb pressed against the ring. One rotation. Two.
"Before we go further, I need you to understand something." His green eyes locked onto Griswald's. "We weren't blind while you were in Fuyuki. The equipment captured audio feeds throughout your deployment. Fragmented in places, corrupted in others, but enough. And Mash provided a comprehensive debrief after she regained consciousness."
Griswald's stomach tightened. Audio feeds. Which meant they'd heard everything. The battles. The planning. The mana transfers. All of it recorded and timestamped and filed away in Romani's mountain of data pads.
"She told us about Cú Chulainn's alliance. The fight with the Archer. The assault on the Greater Grail. Saber Alter." Romani paused. "And she told us about Lev. What he said. What he did to Olga."
The name scraped something raw inside Griswald's chest. He saw Olga's fingers again. Felt them slide through his grip. The portal's light swallowing her whole.
"He called himself Flauros."
Romani's hand stopped turning the ring. His mouth opened, closed, then opened again. The word came out slowly, each syllable tested against his tongue like something that might cut.
"Flauros."
Not a question. Not a confirmation. Just the name, held up to the light and examined. Romani's expression didn't change, but something shifted behind his eyes.
"Mash informed us of this as well." He set the data pad down with deliberate care. "We're investigating whether Flauros is a codename, an alias, or something with deeper significance. The name has... potential connections to certain historical and occult records that Da Vinci is cross-referencing."
Da Vinci's amber eyes flickered toward Romani for half a second. Whatever passed between them was invisible to Griswald, but he caught it. A look that said more had already been discussed. More had already been concluded. And whatever those conclusions were, they weren't for him. Not yet.
Romani picked up the data pad again. His fingers gripped it tighter than necessary.
"Griswald, I need to tell you something that is going to be difficult to hear. And I need you to stay in that chair when I do."
The cold pressure behind Griswald's sternum pulsed.
"He wasn't lying."
Three words. Romani delivered them without inflection, without softening, without the usual deflective humor he wrapped around hard truths. Just the words, bare and blunt.
"About what specifically?"
"About humanity." Romani held his gaze. "The Incineration is real. It happened. Human civilization across all observable history has been burned."
The room contracted. Griswald heard the words. Processed their syntax. Understood their grammatical meaning. But the concept behind them slid off his comprehension like water off glass. Seven billion people. Every city, every village, every farm and factory and school. His parents' house in Garmisch-Partenkirchen with its fading grander and the study where his father kept the family's magical texts. His sister's apartment in Munich. His brother's dormitory at the Clock Tower.
"That's not possible."
"CHALDEAS confirms it." Romani swiped the data pad. The holographic display shifted to show Chaldea's miniature Earth, but wrong. The serene blue glow Griswald remembered had been replaced by a uniform, sickening red. No continents. No oceans. No atmospheric patterns. Just crimson, pulsing like an infected wound. "The light of civilization is gone. Every era, every timeline that SHEBA can observe. Red."
"There has to be an error. A malfunction. The explosion damaged systems across the entire facility, you said it yourself, SHEBA is running at reduced capacity. The readings could be corrupted."
Da Vinci spoke from her position against the filing cabinet. Her voice carried no smile.
"I rebuilt SHEBA's primary observation array myself. Replaced every damaged lens. Recalibrated every circuit. The readings are accurate, Griswald. I staked my reputation as humanity's greatest genius on those calibrations, and I do not use that title lightly." She uncrossed her arms. "There is nothing outside these walls."
Nothing. The word carved a hollow in his chest. He turned to the walls on reflex, as though he could verify it by looking. But Chaldea was mostly buried under Antarctic ice. There had never been anything to see outside. And now, apparently, there never would be.
"The bounded field that protects this facility exists in a quantum state partially removed from standard spacetime." Romani pulled up another schematic. "It's the only reason we weren't incinerated along with everything else. Chaldea is, as far as we can determine, the last surviving fragment of human civilization."
Twenty-three staff members. One Servant. One Demi-Servant. One creature that said its own name. And him. That was all that remained of seven billion.
Griswald's hands trembled in his lap. He pressed them flat against his thighs.
"How?"
Romani replaced the CHALDEAS image with a map. Not a geographical map. A temporal one. The timeline of human history stretched across the display in a luminous blue thread, and along its length, seven points burned like open sores. Each one radiated distortion lines that bled into surrounding eras, their corruption spreading like cracks in ice.
"Singularities." Romani pointed to the leftmost marker. "When you destroyed the corrupted Grail in Fuyuki, you eliminated the anomaly designated Singularity F. It was the smallest. A test case, we believe. A proof of concept." His finger moved along the timeline. "But while you were fighting for your life in that cave, these appeared."
Seven wounds in history. Griswald counted them. Each one dwarfed the Fuyuki marker by orders of magnitude, their distortion fields overlapping and compounding across centuries.
"Seven Singularities. Each one represents a fundamental alteration to a critical period in human history. Together, they form a chain that has effectively erased humanity's ability to reach the present era." Romani's voice had gone flat. Clinical. The voice he used when reading test results he wished were wrong. "The Incineration isn't a single event. It's a sequence. Destroy the foundation, and everything built on top of it collapses."
The seven points burned in the holographic display like coals pressed into the fabric of time. Griswald stared at them and his mind supplied the comparison without his permission. Fuyuki had been one Singularity. One corrupted Grail. Three servants that fought on while the world collapsed around them. And he'd nearly died six times in the span of two days.
His stomach turned. The memory of burning timber and black sludge and the Archer's arrows screaming past his skull fused with the clinical blue glow of the timeline display, and for a moment the two realities overlapped and he was back in that cave with Excalibur Morgan's light eating the air and Mash's shield the only thing between him and annihilation. Seven of those. Seven Singularities, each one larger than Fuyuki. Each one presumably guarded by corrupted Servants with corrupted Grails and the full murderous weight of history gone wrong pressing down on whoever was unfortunate enough to walk into them.
The bile rose fast. He swallowed it back. His skin went clammy beneath the thin fabric of his shirt and his vision narrowed at the edges, the holographic display smearing into streaks of blue and red. His hands had stopped trembling. They'd gone past trembling into a stillness that felt worse, locked rigid against his thighs with the tendons standing out beneath his skin.
Romani's hand settled on his knee. Warm. Steady.
"We can stop here."
Griswald shook his head. The motion made the room tilt.
"Keep going."
The green eyes studied him. Romani's lips pressed together. Whatever assessment he was running behind that gaze, the conclusion he reached didn't satisfy him. But he pulled his hand back and nodded once, slowly, the way a doctor agrees to a patient's request against his better judgment.
"When the emergency rayshift returned you to Chaldea, the recovery team found only one conscious was mash standing over you all with her shield raised." Romani picked up his data pad. The timeline display collapsed and was replaced by medical readouts. Griswald recognized the formatting. He'd filled out hundreds of identical charts during his time in the infirmary. "Your pattern were all non-responsive. Mash was the only one on her feet."
"She was conscious?"
"Barely. Running on residual mana and sheer stubbornness." A ghost of warmth crossed Romani's face. "She refused to move from your side until we physically assured her you were being taken to the medical bay. Even then she insisted on walking next to your stretcher."
Griswald's chest tightened.
"Once we had you stabilized and in recovery, I debriefed Mash personally. She gave us a full accounting of everything that occurred inside the Singularity. The alliance with Cú Chulainn. The ambush on Archer. The assault on the Greater Grail chamber. Lev's appearance and his confession." Romani's voice thinned on the last sentence. "She was thorough. Detailed. She answered every question I put to her without hesitation."
"And after the debrief?"
"Examinations." Romani set the data pad down. "Extensive ones. Galahad's awakening inside her Spirit Origin during the singularity constituted a fundamental shift in her spiritual composition. We needed to verify that the awakening hadn't damaged her physical body or destabilized the balance between her biology and the Heroic Spirit's essence. Blood work, circuit mapping, spiritron density scans, mana capacity benchmarks. The full battery."
Griswald's throat tightened. He knew what those examinations entailed. Hours strapped to diagnostic tables under bright lights while machines hummed and probed and measured. Mash had endured them her entire life. Of being poked and prodded and tested and catalogued like a specimen in a jar. She never complained about it. Never mentioned the way her hands gripped the edges of the examination table or how her violet eyes went distant and flat during the longer procedures, retreating to somewhere inside herself where the instruments couldn't follow. She would never tell anyone how much she hated it. Not Romani. Not him. She'd sit perfectly still and answer every question and submit to every test and then go back to her room and sit on her bed in silence until the feeling passed.
"Is she alright?"
Romani exhaled. The tension in his shoulders loosened by a fraction, the first visible relief Griswald had seen on his face since this conversation began.
"She's fine. Galahad's awakening actually stabilized several markers that had been deteriorating over the past six months. Her circuit integration is stronger than we've ever recorded. No cellular degradation, no spiritron rejection, no anomalous growths." He almost smiled. "And she's been asking about you every hour on the hour since she finished the last round of tests. I believe her exact words during the most recent inquiry were 'Has Senpai opened his eyes yet, and if not, has the rate of his delta-wave activity changed in a manner consistent with imminent consciousness.'"
Something warm bloomed behind Griswald's sternum. Small and fragile and completely at odds with the catastrophe surrounding it, but real. Mash was safe. Mash was asking about him in clinical terminology she'd picked up from years of medical observation because she didn't know how else to say she was worried.
Da Vinci's enigmatic smile returned in full force.
"Every hour, without fail. I timed it." She tilted her head, amber eyes glinting. "She also asked me twice whether your brain could sustain damage from sleeping too long. I told her no, but she didn't look convinced." Her gaze dropped to Griswald's lap, where his hands had finally unclenched. "You should be flattered. I've never seen anyone fuss over delta-wave patterns with such romantic intensity."
Griswald's ears burned. "She's just being thorough."
"Mm. Thorough." Da Vinci's mechanical bird ruffled its wings on her shoulder. "Is that what we're calling it?"
Heat crawled up Griswald's neck. He adjusted his glasses and said nothing, which only made Da Vinci's enigmatic smile widen.
The warmth didn't last. Romani's expression shifted. The almost-smile fell away. The ring turned between his fingers again, and the office felt smaller, the data pads and cold coffee and blue glow pressing inward like walls closing.
"There's one more thing you need to know before I can answer the rest of your questions." Romani's voice dropped. Not in volume. In weight. "After the recovery team confirmed that Director Animusphere's spiritron pattern showed complete dissolution consistent with direct contact with CHALDEAS..."
He stopped. The ring stopped. The silence stretched taut between them.
Griswald saw it again. The portal's light. Olga's face, twisted between terror and incomprehension. Her fingers, reaching. His grip failing.
"She's dead." Griswald said it so Romani wouldn't have to.
Romani closed his eyes. One breath. Two.
"Yes."
The word hung in the sterile air. Da Vinci's smile had vanished entirely. Fou's ears pressed flat against his skull. For a span of seconds that felt much longer, the three of them sat with the fact of it, its ugly permanence filling the room like smoke.
Romani opened his eyes.
"With the Director's death confirmed, command authority of Chaldea falls to the designated chain of succession established under the Animusphere charter." He picked up the organizational chart again. All those red lines through all those names. "The first successor was Vice-Director Goldberg."
Red line.
"After Goldberg, Deputy Chief Castellan."
Red line.
"Then Senior Administrator Petrov. Department Head Morrison. Section Chief Yamamoto. Operations Commander Reyes."
Red line. Red line. Red line. Red line.
Romani set the data pad flat on his knee. His face had gone very still.
"The chain of succession passes through fourteen individuals before it reaches the position of Chief Medical Officer." He met Griswald's eyes. "Every single one of them is dead."
The implication settled over the room.
"You're the Acting Director."
Romani's hand found the ring again. Turned it once. His laugh, when it came, held no humor at all.
"Apparently."
The silence that followed stretched long enough to develop its own weight.
Griswald stared at Romani. Romani stared at the data pad on his knee. Da Vinci stared at a point on the far wall with the fixed attention of someone deliberately not looking at either of them. Fou's tail curled tighter around his paws.
Chief Medical Officer. Acting Director. Romani Archaman, who missed meetings because he fell down rabbit holes of idol fan forums. Romani Archaman, who kept a stash of contraband candy in his desk drawer and once spent an entire afternoon trying to teach Fou to high-five. Romani Archaman, who was brilliant and kind and deeply, genuinely good at everything that mattered in a crisis, but who had been fourteenth in the chain of command for a reason. Not because he lacked competence. Because he lacked the specific breed of ruthless political ambition that the Animusphere charter valued in its leadership. He was a healer. A researcher. A man who deflected hard conversations with jokes about virtual idols and then stayed up until three in the morning solving the problems he'd pretended not to notice.
Now the weight of humanity's last surviving institution sat on his shoulders, and his eyes held the hollow look of someone who hadn't slept in thirty-one hours because sleeping meant the responsibility would still be there when he woke.
"How are you doing?"
The question left Griswald's mouth before he'd fully formed the intent to ask it. Simple. Quiet. The same tone he used with patients who came to the infirmary claiming routine checkups when their hands shook and their eyes wouldn't focus.
Romani blinked. The ring stopped turning. Something flickered across his face, fast and unguarded, a crack in the composure he'd been wearing like ill-fitting armor. Surprise, maybe. The expression of a man who'd spent thirty-one hours answering everyone else's questions and hadn't expected anyone to ask his.
A tired smile spread across his mouth. Genuine. Small. The creases around his eyes deepened.
"Managing."
Griswald huffed. Da Vinci made a sound that was almost a laugh, warm and brief. Romani's tired smile twitched wider, and for three seconds the office felt less like a war room and more like a place where real people still existed. Then the silence returned, settling back over them like snow. The ventilation system hummed. The data pads glowed. Somewhere distant, a pipe rattled in the damaged infrastructure and went still.
Griswald sat with his hands flat on his thighs and the red glow of CHALDEAS branded behind his eyelids every time he blinked. Twenty-three staff. Seven Singularities. One hundred and eighty-seven dead. The bounded field the only thing standing between them and the void where seven billion people used to exist.
His voice came out small. Barely above the ventilation hum.
"What do we do now?"
Romani closed his eyes. His chest expanded with a breath that seemed to draw from somewhere deeper than his lungs. He held it. Released it through his nose, slow and controlled, the exhale of a man setting something heavy down.
"We need to talk. All of us." He opened his eyes. The fatigue remained, but beneath it something harder had surfaced. Purpose, maybe. Necessity. "You, Mash, and Ritsuka. Together. About what comes next."
Griswald's eyes went wide. His spine straightened in the chair and his hands lifted off his thighs.
"Ritsuka?"
The name came out sharp. Wrong. Because Ritsuka shouldn't be a name that could be spoken in the present tense. Lev Lainur's voice echoed in the hollow of Griswald's memory, casual and cruel. Already dead. Her physical body incinerated with the other Master candidates during the first explosion.
"Lev said she was dead. He said she died in the bombing with the others. He told us her body was gone."
Romani and Da Vinci exchanged a look. Not quick. Not hidden. A deliberate, measured communication between two people who had already discussed this at length and agreed on what could be said and how. Da Vinci's chin dipped by a fraction. Romani's jaw tightened.
"She did die." Romani spoke slowly, each word placed with the care of someone walking across thin ice. "Ritsuka Fujimaru died with the other Master candidates in the initial detonation. Her physical body was destroyed before the emergency rayshift ever activated."
Griswald's chest caved. The warmth that Mash's hourly inquiries had kindled went cold. Ritsuka, who'd punched him in the face the first time they met. Who'd teased him without cruelty and offered practical solutions without judgment. Who'd cried in the collapsing Singularity because she already knew.
"Then what do you mean, talk to her?" His voice cracked on the edge of the question. "How can we talk to someone who's dead?"
Romani leaned forward. His elbows found his knees. His hands clasped together, thumbs pressing against each other.
"That's precisely the question we've been trying to answer for the past thirty-one hours." His green eyes held Griswald's. Steady. Unflinching. "She should not have been present in Singularity F. A dead person cannot rayshift. The coffin system requires a living body to anchor the spiritron transfer. She had no body. No anchor. No possible mechanism for entering that Singularity. Olga was only able to do it because she was still alive milliseconds after the rayshifts had happened."
"But she was there. She fought. She bled."
"Yes." Romani unclasped his hands. "And when the emergency rayshift returned you all to Chaldea, her spiritron pattern came back with yours. Intact. Stable. And registering on every diagnostic instrument we possess as something that should not exist."
The office contracted around Griswald. The blue glow sharpened. Da Vinci pushed off the filing cabinet and stood straight, her amber eyes alight with something between scientific fascination and solemnity.
Romani straightened in his seat.
"After extensive examination, there is only one conclusion that fits the evidence." His voice carried the weight of a man about to redraw the boundaries of the possible.
"Ritsuka Fujimaru has become a Servant."