The command center hummed with controlled panic. Griswald felt it the moment the doors hissed open, a current running beneath the surface of every motion, every clipped instruction passed between stations. Staff hunched over consoles, fingers flying across keys, voices low and tight. Cables snaked across the floor in thick black bundles, taped down in hasty crosses. The air smelled of ozone and recycled coolant and the faint metallic bite of magical energy building somewhere deep in the facility's heart.
Mash walked beside him, her boots clicking against the floor. She'd changed into her combat outfit, the skintight navy and black armor hugging every line of her body, the segmented paneling catching the overhead lights as she moved. The soft, quiet girl who hid behind oversized jackets had given way to something forged for war. But her hand, when it brushed his, trembled.
He felt the tremor and understood it.
Romani led them through the chaos, his lab coat swishing as he sidestepped a technician dragging a coil of cable. His salmon hair had been tied back again, the loose strand tucked behind his ear, and the squared set of his shoulders hadn't softened since the gym. He cut through the room like a man who knew exactly where he was going and dreaded arriving.
Griswald felt the eyes.
They tracked him from every station. Sidelong glances over shoulders, quick assessments that flicked from his face to the Command Seals on his hand and back again. He recognized the weight in them. Doubt. The same doubt he'd carried his whole life, packed into a single look and multiplied across two dozen faces. He saw Marcus near the spiritron monitors, arms crossed, that faint self-assured smile gone flat. He saw Octavia at a console, her blue eyes meeting his for a half-second before sliding away. He saw Cerejeira standing motionless against the far wall, journal clutched to her chest, her green-gray eye vacant beneath that asymmetrical sweep of icy hair.
A familiar voice in his skull, his own, began its catalog. You're not qualified. You only stand here because everyone better is dead.
He breathed through it.
Beside him, Mash's jaw was tight, her gaze fixed forward with the rigid focus of someone holding panic at arm's length. He could see the fear under her armor, the way her shoulders sat a fraction too high, the way her thumb pressed white against her index finger.
So he straightened his own spine. Pushed his glasses up his nose. Made his face into something steady, something that looked like it belonged here even when every cell in his body insisted otherwise. If she was watching him, and he knew she was, she would see a man who wasn't afraid.
It was the kindest lie he knew how to tell.
"Senpai, this is the first one, isn't it," Mash said quietly, just for him. "The first real rayshift."
"Yeah…"
She glanced at him then, just a flick of violet, and something in her expression eased by a fraction. Not the fear. The loneliness underneath it.
Da Vinci stood at the central platform, surrounded by a constellation of floating holographic displays. The mechanical bird absent from her shoulder for once. Her amber eyes moved across three screens at once, lips moving in silent calculation, hands dancing through projected interfaces that rearranged themselves at her touch. She looked up as they approached, and for an instant the brilliant, composed mask slipped, revealing something almost maternal beneath.
"There you are." She tapped a final command and the display locked into place with a chime. "I was beginning to think Director Roman had gotten lost dragging you here."
"Just running behind," Romani said.
"You're always running behind." Da Vinci waved them onto the platform. "Come. Both of you. We don't have time for the long version, so you're getting the efficient one."
The largest display rotated to face them. A globe of Earth turned slowly in the air, blue and green and threaded with golden light, except for the great wound that bled crimson across the surface of all of it. From that ruin, seven points pulsed like infected stars. One blazed brighter than the rest, anchored over western Europe, throbbing with a sick red rhythm.
"This is your destination," Da Vinci said. The globe zoomed, the point swelling until coordinates and dense scrolling data filled the air around it. "France. The fifteenth century. The year 1431, give or take. The Singularity has localized around the region of Orléans."
"Orléans," Griswald repeated. The name meant something. A history lesson, half-remembered. "That's was the year Joan of Arc burned and Henry VI was crown king of France right?"
"Very good." Da Vinci's mouth curved. "You did read something Roman gave you."
"I read the cover."
"Honesty. I admire it." She flicked the display and an image resolved from the data, a stylized rendering of armored figures, banners, a city wall. "Here is the historical record. In the spring of 1429, Jeanne d'Arc lifted the English siege of Orléans, turning the Hundred Years' War in France's favor. She was captured, tried, and burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431. A peasant girl who heard the voice of God and saved a nation, then died for it." She paused. "That is what should have happened."
"But now the timeline has been overwritten." Romani stepped up beside Da Vinci, arms folded, his green eyes fixed on the burning fields. "We don't know how, and we don't know by whom. The historical events have been corrupted the same way Fuyuki was, but the distortion runs deeper here. France isn't being saved. It's being destroyed. The whole region is consumed by something we can't identify from this distance."
"Servants," Mash said. Not a question.
"Almost certainly." Romani's jaw worked. "Multiple, by the energy signatures. Far more than Fuyuki had. But the records are too damaged to tell us who, or how many, or what side they're on. That's the problem with a Singularity this large. It generates its own noise. We're half-blind going in."
Griswald felt the cold settle into his stomach. He thought of the Archer's arrows splitting the air, of the lancer cruel smile, of Saber Alter's golden eyes, of how close every one of those fights had come to ending him. And there had been three Servants in Fuyuki. Here Dr. Romani spoke of more like he was counting raindrops.
"What changed," Griswald said. "If Jeanne d'Arc saved Orléans in history, then what's happening now?"
"That's what you have to find out." Da Vinci turned the globe again, the wound pulsing red. "We can give you a destination and a year. We can't give you the answer. The truth of a Singularity only reveals itself from the inside. Something altered the course of these events, and until you stand in that fire and see it with your own eyes, we're guessing."
"And we don't have the luxury of guessing wrong." Romani touched the ring on his finger, an absent motion Griswald had learned to read as worry. "Listen to me. Both of you. This is bigger than Fuyuki, but the principle is the same. A Singularity can't sustain itself out of nothing. Something is feeding it. Anchoring it. In Fuyuki it was the corrupted Greater Grail."
"The Holy Grail," Mash said.
"The Holy Grail." Romani nodded. "There will be one here. There has to be. It's the only object with enough power to tear a hole in history and hold it open. Find the Grail, secure it or destroy it, and the Singularity collapses. The timeline corrects. France lives. That is your objective, stripped down to its bones. Everything else, every fight, every choice, serves that single goal."
Griswald breathed in slow, then let it out slower, the air dragging through his lungs like it weighed something. It was happening. This was it, then. No more briefings, no more theory laid out across the glowing curve of a wounded globe, no more time to talk himself out of it. Once more he and Mash were taking the field, stepping out of the safety of the command room and into a hole torn through history, with nothing certain waiting on the other side but fire and the things that lit it.
He felt Mash's hand find his.
He didn't look down at it. He just turned his palm and let her fingers slot between his, and squeezed. Her grip was steel-strong, the strength of a Demi-Servant who could hold back Excalibur, but it shook in his hand all the same. He squeezed harder. Anchored her the way her shield had anchored him.
"We can do this," he said. Quiet. For her, mostly. Maybe a little for himself.
She nodded, the rigid line of her shoulders settling. "Yes, Senpai. We can."
"One more thing." Romani's expression sharpened. "You won't have a Cú Chulainn handed to you this time. No one ambushing your enemies for you out of the goodness of his heart. But Fuyuki proved something important. There are Servants in these Singularities who may be willing to help you. You found one by luck before. This time you need to find them on purpose. They'll be your only real advantage against the numbers in there."
"How do we know who we can trust?" Griswald asked.
"You won't, at first." Romani spread his hands. "You'll have to talk to them. Read them. Decide who's worth trusting and who's trying to kill you, and you'll have to do it fast, sometimes in the middle of a fight. It's not a science. It's judgment. And, frankly, it's the part of this job no amount of magical theory prepares you for."
A small sound came from Da Vinci. Griswald glanced over to find her watching him with a glint in her amber eyes that he had learned, over one very educational evening, to be deeply wary of.
"On that note," she said, the gravity peeling off her voice like a discarded coat, "I have every confidence in our Master's powers of diplomacy."
Griswald felt the heat hit his face before he fully processed the word. "Da Vinci—"
"You've been studying so diligently." She pressed a hand to her chest in mock pride. "I'd hate to think those lessons went to waste. If you find a Servant who needs a little persuading to join your side, well." She tilted her head, and then she winked at him, slow and shameless. "You have a remarkably persuasive technique. Our lessons on the subject were very promising."
"That's not—" His voice cracked. He looked anywhere but at her. "That's not… that's a completely different—"
"Is it?" Da Vinci's smile widened.
Beside him, Mash had gone scarlet to the tips of her ears. She stared down at the floor. The hand still tangled in Griswald's tightened until he nearly winced.
"Da Vinci," Romani sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "They're about to rayshift into a war zone."
"And they'll do it with high morale." She turned back to her displays, utterly unbothered, fingers resuming their dance across the projected light.
Griswald wanted to sink through the floor and into the timeline early. Mash made a strangled noise that might have been a protest or might have been a prayer.
But her shoulders had come down. The fear in her grip had loosened, just a little, buried now under embarrassment. And somehow that was easier to carry into the fire than the dread had been.
He squeezed her hand one more time. She squeezed back.
Across the command center, a hand went up.
It was a tentative thing, raised barely to shoulder height, fingers half-curled as though its owner already regretted the gesture. Griswald followed it to a compact man near the spiritron monitors, blond hair cut tidy around a round, soft-featured face, narrow rectangular glasses catching the light. Meunière. The staff officer. His teal-paneled jacket sat crisp on his shoulders, but his light blue-gray eyes darted between Romani and Da Vinci with the nervous energy of a man who couldn't quite believe he'd volunteered himself for attention.
"Sorry, I, um—" Meunière cleared his throat. "I had a question. About the summoning."
Da Vinci's fingers paused over her displays. "Go on."
"Well." Meunière swallowed, glanced at the burning globe, then back. "When they get there. To Orléans. Can't they just… summon Servants? On site? That was the whole plan for Team A, wasn't it? You drop the Masters into the Singularity, they establish a summoning circle, they call their own Servants from the catalogs we prepared, and then they fight with a full roster. That's how the Grail War system is supposed to work. So why is there such a reliance on rouge servants?" His voice rose with the momentum of his own question, then crested and broke. He seemed to hear himself, and the color climbed up his neck. He dropped his head, shoulders folding inward. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have interrupted, you all clearly know what you're doing, I just—forget I said anything—"
But it was too late. The room had heard him.
Griswald felt the attention shift, the weight of two dozen pairs of eyes swinging away from him and toward the central platform, toward the answer. And underneath the weight, a hot prickle of shame crawled up his spine, because he already knew the answer. Or thought he did. He'd read it, somewhere in the materials Romani had dumped on him, in the dry language of a system that had been built for people far more capable than him. The fact that he was walking into the largest Singularity yet identified with exactly one Servant at his side was a quiet indictment, an unspoken measure of everything he lacked.
Romani and Da Vinci looked at each other.
It was a brief look, but Griswald had spent his life reading rooms he didn't belong in, and he caught the freight of it. Not dismissal. Not the easy reassurance he'd braced for. Something more careful. More complicated.
"It's a fair question, Meunière." Romani turned, addressing not just the staff officer but the whole room, his administrator's instinct kicking in. "Don't apologize for it. Everyone here is putting their faith in this operation. You deserve to understand it." He drew a breath. "The honest answer is that we don't know how easy it would be."
A murmur moved through the staff. Meunière looked up, blinking.
"The models Team A trained on," Da Vinci said, stepping in smoothly, her amber eyes sweeping the displays, "were built on assumptions that no longer hold. Team A planned for managed Singularities. Controlled descents into stable temporal anomalies with reliable mana baselines, predictable ley line access, summoning circles established in advance through the Coffin's spiritron tethering. They expected to walk into something dangerous but knowable." She let the word land. "What's happening now is not that. The Incineration changed the rules. Every assumption in those models came from a world where humanity still existed across the timeline. That world is gone. We are operating in conditions no one designed for, and frankly, no one anticipated."
"So Von Garmisch can't summon?" Octavia's voice, sharp, from her console. Her arms had uncrossed.
"I didn't say that." Da Vinci's mouth curved, but the humor didn't reach her eyes. "I said it isn't simple. To summon a Servant, you need mana. An enormous quantity of it, far beyond what any single Master can generate alone." and here she did not look at Griswald, which was its own kind of mercy, "In a functioning world, you draw that from the spiritual energy of the land. A ley line. The arteries of the world's mana."
"Then he finds a ley line." Marcus, flat, unconvinced.
"That won't be easy," Romani said. "We do not know how the singularity might have change the environment as it did in Fuyuki. Along with the fact the our systems have been having problems getting any data from the mana rich environment that these singularity's emit means they would be on there own looking for one. Finding a ley line under those conditions isn't a task. It's a miracle. And even if he found one—"
"Even if he found one," Da Vinci picked up the thread, and now her tone shifted, dropped into something graver, "the Singularity itself corrupts the equation."
She turned the display. The burning globe vanished, replaced by an image Griswald knew too well. Fuyuki. The ruined skyline beneath a blood-red sky, rendered in cold holographic lines.
"Consider Fuyuki," she said. "The mana saturating that Singularity was poisoned. Twisted by the corrupted Greater Grail until it ran thick with the filth of every evil in the world. Now." She tapped the image, and the air around the ruined city bloomed with sickly red contour lines, mapping the density of corruption. "Suppose Master had found a ley line there. Suppose he'd had the reserves to draw on it and attempt a summoning. What do you imagine answers a call made through that?"
Silence in the command center. Griswald felt it crawl over his skin.
"Not a Heroic Spirit," Da Vinci said softly. "Or not one you'd want. You'd reach into a wellspring of pure malevolence and pull out whatever was closest to the surface. Something warped. Something far worse than the enemy you were trying to fight. You wouldn't gain an ally. You'd hand the Singularity a weapon and point it at yourself."
Meunière had gone pale. "Then Orléans—"
"We don't know." Romani's hands spread. "That's the part I can't soften for you. Orléans might be cleaner than Fuyuki. The local mana might be pure enough that a summoning would call something genuinely heroic, something that could turn the whole operation. Or it might be filthier. It might be a trap with a circle drawn around it, just waiting for someone desperate enough to try." He shook his head slowly. "We are going in blind. Completely blind. I won't pretend otherwise. The safest assumption is that summoning on-site is a gamble we cannot calculate, and so the plan does not depend on it. If the opportunity presents itself, and the conditions are right, then yes—it becomes an option. But Master goes in prepared to win with what he has. With Mash. Anything more is a gift we haven't earned yet."
What went unspoken hung in the air all the same, and Griswald heard it loud as a struck bell. Even with a clean ley line. Even with the perfect conditions. Could he actually do it? Could a third-rate mage with circuits that had failed every test his family ever set, who'd only managed to light up at all by kissing a girl in a ruined storefront, reach across the veil and pull a Heroic Spirit into the world? No one asked it. No one needed to. Romani had built the entire plan so that the question never had to be answered, and the kindness of that, the careful architecture of low expectations, sat in Griswald's chest like a swallowed stone.
But the room had calmed. He could feel it. The murmurs settled, the sharp edges of doubt sanding down into grim acceptance. Meunière gave a small, jerky nod and ducked his head again, muttering another apology that no one acknowledged. The staff returned to their stations, the current of panic resuming its low electric hum.
"All right." Romani straightened, the Acting Director snapping back into place. "Final checks. Da Vinci, run the tether diagnostics one more time. I want the Coffins green across the board before we commit anything."
"Already running." Her fingers flew.
Romani turned to Griswald and Mash. For a moment the administrator's mask thinned, and beneath it was just a tired man who'd buried a hundred and eighty-seven names. "It's time. The Coffins are this way."
Griswald nodded. He didn't trust his voice. He glanced at Mash, found her watching him with that steady violet gaze, the fear in it folded down and locked away behind purpose. Her hand had never left his. Now she turned and started walking, drawing him with her, their boots ringing against the cabled floor as they crossed toward the bay where the two Coffins waited, lids open, the soft blue glow of their interiors pulsing like held breath.
This was it. The fire. The hole in history with nothing certain on the other side. He fixed his eyes on the open Coffin and tried to remember how to be brave instead of just looking it.
"Wait."
The voice cut clean across the command center.
Griswald stopped. Mash stopped. He felt the whole room still around him, the hum of consoles dropping into a hush as heads turned, as the diagnostic chatter died on a dozen tongues. He turned.
Standing in the threshold of the command center, framed by the open doors, was Ritsuka Fujimaru.
Her vibrant orange-red hair was gathered in its familiar side ponytail, a few loose strands falling across her forehead. Her amber eyes burned with that intense focus he'd seen flash in the ruins of Fuyuki, fixed on him, on Mash, on the open Coffins beyond them. She wore a standard Chaldea uniform, but something about her had changed in a way he couldn't name and couldn't unsee—a faint, impossible clarity to the air around her, the unmistakable presence of something that no longer belonged entirely to the world of the living.
A breath caught in his throat.
Around him, the surprise rippled outward in a wave of murmurs and startled glances. Romani turned, his green eyes going wide and Da Vinci's hands froze over her displays.
Because she was supposed to be in medical. Under observation. The Servant who shouldn't exist, the dead girl walking, the variable no one had solved—and she was standing here, in the command center, on the threshold of war.
"Ritsuka?" Griswald breathed.
Ritsuka's mouth pulled into a smile, but Griswald saw the strain holding it up, the deliberate effort behind every curve of it. Nothing like the easy, reckless grins she'd worn in Fuyuki when she'd teased him through their first kiss with Mash, when she'd stripped down without a flicker of shame and walked him through things he'd never imagined doing.
"You really thought you could go on without me?" She started walking, crossing the cabled floor toward them, her boots steady though her shoulders weren't. "Team F. I helped name that disaster. You don't get to leave me behind."
"Ritsuka." Romani moved to intercept her, his lab coat swishing, one hand half-raised. "You're supposed to be in medical. How are you feeling?"
"Fine." She didn't slow.
"That's not an answer." He stepped into her path, and to his credit he didn't flinch when those amber eyes lifted to his. "We don't understand what you are yet. You came back from Fuyuki as a Servant with no class, no Master, no contract, and you've been stable on a mana source we can't identify. That's not a clean bill of health, Ritsuka. That's a question mark we can't afford to ignore. You could destabilize in the middle of a Singularity and we'd have no idea why, or how to stop it." His voice softened, the administrator giving way to the doctor. "I can't sign off on sending you into the largest temporal anomaly we've ever recorded when I don't even know what keeps you breathing."
"And how long would it take you to find out?" Ritsuka stopped in front of him. "Days? Weeks? Run every test you've got, and at the end of it you might still be guessing, like you're guessing about Orléans, like you're guessing about whether Gris can even summon." She shook her head, the ponytail swinging. "We don't have weeks. We barely have today. Seven Singularities, Doctor. Only three people who can rayshift in the entire world, and one of them is me." She held up her hand, fingers spread, the gesture sharp. "You need all the help you can get. You know you do. I'm the only other person alive—" she caught herself on the word, and her mouth twisted, "—the only other person who can do this. Who can step into a Coffin and come out the other side somewhere in history. That's not a small thing. You can't bench it because the my health makes you nervous."
Romani's jaw worked. He didn't have an answer for it. Griswald could see that he knew she was right, and that knowing it didn't make it sit any easier in his chest.
Then Ritsuka's gaze dropped.
She looked down at her own hands, turning them over slowly, studying the palms as though searching for something that should have been there and wasn't. When she spoke again her voice had changed, gone quieter, the bravado draining out of it until only something raw and tired remained.
"Besides," she said, "what does my health even matter?"
The room stilled.
"What does it matter if I'm safe?" She kept looking at her hands. "If we fail, we all die anyway. Every person in this room. Everyone who already died across all of history, gone for good, because we couldn't fix it. So what does it change, keeping me wrapped in cotton in a medical bay while the seconds run out? I'm already dead, Doctor. My body burned in the bombing. Whatever I am now—" her fingers curled closed, "—if it ends in a Singularity instead of a hospital bed, what's the difference? At least out there I'd be useful. At least out there I'd be doing something other than waiting to find out whether we all stop existing."
The silence that followed had weight to it.
Griswald felt the recoil move through the command center like a cold draft. A technician at the spiritron monitors went rigid. Octavia's hand stilled on her console. Marcus's arms uncrossed, his self-assured face gone slack. Cerejeira's vacant eye flickered with something for the first time since Griswald had walked in. Because no one had said it. Not out loud. Not in this room, where everyone had been carefully, deliberately not looking at the full shape of the thing they faced. And Ritsuka had just torn the architecture down with a single sentence. If we fail, we all die anyway. The truth of the Incineration, naked and unadorned, hanging in the recycled air.
Ritsuka looked up, and she saw it. Saw the faces gone pale, the shoulders that had pulled inward, the way the whole room flinched from the words she'd let loose. Her expression cracked.
"I'm sorry," she said, low. "I didn't—I shouldn't have put it like that. I'm sorry."
No one answered. The hum of the consoles filled the gap.
Romani let out a long breath through his nose. He turned, looking past Ritsuka to the central platform, to Da Vinci standing motionless among her displays. The question passed between them without a word, the same careful, freighted look Griswald had caught earlier, the one that carried more than it showed.
"Da Vinci," Romani said. "Your assessment. Honestly. Is she well enough to go?"
Da Vinci's amber eyes moved over Ritsuka, slow and clinical, the same gaze she'd run across his own anatomy in a lesson that felt like a lifetime ago. Reading her. Calculating. The mechanical bird's absence left her shoulder bare, and she stood very still, every ounce of that genius-level attention narrowed to a single point.
"Honestly?" Da Vinci tilted her head. "I can't give you a number. Her spiritron composition is identical to a Servant's, and she's holding stable without a contract or an identifiable mana source. By every metric we have, she should have dissipated by now. She hasn't. Whatever sustains her, it's working, and it's been working consistently under no particular stress." She folded her arms. "But here's the part you don't want to hear, Roman. We're in exactly the same position we were with Mash before Fuyuki. We had a Demi-Servant who couldn't access her Noble Phantasm, who didn't even know the name of the spirit fused with her, who by every careful assessment we ran should have been kept far away from a battlefield." Her gaze flicked to Mash, who had gone very still. "Sometimes a thing only reveals its nature when you ask it to do the impossible. We don't learn what Ritsuka is by keeping her under glass. We learn it by watching her standing on her feet."
"That's not a recommendation," Romani said.
"It's the only honest answer I have." Da Vinci turned then, and her amber eyes settled on Griswald, the full weight of her attention swinging onto him like a spotlight. "Which is why it isn't my call. Or yours, Director. The Coffins tether to the Master. The rayshift anchors to him. If Ritsuka goes, she goes because he allows it, and he's the one who has to live with whatever happens out there." A small, knowing curve touched her mouth. "So. Master. Your decision. Does she come?"
The room turned to him.
Griswald felt the weight of all of it land on his shoulders at once, two dozen pairs of eyes, the open Coffins glowing at his back, Mash's hand still warm in his. And in front of him, Ritsuka.
He looked at her properly. Really looked.
The girl who had woken in a corridor and punched him in the face on instinct, who had taken charge of a situation three other people couldn't even discuss without blushing, who had laughed at the idea of fighting Saber Alter and declared they were all going to die with a kind of gleeful courage that had terrified and steadied him in equal measure. That Ritsuka had burned with confidence, an athlete's easy certainty in her own body and her own nerve.
This Ritsuka stood smaller. Her shoulders curled in just slightly, her hands still half-closed at her sides as though she didn't quite trust them. The fire in her amber eyes hadn't gone out, but it flickered now, banked low under something he recognized too well because he'd carried it his whole life. Doubt.
She wanted not to be left behind. She wanted to still matter.
He knew that want. He knew it down to the marrow.
And he already had his answer. Had it the moment she'd appeared in the doorway. He'd watched Olga get torn from his grip and pulled into a burning world. He'd held onto Mash through a collapsing chamber. He was not in the business of leaving people behind, not when they were standing right in front of him asking to come.
"Of course you're coming," Griswald said.
The words came out steadier than he felt. Ritsuka's head came up and for a moment she just stared at him. Then the strain went out of her face, the forced edges of the smile dissolving into something real, something that reached all the way up into those amber eyes and lit them the way he remembered. The doubt didn't vanish—he didn't think it ever fully would, not for either of them—but it loosened its grip.
"Yeah." Her voice cracked a little. She cleared it. "Yeah. It'll take a lot more than this to break up Team F."
Griswald felt that land somewhere in his chest, warm and aching at once. He pressed his lips together and nodded, not trusting himself to say anything that wouldn't come out shaking.
Romani exhaled, long and resigned, and pinched the bridge of his nose. "All right. All right. Da Vinci, reconfigure the tether for a third occupant. Ritsuka, you're getting a full diagnostic strap in the Coffin whether you like it or not, and the second your readings spike I am pulling you, do you understand me? I don't care how useful you think you're being."
"Wouldn't dream of arguing," Ritsuka said, already walking toward the Coffin bay with a fraction of her old swagger back in her step.
"Liar," Romani muttered, but he was already turning to his console, fingers moving.
The command center came alive again, the hush breaking into a flurry of motion. Da Vinci's hands flew across her displays, recalculating, the holographic interfaces rearranging in cascades of light. A technician hurried past with a diagnostic harness. The blue glow of the third Coffin's interior pulsed brighter as it powered up, lid yawning open to receive her.
Griswald felt Mash squeeze his hand. He looked down, and she was watching him with that steady violet gaze, something soft in it now, something that might have been pride.
"That was the right thing, Senpai," she said quietly.
"I hope so."
He didn't let go of her hand until they reached the Coffins. Three of them now, lids open, the soft light spilling out like held breath finally released. Ritsuka was already lowering herself into the third, a technician fitting the harness over her chest, her amber eyes catching Griswald's across the bay. She gave him a small nod. He gave it back.
Then he climbed into his own Coffin, the padded interior cool against his back, the lid hovering above him ready to descend. Mash settled into hers beside him. He could see her profile through the open lids, calm now, resolved, the fear locked away behind purpose.
"Rayshift sequence initializing," Da Vinci called, her voice ringing clear over the hum. "Spiritron conversion at twelve percent. Coffins green across the board. Connecting to the second coordinate. Confirming first Singularity. France, 1431."
The lid began to lower.
"Orléans," Romani's voice came through, taut and final. "Bringing the Holy Grail under control, securing the temporal foundation. Operation start." A breath. "All three of you—come back. That's an order."
Light flooded the Coffin, so blue, and as it swallowed him Griswald thought about, the difference between being brave and only looking it, and found, this time, that he couldn't quite tell them apart anymore.
As the rayshift took him apart.
Griswald felt it again the way he'd felt it in the staging area before everything burned, that sensation of being unwound thread by thread, his body dissolving into something less than matter and more than memory. Cold light poured through him. The world he knew peeled away in layers, the Coffin, the command center, the hum of consoles, all of it stripping back until there was nothing but the blue and the falling and the certainty that he was scattered across a distance no body should survive.
He braced for it. For all of it.
Behind his closed eyes he saw Fuyuki. The blood-red sky. The skeletons clawing up out of the rubble, the Archer's arrows splitting the air, Saber Alter's golden eyes locked on him across a collapsing chamber. Da Vinci's voice came back to him, far more than Fuyuki had, and Romani's, this is bigger, and he gathered every scrap of resolve he could find in the dark and held it tight against his chest like a shield. Whatever waited on the other side, it would be worse. He told himself that. He believed it. He prepared to open his eyes onto horror.
He opened his eyes onto a hillside.
Griswald blinked.
Green. That was the first thing his brain refused to process. Green grass, soft and rolling, sloping down beneath him in long gentle waves toward a valley he could only half see through the haze of distance. A breeze moved across it, and the whole hillside breathed, blades bending and rising in slow silver ripples. There were trees down the slope, real trees, full and heavy with leaves, their canopies shifting in the wind. The air smelled of earth and growing things and faint woodsmoke from somewhere far off.
And the sky.
The sky was blue. Not the bruised crimson wound of Fuyuki, not the sterile white of Chaldea's recycled lights, but an honest, ordinary, impossible blue, scattered with a few soft clouds drifting fat and slow across it. Sunlight fell warm on his face. Somewhere a bird he couldn't see was singing.
Griswald stood there in the middle of it, completely thrown.
It was nice. The thought arrived absurd and unbidden, but he couldn't shake it. After the staging area, after the corridors, after months sealed inside a facility carved into a frozen mountain where the only weather was whatever the climate control decided, it was nice. Fuyuki didn't count. Fuyuki had been hell wearing the skin of a city. This was a spring afternoon in France, five centuries before he was born, and his lungs filled with clean air while his eyes ached at how far he could see.
He turned, half a comment already forming on his tongue, something dry about how Romani had undersold the travel arrangements.
The words died.
Mash stood a few paces off, and she wasn't looking at him. She wasn't looking at anything in particular and at everything all at once. Her violet eyes had gone wide, her lips parted, the rigid combat readiness she'd carried into the Coffin melted clean off her face. The breeze stirred the loose lavender strands of her hair across her cheek and she didn't move to push them back. She just stood there, turning slowly, drinking it in. The grass. The trees swaying down the slope. Her gaze tipping back, up, to the wide blue reach of the sky, and she stared at it like it was the first thing she had ever truly seen.
It struck him then, hard, low in the chest.
This was the first time. The first real time. She had been born in a lab, raised inside Chaldea's walls, a girl engineered to be a vessel and then set aside as a failure, a person who had spent her entire life beneath artificial light and recycled air. This was the first time in her existence that Mash Kyrielight had stood under a real sky, in a real field, with the sun on her face and the wind in her hair.
He started toward her slow. Careful. Setting each foot down soft on the grass, terrified that any noise, any clumsy word, would break whatever spell held her and snatch this moment away before she'd had her fill of it.
He felt Ritsuka fall into step beside him. He glanced over and found her watching Mash too, her amber eyes gone gentle, and she read the moment exactly as he did. She didn't speak. She didn't crack a joke or tease or do any of the things the Ritsuka of Fuyuki might have. She just walked with him, quiet, letting Mash have it.
Griswald stopped a pace away. For a long moment he didn't say anything either. Then, soft, barely above the breeze:
"Is this what you imagined it'd be like?"
Mash didn't startle. She kept her face tipped to the sky a moment longer, and when she finally lowered it to look at him, her eyes were bright, wet at the edges, shining with something that had no place on a battlefield.
"No, Senpai." Her voice came out hushed, full of wonder. "All the books, the ones I read at night when I couldn't sleep, they tried. They described skies and fields and sunlight in such beautiful words and I thought I understood." She shook her head slowly, a breath of disbelieving laughter slipping out. "But all that writing. All those pages. They pale in comparison. None of it comes close to this."
Griswald felt something in him lift.
It was a small thing, watching her face light up like that. But it cut clean through the dread he'd carried into the Coffin, through the weight of an extinct humanity and his own bottomless inadequacy, and for one suspended moment he felt lighter than he had in longer than he could remember. He looked at her amazement and it gave him something he hadn't dared name. Hope.
Then Mash's brow creased.
"Though the books never mentioned the ring," she said.
Griswald blinked. "The ring?"
He followed her gaze upward, back to that impossible blue.
It took him a moment to see it, because it was so large his eye kept sliding past it, mistaking it for the edge of the world. But it was there. A ring of pale light, vast beyond reckoning, arcing across the entire dome of the sky in a perfect immense circle. A halo so enormous it seemed to crown the whole horizon, the heavens themselves ringed in cold radiance.
The warmth drained out of him.
"Mash," he said, and his voice had gone flat and careful, the dread crawling back up his spine cold as the rayshift. "That. That's not normal."
"…oh."
Order I - Orleans