41 pages filled with tldr nasu stan posts, sb's worst nightmare too
truly, xhom's fav thread
) as Shiva actually got rid of it by drinking the Milk that give him name of Nilakanta of the Blue Throat. 
Snowfield, central street
The best way to describe the creature was as a torrent of power.
A huge clump of energy, like a Heroic Spirit but somewhat different.
Like a living tornado of Elements, repeating the cycle of compressing the Elements of its surroundings, accelerating them, and immediately bursting them back out.
Taking water as a metaphor, it could be described as a hydraulic jet cutter shaped to a specific form.
Its amount of water is nothing compared to a giant waterfall, but with enough speed, its spray becomes a fluid blade capable of splitting rocks.
Likewise, a torrent of magical energy whirled in the skies above Snowfield, circulating with enough intensity to crush souls.
The otherworldly creature did nothing but circulate magical energy at high speeds. Like a momentary glimmer turned permanent. The "specific form" it was shaped to was none other than the human form.
A grotesque humanoid figure, close yet distant in shape to what once was Flat Escardos.
The young Master of Jack the Ripper's clothes were stained with his blood and had a large rifle bullet hole in the chest.
Nothingness and light could be seen from the gaps in the red fabric.
The bullet hole in the chest revealed an open scar composed of crack-like lines, reminiscent of punched glass.
An elongated slant ran through the hole, and jet-black darkness could be seen from inside it.
It was like a mass of dark, dim shadows sucking in all light.
Despite being in the center of a human body, the hole felt deep as an infinite corridor. Its apparent absorption of light made it the most prominent part of the entity.
And a giant light source can be seen from the gaps of the hole, assumedly the final destination of all the absorbed light.
It was a light source, but the darkness in the hole wasn't illuminated by it.
The light source emphasized only its own existence - a Core resembling a giant eyeball, covering only its own body in radiant light.
A third party has no way of knowing if this "eye" too massive to be a real human eye is the Core controlling the darkness or a Core domesticated by the infinite hollow enveloping it.
And what was above this hole and eyeball?
A head. The most important part in the composition of a humanoid figure. Contrary to the grotesqueness of the center of its body, its head looked quite peaceful.
Like a young human's head, at first glance.
But anyone who knew Flat Escardos could tell from a distance that that was not him.
Short protuberances appeared on the sides of its head, barely visible from the gaps of its hair, which is longer than Flat's.
Bizarrely shaped horns or antennae, like a mix between the luminescent crystal wings of an insect and the leaves of a tree, wiggled upwards, in a struggle against gravity.
It might look like a boy dressed as some kind of mystical creature for Halloween, but the almost arcane harmony of its design let anyone tell at first glance that what they were seeing was real.
The face on it looked perfectly human, molded as a more refined version of Flat's now blown-off face.
But contrary to Flat's peaceful, innocent, and boyish eyes, the figure had the lonely eyes of someone who disdained, pitied, and detested all in the world. Around those eyes, there were marks that could be interpreted as either scars or tattoos.
Its face looked even younger than the already babyfaced Flat.
Its body was also quite deaged. The clothes that fit Flat perfectly rapidly became too big for the new body, and the holes in them started to expose skin.
But what was inside the clothes is still as hollow as before.
Like a broken ball-jointed doll, it was missing most of its hip and elbows.
The shot portions of Flat's body could be seen crumbling in real-time.
The hollow shadows leaked out of the cracks in an attempt to prevent that and hold the human body in place.
Its limbs floated in the air despite the lack of knees and elbows, making the world assume its silhouette was one of someone with a complete body.
Despite taking the appearance of a young boy, the otherworldly creature had a mature figure and grotesque shape. It set foot at the tallest peak in Snowfield -the Crystal Hill rooftop- and took a slow look at its surroundings.
It no longer showed any interest in the folded cadavers atop the other buildings' roofs.
Instead, it borrowed one of their sniper rifles and gracefully placed its finger on the trigger.
But instead of pulling it, it just stared at the gun with uninterested eyes before tossing it away.
With a loud metallic noise, the gun hit the heliport floor without ever going off.
The otherworldly creature in the shape of a boy in his midteens mechanically spun its head to observe the city's sceneries.
It found the central park where Flat Escardos first summoned Jack the Ripper.
Next, it turned its eyes to the police station where the Executor fought the bloodsucker.
The motel they were using as a base, the opera house where he was called for a TV interview...
Its eyes eventually passed through the hospital where they fought that powerful Archer... and locked at its final destination, the spot where Flat was ultimately shot.
Once his eyes were done tracing the steps of the young Master in this land, the boy close them and stopped moving as if it was making a silent prayer.
It's possible he was indeed making a silent prayer.
Though he will never tell what he prayed about in this silence.
The boy opened his eyes and saw a fast-moving figure.
Richard the Lionheart, a Heroic Spirit with a Saber Saint Graph.
The otherwordly boy's eyes sharpened when he saw what Saber was carrying.
The special Magic Circuits connected to these sharpened eyes understood everything.
He knew what the Ayaka Sajou in Richard's arms was.
He knew the tremendous size of the magical energy swirling inside Ayaka.
He didn't learn it now. He understood it the second he first looked at Ayaka Sajou through Flat Escardos's eyes.
Ayaka was the opposite of him. A vast still lake of magical energy.
Massive amounts of unmoving magical energy. It will never go active of its own volition, but in exchange, it can become a giant source of power without needing to make any moves of its own.
Knowing that, he had to accept a fact whether he wanted or not:
Ayaka Sajou was not one of his own kind, but she was exactly as otherworldly to human society as he was.
"That creature... will be a problem later."
The words he whispered could have been his true opinion, but they could also have been part of his farewell ritual to Flat. The boy didn't know.
And without looking for the answer, the boy circulated magical energy in his hand.
With the sound of grinding gears, shadows seeped out of the hole in his chest and enveloped his arms.
Magic circles appeared where his missing elbows should be and his chest started sending magical energy through his floating forearms to their focal points in his fingertips, amplifying the energy throughout the travel.
The shadows enveloping his arms form further magic circles as they expand, adding second and third layers to the elbows and in front of his palms.
Furthermore, the shadow stretching from his back collected crystalline shards from the atmosphere to grow into a pair of wings, then started drawing a tridimensional emblem in the air.
Flueger, a mage observing the scene from a distance, reported it to his employer as follows:
Common sense tells me I'm probably wrong
But I think that thing was... Magic Circuits... no, an externally expanded Magic Crest
This thing's on a level beyond those monstrous Magic Crests from ancient houses
The Magic Crest broke out and is now one... no, countless independent living beings
Real-time Magic Crest growth... Nah, sorry man, I gotta be jumping the gun with these theories
A report that made its sender question his own sanity.
Magic Circuits and Magic Crests are two very important substances to mages.
Magic Circuits are an essential "organ" for the use of magecraft, spread through the body in the form of a fixed number of pseudo-nerves. One reason behind the mages' jus sanguinis doctrine is that they strive to increase this number, even if by just 1.
Likewise, the Magic Crest is a symbol of the accumulation of experience in a mage's bloodline. However, normal Magic Crest are not provided with biological functions like the one you're currently seeing. Instead, they are "artificial hearts" designed by each family to be passed from parent to child.
The Crest's creation is supposed to span centuries or millennia with each holder adding their own contribution to it. It suddenly proliferating outside the holder's body is normally unthinkable.
But the boy immediately figured out what was this thing constructing himself around him and what was it for.
The magical energy in the city's rich air, or perhaps the land's dragonvein resources allotted to the Holy Grail, were assembling themselves together around the boy in a frantic speed.
Borrowing Holy Grail War terminology, the sheer of magical energy concentrated in one place could plainly be described as a "Noble Phantasm".
The boy's sharp glare aimed his arms and the magical energy they controlled at Ayaka and Saber, ready to shoot.
And then, at the moment of the fallout...
"Hi."
A soothing voice echoed, dissipating all tension.
After the boy stopped his movements, he skillfully put the concentrated magical energy to circulate around himself and turned back.
There he saw someone appeared behind him before he noticed it. They spoke, still in the same soothing voice.
"Nice to meet you, friend."
He saw a forest, an ocean, a mountain, a city... one world standing before him.
The boy's special "eyes" made him more aware of what he was facing than any other person.
A being unlike himself or Ayaka, who did nothing other than blend their power with the world's.
They weren't concealing their presence.
They were assimilated into the wide world with no efforts to hide their powerful presence.
Mother Nature in human form. Confronted by the questioning eyes of this being somewhat similar to Divine Spirits or Elementals, the boy opened his mouth.
"A Heroic Spirit...? The protectors of Human Order are here to erase me?"
"Right now I'm just a Servant walking the land with my Master. Besides, the planet doesn't seem to have decided its opinion on you yet."
"Then what are you here for?"
The boy spoke with maximum caution, but not out of suspicion. He decided from the first moment that he was talking to an enemy.
The Heroic Spirit, this beautiful figure with green hair flowing in the wind, responded with a soothing smile.
"You know this girl you were just trying to obliterate?" Still with no hostility in their smile, the Heroic Spirit -Enkidu- gushed magical energy around themself with the elegance of vegetation fluttering in the wind. "I'm on an alliance with her team. I can't ignore the signs of an attack when I see one."
" 'this girl'? You're seriously counting that as a person, Servant?"
"Yeah, she's a person. Just like you are."
The boy glared and grit his back, displeased with Enkidu's unpretentious response.
"Fine... This is a good time for a test.", whispered the boy. In the next instant, he skillfully manipulated the high-speed energy circulating around him and started forming a whirlpool of raw magical energy with Enkidu at its center. "To test how big of a hole I can bite in the world now that I'm not with Flat."
Magical energy manipulation bypassing chants, formulas or any kind of procedure.
This image alone would be enough for the Lords of the Clock Tower or the high-ranked engineers of the Atlas Institute to figure out what the boy was.
No matter how outlandish the answer may seem to them, nothing changes the fact that he exists.
Perhaps one of the Lords, a lecturer who observed Flat's abnormalities for a a long time, already knew about the creature for years.
"You want to compete against me? Heh, that would have been so enjoyable, had we met in a different place under different circumstances..."
"..."
Enkidu silent spread their arms opens at the same time the boy activated his magecraft.
The violent whirl of magical energy around them twisted space.
But almost at the same instant, countless chains sprouted from the floor Enkidu was stepping on, drawing a spiral spinning in the opposite direction as the space distortion to fill up all the space that would have been dislocated away.
With a bursting noise, the dense magical energy in the area dispersed.
However, it was immediately absorbed into the Hole open in the boy's body. The eyeball visible from its gaps scowled at Enkidu.
Enkidu flashed a smile to that eye while they continued their previous sentence.
"Sorry, but protecting Master is my priority now."
Next, Enkidu grabbed a chain they sprouted from the ground.
The chain entangled them and permeated, as if being absorbed by their body, until it was assimilated into their clothes.
"A serious battle between us would take this whole area as collateral damage. I'd like to avoid that."
Enkidu slowly approached the boy, still with the chain in hand. With a slightly lonely smile.
"I had this ready, but it was for round 2 with Gil..."
With the elegance of a bloomed flower, Enkidu was holding their open arms above the ground.
And with powerful words, they started chanting the name their Noble Phantasm.
Now is the time to sing of the scars and splendor that marked the planet.
The boy tried to make his move before they could finish the sentences, but noticing the massive magical energy approaching from the building floors below him, he redirected all the accelerated energy toward defense.
Wisdom of the people
Age of Babylon
This was the Noble Phantasm Enkidu was regularly using without a chant.
An equivalent to Gilgamesh's Gate of Babylon. It uses chains to connect to the planet and reproduce Human Order's creations from the ground.
This Noble Phantasm can be considered Enkidu's basic weapon, the primary form of attack they're always using, but since they placed a fragment of their Saint Graph into the words they spoke to exercise it, the Noble Phantasm shows signs of its true nature for the first time.
At first, Enkidu's usual blades -swords and spears- spawned out of the rooftop floor in large amount along with the chains, charging at the boy's body in quick succession.
Faced with the tyrannical attack of a thousand blades, the boy was deep in thought.
What can his perfected form do?
Now that he's freed from Flat Escardos, his beloved shackles, he fully became what Messara Escardos wished for.
Everything past this was uncharted territory.
But he already the knowledge he needed.
Everything was recorded in the Magic Crest passed down through generations of the Escardos family, in a form only him could comprehend.
For that reason, the boy didn't feel threatened.
He could see countless blades coming in his direction.
Each of them was a reproduction of the greatest weapons in Human Order and could erase a poorly built Saint Graph with a touch.
One or two hundred of edges that sharp approached him faster than a falcon flying after its prey.
The boy calmly watched the glimmers in the flock of blades.
He accelerated his own consciousness to the limit and stagnated his subjective perspective of the world's flow, just like he did to the snipers before.
Naturally, time wasn't truly stopped, so the boy's movements were slowed down accordingly, making the air around him feel viscous like an ocean of tepid muck.
But the boy accelerated the od running through all his Magic Circuits, propelling the mana around him into sudden acceleration and putting it in circulation.
Magical energy accelerated ludicrously, as if it had an external rocket engine placed in addition to its own internal combustion engine.
And yet, the magical energy flowed with perfect artistic elegance, spreading to its surrounds in the shape of a pair of shadow wings and drawing magical formulae that couldn't be found in any paper about magecraft.
What the boy did may have looked a brand new form of magecraft created on the spot, but in reality, it wasn't.
It was an impromptu orchestra of numerous magecrafts, from basic to advanced.
This was Flat Escardos's preferred form of magecraft. A most troublesome system that could improvise ideal results but made it nigh impossible for the user to faithfully reproduce them a second time.
What the boy was doing is essentially the same.
By combining numerous magecraft systems, the boy can explosively accelerate his nerves and limbs and constantly regenerate the cells and joints destroyed by this sudden bursts of speed.
He applied layers upon layers of magecraft on his own body with no signs of burdening it, seeming as if the boy's very body was a form of magecraft.
If Flat Escardos and this boy here use the same kind of magecraft systems, what makes them different?
The answer couldn't be simpler.
Frame and engine.
The difference in their specs was simply the difference between heaven and earth.
If Flat was a minicar with the latest digital controls, the boy was a fictional mobile weapon: a never seen before drive machine with the resistance of a tank, the energy reserves of a battleship, and the propulsion of a jet.
Working backwards from this "fictional weapon" example, Flat's geniality could be described as what would happen if a computer built for the sole purpose of processing a simulated object was suddenly able to operate this object.
The world of humanity lost a man of genius insight, and the advent of a catastrophe that loss incite.
All concluded as Messara Escardos dreamed.
As Enkidu's blades approached, the boy displayed his ability.
The magical energy in high-speed circulation around the boy expanded, repelling them all.
Not literally repelling. The boy created a mana barrier that pulverized the weapons on contact, turning the products of Enkidu's power and Earth's ground to dust.
By immediately reading and hacking the magical energy in Enkidu's Noble Phantasm, he absorbed it into his circulation of energy.
Not only that, he also manipulated the magical energy in some without destroying them, sending them flying back to Enkidu's body.
But the barrage of counterattacks didn't reach Enkidu.
The rampart floating in front of Enkidu blocked all of them.
Laced with powerful magical energy, this golden wall could serve as a strong boundary.
Each brick in the three layers of the wall had the words Nabû-kudurri-uṣur engraved in cuneiform.
The wall was only about two people tall, but it could effortless defend against the magically propelled weapons.
But the otherworldly boy didn't lose his calm.
He flew higher and kneaded his energy in the form of the attack he tried to use earlier on Ayaka.
The black shadows once again spread behind the boy's back and from around them, beams of energy in high-speed rotation were shot.
There is a power limit to a raw beam shot by a human mage, but through some kind of process, the beams he shot were hundreds, thousands of times above this ceiling.
But in response, the rampart changed into a dome, protecting against attacks from above.
But this was trivial to the boy now that he finished preparing his attack.
Countless beams of light converged instantly to the space in front of the boy, forming a monster made of magical light. The monster charged at Enkidu.
Two bites was what it took to open a hole in the seemingly impregnable multilayer rampart, and after few rounds it was completely taken apart.
"...!"
But the boy flinched at the sight of what appeared behind the bricks and the cloud of dust.
Enkidu's soothing face was surrounded by objects completely misfit with their expression and what he fought with thus far.
"What...? What the hell are you...?"
Still floating in the air, the boy dropped a shocked question out loud.
Any modern mage knowing Enkidu's True Name would have reacted the same way.
The objects deployed around Enkidu were clearly associable with ancient Babylonia due to the symbols engraved on them and the mixture of clay and shining gold.
But those weapons clearly didn't exist back in the days of ancient Babylonia.
Flat Escardos was an avid fan of movies and manga. Through him, the boy gained the knowledge necessary to understand what they were. Though not to accept his conclusion.
A past memory the boy had seen through Flat's eyes flashed back.
It was a memory of Flat taking an acquaintance's Mystic Code - Trimmau, a mercury maid- without permission to watch a movie.
The boy didn't have the movie's title memorized since that wasn't an important memory for him, but it was about a giant mantis monster coming out of an iceberg, attacking an American city, and fighting against the army.
One scene in the movie.
The army started attacking the giant flying mantis from the ground. Flat was commenting the scene as they watched.
ーThis is so freaking cool! See if you can transform into it, Trimm!
ーAn application for a new shapeshift pattern requires an official name.
Flat had an "I was waiting for this moment!" reaction to the mercury maid's mechanical response.
ーDon't worry! I imagined this would happen and made sure to ask my gun nerd friend what it's called!
The boy extracted the weapon name from the file in his memory.
ーThis weapon is called a...
Remembering Flat's words, the boy let the the formal name slip out of his mouth.
"...M1... 120mm anti-aircraft gun..."
8 units.
The number probably wasn't much of a factor in this, but it's a cold, hard fact that the boy needed to recheck his vision in other accept that the image before his eyes was real.
Albeit inorganic, their form was dignified enough to resemble a guardian statue with an over 7 meters long barrel.
While they were indeed repainted in the style Enkidu's home Babylonia, what they were was plain to see.
Modern weaponry from this American land, discontinued only 5 decades ago.
Enkidu's eccentric line-up dominated the space of Crystal Hill heliport.
The beautiful rows of anti-aircraft artillery around Enkidu filled up with golden energy, in a display of color that harmonized surprisingly well with Enkidu's own.
It looked as if they were defensive weapons installed on Babylonia's walls.
Or perhaps as if even this modern weaponry was part of the planet's natural decoration.
Something as central to the current civilization as modern weaponry could be made to resemble a great beautiful tree. This powerful scene manages to resemble a painting of a historical moment, despite the inherent irony of its composition.
Wisdom of the people
Age of Babylon
.
This Noble Phantasm has the special property of constantly "updating" with Enkidu's every summon as a Heroic Spirit.
The ability to draw from the planet's memory and produce various objects.
The very act of copying human history.
Therefore, the longer time passes, the denser, higher, and deeper is the data they gain.
The Heroic Spirit Enkidu can expand the range of civilization they can replicate by connecting themself to many different eras.
Think of a hypothetical situation where someone could summon Enkidu to multiple different eras. If Enkidu was summoned to the ancient Babylonia from their lifetime, they would be limited to reproducing only the weapons they came to know in life or other weapons men had already created in that era in that land.
Conversely, were they summoned to a future beyond the Holy Grail War in Snowfield, they would be summoning numerous that can only be considered impossible fantasies nowadays.
Although that's not necessarily a good thing.
Much like the greatest modern firearm can't compare to the radiance of a Holy Sword, in a battle of Noble Phantasm newer doesn't necessarily mean stronger.
It is known in the world of magecraft that the closer something is to the Age of Gods, the more pronouncedly arcane it is. And even on more realistic terms, it's inadvisable to face a 16th-century grapeshot cannon with a 21st-century pistol.
However, this Noble Phantasm belongs to Enkidu, whose very foundation is already arcane.
Every individual bullet in a Gatling gun would be boosted with magical energy to destroy enemy Saint Graphs. The latest model of fighter jet would be empowered enough to compete in a flying race against a mid-level dragon.
Gilgamesh collected the peaks of human potential in his Gate of Babylon. One of the articles stored there is Vimana. Replicating that would, needless to say, require being summoned either in a far distant future, the era when humanity reaches its peak, or in the opposite extreme, the era when humanity was ruled by the star-crossing gods. And replicating key elements such as the bodies of these alien gods or the planet's Holy Sword would require using parts of world itself or treasures of equal value from Gilgamesh's treasury as ingredients.
Nevertheless, there's a reason why this Noble Phantasm is comparable to Gate of Babylon: the number of weapons Enkidu shapes from dirt is the number created by Human Order after parting ways with the gods. That means they use the land as a means for mass production.
Enkidu managed to create numerous weapons considered state-of-the-art half a century ago, just one step below the current standard of weaponry.
One of those is this giant anti-aircraft gun and its every shot is boosted by Enkidu's magical energy.
And now is the moment the weapons started their operation.
Enkidu mercilessly unloaded the anti-aircraft artillery on the boy watching them from above.
With loud explosions, the arcane gunpowder made of earth rhythmically detonated inside the cannons.
"...!"
The boy judged it would be easy to dodge cannonballs that flew in a straight line after looking at their trajectory, but this naive thought didn't survive being put to the test.
Even after being fired, the shells are still Enkidu's arcana.
They may not be able to make full turns, but they still could take tricky trajectories that defied the laws of physics. The boy immediately determined this was the case and chose not to dodge but to completely neutralize the projectiles with his defenses.
He accelerated his mind once again until his vision was in slow motion and search for a gap he could attack from.
However, in this slowed-down scene, the cannons' firing speed hadn't decreased as much as the speed of everything around it. It was out of pace. Mismatched.
He knew from Flat's knowledge that one anti-aircraft gun can normally fire 12 shots per minute, but those were getting gradually faster than that.
"They're... accelerating?"
The 8 anti-aircraft guns had reached the pace of 1 shot per second.
The advantage provided by the boy's thought acceleration was being mitigated by the unfair power of a Servant's Noble Phantasm.
Below the boy, there was a curtain of cannonballs capable of exterminating the average phantasmal beast in one hit.
But the protective wall created by the peacock wing-like shadow symbol behind his back was equally on the level the laws of the world would deem unfair. Enkidu's arcane ammunition shattered against it.
"I see... I didn't think a temporary being would be able to sink its roots that deep into the planet.", dispassionately whispered the boy. "Great learning experience. Show me more."
He quietly took control of his breathing and coldly kneaded his magical energy while defending with precision.
He fully grasped the rhythm of the barrage and switched to an offensive spell that would pass through the gaps in the firing pattern. That instant, the moment the blast's flame dissipated, Enkidu appeared by surprise directly under him.
They had merged with a bundle of countless chains sprouting from the floor and fired themself as a high-density magical energy shell.
"I saw that move coming.", the boy declared dispassionate as ever. He unleashed his magical energy as a counter to Enkidu's main body.
High-density magical energy adjusted for the sole purpose of destruction.
If Enkidu dodged it, the tallest building in Snowfield would have been reduced to bricks in an instant.
The boy, fully aware of that, shot without hesitation. He had zero reasons to care about the concealment of magecraft. Enkidu also temporarily dropped their principle of arcane concealment.
Not that Enkidu's Master, a silver wolf, ever put any thought into the arcane concealment in the first place.
Countless chains rose from the ground below, enveloping the whole building.
It didn't stay that way for more than a few seconds, so a civilian watching from a distance could assume they saw Crystal Hill testing a special light setup for some event. And every mage watching the situation would make a face begging for mercy.
That is because they would know they're dealing with a Heroic Spirit, someone who requires a fair deal of power to stop.
After reaching the rooftop, the swarm of chains kept stretching higher to the skies, becoming a gigantic heavenward tree.
"Haha..."
Verifying that the attack he fired was absorbed into the great tree of light, and its energy used to stretch the chains even further, the boy sneered.
"I wish Flat could see this. He would have loved this over-the-topness."
Enkidu approached from below for a chop, which he blocked with a pitch-black blade extending out of the Hole in his chest and countered with several blades that pierced the divine doll's abdomen.
Even then, the Heroic Spirit maintained their pressure, pushing the boy's body further up and above.
Crystal Hill and Snowfield City were disappearing further and further into the distant background below.
Somewhere along the way, the boy and Enkidu noticed their energy scraped on a blimp under concealment magecraft, partially destroying it.
But neither of them had the time to care.
The great tree of chains involving the building had already disappeared and its energy was all poured into Enkidu's body.
Enkidu morphed their arms and part of the clothes into bird wings and kept rising higher with bursts of magical energy from their feathers.
This is not how real birds fly. Enkidu did this to incessantly attack amidst their powerful flight, perhaps imitating the flying phantasmal beasts of their time.
To counter that, the boy spread his own "wings" further and gathered the vestiges of mana in the skies above the planet.
The boy caught a random glimpse of a giant something swimming in the sky but was too busy to identify what it was.
Enkidu, pushing his body further up, opened their mouth.
"I knew you were a threat to my Master."
Their words expressed concern but still had a soothing tone to them.
As proof, Enkidu's next words were spoken with a tranquil smile.
"But I'm glad you were born. If no one else will celebrate your birth, I will."
"...? Oh... Thanks..."
The boy thanked before thinking, flustered by the unexpected words.
His words and expression showed confusion, but he never left his battle stance.
The same goes for Enkidu. With their body overflowing with magical energy, they took a look at the land expanding below them and spoke with heartfelt relief.
"It's proof that our planet still hasn't given up hope."
After trading remarkably powerful blows, the two opened up the distance between each other as they kept flying higher.
"Pretty late to this question, but what should I call you?"
Their surroundings suddenly grew dark and the stars above them more prominent.
Both the boy and Enkidu knew that the sun wasn't setting ahead of time.
Until this moment, the boy's eyes were filled with suspicion, but now they had a hint of the curious tone of Flat Escardos's eyes.
"Thia. Thia Escardos. My friend named me that. I won't go by any other name."
And so, the boy who used to be Flat Escardos a few moments prior spoke his name.
In this place dozens of kilometers above the ground, this altitude past the stratosphere but still not yet in the mesosphere, the boy spoke his name.
The air was 10 times thinner than it was on the surface.
Regardless, the two of them remained as capable of holding a conversation as ever, either because they loaded magical energy into their voices or because their hearing is abnormal. Enkidu heard his name clearly.
But their conflict didn't end there.
The lack of oxygen and the cosmic radiation didn't matter to the Heroic Spirit and the otherworldly boy.
The surveillance satellite registered their extended battle as gorgeous aurora lights... but since the data satellite observed only Snowfield for management purposes in Faldeus's organization, the footage never went public.
Though perhaps it would be safe to let it go public.
Any non-mage would dismiss it as a sensationalist video heavily edited to provide a made-up justification for what happened later.
Even the mages unaware of the Holy Grail War would come to the same conclusion.
Light.
Pure, overwhelming light contrasted with hollow shadows extended around Thia.
Another light shared the space of the stars and another shadow shared the space of the dark sky.
If Enkidu was the embodiment of nature, the boy had now become the embodiment of light and shadow.
With the spell that put the high-density magical energy in circulation, he twisted space, bending the light of the sun to form a new magic circle with it.
Meanwhile, the completely light-absorbing shadows produced a different spell, forming a multi-layered magic circle around the boy.
Enkidu was surprised at the image of the boy's Magic Crest seemingly starting to corrode the world itself.
"Are you trying to connect yourself to the world...? You really can see everything, huh..."
"..."
With this silent confirmation, the boy launched himself up with a sudden burst of speed. He placed himself precisely above Enkidu as he activate his new magecraft.
"...
Modding
Cheat on
."
His short words contained faint hints of grief and homesickness.
These words seemingly in tribute to Flat Escardos caused the boy to temporarily rewrite the laws of the world around him.
Unlike a Reality Marble, this was an attempt to permanently overwrite the real world. The rules of the world around him grew unstable.
With that momentum, he permeated himself into the world using magically compressed words that could be interpreted as either a chant, a confession, or a manifesto.
I am without the protection of Human Order.
Earth!
I support the current prime species' right to hate, pity, forgive, scream, and pray to its Counter Force
People!
In this crevice, I shall ingest all good and all evil to demonstrate who I am.
Sing! Dance!
My eyes sing praise to all human creation and for that very reason I take the challenge to overcome the human intellect.
Eternal doom comes.
Through this destruction, I'll be celebrating the prosperity of human intellect until the time the planet withers completely.
Do your best to survive!
These final words triggered an explosive expansion of the space distortion, taking Thia even higher as his magical energy spread to cover the area above the entire United States.
And the distortion started producing its own gravity, gathering together the objects above the planet's skies.
"Those things are human creations, huh.", Enkidu whispered.
The remains gathering around Thia are called space debris.
Dangerous fragments of dreams, sweat poured from steps in humanity's walk toward the sea of stars, floating in the skies at ferocious speeds.
By the year of Snowfield's Holy Grail War, the amount of space debris in the sky is estimated to be over 2000 tons.
From discarded satellites to detached spaceship implements to iron microfragments scrapped off with the attrition between two objects. Pieces of many different metals are drawn into the swirl, gathering and compressing around Thia.
The vortex also drew minuscule meteors and the microparticles left behind by comet trails. Those all combined into numerous tiny planets rotating around Thia.
Spheres of varying sizes orbited Thia like he was the sun in the Solar System.
He covered them in dense mana to make them as energetically large as they could be. Their rotation accelerated as abruptly as their magical energy circulation.
"...!"
Predicting what would happen next, Enkidu explosively unleashed the magical energy they brought with them from Earth's surface and prepared to intercept the attack.
The next instant... In an attempt to activate his magecraft before Enkidu had the time to deploy their Noble Phantasm, Thia yelled powerful words.
"
Hollowed Hearsay/Oblivion turns to festivity
A Clockwork Abbadon
!"
Numerous "moons" with masses ranging from 500 kilos to dozens of tons rained on Enkidu and Earth much beyond the speed of sound.
Due to a spell to ignore air resistance, the projectiles he continuously fired with the high speed of a railgun shot would never burn or slow down. It was clear that if they reached the surface, they would cause major harm to the land and all the life on it.
At that moment, the energy levels in Enkidu's body skyrocketed. Thia couldn't tell where all this power was coming from but all of the Heroic Spirit's parameters got a temporary boost.
"
People, let us bind the gods
Enuma Elish
!"
Enkidu unleashed their Noble Phantasm without a moment's delay.
The power to turn their Saint Graph into one all-piercing lynchpin weapon by borrowing power from the planet and Human Order.
Enkidu charged with the golden chains deploying around them, forming a spiral in attempt to crush all the numerous approaching malignant stars.
They collided.
And then there was a flood of light.
An enormous flower of magical energy bloomed in the upper limits of the stratosphere, with each of its petals holding the shattered asteroids.
The impact's rebound reached the Kármán line, which represents the border between the planet and the universe, where it became a pseudo-aurora gaudily decorating the space above Snowfield.
Thia's greater magecraft was possibly perceived as a threat to the planet or Human Order.
Through the power of the Counter Force poured into their Noble Phantasm, Enkidu managed to block the massive attack on Snowfield.
Which doesn't mean they perfectly neutralized the whole attack, however.
Its shockwaves were tremendous.
Quite a few star pieces slipped through the magical petals and landed on Earth, although scattering during their fall.
The smallest fragment slipped east, in Washington D.C's direction, falling where the Anacostia River meets the Potomac River.
The impact of the fragment falling in the center of a 1 km wide river instantly sent its water flying and was felt in the White House as an earthquake accompanied by heavy rain.
Another fragment pierced the ground of Yellowstone National Park, almost giving some geologists a heart attack by temporarily exciting the dormant magma.
Another fragment flew far west, crossing the Pacific Ocean and falling on Japanese maritime territory.
The fragment's uncontrollable magical energy generated heat, instantly evaporating a large volume of water on the oceanic surface.
The kilometers-tall splash and evaporation pillar was witnessed from the nearby coast and ships, generating online speculation about an underwater volcanic eruption, a long-ranged missile landing, or an alien invasion.
Another fragment fell on Russian land, raising an alert for an attack from another nation, which left the whole world in a tense state.
But it was the second large fragment that caused the biggest worldwide impact.
The fragment flew north preserving all of its tremendous magical energy, making the impact of its fall to physically obliterate its surroundings.
It didn't cause visible geographical changes, but its mental shock on humanity was large.
As the observation satellites suddenly showed that
12% of the Arctic ice caps vanished from one footage clip to the next.
Had this happened to Antarctica's ice, it would have had a tangible effect on Earth's oceanic levels.
Eventually, it was discovered that the fallen fragments were pieces of space debris, artificial satellite parts, leading to rumors that a space station fell off or that something caused all satellites around Earth to drop, but that was only many hours after the fact.
From a mage's point of view, the most significant fragment was the largest one.
It was less of a fragment and more of an asteroid still in its original form.
Thia used all other asteroids as decoys as he sent this one in a different trajectory with concealment magecraft hiding it from sight and magical energy detection. It was set to fall on Snowfield.
Did he do it for the sole purpose of eliminating the girl Ayaka Sajou?
Or maybe he was planning to take down Enkidu indirectly, by destroying either their Master or the land the Holy Grail was rooted on?
The answer was yes for both, but while they were correct answers, they weren't THE correct answer.
(Don't try to fool yourself. I hate the Holy Grail War. I hate this ritual and the guys who killed Flat for it. Humans... Human cities... Honestly, I quite liked London... But I don't care about this city. ... Flat, there's one thing I never told you about. The reason why you summoned that serial killer. That Heroic Spirit... couldn't possibly be brought out by a toy knife. It was because of me. Because I have the potential to be a serial killer for humanity... and I'm not anyone yet.)
This inner monologue was just a fraction of a second in the real flow of time, done amidst the fluid movement of dropping this asteroid on Earth.
But it didn't escape Enkidu's Presence Detection.
The tactic of perfectly concealing its magical energy backfired. In this space Thia and Enkidu made so turbulent with magical energy, one neutral spot becomes too conspicuous to go unnoticed.
Enkidu stretched their chains in an attempt to apprehend the egg-like asteroid of magical energy but Thia followed up his magecraft to prevent that.
This resulted in the magical asteroid flying toward Earth almost intact, although Enkidu managed to shift its trajectory.
Instead of Snowfield, it went to the largest city on the West Coast, Los Angeles.
Goodbye, City of the Angels.
Goodbye, Long Beach.
Goodbye, Griffith Observatory.
Goodbye, Hollywood.
Once he finished calculating the mark of the magecraft he fired, Thia noticed Hollywood was there and felt sad about it, remembering it was a place Flat wanted to go to, while simultaneously canceling the sadness with resignation, as he didn't care because there was no Flat in him anymore.
Direct contact with the malignant star's destruction and atomic decay spells would return the city named after the angels to light.
The magical energy contained in it could erase all life within a few kilometers' radius. And the decay that comes after the destruction would cause a chain of cataclysms by stimulating the land, the dragonveins, and the underground magma.
Not even Thia himself was able to stop this. This impact would define the future direction of humanity, on a physical level far beyond the arcane concealment.
Keyword: would.
Thia line of sight took him to a dense swirling cumulonimbus.
Supposedly a western hurricane that passed Los Angeles on its way to Nevada.
The giant cumulonimbus might seem like just a grotesque mass of giant clouds taking up space on Earth's troposphere but Thia always felt an unpleasant presence inside its dense clouds.
It felt like all the magical energy of the land and air around the cumulonimbus was trapped inside the cloud.
Some major unknown threat was inside it but he knew he was in no condition to do anything about it.
That's why he didn't give it any attention until now.
His magecraft would activate on impact, regardless of what was inside the cloud.
The boy wondered if the malignant star would get to ravage America's west metropolis.
But then something abnormal happened.
"..."
Thia was taken aback by what he saw.
Part of this over 500-kilometers-diameter swirling cumulonimbus wriggled like an animal raising its head, and from it, a pair of tornados grew pointing up.
The tornado system operated with a clear disregard for the laws of physics. It extended its whirls with beautiful symmetry, looking almost like the horns of a giant beast.
No.
Thia was sure.
They weren't "almost like horns".
Those were the real horns of a real colossus.
His magical energy sight could precisely confirm its arcanely concealed figure.
The pair of whirlwinds covered a deep yet lustrous blue.
The sea and the sky combined into a solid mass of azure made from pure lapis-lazuli in seemingly larger amounts than all minerals on Earth combined.
Adorned gold bones could be seen between the rifts of the giant typhoon cloud.
Each bone in the golden and blue beast was the size of a large city. It roamed the world with violent winds as its flesh.
(Its magical energy levels spiked...? I didn't see it draining the energy from the planet. Is that creature from... somewhere else...?)
Thia's mind was full of questions, but the biggest one was why it moved.
He immediately learned the answer.
The malignant star of atrocity and destruction zooming across the troposphere was going to hit one of its peninsula-sized azure horns.
The horn wriggled.
More precisely, the vast magical energy covered in divine aura gushing out from deep inside the horn did.
Unlike Thia's magical space distortions, the horned colossus used its divine aura to crush and swallow space, breaking the concepts of range and direction.
With its energy vector distorted, the malignant star began falling long before it hit Los Angeles, plunging in a straight line towards the colossal cumulonimbus face.
An egg of ruin and destruction, charged with enough power to cause a widespread earthquake when it hit the ground.
Is it more powerful than the hurricane then?
Obviously, comparing different forms of calamities is comparing apples and oranges, and cataclysmic earthquakes are inherently more damaging to the world than giant tornados, but looking only at their energy numbers, the bulky hurricane had the power of a hundred magnitude 9 earthquakes.
What would happen if all this energy walked like a beast?
The answer is what he sees.
A large hurricane made of dense cumulonimbus.
It was the textbook image of a typhoon, a beautiful rift separating the clouds from the sky. Almost a perfect circle when seen from above.
Nonetheless, for someone capable of seeing the dense magical energy it contained, it was a typhoon-sized colossus slowly walking in his direction.
Its bellows are gales.
Its veins are torrents.
Its huffs are lightning.
The dense cumulonimbus is its very meat while also the armor guarding the whole divine beast.
Not a zoomorphized cyclone. The opposite of that, in fact.
This appearance is the direct result of attempting to make a beast of the gods descend to the world without changing its shape. Thia knew exactly what the monster truly was.
The beast with the golden skeleton visible inside the cumulonimbus slowly raised its head.
No, it only seemed slow to Thia and Enkidu because of the distance between them. Considering its massiveness, the speed its chin opened and closed should have been amazing.
The malignant star slipped straight into the colossus' mouth, which closed soon after.
It would have immediately formed a dust cloud of destruction had it reached the ground.
But it never happened.
He waited for it, but it showed no signs of happening.
Gold and azure light shone in the hurricane's interior, explosively increasing its energy level without changing its size.
The 50m/s winds became 80 m/s, momentarily approaching the historical wind speed world record of 100 m/s.
The colossus could easily break the record if it dedicated all of its power to raise the wind speeds.
Was it just coincidence or did the divine beast has a reason not to do so? Maybe someone ordered him not to do it.
But these questions were trivial to Thia and Enkidu.
They were sure of it.
That this colossal cumulonimbus beast with a length in the triple digits of kilometers was looking at them.
And that this colossus hosting enormous calamity mocked them.
The boy reacted with a curious smile... while Enkidu lost his smile and gazed at the divine beast with a sad expression.
X X
West Snowfield, forest region
The duo flying high above had no idea that someone on Snowfield was observing the colossus' behavior.
The observer was Filia... Ishtar. Feeling what happened to the divine beast that is her property, she sighed.
"Oh, my boy never learns, does he?"
She wasn't bothered by the sudden power increase nor worried about the land's destruction.
She merely shrugged at her divine beast's appetite.
"Don't go complaining to me if the trash you ate gives you a stomachache."
