Chaldea was in mourning—no, if anything, the atmosphere was even heavier than that.
“It’s my fault... It’s my fault... It’s my fault...”
For ten days after Albus was sent into the Singularity, Olga Marie had not slept once. She just stared at the monitors.
“Senpai... I’ve told you this several times, but you can’t go there...”
“...If it’s impossible, then I’ll go alone...”
“Senpai!!”
Ritsuka was trying to go back and save Albus, even if she had to do it alone.
What had happened to them? To explain that, we have to go back to the time when Ritsuka returned... yes, one week earlier.
“Fujimaru Ritsuka!”
“Mash Kyrielight!!”
““We’re back!!””
But the one who came out to greet them was only Romani.
“W-welcome back...”
“Doctor, where is he?”
Even during the Singularity investigation, Ritsuka had asked about Albus’s whereabouts, but Olga Marie had said she would explain after the operation was over, saying it might interfere.
“Th-”
“...What happened, Doctor?”
Romani dragging things out like that was never a good sign.
“Albus crash-landed alone in a different Singularity from yours...”
“Can we go there right now, Mash?”
“Yes!”
“W-wait!! Even if you want to go, you can’t!!”
According to Romani, opening a Singularity and entering it already consumed a huge amount of resources.
With two opened at once, they had exceeded the original limit by more than double, and now they were in a state where they couldn’t open another one even if they wanted to...
“Fortunately, he’s currently joined up with two Servants and is defeating the enemy...”
But that hopeful situation ended almost immediately.
“This is bad!!”
The emergency report that came rushing in from the control room made everyone present tense up.
““““”
“N-no...”
At Olga Marie’s scream, what Ritsuka and Mash saw was the miserable sight of Albus’s Servant, who had fought beside them, being brutally killed.
Right now, the control room could barely transmit the image, and there was no sound at all.
Albus and the mysterious woman exchanged a few words, and then she dragged him away.
“Wh-what are you...”
Where they arrived, a massive dragon was bound in place, and the woman took something like a huge tube from it...
Then she drove it straight into Albus’s stomach.
There was no sound, but he coughed up blood and thrashed in agony.
But the woman didn’t stop. She kept driving smaller tubes into various parts of his body.
Thud!
“No...”
“Albus...”
“Damn it...”
Ritsuka, Mash, and Romani all tried to voice how horrifying the situation was, but the one whose heart was being torn apart the most was...
“...It’s my fault... What kind of Lord is this... I can’t do anything...”
Olga Marie slumped to the floor and completely lost it.
On the screen, they kept showing Albus screaming and struggling like a madman, and the woman continuing to drive in the tubes anyway.
““““”
On the day of the final battle, Typhon’s charging was finally complete.
“But what are Poseidon and Zeus even doing this whole time?”
“For beings like us, time works differently to begin with. A week probably feels like two or three hours at most.”
“So today we finally get out of here...”
“...Yeah. It was a short time, but I enjoyed it.”
And so we left the underworld and found Poseidon and Zeus.
“So that oppressive feeling I sensed back then was Zeus...”
If a Heroic Spirit in a human body was already that overwhelming, then just how terrifying was the true body...?
“Stay sharp. I’m going in all at once.”
Even without Ephemeros saying it, I was already as tense as I could possibly be.
Then Zeus, who had been glaring at us, opened his mouth.
“Fruit of the formless void. Do you even know what kind of bastard the one you’ve brought here is?”
“I know he’s someone who’ll help us kill you guys.”
“Foolish... Not even Sephar... No, it’s not just that. That thing will become a monster greater than Velber.”
“I don’t know if you’ve been reduced to a divine spirit and gone senile, but I have no intention of listening to you!!!”
“Even if this temporary body is torn apart, I’ll have to kill that thing with my own hands...”
And so the clash began.
Zeus unleashed countless bolts of lightning, while Poseidon supported him with storms and driving rain.
“Watch out!! Typhon can’t use its main cannon right now!! It’s a body slam!!”
No matter how much mana had been charged, Typhon was Typhon. At best, it could be charged enough to move.
With its defensive functions unusable right now, Typhon was paper-thin. So attacks like that flying in...
“Shit!! Just kill me already!!!”
I absorbed every last one of them with the lightning rod.
“Nice!!!”
Ephemeros said that and grabbed Poseidon and Zeus, one in each hand.
“Die!!!!”
Then, with a force like crushing tomatoes, she squeezed and shattered them.
“Gah!!”
I had only been eating the pills Typhon made for a week, but I ended up vomiting blood again and spat those out too.
“Ha... ha... It’s over...”
Just as she said, the Holy Grail appeared and the Singularity began to collapse.
“H-hey!!”
“Thanks, Ephemeros. This was all because of you.”
I offered my thanks first, out of courtesy.
“I-I just used you!! We might meet again as enemies next time, so be prepared!!!”
“Yeah... Thanks.”
She wasn’t honest about it, but like Olga Marie, she was strangely easy to talk to, and the exchange had been oddly pleasant.
Still, next time, I swore I would never do that tube thing again, even if it killed me...
There was a limit to how much pain a person could take.
“Hmph!”
Ephemeros didn’t say anything else, but the corners of her mouth had loosened in obvious satisfaction.
“Before you go... want to try flying once?”
“I have a fear of heights, and I get motion sickness really badly.”
“...I’ll let you ride inside me and do it.”
Her face was red for some reason, but in any case, after about thirty minutes of flying, we safely returned to the Singularity.
“I’m back, damn it...”
“This time I’m not backing down. No, I can’t back down. I’m going to curse them right to their faces...”
We met up with Olga Marie, Ritsuka, Mash, and Romani after they had come down from the control room, and...
“So... you’re alive, right?”
Every one of them looked like an overworked office worker hospitalized after a nursing practicum.
““““”
After a week of torture-like mana extraction, Albus had been dragged away.
And the woman who took him used him like a lightning rod in the battle between Poseidon and Zeus.
His body was torn apart countless times by lightning and storms, and blood poured from the holes all over him.
“Just how much...”
Even Mash, who had endured countless experiments and could normally bear most pain, found it horrifying to even imagine taking that kind of attack over and over.
“Ugh!!”
Ritsuka even looked like she might vomit at the cruel sight.
“...Please... don’t do this...”
Even with the title of Director, Olga Marie couldn’t bring herself to face that scene with her own eyes, nor could she face the employee she had driven to that state through her own incompetence.
And once the Singularity was resolved, he returned.
“Let’s go...”
Ritsuka said it flatly, as if nothing more than that was needed, but to Olga Marie it sounded like a death sentence.
And the moment she met his face, she realized he could no longer even properly feel how much pain he was in...
“...”
It felt impossible to even breathe.
He had done nothing wrong, and yet she was so conscious of herself that she couldn’t bring herself to open her mouth.
“Um... Doctor?”
She spoke to Romani, the only one who still looked relatively normal.
“I’ve heard the rough details, and I already explained that it was all a misunderstanding, so why is everyone acting like this...”
I could no longer meet Romani’s eyes. His gaze was too frightening.
“Albus, you were an ordinary person.”
“...Right?”
“How could an ordinary person go through something like that and still be fine?”
“Uh...?”
He was right. If your body had been pierced in multiple places, torn apart dozens of times, burned, and had mana ripped out of you while you were still alive...
There was no way you could talk calmly with the one who had done it to you, or keep walking around as if nothing had happened, without any aftereffects.
“Could it be that this power...”
“This is only my guess, but...”
Cold sweat poured down me, and a bad feeling rose in my chest.
“That power seems to manipulate your thoughts, deleting anything that would be disadvantageous to survival and making you think only in ways that favor survival as much as possible. Or perhaps, if not survival, then the restoration of human order...”
It stripped away trauma, hostility toward the one who attacked or hurt me, everything, until only survival remained as the purpose...
“That’s not a person anymore...”
Even while remaining human, my thoughts were being manipulated and I was losing the freedom to think. The power that kept me alive was destroying me.
To live this far...
My thoughts shut down. My whole body kept rejecting the idea, insisting that this was as far as it could go.
“Hah... unbelievable...”
I do want to live. But did it have to come to this? Did I really have to go this far just to survive one year?
“Doctor... where did I go wrong?”
“...Probably the moment you came here...”
“Hah...”
Come to think of it, it was strange. The fact that I had heard I only had one year left, yet didn’t give up and instead chose to fight—that was a decision I never should have been able to make in the first place.
No, more importantly, was the power inhabiting this body even aimed at survival?
Was it trying to use my body like a puppet until human order was restored no matter what?
What was certain was that my life had already been pushed onto a road I could never turn back from...
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