An endless sea of flowers stretched in all directions. White lilies and purple irises alternated in uniform bands as far as my awareness reached. Rising between those fields were mountains of blue ore, stretching skyward in patches, crystallised mana stored in solid form.
The horizon was a stark white line where sky and earth met, its colour bleeding into a gentle blue from where it rose upward. Pale spheres of condensed mana hung overhead like stars dotting a canvas.
I swept my gaze across the landscape while Illyasviel lay motionless on a bed of flowers nearby. Between sweeps, my attention flickered to the bracelet on my wrist, which had suddenly gone limp.
Before I could focus on that, silver threads crept out from between those flowers, more luminescent and complex than Irisviel's.
They gathered in a single place, writhing and coalescing together, then rose upward into the vague silhouette of a woman. Seconds passed as that shape solidified into Justeaze, her hands folded near her navel, eyes closed.
"You are here," she commented, her shoulders remaining perfectly still, face shifting toward Illyasviel on the ground. "... And you brought the Lesser Grail."
"I did." Tilting my body, I brought my focus on Illyasviel ahead of me.
Justeaze turned and came to stand shoulder to shoulder with me, her eyes still fixed on the smaller Einzbern. "What would you have me do? Take her, souls and all, and open the way now?"
"Not quite. Take those heroic souls, leave hers. I've already prepared a vessel for her." I paused, considering my next words. "I want you to move her soul into it."
While speaking, the magic circles on my glove rotated in sequence, and a new homunculus body materialised beside Illyasviel's. It was a perfect, one-to-one copy of hers with the same height and frame, except the original had golden veins running beneath her skin, while this new vessel bore none.
Justeaze finally opened her eyes, her attention locking onto that new body created by the combined efforts of Medea and Irisviel, with further optimisations to its schematics made by me.
"You created this?" She cocked her head, two of her fingers twitching unprompted for a fraction. "... This is very close to my own framework. In some places, even better than mine."
Her chin dipped, her gaze landing on the bracelet on my wrist. "I see... so you had that to guide you."
At those words, Irisviel trembled, her threads clenching tighter around my skin.
"Can you do it?" I asked despite knowing her answer, slipping my hands into my pockets.
"Using the Third Magic will deplete enormous amounts of stored mana. Is that your desire?" Justeaze asked, extending her arm toward Illyasviel.
I remained silent for a moment before replying. "Do it."
"... Very well."
Her fingers spread apart as an entire field of flowers behind us unravelled into silver threads. They sailed through the air, one end connecting to Illyasviel's sternum and boring into her body, while the other ends detached from earth and slid over to that new vessel, sinking into its chest.
Walking forward, Justeaze came to a stop between those two bodies, her palm closing around the cluster of threads binding them together.
A pulse spread outward from her, and all the flowers as far as my vision reached bent backward in a wave, earth quaking with tremors that escalated with each breath.
Cracks surfaced across those blue mountains, and gaseous mana sprayed out from inside, diffusing into air and turning it dense and heavy with the metaphysical weight of years of accumulated energy.
That haze kept climbing, thickening by the second, until it pressed against the white spheres hanging above. One by one, those spheres swelled past the shape that held them, outlines straining thin as that rising gas fed into them from below.
I snapped my head up as the stars began to blink, and something seeped down from them. A single drop struck the back of my coat first. Then a dozen. Hundreds.
A rain of whitish-blue fell from the sky.
One drop touched my cheek and dissolved into my skin, and I felt my pseudo-magic circuits awaken on their own, frantically trying to convert the ambient rain of mana into usable energy.
Around us, the endless sea of flora began to shift. Every flower twisted and unfurled, its petals expanding into wide, upward-facing funnels to catch the descending rain.
From the base of each bloom, wire-like filaments spilled across soil, revealing a vast, intricate magic circle carved into earth.
All of those strands converged on Justeaze, vanishing seamlessly beneath her dress. And as rain pooled within those funnels, an electric blue luminescence surged through those wires, racing along the ground to pour endlessly into her feet.
That blue current climbed through her in silence, from her feet to frame, tracing the circuits beneath her skin until it reached her hands. Then it bled into the silver threads she held, colour creeping along their length in a slow crawl.
A minute passed before it reached the ends buried in Illyasviel's sternum. The moment it touched her, her heart skipped a beat. A pulse beat outward from her through silver wires beneath, then another, each turning sharper than the last.
Her chest wrenched upward, spine straining, and her body convulsed in ragged, uneven heaves that synced with the flickering current.
One second. Two. Three.
Then her breathing stopped entirely.
Her chest fell, pulses cut, threads going still.
Silence swallowed everything save for the rain still drumming against funnels around us.
Seconds turned into minutes.
Then that new vessel's chest wrenched upward with a jerk, her spine arching off the ground. A choking cough tore from her throat.
I stepped closer and crouched down to put a finger on Illyasviel's forehead, cataloguing her heartbeat, body temperature and other biometrics, checking for any irregularities from the earlier process.
Justeaze had turned toward the original, and those flowers beneath it split apart into strands that coiled around from every direction, tightening until that body was swallowed entirely beneath a writhing mass of silver.
Golden flares erupted from inside that mass, detonating outward in waves of pressure that flattened the funnels and their stalks in a wide radius. More threads lunged over in response, folding over it in layers until a cocoon formed.
The mana signatures of those bursts were unmistakable. The Servants I had fought in the war.
Their souls.
I watched as they struggled against Justeaze's bindings. One nearly tore halfway through the cocoon, golden light spilling from a gash before threads flooded over to seal it shut. The next came weaker. Then weaker still.
It took considerable time for their final struggle to fade and die.
After that, one by one, her threads peeled away, pulling apart like petals opening in reverse, and drifted upward as fine silver particles. What remained there was empty ground scattered with fading motes of light, dissolving into air before they reached the sky.
Justeaze shifted toward me, her expression unchanged. "Do you want me to open a path to another world now?"
I stood from my crouch, coming face to face with her.
"No."
She tilted her head at that.
"I've changed my mind about the wish." I glanced down at the bracelet on my wrist, then back up at her.
"I want..."
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[15 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Author's Thoughts]
Guess what he wishes for? Let's see where it goes from here. Illyasviel's thing is done now. All we need is to wrap up those outside, send her over where she can live her life, and then we're off.
And our boy has really grown up, now even wanting other things. Good. Good.
Anyway... Have a fabulous day, everyone!