Fate/Strange Fake Volume 7
TIP
The following is translated by Comun on BL.](https://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/378-Fate-strange-fake-%28Free-Range-Spoilers%29?p=3222241&viewfull=1#post3222241)
(image)
(image)
(image)
Intro: -----
A lodge in the American mountains.
A luxury lodge deep into the natural boundaries of a mountain.
At its center, there was a conference room where a group of people distinctively not in tune with the vast greens outside gathered.
Men and women in high-brand suits or military uniforms decorated with medals one wouldn't find in normal society. Silhouettes together in a poorly lit room.
One man's presence and treatment clearly informed he was the highest-ranking general. He was indeed a man who didn't show his face in normal ceremonies and announcements.
Even so, people understood who he was at first glance.
Half of the people there, be it the ones wearing modern suits or the ones wearing military uniforms, had a mage's mindset.
Considering this place wasn't the Clock Tower, logically some members there weren't mages or spellcasters. Some didn't even have Magic Circuits in the first place.
Everyone in the meeting had a tense expression until a report finally put the color of relief in the participants' eyes.
"I see. The Clock Tower really has gone soft."
"Yes. Lord Trambelio's spokesman said he will handle the current incident as a formal negotiation, in a way no one owes anyone, be it materially or as a debt of honor."
"Oh, that's great to hear. Our greatest advantage is being a country with minimal mage interference, but on the flip side, that also means no Lord will trust us. Naturally, we wouldn't trust any of them either."
Numerous others voiced their agreement.
"Not that there is any form of true trust among mages."
"Even more so when they disregard us as mere spellcasters."
After that quite self-derisive comment, the main general raised a comment.
"But the Clock Tower signaled they'll turn a blind eye to this incident. All Clock Tower men already in the city agreed it's a fair compromise."
"Are you sure it's a good idea? The mysterious disease Faldeus report about is clearly some kind of malediction, but under the current circumstances, no curse can leave the city, right?"
"Anyone who can't escape the curses is considered unnecessary to the world of magecraft, I assume. Or perhaps the Clock Tower wants the mages in the city to be erased."
"A conflict between factions, you say? So the stalemate between the Clock Tower's three factions continues, huh..."
"And I hope it stays that way. Large-scale strife there would be a great opportunity for us to make a move, but the continued stalemate is still a better alternative to anything that unified the Clock Tower's policies."
His choice of words showed how wary and afraid they were of the Clock Tower. They needed to lurk and wait for their moment to strike.
"What did you tell the President?", the tall woman commanding the business suit half of the participants asked the military man.
"I reported nothing. I intend to relay everything ex post facto."
The business suit woman snorted at the general's response.
"Are you insane? What explanation will you give him?"
"Just tell the president that we had with emergency switches in case the ritual's magical energy goes out of control... We'll need a different cover story for the media and the other nations, but for the time being, everyone is believing the articles about the shockwaves of two clashing asteroids."
The military man glanced at his subordinate.
The subordinate nodded and put numerous TV programs on the conference room monitor. The news coverage in the most high-rating channels in multiple countries.
"One country is airing cartoons!"
"That's Japan."
"Well, it figures, considering how minimal the direct damage was there."
"The damage on our side wasn't just Washington. Russia was also hit, so any misunderstanding could lead to nuclear warfare."
With a nervous grin, the suited woman looked at the monitors again.
The vast majority of the TV shows displayed the same marks of destruction. The screen subtitles showed the words "meteorite" or "missile attack" in multiple languages.
"What a pity...", the military dispassionately commented, looking at the images occupying half of the TV shows. A gigantic hole in the Arctic sea caps. "If only this power was something within our control, rather than arcane power manipulated by an individual's will..."
"Don't be stupid. The moment you think of weaponizing the arcana, you'll get the Clock Tower and the Atlas Institute knocking at our door and then it's over. Regretfully, we're still babies when it comes to magecraft, remember? Although this could change if we incorporate ancient ones like Tine Chelc's tribe into our ranks."
After rebuking the military man, the suited woman continued her semi-monologue.
"This is precisely why we had to go along with Francesca's plan... To choose the route of degrading magic into magecraft. We failed this time, but from the start, we've been making plans on the scale of centuries rather than years."
The people around her started sighing.
"So the 1st American Holy Grail War ends in a no contest."
"Remember how Fuyuki had 4 no contests?"
"Maybe 5. Our investigation is still struggling to determine the outcome of the 5th one."
"Yes, we can't make any careless moves now that the Eulyphis are always there."
The leader of the military men raised his hand to contain the stir in the audience, then proceeded to his speech.
"We'll cleanse the city, but before that, we'll have Francesca carry the core system of the Greater Grail away to use as the cornerstone of the next edition. Most Heroic Spirits should soon vanish once we cut off the energy resources."
After this response, the military man checked his wristwatch and proclaimed something to all in the conference room:
"From this moment onward, Code 983, 'Aurora Fall', is in effect."
The suited woman closed her eyes in response. After opening them again, she glared at everyone present while she spoke.
"In 48 hours, Snowfield will be 'cleansed'... I won't say this is for the country's sake. Much less that it's for justice. It's a sacrifice necessary for humanity's long-term benefits. You have no reason to feel any guilt."
And so, it was decided that two days after the meeting, Snowfield City was going to disappear from the face of Earth.
Along with its 800 thousand citizens.
Why did the masterminds of the Holy Grail War make this decision?
That was due to the events of the previous day.
The death of a young mage named Flat Escardos, and the consequential birth of a new lifeform.
Bridge chapter: Messara Escardos
Long ago, there was one mage.
Although he was below the level of the magicians, he was still a powerful and ancient mage obsessed with bizarre ideas.
The mage's name was Messara Escardos.
The mage built his small yet deep workshop in a place currently called Monaco. In his conversation with his magician friend and other big-name mages, a thought crossed his mind.
It all started in a conversation with an acquaintance.
There he heard his allegory about countless possibilities. Worlds that could have been, lined up in parallel with our world.
It was an idea most would dismiss as simple chatter, or perhaps a fable or a joke...
But the mage Messara found hope in his words.
His thesis as a mage had been unclear until that moment, and there he felt assured that his brain was simply waiting for that moment to start gushing out ideas.
Concealing one's research is a natural thought in mage society, but Messara was so flushed with excitement that he start telling other mages about his dreams and proposing everyone should do the same thing he was doing.
The majority laughed at the stupidity of what they considered to be an impossible dream.
Some also mentioned that what he wanted could be achieved by simply modifying someone's body, without the need to wait for such a long time.
Considering Messara's level of proficiency, that would indeed be a viable shortcut.
But Messara believed that his creation actualizing itself through a process of evolution was the entire point of the project.
Two people listened to his thoughts in earnest, even if they didn't endorse them.
One of them was the man who inspired Messara's plan: the magician who would later gain multiple epithets such as Mystical Marshall, Kaleidoscope, or Old Man of the Jewels.
The other mage was a capricious dollmaker of peculiar descent, who would later gain multiple epithets such as Magical Castle, or Dark Lord of Finance.
The two men had different positions in life, which lead to different experiences, but both experiences led them to realize that, although the chances were low, Messara's ambitions were possible.
Though they didn't endorse it, perhaps because they knew perfectly well what the consequences would be.
But that was enough to Messara.
He had people in his circle who would debate his theories in earnest.
That alone told him that staking his life was worth it. With a smile on his face, Messara dedicated his remaining years to his plan.
No, his own life wasn't the only chip he wagered.
He instrumentalized the blood of his descendants for the next centuries, potentially millenia.
Most mages hearing this would answer "It's simply what every mage family does."
Many families of ancient mages offer their blood for their ancestor's thesis.
But Messara's actions didn't follow that common sense.
When the ancient mage established the Escardos family, he set up one gimmick to further his research.
The longer his lineage continued, the more they would lose information on the family's purpose.
Messara couldn't trust the descendants he didn't know.
He could predict that when the goal was close to completion, someone would try to achieve its conclusion in their own generation instead of waiting for its maturation.
(I can't let this happen.)
Messara rejected his descendant's passion before it came to be.
(My creation will naturally complete itself one random day. It must. There's no point in letting out in an imperfect state. If my theories are correct, my creation will spawn naturally and take away everything the Escardos clan ever had.)
That's what it meant to instrumentalize his descendants' blood.
By the time that happens, his mage descendants will all be assuming that the Escardos were a family with no thesis, only a lot of history. Therefore, they would either find some new thesis that exploited their unique Magic Crest or would simply be trying to gain money and status in the world of magecraft.
Messara Escardos feared that his glory-hounding descendants could add their modifications to their Magic Circuit's evolution system or the Magic Crest in an attempt to "become" his creation.
To him, that would have been even worse than having the mages who laughed him off come to steal the fruits of his research once they accepted that it was possible. Not that he was expecting any kind of results in the first 1000 years.
The Escardos family gradually forgot its purpose, as Messara wanted, and remained always part of the world of magecraft as an entity that did nothing.
With no faith in his distant future descendants, he set up a mad mechanism in his own child and Magic Crest.
The result: In what is almost a miracle, Messara Escardos completed his tightrope walk after 1800 years had passed.
While Messara was still alive, he couldn't know if the day would come or not.
At that time, he dedicated a soliloquy, not to the bloodline he was sacrificing, but to the one child in the distant future who would see it completed in their generation.
"Oh, oh, my distant child. Man or woman of blood whose name I don't know, if you're born before the end of Human Order, I won my gamble. You have my gratitude and my apologies. You'll be considered a prodigy in your distant future of minimal arcanity. Some may shun you for that. Such is the nature I'm granting to your body. Your life won't be an easy one. And to top it off, the moment you inherit your Magic Crest... you'll be erased. Not die, be erased. Just disappear, not reaching anywhere nor being engraved into the world. But in exchange, our planet will see the birth of a new prime species. Goodbye, descendant I'll never meet. I'm sorry, and thank you."
Where no one could hear him, Messara thanked and apologized out loud to someone who hadn't been born.
One could say this was where he was at his least mage-like.
"You're a necessary sacrifice."
And after a long time, a baby was born.
The generation he was talking about.
Flat Escardos, the boy meant to be sacrificed to the Escardos family's ambitions.
Messara Escardos ultimately won his bet.
But he failed to predict many factors.
The first is that the boy's parents feared him so much that they plotted to dump their Magic Crest somewhere from where it could never be retrieved.
Flat's parents went to an underground casino famous among the mages of their region and lost everything they had on purpose, leading them to need to mortgage their Magic Crest as compensation for their gambling debt.
Messara would have appreciated the amazing irony, as the casino was run by one of his old friends, the one known as the Dark Lord of Finance.
But this miscalculation was trivial. In fact, Flat, with the help of his friends, took the Fem's Casa challenge and got his Crest back.
The other two are factors that Messara never even came close to considering.
One of them is that Flat Escardos's talents were even more freakish than Messara had considered.
And the other is that the boy met someone who changed his life.
An ordinary mage borrowing the title of a Clock Tower's Lord.
X X
Present day, Clock Tower
"The Lord of Norwich is currently not accepting visitors. Please leave."
"Oh shucks."
Hearing the words of someone in a Department of Policies uniform, a boy dejectedly went away.
He was the private pupil of the dollmaker Rohngall and visited the Norwich building to relay an important message to El-Melloi II.
However, Policies members blocked the building's entrance.
He could see a group of protesters, presumably El-Melloi II's current students, in a heated argument against a plump young man commanding a guard of homunculi.
Seeing how all of them flocked at him instead of at the woman in kimono on the other side, he could assume that the boy was more open to conversation than her.
Rohngall's young private pupil observed the students, impressed at how much they cared about their teacher.
Most Clock Tower lecturers, especially Lords, were treated with more fear than respect.
He doubted that even the notoriously friendly Lord of Creation would have students this passionate about her.
But that made perfect sense in the boy's mind.
Although many people from other faculties came for Norwich's lectures after El-Melloi II became its Lord, very few students were enrolled in the Department of Modern Magecraft beforehand.
And yet, El-Melloi II's Norwich was now seen as a major force capable of upending the Clock Tower's power balance.
The Department of Modern Magecraft is obviously not as powerful as any of the infamous Three Noble Families of the Mages Association, but the El-Melloi Classroom is said to have the weight to tip the scales on the delicate balance between the Neutral, Aristocratic, and Democratic factions.
The boy remembered the conversation he had with his mentor a few days prior.
ー"Werner Ceasarmund, the heir to Butterfly Magecraft. Roland Berzinsky. Org Rum. The sisters Radia Pentel and Nazica Pentel. Fezgram von Senbern. What do these names have in common?"
He answered "They are mages who rose to Pride and Brand status in the past few years", only to be met with a shocking response from his mentor.
ー"They're all El-Melloi Classroom students."
Back then he already reacted with shocked silence, but after seeing Lord El-Melloi II in person, he was even more surprised at how he didn't give off the impression of someone that amazing.
He looked nothing like a lecturer capable of producing multiple mages who would leave their mark on the Clock Tower's history, but the boy managed to convince himself that this was an act of camouflage to lower others' guards.
"What an incredible class. Maybe I should ask Mr. Rohngall to let me attend a lecture one day..."
He looked into Lord El-Melloi II later and found out he left numerous achievements.
The list of students he produced alone was already enough of a medal. It countained the names of several mages the young boy took as inspiration.
Svin Glascheit, the talented Beast Mage who reached the rank Pride still during his school years.
Yvette L. Lehrman, the mad genius who polished gemstones into high-end Mystic Eyes closely comparable to natural ones.
Caules Forvedge, the distinguished Electricity Mage who handled lightning as if it were part of himself.
Mary Lil Fargo, the shooting star of the Department of Astromancy, who made a name for herself by producing a whole new theory for her family in a single generation.
Sajou Ayaka, who didn't stay enrolled in the Classroom for too long, but nonetheless made notorious use of her mixed talents in the Department of Botany.
"And then there's... No, I wouldn't want these two as role models..."
He recalled a pair of female mages more infamous than famous. The boy was once a victim of one of the disasters caused by this duo, so he chose to forget the two ladies nicknamed Kischur's Nightmares.
And then, the boy remembered one last name.
Flat Escardos, the oldest student in the current El-Melloi Classroom. The one currently participating in the Holy Grail War in the United States. A previous topic of discussion.
He once asked his mentor Rohngall about this genius known as The Unwanted Blessing.
After a moment of sullen silence, Rohngall confirmed that no one was around and started speaking.
ー"Keep your distance from it if you can help it. One time, it requested me to build a doll in its image. I ultimately refused, but I had my interest in The Unwanted Blessing's Magic Circuits. Looking into them, I noticed something... Lord El-Melloi must have also noticed, and so must have the genius dollmaker that once called it interesting... The child itself was already something akin to a doll created to be something's receptacle. I'm morbidly curious to know what the Escardos ancestors intended to insert in it."