A plume of smoke rose where R1's tires ground against concrete as I pulled its brakes. The bike came to a slow halt, its engine's rumble dissolving into silence as ordinary daylight reflected off its mirrors.
Around us, sky-blue particles folded inward. Concrete slabs detached in precise geometric patterns and raced backward, the ordinary sky above losing ground as the blizzard reasserted itself. My Reality Marble closed completely in a single breath.
Medusa withdrew her palm from my hand and vaulted over R1's seat, landing fluidly on the snowy ground.
I flicked a switch near the handlebar. Those crimson headlights died, their fading rays illuminating a treeline arranged in a perfect circle around a castle further ahead.
The blizzard's winds ruffled my coat and gloves; cold air slid through their seams to bite at my skin.
Deploying the kickstand with a nudge of my boot, I rose, my gloved hand resting on the fuel tank one final time.
Magic circles atop my glove rotated in a precise sequence. In response, the other circles beneath R1's chassis spun once, flashing a dim violet. Our bike's colors shifted seamlessly, assimilating with the snowy environment and vanishing from sight in exactly two seconds.
Any snowflakes drifting into its space were swept aside by a localized wind, seemingly harmless, but created by those same magic circles responsible for an active camouflage.
Medusa was already gazing ahead at the castle's symmetrical spires. Not a single speck of snow clung to their lengths. From this distance, its windows glowed with a warm, golden light, promising a hearth that up close, none of those windows seemed to have.
I stepped away from R1, stopping beside Medusa after two steps, shoulder to shoulder.
"Let's go."
My boots sank into snow, hands slipping into my pockets. Medusa followed a step behind, her shoulders coiled tight as she swept her gaze across the surroundings.
Our footfalls left prints behind, running parallel to another set of tracks. Wolf tracks, to be exact, and they only advanced toward the castle, none doubling back.
After walking for a minute, covering nearly half the distance to that castle, a crunch resounded from an underbrush. It was faint, but to my ears, it might as well have been right beside me.
The sound of eager, rushing movement followed.
My surroundings were mapped instantly; calculated angles of movement, simulating trajectories, even predicting where individual snowflakes would land an hour from now. Simultaneously, I extended my right arm forward, fingers curling around a half-formed trigger. The barrel was still materializing when I pulled it.
Bang.
My bullet ignited a vapor trail in its wake, surging toward three wolves closing in from ahead in a horizontal line.
The middle wolf dropped low on instinct; those other two flanking it continued their charge without pause.
As my bullet closed the distance, two snowflakes drifted into its path. An immense pressure from friction melted them instantly, launching the resulting water droplets toward those flanking wolves.
They flattened into high-velocity pins by the bullet's momentum, surging onward like needles.
Those two water pins punched straight through the flanking wolves' eyes, piercing out the back of their skulls.
That third wolf pressed itself even flatter against snow. My bullet passed harmlessly over its head, and it threw its snout up, howling in our direction.
Another snowflake was caught in the bullet's wake behind it, morphing into a third water pin. It launched downward at a precise angle, straight through that wolf's throat.
All three beasts buckled sideways, dead.
We continued forward as the half-formed gun crumbled into particles that drifted away with wind.
"Do you feel it?" I asked, my hand returning to my pocket.
Medusa swiped her arm in a half-circle, her fingers sweeping through air.
"...I do."
The temperature around us had stopped dropping, even as the blizzard raged harder. It did not rise either; it had stabilized at 17.3°C.
Another snowflake drifted over, landing on my eyebrow.
It should not have. According to my predictive model, this specific flake should have passed 2.1 inches from my shoulder before being swept away by a localized gust.
An error. Or rather, a flaw in the architecture of that boundary field surrounding this castle. The exact same flaw I had left in R1's camouflage, because fixing it would have been too tedious for what it was worth.
Was this boundary field made by Justeaze?
"... Should I set up... Blood Fort?"
Medusa asked, tilting her head in my direction, eyes narrowed slightly.
"Wait for now."
Sky-blue particles flickered between my fingers inside the pocket. When I drew my hand out, a single black pencil rested between my index and middle fingers.
Shifting my grip by centimeters, I flicked the pencil forward. It sheared forward with a shriek, colliding with something invisible a meter ahead.
Fractures raced outward from the point of impact, and a semi-transparent dome stretching for hundreds of meters glimmered into view.
Under our collective gazes, those fractures sealed themselves, that barrier vanishing like a mirage.
Medusa spread her fingers wordlessly. A stake-chain materialized in her grip, and she held it out to me without needing to be told.
My hand was already moving before she finished her motion, fingers closing around the weapon.
That dome's structure flashed through my mind, magic formulae linked to magic formulae in a complex formation, optimized over hundreds of years. Even for me, deciphering it completely would take time.
But I didn't need to decipher it. I only needed to find a weak spot in its composition. It was exactly like looking at a wall and finding chips on its surface rather than trying to comprehend its entire creation process.
My rear foot slid half an inch back, the stake-chain arm coiling backward. I held it there for exactly one second.
Then, I wrenched my arm forward with calculated amount of force.
The stake-chain's tip met that boundary field. For a fraction, both held firm, but then cracks, many times wider than before, splintered across the dome, and Medusa's chain tore straight through.
That semi-transparent membrane shattered in front of us, opening a path wide enough for us both.
We passed through just as the opening sealed shut behind us.
Our entrance triggered an alarm. Footsteps, far more numerous than those wolves broke out from the castle.
White-haired homunculi, each with identical red eyes and blank faces, charged toward us. Green magic circuits pulsed visibly beneath the skin of some. A few moved with jerky, mechanical movements, while a small fraction displayed fluidity closer to a human's, though still distinctly artificial.
Another stake-chain materialized in Medusa's hand.
My steps did not pause. I assessed the horde: thirty-plus hostiles, lightly armed, with average strength. Hardly a threat to either of us, but dealing with them manually would be dull.
Sky-blue particles bled from my body and drifted to my side, coalescing into a faint outline.
Three steps later, that outline solidified.
A slim woman with short black hair, purple-grey eyes, and a freckled nose. Her thin frame accompanied by a completely flat expression.
The [Ultimate Soldier].
She glanced at me.
"... Izuru Kamukura."
I glanced back.
"Mukuro Ikusaba."
She then looked ahead at that horde of Homunculi.
"What do you need me to do?"
"Clear them for us." I commanded.
With a silent nod, she erupted forward, snow parting in curtains along her path.
Mana crackled through my magic circuits as a compact military knife materialized near my heel, dropping into snow.
I flicked my toe upward, launching that blade into a rapid spin.
Without looking back, Mukuro raised her arm overhead. The knife spun end over end toward her, its handle locking seamlessly into her grip just as those Einzbern homunculi reached her.
She vanished into the fray.
I continued on my way.
One homunculus broke away and lunged for me. It couldn't. A chain snapped around its neck, violently hurling it backward into the chaos. Medusa retracted her chain and matched my pace.
I took a dozen more steps. Sky-blue particles unfurled outward from me as an epicenter on the first step, folded back on the second, then expanded again on the third.
A technique I had used earlier on R1 to make my Reality Marble mobile.
Concrete spread outward from beneath my feet. Lockers slammed into existence around us, and a row of benches parallel to me rose from the ground.
Ahead, my domain collided with another boundary field, right at a structurally weak seam.
Black sparks erupted in all directions. I did not break my stride.
A second dome shimmered into view, groaning under the immense pressure of my encroaching world. Opposing magic formulae scrambled to resist, but a Reality Marble enforced my inner world onto reality itself.
In seconds, that barrier buckled and shattered completely.
Einzbern Castle was only meters away now.
And standing at its front gate was an old man.
Reigning in my domain, I advanced toward him.
He stood at 192 centimeters, towering over my 178. He had long silver hair, a white beard, and blank eyes that held an astute, calculating light.
I stopped a measured distance away from him.
His eyes locked onto mine.
"Are you Jubstacheit von Einzbern?" I asked.
"...I am." His voice carried no warmth, only the calm certainty of someone who had spoken those exact same words for hundreds of years. "Though I find myself curious which of my failures brought you to ask."
His gaze dropped briefly to the shattered dome still knitting itself shut behind us.
"That barrier took the better part of a century to perfect," he said. "Instead of breaking it, you found where it was already broken and simply widened those seams."
His eyes lifted back to mine and sharpened. His beard did not stir, despite the sharp wind currents whipping between us.
"Tell me your name, boy. I would like to know what manner of thing I am speaking to before I decide whether you deserve more answers."
"Izuru Kamukura," I said.
"And your companion?" he asked, gaze shifting to Medusa.
Her fingers tightened, almost imperceptibly, around the chain at her side.
"She doesn't require a name for this conversation." My eyes followed his micro-expressions, deciphering him.
Jubstacheit's gaze flickered with an amusement too worn down to fully surface.
"A vague answer," he said. "Fitting, for whatever reason brought you to my door in the dead of winter."
His hands, folded before him, did not move. Nothing about his stance suggested he intended to strike.
"You've broken two of my boundary fields to stand here and ask my name. I doubt you came this far only to withhold your purpose next." His head tilted fractionally, reminiscent of Justeaze.
"So. Which is it, boy? Do you come to take something from this house, or are you here thinking having a Servant and an actualised inner world means you can get whatever you want?"
I remained silent for a single breath.
"I'm here because of one of your failed products."
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[5 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Authors Thoughts]
Honestly, it didn't even take Jubstacheit, or better yet, Acht even three seconds to deduce the cause and effect of the whole Holy Grail War broadly and come to a conclusion that Izuru was a Master who had come with his Servant. Anything less would be doing him dirty. Bro is a nearly 200+ years old, and for that age, he has been watching the Grail's system run.
As for the mobile reality marble? Its a simple technique, open a compact version, close it, then move an inch forward, open it again, and do it so fast that the intervals between opening and closing it becomes close to negligible, hence getting a mobile boundary field, though its only possible for those who have inhuman control over their inner world and have a tremendous amount of mana.
And one more thing, the Mukuro summon, its explicitly explained by Justeaze earlier that he can't summon many Ultimates, but one or two is still possible, though with slight strain.