I checked the time, glancing toward a clock nearby.
6 minutes left.
Through the floor, subtle quaking of earth reached me. It was immediately followed by a shockwave that rattled nearby windows and stilled the air for half a second before everything returned to silence. It originated from the direction of Ryuudou Temple.
My Servants were still fighting.
A container of glass was gripped in my hold—the same one Medea had teleported to this room minutes ago. Magic circles carved across its surface suppressed a sludge of something dark and malevolent within. It thrashed and writhed like a sentient thing, pressing against its prison in feral desperation.
I could feel it even through the glass—something eerily similar to my own [Ultimate Despair], but corrupting where mine was pure.
My gaze shifted to the vat. [Avalon] lay inside, suppressing the Dragon Marrow to keep every ingredient balanced. No ripples or bubbles were visible on the solution's surface, it was perfectly still.
Calm. Harmonious.
Now, only one final ingredient remained—something that would allow this ink solution to absorb mana from the world and store it within. Something that could contend against the Dragon Marrow rather than relying on [Avalon] to maintain equilibrium.
In any chemical creation or alchemy, balance was everything. Stabilise the reaction, and creating longevity drugs without side effects or gene enhancers became simple mathematics.
Similarly, creating pseudo-magic circuits was like adding a new organ to my already perfectly balanced biology. If dragon materials became dominant, my genes could destabilise—transforming me into a dragonkin, a half-monster covered in scales.
My hand went to the container, magic circles across it cracking as I gripped its lid, turning it clockwise.
One turn. Two turns.
Before I could fully open it—
I snapped my eyes to the side. A minor displacement in air. A slight spike in heat. Micro-vibrations of something touching ground.
Beside me stood a figure with long, white hair. He had a face eerily similar to mine. Even our eyes were identical—expressions the same blank, like looking into a mirror.
I tilted my head at him.
"Who are you...?"
He tilted his head. An exact replica of my motion.
"I am... yo—"
His voice cut off abruptly as he looked down—
"Huh?"
A bewildered sound escaped him as he watched his legs slide off his thighs. Blood erupted from those severed stumps like a fountain, his back colliding against the floor.
I wordlessly walked up to him and placed my heel on his chest. My hands remained on the container's lid.
"How?"
Shock leaked through his blank facade.
I did not reply.
His hands twitched.
Then, they did not. Because they became stumps—cleaved by two invisible lines of wind. [Dismantle].
My voice did not fluctuate. Blank. It always was.
"Your body temperature was 0.367 degrees Celsius below mine."
His eyes widened, mouth falling open.
"Your left hand rested 0.112 cm below the optimal height my hand always maintains."
He closed his mouth.
"Your right leg angled 1.21 inches away from me, leaving your guard wide open. Something I would never do—even against myself."
Silence fell between us.
"So... I'll ask again. Who are you?" My heel dug deeper into his chest, right above his heart, pinning him beneath me.
His flat lips stretched upward at those words—an expression that the 'thing' in my guise directed at me.
"Ha...Ha." A slight laugh leaked from between his lips. His blood had pooled beneath us, shallow and spreading.
Red turned to charcoal black at that pool's edges, the colour spreading around like ink spilled into water.
"Haha...haha—" His voice was cut short as my heel climbed from his chest to his face, crushing inward, forcing him to swallow his laugh.
"Huu—Haa—"
His laughs did not stop.
I watched his face begin to melt—colours mixing with one another, turning into a similar shade of charcoal black as the blood beneath him. His body followed, dissolving into a sludge nearly identical to the one within the container in my hand.
That sludge slid away from my heel and rose at my side. White hair materialised once more—but the face was no longer mine. It was a woman's. One who resembled a grown version of Illyasviel.
"Einzbern?" I asked.
She had long white hair and crimson eyes like Illyasviel, wearing a short, flowing, revealing black dress with detached sleeves.
"My, my~"
Her hand came to cup her cheek as she regarded me with an intense gaze—one I had felt before from another person, in another world.
From Enoshima Junko.
"What a rude greeting, Izuru-kun. I only wished to see you up close, and you go and cut me open like that..." She stepped closer, her fingers hovering near my cheek—not quite touching.
The sludge beneath us rippled, climbing up my heel.
"Say, Izuru-kun... join m—"
Countless crisscrossing lines became visible across her form—uniform cracks spreading over her body. They widened in an instant, dissecting her into countless segments.
Yet every fragment dissolved into black mud and climbed back up, reforming within seconds.
"How cruel, Izuru-kun. You didn't even let me finish." She tilted her head, voice innocent, but beneath that innocence lay something malevolent.
"Join me. That was the trajectory of your sentence. A recruitment pitch. Predictable." I spoke, raising a single finger to my neck.
The sludge reached my ankle.
"So... what do you actually want?" My finger pressed against my skin.
A pause.
"Because if it's despair..." I let the sentence hang, unfinished.
Her smile stiffened.
"...I've seen it. I've been it. And it's boring."
Those words were followed by—
"[Dismantle]."
A thin line stretched across my neck. Under her constricting gaze, I felt the world spin—darkness swallowing it whole.
I killed myself.
Yet, instead of silence, I snapped back into awareness. The vat stood ahead of me, ink solution ready for the final ingredient. My hands still gripped the container carrying that mud—which was now thrashing harder than before, as though agitated by failure.
A mental intrusion. This mud had attempted to corrupt my consciousness the moment I began opening its seal. That woman, our conversation—all were projections. All illusion.
For a moment, I just stood there, letting myself process the feeling of dying in an illusion for ten seconds.
After that, I took a breath and let it go.
A glance at the time.
4 minutes left.
This time, I opened the container without interruption. A small amount of black mud thrashed inside, writhing as though trying to escape.
[Ultimate Despair] ground awake. My hand closed around that mud, crushing it within my grip. My own despair began to saturate that black mass with each passing second.
A woman's scream rang from my closed fist—high, desperate, unraveling into something less than human as I squeezed tighter. My focus remained on the steps ahead—simulating and calculating every variable I might encounter.
The mud's thrashing peaked—violent and desperate—then faltered.
Slowed. Stopped.
I opened my fingers. Black mud lay within, unresponsive, red streaks running through its dark surface.
It was ready.
I did not waste time. I pulled [Avalon] out of the vat.
And with a final motion, I added the mud into the ink solution.
It would be ready in moments.
Now, only engraving and connecting it to the Thaumaturgical Foundation remained.
It wouldn't take long.
Hold on.
Everyone.
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[5 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Authors Thoughts]
Izuru Kamukura is really something else. Killing yourself? Really!? Though bro was very correct to cut himself off before getting corrupted without even knowing how. And against that tiny part of Angra? [Ultimate Despair] is enough to saturate and turn it into something else altogether. Like purified despair with no with corrupting will attached to it.
...
Some people might ask... How is he using [Dismantle] again and again, right? Each time bro uses it, he has to create a new spell that acts like a [Wind Blade] in the world's eyes, fooling the world into thinking that he is casting [Wind Blade] instead of [Dismantle].
In fact, I'll tell in simple words with an example. If spells are like apps, then Izuru is using the icon and name of [Wind Blade] as an app to fool the world into executing it for a moment, after which, it gets 'banned' by the world, so Izuru creates a new app which once again looks similar to [Wind Blade] but is actually [Dismantle], like a food delivery app name and icon but when opened, its use is actually to chat.
...
Anyway... have a productive day, everyone!