A pure white Pegasus neighed high in the night sky. Wings spread wide, each flap twisting the air behind it, sending ripples through the clouds below. A woman with a purple blindfold sat on its back, facing straight ahead.
Medusa.
A considerable distance away, a golden ship floated in the air, light radiating from its every inch like a treasure forged by something beyond mortality. Wings of emerald protruded from its sides, spread along its length like the pincers of a scorpion.
Vimana.
On a single throne atop Vimana sat a golden-haired, red-eyed man, an elbow on its armrest, hand against cheek, a faint, arrogant smile on his lips.
Gilgamesh.
"Mongrel... Keep me entertained. This king doesn't expect much from a phantom with no tethers to the present. Just don't be too much of a disappointment."
A single golden portal opened behind him. A Noble Phantasm peeked out from within—a scythe with Anti-Immortal properties.
The Immortal-Slaying Scythe, Harpe.
Lethal against Medusa herself.
She tightened her fingers around nothing as a saddle slowly started to materialize beneath her.
NEIIIGH!
Her Pegasus moved. At the exact same instant, Harpe released—and a golden line cleaved the night in two. It hurled toward her with finality, a streak of scythe-edged light trailing a golden spiral.
One moment, Harpe was three hundred meters away.
The next, it was beside her head.
She could see herself on that blade's curve—a distorted, enlarging reflection, purple blindfold and pale skin stretched across the scythe's gleaming surface.
Medusa's heel cracked against Pegasus's flank before her mind could catch up.
A wingbeat followed, less of flight and more of violence against air itself—a concentric boom that split clouds beneath them. Pegasus surged forward, not back, charging into Harpe's path rather than away from it, and at the last fraction of a second, banked hard sideways and down.
Her world inverted. Sky became ground. Ground became a distant green forest above her.
Harpe carved the space where her throat had been a heartbeat prior, splitting her hair in its wake.
Four purple strands fell. They drifted in the golden light of Vimana below, twisting, dissolving.
Gone.
Pegasus surged forward, gliding upside down through the air.
In a breath, the distance between them—three hundred meters of open night sky—vanished. Everything smeared into horizontal streaks of black and gold. Vimana swelled ahead from a toy to a fortress in a single heartbeat.
The ship. The throne. The king. Everything inverted.
Medusa looked at Gilgamesh.
Her blindfold began to radiate violet, its glow intensifying from a flicker to a blinding blaze.
[Breaker Gorgon]
Gilgamesh saw it before he felt it.
Atmosphere around him flaked. Layer by layer, Vimana's deck peeled away like paint, revealing something underneath—a white island, a Greek temple of cracked pillars and sun-bleached stone, a place that existed only in Medusa's memory now overlaid onto his reality.
Shapeless Isle. Her prison. Her home.
He blinked.
And gold flooded every inch of it. Her temple shattered like glass beneath the sheer, crushing weight of his existence.
Gilgamesh's smile died.
He lifted two fingers, and the Gate answered. Not a single portal this time—ten, twenty, forty bloomed at once until the sky behind him became a honeycomb of gold, each comb loaded, each weapon hungry.
The weapons fired.
No sound—but pressure. A continuous, bone-shuddering force that Medusa felt in her spine before her ears registered anything at all.
Those Noble Phantasms—they teleported forward in violent detonations, each one shattering the air it occupied with a miniature explosion, overlapping shockwaves turning the sky into a river of golden light.
She couldn't dodge. Not all of them. Not at this range. Not while gliding inverted.
A golden sword missed her arm by a fraction, yet an axe just behind it cut into her arm, leaving a shallow wound behind.
Another sabre screeched for her torso, she tilted sideways while hanging upside down at the last moment, her body twisting with serpentine grace.
That mauver however left her mount wide open.
One weapon clipped Pegasus's left wing.
Bone snapped. It bent at an unnatural angle.
Pegasus screamed, and the sound was almost human, almost a woman's scream, and the world rotated—Vimana above, forest below, everything spinning in relentless turns.
Medusa grabbed its mane. Her knuckles bone white.
They fell, tumbling through a merciless wind that slapped them left, right, up, and down. Ground was closing in, a distant but approaching certainty that screamed at her monstrous instincts.
High above, Gilgamesh watched them drop. He leaned back, crossed one leg over the other, and let out a single syllable.
"Tch."
He raised his hand. Harpe returned to his grip, its anti-immortal edge oscillating at a frequency that only those with monster blood could feel.
Medusa felt it.
Even through the wind. Even through the tumble.
Vimana tilted down in an incline. Emerald wings, throne, everything plunged in a downward diagonal. Gilgamesh remained seated on his throne.
He was following. Descending. Vimana was moving with him, its emerald wings adjusting, tilting the ship in a dive that somehow still looked regal, like a king taking stairs rather than running down.
Harpe hung from his grip, trailing golden light behind.
Medusa's hand found Pegasus's neck.
"I know." She whispered. Pegasus didn't hear her. Air sheared her voice away mid-fall. But Pegasus felt her words through the touch, felt a shift in her weight, a relaxation of her thighs.
Their tumble slowed. Then—it reformed. What was chaotic became intentional. Her spin became a spiral. That spiral became a dive.
A controlled, screaming, terminal-velocity dive.
Straight down.
The ground rushed up. A forest with shattered trees. Earth cratered with hundreds of depressions.
Medusa pulled.
Pegasus's intact wing cracked open to its full span—four meters, six, eight—and the deceleration hit Medusa like a shockwave originating from her gut. Her breath choked in her throat, a sound of ribs fracturing echoing from her torso.
They caught themselves just ten meters above the ground, each wingbeat of Pegasus limping now.
Because of its left wing. Because of him.
Medusa looked up.
Vimana descended through the clouds. Slow. Graceful. Utterly without urgency.
Gilgamesh watched from his throne.
His expression hadn't changed. That same half-lidded disinterest, that same bored gaze as a certain Ultimate.
But his hand was resting on a Gate.
Not in it. On it. The portals behind him hummed at his touch, ready to open wider at a thought.
"I'll admit," He said, and his voice carried across the space between them without effort. "that was slightly interesting."
Medusa's breath came in shudders. Each inhale flaring white-hot pain in her chest, a dive from that height had broken two of her ribs. Pegasus's left wing lay half-folded against its side, its joint shattered, feathers falling down.
She raised her head.
"Is...that—"
And coughed red.
"—all?"
Her word hung in the air between them.
Gilgamesh's eyes opened. Fully. The crimson of his irises deepened, and for the first time, something flashed within them that wasn't contempt.
Interest.
"Good." He said quietly.
And the Gate of Babylon opened all the way.
Sky behind Vimana disappeared. Every centimeter of it replaced with portals—hundreds, thousands, a wall of pure light that stretched from horizon to horizon.
For a moment, night turned into noon.
Medusa felt a searing heat burn all the way to her face. She opened her mouth, then closed it— having no words left.
Her grip became crushing over the reins.
Pegasus's wounded wing opened.
It shouldn't have. The joint was shattered. But it opened—because she asked, because the bond between them was stronger than this injury.
It opened, and it blazed with mana. White light pouring from every feather. Every inch of skin.
They climbed.
Fast. A screaming vertical climb forged from a stubborn refusal to stop, refusal to fall before looking at a certain Ultimate with her eyes, once.
Countless Noble Phantasms launched.
Everything became light.
A mountain of golden projectiles screamed across the sky, each one trailing its own legend—here a spear that had pierced a dragon, there a sword that had split a mountain, that a halberd that had brought down a mythical beast.
She twisted, a dagger passing over her scalp by inches and parting her hair. She rolled, a mace missing Pegasus's hooves by a handspan, the shockwave ruffling its white mane. Weapons howled toward her from every direction, but she dived into the gaps between them, Pegasus crossing deadly spaces in fractions of a second, dodging death by millimeters.
And she climbed.
Higher.
Closer.
Vimana grew in her awareness. The pressure of a king's presence. The hum of golden portals.
Fifty meters.
Thirty.
Twenty.
Ten.
Gilgamesh didn't move. Didn't order another volley.
He smiled.
And raised one finger.
A single portal ripped open directly in Medusa's path.
Inside it was a shield.
Medusa's hand went to her blindfold instinctively.
An ancient shield was thrust toward her. Bronze, polished to a shine that reflected not light but truth. Her truth.
Aegis.
On its surface was a gorgon with closed eyes. Snakes for hair. A monstrous expression frozen in place.
Medusa wrenched her blindfold aside.
The eyelashes of the Gorgon carved over Aegis trembled. Then snapped open.
Two pairs of purple eyes were reflected in one another.
Mystic Eyes of Petrification against Mystic Eyes of Petrification.
Cybele on Cybele.
Reality froze.
No—turned to stone.
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[5 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Breaker Gorgon]: It is Medusa's blindfold, a type of powerful Bounded Field Noble Phantasm on the scale of another World which seals her eyes. Breaker Gorgon has the ability to "seal all magical properties", and if used on others, it will imprison the consciousness of the enemy within a replica of Shapeless Isles within her mind.
[Mystic Eyes of Petrification- Cybele]: They are Mystic Eyes of the highest order that cannot be replicated by Magecraft. With them, Medusa can turn anything within her line of sight into stone, from Noble Phantasms to other Heroic Spirits and everything else. The only counter to it is a very high [Magic Resistance] like Artoria.
[Authors Thoughts]
Cybele against Cybele. Oooof.
...
We have one thing to clarify first. There is no concrete information that Gil has Aegis, but most people deny it due to it being a Divine Construct, yet... Gil has other Divine Constructs like Ea, Enkidu, Vimana, Vajra, Ig-Alima and Sul-Sagana... All of these are Divine Constructs, so technically, Gil should have Aegis.
Anyway... have a wonderful day, eveyone!