EoR Wine Country - NNWM2k19 - 16
Nov. 26th, 2019 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
atma posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
heroicrecordsWC: 44153/50000
It’s all been done before and it’ll all be done again and again until we get it right. Whatever right is. Since the second the universe was made and until the last second of entropy has passed, we’ve been embroiled in a battle, all of us, whether we want to be or not. Some of us have small, easy ones we think only impact a little while changing a lot, and yet others with huge egos think they’re doing the world a favor and achieving nothing.
And that speaks nothing for what has been going on behind the scenes this whole time.
The universe is made of strings that attach us all to one another, meant to be bound and twisted into a rope a certain way, and along the way, the powers that be or mortals or magic or something comes along and shreds a twine of it off, threading it into a new, horrible form that should not be. This has been the use case for the servants and Counter Forces of Alaya, the collective consciousness of humanity, to make sure that we’re allowed to Be and do so in a time that’s stable and doesn’t threaten anything else. One fraying can undo the whole thing and guarantee a vastly deformed looking future, full of frayed ends and uncertainty, its pattern unrecognizable. It is being wound at all times, past and present and future, and has gone through many attempts to ruin it, and sometimes outright destroy it. The case with Solomon and the Goetia was the most recent example, ruining enough of time throughout different points to cost the Master a long year fixing it.
At the center of this is the Root, where Alaya and Gaia, the consciousness of the Earth, live and gain their powers, and are sometimes interpreted as the Root themselves. The Root’s true name is one we cannot know, nobody can pronounce it, and it is usually represented by an empty space. There have been countless attempts to reach this, especially by mages, to try to understand the truest magic of the universe and gain the knowledge of infinity. Most have never returned. Some come back touched. And a couple “lucky” few are even made from the dust of the universe to be a strand of the Root itself.
Alaya knew that one of the greatest Masters in history was to be a woman. This Gudako, no matter how ridiculous she is, was one of undeniable power, and should be kept alive in order to sort her history out. But how does one go about setting it up so that you’re able to keep her alive?
The answer lay back at the beginning of it all, when Alaya decided to put a piece of her into a specific soul, that of the one named Atma Weapon, giving her the knowledge of the history of womankind from the past and now through the entire future, laid out not in specifics but in a path she could recognize as being the one true one this universe should walk. She was also granted the powers to travel to any of these times as needed and help other major lady figures in history fix what they needed and keep their place in history.
Penthesilea. Quetzalcoatl. Tomoe Gozen. Boudica. Mata Hari. Lakshmi. Nero. So many more were guided to their place in the annals of mortal history, and were guaranteed their spots as servants through the background work of Atma. Anytime you would hear rumors in the scholarly world about some kind of unknown female companion to anyone important like that, it was most likely Atma working under a different name or guise, her powers from the Root and Alaya resolute in their duty and keeping a tight ship going.
There was the Queen Calafia, whom promised that when it came time for her to live her original mortal lifetime out, so that she would have a time herself in which to live as a hero and die remembered as one, so that her spirit was summonable at some point in our existence, said she would call her back as a Counter Force to ensure that she would be able to do this.
Without Atma, nobody identifying as a woman would find success, and even the Grand Ruler Calafia would not ever have been. So much of history was determined but this swordswoman, wielding the one sword that could cut even stars and planets down, imbued with a strength to slice through even legend, using its power to guide things back through the flow of time as what should be.
But to create Atma, whose name meant “the self” in a few religions, and to create her as Womankind’s Paramatma, which was the entirety of all one thing, she needed to go through an incredible amount of trials and tribulations, and would only learn her humanity and how to love through the power of four women. Her Four Heavenly Wives, retroactively given servant status for the incredible heroic feat of making our Atma as she is now, their influence on her echoing throughout time as she went about and saved another woman, another time, another strand fixed.
There was rumors written in many mage’s historical texts referring to this influence, this force she wielded as the Root of Chivalry, concluding she must be a part of the Root itself, and that without her many a good thing we have now simply would not be. But everyone described her looks and voice and powers differently; she fit in with each time she traveled through, not regretting the choice to become this or live up to Alaya’s will, even in the hardest of times. \
She had a sort of immortality, being aware of when your own birth would be and having to protect that.
Imagine the most important person you’d guide into being born and dying properly and making sure her mark was left was yourself.
In order to do this, she made sure that Gudako would be able to exist as well, under the powers and guidance of da Vinci and Mash, she would need a Master of that caliber to summon her spirit as it was during her own life, and she would need it to be a woman. No man could contract her, if they tried at all. So the proper timeline was set, and off she went to save herself.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this, though.
She was supposed to swiftly take care of PG&E and live her days as the modern samurai that protected the coastline, her name etched alongside those of Calafia and Norton as some of the most important to the history and myth of the state. There was meant to be no demonic interference. No interference of any kind whatsoever.
The fact that some of the Goetia escaped through time wasn’t a surprise; after all, Solomon was “supposed” to wipe out humanity, and it being saved threw time for a loop, causing these pseudo singularities to pop up and show alternate times. But should those times succeed, they’d become the reality for all of us, and were just as important to quash when they came up if not more. Time had to remain on the schedule it was.
But the fact it was Haborym, the Grand Duke of Flames and Ruin, that was so dead set on bringing this Root down, burning her so maybe it could stretch out to the full tree of life itself, was a problem. His will made the flames and ruin much stronger and much more permanent, if the land were to be recovered at all it would take generations. Even if she saved the day here, Atma would not be remembered as such, and that was unlikely, as the flames were supposed to build and burn even her down here, ensuring the Root of Chivalry never came to be and that time would belong only to the villains, only to death and decay and chaos.
That’s why her showing off her true form now, which was still shrouded in mystery, so many questions being unanswered, more questions than not now existing, what the implications of it was, was such a dire gambit.
Should she die in this form, it would echo back and forth through time and undo all her work. None of them would be standing here, some probably never born, at least not reborn as spirits, and the future they’d inhabit would warp into something unrecognizable and sinister and ruled by them in a stronger, more twisted form.
Cortes, Guzman, Haborym, it was a perfect storm of things meant to not happen in this time.
But for some reason, Atma welcomed it. Perhaps this was the true origin of her becoming a servant, and she was righting her own history, as well as Calafia’s, so that her ending was not the one written by the Conquistadors, and instead written by her and known by her. It was the last shot womankind had at any kind of a stable narrative, and it was up to Atma to make it known to never cross swords with her, regardless of who’s timeline they were messing with.
This was her timeline, her battlefield, her right to exist.
It was all an astounding matter of fact to take in, and many people refused to take this as real. You, the reader, probably struggle to follow all that is going on, so let us sum it up as; shit gets complicated. Atma is the will of Alaya guiding women to safety. She is stronger and better than you. She will probably sleep with Your Wife, but that’s in history’s best interest.
~ END OF CHAPTER 12 NODE 1
da Vinci sat back at Chaldea, amused by this turn of events, and looking back on her notes on what had been going on, deep in a book about the myth of Calafia and smirking.
“I knew there was something special about that Archer.” she said aloud, with only Mash left to hear her. “I just didn’t think she’d be the one we’d all been making margin notes about in our design books way back when.”
“You’ve heard of this?” Mash asked, curious.
“Yes, of course. Every time a woman in history made good, there was always someone discussing the power behind her throne, in a hushed sense, that she was always a woman, always strong, possibly a secret lover to a lot of them. You know, the usual historical gossip mill. Even I doodled a few things about her ever changing identity into a few of my books.”
“I can’t believe a force like this existed. I mean, I knew of the Root and everything, the beasts and the forces behind this, having read through your own notes after we beat Solomon and my encounter with a strange Beast, but to think it extended this far and into so many different points in history?”
“Yup. That’s just how it be sometimes, Mash. You never know what’s going to come crawling out of these singularities. There’s still so much for us to learn about us as servants and a heroic force as well. We are all chosen by Alaya, but only Atma and a couple others were made to be a sort of swordarm to correct things while she was busy doing… who knows what those kinds of forces do in their spare time, huh?”
A mysterious figure walked in quietly, holding her thumb over the tsuba on her katana, kimono flowing like the snow that she resembled. She offered a rare soft smile and entered the conversation.
“I see another one of us has arrived.” she spoke.
“Oh, it’s you, Shiki. I should have known you’d sense this and come by.” da Vinci offered her some tea, the three sitting down and discussing the ramifications of this.
“I am one touched by the Root as well, one extremely close to Alaya, and I knew in the back of my mind this day would come when we’d be reunited. She also had to help me come to be, so we could protect the Root together, even though I’m pretty sure I could be called her mom...”
“She’s related to you?” Mash asked.
“In a sense. Not in the traditional way. But she’s definitely like, a rank below me, but that’s the only person or being in this universe she answers to. She is a highly individualistic, strong willed, stubborn, passionate piece of humanity’s soul, and I suppose that’s why Alaya looked at her in her origin point and deemed her worthy of this title.” Shiki added. “It’s… It’s complicated, I’ll tell you that much.”
“My sympathies, Shiki.” Mash offered her a shoulder pat. “So she’s responsible for us all then, in a way? What about Senpai? What was her role in making Senpai, well, my Senpai and not anyone else?”
“Would you believe it’s simply just they got along well personality wise? I mean, just listen to how they’ve been interacting.” Shiki added on. “She needed a very specific female master to pull this off and she just liked the cut of her jib more than the other women around here.”
“So she’s also why Director Animusphere died?” Mash bit her lip.
“That’s unfortunately probably true.” da Vinci frowned a bit. “There’s going to be a lot of downside to a job like that, knowing what narrative to push and when, your power over life and death on an individual and grand scale both an overwhelming amount, being given that responsibility just because Alaya needed someone to handle it, and knew it wasn’t her thing. At least, that’s what I’m guessing is going on. Tell me if I’m wrong, Shiki.”
“It’s… It’s complicated, yes, so don’t worry too much about it, da Vinci. You’re all doing well enough to come to terms with this, and I hope you remain so. It’s our reality now, and it always has been. She just didn’t show her face directly in history until the time of the singularity the Master now fights in happened. And, well, she can probably sense she’s having to rewrite her own story. Or perhaps she knows it was always meant to play out in such dire straits?”
Shiki trailed off a bit. This was an incredible amount of information to take in at once, and as fast as da Vinci could take notes, it didn’t seem fast enough. She would pause now and again and look over the words of the books she had out before her and sighed a bit. This was going to be a long, hard forever just studying the ramifications of it all. What else are you supposed to do? She wasn’t quite sure what to make of all this. It was all so confusing, so dense, so intricately woven into the fabric of her and every other woman’s existence.
But she could tell one thing; a lot of the notes she’d written in the past about certain individuals or singularities was beginning to change. Anything referencing this Root of Chivalry was becoming more clear and detailed. The notes she’d taken about her as an Archer and then a Counter Force began to gain word count. Her whole face lit up and she cackled, almost.
“Oh, this is interesting! I never quite seen something like this before! It looks like history is changing right before our very eyes, ladies!” the genius mage laughed some more, a tear streaking down one cheek. “I… I’m witness to something incredible.”
“It’s incredible...” Mash stared in awe. “I feel myself thinking as if I remember knowing this Atma, somehow, in my days at Chaldea, dressed as one of the clerks, urging me on to help Senpai, putting us together frequently. Had she been navigating even me towards this?”
“She’s been doing it for all of womankind, so yes, that includes you two, too.” Shiki smirked and moved her hair aside out of her eye, just watching the will of her protege changing history before her eyes. “This is a good sign. Yes. Very good, indeed. It seems we, or I, picked the right woman for the job, and in turn picked the right four women to guide her in her mortal existence to this kind of power. Let’s hope it remains this way.”
It wasn’t long after that that the power in Chaldea began to short out, sparking, bulbs exploding, the red alert sign blaring. Though it was not them in danger, it was them being warned the Master and the singularity itself were in danger. It was black, glowing only red with the alarm, and the three sat there by candlelight trying to determine the cause.
“Maybe I spoke too soon.” Shiki sighed. “I was kind of hoping she wouldn’t go down the route that’d end in some epic, dire struggle but I almost forgot who she was. Dammit, Weapon. What have you gotten us into?”
“Come again?” da Vinci glared. “What is happening?”
“Seems our universal heroine isn’t going to let her story be forgotten, in a way that even we will know to respect her power.” Shiki sighed.
“Are we… What’s happening? My memories are going hazy… The books! The books, look!” Mash pointed, gasping.
The notes and books containing the history of Atma in any form, as Archer, as Counter Force, and especially as the Root of Chivalry, began to flicker in and out of existence, some of it reverting back to the original vague terms it was, some trying their best to fade out. This was not the kind of thing they were expecting, but towards the end of a singularity, they really ought to be.
What’s a final fight without stakes thrown in, after all?
A quick flash to where Atma stood, grinning, her sword still defiant in Haborym’s face, and she spoke the words that caused history itself to start to splinter all over again.
“It’s you or me. One of us is getting erased from history tonight. What do you say to that bet? If I win, you’ll go down as nothing more than petty vengeance and my name screamed by women everywhere forevermore. And if I go, that’s it, you’ve conquered one of the keys to ruling over time and space itself.”
“Ahaha, so be it then, Root! Let us see who stands last, laughing, the others’ head in their hands!”
Whose fire would burn brighter?
The Paramatma of Womankind?
Or the very concept of flames itself taken form to burn even her spirit down?
It was time for the final party arrangement.
No turning back.
~ END OF CHAPTER 12 NODE 2
It’s all been done before and it’ll all be done again and again until we get it right. Whatever right is. Since the second the universe was made and until the last second of entropy has passed, we’ve been embroiled in a battle, all of us, whether we want to be or not. Some of us have small, easy ones we think only impact a little while changing a lot, and yet others with huge egos think they’re doing the world a favor and achieving nothing.
And that speaks nothing for what has been going on behind the scenes this whole time.
The universe is made of strings that attach us all to one another, meant to be bound and twisted into a rope a certain way, and along the way, the powers that be or mortals or magic or something comes along and shreds a twine of it off, threading it into a new, horrible form that should not be. This has been the use case for the servants and Counter Forces of Alaya, the collective consciousness of humanity, to make sure that we’re allowed to Be and do so in a time that’s stable and doesn’t threaten anything else. One fraying can undo the whole thing and guarantee a vastly deformed looking future, full of frayed ends and uncertainty, its pattern unrecognizable. It is being wound at all times, past and present and future, and has gone through many attempts to ruin it, and sometimes outright destroy it. The case with Solomon and the Goetia was the most recent example, ruining enough of time throughout different points to cost the Master a long year fixing it.
At the center of this is the Root, where Alaya and Gaia, the consciousness of the Earth, live and gain their powers, and are sometimes interpreted as the Root themselves. The Root’s true name is one we cannot know, nobody can pronounce it, and it is usually represented by an empty space. There have been countless attempts to reach this, especially by mages, to try to understand the truest magic of the universe and gain the knowledge of infinity. Most have never returned. Some come back touched. And a couple “lucky” few are even made from the dust of the universe to be a strand of the Root itself.
Alaya knew that one of the greatest Masters in history was to be a woman. This Gudako, no matter how ridiculous she is, was one of undeniable power, and should be kept alive in order to sort her history out. But how does one go about setting it up so that you’re able to keep her alive?
The answer lay back at the beginning of it all, when Alaya decided to put a piece of her into a specific soul, that of the one named Atma Weapon, giving her the knowledge of the history of womankind from the past and now through the entire future, laid out not in specifics but in a path she could recognize as being the one true one this universe should walk. She was also granted the powers to travel to any of these times as needed and help other major lady figures in history fix what they needed and keep their place in history.
Penthesilea. Quetzalcoatl. Tomoe Gozen. Boudica. Mata Hari. Lakshmi. Nero. So many more were guided to their place in the annals of mortal history, and were guaranteed their spots as servants through the background work of Atma. Anytime you would hear rumors in the scholarly world about some kind of unknown female companion to anyone important like that, it was most likely Atma working under a different name or guise, her powers from the Root and Alaya resolute in their duty and keeping a tight ship going.
There was the Queen Calafia, whom promised that when it came time for her to live her original mortal lifetime out, so that she would have a time herself in which to live as a hero and die remembered as one, so that her spirit was summonable at some point in our existence, said she would call her back as a Counter Force to ensure that she would be able to do this.
Without Atma, nobody identifying as a woman would find success, and even the Grand Ruler Calafia would not ever have been. So much of history was determined but this swordswoman, wielding the one sword that could cut even stars and planets down, imbued with a strength to slice through even legend, using its power to guide things back through the flow of time as what should be.
But to create Atma, whose name meant “the self” in a few religions, and to create her as Womankind’s Paramatma, which was the entirety of all one thing, she needed to go through an incredible amount of trials and tribulations, and would only learn her humanity and how to love through the power of four women. Her Four Heavenly Wives, retroactively given servant status for the incredible heroic feat of making our Atma as she is now, their influence on her echoing throughout time as she went about and saved another woman, another time, another strand fixed.
There was rumors written in many mage’s historical texts referring to this influence, this force she wielded as the Root of Chivalry, concluding she must be a part of the Root itself, and that without her many a good thing we have now simply would not be. But everyone described her looks and voice and powers differently; she fit in with each time she traveled through, not regretting the choice to become this or live up to Alaya’s will, even in the hardest of times. \
She had a sort of immortality, being aware of when your own birth would be and having to protect that.
Imagine the most important person you’d guide into being born and dying properly and making sure her mark was left was yourself.
In order to do this, she made sure that Gudako would be able to exist as well, under the powers and guidance of da Vinci and Mash, she would need a Master of that caliber to summon her spirit as it was during her own life, and she would need it to be a woman. No man could contract her, if they tried at all. So the proper timeline was set, and off she went to save herself.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this, though.
She was supposed to swiftly take care of PG&E and live her days as the modern samurai that protected the coastline, her name etched alongside those of Calafia and Norton as some of the most important to the history and myth of the state. There was meant to be no demonic interference. No interference of any kind whatsoever.
The fact that some of the Goetia escaped through time wasn’t a surprise; after all, Solomon was “supposed” to wipe out humanity, and it being saved threw time for a loop, causing these pseudo singularities to pop up and show alternate times. But should those times succeed, they’d become the reality for all of us, and were just as important to quash when they came up if not more. Time had to remain on the schedule it was.
But the fact it was Haborym, the Grand Duke of Flames and Ruin, that was so dead set on bringing this Root down, burning her so maybe it could stretch out to the full tree of life itself, was a problem. His will made the flames and ruin much stronger and much more permanent, if the land were to be recovered at all it would take generations. Even if she saved the day here, Atma would not be remembered as such, and that was unlikely, as the flames were supposed to build and burn even her down here, ensuring the Root of Chivalry never came to be and that time would belong only to the villains, only to death and decay and chaos.
That’s why her showing off her true form now, which was still shrouded in mystery, so many questions being unanswered, more questions than not now existing, what the implications of it was, was such a dire gambit.
Should she die in this form, it would echo back and forth through time and undo all her work. None of them would be standing here, some probably never born, at least not reborn as spirits, and the future they’d inhabit would warp into something unrecognizable and sinister and ruled by them in a stronger, more twisted form.
Cortes, Guzman, Haborym, it was a perfect storm of things meant to not happen in this time.
But for some reason, Atma welcomed it. Perhaps this was the true origin of her becoming a servant, and she was righting her own history, as well as Calafia’s, so that her ending was not the one written by the Conquistadors, and instead written by her and known by her. It was the last shot womankind had at any kind of a stable narrative, and it was up to Atma to make it known to never cross swords with her, regardless of who’s timeline they were messing with.
This was her timeline, her battlefield, her right to exist.
It was all an astounding matter of fact to take in, and many people refused to take this as real. You, the reader, probably struggle to follow all that is going on, so let us sum it up as; shit gets complicated. Atma is the will of Alaya guiding women to safety. She is stronger and better than you. She will probably sleep with Your Wife, but that’s in history’s best interest.
~ END OF CHAPTER 12 NODE 1
da Vinci sat back at Chaldea, amused by this turn of events, and looking back on her notes on what had been going on, deep in a book about the myth of Calafia and smirking.
“I knew there was something special about that Archer.” she said aloud, with only Mash left to hear her. “I just didn’t think she’d be the one we’d all been making margin notes about in our design books way back when.”
“You’ve heard of this?” Mash asked, curious.
“Yes, of course. Every time a woman in history made good, there was always someone discussing the power behind her throne, in a hushed sense, that she was always a woman, always strong, possibly a secret lover to a lot of them. You know, the usual historical gossip mill. Even I doodled a few things about her ever changing identity into a few of my books.”
“I can’t believe a force like this existed. I mean, I knew of the Root and everything, the beasts and the forces behind this, having read through your own notes after we beat Solomon and my encounter with a strange Beast, but to think it extended this far and into so many different points in history?”
“Yup. That’s just how it be sometimes, Mash. You never know what’s going to come crawling out of these singularities. There’s still so much for us to learn about us as servants and a heroic force as well. We are all chosen by Alaya, but only Atma and a couple others were made to be a sort of swordarm to correct things while she was busy doing… who knows what those kinds of forces do in their spare time, huh?”
A mysterious figure walked in quietly, holding her thumb over the tsuba on her katana, kimono flowing like the snow that she resembled. She offered a rare soft smile and entered the conversation.
“I see another one of us has arrived.” she spoke.
“Oh, it’s you, Shiki. I should have known you’d sense this and come by.” da Vinci offered her some tea, the three sitting down and discussing the ramifications of this.
“I am one touched by the Root as well, one extremely close to Alaya, and I knew in the back of my mind this day would come when we’d be reunited. She also had to help me come to be, so we could protect the Root together, even though I’m pretty sure I could be called her mom...”
“She’s related to you?” Mash asked.
“In a sense. Not in the traditional way. But she’s definitely like, a rank below me, but that’s the only person or being in this universe she answers to. She is a highly individualistic, strong willed, stubborn, passionate piece of humanity’s soul, and I suppose that’s why Alaya looked at her in her origin point and deemed her worthy of this title.” Shiki added. “It’s… It’s complicated, I’ll tell you that much.”
“My sympathies, Shiki.” Mash offered her a shoulder pat. “So she’s responsible for us all then, in a way? What about Senpai? What was her role in making Senpai, well, my Senpai and not anyone else?”
“Would you believe it’s simply just they got along well personality wise? I mean, just listen to how they’ve been interacting.” Shiki added on. “She needed a very specific female master to pull this off and she just liked the cut of her jib more than the other women around here.”
“So she’s also why Director Animusphere died?” Mash bit her lip.
“That’s unfortunately probably true.” da Vinci frowned a bit. “There’s going to be a lot of downside to a job like that, knowing what narrative to push and when, your power over life and death on an individual and grand scale both an overwhelming amount, being given that responsibility just because Alaya needed someone to handle it, and knew it wasn’t her thing. At least, that’s what I’m guessing is going on. Tell me if I’m wrong, Shiki.”
“It’s… It’s complicated, yes, so don’t worry too much about it, da Vinci. You’re all doing well enough to come to terms with this, and I hope you remain so. It’s our reality now, and it always has been. She just didn’t show her face directly in history until the time of the singularity the Master now fights in happened. And, well, she can probably sense she’s having to rewrite her own story. Or perhaps she knows it was always meant to play out in such dire straits?”
Shiki trailed off a bit. This was an incredible amount of information to take in at once, and as fast as da Vinci could take notes, it didn’t seem fast enough. She would pause now and again and look over the words of the books she had out before her and sighed a bit. This was going to be a long, hard forever just studying the ramifications of it all. What else are you supposed to do? She wasn’t quite sure what to make of all this. It was all so confusing, so dense, so intricately woven into the fabric of her and every other woman’s existence.
But she could tell one thing; a lot of the notes she’d written in the past about certain individuals or singularities was beginning to change. Anything referencing this Root of Chivalry was becoming more clear and detailed. The notes she’d taken about her as an Archer and then a Counter Force began to gain word count. Her whole face lit up and she cackled, almost.
“Oh, this is interesting! I never quite seen something like this before! It looks like history is changing right before our very eyes, ladies!” the genius mage laughed some more, a tear streaking down one cheek. “I… I’m witness to something incredible.”
“It’s incredible...” Mash stared in awe. “I feel myself thinking as if I remember knowing this Atma, somehow, in my days at Chaldea, dressed as one of the clerks, urging me on to help Senpai, putting us together frequently. Had she been navigating even me towards this?”
“She’s been doing it for all of womankind, so yes, that includes you two, too.” Shiki smirked and moved her hair aside out of her eye, just watching the will of her protege changing history before her eyes. “This is a good sign. Yes. Very good, indeed. It seems we, or I, picked the right woman for the job, and in turn picked the right four women to guide her in her mortal existence to this kind of power. Let’s hope it remains this way.”
It wasn’t long after that that the power in Chaldea began to short out, sparking, bulbs exploding, the red alert sign blaring. Though it was not them in danger, it was them being warned the Master and the singularity itself were in danger. It was black, glowing only red with the alarm, and the three sat there by candlelight trying to determine the cause.
“Maybe I spoke too soon.” Shiki sighed. “I was kind of hoping she wouldn’t go down the route that’d end in some epic, dire struggle but I almost forgot who she was. Dammit, Weapon. What have you gotten us into?”
“Come again?” da Vinci glared. “What is happening?”
“Seems our universal heroine isn’t going to let her story be forgotten, in a way that even we will know to respect her power.” Shiki sighed.
“Are we… What’s happening? My memories are going hazy… The books! The books, look!” Mash pointed, gasping.
The notes and books containing the history of Atma in any form, as Archer, as Counter Force, and especially as the Root of Chivalry, began to flicker in and out of existence, some of it reverting back to the original vague terms it was, some trying their best to fade out. This was not the kind of thing they were expecting, but towards the end of a singularity, they really ought to be.
What’s a final fight without stakes thrown in, after all?
A quick flash to where Atma stood, grinning, her sword still defiant in Haborym’s face, and she spoke the words that caused history itself to start to splinter all over again.
“It’s you or me. One of us is getting erased from history tonight. What do you say to that bet? If I win, you’ll go down as nothing more than petty vengeance and my name screamed by women everywhere forevermore. And if I go, that’s it, you’ve conquered one of the keys to ruling over time and space itself.”
“Ahaha, so be it then, Root! Let us see who stands last, laughing, the others’ head in their hands!”
Whose fire would burn brighter?
The Paramatma of Womankind?
Or the very concept of flames itself taken form to burn even her spirit down?
It was time for the final party arrangement.
No turning back.
~ END OF CHAPTER 12 NODE 2