Fate/Stay Night Fan Fiction ❯ Escaping Fate ❯ Shooting Hundred Heads ( Chapter 23 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

AN: Pun title.  Kind of a terrible one this time.

For those interested, the version of this I post up on Beast’s Lair includes notations for when to start and stop music, plus links to said music on Youtube.  Otherwise, the theme to this chapter is the Fate/Unlimited Codes version of “Emiya.”


Escaping Fate
Chapter 16
Shooting Hundred Heads



It lurked in the shadows of the forest.
The area surrounding the graveyard was unfortunately isolated from the rest of town by numerous trees.  The only saving grace it seemed was that Illya’s grave was in plain sight from the road leading up to the Church, and foot traffic there was, while irregular, present.
The beast was beyond, out of sight, though even I could feel its malice.
“Why isn’t it just charging in?” I asked.  “Should it have awareness like that, to be cautious?”
“It has awareness,” Caren said.  “But usually they react viscerally, on pure emotion.  This…is strange.”
I’m not sure, but…
“Like it’s waiting for us,” Tohsaka said, reading my thoughts.
Caren nodded.  She fingered a set of Black Keys and glanced back toward the street.  “To have form, it is already strong enough to warp the minds of any passerby and even possess them.  But this is acting…unlike what it should be.  The demon image of children, of minds like Yumi and those before her should act like one.  A monster, a terror.”
But there it waited, shadow in the shadows, still meters beyond the clearing we stood in.


It felt their presence.
Rin Tohsaka.  Shirou Emiya.
It bore his malice.
Zouken Matou.
It suffered their desires.
Numerous, from nearly adults to barely teenagers.
It sensed her magic.
Ilyasviel von Einzbern.  The Grail of the Third Magic.
It wanted it all.
But the malice kept it and the desires deemed it.
The most dangerous one and the most irrelevant one.
Caren Ortensia.  The memories of Yumi recalled out her name.
Kill her.


As Caren stepped forward, the shadows moved.
“Scatter!” Tohsaka shouted.
Caren went to my left, Tohsaka right.  I made a charge for the shadow down the middle, bringing the anti-demon Shamshir-e to mind—
Before my eyes, the shadows seemed to grow, take shape, and shot out of the cover of summer canopy.
An undulating mass of darkness, textured, like black static given shape.
It rose like a wave and rushed past, completely ignoring me and charging Caren.  With a single bound, it was beyond my reach, leaking something that smelled like sulfur burning the grass in its wake.
The priestess tossed two handfuls of blades into the mass, which crunched and screeched like dying cicadas.  
“Dammit!” I tried twisting around, Tracing Shamshir-e Zomorrodnegar and planting it in the ground, bracing my foot against the flat.  I kicked off from the blade and pulled, dashing at the shadow’s mass—
Caren tried to jump clear, but the darkness consumed her.
It swarmed her.
It looked…
“And knowing who your old man was doesn’t change that, you know.  Maybe, in spite of that, I’d want to doubly make sure you’re alright.”
For a brief moment, I thought of Kirei Kotomine, smirking, standing over the darkness of Angra Mainyu as it consumed his daughter—
“Shirou!” Tohsaka called.
I spared a glance her way: she had ascended a tree at the edge of the clearing and was now a good four meters above me, giving her a clear view of what was going on.  She raised her hand and I saw the glint of color between her fingertips.
“Neun, Acht, Sieben!  Stil, schießt Beschießen, Erschie Ssung!”
A sense of déjà vu overwhelmed me, recalling a time when Tohsaka jumped from a tree with those exact same foreign words.
Ice rained down on the darkness before us, and as I moved in, raising the emerald-studded sword in my hands, I could see it.
This was not just amorphous shadow, but tiny shadows amidst one another.
Tohsaka’s spell froze some in place, and I cut what was frozen with the scimitar glinting green.  The shadows flinched and undulated, shifting away from the conception of their bane, and from within their grasp I saw the flash of white hair, the faint pale skin of a hand.
I cut a swath, and reached as far in as I could.
“Caren!”
Unable to make it completely in, I was relieved when I saw Caren’s hand reach out for mine, struggling against the wave of black that separated us.  The mass was ugly, horrible, like bugs swarming, crawling and rolling and—
Fangs from within and fangs from without suddenly opened, as if the mass formed a giant mouth with fangs, and each individual worming shadow bared fangs of their own.  Even without eyes, they seemed to look at me eagerly, salivating, ready to consume and feast.
No.
“The horned demon’s fang cries out in agony…”
The squealing masses all seemed to silence in disbelief.
I flooded prana into the scimitar in my hand, and did what I could to Reinforce my body—
Boom.


The blast was nowhere near the level of Caladbolg, for which I was thankful.  As an anti-demonic weapon, Shamshir-e was built around the cutting of elemental creatures, not material ones, so Breaking it was probably more akin to a prana burst than an actual explosion.  Still, I felt pain tear into my hand and arm and enough of a push that I not only caught Caren’s arm with my other arm, but slammed full-force into her.  We were flung completely through the screaming masses of shadows and out the other side, tumbling further into the graveyard.
“AGHHHHH!” I heard myself scream.
In the haze of pain, I could not help but think that was a bad omen.
My eyes opened to the clear blue sky, as if it were mocking the horrific pain I felt in my left arm.  I forced myself to look down, first to check on Caren, who was sprawled just beyond my reach, and I felt relief to see her still whole, still breathing.
Then my arm, which, as I expected, now looked something more like Gae Bolg, blood red and thorny.  Thankfully, still whole as well.
I glanced at the shadow, which now resembled a piece of modern art: textured black wave with a huge hollow circle of negative space smack in the middle of its body.  
“Shirou!” I heard Tohsaka’s voice again.
When I looked her way, she was not looking at the demon.  Instead, she was looking horrified toward the road, and I thought maybe someone had spotted us.  I had, after all, just caused a grenade explosion in the morning hours of a weekday.  I followed her gaze back to the road—
Sakura and Yumi stood there.  Sakura had a deep gash along her face.
I staggered to my hands and knees, wincing as my left arm took on weight and jabbed every nerve in my shoulder with the sensation of a thousand needles.  I groaned and tried to wobble in Caren’s direction to see if she was even conscious.
And found her staring up at the sky, hands clasped together, saying something in what I assumed was Latin.
She was praying.
…Well, at least she wasn’t a fake priestess, I suppose.
“You’re crazy, Shirou,” Caren finally said in words I could understand.  In fact, I understood them better than most, since I often got those exact words in that exact combination.  “And there’s ringing in my ears.”
Tohsaka made it to us and immediately grabbed Caren, pulling her up.  “It’s moving again!” she warned.
I glanced back to find the black mass reconstituting, filling in on itself to reform the mass it lost.  Something about its tiny shapes, though, made me turn back to look over my shoulder, and I saw Sakura now with her attention on it—
The absolute terror in her eyes, with the blood running down her cheek a distorted rendition of tears, and it hit me.
It had awareness greater than a mere demon to terrorize and distort.
Caren said she thought it had been on the residential side of town first, and then it had come here.
Like bugs crawling over one another—
Or worms.
This thing, this demon, had consumed upon darkness before coming here.
The sensation of my blood chilling was enough to get my mind off the pain in my arm, and I pulled myself upright.  “What happened?!” I shouted Sakura and Yumi’s way.
Sakura tore her eyes off the amorphous thing.  “Setsuka Yuushi attacked us!”
I heard Tohsaka make a guttural sound that I’d never heard from her before as she pulled Caren up and put the priestess’ arm around her shoulders.  “Bastard.  Should’ve crawled under a rock where nobody’d find him.”
“Shirou!” Yumi shouted.
Even before turning, I knew that the shadow had returned to a previous, unnervingly monstrous sight.  Flexing my left hand—it still moved, thankfully—I planted myself between the girls and the demon-turned-demon.  “Let’s get out of here.”
“Shirou, you can’t do that when saying let’s,” Rin hissed.
Sakura and Yumi made it to us, and with a closer look it was readily apparent that Sakura had more than just a cut face.  “He attacked us right after you left…I think we lost him just before crossing the bridge,” Yumi said.
A magus that attacked in broad daylight, and a demon ready to do the same.  We had to get away from here; even the church was just not isolated enough.
“Einzbern Castle,” Tohsaka said, again reading my mind.  “A taxi will be faster than any magus is on foot.  At least until we get to the forest edge.”
The mass of shadows withdrew upon itself, like the tide of the sea withdrawing before a great wave.
“Go,” I said.  “I’ll meet you there.”
Yumi pulled at Sakura’s hand and Tohsaka, with a much put-upon sigh, half-carried Caren.  They took toward the street and down toward Shinto, where they could find a car.
I stared at the writhing blackness, and shook my head.
Archers suited for independent action, huh?


The extra got away.
Shirou Emiya still here.
Then…
Malice rose up to control malice, and the desire to kill consumed it.


Once more, looking less like a monster and more like a wave of consumption, the demon reared back and prepared to strike.
“Removing stops.”
If this was infused with Crest Worms, I was going to have to do more than swing an anti-demonic sword at it.
If this was now an extension of Zouken Matou, I was going to have to shoot it a hundredfold times.
I charged right past the creature as it swept in at me, ducking just below an arm-like wave that tried to clothesline me as I did so.  I ran as hard as I could for the trees, and the thing made the same acidic-oozing noise as it moved across the grass after me, now chirping like a perverted sense of laughter.
Sprinting between trees, I prepared them within my mind’s eye.
Demon-Zouken-worm-shadow-mass-creature gave chase, dividing and swaying itself between the narrower confines of the forest, avoiding the tree trunks and masses of bushes that sought to get into its way.
The Greek demigod might have had a bow to shoot many times at once, and heated swords to cauterize stumps, but I did not.  I was also not a Greek hero.
I was Japanese.
“Full Trace, release!”
The god Susanoo defeated the Orochi by bringing its heads through gates by which he could easily cut them.  Out in the open, the demon could hit me from any angle, but between trees and foliage, it was limited in how it could move and what direction it could take.
I didn’t have the power to do it all at once, so I would have to work my way down systematically.
Blades formed and shot out as my mind released them, slamming into the creature as it passed by every tree, wove past every bush and thicket.  I kept imagining Gilgamesh as he rained terror down on Saber and I, and for a moment I felt like I could perhaps thank the King of Heroes.
Moment over.
The demon screeched with each blade thrust into its mass, not slowing but bleeding something sulfurous each time.  I groaned with each blade, the drain of prana on top of running at full speed making me feel light-headed.  Even with recovery time and help, this was just never going to be something I got used to, even if each time I brought a sword to mind, it became easier and easier to shift from thought to seeming.
I glanced over my shoulder to see the demon narrowing itself, now no longer a wave but a jet of liquid, trying to make its profile more difficult to strike.  The way its body undulated made it look even more like a giant worm made up of worms, and I felt bile rise into my throat.
No, this time, you were going to be the one fucked.
I kept up the barrage, blades flying out of the sky to strike the demon, cut its body, pierce each and every one of those fanged mouths—
“The fourth tail is my domain.”
Tracing the bow in one hand, I brought that same legend to mind.  It might even delay this thing further, though I doubt I could make it destroy the demon completely.
And when the demon lobbed part of itself at me, fanged terrors of shadow and all, I knew I would have to.
I blunted one aside with the bow and slashed at another two with the sword, then made for a narrower path.  I would have to hit it head-on…
“Take the fire of my light into battle with beasts—”
It was not the katana so many seemed to associate it with, but the tsurugi of old, like a thicker, longer Chinese Jian.  I nocked it to the bow, took a deep breath—
Another gibbering mass of shadow flew just over my head, and I leapt up in its wake, spinning in place.
“Kusanagi!”
And from the fourth tail of that serpent in the legend, Susanoo took a sword that cut the grass with arcs of wind.
Wind twisted about the sword as it flew, hard enough to propel me back meters before I tumbled to the ground and crashed into the bush.  I watched with detached interest, though, as it embedded right into the front tip of the demon’s throng and, instead of cutting—
Sent wind into the shuddering darkness.
The mass pancaked as the force of the gale thrust the demon’s form flat and back the way we had come.  It spun awkwardly in the air and then soared like a wobbled Frisbee, then out of my line of sight as the forest enveloped it.
I moaned.  Out of prana.  Again.
Coughing once into the dirt, I picked myself up—and regretted it.  The pain in my left arm, no longer shunted aside by the more immediate concern of death to the rest of me, now shot right up my neck in full force.  I felt something in me pop, heard something like the draining of water in a plugged ear sound off deep in the back of my head, and I shuddered.
“Uuuaaahh…”
I gripped my left arm and tried to get my eyes to focus.
At least, this time, I could limp back on my own.


The darkness gathered unto itself, piecing itself together, until it could swim amidst itself as before.
Shirou Emiya.
The name sounded like whispers amidst the fanged worms and fanged shade made up of worms.
It felt it, too, now, from him, that same taint as the body in the graveyard.
But stronger, pure.
The graveyard was no more than a faint echo.  But Shirou Emiya…
The darkness outside of him was complete.  Full.  Powerful.
If the darkness could consume that darkness, it would be invincible.
Shirou Emiya stood between it and its malice, its desire—
But something troubled the malice, while exciting the desire…
If the darkness around him was so great—
How did the light within survive?