Fate/Stay Night Fan Fiction ❯ Escaping Fate ❯ This Body... ( Chapter 27 )

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

AN: Yeah, I switched narrative perspectives here, without an interlude.  It does the same in the game, too.  That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

You might as well just listen to the original version of “Emiya” this time around.


Escaping Fate
Chapter 20
This Body…


Setsuka Yuushi.
His origin: to connect.
His research had been the perfect culmination of his talents.  He had made peerless leaps in how souls reacted to one another, how they could interact, how they could be bound together and torn asunder.  He had taken that to the furthest personification one could: to connect multiple souls together, to make multiple circuits of magical energy accessible to one body.
But…
He could not have known…
That in doing so to others, in chiseling lives into one perfect expression, he would be creating his own downfall—
A girl, connected to all the lives he had taken.
Her life, connected to those that had saved her.
Her savior, now fated to be connected to the one that made her—


His body was made of swords.
He took a blade, swung it at the enemy.
His enemy raised a scalpel, swiped in the direction of the sword.
The sword would dissolve into harmless liquid or crumble as if brittle coal.
Another sword would appear in hand, before the enemy could press the attack.
Again, the blade would pass into harmlessness.
The infinite blades confronted the tireless soul, one bleeding every ounce of energy into every swing, to make the other bleed out their soul’s relief.
His enemy bleeds the prana of lives stolen.
He bleeds the blades formed like plinths around him.
His blood is of iron and his heart is of glass.


Rin Tohsaka pulled herself with her one good arm enough to tumble and face the battlefield.
 “How did he—?” she muttered, glancing around.  In this place, she felt, though still pained and ready to roll over and die, like something was keeping her from it, like a physical barrier keeping death at bay.  
It felt like…
In this place, the expression of the soul, the Reality Marble of one who was saved, who felt he had to live in the name of those that could not be saved:
The ground was dead, burnt away, destroyed by the evil and curses of the entire world twice over.  It was dusty and dry and unfit for human existence—
However…
The sky was pale and golden, warm, a horizon the likes of which Rin had never laid eyes upon.
It was not the perfect world, the Reality Marble itself a hellish wasteland.
Yet in every direction, no matter which way she turned her gaze, like the majestic beauty of rising mountains in the distance, Rin could only see—
A distant utopia.
“Shirou…”
Evil may have laid claim to the lands within him, but…
His eyes would never stray from the world beyond.


He survived countless battles.
He rained swords down upon the enemy, his soul striking the magus from every side.
Some, the enemy turned into liquid or powder.  Others, he swiped in half with a tiny blade of his own.  More still, if striking his body, rebounded off of dense clothing and hardened skin.
This enemy was older, more experienced, had fought, magi and mundane both.  He had won every time.  He was an expert in his field, knowledgeable, and now had magical capacity surpassing even multiple Rin Tohsakas and Sakura Matous.
But…
Shirou Emiya…
Not even once retreating…
Not even once victorious—


Sakura Matou watched, her eyes drawn to each blade in turn.
She recalled each time Shirou had spoken of Saber, recalled the stories of Saber’s origin.
How the King had pulled the sword from the stone, taking on the responsibilities of a kingdom.
There was no kingdom here, no green lands nor working people.  This place was a graveyard, a mere echo of things long gone.
Yet each was embedded in the stone-like earth, and each stood waiting to be picked up by the one who lived for what they represented.
Sakura saw her sister and Caren both seem to get better, seem to slowly recover, and she thought, perhaps, just maybe—
It was not the world of Avalon, but it certainly did seem to be…
Like the one who took the sword from that stone, as one who had lived for so long by being saved by others—
A blessing of the faeries.
In this place, he would stop being saved, and save others.


The bearer lies here alone.
He doesn’t know how the Reality Marble continues to hold, blades at his feet and swords raining from the sky.  He floods every ounce of his energy into holding the image within him tightly, and a tiny trickle seems to always continue to pour out of him into this world, even when he thinks it should have stopped.
He is grateful, though, and relentless.  
With every sword that passes harmlessly by, he picks up another, scissor-cutting at the enemy’s neck with twin katana, delivering a one-two combo to the enemy’s left shoulder with a curved kopis and heavy gladius, thrusting with the errant longspear, jabbing with a rapier, then jian—
The enemy backpedals, weaves aside, swings wildly to sunder each incoming weapon, deflecting or avoiding the weapons rained down from above.
Shirou Emiya presses the attack with blades that should not exist in a world that should not exist created by a spell that should not continue to exist.
Perhaps, intuitively, he understands why.
He was saved by others buried in a hill of swords.


Yuushi curses.
Reset, circuits.
He curses again.
Reset, circuits.
And again.
Reset, circuits.
He curses until his throat is dry, his tongue sore, his lips numb—
This man, his Reality Marble, the blades he conjured out of the nothingness within him:
Seemed to stretch out into infinity.
Reset, circuits.
Yuushi saw each blade, could recompose each chemical element making up every single one, broke down everything and restructured it until it no longer resembled a sword.  He turned them to the equivalent matter of water, of earthen dust, of hydrogen and helium, into nothing more than a harmless composite of minerals and chemicals.
Reset, circuits.
He cut others into two, down their tempered edges, splitting them to fall at either side of his body, the metallic cacophony of metal raking against metal sounding in his ears as his own precise weapon cleaved great huge weapons into pieces.  His Reinforced scalpel was plenty against these fakes, these illusionary forgeries in this fantasy forge.
Reset, circuits.
His very body took more, blades deflected by clothing as hard as metal armor and skin as dense as ironwood.   He caught some full in the chest, others batted away with hardened arms, some even fielded by his feet and knees and head as if they were a soccer ball.  
Reset, circuits.
Yet for everything, for every move, for every weapon defeated—
More.
More.
More.
These blades…
If they didn’t stop…
Reset, circuits.
He would—


Thus, his life needs no meaning.
He has those that died behind him, those that will die before him.  He had within him enough, just enough—
To turn the tide.
The swords he used before, weapons of utility, blades he had seen within his lifetime in museums, swords he had thought up on his own by breaking down the essential components and building them slowly up in his mind.
Yuushi destroyed, deflected, or avoided every single one.
He was getting nowhere.
The unlimited blades continued against the inexhaustible soul.
So…
Moralltach the great fury.
He plucked a longsword, greater in length than he was tall.  It passed to mere centimeters before the enemy’s skin before turning into dust.
Tizona the feared firebrand.
Yuushi momentarily panicked before the patterned blade, wildly leaping out of the way as it was thrust toward his chest.  The magus dove laterally, charged to one side, and hastily swiped his blade and barrier command at it, splitting the weapon right down the center fuller.
Kusanagi of the multi-tailed Orochi.  Crocea Mors the yellow death.
He flung the Japanese tsurugi as if a mere game of darts, tossing the enemy to the ground when wind scythed about the blade as it missed.  The thick Roman weapon then splashed harmlessly into the soil as he thrust it down at the prone Yuushi, who picked himself up at the same time.
Kiku-ichimonji of the thirteen swordsmiths.
He swung with the precision of his right hand and the might of his left, shearing white hairs before swirling into a mist of sulfurous air.
Arondight the cursed light of the lake.
The black blade exploded in a flash of sparks; the blade manipulated by Yuushi’s spellwork but the energy behind the sword showering the magus in unfading light.
Hrunting the fanged hound.  Nægling the jeweled skewer.
Both weapons broke into two as they collided with a small scalpel.
Tonbogiri the spear with wings.
Thrust.
Zulfiqar the sword of bifurcation.
Swing.
Mistilteinn the sword of Dead Apostles.
Stab.
Taming Sari the dancing kris.
Curtana of confession.
Gae Bolg the spear of heart impaling.
Caladbolg the spiral sword.
Thuan Thien the sword of three returns.
Durandal the paladin’s wish.
Muramasa the killing blade.
Shamshir-e the demon slayer.
Gram of the tree Barnstokk.
Kanshou and Bakuya the twin scimitars.
Joyeuse the sword of shifting colors.
Protesilaus’ Bane the spear of Hector.
Caliburn the golden kingmaker.
With the golden sword in hand, Shirou swung with all his might, and Yuushi raised his scalpel to cut.
The blades met, and halted before one another.
Yuushi was out of prana.
And Shirou Emiya—
His body, truly, was made of infinite swords.


I gasped for air, my lungs on fire, every nerve in my body feeling overwrought and empty of anything else to give, my muscles so deeply aching that I could count every single one individually.  My bones creaked and I thought that if I moved any further, more steel would leap from everywhere in me, worse than ever before, and I would die from my own self-inflicted wounds.
But I forced weight into my arms and wrists, and forced opposition of his scalpel until his balance was off.  Even out of prana, he could still cut me, and though I had survived a cut from him in our first encounter, I couldn’t trust my body to protect me in the same way this time, not when I was so low on prana—
I guided his weapon out of line until it was incapable of cutting me and then tried forcing him to overshoot me and run headlong into Caliburn.  He twisted out of the way as I did and I only caught his sleeve, but the blade of Arturia sundered his Reinforcement just as easily as it had Berserker’s God Hand.  It drew blood beneath the sleeve cut and Yuushi, momentarily distracted, faltered in raising his defense.
Spinning on my heel and making a 180-degree turn, I took a broad swipe.
Caliburn caught his scalpel’s flat and seared the knife in two.


Yumi watched, in fascination, in delight, in terror, in fear—
Fear—
She felt the lives within her, felt as if their senses suddenly were batting down on hers, and she felt confusion as she tried to sort out why.  She thought it might be possible that the lives within Yuushi calling out to her, some terrible connection between herself and them, calling out as they sought release as well, felt their impending demise and freedom to return to what was natural…
And then Yumi realized what it was.
Just outside this world of blades, like the pounding of the surf against the seashore, trying to add itself to the existence within.
She looked up to Sakura and uttered her fears—


And from without the boundary of the Reality Marble, from outside the existence of Shirou Emiya:
The darkness of a demon and of a demon together sought to penetrate and rape the illusionary world, and bring salvation or torment to those within.