A/N

There's a lot to explain, isn't there.

(Much) longer Author's Note at the end of this chapter, but TL;DR is:

I wasn't sure how I would handle having so many characters in this story, so I'm starting over from scratch.

Oh, and...if you're not a fan of Tamamo, you're probably going to hate this story, if you didn't already hate the original version.

If you are, you're in the right place. I hope.

See you at the bottom.

"Trash who can't even follow orders...just the mere sight of you makes me want to throw up."

Standing on the edge of the tall cliff in the cavern housing the Greater Grail, a tall man in a dark green suit and top hat with long, rather spiky dark purple hair faces a small group of young women far below him at ground zero.

One of the women, an adolescent girl dressed in the part of a high-standing modern aristocrat with long silver hair, begins to break rank, inching towards the man up on the cliff at first. The girl standing in the middle, looking rough for wear and holding upright a big cross-shield that towers above her by a good foot or two, notices movement out of the corner of her eye and darts her gaze over to the source.

"Director! Director, don't! That man - that man isn't - !"

"Lev! Lev, oh thank God you're alive! I - huh!?"

The last member of the party, a plainly dressed girl in white and black and with bright orange hair, has spotted the aristocratic girl moving first and has reacted more swiftly, stopping her before she can take more than a few steps by grabbing firm hold of her arm.

"Wait, what are you doing? Let go of me, Miss Ritsuka!"

"...Doctor," the girl named Ritsuka hoarsely calls so that the girl with the shield can clearly hear, "can you make a return portal to Chaldea right now?"

Behind the tall man in the dark green suit is a colossal metal structure, consisting of two levels of slowly rotating spherical beams, and at their center lies a bright red and orange core that looks like the core of the Earth, despite the fact that this core has blackened masses on it that resemble the continents of the planet like a globe.

"Okay, opening emergency Rayshift now. But we need to know what Lev's doing here, and I can only keep the Rayshift active for so long with how badly compromised our equipment is already!"

"Miss Ritsuka, I am giving you one last warning, please let me go!" the aristocratic girl raises her voice in an attempt to intimidate the girl with the orange hair into releasing her, but Ritsuka staunchly refuses to comply and continues to hold her in place.

The man in the top hat on the cliff overlooking the three girls pops a nasty little grin, somehow watching them with eyes that have been closed this whole time.

"Why is it that humans always try to avoid their preordained destinies? Honestly, they're just as bad as the trash who don't listen to orders when they're supposed to..."

"Director, Director, please listen to us! That isn't Lev - not the one we know, anyway!" Mash tries desperately to reason with the aristocratic girl, but she shakes her head vehemently with equal desperation.

"You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong! That's definitely Lev up there! It isn't anyone else! He's here to make sure we make it back to Chaldea safe! That's why he's here! He's always been one of Chaldea's greatest assets, one of our best technicians! He's - "

"He's not here to help us, Director," Ritsuka says quietly, eyeing the man named Lev on the cliff, watching them with condescending antagonism. "He's here to do the exact opposite."

"Oh ho ho! Quite the perceptive Master you turned out to be, Candidate #48!" Lev laughs with a booming but cacophonic voice that is easily able to travel through the vast expanse of this internal cavern. "Indeed, it appears that I have made quite the egregious error to naively overlook you as an improbable little child, a nonfactor. But to see that you have risen well above the capability that an unassuming and frankly unimpressive candidate like you should normally demonstrate, certainly that calls for at least a bit of praise. But I shall spare you of even that."

"Doctor, where's that Rayshift - ?!" Ritsuka yells - the Director is trying to yank her own arm away to escape her grasp.

"I'm working on it as fast as I can, I can only rush this so much! I'm a freaking medical doctor, not an actual technician like Lev!"

"And yet you still know how to operate the Rayshift mechanism in Chaldea. Hm, how curious, Romani - I wonder how that came to be?" Lev nefariously snickers. "Well, no matter; when it comes time for it, I shall dispose of you as I did the others. For now, however - "

Resorting to magecraft, the Director points her right index finger right at Ritsuka's face and fires a quick Gandr shot that blasts her in the face. The shot is mostly harmless, but the Director's carelessness results her pelting Ritsuka directly in the right eye, which, for someone like Ritsuka with merely mediocre magical talent, is enough to smear magical residue all over the lens of the eye, temporarily blinding it.

The resultant pain of taking a Gandr bullet straight to the eye forces Ritsuka to recoil sharply, letting go of the Director to clutch at her damaged right eye, and the Director correspondingly capitalizes on her newfound freedom to make a mad dash for the man named Lev, but Ritsuka, able to overcome the pain quickly, takes off after the Director immediately. For as mediocre of a Master that she is, Ritsuka possesses at least the bare minimum to pass Chaldea's required baseline parameters for physical aptitude, which is more than what someone like the Director can profess to have, and coupled with the Director's desperation and panic, Ritsuka quickly overtakes her again and once more grabs hold of her, this time grabbing a fistful of the back of her collar.

"That's very cute that you're trying to save Olga, #48, but unfortunately I can't have that. I've got a little grudge against her, you see - and I daresay I'll see my little grudge fulfilled before I have this place collapse."

Having raised his left hand down at the two girls closer to him and the cliff now, Lev channels mana through it, and his hand thereby pulses briefly with sickly yellow energy.

Reacting quickly, Ritsuka pulls Olga and throws her backwards away from the spot that they're standing in as hard as she can, and the Director yelps with pain as she scrapes her shoulder from the force of Ritsuka's throw.

"Miss Ritsuka! Just what was - ?!"

To Olga's horror, Candidate #48 is no longer standing on the ground. Instead, she is already in the process of floating up through the air, as if pulled by telekinesis, with her body also glowing with the same sickly yellow energy as that which appeared on Lev's hand - straight towards the rift in the space behind Lev that displays the reddened Chaldeas.

"A heroic sacrifice, is it? Hahaha, perhaps to be expected of you by this point, #48, always going above and beyond! But such exceptionalism ends here. If I cannot purge Olga, then you will do - for now."

"Senpai! Lev, Professor Lev, stop this right now!" the girl with the cross-shield guarding the emergency Rayshift site screams out when she realizes what's happening to her companion.

"Mash, listen to me!" Ritsuka shouts at the top of her voice, but even as her body is compelled to approach Chaldeas as though it were a magnet, her voice remains steady and unwavering. "Take the Director and run!"

"Emergency Rayshift coordinates confirmed, it's ready to go!" Doctor Romani announces finally, though it is clearly a little too late for one of the girls.

"But Doctor, Senpai is - Senpai is - ! ! !"

At that moment, Ritsuka's body, having soared towards Chaldeas with forced impunity, slaps like a wet towel against the surface of Chaldeas, and the subsequent screams of agony and pain echo through the walls of the massive cavern more than Lev's voice does.

"As much as I hate to say it, there's no saving Ritsuka now, she's a goner! Do as she said, Mash - we need to at least save the Director! As soon as you grab her, I'll Rayshift both of you out before Lev can take another one of you!"

Unable to bear the tortured screams of her Master, Mash Kyrielight lowers her shield from its defensive stance to use the last of what strength she has remaining after her arduous fight against the corrupted Saber right before Lev appeared to bolt for Olga. Seizing her by the collar again just as the cavern begins to tremble and quake, Mash leans down to yell straight at her face.

"Director, Miss Director, please, get up!" Mash screams so that she's heard over the roaring of breaking rocks and splitting earth. "We - are - LEAVING!"

Having stared at the sight of Fujimaru Ritsuka's body become absorbed while being incinerated into the molten core that is Chaldeas, the screams of pain having eerily subsided into nothingness in the meantime, Olga snaps back to reality with Mash's desperate shrieks and quickly gets up to her feet, and Mash plants her shield in front of both of them as Doctor Romani calculates the Rayshifting coordinates for the Director quickly.

"Such a waste, might I add, Olga!" Lev calls tauntingly down at the two remaining girls before him. "I wished to explain this to you before this little twist of events, but know this: you are already dead! You got caught in the blast from the bomb I planted in Chaldea - mainly because I literally had it set right underneath your feet when it went off. Your body is dead, torn to pieces by the humiliating means of non-magical destruction! You're only here because Trismegistus oh so thoughtfully transferred you here along with that Demi-Servant and #48 once you'd become residual thoughts. So even if you Rayshift now, all that will happen when your consciousness returns to the present is that you will return to a body that is no longer capable of sustaining it! Either way, I will see my little grudge against you come to fruition!"

Her lower jaw slack with mute terror, Olga merely gapes up at Lev as the truth of her presence in this Singularity is revealed to her.

"...so...so that's why...even though I never could...I never had any aptitude for Rayshifting..." Olga whispers up into the air.

"Humanity's fate is already sealed! You lot have all already perished with your incineration! No one can change the outcome now, for this is a rejection of humanity by human history!" Lev's evil, toothy grin reaches the apex of its sinister nature. "Farewell, Romani. And you two as well, Mash and Olga - believe it or not, I have other things to tend to, so my enjoyment of your annihilation ends here. Olga will die as soon as she leaves this Singularity anyway, and without any more Masters at Chaldea's disposal, you're nothing more than a useless weapon without a wielder, Mash, so even if you do somehow escape this dimensional warp alive, there is nothing you can do. Spend the rest of your days, however limited they are, knowing that there is no hope left for you."

And with that, Lev disappears, leaving the cavern to accelerate its own self-destruction.

"Doctor!" Mash screams one last time, catching Olga as she begins to collapse again to her own feet in shock in the wake of Lev's parting words.

"Coordinates locked, Rayshifting now!"

Rain.

It's not often that it rains down here in southern California. The last time we had rain like this was...back during the later half of last year, now that I think about it. And even more strange is the fact that it's raining during the beginning of July. I can't remember the last time it rained in SoCal during July.

Growing up, I never liked the rain. Back when I was still in grade school, since I lived near the schools I attended, namely middle school and high school, I'd just walk to and from school rather than getting a ride there like most of the other kids did, as they were prone to do since I live in a pretty well-to-do area of Southern California that's near the coast. So you can imagine what happens when it rains - depending on the severity, the storm drains would be flooded and the sides of the roads would have entire torrents of rainwater gushing down the declines towards their respective storm gutters. And then I'd have to walk through all that. I guess it's my own damn fault for not ever bothering to bring an umbrella since I don't believe in those when you can just bring a hoodie jacket or sweater that does basically the same thing - but even then, a hoodie doesn't exactly protect you from cars that drive a little too close to the sidewalk and splash you with a small tidal wave of dirty rainwater.

Eh, could be worse, I suppose. At least those cars had the decency not to run me over wholesale.

Since it's raining for the first time in a while, I suppose I can treat myself to a cigarette, which I also haven't had one of in a while too. Reaching into a small blue rune that appears in front of my right hand, I pull out a perfectly dry and fresh pack of Natural American Spirit Black that I bought earlier this week in anticipation of the rainy weather that's been forecast, and sure enough, it looks like my venture is about to be rewarded.

I take a single cigarette and slip the box back into the small rune that waits for me to deposit it back into it, and it only disappears once I've done so. Holding the cigarette in between my front teeth, I shield the end of the cigarette by cupping my left hand over it and set my other hand underneath. That hand that's slipped underneath, held as though it's holding a lighter even though there is none in it, rolls the thumb inwards as if to use that imaginary lighter, and a small little flame still sparks anyway as if to prove the spontaneous generation theory, which it isn't. I hold the little flame underneath the end of the cigarette for long enough to light it adequately, and once it is, I pull my right hand away and give it a quick little shake off to my side as if to extinguish it, even though there's really no need for me to.

Taking a deep drag of the cigarette and letting the richness of the fumes leave a rather ambrosial aftertaste in my mouth, I lower the quietly burning cigarette down by my other side as I stand underneath the awning right outside a tiny strip that's got a bagel store and a Five Guy's hamburger restaurant, just barely out of range of the moderate amount of rain that we have tonight. The noxious cigarette fumes waft into the winds that accompany the rain, dispersing them away from the stores despite the fact that I really shouldn't be smoking a cigarette this close to the strip. Eh, it's fine, there's no one around and it's almost ten o'clock in the evening - the bagel shop behind me's already closed for the day, and there should only be a few more customers in that Five Guy's to my right.

I reach up momentarily to adjust my cap. It's my favorite cap - a plain black snapback with a little yin-yang emblem over the visor that sports a pair of little wings.

Where did I leave off...ah right, the rain. So yeah...I used to dislike the rain. It's noisy, it's inconvenient and gets all your clothes wet if you're outside without an umbrella, and it's just generally annoying to deal with.

But as people grow older, so too do their tastes and preferences change at times...over time. As I got over all the annoying things about the rain, I found myself starting to enjoy it more, slowly but surely. After a hard day of work, the pattering of rain and the whispers of the winds that so often comes with it is therapeutic to the ears, like a soft, gentle blanket that massages the ears. None of that autonomous sensory meridian response nonsense...though I'll admit some of them are pretty nice. But the rain is a natural form of that; no need to rely on watching videos to listen to something that can help you relax when you have something like this that's free and all-natural. The only damn problem is how rare it is around these parts. I wonder if I should just move up to Seattle instead...

For a natural loner like me, the rain is one of the best friends I could ask for. Not to be dramatic, but it does help ease the sense of isolation that I have at times, as much as I've gotten accustomed to it. It's unassuming, and it comes by whenever it feels like it, with no concern of whatever it is that you've been doing. It's like a nice little periodic reminder to me to make sure to take a moment to enjoy the little things in life, that despite everything else that might be going on, sometimes taking it easy is exactly what I need to do. And it's not like I'm bothered by coming home completely drenched anymore...

Glancing down at my lit cigarette, I watch the end of it smolder with its embers glowing back up at me. I suppose I can say the same about my smoking - at first, in grade school, I was opposed to smoking, partly because I hated the secondhand smoke and how it smelled, and partly because the education I received heavily emphasized the dangers of smoking. Lung cancer, throat cancer, all that stuff, I don't need to recite that kind of shit to you. I remember during my sophomore year in high school, on the last day of school before the end of the school year, a good chunk of the graduating senior class gathered in the center outdoor amphitheater and lit up cigarettes en masse, and the secondhand smoke that got produced as a result was so bad that I could smell it a mile away once I leave campus to head home.

Clearly now is a different story. My father was a casual smoker - being a Korean immigrant, he'd brought over the habit when he moved to America. He used to be a much heavier smoker, but gradually as he got older, and due to the generally anti-smoking atmosphere here in America, he reduced his smoking habit to the point where he actually did completely kick it, but he always kept a pack around just in case he felt that itch again. Usually whenever he did smoke around me, I knew it was a sign that either he was feeling pretty nostalgic that day or he'd had a rough day at work and wanted nothing but a drink and a cigarette to reset himself.

In his memory, I've picked up the habit as well...and I make sure to keep the smoking down to a minimum, of course. I want to say that I first picked up the habit because I'd always wondered what went through his head during moments like these, after he's been compelled to light up another one. Would the thoughts I'd have drifting through my head like the cigarette fumes I produce be similar to his? Surely I must've known back then when I turned eighteen and bought my first pack that there was no realistic way of me knowing. Let's just say that I was young and stupid at the time and leave it at that.

I guess that part of me never changed.

In any case...rain and a cigarette, outside a little strip next to a mostly empty parking lot. The perfect setting for a quiet loner like me, even though I wouldn't really look the part.

Actually, on second thought...I look down at myself to reaffirm my fashion choice for tonight, implying that I have any such sense of fashion. A blue shirt with the word "ARTS" scrawled across the chest like graffiti, a clean pair of black jeans that fit neatly and comfortably, and a light dark gray hoodie...and, of course, my snapback. Yeah, I take that back, I definitely look the part.

Taking another drag from my cigarette, I pull out my Samsung Galaxy S8 in the meantime and press the power button to make it display the time. 9:54 PM...six more minutes. I make the most out of my six minutes standing out here enjoying this rare cigarette and the rare rain, a combination that, for reasons I've explained before, I seldom get to enjoy. I haven't had dinner yet, so the smart thing to do would be to pick up some food at Five Guys' to take back with me to eat at home while I'm out here waiting, but I think I can get a pass on not doing the smart thing when I'm already out here lighting up.

I do take the time to think about what I'll order so that I can place my order quickly without having to wait in line staring like an idiot up at the menu while the cashier waits on me. A cheeseburger with lettuce, onions, barbecue sauce, Portabella mushrooms, and bacon sounds nice, along with medium Cajun fries. Gotta have Cajun fries, Five Guys' has the best Cajun fries in my experience. They put a bit too much seasoning on them for my tastes, but they're still good, and the fact that they practically dump way more fries than their little cups can even begin to hold is what seals the deal.

Just before my phone hits ten flat, a lone car pulls up to the parking lot from the other side of the business park that we're situated in. It's a Mercedes-Benz S560, and it pulls up and parks two spaces over from my black Model S Tesla. Out of the driver's seat emerges a tall, middle-aged man in a business casual outfit who walks up to me with a strong and confident stride.

"Commissioner Stanley," I address the man with a professional smile of regards as the two of us exchange a firm handshake.

"Good to see you, Mr. Il. How are you doing this fine rainy evening?" the police commissioner asks politely with a pleasant smile of his own. He's a tall, lanky man like myself, just with a bit more height over me and of Caucasian descent.

"Enjoying the rain tonight. Been a while since we last had some nice rain," I tell him, waving my lit cigarette in the direction of the rain.

"Nice, nice. I come across quite a few people who say they like the rain, but I've only ever met one person so far who's told me that while outdoors."

"And who might that be?"

"The gentleman I'm talking to right now."

I let out a quick snort of amusement. "Bunch'a fake rain enthusiasts, I'm tellin' ya."

"Certainly seems to be the case. It's just a symptom of the times we live in, Mr. Il, I'll tell you that much. Oh, and if I might remind you, it's against city protocol here to smoke within fifteen feet of any commercial building..."

"I know. You'll let me slide on that one since there's no one around at this hour, and I'd like to enjoy this cigarette with the rain without having to mix the two."

"Yes, yes, of course. Well, I don't want to keep you for too long; is there anything you wish to report tonight?"

I point inside my car, and Commissioner Stanley takes a peek inside from the safety of the awning covering us from the rain.

"Threat's been eliminated. I had some extra time on my hands, so I went ahead and made a file on this case," I inform the police commissioner, producing a file from the same blue storage rune and handing it to him.

"Excellent - well done, Mr. Il. President McLaughlin will be pleased to hear that this matter is resolved now...you wouldn't imagine how much this's been bothering the PD before we had to contact you."

"I can imagine...he was a tricky motherfucker to take out. It's a good thing you didn't pursue this case any further than you did; a lot of good lives could've been jeopardized if you hadn't called me as soon as you did."

"That was the hunch that I got, yep. Considering the previous, let's say, 'shortcomings' we've had over the years."

"No kidding. Well, that's pretty much it from me. Do you want a burger before you head off, Commissioner?" I stick my thumb over my shoulder in the direction of the Five Guys' behind me.

"As much as I'd love to, it's already very late at night - my wife's going to be giving me an earful the moment I get back. I haven't been doing so well coming back home on time lately..." Commissioner Stanley chuckles awkwardly.

"Totally understandable. Then have a good night - feel free to let me know if something else comes up."

"Certainly. And you too, Mr. Il."

Taking another deep drag, I watch Commissioner Stanley's Mercedes-Benz pull out of its parking space and quickly accelerate towards the exit to my right that feeds into one of the major roads of the city, giving the car one last curt wave from my cigarette-holding hand. Tapping the burnt cigarette remains off to the side, where they fall into a tiny blue rune that's acting as a magical ashtray of sorts, I make sure I'm not carelessly spilling any of the ashes down onto the sidewalk.

Once my cigarette is all spent and I've gotten my money's worth out of it, I dispose of the cigarette properly at a nearby public wastebasket and pull out, once again from my magic storage rune, a small little bottle of air freshener. It's a custom-made bottle of spray freshener that's specifically made to combat cigarette smell, and I can spray it both directly onto my clothes and inside my mouth so that people don't have to deal with the secondhand that tends to cling to me after a cig. It's not often I have to use the freshener with how normally little I smoke to begin with, but I like to be considerate of people around me, or try to be, at least.

Once I've gotten rid of the cigarette smell, I head inside the Five Guy's, place my order, wait for it to come out while scrolling through Twitter on my phone, and come back out with a somewhat greasy paper bag with my cheeseburger and Cajun fries inside. The smell of it is amazing as always, even if Five Guys' as a hamburger establishment is considerably pricier than what I'm used to, but once in a while is fine, especially when I can treat myself to their Cajun fries in the meantime.

Entering the driver's seat of my Tesla, I put the paper bag down on the floor of the shotgun seat so that the grease and burger smell doesn't sink into the car seat itself. I put my soft drink in one of the cup holders and my phone in the little tray next to the cup holders, and the electric car's dashboard, recognizing my phone via Bluetooth, picks up the lofi hip-hop playlist that it was playing before I got out of the car about half an hour earlier and begins to pump lofi beats into the car soothingly. A perfect playlist to go along with the moderate rain outside, if I say so myself.

Glancing quickly up at my rear-view mirror, I take a look at the corpse I've shoved into the back seat, directly behind me. It's the corpse of a human male, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts; his head is still sporting a pair of Ray-Bans on its scalp. That's just about where the normalities with the corpse end; blood mars the clothing in several distinct places, each area denoting a gunshot wound. The most eye-opening one is the one that is planted in place of the corpse's right eye, which has caused the corpse's left eye to roll upwards to the left in a horribly unnatural manner.

Actually, I take that back, too. The strangest thing about the corpse in the back of my car is the fact that it's wearing its seat belt. But then again, in the state of California, a human corpse is still considered a passenger, which then allows you to drive in the carpool lane with no penalty. Seat belts are still important, even after you're already dead.

Rocking my head calmly to the slow tempo of the lofi beats, I back the car up and exit the business park to head home for the night.

My office phone suddenly rings next to me. Having arrived home and disposed of the corpse that I'd brought back properly, I've brought my late dinner up to my office with me so that I can eat my burger and fries while watching the start of the Critical Role episode that's rerunning tonight, since I came back home around the time that the live episode concluded.

Glancing at my noisy phone, I quickly reach for a napkin to wipe the bits of grease off the fingertips of my right hand, which is definitely the cleaner hand since my left hand usually handles the fries, and I reach over to pick up the phone.

"Speaking."

"Oh thank God you're still up, August, do you have time right now? This is an emergency!"

"I'm usually up pretty late, it's only about ten forty-five right now at night. What's up, Doc?"

"Long story short, one of our technicians named Lev sabotaged our Chaldea operations when we tried deploying our batch of Masters to the first Singularity, and so we've lost the majority of our staff; pretty much it's only me, Mash, Olga, and Da Vinci who's left. Olga's in deep trouble; Da Vinci's managed to stabilize her condition somehow but she's in need of intensive care and you're the only one among our freelancers who specializes in the medical field at all. Can you get down here right now to assist? The Director's in critical condition!"

"Oh, it's Olga? Meh, she'll be fine."

"She's really not! You see, Lev planted a bomb inside the operations control room and had it go off right as we were about to Rayshift the Masters into the Singularity, and Olga was standing directly underneath it! It was six whole blocks of C-4, it's completely wrecked our entire operations room. I don't know how her body even stayed this intact from that blast - mage or not, that much plastic explosives shouldn't leave anything behind when someone's that close!"

"So what's her condition right now?"

"Da Vinci's managed to stabilize her, like I said - luckily her consciousness got transferred to the Singularity along with the one Master we had who managed to escape the blast unscathed, along with Mash, so Da Vinci was able to work on her while they were in the Singularity proper. But she won't last without proper medical attention, and we are in absolutely no state right now to report an incident of this scale!"

Watching Matt tell the crew, "How do you want to do this?" amidst the subsequent squeals and cheers, I grab my soft drink to take a sip out of it.

"How many casualties? And how many wounded?"

"Casualty count is currently at 74 and counting, Mash is busy accounting for the rest of the staff. It's looking real bad...practically the entire staff's dead, and all the Masters are, too."

"What about the one you said escaped the blast?"

"She, uh...she's gone. Lev somehow pulled her into Chaldeas..."

"Ouch. That ain't a good way to go."

"No, it's not. Anyway, the only wounded we have is Olga. Heavy burns, lacerations, and both of her legs got blown off from the knees up."

"Did Da Vinci make sure to keep her legs safe?"

"Yeah, she's got them, and she's done what she can to delay their cell deaths. You need to get here fast, August!"

"I heard you the first time, Doc. I'll be there in five."

Dropping my office phone back onto its receiver, I quickly demolish the rest of what remains of my burger, take a long sip of my Mellow Yellow Peach, and leave the fries behind on my desk to head to the bathroom to wash up. Once done, I quickly head down the four flights of stairs that take me from the second floor of my townhouse home all the way down to the small storage basement, where I've established, with Olga's permission, a portal rune that leads directly to the teleportation lobby of Chaldea.

With the warp successful, I find myself no longer standing in the basement of my own home next to the garage, but instead in the cold, empty lobby of Chaldea that's hidden behind the large cafeteria, where the staff congregate to eat their meals. The eerie absence of any noise is already enough to suggest that something is very wrong, if Dr. Romani didn't advise me of the situation beforehand.

Realizing that I probably should have asked the Doc where they were keeping Olga, I toss out a short magic scan that sweeps through the facility to locate what little of the staff still remains, and I locate them holed up in one of the rooms that they used to house the Masters and hurry over, running through the hallways when normally it is against facility protocol to do so. Eh, I've already broken one protocol today, what's breaking another gonna do.

The door to the room where Olga and the others are senses my approach and opens up swiftly for me as I step inside.

"You're finally here! Thanks for showing up so quick, but...as you can see, Olga's in a really rough spot right now," Dr. Romani Archaman greets me. He's another tall and lanky dude with long, platinum orange-ish (?) hair that he keeps back in a ponytail and dressed in the usual Chaldea staff uniform, as he's the resident physician in charge of making sure that the Masters who were supposed to go to the first Singularity were in optimal physical condition to do so.

"You couldn't tend to her instead of me?" I remark calmly as I immediately get to work, sitting down next to Olga to fully examine her condition for myself.

"I'm just a physician, you know! Not a surgeon or a medic like you! Cut me some slack, August!"

"Alright, alright, that's quite enough from you when we've got a patient in the room," Da Vinci gives him a quick rap on the head to silence him. Da Vinci is the third Servant summoned by Chaldea's FATE summoning system at a time when FATE was still woefully incomplete, but because she'd taken an interest to Chaldea as a whole and thanks to a little convincing on Romani's part, she decided to stick around, though the details on how exactly she's able to remain here as a Servant despite the fraudulent nature of her summoning is lost on me. I think it involves her making a duplicate version of herself and then asserting that as her "Master" in order to loophole the summoning system, but I'd have to ask Da Vinci herself again for clarification, which I obviously cannot do at the moment.

Back to Olga - the Director, like Romani warned me, is in bad shape. Six blocks of C-4 really should have just instantly vaporized her, especially if I assume that Olga had no idea that the bomb was planted right underneath her feet, which is likely the case since the bomb pretty much eradicated all of Chaldea's staff. Instead, her body has somehow survived and is still breathing with strained effort, albeit at the cost of both her legs that are not torn stumps right above where the knees should be, torn clothes, ripped and burnt skin, and plenty of blood.

"I've stabilized her condition for now, and I've got her legs right here. Do you think you can still directly reattach them?" Da Vinci asks, sparing me of the usual diversionary conversations she has with me whenever I'm around.

I analyze the detached legs of the Director that Da Vinci has placed on a medical cart behind her, which she pulls up for me to see. Two medical runes float above and below the legs to decelerate cell death in them, since blood is not being pumped through the arteries to deliver the cells the nutrients they require to sustain themselves.

"Some shrapnel wounds...torn ligaments and tendons...severed blood vessels from the shrapnel...not to mention broken bones in some places...but I can reattach them. I have to get started now if Olga wants to keep using her legs normally."

Taking Olga's right leg first, I get started on the reattachment process. It's going to take at least two and a half hours of sharp concentration, because I have to repair the leg at the point of separation on a cellular level; it's the most effective method of magical surgery, but naturally the most time and effort-intensive, but I don't believe in offering anything less than the best, after all.

"Did you make sure to lock down the facility, Da Vinci?" Romani asks the Caster as I hunch over Olga's stumpy leg to get to work once I've properly disinfected my hands at the nearby sink and set up a small bounded hygienic field to isolate Olga's open wounds.

"You bet. Now we just need to wait for Mash to come back with the casualty count..."

Sighing heavily, I hear Romani slumping down onto a nearby chair against the wall to my right.

"Rough night, Doc?" I ask Roman casually as magic blue light flickers from my fingertips.

"Yeah...that's already the understatement of the year. And honestly, right now, we ought to call you Doc..." Romani looks up from his seat. "Has anyone told you that you're the king of gross understatements?"

"I think I recall Da Vinci calling me that at one point..."

"Whoa ~ you even remember me telling you that back when we first met?" Da Vinci giggles lightly.

"You were the one who told me that first impressions are really important, after all."

It's going to be a long night with these two in the same room.

The Proper Author's Note:

Where the fuck do I even start? The logical place would be where I stopped, I guess.

I didn't even remember when exactly I stopped and for what specific reason, but looking back in my emails, apparently Chapter 74 was put out during the middle of July of 2019. I don't count Chapter 75 last December because that was a pathetic attempt on my part to try to go back to writing Recourse Light, but I just wasn't feeling it - or fanfic writing in general. Maybe I'd burnt myself out on writing Ambience - after all, I'd hardly call it normal for one person to write four and a half million words in two and a half years.

The reason why I bring up Ambience, which is another fic of mine (that I'm mainly notorious for) is because when thinking back why I didn't want to write Recourse Light anymore, I determined that they shared one crucial flaw. Never mind all the other problems that both stories have respectively that the reviews that they've aggregated over the months and years have pointed out, the one problem I see and care about the most is the fact that both were stories with too many damn characters.

This one problem alone spawned more problems that I as a writer had to deal with, and they all contributed to one another in a vicious clusterfuck of a cycle: too many characters either means too much time or too little time spent on character development. If too much time is spent on character development, the plot doesn't get progressed unless you can weave character development into the plot, but unless the plot line is long enough to accommodate how many characters there are, there just won't be enough time to give everyone development. And if there's too little time, the characters are going to feel dry and lifeless, and you're better off playing the games that they come from if you want any sort of development from them. And that's before the obvious favoritism on the author's part.

Recourse Light unfortunately presented the exact same problem. Originally it was going to be structured the same way as Ambience: a strong male OC who's in charge of a bunch of super powerful people (mainly girls, and in a harem-esque format) yoloing through shit harder than people rushing the toilet paper aisle at Costco, and you as readers could see that. Because canonically, in the context of FGO, you as a Master are in charge of all the Servants who are playable in the game, so trying to write a story where an OC more or less mimics that seemed to me like the natural thing to write - again, it didn't help that I'd done something exactly like that before.

There are writers out there who have the mental gymnastics to be able to handle writing stories that have tons of characters in them; as my years of (mediocre) fanfic writing have shown, I am not one of them. I've come to see that my brain is simply too small to juggle between so many characters and having to deal with the responsibilities of good authoring to maintain them all...as if assuming such responsibilities would automatically make me a good writer.

And so I stopped. At least, that's why I think I stopped, now that I've thought back and searched for a reason as to why. That, combined with my dwindling interest in fanfic writing during the latter half of 2019, meant that I was on the fast track to hibernating as a fanfic writer, save for a last-ditch effort of mine to try to keep my interest in writing by starting Fate: Silva Gelida.

And then I noticed the review/favorite/follow count for this fic.

It wasn't until earlier this year that I came to realize how much attention this fic had gotten while I was AWOL. Where the hell did all you people even come from? What about Recourse Light even made you like it in the first place? And did another forum of angry fanfic reviewers send you all here again?

It's not as if I tampered with my Fanfic alert settings; my email just mysteriously stopped receiving notifications about Recourse Light at some point after chapter 74, so I had no clue about just how much attention it was getting while I was away. I remember back when I first started posting on this site, I'd always see other, more popular fics in the same categories with their hundreds, even thousands of favs/follows and think to myself I'd be one of them one day - and of course it would happen when I'm not even paying attention. (Implying it's because of any tangible effort on my part PepeLaugh)

But even this revelation alone isn't the reason why I'm coming back to it with a full reboot like the entertainment industry these days seems to be fond of doing; the numbers of favs/follows/reviews alone isn't enough to drag my ass back to this, as much as some of you will inevitably doubt. Indeed, it wasn't FGO the game or any of the Fate media that've come out over the past half a year that's brought me crawling back -

- it was another manga entirely. Its name is Gotoubun no Hanayome...or The Quintessential Quintuplets, if you prefer the English-localized title.

Specifically, it was when I started writing a fanfic for Quints, because doing so made me realize why I was losing interest in fanfic writing: I wasn't spending time writing about characters I loved writing about. Yes, I was doing that for other stories - but all the mental gymnastics of trying to figure out how to advance the damn plot and trying to give all the characters in the story some limelight wasn't something I could handle, at least not without having to sacrifice my motivation to write. Naturally, that's pretty contradictory, especially when I started writing fanfics so that I could write about characters I wanted to write about in the first place.

Which now brings us to the present: as you've noticed by now, I've purged the entire story. (I'll be keeping a copy of the original Recourse Light, though.) While I'll more than likely recycle some of the events portrayed in the original, all the chapters will otherwise be written from scratch, as this first one should have indicated already.

And this time around, there will only be one major Servant character. If you don't remember who it'll be, read the short A/N at the start of this chapter.

Please be advised that chapters will still likely come slowly, as I am focusing on the Quints fanfic that I mentioned earlier, called "Five Equal Angels", since I'm prioritizing that over Recourse Light. At the risk of taking criticism for doing this, I'd like to ask you to check that fic out too, since you will find me updating that story more regularly - and, perhaps to nobody's surprise, that fic also has a noticeable Fate undertone to it as well.

Thanks for dealing with my radio silence for all these months. I'll...try not to do that again. No promises though.

Oh, and all the other usual disclaimers about me not knowing Nasuverse lore properly and all that still apply.

Edit: since his review's the most recent one that I can talk shit on - SnarkyScribe, imagine getting triggered over a fanfiction KEKW