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[Chat]:
[Age_Commentary]: is this the magnanimity of a 2000-year-old? seems a little small.
[Defending_Her]: I'm warning you. she clearly saw the state of The Marble and felt uncomfortable. she helped. stop reading into it.
[Proverb_Attempt]: they say a woman three years older brings prosperity — so what does three thousand years older bring?
[Answer]: immortality, presumably
[Scáthach_Response]: slander. I will sue for slander. I am clearly only a little over two thousand years old.
[Fine_Wine_Theory]: women are like fine wine. the older, the richer—
[Immediate_Danger]: do not finish that
[Married_People_Chiming_In]: you young people don't understand. thirty is one thing, forty is another, two thousand—
[Athlete]: I'm an athlete. I'll be fine.
[Practical_Concern]: can The Marble even survive right now? her HP bar hasn't dropped much but the upper limit is dropping fast. burning those worms cut the maximum capacity.
[Lesson_Learned]: never offend a woman. ever.
After the remedial session concluded, Kariya Matou looked somewhat more like a person. Still unkempt. Still distinctly not winning any first impressions. But the pallor of accumulated bug-related damage had cleared, and normal conversation was technically possible again.
Max took the opportunity to explain Scáthach while The Marble collected herself.
Scáthach was a warrior, queen, and teacher of Celtic mythology. The teacher of Cú Chulainn — the Child of Light, the greatest hero of the tradition. She had mastered spear techniques and Rune Magic to a degree that no one else in the mythology had reached, and she served as the gatekeeper and ruler of the Shadow Land: a realm of darkness and death, a world where sunlight couldn't reach, the resting place of the dead and spirits in Celtic cosmology.
She was, in other words, the underworld's gatekeeper.
And she was human.
That distinction mattered. She had slaughtered monsters, people, spirits, and gods. The blood of her enemies had permeated her body over centuries until it changed her. But her essence was human — a human who had surpassed gods by killing them, who had been so thoroughly embedded in the Shadow Land's existence that when the Age of Gods ended and the underworld was pushed outside the world, she went with it. Queen and ruler of a realm ejected from reality, which made her functionally indistinguishable from a divine existence without actually being one.
She did not age. She did not die.
Her wish was simple: she wanted someone to kill her.
That was why she'd taken Cú Chulainn as her disciple. She'd taught him everything, held nothing back, and hoped — not desperately, but genuinely — that she was raising an existence capable of ending her. It hadn't worked. In her estimation, it probably never would. But she still hoped, in a quiet and unhurried way, the way someone might hope for weather to change.
The skill responsible for most of her combat ability was Wisdom of the Demonic Realm, A+ rank — the accumulated knowledge of a human who had placed herself at the edge of the world and survived everything that edge contained. With it, she could demonstrate almost any skill in the B through A rank range with genuine proficiency, and she could teach those skills to others. This was why she was called what she was sometimes called.
Max paused, then chose not to say the full version.
"Teacher. She's called the Double-Spear Teacher."
Her most refined ability was Clairvoyance — not the Archer variant that extended sight across distance, but the Caster variant that touched the future. Partial foresight. She knew things that hadn't happened yet.
She'd known Cú Chulainn's fate from before he became her student. She'd taught him anyway. She still hoped.
That quality — knowing the outcome and choosing to continue — was the core of what she was.
[Chat]:
[Processing]: she's the underworld gatekeeper, a human who killed gods, and her only wish is to die
[The_Relationship]: and she taught Cu Chulainn everything while knowing how his story ended
[Pure]: it really is a clean relationship. no ambiguity. just genuine care and an impossible wish.
[Spear_Down]: you can put the spear down now
[Still_Up]: the spear is still up
[Summoning_Mechanics]: but wait. if Scáthach is alive, she can't be summoned as a Heroic Spirit. Heroic Spirits are shadows of the past.
[Max_Explaining]:
"Right, this is a valid point." Max scratched the back of his head, looking slightly caught out. "So — when we released the skin for Scáthach, I needed to make her actually summonable. You can't release a character and then block them from appearing."
After some brainstorming, he'd arrived at a setting that was consistent with who Scáthach was.
The in-universe explanation: Scáthach, in her realm outside the world, had nothing to do and an extensive amount of time to do it in. She'd discovered the Holy Grail War ritual. Driven by curiosity and her wish — maybe this would produce something that could finally reach her — she'd used her Rune Magic to reverse-engineer the summoning from her end. Found the slot that was supposed to be occupied by a different Heroic Spirit. Forcibly displaced them. Inserted herself.
True body descent, not a Spirit Origin. Actually her.
The summon probability was approximately equivalent to pulling the rarest possible card on the first attempt with no pity system. The Marble had done it without a Holy Relic, on a random roll, after two hours of bear traps and rope-rubbing.
Max had not planned for this.
The cost: all three Command Seals burned the moment Scáthach manifested. The energy required to anchor a living, divine-tier entity in the game world consumed the entire reservoir at once. Nothing left.
The upside: Scáthach could remain active for three hours. With roughly two hours left in the FA Chapter, that was sufficient.
[Chat]:
[FOOL'S_LUCK]: this is textbook fool's luck
[Envious]: I envy The Marble so much right now
[Balance_Question]: isn't this a power level problem? Red side has Gilgamesh and now Scáthach? Black side has—
[Counter]: did you miss the part where Red side has been eliminating Red side all evening? Victor killed by King Hassan. Iskandar eliminated by Gilgamesh. Chloe betrayed Northern Star.
[Red_Side_Summary]: Red side has done more damage to Red side than Black side has
[Prophet_Spotted]: there's a prophet in chat. someone deal with them.
[Scáthach_vs_Gilgamesh]: she has a God Slayer passive. Gilgamesh flies around being Gilgamesh. I am absolutely looking forward to this meeting.
[Elimination_Log]: whoever's tracking the kill log — how many Red side Servants have been eliminated by Red side players?
[Answer]: ...most of them
[Laughing]:
The Marble, for her part, had processed everything and arrived at a working philosophy.
She had no Command Seals. She had no worm familiars. She had no weapons. Kariya Matou's entire skill kit had been sterilized out of existence by medicinal Rune fire.
On the other hand, she had Scáthach.
Never mind. As long as the mother is strong enough.
She was in the middle of cementing this attitude when Scáthach went very still.
Her crimson eyes locked onto something on the country road ahead of them — a figure, moving alone, unhurried, with the particular quality of someone who had decided where they were going and was simply getting there.
An old man. White hair. Black cloak. Moving through the rural landscape of Romania with the bearing of something that had never needed to hurry about anything in its existence.
Scáthach's entire bearing shifted.
The word that would describe the expression on her face was interested.
"What a remarkable-looking elder." Her voice had taken on a quality it hadn't had thirty seconds ago — alert, focused, the way a person sounds when they recognize something they've been looking for. "Master."
The Marble looked up.
"Stay here." Scáthach was already moving. "I'm going to exchange a few techniques with him."
"Huh?"
Scáthach was already gone.
[Chat]:
[WHO_IS_THAT]: who is on that road
[BLACK_CLOAK]: black cloak. white skull mask. moving alone.
[KING_HASSAN]: KING HASSAN
[SCÁTHACH_VS_KING_HASSAN]: SCÁTHACH SPOTTED KING HASSAN ON A COUNTRY ROAD AND IMMEDIATELY WENT TO FIGHT HIM
[Marble_Expression]: The Marble's face right now
[Max_Expression]: Max's face right now
[Everyone's_Expression]: everyone's face right now
[Old_Man_Bell]: the old man the chat has been calling for all evening
[He's_Here]: he's here
[Not_How_We_Pictured_This]: this is not how we pictured this
[End of Chapter 178]
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