Running away is an essential spice in any heroic tale.
If the chaos in Black Iron City had been a tactical victory called "The Trojan Horse," then what came next could only be described as—
Battle Royale: Everyone Must Flee.
"Faster, faster, faster! Don't look back! If you look back you'll turn to stone—no, you'll get riddled into a sieve!" Argo wailed as he sprinted, clutching his backside like it had declared independence.
Behind him, arrows and magic bolts fell like a storm, blasting craters into the ground.
The Black King, Eld, had been blown off his throne, but his mage corps and elite knights hadn't been wiped out. Those pursuers—loyal, or just brain-dead stubborn—had gone rabid, clamping onto their trail like hunting dogs.
"Shirou! Dead end!" Ona, running at the front, slammed to a halt so hard her boots carved twin trenches into the earth.
Everyone stopped and looked up.
Despair had taken physical form.
A gray curtain of light—hundreds of meters tall, stretching from earth to sky—stood across their path like a wall made from a single, endless sigh. Complex ancient runes flowed across its surface, radiating a chill that refused passage to any living thing.
"Is that… the Wall of Sighs?" Fina's face drained to paper-white. She lifted a trembling hand, trying to read the structure of the barrier.
"No… it's built directly off the land's ley lines. A super-scale boundary anchored to the mountains themselves. Unless we can blow up this entire range, we're not getting through!"
Enemy at the rear. A sealed path ahead.
A classic RPG "guaranteed death" scenario.
"No choice!" Crozzo drew a magic sword, eyes sharp with fury. "Then we cut our way back! If we die, we take some of them with us!"
"Don't be stupid—there are thousands!" Shirou grabbed him and forced his mind into overdrive.
Break the barrier?
Saturate-bomb it with Unlimited Blade Works?
No.
Fina was right. This was ley-line linked. Ordinary physical damage—anything below a certain "rank," even a barrage of B-class projections—would be repaired endlessly by the earth's mana.
To break it, they had to sever the barrier's connection to space itself.
They needed…
That.
"Shirou-bro! Does your bottomless bag (Unlimited Blade Works) have anything that can dig tunnels?" Argo trembled behind him. "Or an invisibility cloak? Or—"
"No tunneling." Shirou's voice stayed flat. "It seals underground too."
He stared at the wall of light, breath slow, eyes narrowing. Deep in his pupils, a dark red glow began to flicker.
"If there's no door…" he murmured, "then we'll carve one."
"What are you doing?" Fina's voice sharpened. She felt it—something in Shirou's presence was changing, turning into a pressure that didn't belong to this world.
"Move back," Shirou said, offering no explanation. "All of you. Fifty meters. No—one hundred."
"Hah?" Ona blinked. "You're not seriously going to solo a thousand guys, are you? Don't be an idiot!"
"Do what he says!" Fina suddenly shouted, yanking Argo by the collar and retreating hard. Her half-elf instincts were screaming. "Run! That mana waveform… humans don't have that!"
The others hesitated—then backed away to what passed for safety.
Shirou Emiya stood alone before the Wall of Sighs.
He closed his eyes.
Inside him, twenty-seven magic circuits screamed.
He was drawing power—not ordinary mana, but a high-purity mix: primal aether flowing through his dragonbone arm, and something far more expensive.
His life.
His body might collapse. This was an absolute taboo in this era.
But if they were going to survive this board of despair…
He had to cut open a path.
"Trace… Start."
The air trembled—no, not wind.
Space itself wailed, as if something ancient and heavy—something that exceeded the rules of the Age of Gods—was being forced into reality.
"Huh… what is that?" The chasing black-armored knights slowed, staring at the red-haired boy. He wasn't in a fighting stance. He simply raised his right hand and gripped the air.
And something began to take shape in his palm.
Assess the concept.The void before creation.Establish the frame.The rotation that splits heaven and earth.Replicate the materials—impossible…Then I'll fill it with my soul.
"Guh—AAAGH!" Shirou's low roar tore out of him.
His right arm—the white-gold dragonbone prosthesis—cracked.
Blood seeped through the fissures, turning to red mist before it could hit the ground.
What he was projecting wasn't a sword.
It was a key.
A key that cut open the world and rewrote truth.
A dark crimson pressure burst outward. It didn't blow things away—it made reality itself fracture, black cracks spreading like glass struck by a sledgehammer.
"Th-that… what is it?!" Fina covered her mouth, eyes shaking.
She saw it.
In Shirou's hand, an impossible weapon emerged—no blade, no edge. Three cylindrical segments, rotating in opposing directions, carved with wedge-shaped crimson script. Every character radiated an ancient madness.
Ea — Sword of Rupture (Pseudo, Mythic-Age Spec).
In this mana-rich mythic world, Shirou's projected Ea sat closer to the original than it ever had in the future.
The pressure alone made every living thing—human, elf, even beasts hiding in the forest—drop to their knees.
"…Is that a sword?" Argo whispered, stunned.
No.
It wasn't a sword.
It was a storm given form.
Horses screamed. Knights fumbled, weapons clattering to the ground.
"What is this sorcery?!" a commander shrieked, voice cracking. "Shoot! Fire! Kill him!"
"Too late."
Shirou opened his eyes.
His right eye had lost focus—feedback damage. But his left burned red.
"I don't use this weapon," he rasped, voice carrying through the gorge, "because it's too heavy."
Heavy enough to crush even him.
"But since you built a wall…"
He raised Ea. The three segments accelerated.
A grinding, keening roar—space being pulverized.
Crimson aether surged into the sky, shredding clouds, staining the heavens the color of blood.
"Take it," Shirou said. "This is… the breath of creation!"
"Enuma—!"
He swung.
The motion was slow.
But along the weapon's path, the world split.
"—Elish!"
No explosion. No flame.
Only a dark red spatial fault—a severing line that devoured everything it touched.
The crimson torrent crashed into the Wall of Sighs.
That ancient barrier didn't last a second.
It tore like cloth. It melted like butter under a hot blade.
RRRIP—!
A massive gap opened in the light curtain—wide enough to march an army through.
And the red torrent didn't stop there.
It plowed a bottomless trench through the earth, a newly born canyon stretching beyond the horizon. Mountains, forest, stone—
All erased into nothing.
Silence.
Dead, perfect silence.
Wind stopped. Clouds scattered. The knights' minds blanked.
Argo's jaw dislocated.
"This… is he human?" Crozzo's magic sword slipped from his hand. It thudded onto his foot and he didn't even flinch. "That level of destruction… even the gods…!"
Fina stared at the canyon that hadn't existed a heartbeat ago.
As a mage, she understood better than anyone what she'd just witnessed.
That wasn't destruction.
That was rewriting.
A human had forced the terrain's rules to change.
Shirou dropped to one knee and vomited blood.
Ea dissolved into motes of light.
His right arm had burned black, charcoal-like, and beneath the scorched surface, metallic structure showed through.
Mana: empty. Life: overdrawn.
He couldn't move a finger.
And yet—his lips curled into a grim, satisfied smile.
"The road…" he whispered. "It's open."
"Go."
"Shirou-bro!" Argo was first to snap out of it. He sprinted forward crying. "Are you okay?! Don't die! If you die, who's going to cook for me?!"
"Is that your priority?!" Ona shoved Argo aside and carefully hauled Shirou up. Her voice was rough, but there was something gentler underneath. "Redhead. You're insane. Using that kind of move… on fodder?"
"Fodder?" The commander behind them heard it and nearly coughed blood.
This wasn't fodder treatment—this was a divine punishment delivered by a human hand.
"Retreat!" the commander screamed, one glance at the canyon shattering what remained of his courage. "That's a monster! A monster wearing human skin! Run!"
The pursuers broke like a flock of birds.
No one fought a man who could split the map.
"Quick—heal him!" Fina shouted, snapping herself back to function. "I've got elven medicine!"
She poured a precious restorative into Shirou's mouth, but her eyes lingered on the charred arm.
This wasn't an ordinary burn.
It was a wound inflicted by the world itself.
Normal medicine could only stabilize him.
"It's fine…" Shirou forced the liquid down, color barely returning. "As long as I'm not dead… I can fix it."
"I'm a smith… as long as there's material…"
"Even now you say that?" Ona sounded like she wanted to hit him—and couldn't bring herself to. She sighed, long and heavy. "Hopeless idiot."
"Yeah." Argo wiped his tears, staring at Shirou's pale face. "But… the coolest idiot."
Argo stood, gripping his wooden sword—hands still shaking.
He looked down the path Shirou had carved with his life.
"All right!" Argo shouted, voice tearing open the air. "Our deputy commander paid in blood to pave this road! If we back down now, we'll be spitting on his sacrifice!"
"Target—the Capital!"
"Drag that Black King off his throne!"
"Save the princess!"
"And write… our own heroic tale!"
"OHHHH!" Five people answered like an army.
Shirou lay across Ona's broad back—injured-man privilege—and listened to Argo's grand declarations.
He smiled faintly.
A clown who only knew pretty words…
But sometimes…
"Not bad," he thought. "You're surprisingly reliable."
"Sleep, Shirou," Ona said, voice low. "When you wake up… we'll be at the capital."
"And then…"
She added, almost shyly:
"You're making that 'curry' thing again."
"…Deal," Shirou whispered.
His eyes closed. His consciousness sank into black.
Deep in his soul, the Moon-World skill tree flickered—and a new line of gold appeared:
Achievement Unlocked: Breaker of the Age of Gods' Wall.Title Gained: Holder of Rupture (Pseudo).Unlimited Blade Works — Analysis Progress Increased.
A massive bull-headed monster bound in chains—the Minotaur—opened its eyes.
It felt it.
A presence from far away.
A sharpness that could threaten its "immortality."
It growled, low and ancient. Nearby, the blonde princess Ariadne trembled.
"What… is that?" the monster spoke—words scraping out like stones grinding. "A red… star?"
Black King Eld stared at the distant crimson pillar, his goblet slipping from numb fingers and shattering on the stone.
"That direction… my knights…"
"That light… what was it?"
"Have the gods descended?"
No.
That wasn't a god.
That was a human named Shirou Emiya, leaving the first scar of his existence across the mythic age.
Storm clouds gathered.
And with that single cut, the name Argonaut's Hero Band was about to echo across the continent.
The real showdown—
Was about to raise its curtain on the stage called the Capital.
....
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