The sky was black above Ryuudou Temple.
Gilgamesh scoffed after a moment. Both of his arms came up—one pointed at Artoria, another at Medea.
Noble Phantasms hummed behind him with suppressed destruction, half the gates adjusting to aim at Medea's vitals, another half already locked onto Artoria.
A sword emerged from a gate behind him. Golden cross-guard with wing-like tips, connecting to a pristine, straight blade, its tip aimed at her heart.
Gram.
A demonic sword devastatingly effective against anything with connections to a dragon.
Artoria's was calm even as her instincts screamed danger. Above her, Medea's magic circle had started to crack under the relentless assault of hundreds of Noble Phantasms.
Gilgamesh's expression remained calm as Gram, alongside a deluge of other Noble Phantasms, detonated from his gates.
Air exploded in concussive shockwaves. Soil gouged away in a full circle around them. A hill further away shook from tremors, fissures climbing over Ryuudou Temple at its peak.
Artoria's face was illuminated in gold for an instant. Anti-Dragon weapons screeching toward her.
In the sky, Medea's violet was simultaneously overpowered by the collective radiance of other legendary armaments.
The magic circle floating behind Medea shattered into fragments—no. She had abandoned defense entirely as her fingers twirled, a single magic circle flashing within her grip.
Noble Phantasms reached her.
She smiled like Artoria.
Air parted above the forest, above all of them. A magic circle rotated to life, facing down.
Gilgamesh snapped his gaze up.
Violet flashed, compressing unto itself until only black remained.
From that black—
I fell.
Wind ripped my hair back in every direction. Gravity wrenched me down.
Th...ump.
My heart beat.
Th-ump.
Something beat alongside it. Black tattoos pulsed beneath my coat, under my shirt, crawling across my skin.
I looked down. Artoria. Medea. Gilgamesh. Specks a moment ago. Now I could see their outlines.
Thump.
Ground rose to meet me. Dust struck my face. Air hit my body like a wall—coat flattening against my chest, sleeves pressing into my arms. Ryuudou Temple still trembled, surrounded by a devastated forest beneath me.
I extended both arms.
East. West.
Then, traced my fingers back.
Two lines.
Soil erupted along my gesture. Trees separated before they fell—halves sliding apart like they'd never been joined.
The eastern line raced a centimeter behind my finger, carving through everything in its path—and through every weapon closing on Medea. A blade. A shaft. A hilt. That line traced across them all, their trajectories shifting by millimeters. Just enough to pass her by.
The western line carved its own path through wind and earth.
They met at Gram.
Two lines crossed over its blade from opposite directions, when it was just a finger's width from Artoria's heart.
Gram plunged into soil, dirt spraying over her heels. Predictable.
Artoria's eyes found mine. Blood on her lips. Excalibur still buried in soil for support. But her smile remained—the same one she'd worn when she'd said her Master was coming.
Above, Medea's fingers had gone still mid-twirl, dark blue eyes wide.
Thousands of gates turned toward me with eerie synchronization. My coat, my hair, the clouds above—everything turned gold.
"You dare interrupt this king!?"
They fired.
A flood of crystallised legends hurled up. Swords, spears, axes, arrows—mythical steel screaming toward me in a river that swallowed space on its way.
"See it all. Every angle. Every path. They're already there."
Analyst. Junko Enoshima's voice—bored, certain.
I saw them. Not weapons. Trajectories. Hundreds of lines intersecting, diverging, overlapping. Each one a calculation already solved.
My body moved.
A spear reached me first. Gae Bolg—I twisted, its tip passing a centimeter from my ankle, and my sole found its shaft. Simple.
"Push. Their force is your force."
Sakura Ogami's martial experience moved through me, and I pushed off the spear like a feather. It continued up. I didn't. My body launched down like a rocket seconds after launch.
Two halberds were some distance away from my face a breath ago. Now, they were an inch away from my eyes. But my fingers were already moving, already tracing—
Invisible slashes diverted their path precisely, one halberd passed an inch beside my cheek, another screeched near my eyebrow, lifting it up slightly.
I dropped. Halberds behind.
More projectiles climbed toward me, denser, packed so tightly that their trajectories overlapped, calculations becoming useless.
"847 to 1. You only need one path."
Gambler. Celestia Ludenberg—amused, precise.
A gap. No—a gamble. A sliver of empty space between a longsword's edge and an arrow's top, lasting less than a moment. I shifted my shoulder two degrees and fell through it. Steel whistled past on my sides, close enough that my sleeves brushed both.
The longsword's hilt was near—still passing, still within reach. My hand shot out and gripped its handle. I pulled with force, my own momentum wrenching the sword down with me.
Descending with a sword in hand now. Five meters above ground.
A wall of shields had formed below me—nine weapons stacked horizontally, their faces creating a ceiling of golden steel. No gaps. No way through.
"Every weapon has a seam. Find it. Cut it."
Swordswoman. Peko Pekoyama.
I hurled the longsword at it, right at a point where the edges of four different shields met, and their formation collapsed, weapons tumbling away like dominoes. I fell through a small gap they left.
A lone tree was right beneath me. I crashed in.
Canopy. Leaves and branches. A branch clipped my calves—I used it, pushing off sideways and out of its foliage with a kick, closing the distance to Gilgamesh diagonally, bark exploding behind me.
"Luck isn't chance. It's the universe bending when it should break."
Luck. Nagito Komaeda.
A scythe came from my blind spot. Should have taken my head. Instead, a spear that had been aimed at my chest deflected off another weapon and knocked that scythe's shaft two centimeters off-course. Its curved blade parted my hair. Not my skull.
I caught the scythe's handle on its way past, swung my body around and down it in a tight spiral, and released—hurling myself straight at Gilgamesh.
Ten meters between us. His head turned. Crimson eyes tracking me.
More gates opened. Lateral this time. Weapons poured from portals flanking his position, a horizontal wall of steel closing in from both sides.
"Frame it. The perfect shot is already there—you just have to take it."
Mahiru Koizumi. Photographer.
The shot. A single point ahead where those two walls hadn't aligned—a rectangle of empty air, half a meter wide, shrinking with each breath. I stretched my body into a line and dove through it. Golden steel crashed together behind my heels, shockwave shoving against my back.
Three meters.
"Invent. Improvise. The best solution is the one nobody thought of yet."
Inventor. Miu Iruma—brash, delighted.
An axe was already between me and Gilgamesh. No way around it. No time to deflect it. So I didn't go around—I went through.
[Dismantle] overlapped itself. Cast a hundred times in a second. A line carved down that axe's center, splitting it in two, and my heels slid on both halves simultaneously—each foot on a different piece—launching myself forward through the gap.
Two meters.
His hand was inside a gate, dragging another weapon out.
I didn't strike him.
I stepped past him.
His crimson eyes widened—a fraction, barely perceptible—as I moved behind him. The space where his gates hung open like constellations, still humming, still firing at targets that no longer mattered.
I was between the King of Heroes and his Gate of Babylon now.
Weapons emerged. A sword. A spear. An axe. Each one launching outward the instant they materialized, paths already locked toward Artoria, toward Medea, toward empty air where I'd been seconds ago.
But I was here now.
Behind him. Beside his gates.
My fingers rose.
"See it all—"
Analyst.
I read every weapon the instant it left a gate—where it was headed, how fast, which way it was spinning. Not one at a time. All of them. Every trajectory laid bare like lines painted in the air.
"Push—"
Martial Artist.
I didn't need to stop them. I just needed to nudge them. A weapon flying at full speed already had every ounce of force it needed—I only had to give it a new direction. Two degrees here. One degree there. These weapons would do the rest.
"One path—"
Gambler.
Hundreds of weapons. Thousands of tiny adjustments. The odds of every single one connecting were impossible. But I didn't need every path—just one path where all the deflections lined up perfectly. One winning hand in a thousand.
"Cut—"
Swordswoman.
Every armament has a weak point. The spot where a single touch can change its entire angle. An edge here. A shaft's midpoint there. I didn't cut these weapons—I cut the air around them, carving invisible grooves that redirected them the moment they passed through.
"Bend—"
Luck.
Reality should have broken. Hundreds of simultaneous deflections, each requiring precision beyond human capability, each dependent on the last. It should have fallen apart. Instead, it bent. A sword that should have missed its deflection point by a centimeter shifted—probability stuttered—and the sword aligned itself perfectly.
"Frame—"
Photographer.
There was a perfect moment. The split-second between a weapon leaving its gate and reaching full speed—when it was slowest, easiest to redirect. I cut at that exact moment for every gate at once.
"Invent—"
Inventor.
[Dismantle] was meant to cut things apart. I used it to cut the air itself—carving invisible channels in space that every projectile would hit instantly after they emerged. Ramps. Lines. Guides. A technique that didn't exist, born in this instant because I needed it.
All of them spoke together. All through me. Not seven voices anymore.
"See every path—"
"—push their force—"
"—one chance—"
"—cut—"
"—bend—"
"—frame—"
"—invent—"
[Dismantle].
Every line at once.
My fingers moved—and hundreds of cuts were already there. Invisible lines stretched into the air ahead of each gate, waiting. A sword emerged and hit a line of compressed air, its angle shifting. A spear materialized and caught a groove, trajectory tilting slightly.
Every weapon. Every gate. In a single heartbeat.
Their own momentum carried them now. Tiny adjustments piling on top of each other, every redirected weapon feeding into the next, hundreds of paths converging on a single point.
Gilgamesh's back.
Gold turned on gold.
The King of Heroes had half a second to understand.
Then his own arsenal found him.
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[5 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Ultimate Analyst] - Junko Enoshima.
[Ultimate Martial Artist] - Sakura Ogami.
[Ultimate Gambler] - Celestia Ludenberg.
[Ultimate Swordsman] - Peko Pekoyama.
[Ultimate Luck] - Nagito Komaeda.
[Ultimate Photographer] - Mahiru Koizumi.
[Ultimate Inventor] - Miu Iruma.
...
[Authors Thoughts]
Huuh... Honestly, writing these chapters really is something else. My back is aching XD.
...
Anyway... This is how the real Izuru Kamukura would fight. Merging countless [Ultimate]'s in his fight, something as mundane as photography and gambling. In fact, here he only merged seven Ultimates, he can go even further and merge hundreds, unfortunately, your author-sama doesn't have enough imagination to imagine what that would look like.
... Have a wonderful weekend, everyone!