Chapter 136: Mini Planetfall
Yukari's tone had sounded almost sheepish.
Almost. Listen carefully and there was a thread of amusement running underneath it.
The brain worm's fluid dripped slowly from the tweezers, falling toward the ground in dark, viscous drops.
The moment the first drop hit —
Zōken's body collapsed without warning.
His face still held its final expression: a sliver of terror, of disbelief, of something that had never resolved into understanding.
He died without knowing why.
He died without anyone bothering to explain.
Zōken Matou was a reasonably well-known villain in the Fate series, all things considered. But it had to be said — once you knew his weakness and had it in hand, the threat dissolved. He was not a close-combat fighter. None of the magi in his world were. Put Kaguya Shinomiya in arm's reach of him at full strength and she could have beaten him into the ground ten times over.
Ryū looked at the motionless body for a moment. He trusted Yukari where it counted — she might be completely incapable of basic behavioral standards, but when something actually needed doing, she delivered.
The brain worm was gone. Zōken was gone. The canon storyline that followed from his existence would not follow.
Though the adoption issue wasn't fully resolved — Sakura would eventually need to be placed with another magi family regardless. When that time came, they'd see what kind of people were involved. If they turned out to be another problem, Ryū had no particular objection to making another trip.
"Hmph." Tatsumaki drifted down slightly, casting a dispassionate look at the corpse. "Dying that easily — almost feels like he got off light. But I already crushed his hand with my power and he didn't even flinch, so there wasn't much point in dragging it out."
Shinji Matou, as it happened, hadn't been home. Neither had most of the servants — Tatsumaki had already moved them clear of the area before the main event. The remaining Matou household, whatever form it took going forward, wasn't the objective. Without Zōken, the family's worst tendencies had lost their architect.
"This place still has worms in it."
Tatsumaki extended her senses outward, sweeping the area within a radius of several hundred meters. She caught faint, unpleasant traces of life — small, malign.
She raised one hand.
The ground began to shake.
Fissures spread outward across the earth in all directions, and from those fissures — rock. Enormous slabs of it, lifting free of the soil under her direction, rising into the air one after another. Some tens of tons. Some more. All of it ascending as if it weighed nothing.
The sky above the Matou estate darkened.
A vast, irregular cloud of stone and earth floated above them, blocking the light.
Tatsumaki's open hand closed.
The mass converged. Stone struck stone, merged, compressed — a continuous series of deep impacts as everything folded inward on itself. When the sound stopped, a single spherical boulder hung in the air where the cloud had been. Three to four hundred meters across.
It dropped.
The impact rolled outward through the ground like a shockwave. A wall of displaced air swept past them, thick with dust and debris — the kind of force that would have knocked an ordinary person off their feet.
For everyone present, it was barely noticeable.
Kaguya stared up at the sphere — now settled in an enormous crater — with visible awe. "Tornado-nee-san is really something else. She just... casually rolled a boulder the size of a small town. And she didn't even look like she was trying."
Every worm in the Matou estate was gone. Every last one, down to whatever had been hiding in the walls and the soil. Zōken's body had been reduced to something that would eventually become fertilizer.
The boulder itself would probably become a local landmark. A perfectly smooth sphere, several hundred meters in diameter, sitting in the middle of a residential district.
There was almost certainly only one of those in the world.
Forty minutes in the Type-Moon world. Ryū still hadn't felt anything that resembled Gaia or Alaya turning their attention this way. Whether that meant they hadn't noticed yet, or whether the Dimensional Chat Group was passively shielding them from detection — he didn't know. Both were plausible. No one was going to tell him which, and either way, the sensible move was to leave.
He let the thought settle, and a dimensional gateway opened.
"That's everything. Time to go — before this world's Gaia or Alaya decides to take an interest."
Yukari nodded. She didn't know exactly what Alaya was, but Gensōkyō had the Dragon God, and she understood perfectly well what a world-consciousness could do when provoked. She was not under any illusions about winning that fight.
"I would have loved to take little Sakura-chan somewhere fun, but safety first — back we go. Next time we have the Points, I'll bring Sakura-chan to Gensōkyō for a proper visit. Everyone's welcome to come along, naturally."
She smiled, and a dimensional gateway opened behind her.
One by one — Whitebeard, Tatsumaki, Kaguya — the remaining Group members opened their own passages and stepped through.
The Type-Moon world went quiet.
Left behind: one enormous spherical boulder.
And one enormous crater.
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