Chronal Disassociation Ch. 47

Emiya stared at the glass in front of him in thought. He had Reinforced it to handle just about anything below Divinity itself, so there was no chance that O’Deorain could get out by herself. Of course, he was worried that the arm she sported could be used to bypass her confinement.

The one watching could do so without any effort.

Thankfully, after their lull in conversation, its gaze shifted somewhere else. Clearly, it had some better things to do than watch two people stare at each other through glass.

Counter Guardian he may be, but that doesn’t mean that he was at all confident at trying his hand against some Cosmic Horror. True, he had fought against the likes of BB during that one summer, even made pancakes for Abigail, but that didn’t mean that he was confident in truly killing them if the Outer Gods within them went rogue.

He doubted anyone in Chaldea could, bar its singular Master.

“Hmph.” In front of him, O’Deorain scoffed, “I thought it’d never leave.”

Emiya narrowed his eyes, “You were aware then?”

“Difficult not to, I could feel this arm growing excited.” Lounging as if she wasn’t a prisoner, the scientist flexed said limb, “Strange though, that I can still control this without too much effort.”

Emiya’s knuckles whitened where he gripped the reinforced glass railing. O’Deorain’s casual remark about the arm’s 'excitement' sent a familiar, icy dread coiling through his gut.

"Control it?" Emiya’s voice was dangerously low, a blade scraping against stone. "Don’t mistake temporary restraint for mastery. I’ve seen what happens when those…things…decide they’re bored with playing host."

O’Deorain leaned forward, her expression one of detached scientific curiosity, utterly devoid of the fear Emiya believed she should feel, "Fascinating. You speak from experience, Archer? Overwatch's files did mention that you had some encounters with non-terrestrial entities, but specifics were, sadly, lost."

A thin smile touched her lips, "Tell me, Guardian. What form did these 'Outer Gods' take? Biological manipulation? Temporal distortion?"

Emiya’s contempt was a physical force pressing against the glass. Her clinical detachment, her eagerness to dissect the horrors he’d witnessed, fueled the fire of his loathing, "Ignorance like yours is a luxury." He spat, "They don't take forms you can categorize in a lab report. They unravel the very fabric of what is. They whisper madness into the spaces between thoughts. They turn allies into puppets dancing to cosmic tunes no human mind should comprehend."

O’Deorain flexed the alien limb again, its bioluminescent veins pulsing softly in the sterile light. "Unraveling reality…that sounds remarkably similar to the energies this conduit channels. Yet, I remain in control. My mind is my own." There was a hint of pride, of dangerous overconfidence, in her tone, "Perhaps the difference lies in the vessel. Or the application of will."

“I should kill you just for even thinking that.”

And it would be so easy too.

He had made the glass cage with a minor Bounded Field meant to prevent anything from leaving the confines. However, if this was the case, this would also make it so that the air inside would become toxic due to the carbon dioxide. This was detrimental for a Field meant to imprison someone, so its original make made it so that you could essentially allow air to move in and out.

All he had to do was disable that portion, and O’Deorain would die from a lack of breathable air.

“If you truly wanted that, I would have been dead several times over.”

He did want it. The image of her gasping, clawing at the unyielding glass as the air turned foul and thick was visceral, satisfying. The thought of that arrogant, detached expression twisting into panic was a dark balm on his fury. The world would be cleaner without her and the abomination grafted to her shoulder. Simpler.

But the world, especially Chaldea's corner of it, rarely dealt in simplicity. Killing her now would be a release, a personal catharsis, but it would be a strategic failure. A luxury he couldn't afford.

The Cosmic Horror attached to her was an immediate, existential threat, but Talon and its machinations were a spreading poison that needed to be dealt with as well. Information died with her.

More than that, Oxton would be absolutely furious.

The thought of trusting someone was still foreign, as foreign as it was the first time around in Chaldea. However, he couldn't deny that the image of Oxton, and to a lesser extent her wife's, horrified disappointment was enough to stay his hand.

Ha. He really had gone soft, hadn't he?

Even as a small, bitter smile wormed its way into his mind's eye, he still maintained an outward look of indifference. There was no need to give O'Deorain any leverage.

"Perceptive." Emiya conceded, the word sharp as shrapnel, "For once, your arrogance serves a purpose other than self-destruction. Your continued existence is an affront, O'Deorain. A risk I would purge in a heartbeat were it solely about you and your passenger."

He leaned forward again, his gaze boring into hers, past the scientist, past the detached curiosity, past the arrogance, seeking the core of self-preservation he knew must lurk beneath, "But it isn't. You possess knowledge that isn't yours to take to the grave. Knowledge that threatens more than just Overwatch. Knowledge you don't know the consequences of. Knowledge I will extract."

"Even if it kills you?" There was a touch of dark humor in her tone, that same arrogance that told them that she thought she was untouchable.

"No." Emiya stared at her with a similar voice, "Even if it kills you."

Inside the cell, a soft blue light. Slowly, a sword formed from it, a makhaira in dark colours. Shaped almost like a needle with how thin it was, rusted gold at the hilt, the actual blade itself was almost black, with angry maroon lines cracking all throughout. If seen at a distance, it would have been nothing more than an object of curiosity. Colours notwithstanding, its design was unique enough that it would have been seen as a fantasy weapon by many.

O’Deorain was not at a distance, and could feel the presence of the Noble Phantasm.

In Greek mythology, the legend of the Erinyes, known as the Furies by the Romans, was fairly well known. Harbingers of vengeance, these daughters of Nyx needed one thing in order to proceed with their duties; guilt.

The answer was given to them, with the namesake of their mother.

Νύξ Ἐντός - Nyx Entos.

A shared Anti-Unit Noble Phantasm, which when invoked and stabbed into the offending party, brings about the sins that they committed in the form of illusions. Physical pain would be felt proportional to the amount of guilt that the individual feels. The weapon was used by one particular Erinyes: Tisiphone, and was almost exclusively used to confirm the guilt of her marks before she sought her own brand of vengeance upon them.

It was no wonder that O’Deorain felt the sheer pressure around her, trapped in a room like that.

Very rarely did Emiya need to pull this particular weapon out. More often than not, the enemies he fought against had some form of weapon that he could Trace in order to figure out just about anything. Those that didn’t were usually so unambiguous with their plans that it was easier to just listen to them monologue.

The scientist was unfortunately neither of those.

She was smart enough to keep her mouth shut. She was arrogant enough to think that she would not be found out. She fought with nothing more than the powers she had been given.

None of that mattered to Nyx Entos.

…

The blade quickly plunged itself into O’Deorain, even as the woman tried to go into her smoke-like form. It didn’t matter. The Noble Phantasm didn’t target the physical form, after all. A cry of shock from the scientist was thrown out as the room seemingly transformed in front of them. Wispy strands of white, evidence that they were in an illusion, covered all of the room.

The scene was that of the Talon base that they were in previously. However, the difference was stark, in that none of the flesh and whatnot was present.

The pristine, sterile efficiency of the Talon lab in the illusion was a jarring counterpoint to the fleshy nightmare Emiya knew it had become. O'Deorain stood frozen within the projection, her eyes wide, not with fear, but with a profound, unsettling wrongness. The Nyx Entos pulsed faintly where it had vanished into her spectral form, a dark star anchoring her to this psychic stage.

"What is this?" She growled out, "What have you done?"

"Surely Ogundimu has spoken of what I'm capable of." Emiya scoffed at her.

The scene shifted. Not drastically, but subtly. The gleaming surfaces of the lab seemed to ripple, reflecting distorted images that weren't part of the sterile environment. Flashes of terrified eyes - human, omnic - superimposed over blinking indicator lights. The low hum of machinery warped, carrying faint, choked screams beneath its frequency. The scent of antiseptic was momentarily overwhelmed by the coppery tang of blood and the sickly-sweet odor of decaying organic matter that hadn't been physically present in the memory.

The sterile lab illusion flickered violently. Not with the expected screams of victims, but with jagged bursts of static, like corrupted data streams tearing through the projection. O’Deorain gasped, a sound not of agony, but of profound disruption. She staggered, clutching her chest where Nyx Entos had struck. But her eyes held no tears of remorse, no dawning horror at the sins displayed.

Instead, they blazed with a perverse, analytical intensity.

"Fascinating!" She rasped, her voice strained but vibrating with dark curiosity. She stared at her own hands in the illusion, ignoring the phantom screams and the distorted, accusatory faces flickering at the edges of the sterile environment, "The synaptic interference...the direct neural induction bypassing standard pain pathways. Targeting the limbic system specifically? But..." She looked up, meeting Emiya’s stony gaze across the real cell, a scientist dissecting an unexpected result, "The feedback is muted. Negligible. Why?"

Emiya watched, a cold wave of disgust washing over him, colder than the void between stars. He’d used Nyx Entos on remorseless killers before, on those whose guilt was buried deep or warped beyond recognition.

But this? This was different. O’Deorain wasn’t suppressing guilt. She wasn’t compartmentalizing. She genuinely lacked the fundamental capacity. The weapon wasn't failing to find guilt; it was failing because the substrate wasn't there.

The illusion flickered again, showing a clearer glimpse: a human figure strapped to a table, eyes wide with terror as O’Deorain, wreathed in the same sterile light, approached with instruments humming with the same sickly energy as her alien arm. The victim’s mouth opened in a silent scream. O’Deorain flinched, not from empathy, but as if struck by a sudden, sharp migraine. A thin trickle of blood escaped her real nose, tracing a crimson line down her chin.

"Ah! There!" She exclaimed, ignoring the blood, her focus entirely internal. "Increased neural activity in the prefrontal cortex, but minimal amygdala response. Remarkable! The pain is...cerebral? A system overload warning? Not punitive." She laughed, a dry, hacking sound that held no humor, only discovery, "This weapon, it requires conscience as a conductor? How inefficient. How...human."

Emiya’s jaw clenched so tight his teeth ached. His knuckles were bone-white on the railing again. The sheer wrongness of her reaction, the clinical dissection of her own psychic torture, was more obscene than any scream of agony.

"Lacroix." Emiya ground out, his voice like gravel. He wouldn't let her derail this. He wouldn't let her perverse fascination win. The weapon pulsed within the illusion, a dark star flaring. The phantom scene shifted violently, dissolving the lab table. His words forced the O'Deorain to instinctively switch Now, shadows coalesced - the elegant silhouette of Amélie Lacroix, the cold glint of a visor, the stark outlines of a rooftop at dusk. Pressure built in the illusory space, focusing on O’Deorain, demanding the knowledge, "Where is she? Now."

A meeting between Ogundimu, O’Deorain, Mauga and Lacroix. A photo of a target.

A ruined town. A dropship in full, operational stealth.

A single rifle.

Everything was too familiar. He knew where this was. What this was.

In an instant, Emiya dispelled the Noble Phantasm, even as O’Deorain gave a laugh of victory.

With speed that only a Servant could manage, he moved around the now-filled area around them. Emergency vehicles and personnel were all over, and now the reporters were getting even more numerous. He had to find Amari-

Too late.

A single gunshot.

…