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One red sun had set.
The other still burned.
Without the first sun going down, the coolness that should have followed evening never ca. The heat simply persisted — flat, total, a ceiling that had decided to stay. People who had been managing it hour by hour were no longer managing it. The streets that hadn't been emptied by earlier combat were empty now for different reasons.
In the harbor, the dragon hadn't moved.
It didn't need to.
"Have they arrived yet?" Vritra's voice rumbled across the water, warm and anticipatory. "My heroes~?"
dea's firework was precise, beautiful, and extrely visible against the darkening sky — a burst of arcane light in the specific pattern they'd agreed on, the signal to converge.
Max watched it bloom and looked down at the street below the crane.
The chat was not taking the Eighth Servant situation well.
[AnotherViolation]: He's doing it again. More illegal operations. I can't believe this.
[GaDev_Comntary]: A ga made by a small studio having exploitable chanics that the developer himself is exploiting. This is peak indie ga culture.
[MaintenanceRequest]: Max is going to have to do ergency patch work after this session. The compensation better be good.
[HolyGrailPrice]: Wait, soone said Grail fragnts are only 30 each? That's actually cheap.
[WhaleMont]: Can soone Venmo 50 dollars I want to go completely feral on the gacha this Thursday.
Max was not reading the chat.
He was looking at the summoning circle, which was no longer there.
The summoning had worked — he was certain of that. What had appeared in the circle was not a Servant in any recognizable sense, not a figure he could introduce to his audience or explain in his current lore-explainer format. A fla, humanoid, brief. A single extended finger that had pointed at him with the specific energy of acknowledgnt before the whole thing vanished and the circle shattered.
The Holy Church's wanted system had not flagged it.
Because technically, what he'd perford was closer to necromancy than summoning — a loophole in the ritual architecture that the Einzbern family had originally used and that dea, after two hours with the Matou family's archives, had reconstructed.
The Eighth Servant was summoned.
In a way that wasn't going to make sense until it needed to.
Max filed this under trust the plan and kept moving.
Forty-five minutes later, at the end of the street, figures appeared.
Max had expected Maverick. He had expected Chen Ge. He had, with so optimism, expected the situation to have resolved itself cleanly.
What arrived was: Maverick, Chen Ge, Astolfo, Derek, Shuten-dōji, and an atmosphere that strongly suggested the journey here had contained events.
All of them, to varying degrees, appeared to have been through sothing.
"Are you..." Max looked at them. At Derek specifically. At the general aura of the group. "Did you just co from so kind of mbership-based restaurant?"
"A lot happened," Maverick said, in the tone of soone who had decided not to elaborate. "This is the Assassin's Master. He's in. Shuten-dōji is allied with us." A pause. "For now."
"Glad to hear it. dea—"
dea was already moving before he finished, her expression communicating what she thought of the situation in terms that required no elaboration. She raised her staff and produced, from the water reserves she'd been drawing on all afternoon, sothing between a shower and a targeted flood.
The group accepted this with varying degrees of dignity.
Derek accepted it with significant relief.
[deaService]: She looks disgusted the whole ti and still does it because Max asked her to. Character mont.
[CleaningMontage]: The most practical magic cast all day.
[ShutenvArrival]: Shuten-dōji is here. Shuten-dōji is allied with the group. I don't know how this happened and I respect it.
Then Shuten-dōji, who had been standing precisely far enough away from Derek to communicate her position on the matter, noticed that Max had beco available as a target.
She moved.
The arm that draped itself across his shoulder from behind was unhurried and completely deliberate.
"Oh my~ Oh my~" Her voice was warm against his ear. "Master pays so much attention to everyone else and ignores this concubine entirely. After everything we've been through together. It breaks my heart."
"Get off ."
"Your Servant's voice is getting higher." She directed this at dea, who had frozen mid-water-spell. "You know, if you'd focused on your Master instead of helping those others, you wouldn't be in this position. You've left your ho open."
"You vixen, I swear—"
"dea." Max's voice was even. "Focus."
dea refocused. With visible effort.
[deaFuming]: She is going to combust. She is physically going to combust.
[ShutenvStrategy]: Shuten-dōji is doing this on purpose to destabilize dea before the fight. This is tactics.
[AlsoJustFun]: She's also doing it because she enjoys it.
[BothTrue]: Both are true simultaneously.
[ChenGeConcern]: Soone ntioned from Chen Ge's perspective that Maverick may have accidentally ingested sothing during the fight with Derek. I'm choosing not to think about this.
[CosmosReport]: Whatever happened, Maverick ca out of it with so kind of power-up energy. He had a mont. It was sothing.
Astolfo, who had been looking at everyone with the bright-eyed interest of soone at a very exciting party, drifted toward Max and dea with the specific trajectory of soone who had decided to introduce himself.
"Hello! You must be the Magician's Master — you're very handso! Almost as handso as my Master, though a little less."
Shuten-dōji released Max's shoulder.
She looked at Astolfo.
She looked at him the way a person looks at sothing they want to be far away from without having to say so.
dea, whose Astolfo tolerance had been established definitively earlier, did not wait for more.
Even at E-rank Strength — which was dea's actual physical stat, one of the lowest possible — the collar grab was efficient. The Circe Defeat Punch that followed was the form of a woman who had transford people into pigs before and retained the muscle mory.
"dea," Max said.
"He started it," dea said.
"We need everyone functional."
"He'll be functional." A pause. "Probably."
Max looked at the assembled group — Maverick, Chen Ge, Derek, Shuten-dōji at a careful distance from Derek, Astolfo being held at collar-height by dea, Wuai standing to one side with the expression of a creature that had accepted its circumstances.
He cleared his throat.
"I don't know everyone's nas yet, and that can wait. We have a temporary alliance and we're burning ti." He looked at Maverick. "I need to borrow a Command Seal."
Maverick's eyebrows went up. "You used all three already?"
"Yes. What I'm about to do requires one."
"If it's not enough, I have one too," Chen Ge offered imdiately.
[LickspittleAlert]: LICKSPITTLES. Both of them. Absolute lickspittles.
[DefendingThem]: They're being generous for a joint raid! It's strategically sound!
[DerekAloof]: The Assassin's Master is watching this with appropriate detachnt. Learn from him.
[ChenGeFan]: No, learn from Chen Ge, he's wonderful, stop it.
Max took one Command Seal from Maverick — with the explicit understanding it would be repaid from the Holy Church's subjugation reward once Vritra was down. Two felt excessive, and he had a principle about borrowing more than he could return.
He raised his right hand.
dea had repaired it fully. The Command Seal Maverick had transferred sat in his palm, red and precise.
Max looked at the harbor. At the mountain-sized dragon waiting patiently in the dark water. At the second sun that refused to set. At the chat, which had been watching him do increasingly inadvisable things all day and had never once stopped watching.
"I use a Command Seal," he said clearly, "to command myself."
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