[6/9] Bonus.
Stuff happened anyone curious just know i graduated in life.
Butttt we're back in a new week where i still have 3 pending bonus chapters.
Just like last week the bonus scheme will be announced on Wednesday so till then I can recover the pending chapters.
Untill then you can keep giving the stones till I find a suitable scheme for this week.
---
The car came barreling down the road, engine roaring.
It swerved violently at the final turn, tires screeching across the pavement, before coming to a sudden, aggressive halt outside the gates of the Tohsaka estate.
The scent of scorched wood and ozone filled the air.
Bazett stepped out first, already reaching for her runes, while Artoria and Medusa emerged behind her with weapons half-drawn, eyes sharp and scanning for threats.
But there were no enemies waiting.
Only fire.
The Tohsaka estate stood silhouetted against the night sky—its upper floors blazing, smoke rising high into the darkness.
The manicured gardens were reduced to scorched earth, and chunks of the stone walls had collapsed.
Bazett stared at the carnage.
"...Did you kill the Tohsaka heir?" she asked, not bothering to mask the edge in her voice.
A figure stepped forward from the front steps, unfazed by the smoke, her red hair catching the amber light of the flames.
"Unfortunately, no," Illya said flatly.
She didn't wait for a follow-up.
Without invitation, Illya marched right past the three of them and opened the car door, slipping into the passenger seat like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Bazett exchanged a glance with the two servants.
"She looks pissed."
---
Bazett sat stiffly behind the wheel, hands at ten and two, eyes focused straight ahead.
The night streets of Fuyuki rolled by in a blur of pale streetlights.
Beside her in the passenger seat, Illya sat with arms crossed, and her expression unreadable as she stared out the window.
In the backseat, Archer and Rider remained silent, their gazes calmly fixed outside as well, not acknowledging anything.
"Are you the one who summoned him?" Illya asked abruptly, her voice quiet but clear, still not looking at her.
Bazett blinked. "You mean Leo?"
Illya didn't reply, just waited.
"Yes," Bazett said. "I summoned him."
Illya's head tilted slightly. "Hmm. I thought he summoned himself."
Bazett gave a faint, dry chuckle. "He kind of did. I was just… the one holding the spell circle. He hijacked it...."
"So who do the two servants in the back belong to?" Illya asked, not turning around.
Bazett gripped the steering wheel just a bit tighter. "They're allies."
"I know," Illya said flatly. "I want the names of their Masters."
Bazett sighed. "Shirou Emiya and Sakura Matou."
Illya leaned back in her seat.
"Shirou Emiya," Illya repeated under her breath, her eyes narrowing slightly.
"Interesting."
She knew exactly who that was.
Her "brother."
The boy adopted by her father.
The same father who left her behind, discarded and forgotten in that "castle" while he played family elsewhere.
She didn't say any of that aloud.
She simply turned her gaze to the window again, watching the streets pass.
I wonder what Leo is planning, she thought to herself, resting her chin on her palm.
She wasn't sure what to expect when they reached Emiya's home, but one thing was certain:
The past was about to catch up.
---
Inside the Devilcraft, Leo was leaning back with a glass of mana-infused wine, his eyes half-closed as the plane rocketed through the upper atmosphere.
But something was… off.
More importantly, Mr. Twiggy —the odd little plant-like alien dubbed Specimen E—was missing.
Because the real Leo wasn't in the plane at all.
---
Back on the place where the Devilcraft had once stood, the air rippled. A single black raven descended from the sky, landing with delicate precision.
Its claws touched down, and its shadow… expanded.
A moment later, that shadow thickened, twisted, and rose upward until a figure emerged from it, brushing off his coat.
Leo.
He stood silently in the now-empty zone, one hand holding Specimen E the so-called "twig" like it was the world's most dangerous USB drive.
He looked up at the sky where the Devilcraft had already vanished into the clouds.
"Advice received…" Leo muttered, almost as if responding to someone unseen. "And promptly ignored."
He turned his gaze downward.
The difference between Zelretch's clairvoyance and his was simple.
Zelretch read the future passively.
Leo did it actively.
His was hallucinated cause-and-effect, fueled by the overclocked storm of his fivefold mind working together in concert with mana-simulated quantum logic and the curse.
He didn't need to see what was.
He just brute-forced what could be — millions of outcomes at once, until he found one where he walked out breathing.
In nearly every future timeline he'd processed, Zelretch had shown up the moment Specimen E was directly used.
So, Leo planned accordingly.
The version of him that took off from Russia? Nothing but a beautifully constructed phantom.
Created before he left Russian airspace.
It used his innate talent of pretending and actually fit a mana brain in the phantom.
All to sell the story.
Zelretch had taken the bait.
As calculated.
Leo turned his attention back to the little "twig" — Specimen E.
I'm sorry, Mister Twiggy, Leo whispered in his mind, but eyes devoid of regret, as his hand clenched around the stick.
The fragile, plant-like alien lifeform let out a subtle screech, not of sound, but of information looped within mana, as its root-like body curled inward in defense.
The mana screech tried to interfere with Leo's brain to avoid it.
But alas it didn't phase Leo at all.
With one decisive crush, Leo shattered Mr.Twiggy.
The splintering crystal-like fragments fluttered momentarily in the air — before melting into red and gold motes, immediately being sucked into Leo's palm.
Leo was using echoforge to absorb Specimen E.
A new Codex began to be inscribed into his blood and soul — a silent transcription of everything that had once made Specimen E...
And he did it without mercy.
Because, Mr. Twiggy wasn't just a quirky alien plant…
He was a sleeper agent.
---
Specimen E had no combat capabilities.
But what it did have was far more terrifying — it was an extension, a perfectly engineered appendage of a nomadic planet-eating civilizations.
A biological USB.
A silent anchor meant to gauge if a planet was ripe to be harvested.
Its purpose?
If it died — the civilization that made it would stay away.
Because only a an out of class-tier civilization would be capable of detecting, killing, and consuming a lifeform built to remain invisible even to the planet's perception.
Mr. Twiggy's last memory, recovered during echoforge, was of floating near the Oort Cloud and then silently orbiting Earth for decades.
Which meant… his very existence had put Earth on the interstellar radar.
And now Leo had eaten the probe.
So it will probably help in keeping them away.
---
As Leo walked toward the forbidden zone, the Mage Association's barrier , a seal reinforced to deter mages.
But Leo passed through it easily.
It didn't fail.
It simply couldn't acknowledge him.
Leo wasn't part of Earth anymore — not in the way those wards understood.
Not after adding Mr. Twiggy's stealth protocols into his soul.
Leo walked undettered and perfectly calm without any nervousness.
And with each step, the texture of the world faded.
The air no longer smelled like air. The sounds stopped being sound.
Light curved.
By the time he stepped into the final veil, his body began to shift — branches of crystalline bark erupting from his shoulders, forming fractal latticework through his spine, his face splintering into reflective shards, no longer fully organic.
As his body adapted to the localised reality of the Spider.
And just as the last thread of Earth's illusion peeled away and then....
He saw it.
ORT.
The Spider.
Leo wasn't seeing it with "eyes".
His body had already changed—his skin looked like crystal branches, constantly shifting.
Mr. Twiggy's power was trying to help—trying to make Leo part of this texture, to blend in.
But it didn't work, as his body just kept changing and changing.
Leo understood why this was happening with his insight in the information plane.
ORT was the Ultimate One of the Oort Cloud.
And the Oort Cloud wasn't a place.
It was made of trillions of broken planetoids, infinitely small frozen dust to small planets floating at the edge of the solar system.
ORT didn't become their ruler naturally.
It took over.
It wasn't like other ultimate one's who were deeply connected to their celestial body.
Leo understood something terrifying in that moment.
It "consumed" everything around it and made it part of itself.
It wasn't even supposed to be the Ultimate One of anything.
But he basically added concept of trillions of celestial bodies into his own... Weak they may be but together they certainly were not so.
ORT was so much like Leo.
A faker.
Leo was someone who stole and copied everything, and made them his own.
ORT was the same, but on a bigger level.
ORT forced everything to be as it wants them to be ...which was pretty standard for ultimate one's.
But ORT seemed to be able to rewrite entire Celestial body's structure is one go.
Which is a crazy thing to do....
Leo's adaptive power that he took from Mr.twiggy was going crazy.
He couldn't keep a stable form.
And ORT wasn't even doing anything.
It didn't even notice him.
Just it's passive ability to rewrite texture was very absurdly strong.
Did that scare Leo? Fuck no.
...Well, actually—
Yeah.
He was fucking terrified.
But did that stop him?
No.
Fear didn't stop Leo, most of the time.
(Exceptions exist)
He fought wars as a foot soldier in an era where drones could level squads in Seconds.
Fear never goes away.
You just learn to live with it.
That didn't mean Leo didn't run the hell away....
But in the brief second before he ran away from ORT—He copied it.
Almost everything that made ORT…
ORT.
The body structure.
The material.
The concepts.
The ability to overwrite texture.
He took it all.
Encoded it.
But even then—
It wasn't the same.
Because Leo wasn't backed by trillions of ice-born consciousnesses from shattered celestial bodies.
He didn't have a solar system's worth of spirits singing in his blood.
He didn't have an entire cloud of dead worlds naming him their Apex.
No.
He was just Leo.
A devil in borrowed skin.
A machine pretending to be divine.
But that was fine.
Because even if he didn't have the power of ORT—
He now had something else: The blueprint.
And any Leo with a blueprint was a problem for the universe.
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Power Stones and Reviews please