55Chapter 1: Waking Up on a Glass Train
A worm will be a worm.
Not just any soul would do. The honor of being born a worm could only go to a soul of a worm. Such a thing is undeniable.
Circuits? Circuits are a thing of the soul. I, a being not from this world, would have no such things. No such luck as to gain the keys to power. I was a parasite, a fungus puppeting a body not my own. The lowest form of scum.
That's fine. I'm used to it. Used to envying those with the fortune to be born above me. Those who never had to taste rotten food or wonder where their next meal would come from. I didn't care that I was a parasite. I always had been anyway. I didn't care what horrific things had given me this life, I wasn't going to give it up just because of that. Even if it means crawling through a pit of putrid filth left by the last resident of this body, even if I woke screaming from nightmares that were my own past—
I would survive.
I had to.
I had more than Shinji did. Between the two of us was a century of life experience. I had lived out every torturous moment of his life just as he had, yet those weren't the only memories in my skull. I didn't just know the future he lived, I had watched every other possible route this world could lead down. Read them in a visual novel… however many years ago.
Name? Who needs a name? I didn't. Nope. So what if I don't remember my name or my mother or my father or my—
I swallowed hard.
Stared down at the page.
It was dotted with water.
Crying. I was crying. Weakness. Weakness could not be tolerated.
Not when so much needed to be done.
Not when weakness in this house would be punished without mercy.
Not when a single wasted second could mean the end of this life.
Too much. Too much.
I knew secrets that I had no right to. Not by any power of heaven or hell. Things Shinji Matou had never learned in his decades of research.
Shinji had been a serial killer, cobbling together an understanding of magic through the blood and viscera of innocents.
I had been a physician trained in physically changing the human body.
Both of us had learned the same hard lesson. That for those who are born in the muck of society, the only way to make it in this shitshow is to spend countless hours crawling bit by bit towards the light.
Had the man I'd been ever discovered happiness? Had he known love or loss? I hadn't the foggiest. Memory and experience were separate, fragmented. I remembered internet videos and weddings, none of them my own. Remembered a beautiful lakeside, how I worked day by day, worked my fingers to the bone to chase the dream of living beside it.
Would I be living with someone else?
I…
Crying again. Unacceptable. I flipped the page, taking a deep breath.
I could do this.
I had to.
The Slavic Curses and exotic Magecraft I flipped through book after book on reminded me of a programming course I'd taken in my undergrad years. A bizarre fusion of scripting and programming, really… I'd never had the patience for either. The rules it set up, the way it twisted things to work within those rules… it was so eerily like computer logic that it dredged up long-dormant memories I didn't know I had.
Ninety percent of coding wasn't in the coding. It was in fixing what went wrong with the code when you had no fucking clue where to begin. I wasn't built fo that sort of patience-intensive bullshit. I didn't have the focus to go through each line of code until I found where the error began, then do that countless times until something else inevitably broke it. I preferred knowing exactly what the problem was and deciding how best to fix it. A job done perfectly once beats a job done imperfectly several times.
But now, such sensibilities didn't matter. No matter how much you hate the dirt, when life tells you to crawl on your stomach or die, you fucking crawl.
No matter how aggravating. No matter how humiliating.
Crawl.
A notebook was stolen from a dusty bin. An antique pen. If the magical bullshit made no sense, I would read until I learned. I would take notes. I would wrangle this into a some sort of order like it's the material on next week's graduate finals.
I would.
I had to.
I stared at the warm, kind woman who called me 'son'. Shifted my gaze to the tired man beside her at the table. Smiling despite the lines in his face.
As the old worm shuffled by in the background, I followed his gaze. Confirmed what I already knew.
The joy. The happiness. Something impossible to understand in this broken place.
She wouldn't survive here. She wasn't a worm. If she couldn't crawl, couldn't wallow in the dirt… then she would be food, one day.
Mother to Shinji, perhaps, but not to me. I couldn't afford such emotions to someone who would never learn to crawl.
"Hey, Shin-tan… be good while Mommy's at work, okay?" The woman said warmly. "Don't give Daddy any trouble."
"…Okay." I whispered. Not too loud, not when the walls swam with ears. Returned to the tome wrapped in the dustcover of a children's alphabet.
It was definitely unhealthy that I related to the book more than the human beings before me. Old, falling apart at the seams. Wrapped in the dressings of something new, childish.
I closed my eyes.
Philosophy had always been my passion… but such things are better left in the muck.
I flipped a page. Wondered why anyone had bothered writing down a family history when the first patriarch of the Clan still shambled about as a sentient pile of Blood Worms.
It was interesting nevertheless.
The Matou Clan, previously known as the Makiri, is a Magus lineage situated in Fuyuki City, Japan. It is a lineage that dates back over 500 years, though you could hardly call it a noble lineage. They were chased out of their homeland in Russia for being the worms they are, horrific parasites by nature. Around 200 years ago, the Matou began to decline and their offspring started to lose their capacity to manifest Magic Circuits, pseudo-nervous system by which a person can be determined as a Magus.
Although they covered up with the excuse that they were incompatible with the spiritual land of Fuyuki, the true reason was simple. The spiritual land of Japan, the purifying nature of both its religions and its practices, was toxic to them. No one likes finding maggots in their soup, I suppose, and there are few more disgusting maggots than the Matou.
I digress.
The Magecraft of the Matou works around the concept of 'absorbing'. In short, our Clan Trait is simply a long-developed ability of a parasite, eating things and adding them to itself. In Shinji's timeline, it had been used to 'absorb' Sakura and Rin Tohsaka into our bloodline, despite them being outsiders. Still, the old worm despised outside blood, so even though he could 'absorb' just about anyone, they would never be the Clan Heir. Instead they would be broken down and reduced to usable wombs, infested with Lust Worms that would break down their host's mind until there was nothing left but a husk.
The only reason I was alive was my dick. I carried Zouken's bloodline, genes he had lost when he turned himself into a shambling monstrosity to prolong his life. My fate was clear, outlined in red. If I did nothing, I would live until I knocked up whatever female Magus that Zouken sweet-tongued into the family. If I stepped out of line, I was still painfully replaceable. The people who had given birth to me still breathed, and they could still give birth to an heir.
If ever an heir were born with Magic Circuits, if I hadn't yet proved my worth in other areas, I would be tossed to the Crest Worms, the twisted Familiars that Zouken so adored.
I hated it. But if I ever had a little sibling… they could mean the death of me.
The people who had given birth to me were young, and I knew damn well what the noises at night were. I wasn't about to go stabbing the woman, so my options were restricted. I was on a clock. I needed to find a way to survive before I was replaced.
Perhaps it was heartless, to think of myself before the people who'd brought me into this world. The moment they pushed out a suitable heir, they were expendable worm food too. Careless or not, I couldn't bring myself to give a shit. Kariya had made the choice to run from this place, Shinji's father Byakuya could have done the same. He was a fool for thinking us safe here, and he would one day die for it.
The book gave a detailed explanation of the Matou Clan 'Familiars', or what Zouken Matou had reduced our Clan Crest to over the years. While other families had Crests that could be passed down and used effortlessly, our Crest was now 'absorbed' by the insects. To truly use all our Clan Arts, one would have to accept infestation on a permanent basis.
Crest Worms are not only capable of expanding one's natural Magic Circuits, but also capable acting as artificial Circuits after a certain incubation period is complete. Since they usually remain in a dormant state, the worms don't have that much direct influence over someone. However, once awakened by the activation of Circuits they will try to force the body to continuously produce magical energy in order to sustain themselves. In case the user is unable to create enough magical energy, they will consume their flesh as nutrition or stimulate their desire for intimacy.
There are a few different subtypes of the Crest Worms, each with their own brand of horror. In essence, there are a few basic ways that magical energy can be transferred, and each type of Crest Worm preys on one type.
Lust Worms love feasting on the energy of humans. When the host is a male, they consume their bone marrow and part of the brain after shattering his spine, making him crippled in the process. When the host is a female, they instead absorb the mental energy created after sexual stimulation is made through the nervous system. Long-term infestation causes permanent damage, increasing the host's sensitivity and sexual desire until they become little more than slaves to their cravings.
Blood Worms are the kind that feast on blood, as the name implies, much like 'vampires' do in legend. In reality, they have little to do with Dead Apostles, the reality of the 'vampire' myth. Instead, they target the potent life energy contained within blood along with the energy, the 'Od' contained within.
Giant Worms are… well, picture the love child of a spider, a centipede, and a Voltswagon Beatle. They can literally just eat you, but their preferred method is to tie you up and pump you full of painkillers, then eat strips off of you like a side of beef. When you heal, they just eat that part of you again. That method is especially useful against Magi, which often reflexively heal themselves when injured.
Last but not least are the Blade Wing Worms, which are just flying leeches with hard armor. I'll spare you any more, the picture on the page was something I would wish on anyone's eyes.
I grimaced to myself, closing the book.
Honestly, it was kind of disappointing. If Zouken had managed something like the Chakra-eating bugs from Naruto, I would've judged him less harshly, but as it was, nothing the man had made could be considered useful enough to justify using. No matter what, Zouken's bugs would only eat you. He lacked imagination… no, rather, he lacked a certain level of humanity.
Think about it. If those worms were actually beneficial rather than just being death sentences with side-effects or fates worse than death, he could've raised an army of mages by now. They can give artificial Magic Circuits, for God's sake. Or, hell, if he'd bred worms for more than just parasetic uses, followed further along the lines of the Giant Worms, he could have an army of Zerg-style monsters that could have killed every Master in the Holy Grail War by themselves.
What's the point in fighting a battle royale of ancient heroes summoned to the present when you can just cause the insect apocalypse and win by default? Fuckin' Shinji had come up with the mass extermination plan, and he was about as thick as a brick wall. Why couldn't Zouken?
…Whatever. It didn't matter.
Maybe there was something I was missing. Some reasoning as to why it wouldn't work. This was what information gathering was for, after all. This was still phase zero. And on the off chance Zouken simply hadn't thought of it…
Well.
That gave me options in the future.
Three notebooks of a surgeon's illegible scratch. A fourth beginning on the table before me. Shinji had never bothered learning the basics, not when he had a genius like Tohsaka as a personal slave. I didn't mind, the challenge was a welcome one in the dull monotony.
Shinji was a genius with Magecraft… just, in the same way that Hitler was a genius with shower design.
Fortunately, I didn't have to worry about the agony of another lifetime of education. The not-worm was the only one who knew that children were meant to get such things at this age.
How did I know this?
…Lucky guess, we'll say.
"Byakuya, this isn't healthy. He's antisocial and spends all day with those damn books. Who taught him to read them, anyway?"
"I…don't know."
"He can't go on like this. He has to be around kids his own age, so he doesn't grow up thinking this is normal."
It was normal. Normal for worms, at least.
I was like her, she thought. Disconnected from the Moonlit World due to my lack of Circuits. She was the daughter of a third-rate Magus, her only redeeming quality her unnamed 'inheritor' Sorcery Trait that strengthened the blood of whoever she bred with.
But she was content to sit where she was. I wasn't.
"Tell me, boy, what are you doing?"
An eerie voice, just beside my ear. I nearly cursed in surprise, barely swallowing it back.
I wordlessly handed him the notebook. Waited. He opened it to the first page, slowly flipping through.
Flip. Flip. Flip.
Like the stone across an executioner's axe. See? I can crawl. Believe me, please.
"Hmph…" he mumbled at last, tossing the notebook at me. "A magnificent talent, wasted on you."
And then he was gone.
I exhaled.
Crawl, little worm…
I picked up the notebook. Carefully. Delicately.
Opened it to the most recent page.
"An idiot savant." The worm hissed, stepping past the arguing two. The two who had forgotten that these walls were made of ears. "He may yet be useful, so he is not to be disturbed."
I closed my eyes. Exhaled.
A smaller worm doesn't need to force its way past resistance. They just need to follow the trail of a larger worm.
He was right, I was a waste of ability. A Magus without Magical Circuits was no Magus at all. But that didn't mean my efforts would amount to nothing. I was still learning, still exploring all the options.
Shinji Matou had enacted the most horrific ritual in human history without a single drop of prana. I could do better. After all… even without Circuits, my body still contained Od. I was still a living creature. Shinji had never bothered to explore that route.
He was a fool.
Even if I was a waste of ability, even if I couldn't change myself… I could still change others.
A parasite, unable to do anything on its own, latches onto hosts in order to survive.
Zouken would respect that.
Or he would eat me.
You never know, really.
The first handhold in this insurmountable cliff was gaining some means of fighting back if ever the old worm came to eat me. A simple security measure, something next to impossible for as simple as it sounded.
I was a boy. A little boy, locked in a rotting house literally crawling with Crest Worms.
But rushing for the first handhold would serve me no good. Not if I didn't yet have the knowledge to climb. So, day by day, I studied, learning all the Matou library had to teach me about magic. Shinji had learned much on his own, curses and terrible techniques, but I wasn't him. Not fully. Not when his very wish to the Grail was to turn into someone else. To have someone else live his life.
No. I was and wasn't him, in the same way the rebuilt Ship of Theseus both is and is not the one that once sailed the high seas.
Shinji lived for short-term solutions. Quick fixes. He'd built his twisted magic on the basis of burning others' lives before his own. It had been honed to a horrific masterpiece by the time his foul life ended. Even if I wanted to, though, I couldn't copy his path, simply because I lacked the resources.
Some part of me whispered that new resources could be found. I ignored that part. I had not yet fallen that low.
Rather than setting my sights on the immediate leap, I instead settled on something simpler.
A basic security array, the one Shinji Matou had once used to secure his Workshop door. It had been 'designed' by him only in the loosest sense, of course; he'd been the brains behind it, but he'd had his 'pet' do the actual work to make it happen.
I didn't have a captive genius, and even if I did I would sooner grant them the mercy of death before letting them go through the living hell Shinji had made for his 'pets'. So I took another path.
I played to my strengths. Looked for places where a lifetime of human innovation might shine. I flipped past curses, spells, hexes, cantrips, voodoo, countless techniques recorded within the Matou history books. What I finally landed on was a thick, dusty tome in a language I only half-remembered from my college years. The entire book was like a puzzle, really, from the language itself to its layers of meaning. It seemed designed in such a way so as to hide its own secrets. The writing style didn't match any of the other books I'd read, so it was clearly a gift to the family or the like. After a few days of puzzling it over, I started to piece together what it was about.
Runes are a form of limited artificial Magic Crests. Plop 'em down, power them with a bit of Od, and they'll last for as long as there's mana in the air to mix with. The stored Od will eventually fade if left on an inanimate object, of course, but if attached to something capable of generating more Od? It was the foundation for a stable system.
Worm I may be, but I know how to play to my strengths. Using the strength of others as your own is the core of a parasite's existence.
Runes were really just a primitive form of language, directed towards magic itself. The more I learned about it, the more I started drawing parallels to another time, another life. The principle of it was simple; drawing out a rune would have a set effect, and nothing more. Adding more runes would just add steps beyond that. Most people didn't use it for more than the barest basics of physical enhancement because of such inherent flaws.
Let's say you want to move a rock. How would you do it? Would you carve a rune into the rock to make it move? No, because just carving a 'movement' rune into that rock won't do a thing. You have to specify how you plan to move that rock. For instance, you could use the 'wind' rune along with a direction and hope for the best. If you charged it with enough mana, it might summon enough wind to move that rock. But that method is way less efficient than, say, leaning down to pick up the rock.
But wind resistance is a terrible method to start with. Let's go simpler. A rune of attraction, between one side of the rock and the ground, would tip over the rock. Right? Yes, but only if you charged it with mana. And it would only move it once for all the work of carving a rune into it. But what if you used a hundred runes? Couldn't you build some primitive logic off of that? If you could have a rune telling the 'attraction' rune when to turn on and off, if you had a source of power to drive that rune, wouldn't you have just created a self-propelling wheel?
That's still too inefficient to justify the mana sink, but you can still go further. Instead of turning off the rune when it touches the ground, you just have it very briefly exert force to pull it towards the ground, then shut it off. Minimal mana expenditure. Do that hundreds of times, though, and you have the same rolling motion with extremely minimal loss. That is something you can use. Put a length of copper wire around that sucker, put it in a ring of magnets, and you have yourself a generator. Not too useful for a Magus, of course, but it's a means of efficiently turning prana into electricity, on a factor ten times less wasteful than conventional Elemental Transformations.
Let's take that a bit further, now. Reduce it down to the barest simplicity. You have one rune that makes something attract, another that does nothing. By controlling when each rune is powered at which time, you can even make an engine based off of that. There's something more fundamental, even, something I'm sure a canny eye would have already picked up.
Attract versus nothing. In terms of exerted force, that's basically a one and a zero. Add more ones and zeroes, more runes, and suddenly you have something a great deal more complex than either the one or the zero themselves. The most complex runic arrays were exactly that, a very basic thirteen-rune 'alphabet' that just boils down to whether mana is on or off at a specific point in the array. Power the array, you get the result. It's like running a program, really.
That's right.
For literally thousands of years, Magi have been programming using magic computers without appearing to realize it.
Granted, in this day and age computers are still huge chunks of plastic and metal, with bubble-glass screens that you could bash someone's head in with. M*crosoft W*rd was only released four years ago, hell, the internet was only just 'born' when my father hit age eighteen. We aren't even to the age of mobile phones being common yet.
…Fuck, now I just feel unreasonably old.
Regardless. Now that I had a starting point, I could dig up my old memories of college classes taken in another life, even if I'd never made a career of spaghetti code I still knew what I was doing with it. I made a point to know how to use the systems I entrusted patient files to on the daily.
My studies of runework, or more importantly my new mental image of it, was enough to unlock the rest of the puzzles around me. Half of magic is just that, the mental image. For some people it could be music, for others an exquisite painting or a delicate hand-grown rose. Without the appropriate mental state, one could only go so far. With my metaphor in mind, I was beginning to make sense of the madness. It would take me years to figure out even one branch of Magecraft with my meager talent. Working only with theory was like trying to figure out what an object was while blindfolded and only allowed to ask yes-or-no questions to a nearby Frenchman.
So what I settled on was just taking something I understood and running with it.
It was surprisingly easy to gain access to the computer my mother used for taxes. The hard part was what came next.
Let's say you have your ones and zeroes, right? Prana on or prana off. You probably know that as your basic binary system. What follows is how you communicate with that binary. Magecraft, or the system governing it, only spoke in such binary, so in order for humans to hook themselves up to it, they need a 'bridge' tongue. Normally people cast, or 'communicated', with their Circuits. As a cripple, I lacked that ability, so I had to improvise.
Fortunately, as alien and ancient as the runes I studied were, they were strangely familiar. They were strict, legalistic, and would only do exactly what you told them to.
Weeks were spent, wasted, perhaps, on applying my knowledge to try to make sense of different types of magic. I couldn't wrap my head around the most complex rituals, couldn't visualize what they were or what they did, so instead I wrote them out in a way I did know. Using runes.
Everyone has seen code at some point in their life, but few people put together that 'code' is just a surface level thing. What actually does the work is the back-end compiler that turns the commands given into something a computer can understand. I've mentioned this several times, I know, but it's important. All Magecraft really is, is running a program; the problem is that I need to understand the compiler if I want to know how the hell I can work with it.
My first mistake was thinking that every branch of Magecraft worked the same, when they definitely did not. Some worked like Python, others like Java, others still like the witchcraft known as MATLAB. Knowing one didn't mean knowing them all. Because of that, I stuck with just two basic 'languages', namely the Curses that Shinji knew and the Runecraft that I was growing to love. With them, I built my own 'compiler', and at last I was able to begin theorycrafting spells.
I could've summarized all that in just a sentence. I could have. But that was a month of my life wasted, and I'm damn well making the rest of you suffer through it with me. Because, after all that… it was still nothing special.
Yep, that's right.
All of that work. After all of that toiling and struggling. All I did was something any Magus apprentice would have done on their own. Ninety percent of learning Magecraft is just learning how to turn another Magus's chicken scratch into your own. All that effort, that work, and what I'd accomplished was just basic lesson zero.
I suppose I did it to myself. I suppose it's because I grew too excited about the whole thing.
Still, once I was invested I figured I may as well see the whole thing through. Using my mother's computer, I cobbled together something similar to Java in runic form, building a compiler specifically for my shitty attempts to make spells. I was going to be doing a lot of this over the course of this life, so I was gonna damn well make it something I could more easily work with.
I made a mistake.
I forgot that the walls have eyes. Literally and figuratively both. I was never safe in this house.
I got carried away.
I had been lulled into a sense of privacy. I had let myself get complacent, thinking big deep thoughts and coming up with grand plans. The moment my compiler was done, the moment I had a working copy of my script, it was plucked lightly out of my hand.
Looking up, I saw a bulbous bald head in the moonlight, glowing yellow eyes against black sclera. Swallowed hard.
The mask went up.
"Grandfather." I greeted. "You've come to see my work."
'Don't take it. Please, don't take it. I worked so hard...'
I quashed the thought. I couldn't let it show on my face, not in the slightest. He would only torment me further if he saw weakness, that much Shinji knew firsthand.
Pretend this was all part of the plan. That I was about to give it to him anyway.
"Thanks for not making me walk downstairs, I didn't wanna interrupt the people while they were bed-wrestling." I said blandly. It probably wasn't convincing, but it would suffice.
Zouken nodded, gaze scrutinizing the runes I'd scratched out. In English, they would roughly translate to:
if detected܂MagSig()==code܂MagSig;
→return true
else:
→while not detected܂MagSig()==code܂MagSig():
→capture(detected܂MagSig);
→liquidTemperature܂raise(radius=10, max=500, time=100);
→→ifdetected܂MagSig()==code܂MagSig;
→_→break;
Zouken lowered the sheet of runes, studying me. "A security array, yes?"
I nodded quietly.
He glanced back at the runes. "My memory of such things eludes me… Occultism never held much interest in my youth. Walk me through it, will you?"
Occultist. A person who studies the theoretical aspects of Magecraft. The technical term for what I was becoming.
"…There's a correct signature. If it's not correct, it holds their hand to the array and raises all liquids in their body by five hundred degrees."
A cruel smile stretched across the old fossil's face. "Boiling them alive… how creative. And what, pray tell, do you want done with this?"
"Sell it." I lied. "Funds for research."
I could see the gears in his head turning. Runes were a complex, annoying, and at times downright arbitrary system of magic. Few modern magi bothered to learn it. It simply took too much time and effort to learn such an archaic art. Selling pre-made arrays? Such a thing was truly a profit off the laziness of others.
Especially when mine were usable only with the compiler that could 'bridge' the code and the Magecraft, which rendered my pretty little design near-impossible to replicate.
"Well, boy…" he purred, reaching down to pat me gently on the head. "We'll make a Magus of you yet."
I was silent.
It was a platitude, a reassurance of something that Zouken knew to be impossible. But as long as I remained useful, he would say whatever was needed to preserve my usefulness. The Matou fortune was finite, after all, and as long as I was willing to fund my own interests he couldn't care less what I was doing.
He would keep at least half of my profits for himself, that much was expected. It was the nature of a worm to be greedy. I was as well, but I had a lifetime of experience in dealing with the eldest worm, so I knew to always make him feel he was getting the better end of the deal.
I could rewrite the runes for myself. Sacrificing the sheet of runes was nothing, nothing compared to losing the compiler script. I had to get him off the trail, and money seemed the best way to do it. I didn't have much to go on anyway, and later on in my research I would surely be burning money like tinder on a flame.
It didn't matter who got the better end of it. It was a smokescreen anyway, and a means of increasing my value to the old worm. This was far more ethical than Shinji's method of gathering profit, after all. As long as it let me crawl just a bit further into the light… it would all be worth it.
It had to be.
"I can do special orders." I pressed on. "If people have them. I'm trying to learn. Can you help me with the money stuff?"
Asking for help wasn't always a sign of weakness. It was a sign of knowing another's strengths were greater. Zouken Matou had kept the family fortune at a size that could sink the economy, even after we stopped researching Thaumaturgy. He was just that good with the stock market.
"I suppose a child would be unable to make an account." He grunted. "Very well, I will handle your portion. It will be given to you when you find use for it."
I nodded once.
It would have to be enough.
The woman was pregnant.
Zouken and I shared disgust over the idea, mornings spent awoken by the sounds of retching. Perhaps he had more patience with it than I, simply because it meant another chance at new blood for the Matou.
I wasn't concerned about being replaced. Not when I was being given lists of pretty numbers, not when Zouken was more than willing to help me invest it. I was no Magus, but I was a cash cow. Moreso now that custom orders were beginning to come in.
I had no room in my plans to spare weakness for an infant sibling.
Things were going well. For a time, drowned as I was in my work and studies, I could forget it all. I wasn't a man who'd slaughtered the world for a single wish. I wasn't the man who'd watched from outside as the world unfolded into an orchestra of horrors. I was just a boy. A little boy, playing in a sandbox with imaginary friends.
Granted, I was methodically killing those friends in a variety of horrific ways as I theorycrafted the most efficient means of keeping my budding Workshop safe, but it was the same concept.
Leylines proved a fun thing to play around with, though I was increasingly frustrated with the… bluntness, with which they had to be used. I would make an exquisite design, only for the whole thing to be rendered useless as a fat-fingered surge of raw mana tore the thing apart from the inside. Ley Lines were the lifeblood of the planet, and Gaia did not like humans stealing what was hers.
There was something here, I knew. Something to it. Like a current that lacked surge protectors or step-down transformers. If I knew anything about how to make one of those, I'd damn well try it, but as it was I was left fumbling in the dark.
There were other means, of course. Once I had a basic fence set up, I turned to said means to power the lethal array that had been set aside in favor of a more plain and robust ward scheme.
For a quick-and-dirty means of gaining power, there was the obvious solution of the Crest Worms that Zouken cultivated. They were disgusting things, but they each had a few Magic Circuits of their own with which they could cast. Of course, being born a male, they would immediately start eating me alive from the inside out, so the trade-off there was a shitty one.
If I could tame the Ley Lines enough to get just a spark, I could fire up Emiya's Nerve Circuit method. Though without Circuits of my own to regulate the flow or Avalon in me to repair the damage over time, it would surely cripple me. Plus there's the whole agonizing pain thing, which neither Shinji nor I were big on. If I could figure out the Ley Lines to that extent, I might as well just figure out how to use them directly.
There was also the option of something called a Magical Reactor, which if memory served Lord El-Melloi would be using in the coming war… but those were far, far more expensive than Zouken valued my life at, and I didn't have time to wait to steal Kayneth's. I knew sweet fuck-all about Reactors except that they were rare, expensive, and temporary, so I couldn't even be sure that it would work.
Absolute last resort was the 'vampire' method, which… well, is exactly what it says on the tin. Become a Dead Apostle. I knew where a few would be at this point, and it would really just be a matter of striking a bargain. Hell, I could even rig the coming War so that the Berserker summoned was Vlad III and take my chances from there. Obviously there's the issue of blood, but as I said… absolute last resort.
If it comes to it… if it came down to my humanity or my life… I couldn't be sure which one I picked.
I suppose in the end the Grail did pick someone that could play the part of a worm.
—In any case. First and foremost was the Ley Line solution. Followed by…
I chewed my thumb as I thought it over. All of them seemed like extremely temporary solutions. Last-resort stopgaps. I couldn't even pick a second choice with a knife to my throat, that's how bad they all were.
I really wouldn't make a good Magus.
I decided against the other options for the time being. I had time. I could afford to waste some more chasing the Ley Line solution. It worked, I had the proof-of-concept protecting my Workshop. I just needed to make something usable out ofit.
The air around the table was tense, a rubber band stretched to its limits. I ate quietly, watching the old worm examine the woman.
His arm lowered from the bump of her belly, a hideous scowl twisting his face. "Useless." He hissed. "The both of you."
The woman's expression froze. "M-maybe the Circuits just haven't formed yet." She managed in a whisper.
The food in my mouth tasted like ash. I couldn't even remember what it'd been when I bit into it. Couldn't fathom why. Memory had never before failed me on something so simple.
"Perhaps." The worm tilted his head. "But then… that's what you said about this one." His hand darted out, latching around my wrist. "Have his Circuits developed yet?"
"I-it's still soon to tell—"
A moment later, her feet were off the floor. A clawed hand squeeeezed around her neck, cutting her words short. Zouken studied her for a moment, then turned away. Byakuya tried to rise, but at a flick of Zouken's hand the worms in the man's body took control. Locked his muscles in place.
"You may be a waste of breath," Zouken told the woman, "but you yet have one last use."
A door opened, shedding light into a void.
My heart pounded.
He dragged me along behind as he carried the woman into the darkness. I knew what was coming. Had expected it for years. Yet still…
Weakness is not permitted. I hissed, locking my form in place. Refused to let burning eyes shed tears.
I wasn't Shinji. This was not my mother. I wasn't Shinji, to scream and cry like a useless maggot.
I wasn't Shinji.
The woman's body fell from the top of the staircase. Fell far, fell fast. It was as if her screams were heard from far away.
Shinji was weak. I wasn't Shinji. I wasn't him.
I wasn't anyone, really.
I was an observer. That was all. An impartial observer.
Sensation faded.
I stared down at a blue-haired boy beside a bald old man. I felt no rage or grief or helplessness. I was just… there. Watching, like an anime. Watching the world go by.
I pitied the boy. It was fortunate I wasn't him. The scene looked like something out of a nightmare.
A massive, dark basement. The boy watched with hollow eyes as the shifting mass of insects on the floor began to feed. The old man smiled, watching as well. "You'd do best not to disappoint me, boy." He hissed.
The boy sighed. "You really don't need to threaten."
The screams from below cut off abruptly. I watched every last gory detail as the Crest Worms devoured her vocal chords, then began on her skin. Blood pooled outwards, lapped up by yet more insects. The woman continued to writhe even after her skin was gone, though that too was reduced to slight jerking as her muscles were taken from her. The organs were sucked dry before the feast began, her brain pushed out her skull as bugs crawled inside.
Then the crunching began. Horrible, hollow crunching. Mandibles scraped against bone, eating away at it bit by bit. Little by little, the skeleton was consumed. The skull went last, leaving only a pile of hair and clothes where the woman had once lived.
The boy sighed. Walked up the stairs. The man trembled in his chair as the boy passed, barely stifling his sobs. The boy wordlessly left, returning with a blanket to wrap around the man's shoulders. And then he, too, was gone.
No weakness. I whispered to myself.
I had gotten too comfortable. Given myself too much leeway. Somehow I had forgotten what I was.
The boy crawled into his sheets. Curled up tightly. A lump under the covers.
Then… rest.
The following day was odd. I felt… tired, disconnected. My limbs lagged behind, and at times I would jump as I spotted a strand of blue hair out of the corner of my eye. It wasn't my hair, blue hair was impossible in my world.
But productivity could not stop.
Advancement would not halt because of weakness.
I needed to stop thinking like a person. That was what had led to pain. I wasn't a human. I was just a worm.
And a worm would do whatever it took to survive.
Ley Lines were a fool's delusion. If it could be done, someone would've done it already. I wasn't a genius, I was a desperate fool. I didn't have time to be choosey.
The other options were all stopgaps, temporary fixes. But, maybe that was okay. I didn't need a permanent solution right away. Zouken had survived for centuries in a body not his own. There were ways to find a new body when I was done with this one.
The Matou Clan 'attribute', their unique Sorcery Trait, was that of absorption. If all else failed, I could always use that to find a way to prolong my existence…
—An idea struck. A moment of pure inspiration. If I couldn't find a way with my own means, I just had to leech off someone else's.
I crunched the numbers. Examined the dates.
Four years remained until my first chance to crawl out of this muck.
Four years, two months, ten days, six hours.
I wrote the number down. Stared at it for a time. Frowned, looking up at the clock.
Five hours.
An hour gone already.
Too much to do. I had to work.
I rose, stumbling through the house. Found the place an old worm was crawling. Stared up at him.
"What is it, boy?" He hissed.
I wasn't boy. Boy was someone else.
But that was all right. It was an easy mistake.
"I need a worm." I said quietly.
He blinked. "For what purpose?"
"Experiment." I stated.
He cocked his head. "You would not survive the implanting process."
"Not that." I said. "I just need the worm."
He chuckled. "…All right, I'll indulge you for now. Come, let us go pick out the worm you wish to take."
Into the dark basement we went. I didn't bother with disgust, instead wading into the pool without a moment's pause. Shinji had spent decades with these worms, I knew they would not harm me as long as Zouken didn't order them to.
I made my way to the Blood Worms. Sorted through the writhing mass. The strongest ones would be the ones that had fed the most, the ones capable of trampling their brethren enough to eat their fill. I had no time to work with a sub-par specimen.
I lifted a mid-sized insect, considering it. Flipped it over, ignoring its struggles. Tossed it aside, moving to the next that caught my eye. It was difficult to tell by sight alone how many Circuits each one had, but not impossible. Any worm that had eaten its fill without visible scars or superior strength had to have relied on magical energy.
There.
I dropped the insect in my hands, lunging for the one that had snagged my attention. Perhaps the size of my head, yet fat enough to have eaten its fill multiple times. I carried it back to Zouken, holding it up for inspection.
He bares his teeth in a mockery of a smile. "You have done your research. This one will not need to be fed for perhaps a month, but if you cannot feed it by then, know that you will become its feast."
"Of course." I replied calmly. "May I Contract with it?"
"Hmph. If you have the prana, certainly—"
"No. I need your help." I persisted. Perhaps I was pushing it, but this was a vital step. "Please. I can give the blood, but I need a spark to make it work."
He studied me, gaze inscrutable. "…Very well." He hissed. "But I expect excellent results."
I nodded rapidly, lifting my hand to bite my thumb. An eerily long tongue darted out, lapping up the drop of blood. Zouken's hand snapped out, grabbing my skull and squeezing—
I nearly passed out. Zouken's slithering power flowed into me, brushing against my Od. The next moment, I was no longer alone in the sanctity of my mind. A foreign mind, alien hunger. I clamped down my resolve, grabbing the new mind with an iron grip. Experience borne of decades slammed the screeching thing, chaining it to my will.
FeedfeedfeedfeedFEEDFEEDFEEDFEEDFEEDFEED—
I snorted.
'Hunger,' I told it, 'is a weakness. You will be strong.'
It screeched at me, both in my mind and in my arms. I held it fast, forcing my will onto it. A battle of wills ensued. I held firm.
At last, the screeching died down to a low hum. I clicked my tongue, an old habit from an old life. Tucked the bloated insect beneath my arm like a football.
"Thank you, grandfather." Was all that I said.
He grinned. "Good lad. Take good care of it, now."
The woman's purse was still on the counter, so I helped myself to its contents and slipped out of the house. The man was still locked in his room with grief, so it didn't matter if I put on appearances. My first purchases with my gathered funds were an aquarium, a full blood transfusion kit. and gallon of coconut milk. I set up an environment to make the Blood Worm comfortable, then set about stage one of my experiment.
'If you help me,' I whispered to it, 'I will feed you until you are full.'
It agreed without hesitation.
I placed a hand against the worm's shell. Closed my eyes, enacting a spell taught by my grandfather in another life. A remote puppetry of one's Familiar. For a moment, the worm and I were one.
Magic Circuits are 'opened' when magical energy is run through them for the first time. Based on their experience at that time, a Magus makes their own mental trigger to activate their Circuits at will from then on. To Shirou Emiya, the titular protagonist of the first story, spells were merely weapons. Bullets to be loaded into a gun. He needed not understand their make, merely accept their existence and move on. A cold, robotic mindset that led to his mental trigger being the firing of a gun.
Mine was fairly simple, if less violent than that. To me, Magecraft was a program. I visualized accordingly.
Od coursed through the worm's Circuits. One, two… six Circuits in a single worm. Doomed to a short life from the strain of them, certainly, but I aimed to change that. Power flowed into my human body, and I held my breath.
I had the spark. I just had to… just had to…
Pain.
An old friend. An ally in the darkness. Pain, like shoving a white-hot iron into the back of my skull. I forced it upwards, carefully crafting a Circuit out of useless nerves. I needed access to Magecraft more than I needed the ability to wiggle my scalp or wave a nonexistent tail. The remnants of evolution, finally put to good use.
The smooth click of a button being pressed, machinery whirring to life. A fan hummed softly as the screen flicked on.
For the first time in any life, my own power rushed through my body. I squeezed my eyes shut, taking a deep breath. Enacted a simple spell.
The pain stopped.
It wasn't gone, I'd just removed my ability to feel it. An anesthetic spell. One by one, I transformed the useless nerves into Magic Circuits until my skull buzzed from the amount of power running through it..
I laughed. Louder and louder, until I was wheezing in a puddle on the floor.
Then I collected myself. Picked myself off the floor with numb hands. Opened the gallon of coconut milk, poured some into a bowl. Prana poured into the liquid, suffusing it.
It's a popular myth that coconut water can work as a plasma substitute. It can, but the liquid is closer to the liquid found inside of red blood cells than it is to the high-sodium plasma. The problem was… even if it had a higher effectiveness than pushing prana into plain water, it still wasn't good enough.
That was all right. That's what I expected.
This was only the first step.
I had a month to tweak it to the level that the Blood Worm would accept it as a substitute. Now that I had prana, I could apply the theories I'd been building to all this time. A month to turn a ravenous parasite into a household pet.
If I couldn't do it by then… well. I had the aquarium lined with runes. Certainly they were useful only at close proximity, but they could still pulverize the Blood Worm with mere drops of prana.
The show must go on.
A/N:
Mm, spaghetti code. Also, early update, because I have things, gasp, pre-written for once.
Don't worry, I won't be showing code too often, I know it puts people to sleep and it's too much of a pain to get through Fanfiction's formatting.
I'd like to specify here that this is not a self-insert of any sort, merely a new way of looking at the Nasuverse magic. So many people seem insistent that things must be a certain way, and the reality is that simply isn't the case. For instance, I read a story at one point that made it seem like only violent, abrupt triggers work for channeling magic. Interesting as that is, I raise the counterpoint of Sigma, the Master from Fate/strange Fake whose focus is literally imagining himself falling asleep. (Volume 7, feel free to check me) For as heavy as the metaphors of Magecraft being like running a program, we've yet to see anyone with actual programming knowledge getting involved as a Magus, so I thought that would be an interesting angle.
I would also like to make known that this main character has one notable mental disorder. I'm not really hiding it, it's there in plain view for any armchair psychologists out there. Some part of him still wants to do the right thing, still thinks he has some control over his life. That part of him is gradually slipping away. Some part of him is Shinji Matou, full of grief and regret. Some part of him is the doctor, cold and clinical. Some part of him is just a small child, trying to make sense of his crumbling reality.
A bit of a side note, before I head off. A few reviews made me realize that not everyone reading this fic understands Fate lore, so for those of you who do, please bear with the exposition I give out from time to time. I aim to make my works accessible to all my readers, not just those who know a specific fandom. Who knows, you might even learn something new!
As always, have a wonderful day! If you enjoyed the story, feel free to leave a review or support me on Patr𝖾on!