Jump 362: Fate/Stay Night

Jump #362: Fate/Stay Night
>King of Wands, reversed: One who is charismatic and intimidating, using demonstrations of his own skill to dupe others into accepting responsibilities beyond their ability.
Oh, you mean like Zelretch.
>Age: 16
>Location: Homurahara High School, 2003
What the hell am I doing in a school? This will not end well.
>Identities: (-800) Homunculus, Demi Servant
Well that's a rather odd thing to add there. Oh dear.
>Drawbacks: (+1700) Family History, Sealing Designation, Center Stage, Black Is The New Black, Class War, JUMPER
I feel my sins crawling on my back, and are they ever heavy.
>Magic Circuits (Free)
Another twenty circuits! Joy. 310 in total, now, yes?
>Sorcerer's Apprentice (900)
Well. At least Zelretch is willing to have some words with me from time to time about how to play with the fabric of the multiverse. Travelling between them without the Gauntlet is one thing, being able to make USE of them is quite another!
>Time Bleed (300)
Uh. Crap. This... this is a problem. I mean, sure, it's good to get a bit of memory by way of being around people, but the abilities I have a tendency to use to put myself in fast-forward AREN'T WORKING. And that had been my trump card.
>Artificial Lifeform (Free, Homunculus)
Damn it, even if I shapeshift back to my usual appearance I'm stuck with red eyes and white hair. Stupid homunculi bodies.
>Tiny Terror (Free, Homunculus)
Well, at least I seem to get peoples' attentions appropriately, instead of them going 'aw the little homunculus thinks it's people'.
>Snow Fairy (Free, Homunculus)
Well of course I know how to comport myself in an appropriate fashion, you idiots only stole me from my body!
>Wish Granting (0, Homunculus)
Apparently I can bypass the entire idiotic conflict and use brute force. If nothing else, that's quite useful.

>Servant points: [+1000]
. . . wait.
>Servant Class: JUMPER
Wait wait wait wait. What the hell do you mean, servant class?
>Personalized Class Name [Free, Jumper]
--how is my class is currently set to 「HOLY GRAIL」?! I think something is broken.
(Also I'm going to dedicate one stream of consciousness to doing nothing but using Real Eater on this. Constantly. Just to fuck with everyone, all the time.)
>Template: Lily [800]
...so this is basically acknowledging and enhancing the whole 'you're the good version of you' thing, right? I guess that explains the bonus to mana, strength and agility. And willpower. But how in the hell did you recolor the Uru in my armor WHITE?
>Strength: C [750]
>Endurance: C [650]
>Agility: C [600]
>Luck: C [550]
>Mana: C
Wow. For a servant, those stats are... almost utterly mediocre. C's across the board.
>Class Skill: Counter Hero, Rank A+ [450, Discounted]
Apparently being the 「HOLY GRAIL」 means that I have (or rather I am?) a back door into the system, but basically nothing else at all. Faaantastic. It would seem that enemies AND their noble phantasms get ranked down rather seriously when pitted against me. If a B-ranked Counter Hero skill lowered all of an opposing servant by two ranks . . . well. I'll leave it to your imagination.
>Noble Phantasm: Judgement, Rank EX [0]
...cast in the name of God, ye not guilty. The Blade is no longer black, and that is all that shall be said.

Well this is a problem. I'm not in my proper body anymore - I'm in a homunculus, which was supposed to summon an aberration of a servant and someone stuck me in it instead, at the end of the last jump, since this is literally the next day from the end of that one. Quite frankly, I blame the Einzberns playing with magic and literally ripping me out of my body to try to cheat the Grail system since I cockblocked their attempt to summon Angra Mainyu back in the thirties.

I'll need to call my family and explain that the reason their patriarch dropped dead is because he got moved into a new body, and won't my companions will be happy about THAT. Except... that's supposed to be impossible in this universe, for things to be done that way. So I'm an aberration and possibly this means I'm -technically- undead.

The fact that I'm apparently in class in this school means nothing to me and I'm currently ignoring the teacher who just left to get a higher authority since I pulled a cellphone from the warehouse to make that call to the rest fo my family.

Naturally, the call was tapped, the Clocktower heard, the process means I'm something they don't know how to deal with, and as such I should be destroyed immediately, Grail War be damned. The participants of the war understand that I don't belong in the war, everyone intends to kill me so I don't disrupt the whole process (because let's go three for three), and it turns out that somehow Gilgamesh-the-berserker's stupidity in the past left the door open for SOMETHING to corrupt the grail without even being properly summoned, and that asshat has subverted the whole damn thing and assumed direct control in a more lasting way than Gilgamesh-the-archer did.

Also we're ten minutes into this jump and a copy of me just crashed through the ceiling in my armor and is currently trying to murder me; I had barely a moment's notice that something was going to go wrong and managed to get into my armor, but... well, as I mentioned earlier, suddenly it's white and gold while his is the usual black and gold. Which... like I said, that's a side effect of being Lily rather than normal. Or Alter.

Fighting myself is an unpleasant thing on the best of days, and every time I do it gets worse. My experience in Marvel can attest to that. Likely the main reason I prevailed in the fight was because we both had the same skillset - which meant it severely reduced all of our abilities - and meant no timestops.

So only a school was destroyed, rather than a hemisphere. The news reports later labelled what happened to the school as an earthquake, and everyone who would have said otherwise had their minds forcibly changed by certain parties who could do that sort of thing, but .. yeah.

He withdrew, but it was decidedly a stalemate at best. It seemed that was largely because the Mage's Association decided to come in and try to capture me. Or possibly both of us. With his presence we were both in danger, but without it, escaping was pretty much trivial. Comments were made about being an abomination, an unsanctioned player, triggering a grail war that shouldn't have happened without any masters.

In the weeks to come, I was attacked by the seven servants of the Grail war, but killing them accomplished absolutely nothing because they kept coming back, again and again. Dealing with them was at once easier and more difficult than dealing with my counterpart (who kept coming back and trying to kill me as well), because while I did in fact manage to kill the other servants, they wouldn't STAY dead. It took quite a lot of effort and backtracking to figure out what the hell was going on, because my counterpart's abilities to obfuscate scrying kept me from finding out what was going on until I was able to go on the offense.

Finding out that Angra Mainyu was the impetus behind the whole thing just... made me laugh, when I saw him. Which puzzled and frustrated him - he gets his power from being hated, after all, and of all things, I laughed at him. It probably didn't hurt that Counter Hero still worked on him, if at a reduced effectiveness.

Apparently, with things going haywire and my being a demi-servant, his goal was to kill me so that the pseudo-grail I consisted of would fall under his purview and he could use that energy to manifest in a more concrete way in the world.

It wasn't even as though I'd die permanently, he told me - he would happily bring me back, assuming I couldn't simply bring MYSELF back. And he knew I could. It became increasingly apparent that he was responsible for bringing my future self to the present, from a timeline in which this all went horribly wrong - which inevitably meant that accepting his offer meant that I'd be trapped in my future self's place, most likely what had happened to him.

Everyone knows how this sort of thing goes, right? Villain makes his speech, tells hero to join him, help him moderate his excesses. And you know, he has a point, but I think I'm going to stay true to form this time. I imagine that I've gotten the lighter counter to his darkness through some attempt to balance - perhaps one small nudge from the world? - and I refuse him.

Rather than engage him further and let him distract me until he can bring back the other servants to attack me yet again, I draw Judgement - the Black Blade, now purified - and strike him down rather than engaging him in a drawn out fight.

Cast in the name of God, ye guilty.

"Huh," my future self commented, stepping from between spaces after Angra Mainyu distintegrated into motes of reddish light, "That was surprisingly anticlimactic." And Zelretch likewise stepped out of nowhere, and agreed. And then we went out for drinks to celebrate.

Apparently, fighting at Angra Mainyu's side at that point would have been counterproductive. And so my counterpart had instead chosen to go talk to my (our) companions and catch up since he had nothing better to do. He called off his grudge against me, on condition that I come back post-spark to fix things; passing up that opportunity was a regret to him. Unsurprisingly, of course, Gaia was the one to sway him. My companion, that is, not the world itself.

It was not nearly this simple the several times that I had to deal with Angra Mainyu on an annual basis afterward, but at least it was much more straightforward than spending a dozen weeks trying to backtrace everything. The ninth and final time, he had all seven of his servants prepared for my inevitable attack. I'd gotten it down to a pattern - try to draw out the various servants, strike him while they're preoccupied - and they were all prepared for me, every last weapon arrayed.

So I hit them with an orbit-to-surface purification blast amplified through the Gauntlet and Sajuuk and the whole lot of them promptly stopped being a problem. I may have also completely ruined the Greater Grail due to the whole... orbit-to-surface-holy-bombardment thing.

From what I understand, crime rates worldwide went down rather a lot after the night sky lit up with that, and I'm pretty certain that it acted as a raw infusion of energy to Gaia (the world itself, that is).

Zelretch laughed himself silly when he saw the results of that, and told me he'd be seeing me around.

Literally the only TRULY new trick was playing with the Kaleidoscope, and I effectively have infinite energy on tap already so aside from some very interesting tricks it won't make a difference, and those interesting tricks won't matter if I'm fighting myself, only a multidimensional entity. As far as the difference in experience... I had 350+ jumps and ninety-six thousand, four hundred years under my belt at the start of the jump. I truly do not think that an extra few decades is going to make a massive difference unless I figure out some new exploit I don't have yet - plus there was the mutual nerfing from Counter Hero to keep things down anyway.

The biggest danger would have been if he engaged me directly with the other servants, but that did not happen, according to the dice. Otherwise I would have been in for a much rougher battle.