Ch 4.2 These Tragic Souls and a Sword Reborn in an Intergalactic Space Opera
These Tragic Souls and a Sword Reborn
in an Intergalactic Space Opera
Story Intro: "Welcome! I'm an evil god, though not that evil of a god!" is what they woke up to. Join our heroes and heroines, having just met their demise, displaced by an extradimensional event.”
Story Starts
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Book 1 - The Empty Twin
Ch 4.2 Depersonalization-Derealization
"That was Shirou-sama's doing, mostly," Haruhime said as they cleared the breakfast dishes. "He told me the macaroni soup is a Hong Kong breakfast staple—something served in the cha chaan tengs there—and also inspired by a similar dish from the Philippines called Sopas. I didn't really understand any of it, but the stories about your reality seemed really interesting."
Sakura stacked the last bowl and smiled despite herself. The plan for the day had settled itself over the washing-up: she and Haruhime would inspect their development projects, and Lefiya—who had offered to run their training session afterwards—would tag along in the meantime.
Outside the tent, the morning light lay flat and pale across the grass. Sakura raised her voice only slightly.
"Cuspey? Could you take us to the project site, please?"
A crack, a small grey-clad figure, a bow, and then the world folded.
The logic behind the projects had been hammered out weeks ago, around the same whiteboard Rin never let anyone erase. One day, someone would visit this planet. Perhaps to survey it for development. Perhaps to conquer the dungeon. Perhaps—once they discovered it was already inhabited—to open trade. Every scenario ended the same way: the thirteen of them needed something to offer besides raw monster parts and an apologetic smile.
What nagged at Sakura, every time she turned the problem over, was the peculiarity of the silence. The government seated on Leafil Prime had done nothing here. Nothing. A planet with an intact celestial dungeon—one that, by every sign, hadn't broken in a very long time—should have drawn prospectors, survey ships, at minimum an automated claim beacon. Instead: empty sky, empty sea, and a spire of ivory that fed monsters upward on a schedule.
Which only sharpened the question of what lurked beneath the dungeon's depths. Something that both fed it and held it in check. Something that, perhaps, other people already knew to avoid.
Not that any of it changed their situation. They were trapped here, without a scrap of this galaxy's technology to signal outward. And Zelretch had handed them this mission through the hints everyone had bought—including the one stating they would register their group as an adventuring, mercenary, and bounty-hunting outfit at a space colony three star systems away, within two years. If the omniscient, dimension-hopping vampire had hinted at that, then some event after clearing the dungeon would get them off this planet. The logic was airtight.
Marin complained about it every single time. 'Too metagaming,' she'd groan, flopping dramatically over whatever furniture was nearest. 'You can't just reverse-engineer the plot from the DLC description!'
A sigh escaped Sakura. She'd been doing that a lot lately. And beneath the sighing sat the other thing—the thing she'd been keeping close to her chest, the thing that was—
"Are you okay, Sakura?"
Haruhime had just arrived beside her, Cuspey's second trip complete, fox ears tilted forward in concern.
"I'm fine. Just wo
rrying about our situation."
"I think everyone is feeling the pressure. After the difficulty of the first boss, and not knowing how many floors this dungeon possesses—it's quite understandable. Maybe—"
Pop. Cuspey's third delivery arrived a few paces away.
"—after the next raid, we should organise a day of relaxation?"
"What's this about a day of relaxation?" Lefiya approached, brushing off the residue of side-along apparition. She was strictly a guest today; the island belonged to Sakura's and Haruhime's project ledger.
The island in question sat well north of the one housing the planet dungeon, far enough that the brownies needed several chained apparitions to reach it. A portkey beacon would have solved that in an afternoon, but Illya and Gabrielle were both buried in other work, and the beacon queue was long.
"Yes," Haruhime said. "I think everyone is on the brink of burning out. Rin-sama and Hermione-sama are regularly passing out in their laboratory now."
"I've caught Illya and Gabrielle doing the same thing. Several times," Sakura added.
Lefiya's expression tightened. "And ever since Hermione repaired those time-turners, Shirou, Marin, Ryuu, Rose, and Haruka have been running multiple cycles a day."
"Shirou, Marin, and Rose are on a three-day cycle now, I think."
"At least Marin uses her third day as her inspiration day," Haruhime offered, though the frown Sakura wore didn't quite lift.
Marin's inspiration day meant playing the video games she'd received through Inherit Previous Life's Assets. Setting up her gadgets had required both Shirou and Rose, since none of her electronics were magically shielded and the tent's ambient enchantments played havoc with unprotected circuitry.
Which was its own small irony. For all that Rose and Hermione described their magical society as horribly backwater—allergic to innovation, still arguing about whether ballpoint pens counted as Muggle contamination—their tents and supplies looked strikingly modern inside. Sakura was hardly one to talk. According to Shirou, a proper magus household remained deliberately disconnected from the electric grid, lit by gas lamps, as though the twentieth century were a rumour best left unverified.
The thought circled back, as her thoughts had a habit of doing lately, to the actual problem. The one she'd been holding close, the one she needed to—
"Sakura?"
She surfaced to find both Haruhime and Lefiya watching her.
"Are you sure you're okay?" Haruhime pressed a delicate hand to Sakura's forehead, ears flattening.
"You should go home and rest if you're feeling under the weather," Lefiya said. "I could help Haruhime with the inspections in the meantime—"
"No. I'm really fine. Just distracting thoughts." The words came out sharper than intended, cutting Lefiya off.
"Hmm. Do you want to talk about it?"
Sakura shook her head. "This—it's something I need to discuss privately with Rin, Shirou, and Illya. Umm—" She hesitated, weighing it, then let the scale tip. "It's really personal."
"If you're sure." Lefiya's voice took on the stern edge she usually reserved for the clearing teams. "Just don't bring those distracting thoughts to our training later. One mistake might cause irreparable harm to your sparring partners."
"Understood."
Thankfully, they dropped it. Sakura shook her head once more, as though the distraction could be physically dislodged, and the three of them began the inspection proper while the brownies and centaurs assigned to the island moved through the fields around them.
The island was divided into three sections.
The first, occupying the north-west, held the citrus fields. By request, they were cultivating lemons, limes, oranges, yuzu, shikwasa, calamansi, and sudachi. Between the cultivation techniques from the recently translated library texts, Rose's charm work, the tireless centaurs and brownies, and the frankly astonishing runic arrays that Rin and the skrattes had laid beneath the soil, the first harvest had come in after roughly three and a half weeks.
The development philosophy was simple: the value wasn't in raw ingredients. It was in what could be made from them. Whole fruit was a commodity; processed goods were a brand. And breaking a citrus fruit into its constituent parts was trivially quick with magic, while storage and spoilage—the twin killers of any food venture—dissolved as problems the moment one applied space expansion and stasis arrays.
The juice would become concentrate, straight juice, or other beverages. Haruka and Shirou were both plotting fermented products—alcohol chief among them—and Haruka had introduced everyone to something called a ginger bug: a live ferment of ginger, sugar, and water that lent drinks a natural fizz, since they currently had no means of injecting carbon dioxide into a liquid directly.
Ordinarily, one wouldn't build a business on selling dissolved gas to people who lived in outer space. Hermione had explained the mechanics with visible relish—differences in atmospheric pressure and gravity could trap gas as bubbles in the digestive tract, leading to what she'd diplomatically termed embarrassing accidents upon release.
Fortunately, the citizens of Consortium Primaris member nations received several implants at birth. The first was a translation implant—necessary, because the galaxy was not populated solely by anthropomorphic beings, and a great many sentient species lacked the vocal cords to produce Galactic Basic at all.
The reverse held true for the thirteen of them, in fact. Zelretch's blessing let them understand a vast range of languages they physically could not speak, for want of the right anatomy to make the necessary noises. Gabrielle had theorised that if Marin trained her metamorph abilities far enough—and studied both human anatomy and the anatomy of other sentient species—she should eventually manage to morph her vocal cords into a working facsimile. Marin had immediately added it to her list, somewhere between "power armour cosplay" and "convince Ryuu the leotard is practical".
The second standard implant was a basic nanomachine vaccination. The nanomachines functioned as a smart body-maintenance system: accelerating antibody production during infection, suppressing the self-destructive signalling behind autoimmune conditions, and a dozen other quiet interventions. Imperfect, of course—higher tiers existed, at prices that could purchase a planet or, at the top end, a star system.
But one small function of even the basic tier was efficient nutrient delivery: optimising bioavailability, optimising waste. Gas accumulation from a carbonated drink could simply be managed and released without drama. A vessel travelling through space still needed proper atmospheric pressure and artificial gravity for the fizz to sparkle properly—it would never be quite as lively as planetside—but the carbonated sensation survived, and the nanomachines tidied up whatever lingered.
In short: fizzy drinks were viable. Haruka had already started a list of flavour candidates.
After walking the rows and inspecting the continuous harvest, they moved into the warehouse. The skrattes had truly outdone themselves. Two days ago they'd completed a bottling array powered by dungeon magicite—an installation that used mana to conjure the bottles themselves and auto-dispensed liquid into them. The elegant part: a conjured bottle vanished the moment its contents were finished, or the moment it smashed.
The vanishing function had needed amending. The original design triggered on an emptiness threshold, and occasionally a bottle would retain some infuriating 0.001 per cent of liquid clinging above the line, stubbornly refusing to trigger. The skrattes had added a timer as a fallback and grumbled about it for a full day.
All the bottled products lacked now was a brand. That was Haruka's job, and Sakura did not envy her the committee opinions awaiting her.
Then there was the rind. Sakura had originally suggested candied rinds, pith and all—but they had no stable sugar source yet. That product would come eventually. For now, the rinds went into something else entirely: a fermentation of citrus peel and peppers. A kosho.
Haruhime opened the dark room at the back of the warehouse. Their first batch was nearly done—a full vat of it—and when the cover lifted, a wave of aroma rolled out: strong citrus, bright fruit, a serpentine thread of spice underneath.
Haruhime's tail began to wag. Cuspey appeared at their elbows with teaspoons and small dishes; only the tiniest portion was needed for a taste test, because the stuff was powerful.
Sakura divided her portion into tiny dollops, scooped one onto her little finger, and offered Lefiya another.
She inspected the colour first—a muted green shading towards brown, whether from oxidation or from the orange zest in this particular batch, she couldn't say. This was the mixed-rind batch; seven other first batches waited in their own vessels, each a single citrus variety.
She breathed it in. Citrus and pepper hit the back of her nose. Then she licked the dollop from her finger and let it coat her mouth fully.
Salty. Tangy. Zesty. A pleasant strike of bitterness at the finish. Sakura closed her eyes and savoured it.
Lefiya's ears wiggled, her face caught between surprise and delight. Haruhime fared the same—unfortunately, her excited wagging swept her tail directly across Cuspey's face.
Cuspey, mid-savour of the portion Haruhime had shared with her, yelped and sputtered, batting fur from her mouth.
"Cuspey! Oh—I'm so sorry, I didn't—" Haruhime dropped into a crouch, hands fluttering, apologising in an accelerating stream while the little brownie waved her off with wounded dignity.
"Mistress Tohsaka, here be your boiled chicken breast." Another brownie presented a covered dish. Sakura had requested it yesterday—Shirou's suggestion, a neutral vessel to showcase the condiment's pure flavour in the context of an actual meal.
While the Haruhime-and-Cuspey spectacle played out beside them, Sakura and Lefiya each took a piece of chicken, dabbed it in the kosho, and made twin undignified noises of pleasure.
"Oh, that's—" Lefiya covered her mouth. "That's dangerous."
"Umm, Mistress Tohsaka," Cuspey said, fur restored to order, "Illya-chan be asking you to be meeting with her after training."
Sakura's stomach performed a small, cold flip that had nothing to do with the kosho.
Illya-chan. Illya had been campaigning—with total success—to get the brownies to call her that instead of Mistress von Einzbern, to everyone's endless amusement. Sakura had waged the same campaign with Cuspey for weeks and remained, immovably, Mistress Tohsaka.
She sighed and wondered what Illya wanted. Probably the project. Hopefully the project.
Before leaving the citrus plantation, they set one more thing in motion: the discarded pith would now be collected as a pectin source, which opened the door to marmalade. Orange marmalade, most likely, on the next harvest. Rose would be insufferable about it.
The second leg of the tour took them to the south-western section, where the tea grew.
They tasted the first finished batches on arrival. For now the field held only Camellia sinensis—one of the most versatile tea plants in existence—and from that single species they'd already produced three distinct products.
The largest batch after the base stock was sencha: young leaves grown in direct sunlight, then steamed immediately after picking. The steaming deactivated the enzymes that would otherwise discolour the leaves, locking in their vibrant green. The brownies then used their magic to roll the leaves—releasing oils and flavour while limiting oxidation, since the rolled leaf exposed less surface to the air—before the final drying. The result: green tea, for everyone.
The second success was matcha. The same fundamental process, but starting from shaded young leaves—tencha—which, after drying, were ground into a fine, jewel-green powder.
And finally, for their British friends: the older, withered leaves went through full oxidation to produce an English Breakfast. Gabrielle had put in a standing request for coffee, which they did not have. For now, the black tea would have to console her.
All of it from one plant. Eventually they might add oolong—effectively a partially oxidised English Breakfast; hojicha—roasted green tea leaves; and genmaicha—green tea blended with roasted brown rice.
The commercial angle made Sakura quietly optimistic. The Grakkan Empire was, per General Knowledge, an avidly tea-drinking empire. If no equivalent products existed in their markets—if what this island produced was genuinely unique—tea alone could fund the entire development of the planet. Production would need to scale enormously first, of course. But the foundation was here, in neat green rows.
The final section lay to the east: soy, planted in vast quantity. The product list remained modest for now—tofu, soy milk, edamame—and would stay modest until Haruka's koji rice project matured. Her family had been in the business of shochu and sake, and she carried the practical experience the rest of them lacked. Once koji rice was available, miso became possible, and with miso came its by-product, tamari.
Proper soy sauce would follow eventually—but that required wheat, and wheat was Gabrielle's project, and Gabrielle was buried under dungeon raids and the portkey beacon.
They'd get there. Eventually had become the settlement's unofficial motto.
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Sakura bent forward, stretching her calves against the packed earth of the training ground. They'd relocated to the planet dungeon's island for the session—standing policy now, since anyone training here doubled as a sentry should trouble brew inside the spire.
"Let's start with a two-on-one," Lefiya said, pacing a slow line in front of them. "But Haruhime—I want you to apply your enchantment on all three of us, then continue your own training. Practise using your other magics in tandem with your sorcery. And try your mind-meld with Sakura at the same time."
Haruhime acknowledged the orders with her usual earnestness, then raised a hand. "May I apply the enchantment before the battle? That way I can go straight to the new techniques. If the enchantment breaks mid-fight, I'll recast the sorcery under combat conditions instead."
Lefiya crossed her arms and considered it, lips pursed. "…Acceptable."
She turned to Sakura next. "As for you—I know you're relatively new to fighting, but trust the aptitudes you bought. Even Haruka and Marin lived thoroughly peaceful lives before this, and they adapted to the dungeon without much trouble. And within training, I don't mind you experimenting. Better you try new things here, in a controlled environment, than improvise on the thirtieth floor."
"Understood."
"Afterwards, use the Pensieve and review the session. The mind-meld will sharpen your teamwork with Haruhime, but it will become a crutch the moment you're forced into a situation where it can't be used. I want you able to fight both ways." Lefiya clapped once. "Finish your stretches and make your alterations. We start in ten minutes."
Sakura retrieved her weapon: a double-bladed spear. The design had simply come to her one evening, arriving fully formed, as though it had always been waiting—which she'd decided not to examine too closely. Shirou had broken down the Weapon's seven-pointed star sword and used the material for nearly everyone's new primary armament.
The metal shaft sat slick and balanced in her hands, weighty without being unwieldy. Each end carried a blade roughly forty centimetres long, and at the base of each main blade, two smaller blades angled outward on the diagonal—guards, or hooks, depending on how one chose to use them.
She activated her circuits. Familiar heat bloomed through her body as they converted od into usable prana. Running Structural Analysis along both spearheads, she applied Alteration and temporarily blunted every edge. A precaution, not a guarantee—even a blunted blade tore flesh when driven with enough force. She repeated the process on her arrows, then walked towards Lefiya and Haruhime, breathing herself into readiness.
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"—GROW."
The exhilaration of Haruhime's sorcery was incomparable to anything Sakura had ever felt. According to Haruhime, in her home reality the enchantment granted a temporary level-up regardless of the recipient's standing—even her Level 9 captain had tasted Level 10 through it. Here, with no visible levels beyond skill and aptitude rankings on their status sheets, the increase resisted quantification. But framed in Orario's terms: a standard Level 2 could reportedly handle fifty or more Level 1s.
So it wasn't a doubling of power. It was ascension to the next stage of one's potential, borrowed for a while. Sakura made a mental note—they should check their status sheets while enchanted, sometime.
Then the mind-meld arrived, and she became part of a whole.
It wasn't two consciousnesses conversing. She'd braced for that, dreaded it, half-convinced her secret would spill across the link before she'd had the chance to tell Shirou, Rin, and Illya herself. But the meld was nothing so invasive. It defied clean description: she knew what their opening action would be, yet not as information flowing in that demanded a response. It was more like closing one's hand—no one consciously clenched individual muscle groups to make a fist. The intent and the action were one motion.
Sakura twirled her spear and set it at a diagonal, point towards the ground. Beside her, Haruhime mirrored the stance with her ko-naginata—a shortened Japanese polearm that read more like a katana mounted on an extended tsuka, its hilt long enough for two full hand-widths and more.
Opposite them, Lefiya stood in an orthodox dual-wield guard: left foot forward, a short staff extended as her magical focus; right foot back, an elegant black rapier raised to eye level, parallel to the ground.
No glance. No signal. Focus fixed on their target, Sakura and Haruhime charged as one.
"Falling like rain, burn away the savages—Fusillade Fallarica!" One of Lefiya's god-blessed spells, its chant successfully shortened through weeks of drilling.
A wide arc of elemental fire rushed towards them, and Lefiya charged in its wake, tailing her own magic.
Sakura slammed her spear-butt into the ground and pole-vaulted clean over the flames, flanking Lefiya's left. Haruhime went through—her fire-retardant kimono, courtesy of Marin and Shirou, swept up as she raised her furisode sleeve across her front, the long drape of fabric simultaneously shielding her and blocking Lefiya's line of sight to her weapon.
Sakura summoned two black shadows—one at Lefiya's opposite flank, one behind her. Hold and attack.
She extended her free arm, palm perpendicular to the ground, and rapid-fired gandrs at Lefiya just as one of the tentacle-ribbons whipped around Lefiya's left ankle. Haruhime dropped low in the same instant, ko-naginata angling upward towards Lefiya's torso.
Lefiya's experience showed.
"Becoming a shield, holy grail of crushing evil—Dio Grail."
A circular barrier flared before her staff, drinking Sakura's curses—even as the ribboned tentacle hauled her backwards by the ankle, lifting her briefly off the ground and dumping her sideways.
She turned the fall into an answer. From her compromised position she parried Haruhime's rising blade with the rapier, and in one continuous action severed every tentacle around her, slammed her right foot down to anchor herself, and drove her right elbow into Haruhime's face.
The crack of contact carried across the training ground.
Sakura urged her shadows into renewed harassment and charged into the fray herself.
Lefiya—elbow still buried in Haruhime's cheek—extended that same arm to meet the incoming spear. A sharp parry redirected the thrust; then, generating force from her hips, she rotated a full three hundred and sixty degrees, flinging Haruhime bodily towards Sakura as her staff swung skyward.
"Dazzling stars crossing the jet-black sky. Listen to my immature prayer, guide the flash—come, shine of tears, defeat the filthy. Lumine Pleiades."
Sakura looked up. Beams of light dove towards them.
Haruhime's arms locked around her, and the world twisted.
The sensation of being squeezed through a very narrow tube—unpleasant, breathless—and then they stumbled into existence several metres from the skirmish.
The enchantment cut out. The meld dissolved. Everyone felt both go at once.
"Mistress Sanjouno! You be splinching!" Cuspey's panicked voice cut across the field.
Lefiya's stance dropped instantly, granting them reprieve. Sakura stood bent over her knees, already breathing hard from a bout that had lasted less than a minute, while Cuspey darted to Haruhime with the severed tip of a golden fox ear held gingerly aloft.
Sakura looked at Haruhime, question forming—and found her sporting a smile of pure, radiant triumph. The effect was somewhat undermined by her busted nose, split lip, and the cheek blooming a truly impressive shade of purple where Lefiya's almost certainly reinforced elbow had landed.
"That," Haruhime announced through her damaged mouth, grin widening further, "was my first successful apparition."
Which was, in fairness, an amazing feat. Of everyone learning the art through Conceptual Crossover, only Illya, Rin, and Marin had managed it so far. Haruhime made four.
While Cuspey fussed over the ear, Sakura straightened, slapped both her own cheeks, and psyched herself up. This would be a long day of getting beaten. That was assuredly not their last injury; Lefiya's sessions ran until her students could no longer fight, or until Lefiya herself tired.
Sakura had never once seen Lefiya tire first.
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Sakura dragged herself towards Illya's laboratory, every muscle filing its individual complaint.
She was, oddly, grateful for the ragged exhaustion. It had sanded down her nerves to something manageable. Hard to spiral into dread when standing upright already demanded most of one's attention.
She opened the door and immediately spied Illya's "guest": a girl with short hair and straight-cut bangs, suspended in stasis at the room's edge—the mystery woman from the inherited Einzbern assets, still unexplained, still unnamed. Illya insisted the project she accompanied would most assuredly help with their dangerous mission, and had thus far explained precisely nothing further.
Illya herself stood on a raised platform overlooking a large open workspace, clipboard braced on her left arm, pen in her right hand, taking notes on the enormous formalcraft circle spread across the floor below.
The circle was a thing of severe beauty: drawn in a colloidal Newtonian fluid—powdered blackstone harvested from the dungeon, suspended in a viscous carrier liquid that held every line crisp. Nine circles interwoven around a nine-pointed star, the whole geometry bounded within a nonagon, and threaded throughout, runes in their hundreds.
To Sakura's side, a large wooden table groaned under reference and research materials—open, dog-eared, haphazardly strewn in the particular chaos that Illya defended as a system.
Sakura looked up and met Illya's crimson eyes.
Her stress and nervousness came rushing back all at once, and her composure went out from under her like a kicked stool. She raised a hand and gave a small, wobbly wave.
Illya quirked an eyebrow at her.
"We have something important to talk about," Illya declared. She hopped straight off the platform, twisted mid-air—and vanished with a crack, demonstrating her newly acquired skill with entirely unnecessary flair.
She reappeared at the far side of the large desk, set her clipboard down, and drank from a flask as though she hadn't just apparated purely to show off.
Sakura moved before her determination could desert her, walking briskly across the room.
"Before that, Illya—I really, really need your advice on something first."
Whatever Illya saw in her face, it was enough. The teasing remark visibly died unspoken. Illya sat, crossed her arms, and gestured for Sakura to go on.
So Sakura began to spill the truth—the secret she'd carried since the beach, hoarded through every meal and meeting and training session, terrified of the disappointment it might plant in the faces of the people she loved.
Because she was not the Sakura Matou they knew—
—well. At least, in a technical sense.
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End
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