The cave beneath Ryuudou Temple had Da Vinci standing at its center, her hands extended, her eyes closed, her consciousness spread across Fuyuki like a spider's web with the leylines beneath the city pulsed beneath her awareness now preparing to do something a bit more ambitious in weaving them into a net.
Da Vinci's consciousness moved through Fuyuki like a river, following the leylines to their source. The Tohsaka estate. Where the Matou mansion was. The Einzbern castle. The church. Each location was a node, a point of connection that she could tap into and redirect.
The leylines flared. Mana poured into and out of her like water through a dam as she felt the energy surge through her circuits.
She smiled.
The bounded field settled into place as a prayer woven into the fabric of the city itself.
Da Vinci allowed herself a moment of satisfaction before turning her attention to the next task.
Honestly she had been distracted by a lot of intrusive thoughts.
What?
She had been thinking about death.
The one that had happened five hundred years ago, in a castle in France, in the arms of a king who had loved her art more than her person and she, then he, would not have it any other way.
"I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have."
The words had haunted her then. They haunted her still.
She had been born in a small hamlet called Anchiano, the illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant woman. Her grandfather had recognized her talent early, had sent her to Florence, had watched her become the greatest artist of her age.
But she had never been satisfied with art alone.
Art was a way of seeing. A way of understanding. A way of becoming.
To paint the human body, she had to understand not just its surface, but its depths, its mechanics and its function.
So she had studied.
In her notebooks, she had filled page after page with drawings of muscles and bones, of hearts and lungs, of the intricate systems that made a human being work. She had dissected animals first with the likes of cows, sheep, birds, learning the architecture of life from its simplest forms.
But animals were not enough. To understand humanity, she had to study humans.
Through connections in the medical world, she had gained access to human bodies for anatomical study. Dozens of dissections, carried out over years, each one revealing new secrets. She had studied the nerves, tracing their paths through the body like rivers through a landscape.
She had studied the skeleton, understanding how each bone connected to the next.
She had studied the organs, hypothesizing their functions, mapping their interactions.
She had watched muscles pull on tendons to create movement, had documented the precise angles and forces that made a hand clench or a foot step.
She had broken bodies down into their components, sketching each piece with the same care she applied to everything.
It had been necessary.
And she had never been satisfied.
Then there was Michelangelo.
Not just the man. The competition. The fire that had burned between them had fueled them both, the desperate, consuming need to be better.
It was, she realized, not unlike the fire that burned in Bruce Wayne.
Florence had always been a city of rivals. The Medici had pitted artists against each other for generations, using competition as a tool to extract the very best from their creative subjects. But in 1504, they had outdone themselves.
The commission was simple: two battle scenes, painted on opposite walls of the Grand Council Chamber in the Palazzo Vecchio. Two artists, chosen from the finest Florence had to offer, would compete for glory, for prestige, for the admiration of their peers.
The first artist was Leonardo da Vinci. He was already famous, his Last Supper having become the talk of Italy, his notebooks filled with inventions and observations that would make him a legend. He was a man who approached art with the rigor of a scientist.
The second artist was Michelangelo Buonarroti. He had just completed the David, a sculpture so magnificent that it had been placed in the Piazza della Signoria as a symbol of Florentine pride. He was a sculptor, a painter, a man who had been chosen by the Medici themselves.
And they despised each other.
Michelangelo had once insulted da Vinci publicly, mocking his ability as a sculptor. Da Vinci had responded by writing a fable about a sculptor who was so obsessed with his work that he forgot to eat as a thinly veiled attack on Michelangelo's famously poor hygiene.
The animosity had festered. They had traded insults in the streets. They had argued in public squares. They had even come to blows.
And now, they were being asked to compete.
Da Vinci had approached the commission with the same methodical rigor he applied to everything. He had studied battle scenes, analyzed the physics of combat, sketched dozens of variations. His preparatory drawings were masterpieces in their own right of horses rearing, soldiers clashing, the chaos of war captured with the precision of a scientist.
Michelangelo, meanwhile, had approached the commission with fire. His drawings were less detailed, less studied, but they burned with an intensity that da Vinci could not match. Where da Vinci saw the mechanics of war, Michelangelo saw the drama. The emotion. The raw, bloody, human cost of conflict.
The rivalry had consumed them both. They had worked obsessively, each trying to outdo the other, each convinced that victory was within reach.
And then, disaster.
Da Vinci's experimental technique of a new method of applying paint to walls that he had hoped would revolutionize the art had failed. The paint had not adhered properly. The colors had bled. The work had begun to crumble even as he painted it.
Michelangelo, meanwhile, had been called away to Rome by the Pope. His half-finished battle scene had been abandoned, never to be completed.
Neither artist had won.
Neither artist had lost.
The competition had ended in a stalemate, a draw that neither could claim as victory. And in the years that followed, da Vinci had never quite forgiven himself for the failure. Not because he had lost to Michelangelo (he had not lost)but because he had not finished.
He had left something incomplete, and that was the one thing he could never forgive himself for.
They were all flawed. All driven. All desperately, pathetically human.
And his human flaw was that Da Vinci had been a slow worker.
Every brushstroke had to be perfect, every detail had to be correct and every color had to be exactly the right shade.
The prior of the church where he was painting the Last Supper had grown impatient and complained to the Duke, begging him to force da Vinci to work faster to which Da Vinci had responded by using the prior as the model for Judas.
The painting had taken three or four years to complete.
And even then, da Vinci had not been satisfied.
The Mona Lisa was worse.
Despite his current opinion now and his initial disinterest, he had been commissioned to paint it in the early 1500s, and he had carried it with him for the rest of his life, making changes here and there, never quite satisfied with how it had turned out.
It was technically unfinished and a symbol of his life as an eternal work in progress, a monument to his inability to let go.
He had offended God and mankind because his work did not reach the quality it should have.
Now in the body of his original work…
Da Vinci looked at her hands as even as a mold of ether they were not the hands she had died with but they were the hands of the Mona Lisa, beautiful and serene, untouched by the years of dissection and sketching that had defined her life.
But she could still feel the ghosts of those days in her fingers.
Da Vinci's hands had ached with the effort of making things and yet she had thought: I can do better.
She had designed flying machines that would not be mass produced for another five hundred years, and she had thought: I can do better.
She had dissected dozens of bodies, mapping the basic building blocks of humanity itself, and she had thought: I can do better.
She thought about Bruce Wayne.
About the fire that burned in him, the same fire that had burned in her.
They were all driven by the same thing: the desperate, consuming need to be better. To create something that would outlast them. To leave a mark on the world for the better that could not be erased.
The arrogance of a man who had never learned to accept his own limits.
"You are not so different from me," she murmured. "Two people who have offended God and mankind by not giving more with all that they were given."
"Perhaps," she said, "that is what makes us worthy."
She would not fail here.
She would not leave anything unfinished.
She would not look back on this war and think: I should have done more.