Chaldea (Part One)

"Where am I?"

Inside a laboratory brimming with advanced technology, Ye Uchiha opened his eyes and surveyed his unfamiliar surroundings. Everything was empty and deathly still, without a trace of anyone alive. Even the instruments, tables, and chairs were coated in dust, as though no one had cleaned the place in ages.

I remember talking to Irisviel and Justeaze just a moment ago. How did I end up here in the blink of an eye? Did I transmigrate again?

Ye Uchiha was anything but calm. Just when he had finally been ready to make his mark in the Otherworld, he had transmigrated yet again. Seriously, is the universe out to get me?

"You're finally here, Chaldea's last Master."

The swivel chair facing away from Ye Uchiha turned. A blond man with a ponytail, dressed in a white lab coat and white gloves, lounged in the office chair with a weary, listless expression as he spoke in a slightly fatigued voice.

"You're... Romani?"

The man looked exactly like Romani Archaman from Fate/Grand Order as Ye Uchiha remembered him. Before he could stop himself, he blurted out the man's identity.

Romani Archaman was the head of the medical department at Chaldea, the organization dedicated to ensuring the continuation of the Human Order. His main responsibility was overseeing the health of its forty-eight Master candidates.

His true identity, however, was Solomon, the Grand Servant of the Caster class secretly summoned by Chaldea's director from two administrations ago, Marisbury Animusphere. After winning the Holy Grail War in Fuyuki City, a place of "Everyday Nuclear Peace," he had wished upon the Holy Grail to become an ordinary human. Later, at Marisbury Animusphere's invitation, he had joined Chaldea, the organization safeguarding the Human Order.

Romani slowly rose to his feet and forced a smile. "Welcome, Chaldea's last Master. I am Romani Archaman, the last residual consciousness remaining in this Chaldea."

Ye Uchiha frowned. "Wait. Why are you calling me a Chaldea Master?"

"Because you are the last Master Chaldea chose. You represent the proof that we at Chaldea once existed in this world..."

"I already mentioned it, didn't I? I'm merely a residual image called 'Romani Archaman,' not the man himself. The real 'me' ceased to exist long ago, when Chaldea perished." Romani's gaze grew distant as he slowly explained, his voice steeped in recollection.

Listening to him, Ye Uchiha raised an eyebrow and asked in surprise, "Chaldea was destroyed? Didn't you have Ritsuka Fujimaru? Given how events unfolded in your world, shouldn't he have successfully saved the Human Order?"

"Yes. Ritsuka was an outstanding Master. He successfully prevented the destruction of the Human Order. After he stopped Goetia from destroying it, peace returned to the world. Even I, who should have disappeared, somehow came back to life.

"We originally thought our duties at Chaldea would end there. But the peaceful life we should have had was shattered, beginning when Chaldea detected signals from other worlds..."

As Romani spoke, their surroundings suddenly blurred. In their place appeared mirror fragments displaying countless scenes. The images drew Ye Uchiha's eyes, leaving him stunned.

A woman in white, with two horns on her head and a blood-red, vertical nine-tomoe eye opening on her forehead, fought two white-clad young men who closely resembled one another. She summoned a gigantic, terrifying monster with ten tails to ravage the land, but could not overcome their combined strength. In the end, her own two sons sealed her in the sky, where she became the moon.

In a city riddled with destruction, Bald Egghead, dressed in a yellow bodysuit, killed a gigantic monster many times his size with a single punch. He rubbed the gleaming back of his head, a vacant expression on his face, then walked away nonchalantly with his shopping bags.

A brown-haired man in a moon-white robe held a tachi, his stern face bearing a cold, contemptuous smile as he crossed blades with Orange-Haired Youth. Amid the flashing steel, the surrounding high-rises collapsed in an instant, reduced to heaps of rubble.

On a planet approaching its final destruction, the entire world had become a battlefield. Dark clouds blanketed the sky, thunder rumbled, the ground fractured and collapsed, and molten rock erupted from below, creating a scene of utter apocalypse. A blond young man, bare-chested with powerful muscles exposed, fought fiercely against a humanoid being with a purple-and-white shell. Every clash of fists and feet sent violent shock waves sweeping through the sky and across the land, battering the devastated planet to pieces.

"These are all..."

Ye Uchiha stared at the images, dumbfounded. Unless he was mistaken, weren't the figures appearing in those fragments characters from other anime?

He certainly did not remember other anime characters making cameo appearances in Fate/Grand Order.

A pair of pale green eyes swept over the fragments of past memories. A heavy sorrow flickered across Romani's face as he spoke softly in an even voice:

"These are all Otherworlds detected by Chaldea. They aren't parallel worlds as we understand them, nor do they exist along the three timelines of past, present, and future. They are worlds in other dimensions in the truest sense."

"And the real catastrophe I'm about to describe arose from precisely this. Once personnel from the Clock Tower, the Atlas Institute, and the Wandering Sea learned that Chaldea had detected numerous Otherworlds and planes of existence, they strongly demanded that we cooperate with them to investigate ways of entering those worlds. That was where the trouble began..."

The scene shifted again. Representatives of the Clock Tower, the Atlas Institute, and the Wandering Sea arrived one after another at Chaldea amid the ice and snow, preparing to begin negotiations.

A burly middle-aged man dressed like a medieval noble, an elegant young man in a modern black suit, and a white-haired old man in white cloth robes reminiscent of an ancient Greek scholar-the representatives of the Mage's Association's three great institutions gathered together.

The Nasuverse was in an era after the end of the Age of Gods, when magecraft was gradually disappearing. Even the ancient Phantasmal Species had vanished from the mortal world for various reasons.

Facing a Dharma-Ending Age in which magical energy would soon run dry, the mystery of magecraft was steadily diminishing. In a matter of centuries, magecraft might cease to exist in the world, disappearing entirely.

The mages who prided themselves on their noble bloodlines found this impossible to accept. They frantically sought to change this age of dwindling magecraft and preserve their magical legacies, regardless of the price.

Now that they had heard Chaldea had discovered traces of other Otherworlds, those factions of mages were practically mad with joy. They wanted to come claim a share and explore the "Root" of the Otherworlds together with Chaldea. They believed every world must possess a "Root."

For mages of the Nasuverse, entering the "Root" meant obtaining ultimate power. It was their lifelong pursuit. Even if their own existence came to nothing, they would never pass up the slightest opportunity.

This was the "Root," after all. Reaching it would grant power far beyond the mundane, allowing them to grasp the fundamental causality and laws of everything in the world and easily rewrite its structure and order, like gods... No, more accurately, they would usurp divine authority and wield it with human bodies!

Only out of consideration for Chaldea's strength and the army of Heroic Spirits summoned by Ritsuka Fujimaru did those mages reluctantly suppress their impulses. They selected three representatives from the Mage's Association to negotiate with Chaldea across a table.

Even if negotiations failed, it would not matter. They could simply join forces and attack Chaldea. Heroic Spirit Servants were not without weaknesses, after all, and rejecting the proposal meant making an enemy of the world. Even Chaldea, with its foundation of Heroic Spirits, could not escape destruction. That was how those mages saw it.

Following the death of Director Olga Marie Yasmires Animusphere, Romani had been appointed Chaldea's acting director. Naturally, he was treated as its leader and began negotiations with the three factions.

Otherworlds held too many unknowns. Among the Otherworlds Chaldea had observed, some possessed extremely high levels of mystery, with beings rivaling those of civilizations from the Age of Gods. Some worlds even contained supreme beings capable of effortlessly annihilating Heroic Spirits.

This filled Romani, who had once been King Solomon, with profound fear. It was like the mythical Pandora's Box. Despite knowing it contained horrors capable of destroying the world, foolish, ignorant humans still could not resist its fatal temptation and would open it to release them.

Recklessly opening the way to another world would create a gateway, such as a passage through space and time. Once a gate connecting two worlds was established, both sides would be able to enter the other's world. Between two worlds that knew nothing about one another, friction and conflict would be all but inevitable, ultimately leading to war on a world-spanning scale.

The strong preyed on the weak; only the fittest survived. The powerful could decide whether the weak lived or died. That had been nature's law since ancient times.

It was like the Europeans who ushered in the Age of Discovery. After discovering the Americas, they surged madly into Africa of their own accord, like starving jackals catching sight of succulent meat. They slaughtered and captured indigenous Native Americans, feeding their own vigorous growth with their victims' bones, flesh, blood, and wealth.

In the face of overwhelming profit, no one could resist its temptation. Even Europeans who styled themselves a "civilized race" would turn into beasts, plundering and seizing the wealth before them. The mountains of bones left by the dead during the Age of Discovery were the clearest proof.

Having once been King Solomon, Romani understood humanity's ingrained greed. So long as even a trace of desire remained in a person's heart, the cravings buried deep within would grow and spread over time, eventually devouring that heart and leaving the person ruled by desire. It was an indelible mark etched into humanity's very bones, no matter the world.

Thus, Romani did not dare casually attempt to explore other worlds. He had even tried to conceal the news from outside mages, because he could not be certain his own world would not end up playing the role of the indigenous peoples of the Americas during the Age of Discovery-helpless lambs to be butchered at will.

But in the end, things went against his wishes. The very thing he most wanted to conceal was still made public.

Having obtained the information from some unknown source, the mage factions began to stir. Like sharks scenting blood, they gathered together and eyed Chaldea hungrily.

In the fragmented images, Romani wore a strained smile as he tried to politely refuse the representatives of the three factions. In return, they quietly threatened that if he refused to share information about the Otherworlds, the nations would withdraw their funding and abolish Chaldea as an organization.

Faced with the three representatives' aggressive pressure, Romani patiently explained the dangers of the Otherworlds. Yet they refused to relent, insisting on their demands.

To these fanatical mages, if they could open a passage to the "Root," what did it matter if half the humans in this world had to be sacrificed?!

Chaldea had been established with joint funding from various nations, but seventy percent of its funds came from the Animusphere family of London's Mage's Association-the family of Director Olga Marie.

Even so, if the nations cut off their funding, the Animusphere family's money alone would never be enough to keep Chaldea running. If it truly came to that, Chaldea would lose its financial support and be forced to disband.

For the sake of the future of Chaldea, the organization safeguarding the Human Order, Romani finally gritted his teeth and was forced to compromise, agreeing to their demands.

And so, Chaldea's exploration of the Otherworlds officially began!