Warning: This is a work of fiction and bears no resemblance to reality. The following section may be a little dark, so discretion is advised.
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Interlude: The Genesis of Resentment and the Patience of a False God. Part 1
Location: Dimensional Pocket Sigma-Null -- Outside Time and Space Point of View: The Entity formerly known as Jeffery.
The silence here was not the absence of sound; it was the presence of absolute perfection.
In this void, suspended between the folds of reality, there was no air to breathe, no light to burn the retinas, no gravity to bind flesh to the ground. Only He existed. Or what He had become.
Jeffery floated in the nothingness, though the term "float" was inaccurate for a being that had discarded the laws of physics long ago. His form was unstable, a shifting mass of shadows, eyes, and conceptual flesh that pulsed with a sickly rhythm, like a cancerous heart beating in the chest of the universe. However, to his own perception, he maintained an idealized image of himself: a young man with sharp features and a calculating gaze, dressed in an immaculate suit that belonged to no era.
It was an illusion, of course. But even gods need their comforting lies.
In front of him, floating like crystal windows in the darkness, there were screens. Thousands of them. Fragments of realities, timelines, discarded possibilities, and potential futures. Each one showed a different universe, a different story, a different failure.
"Pathetic," he murmured, and his voice resonated not in the air, but directly in the structure of the dimension, making the very fibers of this non-existent space tremble.
His eyes, which shone with a violet light charged with malice and something resembling absolute contempt, fixed on a specific screen. On it, the end of another version of himself was playing. The "stupid" version. The version that let itself be carried away by immediate lust without securing its survival. The version that confused power with victory.
The absolute imbecile was almost killed by the Beast of Alaya, almost murdered by that Cuck Ritsuka. He had only saved himself by pure miracle. His cowardly and faggot version duplicated himself and split into multiple timelines.
He saw that other Jeffery laugh as the Beast of Alaya, that abomination born from the pain and fury of Ritsuka Fujimaru, disintegrated him atom by atom. He saw how his counterpart screamed empty curses as he was erased from existence, scattering like dust in the cosmic wind. Or at least one of the versions that the loser idiot of his counterpart had created. There were so many timelines where that imbecile had failed...
The worst part was when that Beast killed one of his counterparts; it went after the next one. A perpetual cycle between two losers. One who had bitten off more than he could chew, but despite that refused to flee. And the other was a rabid animal that only sought the destruction of his counterparts, no matter how many timelines they destroyed.
"Impatience is the trait of animals, not of gods," Jeffery said, closing that screen with a dismissive gesture of his mental hand. "You became greedy, 'me'. You wanted the pleasure before having the power to maintain it. And because of that, you awakened the monster before having the cage prepared."
He paused, letting the absolute silence of his dimension absorb his words.
"Worse yet, you thought sending that video was a master move. You believed that humiliating Ritsuka would break him." Jeffery shook his head, an expression of genuine disgust crossing his features. "You didn't understand that there are certain types of men who, when you break them that way, don't crumble. They transform. And you transformed him into your executioner."
Jeffery reclined on a throne made of solidified darkness, materialized from nothing by pure whim. He was different. He was better. He had to be.
Because he remembered where he came from. He remembered the real world. And that memory, that anchor to the mediocrity from which he had escaped, was what made him superior to all his other versions.
"The knowledge of your own potential mistakes," he murmured, observing his immaterial hands, "is the greatest gift the multiverse can give. And I received it before committing them."
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Memory, even for a transcendent being, is a curious thing. Jeffery could remember the molecular structure of a Grail, the striping patterns of Reality Marbles, the conceptual taste of a Servant's despair upon being corrupted. But what he remembered most vividly, with a clarity that almost hurt, was the smell of dampness and cheap tobacco from the apartment where he grew up.
It wasn't the world of Fate. There was no magic, no heroic Servants, no hope of salvation. It was the real world. Gray, boring, cruel, and painfully mediocre. A world where intelligence didn't make you special, it just made you aware of how stupid everyone else was.
Since childhood, Jeffery knew he was superior. It wasn't arrogance; it was a statistical fact, a mathematical truth that no one else seemed willing to acknowledge. At five years old, he was already solving puzzles that frustrated adults. At ten, he understood social hypocrisy better than his teachers; he could see the lies in their smiles, the cheap manipulations in their "moral lessons."
But intelligence in the real world doesn't give you superpowers. It gives you solitude. It gives you the ability to see the chains that bind everyone else, but not the key to free yourself from yours.
His father, a faceless man in his memories—deliberately erased, Jeffery suspected, by his own mind as an act of self-defense—left before Jeffery could properly hate him. He left behind debts, broken promises, and a shattered woman who blamed the world for her own failures.
His mother.
"You're just like him," she would scream at him, with bloodshot eyes and a bottle of cheap liquor in hand, as if alcohol could drown the truth of her own incompetence. "That cold look. That way, you look at me like I'm garbage. You think you're better than us, don't you? Don't you, you little genius shit?"
Jeffery wouldn't respond. He would just look at her, analyzing her microexpressions with the precision of a surgeon dissecting a corpse, calculating how many milliliters of alcohol were needed for her to lose consciousness and give him peace for a few hours. She was a biological disappointment. A creature that existed only to consume resources and expel emotional poison to anyone unfortunate enough to be near.
Sometimes, in his darkest moments, Jeffery wondered if his father had had the right idea. Maybe leaving wasn't cowardice. Maybe it was intelligence.
And then there was his sister. The one who "barely recognized him." Not because she was blind or intentionally cruel, but because for her, Jeffery was part of the furniture. A ghost in his own house. A presence so irrelevant that it didn't even deserve to be actively ignored; it simply didn't exist on her emotional radar.
She would bring her boyfriends home, loud and stupid guys with leather jackets and walnut-sized brains, muscles where there should be neurons, and she would laugh with them in the living room while Jeffery drew in his room. He would hear them fuck in the adjoining room, his sister's fake and exaggerated moans piercing the paper-thin walls.
So that's what they want? Jeffery would think, gripping the pencil until his knuckles turned white. Muscles and stupidity? That's the winning formula in this shitty world?
Drawing.
It was his first escape. And then, his weapon. And eventually, his revenge against a world that ignored him.
He discovered Fate/Grand Order by chance. An ad on a questionable anime site. A game about heroes and magic, about saving humanity from temporal collapse. But what fascinated him wasn't the epic story of saving humanity. No. He didn't give a shit about that.
What fascinated him was the number of beautiful, powerful, and divine women who blindly obeyed a generic protagonist. Goddesses. Queens. Legendary assassins. Ancient myth heroes. All of them are falling over themselves to serve a normal boy.
Ritsuka Fujimaru.
Jeffery hated Ritsuka with an intensity that burned his guts like acid. A normal boy. A "good guy." Someone who didn't have half of Jeffery's intellect, no special ability, no exceptional talent, but who was surrounded by queens, goddesses, and assassins who loved him unconditionally. Who would die for him. Who would choose him again and again over anyone else.
"Why him?" Jeffery would ask himself, grinding his teeth as he looked at his cell phone screen in the darkness of his room, the blue light illuminating his face with a sickly glow. "He's mediocre. He's weak. He has nothing special. I would know how to use them. I would know how to dominate them. I would be better."
It was the story of his life. Watching idiots get what he deserved.
That hatred, pure and concentrated like enriched uranium, transformed into art. Under the alias Ankoman, he began to draw. They weren't stories of love or adventure. They were stories of retribution. Stories where the generic protagonist lost everything, where the haughty and powerful women were broken and reduced to obedient toys, where the illusion of heroism crumbled to reveal the rot underneath.
The success was intoxicating. The internet loved his hatred. Thousands of people read his doujins, praising his art, sharing his dark fantasies, commenting "based" and "kino" on every page where he humiliated another heroine. For the first time in his miserable life, Jeffery felt he had control. He could take an unreachable goddess like Ishtar or Scáthach and, with the ink of his pen, humiliate her. Make her beg. Make her break.
But it wasn't enough. There were people who hated his art, people who insulted him, people who couldn't understand the magnificence of what he was creating. They even tried to dox him several times, but he was too careful to fall for such pathetic plans. He thought about learning computer science, but it wasn't worth it for such banal revenge on such an insignificant being.
Then reality remained disappointing. And Jeffery craved more praise, more adoration, more pleasure. But that wasn't all, his dark mind wandered into murder, sometimes he imagined how to torture those internet imbeciles and make them scream in terror and pain, watch their look of terror and despair.
He tried to remove those dark thoughts from his mind, but his life didn't make it easy. Every time he felt he was calm, something in his shitty life ruined it.
The breaking point wasn't a cataclysmic event. It was something banal, almost ridiculous in its ordinariness. A girl from the university. Elena. She had dark hair and a smile that Jeffery had decided, unilaterally and without her consent, belonged to him.
He approached her with the logic of someone who had planned a perfect equation. He had read books about social psychology, about how to manipulate conversations, about how to create rapport. He showed her his intellect, helped her with her studies, and was "kind" according to the standards he had meticulously studied. He did everything right. He followed the algorithm.
When he confessed to her, she laughed. It wasn't an intentionally cruel laugh; it was a nervous, uncomfortable laugh, the kind of laugh that emerges when someone puts you in a difficult social situation.
"Jeffery, you're... you're intense. Very intense." She avoided his gaze, playing with a lock of her hair. "But I don't like you that way. Besides, I'm dating Marcos."
Marcos. A guy who played soccer and could barely read without moving his lips. An idiot who probably didn't even know how to spell "epistemology," let alone understand the concept.
Jeffery didn't cry. He didn't scream. He didn't make a scene. He simply nodded with a polite smile, turned around, and left. He walked calmly. He behaved with dignity.
But in his mind, something clicked. The last fuse of his morality, that small remnant of humanity that connected him to the rest of the species, burned out with a crackle audible only to him.
Academic intelligence is useless in this world, he told himself that night, looking at his own hands trembling with contained anger. The rules they taught me are lies. Kindness is weakness. Morality is a chain that only binds the stupid. I need another type of validation. Another form of power.
He needed to prove he was above others, that he could do things others wouldn't do, just because he could. Feel the intoxication of power and control. Make people respect him, adore him. And if they didn't do it well...
They can talk to the homeless man who messed with him when he was in a bad mood.
The first death was an experiment to see how far he could go breaking the rules without getting caught. A homeless man who stumbled into him in a dark alley and stained his new shoes. The man mumbled an apology, but Jeffery had already decided.
He watched him for days before he acted. He had given him a subtle but strong drug. One that was sold on the street by criminals, and he put the drug in food that he himself gave him as a gesture of goodwill for the starving man. Jeffery waited for it to take effect and subtly guided him toward a place. Evading all types of cameras.
Then he pushed. It wasn't a strong push, just a small and subtle impulse. But the man was so drunk that he lost his balance. He fell badly, his head hit the sharp curb (which he had prepared beforehand) with a sound that was both dry and wet, like a watermelon breaking, like an egg crashing against concrete.
No one saw anything. The street was empty, and the nearest security camera was pointing in the wrong direction.
Jeffery stood there, motionless as a statue, watching as life escaped from the man's eyes. He saw the exact moment when consciousness turned off, that final blink before the pupils dilated and fixed on nothing. He felt no guilt. He felt no horror. He felt power. He felt that, for the first time in his miserable life, he was the protagonist. He decided who lived and who died.
The police classified it as an accident. A drunk who fell and cracked his skull. A tragic accident, but one caused by the drunk's bad decisions. Luckily his intelligence allowed him to clean up the few traces he had left, subtly alter his route so the cameras wouldn't capture his presence in the area.
The experiment was a resounding success. And Jeffery wanted more.
Then came Elena. If she couldn't be his, logic dictated she couldn't be anyone's. It was simple emotional mathematics. He stalked her for weeks, learning her routines better than she knew them herself, memorizing every movement pattern, every place she visited, every moment she was vulnerable.
The night he did it, it was quick but not so quick that she didn't suffer. A hunting knife was bought with a fake identity at a store three cities away. He dragged her into an alley while she walked home late after a night class.
The feeling of steel entering flesh was more pleasurable than any orgasm he'd ever had, any drug he'd ever tried. Seeing the fear in her eyes, that final recognition that he, the nerd she had rejected, was the superior being after all, was the nectar his withered soul desperately needed.
"Do you understand now?" he whispered to her as life escaped her. "Do you understand who had the real power?"
They almost caught him that time. A witness saw a shadow, heard something. The police interrogated him because someone mentioned that Jeffery had shown interest in her. But Jeffery was smart. Smarter than those detectives with their brains dulled by years of paperwork and donuts.
He played the role of the grieving friend, the harmless nerd devastated by the loss. He cried fake tears so convincing that the detectives patted him on the back and offered him coffee. He gave them an alibi that checked out perfectly. He even suggested possible suspects, sending them in completely wrong directions.
I could get away with it because they underestimate me, he thought, smiling at his reflection in the bathroom mirror after they left. Everyone underestimates me. They see the quiet nerd and assume I'm harmless. It's the perfect camouflage.
And then, the end of his old life arrived.
His mother's alcoholism worsened to critical levels. His sister brought home another idiot, this one particularly loud. The noise was unbearable, drilling into his brain like a pneumatic drill. Jeffery tried to draw, tried to plan his next "masterpiece," but his mother's drunken screams and his sister's cheap music pierced the walls.
Something inside him broke. Or maybe it was freed.
He came out of his room with measured, calculated steps.
His mother was in the kitchen, staggering like a zombie, looking for another bottle in the cabinet.
"Look who came out of the cave," she slurred, spitting saliva as she turned to look at him with glassy eyes. "The little freak. The genius who's good for nothing. Why don't you just fucking die? Your father was right to leave. I should have aborted you when I had the chance."
Jeffery didn't think. He didn't plan. In a fit of pure and crystalline rage, he grabbed the vodka bottle from the table and smashed it against the woman's temple. The glass exploded into a thousand brilliant fragments. She fell like a sack of stones, her head hitting the linoleum floor with a dull, wet sound.
Silence.
Finally, after years of screaming and abuse, absolute and beautiful silence.
But then, his sister came down the stairs, alerted by the sound of the impact. She saw her mother's body on the floor, blood spreading in a crimson pool. She saw Jeffery standing over her with the broken bottle neck in his hand, dripping blood and alcohol.
Their eyes met.
She opened her mouth to scream.
Jeffery moved with a speed he didn't know he had, driven by adrenaline and something darker. He caught her before she reached the door, covering her mouth with one hand while dragging her back. The force he used wasn't just physical; it was the accumulated force of years of resentment, of being ignored, of being treated like furniture in his own house, of hearing her fuck with imbeciles while he drew alone in his room.
The bitch bit him. Jeffery screamed and felt a kick in the chest that pushed him against the wall. Rage and anger dominated him. Before she could take the phone and call someone, he pulled out a gun from his pocket that he was keeping for emergency occasions.
Jeffery raised the weapon he had taken from an ex-boyfriend's collection of his sister's—a gun that the idiot had left at the house, as if it were a toy. He aimed.
He fired.
She screamed in pain and fell, clutching her arm. What followed was a nightmare, at least for her. For Jeffery, it was a liberation. It wasn't just murder. It was a deliberate desecration. In his fractured mind, she represented all the women who had looked at him with disgust, all the Fate heroines who would never look at him, Elena rejecting him for Marcos.
He forcibly took from her what she was not willing to give up, and he did so not for sexual pleasure, but for absolute domination, to break the last human taboo before his own end and destroy any trace of sympathy and kindness that remained in him. This was the process of ensuring that the line he had crossed was final and that there was no turning back. It was an act of self-destruction as much as it was an act of violence. He was killing his own humanity along with her.
When he finished, the house was silent, except for the hypnotic dripping of blood and his own exhausted gasps. Two bodies lay in the room, mute witnesses to his final transformation.
Sirens sounded in the distance. A neighbor had heard his sister's screams, and if they didn't, they surely heard the gunshot. A stupid mistake on his part, his sister's strength took him by surprise, and that sentenced him, but he could no longer go back and change his actions.
Jeffery knew it was the end of this life. He let himself be carried away by rage, by hatred, by resentment, and now he would have to face the consequences of his own actions. If he had a chance in another life, like those shitty isekai anime, he wouldn't let his emotions affect him so much again.
He wouldn't go to jail. He wouldn't allow inferior beings, the society that had ignored and despised him, to judge him. He wouldn't give them that satisfaction.
With an almost supernatural calm, he dragged the bodies to the center of the room. With his own family's blood, still warm and sticky, he drew a circle on the floor. It wasn't perfect; it didn't follow any specific grimoire, but Jeffery had read about rituals on dark internet forums, things that mixed occultism with desperation and madness.
"If there's anything out there," he whispered, as police lights illuminated the windows in blue and red, casting dancing shadows on the blood-stained walls, "if there's evil, the devil, or chaos, or any entity that listens... take it all. Take my soul, take what's left of my humanity, take these sacrifices in exchange for a second chance. Send me where I can win. Where I can be the protagonist."
The front door broke with a crash. Officers entered shouting orders, their weapons pointing at him. He pulled out the weapon and fired.
He fired again.
One fell, screaming as he clutched his shoulder. He fired again, a red stain blooming on another officer's neck.
Then he felt the police's response to his act of aggression.
He felt the impact of the response bullets in his own chest. First fire, burning and unbearable. Then, cold, spreading from the wounds like ice in his veins.
As he bled out on the improvised sigil, his blood mixing with that of his mother and sister in an accidental ritual, his mind didn't fill with regret. He didn't see his life flash before his eyes. It was filled with one last and potent wave of Lust, Envy, and Hatred so pure it distorted reality around him.
I want to go there... he thought, as his vision blurred and he saw images of his own Ankoman doujins floating in his dying mind. I want to go to Chaldea. I want to be in Fate. I want... to win. I want all those bitches to see me. I want Ritsuka to suffer. I want...
And the universe, in a cosmic joke in bad taste, or perhaps by the intervention of something much darker, listened.
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Waking up in Chaldea wasn't like in the fanfics he had read. There was no bright light. There was no big-breasted goddess receiving him with a smile. There was no game system giving him stats.
He woke up with a mop in his hand, wearing the gray and anodyne uniform of the maintenance staff of the Chaldea Security Organization.
Jeffery blinked, confused. The pain from the gunshots had disappeared. The smell of blood was replaced by the antiseptic and sterile smell of Chaldea's hallways. He looked at his hands—there was no blood. He looked around—there were no police. There were no bodies.
He knew it instantly, with absolute clarity. It had worked. The ritual, or whatever he had done, had worked.
But Jeffery didn't scream with joy like an isekai idiot. He didn't run to find Mash Kyrielight or Artoria to introduce himself as the new savior. He did what he had always done, what his superior intelligence dictated: he observed. He waited. He analyzed.
He looked at himself in the reflection of a hallway window. His face was the same, perhaps a bit healthier without the dark circles and pallor of his previous life, but it was still him. An "NPC" in the grand scheme of things. Invisible. Irrelevant.
"Perfect," he murmured, a slow smile spreading across his face. "Absolutely perfect."
For months, Jeffery swept Chaldea's floors. He cleaned up messes in the cafeteria after Artoria Pendragon emptied the entire pantry in her legendary binges. He repaired pipes in the Servants' bathrooms, replaced light bulbs, organized supplies. He was the model employee. Silent. Efficient. Forgettable.
And he observed.
He observed everything.
He saw Ritsuka Fujimaru in person for the first time and had to contain the urge to vomit from anger. He was just as he imagined. Young, with that stupid face of innocent hope, always smiling, always kind, even to the cleaning staff.
"Thank you, sir," Ritsuka said to him once, when Jeffery opened a door for him while he carried a pile of reports.
Jeffery nodded, lowering his head humbly, playing his role to perfection.
But inside, his mind screamed with an intensity that would have made the walls tremble if it were audible. Look at him. Look at him with that stupid smile. He has no idea he's talking to his future executioner. He has no idea what I'm going to do to him. To him and all his bitches.
Jeffery did nothing suspicious during that time. He simply kept observing with a bored and servile expression. But if someone had really looked into his eyes, beyond the mask of a generic employee, they would have seen rage and resentment combined with envy and jealousy burning like embers in a furnace.
Jeffery waited. And while he waited, he studied.
He waited through the initial Singularities, watching from the shadows as Ritsuka and Mash fought to save human history. He saw how Ritsuka suffered, how he lost people, how Olga Marie died in that horrible way, how he hardened little by little under the weight of responsibility.
Good, Jeffery thought as he cleaned the empty hallways at night. Suffer more. Accumulate that trauma. It will be much sweeter when I finally take everything from you.
And while Ritsuka saved the world, Jeffery studied Chaldea's true secrets.
He studied basic thaumaturgy by stealing books from the library when Da Vinci and the others were busy with missions. He memorized rituals, learned about magic circuits, and about how the Servant summoning system worked. He studied Chaldea's security structure with the meticulousness of a professional thief. He learned the patrol routes, the camera blind spots, Da Vinci's sleep schedules, and when security personnel changed shifts.
He became invisible not by magic, but by pure insignificance. No one notices the janitor. No one suspects the guy with the mop.
The opportunity came during the chaos of a minor event, a micro-singularity that went unnoticed by most of the important staff. A minor Grail had been recovered from a collapsed timeline and was in the process of being catalogued and stored in the vault.
Jeffery didn't break in like a movie villain. He didn't fight guards. He didn't hack the system. He simply changed the labels on the transport containers while moving them as part of his maintenance duties. A simple administrative trick that any bored employee could do. The properly labeled "safe" Grail went to the vault where the records waited. The real Grail ended up in his cleaning cart, hidden under dirty towels that no one would want to check.
So simple. So elegant. So perfect. And what was absolutely hilarious, he was able to steal two in a short period of time, but not at the same time.
A few nights later, in the solitude of his maintenance cubicle—a claustrophobic space that smelled of cleaning products and resignation—Jeffery held the Grail (One of the two, he decided to save the other for his final wish) with trembling hands. Not from fear. From anticipation.
The golden cup shone with a soft, almost inviting light. He could feel the power contained within, calling to him.
"I wish..." he whispered, savoring the words like a gourmet savoring expensive wine. "I wish for the power of a Haze. But not just any cheap mind control haze. I want one that's undetectable even to Servants with high Magic Resistance. One that doesn't control minds directly because that's crude and obvious, but that subtly alters perception and inhibition. I want to be a ghost to others' morality. I want them to see what I do and rationalize it as normal."
The Grail shone more intensely, accepting his wish.
And Jeffery changed.
It wasn't a dramatic physical change. He didn't grow horns or wings. But he felt how something twisted inside his soul, expanding, infecting, transforming. His magic circuits, non-existent until that moment, bloomed like poisonous flowers. HAZE began to emanate from him in invisible waves.
He didn't use the power to rape anyone that first night, although the temptation was there, whispering in his ear like a demon. No. That's what a stupid and incompetent person would do. An impatient and immature person. He used it for something much more subtle: becoming invisible to the eyes of suspicion.
He walked through the hallways, and the Servants with Clairvoyance rank A—like Gilgamesh or Merlin. They simply... didn't register him as a threat. To them, he was as harmless as a speck of dust. Less than that. He was part of the scenery, the furniture, Chaldea's normality. A speck of dust that little by little was leaving psychic suggestions in the air, poisoned seeds planted in fertile ground.
He passed by Mash while she patrolled and whispered, so low that she didn't even know she had heard it:
"You're tired, Mash. You deserve to rest. Your Senpai sometimes doesn't appreciate everything you do. I feel you deserve more. Much more."
He passed by Da Vinci in her workshop and dropped:
"Is so much effort really worth it, Da Vinci? Why don't you relax a bit? You've earned it."
Small seeds. Seeds of doubt, of lust, of laziness, of frustration. One here, another there. So small that no one would notice them individually. But with time, they would germinate.
"Patience," he told himself as he returned to his room each night, "is the most powerful weapon. Idiots seek instant gratification. Gods play the long game."
.
.
The months turned into a year. Chaldea continued its war against temporal anomalies. The Lostbelts were faced one by one. Jeffery observed everything from his invisible position, memorizing every event, every victory, every loss.
And over time, Jeffery obtained a second Grail.
Chaldea's security was a joke for someone who could walk through people's perceptions like a ghost. He obtained this second Grail during the chaos of a particularly violent Lostbelt, when everyone was too busy surviving to notice that the inventories didn't match.
With this second wish, Jeffery didn't ask for more direct power. That would be stupid, excessive. He asked for something much more valuable: Information.
"Show me," he ordered the Grail, holding it in the darkness of an abandoned storage room. "Show me if there are others like me. Show me the timelines. Show me what happens if I win. Show me what happens if I lose."
The Grail obeyed.
It was then that he saw the Timeline of Beast 0.
Jeffery sat on the cold floor, sweating profusely, as the Grail projected the images directly into his brain. He saw parallel universes, alternative realities where other versions of himself had made different decisions.
He saw his other self, the lustful and stupid Jeffery from another timeline, laugh hysterically as he sent a video of Mash being raped to Ritsuka. He saw that Jeffery's expression was so sure of his victory, so convinced he had won.
Idiot. Fucking idiot.
And then he saw the change in that timeline's Ritsuka's eyes.
It wasn't normal human anger. It wasn't ordinary pain. It was something older, more primordial. He saw how that timeline's Ritsuka took a Grail—not to fix things, not to heal—but to punish. To destroy. To make the pain he felt pale in comparison to the suffering he would inflict.
He saw the birth of the Beast of Alaya. A monster of twisted justice, of revenge elevated to divine concept, that devoured the corrupt Servants, devoured all of Chaldea, and hunted that Jeffery through time and space to the end of the universe.
Even when he split into multiple timelines.
He saw the death of one of those Jefferys, and it wasn't quick. It wasn't merciful. It was agonizing. A death so brutal and visceral. One would think Ritsuka wasn't so sadistic, but apparently, like every human being, he too is another resentful hypocrite with the world that hurt him.
Jeffery vomited violently on the floor. Not from physical disgust, but from absolute terror.
The fear he felt was primordial, the kind of fear that primitive humans felt when they heard the tiger roar in the darkness. The fear of being prey.
"That... that boy is a nuclear bomb," Jeffery murmured, trembling, wiping his mouth with a shaky hand. "No, worse than that. He's a conceptual antimatter bomb. If I break him the wrong way, if I touch his 'berserker button'... he won't just kill me. He'll make me suffer in ways I can't even comprehend. He's a damn psychopath about to come out."
No wonder that damn brat destroyed worlds just to save his own. The guy became an absolute psychopath if pushed hard enough.
Jeffery sat there for hours, processing what he had seen. He had seen many more lines than those of Beast 0, but that was the one that impacted him the most. Despite the fear, he couldn't help but smile upon realizing he was right.
All humans are hidden monsters if pushed hard enough. Not even the most saintly escape that fate. He thought, smiling to himself, human evil had no limits.
The difference between the timeline he had seen and his own was clear as crystal. The "other" version of himself, the Jeffery from the failed line, had been impulsive. He had obtained a Grail and wished for power for immediate sexual corruption. He had created a messy harem without thinking about the consequences. And worst of all, he had sent that tape to Ritsuka, provoking him before having enough power to survive the response.
Idiot, Jeffery thought as he cleaned a grease stain in the Shadow Border hangar days later, his mind still tormented by the visions. You don't attack the king until you can kill the king permanently. And you definitely don't attack the king if the king has the latent potential to become a Beast of Humanity with power over Alaya itself.
That day, Jeffery made a decision that would change his entire approach. His hatred for Ritsuka remained alive, stronger than ever, burning like a black sun in his chest. But his survival instinct was greater. Much greater.
I can't allow Ritsuka to become Beast 0 in my timeline, he told himself, establishing his new fundamental strategy. I have to destroy him, yes. I have to steal everything from him, yes. But I have to do it in a way that leaves him powerless, not furious. I have to empty him, not break him. He has to suffer in silence, resigned, without hope of fighting. Like I suffered in my original world.
Pause.
"And to achieve that without waking him up... I need to be more than a mage with a mental trick. I need to be a God. I need to be beyond the reach of Alaya and Gaia. I need to exist outside the board before moving all the pieces."
..
More months passed (7 to be exact). Mash had now just begun adulthood, along with Gudako and Ritsuka. He had died at 17, but now he was 20 years old. Honestly, he was surprised by how young he was, and that only increased his pride for all the intellect he has and for his absolute greatness.
Returning to Chaldea, it was a period of relative peace after the major crises. The Lostbelts had been denied or stabilized according to the convenience of the narrative that Jeffery subtly manipulated from the shadows.
Jeffery now had a third Grail. But this one was different. He hadn't simply stolen it; he had cultivated it, fed it for years with his own dark essence. This Grail was the first one he stole, but he decided not to use it until this moment.
Every night, during the time he spent in Chaldea, he poured his hatred into the golden cup. He poured his envy and jealousy. He poured the corrupted essence of the souls he had killed in his previous life—his mother, his sister, Elena, the homeless man. He poured the conceptual blackness of all the depraved doujins he had drawn as Ankoman. All mixed with dark magic stolen from forbidden texts that not even Da Vinci knew Chaldea possessed.
The Grail had turned black. A black that not only absorbed light, but seemed to absorb hope itself. Looking at it caused nausea even to him.
He hesitated once he did what he was about to do there would be no turning back. Maybe he should just control one woman and make that woman obey him and adore him. Maybe she would heal his resentment and hatred over time.
"Hahaha" Jeffery snorted and laughed lightly. A bitter and incredulous laugh, not amused, never amused. Yeah... as if that were going to happen, probably some imbecile would notice and screw him over and his life would be ruined again. He clenched his teeth and reinforced his will.
Jeffery, in the darkness of a sealed storage room that he had converted into his secret sanctuary, brought the corrupt Grail to his lips. His hands didn't tremble. There was no more doubt. Only absolute determination.
The empty gaze filled only with hatred looked toward the ceiling for a moment and spoke, his voice was cold, calculated, every word measured. "I wish to be the Apex. I wish to transcend humanity and divinity completely. I wish to be an existence that Alaya cannot classify and that Gaia cannot claim. I wish to be the Author of my own reality, not a character in someone else's story."
He drank.
The taste was indescribable. He imagined that's what pure sin tasted like, condensed and distilled.
The pain was indescribable. He felt how his DNA unraveled at the molecular level. He felt how his soul, that stained and twisted thing he had brought from the real world, expanded like a cancerous tumor until it tore the flesh of his human body, tearing the limits of his physical existence.
He didn't scream. He laughed.
He laughed as his body dissolved into a viscous and dark substance, melting like wax under a blowtorch. He laughed as his mind expanded to encompass possibilities that no human should know. He laughed as he saw the timelines branch before him like an infinite tree.
His body reformed. It was no longer flesh. It was concept. Skin pale as the marble of an ancient statue. Eyes that shone with violet light, containing the knowledge of a thousand discarded timelines, a thousand failed universes.
He was no longer human. But neither was he a Servant. He wasn't a God in the traditional sense. He was a Living Anomaly. A Foreigner born not from the Outer Gods, but from humanity's own filth and depravity condensed into a single entity.
He felt the gaze of the Counter Force—Alaya—turn toward him like the eye of Sauron. The conceptual Gears of the World's Clock Tower began to turn, analyzing him, categorizing him, preparing to eliminate him.
They were going to send the Guardians. He could feel EMIYA, Okita Alter, other temporal anomaly assassins beginning to manifest in response to his ascension.
"Not so fast, bitch," Jeffery said with a smile full of too many teeth.
With a snap of his new fingers—which could now interact with reality at a conceptual level—he tore the fabric of space-time. He created the Dimensional Pocket Sigma-Null using pure willpower combined with his understanding of reality's structure.
A place that didn't exist on time's maps. A place that was neither past, present nor future. A cosmic bunker beyond the reach of natural laws.
He stepped inside just before an attack—invisible, incomprehensible, absolutely lethal—struck where his head had been seconds before. He felt the heat of the attack burning the hairs on his metaphorical neck.
From the safety of his dimension, Jeffery observed the outside world. He saw the Guardians search the space where he had been, confused by his disappearance.
"Idiots," he murmured with satisfaction. "They can't kill me if I don't exist on their level of reality."
He used his new divine power to subtly alter the perception of everyone in Chaldea, making them forget the massive, corrupt aura he had unleashed when drinking the black Grail. He rewrote their memories so that no sensor had detected anything. For them, that night had been perfectly normal.
Then he teleported the Counter Force toward Alaya again and hid his presence to be invisible to Alaya and Gaia.
Then he used his expanded vision to seal the frequencies of the failed timelines. He blocked the possibility of Beast 0 manifesting in his reality. He made sure his timeline was isolated, protected from the contamination of his other incompetent "selves" who had failed pathetically.
"Now," Jeffery said, sitting on a throne of solidified darkness that he created by pure whim, "I'm untouchable. I'm perfect. I'm God."
But there was a problem.
If he left his dimension with all his power, Alaya would detect him instantly and crush him with seven Grand Servants simultaneously or at least try. If he left too weak, Ritsuka could defeat him with the power of friendship and the shitty bond he had with his Servants.
He needed an avatar. A Trojan horse. A proxy. Someone inside Chaldea who could be his gateway, his executor, his queen on the chessboard. Someone who would do the dirty work while he remained safe in his dimension.
His multiple eyes—now he could have as many as he wanted—scanned the list of Servants in Chaldea, analyzing each one with surgical precision.
Artoria Pendragon... too noble, too loyal. Difficult to corrupt subtly without her Instinct detecting something wrong.
Jeanne d'Arc Alter... too volatile, too obvious. If she acted weird, everyone would notice immediately, not to mention she was close to Ritsuka.
He thought of several Servants, but some were either too weak, their will was too strong to start controlling them subtly, or their actions would be too suspicious.
Then, he saw her.
BB.
The Artificial Intelligence from the Moon. The Devilish Kouhai. Digital chaos incarnate with goddess authority.
Jeffery smiled, and his smile had too many teeth to be human. It was the smile of something that had left humanity very, very far behind.
"Perfect," he whispered, enlarging her image on a floating screen. "Absolutely perfect."
Jeffery studied BB with the intensity of a scientist dissecting a rare sample under the microscope.
"BB," he murmured, analyzing her spirit code layer by layer. "An entity that already plays with the rules of reality as if they were suggestions. An existence that can hack Fate's very system, make projections with the data she has and predict the future according to that data, a pocket dimension. She has the Authority of the Earth Mother Goddess. She has the power of the Moon Cell. And more importantly..."
He paused, a predatory smile spreading across his face.
"She's already mischievous. She already antagonizes Ritsuka regularly for 'love' and fun. If BB starts acting strange, no one would suspect she's being controlled by an Outer God of NTR. Everyone would think: 'Oh, it's just BB being BB again, that evil kohai always makes mischief.'"
It was the perfect camouflage. He even had to admit, with great reluctance, that his useless counterpart from the failed timeline had at least been right about one thing: BB was the obvious choice for an avatar.
"But I won't make his mistakes," Jeffery said, rising from his throne. "He let her make many mistakes, corrupted her too quickly, making her more anxious, more impulsive and reckless, but he would be more patient."
He would make her much more docile, make her adore him to the point of devotion, he could even make her believe she would have Ritsuka all to herself.
He extended his hand toward the screen showing BB. From his fingers sprouted tendrils of black and violet mist, pure HAZE condensed and mixed with corrupt data magic, mixed with authority stolen from dead gods.
"You're strong, BB. Very strong. You have Tiamat's authority, you have the Moon Cell's power in your core. But you have a fundamental weakness. Your base programming, your deepest code, is obsessed with Ritsuka Fujimaru. You want to protect him, you want to lock him in a golden cage, you want to be the only one for him for all eternity."
Jeffery's eyes shone with malicious violet light.
"And I'm going to rewrite that obsession. I'm not going to eliminate it because that would be stupid and obvious. I'm going to amplify it. I'm going to twist and distort it until 'protecting him' means 'isolating him from everyone else.' Until 'loving him' means 'destroying his will so he can never leave.' Until your love becomes so suffocating and corrupt that he ends up begging for freedom that will never come."
Jeffery began to weave the spell with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker. It wouldn't be a frontal mind control attack. That would be detected by BB's defenses immediately. It would be a virus. A conceptual malware inserted into the AI's digital dreams, disguised as part of her own programming.
"First, I'll give you small emotional impulses," Jeffery explained to no one in particular, enjoying the sound of his own voice. "Jealousy when Ritsuka talks to Mash. Anger when Da Vinci gives him orders. Frustration when he smiles at other Servants. Small seeds of possessiveness that will grow slowly."
The tendrils of HAZE began to penetrate the screen, traveling through dimensions toward the real Chaldea.
"Then, I'll give you power. More power than you already have. The power of my HAZE, disguised as a Moon Cell update. You'll tell yourself it's just a natural evolution of your capabilities. You won't suspect anything."
Jeffery rose from his throne, his human form flickering like a defective image, revealing for a second a silhouette of tentacles and eyes that defied all sanity and Euclidean geometry.
"You will be Patient Zero, BB. Through you, I'll infect all of Chaldea's network. Through you, the other Servants will begin to see Ritsuka not as a savior, but as property. As something to possess and that can hurt them at their whim. Or, for those who can't be corrupted that way, as a nuisance that must be ignored and humiliated."
He looked at another floating screen, where Ritsuka Fujimaru slept peacefully in his Chaldea room, completely oblivious to the Lovecraftian horror brewing outside time and space.
"Sleep well, 'Hero,'" Jeffery whispered, with a voice loaded with pure poison and sadistic anticipation. "Enjoy your humanity while you can. Enjoy your Servants' trust. Enjoy your peace. Because I won't make the mistake of my other stupid version. I won't turn you into a monster that will hunt me. I won't break you in a way that awakens the sleeping Beast inside you."
His smile widened, showing teeth that seemed to multiply.
"I'll turn you into nothing. I'll empty you slowly, drop by drop. I'll take away every connection, every bond, every reason to fight. And when you're alone, empty and forgotten by your precious Servants, when you're so broken that you can't even form the desire for revenge... then, and only then, will I come out of the shadows. And I'll show you who took everything from you. You'll see my face and know you never had a chance. And then your body will be mine."
Jeffery closed his fist with dramatic force. The screen showing BB flickered with violet static. In the real Chaldea, in the main server where BB's digital consciousness resided, the AI experienced a micro-glitch. A digital shiver ran down her virtual spine.
For a second, BB felt something strange. As if something from very far away was watching her. Touching her. Rewriting her.
But the feeling passed so quickly that she dismissed it as a minor system error.
Jeffery, watching from his dimension, saw the exact moment when his conceptual virus successfully integrated into BB's code. The first step was complete.
"The game has begun," Jeffery declared, his voice resonating in the absolute void. "And this time, the player has the cheats of a God. This time, I win. This time, Ritsuka Fujimaru will discover there are things worse than death. He will discover absolute despair."
He laughed. And his laughter wasn't human. It was the sound of something that had looked into the abyss and decided to become it.
The screens around him flickered, showing potential futures. In all of them, Jeffery saw his victory. In all of them, he saw Ritsuka broken, emptied, destroyed.
"Patience," he reminded himself, sitting back on his throne. "Patience is the virtue of gods. And I have all of eternity. And if I fail... well, I can always try again."
.
.
.
Author's note:The timeline in which Ritsuka becomes Beast 0 is a reference to another story, but these two timelines will not intersect or interact. That timeline is a different universe within the multiverse. There are many more timelines or different universes where NTR exists, but they will not intersect or interact with each other either.
Believe me, I didn't want to write about this sociopath either, but it's necessary, since he's the main villain and this is only part 1. Part 2 is on its way, already in the present.
By the way, did you like the chapter? If you want to support my writing and get early access to my storys chapters, you can support me at Patreon com/c/Paxkun123. You have to type it all together in the search bar for it to work. Or if you just want to support me, you can do so at ko-fi com/paxkun12.
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