Illya fidgeted a bit as Ruby worked on opening the portal to the mirror world, while Rin and Luvia argued as usual, and her fellow magical girl, Miyu, remained silent.
"What's wrong?"
Illya felt startled at Ruby's call before calming down.
"Nothing. Just trying to wrap my head around the concept of fighting ancient heroes and monsters to seal them away in those tarot cards."
"The situation is much more complicated than that."
Miyu spoke softly, finally breaking Rin and Luvia out of their fight.
"Miyu is right, Illya. We are not actually fighting the Heroes of legends. We are just fighting pale shadows of their true selves contained within those cards."
Rin's face twitched as her thoughts returned to that disastrous fight against the Rider Class Card.
"If it were the real Gorgon that we fought back then, we would be nothing more than smears on the sidewalk in the best case. Worse case, we would be imprisoned within our own bodies after they were turned to stone for all eternity, or until Rider grew bored and shattered us on whim."
Instantly, tears of terror flowed down little Illya's face at that thought as she hugged Ruby close, making the Kaleidostick extremely angry.
And cue its usual reaction to anger, it chose violence.
"Ruby Punch!!"
Ruby shot forward and smacked into Rin's face while still continuing its dimensional transfer task, showing its remarkable multitasking ability.
"No scaring my master, you hag!!"
"Who the hell are you calling a hag, you damned stick!!?"
Luvia sighed at her rival's actions before turning to Illya with a serious look while her eyes still held the softness with which she interacts with Miyu, the girl that the Edelfelt has basically adopted by this point.
"While Rin's way of putting it was too crude, it is simply the truth, Illya. Honestly, we only know a little more about the situation than you since the Grandmaster keeps most details close to chest and on a need-to-know basis. But from what we do know, what we are fighting are beings called Heroic Spirits."
Illya tilted her head in confusion as the transfer finally commenced and threw them into the mirror world.
Luvia continued speaking while Rin continued her fight with the Kaleidostick.
"Heroic Spirits are basically ghosts of the ancient heroes recorded in a place called the Throne of Heroes. A realm whose existence was only discovered because of the Grandmaster of the Clock Tower, an exclusive piece of knowledge that no one else in the world knows about except for us."
Illya went pale as a sheet as she stared at the sky before speaking in a shaky voice.
"U-Um, by any chance, do these ghosts of heroes know anything about magic?"
Luvia's eyes lit up while she grinned broadly.
"You catch on quickly, Illya. Perhaps there is merit in taking you in as a student. To answer your question, yes, there are Heroic Spirits who specialize in magic when they were alive."
"....Like that?"
Illya pointed at the sky, making Luvia follow her finger to find a chilling sight that sent her instincts screaming.
Realizing that something was wrong, Rin and Ruby stopped fighting and looked up as well, only to share the same dumbfounded look as Luvia.
The entire sky of Kuoh's riverside was covered in spheres of energy that radiated such ridiculous levels of mana that it would put an Ultimate-Class devil to shame.
The problem was that Luvia and Rin failed to even identify what kind of magic was being used since they had never seen such manipulation of mana.
Miyu, on the other hand, stared at the Heroic Spirit with a hardened gaze while holding up Sapphire.
Unfortunately, the Heroic Spirit Caster, formerly known as Medea of Colchis when she was alive, took that action as a challenge.
What followed could only be called a massacre.
Rin and Luvia ran around like headless chickens, trying to understand what the hell was going on, while Illya and Miyu concentrated on maintaining the barrier around them so that they wouldn't get one-shot by the magical blasts that were basically the equivalent of magical orbital bombardment via laser canons.
Finally, when Caster started to gather colossal levels of mana in her hand, the girls realized that they had bitten off far more than they could chew and decided to return home.
However, the moment they returned to the real world in their tattered state, they realized that something was wrong.
When they left merely a few minutes ago, it was still Saturday morning with barely any people nearby, a time that Rin and Luvia deliberately chose since they wanted to use the rest of the day to prepare for their classes that would start on Monday. After all, they definitely did not want to leave a bad impression on their fellow students, not to mention a certain someone that they both shared a crush on.
However, just a few minutes after fighting in the mirror world, it was already dusk.
Rin and Luvia stared with a stupefied look at the sky before their minds finally clicked.
"AAAAHH! Stupid! Stupid! How could you forget about such an important piece of information!?"
"Same to you! You damned gorilla!! How did you forget about the dilation effect!?? And you dare call yourself my equal!?"
As usual, the teenagers blamed each other for the problem, leaving the younger girls confused.
Finally, unable to handle the idiocy of the teenagers, Ruby and Sapphire stepped in.
"Alright, enough of that, you two. Can't you see you two are scaring Illya and Miyu?"
"Nee-sama is right, Rin-sama, Luvia-sama. You need to stop and properly explain things to them."
Rin, who was in the process of executing a perfect German suplex while Luvia was prepared to turn the tables and execute an exemplary judo throw, finally stopped their impromptu grappling match and stared at the younger girls with embarrassed blushes on their faces.
Finally calming down, Rin sighed and started to speak while Luvia called her butler and asked him to bring the car around.
"To put it simply, what we experienced is an unstable time dilation effect."
"...Time...dialation?"
At Illya's confused words and Miyu's perplexed look, Rin sighed heavily again and started to explain with slumped shoulders.
"As you know, the Class Cards are hiding themselves within pocket dimensions attached to this world. However, sometimes, these dimensions are far more unstable than usual, leading to time dilation effects where time might flow faster within the dimension compared to the outside, or sometimes, doing the opposite, with time flowing slower in there compared to real world."
"What we just experienced is the latter effect."
Rin stared with a blank stare directed at the setting sun.
"The few minutes we spent in there translated to several hours in the real world, and here we are."
Luvia came back from her talk with her butler.
"I have contacted Auguste. He should be coming around soon-"
Suddenly, Luvia stopped talking and turned around with an alarmed look, one shared by Rin as well.
And a split second later, a deafening explosion erupted from the center of Kuoh, originating from the vicinity of the central park.
At first, all they heard was the noise, before some kind of barrier fell away and revealed the true breath of what it was hiding.
The sphere of flames expanded in a dome the size of the entire park before collapsing inward, giving rise to a mushroom cloud of ash and dust that was visible all the way from the riverside on the other side of the town.
Illy and Miyu struggled to find their footing as the very ground shook from the force of the explosion, and the gale winds combined with the shockwave nearly swept them off their feet, showing how powerful the explosion was, given the distance between their location and the park.
As for Rin and Luvia? They had long since taken off towards the source of the explosion, boosting their bodies with magic, while leaving instructions behind to the Kaleidosticks to take the girls back home with Luvia's butler, Auguste.
Illy and Miyu did not know what exactly happened and why things suddenly gone south out of nowhere.
But what they did know was that this was something truly serious if Rin and Luvia were willing to put aside their differences like this and move as one.
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Rias Gremory gritted her teeth with frustration and exhaustion as she worked hard to isolate the crater that dominated a huge part of the park while her Peerage and familiars worked on erasing the memory from the citizens of Kuoh as quickly as possible with mass amnesia spells.
Of course, her peerage was not doing this alone, as Sona's peerage helped out her servants as well. However, that in itself was the problem, as she was not the only one working on fixing the damaged area.
Sona Sitri, who was glaring daggers at her while working alongside her.
"I told you, Rias. I told you not to do your usual thing and take care of that Fallen before things went south."
"Give me a break! How was I supposed to know that things would deteriorate to this extent? I was already moving when that Fallen put up an isolation barrier around the park, but in the short few minutes it took, things already became like this!"
Sona did not stop glaring at her friend. Rather, her glare intensified even more, sending chills down Rias's spine.
"And yet, all of this would have been avoided if you had killed that Fallen the moment we detected her outside the school that day when she approached Hyoudou. Now, look at this."
Sona motioned towards the slowly recovering ruin.
"The Fallen is missing. Hyoudou is missing. The area reeks of unknown holy energy. The entire town saw that ridiculous explosion. And worst of all, this incident happened exactly when we have 'guests' in our territory, tarnishing our reputation forever across the supernatural community should this news leak out!"
Rias fell silent at the accusation, knowing that Sona was right, regretting her inaction so far.
On the other hand, Sona knew what Rias was regretting her inaction as well. However, the Sitir heiress also knew that it would change nothing.
Rias was, by nature, a creature of sloth. Just like most of the Gremory devils. Just like how Sona's family mostly had the flaw of pride, including herself.
With a sigh, she got back to working on channeling her demonic energy into the magic circle tailor-made to reverse damage to an area, just like Rias was doing.
Yet, their concentration faltered as two new magical signatures dashed into range, bypassing the isolation barrier that the devil heiresses set up beforehand.
It was none other than Rin and Luvia, who stared at the devastation with a stupefied look before turning to look at the Devil heiresses.
"Well, looks like something really interesting happened here."
Rin smirked while Luvia grinned and followed up on her rival's words.
"My, looks like someone really powerful made a mess of things, eh? Gremory? Sitri?"
Rias's temper boiled over at the sight of the two girls.
While her initial impressions of the girls were rather good, thinking of them as promising peerage members if it were not for the orders from the Satans, this impression had long since deteriorated after she had a private meeting with them without telling Sona.
Long story short, she realized that the girls operated on a whole different mindset and were not willing to form any kind of pact with her, not to mention how hostile they were to her kind.
To be fair, Rias did understand their caution and hatred for her kind.
After all, it is hard not to be understanding when the mass outbreak of Stray Devils ten years ago due to a certain incident, which exponentially multiplied their population across the world, causing diplomatic disasters all over the world for the devil race and harming nearly all the factions of the world, one way or another.
Not to mention the personal damage this outbreak did to the two girls by taking away Tohsaka Rin's father when she was little, while also taking away Luvia's sister in a similar way.
And yet, despite knowing all this, Rias could not help but be enraged with how the girls were making fun of them in such a situation, especially since this felt like a personal attack on the Gremory heiress, as Sona's earlier words were still fresh in her mind.
But Rias did nothing to act upon that rage, only glaring coldly at the girls and going back to work while the two human girls started to examine the scene.
All the while, the source of this entire headache, one Emiya Shirou, was facing a crisis of his own as Issei Hyoudou, his unintentional charge, faced the greatest threat in his entire life in the form of the immortal wizard Zelretch, who was having a rather interesting time messing with the perverted boy.
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Author Notes: Read 5 chapters ahead on Patreon: patreon.com/Ruijard1