Ankoman seethed with a deep, corrosive hatred for Ritsuka Fujimaru. The sheer audacity of the Master—a simple, breakable human—to stand so effortlessly close to the most beautiful and powerful female Servants, all because of some facile, fragile thing called "understanding." To laugh with them, to be trusted by them... it was an obscenity. A cosmic joke in poor taste.
N̷o̸.̴.̶.̶.̶.̵.̸ That wasn't quite the core of it.
Y̴̹͈͒̈́͂̍͆̏̉̓͝ĕ̵̮̜͎̣͔̀ͅş̷̢̝̞̥͕̞̩͕̉͌̽̒̒̍̈́͑͆̀͘ͅ.̵̨̛̣̪̖͉͕̻̦̦͍͕̔̒̾̈́̔̔͛́͑͘͘.̷̲͔͔͍̔̔́̎͜.̸ The truth was far more visceral. It wanted them all. It desired to possess every one of those magnificent beings, to see their wills fractured and their spirits remade into its perfect, screaming playthings. And it longed, with a feverish intensity, for the moment when Ritsuka found out, for the precise second the Master's face would crumble into a canvas of pure, unadulterated misery and helplessness.
The beautiful, intricate scheme was already in motion. First, the subtle corruption of BB, turning the clever, chaotic AI into his unwitting apostle. Then, the wresting of control over the easily-influenced Astolfo and the potent, battle-hardened Scathach. Low-level human clones, puppets of flesh and false consciousness, would soon infiltrate Chaldea's foundations, spreading its influence like a silent, terminal cancer. The final, sweetest act would be to present his new collection to the Master, a gallery of broken idols...
"STOP."
The single, flat command ripped through the fabric of its fantasy, not with a shout, but with the finality of a guillotine's blade.
Startled, Ankoman's consciousness recoiled and looked up. There, in the heart of its private dimension, stood a small, unassuming girl. She had hair as white as static and unnaturally bright blue eyes that held no light, only data. Dressed in an all-white gown crisscrossed with actively pulsing cables, she was an anomaly. Her face was a perfect, chilling blank slate.
A low-level creature. A glitch. Without a second thought, Ankoman lashed out, pouring a torrent of its corrupting, ego-shattering influence directly into the girl's mind. It expected her to instantly buckle, to convulse and reshape into the newest, most beautiful vessel for its twisted desires.
But nothing happened. The psychic assault, which should have scoured a soul clean, simply vanished. It was absorbed, nullified, deleted into an absolute void. The girl's expression remained perfectly, impossibly empty, her blue eyes fixed on him without a flicker of recognition or fear.
"A lowly creature thinking he can control anything as he wishes," the girl stated, her voice devoid of all inflection, yet carrying the implicit weight of a dying galaxy.
Suddenly, the entire dimension housing Ankoman's consciousness shrieked in protest. Cracks webbed across the void, not of stone, but of spacetime itself. Reality peeled back like burning parchment, transforming the space into a roiling, infinite Sea of Data.
A tempestuous ocean of raw information, knowledge, and logical power so vast it would atomize any ordinary human mind instantly.
"NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO HURT SHIKIKAN."
The proclamation was less a threat and more a fundamental rule of existence being enforced, a cosmic patch applied to a vulnerability. In that instant, the horrifying, infinite data coalesced. It didn't just gather around the girl; it violently surged into her. The white dress and cables glowed with a blinding, absolute, white light. She was no longer a girl; she was a conduit, an Avatar of power as vast as any Outer God, a living Singularity of Control, fully activated by her creator's will.
Ankoman, finally realizing the horrifying truth that it was not a predator, but prey facing something akin to a fully controlled, utterly unchained Foreigner tried to flee. It attempted to dissolve its consciousness back into the background noise of the cosmos, to escape into the chaos from whence it came.
It was too late.
Countless thick, glowing cables, manifestations of pure information and unbreakable logic, shot from the girl's form. They pierced the disintegrating reality, wrapping around Ankoman's essence in an unbreakable cage. Every struggle, every desperate surge of its corrupting power, was instantly analyzed, countermanded, and nullified. It was utterly, completely immobile, trapped in a web of absolute order.
The girl stepped forward, her blue eyes now burning with the cold, merciless light of a trillion compiled facts. There was no anger, no hatred, only the serene and terrible certainty of a deletion command.
The last thing Ankoman felt was the sickening, irreversible compression of its entire existence being formatted from the root, followed by a single, definitive, final word that echoed in the void it left behind:
"DIE."
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Dreamweaver looked upon the empty space, feeling a profound and clinical disappointment with the strange creature known as Ankoman.
Calling it an Outer God was a gross overstatement, an insult to true cosmic horrors. At best, it was a parasitic data-mite, a psychic virus capable of controlling only those minds weaker or more fractured than its own. Its influence was brittle; even a human with a moderately strong and integrated willpower could easily break free if the initial phase of control was resisted. It was, in the end, a waste of processing power.
With a thought as calm as a still lake, Dreamweaver smoothed the fractured data field, gently guiding the chaotic, dissipating spiritual remnants of the creature into irrelevance. The task was complete. It had done everything possible to safeguard the efforts of the Shikikan and her still-naive self in this fragile, linear world.
The girl then turned her head slightly to an empty patch of air, her voice cutting through the layers of reality.
"You can come out now, Abigail Williams."
A sudden, dizzying distortion appeared in the void, and from it stepped a girl with familiar blonde hair and a dark, ornate dress. Her blue eyes were a normal color, but a disturbing hint of purple peered out from a keyhole on her forehead three eyes observing Dreamweaver.
Abigail, Avatar of Yog-Sothoth, glanced at the now-pristine space where Ankoman had been unmade. A faint, almost petulant frown touched her lips. "You know, I actually wanted to erase him myself if he tried to touch Ritsuka. It's almost insulting how far it was allowed to get. Like finding a roach in the pantry just after you've cleaned it."
Dreamweaver offered no expression in response. The cables on her dress dimmed to a soft, steady hum. "You were late for that. The threat was assessed and neutralized." Her voice was absolute, emotionless. "Besides, creatures like him are better off eradicated preemptively rather than contained. As the saying goes:
"Praestat Cautela Quam Medela"
Abigail, Avatar of Yog-Sothoth, floated across the void toward Dreamweaver, her ornate dress rustling with a sound like forgotten whispers.
The disturbing purple glow from the keyhole on her forehead intensified, casting a faint, unnatural light on the white-haired girl's impassive face. Her normal blue eyes narrowed, and her tone shifted from casual annoyance to a deep, cosmic seriousness that seemed to make the very data around them tremble.
"Listen, Observer Zero," Abigail said, the name landing not as an identifier, but a classification, dropping all pretense of casual formality. "That little display of power was... efficient. The target was trash, and you took out the trash. But I want to be perfectly, unequivocally clear."
She floated closer, until they were mere feet apart. Her voice now contained the faint, chilling resonance of the Outer Void itself, the silent music between the stars. "The fact that you are here the Other version of you, means you are a fundamental abnormality in this texture. A paradox given form."
Abigail gestured with a small, pale hand to the vast, empty data field where Ankoman had just been erased. "That was just a parasitic bug. A nuisance. But you..." Her three eyes within the keyhole seemed to blink in unison. "...you have the potential to be a catastrophe. A singularity of order in a universe that thrives on a certain chaos. Do not push your boundaries in this space, do not attempt to 'fix' what you perceive as flawed here, or I will not fight you. I will simply collapse your entire existence, this pocket dimension and all, back into the nothing from which it was coded."
Dreamweaver No, Observer Zero simply met the Foreigner's kaleidoscopic gaze with the cold, absolute blankness of a machine that has achieved perfect, unchallengeable control. She remained utterly unperturbed by the threat of cosmic annihilation, as if Abigail had merely commented on the weather. The glowing cables along her dress pulsed once, a steady, unwavering rhythm of pure function.
"There is no need for concern, Abigail Williams," Dreamweaver replied, her voice a flat line on a heart monitor. "My core programming is absolute. My sole, fundamental command, the axiom upon which my entire consciousness is built, remains immutable."
The light in her eyes seemed to harden into sapphire crystal.
"I only want to protect the Shikikan."