The fact that her friend didn't blame her only intensified Arcueid's agony. Tears streamed down her face. She was just a naive soul who loved the world, valued life, and cared deeply for her friends. And yet, she had ended up destroying everything she held precious.
The purity of her closest friend, who suffered the most due to her actions yet bore no grudge, made Arcueid feel unworthy and deepened her sorrow. But she couldn't afford to fall apart. She knew that if she did, Crimson Moon would completely take over her body and cause even more harm to her friends.
"Don't resist... do you want to die? This is your body!" Crimson Moon bellowed.
Still, Arcueid disregarded her, persisting in her resistance against Crimson Moon, bolstered by the support of the Emperor of the Moon.
To outsiders, this might have looked like an extreme case of dissociative identity disorder, but everyone present understood it was not. It was a battle of wills, one soul resisting the control of another.
"Damn it!"
With a surge of strength, Crimson Moon broke free from Artoria's holy sword. He soared into the sky, teeth clenched, and declared, 'You've forced my hand! All of you! I'll obliterate every last one of you!'
She lifted her palm, and the cosmic power of the King of the Moon expanded without bounds, materializing into a massive celestial body.
"Good heavens! What is that!?"
"What on Earth—?"
"Is this the end of the world...?"
Soldiers of Camelot, modern Dead Apostles, and even human military units poised for action all froze, their eyes widening in shock. A sense of impending doom settled over them as they watched the massive celestial body take shape.
Massive was an understatement; a gargantuan planet loomed ominously in the sky.
This was the Moonfall, summoned by Crimson Moon using Arcueid's body!
Although not as colossal as the moon from over a millennium and a half ago, it was still one-sixth its size, creating a breathtaking and horrifying sight.
It looked like the end of the world!
"It's over... it's over...!"
From every corner of the globe, people watched in despair, including high-ranking officials with access to satellites and advanced communication systems.
You didn't need a telescope or any scientific instruments to understand the scale of the horror unfolding above; a simple glance at the sky was enough to convey the sheer dread.
By most accounts, it's believed that around sixty-five million years ago, a mere ten-kilometer-wide asteroid was enough to set off a mass extinction, wiping dinosaurs off the face of the Earth.
But this celestial body dwarfed that by an immense margin! It appeared to be vastly larger than ten kilometers in width.
If it were to hit, the Earth would be fundamentally reshaped, with human life likely snuffed out in the same manner as the dinosaurs.
"It's over... it's over..."
The despair was universal, reaching not just ordinary humans but also other beings and even other species that called Earth home.
Fight back? No magecraft was strong enough to halt the impact of such a celestial mass, and current scientific technology was woefully inadequate for preventing a planetary collision of this magnitude.
What room was there for resistance in the face of such overwhelming despair?
Yet amid this blanket of hopelessness, the Emperor of the Moon revealed a cold smile and lifted his palm.
Drawing on his magical energy with reckless abandon, the authority of the Emperor of the Moon expanded limitlessly, giving birth to another celestial body in the sky!
...
A massive celestial body, nearly a sixth the size of the moon, suddenly appeared, hanging ominously above Fuyuki City.
The spectacle was so extraordinary, so jaw-dropping, that it was seen not just by the people in the vicinity, but also by those around the globe through satellite feeds and news broadcasts.
"Is this even real?"
"Someone tell me this is fake!"
The atmosphere was filled with a palpable sense of dread. People huddled together, shaking, unable to understand what they were seeing. The internet was ablaze with panicked chatter and wild speculation.
In the inner chambers of the Clock Tower, a sense of regret was almost palpable. The Lords wished they had taken Marisbury Animusphere's proposal more seriously, the one about building Chaldea, especially considering he had suggested it almost a decade ago during the Fuyuki Fire Sea Incident. But back then, nobody—no institution, no country—was willing to back what seemed like pure fantasy.
The Chaldea proposal was about nothing less than the salvation of human history. And Marisbury had made the startling claim that human history would become unobservable after 2004.
The apocalypse? Saving human history? Back then, it all sounded like alarmist nonsense. No one took it seriously.
And now, as they stared at the colossal celestial bodies looming in the sky, that earlier dismissal felt like the punchline to a bad joke—one with very high stakes.
Indeed, the current calamity had made believers out of the skeptics. The Lords of the Clock Tower now found themselves grappling with a haunting sense of regret. The so-called elites of the surface world felt the same. Disbelief had turned into a harsh reality; something like this was happening, and the consequences were unimaginable.
Marisbury Animusphere's dire prediction—that human history would no longer be observable after 2004—suddenly made a chilling kind of sense. The celestial body that now threatened to descend upon Earth was not merely a local catastrophe. It was a planet-wide, extinction-level event. The direct devastation would be incomprehensibly vast, stretching across continents. The indirect impact—a cascading collapse of ecosystems—would spell the end for countless species, quite possibly including humanity itself.
Once the celestial body actually descended, concerns about preserving human history or Earth turning into a lifeless planet suddenly seemed trivial.
Would the situation have been different if they had invested in Chaldea nine years ago?
Despair filled the hearts of people everywhere. And just when it seemed things couldn't get any worse, another massive celestial body made its appearance. It was only two-thirds the size of the first, but it was undeniably enormous.
Crimson Moon hovered in the sky, glaring at the moon Shirou had summoned, clearly frustrated to the core.
She never saw it coming; he even managed to steal her Moonfall skill!
It was clear, though, that he wasn't as powerful as Arcueid. The moon he summoned was only about two-thirds the size of Crimson Moon's, which she'd created using Arcueid's body.
Considering the added force from free-falling through the sky, she was confident she could obliterate his moon too.
"Die, all of you!" Crimson Moon yelled, pointing her finger. The moon she summoned plummeted like a falling star.
Its sheer size and weight were enough to cause ecological havoc, and this was before it even made contact with the ground. Not only did it disrupt Earth's magnetic field, but it also wreaked havoc on human devices due to its electromagnetic interference.
The moon shot down like a falling star!
"I have to push it back..."
With everything he had, Shirou pushed the Emperor of the Moon's authority to the limit, channeling his top-tier A+++ magical energy and thrusting the moon he'd created into the sky!
Then, in a spectacular display, the two massive celestial bodies smashed into each other mid-air.
For a moment, space and time seemed to come to a standstill. The colossal bodies were so immense that they even affected gravitational waves. It was a clash of Moonfall against Moonfall—a cataclysmic collision on a scale that defied comprehension.
The moment the two celestial bodies collided, an overwhelming, terrifying energy erupted. It was even more breathtaking than the clash between the holy and demonic swords, like the sound of a Primordial God creating heaven and earth all over again!
Bits and pieces of celestial bodies broke off, raining down like meteorites. Just as people closed their eyes, thinking they would share the fate of the dinosaurs, space itself began to ripple. Gateways to Imaginary Numbers Space opened up, sucking those fragments into its endless void one by one.
Still, the magnetic fields generated by the collision were incredibly powerful, worse than the most intense solar flare imaginable. They wreaked havoc on Earth's communication network, causing massive chaos.