Chapter Text
Louise weathered the shockwave of the explosion with gritted teeth. Why couldn’t she even do the Familiar Summoning Ritual without it resulting in an explosion?
She squinted and glared into the smoke to try and see what she had summoned, only to blink in bewilderment when she saw the glint of metal.
After the supervising professor blew the remaining smoke away with a wave of his staff, her expression was suddenly shared with many other students.
“Hah! Says a lot about Zero, for her to summon a commoner’s tool of all things!”
Normally, Louise would’ve snarled at the one who said it, but this time she just ignored it as she knew the statement couldn’t be further from the truth.
It was a sword indeed—one befitting of royalty. It looked like the sort of blade one would expect to be used for knighting.
The silver-white sword was enameled with artful burgundy-red at the base, and was engraved with strange runes along the mirror polished blade. The craftsmanship was simply exquisite. The rosette would dare say that it was as much decorative as it was practical, if it weren’t for one glaring detail.
The damn thing was almost as long as Louise was tall, even with the tip of the sword embedded into the ground.
With a huff, she walked up to the blade and reached for the handle. She was supposed to be the “master” of this thing, right? Then the very least she would expect from it was that it lightened itself for her.
Louise was already screaming from the red lightning surging up her arm before Professor Colbert could warn her that the sword exuded the aura of a wild beast.
X~x~o0o~x~X
The first thing Louise perceived was darkness. The blackest dark that swallowed everything.
No.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that rather than there being dark, it was the absence of anything at all.
Louise wasn’t sure which scared her more.
Then, there was lightning.
Crimson red lightning swelled, filling in half of the void and halting just before Louise’s awareness.
“So, you’re the one who called out to me?”
The rosette blinked. Or at least as much as her not-body allowed her to.
She could make out a figure in the red. The outlines of their silhouette were unclear, as though made of the lightning themselves.
The first thing she noticed about their appearance was that they held the same sword in their hands that Louise summoned.
It was a knight in bulky, ornate armor with red accents and an intimidating horned helmet.
Said helmet then began to slide apart in a show of sophisticated craftsmanship and enchantments to reveal the face of a young woman with spiky blonde hair and green eyes—far from the demon that the mage was half-expecting.
Louise also made the startling realization that the knight was more or less on eye level with her. And she was pretty sure she was one of the shortest students in her year.
The mage withheld from showing any reaction from it, however, as the blonde’s grin was just as bloodthirsty as one would expect a demon’s to be.
“Honestly, I don’t know whether I should be annoyed or impressed,” the knight said, putting an elbow on the guard of their sword that was stabbed into the nothingness, as if leaning on a short wall.
“On one hand, you summoned me without the proper chant to summon a Servant, so my spiritual body isn’t as stable as it should be and I need to resort to something as distasteful as possession to manifest. On the other hand, your element and body makes you amazingly suited to become a Demi-Servant.”
‘W-without the proper chant?’ Louise thought in indignation. The entire reason she had to use another was because the traditional incantation for the familiar summoning didn’t work for her! Also, spiritual body? Possession? Demi-Servant? What the hell was she talking about?
“Tch. Just my luck to get summoned by a kid who doesn’t know anything.”
The rosette opened her mouth to retort, but froze midway.
‘Did she somehow hear my thoughts?’
To her dismay, the knight snorted the moment she finished that thought.
“Of course I hear you. This is all happening in your mind, after all.”
Louise side-eyed her surroundings with a worried expression. “But...that can’t be. Why would my mind look like a yawning void?”
At this, the knight fixed her with a dry look. “I wonder. Maybe it’s because you’re unconscious and it has nothing to do with your element,” she drawled, much to the mage’s confusion.
Seeing that her words didn’t have the desired effect, the blonde clicked her tongue in annoyance. “Whatever. Let me put it in simple terms: girlie, you’ve summoned the spirit of a hero from a bygone era. You know, the sort you usually read fairy tales about. And if I get contracted to you, you would get my powers.”
‘A-a spirit of a hero from a bygone era?’ If Louise could feel faint in this place, she would’ve already fallen to her knees from shock. And this would let her have a hero’s powers? Would that mean magic abilities to bring forth an earthquake or a thunderstorm at her fingertips? Summoning something like this was beyond even mage’s wildest power fantasy dreams.
And she was going to be the one with an actual familiar spirit! One that empowers her! Never before would have the rosette thought she would be glad to have botched a spell.
‘This’ll teach them all to call me a Zero once I contract-’
“Why should I agree to contract with you?
The question snapped Louise out of her fantasy, who then looked up to meet the knight’s dispassionate gaze.
“You’re just a little girl who would probably mess about with my powers rather than doing anything worthwhile. Tell me, why should I agree to partner with you?”
The spirit’s words were like being doused with a bucket of ice water. Fear and anxiety gripped her heart as she considered the possibility of having this chance to actually achieve something she desperately wanted slip right between her fingers because she was found unworthy. Louise cursed inwardly. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. This was the spirit of a hero of old, after all. There was no way she would just give away her powers that easily.
The noble desperately racked her mind for an appropriate answer, but couldn’t bring herself to say any of them due to a reason—namely that because even though she didn’t admit it to herself to keep going, the rosette did not believe there were any good reasons to contract with her. She was a failure, after all; but there was no way she would answer with that.
So she decided to try to negotiate instead.
“Y-you wouldn’t have your own body, right? I shall let you take control sometimes,” she offered.
The knight hummed, considering. “That is much more than what the Heroic Spirits bound to Demi-Servants usually get. It does sweeten the deal, but not the answer I’m looking for.”
Louise looked away, biting her lips as she paced in place. She had to come up with something satisfactory. She refused to- couldn’t stay as a failure. She needed this, else…
She couldn’t fail, but she can’t come up with an answer.
She can’t she can’t she can’t can’tcan’t-
“Bah, that’s all it takes for you to fall apart?” The knight’s condescending voice interrupted the rosette’s spiraling.
For a long moment, the mage only stared numbly.
Then a flame of utter indignation sparked in her chest.
“I suppose I can’t expect-” the spirit was about to comment, but was cut off by Louise’s furious whisper.
“‘That’s all’, you say?” she hissed.
All her shame, frustration, anger, hope, determination and desperation from the past years roused from within the noble all at once.
“‘That’s all?’” she repeated, this time nearly shouting as her voice wavered, yet pushed on. “I endured years of being disrespected, pitied and made fun of due to something completely out of my control! I studied and researched for more sleepless nights than I can count to try to fix it only to run into a dead end at every turn! No matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I studied, every single one of my spells failed and turned into an explosion, which isn’t even a proper spell that could be identified in the grimoires! And because of that, my unofficial magical title has become ‘Zero’, because that’s how many spells I had cast successfully! And yet I still stand here!”
With each sentence, Louise stepped closer to the boundary separating the void and the lightning, eventually shouting in the knight’s face as she stabbed a finger into the knight’s breastplate.
“I didn’t let people’s jeers, nor my family’s pity, nor my unending failures make me back down, and neither will I let you stand in my way!”
It was only at the end of her tirade that she noticed the knight was grinning at her.
“I like you kid, you’ve got spunk.”
The rosette blinked uncomprehendingly for a moment before it dawned on her.
‘D-did she just do that all on purpose?’
Was it all a test of how she’d react? One that she apparently just passed?
“Wanting to succeed in spite of everything going against you is something I can get behind,” she said, extending a hand, “So I don’t see why I shouldn’t help you with that.”
The knight’s posture straightened out from lackadaisically laying against her sword to standing tall and dignified.
“I, Mordred Pendragon, son of King Arthur Pendragon, shall assist you with your endeavour,” she stated formally.
Louie quickly schooled her slackjaw expression into a formal mask before speaking.
“I, Louise Francoise le Blanc de la Valiérre will gladly receive your aid,” she replied, shaking the knight’s hand as she looked her in the eye.
As the moment passed, the noble couldn’t help but glance down at her small hand still holding Mordred’s gauntleted one, as if still having to convince herself that this was really happening.
“Oh, fair warning by the way.”
Louise looked up to see the knight smirk with a malicious glint in her eye.
“You may be awfully suited for being a Demi-Servant, but the integration is going to hurt a lot. ”
“Eh?”
And Louise’s world exploded in pain.
X~x~o0o~x~X