Chapter Text
Premise: Ritsuka realizes she should never be humanity’s last master. What she should be - is Eva of the New World.
Commissioned Fanart of Edmond Dantes and child - Artist: Trang Do
Prologue: Mad Woman, Come Knock on Your Door.
……….
The moment the idea takes form in Ritsuka’s head, it possesses her thoughts. She thinks about it from the moment she opens her eyes at the start of every dawn to the moment she lies back down on her bed at the end of every dusk. It is a worm that infects her brain, insidious and tenacious. It is a mad thought that does not let go.
It starts like this, in the frozen, wind-blown plains of a Permafrost Empire, beneath the shattered remains of an alien tree, she stands before a proud King on his knees, a grieving Duchess with her star-crossed lover, and the Yaga who she once called friend but now whose blood paints her fingers and splatters the snow at her feet.
Patxi is the one who shakes her faith. He tells her he will never forgive her. It’s not fun making her cry, he says. But he is the one dying here, and Ritsuka the winner with her crown of ash and bones. It’s not fair, she thinks. She didn’t come here to burn down Patxi’s world, for all that it is cold and unforgiving.
Your world sounds beautiful, he says. So it should be the one to survive. A world whose only virtue is strength should not be the one to survive. Maybe we made a mistake somewhere, but it’s not for nothing.
Then he tells her he will never forgive her, and that she needs to go on living now, for all the lives she takes from them, for the future she steals from them. He tasks her with living in their place, with smiles on her face and her head held high.
This is, perhaps, the most daunting task anyone has set at Ritsuka’s feet. More difficult and unrelenting even than saving the world from the King of Magic, than stemming the grief of a forsaken divine mother, then fending off an Alien Goddess. To smile and hold her head high with the blood she will have to spill.
Perhaps Patxi laid a geas on her, with his dying breath and the weight of their betrayal. The end result is this, Ritsuka takes his words to her heart and carves them into her flesh, and from these words spring the germ of an idea.
Ritsuka is the last master of humanity. Ritsuka is the single keystone onto which humanity’s survival is anchored. Paradoxically, if they are ever to have true victory, if Ritsuka is to keep her words to a dead Yaga in a long-forgotten world, pruned by the cold calculus of Akasha itself, then Ritsuka should never be humanity’s last master.
She carries this thought in her head and goes into the Ice Fire of Gotterdammerung, where she watches a woman burn herself in the blaze called love. It is as beautiful as it is alien. For all that Ritsuka rages at Ophelia for turning her back on humanity for the love of a single man… and then kills herself for the love of a different man, she can’t help but admire her too, for the courage to pursue her heart to the very end.
The germ in her head is fed with the death of Ophelia, with Surtr’s scream at a denied future at the side of the woman he loves. And now it springs like a seed burrowed under the earth.
There are only ten thousand humans in the vastness of Gotterdammerung and their one lonely goddess. There are only ten thousand because that is how many that can survive; because that is how many might be supported from the meager stretch of living land in a world long past its Ragnarok, how many their lonely last goddess can succor.
How many humans are left in the entirety of the Pan Human History Ritsuka is trying so hard to preserve?
Less than fifty.
Ritsuka is fighting for less than fifty people, and a nebulous seven billion more that she has no guarantee might be resurrected once this war is over. For this, she has murdered ten thousand humans in the burning fields of Gotterdammerung.
The humanity Ritsuka fights for is a gleaming candle in the face of a strong wind. Should the gust snuff out Ritsuka’s life, so too will the last chance of her humanity perish. Should they survive, none among the remaining humans can call on the strength of the thousand dead as she has. No more servants to do their battles for them. No more wisdom of the dead used to build a struggling, grasping future.
The thought is now a living thing inside her head. It squirms in the back of her eyes every single time her gaze lands on the child Da Vinci. Da Vinci too was in a similar situation, wasn’t she? What she does can be replicated by none, just as what Ritsuka does. But unlike Ritsuka, Da Vinci had the foresight to predict her own death, and thus, prepared a substitute.
It comes to reason then, that perhaps Ritsuka should think of doing the same. It is almost a dare to the enemies to come and snuff out the life of humanity’s last master, and thus take out the last bit of fight in them.
And so they do. Koyanskaya’s poisoned cake very nearly does the job. Ritsuka survives by sheer dumb luck and by Director Goredorf’s gluttonous taste for cakes.
In the aftermath of the Synchronized Intellect Nation, Ritsuka is galvanized by terror and purpose. She does not want to be humanity’s last master. She does not fear death. What she does, she has done too many times, walked into dead land too many times, to truly hold a fear of death anymore, not when she knows beyond that one final line is a friend she holds dear to her heart. Ereshkigal in her quiet Kingdom. But all the same, she does not want to betray Patxi once more. And having witnessed Ophelia’s love, Ritsuka desperately wants to, as the Yaga put it, hold her head high and live with a smile on her face.
What she has to do is clear. She convenes with Da Vinci, then with Sion, but not with Mash, or with the Director. This, if she is to do it, is an intensely personal thing. And she thinks, with instinct and jealousy born of a young woman who has never once been in love or loved, that she would like to keep this to herself, at least for the moment. She would like to see how far she can take it, if she can take it, before she comes to Goredorf and then to Mash, and present to them what she will build from her bones and flesh.
It is possible, says Da Vinci, having anticipated where Ritsuka’s thoughts turn in the last two Lostbelts. Sion confirms the case for her, concurs the need for such actions, then promises her aid and her silence.
And so it is with a trembling heart that Ritsuka takes a Holy Grail from the vast storage space of Novum Chaldea, fills it with her blood and Da Vinci’s elixir, and then goes to find the Count of Monte Cristo.
Perhaps it is her youth, or perhaps it is the insanity of her plan, or the brazenness of her hope, but Ritsuka’s proposal to the self-titled Demon of the Prison Tower is… less than poetry.
“Edmond Dantes, I want to have your baby,” says she unto him.
………
Next Chapter: Man, Woman, Love.
Preview: Ritsuka stands in front of the mirror, naked. She is twenty-three. When she first stepped foot into this world, blind and ignorant, she was nineteen, a fresh high school graduate looking forward to her gap year. She thought: I’m going to make money, fall in love, build my future. I’m going to a good school, and then to a good job . She thought: I want to buy the new Nintendo Switch without looking at the price tag. I want to walk around Yoyogi park holding hands with the boy I love. We will go to Nakano Broadway and stuff our faces with the largest sundae at Daily Chiko. I will give him my first kiss, and he will give me his first time. It’s been four years since the day. Ritsuka is twenty-three now and the only hope of all the surviving humans, all fifty of them. She has white hair somewhere in her head and more scars on her body than she cares to count. There will always be more the next time. That, more than anything, reminds her of the frailty of her humanity. One tiny little slip and this lonely little candle is snuffed out.