Chapter Text
Claude really doesn’t know why he let himself get tangled in this.
Even after examining one too many blacked carcasses that, on any normal day, he’d be quite delighted to observe, this whole situation clearly does not bode well for his current mental health. Claude regrets coming here, more than he normally regrets doing dumb shit.
Mostly because of a certain teal-haired fish who kept poking at everything as if they were mere playthings and not incredibly delicate bodies that could possibly have magical properties.
Claude can only pray one of them doesn’t spontaneously explode.
Curiosity killed the fish.
“Eww, this one’s skin is super ashy.” From the cleric’s peripheral, he spots said fish gently nudging the corroding head of some poor security guy with a rock.
There's an unnatural amount of bodies to step over (as if there could ever be a natural amount), especially as they get closer and closer to whatever mechanism is at the center of this shithole, all charred and disgusting at different levels. Claude stopped observing them after the 5th one they passed, too busy with completing the task at hand. Finana clearly did not.
He would’ve retorted with some witty remark or mocked her with his terrible Finana impression, but he was unfortunately busy making sure the air in this place wouldn’t instantly murder everyone when they took their gas masks off. Which was easier said than done, even for an alchemy nerd such as himself. Purification processes are complicated, okay?
Though they had the masks, all this hassle was frustrating and Claude really wanted certain people to stop complaining about not being able to breathe in them. Besides, the fumes made everything ten times less visible, even with the flashlights they were given.
And so he was in the midst of whipping up a potion to clear out the air in this place.
“Finana… We’re supposed to only grab the files and leave, not touch the corpses.” Shu, the voice of reason, berates, “Also you might catch like, some terrible virus or something.”
The sorcerer was standing next to her crouched form, surveying their surroundings for the nth time, more on edge than usual. Claude couldn’t blame him, this place sent his hackles raising.
From the smooth concrete ground, littered with slabs of roof, files and tech, along with ashy remains and dried, burnt blood—some even still smoking—to the eerie silence, only occasionally broken by one of the three of them; it’s creepy enough to be the setting of a particularly terrifying horror movie. It doesn’t help that it’s the middle of the night.
The room they're in is lined with rows and rows of shelves, housing a range of strange liquids and papers, only barely seen through the preposterous amount of smoke trapped inside. It’s unnervingly similar to Claude’s own lab, the thought of which makes his gut twist uncomfortably at the familiarity, even though he’s never been here in his life.
More irritating, though, is that if they tried to air out the place, they’d just lead the smoke to another smoked out room. Because the roof is somehow still intact.
Claude is only mildly pissed off about it not being destroyed along with the rest of the walls, but then again, if the roof sank in, he couldn’t have gotten here in the first place. Maybe.
He would’ve snuck in anyway.
Again, curiosity killed the fish. Cat. Whatever the saying was.
Claude sighs, knelt down to a weirdly angled squat, trying to fish out ingredients from his many pockets. As he does so, Finana begrudgingly stops poking around the bodies and says something sarcastic-sounding back to Shu—who sags like a bag of potatoes.
He’s too busy shoving delicate lavender into a bottle with shards of pure oxygen, then slowly pouring in vial after vial of expensive acids, to really care much about the conversation.
Hopefully they like the sickly sweet smell of lavender. It’s still miles better than smoke, at the very least.
Feeling the cool rush of glass seeping through his thin gloves, an air of ease washes over Claude, potion-making has always calmed him down. It takes him back to his personal brewery, the only place that he could risk blowing shit up in because the costs were covered by insurance.
He still remembers being holed-up in there, test tubes and random ingredients messily tossed anywhere, when the ding of a notification lit up his phone nearby. It was another message from staff about the recently developed mission.
Two weeks ago was when the fanfare of some government mission started, so much so that it somehow reached the distant ears of Claude.
(Claude wasn’t particularly out of the loop per se, he simply liked his quiet, often holding a six-foot pole against whatever was currently the center of attention.
Being the “funny bit guy” does not correlate to being in the middle of the drama, and he was nothing if not committed to the bit).
The fact that everyone seemed to be talking about it meant that it was something big, and more likely, bad. Precisely why Claude had decided to avoid it completely. On top of that, the mission was conveniently sent straight from the government—already a pretty telling sign, if you asked him.
Naturally, the job fell into the hands of an agency called Nijisanji and landed on the EN side, the branch he worked under.
Nijisanji, or NIJI for short, shelters and houses many confusing entities. Supernatural beings, fancy magic-wielding species, heroes and time travellers alike, and a lot of great singers… for some reason.
When approached with any question about his work, Claude lies like his life depends on it. Usually he says he’s “just a researcher” and tries his best to leave it at that, because alchemized arson isn’t really normal for a normal guy to be doing normally.
(A couple months ago, Claude was dragged to a fancy NIJI event by almost the entire NIJI staff team, one with way too many strangers for his liking.
He wasn’t even drunk, unfortunately, when some random girls he didn’t recognize decided to corner him, saying they noticed the damn TTT logo embroidered on the inside of his custom-made, elbow-length gloves. Shit.
Claude can only assume they’re staff from a smaller, less secretive, agency, judging by the way the logos on their fancy outfits were foreign to him. It’s stupid, really, because they could be cornering the better known NIJI agents, like the infinitely more infamous Luca Kaneshiro, who was currently playing—and losing—a poker match with Shu, Ike, and Vox.
He ends up responding to all of their questions with his usual one liner.
“I’m a researcher, you know, biology stuff.”
They didn’t buy it. No one with half a brain would, but Claude really didn’t have the energy to come up with a more elaborate lie.
Jesus fuck, how did he manage to get himself in this situation.
One of the girls then proceeded to yap his ears off about him “clearly being in one of the specialized divisions of NIJIEN because of the emblem, with the inherent magical nature of TTT and how it’s different from other units,” which isn’t untrue, but they obviously didn’t know how the company works and were trying to squeeze secrets out of him.
Nuh uh, not happening.
If only he could get a single word in between the constant questions and blatant disrespect to his coworkers to make up an excuse to leave, because this girl will not shut up.
Tired and trying his damn best to avoid further interaction with his interrogators, the sound of Finana scoffing as she closes in from behind nearly has him thanking her on his knees.
“Yeah, he’s a scientist, cool, but this one has a certain language teacher whining about him,” From the corner of his eye, Claude sees Finana roll her eyes so hard they almost fly out of her cranium, “So, c'mon. Leo wants to see you, he’s by the drinks.”
Her fins were twitching in the way that signified she was spouting a complete lie—but they wouldn’t know that—and she glanced at him with a cheeky, star-lit smile that said, you owe me one now.
She drags him by the arm towards the bar while waving down Leo—who was surprisingly pretty close to the bar anyway—and Claude has to stop himself from complaining about the grip on his poor arm in favor of muttering a small and embarrassing thanks.
Internally, though, he’s smirking at the group of girls who failed to prod any meaningful information out of him. Hah. They’re company secrets for a reason.
Claude then bought Finana several drinks at her request, held her hair back as she loudly regretted her decisions, and drove her home by the end of the night).
As an agency hiring crazy management and crazier people, their reputation was definitely stigmatized, yet still, they offered protection to any magic user, entity, and researcher who needed it—magic isn’t widely regarded as a good thing, after all.
Besides, as a magic researcher himself, Claude isn’t really partial to judging people. Not with these fuckass claws and uncontrollable violent tendencies.
Plus, the pay is good, the people are nice, that’s more than enough.
Safe to say that Claude, resident sometimes-unhinged, usually-chill guy who does cleric stuff has seen his fair share of the supernatural. Like, life-altering, brain chemistry-changing, things. At least 80 percent of his colleagues are some kind of non-human or wield logic-defying magic. Lazulight, Obsydia, Ethyria, Luxiem, Noctyx, Iluna, Xsoliel, Denauth; to name a few. Even himself.
So a mission about a portal that messes with the perception of any conceivable reality was not out of range as far as expectations go. The fact that it’s a government-mandated, top secret portal that randomly exploded and killed a ton of people, was just the cherry on top.
Initially, when Claude caught wind of the “super secret mission” that was magic-adjacent, he didn’t know why he volunteered. Probably some deep-seated curiosity that overruled his logic, because portals are incredibly interesting goddamnit, and he’ll happily die on that hill.
Finana seemed to think otherwise, always refuting Claude whenever he brought up something actually interesting for once. Ugh, one more thing to disagree on.
Which begs the question, why would the mermaid want to join him in the first place?
His working theory is that it’s her inscrutable need to be an annoying little gremlin. (Claude will never admit out loud that he actually likes her constant presence).
At least the managers were smart enough to convince Shu to come along so that no one died from lack of brainpower.
He isn’t stupid—not usually—but bickering with Finana lowers his IQ by at least 20.
All in all, the three of them weren’t an objectively bad team; between Shu’s straightforward observative nature, Finana’s constant complaining that served as entertainment to keep them sane, and Claude being his usual taskmaster self—they could get this done without screwing up the balance of the universe. Hopefully.
“Uh, was there always a beeping sound in here?” The clear pitch of Shu’s voice breaks Claude out of his hyperfocus, barely in time for him to have finished the bottle off with a cork without even realizing he had a cork on his person.
“What beeping sound?” Claude, who had been too lost in the cloud of his own thoughts to really register anything around him, replied. No one spoke for a second, not even Finana, and oh shit there really is a beeping sound.
“Fuck. That’s probably not good.” Claude forsakes his inability to be anything but deadpan in urgent situations.
“What do we do?” Finana’s voice quivers into a higher register than normal.
Claude couldn’t blame her for being scared, that thing sounded like a bomb waiting to detonate—and they should definitely stop it from doing whatever it's going to do.
“Guys?”
The cleric tries to regain control over the quickly-escalating situation, “Calm down Finana—” And he’s promptly cut off.
“What do you mean, calm down, there’s a creepy beeping noise and you said it’s probably not good!” She’s borderline screaming now, and even if Claude’s supposed to be more level-headed than this, god does it set off his temper.
“Guys.”
“I meant, stop screeching our ears off, so we can find the damn thing and turn it off!” He really doesn’t mean to speak so loud, but the beeping is getting louder as time goes on and it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to hear anything.
Finana retorts like normal, “Okay! You don’t have to yell…”
“GUYS!” A burst of green-purple flame incinerates the atmosphere, narrowly missing the tops of both Claude and Finana’s heads.
Silence overtakes the group of three, save for the still-annoying beeping.
Holy hell.
Shu can be scary when he wants to be.
“There’s a red light over there.” Shu points at some corner of the room, looking amused and exasperated at the same time in the dim light of the flashlights. He’s right, though, a menacing red dot shining through gray smog like a laser pointer.
Claude heaves a breath that sounds more like a groan, stands up and shakes the bottle in his hands to prep it for use, “You guys might wanna stand back for this.”
For once, Finana follows his direction, while Shu’s already grabbing their items and doing some fancy sorcerer charm that lights up the floor leading to the furthest door. Claude, once again, is impressed at Shu’s innate ability to be so aware of his surroundings that he even remembers the way out.
Claude tries to stay calm, fiddling with the glass bottle, cursing at himself for pushing the cork so deep in the neck. And staying calm proves to be especially hard when a beeping sound is drilling itself into your ears, so he forgoes all delicacy as he snaps off the neck of the bottle while quickly swiping his claws from the loop in his belt, pouring the potion in the tubes on the sides.
He tsks at himself when he realizes one of the wires is bent, quickly fixing it and holding his hands out, releasing a very, very disgustingly sweet lavender smell in the form of a gas. It does clear the air though, thank fuck.
He can finally tear the highlighter-yellow hazmat suit off, much more comfortable in his own clothes underneath. Shu and Finana follow in his actions, and discard their suits as well, both clearly less annoyed by the crinkling plastic.
A light comes on from somewhere behind him, Claude jolts at the brightness, yet slowly stands up to look at the room anyhow. A good half second later he realizes it's Shu who lit up the place, and another half second later he nearly shits himself at the sheer size of the room that had been hidden behind smoke this whole time.
The red beeping light is coming from the opposite end of this lab, how did Shu even see that from this far through the smoke, and Finana comes bounding up first.
Problem is, the beeping mechanism is actually what looks like a sensor, connected to a terminal, connected to the single largest toroid he’s ever seen. Said toroid currently making multiple horrid screeching noises.
He shoots out an arm to pull Finana back to his side, barely missing her as Shu yells out her name. For god’s sake.
She makes it only a few strides further before Claude remembers he can speak, “Finana, don’t go closer. Please.” Finana turns around.
“Why?” She whines, Claude curses under his breath.
“It’s not safe, we should leave. We need to leave.” His voice shook.
“But we need those files… I was gonna turn the thing off.” She glances back at the controls, a big reg button at the forefront of one of the terminals, along with a large pile of papers—likely the info they need—scattered under what can only be the control panel. She’s unfortunately right. They should turn it off.
But fuck, because right behind her stands an electrifying, glowing, donut-shaped portal that’s currently doing god knows what.
Shu, who Claude almost forgot was behind him, pipes up, “It’s too dangerous though, we can't—we…” he cuts himself off, stuck at an impasse.
Nabbing those files and finishing this mission is important.
But risking their lives for some papers… is it worth it?
They need to turn that damn thing off.
All of them stood stock-still, Claude still trying to will himself to move, the air in the room thick with tension that was steadily growing as the portal sparked more and more. Roots seem to have stuck their feet into the ground, unable to move out of fear.
Finana turns around fully and begrudgingly walks back, but she has a point. They need those files.
Claude thought his managers weren’t serious when they said this is an extremely important, top-secret mission. They were talking about how the fate of the universe could rest on those files and that the portal was a world-defying, reality-changing thing, something that Claude brushed off as mane-san over exaggerating again—because these ideas were tantamount to thinking that normal humans could rewrite fate. A portal of this calibre was unheard of. And a manmade one? Even more impossible, by all laws of physics and magic alike.
Now he actually believes them.
This portal wasn’t just a normal portal, or the portals that NIJI was familiar with—the interdimensional ones that dragged Ethyria and Luxiem to the current world. It probably dealt with something other-worldly, outside of their dimension, an entirely new universe that didn’t abide by the laws they were used to.
If this thing is really that powerful, then that’s probably how it exploded and killed those researchers… Oh shit. Is that what it’s doing right now?
But how? And why?
As it stands, Claude has exactly 0 seconds to figure out the answers to those questions.
Alarm bells ring excruciatingly loudly in his head, protect them, turn that shit off, go, run, save them. Get the files and get out of here. Don’t let them die too.
The beeping sounds more like a single constant beep now, so Claude decides, against his better judgement, to ignore the fact that he’s a huge hypocrite and just run for it, muttering multiple strings of expletives under his breath.
This is a mistake.
Sprinting at his full speed has never felt slower, passing and pushing Finana—harsher than he would’ve liked—back towards Shu, who Claude is sure would keep her safe, eyes locked onto the red button right as the portal starts smoking. Great.
“Claude, wait—!” Faintly, he recognizes the voice as Shu’s, but blood is pumping directly into his ears, and everything is muffled.
He trips on a dead body, dried, tacky blood staining the soles of his shoes, knees knocking painfully against the concrete and drawing blood from a scrape. It would’ve hurt a lot more if he could feel anything but the rush of adrenaline.
It doesn’t take very long to make it to the portal, still smoking, beeping, terrifying, he lunges at the terminal, hand outstretched to slam the button down, lungs seizing, legs twitching.
As he reaches the terminal, with barely enough time to examine anything properly, someone screams from behind him and a concerning smell of burnt flesh emanates from whatever mass is in front of him, and wait, is the portal turning blue?
The world tilts.
Claude registers only three things at that moment.
First is a light that completely flashbangs his eyes—a light that he also might’ve mistaken for the light of god, despite not being religious.
Second is the feeling of being completely torn apart, one slow molecule at a time, starting with his forearm, a zap of what felt like electricity up his neck, head, then traveling down to his midsection and legs. It should’ve hurt, but it didn’t. Which is the weirdest part.
The third and final thing he registers is the smell of… the ocean? And something akin to purple light dancing in front of him. Claude assumes it's the smell and sight of death, delirious from sprinting, falling, and being borderline electrocuted—or at least something remotely close to being electrocuted.
Ah well. Everything’s got to have an end, right?
He hopes he can meet Raven again. That’d be nice.
Contrary to his expectations, there was still light, and still blue. Everywhere, blue. Bright and drilling the color into his retinas. He closes his poor eyes, praying for the stupid ringing in his ears to go away, and for the belated pain of being completely ripped apart to fuck off already.
If anything, Claude expected this whole dying process to be less painful and prolonged, but he also assumes that being electrocuted and mutilated to death isn’t really supposed to be painless and fast.
He’s going insane. Why is death so slow.
Instead of the sweet release of death, Claude sees lights dancing behind his recently-closed eyelids, the smell of oil and things he’d associate with mechanics, and worst of all he feels. Feels a body on top of him. Maybe even two bodies. Which is weird, because death does not involve the feeling of being toppled by two very heavy beanbags with limbs. He wouldn’t know, though.
The second he opens his eyes, his whole brain is alert, ready to attack whatever is on top of him, before he sees a lock of teal hair and the sharp nails of a certain sorcerer. Wait what?
Didn’t he die?
Maybe he really is going insane.
The two bodies on top of him collectively groan, before they straighten up, instantly as alert as Claude is. Shu is the one who pulls him upright, struggling to find purchase on the smooth tile floor, legs bent at weird angles from the lunge into the portal.
Just as he’s about to say something, he looks around, and immediately finds himself staring down multiple pistols and almost as many threatening glares.
Holy fucking shit.