Different Masters

By _

For a brief moment, a single glimmer of wrongness roused a slumbering artifact. Something had disrupted the flow of time and was attempting to seize what was rightfully another's. In that instant both sides were weighted and a conclusion was reached.

The path of most destruction was found and settled upon.

"I ask of you, are you my master?"

Archer opened his eyes slowly following this instinctive line, his awakening mind reminding him of the task at hand. He had made a bargain, delivered on his half, it was now time to collect. He blinked slowly at the supremely advanced laboratory he found himself in. This was not Rin's house.

"Ah, great-grandpa Shirou. Hmm, I had thought my blood as a reagent would bring great-grandpa Negi or great-great-grandpa Nagi." The bun-haired girl he had never seen before muttered to herself, barely caught by his enhanced hearing. Shirou... Yes, that was his name, the name of the child he intended to kill as well... "Yes, Servant Archer, I Chao Lingshen will be your master."

Chao Lingshen, huh? He took a moment examine his summoner. She was young, younger than Rin or himself had been, dressed from her neck to her toes in some kind of slender, hardened bodysuit with white, cloak-like strips of plastic looking cloth hanging over it. For just a moment he paused and glanced over his own black, full body armor and the modified burial cloth he had draped over it. There was a superficial resemblance...

He found it difficult to describe her face, though. Aside from the two strange, perpetual spots of pink on either cheek and the different eye color, all he saw staring back at him was a younger, grinning Rin. And not the smirky, evil kind of grin that was the only one he'd ever seen on Rin's face either. He couldn't really explain it, her hair, expression and body type were nothing like his former lover, but he could still see the tiny magus in her face. It was rather uncanny.

But this girl wasn't Rin. Did Rin kill her and take her place before he met her? How did she already know his class... Wait... Great-grandpa Shirou? What the hell?

"Ah, you look confused. Basically I am your descendant from almost two hundred years from now." The girl admitted casually, looking entirely too pleased with herself. "So no killing yourself even if you're the only one between us and the Grail."

Archer scowled at the pushy brat. The way she phrased that, she really knew didn't she... Damn, this wasn't going to go how he planned was it? Wait, two hundred years from now... A Sorcery? A descendant of his knew Sorcery?

With a low buzz a wall of screens flickered on. "Now then, lets find the others before they find us, shall we?"

Archer turned to find himself faced with a hundred different angles and view of the city, each one flickering to another site every few seconds. He stared blankly, wondering how she'd set up so many cameras.

Ilya smirked happily to herself as she stepped up to the specially prepared chamber where she was to summon her Servant. Every single aspect imaginable had been carefully considered and calculated to remove any chances of not receiving Herakles as Berserker, though why grandpa was so fixated on that particular hero and class was unknown to her. All that mattered was that his strength would be great enough to outdo anything onii-chan could possibly call upon.

As her loyal and literally brand new maids cracked the door, a storm of mana abruptly washed over them, more raw power than she had ever heard of before. And the source of this overwhelming emanation was what appeared to be a cos-playing woman in a black sailor fuku with a deviantly short skirt and matching accessories who turned to confront them as a leaden giant rose from the storm of power silhouetting her.

"The timeline has been disrupted. I apologize, but there is no other means of correction. Unfortunately your own agenda also interferes if you are not a Master. Berserker." At the thief's command the dark giant roared, grasping the prepared axe-sword and charging forward. "Dead scream."

As the maids moved to interpose themselves and Ilya recovered from the shock of it all, she suddenly realized the sorceress was nowhere in sight and that voice had just come from behind her for the final two words. She couldn't turn fast enough to actually see the ball of compressed temporal energy that sent her tumbling, but she felt it well enough.

Berserker roared as Ilya groped dully at the missing section of her torso, a fine powder sifting through her fingers where scorched flesh was expected. Sella, at least she thought it was Sella, grabbed her and tried to run, Leysritt thrown hard pass them by the stolen Servant. The pause to recover her and leap through the window proved too long.

"Dead scream."

There was a shock and the one carrying her jerked violently, followed by sudden, total blackness.

Sousuke Sagara frowned at the lack of reaction from the building the target was in. Typically some unseen force prevented MITHRIL agents from approaching or spying on the church that held his target at all, yet here he was, crouched just outside the doors with no sign of whatever prevented the other agents from getting this close.

It made him nervous. Maybe the scientists were correct that his lambda drive training somehow allowed him to neutralize the energy disturbance, but all he was really doing was picturing the defensive screen enveloping him like it did Arbalest.

He hoped there was something in the all concealing tactical gear that he had simply been uninformed of for whatever reason, otherwise he'd feel slightly foolish about this whole operation.

He had no doubt the enemy was already aware of his presence, Kirie Kotomine was an extremely dangerous and cautious individual who had never been successfully confronted. In fact it was more likely he had abandoned the church as his base than-

A woman's scream pierced the night, coming from inside.

Sousuke stopped over thinking at that point, and burst into the room, his service pistol raised to target the fake priest's head. He quickly cataloged the people present, a strange man in a blue costume with an antiquated, red spear of some sort, an injured woman in a suit on the ground before him missing an arm. The target stood near them, studying the limb he had apparently severed, specifically the tattoo on the back of the hand.

There would be no capture and no surrender. As soon as Sousuke confirmed his visual he fired a rapid burst of four shots. Something blossomed to life, an energy form he couldn't fully comprehend, which surrounded the disguised terrorist and allowed him to merely reel from the shots instead of having his brains splattered onto the wall behind him.

The sound of his gun roused the stunned man in blue that had been gaping at the mortally wounded woman on the ground. As Kotomine dropped the arm he held in surprise, the other figure whirled on him, his red weapon driving straight into the false priest's heart with a scream of 'Gae Bolg'!

Keeping his weapon trained on the last uninjured party in the room, Sousuke made his way over to the corpse to check for a pulse. The man in blue made no move to interfere, his attention transfixed by the dead woman on the floor yet again.

Confirmed. Target has been silenced. It was unfortunate some individuals forced such violence into the world like this, but that was the harsh reality of what was required in the name of peace. Still doing his best to project the lambda field effect, Sousuke almost didn't notice when he bumped the disembodied arm while switching his radio on to inform the commander that the private contract had been carried out.

He did notice when the tattoo on the limb flashed and the back of his corresponding hand burned, forcing him to drop the radio with a surprised, pained grunt.

Caster met the gaze of the human-shaped thing that had just broken the neck of her summoner while wearing the face of an attractive woman. Now it sat across from her, leering with a vaguely masculine, nearly human face of fanged teeth and purple, slitted eyes. It 'wore' black shorts and a black shirt that were both not so much clothes as part of its body, long clumps of dark brown hairs trailing down to its calves behind it.

She couldn't tell until the moment blue light had run over its form in an electric burst and left it changed that it hadn't been a flighty, idiotic but well built woman. It was a construct of some sort, she could distinguish that now, in this form, but even like this it was crafted too well. As though its maker had precisely measured what formed a human body and super-charged that composition with several times the magic living flesh could hold before binding a soul into the result. The Grail provided information on homunculus at her inquiries, but from what she gathered they were of considerably less power and poorer craftsmanship, the best being indistinguishably close to humanity despite greatly enhanced strength. Similar, but inferior.

It was pointless to flee now. Her master had been a disgusting creature that barely managed to fulfill her minimum requirements as far as od went, a tactic designed, no doubt, to force her into baser means of getting energy from him. She had come here to try and leave her past behind, to give up the hatred and rage that had powered her this far. Only to find a master that all but drove her to stabbing him with Rule Breaker out of pure spite.

Besides, even if the creature let her walk away, where would she find a servant she could defeat in so little time with so little power? It was so cruel, even now the gods must be mocking her. To give her hope and then deny it just as abruptly...

The thing drew her attention, raising the dead man's hand up to examine her command seals, its eyes finally leaving hers. After studying it carefully its own arm morphed under another blue glow, becoming an exact, unmarked replica. Satisfied the construct draw a complex array of symbols onto both wrists all the way to the elbow with frightening speed and accuracy.

"You know, back home I had almost no alchemic power despite knowing more about it than any mortal alchemist? Funny how things change just by falling through a Gate, isn't it?" The thing spoke for the first time in this form, sounding sardonic and nostalgic. A trickle of prana shifted into both arrays and they flared to life before disappearing.

For a moment Caster was dumbfounded by the pointlessness of that exercise. And then she was dumbfounded by how little energy it took as she noticed the command seal on the creature's hand. After carefully observing and shifting the limb into new forms a few times without erasing the acquisition the construct was evidently satisfied with its work. Energy began surging through her, restoring her reserves from the dangerous lows they had fallen to.

"No equations, no equivalence and no real understanding of chemical complexity and interaction. Just throw more and more power until it gets the results you want. Still, you can certainly do more with the native alchemy than I can even imagine." The creature drawled, doodling another design on the corpse's brow.

"Is that so?" Caster asked cautiously, not really understanding what this thing was talking about, but comprehending that he apparently chose her specifically out of all the servants to take as his own. It concerned her, but for now she was content to leave the situation alone. A chance to break free and still emerge victorious would come eventually.

A shark-like grin emerged as the new design was completed and activated. Her old master's body liquified into a bright red fluid that was nearly pure prana, blood, flesh and bone recycled into their individual potential rather than discarded. The mass oozed into a puddle at first but recoiled and collapsed onto itself, compressing and tightening down into a single, dull red stone that blazed with more energy than the man comprising it had ever dreamed of holding in life.

The new Master of Caster lifted the rough, marble-sized gem and dropped it in his mouth, loudly crunching it between his pearly fangs. "Of course. All you need is power."

In a dark throne room beneath Fuyuki city a tall, silver-haired man with golden slit-pupil eyes carefully, lovingly placed the final domino on its end and stood, sweeping open his cape in a dramatic and gloating fashion as he laughed sinisterly at having completed his work.

With the moment over he lightly tapped one of the tiles, causing it to tilt over and lean on the next, creating a wave as more followed suit, unable to remain upright against the weight of their fallen brethren. And, after a few fleeting seconds of the gentle taps of wood fell silent, the regal man smirked at empty air, already anticipating the next construct he would precisely and delicately craft before causing it to fall to inherent pre-designed ruin.

But alas, it was not to be, for as he touched the beautiful, intricate circular arrangement he had chosen this time, something reached out and into him drawing power that emerged as blue light from the wooden tiles.

A form arose from this light, a dark shape that faded into the shadow of the room, except for a simple skull mask. It was a dangerous creature, the man instantaneously realized, too weak to threaten his life, perhaps, but skilled enough that it might take years to fully heal from the wounds caused if it ever caught him unaware.

"Servant Assassin. Are you... my Master?" The form wheezed, shifting awkwardly to face him.

For a moment the taller man stared at the thing before him, utterly unconcerned. "So the humans continue their foolish, corrupt rituals." One hand rose to meet the other, peeling away the glove to expose the symbols of a Master. "I suppose this overrides the duties of ACROSS while underway. Very well, I accept."

Zouken paused in his preparation to transfer Rider from his materials to his incompetent grandson. A vast amount of life force confined within a human body had just pierced through the bounding field surrounding the Makiri estate through sheer density. A demon-hunter, he supposed. They would choose to show up just prior to the Grail War, wouldn't they? All the better a reason to keep what was actually valuable as removed from the fighting as was possible.

There was little need to delay things, though. If anything it could be a decent test and first feeding for Rider, as modern magi had declined in strength so had modern warriors.

But somehow the Grail itself railed against the attempted transfer, refusing to accept the worthless boy as a host and instead latching directly onto the intruder even as he leaped an astonishing distance away.

No, this was impossible, he had designed the command seals! They could not deny him, he knew every facet of them, every rule, every loophole. He made them and they would not defy him!

But even as he committed to securing control he realized his error. This was not the command seals rebelling, this was the Grail itself choosing a replacement for the Makiri after they rejected their appointed champion.

More than that, there was something lurking, concealed within the disobedient presence. A dark, hateful thing, intermixed with the Grail itself. Something he had not known of and was unprepared for. In all the time he had observed, tested and prepared the shattered remnants he had found he had never dreamed of what laid beneath the surface and now rose to oppose him.

For a moment he wondered at what the Einzbern who forged the Grail had been thinking, this was not in any of the notes or research he had stolen. To put such malice into the focus of a True Magic...

Zouken had already committed to defying the Grail's will, he knew how to subvert that, he had constructed an almost perfect non-Einzbern Grail all his own. It was thoroughly cowed and obeyed his every whim, save one that he was saving to crush what spirit was left in it.

As the presence loomed from within, a figurative colossus awakening from a nap and lashing blindly at what had roused it with all the nigh-omnipotent might of Heaven's Feel, he realized he had erred, thinking the tendencies of this sleeping force behaviors of the Grail itself. He had erred and was prepared to battle only the less self-aware mind of a Grail awaiting the next war and the passive, subservient shell he had forged for it.

For this he was smote, instantly and completely, by an overwhelming gale of power that tore his circuits open and consumed all else around them in a tightly bound magical implosion. Only the fact that his materials were designed specifically to devour all magic they touched and greedily pull against any loss prevent her from perishing in the manner of his incompetent grandson, who had his life force shucked from his body by the gravity of Zouken's self-destruction.

Rider retched for moment as she was hurled violently through space to appear before her new Master as if just summoned. "Servant Rider." She spoke slowly, loathing for the creature that had caused this, torn her away from her proper Master so completely, lacing the undertone of her words. The Grail demanded its traditions be kept and even as her hatred rose she kept herself bowed. "By your summoning I have come forth. I must ask, are you my Master?"

The response was not what she expected. "Ah dammit. Not again. I don't care what pops took from you, I ain't gonna marry you, so scram."

Rider brought her head up as if to make eye contact at that, blindfold mercifully in place. Unfortunately her new Master had already performed a superhuman feat and was landing on a roof top a block and a half away. She couldn't make quite that distance in a single bound, at least not without relying on the fact that she wasn't truly physical. The power that spoke of...

With a mental apology to her original Master, she came to the conclusion that this might be for the best as far as her victory went, even if her new Master didn't know about the Grail War. "Master, wait! I need to explain!"

Sasshi grinned to himself as he looked over his preparations. Six years of onmyouji training should have given him the discipline to properly control his power without causing a cascade of altered realities to be born out of his subconscious. Just in case he was visiting Fuyuki city so any abortive failures that made him lose control could be dumped into those leylines without unduly stressing the land.

His goal was rather simple today, animate fifty shikigami without creating another fabricated world or having them all end up being attractive female humanoids. He'd thought that was just a phase, but the slightest concentration slip and his subconscious took over which only ever ended that way for some reason.

It was kind of a leap from the hundred he could manage reliably without messing anything up, but he was confident in his own ability to control himself now, he wasn't some foolhardy otaku kid any more! And he was not going to manifest Mune-Mune again!

He put all of his focus into his task, a quite chant and a focusing talisman to aid him. All around him a spiraling cyclone of plain, flat paper birds manifested and swirled, waving and curling on their own as artificial life was gifted onto them. And then something went wrong.

A sliver of his power accidentally brushed something lurking in the leylines below, which responded by shoving its own power and will as feedback into the shikigami he was activating. Sasshi tried to collapse the wave of power before a new, false world took hold, trying to foist it off as he had planned only to be shocked when the leyline instead threw further weight behind the surge as everything the two forces shoved at the other collapsed down into a single form.

"Servant Avenger." The new form spoke as its glow died down, revealing a Mune-Mune variation with her pink hair in a ponytail, a skimpy, abbreviated blue and purple garb with golden trim that might have been intended to represent a traditional swordsman's costume clinging tightly to her voluptuous frame. She seemed to fidget with an overly long blade in her hands as she bowed before continuing. "Mune-Mune. Are you the Master I have sought?"

Violently reminding himself that Mune-Mune was just a left over figment from someone else's attempts to alter the world that he had ended up adopting and adapting on accident, Sasshi tried to wipe this mishap away. A burning and new mark on the back of one of his hands informed him that this was not a reality that he had altered alone, it was someone else's that he had simply supplanted and commandeered, overwriting the non-specifics with his own details. It was something equally stolen from himself and another, fused into one semi-permanent form. And he couldn't just erase it.

He swallowed nervously, a mantra repeating in his head to remind him that no matter how appealing, and apparently partially real, Mune-Mune was, she would always be fake. And somethings needed to be reserved for the real world. Besides, there was a task here that someone of comparable power was forcing on others. He had to put a stop to that at least.

"Y, yeah. I'm the one who summoned you."

Shirou Emiya was, relatively speaking, a normal young man. In fact one could almost dare to call him slightly boring at first glance. He was a nice guy to the point of being a sucker, good with repairing machines and well, that was about it as far as most people were concerned. But there was another side to Shirou.

Aside from being an orphan with only a mysterious fortune and estate left over from his adoptive father who, himself died mysteriously. Aside from surviving a terrifying conflagration that rendered his entire town as so much ash with terrifyingly sparse warning. Aside from the remarkable ability to consistently hit what he aimed for using a bow with remarkably frightening consistency.

Yes, aside from those and other such minute details, he had a dark secret. For you see, Shirou Emiya was a failure.

He concealed it well for the most part, mostly due to the fact that he wasn't suppose to tell anyone anything about what he was failure at in the first place. That being said he was also a mage, which is, of course, what he was a failure in. A fact that was rather shocking considering the path of a magi was supposed to be replete with death yet somehow a complete failure, studying on his own no less, managed to survive several years.

It was made all the more impressive by the fact that what he had been doing as practice would have easily killed far more experienced and knowledgeable magi several times over.

It was actually not Shirou's fault he was failure at human magic, nor his circumstances. For you see, nothing human escaped the blaze all those years ago. What appeared on the physical plane as a young human child was in truth nothing more than an anchor.

A leyline as powerful as Fuyuki city's was not limited to the use of those in the Heaven's Feel alone. The late Tohsaka approved greatly of the search for knowledge to bring magi closer to Akasha. Exactly what experiments were going on at the time of the Grail's destruction were perhaps known only to him and the experimenters, though it was just as likely only those performing the tests had any idea they was occurring.

And in the cursed flames all those years ago, one of the experiments forced itself to limp on, its physical side burning away even as its true self grew to outrageous heights from the suffering and despair that surrounded it.

In his proper mind, in an area lacking the masking fire born of all humanity's evils, Kiritsugi would never have mistaken the symbiotic pair for a human boy. But by the time such examinations were performed Avalon had done its work chaining away what was believed to be an imprisoned foe of the fair folk and restoring every bit of damage it could to the supposed prison.

Normally the accrued damages required to hold and merge the physical, mortal shell with the terrible eldritch form from the Four Pillars would have been permanent and continuously degrade until the weaker of the pair simply fell away from the other. The puppet and the monster became one far more thoroughly than the original creators would have ever believed possible, had they not perished in agony within the inferno but a handful of hours before.

And the bizarre amalgam lived on, thinking himself both somewhat normal and glutting himself on the many flavors of human emotion.

Why, he had only the barest grasp of the fact that normal people weren't puppeting their bodies from halfway into the astral planes like he was, a fact he attributed to his being a mage and not to his being an inhuman monstrosity.

In contrast he knew his physical parameters, adaptability, resilience, reflexes and perception were much greater than a pure human's. Great enough that he could perform nearly superhuman feats and defeat any villain that dared to appear.

Or at least he should have been.

The reality of it, when he confronted a smirking, arrogant blond-haired kidnapper by stumbling over him in the act, was that he was still too inexperienced to save anyone.

The condescending jack-ass had casually stomped him into the ground while ranting on and on about a king's rights, mere peasants and a worthless priest that evidently got himself killed before he was given permission. Somehow the last resort became the first, but without the focus and concentration he required to use magic, a very different power surged to meet his grasp and read his intent.

He wanted power. The power to save, to protect. And it was given to him.

Being the first use of his inherited power, an unknown energy from a land where the Lord Of Nightmares dwelled, it was both spectacular and disappointing. On one hand it was an uncontrolled emission of shimmering, scattering particles that tore apart reality, burning miniscule holes through matter, energy and space as they went. And on the other, it was a sloppy unfocused burst that lost most of its momentum twisting reality into something closer to its creator's origin point.

And it hurt. A crippling burn that gnawed through his torso and limbs. Shirou clenched and struggled to maintain the effect, believing it would somehow give him the power to prevent the enemy he suspected of being something other than human from endangering anyone else. With a swift, but rapidly weakening movement he tumbled at his foe.

The ranting madman paused for a moment, startled but unworried. It took all the high schooler had to reach him. In fact, the blond stood patronizingly still, clearly intent on mocking him. With a lazy grace despite how fast his attacker moved, the man shifted his head aside from the punch, only to be caught completely off guard as Shriou's legs gave out and he tossed forward, the skin of his arm blackened with luminescent purple veins peeking through from the energy he had meant to put into that blow. It scattered like disturbed ashes as an attempt to flail for balance instead passed through what he had thought was 'another' human with as little resistance as a pool of water.

The radiation of eldritch power cleanly stripped through any magic it encounter, replacing local world rules with its own where its grasp extended. The absolute melting of everything it touched on the blond fool was merely a byproduct. With might not unlike a sun and the clumsiness oft attributed to bulls the blow was struck.

Shirou Emiya laid where he had fallen for less than an hour before he was found and taken to a hospital where, after forty-eight hours of treatment for his mysterious collapse and observation to ensure it wouldn't be repeated soon despite his evident fatigue, he was allowed home. Only to end up accidentally summoning a Servant fifty minutes later when he hobbled exhaustedly into his 'workshop'.

Gilgamesh lost cohesion in the unexpected assault and, given that the nature of the eldritch power used against him, lacked enough prana to materialize again after astralizing to escape.

Which of course, also put him virtually on top of the immense, invasive extradimensional abomination that normally had nothing to interact with except through use of its anchor. The ensuing fight between a wounded Servant in a realm that allowed him none of his true capabilities and the supernatural predator powerful enough to drive everything aware of it away from the succulent leyline it lived atop through mere presence alone was prolonged only by how long it took the predator to get bored with testing its newly realized abilities.

Gilgamesh was mercifully devoured after a mere twenty-nine hours. He ceased to exist in his capacity at the Throne Of Heroes of the local reality some nineteen minutes later and was similarly erased from the corresponding humanity's collective consciousness and history roughly two hours later.

Enkidu was retconned into the role of a feral man who rose to become a legendary king, a footnote about the former king he took his kingdom from being the only bit of Gilgamesh to escape erasure.

Rin Tohsaka was in hell.

It hadn't started that way, of course. She'd thought she was having a great time, right up until she attempted to summon a Servant at the wrong hour. Failing to draw one at all, something that should have been impossible as the Tohsaka heir, was both infuriating and a shame that would never be spoken of again.

In response to this she had tried to contact the administrators, but neither the representative of the Church or the Mage's Association replied to her attempts. As Kirei was the one confined to a single location it should have been far easier to march down and demand an explanation from him. Besides, unlike the Mage Association candidate, he had been selected by the Grail itself to perform this task, meaning he might actually have an answer for her.

Naturally it wasn't anywhere near as simple as she had hoped.

At some point earlier that day someone had murdered the priest and partially dismembered another victim, it was only due to an anonymous tip called in immediately afterward that the emergency crews prowling the Church had beaten her there.

It took a bit of minor hypnosis to discover some meager details, there were shell casing for a mid-caliber handgun of currently unknown make, but no sign of the bullets fired, the priest was impaled by some sort of jagged blade that hit dead center of his heart as it skewered him and the other victim was a woman who had her left arm severed.

That was all her target had known at that point, but it was more than enough for Rin to forge her own conclusions. The first being, this was done to bind a Servant to someone who had not summoned them. That it was done in front of the Church representative spoke of a magus that was willing to openly defy both the Mage's Association and the Church, his consequent death was most likely coincidental and unintended, brought about by an attempt to interfere.

For a brief moment she considered just turning her back on the whole issue, she had summoned no Servant and thus was no match for whoever had done this. But this was still her territory, she would still be living here, in the middle of the battlefield as the Masters sought out and killed each other. Worse, she was also known as the heir to one of the families that founded this ritual, and so a much more likely target than whichever no name magus dared to defy the Church so blatantly.

Worse yet, she still couldn't contact the Mage Association's representative, indicating they might have done away with both administrators, something that spoke ill of whatever they planned. There had to be something she could do to prevent them acquiring the Grail at least...

Wait...

That was a mundane emergency crew...

Both administrators were likely killed or otherwise incapacitated...

They came there directly from an anonymous tip phoned in immediately following whatever had happened, and the magi in question had left the entire mess intact?

…

Fuck!

Young Rin Tohsaka spent the rest of her night discovering horrible things about that damn priest and repeatedly memory wiping the investigators accompanying her.

#Author's Notes#

There are more than a few fics where everyone summons different servants or one new guy summons one of the canon Servants. With that in mind I asked simply, why not? I couldn't think of a reasonable reply so here we are.

I thought about who to make Saber's master for a while before realizing you can make Shirou anyone, given his origin. So then it became a question of who or what had inherent power that relied very little on their knowledge or even awareness of said power. Half-demon? Sayain? Young vizard Ichigo repossessing his own dead body? I thought about it a lot before settling on the admittedly intentional misinterpretation of mazouku. Just to let him keep up with the others, of course.

Also, I may have watched Abenobashi too soon after Haruhi because my mind started making connects that just won't go away. So, Sasshi is going to have what ever rules he's suppose to be confined to fudged towards god-like.

I don't think they ever really covered anything about his ability anyway, other than the lack of control, various people insisting it was either fake or unable to affect the real world and Eutis trying to steal/study it to do the same thing to rewrite his own history.

And between Eutis trying to copy it and the fact that Sasshi prevented someone from dying when we know they had already died at the very beginning, I think it's safe to say the ones nay-saying the ability were something like Koizumi trying to keep Haruhi from discovering her power, they (rightly) didn't want an immature brat bending the universe to suit his whim. By convincing him it was in someway illusionary or false, he would subconsciously prevent it from permanently changing things, thus keeping the world stable and considerably less fanservice-y. Which is both a good and bad thing at the same time.