The Terrible Fate/Grand Order Tickling Fanfiction, Part I (/m, /f)

Foreword:

As you might have guessed by the title, I have fallen far, far off the deep end. (It was something to do during Covid.) This story has been rattling around in my head for a while, and since I was off work this past week, I decided I was going to do something about it. The trouble, as I am sure a lot of you have noticed, is that I have a terrible habit of leaving things unfinished. To avoid that, this time, I did not let myself release the story in parts or anything like that.

I wrote the whole damn thing over the course of this last week and resolved I was not going to post it until it was done. Which, yay! It's done. As in, a fully complete story with a beginning, middle, and (kind of) an end. (I definitely feel like I rushed the end, but I wanted to get it done while I was still on vacation.)

Now, I'll admit that this story is fairly meme-y. I wanted to try and write it in the style of FGO events, which (for those of you who know) can veer very heavily into the realm of bulldozing the fourth wall and putting up a parking lot over it. I tried not to let the nuts and bolts of it overwhelm the story I was trying to tell, but I admit I ended up using a lot of game terminology as it is, so if you don't get it, that's OK! Most of the time, it's just dumb in-jokes. You can, for the most part, skip those spots and it won't really impact the story much. I tried to explain things briefly where it makes sense to help out those of you who aren't familiar.

It's also somewhat unusual for me to write canon stories, so to help everyone understand the characters I am talking about, I prepared some visuals ahead of time, since (at least for some of them) knowing what they look like makes it easier to understand what's going on. Therefore:

The protagonist(?), Ritsuka Fujimaru: https://i.imgur.com/LjejcZs.jpg

The actual protagonist, BB (Class: Moon Cancer): https://i.imgur.com/JsMmeGq.jpg

The probably-doesn't-need-introduction fan favorite, Astolfo (Class: Rider?): https://i.imgur.com/sE0VxdI.jpg

The Worst Goddess, Ishtar (Class: Archer): https://i.imgur.com/icpph4I.jpg

The hapless gold-digger, the Queen of Sheba (Class: Caster): https://i.imgur.com/ifZz3qX.jpg

The Queen of Quick, Scathach-Skadi (Class: Caster): https://i.imgur.com/2byDyxj.jpg

The most unrealistic proportions ever, Passionlip (Class: Alter Ego): https://i.imgur.com/S4K00qY.jpg

And the easily-bullied Tsundere Queen, Jeanne d'Arc Alter (Class: Berserker): https://i.imgur.com/QDWZtax.jpg


Obviously none of these characters nor the setting are owned by me, et cetera. Be warned, this story is huge. Like 40,000 words huge. So yeah. Read at your own risk and all.

---

“I’m so glad that we’re able to enjoy these peaceful days together, Senpai.”

Ritsuka Fujimaru, Humanity’s Final Master, Singularity-solver and Finder of Lost Belts Extraordinaire, picked up the teacup that Mash Kyrielight had just slid across the table in her room at Novum Chaldea and cast a cynical look over the top of it. “Mash, you realize that’s an almost guaranteed way to raise an event flag, right? Nobody ever talks about peaceful days unless the peace is about to be shattered by some ridiculous event.” She paused to take a sip of the tea which was, admittedly, very good, even as the bespectacled Shielder wore an expression of sudden realization and then dismay.

“Oh no! No! I’m so sorry, Senpai! I didn’t realize -- uh, uhm… I’ll do something… un-peaceful! That’ll lower the flag, right?” But, though Mash grew increasingly agitated as she looked around Fujimaru’s white, spare room - honestly, why was the room such a blindingly sterile white? - the Master calmly waited, sipped her tea, and turned her left wrist to check the watch that she was not actually wearing. Eventually, the distraught Mash managed to pull the sheets off of Fujimaru’s bed and toss them onto the floor, panting with exertion as though she’d carried Passionlip across three Singularities on her shield. “T-there, I…”

As the inevitable alarm went off, Fujimaru didn’t even blink. Instead, she tipped the teacup to her lips as the BGM changed to the up-tempo track that usually indicated the beginning of the event. Only after she had finished the tea did she set down the teacup and pat Mash on the shoulder reassuringly, even as her face stretched into a malicious grin. “Don’t worry, Mash. I’m sure I’ll find some way to forgive you for ruining my day off with an event.” And then she turned on her heel and was gone, humming herself an idle tune as the alarm blared and Da Vinci got on the loudspeaker to yell at her to hurry to the Command Room, an instruction she promptly ignored, taking her sweet time.

“You sure took your sweet time getting here,” Da Vinci said a few minutes later, turning around in her swivel chair with a cup of coffee as Fujimaru made it to the Command Room of Novum Chaldea. “The readings indicate a Singularity is forming somewhere in the Pacific. It’s centered on some small island in the Guam Islands chain, and the Singularity itself is very small and not growing at this point.” The urgent BGM and the blaring alarm seemed to have no effect on either Da Vinci or Fujimaru, who seemed to be having a casual-off to see who could treat the situation more nonchalantly.

“So you’re telling me that this is the kind of inconsequential Singularity that won’t do anything and will go away if left by itself, right?”

“Weeeeeeeeeell… I’d like to say that. It does seem very stable, and it’s not expanding, nor really exerting any kind of strong spatial or historical influence. However… the reason for the alarm is that we have actually detected seven missing Spirit Origins from Chaldea.” Da Vinci set down her cup of coffee and ticked the list of the missing Servants off on her fingers. “Astolfo, Scathach-Skadi, Passionlip, Ishtar, the Queen of Sheba, Jeanne d’Arc Alter and…” Da Vinci paused for dramatic effect, and Fujimaru’s eyes narrowed. She could feel the hook about to sink in, and seriously considered making a dash for the door. But morbid curiosity was starting to take hold, too. Why those six, and who was the seventh? Who could be…?

“BB.”

“Oh, come on!” Fujimaru burst out in protest, just as Mash arrived in the Command Room, breathing heavily.

“I guess we could find out what happens if we leave BB alone in a Singularity with no supervision for a while,” Da Vinci said, feigning complete innocence.

“I’m going, I’m gooooooing,” Fujimaru groaned. “I’ll go now before she makes this any worse.”

“Who knows, she could be the victim this time! Maybe Ishtar’s actually the one behind it--”

“I said I’m going,” she snapped in reply, then sighed. “Uuuuuuuuugh. I was really enjoying my day off, too. Is there any more event exposition we need to do?”

Da Vinci tapped her lip. “I don’t think so? Usually around now is when we’ll go to a bit of mysterious foreshadowing by the obscured culprit who will obliquely hint at what they’re up to, and we might see a glimpse of what happened to the missing Servants. Then, we’ll play the Rayshift animation and the heroic music, and send you off to the event map! Oh, I guess I need to find someone to run the event shop this time…”

“You’d better,” Fujimaru grumbled, changing into the Chaldea Combat Uniform, and Mash began to equip the Ortinax in preparation for the Rayshift. “I expect a Grail, a boatload of QP, and a bunch of ascension materials from this, too. Make sure the event CE is a good one, too. None of those crummy Damage Cut or Guts ones. They’re boring. I want something like Buster and NP Strength and 50% starting NP Gauge.”

Da Vinci rolled her eyes. “Right, right. Get in the Coffin so we can start the Unsummoning Program and get this event resolved. Maybe since we caught it early on when it was so small you can get it taken care of right away. Mash will be there with you, and honestly, you two have a one hundred percent success rate so what’s a little tropical island jaunt? Maybe you’ll even get to have some fun!”

---

“To love… or to kill… ahahaha, hahahahaa, ahhaahahahaha, please… it’s so haha-hahaha-ahahahahahaa….!”

“No, no, no! No killing, remember? It’s against the rules. All you have to do is make it up to your wand up there, and you can get out of this trap and make it back to Senpai. That’s what you want, right? To help her escape? Hehehehehe. Hehehehehehehehe!”

The poisonously adorable words filled Skadi’s mind as she tried to focus. Her wand. Somehow, in this place, all of her power had been focused into that object. She shouldn’t need it. Not with how powerful she was. She should have been able to simply freeze this entire space over with her ire and walked imperiously up this writhing, infernal pillar to snatch it and put paid to her smirking tormentor. But when she reached for that power, it seemed… high above her. Focused in that object that was so far out of reach, taunting her.

More suspicious goings-on were taking place, too. Somehow, being in this place had caused an alteration in her Spirit Origin - a minor one, to be sure, but enough to make her self-conscious, and vulnerable to this infernal pillar’s machinations. Normally, her gown was regal, elegant, not hiding her form, but neither crassly putting it on display for everyone to see. But now, her dress had been… altered. Now, it was like her body was sheathed in a tight, crimson gauze that wrapped around her chest and fit snugly around her torso, stopping indecently short less than halfway down her thighs. Thankfully both legs were still clad in a similar material from waist to toes, but it was sheer - it provided almost no protection whatsoever against these marauding, fiendish little tendrils, their tips covered in what felt like a stiff, coarse fur that brushed repeatedly against her body…!

Laughter burst from her lips, a most confusing sensation. Had the heat made her delirious? Or was it more of this wicked alteration? Whatever the reason, the touch of these stiff little tendril tips caused Skadi to laugh uncontrollably when they touched her, and her body reacted involuntarily - twitching away from the touch, trying to close her arm against the invader, kicking at one that had snuck up on her from below and rubbed its brushy tip against the ball of her foot. Three times already now she had fallen, but to fall was worse than to climb - that, she had learned quickly. The floor was absolutely covered in these nightmarish tendrils, and if she lingered there in self-pity or exhaustion they would swarm her body, touching her everywhere with that maddening sensation.

The best that she could determine, Skadi was in some sort of open cavern, holes in the wall and the entrance itself letting in light. She could see, and was presumably not very far underground if the light was able to illuminate this cavern so fully. Coiling up from the floor and forming a sort of ladder to her wand, which was suspended from the ceiling high overhead, was a writhing, undulating pillar covered in soft scales like the belly of a snake. Physical labor had never been her forte, but she found herself forced by circumstance into this unfortunate choice, and so she was trying to climb for lack of any better option.

The pillar was not very cooperative, however. At every step, its teases made concentration difficult. In particular, the goddess found her underarms drew the attention of those short, flexible, scrubby little tentacles whenever she tried to reach up to pull herself a little further along the way. “Hahahahahahhahahahahahahahaha… hehehehe, hehehehehe, hehehe, wh-hahahah… hahahahaha…! It’s so hahah-hehehe-heheheh strange…! I cahahahan’t…!” She tried to protect her underarms from that sneaky attack by pressing her elbows tight to her sides, and gripping onto the pillar for dear life, giggling helplessly. Why was it so hot? Her modified dress clung to her tightly, seeming to offer no protection at all, while it was simultaneously stifling, making her feel weak and helpless. Her wand seemed so far out of reach, like it was miles away through a heat haze, and she helplessly stretched a hand up towards it, beseechingly, heedless of the ticklishly stroking sensation in her armpit --

“Oh, looks like they’re just on time. I’ve gotta run! This kind of epic production isn’t going to make itself, you know★ But don’t worry! Even if you can’t get yourself out of this mess, you might just get help! ...Eventually.” BB’s words were relentlessly cheery, as if she were actually trying to encourage Skadi to do her best. But that last word betrayed her true intentions - it all but dripped malice, almost palpable through its very sound.

“W-wait!” But even as Skadi implored her captor, she felt a terrible sensation - two semi-stiff points had taken advantage of the fact that her toes were fully flexed into the material of the pillar, and wiggled wildly at the little divot beneath the ball of each stocking-clad foot, causing a most unseemly shriek of laughter to burst forth from her lips, the ponytail of auburn hair swaying wildly behind her head as she tried desperately to withstand the sensations without shifting her footing! It was torturous, being forced to expose her body for this evil sensation, and even as that sense of malicious amusement in the air faded away she felt herself losing the battle, giggling ringing out helplessly in the cavern!

“Nohoh-ho--hohoho! Nohoho-ooohoho! Hahah-hahaha-AHAHHA-nyoohohoohohohheeeeeee!” A few seconds later, the normally dignified and reserved Scathach-Skadi lost her grip with her toes, her fingers following soon after, and she slid down the pillar back down to the bottom, wailing with despairing giggles as she lost her progress, and the unceasing tickles at the floor of the cavern awaited her once again…

---

Fujimaru touched down - on the ground, thankfully - and immediately fanned herself. Maybe the plugsuit hadn’t been the right idea in this sort of tropical heat, but it was too overpowered for her to pass up. She looked around with a frown, as if she were forgetting something important -- “Oh. Mash? Where’d you go, Mash? Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaash,” she called out, somewhat halfheartedly. “Huh. Da Vinci, you know where Mash is?” She tapped the side of her head and called out once more. “Da Vinci? Mash? Ughhhhh, seriously? Where did you --”

“Don’t be so worried, Se~n~pa~i★ Mash is safely back at Chaldea with Da Vinci… because there’s only room for one kouhai heroine in this episode!”

Slowly, Fujimaru turned. The voice, the form of address, the suspicious tropical Singularity, the cutting off of all support the moment that she’d touched down - it had a certain someone’s fingerprints all over it. And there she was, perched atop a coil of red-and-black tentacles, a gravity-defying bat-wing cloak fluttering slightly in the breeze, the one-piece white swimsuit that somehow had a collar and a red ribbon tied in a bow at the neck… “That’s right! It’s everyone’s favoritest idol, ultracute kouhai, illegal super AI and Ruler of the Moon Cancer extraordinaire --”

“We all knew it was you right from the start, BB.” Fujimaru heaved a sigh. “As much as I was really, reeeeeeeeeally hoping maybe it wasn’t, that maybe Ishtar or Jeanne Alter was the bad guy this time, this has you like, written all over it.” Fujimaru bit her lip for a moment to stop herself from making any further comments, knowing that as cheerful as BB appeared, it was entirely possible for her to sour at a moment’s notice, and then who knew what ridiculous obstacles would be added to her path. “All right, so, you’ve got what you want. I’m here, and I’m guessing you blocked Mash’s Rayshift with me, so I’m completely at your mercy. What am I going to be doing this time?” At least it wouldn’t be like last summer’s doujinshi hell. Who in their right mind expected anyone to be able to finish and publish a full doujinshi in a literal week?!

“Awwww, hehehehe! Senpai, it’s so cute how you believed in me! Now, I know how boring those looooooooong hours of doing nothing at all, with no danger or thrills, can get to be! But I promise, Senpai, I’ve really learned my lesson this time. No harrowing races against death or bone-wearying deadlines repeating endlessly! I promise that everyone’s suffering this time will be strictly nonlethal!” BB’s smile seemed genuine at least, one arm sheathed in the strange black cloak… robe… thing she wore, a white-gloved hand turned palm up placatingly. Her long lilac hair drifted gently in the breeze, tied back on the left side of her head with a little red ribbon as usual, as she explained her latest and greatest scheme to inconvenience everyone while amusing herself.

“Have you ever heard of a game called a roguelike? I was bored one day and going through some games when I stumbled across the concept. I was able to beat it on the first try by cheating, of course, but then I watched some of the other Servants play. Apparently, the entire concept of the game is learning from failure! That suits humans remarkably well, don’t you think?” Fujimaru had to admit that BB wasn’t wrong, in both the ‘learning from failure’ part and in the actual concept of a roguelike, but this emphasis on failing had stirred up a concerned feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Leave it to humans to design a game where you’re actually rewarded for failing!”

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that you’ve actually come up with some kind of failure reward system to make this easier to clear,” Fujimaru said hopefully, although knowing BB, that was almost certainly a vain hope.

“Hehe. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Senpai? I thought about it, but nope! No hints from BB. But like I said, I’m feeling nicer this time around! There won’t be any consequences to you for failing to solve the riddle and clear the Singularity within the three-day time limit. You’ll just loop back to this spot and get to try again as many times as it takes! I can’t guarantee that you won’t fail… over and over again… hehe… but think of it this way! You usually don’t get the chance to do something like this, do you? It’s all apocalyptic world-ending threats. Why not indulge in that natural human response to fail miserably and spend some time here? Hehehe. Hehehehehehe!”

“You do know your eyes turn red when you’re thinking evil thoughts, right?” BB’s smug smile slid straight off of her face at that comment and her brows drew inward with irritation. “Anyway,” Fujimaru went on hurriedly, “this is just one of those time loop things again, right? You’re going to make me keep trying until I get it right to your satisfaction. What am I supposed to be doing this time around?”

BB’s mercurial mood instantly shifted back from irritation to amusement. “Hehehe. Couldn’t you figure it out? I want you to save all six of the missing Servants! They’re all here on the island, Senpai, and don’t worry, none of them are being hurt.” BB pointed to the areas around them - six straight dirt paths led to different areas of the island, far too straight and well-groomed to be natural. The area in which they were standing was a perfectly symmetrical hillock covered in grass, perfect for basking in the sun as long as you had sunscreen or didn’t sunburn easily. “But getting them free won’t be easy! There’s tricks to each of them, and a bigger puzzle you’re going to have to figure out and solve along the way. Don’t worry, I’ve made sure you won’t have to deal with any stray monsters on the island, since you won’t have a Servant with you every time you start out!

“You’ve got three days to figure out what’s going on, free everyone, and bring them all back here. If you don’t make it within the time limit, you’ll get looped back to this very moment - a fresh three days, but everyone goes back into their captive state. It sounds fun, right? I’ll be keeping an eye on everything, so don’t think you can try to cheat somehow, Senpai! Hehehehehehehe…” With that, BB sank into the ground through a dark, starry portal that she had opened up, eyes locked on Fujimaru’s the whole time, the wicked sound of her giggling somehow echoing for over a minute after she’d disappeared.

---

LOOP 1

“You’re so adorably pathetic, Jeanne. Do you have any idea how much people get off on the idea of you suffering?”

The pale-skinned, platinum-blonde Servant, who had likewise had her Spirit Origin tampered with thanks to BB’s meddling, found herself at least in a familiar outfit - a red-patterned black bikini with a windbreaker left open in the front. She ignored BB’s barb and focused all of her considerable destructive strength in her right fist, driving it into the translucent white barrier in front of her. The barricade was no match for her raw fury, and cracks spread through its surface for a brief moment before it shattered with a satisfying sound, and Jeanne d’Arc Alter took a step forward, focusing her might on a left jab, and driving it forward into the next translucent wall. Though this one spiderwebbed with cracks, it did not shatter like the first one had, and its surface somehow ‘swallowed’ her wrist!

From the rocky soil below burst a trio of tentacles. Unlike the smoother, snakelike tentacles BB perched upon, watching Jeanne’s trek up the spiral path out of the crater in which she’d been placed as her own personal trial. The path wound in a tight spiral from the outer rim of the crater down to the starting point at the bottom, and every few feet along the path was placed one of these opaque light barriers, which easily numbered in the dozens. One hundred twenty-eight in all, to be precise. These barriers could be - and were - shattered by Jeanne’s pure physical power, but they did not give way easily, and incompletely broken barriers would defend themselves in this fashion. As she tugged on her wrist to free it, her features contorted with pure, spiteful rage, the tentacles that rose from the ground attacked!

Like the sea demons so many Servants were accustomed to fighting, these tentacles were covered in ‘spikes’ on the underside, but these spikes were not of the rending and tearing variety. They were no sharper than the bristles of a hairbrush, but when they coiled and twined around Jeanne Alter’s waist, and began to stroke back and forth, they didn’t need to be. “GAHAHAHAHAH GOD DAMMIT BB!” she howled, pulling on her wrist with even greater fervor, swatting at the infuriating tentacles with her free hand! They were difficult to dislodge, even with her strength, and though their motions were small and limited, that was all it took to drag dozens of those stiff protrusions against her sides and stomach, causing even the formidable Avenger - well, Berserker in her bikini - to toss her head back with laughter. Each and every little motion against her smooth, pale skin sent fresh waves of unbearable ticklish sensations screaming through her body, and she even spent a few moments unsuccessfully trying to dig her fingers in underneath the tentacles’ grip so she could pry them off before letting loose an expletive-laden string of laughter and trying once more to free her wrist!

When she put her foot on the translucent wall to apply even more leverage to it, muscles straining with frantic, panicked energy, she felt it sloooooowly come free from the entrapping magecraft - and then come free so suddenly that she lost her balance, tumbling backwards and rolling down the gentle downward slope of the crater path, yanking her body free of those horrible tentacles sprouting from the soil, but inadvertently placing herself in the path of an even greater danger.

It had started as a small puddle of inky blackness placed right in the center of this rocky crater, but slowly it had begun to grow. Normally, outpacing its slow rate of growth would be an easy feat, but needing to break through these ridiculous walls every two feet meant that even its slow movement could eventually catch up to her if she took a break for too long. And, as she had discovered much to her unpleasant surprise, if she even so much as got near it, it would extend tentacles to torment her even more than the ones that BB randomly summoned from the ground to make her life miserable! Those inky black tendrils made Jeanne shudder, their tips covered in horrible things like brush tips or feathers or claws. Before she could stop herself, she came within range of that evil puddle of blackness, and with lightning speed it had two tentacles slithering in her underarms!

Not only was the feeling completely gross, it tickled like hell, with those scratchy bristle-tips thrusting themselves through her closed armpits in spite of her own best efforts, squirming backwards and forwards as the howling Servant tried first to clamp her arms so tightly to her sides that the tickling couldn’t reach her, and then levered herself up to her feet and stumbled away from the inky blackness, towards higher, safer ground, and glared pure malice at the figure of BB perched upon her tentacle cushion on the ledge above her. Normally, Jeanne would have leapt straight at the malevolently smirking AI looking down on her and pummeled her into the dirt, but the barriers that prevented vertical movement were harder to get through than the ones which impeded her movement up the path, and it wasn’t worth jumping at them over and over.

“What the hell is all this about?!” she snapped instead. If she couldn’t beat BB into the rock face with her fists or her katana, she’d flay the hide off of the smug little bitch with her tongue instead! Or, that was the idea. “Why did you kidnap us for this perverted little game of yours?” Channeling her anger into another blow, Jeanne kicked the cracked barrier she had already started on breaking down, and it too shattered into shards and then vanished, allowing for just a little bit more progress up the crater.

“Why did I kidnap you? Hmmm~! You know how this sort of thing goes,” BB answered with a smirk, ticking points off on her fingers. “When picking an event cast, you need to check off a few boxes! One, you obviously need a Saberface. You meet that criteria, and I honestly hadn’t quite gotten enough of bullying you last summer! On top of that, tormenting you is so much fun that the second episode of Grand Carnival is apparently devoted to making your life miserable!” The fourth wall, not nearly so strong as the barricades Jeanne Alter was breaking down, shattered under the self-proclaimed kouhai’s unrelenting pressure, but she plowed on, heedless of the suspension of disbelief as she continued to explain how she’d arrived at her decision.

“Then, I picked Passionlip because she’s an outside choice! You always need a couple of less-frequently spotlighted characters, and, well.” BB made an enormous cupping motion over her already generous chest. “You get all of the boob people in with that. Then Skadi, because everyone knows she dislikes the heat and she was an easy choice to weaken just from the environment being tropical. The Queen of Sheba was another outside choice, but she’s noticeably fanservice-y and I thought up a good gimmick using that gold-digging personality of hers, so I figured, why not? And then there’s Ishtar. Let’s be honest. Humiliating Ishtar is an industry that could probably fund a small country’s GDP! You really can’t pass up a chance to put either her or you in frustratingly embarrassing situations so we can watch you writhe. Finally, Astolfo! Everyone loves Astolfo, and he’s trending again ever since the Monster can incident. All in all, I think I combined popular staples with enough variety and niche picks to make a good lineup.”

“I… that… do you even LISTEN to yourself?” Jeanne Alter snapped, having just heard BB weave together reality and non-reality with such aplomb that it left her momentarily speechless. “Ugh! Whatever! Forget I even asked! I’m not going to be kept in a tickle hellhole for your fucked-up BB Channel bullshit or whatever! As soon as I find Master, we’re going to give you the beatdown just like we did in Hawaii!” In one of her trademark displays of ostentation, Jeanne stood before the next wall to shatter, legs planted shoulder-width apart, and joined her two hands together to form one solid hammer blow with which she would crush this ridiculous wall in a single strike! “Hyaaaaaaaaa-AAAAAAAAA!”

“Jeanne Alter!”

That voice! Jeanne’s head swiveled around to look up at the rim of the crater to see - “Master!” she yelled back, her grin growing fierce and smug for a fraction of a second - before the wall in front of her suddenly took the initiative. Bending its form outward, it encased Jeanne’s joined hands in its thick, ethereal body, trapping them together and stretched out over her head, and pulled her up, off the ground, and pinned her against the wall! At first, Jeanne was trapped against the wall face-first, but the bizarre construct somehow twisted itself fully around even while she was trapped in it, and because of that turn, Jeanne’s back was now pressed against the translucent wall, her wrists trapped within. Her feet flailed wildly at the air in a sudden panic as Fujimaru started to race around to the side of the crater where the path led downward.

“Jeanne! Hang on, I’m coming!” Fujimaru called out, but found the path down into the crater blocked by the same magecraft barricades that Jeanne had been breaking through, and these walls were designed to be breakable with some effort by one of the most physically powerful Servants. For a human, they might as well have been impenetrable, and even as Fujimaru dithered, trying to see if there was some trick to unlocking them, Jeanne’s howling laughter rose up out of the crater to hear ears:

“NFAAHAAAAAHAHAHAHAAHAH! FAHAHHAHAAHAHH AHAHHA FAHAHAAAACK! FUCK FUCK FHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” Howls of indignation mixed with her laughter, but she could not stop herself from producing exactly the sound BB wanted to hear - with both arms pulled over her head and trapped there quite firmly, it gave the tendrils rising from the ground a golden opportunity. Her pale skin came under attack from the multitude of little blunted spikes covering the tips of the long tentacles rising from the ground, the stimulation raking mercilessly along the upturned and completely exposed hollows. The muscles beneath her skin tensed and flexed as Jeanne tried to pull away, but this position had her in a uniquely powerless situation, and she could do nothing but scream with enraged laughter as her nerve endings were stimulated so ruthlessly.

The stroke of the little blunt spikes started at the lowest edge of her armpit and, following the slight curve of the feature perfectly, pressed against her underarm so as to drag every last one of those ticklish spines against the maximum amount of sensitive skin with every stroke. Sometimes they would stroke vertically, the broad and flexible surface covering the bottoms of the armpits to the tops, making the long twin tails of the screaming, bikini-clad Berserker shake erratically. One long, pale leg was bare, but the other adorned with a red legging, sporting the bizarre-but-apparently-popular asymmetrical clothing look. Both the bared foot and the stocking-clad one hammered against the barrier which had trapped her, and a small glimmer of hope shone through as she could feel its surface crack slightly against the force of her kicking.

But kicking backwards was nowhere near as effective as punching or kicking forward, and Jeanne had a lot of work to do if she wanted to get free. “NAHAHAHHAHAHAAHAHHA MAHAHAHAHAHAH MASTER! LE-HEHEH-HHHAHAHEH LEAVE AHHA-ANNND GOOHHEHEHE GO HELP SOMEONE EHEHEHEELSE! I CAN-GHEH-EHEH-GET OUT OF THIS MYSEHEHEHEEEELF!” Her heels drummed on the surface of the translucent barricade, in tandem and in sequence, and even with Jeanne swinging her entire lower body in service of putting more force behind her kicks, it was slow going. Punching these barriers with her full weight behind them had required no more than two hits to break through, but this was…

When Jeanne swung her hips forward, using her trapped wrists as an anchor point to build momentum to slam her feet back down in the wall, her motion was rudely interrupted by a third sensation! It was honestly no more than a fingertip prodding in her navel, but the way she’d been arching her body, on top of the way that sensation had caught her completely by surprise, totally ruined the motion she had been going for, and she fell back against the wall with her feet kicking like she was throwing a toddler’s tantrum, rather than impacting with shattering force like she’d hoped! “FUHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! HAHAHAHAHAH FUCK THIHIHIHAHAHAH THIS!” The fingertip-tentacle had followed her bellybutton back to its resting point, and settled into that sensitive little navel… digging in deeply, and stretching to reach the very furthest point within, invading the ticklish divot mercilessly.

The stroking tentacles in her armpits weren’t even moving that fast. It was like a slow, methodically firm stroking that covered every last inch of that particular body part and straying nowhere else. In its own way, it was maddening to have them focused so relentlessly on just one spot, tickling over and over and over until she thought she would scream with fury! Oh, wait -- she was screaming, only it was fury mixed with absolutely helpless laughter. BB was watching this show with a sadistic little grin on her lips, and Fujimaru grew increasingly restless in her attempts to enter the barrier-filled crater and come to Jeanne Alter’s aid. “Ihe-haha-AHHAHA-HAHAHA JUST GOHOHOOOO! HAHAHAHAH YAAHHE YOU CAN’T DOHEHEH DO ANYTHING HERE SO JUAHAH-HEHEH JUST GO ANAHAHAHAHAHEHE AND FIND HEHEH-HEHEHEEELP! I CAN MANAGE THIHIHIHEHEHEHEHEHEHEE!!” The stroke of those rounded spines at the lowest point of her underarm, pressing into where the ribcage, the side of her breast, and her underarm all met, was driving Jeanne into frantic, cackling hysteria.

“Awwwww~ Isn’t that so sweet and self-sacrificing of you~” Jeanne Alter had almost let herself forget about BB’s poisonous presence on the nearby ledge, and her face darkened in anger for a few seconds, even enough to overcome the ruthless tickling. “Or that’s what you want me to say, and you’re trying to hide the true reason for not wanting Master to be here - you don’t want her to see you laugh! It would ruin your tough, tsundere image to be seen howling and squealing like a ticklish little girl --”

Fujimaru had kind of had her suspicions about Jeanne’s howled request to go help somewhere else, but the scream that she let out as BB needled her all but confirmed that the snarky little AI was one hundred percent on the mark. Still… Jeanne wasn’t wrong. These barriers weren’t something that she would be able to break down by herself, and she was all too mindful of the fact that BB had put her on a time limit. It had taken a half hour of relatively brisk walking to reach this point from the start, and she was already starting to see how this little puzzle island was set up to waste her time. If she spent too much time staring at this wall, she’d fail for sure, and Jeanne would just be tickled for even longer. Though...

“Well, it’s just some tickling, right? I didn’t know Jeanne was so ticklish but I guess BB has an eye for that sort of thing,” Fujimaru muttered under her breath. “It’s almost canon that she has a tickle fetish or something… anyway.” She raised her voice so that Jeanne would hear her: “I’ll be back with help!” she promised, and then retreated from the crater entrance, walking around the circumference to the sound of Jeanne Alter’s hysteria until she was able to take the path that led back to the central area.

It sounded like she was having a hard time, but Jeanne was plenty tough. Even the Servants with E-rank Endurance were many times stronger and more durable than a human, and Jeanne’s C-rank Endurance meant that she would be able to deal with something like tickling for a while, right? She had basically not slept for a week back in Luluhawa, and routinely fought through waves of monsters and trekked through harsh landscapes in their travels, so tickling should be no problem at all. Sure, it probably annoyed the hell out of her to be tickled - as Fujimaru turned back along the path to try a different route, she could hear the fading sound of laughter occasionally punctuated by an indignant shout as BB struck one soft spot or another, but in that sense, BB had kept her word. No one would really be hurt by this prank. They would absolutely have to punish her once the Singularity was brought under control, but this time, nobody would really be in any danger...

---

...Then again, if there was someone who really would be having a hard time with being tickled, it would be Passionlip, Fujimaru judged.

It had taken her a not-inconsiderable amount of walking to make it here, the sun sliding lower in the sky by the time she’d reached the… hot spring? It was a wide rock pool with the hopelessly flailing Passionlip causing great geysers of water to shoot up as her enormous mechanical hands slapped uselessly at the water, the poor girl’s giggling continuing almost unabated, although it was hard at first glance to see why. Passionlip, the notoriously top-heavy (and regularly heavy) Alter Ego of love and hate, had been submerged into water that came up just under her neck, but it did cover her absurdly sized breasts, which… were bare. That was unusual. By the way her arms seemed to keep trying to cross to cover her chest, it seemed she was conscious of that fact, too, but something in the water was causing her a great deal of distress.

Like Jeanne, Passionlip’s Spirit Origin had been altered, in her case a great deal more than Jeanne’s had been. Maybe it was because Passionlip had originally been created by BB that the devilish kouhai had been so easily able to tamper with her? But whatever the reason, Lip had been dunked into that pool wearing a string bikini, if the remaining bottom half was anything to go by, yet the top was missing. It was not hard to imagine why the top was missing, either; Lip’s frantic gyrations had set her chest to bouncing in a way that would probably only be seen in hentai, and that bouncing had probably set the bikini top adrift somewhere.

“Mahahahahahahhaha Master! MAHAHAHAHAHAH Master Master plehhe-heheh-hehehheHEHEHEh please help! Help, help, hehehehehehehe I can’t, I can’t, I’m too ticklish! PLEHEHHEHEHEHEHEEHEEEZE!” In spite of the cacophony that she was kicking up, the poor girl caught sight of Fujimaru’s approach, and at least the knowledge that she wasn’t trapped and alone in this pool of ticklish torment seemed to calm her for a moment, the crashing of her mechanical hands against the water’s surface quieting for a moment. But she could not stop her giggling, and it was only a few seconds before she crossed her arms over her breasts in a wholly useless display of protecting them. “I can’t mohoheheheheheh move Master pleheheh-HEHEHEEEEZE!” Despite her obvious distress, it still wasn’t very clear what was happening to her. The water appeared to be just that, water, and it didn’t seem like there was anything in it at first glance. The pool was very, very large, it was true - probably more than three hundred feet from where she was to Lip, and that much water on every side of the beleaguered girl.

“Hang on, Lip! Let me try to figure out what’s going on here!” she shouted in reply, although whether or not Lip even heard her was in question, as she shrieked with giggles and thrashed around in the middle of the pool. Fujimaru knew better than to trust anything when BB was involved, but - true to form - the mischievous kouhai had also jammed her connection to Chaldea, which meant that the analytic insights of Da Vinci or Holmes or Sion and even Mash were out of her grasp. She was by and large on her own, the only saving grace being that BB had told the truth in that there were no enemies to waylay her and slow things down even more.

So, as Passionlip’s constant giggling filled the air along with the sound of splashing columns of water, she leaned down closer at the edge of the rock pool to examine it. The rippling caused by Lip’s splashing, even so far away, combined with the glare of the sun off of the water’s surface, made it difficult to see into the water. If she wanted to figure out what was going on here, then she didn’t have any other choice but to get down on her stomach and dip a bare hand into the water. Surprisingly, even doing just that gave her a few hints, and after a handful of seconds she had mostly figured out what was going on. What to do about it was another matter entirely…

When her skin had come into contact with the water, she had felt almost right away the sensation of something nibbling at her hand, almost everywhere. Getting even into the spaces between her fingers, and along the palm and back of her hand, a ticklish nibbling sensation that had her fighting a smile even with only her hand at stake. Scooping up some of the water in her palm had made it easier to see the small, silvery darting fish that filled the water, nibbling at her skin the moment they had found it. Not only was that a really ticklish sensation on its own, Lip was dealing with it effectively all over her body - they must be swarming at her big breasts, nibbling at the really ticklish spots on the sides and underneath, and getting other places too, from her neck down.

On top of that, while those fish nibbled along the curve of Lip’s back, and swarmed into terribly sensitive places like the crack of her ass and between her thighs, and set the hypersensitive nerves of her underarms afire with ticklish tingling… they were also getting literally every other crevice on her body, in her navel and behind her knees, down to her feet and between her toes. Fujimaru found herself almost forgetting to consider the second piece of information she’d gained from her hand being in the water, so caught up she was in her contemplation of Passionlip’s perfectly ticklish suffering. That kind of body, jiggling and bouncing with a display of ticklishness that made her appear so obviously powerless, drew almost anyone into wanting to bully her endlessly, because of how responsive she was to even the slightest touch -- Again, the Master of Chaldea had to shake her head and try to re-focus. The movement of the water. It appeared to be still, but it was actually swirling. Not strongly, but it was moving enough to be noticeable, and that force was also trapping Lip in the very center of the circular pool. The height of the water, combined with the weight and uselessness of her hands for swimming, coupled with the constant debilitating tickling and the centripetal force pulling her towards the center, all of these ‘soft’ restraints combined to trap the hapless Passionlip at the center of this whirlpool of tickling.

On top of that, there were two other issues. Passionlip’s Hypersensitivity trait meant that, as ticklish as the sensations had been for Fujimaru, it was likely amplified many times over for the poor girl currently squealing with laughter. The more she thought this through, the more she realized the depth of BB’s trap - Passionlip was, despite her appearance, the strongest of the Alter Egos and possessed unrivaled destructive power. Power enough to crush the barricades holding Jeanne Alter back in no time at all. But power alone wouldn’t destroy water. Passionlip also had incredible physical endurance that one wouldn’t guess just by her appearance. She absolutely would be able to withstand being tickled for days on end with her A-ranked Endurance. The question was, how to get her out?

The second issue was the one that had kept distracting Fujimaru. Lip’s laughter was enchanting - a sort of helpless, giggling keen that continued on and on. She was so thoroughly powerless to stop herself being tickled that it made Fujimaru consider just sitting here and listening to it for a while longer. How would she get Lip out of this whirlpool? The suction would drag her in as well, no doubt, but she had to admit that - once sucked into the center - the allure of continuing to punish Passionlip with tickling might be overpowering. While it was hard to really think of it as an “ability”, Lip’s Masochistic Nature had the power to somehow make anyone enjoy the thought of bullying or teasing her. Because it really would be easy to just press up against her back, where she couldn’t make use of those unwieldy hands, and just tickle the sides of her sensitive tits until she was crying with laughter. Speaking of unwieldy, those tits just would not fit in anyone’s hands, ever. What had BB been thinking when she came up with Passionlip’s design? Those huge, sensitive breasts would just keep trying to break free of her fingers’ grip, forcing her to keep groping and tickling over and over to punish --

Fujimaru shook her head forcefully and took a stumbling step back from the edge of the rock pool. “MAHAHAHAHAH-HAHAHEHEHEHEH MASTER PLEHEHEHEHEEEZE SNAP OUT OF IT!” Passionlip cried, a ticklishly panicked look on her face that managed to be alluring somehow! That image was so hard to shake - even if she just ‘fell’ into the water by accident and ended up there until time ran out, she’d reset at the end of the time period, and she’d get to bully Passionlip’s ticklish tits for a day or two. It was difficult to fight against, a siren song that --

That was it! A siren song. That’s what this was! Literally a myth of an alluring song that would lure sailors into a whirlpool of doom. Fujimaru almost had to give BB credit. This was actually kind of clever. “Lip! I’ll be back! I promise! I know how to get you out, I just have to find help!” This was actually a complete lie - Fujimaru had no idea how she’d get Passionlip out of this, but she couldn’t just turn tail and run away from the poor girl without at least offering her something to hang on to. Even as she scrambled frantically back up the rocks and all but ran back up the path, the image haunted her mind, running her fingertips underneath Lip’s huge breasts, tickling the undersides, cooing softly into her ear about how helpless she was to make any of it stop…

“Ihehehe-HEHEHE-ehhEHEHEHEHE I’LL TRY!” Lip called back, feeling… at least a little better! She wasn’t alone. BB had been so mean, teasing her about being in a trap that would make nobody want to help her. She still didn’t know why bullying her was a thing that everyone liked to do, but it was just that sort of thing, and she had grown so masochistically accustomed to it that she sort of expected it by now. Even when Master was being nice, she would still bully Lip a little bit, but the Alter Ego could feel that at least her bullying was affectionate! So knowing that Master was going to try and help her gave Lip the strength to keep enduring for a while longer.

She’d need it. This whole time, she had been trying to put on a brave front for Master, trying to keep her giggling restrained somewhat, but now the whole ticklish mess just burbled up from her lips and she couldn’t stop it. The little nibbling fish were far too agile for her claws to hit them in the water, and they got too close to her body. So many of them were underneath her boobs, their nibbling bites feeling like fingernails tickling those ticklish, secret spots underneath! They covered every bit of her that they could find. So many of them were on her breasts, and she’d lost the little bikini top BB had given her a while ago. It was still in the water with her, but her hands just weren’t suited to work like putting on a string bikini! It might not even have helped much, because the fish had swarmed into her bottoms as well, and made her butt jiggle helplessly as they invaded the sensitive crack.

So many places were just completely unable to be defended! “Iheheheheh-HEHEHEHE-HAHAHAHAhehehe it tiiihiiickles it tickles IT TICKLES PLEHEHEHE --ehhehe heheheh EHEHEHEHEHEHE!” Her armpits couldn’t close tightly enough to stop the fish from attacking her underarms. Her hands wouldn’t protect her breasts at all, or anywhere else on her body. The only thing Lip could do was keep her feet flat on the smooth surface of the rock pool, but then the fish could still nibble at her toes and the tops of her feet, and she’d forget to keep them flat when some other part of the tickling got to be too much! Then she’d realize suddenly that they were nibbling all along an arch and that would set her to dancing and squealing again, a perpetual motion machine of ticklish response. “PLehehe-ehehhe… EHEHEHEHEHEEE…”

“PLEHEHEHEHEEEEEZE HURRY MAHAAAHAHAHAHAASTER!”

---

Fujimaru was definitely feeling the physical exertion by the time she had followed the third path to its destination, which seemed to be a cave of some sort. The sun had long since gone down by the time she made it here - she had been under the spell of Lip’s laughter for longer than she had realized, and had forced herself to run until the sound no longer tantalized her with the desire to make poor Lip suffer. There were, thankfully, some light sources marking the paths at nighttime, but it had still been unnerving to walk down an unfamiliar road in the dark, and that made her hurry. She’d been walking all day at this point, and upon reaching the entrance to the cave, Fujimaru made an unexpected and suspiciously convenient discovery.

Out of quite literally nowhere, set up outside of the cave entrance, was a ‘rest area’ so marked with a sign. It featured a streetlight illuminating a bench and a vending machine, all things which were completely out of place in an environment in which she had encountered nothing besides wilderness and magecraft. This almost certainly had to be BB up to shenanigans again - moreso because just off to the side of this ‘rest area’ was a tent, a campfire, and something cooking over said campfire. The smell of what seemed to be curry reminded her that she hadn’t eaten since arriving in this bizarre Singularity, but Fujimaru put all those things out of her mind - the tent, the food, the misplaced vending machine - and proceeded into the cavern, which was, against all expectations, brightly floodlit. It was enough to cause Fujimaru to shield her eyes when she entered, but the sound she heard told her what was happening even before her eyes opened.

“Noooohohhahahaha… HAHAHAHA, ahahaha, hahaha, hahehehehehe… HEHEHehehehe… heeee! I… hahahaa… haaaa…” It wasn’t Jeanne Alter’s raging, hysterical, sometimes screeching laughter. It was different from Passionlip’s enchanting, please-bully-me-more laughter. This laughter had a stately, more refined quality to it. The sort of laughter that made you want to hear more of it just because the sound of it was so rare that it had to be cherished. Fujimaru had never seen Scathach-Skadi in anything besides complete control of herself and exuding total dignity as befit a goddess, so to now come across her in what appeared to be a sheer, slinky cocktail dress and nylons was a shock in and of itself. “Mahah-hahahahhaahaster, beware! This pla-haheheheh place is cursed…! Hahaha, ahahahaha, I cahahha - cannot control myeheheheh myself… this enchantment…!”

“Skadi, it’s tickling,” Fujimaru explained, a hint of exasperation in her voice. Although it probably made sense that her experience with this sort of humanlike response to a sensation would be… minimal. What was going on with this trap…? Skadi was, at the moment, dragging herself along the ground in a most undignified fashion, and if the rest of the bowl-shaped depression in which she was trapped was any indication, she was dragging herself over top of a carpet of what appeared to be hundreds of tiny little wriggling tentacles, tipped with feathers. Feathers? No, on closer inspection, they had a feather’s shape but appeared to be a little bit stiffer than that, probably the better to tickle through the sheer material of Skadi’s clothing, but unlike the tentacles which had deliberately targeted Jeanne Alter or the swarming of the nibbling doctor fish, these tentacles seemed to just wiggle aimlessly.

Growing out of the center of this bowl-shaped depression was an enormous pillar that looked like a snake’s underbelly, except it had no head and no tail. The cavern’s size was easy to discern thanks to the fact that it was fully illuminated, and the pillar stretched from the floor all the way to the ceiling, where a small object glittered in the light - Skadi’s wand. So that was it. She must have been climbing to try to reach the wand, and since this was BB they were talking about, the Caster-class Skadi had been assigned a difficult physical task, and punished for falling back down to the floor.

“Mahahahahaster, I… ahhah… this is exhausting labor, but I cannot give uhuhuhuup,” Skadi giggled, having dragged herself over to the pillar and, digging her fingers into it, pulled herself upright, then climbed up a few feet, planted her toes firmly in one of the ridges in the pillar’s surface, and rested against it, panting, before she turned her gaze to Fujimaru. “Somehow, my power has been sealed in the wand up by the ceiling. I am certain that if I am able to reach it, I will be able to free myself from this, but every time I start to climb up this accursed construct, I… hehe… ehhehe… oh nohehhehe, hehehe, this is so hard t-tooehhehe to hold on whe-ehhe-hehehe when it doesthahah ahahahha AHAHAHAHAH!”

Fujimaru had been expecting the attack to come at Skadi’s armpits. After all, it would make sense that targeting someone’s underarms and sides while they were climbing would make them lose control. But here, because of how Skadi had used her toes to stay balanced on the pillar, it stretched out her nylon-clad soles, and a pair of… what looked to be pure white, feminine hands had emerged from the soft surface of the pillar. There was nothing out of the ordinary about them, simply that they had short fingernails, but this was all that they needed. Their fingertips began to scratch almost lazily around Skadi’s heels, which had produced the initial, giggling laughter. Tracing around those soft heels that had literally been preserved by divinity and millennia of not needing to do physical labor, they drew forth the stirrings of laughter from the queen by stimulating nerves not accustomed at all to this sort of touch.

It was almost mesmerizing how gentle their motions were, four fingers on each heel lightly scratching at the side here for two strokes, scritch-scratch, then to trace over to the other side for a few, scratch-scritch-scritch. Then to trace the arch where the sole met the heel, back and forth, and crawl slowly up onto the sole. This had produced the intensified laughter and the first wigglings of distress, but Skadi seemed frozen in place as the hands exploited her tensed soles. Working in perfect tandem, one fingertip apiece stroked at an inch-long spot in the center of the arch and slightly offset towards the inside of her foot, the sound of fingernails stroking over nylon fabric having an alluring quality all on its own. Scritch-scritch-scratch-scratch. The peals of laughter which sprang from Skadi’s lips, though increased in volume when this spot was targeted, somehow still retained that regal dignity of hers.

Two fingertips rose from that center spot and began to scratch upward, in paired movements on each sole, towards the balls of her feet. Skadi’s upper body curled in on itself a little tighter, her fingers digging into the surface of the pillar, her reddish hair in its ponytail showing the signs of an extended tickling. More than that, Fujimaru realized, her breathing was shallow and it was apparent she had been sweating. While that itself was not a surprise - this was a tropical island and it was very warm - she recalled that Skadi did not care for the heat… and so by combining her unfamiliarity with tickling and her weakness to warmth, BB had managed to subdue someone who would otherwise be an extraordinarily formidable rival and trap her here for the purposes of… what, exactly? Was there a purpose to all this tickling?

As Skadi’s laughter grew noticeably higher in pitch, and her body’s response to it more acute, Fujimaru pondered the information she had. It seemed safe to assume that all six of the missing Servants were going to be in some sort of tickle endurance trap designed to exploit them in some way. There were also going to be barriers to freeing them - she was already starting to try and put together a plan of action in her head. Passionlip could free Jeanne Alter. How could she free Passionlip, and who might Jeanne Alter be able to assist? This kind of climb would be easy for her, probably. She might just jump, or throw a katana. And assuming Skadi was freed, would she be able to help someone else? One thing seemed clear, however. As the fingernails tickled under Skadi’s toes, focusing on the very base of each digit, she visibly wobbled, and her eyes shot wide open as she tried to ‘dance’, lifting one foot away from its ticklish tormentor, only to have both hands begin to softly scratch their fingernails on the sole of the remaining one.

Skadi tried to bring the first foot down and anchor it in place of the other, so she could switch which foot was being tickled, but of course both hands focused on their new target. “Hehehe-hehehe-HEEHHEhe this curse mahah-maheheh makes it so hard to control my bodehehehehehehehe…!” she gasped. At least Skadi seemed the most capable of the three she’d found so far of having an actual conversation, but that didn’t seem likely to help at the moment. “Hehe-ehehehe-ehehehehe…! It… I cannot think of anything but moving my body awhaahheehehehe from that feeling. It’s not painful, buheheahah but somehow more unbea-haha-ahahah-HAHAHAHAHAHAH unbearable than any pah-ahah-heheh-PAHAHAHHAAIN!”

Eventually, of course, Skadi missed one of her feet trying to re-anchor itself on the surface of the pillar, slipped, and tumbled back down to the (thankfully) soft floor of the cavern. There seemed to be no tentacles long or strong enough to serve as actual restraints; the scheme relied entirely on Skadi being too slow to get up and attempt to climb the pillar again. So, as she lay upon the floor of the depression in which she had been trapped, the wriggling tendrils stroked at her body in a sort of slow and teasing manner, rubbing up against her sides or curling against her thighs, flitting against her butt and in general thoroughly taking advantage of the clothing that protected very little, and didn’t even seem to mitigate the sensations of touch that stroked upon its sheer surface. So, now Fujimaru confronted the question she had been confronting up to this point, and the frustration she could feel was starting to make itself known.

She’d promised Jeanne that she would be back with help; promised Passionlip that she’d be back with help. BB’s fingerprints were all over this, forcing her to make hard decisions to leave her Servants to ticklish torment while she raced all over this godforsaken island in search of a clue. This seemed to be nothing but a climbing puzzle. Maybe this was something she could do herself, jump down into the pit, climb the pillar, and retrieve Skadi’s wand? But the sides of the depression were not only steep, they were also covered in those ticklish, wriggling tentacles, and Fujimaru couldn’t kid herself - if she fell into one of these tickle traps, and failed to solve it, there would be no getting out for anybody until time had expired and she was reset back to the starting point.

Somehow, despite rolling about on the ticklish floor of the cavern in a most un-queenly fashion, Skadi was able to read her expression, or her body language, or something, because in the midst of her body being wracked with giggles her voice came, reassuring: “Do-h-ehehe-ehheahahah do not dehe-hahaha-despair, Master. Ihehehahhah deheh-haha-heheheh despair is whahahaha eheheh what she wants - for you to give in and mahahah make things worse for yourself. Plhe-ehhe--hehehe-ehehehe please do not worry, Ihihh… I can endure this. I can, I caahahahahah can do it, and wehehehhe we all believe in you. The answer will come in tihhih-heheh-hehhe…. Hehehe… hehehehee…!” Her resolve finally wavering, Skadi clutched onto the pillar with her fingers, but seemed unable to pull her body up any further, and slowly sank back down onto the soft, ticklish floor.

---

But, there was no way to get around the fact that she was tired. This whole campfire thing reeked of a trap, like an event flag waiting to happen the moment she sat down. Hesitantly, she approached the campfire on tiptoe, trying to watch the darkness at the same time she watched the bubbling pot over the fire, the smell making her stomach gurgle. Even so, her eyes were narrowed. “Okay, if I was BB, what would be the most annoying crap I could pull here? Drugged curry is a maybe, but that seems a little bit… too direct? Semiramis or one of the Hassans would totally try to ‘poison’ me like that, but I dunno that BB would. No, probably more like… like ultra-spicy curry. Yeah. Like ghost peppers or something, and then she’d fuck around with me by like… giving me jalapeno-flavored water or something horrible.”

The vending machine was still close by, and though that was probably a trap too, it couldn’t hurt at least to look. “She’s probably watching me right now, too,” Fujimaru muttered as she considered the vending machine’s wares. Ice cream? A can of hot coffee? A huge can of Monster energy drink? What the hell kind of vending machine was this? Cup noodles, too. And water labeled as “★Boring Water★” which couldn’t have been more obvious if she had been trying.

“Se~n~pa~i~ The fun part is that not all of these are a lie… and it’s so funny to watch you squirm trying to figure out which ones are!” Even being halfway prepared for this, Fujimaru still nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard BB’s voice nearby, and whirled around to see her… sitting by the campfire with a bowl of curry in her hand, taking a spoonful and putting it in her mouth. The red-and-black cloak was nowhere to be seen; the tentacles were out of sight, and her red high heels were neatly placed beside the entrance to the tent. Just sitting there, with her long hair spread out behind her, in only the white one-piece swimsuit, she did look considerably less threatening. “Come on, Senpai. Sit with me. What are you going to do, walk all day without any rest and not eat for three days? You’ll look like a mess!”

The really insidious part of BB’s traps was always that she managed to set things up in such a way that you had no choice but to do what she wanted, even knowing that it was a trap. Or might be a trap. Yet, like she had said, there was just enough chance that it wasn’t a trap to make it believable - she’d come through, at the very last second, to help with the sinking of the Seraphix, and her Hawaiian Singularity scheme hadn’t been foolproof, either. Skadi was right. It wasn’t as hopeless as BB liked to make it out to be, and so Fujimaru went to sit beside her pain-in-the-ass kouhai. “I wouldn’t leave you to wander around the island all day with no rest and nothing to eat, Senpai. I got my fill of making you stay up for days on end last year! I bet that with all your experience in figuring out Luluhawa, you’ll get through the rerun event this year in five loops or less!”

The scary thing was always that it felt like she meant it: like saying ‘Oh, Senpai, you’ll only need to experience thirty-five sleepless days this year instead of fifty or more!’ was an actual present to her. What was it Robin Hood had said? ‘She mostly operates on malice and a really twisted idea of good intentions.’ “Come on, do you really have to --” Fujimaru was interrupted by BB popping a spoonful of curry into her mouth, but to her surprise (and relief) it was a very sweet curry with a mild taste instead of being Carolina Reaper-flavored curry. She swallowed it, and continued: “--To rerun the event this year? Now that it’s all been revealed, there won’t be any big surprise, and --” Another mouthful of curry.

“Of course I do! You know the rules, every year the previous event is rerun first before you move onto the next one.” She was leaning awfully close to Fujimaru, giggling like they were lovers on a date, feeding her Senpai the homemade curry that she had probably cheated up with her ridiculous cheat powers somehow. Even Passionlip, with her monstrously unwieldy hands, actually tried to practice cooking, but somehow Fujimaru just couldn’t see BB bothering with actual manual labor like that. “Now, stop worrying so much about stuff you can’t do anything about right now and focus on worrying about what you’re going to do here. I see you haven’t freed any Servants at all, and it’s already the end of your first day. You’ll have to work harder than that if you want to get out of here, Se~n~pa~i~”

Fujimaru wanted to protest, but BB was relentlessly shoving that curry into her mouth, and she couldn’t even complain that much because it really did taste good and she was starving. It was like sitting down and having a hot meal made her body realize how much she had been moving around today, and how tired that had made her, and even though she really ought not to trust BB with putting anything in her mouth, she just couldn’t muster up the strength to put a stop to it…

---

Fujimaru’s eyes fluttered open. It was daylight, that much was certain, but muted, because she was laying atop a rather comfortable pile of sheets with a tent canvas blocking the light overhead. “Ughhhhh…” she groaned, sitting upright. She hadn’t remembered falling asleep, or crawling into the tent, which meant BB must have put her there, and that was always incredibly dangerous. Shifting around in the dim light of the tent, she bumped into something, and picked it up with her hand. It was a bottle of water, with a scribbled drawing of BB winking on the label, and attached to it was a curry bun in a sealed plastic bag. There was also a note taped to the bag, which Fujimaru peeled off and read aloud:

--Seeing you keel over from dehydration or hunger wouldn’t be very fun! Enjoy some of BB’s Infinite Cheat Rations!--

“This is probably one of those twisted ways she shows affection,” the Master grumbled, taking a long drink of the water bottle. As promised, it seemed like she hadn’t even made a dent in the amount of water there, and the curry bun tasted good, too. After she finished it, it seemed as if the bread reappeared when she took her eyes off of it. This at least made sense. BB wanted her to race around the island in despair trying to save all the trapped Servants, not to shrivel up by the side of the path from dehydration. For the moment, it seemed like the rations could be trusted. Today was the second day, and she wanted to get a bright and early start to --

“Dammit, BB!” Fujimaru howled at the sky. Where the tent was now was most certainly not where it had been last night, and for that matter, it looked like it was almost noon with how high the sun was in the sky. So much for being helpful. She had ended up somewhere smack in the middle of one of the jungle areas that the paths around the island had been cutting through, and she had no idea of her bearings whatsoever, but she could almost guarantee that BB had put her someplace with the idea of wasting the maximum possible amount of time. Given that it was, at this point, already halfway through the allotted time period for solving the puzzle, Fujimaru wondered if she’d even be able to find all six captured Servants before the first attempt even ended…

---

The Queen of Sheba was in a most unpleasant situation. Oh, sure, she was being forced to crawl around on her hands and knees in this wide, grassy clearing surrounded by thick, impenetrable jungle. And there might have been some extremely annoying monkeys perched on her back, tickling at her ribs and sides to make her fall, jumping clear of her agitated swats, and bringing their little claws to bear on her sides and ribs when she rolled onto her back! They might have been clutched firmly onto her ankles, her shoes long since flung somewhere she couldn’t see, and crawled those ticklish sensations over her sensitive feet for an entire day or more! In fact, it had been a whole day, hadn’t it? She had started to lose track.

It wasn’t even that the traps were the most annoying thing. Her hands had been forcibly locked into annoying cat-paw mittens, which meant doing anything with any kind of dexterity was almost impossible, and more than a few times she had put her paw - er, hand! - on the ground and had it sink straight into the soil, getting her stuck awkwardly while these horrible monkeys chittered and giggled at her. Being stuck face-down in the ground meant that, usually, two of them would sit on the backs of her calves to pin her legs down, and two others would sit down beside her feet, and she’d have all four of them scratching at her sensitive, bronze soles. The tickling made it hard to move her body the way she wanted, and brought her to howls of laughter as those little claws wiggled into the wrinkles on her feet, touching on those super-sensitive nerves she had everywhere!

Not even the grass was the worst part of it! Sheba didn’t really wear much clothing. Her bikini-like outfit had gold decorations and designs on it, and she wore a curious sort-of-but-not-really set of leggings up to her thighs and little heels upon which she normally walked, but there was otherwise not very much to cover her body, from her toes up to her curiously foxlike and very soft ears. The grass itself seemed to tickle her front whenever she was actually able to crawl around in the grass, brushing every last inch of her skin nonstop and making her giggle. That really did make it hard to concentrate and it was kind of annoying, especially when the monkeys’ agile little fingers snuck into her armpits or onto the sides of her breasts and made her collapse into the soil with hysterically desperate laughter once more!

No! None of that was quite so annoying as the fact that someone had dropped TONS of gold coins all over this clearing, and that wearing these mittens made picking them up extremely difficult! And not only that, but there was a ridiculous toll booth set up at the entrance to the clearing. It wouldn’t let her out unless she paid the absurdly overpriced toll by collecting a single coin at a time and depositing it into the coin slot - which itself was a difficult task when the monkeys tickled that really annoying spot where her ribs, breasts, and armpits all met! She’d dropped coins more than a few times and had to go hunting in the grass to pick them up a second time and drop them into the coin slot! The sheer waste and inefficient use of money was so galling that she could scream! Also maybe she was screaming with laughter because the monkeys had pinned her on her back and were tickling her everywhere, but... the money…!

Fujimaru watched these antics from the other side of the toll booth with a slight sense of exasperation. To be sure, Sheba was kicking her feet and squealing, the little mischief-making monkeys going flying as she struggled, but there were about a half dozen of them and only one of her, and they continued to swarm to the attack. The only real saving grace was that they didn’t really weigh enough to completely pin her down, so when they sat on her forearms like they were doing now a good shove would free the Caster’s limbs, but that shove was a long time in coming as they exploited her very exposed sides with their little claws. A minute later, Sheba was free, but down on her hands and knees in the grass, giggling, a glittering gold coin caught in between her large cat-paw mittens.

It had been easy to sympathize with Jalter’s frustration at the obstacle placed before her, and BB’s obnoxious taunting. It was easy to want to help free poor Passionlip (once no longer caught in the grip of her Masochistic Nature, anyway) from the trap BB had set her up in. And Skadi’s dignified but exhausted giggling was the sort of thing that inspired her. But… this just kind of felt that BB was using the Queen of Sheba’s notorious greed against her, and that Sheba wholly lacked the self-awareness to realize how much trouble her gold-digging was getting her into. Sure, there were some aspects of this designed to frustrate her, like the grass hiding the coins, the monkeys’ interference, and the forced lack of dexterity from the mittens, but when she did things like holding onto her coin with both hands and letting the monkeys sit on her thighs to tickle her butt, it definitely lent credence to the idea that she was partially doing this to herself.

The toll booth was the most frustrating part. This task was well within the realm of Fujimaru being able to assist with. It was only finding coins lost in the grass and using them to pay the toll, like some kind of MMO fetch quest, the sort of timewasting one that developers put in the game to increase their time played metrics. But try as she might, the booth exerted some kind of repelling force that prevented her from crossing over it, like some kind of train turnstile on steroids. It was possible to throw inanimate objects over the barrier, and Fujimaru had entertained the idea of trying to throw rocks at the monkeys to speed up Sheba’s rate of coin collection, but that ran the risk of actually hitting Sheba as well, and the monkeys would probably take a lot of rocks before they would actually be driven off. It was frustrating! This task was so close to being achievable, but not quite… Who could help here? Lip could probably crush the barrier, and Skadi might be able to shoot spells to actually hit the monkeys…

“Nuheheheheheheeeeheh noooo no my money!” Sheba squealed as the mischievous primate snatched the coin directly from her fingers and ran off with it. Some distance away he seemed to disappear into a small hole hidden by the grass. That seemed to be the one thing that galvanized her, and she half-rose to her feet, stumbling as she shook off the monkeys, and reached down to chase the monkey into the hole where the coin had been hidden. “Gotcha!” Her eyes lit up with currency signs (varies with locale) and Fujimaru could guess she’d retrieved the coin… only for her expression to suddenly turn comically teary-eyed. “Uwaaaaaah I can’t get my hand outtttttt!”

Fujimaru literally face-palmed at that moment. This was literally the monkey trap, where the monkey was distracted by a shiny inside of a gourd, but couldn’t get its hand out while clasping the object with its fist. Except this time the monkeys had trapped the hapless Queen of Sheba and were taking advantage of her one stuck arm to tickle along her spine, her sides, and the backs of her knees, leading to quite a lot of wailing and kicking before her ankles were pinned down once more. It didn’t seem like there was a lot of focus on teasing, buildup, or attacking any one particular spot this time. Sheba was just being made to suffer at random at the whims of the monkeys, entrapped by her own greed, and seemingly very little the worse for wear. At least this time, it wasn’t very difficult to accept that she couldn’t help and to walk away from Sheba. For that matter, had she even noticed Fujimaru standing there?!

---

Thanks to BB’s meddling and the time lost in finding the right path - the first path Fujimaru had come across that day had led back to Lip, and she had wasted time in going first towards the enchanting siren song of her giggling before doubling back to try another route she hadn’t yet - the sun was starting to set by the time she came across Ishtar. Fujimaru had to admit that BB was at least good at this ‘ironic trap’ thing; Ishtar was trapped in… well, it would be a literal gold mine if what was glittering in the setting sun was gold, but in this case, as befit the Mesopotamian goddess of love, fertility, war, et cetera, it was piles upon piles of gemstones.

Unlike Sheba, who Fujimaru suspected had never even realized she was standing there, Ishtar noticed right away when she approached the beach that was literally made of actual gems. Not even a metaphor - not a speck of sand in sight on this shore. It was instead gems as far as the beach stretched left and right, and into the ocean. This puzzled Fujimaru as Ishtar scrambled over the uneven surface of smooth, polished gemstones, losing her balance several times as she wailed. “MahahAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH Master MahahahahHAHAHAHAH hahahahah please pleheheeeeeeze help meheheheh heeeelp! It tickles, it’s too ticklish, I HAHAHAHAHAAAATE IT!” Before she could ask what was wrong, Fujimaru saw one of the gems suddenly rise up from the countless stones littering the ground and suddenly fling itself through the air right at the howling goddess! Ishtar, like Sheba, hadn’t really even needed any kind of modification to expose her body to this kind of tickling - just her normal white-and-gold top stretched over small breasts, the black underwear held by gold clasps, one arm and one leg (on opposite sides of course) sheathed in a tight black band of clothing that was wholly useless.

Thanks to this natural state of vulnerability, the gemstone was able to lodge itself directly in Ishtar’s navel and vibrate frantically, causing her to stumble and shriek as she slid facedown in the smooth gems, limbs flailing. “NOHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAA! Hahahahahahahh nohahahahh no fair no fair nohahahAHAHAHAHAHHAHA whyyyyy meehehehehehehe?!” Usually, Ishtar loved gems, just found it hard to come by them, and so this should have been a paradise for her. But BB, of course, had turned her paradise into hell - now Fujimaru could see the gemstone humming ticklishly in her navel, and the other gemstones sliding into the crack of her ass, intruding beneath that skimpy outfit she wore without shame. One was even lodged under the stirrup that covered a small portion of her right foot and seemed to serve no actual purpose other than to provide an appealing target for persons of a certain fetish (read: all of the people reading this right now). Ishtar had to shamefully flail about and retrieve the gems one by one, throwing them into the ocean where they splashed down with slight plip-plop sounds, and then sank to her knees before Fujimaru, teary-eyed and frustrated.

“Master! This is horrible! My, my power is somehow sealed into one of the gems on the beach, but…” Helplessly, she swept her arm out over the gemstone-covered beach, and Fujimaru understood. “And they keep tickling me! I can’t stand it! I’ve been getting tickled all day and it’s driving me craaaaaaazy!” Ishtar wailed. Powerful and authoritative she could sometimes be, and other times, like now, simply had tears flowing down her cheeks like twin waterfalls. Sometimes it was hard to feel sorry for her, as she often did things to deserve her own misfortune (or just acted in such a way that nobody felt compelled to lift a finger) and though Fujimaru often fell into that camp, she saw an opportunity here. “I hate being tickled so much and - NYEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEEHEHEEEE!!!” A pair of gemstones had swooped into her underarms, and rolled around the inside, vibrating wickedly to stimulate the ticklish nerve endings in her skin. Ishtar’s reactions were slower than they probably should have been, but BB’s tickle trap situations all seemed to be designed to wear down the victim over time, and delight in their despair as the goal slipped further and further out of reach.

“Well, two of us will find it faster than one, right? I’m sure BB has designed this to make it hard to find quickly, but…” But there was a glimmer of hope here. There was no barrier making it impossible for her to enter Ishtar’s ticklish torment area, and the task at hand was something that a human could do, even if she was under no illusions about how long it would take. “Do you know what the gemstone looks like, Ishtar? The one with your power sealed?” Fujimaru asked, wading into the gemstone beach herself - and then gasping as she, too, became a target. “Nyeheheheheeeeeek!!”

Though her Chaldea Combat Uniform, often nicknamed “the plugsuit”, covered her body entirely, it didn’t completely block out the ticklish sensation. It would still be a distraction that would make it harder and harder to focus on finding this special gemstone as time went on. Fujimaru swatted the stone away that had started to buzz at her ribs and helped Ishtar dislodge the two that were tickling her armpits, and helped her up to her feet. “Come on, let’s get this done and beat BB at her own game.”

There was no bondage, like there had been none before, and yet - not being restrained was its own special kind of exhausting. They worked out quickly that stopping to help each other simply led to nothing getting done, and so they agreed to work independently, dealing with the tickling as best they could themselves. The gemstones did seem to favor harassing Ishtar quite a bit, however. Fujimaru would often look back from more fruitless sifting through what seemed like a never-ending cascade of more and more multicolored, polished gemstones, and see that she had several of them buzzing around her like insects. When she was down on her hands and knees, they would roll over her bare soles, and the thinner ones would thread their forms between her toes, distracting her until she had to stop looking, sit upright, and toss each and every one of them into the ocean - she’d explained to Fujimaru that this at least seemed to slow them down from returning, but there were too many to stop completely. Hugging her knees to her chest, giggling with laughter, then shrieking - as several underneath of her would start humming along the crack of her ass.

They seemed to favor spots like this for some reason, too. Making Ishtar dig into her own clothing, what little of it she wore, to retrieve the tormenting gemstones happened quite a bit, and though she glared that blushing, angry tsundere glare when Fujimaru stared through an entire sequence of plucking several ticklishly buzzing gems, she didn’t launch into her usual tirade. That, more than anything, showed how much this was taking a toll on her. The light was starting to fade, too, and all they had to go by was an ephemeral, flickering firelight that danced and flared as fires do, making their eyes play tricks on them, making it harder to see anything, and now Fujimaru worried: what if they missed the gem in the darkness? For that matter, why was there firelight?

On the short rocky cliff overlooking the beach, only about ten or so feet above the gem-strewn surface, there she was: BB, sitting with her legs dangling over the side, silent but smirking, her eyes red like the firelight. This time she was wearing her entire outfit, the red-lined black bat-wing cloak spread out to either side of her as she sat, the campfire flickering its poor, meager light down on the two of them, crawling on hands and knees and sifting through an endless sea of riches. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m just enjoying the sight of the both of you pathetically crawling around in the dark, discarding riches that would make even the King of Heroes take note. Does it hurt, Ishtar, to have to throw away the gems you love so much all the time?” No cheery helpful kouhai mode tonight, it seemed…

“Grrr… you bitch! Just you wait, I’ll make you pay for this humiliation --!” That was as far as Ishtar got, half-rising to her feet before a literal snake made of gemstones started to coil up and around one leg, vibrating fiercely. Yet even that didn’t explain how Ishtar suddenly shrieked with laughter and fell to her knees, batting helplessly at the dozen or so gemstones somehow linked end-to-end, slithering up over her hip and making several tight loops around her waist, making her clutch desperately at her stomach. But the gems had already moved on, snaking back down through her thighs, then up against the crack of her ass, causing the goddess’ eyes to pop wide with indignation and arch her back, fingers scrambling to intercept the slithering snake of ticklish torment, but she was only able to seize the final gemstone and toss it into the ocean with a plip.

“Ishtar!” Fujimaru cried out, abandoning her own search to wade through the gems over to the madly giggling goddess, tears already showing in her eyes from the ticklish exhaustion she’d been subjected to. “BB, stop it!” The elusive trail of gemstones slithered up Ishtar’s spine, vibrating upon each and every sensitive bone in her back before splitting in half, some of the trail sliding under one armpit, and some the other. Fujimaru tried to grasp for one of these, missed - and gasped as the trail smoothly slid onto her arm, coiling around it, and then finding an entry point at the neck and dipping into the skintight suit, causing her to gasp and withdraw her hand, now frantically patting at her own body as she was dealing with a similar issue, except - while wearing her outfit, she couldn’t grab at the gems and throw them in the ocean!

As she looked down upon the two writhing, giggling females curled around one another, the malicious Moon Cancer drew patterns in the air with her fingertip. “Stop? But why? Right now it’s a toss-up as to whether or not people like seeing Jeanne Alter or Ishtar suffer more. I’m sure that everyone is absolutely loving the sight of watching you contort, bend over, and embarrass yourself by grabbing in all of those indecent places! Hehehe. Heheheheheehe! Senpai, if you’d just kept your hands to yourself, I wouldn’t have needed to punish you like this.” She didn’t elaborate, and Ishtar seemed to be too wrapped up in her own hysteria to add anything more, but something about what BB had just said made Fujimaru’s body shiver with a chill despite the tropical warmth. She stretched out a pleading hand up towards BB, but the wicked little AI was already gone.

---

The search in darkness had been fruitless, of course. The exertion of walking around in the heat, in spite of BB’s infinitely refreshing water and curry bread, had taken its toll on Fujimaru, and eventually she had crawled up on the ledge where BB had left the fire - no curry this time - and the tent. Fujimaru avoided the tent, using the blankets from inside to make herself a bed as best she could under the stars, and slept to the sound of Ishtar still trying to search for the gem.

At least when morning came she was in the same spot she had been before, and it wasn’t almost halfway through the day when she woke up. While she knew Heroic Spirits like Ishtar didn’t need sleep or food in the way that she did, leaving her to struggle through the night in the dim light to search for her gem made Fujimaru feel slightly guilty, but this was not a new situation for her - she had to recognize that her limits as a human kept her from imitating the feats of her Servants. There was nothing else to be done except to rise and get down on the beach and help Ishtar again, but the time this was taking was starting to feel problematic. Sure, this was a task that could be done by a human, but it was also finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. There had to be some trick to this, some method that was better than literal random searching while being constantly assaulted by tickle-torture gemstones.

A shriek from the beach startled Fujimaru out of her reverie, and she was greeted by the sight of Ishtar clutching both hands over her navel, kicking her feet in the air, and letting out a keening squeal of laughter. “Nooo-hoooho-hHAHAHAHAHAHAHA NO NONOOOOHOOOO GET OUT GET OUHUUUUUUUTTTTT!” she wailed, looking for all the world like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum as she rolled about on the gemstone surface, sinking slightly as her gyrations caused the gems to shift. Fujimaru raced her way to Ishtar’s side, stumbling through the uneven ground, and then knelt beside Ishtar and tried to soothe the Archer, who was laughing hopelessly, little ticklish tears in her eyes.

“Let me see, Ishtar! I’ll help, just --” Taking one of her hands and moving it away from her navel, Fujimaru could get a clearer picture of what ailed Ishtar, and the sight of it was… bizarre, to say the least. A small, translucent barrier had somehow been stretched precisely over her navel, and within that barrier, buried deep within her navel, was a gemstone. Smaller than most, it seemed also to be covered with tiny, tiny protrusions on all sides, and its vibration rolled those protrusions around in the depths of Ishtar’s bellybutton. The barrier prevented it from falling out, and also prevented the goddess from reaching in, leaving her in a state of helpless, ticklish torment that Fujimaru’s mind raced to counteract. Ishtar’s own power was sealed in the frustratingly hidden gemstone, and her own magecraft generally didn’t stack up against anything that a Servant conjured, much less an expert in cheating like BB. The only solution felt like finding Ishtar’s sealed power, but now she would have to look by herself.

“Just try to bear it, okay, Ishtar? I’m going to find the gemstone with your sealed power, and then we’ll get out of this, don’t you worry.” With that, Fujimaru had to leave Ishtar to her ticklish agony, the squeals of laughter in the background as she sifted hurriedly through gems. It was mentally taxing, trying to keep an eye out for something that stood out in the sea of multicolored gems without knowing what she was looking for. Moreover, Ishtar’s laughter was a little distracting, because normally it would have been fun to watch her writhe around and tumble down a couple dozen pegs. Was that the key thread here? Had BB picked Servants that were fun to tease? It would certainly fit Jeanne Alter, and Passionlip too, but she couldn’t really imagine that Skadi or Sheba had done anything to really incite that kind of reaction.

Ishtar’s navel was a point of severe weakness for her, yet perversely she kept it fully on display at all times, a choice she was now regretting. Eventually her fingers stopped pressing at the magecraft barrier sealing the vibrating stone inside of her navel, and just splayed out helplessly, staring at the sky and laughing. Her mind wandered, trying to grasp hold of an idea to provide some sort of grounding, some sort of haven she could make use of to endure the ticklish sensations pouring out from that small point in her belly. The little protrusions vibrated with cruel, robotic relentlessness over the overworked nerve endings, causing her to bubble up and overflow with laughter no matter how hard she tried to fight it. Teary-eyed, her long, dark hair splayed out on the gemstones behind her, she knew she had to look like a mess, but she couldn’t wipe the big, stupid grin from her face, and the dam continually leaked to let laughter spurt out in spite of her best efforts!

Think! BB. She would… she was going to completely destroy that scheming little bitch once this was over! Desperately, Ishtar tried to hang onto the idea of blasting that smirk off of her face, to see her expression turn to dismay as the full power of An Gal Ta Ki Gal Se crashed down onto her and wiped her out along with the whole twisted Singularity. Whose idea was it to craft a Singularity just for some perverted, self-serving purpose like this anyway? Who would come up with strange, messed-up rules like forcing everyone into swimwear or otherwise revealing outfits and have them perform some strange, arcane task that fed into a grand diabolical scheme in secret?

The laughter was making her thoughts waver, constantly pulling her back to the ticklish torment in her navel. Again her feet kicked and flailed against the smooth surface of the gems, her anger trying to overcome the sense of ticklish helplessness that threatened to overtake her. Had BB gotten this many gems and come up with this scheme just to twist the knife even deeper by turning her precious gemstones into her enemies? That was so warped it was perfectly in character for the troublemaking kouhai. Even that golden, shining gem that Fujimaru was holding in front of her face, shouting frantically like she was trying to get Ishtar’s attention, even that was her enemy, so beautiful and yet so cruel as she reached up to take it in her hand like she wanted to crush it between her fingers.

The suddenness of it startled Fujimaru. That shining, golden gemstone had to be it. It just had to be! There had been other gold-colored gems but none that had that particular quality, and when Ishtar grasped it in her hand, the barrier in her navel vaporizing, the gemstone within ejected with such force that it shattered upon the nearby stone cliff that flanked the beach. In the blink of an eye Maanna, the Boat of Heaven that didn’t look anything like a boat but more an enormous blue bow with gold trim that stood taller than Ishtar herself, had materialized out of the air, and Ishtar put her hand on it, shooting up into the sky without a word but with fire in her eyes and a shriek on her lips.

High up into the sky she rose, the gemstones trembling as they felt the pull of her magic, and then forming a great funnel twisting up into the sky towards Ishtar and where she had parked herself, a moment of calm before the storm - then, having apparently sighted her target, let loose her fury. A veritable storm of streaking bolts of light shot forth from her pointed fingertip, bombarding an area beyond the visible horizon but making enough sound and fury for Fujimaru to know that she meant business. More than likely, she had spotted wherever BB was at the moment and unleashed a furious attack on her, but as the Master of Chaldea got to her feet and raced for the campsite, she called up in vain to Ishtar:

“Ishtar, wait! That’s not going to work! If you do that, I’m sure BB is going to use it as an excuse to cheat!” This much Fujimaru was fairly certain of. BB was nothing if not predictable, and if this was a ‘game’, then she was the final boss, and would act like such, showing up to taunt the hapless heroes, but also not directly attacking until the dramatic climax. Her words didn’t reach Ishtar over the sound of the goddess’ own fury and the continuing detonations of wherever she was firing, but someone else’s words did, filling the air as if spoken from beyond the clouds in a booming, authoritative voice.

“That’s completely against the rules, Senpai!” Fujimaru couldn’t see BB, but as the sky darkened and her voice thundered down from somewhere above, she knew it was going to be bad. “The point of this game isn’t to fight. It’s a puzzle solver! I’m going to have to penalize you, Senpai. But don’t feel too bad! I told you that you were going to fail, and the Goddess of Futility here can only blame herself for losing her temper!” Ishtar’s bombardment had ceased, and she was clinging onto her flying craft for dear life as the winds high above the island suddenly whipped up into a frenzy, sending her looping and careening wildly through the air, spiraling back down towards the ground.

There was an uncomfortable sensation of being off-balance, like the ground itself had been yanked, hard. Like an earthquake, except just one shake and then it was done, but still hard enough that Fujimaru fell to her knees from it. But when she looked up, she realized something had changed drastically - the sun, which had just been at its zenith moments ago, was setting! Ishtar was nowhere to be seen in the sky, and as Fujimaru took off running in the direction she had seen Ishtar going down, BB’s voice thundered down at her, no less mocking for the reverberating quality it now possessed: “I’ve taken a couple of hours from your allotted time, Senpai! Make sure you follow the rules next time, and don’t let this little hothead go raring off on her own~ It really won’t end well for you if you do! Make the best of the little time you have left, Se~n~pa~i… hehehehe…!”

By the time Fujimaru had located Ishtar, it was dark, and the foul-tempered Archer was cross, stamping her foot on the ground with frustration. So very little progress had been made, and all that time spent freeing Ishtar was about to mean nothing when BB reset the game in a few hours. There was little time left to do anything except come up with a better strategy for next time, and in that time, they discussed the traps Fujimaru had already seen, brainstormed possible ways to free the others, and tried to figure out if there was any better way to locate the sealing stone in that beach of gems.

But, soon enough, complete darkness fell. And it continued to fall. Darker, darker, and darker still, until it seemed that she could even hear Ishtar’s voice only from far away. Until finally, even that was gone, and for what felt like an uncomfortably long time, Fujimaru wasn’t even on an island in the pitch blackness and silence, but floating somewhere in space…

The sight of the rising sun was heartening, but to find herself back on the grassy hill in the center of the island, a smugly smirking BB raised up atop her pillar of tentacles before her, reminded her of just what was at stake.

“Time to try again, Senpai.”

---

LOOP 2

“Graaaaaaaaaghhh!”

A fist wreathed in black flames shattered a translucent barrier. A barrier that was all the way at the bottom of this accursed crater. Jeanne Alter’s fury was boiling over again, and for the first time in a few hours, she felt like she could sustain it. BB’s little time-rewinding crap had reset her physical stamina, so while Jeanne was aware of how much time had actually passed since this shitshow had started, her body felt fresh like it had at the very start, which was a good thing. This piece of shit trap had pissed her off like nobody’s business, and by the time the time limit had run out, she was still a dozen or so barriers short of getting free, on top of the fact that she had been so exhausted by punching through them and being tickled that it had taken her longer and longer to get through each one.

It was just like BB to come up with some crap that pissed her off to the max. She could take out her anger on these breakable barriers, and that helped a little bit, but knowing that they were designed to tire her out, and the fact that breaking them DID tire her out, just pissed her off even more. So now here she was, back at the bottom of this hellhole, but at least she had her strength back. The whole point of this shit was to learn, right? The key was to break through each one in a single hit. To put as much force behind each blow so that it would shatter, and not trap her as they did when not broken immediately. So she needed to think of it a little differently. The black crap that was slowly filling up the crater didn’t move very fast, and the tickling tentacles didn’t attack her if she wasn’t stuck - she’d found out that she could take a rest as long as she had enough space between her and the black goo.

Her katanas weren’t very good for delivering a forceful, shattering blow against a flat, solid object, so she had given up on using them. Methodical. That was the way to go. A solid, hammering right, shattering the first barrier. Stepping right into the next punch, a devastating left jab, and another crushed barrier. A few moments to breathe, and then a spinning roundhouse kick. It was satisfying at least to watch them explode, but Jeanne had learned also to vary the kind of attack she used, to avoid wearing out any one part of her body. Taking a few steps back, she ran at the next wall, and then jumped into the air, kicking with both feet to slam the heels crushingly against the --

“What the FUCK?!”

The surface of the wall had just… opened up before her feet struck, and then closed again immediately around her ankles, causing her glorious march of destruction to come to a screeching halt as she fell on her ass, then hit the ground with her legs stuck in the wall. A malicious chuckle nearby instantly drew a fiery rage out of the Berserker (even though she was mad enough to still be an Avenger) and her head swiveled around to spot BB, come to mock her again as she had done several times already. This time, she was on the opposite side of the barrier that Jeanne Alter had just tried to break, and with a smirk, started to tug on the red legging, pulling it neatly off of her foot and tossing it aside so both of her pale feet were bare and on the other side of the barricade, a state of affairs that engendered both volcanic rage and icy shock. “You bitch--!!” she growled, sitting up and swinging at the barrier, but the position of her body meant that she could barely put any force into the swing, and it just glanced feebly off of that translucent white surface.

“Awwww, is someone feeling a little frustrated~? Mad at seeing that she had to come aaaaaaaaaall the way back to the start and all of that cursing, screaming, swearing and laughing for the past few days was all for nothing? Hehehehehehe.” As BB spoke, black tentacles started to grow out of the barrier’s surface. Black tentacles that were absolutely covered in wicked-looking red spines. “But don’t worry. This time around I’m going to save you that feeling of awful frustration! That twisting, grinding feeling in the pit of your stomach that things just aren’t going your way! This time… you’re just going to suffer for amusement!”

The underside of the black tentacle touched to the base of Jeanne’s toes, and began to stroke its way back and forth against them, pressing them up against the barrier to pin them in place and stroke the spines, feeling like dozens of tiny little claws, along the sensitive skin. Jeanne’s head flew backwards, her mouth screwed shut, her eyes squeezed closed, her skin reddening and her expression twisted into one of barely-repressed laughter. “That’s what we waaaaaaaaant,” BB giggled mischievously. “Juuuuust the perfect expression. Oh, it’s too perfect! Hehehehehe. All that pent-up laughter that just wants to come out, but you’re too proud to surrender even though you know there’s no way you can win! That’s the expression I love, Jeanne! That useless fight against the inevitable - that struggle you’re doomed to lose but stubbornly persist in anyway!”

It felt like an earthquake was building up inside of Jeanne Alter. She wanted to absolutely tear BB apart with her hands and her words both. But that feeling of little claws scritching under her toes - the feeling she couldn’t stop, couldn’t curl her toes against, couldn’t use her other foot to cover for - was hellishly ticklish. If she so much as opened her mouth to ream out BB, she would instead laugh like a ticklish little bitch, and the thought of that was absolutely unbearable. So many times before she had been caught, tickled, and broken her way free, but this position was making it hard to apply any kind of meaningful force to the barrier whatsoever. She had to think of a way out of this, but it was damn impossible to think with that stupid AI and her stupid tentacles tickling her own stupid feet…!

“Ah, ah, now~ None of that~” BB teased whimsically, as she caught Jeanne’s foot trying to somehow nudge the tickling tentacle aside. As punishment, it was treated to its own pinning, scritching tentacle, meaning that now all ten of her toes were pressed up against the translucent barrier, struggling with the tentacles pinning them up there, and trying desperately to deal with the sensations of so many scratching little claws underneath of her toes!

“Fhhh-hhhnhhnnhh---ghhnnhhhfhhhh…!” she growled, but even that growl was within an ace of just dissolving into helpless laughter. The slow, methodical stroke, stroke, stroke against her sensitive skin was sending waves of frantic tickle sensation racing up through her legs. No longer was her mouth firmly pressed shut, but her lips stretched wide in a stupid grin, and her teeth clenched, her only defense against a humiliating howl of laughter! This had been happening over and over again. No more! She was fresh, still had all her stamina, wasn’t going to just bust out laughing at this first… first…! Jeanne’s eyes shot wide open, cheeks puffing out.

Something was stroking under the balls of her feet. That little divot right where the sole met the ball, in the center, a tentacle had started to scratch that with its long, tickly body, delivering slow and mechanical strokes that couldn’t be more than an inch long. Just fucking focusing on that one spot! It was utter torture, and Jeanne’s fists balled up, slamming into the dirt to either side of her, her upper body twisting and writhing and curling up like she was doing sit-ups. She tried to keep the presence of mind to deal a few punches to the barrier, ineffective though they were, but eventually she had to relax her muscles. “F-hahha-hhhhhckkkk!” Shit, shit, shit. That was close. Too close.

“Was that some laughter I heard~? Hmmmm? Or were you just being foulmouthed as usual?” This was too easy, and so fun! BB’s snarky little remark seemed to offer Jeanne Alter a way out, a way to claim she hadn’t been laughing, just cursing. Letting her hold onto that hope just a little longer, drawing out this long, extended period of futile resistance, was absolutely golden. That false hope, the ability to lie to herself and to say that, no, she hadn’t given up yet… it played right into BB’s hands. This sort of struggle couldn’t be scripted, and by its very nature couldn’t last forever, but if Jeanne could be convinced to draw it out…

The little shaking as tiny giggles escaped her, the silly, useless grin, the expression of sheer ticklish suffering on her face as she fought to delay the inevitable. “Pfffft...hnhnh… nnhhhh…. Fahhacking…” This was unbearable. That little fucking tentacle which just kept running its touch over that one spot on her one foot was… was…! It was like the perfect combination of scratching, putting friction onto the skin and signaling her nerve endings over and over again that she was being tickled. Small, individual sensations, dozens of them, working that same spot relentlessly. Each wave built higher than the last, each one seeming like it would breach the frantically built-up wall, leaking in a dozen places, but holding, just barely.

She hadn’t even realized she was holding her breath until the tickling on her arch paused for just a moment. Only on the right foot, the one that had been focused on. The stroking along the base of her toes kept them pinned back, but now Jeanne could feel something additional on that foot. Something slick, warm, slippery being rubbed into the flesh. Fucking lotion. Fucking hell. Not this again! She took a deep breath, holding it, trying to steel herself for the inevitable torture of that stroking bunch of clawtips reaching into her vulnerable spot. The muscles she could tense in her leg and her foot, she tensed, hoping against hope that she could somehow, in some way, build up enough resistance to stop herself from simply crumbling on the spot!

“Got~cha~” Before Jeanne could wonder what the hell BB was on about, the surprise attack struck. Not the slow, methodical, and horrible tickling on her now-lotioned foot, but what instead felt like a thousand stiff bristles raking against the other foot out of absolutely nowhere! And, just as BB had hoped, that broke her. A helpless cry of laughter subsumed the angry howl that she’d wanted to let out, and once the dam had broken, there was no fixing it. Laughter gushed forth in great, uncontrollable waves - the beating of her fists intensified on the ground, on the barrier, flailing in the air to no purpose whatsoever, anger mixed in with laughter in the perfect combination for the connoisseur of Jeanne Alter’s suffering.

“Fuuh-haha-HAHAHAHHAHA FUCK YOU FUCK FUCKAHAHAHAHAH HAHHAAH STOPPHAHAA THAHAHA AHAHAH-THATHHAH THAT SHHIIHIHIIIT!” she screamed, as the original tickling tentacle on her lotioned foot rejoined the fray, now scrubbing vigorously at its small ticklish spot, in contrast to the new tentacle which brushed in broad horizontal strokes across the entire sole, feeling like so many individual bristles attacking each millimeter of ticklish flesh individually, and all at once. The surprise of the sensation, the intensity of it, the way she’d built up her defenses for the wrong thing and let BB trick her - it was infuriating, and she couldn’t stop laughing! “NOOOOOO! NOHOHOHOHOOOOHO STOP STOPPIT BIHIIHIHIIIIITCH!”

“Is someone a little ticklish? You know that this is absolutely delicious, don’t you, Jeanne? Tough, angry, tsundere queen Jeanne Alter who everyone loooooves to see suffer to the extreme has ticklish feet! And nobody would ever dare try because they’d fear getting their head twisted right off of their shoulders, but now… Now, you can’t do a damn thing to stop this ticklish torture. Does it make you mad? Are you salty, Jeanne? Do you wish you could punch me right in the face right now, hmmmmm? Or are you more mad at yourself…” BB’s voice dropped to a malicious, condescending whisper. “...are you more mad at yourself for being such a weak… little… tickle…

...Bitch.”

BB seemed to know just how to get under Jeanne’s skin - the last word brought such a howl of indignation in reply that for a few brief seconds the laughter couldn’t even be heard. Yet there was no way for her to escape the reality of her feet, pinned in place, oiled up, tickled ruthlessly. That dragged her back down into BB’s hell of sensitivity, pulling her down deeper and further into the abyss from which there was no escape, only more embarrassingly effective tickle torture. “Do you hate it how I can turn your body against you so easily, Jeanne? Is it frustrating how being tickled like this just makes you sooooooooooo helpless? You must be used to everyone cowering in fear before your towering flames of hatred, your all-consuming rage… reduced now to nothing more than a little flickering ember just because your feet are getting ti~ck~le~d~”

Jeanne Alter let out screaming, hysterical waves of laughter. “SHUHAHAHAHAH SHUT UP SHUT HAHAHAH SHUT UP SHUHUHUUUUT UP!!” she howled. It wasn’t hard to do because it did tickle that much, but besides that she was just trying to drown out BB’s honeyed, poisonous words. It was like BB could get inside of her head with that shit and that was the last thing she needed right now was that godawful, fucking teasing! If it wasn’t that, then it was those hellish tentacles all over her feet that had barely fucking moved. They would shift positions sometimes, change the angles they came from, sometimes move a little faster or slower, but they always kept up the attack on those same four points. Why couldn’t she get used to it? Why wouldn’t it stop getting worse! Why were her feet so fucking ticklish?! This was torture! It was horrible! She had to break the wall and get out of this as fast as she could, but this position was making it so hard for her to hit the barrier with any sort of force at all!

Worse still, what would she do after this? Already, the thought of kicking any more walls and getting her feet tickled again made her normally steely, single-minded resolve quiver. She couldn’t go through this again! It wasn’t even over and she couldn’t do anything but think about how to make this never happen again, ever. Ever! BB hadn’t even said anything for the past minute or so, but Jeanne was so far inside of her own head that the thoughts whirled around after one another in an endless loop of teasing torment. “Stooo-HHAHHA-AHAHHAHA AHAHHAH AHHAHAH LEEHEHHE LET ME GOO-HOOO-HOOOOO! LET GOOOHAHAHAH STOPPPPPP PLEHEHEHEEEEEZE!” Even hearing her own voice beg so shamelessly like that was maddening, but that rage just couldn’t be turned into the sort of sheer destructive power that she needed! Damn BB and her pervert trap island! The only thing Jeanne could do was to gather her strength, sit up with her chest against her thighs, and flail at the wall with her fists! It was, slowly, somehow, having an effect, but it was taking so long to make any progress!

“STOP! STOP STOP STAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH STOPPIT STOP AHAHAHAHAHAH AHHAHAHAH HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAHAHAHHA!!” Desperately her fists wailed upon the barrier. Jeanne Alter was so absorbed in her own suffering that she’d failed to notice BB was already gone, leaving her to sink deeper into an abyss of her own making. The tentacles never failed to tickle her, a constant screaming tickle sensation in her soles that she couldn’t ignore, her toes pressing back against the restraining tentacles, then flinching back ticklishly as the action just intensified the torment she felt. Having her feet stretched out like this with the toes pushed back to expose the soles for the other two tentacles was pure agony. Never again, never again, never again! She grunted the words under her breath, in between screams of laughter, holding onto them like a frail reed of hope in a blizzard.

Never again would she fall victim to this kind of trap with its horrible scrubbing bristles against her left foot, covering almost the entire sole from heel to ball and just ruthlessly swishing back and forth. Never again would she let her right foot have that little spot underneath the ball of her foot take so much ticklish abuse. Never again would she use her feet to try and destroy one of these walls! No matter what. She could deal with having her armpits tickled, sides, boobs, ribs, hips, ass, thighs, everywhere else that had been targeted on her first attempt to escape this hellhole. But she couldn’t ever let this happen again. Not ever. Never, never, never, never, no!

Jeanne felt her position shift, ever so slightly, and saw that, finally, she had caused some visible cracking in the wall, starting it on the path to crumbling for good. Frantic, desperate strength lent itself to her blows, and when, at very, very long last the wall came down, the tentacles disappeared. Jeanne immediately tugged her legs back towards herself, sitting upon them in a Japanese style, her soles faced away from the horrible barrier that was a few feet in front of her. Finally. FINALLY. How long had that even been? Like, not even that much time? Or had it been? Finally she could catch her breath, rubbing her feet slightly against one another, to feel what it was like to not be tickled.

The creeping black good had gotten perilously close to Jeanne during her ordeal, and with her soles currently tucked underneath of her body, facing backwards, it was too good a chance. The light skittering up each sole, done by a featherlight tendril extended from the main mass of the blackness, wasn’t even close to the intensity of the scrubbing tentacles she had just experienced. But the surprise and shock was everything that BB could have hoped for, even though she was no longer there - Jeanne Alter screamed, eyes wide with shock, and in her body’s frantic, panicked attempt to escape the sensation behind her, stumbled over her own legs, tripped, and rolled into the base of the next barrier, facing the encroaching black goo with eyes wide with terror.

There she lay, curled up in a defensive ball, watching the black goop as she panted heavily, taking another minute for the shock to wear off and her breathing to return to normal, as she became aware of just how weak and defensive a position she was in right now. Unsteadily, she got to her feet, and a growl rose in her throat - Jeanne Alter all but saw blood, a red haze in her vision as she screamed and punched through the wall, envisioning BB’s face at the spot where her fist landed.

A thousand deaths were too good for that insane AI. Just beating her once almost wasn’t good enough anymore. She needed to suffer. Deep in Jeanne’s heart, the raging inferno of her desire for revenge - the hallmark of the Avenger class - flared back to life. Revenge. She would have it.

And if nothing else, she had plenty of time to think.

---

It had occurred to Fujimaru that there was still one Servant she hadn’t even seen yet. Ticking them off her fingers, she counted. Jeanne Alter, Passionlip, Scathach-Skadi, the Queen of Sheba, Ishtar, BB of course, and… Astolfo. She hadn’t seen Astolfo at all, but then recalled that she had only traveled down five of the six possible paths. Astolfo must be at the end of the sixth path, but in all honesty, Fujimaru was hard-pressed to come up with something that he could do to help them out. One Servant had to be rescued last, after all, and that one would technically have no ability to help the others, unless there was more than one possible solution for different problems? That was something that she hadn’t considered before, but he had to be saved anyway, so she might as well take the time to go and see how BB had trapped him.

As she walked along the path that seemed to be rising slowly above the general vegetation that obscured sightlines on this goddamned rock in the middle of nowhere, Fujimaru considered the current shape of the puzzle as she understood it. The clearest connection so far was Passionlip and her vast destructive power clearing out the barricades that impeded Jeanne Alter’s progress out of the crater. Against something that did not move, Passionlip’s Trash & Crush would overwhelm anything that even BB could put up in her way. The question was how to help her escape the whirlpool while resisting the effects of her Masochistic Nature. Actually, maybe Astolfo might help there - he was oblivious to that sort of thing sometimes, and didn’t have a mean bone in his body. Jeanne would probably have no trouble jumping up to grab Skadi’s wand, and Ishtar might be able to deal with the monkeys trapping Sheba? But the question of how to find Ishtar’s gem in any reasonable amount of time still nagged at her, and she had no idea what trouble Astolfo might be in. It would probably be best to start working this out after she got a look at that, and then work out the details afterwards. Sheba’s purpose might become clearer once she saw that, after all. It was like a lot of adventure games in this vein - finding the place to start was often the most difficult task, and once you obtained your new skills or items, the puzzles you could solve with them became clearer. She’d proven that Ishtar’s puzzle could be solved - the trick now was doing it faster.

It was not a surprise to hear Astolfo’s tinkling laughter floating from up ahead. It was a pleasant sort of sound, although knowing Astolfo he might be laughing quite hard, just without much in the way of volume. But, at long last Fujimaru came to the top of a grassy hill, and got her first glimpse at what the legendarily airheaded Rider was up to. His long pink hair was unbraided, twintails flowing down his back, and rather than his usual attire he had on a pair of black bunny ears and sleeves that covered his arms from wrist to bicep, a little black bow and collared shirt except… no, it was just a skimpy black tank top that covered his chest and left everything else exposed down to his waist, where a useless belt circled around and barely held a tiny skirt onto his hips, and his legs were sheathed in black leggings with his white boots kicked off somewhere else. Fujimaru blinked. Wait, wasn’t that the casino bunny look from his Saber outfit that hadn’t been released on the NA servers yet?

It wasn’t as if the choice of costume was hard to understand. Astolfo was seated rather comfortably in the lap of a lamia, a snake woman who had her lower body coiled around his legs, and his head cushioned into the pale white flesh of her breasts, looking like he was having a good time! It was enough to almost make Fujimaru fly straight off the handle. The snake woman had his left wrist grasped in the tip of her tail, but allowed his right hand to remain free, whispering soft teases into his ear and nibbling gently on it as her six hands enjoyed the vast expanse of exposed flesh left by Astolfo’s costume. “Hehehehe… hehehe… oh, Master, hehehe, hiya! I diheheheh didn’t expect to seheheheh see you here! Hehehehe…” The lamia holding Astolfo seemed to ignore Fujimaru completely, and there were actually two of them - the other was seated across from Astolfo, and between them was a large, flat stone warming in the sun, with a bunch of marked rectangles spread out evenly on its surface. The lamia holding Astolfo in her lap tickled her fingernails up along his sides, gently teasing up to his ribs, scritch-scritching against his exposed skin and making him squeal and rock back and forth with giggling, before he nestled back against her, still giggling. She hummed softly in reply, and Fujimaru could feel her blood pressure rising.

The lamia sitting across from them turned over two of the rectangles to reveal a different set of patterns, and then collected both of them and turned over another pair, with different patterns. Once that was done, Astolfo took his turn in reply, turning over one pattern that matched the previous pattern his opponent had turned over… and then turned over a completely random rectangle which didn’t match at all, and then turned both back over face-down and went back to squirming helplessly in the lamia’s grasp! The orange-haired Master nearly went nuclear right then and there. Seeing the other lamia turn over two matching patterns and then stack them neatly on her side of the table, and then turn over another pair of rectangles. At this point, it was obvious to anyone that they were playing a game of Memory, except that Astolfo was too addled by the tickling to even pay attention to what was going on! “Nuuhuhu, hehehe, hehehe, not that spot, come on!” he pleaded, similar to the way Passionlip did in that all his protest resulted in was a desire to tickle ‘that spot’.

In this case, the fingernails had focused on the left side of his ribs, the side where his hand was restrained by her tail, and when his right hand flitted across the side of his slender ribcage to try and protect his ticklish spot, the fingers just danced away, tickling whatever spot he wasn’t covering. Up into his armpit, and when he covered that, down to his hip and the lower part of his ribcage. Over and over this went on, and Fujimaru realized it had been Astolfo’s turn to move for several minutes now and he hadn’t flipped any cards. It didn’t even seem like he realized it was his turn! On the one hand, this seemed uncharacteristic for Astolfo - he usually didn’t get sucked into traps of feminine charm (if anything, his own rather feminine charm sucked in the ladies). Had this been someone like King David or Blackbeard, a crane would probably have been insufficient to pry them out of the lamia’s lap, but Astolfo was a different story.

Was the tickling disrupting his ability to resist the lamia, too? On the other hand, Astolfo was such a notorious space case that being tickled might have just pushed him over the himbo cliff to the point that he was just nonfunctional, period. He never showed a talent for any kind of long-range planning or concentration, and just relied on his instincts to get him through difficult situations. To be completely fair, it usually worked for him, but it might be that having those fingernails scratch in his exposed armpit scrambled his natural instincts, forcing him to try and think things through, which would never work. It seemed to occur to him that he needed to take his turn in the game, and tried to reach out with his right hand to flip over a rectangle-card-thing, but the lamia giggled in his ear, and started to tickle him faster, making Astolfo squeal and retract his hand back to cover his ticklish body!

The lamia sitting across from Astolfo simply waited with a patient smile. Of course she would be smug about it, playing against a ridiculously handicapped opponent who probably wouldn’t even notice if she cheated. The idea was just to waste time, and if Astolfo never even took his turn, because of those fingernails dancing all over his slim torso, which was honestly really kind of distracting and it was fun to watch him get wrecked, then there was no danger of him freeing himself. He probably didn’t have the presence of mind to realize he should be offended by the fact that this was all it took to keep him in place and at BB’s whim, whereas the others had had elaborate obstacles constructed for them designed to cause repeated failure and frustration. The flip side of it was, at least Fujimaru had found the place she’d been supposed to start. This ‘trap’ was so ridiculously easy for even an ordinary human to clear that now Fujimaru was annoyed by the fact that she’d managed to visit the easiest one last! She hadn’t even made it here on the first set of days, and wasted a lot of time.

Since he hadn’t been able to even reach out to take his turn yet, Fujimaru did it for him. She flipped over a pair of cards she’d remembered seeing, grinned smugly at the lamia, and then collected the pair and flipped another, but to no result. Hm. The lamia didn’t even seem to react to her presence. Were they just constructs or illusions? Fujimaru brushed at her sides slightly and watched the board closely. No, there had been a reaction to her joining the game, actually - Astolfo’s right arm had been somehow coiled up and joined his left arm, and now he had both hands pulled up and behind his head, behind the lamia’s neck, and snugly coiled around to prevent them from moving at all. Now there was nothing at all to interfere with the tickling, and his persistent, burbling giggling distracted Fujimaru as the lamia’s claws scritched up into his armpits, teasing at the sensitive hollows, and sneaking into his pathetically small top to tickle his chest and his nipples.

Fujimaru stared at the board as the lamia took her turn and didn’t turn over any matching pairs, but her second card flip had revealed a pattern that Fujimaru recalled seeing, and flipped over that card pair with a bit of flair! “Hehehe. Hmhmhmhm.” That was a smug laugh of victory, right? Not a weird reaction to somehow feeling what seemed like ghostly echoes of fingernails underneath of her tight-fitting Chaldea Combat Uniform. Now, she had to do this next turn blind, but -- oh, hey, hadn’t she seen that one before? It was right… there! Yes! “Hehehehe. Heeeee ehehehehehehe… hehehe… hehehe…” Smug, kind of villain-like laughs. It actually sounded sort of like BB’s smug laughter when she was busy pulling off some kind of evil scheme. Fujimaru got to take another turn, and -- “Wh-whaha what the hell is…?” She turned around, to look at Astolfo behind her still being tickled, rather helplessly laughing and squirming in the coils of the snake-woman, totally unable to stop her lowest set of hands from sneaking underneath the waist of that tiny skirt and…

“God damn it, BB,” Fujimaru hissed under her breath, using her hands to support her increasingly giggly and unsteady form. She should have known! Should have known better than to think that BB would make ANYTHING as easy as it appeared, and she’d been so eager to jump in that she’d gotten herself mixed up in this. It felt like the more cards she collected, the more she felt what Astolfo did, and since he was being super useless and not resisting anything to the slightest degree, that meant Fujimaru was feeling the ticklish torment all over her own body with pretty much nothing to stop it! There was nothing for it but to keep going forward - this was more difficult than she’d thought it would be and just as frustrating as everything else, but also way more straightforward. She didn’t have to guess at the goal here, just concentrate!

The good thing was the sensation didn’t intensify unless she had picked up an extra pair of cards. The bad thing was that, to win, obviously she needed to do exactly that, and she’d jumped into this game halfway through, so Fujimaru was at a disadvantage against the lamia. The only fortunate thing that she could identify was that her opponent, whatever or whoever it was, didn’t have some kind of photographic memory or a computer’s perfect record of each card as it was flipped. Was it some kind of simulation of a lamia? Whatever it was, it was an opponent that Fujimaru could defeat! This was totally doable. One hundred percent doable. She totally could…

“Grah-ahhaha-ahahahahahahahah! Dahha-ahHAHAHAHahahhammit!” Well, shit. Fujimaru found herself, some time later, slumped over the flat stone they were using as a playing table, grasping weakly as the lamia finished up the last card pair to end the game in victory, while she felt fully the effects of Astolfo’s ribs being tickled, the presses of those fingernails deep into the gap between each rib, her own laughter mirroring his own as they suffered in tandem. Though his laughter did not settle, Fujimaru felt herself grow calmer as the sensations faded. All of the cards had been replaced on the flat stone, and a new game started. With zero card pairs collected, Fujimaru returned to her senses, and caught her breath as the lamia turned over two cards to begin the game, getting a completely unmatched pair, and passing it to Fujimaru’s turn. “Hah… phew… hmhm… mmhhh. All right. Now that I know what I’m getting into, and I’m not starting off like four matches behind, I can totally do this. Wait, shit.” She hadn’t been paying attention. Not an auspicious start!

In the end, it took another three games for Fujimaru to win. Every time she got close, the lamia would start to tickle Astolfo more intently and in more invasive places, and that would make it harder to focus, and she’d end up losing by one pair or something. Not only did being tickled distract Fujimaru from concentrating, the desire to look back and see Astolfo getting tickled had ended up disrupting her concentration a few times. Watching those nails dance on his slim torso, and casually scritch up into his tiny top or sneak into his skirt, was kind of enchanting. Astolfo himself was unusually subdued during the whole ordeal, which really did make it feel like they were using the tickling to suppress his resistance to charms and keep him docile, and when Fujimaru finally won the game nine pairs to seven, both lamia faded from view and Astolfo tumbled to the ground, blinking as if he were only just coming to his senses.

“Oh, heya, Master! What are we doing? I kind of get the feeling I’ve been here for a while, but I’m a little hazy on the details! But that’s okay. No matter what’s going on, your super-duper reliable Astolfo will help you out!” Fujimaru had her doubts about that, and wasn’t sure exactly what help Astolfo would be. The best she could come up with was that he was an extra body to help sift through Ishtar’s mountain of gems. Maybe he would be able to help Skadi out with her climb, too? Astolfo was at least decently athletic even if he was an airhead, so that might be a possibility. And there was his (hoped-for) resistance to Passionlip’s alluring tickle suffering, though Fujimaru doubted that even his Monstrous Strength would be sufficient to dislodge Passionlip from her whirlpool.

The sun had moved a disappointing amount in the sky, too. It looked like it was late afternoon. “Come on,” she said, making her decision. “We’ll have to do this sooner rather than later. Let’s go and try to find Ishtar’s gem. I’ll explain on the way.”

---

The sun was setting by the time they had reached Ishtar’s gemstone beach, and found the goddess laying on her stomach, throwing a full-on tantrum as she kicked her feet and pounded her fists on the gems, scattering them across the beach, and throwing a few into the ocean before she let out a whiny ticklish laugh and rolled onto her back, kicking her feet into the air as a pair of gems rolled across her soles like pumice stones. That could definitely be a problem, Fujimaru realized as they walked down onto the beach. Technically speaking, Ishtar had been dealing with intermittent tickles for, what, four days now? Servant or no, that had to be physically and mentally draining, and she was probably entitled to a tantrum. Especially since her task wasn’t to sit there and comfortably get tickled by a busty snake-woman while completely spacing out and forgetting the game you were supposed to be playing. Ishtar let out a shriek of laughter and sat up, pulling her right foot into her lap and fishing the gemstone out of the stirrup, then throwing it vehemently into the ocean, before sinking to her hands and knees and pounding her fists on the carpet of gems.

“Ishtar looks like she’s having a hard time, Master,” Astolfo observed with a blandly oblivious yet cheerful look on his face. The gems seemed unable to resist attacking the same spot again, and Ishtar had two more gems settle themselves into the exact same spot on the lower part of her sole, one hidden beneath the stirrup and one not, and in her fit of ticklishly frustrated wailing, Ishtar just flung her limbs everywhere rather than dislodge the ticklish vibrations right away. Astolfo stepped forward and called, one hand cupped around his mouth while the other hand waved: “Yahoo, Ishtar! Don’t worry, we’re here now!”

Fujimaru applied her palm directly to the forehead as, predictably, the realization that she wasn’t alone brought a complete turn in Ishtar’s personality. Taking the offending stones and flinging them into the ocean, she stalked across the uneven surface, approaching the pair with an indignant look on her face, albeit one marred by the fact that she still had a tickly blush and wasn’t quite fully recovered from her giggling. Moreover, while Ishtar might have been more comfortable with being candid when it was only Fujimaru, the presence of another Servant set off her towering tsundere pride. “Oh, look who it is! What did you do, come to stand around and watch me suffer for fun? You pervert! Don’t just sit there looking pretty - although you do definitely look pretty…” This last part was mumbled under her breath, but Astolfo was, thankfully, still completely oblivious. “But don’t just stand there! Help me look for the stupid gem so I can stop getting tickle-ehehe-HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEEEDDDD!”

Sometimes Fujimaru wondered if BB had imbued her natural tendency for embarrassing, teasing, and otherwise showing up at the exact worst moment into every single one of these traps, because in the middle of Ishtar’s hands-on-hips tsundere mode lecture, a pair of gemstones slipped into the back of her undergarment and slid between her asscheeks, causing her to yelp with ticklishness, then clap both hands to her rear and almost dive in to pull them out, only to realize Astolfo was still standing right there, looking puzzled. “Look awayahhaHAAHHAAH LOOK AWAY!” she shrieked, pointing in the opposite direction as she danced in ticklish torment, trying and failing to prevent her hips from shaking all over the place as she demanded the boy look away before she shamefully reached into her own underwear.

Astolfo complied, of course, but leaned in to Fujimaru to whisper as Ishtar screeched incoherently, throwing the gems as far as she could and huffing with exertion afterwards. “I see what you meant now, Master! We should help Ishtar right away.” When it was safe to turn around, he said, “Don’t worry, Ishtar! We came to help you. We’ll find that, uh… what were we looking for again?”

“It’s gold! A gold, shining gemstone that has my powers in it.” Narrowing her eyes suspiciously, Ishtar turned to Fujimaru. “Master, I know it took us a long time to find the gemstone, but I don’t know that he’s going to be much help. I’ve seen him wander into the simulator after he reserved time for it, forget what he was doing, and wander back out not a minute later to go to the cafeteria! He’s so lost in the clouds that --”

“Hey, Ishtar! Does it look like this?” And, with a slow, mounting sense of dread, both Fujimaru and Ishtar turned to Astolfo to see him holding a gleaming golden gemstone between his thumb and forefinger. Ishtar’s eyes immediately brimmed over with tears, and she grabbed onto Fujimaru’s shoulders, shaking the Master back and forth while wailing about the injustice of the universe and things like that.

For her part, Fujimaru was feeling a lot of universal injustice herself, but it had just clicked. “That was the key, Ishtar! Of course we weren’t going to find it because we were actually LOOKING! Remember Astolfo’s Evaporation of Reason? Things just somehow stupidly work out for him when he isn’t thinking! That’s how we solve this puzzle! The ridiculous odds of finding that one needle in a haystack gem don’t apply to him because of his stupid, mindless luck! Stupid, stupid A+ ranked Luck!”

Fujimaru and Ishtar hugged onto one another and cried waterfall tears for a while in commiseration of their previous suffering together while Astolfo stood there blankly, the question marks all but visibly floating off the top of his head. Luckily, Astolfo was also fairly good at setting up camp, and Fujimaru was feeling better as they set up for the night. Tired, but also hopeful. Two Servants down, and four more to go.

---

She should have known that nothing ever went that easily when BB was involved.

“Master, Master, what do I do?” Astolfo cried in panic, dancing in place on the ledge of the smooth bowl-shaped crater, looking left and right, and flapping his arms indecisively. A giant, flailing tentacle whooshed by his head, with Fujimaru clasped onto it for dear life. Ishtar’s Boat of Heaven had been sent careening into a side wall of the cavern, and the docile white pillar that had extended from the floor of Skadi’s cavern up to the wand at the ceiling had turned an angry red and black.

“Hehehehehehe. Hehehehehehe! Oh, Senpai! It’s so much fun when you get the answer wrong! I have to say that you’re doing better than expected to have two Servants free already! Buuuuut you’re way off the mark here, Se~n~pa~i~ Skadi is the one who has to get her wand! You can’t have Ishtar or anyone else do it for her! So that means it’s… Punishment Time!” One large red-and-black tentacle had curled up from the floor and made a seat for BB as she crossed her legs, the wicked red burning in her eyes and that smug little smirk of superiority on her lips as she cast her gaze pitilessly down upon Ishtar and Scathach-Skadi. Fujimaru was still trying to get her bearings from being flung around wildly, but just as she thought she might lose her grip, BB relented and deposited her on the ledge beside Astolfo, where she promptly collapsed in a dizzy heap. Astolfo was distracted trying to bring Fujimaru around, which left BB with her two chosen victims for this particular venture.

Ishtar and Skadi were both secured to the base of the black tentacle pillar by thick loops around their waists, arms caught at their sides and further bound behind their backs. Ishtar’s left leg was pressed up against Skadi’s right, and while Ishtar glared bolts at BB, Skadi seemed worn out by the heat and ticklish exertion, but nevertheless they were paired, Skadi’s right ankle crossed over Ishtar’s left to create a single ‘pair’ of feet from the both of them. “I’ve had it with your sick games, BB!” Ishtar shouted, still considerably salty about the fact that she hadn’t been able to defeat BB in a direct confrontation twice now. Even though BB was the direct controller of the Singularity, and there was probably some Holy Grail she’d stolen serving as its core and empowering her, Ishtar still was annoyed by her defeats.

“You’ve barely even begun to participate! And you know, you two are the perfect pair to answer one of those questions that bug people. When you’re tickling someone’s feet, there’s always the question - is it more ticklish with the nylons on, or with them off? And so many different answers! But today, we’re going to delve into that question right now as part of your punishment! The way you get out of this is simple - all you have to do is determine… which one is more ticklish! Ishtar’s bare foot, or Skadi’s stocking foot? Ready?”

“No we are not ready!” Ishtar interrupted.

“Go!” Ignoring the tsundere goddess completely - or, wait, was Jeanne Alter the tsundere goddess? Hmmmm! - BB’s latest scheme began to play out. From the floor of the bowl-shaped depression where the two goddesses were trapped, emerged two peculiarly-shaped tentacles. Not cylindrical and tapered like usual, these were strangely flat on one side, the usual stiffness of tentacles eschewed in favor of a fleshier surface, covered in dozens of rough little protrusions and a slight coating of some kind of fluid. In much simpler terms, they were tentacle approximations of tongues, and the tongues began to lap at the pair of feet that were before them!

“NOOOHOOHOOOOHOOOO STOPPIT! STOP STOP GET THAHAHAHA THAT GROSS THING OFFFFFFF!” Ishtar squealed. Her foot wanted to flap side to side, but - tied right up against Skadi’s ankle and crossed over, she couldn’t avoid the sensation of something rough, warm, and wet slurping against her sole! The sensation was utterly maddening. The vibrating gems had made her angry, but this just drove her straight past angry into outright mad! Mad more like insane, however, as the strange combination of sensations combined to send lightning bolts of ticklishness up through her leg. Her torso jerked back and forth frantically, bumping shoulders with Skadi sitting beside her, trying to pull free of the sensation, but finding that at every turn she and the other goddess were pulling in different directions to try and escape. Ishtar tried to coordinate with her through the cascade of tickling sensations that was making her kick and jerk her leg in her futile attempts to escape: “Skaaha-ahha-ahahha-AHHAHAH Skadieheheheheeh we have to wor-hoohoork togetheh-ehehehehHEHEHer or we’re just gonna…!”

“I hehehehhhahahahahah am try-hiihing!” she replied, the long red hair swishing about, streaked with sweat from her exertions and the heat. Skadi’s once-elegant dress was hiked up to around her hips, a situation which would be terribly embarrassing if she had any ability to focus on it. Like Ishtar, she was struggling against the sensation of being licked on her right sole, a sensation which was relatively new to her. Skadi had proven to be quite sensitive, and the sheer material which covered her body was receptive to the lighter tickling touches to which she’d been subjected to. This was considerably harsher - the nylon material covering her sole seemed to send off a series of wild sparks of ticklishness that shot through her leg instantly, demanding one thing and one thing only of her brain: stop the source of the sensation immediately. But she couldn’t, and her laughter only intensified, a most undignified state of affairs.

“The difference between you two is really funny, you know! Technically you’re both goddesses, but Ishtar squeals, screams, thrashes, and threatens like a bar wench! Not to mention I’ve seen bar wenches who wear more clothing than Ishtar does!” BB had chosen her adjectives with great care, and paused to let the audience at home bask in Ishtar’s attempt at an indignant retort fall apart in her gales of laughter, a display of impotence which she knew would only get further under the skin of the Goddess of Futility. “And on the other hand you have someone who really plays the part! Ensconced in her fairytale castle of ice up in the far north, dressed in an elegant gown… she’s completely unused to any sort of physical labor and falls apart under just a little exertion! You know there’s a loooooot of people who love seeing that powerful, aloof type forcibly pulled out of their shells, right?”

The tropical heat bothered Skadi enough as it was, and she was most certainly not dressed for it. That fact had made it much easier to separate her from her power and alter her Spirit Origin enough to create a sort of slinky satin cocktail dress rather than her usual elegant gown. The sight of the powerful but usually reserved Skadi tossing her head back against the pillar, then struggling feebly against the ticklish licking of her foot was a sight that BB could watch all day! Even better as the pair of them continued to struggle and ended up, shoulders together, leaning their heads on one another in a display of mutual exhaustion! That was simply too perfect.

Their toes hadn’t been bound this time. Leaving them the freedom to struggle uselessly and fight against one another was fun in its own right, and the broad, lapping tongues caressed those helpless soles with the unceasing mindlessness of the animals they were designed to imitate. Designing them like this let them force their way underneath Ishtar’s curled and clenched toes, squirming that ticklish tongue surface in between them until she cried out with submissive laughter and splayed her toes instead, trying to do something to alleviate the sensations of tickling that had her red-faced with laughter.

Skadi’s attendant tongue focused more on the lower part, nearer the heel and the middle of the arch, finding that spot to garner the freshest and most intense laughter. It was a little harder to tell with her, as she wasn’t quite so expressive as Ishtar, but by looking at her body language - the slumped shoulders and constant giggling - one could easily tell it was taking its toll. Their laughter intertwined and rose towards the ceiling, spilling out in all directions, calling to Fujimaru to try and pull herself back together to see if there was any way to salvage this disaster. Astolfo, trying to wrack his brain for a plan, simply got tied up in trying to go three different directions at once and coming up with nothing whatsoever.

Fujimaru finally recovered from being flung around like a rag doll and sat up, clutching her head and shaking it for a moment to chase off the last of the dizziness. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Senpai! I didn’t mean to make this a situation where you had to sit up here helplessly and watch -- “ Astolfo flailed, overbalanced, and then slid ungracefully down the slope to roll into the pillar where the two goddesses were currently laughing themselves hoarse, and BB watched him with some satisfaction after the push. Then she turned to Fujimaru, and grinned wickedly as the ground itself began to deform beneath her. “ -- Watch your Servants get tickled while you can’t do anything about it. Instead, I’m going to be nice and let you all share in the suffering until the next reset! That’ll be much easier than running around in a panic trying to salvage an unrecoverable situation, don’t you think?”

Fujimaru grasped in vain at the ground as she, too, tumbled into the ticklish abyss, joining her three Servants in flailing about in ticklish futility. It was very easy to lose track of time here - in fact, it had been hard to keep track of time even when she wasn’t rolling around on a floor made of tickle tentacles - but when the setting sun finally brought with it the all-consuming darkness, it was something of a relief this time. Note to self: Ishtar wasn’t going to be able to help Skadi, and solving puzzles incorrectly just got a whole lot more terrifying…

---

Continued in Part II, since it was too long to actually post. Hmhmhmhm.

the legendary writer who wrote Sailor Moon Series