Editing BlazBlue:Phase Shift 4 Chapter 6 (section)

===Part 0===
The room was unusually cold.

It was technically winter, but the world was still blanketed in seithr, which was wreaking havoc on the seasons with no sign of them ever recovering. It was chilly at best outside, and compared to the cool air of the seemingly endless corridor leading up to it, this room was practically freezing.

The owner of the room thought nothing of it, however, as he gracefully offered a seat to his female visitor with a serene look on his face.

"Hey, why is this room so cold?"

Grumbling, the woman wearing a luxurious fur mantle sat down in the chair.

The man stood up just as she did so, practically switching places with her. The tea the man had brewed was the only warm thing in the room, and mercifully so.

"My apologies for the discomfort. The issue will be resolved shortly, so you'll have to bear with it for a little while."

"...Let's hope it will."

The woman's current less-than-ecstatic attitude wasn't just because of the temperature of the room. She didn't particularly enjoy having to spend time alone with this man, either. As both a member of the Ten Sages and the rightful heir to his clan, this room was his private property for all intents and purposes. She felt like she had been lured into his personal domain… the Kisaragi clan's home.

Nevertheless, she had still come when this man said he had a favor to ask of her. Supposedly it was a very serious favor, one that concerned the Nox Nyctores causality weapons.

"So? What do you want me to do?" "Look here."

With an air of calm pervading his demeanor, the man placed a sword on the table. It was a katana in a blue scabbard. One of the Nox Nyctores, Mucro Algesco: Yukianesa.

The woman gasped the moment she saw it, and the man smiled thinly as he watched her reaction.

"I would like to leave this in your care."

"Huh? Wha- what are you talking about? Weren't the Nox Nyctores supposed to be sealed..."

"Would you have let this be sealed away if you had been in my position?"

The man was speaking as calmly as if he was just having an ordinary, everyday conversation. He lightly pushed his glasses up with one of his white-gloved fingers.

"I'll say it again. Please, hold on to this for me. The Kisaragi Family will report that it went missing in the turmoil of the war, and with how fast the world is changing around us, everyone will forget all about this thing before long. Once that's happened, we'll be able to study it to our hearts' content."

"You're going to privatize a Nox Nyctores, just like that?"

"Three has already claimed that hers was lost."

The woman was at a loss for words as she listened to the man's ever-calm voice. She gripped her tea cup, thinking she had to calm herself down. She couldn't take her eyes off of the katana on the table in front of her.

Eventually, she opened her mouth.

"Alright. If all I've got to do is hold onto it for a while... then there'd be no problem with me analyzing it in the meantime, right?"

"By all means."

The man's smile grew wider. He beckoned with his white-gloved hand, and the woman took her cue to reach for the katana. She was overcome by curiosity. This was a Nox Nyctores, one of the weapons created to defeat the Black Beast, in which hid an utterly unnatural power. It was hard for her to resist the temptation to take possession of one of those, given the chance.

The man was no different. Watching the woman as she took the sword in hand and pulled it toward herself, he crossed his legs and placed his white fingers on his knees.

"Please do try to analyze it, if you can."

"Huh...?"

The woman hadn't understood what he meant, but in the moment when she lifted her head to look at him, the room froze around her.

In the most literal sense... the inside of the room was encased in ice. The formerly warm tea, the cup it was in, and the woman half-standing out of her chair with sword in hand, all frozen solid.

The only two things left untouched were the sword laying horizontally in the woman's grasp and its master, the man.

"I'll provide a brief explanation for you. You will steal my Yukianesa and disappear without a trace. No one will ever find you, but once the world has forgotten about the Nox Nyctores, Yukianesa will mysteriously find its way back to the Kisaragi Family... That's the scenario we will be going with, Eight."

His voice was as peaceful as could be as he took the ice blade from her hand. Casually drawing it from its scabbard, he cut down the ice sculpture erected before him with a flick of the wrist. The ice fell and shattered on the floor, and his long blond hair fluttered as he left the room, the sword with the blue scabbard still in hand.

Once the war with the Black Beast came to an end, the Ten Sages' top priority was to seal the Nox Nyctores Gigant: Take-Mikazuchi.

It was much harder to control Take-Mikazuchi than any of the other Nox Nyctores because it could be summoned, and they were worried about possible instability from its core being incomplete. Its creator, Nine, wanted to just destroy it, but in the immediate aftermath of the war, neither the Mage's Guild nor the Orbis Librarius Norma had enough manpower left to carry out such an operation.

Thus, they decided to pull Take-Mikazuchi out of its summoning circle, stick it inside a different container, and seal it somewhere where no one would ever be able to reach it, with plans to destroy it later once the state of the world had become more stable. The 'somewhere' that they had chosen to send it to was a place far out of reach and not within the jurisdiction of any country... outer space. Take-Mikazuchi disappeared from the surface of the earth, bound under layer upon layer of locks and control devices in a coffin-like apparatus.

They didn't have the means to immediately dispose of the other Nox Nyctores either, so for the short term they simply disabled their cores.

Deus Machina: Nirvana. Mucro Somnio: Musashi. Interfectum Malus: Ookami. Arma Reboare: Muchourin. Those four Nox Nyctores were returned as ordered and the power of their cores was released to make them inert, leaving them as nothing more than finely crafted, but mundane weapons.

Mucro Algesco: Yukianesa, Arcus Diabolus: Bolverk, and Geminus Anguium: Ouroboros couldn't be recovered because they were lost after the fighting, and their whereabouts were currently being investigated.

...Meanwhile, on the outside of the cloudy postwar world.

In the rose castle of eternal night, Rachel slept in the innermost bedroom of her manor. The world between the posts of her bed that had only just reclaimed peace was already falling into disarray again, like it was trying to cling to what little power it still had.

Her butler, Valkenhayn, had left Ishana and rushed back home to his princess' side as soon as possible after the war to resume his duty as her bodyguard. He had told his allies that he wouldn't be returning until Rachel woke up, and in fact, he ended up not leaving her side for a single moment at any point for the next several decades.

As a result, it was a long time before word reached him of how things went after the war and what ended up happening.

──And, of who lived and who died.