Recap / Fate/Grand Order S3 E7: Nahui Mictlan

Gods did not exist in the world of the deinos before Daybit Sem Void came along. His summoning of Tezcatlipoca, a god from Pan-Human History, gave meaning to many a thing. What we used to take for granted became “something special”. While this act replaced phenomena— For the first time ever, our world produced stories.

—Tepeu

Full title: "Lostbelt No. 7 - Golden Sea of Trees Travelogue, Nahui Mictlān [The One Who Rules the Planet]". Written by Kinoko Nasu.

With the anomalous largest Singularity in Area 51 resolved, Chaldea resumes their plans to assault the final Lostbelt and defeat the Foreign God that currently resides inside it. There's no time to relax though as the Foreign God is planning to use the Lostbelt as a stage to strengthen itself even further. Once Chaldea enter the Lostbelt in what was the Amazon Rainforest, they see that the surface has been transformed from a lush jungle teeming with life to a hellish, barren wasteland that rejects all life. The Foreign God moves to intercept and destroy them, only for a third party to intervene and strike down both, forcing Chaldea to disembark. Chaldea must team up with an amnesiac Foreign God, head into the subterranean underworld of Mictlān, destroy the last Tree, and stop the enigmatic last Crypter Daybit Sem Void before another threat from the stars even more terrible than the Foreign God awakens and destroys everything.

Watch the PV here.
Trailer for Part 1.
Trailer narrated by U-Olga Marie Part 1.

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Tropes in this episode:

• Actually Pretty Funny: The Dinosaur King thinks Wak Chan trying to court U-Olga Marie is the most hilarious thing he's seen since he started ruling, and even orders his troops to stand down just for the sheer amusement it gave him.
• Advanced Ancient Humans: The humans of the Ka'an kingdom evolved into existence after the first sun went out and the Deinos entered slumber. In the 100,000 years they existed in the dark, they managed to achieve technological prowess on par with Olympus by themselves. Alas, nothing remains of their society after the battle with ORT except the stone ruins and their king Camazotz.
• Alternate-History Dinosaur Survival: The main premise behind this Lostbelt as the Point of Divergence within this Lostbelt revolves around the dinosaurs somehow not dying to the Chicxulub impactor.
• Amnesiacs are Innocent: In the aftermath of the Storm Border being assaulted by a mysterious entity, U-Olga Marie ended up losing many of her memories; she remembers her name and purpose to rule the Earth, but forgot almost everything else, including who her enemies are. As a result she becomes far more agreeable, acting less like an eldritch god and more like the original Olga Marie having a Chuunibyou episode (albeit with actual godly powers).
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Should the player lack any Servants having Instant Death Resistance buffs or other countermeasures to Beni-enma Alter's ability to inflict Instant Death with every attack, the game will quietly put First Hassan as a support Servant in the party backline who comes with a buff that grants everyone Instant Death immunity when on the frontline.
  • ORT will not eat the last party of Servants to defeat the spider form's last bar in the third Underworld border (since that actually counts as a clear), granting the player an opportunity to use them again for the UFO fights.
  • ORT is also a unique case where the usual minimum deployment of three Servants doesn't apply. If you're concerned about your barracks being too sparse to go all-out with proper team comps, you can choose to whittle ORT down one Servant at a time.
• Apocalypse How: ORT can literally end the world in seconds if given the chance, its nickname, besides being "The Spider", known as the "Planet Eater". The reason it doesn't right away is because its missing its heart; even then, it waking up angry and merely traversing throughout Nahui Mictlan layers ended up wiping out nearly all life in the Lostbelt. Below is a frightening excerpt as ORT starts its journey towards its heart and transformed the terrain into its Crystal Valley dimension, its seeds spreading:
  Narration: The end arrived without mercy. The end arrived without cause. No longer does refuge exist in the underground world. The Fantasy Tree seeds came in droves, ravenously consuming all vegetation as nutrients. They considered all non-plant life as enemies, and attacked them indiscriminately. The animals killed by the seeds were crystalized, and then shattered to become stardust scattering in the winds of Mictlan. Deinos and Ocelomeh alike, all who lived in the forest dwellings lost their lives, powerless to resist.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Mage families like Kadoc's apparently found it very hard to believe that there was a giant alien residing in South America and that the ill-fated expedition happened even though they're working in a world of magecraft.
• Arc Hero: U-Olga Marie!? Yes, really. She's the one who gets the spotlight after being rendered amnesiac and slowly forms bonds with the various characters. The last part is significant because the Foreign Priestess has only been shown to watch her master when U-Olga Marie talks with both Mash and the protagonist.
• Bad Future: Daybit empowers Tezcatlipoca with a Command Spell to use his Authority and temporarily bring everyone there into a possible future where ORT has fully awakened and slaughtered every living being in Mexico City down to the last person. However, the Storm Border and further layers appear to be undamaged in this future so Kukulkan hurls the ship over to the Deinos city of Chichen Itza. It has a time limit so everyone is brought back into the present and most of them are visibly shaken by the experience, even Tlaloc and Izcalli who are ostensibly on Tezcatlipoca's side.
• Bait-and-Switch: Oh boy. After a previous Lostbelt and two intermission chapters worth of building it up, the game did a good job of hyping up Lostbelt 7 as the Grand Finale and the final showdown with the Foreign God. But we don't even make it through the first chapter before everything goes off the rails: you're immediately thrown into a Grand Battle against U-Olga Marie, which is then interrupted by a third party that causes her to get amnesia... and as a result she joins us as the Arc Hero. It turns out that Lostbelt 7 is not U-Olga Marie's final showdown — it's her Character Development chapter!
• Book Ends:
  • Like the Seventh Singularity, the Seventh Lostbelt has Chaldea finding itself in an ancient supernatural kingdom with strong ties to a mythic underworld. The ultimate threat is likewise a titanic and unfathomably powerful monstrosity. A character with strong ties to Solomon declares that Chaldea will only become his enemy if they manage to beat this Lostbelt, mirroring Goetia's declaration that Chaldea eliminating the Seventh Singularity signifies them as an actual threat. Also, both contain an Outside-Context Problem that can overtake the scene if allowed.
  • To the first Lostbelt, both of which involved a meteor impacting the Earth and ushering in a permanent change to the ecosystem, forcing the Prime Ones to come up with a magical means of survival and resulting in the dominant species as distinctly animalistic.
  • At the beginning of the Lostbelt, the Protagonist being knocked off the Storm Border gives them a near-death experience that lands them in Tezcatlipoca's underworld. At the end of the Lostbelt, overtaxing themselves to take down ORT lands them in it again. Thankfully due to Tezcatlipoca's attitude, he helps them back out both times.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The good news? Chaldea learned from Tunguska and the last two Lostbelts, this time having summoned Servants ahead of time — Nitocris, Kingprotea, Beni-Enma, and Ereshkigal — with an extra helping of Independent Action stapled onto their Saint Graphs so they can be active without their Master. The bad news? They were scattered in the aftermath of the Storm Border crashing, and all but Nitocris were brainwashed into being Underworld border guardians. Though the protagonist can break the brainwashing, the Servants each remain bound to their own Underworld border and can't help outside of it.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Since this chapter was released on Christmas Day, Kotomine will specifically greet players with "Merry Christmas, ladies and gentlemen!" if they play it on those days just to screw with them.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: The main reason the Deinos would be pruned away by the world - they are a perfected species and fundamentally incompatible with the Evils of Humanity, but have become totally stagnant as a culture because they've never had a reason to advance themselves or their species. For all their power, wisdom, and skill, they've peaked.
• Brought Down to Normal: Tezcatlipoca takes the Protagonist's Command Spells and Master Rights in exchange for healing them after they're mortally wounded during the opening battle against the Foreign God. While they can reclaim the Command Seals, Tezcatlipoca keeps the Master Rights to himself, preventing them from summoning any new Servants and having to enlist only ones they already have. When Daybit discovers this fact from his Servant at the very end, he's astounded that the protagonist managed to thwart him and ORT while suffering from a handicap.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The Deinos play a sacred game to worship Kukulkan and ease tensions between the various types of dinosaur, xoqqer. Yes, it's just the game of soccer with a funny misspelling. The protagonist even points out that this is just soccer and the others from PHH ask if they can just call it football.
• Call-Back:
  • U-Olga makes the protagonist do a simulation where they first go up against seven Servants: Suzuka Gozen, EMIYA Alter, Lancer Li Shuwen, Mephistopheles, Carmilla, Medb, and Cu Chulainn Alter. This isn't just a random hodge-podge picked for the fight, it's the exact same lineup of Servants from Olga Marie's dream of clearing Singularities as a Master in the Moonlight/Lostroom OVA.
  • Roa's perturbed read of Mash's future in Melty Blood: Type Lumina is clarified here; if she continues using her powers as a living human, she is projected to shed her status as Demi-Servant and become a full fledged Servant.
  • It turns out the reason that Kirschtaria remembers Kadoc only in the First Singularity of Orleans during their simulation together is because the latter died there and never made it beyond to any other Singularity according to the data taken from Kirschtaria's computer in Olympus.
  • Nitocris still has her Medjed sheet, which she uses to help protect the party from Gugalanna legs. She fervently denies that the Assassin Servant with it was her.
  • After being teased way back in Babylonia and then in the second summer event, Ereshkigal gets to show off Gugalanna being used for Gilgamesh's desired purpose to defend against an equally formidable giant. She promptly takes that idea into overdrive by summoning a thousand of its legs to quash ORT's spider body.
  • Ereshkigal also grants the party fighting ORT the same Max HP increase/damage buff/NP gain up buffs she gave to Servants fighting Tiamat in Babylonia.
  • An in-story example: while the Deinos' exist in a world that is pretty much the opposite of the Yaga, both parties are beastial sentients that deconstruct the idea of being a Superior Species — the Yaga's focus on strength has made them unable to think beyond said strength, while the Deinos never wanting for anything means they never desired for anything and thus don't do anything. Both grounds live, yes, but Living Is More than Surviving, and this is why their worlds would have been pruned.
• The Cameo: BB appears in a flashback where it's established that Gilgamesh telling Hakuno telling BB telling the protagonist is how the last person knows that Gilgamesh went back to get the rejuvenating herb and turn it into his youth potion stored within his treasury.
• Central Theme: The only Lostbelt to have two:
  • Sacrifice. Nahui Mictlan only exists because all of mankind sacrificed itself so that Camazotz could gain the power to defeat ORT. The Deinos are willing to sacrifice items to others freely due to being an enlightened race who recognize that others might need things more than they do. In the finale, everyone is willing to put their lives on the line (and even outright die) to defeat ORT, be it for the sake of their families or for PHH. By contrast, Daybit is willing to sacrifice the future of mankind rather than condemn mankind to suffer a Fate Worse than Death according to Marisbury's plan.
  • Desire. This Lostbelt finally brings into focus what every faction desires, and how they wish to achieve it. Notably, the Deinos, due to being a Superior Species, have no desire at all, which is why they would have been pruned - no desire means no change, causing them to stagnate.
• Character Title: "The One Who Rules the Planet" refers to all the major powers who could each lay claim to ruling the world (U-Olga Marie as self-proclaimed Sovereign of Earth), the Lostbelt (Kukulkhan as its Lostbelt King, Tezcatlipoca as its actual overseer, Camazotz as the former king of humanity), and attempting to claim ownership (the Dinosaur King as ruler of the Deinos, Izcalli as the ruler of the Ocelomeh), but ultimately the title belongs to ORT, the Ultimate One that established itself over the Lostbelt by becoming not just its most powerful being, but its very Cosmic Keystone from devouring the Tree of Emptiness.
• Chekhov M.I.A.: The Deinonychus brothers run off after Ocelomeh during the second assault on the Storm Border and are assumed either MIA or KIA by everyone. It turns out at the very end of the Lostbelt that they got forcibly recruited to be Koyanskaya's personal labor force to help upgrade her Noble Phantasm. The protagonist has nothing else to say but laugh for how amazing it is they managed to survive at this point.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The calaveras de azúcar Tezcatlipoca gives to the protagonist as a bonus for giving him their Command Spells is seen by the Dinosaur King version of Tezcatlipoca and he decides to let them go beyond his city since they have it.
  • It turns out Goredolf actually kept Koyanskaya's lipstick from way back in the third Lostbelt this whole time. This is a good thing, as otherwise Chaldea had no means of bringing themselves an instant backup without the protagonist and Mash at hand to enable more summons.
  • Daybit's shopping itinerary that he dumps on the protagonist are all things he knows Chaldea will need for traversing the next three Underworld borders. The orchids provide them heat to endure the second border's chilling winds while the ropes help to traverse the steep mountains, the cucumbers provide enough moisture to get through the third border's scorching desert, the bat repellant wards off Camazotz's bats in the fourth border, and the alumite cloak provides protection from the radioactive final layers.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Tezcatlipoca offers a handshake to the protagonist but they reject it, quoting Kadoc's sentiment from the last story chapter that mages shouldn't just offer a hand freely to others.
  • Tezcatlipoca remembers the time he went over to the Indian Lostbelt and still greatly dislikes the taste of the dead there.
  • Camazotz remembers Koyanskaya as that lady who gave Daybit a hitch to some other place.
  • Fionn pops in because Dagda told him that Odin can't be the only god of wisdom helping out Chaldea with the Lostbelts. Fionn also tells Chaldea to say hi to Beni-enma for him as a reminder of their friendship from her debut event.
  • Gilgamesh comments that the protagonist seems to have lost their force of providence somewhere. It was partially used up as ammunition for the Black Barrel Replica against the Olympians and Cernunnos.
  • Kadoc and Goredolf can't stand the jungle heat, the former stating he'd rather be back in the Russian Lostbelt and the latter wondering if the Sixth Singularity's deserts were much more intolerable for the protagonist and Mash to take it in stride.
  • Ereshkigal Alter's Underworld border has characters frequently reference "Merry Christmas in the Netherworld" and "Dead Heat Summer Race" because of the goddess and Gugalanna's presence there. Before Dumuzid dies, he remarks that he has faith in the summoner who brought the rainbow to the abyss and save Ereshkigal to similarly accomplish an incredible feat fighting ORT.
  • Kirschtaria's lack of memories on going through the Singularity Simulations with Daybit is brought up again in the notes Kadoc took from Olympus. This is because Daybit went through his own simulation and completed it by himself without Kirschtaria's help.
  • Koyanskaya comments that the Deinos being so remarkably calm in discussion about their impending death is far different from the future possibilities for an advanced lifeform that she imagined and wonders if she was too hasty in leaving for the cosmos, complaining that she should have killed Taigong Wang when she had the chance.
  • The four Deinonychus brothers, who at this point are the only native lifeforms in Mictlan besides Kukulkan left alive after ORT's destruction, go to play xoqqer before the Lostbelt fades. Koyanskaya remarks that it's only natural for life to follow their instincts in the last moments of their life like a certain faerie horse running across the wild plains of Faerie Britain.
• Contrasting Sequel Setting: Mictlān serves as one to the previous Lostbelt of Faerie Britain.
  • Both have been actively molded by the Crypter's Servant to fit their desires, but while Morgan did it on her initiative out of sympathy for her alternate self and to give that doomed Britain a second chance, Tezcatlipoca does it because he wants to create new circumstances where ORT will awaken once more as Daybit's scheme intrigues him. Morgan actively manipulated history over the course of thousands of years, Tezcatlipoca managed to fully manipulate Daybit's Lostbelt into becoming his domain within a year.
  • The faeries are capricious beings who eat humans to nourish themselves and easily doom themselves with shortsighted in-fighting over the pettiest reasons. The Deinos are peaceful herbivores who have successfully managed to smooth out all conflicts between themselves to the point where they allow goods to be taken freely from each other with the understanding that the other Deino may have a better use for it than its original owner. The Deinos also cannot eat human flesh on a biological level because it will drive them insane, contrasting faeries going wild over the chance to eat humans. The faeries ultimately go out bickering and fighting each other for their various goals to the very end, with all of them easily swept away by the various Calamities. The Deinos go down fighting ORT together because they would like to help Chaldea and if they were going to die, it might as well be to help people they like.
  • Both the faeries and Deinos share a fascination of Proper Human History culture and manage to create a fascimile of it in their societies. Faeries find human culture to be fun to imitate and have no actual interest in any deeper meaning. The Deinos are much more interested in listening to Chaldea's stories of their world and the other Lostbelts and come away with a deep understanding of the other worlds that surpass Chaldea's own.
  • Both carry a titanic being within the deepest depths of the Lostbelt, but Cernunnos was a Earthborn threat entirely original to Faerie Britain as a result of its Alternate Timeline. ORT is specifically something from Proper Human History that originates in the Oort Cloud far beyond Earth.
  • Humanity went extinct long ago from an alien invader in both Lostbelts, but Velber had little to do with what happened to the very last human who was torn apart with her god in the backstory of Faerie Britain who was unwillingly torn apart to serve the Six Faeries' whims. The humans of the Ka'an kingdom willingly sacrificed themselves down to the last man just to give their god-king Camazotz a chance to win against ORT.
  • The land created in Lostbelt 6 was fundamentally cursed to its very core because of the cold-blooded murder used to found it and kept spawning more and more threats to ensure its own destruction. The land created in Lostbelt 7 was made with benevolent intent and would only end from natural causes, barring any unusual interruptions like ORT.
  • Faerie Britain only used certain elements of PHH for Morgan's own gain and actively disallows Servant summoning unless they were already summoned or have a strong enough connection to the land. Mictlān has a literal connection to the Throne from the Underworld borders set up by Tezcatlipoca, allowing Chaldea to go wild with summoning various Servants and even just Noble Phantasms as they need.
  • Both Lostbelts live on despite not having a living Tree of Emptiness. In Faerie Britain's case it's because Morgan managed to create a history powerful enough to sustain the timeline as a Lostworld even after using up the Tree's energy. For Mictlan however, while the circumstances behind their Lostbelt are certainly extraordinary, the Deinos themselves lack any ambition and basically haven't changed in millions of years, which dooms them to be excised by the Pruning theorem. The only reason their Lostbelt is still around is because ORT devoured the tree at some point during its war with the lost human civilization of Ka'an, and has taken over its role as the Lostbelt's Cosmic Keystone.
• Crazy Enough to Work: Kadoc thinks Ereshkigal's plan of creating an interlocking wall of Gugalanna legs might just be insane enough to work as a barrier against ORT. It is then subverted when ORT easily crashes through it.
• Damsel in Distress: Sion and da Vinci are picked as the superior mage/Servant sacrifice to go first on the altar when given the choice between them and the pair of Kadoc and Nemo, necessitating Koyanskaya and Rasputin to save the two while the others distract the Ocelomeh.
• Death or Glory Attack: In the very final battle against Tezcatlipoca when he's down on his last legs after bringing his HP to zero, he has a second wind that restores one bar of HP and forcibly locks the party's attacks and skills. He must be taken down in this turn with a Noble Phantasm (which the game compensates for by automatically filling all bars to max) or he will mow everyone down right there and then.
• Death World: The surface is a perpetual volcanic landscape engulfed by thunderstorms. Below is a liveable world courtesy of Malla but it's teeming with lethal insects, iguanas, and other types of wildlife that will try to kill the unwary traveller. This is worsened by Daybit's arrival who introduced Tezcatlipoca who in turn cordoned off each layer of this world with borders lifted from the Mayan afterlife, forcing travellers to go through deadly trials just to move around. He also introduced the Ocelomeh who have been murdering Deinos indiscriminately for their religion and turning them into mindless beasts by feeding them meat.
• Description Cut: Kukulkan is enamored with Orion's struggle in the Atlantic Lostbelt, believing that he must be a stoic, chivalrous, and glowing-eyed mechanical Archer gleaming in the moonlight. The protagonist notes that she's actually way closer to describing Minamoto no Tametomo than Orion.
• Didn't See That Coming: Near the beginning of the arc, the Chaldean spells out in no uncertain terms to the protagonist that if Novum Chaldea excises the final Lostbelt, then they will become enemies in the future. He said this before Novum Chaldea turns against Finis Chaldea now that they've learned the truth about Marisbury; the Chaldean wasn't expecting them to turn against their predecessor even with the truth revealed. He realizes in the Lostbelt's conclusion that he'll have to seriously rethink his earlier statement.
• Dismantled MacGuffin: Tezcatlipoca didn't simply hoard the protagonist's Command Spells and Master Rights, he entrusted the spells to Camazotz to bastardize the already-hellish Underworld border crossing trials. Fortunately, this not only gives the Protagonist a loophole to summon in the Underworld borders, but clearing a trial lets them retrieve the Command Spell used on it; each one restores some of their summoning powers outside of the Underworld borders, and they reclaim their Master Rights by defeating Tezcatlipoca for the final time.
• Disney Death:
  • Meunière is shot through both the head and heart point-blank with a gun by Tezcatlipoca and remains that way until Koyanskaya allows Chaldea to escape into their ship's wreckage, bringing him along. He is then declared to somehow not actually be that badly wounded and Rasputin uses surgery and his Divine Spirit powers to bring him back.
  • The Protagonist actually dies (or at the very least is brought to the border between life and death) after being knocked off the Storm Border by the unknown entity interrupting their battle with the Foreign God, but Tezcatlipoca agrees to heal them in exchange for their Command Spells, as he's a big fan of modern technology and magecraft. They then die again from sheer exhaustion claiming their body after ORT is destroyed and must duel Tezcatlipoca in the afterlife for revival.
• Do Not Go Gentle: Everybody refuses to simply give up and perish to ORT, fighting to the last person to try and help against that indomitable alien.
• Downer Beginning: Following on the cliffhanger left off in the last part of the main story, Chaldea is quickly pressured by Ruler James Moriarty's revelation that the Foreign God aims to use the Ultimate One residing within South America as her new host body into rushing off to the final Lostbelt to intercept her. Once there, they discover that their Holy Sword Cannon, the acquisition from Faerie Britain they were banking on to demolish their enemy does not work. It goes From Bad to Worse when U-Olga Marie is easily stomped by a mysterious new entity emerging from an underground sun and then inadvertently wrecks the Storm Border with its attack, forcing Chaldea to evacuate in the Shadow Border while the protagonist plummets to their death.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The Lostbelt is revealed to take place in a cylindrical world beneath the planet's surface where lush rainforest surrounds an underground sun. It has roughly 1 million square kilometers of space and is 1000 kilometers deep from the surface, both of which are physically impossible in PHH's Earth. And due to Tezcatlipoca imposing the concepts of PHH Mictlan over this Mictlan, the underworld borders becomes a zone where "proper and pruned" phenomena mingle. In other words, a zone where anything can happen, allowing the protagonist to summon any Servant they want provided it happened in another timeline.
  • The whole Lostbelt gets terraformed into ORT's Crystal Valley, changing every tree into a Tree of Emptiness and the sky of the underground world into the cosmos.
• Enemy Mine: Though she doesn't recall that they're supposed to be enemies due to Laser-Guided Amnesia, U-Olga Marie, the Big Bad of Cosmos in the Lostbelt, is the main ally for this Lostbelt. By extension, this later results in Rasputin forcing his way into the group because Chaldea can't get rid of him without revealing their true adversarial relationship with U-Olga Marie. Koyanskaya is also on our side this time, but she has the excuse of being her friendlier Koyanskaya of Light incarnation that Goredolf summoned.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Tezcatlipoca has a fair few other gods working with him against Chaldea, and some of them are as crazy or even crazier than he is. But when Tez gives everyone a Final Boss Preview of ORT and proclaims his intent to wake the monster up, every enemy God from the impassive Tlaloc to the Ax-Crazy Camazotz is vocally disturbed.
• Final-Exam Boss: ORT is the Climax Boss of the Lostbelt, and it proves the greatest test of just how well the player has mastered all of their servants and abilities - ORT will straight up eat any servants it defeats (and while Mash isn't eaten, she'll be unavailable for several fights), and has the ability to change classes, meaning defeating it will require you to have all your servants up to snuff while using every trick you have to smash through its health bars before it can eat all of your Servants. If you can't, you'll have to start over the entire fight.
• Fisher King: Invoked. Three of the four Servants meant to help with the Lostbelt were brainwashed and distributed into three of the Lostbelt's four Underworld borders to serve as guardians. Crossing these Underworld borders was already a harsh trial, but the presence of the Servants has altered them to suit their guardian duties, such as the first border's river being converted into a labyrinthine waterfall to accommodate Kingprotea. Nitocris then exploits this by becoming the final guardian of the fourth border and imposes a new rule for her trial to weaken Camazotz.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The Deinos city was not built for them and they had to renovate it to fit, with similar ruins scattered all across this Lostbelt. It can't be the work of the Ocelomeh who were only brought in a year ago so it's left a hanging question as to how these ruins happened. It's then later revealed that there was in fact a human civilization native to the Lostbelt existing several millions of years prior to the Deinos that went extinct in a bloody struggle against ORT.
  • The existence of Ka'an is further foreshadowed by the fact that all the skeletons Camazotz uses as his minions are distinctly humanoid, not saurian like the Deinos.
  • ORT's true body being the UFO is hinted at when it's the UFO that starts up upon revival, not the spider body.
  • ORT's presence in Mexico City in the Bad Future goes unquestioned until Chaldea realizes that Daybit's imperative for it to destroy CHALDEAS means there shouldn't actually be a reason for it making a stop there. That's when they piece together that Mictlan's sun is its heart and Mexico City just became its resting place.
  • The existence of Ordeal Call is specifically hinted at by U-Olga Marie who comments that Alter Ego Servants are not a proper existence for PHH and Daybit who comments that Chaldea has excessively abused the Human Order in their fight against the Foreign God.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • ORT straight up eats any Servants it defeats in its raid battle. Any Servants aside from Mash that are defeated by ORT cannot be used in the raid until it is reduced to its final health bar.
  • Before the raid begins, the narration will correctly count how many unique Servants the player has.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The Decisive Battle Mystic Code is formally introduced as the uniform for the protagonist to wear in this chapter. The story treats it as if they are wearing it in all fights and will override art of the actual equipped Mystic Code being used for that fight.
• Godzilla Threshold: Kadoc and Goredolf resort to contracting with Koyanskaya of Light and letting her draw magical energy from both of them to let her ascend to becoming a Divine Spirit Servant to give them a better chance at stopping Daybit and Tezcatlipoca's plan to awaken ORT. Daybit notes that Kadoc must have been truly desperate if he was willing to empower a Beast candidate like Koyanskaya.
• Have We Met Yet?:
  • Kingprotea remembers the event of her mini storyline in SE.RA.PH but the protagonist has the option to not remember meeting her if they haven't done her fight yet.
  • Even though she's summoned by Chaldea, Beni-enma can have no recollection of Chaldea dropping by her inn during New Year's Day if the player skipped her event.
• Hope Spot: Several, several times as Chaldea seeks to stop ORT. At first, they believe killing Tezcatlipoca has put a stop to its awakening, only for Daybit to prove them incredibly wrong as he uses himself to awaken it. Kukulkan seems to put a stop to it in the temple but it quickly shrugs that off and emerges from the temple far bigger than it started out as. Ereshkigal with Gugalanna seem to have stopped its spider body, but it's revealed that the UFO disk is its true form and it flies off. Tenochtitlan holds it off with her mech but it cracks the city's arms and flies around her. U-Olga Marie stops time and the Storm Border hits it directly with a beam from its Holy Sword weapon, disintegrating it completely. Then it reveals that Kukulkan is sufficient to maintain its existence as it utilizes its consumed knowledge of Heroic Spirits to summon itself as Grand Foreigner. Only when Kukulkan achieves a Mutual Kill with Grand Foreigner does ORT and its threat against the planet finally cease.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: ORT's Final Boss Preview at the end of Part 1 is one hell of a fight that puts other impossible bosses and other infamously difficult bosses such as Cernunnos and Demeter to shame. Despite being level 1, its first HP bar has 1 million HP and when that breaks, it's revealed to have 10 more HP bars for a total of 3,591,250,000 HP. And when your entire party is wiped out (and by that we mean defeated Servants turn into green silhouettes and are seemingly absorbed into ORT), U-Olga Marie, who has been travelling with you throughout this part of the Lostbelt, tries her hand at it only for her to do squat against it as well. While your job is to simply survive, the fact that this is what awaits everyone in this Lostbelt can and will scare the crap out of even the most experienced players. In addition, the player cannot use any revives whatsoever in this fight.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: Da Vinci states that it's impossible for any Servant to remember anything stretching as far back as the Precambrian era before she remembers Mélusine exists as derived from the 4.6 billion years old dragon Albion and has to amend her statement that there could be exceptions.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • The Deinos managed to come up to a game almost identical to soccer in every way, including name, at some point in their Lostbelt's history. Daybit just came along and added the rules they were missing to basically make it a one to one match after he came into the Lostbelt.
  • Tepeu and Ixquic being Star-Crossed Lovers, of all things, becomes this when you realize they are alternate world equivalents of Shiki Tohno and Arcueid, right down to the former having Mystic Eyes of Death Perception and the latter being the local Archetype: Earth.
• Inevitable Tournament: The party gets roped into participating in a xoqqer tournament in order to meet the Dinosaur King after Tepeu's plan A for meeting him didn't pan out.
• Info Dump: Goredolf and Kadoc take the time to explain together to everyone else all the available info they have on them regarding the Clock Tower's interaction with extraterrestrial entities with the Department of Lore and ORT.
• Last Stand: What the Dinosaur King manages to convince the passive Deinos into doing. Rather than simply waiting for their inevitable deaths by ORT sitting down, the Deinos instead arm themselves with weapons from Koyanskaya of Light and perform a last glorious charge against the invader. It leads to a one sided slaughter but at least the Deinos went out swinging, with Tepeu even managing to kill ORT once:
  Narration: Across the reddened plains, the last of the Deinos ran. Some fell before even getting close. Some fell trying to save their comrades...Some fell while in the middle of attacking the enemy's shell...Some fell after turning back against the flying saucer even as it passed over them, biting at it into the bitter end, despite not inflicting so much as a single injury. One fell streaking across the sky like a lighting bolt, killing one of the saucer's lives, before having his limbs torn off in return and plummeting to the ground. And just like that, the enemy passed over the great plains, with the charge of the Deinos having come to an end. The mighty Deinos did not die immediately even with half their bodies torn to pieces. Their tattered bodies laid still upon the ground, and though they had accepted their impending end of their lives...There they still lay, with a vague look of longing, staring at the red sun that had long since left them behind, far off in the distance.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • Tezcatlipoca basically spells out that the first battle with ORT is just a Final Boss Preview courtesy of him that will be relevant for the second part of this Lostbelt where Chaldea ends up having to fight ORT proper multiple times.
  • Goredolf warns the protagonist before selecting Servants to go up in the first battle against awakened ORT that this is just a scouting match and they absolutely should not use any trump cards right now and save them for later, hinting that the fight against ORT will be far more protracted compared to other enemies in the game.
• Living Dinosaurs: The Prime Ones of this Lostbelt are the Deinos, who like the birds of Proper Human History, are the descendants of the dinosaurs. Strangely enough, there are actual birds alongside Deinos in the Lostbelt even though the only reason in PHH they exist is because the dinosaurs had to evolve after the mass extinction.
• Loophole Abuse: There's a fair bit of it going on from both sides.
  • The protagonist trades their Command Spells and rights as a Master to return to life, preventing them from summoning any Servants. But as long as they're in the borders of the Underworld, they're not technically alive anymore, so the contract is voided until they leave the Underworld's boundaries. The act of retrieving one of their Command Spells used in the Underworld borders also restores some of their summoning capacity outside of them.
  • Chaldea's last few outings gave them major trouble in summoning Servants on-site. They learned from their mistakes this time and summoned Servants before entering the Lostbelt, additionally superimposing the Independent Action on those Servants who didn't already have it, letting them stay manifested without a contract should they be separated from the protagonist (which happens). Similarly, Koyanskaya of Light can stay active after Goredolf called her because she has Independent Action and Independent Manifestation.
  • There are Aztec gods inhabiting the Lostbelt, despite there being no Aztec history for the inhabitants to draw from, because of Tezcatlipoca summoning them himself. Normally this wouldn't work because Servants aren't ordinary flesh-and-blood and thus can't acquire Command Spells, but Tez gets around it by hijacking a human body. This doesn't answer how he's managing Divine Spirit Servants without being sucked dry of mana, but in this case it's a subversion: Izcalli is an ordinary Servant, Tlaloc is a Pretender Servant in disguise, and Camazotz was never summoned at all and is actually a Lostbelt native.
  • In a more down-to-earth example, Koyanskaya gave Tezcatlipoca a month-long trial run of her firearms. Tez, an enthusiast of modern weaponry, used that month to reverse-engineer the firearms and produce them himself for his Ocelomeh, removing the need to negotiate with Koyanskaya entirely. She is not happy.
  • Daybit cannot summon Servants by himself due to his removal from the Human Order, but he correctly deduces that the Lostbelt's land will provide itself as a powerful enough catalyst to override this incompatibility he has with Heroic Spirit summoning.
  • Also, while he cannot summon Servants, his accident with an Angelic artifact gave him an ability to summon angelic shadows, aka aliens, which are just as useful in combat. In fact, that's how he cleared Singularities in his simulation.
• Mathematician's Answer: When Sion has her Trismegistus II calculate probabilities of defeating ORT with their plan to summon Servants en masse in the final act, its only answer is "Yes."
• Mayincatec: Played with. It's initially explained that the presence of Mayan and Aztec cultural signifiers like their gods, architecture, consumption of maize, sun worship, and culture of sacrifice are only present because of Tezcatlipoca's presence despite the Lostbelt being set in South America. The story then goes out of its way to reveal that there was a civilization of humans who are the Lostbelt counterpart to PHH's Aztecs, which the Deinos later appropriated and that the land isn't actually corresponding directly to South America because Malla kept Pangaea around. There's even a section where Mash points out that it's more accurate to call this a Central American Lostbelt but da Vinci insists that they call this the South American Lostbelt anyway, which points to a conflation of the indigenous peoples across both sections of the America despite the little cultural overlap.
• Musical Nod: Another remix of "Sword of Promised Victory" plays when Chaldea fires the Rayproof at ORT.
• Mythology Gag: It is stated in Nasuverse side-material that ORT cannot be overcome by humanity alone. It proves the side-material right on multiple counts, firstly having already exterminated the humanity of the Lostbelt, and secondly shrugging off the efforts of another humanity (Chaldea). It takes forces outside of the Human Order, namely U-Olga Marie (the Foreign God) and Kukulkan (ORT's own missing heart), to tip the scales in humanity's favor.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: All the Servants Chaldea sent out to take down ORT ends up backfiring on them as thanks to ORT's Cannibalism Superpower, it ends up gaining enough knowledge from the Servants it devoured to essentially hack the World and the Throne of Heroes in order for it to summon itself as the Grand Foreigner after it seemingly died.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Camazotz's bloodsucking powers being used on Deinos results in dinosaur vampires, which Sion even lampshades as something distinctively new for Chaldea.
• No Item Use for You: Command Spells are permanently locked out to the protagonist from start to finish, robbing the player of the ability to pop them for instant heals, NP, or revives. The game does compensate for this with the Spiritron Stones that function as a full party revive, but anyone who was relying on CS to get out of a quick bind with instant heal or NP are in for a world of trouble.
• Non-Standard Game Over: If the player runs out of Servants to fight ORT before its penultimate fight, the game will tell them to "Try Again, Save the World" and boots them all the way back to the very start of the ORT raid sequence.
• Noodle Incident: Camazotz mentions that there was a mistake involving himself and ORT 6 million years ago. He's not very interested in it happening again going up against ORT. This is later resolved by revealing that was when he fought ORT to the death and succeeded in ripping out its heart at the cost of literally everything in his kingdom.
• Oh, Crap!: The Foreign Priestess shows up in Area 51 the moment Kadoc brings up checking for magecraft or magical energy in Subject E's operation room and the protagonist quickly realizes that her presence can only mean bad things. Sure enough, the place immediately starts collapsing in spacetime, necessitating a quick retreat.
• Outside-Context Problem: Considering the presence of both U-Olga Marie and ORT in the Lostbelt, Chaldea understandably expects they're going to be the biggest problems. Both Chaldea and U-Olga Marie are proven wrong in the middle of their initial showdown when something several-hundred feet tall, made of green light, described to be some kind of plant/mineral, and comparable in energy output to the Sun (that also isn't ORT) proceeds to rise out of the ground and quite literally bitch-slap both warring parties back down to Earth, completely altering the conflict. That "something" is later revealed to be Kukulkan, the resident Lostbelt King, launching a preemptive strike.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: Daybit's alien shadows increase in numbers based on the enemy's threat level. The intended solution is to exploit this and only bring three Servants to the fight with them since Daybit will respond in kind and bring only three shadows to match.
• Planet of Hats: Played with for the Deinos. Because the Deinos are engineered to have the same traits right down to super intelligence, they on paper would seem all the same and a majority of them do espouse the same philosophy of natural acceptance for their end and no hard feelings towards the Ocelomeh or PHH. However, Chaldea first meets Tepeu who is far more curious than other Deinos and then meet other Deinos purely through the context of xoqqer where a vast majority of them are easily outwitted at the game by the most basic PHH player, the party doesn't actually have a true impression of their baseline average mindset until Kukulkan and the Dinosaur King have Chaldea hold daily talks with Deinos in the shrine.
• Point of Divergence: This time, the point where history diverged is made clear early on: the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs. The actual events however, aren't made clear until midway through; how it went in Proper Human History is that ORT the dino-slaying meteor landed first, and Malla the Aztec precursor meteor second. In the Lostbelt, these landings were not only in reverse order, but Malla landed much earlier and created the underground haven of Mictlān for the humans and Deinos to avoid the aftermath of ORT's landing. Unfortunately ORT eventually awoke and began its extermination of humanity, from which Camazotz was the Sole Survivor.
• Pyrrhic Victory: The Ocelomeh ultimately accomplish their goal of stealing the Solar Itinerancy to control Mictlan's sun and killing the Dinosaur King in the battle over Chichen Itza, but lose an astonishing amount of troops to kill the Deinos and accomplish these goals. Izcalli is heavily shaken by this.
• Sad Battle Music: The usual Lostbelt battle music is replaced with "Lingering Heat" when Mash discovers (the illusion of) all Chaldean staff being slaughtered by the Ocelomeh and starts fighting them.
• Sequel Hook: After Chaldea vanquishes the Seventh Lostbelt and is now heading to Antarctica to verify Daybit's claims, Rasputin drops several in a conversation with "Romani Archaman".
  • He ominously portends to Chaldea having to reckon with their "debt to the Human Order". This manifests as the Ordeal Call where Chaldea is being tested by the Human Order regarding their use of Extra Class Servants, blocking their path to the Antarctic until it is done.
  • He also discusses the scattered fragments of U-Olga Marie's Saint Graph — scattered, not gone — and how the last of the Alien God's apostles, "the Count", can put them to use. This forms the basis of the E-Olga Marie boss fights that occur throughout the Ordeal Call.
  • He finally states he has a backup plan to stop Chaldea himself just in case all of the above fails.
• Static Screw: Just to show how threatening ORT is as an entity after awakening and spreading Crystal Valley within the Lostbelt, the game kicks the player out to the main menu where it proceeds to show Nahui Mictlan's menu select option rapidly glitching and falling apart before being completely replaced with a menu select hijacked by ORT.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: In Arrow 1 of Act 19, the fight against Izcalli has no music whatsoever. Even if you use a Servant whose Theme Music Power-Up plays even after they used their Noble Phantasm, it will stop playing at the end of it.
• Superior Species: Thoroughly deconstructed with the Deinos. They are all as strong as a Servant at worst, possess super intelligence that can improve on modern technology the literal second they get their hands on it, possess natural telepathy and empathy, can live for hundreds of years without aging, can subside on photosynthesis alone so there's no need to compete for resources, and are very kind to boot. Da Vinci goes as far to claim that they are the race of ideal gods that Kirschtaria tried so hard to create, and Koyanskaya realizes that they are the most dangerous form of humanity across all seven Lostbelts... if they actually bothered to try, that is. A perfect species that needs nothing will desire nothing, not even their collective survival, and so the Deinos have spent 66 million years doing absolutely nothing without creating a single legend to their name. The humans of the Ka'an kingdom achieved far more in 100,000 years and left behind the ruins the Deinos live in, and the Ocelomeh are poised to take over as the Prime Ones in just one year after Tezcatlipoca uplifted them. In the end, Da Vinci concludes that the Deinos never had a chance of winning the competition between the Lostbelts while Daybit says that Kirschtaria's plan was doomed to fail from the beginning.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: The Deinos have their own Alaya equivalent in the form of Malla who created the world of Nahui Mictlān beneath the planet's surface after it became unliveable. It is later revealed to be the Lostbelt equivalent to Quetzalcoatl's alien brethren in PHH, which arrived much earlier to empower the Deinos and serve as a benevolent network instead of just enhancing select individuals.
• The Tape Knew You Would Say That: Ruler Moriarty deliberately pauses in his final recording so he can snark about Kadoc and Mash not liking his attitude, both of whom just made irritated responses to his disbelief that Chaldea as a whole will not accomplish anything.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: The Deinos are genuinely perfected as a Prime Species. In addition to all being naturally powerful, empathetic, long-lived, and intelligent, they are even capable of photosynthesis, which completely eliminates the need to compete for resources to survive. As a race, they are fundamentally incompatible with the evils of humanity as represented by the Beasts, with special attention being called to how they lack the sin of Comparison. They need nothing, and thus want nothing... and do nothing. Even after millions of years they basically haven't changed at all. They're so fulfilled as a race that they never once aspire to anything greater despite their incredible potential, and benign stagnation remains stagnation nonetheless. Even knowing that hostiles are invading their city, or that invaders from another timeline want to cull theirs, or even that their own sun is about to explode, they simply accept that as the natural order of things and don't consider it worth worrying about. The things that make their Lostbelt extraordinary - Malla's early arrival and stewardship of the planet, ORT's own early descent and eventual war with the Ka'an Kingdom - have nothing to do with the Deinos' own attributes, which, as cruel as it is to say, makes them no more important than plants or wild animals. Unlike the Faeries of the British Lostbelt, their purity isn't in a Pure Is Not Good way, but instead in a "this species is pure and will never make it" type of way. It's likely that even without the shadow of ORT hanging over their Lostbelt, the Deinos, a species that could not produce a single story to their own name, would have been pruned regardless.
• Translator Microbes: Malla analyzed Daybit's manner of speech and language to implement a universal translation field over all Deinos so they can communicate with humans and overcome their language barriers. This does not apply to the Ocelomeh, however, and Chaldea has to rely on Kukulkan to translate for them or the few Ocelomeh who taught themselves to speak modern human languages for understanding.
• Two of Your Earth Minutes: There is a day/night cycle in this Lostbelt as the sun descends further underground and its light gradually disappears from the area, but it's 12 hours longer than the rotation of the Earth's surface with the sun. Chaldea keeps time with the standard PHH system despite the lengthened amount of time in play.
• Unnaturally Looping Location: Beni-enma Alter's imposed punishment on the party forces them into an endless loop of walking up the second Underworld border's mountains until the allotted time is done. Rasputin calculates it would take them roughly 100 quintillion years before they would be allowed through, which everyone obviously considers a deal breaker. They then try to figure out how to get Beni-enma to remove the punishment, which is accomplished by forcibly ageing her back to normal and she removes the loop afterwards.
• The Unreveal: A flashback to Daybit's meeting with Marisbury has the latter reveal his entire plan to the former, which is not shown to the player. Whatever it is, it was bad enough to make Daybit decide on the spot that he would dedicate the rest of his life to ensuring that Marisbury's objective would never come to fruition.
• Unseen No More: After more than two decades of buildup in the Nasuverse, the player finally comes face to face with none other than ORT. And it does not disappoint.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee:
  • Chaldea apparently didn't learn the real lesson of "Tunguska Sanctuary": don't blab about your plans on-screen. They go into detail about how to use the Holy Sword Essence armament to bring down U-Olga Marie only for it ultimately do nothing, to the confusion of both sides, and they don't get to figure out why because Kukulkan forcibly ends the encounter.
  • It happens again when Sion and Nemo hastily concoct a plan to ward off Tlaloc by explaining in detail how they believe their enemy would conceptually be injured by an Anti-Divine Spirit torpedo warhead enhanced by a copy of Quetzalcoatl's Authority. It completely fails to work and the only reason Chaldea escapes unscathed from her second attack on the ship is because Camazotz swoops in to attack Tlaloc as well.
• Wham Episode: Oh dear.
  • Not only do we end up allying with U-Olga Marie after she is rendered amnesiac, but ORT finally makes its grand appearance in the franchise after being hyped up for decades.
  • There is another Evil of Humanity lurking in the Lostbelt, Camazotz the Beast of Oblivion who did the impossible and DEFEATED ORT millions of years ago. It is thanks to him that life still exists in the Lostbelt at the cost of all of humanity in the Lostbelt going extinct.
  • There is another secret Disciple out there who was meant to help Chaldea, code named the Count.
  • U-Olga Marie was nothing more than an avatar and Body Double for the Foreign God's true form, the Foreign World, a.k.a. CHALDEAS. The true (posthumous) mastermind behind the Reconstruction of Humanity is none other than Marisbury Animusphere.
  • The true purpose of the attack on Chaldea on New Year's Eve was to kick the staff out, Da Vinci especially, so they couldn't examine CHALDEAS and figure out the truth, and Anastasia was selected as the point man out of all of the Crypters' Servants because she was to encase CHALDEAS in a protective shell of ice.
  • Whatever Marisbury and CHALDEAS are planning for humanity will be good in the short term but will forever put them at odds with the rest of the universe to the point that Daybit believes extinction is a better alternative than facing that dismal future.
• Wham Line: Several, as expected of the last Lostbelt before the finale.
  • U-Olga Marie in a fit of despair after Wak Chan dies saving her from ORT lets out a crucial piece of info that hints who Subject E really is.
    "Earthlings are such evil creatures. For years, for decades, they kept on dissecting me. Even after I kept saying that I was also human, over and over again. But no one listened."
  • Daybit lets out a massive bomb that reveals who the true mastermind behind the Reconstruction of Humanity is before he awakens ORT.
    "If all seven Lostbelts are destroyed, the security of the Human Order will be guaranteed. But if it were to happen, humans would be known as the worst of intelligent life forms in the universe. I will destroy the planet before that happens. Because that's the only way to destroy the mastermind, the Foreign World CHALDEAS.... The Foreign God was a god born within CHALDEAS. The bleaching of the Earth was a plan made within CHALDEAS. Grand Order, Animusphere. We of Team A were pieces gathered for this purpose."
  • Not long after Chaldea finally defeats ORT, having exhausted everything they had in the process, a Servant Summoning begins and Trismegistus II's analysis punctates that it's not over just yet.
    "Misuse of photocopied Proper Human History. Summarization of Simulated Human History spanning three hundred million years. The construction of a Virtual Heroic Spirit Form by using these factors has been confirmed. Biological classification: One Radiance Thing, Grand Servant: Class Foreigner. ORT is being summoned.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Several motifs from Angel Notes return in this story chapter, such as a ravaged planet populated by post-humanity replacements, an invasion by an Ultimate One, a holdout of mankind fighting against that, and a mysterious supernatural young woman at the center of it all. The ending inverts the climax of the short story, however, with the wielder of a Black Barrel weapon surviving, and the whimsical comrade derived from an extraterrestrial Type perishing in a Heroic Sacrifice instead.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Tezcatlipoca's Authority has ensured that ORT will awaken in 10 days, so Chaldea has that long to figure out what to do about this problem.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: Daybit's contingencies to ensure ORT awakens are nothing short of impressive, and shows that his summoning of Tezcatlipoca was completely intentional. If Tez fails to sacrifice Izcalli, he can try sacrificing the Protagonist or even himself instead. And in case that fails, Daybit had Tez carve out U-Olga Marie's heart earlier and graft it to Daybit's chest so he can sacrifice himself to awaken ORT, at the same time giving him a means of defense against U-Olga herself. By extension this torpedoes U-Olga's master plan to merge with ORT, as with it already adapted to her heart, she'd be the one hijacked. Truly the only reason Chaldea has a chance to stop Daybit is because he has to explain the truth about Marisbury and CHALDEAS, and even then he waits until he's won before delivering his Exposition Dump.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: At the end of this Lostbelt, Earth remains in its bleached state, dashing the hope that excising all seven Lostbelts would restore Proper Human History. Chaldea decides their best option at this point is to verify Daybit's claims and see if there's some way to return to Antarctica.

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