Recap / Fate/Grand Order S3 MI4: Tunguska Sanctuary

Under the guidance of the law of the jungle, within the ceaseless circle of life, the animals will live as they will, then die, then live, then die and then live— And someday- May I—

—Koyanskaya

Full title: "Anti-Primate Biosphere, Tunguska Sanctuary".

Chaldea repeatedly clashed with one particular foe as they journeyed through the Lostbelts; the leader of NFF Services and mercenary of the Foreign God, Tamamo Vitch Koyanskaya. Seeking to become an Evil of Humanity that surpasses Amaterasu, she has been collecting materials for her "tails" from each of the Lostbelts to fuel her apotheosis, and despite their many encounters she has evaded Chaldea at every turn.

But her luck ran out in the Sixth Lostbelt. Having suffered a crippling wound and the Lostbelt's "materials" being a horrific curse of self-destruction, Koyanskaya has no choice but to accelerate her plans, beginning her apotheosis with only six tails in an effort to survive. And so it goes that Chaldea detects a strange distortion painting over the bleached earth in Tunguska, Russia. Chaldea decides to put their fight against the Foreign God on hold to enter the special zone, test their preparations for the final Lostbelt in South America, and prevent Koyanskaya from becoming a true Beast before it's too late.

While the chapter was originally released as a limited event, it is important to the Myth Arc and was later made available as a Main Interlude.

Watch the trailer here.

Tropes in this episode:

• Aborted Arc: Holmes’s declaration of Koyanskaya as his Arch-Enemy back in Olympus ultimately leads to nothing, as the Tunguska distortion has the same rejection of PHH Heroic Spirits going on as the Sixth Lostbelt did, thus incapacitating Holmes the moment he enters the area. He isn’t seen again until after Koyanskaya is dealt with.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: U-Olga Marie attacks the Wandering Sea during the epilogue, resulting in its destruction and Chaldea retreating on the Storm Border. While the “True Wandering Sea” still exists, and the Wandering Sea will exist in both the past and future, the Wandering Sea of 2017 is gone.
• Allegorical Character: The War-beasts in the Dead Zone are eldritch creatures decked to the brim with guns and who hunt each other down for seemingly no good reason, all while cackling with each kill they make. They basically exist as representation of what Koyanskaya, or to be more specific the animals who created her, thinks what humans really are.
• Behemoth Battle: Ibuki-Douji occasionally summons her father Orochi to assist the protagonists during certain Raid boss fights.
• BFG: The Black Barrel, as usual. It has been further enhanced by Habetrot, allowing it to fire physical instead of conceptual bullets, which has the benefit of not requiring Command Spells or nearly killing the Protagonist and Mash each time it's fired.
• Closest Thing We Got: Koyanskaya's modus operandi has been to absorb one furred creature from each Lostbelt to represent it in her path to become the next Nine-Tailed Fox. But because Qin Lostbelt didn't have any unique furred creatures, she instead had to improvise and create cyborg tigers based on the Duō Duō Yì Shàn Tanks.
• Cruel Twist Ending: Subverted. After the Everybody Lives of the main story, U-Olga Marie shows up in the Epilogue having finally tracked down the Wandering Sea and is fully prepared to wipe it out to end Chaldea's threat to her once and for all. However, Sion accounted for this and made the prior preparations to get everyone out of there on the Storm Border, and even manages to escape the Wandering Sea's self-destruction herself while throwing the wool over their foe's eyes.
• Eldritch Location: The Tunguska Sanctuary is the strangest location visited yet. It shares similarities to Singularities and Lostbelts yet can't be defined as either. Most Heroic Spirits are either forced out or weakened dramatically just by entering like the British Lostbelt. The Sanctuary itself is split into two; the outer zone is dedicated to life and features mindless animals not found in Proper Human History that mimics human society, the inner to death, an endless and eternal battlefield where beasts kill each other with guns for sport. Eventually, Taigong Wang realizes that the special zone is a Reality Marble and everything inside shows how Koyanskaya views the world. Reality Marbles are naturally crushed by the Counter Force to restore the World's order but this can be avoided if the user deploys it inside their own body as she's doing now. In other words, the special zone is Koyanskaya herself, having expanded her titanic Saint Graph outside of her physical body to accommodate the Marble.
• Epic Fail: As Taigong Wang uses his anti-Daji Noble Phantasm on Koyanskaya, he casts a Magical Incantation that doubles as a Badass Boast with Chaldea hyping him up to be as strong as Skadi or the Machine Gods of Olympus, leaving no doubt that it will succeed. The Noble Phantasm bounces off Koyanskaya to no effect because she isn't a Tamamo, leaving Taigong Wang gobsmacked.
  Taigong Wang: Huh?... Hm? Huh? That's weird. Ahahaha, well, shit! That was my Anti-Beast Noble Phantasm, tailored specifically for Daji's shadow. It had the power of the Twelve Golden Immortals... AND IT DID NOTHING! I WONDER WHY!?
  Koyanskaya: Hehe, hehehehe! Ahh, that was hilarious! I wish I'd brought a camera crew! All that buildup for a complete flop! You're quite the entertainer, aren't you? I thought you were a most unusual Heroic Spirit. Were you a court jester or something?
• Everybody Lives: Barring the obligatory Servants being unsummoned after their mission is done, the main chapter has no named character dying. None of the Servants on your side gets killed, Koyanskaya is spared, even the creatures that live in Tunguska are spared due to how the Reality Marble is dealt with.
• Fighting a Shadow: The Wandering Sea that appears every year is nothing more than a copy of the real one, which is a Singularity in Void Space like Solomon's Ars Paulina. The Foreign God destroying it means nothing as they'll be back again next year to headhunt new recruits.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Something is up when Chaldea returns from Tunguska since the Nemo Series are demanding everyone pack up their belongings, while Fou detects something above the Wandering Sea. Or rather, someone, as the Foreign God has finally located the Wandering Sea and arrived to destroy it.
• Foreshadowing: The chapter opens with the Wandering Sea offering to extend Sion's lease there for a price, which she refuses for some reason despite it's importance to Chaldea's operations. That's because Trismegistus II predicted the Foreign God is going to destroy it in short time.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every section uses James Tiptree Jr. story titles as the basis for their name.
  • Section 1, 'Beyond the Walls of the World', is named after Up the Wall of the World.
  • Section 2, 'Great Collision', is named after "Collision", a short story from The Starry Rift.
  • Section 3, 'The Boy Walking to Forever', is named after "The Boy Who Waterskied to Forever", a short story from Tales of Quintana Roo.
  • Section 4, 'The Nikitich Solution' is named after "The Screwfly Solution", a short story from Out of the Everywhere, and Other Extraordinary Visions.
  • Section 5, 'With Delicate Mad Lives', is named after "With Delicate Mad Hands", a short story from Out of the Everywhere, and Other Extraordinary Visions.
  • Section 6, 'Out of the Everywhere, and Other Extraordinary Slaughters', is named after the short story collection, Out of the Everywhere, and Other Extraordinary Visions.
  • Section 7, 'The Ices Are Melted, The Flames Will Be Gone' is named after "The Snows Are Melted, The Snows Are Gone, a short story compiled in Ten Thousand Light-years from Home.
  • Section 8 is named after 'Your Haploid Heart', a short story from Star Songs of the Old Primate.
  • Sections 9 and 10, 'Planet Songs of the Primate I(I)', are named after short story collection, Star Songs of the Old Primate.
  • Section 11, 'Second Coming of Taming' is named after "Second Going", a short story compiled in Crown of Stars.
  • Section 12 is the only one to not modify its title and directly lifts it from "The Only Neat Thing to Do", a short story compiled in The Starry Rift.
  • The final section, 'Love is the Plan, the Plan Is...', is named after Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death.
• Insult to Rocks: Before the final battle, Koyanskaya describes humans as a greedy and destructive kind of ape, before backtracking and saying that's an insult to apes since they will find humans very alien compared to them.
• Heroic Sacrifice: After his Noble Phantasms fail to kill Koyanskaya, Taigong uses his Xian arts to teleport everyone to the Storm Border while he keeps Koyanskaya's attention on him. Koyanskaya mocks how foolish he is to let himself die so the others can escape... which Taigong agrees with as he finds the idea of a commander letting himself be killed just so his subordinates can escape without any guidance as the utmost foolishness, which is why he's distracting Koyanskaya and her Lostkins with a Shadow while the real one joins Chaldea in retreating.
• Homefield Advantage: As the Special Zone in Tunguska is in fact Koyanskaya's Reality Marble, she naturally has multiple advantages. For one, the barrier around it is set to only allow Demonic-Beast or non-Hominidae type Heroic Spirits inside, meaning any Hominidae Heroic Spirits will be rejected outright or have to expend an enormous amount of mana on whatever methods they're using to stay manifested, weakening them. Every single living creature inside the Reality Marble is her "child" and obeys her commands without question, to the point she can summon them on a whim or grow them right out of the ground for an instant and never-ending army to overwhelm her foes. She has knowledge of almost anything that's going on inside the Reality Marble and can teleport a shadow familiar of herself to any location of her choosing, with said familiar being powerful enough to manifest her five-tailed Beast of Taming form. Really the only reasons she didn't instantly wipe out Chaldea the moment they arrived are because she's staying at the center of the Reality Marble devoting nearly all of her focus to recovering from the events of the Sixth Lostbelt and speeding up her transformation into a Beast, and as she herself admits she still didn't truly consider Chaldea her enemy until they muck about for too long in the zone, likely preferring they would have turned tail to run as soon as they realized what her barrier was doing.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: While Ibuki-Douji was mostly unaffected by Koyanskaya's Reality Marble, it did end up scrambling her memories enough that she's mostly in oblivious teasing mode rather than actively screwing with the protagonists.
• Lighter and Softer: While the stakes are still relatively high and no less dangerous, this distortion is comparably more tame and soft-hearted than the previous ones as no one, not even Koyanskaya herself, dies at any point in the story. In this respect, it can arguably be viewed as a Breather Episode after the depressing Downer Ending that was the British Lostbelt.
• More Dakka: The Combat Beasts are covered in guns, can fire exploding eyeballs from the tops of their shells, and their Noble Phantasm involves launching themselves at their enemies after transforming into miniature planes.
• Plot Tailored to the Party:
  • Inverted twice over. The two main ally companions on the side of the protagonists are both Riders, and whilst they would be useful against the regular Caster Tamamo, Koyanskaya in both her Assassin and Alter Ego versions has the advantage over them. Even worse, Taigong strongly believes his purpose for being summoned here was to deal with this "Alter Ego of Daji", and even brought two Noble Phantasms tailor-made for the purpose of slaying her — but with the reveal that Koyanskaya ultimately isn't Daji, one Noble Phantasm has its power cut to a tenth, and the other just plain doesn't work.
  • On the other hand, Ibuki-Douji being the main Chaldea Servant companion is very fortunate, as not only is she a powerhouse, she's combat-wise unaffected by Koyanskaya's Reality Marble affecting non-Demonic Beasts Servants, meaning she can leverage most of her power without consequences and can even summon help via her Orochi. As a result, she ends up taking the lead as the major beatstick for the party.
• Prophecy Twist: Sion's endgame prediction this time around is "Chaldea is completely wiped out". It is indeed wiped out due to a surprise visit from the Foreign God — or rather their base in the Wandering Sea is wiped out. Sion having planned for this prediction is what the Storm Border was for all along: she had all Chaldea staff and operations transferred to the ship before the Foreign God attacked, and set the Wandering Sea to self-destruct so they could escape.
• The Reveal: We finally learn Koyanskaya's origin here. It's been hinted at constantly that she's a rogue Tamamo and an Alter Ego of the former Beast Daji — only for both to be a Red Herring. Koyanskaya actually isn't a Tamamo at all, and just impersonated Daji because she liked her schtick; Koyanskaya's true nature is actually that of a conceptual-type Servant born of the loathing of the animals that died in the Tunguska meteor impact (they thought the fire and explosion of the meteor were humans going on a mass hunt with guns). This burning hatred of "primates" alone normally wouldn't be enough to sustain a Servant after its "Masters" died, but that same hatred also gave Koyanskaya the basis of becoming Beast IV since Fou had left the seat open, granting her Independent Manifestation to remain in the world.
• Running Gag: Habetrot popping out to help in combat before being shocked by the conditions she's fighting in.
• Take a Third Option: Even with Koyanskaya tamed, there is the problem of the Tunguska Reality Marble that originally existed as a pupa for her to become a Beast. Since her transformation has been stopped, she must be killed to dispel it or else it will interfere with the restoration of Human Order. However, Taigong has a different idea on how to please both parties: have him use Xian arts to compress the Reality Marble into "The Ark" in the form of a Cosmic Egg so that once the last Tree of Emptiness is destroyed, it can be launched into space so that Koyanskaya can find a new place to call home far away from human society. While Koyanskaya finds the plan to be dumb, the Protagonist points out that however dumb it might be, if it works it would be a beneficial and peaceful resolution to both parties. Unable to refute this, Koyanskaya accepts defeat and agrees — with the condition that she's going to finish what she started if it fails. Sion notes this was the best possible outcome; originally, Trismegistus II predicted that Koyanskaya either slaughters Chaldea or pulls a Taking You with Me.
• Too Awesome to Use: Subverted. With Habetrot's help, the Black Barrel has gone from a last-ditch godslayer to a once-per-battle on-demand Limit Break. It's weaker in this state, but still more than powerful enough to turn the tide.
• The Tunguska Event: It's the locale of the event, and part of Koyanskaya's backstory.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Both Chaldea's blitzkrieg plan against the special area and Taigong's anti-Beast Noble Phantasm are discussed in depth, so they both predictably fail the moment they can be put into action. The plan that actually works against her is discussed offscreen.
• Wham Shot: The mage that greets Sion before she self-destructs the Wandering Sea is none other than Fabro Rowan — better known in another timeline as Nrvnqsr Chaos!
• What Happened to the Mouse?: While the story establishes that there are six Lost Weapons roaming Tunguska, only two of them are fought before Koyanskaya enters the scene, with the remaining four being left unaccounted for.
• Where It All Began: Koyanskaya sets up her Reality Marble in Tunguska, Russia, where she was born from the meteor impact.
• Xenofiction: This chapter examines how non-sapient creatures could incarnate a Servant with the thousands upon thousands of dying animals in the Tunguska Explosion blaming humanity for the massive explosion because they had no other way to comprehend death in such an instant. Characters try to make sense of what they were thinking, with Taigong Wang hypothesizing that these animals must have seen the explosion as more gunfire to kill animals, and Koyanskaya comments that animals are aware of their coexistence with the primates known as humanity but helpless to stop them from slaughtering all other forms of life.
• Zerg Rush: When Koyanskaya decides to confront Chaldea, she takes note of the fact they took out two of her Lost Weapons already and so decides to switch up tactics, summoning an army of her Lostkin combat beasts straight from her Reality Marble to overwhelm them with sheer numbers. She even points out that in nature, quantity often beats out quality. This swarm makes up the contents of the third Raid event.

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