Chapter 55 - Survive
Were someone to stand on the hill where Kotomine Church had stood, they would, just for a second, have experienced a moment of perfect silence. The night was clear and cool, a breeze rushing across the grass of the grounds and rustling the trees that surrounded the site. To the North, our observer could have seen all across the city. At last, the fires of Berserker's rampage were entirely extinguished, though in many places power had not been restored, and Fuyuki stood dark and peaceful at last.
If that observer had looked to the East instead, they might have made out a dull glow, where the Einzbern castle was burning still. But even that blaze was not enough to wash out the night sky, or to cover it in smoke, and so the stars could still be seen, twinkling down uncaring.
And if you strained your eyes, you could just about make out a hundred points of light, rising and disappearing against the stars until you could hardly be sure they had been there at all.
For just a moment, you could hear a pin drop.
Just a moment. Then our observer would find that the site of Kotomine Church was not such a peaceful place to stand after all.
What dropped was not pins.
Avenger was not just struck – she was
flattened by the storm of mortar shells that descended upon her like the fist of God. Knocked to the ground, Avenger could do no more than lie there and take the hits, driven into the dirt by the barrage of explosions.
These were no simple mortar shells. Every single one was on the same level as a Noble Phantasm. That was all very well to say, but picture it – really picture an item of legendary power, around which awe-inspiring tales might be crafted. Within that tale, nothing could stand up to such an overwhelming weapon. When the hero is finally worthy of wielding it, he crushes all opposition thanks to the sheer superiority of his weapon.
Something like that might just be able to stand up to
one of these mortar shells. The other ninety-nine? Those would be more of a problem.
It was over in a single second. When it was done, the hill was scorched and blackened in a tiny circle – no more than ten feet across. Lancer didn't miss. Within that circle, though, the soil was pounded and baked into solid lumps then shattered and hurled aside, and the grass would never grow again. The breeze had been chased away by the shockwaves – as had some of the branches on the nearer trees.
The quiet that followed the shockingly sudden assault was broken by the sound of debris falling back to earth, and rubble shifting in the small crater as Avenger pulled her body back together again.
As soon as her head reformed, she glared at Lancer. "Cannon fire, huh? Or something like it. Don't know what you think you're going to achie-"
Lancer trailed their hand through the dirt, and the mortars fired once more. Avenger hissed, eyes widening, and she rushed back together, reforming just in time to lunge out of the way of the first shells. This time, however, Lancer had spaced out the hits, and Avenger was staggered by an explosion as she was struck directly on the top of her head.
With a snarl, she lashed out upwards, and her sword flashed a dull, angry red. A wave of searing demon fire blasted forth in a wave, engulfing the descending shells…
… to absolutely no effect. Avenger shrieked in rage as she was slammed into the ground once more. A second later, she was back on her feet, and this time her flag lashed out to intercept the last few shells. The deafening blast blew her hair around her head, but she stood unmoved even as the shockwaves opened cracks in the earth.
Lancer thumped the ground once more, and the mortars fired again. This time, Avenger responded by slamming her flag onto the ground herself. Around the impact point, the ground rippled, glowing red cracks opening up – and when the whistling shells descended, they were met with a forest of spears reaching for them.
Avenger's weapons shattered. Lancer's weapons exploded. The dust danced madly in the blasts, each new explosion creating strange shapes in the expanding cloud.
Avenger laughed amid the chaos. "Amusing toys, Lancer. But really, there's no way they could-"
That was as far as she got before Lancer emerged from the dust – fist rising with the unstoppable force of mountains.
An observer standing on the Indian subcontinent, if such an observer were several miles tall and witnessed things on the timescale of eons, might have understood Avenger's pain had they carelessly left their chin in the path of the emerging Himalayas. Lancer's fist tracked its inevitable path into Avenger's jaw, and the power of the planet lifted her off her feet.
The power of humanity, embodied in this case by a beautifully-wrought mortar shell engraved with lapis lazuli cuneiform extolling the history of ballistics, met her going the other way.
Avenger smashed into the ground. A lightning-fast punch blurred in to follow, and she only just rolled out of the way in time – only to groan when the familiar
thump of artillery echoed off the hills when Lancer's fist struck earth.
"This is so unnecessary," grumbled Avenger, scrambling back as the shells rose high into the sky. Cracks of red fire, as from pottery left too long in the kiln, ran throughout her body, visibly knitting themselves together. "You already know those shells won't hurt me. Do you just like making noise? Is that it? Why bother?"
Lancer shrugged.
Avenger snarled, and with a contemptuous swipe of her flag a roof of interlocked spears thrust itself over her head. Lancer lunged, and Avenger raised her sword to parry the blow…
… which never came. Instead, Lancer seized her collar, and yanked her out of her protective phalanx straight into the path of the next descending mortar shell. It exploded with stone-shattering force directly against the side of Avenger's head, tearing her out of Lancer's grip, and she bounced and rolled across the cratered ground.
She was up in a moment, and launched herself at Lancer with a vicious sword slash which lit the air on fire behind it. Lancer ducked into an easy-looking crouch, tapping their fist against the ground while they were down there.
Then, they exploded upwards. They grabbed Avenger's head in a flying tackle, and bounced it against the ever-more-exposed bedrock. Rock lost.
This time, Avenger took long seconds to reform, and was visibly breathing hard after she had pulled herself back together. "Pointless. Pointless, pointless, pointless! You've seen this doesn't work! Why are you still trying?"
Lancer cocked their head. "Funny."
Avenger screamed wordlessly, and along with the sound came spears. They emerged from her body, punching out six feet or more – followed by another spear from the end of the first, then a third from the end of the second, quicker than the eye could follow until Avenger seemed to be at the centre of a bizarre and malevolent tree. Forking like lightning, the spears chased down Lancer.
The Chain of Heaven was faster. They dodged and ducked and wove their way through the darting spears – and wherever they would have been spitted regardless, a mortar shell dropped from the sky and shattered the offending spear to splinters. Despite the cracks and craters left in the ground, Lancer was surefooted, and even against a headwind of rushing metal they approached Avenger.
When they were only just out of arms' reach, they plucked a falling shell from mid-air and swung it full into Avenger's face. She flew back, carving a trench in the earth, but recovered smoothly using her sword as a brake. When she rose to her feet, she levered a rock the size of a small car out of the ground and kicked it at Lancer, dirt flying.
Mid-air, the rock lengthened, sharpened – then shattered, until a small cloud of razor-sharp spears flew at Lancer. They ducked, and their fist descended yet again.
It was caught by a black gauntlet as Avenger appeared from the dust cloud, and the guns fell silent.
"
Enough," growled Avenger.
Only a hastily-raised forearm prevented the sword stroke from taking Lancer's head off, and even that was chopped almost clean through. Avenger let out a scream of effort, and with a dull red explosion quite different from Lancer's artillery, 'almost' became 'completely'. Lancer's hand fell to earth, the severed end glowing cherry-red.
Lancer backed away, but their vision was blocked by a black flag – before a sword ripped through it, and pierced an inch into Lancer's head before they managed to slip away. They kicked out, but Avenger had the rhythm of the fight now and the kick met a quickly-extruded spear. Chains wrapped it, but Avenger simply seized the chains and whipped Lancer overhead to slam into the ground.
Lancer, unbothered by lying on their back in a crater, raised a fist and brought it down – only for it to hit a black boot instead. Avenger grabbed their tunic and hauled them up.
"I said enough," said Avenger. "Let's just keep this between you and me, yeah? No more of those stupid cannons. Things like that," she tutted. "They'll always fail when you need them most. Good steel, that's what you want."
Lancer was – or could make themselves be – one of the toughest things on the planet. So when Avenger raised her sword and slammed it straight through their body, it said terrible things about the level of sheer force she could call on. It pierced even Lancer's invincible body like a knife through butter.
With a sick grin, Avenger lit the sword on fire, and made it a
hot knife through butter – a white-hot, incandescent glow, that set grass on fire clear across the hill. Lancer glowed from within, their eyes and mouth highlighted in an angry red, and where the sword entered their chest you could see the clay start to splinter and crack.
For a second, the two were immobile. Lancer transfixed, a blinding bar of fire through their chest; Avenger holding them bodily off the ground with one hand and pushing her sword deep with the other. In that moment, it looked as though even Enkidu would fall.
And then the Chain of Heaven abandoned the pretence of human form.
Starting from their wound, they
unravelled. First, their long hair whipped around them in a frenzy of green and gold. Then, it was impossible to tell where hair ended and Lancer began – and finally, Avenger found herself thrusting her sword into nothing more than a ball of golden chain.
With a
snap, the chain writhed – and like a magician revealing a cunning knot, suddenly Avenger's arm was bound up to the shoulder. She swiped at the chains, but they simply gave way – and more wound themselves around her legs, until she was held fast, anchored at a dozen points to the ground.
A knot of chain behind Avenger blurred, shifted – and turned into the familiar androgynous figure of Lancer, holding three lengths of chain in their hand.
"You're stuck in the past, Avenger," they said. "Revenge is selfish, and can never look forward, so of course you'd never appreciate the works of humanity past your own era. But, as in all things, the only constant is change."
Avenger snarled, and exploded with spears once more. They passed harmlessly through Lancer's chains holding her captive, and Lancer simply sidestepped out of the way.
"In one thing you were correct, however," they said. "I have indeed used enough mortar shells."
And, body crackling with golden lightning, they slammed their fist down in a titanic blow. The power behind it was nothing like as weak as an avalanche, or even colliding continents. This was the kind of impact that created
moons.
The ground in its path shattered.
And, already softened by the impact of hundreds of Noble Phantasm artillery, so did the hill. All of it.
It took long seconds for the two Servants to fall.
Lancer landed partway down the side of the pit, hand braced and body still crackling with lightning. Avenger landed on her feet in the centre, and swiped her sword to one side defiantly – before her mouth fell open in shock.
Cannon dug themselves from the ground on every side, lining the crater like crystals in some enormous geode from a dream of war. Ornate bombards, modern howitzers and naval guns, all the way up to carronades lining the rim of the pit. All were beautiful, all were the pinnacle of human craft turned to destruction, and all were aimed squarely at Avenger.
Across the top of the pit, a spiderweb of chains flashed orange-gold as every single one fired at once.
Had a living human somehow been in the pit, they would have died instantly, not from the cannonballs, artillery shells and grapeshot that filled the air in an almost solid cloud, but from the sound alone – or would have, had the muzzle velocity of Noble Phantasm-level artillery not exceeded the speed of sound.
Avenger was torn asunder. From the impacts, certainly, but in many cases the projectiles from opposite sides actually collided within her body, and the shockwaves blew even her iron-hard form apart like water. The instant after the cannon pit fired, there was nothing but a pile of fused projectiles glowing red-hot where Avenger had been.
Then it stood up.
"Oh, do you not need all this clay?" it said. Slowly, the cannonballs and shells melted and ran together, and the blue cuneiform that had been engraved on them became an angry red glowing script, promising revenge on the world in Medieval French before fading. Within seconds, Avenger stood again. "I'm more than happy to take it over, if you're sure."
"I won't lie, I'd rather you didn't," said Lancer, resting a hand on a magnificent bombard. "It does feel rather disturbing."
"Oh, well, have it back then."
One moment, there was a small armoured woman. The next, a messy ball of spikes, spears driving themselves deep into the earth that made up the crater sides. Guns broke, pierced by spears or bent – but not all. The largest remained, aimed, and fired again.
The ball disintegrated. But before it did, Avenger reformed herself from a knot of spears stabbing up towards the sky, and leapt upwards, slashing at the golden chains. Before she reached them, another coil lashed round her ankle, and Lancer slammed her down into the ground – or they would have done, had Avenger not reached out a hand and snagged a spear on the way down.
In the blink of an eye, Avenger became nothing more than a wicked-looking spike branching out from the spear she'd grabbed, and the chains closed on nothing. That spear, in turn, glowed a furious red – and then the one it was connected to, and the one connected to that, before one close to Lancer exploded, thorns branching out in a lashing frenzy. Lancer skipped back, and by the time they landed, Avenger had taken her human form again.
"That's an unfortunate trick for you to have learned," Lancer said. "I'd hoped it would take you longer to discard your human body."
"I rejected my humanity the moment I was reborn in the Grail," Avenger sneered. "If it holds me back, why keep it? But, yeah, if you hadn't shown me how, it might have taken me a little longer, so cheers for that. Seems like this body's really good at learning."
"Ah. Still, this pit will be your grave."
Avenger rolled her eyes. "How long before the lesson sinks in, Lancer? I'm
invincible."
In answer, the guns fired – specifically, the old-time naval cannons. Avenger sighed and let it happen, clearly expecting to have to put herself together again.
Instead, chain shot wrapped itself around Avenger's body in a blur, and somehow wove themselves between a
second web of chains which shot from Lancer's hands to link with the one covering the pit. Avenger was suspended, disconnected from the spears which were even now falling in pieces to litter the base of the crater. She struggled, and shot more spears from her body – but with a roar of gunfire these were disintegrated before they made it more than a foot.
"Yes," said Lancer. "Still, dodging is sometimes useful even so."
"You can't keep me here forever!" fumed Avenger – literally, smoke rising from her form as an impossible heat raged about her.
"No," agreed Lancer. "Just long enough."
And Serenity, recognising her cue, dropped silently from her hiding place at the top of the pit.
Observing this fight was, in some ways, the most difficult thing she had had to do throughout the entirety of the War. Lancer could tell where she was, and could try to steer their shots away from her and keep Avenger's attention on them, but it was only Serenity's skill that had avoided some of Avenger's more indiscriminate attacks – and, being frank, Lancer's sheer power was not gentle on those nearby either.
But Serenity had persisted. When the sky fell on Avenger, she had been out of the way, forewarned by Maiya (herself in constant contact with Kirei). When the two monsters had fought it out in close combat, Serenity had sought an opening while shockwaves tore at her skin. When Avenger had turned the area into a storm of blades, Serenity had used every ounce of skill and speed to stay one step ahead. When Lancer had turned a hill into a pit and then fired it at Avenger, Serenity had clung to the top, even as her eardrums burst under the pressure.
All of it, for this one moment.
She fell, utterly noiseless and invisible, not even a shadow to be seen. In her hand, she held a misshapen, kludged-together device – the Spiritron Dispersal Bomb.
It would – claimed Waver Velvet – completely annihilate all magic within its area of effect, which was a radius of three feet.
All magic. All spells, all curses, all Bounded Fields, all spirits, demons, fairies, ghosts… even Ghost Liners were not unaffected, although erasing all but the weakest Servant was beyond it.
And, of course, it would unmake entirely the Dragon Core Stabiliser that was Avenger's foothold in this world.
It was the ultimate anti-magus tool, and there had been enough material in the remains of Caster's workshop to make six of them. Waver had ruined two in the process of figuring out how to repurpose Caster's designs, before settling on a bomb instead of a beam. They had tested one, to check if it worked and to find the all-important range.
In Serenity's hand, therefore, was one of their three last chances.
Like an owl stooping towards an apocalyptic mouse, she dropped, watching the cocoon of chains that held Avenger get closer.
Six feet.
Five.
She thumbed the detonator.
Four-
It happened too fast for even her to track.
Avenger's head snapped round, shocked and furious eyes meeting Serenity's. In the next instant, there was an earsplitting
crack, and the chains binding Avenger snapped. Avenger grabbed a length of chain one-handed and whipped it through the air even before she started to fall. The end
blurred towards Serenity-
-and smashed the Spiritron Dispersal Bomb to smithereens.
Avenger landed back at the bottom of the pit. Serenity snagged a trailing length of chain and scuttled along it to the shadows in a far corner, but the damage was done. Avenger's eyes tracked her.
"Presence Detection too?" frowned Lancer. "You really do learn quickly. I'm a little annoyed at how easily my chains snapped, as well… those were made to hold gods, you know."
"Well then, I'm as far from divine as it gets. No wonder they couldn't hold me," sneered Avenger, not taking her eyes off Serenity. "I'm no mere
god. I'm the Devil herself."
With a swipe of her sword, spears rose from the earth. With the planting of her black flag, they set alight with a sinister red glow, and the heat of it set the air shimmering.
Avenger smiled at Serenity, and the malice in it made her skin crawl.
"
Welcome to Hell, little murderer."
