[X] Plan Not A Scavenger Hunt
"Have you found anything? It doesn't even have to be one of the witch's emblems; just tell me that you've found anything relating to the witch that could help us tonight, and I'll call it good enough."
"I found a discarded rosary necklace nearby the warehouse we blew up where Sister Hope and her father used to hold their sermons; but aside from that? Nothing."
Your heart stops in your chest. A discarded rosary necklace. Why didn't you think of it before? You've had Archer, Lancer, and Assassin scouring the city for visible depictions of the witch's sunburst emblem all day, and yet it never occurred to you to have them check for depictions you already knew about. Gods above, if you hadn't realized it when you did, then Hitomi might really have been... There must be hundreds of those necklaces scattered all over the city, worn under the clothes or stashed away inside the houses of the people who attended Father Despair's sermons. When Caster said they would be small and difficult to find, this must have been what he meant. The only way you'd be able to find them all in time would be to stop time and go door-to-door, but you doubt you have enough Grief Seeds to do that, and still have a safe amount left over for Walpurgisnacht. "There's bound to be too many of these things for us to be able to track them all down in time. We should have started scouring the city the instant Hitomi clued us in to something being off about the necklaces. I'm afraid we have no choice but to let this go, and to hope for the best in spite of our inability to find and destroy them all."
"Are we supposed to just give up then?" your servant asks, sounding just as concerned about your call as you are in making it. "I was under the impression that we'd need to destroy these things in order to make the familiars drop their intangibility. What are we supposed to do now?"
"I know you have your ways. Get as much information out of it as you can, and then destroy it. Even if we'll be unable to track them all down, even one less will be helpful, and if we're lucky you'll get something useful out of whatever you find."
"Understood."
Even if we'll be unable to track them all down, even one less will be helpful, and if we're lucky you'll get something useful out of whatever you find."
That's all your master has to say about the matter. Giving her one last "Understood" you terminate the link between the two of you. "So, I'm to get as much as I can out of this thing, then destroy it." That should be simple enough to do. You clench the painted wooden sunburst in your fist, whispering to yourself "Analyzing structural components"
The construction is as basic as it feels, simple carved wood and acrylic paint. From its initial construction, a little under two weeks ago; to being dropped by Sister Hope when you raided the warehouse to retrieve her; and to it being left here, abandoned, "Sister Hope was the only person to ever touch this particular piece, it seems..." There's nothing else for you to analyze about this necklace, so with a strong wrist you fling it high into the orange-tinged sky, before drawing your arrow and sniping it with a single well-placed arrow.
"Mission accomplished, master."
"Good. Find Lancer and Assassin, and return home for now."
The sun is low on the horizon, the deep orange of the setting sun giving way to the encroaching shadows of the night as you and Tomoe-san make the trek out to the wooded clearing where, just days earlier, you and your team prepared for combat against the witch's intangible familiars. With hundreds of of the witch's sunburst emblems scattered throughout the city, worn on the necks or kept in the houses of hundreds of former 'Church'-goers, any chance of negating their intangibility advantage is all but lost to you now. You'll have to hope that your training, and whatever breakthrough you've made with your Isa rune, will be enough to overcome the obstacle facing your team tonight.
The other members of your team will be expecting the two of soon, but you want some time to see for yourself what the day's breakthrough has earned you. "Grief dampening, please," you say to Tomoe-san. "I don't know what I'm about to do, nor how much it might cost me to do it, so I'd prefer to play it safe." Tomoe-san nods, staying silent as she applies Wunjo's Grief-dampening effects to your Soul Gem.
You know that your efforts have accomplished something, but your conscious mind has no idea what that could be. Breathing in deeply, you let your arms fall loose at your sides, and allow your unconscious self to take over.
Instantly, you've drawn your bow, and pull back on the string as the water molecules in the air freeze, forming into the perfect shape of an arrow. You raise your aim skyward, and loose your arrow high. As the arrow flies, it collects frozen water molecules, transfiguring them into arrows alongside it, as the ever-expanding flight of arrows soars ever higher. Then! The volley descends, crashing back down to earth; and as each arrow collides with the ground, it instantly freezes anything it touches, splashing ice in every direction, until the entire volley has collided with the earth and turned the wooded clearing into a frozen wasteland. You take a single step forward, and the tremor of your foot against the ground causes the frozen earth to shake. The ground splinters into fine powder of white and brown, while the trees completely disintegrate into piles of shaved ice.
"Impressive," Tomoe-san says, as you turn your head back and forth as you survey the damage to the clearing. You've effectively tripled the overall size of the clearing, if not more; and inadvertently turned the train tracks passing through it into a white mist. Oops. It's a good thing that no trains will be coming this way until the repairs to the bridge are complete, or else your little test might have been responsible for a serious accident. "A self-replicating frozen projectile, capable of reducing anything it touches to shards of ice."
Tomoe-san is right; it's an impressive attack indeed; with an impressive cost, to boot. "Tomoe-san, by how much does your use of Wunjo dampen our Grief when applied?"
"At the moment, it should be by a little over forty per cent, I believe. Why?"
Even with Tomoe-san's Grief dampening, that attack still took far more out of your Soul Gem than you had expected; and an impressive attack like that requires an equally impressive name. Knowing her, she would probably recommend something in a foreign language. Just the way she did for Madoka, back then. She was always so impressionable, copying Tomoe-san's penchant for giving her attacks foreign names. You close your eyes, and you can almost hear Madoka's voice, calling out in that first timeline "Finitora Freccia!"
Yes, that will do for a name.
After you've applied a Grief Seed, draining your Soul Gem of the heavy corruption it endured to enable your finishing arrow, you turn to Tomoe-san, and ask her "Do you think you could ask Caster about the mystery servant he thinks was responsible for taking out Assassin?" It would be good to know their and their master's identities, and if possible you might even have an additional ally against the witch tonight. The gods know you'll need all the help you can get.
"I asked him," Tomoe-san says when she returns to herself after speaking with her servant. "But, Caster just laughed at me, and told me not to be so hasty."
"I hope that means we won't have to be waiting very long, then, to learn the identity of our mystery servant." It isn't Saber; that much you know, and outside of Saber all of the classes Archer told you about have been filled. Short of an entire second faction of servants appearing, as Rider described during his War, that just leaves the 'abnormal' class McRemitz-san asked about, the class called "Avenger'.
Whatever, and whoever, they are.
[ ] Wat do?
