Taylor: *Gets completely roasted*
Anderson: "But none of this is new to you is it?"
Taylor: "Nope. Mistakes aside I'm satisfied with the results of my life. If I could do it again I'd do it better, there's always regrets one would like to fix, but I'd still do most of it again. Even the bad stuff. Especially the bad stuff. It's kind of important for more than just me that I do the bad stuff."
Anderson: "Objective retrospection, how rare."
Taylor: "So, we may be enemies in this Singularity," *digs out book* "but can I have your autograph? My mother was an English professor and I kinda grew up reading a bunch of your work."
The dragon's roar seemed to shake the world, and answering screams came from the fort in the distance as it descended like the wrath of some terrible, pitiless god.
I broke into a run. I didn't even think about whether it was a good idea or not. All I saw was an enemy — a familiar one, one I knew how to fight and beat, one I now had the tools to beat, again.
"Senpai!"
"Miss Taylor! Wait!"
My swarm rose up, from the grass, from the trees, from every nook and cranny where they'd been hiding, waiting, living, and they took to the air ahead of me, around me, and the buzz of their wings was like a heavy drone that I felt within me as much as I heard, vibrating through my whole body and soul. Neither the dragon nor the soldiers racing back towards safety could miss them, and as the soldiers broke whatever ranks they had managed to muster to defend against the beast, the beast itself turned away from them and towards me.
I didn't waste any time. The instant it was in range, I set my swarm to harrying it. My harmless fliers, the ones that didn't have any hard offense, they honed in on its maw of sharp teeth and its nostrils. The sole nest of wasps I'd managed to collect, they focused on its eyes and swooped down, stingers ready, venom set to deploy.
My plan fell apart almost immediately.
I'd known, intellectually, that actual dragons were much different from Lung. They were existences of fantasy rather than passengers meddling, creatures that man didn't understand and so had gained a degree of power that modern weapons couldn't touch. Lung's scales, I could have cut through. Punched through with a knife or a bullet, or failing that, one of Bitch's dogs could have torn him up with their teeth. His mouth was armored, but although his biology was strange and inhuman, he himself was still just as human as any other cape. I could have drowned him in bugs, the same way I had Alexandria, if I wasn't afraid to lose twice the number to his flames.
A real dragon, it turned out, wasn't that easy to put down.
My harmless fliers came within reach of the dragon's mouth and nostrils, and the sheer power, the dense magical energy in its breath killed them immediately, overloaded their bodies until they burst, raining their guts down to the ground in a disgusting shower of yellowish viscera. The beast swung its long neck to and fro, and with every pass, anything that came within three feet of its fangs simply exploded.
The wasps didn't fare much better. They flew towards the beast's eyes, stingers out, and thrust them with all their meager strength towards the vulnerable tissue, but when the narrow points came into contact with the dragon's eyes, they skidded off, like there was some membrane as strong as iron that they just couldn't penetrate.
A dragon's entire body was Mystery. I hadn't thought much of that lesson, at the time, beyond filing away the important bit for later: Mystery could only be beaten by a stronger Mystery. It had sounded like sophistry, like some zen koan that was supposed to be incredibly insightful or a recursive argument that wound back on itself.
I was beginning to see what it meant, now. A dragon was a creature of mystery that existed in the realm of fantasy, and that meant that the only way to kill it was to have enough magical power to hurt it. My bugs, meagre existences that had so little strength on their own, either in the physical sense or the magical sense, couldn't even pierce its flesh, let alone the scales that covered it like armor. Even my wasps couldn't hope to hurt it at all.
The only thing they were good for was a distraction.
It meant I had to reorient my plan, because there was no way for me to bring this thing down by myself, not the way I had those skeletons in Fuyuki. No, of course not, what had I been thinking? Cúchulainn had said it himself — skeletons, reanimated corpses, were the lowest of the low in terms of magical beasts and familiars. Any mage worth her salt could pick them apart, as long as their numbers weren't overwhelming.
My bugs were the same way. They had always been the same way. It was just that humans could be brought down by stings and bites in ways something like this couldn't.
My thoughts raced, and as my bugs adjusted their courses to focus on its eyes — to block the dragon's vision, even if only with the sheer volume of bodies that buzzed around its head — a new plan started to form.
I wouldn't be able to do it by myself, though. I'd need some help from someone with the raw strength to hurt it. Fortunately, there was just such a person running behind me.
"Mash!" I shouted. "Bring it down!"
"W-what?" she called back.
"To the ground, Mash!"
Through my swarm, the small number of bugs I'd stuck to the rest of the team more via old habit than conscious consideration, I felt her shift as she turned to the twins.
"Master —"
"Do it, Mash!" Ritsuka ordered.
"Y-yes!"
And then, she leapt into the air, far, far too high for a human to manage, still carrying that massive shield around like it weighed nothing at all, and my bugs parted in front of her to give her a clear path to her target.
"Hiyaaah!"
The thud of her shield making contact reverberated throughout my swarm, and the dragon let out a roar that I could only interpret as pain as the edge of the bottom spoke slammed into the base of its neck, right between the wing joints. The beast spasmed, and its wings flopped helplessly as it lost the rhythm that kept it aloft. Without that, it dropped like a stone towards the ground.
I was already racing towards it as it fell, my knife in hand.
Could I kill a dragon? I didn't know. I wasn't at all sure, and I was keenly aware that this was incredibly dangerous. The better idea was to just let Mash finish it off, whack it over the head until she smashed its brains or whatever. A gross way to end the thing, but letting a dragon rampage throughout the French countryside sounded like something we weren't supposed to let happen.
But some part of me needed to know. Was I strong enough? Was my knife, hodgepodge mess of magecraft and tinkertech that it was, powerful enough to hurt it?
The dragon landing shook the ground beneath my feet, but I kept running. It wasn't far, and as long as I was fast enough…
I wasn't. The dragon remained stunned for only a few seconds, and even running full tilt, I couldn't cross the distance in enough time. It was already starting to stir.
"Mash! Keep it down!"
Mash landed atop one of its wings with a crunch, driving her heels into the joint where the bones were weakest, and as the dragon cried out, she flipped up, took hold of her shield with both hands, and slammed it down into the ground next to the dragon's neck. The left spoke came down on the beast's neck like a hammer, driving it back to the earth with another thud that left it dazed.
I didn't have time to inspect it, but as I raced towards it, in some distant, faraway place, I was surprised at how small it turned out to be. Big, still big, but not any larger than one of Bitch's dogs. I clambered astride the neck as quickly as I could, my heart thundering in my ears, took hold of my knife with both hands, and drove the tip towards the base of the skull, right at the top of the spine. A killshot.
It skidded off. The scales were just too strong.
My options ran through my mind at light speed. There weren't many. If my knife couldn't get through its tough hide and its mouth was filled with dangerous, sharp teeth and a breath that could burn the flesh off my bones, where else could I attack it? Where else would it be vulnerable?
If it worked on Lung…
The fingers of one hand wrapped around one of the horns protruding from its head as I threw myself forward and drove my knife into one of its eyes.
After a moment of resistance, the blade sank in like butter.
The beast bucked beneath me, tossing its head back, roaring, and I had to wrap my legs around its neck to keep from being thrown off. The horns threatened to skewer me, and I was keenly aware of the one jutting out past my hip that would gut me with one wrong move, but somehow, I managed to stay on.
"Miss Taylor!" Mash called.
I ignored her, twisting the nanothorn dagger in the soft tissue of the beast's eye with a savage wrench, and then my thumb flicked the switch to turn it on.
Blood spewed forth, splattering over my hand and fingers in a fine, crimson mist. My dagger sank deeper in, and the dragon's thrashing grew worse as I clung to it with all my strength, trying to keep its undulating neck from tossing me off. The hum of the nanothorns was all but unnoticeable under the noise of the beast's suffering.
Deeper and deeper my dagger went, further and further into the skull until my hand was wrist deep into its eye socket, and then, suddenly, the dragon jerked and collapsed, every part of it sagging into the dirt like a puppet whose strings had been cut. My entire torso rocked forward, and the smooth, rounded shaft of the threatening horn pressed hard against my side, like a warning of just how close I'd come to a mortal wound myself
I held, for a moment, heart still pounding, pressing my dagger ever deeper and keeping it there just to make sure.
But the dragon didn't stir, didn't so much as twitch, and it had gone completely silent. It wasn't even breathing anymore.
It was dead.
My finger flicked the switch again, and the dagger turned off as I slowly extracted it from out of the creature's head with a sickening squelch. When I looked down at it, the entire thing was coated in blood and small bits of vaguely pink blobs that I didn't really want to think too hard about. My sleeve was red almost up to the elbow.
Something curled in my belly. It felt like accomplishment.
I killed a dragon.
Slowly, I extricated myself, wiggling my legs out from under the dragon's neck — my shins were definitely bruised, I realized with a wince, and I was going to be feeling it for quite a while. It was probably a miracle I hadn't broken anything.
But I couldn't be too upset about that. I killed a dragon. A real one, not an imitation like Lung. A beast of legend, a creature of myth, and sure, Mash had been the one to bring it to the ground, but I dealt the killing blow.
For just a moment, I felt strong again, powerful, in a way I hadn't since Gold Morning. I was Skitter, I was Weaver, the cape who faced down all comers and never lost, even if she didn't win. I wasn't the no name spellcaster struggling to catch up to her peers, I was the girl who stood against the end of the world and gave it the middle finger.
"Whoa."
I smoothed my expression out as the twins came over, eyes wide and staring at me. I felt hyper aware of the blood dripping from my right hand and my knife, the red stains that coated my sleeve, as I turned to face them. They gaped openly and unabashedly at the corpse behind me.
"Senpai really did kill a dragon by carving out its eyes," Ritsuka breathed.
"I thought she was exaggerating," Rika admitted. "Senpai really is a badass."
A muscle in my cheek jumped as Mash came over to join us. I hadn't realized the twins had taken that brief bit I'd mentioned to Cúchulainn so completely to heart. It must have sounded pretty ludicrous at the time, after all.
"Th-that was incredibly reckless!" Mash scolded me. "Even if it was just a wyvern —"
My brow furrowed. "Just a wyvern?"
That brought Mash up short, like she'd forgotten that my education in magic and magecraft was much shorter and less comprehensive than hers or the rest of Team A's.
"Wyverns are a subspecies of dragon, Miss Taylor," she explained slowly. "Thaumaturgically, they're not considered true dragons, because their mystery is weaker, although they share many of the same innate traits." She bit her lip worriedly, and her face twisted as she looked behind me at the fallen beast. "If our enemy had been a true dragon, I'm not sure any of us would have been able to harm it at all."
The sense of triumph in my gut soured. My grip on the nanothorn dagger tightened.
So. I'd gotten myself all hyped up for nothing, huh? Taylor the Dragonslayer. In the end, it was nothing more than a worthless fantasy cooked up by my own ignorance.
I looked back at the wyvern, still just as dead.
Saying "all that effort" like we'd fought a long and arduous battle wasn't quite right, but I'd had a hard enough time doing anything at all to it. My swarm was useless, nothing more than a distraction, and my knife had made it through, but only the soft tissues of the eye. Now might be a good time to test it, see if I could carve off its scales with the nanothorns active, but did it lose mystery at the moment of death, because it was no longer a fearsome, unstoppable monster? That might be a worthless thing as well.
An approaching presence jerked me out of my thoughts, and I looked up at the soldiers cautiously approaching from inside Vaucouleurs as a fly landed on the leader's back. Mash, seeing my attention shift, followed my gaze, and when she saw the soldiers coming closer, weapons raised, she held up one of her hands and took a step towards them.
"Monsieur," she began. "Excuse me, but we are travelers —"
"Back!" the leader shouted, brandishing a spear. Both it and his voice shook. "Stay back, heathen! Begone from this place with your witchcraft and sorcery! W-we'll have none of that, here!"
Mash blinked. "Witchcraft?"
"Do you think none of us saw you summon that infernal swarm? Get back! Go! Leave this place!"
Slowly, she stepped backwards until she was next to me, but she didn't go any farther. To protect me? Even if I didn't really need it against a bunch of ordinary soldiers, I still appreciated the thought.
"The ley line?" I muttered to her.
"There should be a spot somewhere outside the village, as well," she whispered back. "It won't be as convenient as lodgings here, but we could set up camp there, if we have to."
The lead soldier thrust his spear at us threateningly. "Go! Leave! Now!"
"I'd say we have to."
She nodded. "Okay," she said louder, to the soldier, "we'll leave peacefully."
Carefully, we backed up until we reached the twins.
"Senpai?" Ritsuka asked quietly. "Mash?"
"There should be another ley line terminal somewhere in the forest outside the city," I summarized for him. "The soldiers think we used witchcraft to summon an evil swarm of bugs, so we'll have to camp out there instead of in Vaucouleurs itself."
"That was us, right?" Rika asked.
"Yes, but it wasn't magic."
"Then what —"
"Now isn't the time," I cut across her. "We can discuss that sort of thing later. For now, we need to leave, before those soldiers' desperation overwhelms their fear."
The twins nodded. "Right."
Carefully, we all backed up, keeping Mash in front of us in case one of the soldiers got particularly brave, and we kept going until we'd reached the treeline again and Vaucouleurs and its soldiers disappeared behind the foliage.
"Now what?" Ritsuka asked.
I turned to our resident Demi-Servant. "Mash?"
She pursed her lips, and an instant later, her shield disappeared like a mirage. Returned to spirit form, I realized after a second, because regular Servants could do that with both themselves and their gear. I hadn't known Mash could, because she was obviously a living person and a Servant simultaneously, but then there was a lot I didn't know about how a Demi-Servant was supposed to work. I wasn't sure anyone else, even the Director, did either.
Mash reached out and pushed aside some of the foliage. "This way," she said. "Follow me, please."
We ducked under the canopy and left the beaten path to enter the forest proper, following Mash as she led us towards where she sensed the ley lines converging. Not for the first time, I wished my training in magecraft was more complete, that I'd had more time to learn the things most magi took for granted. Being able to sense out the ley lines beneath my feet would have been an invaluable skill, both then and in Fuyuki.
We made a beeline through the trees, and through my bugs and the galaxy of lights in my head that represented them, I felt us skirt around Vaucouleurs. The soldiers had retreated back into the fort, and as we got closer and I could send more bugs to recon the inside, a nasty picture started to form for me.
We'd been expecting a small town, a thriving place with a contingent of soldiers there to protect it. What I saw instead was little better than a mass grave, building upon building — those that were still standing, anyway — filled with people with varying and various injuries. Most of them were soldiers, wrapped in bloodied linens and disfigured in some way or form. The lucky ones were intact, but for gashes torn into their flesh. The unlucky ones didn't bear mentioning.
What happened to this place? Had there been a battle that broke out, and these were the injured leftover? Or…
A chill went down my spine.
Was that not the only time they'd been attacked by a wyvern? In that case, was the one I'd killed the only one, or were there more, terrorizing the French countryside?
A better question might be where a bunch of wyverns would have come from, since this was definitely too far outside the time when such things had supposedly lived in this world. How had Marie put it? With the advancing of mankind's supremacy, the mystics of the ages past retreated to the inner sea. Whatever that meant. I didn't need to understand the fine mechanics of it to get the general idea that things like dragons and unicorns had all but disappeared past a certain point in history, and the fifteenth century was definitely long past that point.
Eventually, our little group came through the trees and found ourselves in the middle of a small clearing, where there sat —
"A campfire?" Ritsuka asked incredulously.
Not anymore, but little tufts of smoke were rising from the blackened logs, piled on top of each other and arranged in the center of the clearing, away from anything else flammable. Cautiously, I stepped closer and reached out, waving my hand as close to the charred wood as I dared. If the lingering smoke hadn't convinced me, what I felt there did.
"It's still warm," I confirmed.
"Someone else was here before?" Mash said lowly.
"Yes, I was," a new voice interrupted.
Mash and I both leapt, startled, as she summoned her shield and my hand went to my dagger, and we whirled around towards the voice to find a young woman, dressed in purple cloth and gleaming silvery armor. Her long, blonde hair was tied into a thick braid that was just way too long to be practical.
She smiled at us sheepishly. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you."
"Who —"
"She's a Servant!" Mash said urgently.
I glanced at her, and then back to the young woman. The only way she could have managed to get that close as a Servant without either Mash or Romani detecting her was if she was —
"An Assassin?"
The young woman blinked, and her hands came up in a placating gesture as she shook her head vigorously. "W-wait a second, I think there's been some kind of misunderstanding!"
Beep-beep!
"Everyone, I'm detecting a Servant nearby!" Romani told us. "Their presence is incredibly weak and diminished, but it's definitely a Servant!"
He stopped and looked at the young woman. Silence hung in the air for a second.
"Ah?"
"Maybe if I explained things?" she offered with a tentative smile. Slowly, she lowered her arms and pressed one hand between her, ah, large tracts of land, which were for some reason unarmored while gleaming plate covered her midsection. "Yes, I am a Servant of the Ruler class. My true name is Jeanne d'Arc."
"What?" Romani blurted out.
"It's true!" the young woman insisted. "Ah, the reason you might have trouble sensing me… Yes, for some reason, my performance is much lower than it should be. All of my stats have been ranked down for reasons I can't explain, and a lot of the unique abilities of the Ruler class that I'm supposed to have are missing. For example, the anti-Servant Command Spells and the ability to reveal the true names of other Servants I encounter."
If those were the sorts of advantages Rulers could expect, maybe summoning one of them should have been my goal, instead of one of the Knight classes. That sort of thing sounded invaluable.
"Have you encountered other Servants, here?" I asked sharply.
The young woman who claimed to be Jeanne shook her head. "No. I was only summoned into this era a few hours ago, so I'm afraid I'm not even sure what's going on with this Holy Grail War. A lot of the information I should have been provided by the Grail seems to be missing entirely. It's been a bit of a godsend that I was summoned into a time and place I'm familiar with, because I can at least speak the language."
I shared a look with Mash, and then I turned to the twins. "Ritsuka, Rika, what do you see with Master's Clairvoyance?"
They both squinted at Jeanne, frowning, and after a moment, shook their heads.
"Ruler class Servant, Jeanne d'Arc," Ritsuka reported. "Revelation, Charisma, and Saint, although the last one is sealed. It looks like she is who she says she is, Senpai."
Slowly, we all relaxed, and Jeanne's tentative smile became broader and more open.
"Mademoiselle Jeanne?" Romani said. "I think there's some things we need to talk about, before we get ahead of ourselves."
And so he explained Chaldea, our mission, what we were doing there and why. The Grand Order, Singularities and what little we knew about how they functioned, what they were and what they did, the proposed existence and role of the Holy Grail in making them, everything relevant to the situation.
"There are some things we just can't say for sure, yet," he finished, "but we can at least make some educated guesses. Do you have any questions?"
"It's a lot to take in, I'll admit," she said at length, "but no, I think I understand all of the important parts, ah, Doctor Roman?"
"Doctor Roman is fine," he assured her.
"So the reason I don't have most of the abilities I could expect in a Holy Grail War is because this isn't strictly a Holy Grail War?"
"If you loosen the description to 'any conflict with the Holy Grail as its central prize,' then you could call it one, but yes, this isn't really a Holy Grail War like the ritual in Fuyuki, Japan. The Holy Grail is still the prize, but technically speaking, this whole thing started when someone 'won' it."
"It would definitely explain a lot," Jeanne muttered.
"What about you?" I asked. "Do you have any information about what's going on in this Singularity? What point of history has been overturned?"
She scowled. "Unfortunately, I don't know as much as I would like to. However… Yes, there are a few things I managed to find out in the few hours I've been here." She took a deep breath. "Firstly, my living self was executed only a short time ago. In fact, it seems to have been only about a week. This might be why my abilities are diminished, since my legend is so 'new.' Secondly, as the point of divergence… King Charles VII has been killed, and Jeanne d'Arc was the one who killed him."
Silence met this statement.
"What?" Romani croaked.
"You didn't…" I started, but I wasn't sure how to articulate the question in my head.
How did you ask a woman whether she killed the man she dedicated, sacrificed her life for? Jeanne d'Arc gave up everything in order to see Charles VII crowned; the idea that she would turn around and kill him seemed like something out of a Master-Stranger horror story.
"No," Jeanne confirmed. "Based upon what I was able to hear, Jeanne d'Arc lived and died here according to proper human history, as you call it. However, a few days after she was executed, a woman bearing her face and name, my face and name, appeared. She attacked Orléans, slaughtered the entire city to a man, and slew King Charles VII and every single member of his court."
Orléans and King Charles VII… Her entire history was bundled up into that. The two greatest accomplishments of her relatively short career were ending the English occupation of Orléans and ensuring Charles VII made it to the throne. It was quite literally what she'd given her life for, after a fashion.
I eyed her, looking for any sign that the news had gotten to her, but she didn't seem particularly upset or distressed. She might have been planning another military campaign with the French army instead of telling us that her life's work had been all for nothing, for all the difference it seemed to make to her.
If it had been me, being told that a woman wearing my face and name had gone and crushed the refugees of Gold Morning just days after I killed Scion… I wasn't sure I would have been anywhere near that calm.
Jeanne's lips drew tight. "They also say…that as part of her pact with the Devil to gain new life, she also gained a sorcery that allowed her to summon legions of dragons to do her bidding."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Taylor killed a dragon! For real, this time! It was a real dragon, with wings and scales and everything!
But it was a super weak dragon that skipped leg day, so she only gets half points.
Next chapter, Taylor finally gets to do the summoning thing and become a proper Master for reals, guys.
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out, and especially to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best, and your continued support is invaluable. If you like what you're reading and want to support me as a writer so I can pay the bills, I have a Patreon. If Patreon is too long term, I have a Ko-fi page, too. If you want to commission something from me, check out either my Deviantart post or my artist registry page for my rates. Links in my sig. Every little bit helps keep me afloat, even if you can only afford a couple dollars.
It only took a few seconds for the implications of what Jeanne was saying to sink in.
My eyes went wide. "The wyvern…"
Jeanne nodded. "It was likely one of this other Jeanne's…this Jeanne Alter's army."
"Jalter?" Rika mumbled.
"That makes some sense," Romani said thoughtfully. "There's no way wyverns are a native existence to fifteenth century France. By that time, mankind's advance had already pushed them out into the previous texture. Even most of the stragglers were long dead."
"I can't say I understand all of that, but you're right that no such thing existed while I was alive," Jeanne said. "Moreover… I just don't understand how she'd do such a thing as command them, either. I certainly didn't have any skill for controlling magical beasts."
That was a good point, wasn't it? There was a reason dragons of all types tended to sit at the top of tier lists when magi talked about Phantasmals. Admittedly, I didn't know as much about them as I'd have liked to, and I didn't know if I was overcorrecting for how much my head had swelled over killing that wyvern, but if even things like ordinary lions and tigers were hard to tame, then something as powerful as a dragon would be even more so.
For that matter, we had enough trouble just managing to summon Servants. We had a whole system dedicated to it, a cutting edge mechanism that still only had four recorded successes to date. Would summoning a magical creature be easier, or harder?
And even if it was easier, to summon a whole army of them…
"Summoning them is already going to be an incredible feat, right?" I asked Romani.
"It's much like summoning Servants," Romani answered. "Strictly speaking, for modern magecraft, it's impossible. Even for the fifteenth century, it would be a difficult, high level spell, the sort of thing you need a Grand Ritual for."
"Or a Holy Grail?"
…you'd need something with a whole lot of power backing you up.
Mash's brow furrowed. "Miss Taylor…do you think…?"
I looked at her, face solemn.
The pieces were starting to come together in my head. Jeanne d'Arc had been summoned back into the world using the Holy Grail and then corrupted by it, and after that, she turned on France, used the Grail to summon her own army of powerful magical beasts, and destroyed everything her living self had helped to build. Out of what? Spite? Revenge, for the French letting her be executed instead of mounting a rescue? The reasoning didn't matter so much as the acts themselves.
And perhaps this Jeanne Alter's presence had triggered a sort of autoimmune response that automatically manifested the original. I was a bit murkier on that, but I thought I understood the gist of how that sort of thing was supposed to work.
There were a few holes, a few things that I didn't have an answer for, like who or what had summoned that twisted version of Jeanne in the first place, but it was entirely possible Lev or someone had done it just for the purposes of unpinning this point in history.
"I wasn't expecting to find the answer this quickly," Romani admitted, "but I think you're probably right. Occam's Razor and everything. If there's a Servant going around, by all accounts as corrupted as the Fuyuki Servants were, performing feats of magecraft that would otherwise be nearly impossible…"
I nodded. "It only makes sense that Servant would be the one with the Holy Grail. And if she killed King Charles VII and all of Orléans, too —"
"Then she'd also be the source of the historical deviation," Ritsuka concluded.
Romani's hologram nodded. "Presumably, yes."
"And so the only way to correct the deviation from proper history and set this all to right is to defeat my alternate self and reclaim the Holy Grail?" Jeanne asked.
"Presumably," Romani hedged. "I don't want everyone to get the wrong idea, here. This is all just speculation. Educated guesses. It's just that this is the best we can do with the evidence we currently have. The only way to find out for sure might be to confront her yourself, and, well…"
I grimaced. "Army of wyverns, right."
That would probably wind up being the biggest obstacle. One at a time, we might be able to take them down much the same as we had the first one, but I doubted Jeanne Alter or the rest of her army would be so kind as to come at us in an orderly line and wait their turn instead of just mowing us all down all at once.
Romani let out a heavy sigh.
"Yeah. If it's just one or two, Mash and Jeanne might be able to handle them just fine, but if it's an actual army, I don't want you guys going anywhere near that."
Absentmindedly, my hand rose and glided over the hilt of my knife.
With what we had right then, neither did I.
"I don't taste good extra crispy," Rika mumbled.
What we needed right then was someone to even the odds, someone who looked at an army of dragons and smiled. The trouble was, while quite a few Heroic Spirits had the anecdote of slaying a dragon in their myths, vanishingly few had it as a central focus of their legends. Most of the Knights of the Round Table, for instance, had slain at least one dragon throughout their adventures, but the killing of the dragon itself was just the removal of an obstacle, not the goal of the adventure itself.
If I narrowed the field down… Saint George was a big one. But if I was going for an iconic dragonslayer, a Heroic Spirit whose name was practically synonymous with the deed, someone whose legend still reverberated through the modern day? A big name, a powerful name, a respected hero with a storied history?
I could only think of two.
I turned back to Romani. "You said you wanted me to try summoning again once we found a ley line, right?"
Romani blinked at me, and then his eyes widened. "Wait, you're not thinking what I think you're thinking, are you? Listen, one Servant isn't going to make much difference against an army of wyverns!"
"Depends on the Servant," I replied. "I wouldn't say no to Saint George, but I was thinking…if we could get Sigurd or Siegfried…"
"We might be able to play on the conceptual advantage," Romani muttered. "But still, that's… Even with one of them, Taylor, that's an uphill battle. Plus, think of how much magical energy a fight like that would burn through! I'm not sure our generators can handle it!"
"Did you get the Grail from Fuyuki hooked up properly?"
"I-I'm not sure that means what you think it does!" Romani sputtered. "Just because we got the Grail jacked into our power grid doesn't mean you can just use as much energy as you want!"
"You said getting the Grail set up would let us support another three or so Servants, didn't you?" I asked pointedly. "We don't need another three Servants, we just need one who can do the job of three. One top tier dragonslayer who can handle the wyverns for us."
"But that's not a guarantee!" Romani protested. "Sure, it would be great if you could manage to summon a Servant as powerful as Sigurd or Siegfried, but the spell doesn't work on pretty please and wishful thinking! You'd need a catalyst with a connection to one of them, and even then —"
I lifted my right arm, sleeve still coated in wet, red blood. "A catalyst, like the blood of a dragon, for instance?"
Jeanne gasped, and Romani's mouth flapped soundlessly as he stared at the proof of my victory. It was too bad I hadn't managed to grab a scale or fang or something, because that probably would have been a much less time sensitive catalyst, but when it came to the ideal catalyst for someone like Siegfried or Sigurd… Well, the heart and blood were definitely top tier. They were just a lot more prone to degrading quickly.
"How…" he began, and his voice cracked halfway through. "How did you get dragon's blood on your arm, Taylor?"
"I killed a dragon," I replied simply.
"I-it was very reckless!" Mash burst in. "Even if it worked, Miss Taylor could very easily have been killed, Doctor Roman!"
"She carved out its eye," Rika said, giggling a little under her breath.
"What?" Romani asked, voice strangled.
I cut the story down to its bare bones. "Mash brought it down, and while she was holding it in place, I stabbed it in the eye with my knife and kept going until I reached its brain."
"I really didn't need to picture that part," Ritsuka muttered.
"Your knife?"
"Oh!" Romani was pushed aside with an indignant squawk, and Da Vinci's smiling face filled the hologram's screen. "You got to give it a test drive! Tell me, how did it perform? Was it up to spec? Was it better or worse than it was when you first got it? On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate my repair job?"
I blinked. "Uh… Ten?"
Checking to make sure the nanothorn knife had been exactly as it had when Defiant gave it to me hadn't been very high on my priority list while I was busy shoving it into the skull of a powerfully magical beast. It was very close to the bottom, in fact.
Da Vinci danced away, whooping triumphantly about how even alien blackboxes couldn't trump sheer genius, and Romani slowly pulled himself back up into his seat. He took a deep breath.
"Okay," he said, and he sounded much calmer, now. "Putting aside just how reckless and incredibly dangerous it was to get anywhere near a dragon of any kind with nothing more than a knife… I'm still not sold on this idea. Before you say anything," he added as I opened my mouth, "I'm not disagreeing with the merits. And yeah, I did ask you to attempt a summoning when you found a ley line. I'm just a little nervous about the impact this is going to have on our power consumption, because if it's not enough from us here, Taylor, you'll be the one having to pick up the slack, and that could be very, very dangerous."
"We don't have much choice," I answered. "Maybe we could bring Emiya in, but it would be better to have someone who specializes in taking out dragons instead of a Swiss army knife."
"A what?" Mash asked bewilderedly.
"It's a metaphor for a jack of all trades," Romani told her absently.
Technically, that was a metaphor as well.
I spread my arms. "If you've got a better idea, Romani, I'm listening."
Romani's brow furrowed, but he didn't immediately offer any suggestions.
"Let's do it," Ritsuka said quietly.
Romani's head swiveled in his direction. "Ritsuka?"
"We're up against an army of wyverns, Doctor Roman," said Ritsuka. "We need all the help we can get."
The silence stretched for a moment, and at length, Romani finally sighed and gave up.
"Okay," he said. "I guess making an attempt for a specific Servant will double as an extra test for the system. I'll monitor everything from this end and try to see what the readings will tell us, and that should make things smoother in the future. I hope you know what you're doing, Taylor."
So did I.
Romani's image blinked out. Immediately, I turned to Mash.
"Get the summoning circle set up," I ordered. "With your shield, like in Fuyuki."
She hesitated and glanced at Ritsuka and Rika, and then set about doing as I'd said. While she was getting that ready, I reached for the clasps and zippers on my top and started undoing them.
Jeanne and Rika both squeaked.
"W-what are you doing?" Jeanne demanded in a high-pitched voice.
"S-Senpai, a maiden only reveals herself to the love of her life!" Rika agreed. She gasped and threw her hands over Ritsuka's eyes. "Onii-chan, don't you dare look!"
One of my eyebrows rose.
"I can't exactly throw myself onto the summoning circle, can I?"
It took a little doing with just one hand, since my other was covered in blood, but eventually, I managed to get everything unfastened and shrug one arm out of my clean sleeve. There was no real way to avoid smearing more blood everywhere, though, although the blood on my hand had mostly dried. Some of it still got inside my top.
Rika gasped. "S-Senpai took her shirt off!"
I rolled my eyes.
"Chaldea does have its own workout gym, you know," I told them. "You're not seeing anything now you wouldn't see if you spent time there."
It wasn't like I was wearing sexy lingerie, either, or some sheer, lacy thing you might see on a femme fatale in a James Bond movie. A sports bra only made sense when you were going into a combat zone, and it wasn't like I had a pair of melons attached to my chest that anyone would be getting a peek at. I had enough problems without adding chronic back pain on top of them.
When Mash was ready, I stepped over to the shield she'd placed on the ground, took an awkward hold of my top, and tried to wring the blood out of my sleeve (sorry to wrinkle your hard work, Da Vinci). Several thick drops squeezed out of the fabric and fell onto the surface of the rounded centerpiece, but too much of it had dried.
This was going to be a pain in the ass to get clean, wasn't it?
With a sigh, I shook out my hands and carefully draped my top over Mash's shield, taking great caution not to get the blood I'd just squeezed out back in the cloth. Then, I stepped back and turned to her.
"Are we good to go?"
Mash nodded. "Whenever you're ready, Miss Taylor."
I took a deep breath and forced my doubts down and away, and when I let it out, I thrust my hand towards the shield. The others stepped back a few feet to give me some more space, leaving me to stand there by myself.
No thinking about the results. No worrying about who might or might not show up. My catalyst should work, but even if it didn't, we wouldn't be worse off to have more allies on our side. Whichever Heroic Spirit answered my summons, he or she would be useful in at least some way for the upcoming battles.
So it was time to stop dawdling and fucking do it, already.
"Thy Essence is of Silver and Steel," I announced confidently. "Thy Foundation is built of gemstone and the Archduke of Contracts."
I wouldn't deny I was hoping for a dragon-slaying hero, though. Not when it would be oh so very convenient for the army of motherfucking wyverns we were going to have to deal with. Sigurd or Siegfried, would it be too much to hope one of them would be the Servant who came to me, now?
"Let the alighted wind be as a wall. Let the four cardinal gates be shut. Rise above the Crown, and let the three-forked road to the Kingdom revolve."
Above Mash's shield, a magic circle rose and glowed a bright, pale blue. A faint pillar of light jutted into the air, brightest where it met the circle and all but invisible at my eye level.
Not for the first time, I felt there must have been some deeper meaning to the incantation, that it couldn't be pure nonsense. The Crown, the Kingdom, I recognized them as having some relation to Kabbalism, but I knew next to nothing about that as a system of magecraft, so I couldn't have said how they were relevant here.
"Let it be filled. Again. Again. Again. Again. Let there be five-fold perfections upon each repetition. In my stead, let the filled sigils be annihilated."
A wind swept out from the pillar, low and gentle like a summer breeze, and my hair fluttered as it was pushed back away from my face. It was like the breath of some great entity turning my way.
The connection with the Throne was forming. Just as it had in Fuyuki, just as it had in the summoning chamber where Rika had called Emiya. This time, this time, I was definitely going to summon a Servant of my own. No fuckups, no uncertainties. This time, for sure.
"Thy body shall rest under my dominion, and my fate shall rest in thy sword. Let this be my oath. I shall attain all the virtues of Heaven. I shall punish all the evils of Hell."
The wind reached a fevered pitch. My hair whipped about, yanked back away from my head. The winding, grinding echo of the magical energy churning vibrated through me and through my magic circuits, racing up along my nerves like electricity up a copper wire. The back of my right hand, my prosthetic, burned like someone had jabbed it with a cattle prod.
I had to grit my teeth and force the rest of the incantation out. One last line. Just one. That was it.
"Thou the Seven Heavens, clad in the Three Great Words, arrive from the Ring of Deterrence, O Keeper of the Balance!"
The pillar of light flashed. The vague burning on the back of my hand sharpened, condensed down, and I had to squint through the blinding light to see a familiar pattern etch itself across my skin —
The wind vanished, sweeping out in one final burst. The light went with it, disappearing just as suddenly, and slowly, as I blinked the spots from my vision, my eyes readjusted to the shaded alcove of our little clearing. My heart thundered in my chest anxiously.
"You summoned me, so here I am," a man's voice said calmly, and the bugs on the edges of the clearing started jerking about erratically as triumph filled my chest like an expanding balloon.
His confident grin was the first thing I saw, and then the turquoise chestplate and shoulder plates, the red gauntlets and greaves. Short, dark hair, dark eyes that glittered, olive skin, and — the triumph in my chest wilted and died — a wicked-looking crimson bow.
"Archer class Servant, Arash Kamangir," the man said. "Pleasure to meet you, Master."
I looked down at the marks etched into the back of my hand, identical to the ones the Fuyuki Grail had handed to me when I contracted Cúchulainn back in Fuyuki. Before, I hadn't had any idea how to describe them, what they could be said to resemble. Now… Now, I saw them for what they were. Tentacles, branching tentacles made of eyes, or perhaps eyes made of tentacles. An eldritch monstrosity with a thousand eyes and an ever expanding reach.
My passenger.
"Yes," I said with affected neutrality, "I guess it is."
The bugs in the distance buzzed with agitation.
The summoning had worked, but I hadn't managed to call either of the two I was trying for. Was it just a matter of my catalyst not being strong enough, or was it me? Was this my karma or something? Destiny? Was there some cosmic rule that said I wasn't allowed to get what I asked for and had to make do with whatever the dice rolled for me? Because I was tired of getting snake eyes.
Arash's grin fell and his brow furrowed. "Is something wrong, Master?"
I pointed to his feet. "You're standing on my shirt."
"Oh!"
He jumped away and reached down, picking it up and flapping it as though that would clean it of the blood and grime already on it. When he apparently thought he'd got it as well as he was going to get it, he stepped towards me and held it out with an apologetic smile.
"Sorry about that," he said genially.
I took my proffered shirt and started putting it back on.
"It's fine."
The others, perhaps sensing that things hadn't gone catastrophically wrong, stepped back closer to get a better look at our new addition. They all regarded him thoughtfully, like he was a puzzle that needed solving. Rika came the closest, leaning in to inspect him.
"Something the matter?" he asked her politely.
"You're not Sigurd," she told him bluntly. "Or Siegfried."
He blinked, like he wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean. "I'm not. Were you expecting one of those two?"
Rika pointed at me. More accurately, at my sleeve, which was still red with drying dragon blood.
"Senpai was using dragon's blood as a catalyst."
He turned back to me, bewildered. "And you got me instead?"
"Do you have dragon-slaying in your myth?" I asked pointedly.
"Afraid not," he told me with a self-deprecating grin. "I'm just an ordinary archer. Nothing special."
"Then yes. I got you, instead of one of the two I was actually trying to get."
"Yeah," he laughed. "Compared to those two, I guess I am something of a letdown, huh?"
Beep-beep!
"Successful summoning completed!" Romani announced brightly. "It all looks good, magical energy flow from the reactor is nominal, we're completely in the green! I guess I was really worried over nothing, huh? So, this is…"
He trailed off as he caught sight of Arash, stared for a long moment, and then he looked down and started to furiously type at his keyboard.
"An Archer?" he muttered. "But neither Sigurd or Siegfried should qualify for that class at all… Plus, that appearance, that armor, that's all wrong for Scandinavia. Wait…" He squinted down at his screen and blanched. "Arash Kamangir?"
"In the flesh!" Arash said with a jaunty wave, and then he winced. "Well, kind of. Servant and all."
Romani sighed and deflated.
"Well, this didn't go anything like how it was supposed to."
Arash took it in stride. "Sorry to disappoint."
That. That was kind of frustrating on its own. We'd spent the last minute or two trashing him and talking about how we'd wanted a completely different Heroic Spirit, and he wasn't even getting angry about it. In his place, I wouldn't have been anywhere near as forgiving or level-headed about it.
In the absence of a catalyst — or if the catalyst just didn't work, I guessed — I was supposed to summon a Heroic Spirit who matched me as a person, someone who fit well with me. But this guy… I just wasn't seeing it.
"I'm sorry. It's just we were pinning our hopes for resolving this Singularity on managing to summon a dragon-slaying hero."
"You really needed them that badly, huh?" Arash asked.
Romani's lips quirked, mirthless. Not a smile or a grin, but not quite a scowl or a grimace.
"What do you know about the situation?"
"Almost nothing."
Romani sighed again and ran a hand through his hair.
"Yeah, we're still working on getting all of the systems restored, so the information packet provided to summoned Servants is still really sparse. It should have at least contained the information about our Grand Order…"
Arash nodded. "I got that bit, yeah. I'm not sure what's going on here, though. Can you fill me in?"
Romani turned to me expectantly, and with an internal sigh of my own, I took that as my cue. Don't think I don't see what you're trying to do, Romani.
"Alright," I said, "this is the situation as it stands so far, at least as we know it…"
I gave him the important bits, including the highlights of our adventure through Fuyuki and what little information we'd managed to scrounge up about the Singularity we were currently inside of. I left out the part about how we could have gone to Rome instead, out of respect for Romani's wish to keep the twins as innocent as we could for a little bit longer.
I got the feeling Arash saw right through that. Not that he gave any particular sign that I could point to, but rather a kind of instinct I'd honed after spending so much time with Lisa.
"As of right now, our only confirmed enemy combatants are this Jeanne Alter and her army of wyverns," I finished. "There's no indication of other Servants on her side or ours, so far."
Arash hummed. "It could be that the reason you didn't get Sigurd or Siegfried is because one or both of them are already here," he said shrewdly.
Romani blinked. "What?"
"Well, call it a hunch," Arash hedged with a shrug. "But it makes sense, doesn't it? If stray Servants were summoned to counter Jeanne Alter and her army of wyverns, wouldn't an iconic dragonslayer be the top of the list for appropriate responses?"
I shifted a little as I regarded him in a different light. It was possible, wasn't it? If Jeanne herself could be summoned by the world's autoimmune response to counter her evil self, then it was definitely possible that the very same kind of response had brought Siegfried or Sigurd into this Singularity as well.
A glance at my hand showed the dark red command spells that stood out against my skin.
In which case, it was still possible to form a contract with one of them, wasn't it? As long as they were here, we could find them and team up.
"That would be wonderful, wouldn't it?" Jeanne said brightly. "If they're already here, then all we have to do is find them!"
"I…don't think it's going to be that easy," said Ritsuka, wincing.
There were just a few problems with it, though.
"We have no way of knowing where they might have been summoned to, all things considered," I agreed. "If they're even here at all, the entire French countryside is up for grabs."
"They could be anywhere, couldn't they?" Mash said. "Even if we went looking across the whole country, they might move on before we reach them."
"My poor feet," Rika mumbled miserably.
Romani sighed for a third time. "There goes that idea."
"No," said Jeanne confidently. We all looked to her.
"No?"
"If either of them was summoned, they would have appeared somewhere relevant to the situation, am I understanding that right?" she said.
"Theoretically," Romani hedged. "But that could still be anywhere."
"Maybe so," Jeanne allowed. "Even if you're right, we already have a lead, don't we? The one place we know for sure my evil self has been, where she definitely used her army of wyverns to slaughter the populace."
I saw where she was going with that.
"Orléans."
Jeanne nodded.
"We should begin investigating there."
My eyebrows rose a little. Wow. Okay. It was one thing to hear about exactly how clever Jeanne d'Arc had been and how she had routed the English army without ever even drawing her sword. It was another thing to see it for yourself.
"Whoa, wait a minute!" Romani said urgently. "That's where we know she's been already, right? What if she stuck around and set up her own base? You could be walking right into her headquarters! Even with an Archer like Arash, there's no way you're ready to face down an army of wyverns, right now!"
Ironically, that was probably my first instinct — rush in and work things out as we went. But I wasn't too excited about our odds of making that work with what and who we currently had, and I didn't want to bring in our reinforcements just yet. Better to save Emiya for an actual emergency.
"You both have good points," I cut in as Jeanne opened her mouth to rebut him. "Orléans is our best bet, but going straight there could be dangerous. So what if we did some snooping in the area, first, instead of charging headfirst into the dragon's den, as it were?"
I took a quick glance at Arash with the Master's Clairvoyance that was supposed to come with the FATE system — and had to suppress a flinch, because wow, that Noble Phantasm was a huge handicap. Finding other stray Servants to ally with, if there even were any around, just got bumped way up the priorities list.
"There should be a few towns around the city," Mash added. "If there's a Servant like Siegfried or Sigurd near Orléans, there would almost certainly be at least a few rumors circulating through them."
Jeanne frowned. "There are several smaller towns within walking distance of Orléans."
"The closest one from here?"
Jeanne's brow drew together in thought.
"La Charité," she answered after a moment. "It doesn't sit directly between Orléans and Vaucouleurs, but it's one of the closest towns from here."
"Then we'll head there, first," I decided.
Jeanne nodded. "We can head out first thing in the morning."
My brow furrowed.
"It's not even noon," I pointed out. "And it's June in France. We should still have a half a day of daylight left to make it there. If we're quick, we can be there by sunset."
"Sounds like a good idea, Master," Arash chimed in with a bright grin.
"Um, Taylor…"
I turned to find Romani staring at me. "Yeah?"
"La Charité is… That is, from here to there is… H-how should I put this…"
"It's over three-hundred kilometers, Miss Taylor," Mash informed me.
I blanched. "What?"
A noise of distress, like the air being let out of a balloon, came out of Rika's throat. Her brother's face was twisted in horror.
"On foot, it'll take you about sixty hours to make it there," Romani told us. "That's about…five days of walking, give or take, and that's only if you don't take breaks or stop to eat."
"It would be faster with some horses!" Jeanne put in helpfully, except it really wasn't all that helpful.
"That's great," I said. "Do you happen to have some? Or maybe know where we could get a few, without any money to pay for them?"
Jeanne flinched and her slumping shoulders answered me as surely as anything else would have. Not like I was expecting anything different.
There was a moment of frustration where I had the thought about how much easier it would be if we could just steal a couple and move on, if only I believed Jeanne would let us get away with it, but it passed and settled into resignation. Even if this was a Singularity and everything would be corrected when it was all said and done, taking whatever we needed by force wasn't going to work in the long run.
"Romani, send us over some rations," I ordered. "We're going to need them, and there's no way of knowing when we'll find another ley line."
"You still want to head out as soon as possible?" Jeanne asked.
"Sitting around the campfire for a day won't change how far we have to go or how long it'll take us to get there," I said. "We might as well get there sooner instead of later."
"I wish there was more I could do, but Taylor's right," Romani said. "I'll make sure to pack you enough supplies to last two days."
"Yay, more walking," Rika muttered miserably.
"Well, it's not like they had cars in the 1400s, Rika," her brother hissed back at her, but he didn't look any happier at the news.
It wasn't like there was anything I could do about it, either. One way or another, we needed to put things to right and set human history back on track. Without any other way of getting around, we were just going to have to hoof it the whole way.
I let out a long, explosive sigh.
How ironic. It wasn't the way I'd originally feared, but it looked like the only way to correct this Singularity was by killing Jeanne d'Arc.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Arash isn't the obvious pick for Taylor's Servant. Strictly speaking, he isn't necessarily the absolute most compatible, either.
But their mindsets and tendency towards self-sacrifice are similar, and that will have payoffs in the future.
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out, and especially to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best, and your continued support is invaluable. If you like what you're reading and want to support me as a writer so I can pay the bills, I have a Patreon. If Patreon is too long term, I have a Ko-fi page, too. If you want to commission something from me, check out either my Deviantart post or my artist registry page for my rates. Links in my sig. Every little bit helps keep me afloat, even if you can only afford a couple dollars.
As this chapter brought up self summoned/masterless Servants i wonder who is going to end up as their masters in this story? Seeing as we have 3 potentials rather then just the one protagonist in the game. Though i feel bad for (and somewhat amused at) whoever gets stuck with
Taylor would put that situation down immediately if it was her, I don't think Rika as presented in this story would be at all comfortable will her affections and then Taylor would get involved, it would probably be Ritsuka that would be her chosen love interest.
Kiyohime: "And Master... If you ever leave me or I catch you being unfaithful-" *fire*
Rika: "Oh hell no. Listen here you crazy broad. You don't get to appoint yourself his wife and control his life just because he summoned you!"
Kiyohime: "A love rival already? I won't allow it!"
Rika: "Love rival? Not in a million years! He's not your Anchin reborn! He's my brother, and it's my sacred duty as the twin sister to protect him from crazy women like you!"
Ritsuka: 'Huh, I never knew Rika felt that way about me.'
Rika: "Even if I have to beat him unconscious and lock him in a room with a nice girl like Mash until they decide to get hitched I'll do it!"
Ritsuka: 'Nevermind.'
Mash: "Senpai!"
Rika: "Hypothetically. She needs to grow a bit more self confidence before I'd be confident handing my brother off to her."
Kiyohime: *Deathglares Mash and Rika*
Da Vinci: "Aren't you going to do something, Acting Director?"
Romani: "My Doctorate is in medicine, I initially majored in biology, and my minor was in anthropological studies. I am not in the least bit qualified to touch this mess with a ten foot pole."
Da Vinci: "But you're still in charge."
Romani: "Excellent point, and it is the mark of a great leader to know how and when to delegate. Luckily I have an acclaimed genius on staff I can hand this off to. What do you think, Da Vinci?"
Da Vinci: "Polygamy?"
Romani: "TAYLOR!!! I NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE!!!"
Finding a compatibility match for Taylor was hard. Tamamo is certainly a decent enough fit, but pairing them together doesn't have as much room for character growth as I would like. Taylor and Cu definitely got along well in Fuyuki, and they'd pair up very well in terms of methods and means and the lines they refuse to cross, but CasCu doesn't stack well into the later game and Gae Bolg trivializes a whole buttload of early game enemies. Karna has some compatibility, too, but he has much the same problem as Cu.
My original choice was Vlad, to make Taylor take a good, hard look at her darker side, but Essence was all about that and Vlad is really a better suit for Warlord Skitter than post GM Taylor. Too, Lancer Vlad kinda sucks if he's not hunkered down in one place or isn't rocking the vampire lifestyle.
The editing team's original pick was Salter, but Salter also runs into that trouble of Excalibur trivializing a large number of early game enemies, and I didn't have a solid enough grasp on her personality to do her justice as a deuteragonist.
So why Arash? It's true, their outward personalities are polar opposites. Taylor is reticent and serious, whereas Arash is open and cheerful. But that core value, that willingness to sacrifice as much of themselves as necessary to achieve a greater good, it doesn't match up perfectly, either, but it's close enough. Too, Arash is a look in the mirror. He's her and everything she strived to be, and he's an image of what she might have been like if she had managed to do everything right the first time.
Having them play off of each other gives me an angle on her character that the others wouldn't. I understand he isn't everyone's favorite Servant. He's not mine, either. But he's the right character for the right job.
RE: the catalyst — yes, it failed. No, there's no nefarious reason behind it. There's any number of reason why it wouldn't work. Primarily, dragon's blood would target Siegfried first, and he could very well refuse for fear of bringing another Fafnir into the world, or accidentally dragging the Rheingold along. Ironically, Sigurd's connection is much weaker, because he's more attached to the heart. Dragon-blooded heroes are a bit iffier, because this is dragon's blood that has been spilled in battle rather than harvested or what-have-you.
Of course, it could even be that the ritual twigged to the wrong thing and took her jacket as a whole instead of just the blood that was spilled on it. The jacket being a weak catalyst, even stained in the blood of a dragon, Taylor herself would form the backbone of the ritual and you get a compatibility summon instead.
I lie to you guy sometimes to preserve secrets about the future of the story, but there really isn't anything more complicated at play, here.
Chaldea's beds were fairly basic and simple, but modern mattresses had spoiled me for bedding, because when I woke up in the attached quarters of La Charité's Notre Dame, it was on a far less comfortable cot that could barely own the name. My lower back and neck were both sore as I rolled off of it, and my shoulder throbbed whenever I moved it the wrong way.
It was the worst sleep I'd ever had, and I wasn't sure we hadn't been better off camping in the woods. Maybe I shouldn't have expected much from what amounted to the guest quarters in a church run by a small group of monks in a tiny garrison in Medieval France, but I'd made too many comparisons to the cots we'd slept on in that summer camp what seemed now like an eternity ago.
The twins didn't look any better off when I found them. In fact, they didn't look like they'd gotten any sleep at all.
"I'm guessing your beds weren't very comfortable, either."
They glanced at me from their seats at the table, bleary-eyed and miserable, and mumbled a greeting my way. Mash, next to them, seemed a little better off, but not by much. Arash, of course, as a Servant, didn't need to sleep at all, and so he looked no worse than he had at the moment of his summoning.
I envied him for that. Times like this made being a Noctis cape sound absolutely wonderful.
"Good morning!" Jeanne said brightly as she came over. Her arms were laden with a large, wooden tray piled with what might generously be called food. She set it on the table with a hefty thud.
I raised one eyebrow. "Morning."
Jeanne, on the other hand, looked positively at home. Which made some sense, I supposed, because she must have spent a not insignificant amount of time under the care of one monastic order or another both before and during her campaign.
"The monks didn't think it was appropriate to mingle, so we've been left to our own devices, I'm afraid," she reported apologetically.
"That's fine."
I glanced down at the platter she'd prepared. Unsurprisingly, it didn't look like anything special or well-prepared, and it wasn't a restaurant quality spread, but the scrambled eggs were familiar and the porridge, although I hadn't ever had any myself, wasn't all that out there, either. But I could already tell, just from the smell, that they were going to be bland and kind of tasteless.
That was probably about what I should have expected on a pauper's penny. Spices would have been luxuries in this time period, a commodity whose trade would easily make you rich. I wasn't sure trade with India and China, where a lot of them had originally come from, was even all that common, yet. Either way, cinnamon and salt were not something you'd find in a monk's kitchen.
There was nothing to be done, and it would at least be more flavorful than ration bars, so I sat down, took one of the heavy, wooden bowls, and started to eat. Fortunately, at least, we had modern steel utensils, because my other options weren't particularly exciting.
The others, like they'd been waiting for me to give the okay, grabbed their own breakfast and dug in. Rika and Ritsuka were still sluggish, but weren't missing their mouths or anything, at least.
Between bites, I turned back to Jeanne. "Were you recognized?"
Nervously, she patted her black hair, cropped short just below her shoulders. As much as she might have liked it, that ridiculous braid was just too distinctive, so it was the first thing we'd had to change to disguise her.
"No, it seems like your disguise did the trick," she admitted. "I'm not sure we even had to worry. I don't think Perrinet-Gressard ever even saw my face, certainly not close enough to recognize me at a glance."
For context: Perrinet-Gressard was the man who had held La Charité when Jeanne had put it under siege in 1429 on the orders of King Charles VII. Owing to a number of factors, including some apparently very persistent inclement weather, he'd managed to outlast Jeanne and her forces until they had no choice but to lift the siege and retreat.
Naturally, it was something of a sore point for her, but the last thing we needed was him realizing she was right there under his nose and raising a stink.
"He's only one man, and it doesn't have to be him to make things difficult. As long as one person can point you out from the Siege, we could get in a lot of trouble," I told her. "Besides. Would you have preferred skulking around or staying behind while we came here on our own?"
She sighed. Her shoulders sagged. "No. You're right. Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive about it."
It wasn't that I didn't sympathize, I really did. Waking up in Chaldea's infirmary with most of my hair shorn off had been the topping on a shit sundae. But sometimes, sacrifices had to be made, and cutting your hair and dyeing it was a really minor one in the grand scheme.
"If it helps, you're just as beautiful with black hair as you were with blonde," Arash added in with a charming smile.
Damn, he was pretty smooth, wasn't he?
Jeanne's cheeks flushed pink.
"N-not that it was a concern for me!" she said, her voice a little higher than before. "But… I guess it's really convenient, this hair dye thing you have in the future. In this time, something like this would have been much more work."
"We're just lucky that one of Chaldea's staff members happened to use black hair dye," Mash muttered somberly.
One of the deceased staff, she meant. There had to be some kind of irony in the fact that this whole plan only worked because the original owner of the dye was dead and didn't need it anymore.
"If you think this is incredible, you should see some of the colors people dye their hair in our time," I said wryly. "Red, blue, green, purple, pink…"
"Like Mash's?" Jeanne asked.
Mash flushed and patted self-consciously at her own hair. "Ah, no, Miss Jeanne. This is my natural color."
"Really? Rika, too?"
"Carpet matches the drapes," Rika reported with a kind of smug humor.
Arash choked on a laugh that he smothered, while Mash flushed again and Ritsuka gave his sister a completely unimpressed look. Jeanne, on the other hand, didn't seem to get what that meant, and I didn't have any intention of explaining it. Was there a thing for corrupting a saint? Something like "delinquency of a minor?"
I shrugged. "It's not common, but there are different kinds of mutations that can result in unusual colors."
Or magecraft. I hadn't seen anyone else like that for myself, but if magic could change your hair color as a side effect, then whatever they'd done to make Mash must have been responsible for that particular shade of lavender.
"You're looking at the prime mutation herself," Ritsuka said, looking pointedly at his sister. She stuck her tongue out at him childishly, and fuck, if that didn't tell me they were siblings, nothing would have.
"In any case," I steered the conversation back around, "Arash, did you have any luck?"
Arash shook his head ruefully.
"Sorry, Master. No luck finding any dragon-slaying heroes. There were rumors of a powerful warrior further down south, but no one gave me anything more solid than that."
"That certainly narrows it down," I grumbled.
Southern France… There was no way we had the time or the resources to spend searching the entire southern half of the country on a rumor, especially one that vague. With the speed of travel in this era — in terms of both the physical and the information — that was the work of months or years.
"What about my evil self?" Jeanne asked. "Was there anything else you learned about her?"
Arash shrugged. "Nothing that we didn't already know. Sorry to say, your other half is just as bad as you feared. The folks around here had much more vivid stories about what she did to Orléans, none of it good."
Jeanne let out a heavy, explosive sigh.
I didn't have anything to say to comfort her, so I didn't even try. "It's a dead end here, then."
"Seems that way, Master," said Arash.
Frustrating, but there wasn't anything we could do about it. Lisa would probably have told me that sometimes, when you followed a lead, it didn't take you anywhere useful. Sometimes, there just wasn't anything there for you to find.
That didn't stop it from feeling like a waste of time, though.
"Should we travel south next, Miss Taylor?" Mash asked.
I chewed on a mouthful of eggs to give myself a moment to think. As expected, they were bland and kind of tasteless, although they weren't anywhere near as bad as the ration bars, so they had that going for them.
We didn't really have a lot of options, did we? There were rumors we could chase down south, and we might find out more as we went, but that wasn't a guarantee. It sucked that we didn't have anything more actionable than that, but there also wasn't any guarantee that we'd find anything of use if we circled through the cities and towns around Orléans, either.
As for our group, particularly when it came to combat…
I glanced over at Arash.
His skills were mostly decent and worked well both to keep him alive and support his archery, and I had to assume he was good with his bow, if he'd been summoned as an Archer instead of one of the other classes. In hindsight, an Archer was probably the better option for fighting wyverns, since attacking something that could fly would be easier if you had ranged options yourself.
But his Noble Phantasm was a nonstarter. It was the last resort of last resorts, because it would immediately leave us down a fighter, and that put a limitation on him that instantly undercut everything else. He'd be useful, but at this point, we needed more than just him, and if Siegfried or Sigurd really was here, then there was no way we could pass them up.
Once I'd swallowed, I asked, "What's the next major settlement south of here?"
Mash turned to bring up the map, but Jeanne answered me immediately. "Lyon."
"Another week of walking," I muttered, doing the math in my head.
Rika's head hit the sturdy, wooden table with a solid thunk, and she groaned at the floor at the mere thought of it. Her brother's face had paled to match his porridge.
I wasn't exactly enthused with the idea, either. The travel time was fucking with us really badly, and I'd never wished for a car and modern roads more than I had during the days we'd spent trekking from Vaucouleurs to here.
The problem remained that there still wasn't anything we could do about it. Horses would definitely cut down on some of it — not as much as I would have liked, but definitely some of it — but the entire reason we were bunking in the living quarters adjacent to La Charité's Notre Dame instead of an inn or something was because we still didn't have any money to spend on anything else and we didn't much have a way of acquiring any in a reasonable timeframe.
"There's nowhere else closer by?" I asked Jeanne. "No other major towns or cities in that direction?"
"There are, but none of them are as big," she answered. "If we assume that my evil self wants revenge, then she'll start with the places that were most important to me, and then attack the largest cities."
"And she's already massacred everyone at Orléans, the site of your iconic victory…"
Jeanne grimaced.
So if her evil self, this Jeanne Alter, wanted to destroy everything Jeanne had built and kill all of the people Jeanne had saved until, assumedly, all of France was a smoldering ruin, where would she go next? Working under that idea, it would be the site of Jeanne's next biggest victory, and I would have thought that meant Reims, where Charles VII was crowned.
Except Charles VII was already dead, along with the entirety of his court. Would there even have been any point in going after Reims, except as and when it became "convenient?"
Ugh. There was still just too much we didn't know and too large an area to cover without a good way of getting there in anything resembling a timely manner.
"Do you have any idea —"
Beep-beep!
Romani's image appeared atop the table.
"Romani," I began.
"There's no time!" he cut across me urgently. "Everyone, I'm detecting the presence of a Servant, approaching fast! It's headed right for you!"
The whole group froze, turning to look at him, and Rika's spoon fell from her fingers with a clatter. I was the first one to move, and my stool toppled over, I stood from my seat so fast.
"If you left anything in your rooms, get it now!" I ordered the twins, and they jolted, scrambling out of their seats. "Jeanne, Arash, you two are going to be our frontline, I need you to —"
"Wait!" Romani shouted. "I'm getting a better scan now, it's separating! I-it's not one Servant, I'm reading at least five!"
"F-five?" Ritsuka choked out.
That many? How? Why? Did they know we were here, somehow? Had they detected us through some manner of Clairvoyance or magecraft and were even now coming to eliminate the threat to their plans?
I didn't even entertain the idea that it could be a coincidence. The mere thought was ludicrous. Why else would Jeanne's evil self bring four or more other Servants to the fight if not to crush us with overwhelming force?
"You need to get out of there!" Romani said. "There's no way you can take on that many enemy Servants by yourselves!"
And for once, I agreed with him. Five on three wasn't the worst odds, but between not having any idea who the other Servants were and the simple fact that Arash was the only one with an offensive Noble Phantasm among our group, even I had to acknowledge that we were massively outmatched. If any of them had an Anti-Army Noble Phantasm? Or worse, if more than one of them did? We were fucked, completely and utterly.
Even if they didn't, none of our Servants was suited for close range combat, let alone against multiple opponents at once. If they had enough frontline fighters to our ranged fighter and two supports, they wouldn't even need Anti-Army Noble Phantasms, they could just close in and pick us off with sheer numbers.
That wasn't even considering if they brought an army of wyverns with them.
If, if, if. Too many fucking ifs, not enough solid answers.
"Ritsuka, Rika, go!" I told them. "Get your stuff, get moving!"
"B-but the town!" Ritsuka protested.
They were going to burn it down, too, I realized. Massacre everyone here, like they had at Orléans. No, of course. Even if they were here for us, there was no way Jeanne Alter would pass up the chance to get yet more revenge against France.
And there was nothing we could do about it, was there? Unless…
I glanced to Arash, brow furrowing.
We had just summoned him. I had just summoned him. He'd been with us barely a week, and I hadn't seen him fight anything more dangerous than the animals he hunted for us on the road here.
But if we could get the group to clump together, if the enemy Servants grouped up close enough to hit them all at once, then… That would be it, wouldn't it? Threat beaten, Singularity corrected, everything was said and done with a single Noble Phantasm.
All it would cost us was one good man who was technically already dead.
My right hand ached. My Command Spells throbbed, as though to remind me how easy it would be to force him, even if he resisted, and if I gave the order, I wasn't sure that he even would. Not when his Noble Phantasm itself was a crystallization of a moment of self-sacrifice.
It was the pragmatic thing. It was the correct choice, as a matter of ending this whole thing as quickly and efficiently as possible. Three years ago, I didn't think I would have flinched to make it.
But did that make it the right choice?
"I know how you feel, but there's nothing you can do for them!" Romani replied.
"We'll do what we can for them, but this is already going to be a fighting retreat," I said. "Ritsuka, Rika, Mash, Arash, Jeanne — our job will be to occupy the enemy Servants long enough for as many people as possible to evacuate. We'll draw their attention away from the town and disappear into the forest."
And if the opportunity to finish them all off with Arash's Noble Phantasm presented itself… I'd make the decision on what to do about it then.
"S-Senpai!" Ritsuka gasped.
"It's the best we can do!" I snapped at him. "If we had more Servants —"
I shut my mouth before I could say something I regretted, like implying Arash was useless. It wouldn't help anything, and especially not unit cohesion.
"Go, get your stuff," I ordered instead. "Romani, how long do we have?"
"Not long!" he replied. "M-maybe…thirty seconds? They're approaching fast, but it's more like a speeding car than a jet plane!"
Finally, finally, the twins jolted into action, almost stumbling over themselves as they raced off to the rooms they'd been let borrow to retrieve whatever bits or bobs they'd left in there. With them out of the way, I turned to Mash.
"Mash —"
But she'd predicted me; in a flash, she had transformed, clad in armor once more, although I still thought it looked skimpy and pretty useless. At least it protected her chest.
"I'm ready, Miss Taylor."
Arash, next.
"Arash —"
"I'll set up in the bell tower," he said, "and keep an eye out for our uninvited guests."
"Jeanne," I finished, turning to her last, "keep that disguise as long as you can."
"I won't shy away from my evil self," she told me firmly.
There was no time to argue, no matter how stupid or misguided I thought it was.
"Just don't rush in to face her!"
With that last bit taken care of, I raced back to my own room to pick up the pack of supplies we'd been carrying on our journey here. Or one of them, at least. It was much lighter than it had been when we'd set off, but that didn't mean it was useless enough to leave behind.
Ritsuka and Rika had made it back by the time I did, pale and a little shaky, but they seemed wide awake, now. The adrenaline of the moment had woken them up the rest of the way the same as it had me, but the crash later was definitely not going to be pretty for anyone.
I turned to my communicator. "Romani —"
Master! Arash's voice interrupted.
A piercing scream from outside rang out before he could go any further, and Jeanne's face contorted with surprise. She didn't wait a second longer — before my eyes, she vanished, a gust of wind chasing after her.
Shit.
"There's no time," I told the twins. "Go!"
They didn't fight me or protest. Together, we raced out of the living quarters and from the Notre Dame into the street, and as we went, I reached out into my swarm to try and get an idea of the situation. To the east, there was nothing unusual, except the people now running that way to escape, but to the west, across the Loire river —
A dragon, a wyvern, fell from the sky maybe thirty feet from us, startling both the twins and Mash, who jumped to put herself between it and us. She needn't have bothered. Two arrows jutted out of one of its eyes, buried almost up to the fletching, and six more were embedded much shallower into its neck. If it wasn't already dead, it would be very shortly.
"Th-that's…!" Rika stuttered.
Good job, I sent back to Arash.
He didn't reply, but I saw another volley of arrows shoot across the sky towards another wyvern that my bugs were tracking. Several of them lodged themselves into its scales without even drawing blood, but several more sank into the crevices between them and found vulnerable flesh as the beast reared back in pain.
Against my will, I was impressed. At closer range, I probably could have managed a shot like that, using some of my old tricks. But to manage such pinpoint precision from so far away, with a bow and arrows instead of a bullet? I was beginning to understand that Servants weren't just massively superhuman in terms of speed or strength, but that they were utterly superhuman in terms of their skills, as well.
"Where did Jeanne go?" Ritsuka asked loudly.
"I don't think we can afford to wait for her, Master," Mash said.
I didn't say anything as I searched for her myself, spreading out my swarm to find the telltale scent of the chemical dye in her hair. As the only person in the whole country right now who had that modern hair dye, she should have been relatively easy to find.
"Ha!"
Of course, it turned out to be completely unnecessary, because it wasn't at all easy to miss the blonde-haired woman in armor jumping fifty feet into the air to slam the haft of a rolled banner into one wyvern's head. It was even harder to miss her riding it down to the ground until its neck snapped under her and then standing up as though nothing was amiss.
"Whoa," said Rika.
But as though they were white blood cells detecting an infection, the other wyverns turned from what they were doing — from setting buildings on fire, from crashing through brick and wood, from swooping down to claw at whichever unfortunate soul happened to capture their attention — and started to converge on Jeanne's position. They made directly for her like they were being drawn in by some kind of magnet.
Arash predicted me before I could even make the order, and he shot salvos of lightning fast arrows towards every wyvern that he could see from his perch. One after the other, his targets dropped from the sky, crashing through buildings and blocking the roads. A few of them disappeared beneath the surface of the river with a titanic splash.
It was a drop of water in a bucket. Even as he killed them, there were so many more that it didn't seem to make a difference at all.
Jeanne took a deep breath —
"I am Jeanne d'Arc!" she shouted, and her voice carried over the screams of the fleeing townsfolk. "I am the woman they named the Maid of Orléans! I am she who saw King Charles crowned! I am the one they burned at Rouen! As a servant of God, I have returned from beyond death itself to protect the good people of France!"
What the fuck was she doing?
"You, foul devil who claims to seek revenge and wears my name, present yourself before me, for I name you a charlatan and a deceiver!"
The crowd of wyverns shuddered, stuttered, and then, slowly, they began retreating, pulling away from the beeline they'd been making towards her as Jeanne stood strong, triumphant over the body of the one she'd killed. From above, five more descended, and I knew immediately who and what they carried without even having to look.
The five enemy Servants.
I got a better look as they came closer. The two on the left were both pale and white-haired, almost sickly looking. One was a man, dressed in fine, black clothing of rich make that gave him the air of a prince or a lord. He carried a spear. The woman next to him was full-bodied and looked like someone had crossed a noblewoman with a dominatrix, although the stark red of her gown contrasted her pasty white skin.
The other two on the right — my right, that was — were in complete contrast. The first was a woman, long, dark-haired, dressed in a fetishized version of a knightly tabard and carrying a heavy staff whose end was fashioned into a crucifix. Her companion was…effeminate, but androgynous, with a slender frame and clothing that looked like it came right out of The Three Musketeers, complete with a fluffy feather stuck in a wide-brimmed hat.
And in the center of this line was, incredibly…
"Two Jeannes?" Ritsuka muttered.
Yes, another Jeanne d'Arc. Identical from the shape of her face to her hair to the armor that looked as though it had been stained black by soot. She looked as though she could have stepped right out of the pyre that had killed her.
The important difference was in their demeanors, the way they held themselves. Our Jeanne, standing on the ground, was a gallant figure, upright and righteous. The Jeanne riding the wyvern was the exact opposite, because her expression was cruel and twisted, and the air she gave off that I felt even from that distance was dark and malevolent.
For an instant, she reminded me of Jack Slash.
"W-whoa," Rika gasped, "that's so freaky! She really is Jeanne Alter!"
"Don't be silly!" her brother chided her.
The Jeanne atop the wyvern, Jeanne Alter, looked down at us from her mount, and the instant she saw her counterpart, she broke out into laughter. Cackling peals rained down upon the stillness of the town, high pitched and almost stereotypically evil.
"What," she rasped out between laughs, "what nonsense is this?"
"So," our Jeanne said stoically, "it's true, then."
"This, this is too much!" Jeanne Alter guffawed. She turned around to look behind her. "Gilles! Gilles, look! Where is Gilles? He just has to see this!"
Jeanne hesitated. "Gilles?"
"Oh. Yes, that's right. Gilles stayed behind." Jeanne Alter giggled, still grinning. "What a farce this is. What lunacy. This joke is so poor that I might just die laughing. To think, France is so pathetic that it still clings to me like a child at her mother's skirts, even after they betrayed me!"
As they talked, I turned narrowed eyes on the assembled group and tried to measure the distance between each of them. Just from looking, it was already larger than I would have hoped, which meant it was far too likely that Arash would miss, if he tried to get them all at once. At least one of them would escape, which was a problem when we had no idea where the Grail pinning this Singularity in place was or who held it.
I looked at Jeanne Alter suspiciously.
In Fuyuki, the Grail had been held by Saber, who had been corrupted by whatever had originally formed the Singularity. A "Saber Alter," as it were. Now, a Jeanne who had been somehow corrupted was standing — flying, whatever — above us. A "Jeanne Alter," as we had taken to calling her.
Would the enemy really be that confident, that brazen, that stupid that they would deliver it right to us?
"Who are you?" Jeanne demanded. "Why do you have my face and my name?"
Arash, I sent his way, if you used your Noble Phantasm, could you take out all of them at once?
He hesitated a moment. He must have, because it took a few seconds for him to reply.
Maybe, Master, but I can't guarantee it. Not without knowing what to expect of the enemies' Noble Phantasms.
"What a useless question!" Jeanne Alter snickered. "I'm Jeanne d'Arc, of course! The saint who raised France from defeat and lifted the siege at Orléans!"
"Saint?" Jeanne repeated, disgusted. "What nonsense are you spouting? You're no more saint than I am!"
If we couldn't risk his Noble Phantasm without knowing what their defenses looked like…
What about a volley of regular arrows? How many could you fire at once?
His response was immediate and matter-of-fact. Ten-thousand.
My mouth twitched and my eyebrows rose just the slightest, the only signs of my surprise.
But it would take me a moment to prepare, Master.
"That's not important, though!" Jeanne shouted. "No… No, more importantly… At Orléans, you slaughtered the whole city! You killed King Charles and all the members of his court! And now, you've come here to do the same! Why? Why are you attacking the very people I fought to save?"
I think you might have that moment, I told him. Get ready. Try and focus down. Jeanne Alter is the most important target, but get her army of wyverns if you can.
Understood, Master.
"Shouldn't it be obvious?" Jeanne Alter asked with a malicious grin. "I'm going to carve a crest of blood across all of France, until the streets run red and not a single living soul remains!"
She cackled.
"Such is the will of God!"
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
FMA reference, get.
Before everyone jumps in to talk about how, "Actually, Stella blocked a shot from Rhongomyniad," let me stop you right there: sure, it did that in canon. Taylor doesn't know that. Keep that in mind for next chapter, too.
Also, Arash's Clairvoyance skill is really vague. It lets him see through Bedivere, but the skill description is the stock one that implies precognition, and precognition means there are a couple of things in Camelot that shouldn't have happened the way they did if Arash could see them coming.
If you're frustrated by the travel times and wondering why the group doesn't just hop on their Servants' backs, I feel you. Taylor kinda addresses this later and says, "Yeah, it's a stupid rule, I think we have stop following it."
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out, and especially to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best, and your continued support is invaluable. If you like what you're reading and want to support me as a writer so I can pay the bills, I have a Patreon. If Patreon is too long term, I have a Ko-fi page, too. If you want to commission something from me, check out either my Deviantart post or my artist registry page for my rates. Links in my sig. Every little bit helps keep me afloat, even if you can only afford a couple dollars.
"Y-you!" Jeanne gasped, and for the first time since we'd met, she seemed not determined or merely angry, but utterly and completely furious. "How dare you! To claim that this…this barbarism, this cruelty…that this is the will of God!"
"Is it not?" Jeanne Alter smirked. "I no longer hear the voice of the Lord. To have been called back from beyond death and set upon this country, and yet God no longer speaks to me, is that not evidence itself that He no longer blesses this country?"
"What madness has possessed you to think such lunacy!" Jeanne snarled at her doppelganger.
"Madness?" Jeanne Alter sneered. "It's this country that has gone mad, not me! It's you who has gone mad! They betrayed me, they turned their backs on me, they spat upon me! I delivered them salvation in accordance with the Lord's will, and now that they have fallen from His grace, I'll destroy them in accordance with His wrath and His grief!"
Jeanne's fist trembled, clenched so tight that her gauntlet creaked.
"I wasn't certain before, but now I'm sure," she said lowly. "You… There's no way you're me."
Jeanne Alter laughed. "Shouldn't that be my line, you country bumpkin? Any human should understand exactly what I'm saying! Any human being would feel the way I feel and come to the conclusions I have! If you can't understand why I am the way I am, then you're not a human, you're just a phantom! A ghost, a fragment, an image of me cast in the ideal of a saint who piously protects France!"
She drew her sword with a long, metallic rasp.
"Yes, I know what you are, now! You're the scum I scraped off the bottom of my boot! You're nothing more than the residue of my discarded leftovers! You're neither a Ruler Servant nor Jeanne d'Arc, you're just the unnecessary bits of myself I got rid of!"
Jeanne's shoulders shook. At first, I wasn't sure if it was despair or anger, because just based on my experience with people, it was more tempting to agree with her other self. We were all ugly and horrible, deep down, selfish creatures that lashed out when hurt and jealously guarded the things we cared about, even at the expense of everyone else.
And then she opened her mouth. "No, it's exactly the opposite! The woman known as Jeanne d'Arc… I had all of those feelings! I was angry, I was wrathful, I was spiteful and opinionated! That's why…those were the things I had to cast away in order to save France!"
She brandished her flag.
"I had to be better than my human frailties!" she said, with such conviction in her voice that I thought I must at last be seeing the woman who had led the battle against the English. "I had to be pious and upright, that the people of France could take heart and know that we were not beaten! I had to become more than a simple farm girl who had never held a sword in her life and knew nothing of the arts of war! I couldn't be moved by such petty things as my baser instincts and emotions!"
I'm ready, Master, Arash reported.
I made sure not to show it on my face. Not the slightest smile or the smallest smirk. Wait until I say.
Jeanne pointed the spiked tip at her counterpart. "You are all those things that I had to give up! You're nothing more than my lingering regrets and grudges, given form!"
Jeanne Alter snarled. "I'll show you who's real, you bitch! Berserk Lancer, Berserk Assassin!" The aristocrat and the dominatrix shifted, so that must've been them. "Rip her to pieces! Remove this ugly eyesore from my sight!"
The aristocrat's face broke out into a pearly grin, and the dominatrix's lips curled with a sadistic smirk. The one lifted his lance, and the other materialized a heavy, metal staff topped with a winged figure that might vaguely be called draconic.
There wasn't going to be a better moment than this.
Now! I commanded, and something shifted as Arash let loose his ten-thousand arrows. The air howled. The sky opened up and dropped down upon the world. All at once, they came, an endless torrent as inevitable and inexorable as the tide.
At one point, way back in my Skitter days, Alec had dragged the whole team into movie night and sat us all down to watch a cheesy action flick from Aleph, called 300. As a dramatized recreation of the Battle of Thermopylae, I'd rated it a 4 for historical accuracy and privately rated it a 6 for all of the shirtless hunks in loincloths. There were some things that hot men in revealing clothes just couldn't fix.
As Arash's arrows rained down from above, at that moment, a line from that cheesy movie came back to me:
Our arrows will blot out the sun.
The special effects from the movie…actually looked a lot like what I was seeing, now. Ten-thousand arrows — that number seemed enormous, but you couldn't appreciate the scale of something like that until you saw it yourself. Until you saw them rise into the sky and come back down, black dots growing larger and larger as their sheer number cast a long shadow over everything beneath them.
Watching it, I was certain that even Cúchulainn wouldn't have been able to dodge them all, even with his Protection from Arrows skill. At a certain point, the utterly ridiculous quantity had to overwhelm even as celebrated a hero as that.
Even a towering monolith could be brought low if you swarmed her with enough numbers.
Jeanne Alter screamed, lifting a hand up as though to shield herself from the incoming barrage. Like that would have been enough. No, we didn't even need Arash's Noble Phantasm if he could just fire off this many arrows like this. What enemy could muster a defense against what might as well have been an Anti-Army Noble Phantasm all on its own?
The woman in the fetish tabard, apparently.
She raised her staff towards the sky and the falling arrows, she opened her mouth, and she shouted one word towards the heavens.
"Tarasque!"
And above their heads, large enough to cover all of them at once, an enormous tortoise-like shell shimmered into existence, covered across the back with huge, wicked spikes that jutted out in every direction.
"Then we will fight in the shade," Rika mumbled, and my face twisted into a complicated expression.
For once, I was glad I didn't have time to unpack that, right then.
I knew before the arrows even hit that they wouldn't break through. Not against the deployment of an actual Noble Phantasm. We'd just missed our best chance to end this whole thing in one swoop, and now we were on the backfoot. We'd lost the element of surprise.
And sure enough, even against so many coming down, the woman's defense held, and Arash's arrows bent, bounced, and broke against the hardened surface, skidded off the spikes, and sometimes just plain shattered into sparks of light.
On the bright side, that shell might have been big, but it was barely big enough to cover the enemy Servants, and it most certainly wasn't big enough to protect the army of wyverns that hovered behind them, neatly lined up and waiting for orders. They had no Noble Phantasm defending them as Arash's barrage came down, nothing but their scales, and that proved not enough. The arrows tore through wings, sank through flesh, pierced eye and scale alike, and under that rain, they fell, crashing to the ground with thunderous thuds drowned out only by the staccato of the arrows landing.
When it was over and the last arrow landed, Jeanne Alter turned a furious gaze towards the church and the bell tower, snarling out, "You!"
She lifted her sword as though to race forward and run him through, but I didn't waste any time; just as the barrage petered out and ended, I lifted up my arms and my swarm arose, a single, droning mass of black and brown easily enough to outnumber Arashs' arrows a thousand times over. They came up as a wall of chitin and wings, interposing themselves between our enemies and us, and I turned immediately and grabbed the twins by one wrist each.
"Come on!" I urged them.
"Wha — Senpai!" said Ritsuka.
"Wait!" Rika cried.
"Miss Taylor!"
"There's no time!"
Arash, I thought at him, retreat!
A blur leapt out of the bell tower, and even as he did, a wash of flame cut into my swarm, frying some of my bugs, but it was no use, because my swarm was almost twice as large as it would have been in modern France. Just the complete lack of pesticides had swollen their ranks past even my best from back in my days as a cape.
The twins, once I got them started, picked up the idea and ran on their own, so I let them go and ordered, "To the forest! Go, go!"
Mash followed behind them, sparing me a worried glance as she passed, and I made to bring up the rear — but there was one person still left behind, and when I turned to look, she was standing there, staring up at the swarm and the gouts of flame that were making quick work of it.
Fucking pyrokinetics. They'd been screwing with me ever since my first night out.
"Jeanne!" I shouted at her. "We need to get out of here!"
She looked at me, hesitated, looked back at her evil self, and then turned away and started to run.
Turning her back on her dark reflection, it must have tasted like the bitterest of defeats.
We raced towards the treeline in the distance, and between my pace and Jeanne keeping slightly behind me, we caught up with the twins and Mash in short order. We'd made it halfway there when something suddenly bulldozed its way through my swarm, swiftly making it towards us at a speed that could only make it one thing.
"Shit!"
Jeanne and I both spun around, and the sheer force of the collision as a black blur slammed into her sent me flying back and tumbling ass over teakettle. Through the sparser collection of bugs I'd kept closer by, I made out one of the enemy Servants, the aristocrat with the spear, even as I righted myself and pulled myself to my feet. Jeanne had managed to block him with the shaft of her flag.
Back in town, Jeanne Alter was quickly whittling down the swarm, and it was only a matter of time until she'd thinned it out enough to give pursuit. We couldn't afford to sit here and fuck around with the aristocrat, not unless we could guarantee a kill.
Arash!
As though he'd predicted my thoughts, an arrow whistled over my head and towards the aristocrat, but he dodged it, leaning out of the way. Jeanne gave a shout and swung her flag, flinging him back a paltry dozen feet or so.
It was enough room for Arash to fire another arrow, and then another and another, not a barrage like before but a series of consecutive shots that forced the aristocrat to deflect them with the shaft of his own spear. I didn't know how long either of them could keep it up, but I had the nasty suspicion that Arash would run out of arrows and have to restock before the aristocrat slipped up and took one someplace inconvenient.
So I told him, Wait for an opening, a guaranteed hit. We don't need to kill him, we just need him injured enough for long enough for us to escape.
Abruptly, the arrows stopped, and the aristocrat — Berserk Lancer, apparently — rushed forward to fill the space they'd opened and attacked Jeanne, jabbing at her with the business end of his lance. She scrambled to defend herself, and if it hadn't been obvious before, it was now, as I watched them, that whatever the reason behind her decreased performance, it was severely impacting her ability to fight. He was going to overwhelm her eventually, one way or another.
I palmed one of the runestones Cúchulainn had left us in Fuyuki and eyed the aristocrat, squinting at his stats and skills with the Master's Clairvoyance provided by Chaldea. Magic Resistance B. My lips twitched. It wasn't even worth trying.
"Miss Jeanne!" Mash's voice called out, and moving so fast that the bugs I had attached to her were ripped off completely, she leapt over my head, hefted her massive shield, and with a warcry, brought it down on the aristocrat.
The aristocrat — Lancer, because that was honestly easier to keep track of in my head — dodged out of the way, and the bottom of Mash's shield crashed into the spot he'd just occupied. Mash didn't wait for him to come back around. She lifted her shield back up and kicked off the ground, eating up the distance between them effortlessly.
She was moving better now than she had in Fuyuki, I noted as I watched her engage Lancer. A little more graceful, a little less clumsy, not as much in the way of wasted movement or overextending her attacks. Was it just a matter of her attuning to the Heroic Spirit that slumbered inside her, or was she actually learning how to fight that quickly?
Lancer struck back with his spear, equally as quick and twice as elegant. There was a smoothness to his attacks that Mash still lacked, although even so, he couldn't land a clean hit. Like Medusa before him, Mash's shield was just too sturdy a defense and too large to operate around.
I recognized the distraction for what it was. I didn't know if the twins planned to summon Mash back with a Command Spell, but if that was their plan, then it was actually fairly decent, since they had six Command Spells between them.
I seized the moment and ran back to Jeanne, wrapping one hand around the cold steel of her gauntlet. She turned to me, blonde hair whipping against her cheeks.
"Come on," I said. "We need to get out of here."
She looked back towards the fight.
"But Mash…"
"Will be fine," I cut across her. "She's buying time for us to escape. The twins can get her after we've left."
She hesitated for a moment longer, and then nodded, and we raced off again, heading for the treeline. In the distance, the bugs I'd left on the twins hovered just out of plain sight, waiting for us in the forest.
"Have you gone soft, Dracul?"
Jeanne gasped, and she wrenched me backwards so suddenly that she almost pulled my arm out of its socket. A bare instant later, faster than I could blink, the dominatrix, Berserk Assassin, appeared in front of her. Jeanne's flag and Assassin's staff collided so swiftly and with such force it was as though they were magnetized.
"It's not befitting such a monster," Assassin purred, yellow eyes gleaming, "to go so easy on such a tiny waif of a girl like that."
My brain skidded over the word like a record scratch.
Dracul.
Several bugs sought him out, tried to land, but he was moving too fast and his swings were too strong. Those that got close enough were either blown away by the force behind his blows or else died outright.
Was he…? If I squinted, maybe it fit. He certainly looked the part of the legend, rather than the man. I could imagine him stalking through the streets of London or welcoming Jonathon Harker into his home with an unsettling smile, gracious and yet so subtly wrong.
Dracul. Dracula. There weren't many other Heroic Spirits, if any at all, who had such a connection to that name. Vlad the Impaler had planted the seed, and Bram Stoker had made it grow. There was no one else I could think of that would be referred to that way.
But for someone like that to have been summoned here, in the service of Jeanne Alter… No, I suppose that actually made a whole lot of sense, didn't it? Who else would be so appropriate an attack dog than one of the most vicious warlords in history, so much so to have spawned the legend of bloodsucking monsters in popular media even hundreds of years later?
"Well, no matter," said Assassin. "It means I have the two of you all to myself. Your blood, so young and virile, will only make me all the more beautiful."
"You sicken me," Jeanne spat.
Assassin leaned forward, chuckling low beneath her breath. "My dear, you say that as though I haven't been hearing it all my life."
Right. This nutjob needed to be handled, too.
I squinted at her with my Master's Clairvoyance, and a surge of triumph jolted through my gut.
No Magic Resistance for you, bitch, I thought viciously.
One of Cúchulainn's runestones found its way into my hand. In my head, the image of a silk thread snapping resounded, and my magic circuits whirred into activity.
"Jeanne," I shouted as I wound back my arm, "close your eyes!"
It said something about her that she trusted me enough to listen, turning her face away from Assassin, as I flung the runestone between them like a grenade. I squeezed my eyes shut and threw my arm over them to protect them.
"Anfang!"
Assassin screeched as the runestone flashed with light that was, for a short moment, brighter than the sun, reeling back as she clawed at her face.
Another Master might have let her go. An inexperienced Master might have prioritized escaping over the elimination of an enemy combatant. They weren't necessarily the wrong choices, and if we'd just had Mash and Jeanne, I would've run for all I was worth while I had the chance.
Not here. Not now.
Arash, take her down!
A bevy of arrows loosed from the treeline, and Assassin gasped as they sank into her back with several, meaty thuds. One, two, three, four — an even dozen in total, all of them center mass, all of them targeting something vital and vitally important.
I didn't need the spurt of blood that gushed from her mouth to know that at least one of those was a killshot.
"Y-you…" Assassin rasped breathlessly as red trickled down her lips.
Whatever she'd been about to say was lost. One, final arrow came from the trees, and it scythed through Assassin's neck, bursting through her throat just under her chin. The metal tip glinted.
It was becoming more and more obvious that I'd underestimated Arash pretty badly. He wasn't a dragonslayer, that was true. He wasn't a frontline fighter who could take on the enemy Servants while Mash defended his flanks. He couldn't effortlessly mow down every dragon, every wyvern, that we came across.
But thinking that any of those things made him useless was absolutely wrong, and as someone who had wielded something as weak as bugs effectively enough to kill the woman everyone thought was unkillable, I should have known better.
Assassin collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, and her body vanished before she even hit the ground, disappearing into motes of blue light. It felt a little anticlimactic to have defeated one of the enemy's Servants that quickly in the first encounter, but I wasn't going to complain that we'd eliminated one of the threats arrayed against us.
I rolled back to my feet and took off again for the trees. "Go!"
Jeanne startled, but she followed my lead without hesitation. "Y-yes!"
Back in town, my swarm was starting to thin. Jeanne Alter was really the only one who could kill them with any speed, but that just meant she was killing them too quickly. My swarm was massive, bigger than it had ever been, yes, but that didn't make the bugs in it any less vulnerable to fire or extreme heat.
As the treeline loomed ahead, I turned my attention back towards Mash and Lancer to find nothing had really changed. We were running out of time for her to disengage, and Lancer didn't look like he had any intention of letting her take a breath long enough to escape.
There were a couple of different ways… But if we could avoid spending any Command Spells if we didn't have to, that would be better. And the way Assassin had been killed gave me a few ideas.
Arash, I sent his way, are you ready?
What did you have in mind, Master? Arash asked back.
That tight spacing you did against Assassin — if you had a clean shot, could you do the same thing to Lancer?
I could almost imagine the smirk curling at the corner of his mouth. If you can get me that clean shot, Master, I can handle the rest.
Feet pounding the ground, I pivoted on my heel, turned around, and as I gathered as big a swarm as I could from the surrounding grass, I opened my mouth and shouted, "Mash, get out of the way!"
Mash blocked Lancer's next blow, and then she kicked off the ground and threw herself to the side. Lancer made to follow and chase after her, but at the same moment, a cloud of harmless bugs buzzed up and in his face, and he let out a startled yell, jerking back.
Another dozen arrows flew out of the trees, and Dracul was in no shape to avoid them. They each landed, twelve perfect shots that hit center mass on his chest, just like they had Assassin. Killshots, a number of them. Debilitating even for those that weren't.
And without even pausing, Lancer reached down and yanked them all out, one by one, brackish blood spurting out from each wound. My eyebrows rose towards my hairline and my mouth dropped open.
Furiously, I checked his stats again, and something dreadful squirmed in my gut as my mind landed on one of his skills, one that made fighting him a lot more problematic than I'd been expecting.
Battle Continuation A. The ability to take even terrible wounds and keep fighting. To take an arrow to the heart, to the stomach, to the lung, and still advance like nothing had happened.
Then, before my eyes, the blood leaking from Dracul's wounds rose into the air and lashed out in tendrils, like tentacles, spearing through my bugs with unerring accuracy until I felt every single one of them slip from my control. Dead.
I could only watch as the bugs he'd speared melted into slurry and got absorbed into the tendrils of blood, and as they sank back inside of his body, disappearing into his wounds that sealed up behind them, two more unknowns cleared up in the mind's eye of my Master's Clairvoyance.
Vampirism A. Kazikli Bey.
The ability to recover vitality and energy by sucking others' blood, and the Noble Phantasm of Vlad III, twisted by the legend of Dracula. Combined with his Battle Continuation, the only way to kill him would be to obliterate him all at once, to deal so much damage in a single attack that there was no way for him to recover.
"Mash, get out of there!" I screamed.
It was like facing an Endbringer. The sheer, destructive power wasn't on the same level, and the raw durability wasn't anywhere close. But every wound he inflicted and every kill he made would rejuvenate him, and he could survive and recover from just about anything that didn't kill him outright. And if he came in range, he could pierce through our defenses with a Noble Phantasm that turned his entire body into a weapon, from his hair to his bones to the meanest drop of blood.
It wasn't the best comparison. Maybe Alabaster was a better one, in some ways, and Crawler in others, but it was the one my brain made.
Mash hesitated for the barest fraction of a second, and then she started to make her retreat. I didn't give Dracul any chance to follow her — I pulled every bug I could from the surrounding area, not just from the grass this time, but from the trees and the bushes and their boltholes in the ground, regardless of what they were or what use they could be, regardless of how few there were, and I set them upon him, knowing already that it was pointless at best and feeding him at worst.
There wasn't anything else to do. Something like that, we couldn't hope to beat him, right now.
"Arash, covering fire!"
Arrows shot forth from the treeline with perfect accuracy, but Dracul wasn't bothered by them in the least. With lazy swings, he knocked them from the air, or else he stepped to the side or back, avoiding them entirely. I watched him, unblinking, the whole way, until Mash made it past the treeline and into the cover of the foliage. Only then did I turn away and follow.
The instant we'd all made it, I pulled the tattered remnants of the swarm occupying Jeanne Alter and her other three Servants away from distraction duty and spread them out, blanketing the entire field we'd just crossed and as much of the town that was still within reach in a writhing, droning mass of chitin. It wasn't as thick a cloud as I would have liked it to be, but it was still thick enough that those in the group without some sort of extrasensory ability wouldn't be able to track us as we fled.
The twins and Jeanne were waiting for us, pale-faced and nervous.
"Senpai," Rika greeted me.
"We need to get out of here," I said without preamble. Arash landed beside me almost as though to punctuate that statement.
"That wave of bugs, I assume that was your doing?" Jeanne asked. It sounded more like an accusation.
I still hadn't figured out how I was going to explain that. A part of me wondered why I even had to, like being able to control bugs was somehow a strange and unusual magic that defied all orthodoxy. I'd seen some pretty ridiculous powers in my career as a cape, but just what little I knew of magecraft was enough that I was perfectly aware of exactly how bullshit that could get, too.
They could build a wish-granting perpetual motion engine. I controlled bugs, why was I the weird one?
"Not now," I said instead. "That won't keep them busy for too long, and we need to be gone when they get past it. Jeanne, you said Lyon was the next place we should go?"
"Yes," she answered immediately, although the set of her brow told me we weren't done with my bugs, just yet. "There are other villages between here and there that we could stop at, if we don't take a straight route there, but it should be our next destination."
I remembered that we'd originally been discussing it in terms of investigating her evil self and figuring out motives for this destruction, but that wasn't exactly necessary anymore, was it? Jeanne Alter had told us exactly what she was doing and why. Putting more into investigating the rhymes and reasons was pointless.
But our best lead on our potential dragonslayer was simply "down south." A major population center like Lyon was as good a place to start looking for that as any other. Better, even, because it should get travelers from across the region instead of just localized tradesmen.
I nodded. "Then we'll go there. Mash," I turned to her, "lead the way."
She hesitated and turned to the twins, but Ritsuka gave her a nod, and her expression firmed.
"Please follow me, everyone," she said, and then she turned and started off deeper into the woods, fast enough to be called a speedy retreat but still slow enough for us mere humans to keep up.
Behind us, as we put distance between us and La Charité, my swarm spread out and dispersed, forming vague blobs big enough to contain all of us that made off in every other direction but ours. Whether that worked or not, either way, it didn't look like Jeanne Alter and her Servants intended to chase us down.
The smirk on Dracul's face as he watched us run away was going to stay with me the whole night through.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Sorry, Carmilla. You don't have any plot armor, so you really could die just like that.
Dracul really is kinda terrifying as an opponent, especially when you don't have a "fuck everything in that general direction" Noble Phantasm to take him out all in one go. This isn't the last we'll be seeing him.
Also, whoever made that 300 reference (you know who you are), this just proves that yes, you had the appropriate pop culture reference in mind, because remember, I wrote this over a month ago.
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out, and especially to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best, and your continued support is invaluable. If you like what you're reading and want to support me as a writer so I can pay the bills, I have a Patreon. If Patreon is too long term, I have a Ko-fi page, too. If you want to commission something from me, check out either my Deviantart post or my artist registry page for my rates. Links in my sig. Every little bit helps keep me afloat, even if you can only afford a couple dollars.
As the town of La Charité disappeared in the distance, no longer visible through the foliage, we kept running. Our panting breaths and the pounding of our feet on the ground formed a soundtrack to our sprint, as though to keep driving us forward towards the city of Lyon that lay in the far distance. Like we could reach it over the crest of the next hill or beyond the next copse of trees, forever just out of reach.
We didn't stop. Long after even the field we'd crossed to reach the forest had disappeared from the range of my control, we were still going, racing as far away as we could as fast as our legs would carry us. My legs burned, my lungs ached, sweat dripped down my head and my shirt, but none of us dared to stop for even a second.
The twins, to my surprise, didn't complain or even really slow down as we went. Whether they'd been trying to build up endurance in Chaldea's gym while I wasn't looking, I didn't know. Maybe I was just giving them too much credit, though. When it came to pushing past your limits and going farther than you'd ever thought you could, adrenaline was a hell of a drug.
Eventually, something had to give. Half our party was still human, and two thirds of it was still living and breathing instead of a materialized ghost. Perhaps somewhat expectedly, the twins burnt out first and stumbled to a stop, their legs trembling and their chests heaving as they gulped down air.
I wasn't all that much better. Less winded, because I was more used to this sort of thing, but it wasn't like I could sprint all out and not even break a sweat. Even Mash was huffing and puffing a little.
"Did we lose them?" Ritsuka asked breathlessly.
"No enemy Servants detected, Sen-Senpai," Mash answered.
"It doesn't look like they're chasing us," I said.
Why, I couldn't have said. After all, we'd killed one of Jeanne Alter's Servants. That was one more Servant she didn't have to fight for her, to help her burn down the country. Shouldn't that have put us higher up on her shitlist? More of a threat? If it had been me in her place, losing one of what was for all intents and purposes my generals would definitely have had me focus on the one who had done it.
Then again, even at my worst, I couldn't imagine burning down an entire fucking country on some roaring rampage of revenge, so maybe wondering why a pyromaniac nutjob wasn't making a rational decision wasn't a good question to ask.
Or maybe…
The thought sent a shiver of dread down my spine.
Maybe the reason why Jeanne Alter wasn't concerned about the loss of a single Servant was because she could just keep summoning more. She'd had four with her, after all. Four Servants that she took out to burn down a relatively minor town, backed up by an army of wyverns, and just by the way she'd reacted to us, she hadn't expected us to be there when she did it, either.
When the enemy could throw around that much force that casually… What did that say about what she could bring to bear if she seriously wanted to destroy us?
"What about the townsfolk?" Ritsuka asked.
"Ah…" Mash's face fell. "Senpai…I don't think…"
"Most of them managed to evacuate," I told him.
His expression lifted hopefully.
"Most?" Rika asked, voice somber.
Her brother's hopeful expression faltered.
There was no way to break this news delicately. Romani might have preferred if I told them a pretty little lie and said that everyone made it out unscathed and it would all be sunshine and rainbows, but even if I agreed not to burden them too much too quickly, hiding the truth like that wouldn't help out anyone, and eventually, they'd realize I'd lied, anyway.
"We did what we could, but some people died before we could do anything," I told them. "Some people died from the wyverns. Some people were crushed by the wyverns' bodies when Arash shot them down."
"I did my best to put them out of the path of any bystanders," Arash added.
"Some people never made it out of their houses," I went on. "And some people got trampled on the way out of town or fell into the river."
And now for the part that none of them wanted to hear.
"Most of them… are probably going to die anyway."
The twins sucked in a sharp breath.
"Miss Taylor!" said Mash.
"No, she's right," Jeanne said miserably. "My other self… If she truly desires the destruction of France and all of its people, then she won't let them go."
"The smart ones will leave and go to another town nearby," I said. "Most of them… When Jeanne Alter leaves, they'll return to town, try to pick up and rebuild, and when she brings another army of wyverns to finish the job…"
They would all die just the same, as if we hadn't saved them in the first place.
"We have to go back!" Rika shouted. "We can't just leave them all to —"
"And do what?" I demanded. "Fight off five Servants and an army of wyverns with one Demi-Servant, one malfunctioning Ruler, and one Archer?"
Jeanne winced, but didn't protest the point.
"Four Servants," Ritsuka corrected, staring me straight in the eye with a determined look on his face. "Arash killed their Assassin."
"Five, minimum," I rebuked. I didn't back down. "If she doesn't already have more she can call on, then she can just summon another at her earliest convenience. Holy Grail, remember?"
"It can't be that easy." Ritsuka didn't back down, either. "Doctor Roman said that hooking the Grail we got from Fuyuki up to the power grid would let us support three more Servants. Jeanne Alter can't just summon as many as she wants."
Except that all appearances said that she could.
"You don't think," I began, trying not to sound like a condescending asshole, "that a Holy Grail, a legend born in France and connected to the Middle East, might be more powerful here, closer both geographically and culturally to the place it originated, than it was in the middle of a city in Japan?"
I gestured back the way we came and squashed the burgeoning guilt in my belly. I had to get through to these two, because as much as I hated it myself, there wasn't anything we could do for those people that wouldn't get us all killed ourselves.
"How many wyverns do you think she had, for that matter? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? More?"
"At least a thousand," Arash confirmed grimly.
"Four Servants as backup and an army of a thousand wyverns to burn down one little town when she didn't even know we were going to be there. How many would she have brought if she did know? How many can she bring?"
"We don't know," Mash mumbled.
"And worst of all," I finished off, "none of us can kill Dracul."
"I saw that," said Arash. "He shrugged off six fatal wounds like they were nothing."
"Battle Continuation, A-Rank," I said. "Vampirism, A-Rank. And if he gets close, Kazikli Bey, which turns his whole body into a weapon."
Hookwolf might actually have been a pretty good comparison, there, now that I thought about it.
"His Noble Phantasm," I answered. "It weaponizes everything from his hair to his bones to his blood and turns them into 'stakes' that can pierce anyone in his range. He has to get pretty close to use it, but if he does, he can rip any one of us apart in an instant, and it would definitely kill each and every one of us."
The twins turned a little green. My lips pulled tight.
"The only way to kill him is to deal so much damage all at once that he dies immediately. None of us can do that."
I looked meaningfully at Arash. "None of us."
He nodded. Message received. No using his Noble Phantasm on Dracul. Good.
"We can't just leave them all to die, though!" Rika burst out. "S-Senpai! Why did we even save them if we're just going to let them all get killed! A-Aren't you the ultimate badass? You killed a dragon! You can do something, can't you?"
"No."
Her face fell. She must have been expecting me to pull some crazy plan out of my ass, but the simple fact of the matter was, there wasn't anything we could do about it. Not as we were.
"That's why we're headed to Lyon," I said. "If Jeanne Alter can just keep summoning wyverns and Servants willy-nilly, then we need more firepower. We need to see if there's any truth to the rumors about a great warrior down south. Lyon will give us a more solid heading."
I hoped. But I couldn't exactly seem so uncertain about it right then, could I? Rule one of being a leader: always look like you knew what you were doing, even when you were completely lost. There were a lot of things you could bullshit your way through just by being confident as you were doing it.
Beep-beep!
"Thank God, you're all okay," Romani breathed as he appeared. "I was a little worried… I-I mean, I knew you guys were going to make it through! After all, Taylor's the one leading you!"
My lip twitched. Yeah, really strong vote of confidence, Romani.
"I-I managed to confirm the disappearance of one of the enemy Servants' Spirit Origins," he went on. "Good job, everyone. That's one enemy down."
"With no guarantee they can't just summon more," I said.
"Urk." Romani blanched. "B-be that as it may, at least you guys managed to take out one of them! A-and anyway, I'm detecting a ley line nearby. You should be able to set up camp there while we plan out your next move."
"It's already been decided, Doctor Roman," said Mash. "We'll be heading to the city of Lyon, next."
Romani's brow furrowed. "Lyon?"
"There are rumors of a great warrior somewhere in southern France," Jeanne said. "Lyon would be a good place to look for more information."
"A great warrior…" he mumbled. "You think it might be a Servant?"
"We think so, yes," I said.
And hopefully, it was one of the dragonslayers who didn't show up for my summoning.
"Hang on, let me take a look."
"Wait, isn't that, like, super far away?" said Rika. "I thought you couldn't read Servants from that distance!"
"You guys are our main observation point, so we can get clearer readings the closer to you we look," Romani explained absently, looking at something away from the camera. "Within a mile, we can get details like Class, Alignment, and as you observe details with your Master's Clairvoyance, even things like True Names, Skills, and Noble Phantasms. But if we go further out than that, things start to get blurrier. If we can get a good enough look to detect a Servant at all, the only thing we'll be able to tell is whether there's a Servant in that general area. Well, unless it's a really powerful Servant, like a Grand, but there's no way you're going to run into one of those."
A minute of silence later, he blinked.
"Well, would you look at that," he said. "It's faint, but I'm definitely detecting the presence of a Servant in Lyon. I should be able to pin it down better once you're inside the city itself, but it's definitely worth checking out."
"Doctor Roman," said Ritsuka, "can you detect whether or not there are any Servants remaining at La Charité?"
Mash glanced at him sadly. "Senpai…"
"You're not that far away, so…" Romani trailed off for a moment, hands moving across his keyboard. "Yes. I'm still detecting a fairly strong Servant presence in La Charité. It's a bit difficult even from here, but given the data, it looks like multiple Servants are still there."
"And the townsfolk?" Ritsuka asked. "Can Chaldea detect vital signs from living humans in that range?"
Romani's hands stopped moving. "Don't do this to yourself, Ritsuka. It won't bring you any peace."
"We're leaving them behind!" Ritsuka barked. "The least we can do is acknowledge…!"
He looked down, angry, his fists clenched and trembling.
"If we couldn't even save them," he said roughly, "then the least we can do is acknowledge their loss."
Romani sighed. "On average," he said solemnly, "one-hundred-sixty-four-thousand people die every day."
Ritsuka's head jerked up, stricken.
"That's not how people work," I cut in. "Things like 'the whole world' or 'the entire country' are just too big. People deal better with the stuff right in front of them. It's more real. Solid."
"That's the point I'm trying to make," said Romani.
"What, that there are seven billion lives on the line?" I retorted. "People don't fight for seven billion. They fight for seven. For seventeen. Their friends, their family, the people they care about and the people in arm's reach. You fight for the guy next to you, and the guy next to you fights for the guy next to him, and eventually, everyone is fighting for everyone."
I looked Ritsuka straight in the eye. "I get it, Ritsuka. You feel that weight, don't you? You may not have known anyone in that town, and you probably couldn't name more than three of them, but for just that little while, they were your arm's reach."
And sometimes, that was all it took for it to matter. Like Dinah. I'd seen her all of a few minutes, and just like that, she'd become someone I couldn't leave alone and let suffer.
"And the worst feeling of all is when the only thing you can do is walk away from them."
"Taylor…" Romani muttered.
"So don't let it be meaningless," I finished. "You have to walk away now, but this isn't how proper human history says they all died."
Something sparked in his eyes, and Ritsuka's shoulders squared. "So if we correct this Singularity, none of them will have died at all!"
His twin sister gave a triumphant whoop.
"Let's go! The faster we fix this stupid Singularity, the faster everyone will be saved!" Rika shouted, and then she took off running. "To Lyon!"
"W-wait!" Mash scrambled after her. "S-Senpai! Master, Lyon is the other way!"
"Rika!" Ritsuka shouted as he chased them.
It left me alone with Arash, Jeanne, and Romani.
"Do you really think it's going to be that simple, Master?" Arash asked solemnly.
"I don't know." The metaphysics made my head spin, and so did the regular physics. We were in aberrant space-time, as I understood it. Did anything we did here change anything at all? Or would things just snap back the way they were supposed to be the instant we took the Grail and left? "But it's the only way I can accept leaving them to die myself."
"Theoretically, as an otherwise unobserved moment outside of proper time and space…" Romani began.
"I don't want to hear any guesses, Romani," I told him bluntly. "If you don't know for sure, just leave it alone."
He shut up immediately.
"As much as I hate to admit it, there was nothing we could have done as we are," Jeanne said quietly. "My evil self… Her forces simply outmatched us."
"And that's the only reason we didn't stay and fight," I said.
She smiled a tight smile and then raced off after the others.
"Rika, Ritsuka, Mash, it's this way!"
A moment later, Arash and I followed.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
It was the better part of another week and a half of walking, trekking through the French countryside, before we finally made it close enough to see Lyon in the distance. What we saw as we looked down on it from atop a hill, however…
"Oh no…" Mash whispered.
…was a smoldering ruin. The smell of the smoke reached us even from so far away.
Not the entire city had been reduced to rubble, but enough of it was gone, scorched down to the foundation, that there was little need to ask what had happened to the city and most, if not all, of its inhabitants. Because of course, the one thing we hadn't considered as we rushed to make it to Lyon was that Jeanne Alter would have gotten to it, first.
How much sooner? Who knew? She could have ransacked it before we ever even made it to La Charité, just burned it down while we were making our trek through the forest from Vaucouleurs, or maybe she'd anticipated where we were heading next, flew on ahead of us on a more direct path that we'd never seen, and wiped it out before we could come to find our reinforcements.
Had she killed the Servant we'd been hearing rumors about, the one whose presence Romani had confirmed, or had our possible ally managed to escape her and her squad of murderers?
My hand snapped up and I barked into my communicator, "Romani!"
There was no response. Damn it. Was there something interfering with our communications somehow, or were we just too far away from the nearest ley line terminal to get a secure connection? The only thing I could do was hope it was the latter and plan for the former.
"We need to get down there and find the ley line," I said.
Rika jolted. "Survivors!" she burst out.
"That's right!" her brother startled. "Senpai, with your bugs, can you —"
"It's out of range, right now," I cut across him quickly. "Once we get within about eighteen-hundred…" I did a quick bit of mental math. "About half a kilometer, I'll be able to start looking. But Ritsuka, Rika…"
"I wouldn't get your hopes up," Arash finished for me, face grim.
"Wait," said Ritsuka. "Arash, you can see that far, can't you?"
"That's why I'm telling you," said Arash. "If there's anyone down there still alive in all that destruction… I'm not seeing them."
And the twins just sort of crumpled. My gut twisted, but none of my own turmoil showed on my face. As awful as this was, when it came down to it, nothing could beat out the carnage left behind by the Slaughterhouse Nine, the casual, malicious cruelty with which they'd tortured their victims. Even by the numbers, Jack Slash had Jeanne Alter beat.
"This is horrible," Jeanne anguished, her face twisted with pain. "No matter how wrathful she is, how could she do something so terrible to all of those innocent people?"
"I'm sorry, Miss Jeanne," Mash said quietly.
Jeanne shook her head, blonde hair whipping at her cheeks. "There's nothing you need to apologize for, Mash. This… This is…"
She trailed off, because she couldn't seem to find the words to describe the atrocity before us. No one else suggested anything to fill her hanging sentence.
"We need to get down there," I said into the uneasy silence. "Find the ley line, connect with Romani. If we can figure out if the Servant he detected is still here or where he might have gone, then that'll give us our next move."
"This… Doesn't this mean anything to you?" Ritsuka snarled at me. "People are dead! Hundreds! Thousands! The whole city is —"
"As callous as it is for me to say it, Ritsuka," I interrupted, staring straight into his eyes, "I've seen a lot worse than this. And crying over all of the people who died won't bring them back. Only fixing this Singularity will."
Ritsuka flinched, and I turned back towards the city, or the husk that remained where it had once stood. In the quiet after my rebuke, the background buzz of my bugs seemed almost thunderous.
Stupid. I forced my swarm to thin out, so that the agitated droning didn't give me away. Eventually, if the local insect population started acting out whenever they expected me to be reacting more extremely, they were going to figure out that my swarm expressed all of the emotions they never saw on my face.
It had been so long since I'd last had my powers that I'd forgotten I used to do that. I'd gotten so accustomed to having to bottle up and push down my frustrations that having that outlet had let me slip back into old habits without even realizing it.
"Whatever we feel about these circumstances," Jeanne began, "it's true that there isn't much we can do about it, now. The best we can do at the moment is as Taylor says: find out whether or not the Servant we were looking for is still around. Especially if he managed to survive this attack, that would be a good sign."
Ritsuka scowled.
"And if we find any survivors —"
"Then we'll do what we can for them," I said.
The twins didn't seem to like that, exactly, especially Ritsuka, but they accepted it as the best they were going to get, because it really was the best we could do, in the circumstances.
We resumed our trek towards the city, a little slower and a little more cautiously, in case there were any stray wyverns still hanging around. As we came closer, the sharp, acrid tang of smoke became stronger and stronger, and the true tale of the city's destruction became ever clearer. Even now what must have been at least a day after the fact, a haze still hung in the air like mist, drifting upwards.
It reminded me of the aftermath of an Independence Day party, after all of the fireworks had been set off. The smoke from the fires had spread out and thinned, and the sulfur from the flames lingered, clinging to the area even long after it was all over.
As more and more of the city came into range of my powers, more and more was my original estimate borne out. Flies and maggots clung to corpses, and the other carrions flitted about from meal to meal, but aside from us, there didn't seem to be a single living person left in Lyon. By all accounts, everyone else had been killed.
"Senpai," Ritsuka whispered. "Is there anyone…?"
Even if he'd wanted it, I wasn't going to give him a pleasant lie.
"I'm sorry, Ritsuka."
He took in a deep, shuddering breath.
"Maybe," Rika said hopefully, "maybe it's just because we're out here, and as we get further in, we'll find…"
Even she didn't sound like she really believed it.
"I don't think we're going to find anyone alive in Lyon, Master," Mash told her somberly.
We kept going and went deeper into town, through the outskirts and over the river that split the city in two near the northeastern edge, where we'd come down from. The deeper we went, the further into the city my range stretched, although the fewer bugs their wound up being, on account of the burnt out husks of homes. Not only was the number dropping, but the variety was slimming down, as well, leaving me with mostly flies, maggots, and a few other creepies of the crawling kind.
"This was such a beautiful town," Jeanne said quietly. Her head swiveled as she looked around at the destruction. "Why would she do something like this? Lyon had no connection to me, at all."
"Didn't she already say it was revenge?" I said. "Against the whole of France?"
"It's not that simple," Jeanne declared with such confidence that she sounded absolutely certain. "It can't be that simple. Can it?"
I thought about the villains I'd known. About Lung. About Coil. About the Travelers and Echidna. About the Teeth and the Fallen. Mostly, I thought about Jack Slash, and how twisted and wrong he'd been, not only in how he acted but in his entire way of thinking. Cruelty for the sake of cruelty, theater for the sake of theater, sadism for the sake of sadism, and all of it backed by the desire to be the biggest monster out there. The boogeyman that everyone feared.
In other words, fame.
"Yeah," was the only answer I could give. "It really can."
Jeanne's brow furrowed, troubled.
I didn't really blame her for wanting to think there must have been something more to it than that. It was tempting to grasp for a reason behind the evils of others, some greater purpose or narrative that explained their actions in a larger context, but all too often, the enemies I'd faced had been driven by the pettiest of shit.
Most people, it turned out, really weren't all that complicated.
"Miss Taylor," said Mash, "have you found any clues as to the whereabouts of the Servant that Doctor Roman detected here?"
"No sign of them, no," I said. "And there aren't as many bugs here as there were in La Charité, either. Do we know where the ley line is?"
Mash lifted her wrist and brought up her map. Da Vinci had even included ley line terminals on that thing? I shouldn't have been surprised that she went that far, but somehow, she kept catching me off guard.
"There's one back on the other side of the river," Mash said, pointing back the way we came. Her arm swung around to the left. "One north of our current position." She swung her arm around again and to the right. "There should be one more to the south. According to the map, it should currently be the site of a castle."
"Whoa," said Rika. "Like, an actual castle? Battlements, ramparts, have at the foul knave! The whole thing?"
"Many towns started that way, Senpai," Mash explained. "The oldest ones were settlements along sources of water, like the rivers that run through Lyon. Those also made ideal places for fortifications, so some towns and cities in Europe started off as Roman forts and military emplacements. Those evolved into medieval castles, and then towns and cities grew around them. Or sometimes the other way around."
"You sure know a lot of stuff, Mash," Ritsuka commented, although his heart didn't really seem in his smile.
Mash flushed. "O-oh, well… I read a lot, growing up."
I looked in the directions Mash had pointed out. Back behind us, to the north of us, to the south of us, it was all destroyed, razed to the ground like it had been stomped on by a giant boot. I didn't like our odds of finding anything good no matter which direction we took, but…
"I think the castle is our best bet," I said.
Jeanne nodded. "I agree. With the city in…the state it's in, the castle is the building most likely to be intact."
Because larger structures made of brick and stone were harder to tear down than smaller residences made of wood and plaster, or whatever people built their houses of in this time period. Yeah, that was my reasoning, too.
"Senpai," Ritsuka began.
"Still nothing."
He didn't press.
We picked through the rubble to find the most intact street we could and made our way south, towards where the castle was supposed to be standing. Eventually, we had to make a detour back north to reach the bridge that took us across the other river — the Rhône, Jeanne called it, to the Saône that we'd already crossed — and then make our way back south, again.
No matter how much we walked or how deep into the city we went, I found no signs of life. The whole place was as silent as the grave, an expression all the more appropriate now, it seemed to me, even if it was equally morbid.
At last, in the distance, situated atop a hill and surrounded by foliage, a towering castle came into view, standing above the rest of the destroyed city. A thing of brick and stone with solid, strong walls, it was…
"That's it?" Rika asked. "That doesn't look like a castle at all!"
Disappointingly small. In terms of its size, it was definitely bigger than any of the residences around here would have been when they were intact by an order of magnitude, but I'd been expecting something epic and enormous, like it had come straight out of The Lord of the Rings, or at least something on the scale of the Tower of London or Buckingham Palace.
The castle we saw was definitely a castle, but it was like the whole thing had been built on a tight budget, so all of the features you normally expected of one were compacted down as much as possible. The thing didn't even have a moat and a drawbridge.
"Not everyone can be the King of England," Jeanne said with an awkward smile and laugh.
"Well, you know what they say," I commented idly. "Men who carry big swords or build huge castles are making up for being…undersized elsewhere."
"M-Miss Taylor!" Mash squeaked, scandalized, as Ritsuka squeaked and Rika gaped at me. Even Jeanne's face had turned bright red.
Arash, at least, found it funny, if the laugh was anything to go by.
"On the bright side," I said like nothing had happened, "the fact it's not that big means it'll be pretty easy to search."
"The tower makes for a good vantage point, too, if we decide to stay the night," Arash added.
"We'll make those kinds of plans after we hash out our next move with Romani."
"R-right," Mash said, still a little flustered.
Beep-beep!
"Romani?" I blurted out, surprised.
A burst of static ate his first few words, but there was no mistaking the rest of his shout: "— Servant incoming!"
I whirled around. "Mash!"
"Master!" Arash yelled at the same time as Mash called, "Senpai!"
An arm wrapped around my middle like a steel bar, and my gut lurched as I was yanked off my feet and through the air, just in time for a meteor to fall out of the sky towards where I'd just been standing.
"LORD CHALDEAS!"
A pane of thin, blue light resolved itself into a castle wall, and the meteor slammed into it with a thunderous clang, forcing Mash to brace her back foot against the ground. A bare second later, my feet found the ground again as we landed and Arash set me down. His arm didn't leave my stomach. In case he had to pick me up and dodge again.
Thankfully, Mash's Noble Phantasm held, protecting her, Jeanne, and the twins completely, and the meteor bounced off of it and spun back in the opposite direction to land in the destroyed street. The weight behind it cratered the already cracked road, and as it bled off its momentum, it slowly came to a stop.
A tortoise shell. Lined with spikes and ridges, it was a gigantic shell the color of dried blood, and tucked inside were a horned, bearded head, six clawed legs, and a long, serpentine tail that emerged before our eyes. It glared at us with baleful yellow eyes over a leonine maw filled with sharp fangs.
It didn't attack. It stood there, tail lashing out behind it, utterly massive and easily big enough to swallow each of us whole.
And then another meteor fell out of the sky, a blur of white, red, and black that landed atop the beast's shell with inhuman grace. When she stood back up, staring down from her mount's back, it was the woman in the fetish tabard.
"Originally, I was tasked merely with observing your path forward," she announced in a strong, clear voice. "However, the Servant you're searching for here in Lyon is the greatest threat to my Master in this era, and as her Servant, I should absolutely prevent you from reaching him."
She brandished her staff.
"And as a servant of Our Lord, I must also do whatever I can to aid you, so long as even a fraction of my sanity remains. That's why…if you cannot make it past this Saint Martha, then you have no hope of facing my Master and her personal mount!"
"S-Saint Martha!" Romani stuttered, voice broken by a burst of static. "Then that means… Her mount is the dragon, Tarasque! N-not a wyvern, but a dragon! A real dragon!"
In what world was that a dragon, I wanted to ask, but it was a useless question.
"Romani," I said instead, "the Servant we came here for, is he in the castle?"
"W-what?"
"The Servant, Romani! Is he in the castle?"
"Oh!" Romani scrambled. "C-checking… You're much closer, so my readings should be much more accurate! Yes! I'm detecting the presence of a Servant inside the castle! The bottom floor, in the basement! W-wait, that would be the dungeons, wouldn't it?"
The dungeons? Why…? No time to worry about that. I could ask him myself when we found him.
Except there was a problem: five and a half feet of a reincarnated ghost of a great hero from the past and her twenty-something foot tall dragon, neither of whom would just let us run inside the castle and find that Servant. If we turned our backs and made a run for it, that dragon would squash us flat in an instant.
I had to make a decision.
We didn't have the firepower to take out Martha, not as long as she had her Tarasque by her side, which meant someone had to go into the castle to search for the other Servant there. The fact that we didn't have the firepower meant that we needed the defensive power instead to hold our ground while someone split off to go look. That meant Mash had to stay behind and keep Martha busy.
She held off Excalibur. It wouldn't be easy, but she should be able to do it.
The trouble was, the person who should go search for the Servant hidden in the castle was also obvious, because not only was Mash better off with the support of her Masters, but the person best suited to go was the person who could find the other Servant fastest. In other words, me.
And that meant I was going to have to let the twins handle this on their own for the first time since we met up in Fuyuki.
I hated it. I hated it. My job was to be their leader, to look out for them and make sure they made it back from all of this as alive and intact as I could possibly manage. As their leader, it fell to me to make the sacrifice play if and when the situation ever arose, because they were my responsibility and I wasn't going to throw their lives away. The people, it had to be about the people, or else what was the point of this second chance I'd been given?
But the person who went into the castle had to be me. The Servant who stayed to hold off Martha had to be Mash. I could bring the twins with me, but if something happened to Mash because they weren't there to help with a well-timed Command Spell, none of us would forgive ourselves.
Damn it. Damn it. Damn it all. Why did this feel so much like running away?
My mouth had already made the decision my heart still fought against. "Ritsuka, Rika, Mash! Hold her off! Arash, give them support! Jeanne, I need you with me!"
"Yes!" Mash and the twins shouted back.
Arash let out a short chuckle and leapt away from my side and up onto the roof of the nearest tower. He drew back his bow and took aim, waiting for the right moment. Ritsuka and Rika retreated to a safe distance, even as Mash planted herself like a tree between them and Martha.
Jeanne was the only one who hesitated, glancing back at the woman on her dragon, like she thought her place was on the front lines.
I understood the feeling, but I wasn't so stupid as to risk my own life needlessly by running to face an unknown Servant by myself. Not when I didn't know his alignment, his temperament, or anything else about him except that Jeanne Alter apparently had reason to fear him.
"Jeanne!"
Finally, she turned away and came towards me, and once she was beside me, I turned towards the castle and we made our way inside.
"We shouldn't leave them by themselves," she told me as we sprinted across the courtyard.
"We don't have the firepower to beat her ourselves," I retorted shortly, "but the Servant inside this castle is apparently a big enough deal that your evil self doesn't want us recruiting him, because he's a threat to her super special personal dragon. Which means…"
"He's probably one of the dragonslayers you wanted to summon," Jeanne realized.
"Yeah."
I hoped.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
It's Saturday, right? Right.
When I was writing this, I had a helluva time figuring out which castle in Lyon our intrepid hero was hiding out in, because when I looked at Google Maps, there were EIGHTEEN FUCKING CASTLES. WHICH CASTLE, NASU?
Ahem. Anyway. The one I eventually decided on was technically outside the age range I was looking for, because the earliest records of inhabitance were from 1476. I fudged it under the logic of, "Well, it wasn't built in a day, was it?" I just decided to assume it was older than that record and could feasibly have been in use in 1431.
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out, and especially to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best, and your continued support is invaluable. If you like what you're reading and want to support me as a writer so I can pay the bills, I have a Patreon. If Patreon is too long term, I have a Ko-fi page, too. If you want to commission something from me, check out either my Deviantart post or my artist registry page for my rates. Links in my sig. Every little bit helps keep me afloat, even if you can only afford a couple dollars.
Our footsteps echoed through the hallways as we raced through the castle. We didn't waste time on talking and debating, on worrying about our friends and comrades as they faced off against Saint Martha and her Tarasque, we just focused entirely on the objective in front of us. Single-minded.
For a wild second, I wondered if the only reason why Jeanne herself hadn't been the one I summoned was because she was already there.
But that sort of speculation was a pointless distraction. I didn't have time to deal with what-ifs and maybes, so I let that thought be swept away, an idle curiosity.
And while I ran, my swarm surged out ahead of us, beneath us, behind us, part of it crawling through the castle in search of our mystery Servant while the other half rose up to distract Saint Martha. Any support I could give Mash and the twins had to be worth something.
No. Saint Martha didn't even flinch as a veritable biblical plague closed in upon her — if she would even have had to worry to begin with, because my utterly mundane "familiars" wouldn't even be able to bite her — she just tapped the shell of her dragon with the butt of her staff. The Tarasque reared its head back, throat bulging, and spat out a gout of flame like some sort of biological flamethrower, swinging its neck back and forth wildly.
Instantly, large swaths of my swarm disappeared as the dragon's breath flash-fried them. My initial attack run had failed, but I hadn't really expected it to succeed to begin with. If a wyvern's breath was so densely magical that my bugs popped just from proximity to its maw, then it stood to reason that the real deal, an "actual" dragon like the Tarasque, would kill them just as easily and just as effortlessly.
But the fact it went through the effort to kill them more expediently told me that Martha didn't have the patience to play around and didn't have some sort of extrasensory skill that would let her fight around my swarm.
I couldn't sting her, I couldn't bite her, and if I tried to weave ropes of silk thread, chances were she wouldn't even be inconvenienced by them. But I could throw her off course for at least a little while, and every second I bought with my bugs was a second Mash didn't have to fight and an extra second I had to find and reach the Servant in the dungeons.
"This way!" I called to Jeanne, and I made a sharp turn as I found the quickest route to the basement.
Outside, my swarm pulled back, and instead of swooping in to attack, they formed as dense, tall, and wide a wall as I could manage between Saint Martha and Mash, a screen of chitin that hid Mash from view. I knew it wouldn't last long.
Saint Martha proved me right. She tapped the butt of her staff against her dragon's shell again, and the Tarasque reared its head back again and let loose another stream of fire. It burned a hole through my swarm, and those that weren't immediately fried by the flames dropped as the heat cooked them inside their carapaces.
Saint Martha wasted no time; she leapt off of her dragon and through the gap it had made. I collapsed my swarm in on her, but she bulldozed right through it like it wasn't there, disrupting it in her wake with the speed of her dash.
As Jeanne and I raced down the stairs, Mash took Saint Martha's blow head on with her shield, grunting and bracing herself with her back foot. Saint Martha wasn't deterred, and she attacked again with a blazing fast series of blows from her staff that rang as they smashed against Mash's shield. She moved so quickly that I'd already lost count of them by the time my swarm had recovered enough to chase after her.
Saint Martha stayed a step ahead of me and flung herself backwards in a leap that took her over the bulk of my bugs, and she landed back on the shell of her dragon. A tap from her staff had it spitting out another burst of flame that consumed yet more of my swarm.
I was already down to about a third of what I'd started with.
But up ahead, the rest of my swarm finally found something, a figure in the shape of a tall, broad-shouldered man who was lying in a cell. He was propped up against a wall, and in one hand, he clutched the hilt of a sword that seemed, at least to my bugs, absolutely massive.
"I found him!" I told Jeanne.
She smiled radiantly and opened her mouth.
"Have you?"
"Taylor!" Jeanne shouted, and she pushed me to the side so hard that when I slammed into the brick wall, I blacked out.
I came to on the floor, sprawled out where I'd fallen with my glasses askew. Through the lenses, I saw a tall, spindly figure with long, dark hair dressed in a ragged, black cape. His hands ended in claws like knives, and what little I saw of his skin was pale and sallow, because the half of his face I could see clearly was covered in a bone white mask.
Jeanne struggled to hold him off, keeping him at bay with the shaft of her flag. Slowly, the tips of his claws inched closer to her face.
"How naive, how naive," the new Servant rasped, because he couldn't be anything else. "To think you would come here, and not realize that the dragonslayer you seek would be guarded by another Servant."
"Taylor!" Jeanne shouted at me. "Go! Find the other Servant! I'll — urk! I'll hold him off!"
"That simply won't do," said the new Servant. "The Dragon Witch has left me in charge of this town and the hero who once protected it. You won't reach him. You mustn't be allowed to reach him."
I stumbled to my feet, the world swaying around me for a moment, and I spared only a single glance back at Jeanne.
But there was simply nothing I could do for her, just then, and the dragonslayer was only down the hall. Even if it left a bad taste in my mouth to turn my back on another comrade again, the best thing I could do just then was to make contact with the reinforcements who could turn the tide of this battle.
After all, he might have been lying, but if he wasn't? This new Servant had just confirmed that the other one down here was exactly who we were looking for. Sigurd, Siegfried, Saint George — right then, I wasn't picky. Any one of them would be useful.
I took off into a dead sprint. Behind me, I heard Jeanne grunt and then shout out, "I won't let you past!"
Alone now, I raced towards my target, even as I tried to keep track of two other battles at the same time. It was getting harder up above, because Saint Martha and Tarasque kept thinning out my swarm, but Mash was holding on, so if she could just keep it up for a little bit longer, then it would all be worth it.
I made a sharp turn, and my boots slid along the floor as I threw myself into it without slowing down. The dragonslayer was being kept in —
I came to a stop in front of the fifth cell down, and there, lying against the wall just as I'd seen him with my bugs, was a tall, broad-shouldered man. He was sparsely armored with long, shaggy gray hair, but the most striking thing about him was the luminescent green marking splashed across his chest that curved up his neck and over one of his cheeks.
And just like I'd seen, he held tight to a massive greatsword with one hand.
In different circumstances, I might have taken a moment to admire the sharply chiseled muscles shown off by the open front of his bodysuit, but right then and there, I wasted no time and ripped my knife out of its holster. A flick of a switch turned it on, and with a savage jab, I cut right through the lock on the cell door.
It was so pathetically weak that I was surprised it managed to hold him.
Finally, as I stood in the doorway, he looked up and blinked at me. "You're not the Dragon Witch."
"No," I confirmed. "I'm with an organization called Chaldea. We're here to stop her."
"I see. So there are still people who would fight back against her."
"It's a little more complicated than that." The cell door swung open with a metallic squeal. "We came here to get you. We need your help to beat her."
"Ah," he mumbled. "I'm sorry. I'm afraid I won't be of much use to you like this. You've come to rescue me for nothing."
My brow furrowed. Was he speaking generally, or was there something in specific wrong?
Time, time, not enough time to sit here and think about it. Jeanne was still holding off the other Servant, the man in the tattered cloak, and my thinning swarm was providing all the sparser a cover for the twins and Mash up above. Noble Phantasms hadn't been pulled out again, yet, but Saint Martha didn't seem to be pulling any punches otherwise.
Or maybe she was. Maybe this was her fighting her orders from Jeanne Alter as much as she could. Without a reference point, I had no way of telling exactly how strong, fast, and brutal she was normally, so for all I knew, she was holding back to give us the chance to beat her before she did anything else she couldn't stomach.
"You don't have a Master, right?" I thrust my hand forward, showing off the bright red of my Command Spells. "If you need magical energy, I can help you with that. Forge a contract."
He blinked up at me again, nonplussed, and then his lips curled into a rueful smile.
"I'm afraid that's not it at all."
He reached down with one gauntleted hand and pulled the fabric of his bodysuit to one side, revealing —
"Holy fuck."
It wasn't the worst wound I'd ever seen. It wasn't even the worst wound I'd ever suffered myself. I'd been cut in half before, after all. Had my entire lower body disintegrated and my entrails flopping all over the ocean. As far as "things that happened to me, and I survived" went, that one in particular was hard to top.
But the ugly, ragged wound ripped into his chest just under the line of his ribs was raw and discolored, sickly and infected. I'd never realized Servants even could get infected wounds. The assumption had always been that they were completely impervious to mundane afflictions like gangrene and bacterial infections.
That was part of the point. Only Mystery could defeat Mystery. Regular germs didn't have the oomph to so much as inconvenience a Servant.
"My last encounter with the Dragon Witch's minions left me with this injury," the swordsman explained. "Normally, a wound like this would have been healed already. My constitution being what it is, it would've been gone in a matter of minutes. The blessing bestowed upon me by the evil dragon's blood is simply too potent."
He tucked the injury away behind the fabric of his bodysuit. Now that I knew it was there, I couldn't believe I had somehow missed the gigantic splotch of blood that soaked through the cloth.
"This curse, however, persists stubbornly," he said. "I'm sorry. I would like nothing more than to help you, but in this state, I'm of no use to you at all."
My mind raced.
If he had Battle Continuation… But if he had Battle Continuation, even a wound like that shouldn't have held him back. He would be able to stand up and keep fighting until someone managed a killing blow.
That was the question, though. Did I need him to fight? Or did I need him to take advantage of a single weak spot, a fleeting moment of vulnerability? As a dragonslayer wielding a weapon for slaying dragons, did anything else matter as long as he could kill the dragon in a single blow?
Without Tarasque, Saint Martha could be hemmed in, trapped, and taken out by Arash, Mash, and Jeanne. As long as she had Tarasque, though, she could hide behind its shell and be protected from any attack that might otherwise kill her. Just like she had in La Charité, where her Tarasque had stopped us from killing Jeanne Alter's whole retinue in one go.
"Can you at least use your Noble Phantasm?" I asked. "If you had the magical energy?"
He was silent for a long moment, considering me. I had to keep myself from fidgeting and demanding an answer immediately.
"Yes," he said at last. "I should be able to use my Noble Phantasm at least once. I'm sorry, I can't guarantee consecutive uses."
I nodded. Nothing about this was ideal, but as long as we hit the right target at the right time, I didn't need him to fire it off more than once.
"Then, there's just one last thing I want to confirm. Your True Name, it's —"
"Saber class Servant, Siegfried," he answered.
A thrill of triumph jolted through my belly. So, I was right. The Servant in Lyon was a dragonslayer, and his identity was Siegfried. That must have been the reason my catalyst failed when I summoned Arash, because Siegfried was already here, and therefore he wasn't available to be summoned a second time.
Just as importantly, this would mean we now had the dragon-slaying hero we had been in desperate need of since we got here. For once, for once, things weren't going to hell in a handbasket while I struggled to find whatever I could to pull out a win, and we'd been handed a secret weapon long before things had spiraled too far.
I thrust my hand down, as though to help him to his feet.
"Then, let this be our oath," I told him. "Thy body shall rest under my dominion —"
He reached out, letting go of his enormous sword long enough to wrap his massive, gauntlet-covered hand around mine. The metal was cool to the touch, and he was shockingly gentle. "And thy fate shall rest in my blade, Master."
A brief flash of light. Pain lanced up my arm like fire, surging through my Magic Circuits, and my Command Spells throbbed as another contract was established. Siegfried, Servant Saber, was now my Servant, just like Arash. When I looked at him through my Master's Clairvoyance, his True Name, his class, and his Noble Phantasm all stood out, proud and prominent.
Romani was probably going to be mad that I did this without consulting him, first, but there wasn't any time to get into an argument with him about this.
Slowly, Siegfried leveraged himself up and stood, stooped over his wound. He took one step and stumbled, his free hand twitching as though to grab at the injury, but righted himself without me having to swoop in and help him. A good thing, too, because I wasn't sure he wouldn't drag us both to the floor decked out in as many metal plates as he was. Even without a full suit, they were big enough and thick enough that they couldn't be light to a normal human.
"There's another Servant out in the hallway," I began.
"The Phantom," Siegfried mumbled. "Yes, he's been guarding me since the city was ransacked."
Phantom? Was that a name or some kind of title? A discussion for later, when we weren't pressed for time.
"The real Jeanne d'Arc was summoned to fight her evil counterpart," I summarized. "She's holding him off as best she can, right now. I don't need you to fight him, but if I give you an opening, can you kill him?"
Siegfried eyed me shrewdly.
"An opening?"
I palmed one of Cúchulainn's runestones. I was down to a meager three, and if and until we managed to summon him back to Chaldea, that was it. My rune magecraft wasn't anywhere near good enough to make replacements.
"I'm going to distract him," I said simply. "You'll have only a second or two at most. Are you up for it?"
He inclined his head. "I'll have to be."
We made our way back down the hallway at a brisk walk. Even as tall as I was, Siegfried still had what had to be almost half a foot on me, with a stride to match, so despite his pace being stiff and slow for a Servant, he was still keeping up effortlessly.
I wanted to run. My blood was thundering in my veins, and the impulse to take off at full speed was almost unbearable, but with my new Servant as injured as he was, we had to go at his speed. Instead, I used the time it was taking us to lay out the plan to as many people as I could.
Arash, I projected my thoughts his way, I've found the Servant we were looking for. True Name: Siegfried, from the Nibelungenlied. He's injured badly enough that he won't be able to fight, but he'll be able to at least take out Saint Martha and the Tarasque with his Noble Phantasm.
Got it, Arash answered. I'll keep things in hand while you guys make your way out of the castle. Hurry, though, Master. I'm not sure how much longer Martha is going to "test" us.
As fast as we can, I confirmed, and then I pushed down the thread to Siegfried. I have a runestone that I'm going to throw at Phantom. It'll let off a bright flash of light, so when I tell Jeanne to shield her eyes, that's your cue.
Understood, Master.
As we came to the corner, I reached out with my bugs to get a sense of the fighting I could hear down the hall. Even diminished as she was, Jeanne was still moving fast enough that it was hard to keep anything on her at all, and Phantom was just as bad. It was still enough that I could grasp the basic layout of the action and the area around it.
Nothing much had changed in the brief couple of minutes it had taken me to get Siegfried. Jeanne still held on, but that was likely only because the corridor was straight and narrow, which limited angles of attack, and Phantom liked to come at her with quick, obvious strikes before backing away to try again.
Those were probably the only things saving her. I wasn't sure what Heroic Spirit Phantom was supposed to be, because I couldn't recall any legends about great figures who wore half a face mask, but even I could tell that he wasn't really the fighting type. The way he attacked was befitting of his class — like an ambush predator, a stalker, an assassin, used to finishing the target off before they could fight back, and as a result, not that good in a straight fight.
Wait.
An assassin, an ambush predator, a stalker, called Phantom, who wore a white mask over half of his face and dressed in the tattered finery of an aristocrat. Could it really be the Phantom of the Opera? Really? A character from a book qualified as a Heroic Spirit?
Later. No time to give that too much thought.
Leaping out from the corner, I sprinted down the hallway as Siegfried hobbled after me. The runestone grew hot in my hand as magical energy ran through it.
My arm cocked back. "Jeanne, eyes!"
And I threw the runestone unerringly towards Phantom, or more accurately, towards the fly that was buzzing in circles directly behind him.
Jeanne glanced over her shoulder at me, but she didn't hesitate to follow my command and squeezed her eyes shut as she flung herself to the side. Phantom leapt back warily, but it didn't matter, because the point hadn't been to hit him at all in the first place.
I squeezed my own eyes shut.
"Anfang!"
Phantom gave a startled shout as a bright light flashed, bright enough I could see it through my eyelids again, and a swift wind rushed past me, whipping my hair about. The bug I'd attached to Siegfried's back was ripped off from the speed.
The squelch of metal sinking into flesh was quiet, but the way it pierced the hallway, it might as well have been thunder. Phantom gasped, and there was an unholy shriek as metal ground against metal, and another squelch as Siegfried's massive sword was drawn from out of Phantom's body. Then, I heard the thump of someone hitting the floor.
My eyes squinted open just in time for me to see Phantom disappear into motes of light that flickered out like fireflies, and Siegfried panted, using the wall to prop himself up as Balmung drooped in his grip.
Jeanne pulled herself to her feet as I came up to join them, her brow furrowed, and Siegfried turned just far enough to see me out of the corner of his eyes.
"Enemy Servant eliminated, Master," he reported, labored.
I nodded. "Good job."
"You're hurt," Jeanne noted.
"A cursed wound," Siegfried explained shortly. "There's nothing to be done. I'll deal with it."
Jeanne reached for his side, where the wound was, and hesitated for a moment.
"May I?"
Siegfried looked at her curiously, but shifted to provide her better access. Immediately, Jeanne pulled his bodysuit to the side, and she hissed when her hand found the nasty wound. Siegfried barely even flinched as she probed it.
"My evil self did this," she muttered, somewhere between disgust and scorn. A gusty sigh left her mouth. "I'm sorry, but I can't heal it completely. In my current state, she's just too strong. I can at least ease it a little."
"A little will be more than enough," Siegfried said.
Jeanne nodded, and she pressed her hand to the mauled flesh, muttering something under her breath. It sounded like a prayer. Her hands glowed, and before my eyes, the nasty wound started to close and fill in, some of the discoloration fading.
But only some. When she was done and pulled away, it looked better than before, but it was still bad enough that a human being would be dead or dying, not standing straighter the way Siegfried did.
"Thank you," he said.
Jeanne returned it with a wan smile. "I only wish I could have done more."
"Are you still good to use your Noble Phantasm?" I asked Siegfried.
He nodded, sure and confident. "At least once, Master."
"Then we need to get back," said Jeanne, taking the words out of my mouth. "Mash and the others need our help."
Jeanne and I started back the way we came, with Siegfried bringing up the rear at a brisk walk. His gait was smoother and easier than before, but he still wasn't back up to full health. His wound still bothered him, made him flinch every few steps.
I didn't know how we were going to do it, but we were going to have to find a way to break that curse.
As we made our way back out of the castle, I kept track of the fight happening above with my bugs, as much as I could with my swarm getting cut down with every breath Tarasque took. Mash was still holding her own, but she was visibly starting to struggle, and Saint Martha was still going strong. The twins, having some sense, had backed further away from the line of fire, and from his perch, Arash forced Saint Martha to ease up by peppering her with arrows that forced her to disengage or else become a pin cushion.
It was a stalemate, but only because no one had pulled out a Noble Phantasm yet.
If Saint Martha knew who had been locked in this dungeon, and I had plenty of reason to believe that she did, given what she'd said at the start of the fight, then it was entirely possible that would change the instant she saw Siegfried. No, it was even likely. Siegfried was the only Servant on our side who could definitely defeat her in one blow.
That would be our opening, then. A moment where both Tarasque and Saint Martha would be vulnerable. The perfect moment to finish them off.
When we stepped out into the sunlight, it felt like we had been down in the dungeon for days, and we rushed for the gate as quickly as we were able. On the other side was devastation, the husks of the buildings that had been there before now flattened by the fighting. From the hill the castle sat on, I had a clear view of everything that had been crushed.
I took in a deep breath.
Get ready, I told Siegfried as he came up behind me. He jolted to a stop, like he'd been about to jump into the fray until I'd said something.
"Mash!" I shouted at the top of my lungs. "Pull back! Ritsuka, Rika, get to the castle! Arash, cover them!"
To Arash, I added silently, Force her back, but give her just enough room to breathe.
Understood.
The twins and Mash hesitated for only a second or two, then moved to follow my orders. Mash never turned her back to Saint Martha, holding her shield up as she tried to gain distance. The twins just turned and ran towards me as fast as their legs would carry them.
Saint Martha herself looked up at my voice, and even from that distance, I could see her eyes widen as she caught sight of Siegfried beside me — and then a series of arrows from Arash forced her to retreat behind her dragon, where they broke upon its shell.
I knew my plan was working when the dragon curled up into its shell like a turtle, pulling all of its limbs in. The instant Arash's arrows stopped coming, Saint Martha leapt up behind it and swung the cross-shaped section of her staff like a hockey stick, with the Tarasque as the puck.
"TARASQUE!"
The dragon flew off of the ground with way more speed and force than she could possibly have imparted on her own, spinning as lightning crackled along its shell and gouts of flame burst out from the openings. With that much weight and speed behind it, it would hit like a rocket fired from a jet plane.
But even before her staff had hit the beast, I was already giving another set of orders.
"Mash!"
"Use your Noble Phantasm!" Ritsuka shouted, picking up on my plan.
Mash, halfway to us, planted her shield, and like she was issuing a challenge to the world, cried out, "LORD CHALDEAS!"
The barrier formed in front of her, morphing and twisting into a bricked, castle wall, translucent but solid. Tarasque slammed into it like a ballistic missile, and its spinning shell ground against the brickwork like a drill, trying to bore its way through to reach her, to smite her, to kill all of us in one go.
But the castle wall held. The Tarasque hung, suspended in the air by its own momentum for a handful of seconds, and then rebounded, bouncing back and sliding on the bottom of its shell in the direction it had come from as its spin slowed down. The castle wall faded out of existence.
There wasn't going to be a better opening.
Saber —
"Now!"
Siegfried leapt into the air with a grunt, crossing the distance in an instant to land roughly in front of Mash. The wind of his passing whipped my hair about, and Rika let out a startled yelp as her own hair fluttered.
He stood and took grip of his sword with both hands, lifting the blade above his head. The jewel in the hilt glowed, and suddenly, a burst of energy surged up the blade, extending into a massive pillar of pale, blue light that reached up to the clouds above.
My stomach flip-flopped. For an instant, I was reminded of King Arthur and her Excalibur, the terrible beam of energy that had almost killed us all.
Siegfried stepped back on one foot, bracing himself. The pillar of light moved like it was nothing more than an extension of his blade.
"TARASQUE!" Marth screamed.
The sword came down.
"BALMUNG!"
The pillar of light descended like a guillotine, carving a path of destruction through everything in its way. It slammed into the ground and detonated, surging out in a wave and scouring the already destroyed city clean. Everything it touched was seared away and disappeared beneath the torrent of its might, and even Saint Martha and her Tarasque were swallowed up the same as everything else.
The blast lasted an eternity, but also only an instant. Steam and smoke billowed out in its wake, and Siegfried stumbled back, clutching at his wounded side and panting as though he'd run a marathon. My Magic Circuits throbbed from the sheer amount of magical energy that had been channeled through them to support that single blow.
The billowing smoke eventually spread out and dissipated, curling in tufts up into the sky, and when it was gone, there was no sign anymore of the great dragon that we had struggled against. The Tarasque was no more.
But Saint Martha remained, if only just. She was still alive, for whatever that word meant to a Servant, but she hadn't come out of Balmung's attack unscathed.
Both of her arms were burned almost entirely black, along with a large portion of the left side of her face, like she had turned her head away and tried to shield herself with her arms. Her white tabard was ripped and torn and barely covered her modesty, not that it had been particularly conservative before, and her staff had disappeared somewhere, gone. Various other wounds mottled the front of her body, and any normal human would have been writhing on the ground in agony.
Saint Martha didn't. She dropped her arms, scowled at us, and settled into a stance reminiscent of a boxer, leading with one of her mangled hands. Her legs bunched, tensed, as Mash and Siegfried both prepared to meet her, and —
She stopped, face slack, as an arrow sprouted from the left side of her chest, buried in her flesh almost up to the fletching. A spurt of blood splattered across the ground behind her, and more leaked from the wound down her front.
I didn't need to be Panacea to know that was a killshot.
Saint Martha collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, falling to her knees as her arms dropped down, an expression of surprise on her face. For a moment, she swayed like that, her outline growing fuzzy and indistinct, like static on an old tv, and then she fell forward. The instant her face hit the ground, her entire body vanished in a cloud of golden sparks that flickered and died.
But as she fell, I could have sworn I saw her smile.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Is it too much that Taylor figured out who Phantom was just from those clues? Eh. I think she would have heard of Phantom of the Opera, even though one of my editors had never heard of him before FGO.
Also, a reminder for Taylor: even when a Servant is trying to save your life, they can really fuck you up.
That ending was so anime, though. I can picture it so clearly even now, so long after I wrote it, just going by how it was described in the story. Goddamn.
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out, and especially to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best, and your continued support is invaluable. If you like what you're reading and want to support me as a writer so I can pay the bills, I have a Patreon. If Patreon is too long term, I have a Ko-fi page, too. If you want to commission something from me, check out either my Deviantart post or my artist registry page for my rates. Links in my sig. Every little bit helps keep me afloat, even if you can only afford a couple dollars.
The instant Saint Martha was gone, Siegfried collapsed to his knees, as though her presence was the only thing keeping him upright. He supported himself with his sword, the tip thrust into the ground, and his other hand clutched at his side, where his wound still persisted.
Rika squawked. "Hey, is he okay?"
"Fou, fou!"
The little menace leapt from off of her shoulder and scurried over to Siegfried, and as much as it sent a shiver down my spine to follow it, the rest of us took off and jogged over to Mash and Siegfried. At least for the moment, there didn't appear to be any other Servants nearby to worry about. For whatever that was worth, when the Tarasque had burned through so much of my swarm.
"Senpai!" Mash called as we approached.
"Good going, Mash!" Rika cheered, grinning, and then she turned to Siegfried worriedly. "This guy doesn't look too good, though."
"I'm…sorry, Master," Siegfried said, looking up at me with a pained expression. "Even just that much…took a lot more out of me…than I expected."
"You did well," I told him. "Exactly what I needed you to do."
He sighed, and something of a relieved smile broke out on his face. In a movie, that would have been the cliché moment where he died, having succeeded in his mission or rescued the princess, but fortunately, his form stayed solid and corporeal, and he seemed in no danger of fading away, just yet.
Yet. That was the part that worried me. That wound needed to be dealt with sooner rather than later, or else it was going to become a liability in short order. The very last thing we needed was to run into another pack of wyverns or one of Jeanne Alter's Servants and Siegfried be too weakened to fight back. The Armor of Fafnir would help, but the wound itself already proved that it was possible to get through that and deal a heavy blow.
"Is he okay?" Ritsuka asked, concerned.
"Jeanne Alter and her Servants wounded him, and because it's cursed, it won't heal," I summarized for the twins. "He won't be able to fight until we break the curse and heal the wound."
"I did everything I could," Jeanne lamented, "but I'm afraid…with my abilities as diminished as they are…"
"You can't break the curse," Mash concluded.
Beep-beep!
"— got through!" Romani said. "Thank goodness! That interference was really strong!"
"Doctor Roman!" said the twins together.
"Contract registered, by the way!" said Romani. "Saber class Servant, Siegfried, hero of the Nibelungenlied. It turns out your instinct was right on the money, Taylor! This is definitely a top class, Rank A Servant!"
He grinned.
"And two Spirit Origins have disappeared, as well! A-ah, we didn't detect the last one until moments before it was snuffed out, but you definitely managed to handle Saint Martha! Congratulations, everyone!"
With a quiet thump, Arash landed next to us. "Doctor."
"Arash Kamangir," Romani replied respectfully. "Thank you for looking out for everyone."
"Just doing my job," said Arash, smiling.
Romani looked over at something on his console. "Everyone's vitals are all in the green. No injuries, no one's hurt, and thank God, no one died. I'd call that a success. Although…"
Yes. "Although." There was no way he could have missed it, that little hitch.
"You can see it, right?" I asked.
Romani nodded.
"Siegfried's Saint Graph has some irregularities in it. Damage that predates the contract, along with some kind of status effect. Was there something that happened before you made contact?"
"It's a curse," Jeanne said sourly. "My other self… My evil counterpart and her minions inflicted it upon him. I can't lift it as I am."
"If it's lingering this long and managed to get through his Noble Phantasm," Romani hedged, frowning, "it's likely the result of a Noble Phantasm itself. You'd need either a specialized Noble Phantasm or else a bona fide saint to lift it… A-ah, I mean, n-not that you're not a saint, Jeanne —"
"Whatever history says of me, I don't think of myself as one," Jeanne interrupted, and then she sighed. "However, whether or not I am one, in my current state, I can't do anything more."
And without her, we were fresh out of the other two things, weren't we? Damn it.
"Maybe Emiya has something?" Ritsuka suggested tentatively.
"Emiya?" Arash echoed.
"Our emergency backup," I explained shortly. "An Archer class Servant who can reproduce Noble Phantasms, at the cost of lowered performance."
Arash, Jeanne, and Siegfried all reacted in a way I honestly should have expected: with surprise. In hindsight, being told a Heroic Spirit could make copies of the things that made other Heroic Spirits special wasn't something ordinary even among Servants. I had to start thinking of it like Tinkertech — even other Tinkers couldn't just casually reproduce a Tinker's work, and mass producing them was the Holy Grail of Tinkering.
And I just compared Emiya to Dragon in my head. I wasn't sure who should have been flattered more.
"I've never heard of such a Heroic Spirit before," Arash said.
"Neither had we," Romani told him. "As far as our records are concerned, he didn't exist before Taylor, Ritsuka, and Rika saw him in Fuyuki."
Arash shook his head. "You would think a Heroic Spirit with such a unique talent would be well-known."
"According to Emiya, his capacity for reproduction increased dramatically after his ascension — or rather, he couldn't just throw around copied Noble Phantasms willy nilly while he was alive, and large parts of his repertoire were only acquired during his summonings as a Servant," Romani said. "In any case, I could ask him, but I don't think he'll be able to help with this. Remember, he's limited to bladed weapons, and swords aren't really made for healing, you know?"
My lips pursed as an idea came to mind.
"You could ask him, but I'm not sure we need him," I said. "How easy is it to send him here, anyway?"
Romani scratched at the back of his head. "There's some sort of time differential between you guys and Chaldea. We can keep track of you and where you're heading, but even if it takes you a week to get somewhere, for us, it's a few hours to maybe a day or so. Da Vinci thinks the difference is going to get even more extreme the further back you go and the bigger the deviation from proper history."
"So?" Ritsuka prodded.
"I'm getting there!" Romani said. "It means that, when we're not in direct contact like this, it's harder to pinpoint your exact location at any given moment. Chaldeas is a little more accurate than a GPS, but for us, you guys are moving around like a car on a highway. That's why I'm sometimes late announcing the presence of an incoming Servant. By the time the sensors pick it up and I get the readout, you guys are already fighting. And that's when interference doesn't make connecting impossible to begin with."
I made a noise of understanding in my throat.
"So if you tried to Rayshift Emiya to us, there's no guarantee he'd even land in our general area. Rika might have to use a Command Spell just to bring him to us."
Waste one, I meant, and everyone picked up on that.
Romani nodded. "Basically, yeah."
"Why didn't you just say that?" Rika groaned. "That wasn't that hard to understand!"
"Wha — h-hey!" Romani squawked. "I'm doing my best here, you know! This isn't exactly my normal job!"
"Romani." I brought the conversation back around before it could devolve. "If we forget about bringing Emiya in for now, can you detect any other Servants to the west or east?"
"Hang on a second."
He went back to the monitor, showing us the side of his face as he looked away.
"It's far enough away that the resolution isn't great, but I'm definitely detecting the presence of at least one Servant west of you, at a city called Thiers, roughly one-hundred-twenty kilometers from your current location, and there might be one even further out past that. If it's even there, it's at least twice as far, so I'm sorry I can't give you anything more concrete."
I nodded. "And the one at Thiers, can you detect human vital signs in its general vicinity?"
Everyone turned to look at me, eyes wide.
"Oh my," said Jeanne. "That's clever."
"H-holy crap!" Romani said. "H-hang on a second, I'll — Da Vinci's going to cackle like a madman when she hears about this one!"
"Human vital signs?" Mash asked. "I don't understand."
"Aside from our team, there should only be two kinds of Servants here," I explained while Romani checked the sensors. "Those who are on Jeanne Alter's side, and therefore will be slaughtering every living person they come across, and those on the side of the French people, who will fight back and protect the innocent citizens. If there's a Servant at Thiers and a bunch of people still alive there —"
"Then that Servant is protecting them!" Ritsuka concluded.
"That's awesome!" said Rika. "I don't see how that helps us, though."
"Jeanne was obviously summoned to fight her evil self, the Dragon Witch." I nodded at her, and she grimaced, but didn't protest the point. "But here at Lyon, we found Siegfried, a dragon-slaying hero, specifically suited for killing Jeanne Alter's wyverns. There's no guarantees, but if the Servants summoned are responses meant to match the threat, then the Servant at Thiers just might be another dragonslayer."
"It could be Sigurd," Mash suggested.
Siegfried nodded. "It's possible. Though our legends are similar, he and I are two different Heroic Spirits. If the threat is dragons, he may have been summoned as well."
"Maybe," I conceded, because it wasn't impossible. "But if he wasn't, then there's one other dragon-slaying hero that might have been called."
"Saint George," Romani said. "I've got a reading, and your instinct was right again, Taylor. I can't get an exact number, but there are numerous human life signs located at Thiers. It looks like whoever the Servant is there is protecting the city along with all of the people inside it."
My lips curled into a small smile.
"Can you tell if it's Saint George or not?" Jeanne asked.
Romani shook his head. "I've already explained, I don't have that kind of resolution from this far away. Not without one of the Masters having seen the Servant with their own eyes. The only thing I can tell you from here is the general location. I'm sorry."
"It's not ideal," I allowed, because it really would have been better to know who or what we were dealing with for sure, "but it's better than what we had to go on five minutes ago. We don't really have much better in the way of options, right now, unless you want to take another shot at summoning?"
I addressed the last part to Romani, who grimaced.
"Even if we tried, there still isn't a guarantee that who you summon will be of immediate use," he said. "We already tried to summon Siegfried, right? Arash answered instead, and we found Siegfried later. So if we tried to summon Saint George and it turns out he's the one at Thiers, won't we just have filled up one of our open slots and increased the strain on you Masters unnecessarily?"
That wasn't exactly my thought process. But it wasn't completely off the mark, either.
"Then our next destination should be Thiers," I concluded. "Whether or not Saint George is there, the odds are good that the Servant there will be an ally. At the very least, we'll be able to rest and brainstorm the next step from there."
Arash nodded. "It'll be a nice break from camping out every night."
"Is it really that big of a deal?" Ritsuka asked. "Rika and I haven't really been feeling any strain from supporting Mash or anything. Right, Rika?"
"The only things strained are my legs!" Rika reported cheerily.
Very deliberately, I stopped myself from rolling my eyes.
"That's because Chaldea's doing most of the heavy lifting," Romani told them. "The more Servants you contract with, especially out in the field instead of inside Chaldea itself, the more you guys will have to pick up the slack with your own power. Right now, Ritsuka, Rika, you two are only supporting Mash, and Taylor is only supporting Siegfried and Arash. If you just kept summoning as many Servants as you could, you would definitely start to feel the strain. If they all started fighting the next time you ran into an enemy Servant, the drain might just kill you."
The twins both blanched. I didn't have any idea what they were imagining it would look like to be drained dry of magical energy, but the image in my head was of a desiccated corpse, sunken-cheeked and so brittle it flaked away at the slightest touch.
"Then, it seems our next course of action has been decided," Jeanne concluded. "We will make our way to Thiers in the hopes of finding another ally and work out our next step from there. Are there any objections?"
"I'm sorry," Siegfried mumbled. "You're going through all of this trouble for me."
I shook my head. "Getting help for you is one thing, but Thiers probably would have been our next stop anyway. We'll need as much help as we can get to fight Jeanne Alter and her army."
Siegfried's expression drew out into determination. "Then I won't let your efforts go to waste. Once my injury has been healed, Master, I will ensure the Dragon Witch is destroyed. This, I swear."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Not for the first time, I lamented the lack of industrial era conveniences in fifteenth-century France. It probably wouldn't be the last. Without a car to take us there, the journey of a few hours became a few days, and while we didn't have as far to go as before, Siegfried's disability slowed us down by at least a whole day, so it still took us the better part of a week to go from Lyon to Thiers. It didn't help that the terrain got far less flat the closer to our destination we got, to the point where "rolling hills" was a frustratingly accurate description of the obstacles we had to cross.
And unfortunately, by the time the sun had set and we settled down at the end of the fourth day, we still had another few hours of travel before we could crest the final hill overlooking the valley Thiers was nestled into, which meant another night of camping out in the wilderness.
For a certain value of the word "camping," at any rate. We didn't have nice, expensive tents or comfortable sleeping bags, and the only things we had for pillows were our own clothing, which didn't exactly make for the most comfortable of rests. The only small mercy we had was that my powers let me keep things like mosquitoes from harassing us, and that meant we didn't have to wake up in the morning with unexplained bites swelling on every stretch of exposed skin.
Not for the first time, and definitely not for the last, I was jealous of the Servants who didn't have to sleep. Jeanne did anyway, and so did Mash, but Arash was always taking the night watch to keep an eye out for us, and Siegfried didn't sleep, exactly, so much as he closed his eyes and tried to move as little as possible throughout the night.
Trying not to aggravate his wound was my guess. Or conserving magical energy. It might have been both at once.
That night, the twins fell asleep almost instantly. They were huddled up next to each other on the edge of our little bonfire, and despite how uncomfortable sleeping on the hard ground was, they were sawing logs without a care in the world.
With Arash off in the dark, staying away from the fire to maintain his night vision, and Siegfried set off to the side, engaged in his nightly imitation of a statue, it left Jeanne and I alone in a rare moment of solitude.
Not for much longer, I knew. I was handling it all better than the twins were, but walking all day still took a lot out of me, too. With food in my belly and my body aching from a long day, I'd be heading off to dreamland myself, soon. It took everything I had just to stifle my yawns.
"Do you think she was right?" Jeanne asked into the silence.
I blinked at her, uncomprehending. "Who?"
"My other self," Jeanne said quietly. "My…evil self. Jeanne Alter."
Oh. One of those conversations, then.
"About?"
"The reason my abilities are so diminished," Jeanne clarified. "Why I'm…not as strong as I should be." She was quiet for a moment longer, and then went on. "I know I said it so confidently back then, but… Could it be true that I'm the fake, and she's the real Jeanne?"
Wasn't that a loaded question?
"Do you think you're fake?" I asked.
"I…I don't feel like I'm fake, but…" She trailed off for a moment, then started again. "If I was nothing more than the idealized version of Jeanne that the people of France believed in, would I even know for sure?"
I didn't know how to answer that. I didn't really know that there was any good answer to begin with.
"I'm not sure what you're expecting me to tell you," I said. "It's not like I knew you when you were alive or anything. I can't say one way or the other which one of you feels and acts the way the real Jeanne d'Arc did while she was still living and breathing."
But I definitely knew that Jeanne wouldn't appreciate me telling her that I thought Jeanne Alter's way of thinking was more realistic. It felt more natural for someone to hate the people who abandoned her, to feel like everyone who turned their backs on her deserved to have everything she'd ever given to them ripped away. For the French, to whom Jeanne delivered everything, having everything destroyed was…not the appropriate response, but the one that matched what she'd done for their sakes.
What she'd sacrificed for their sakes.
Jeanne frowned miserably at the smoldering embers of our fire.
"But," I continued, "I've heard enough of the stories about her to know she didn't begrudge anyone for what happened. The English for their partisanship, maybe, the clergy who condemned her on every trumped up charge they could, probably, but not the people or the country she'd given up everything for."
It felt like a lie. It was all true, of course, and none of it was wrong, but people could change a lot in the moments of their death. As she burned at the pyre, it was entirely possible the real Jeanne d'Arc had cursed everyone and everything even remotely connected to it. Maybe it was even likely.
I didn't tell her that.
"Yes." Jeanne closed her eyes and bowed her head. "I accepted it, at the end. The English, the clergy, they tricked me into a false confession. But I knew…from the beginning, didn't I? I knew that I would never return to the simple life of a farm girl the instant I left home to seek out King Charles. I knew what I was giving up for my people and what it would cost me."
She clutched her hands to her chest.
"I remember the moment I knew what I must do," she said quietly. "I remember making the decision to leave. I remember it all. My mother's tears. My father's love. My brothers' embrace. The smiling faces of my countrymen, liberated. The jeers of the crowd as I burned." She pushed out her arms, as though throwing something into the flames. "I remember that final moment as I offered my body unto God."
A small smile pulled at her lips. "Those are all things the real Jeanne d'Arc did. Those are all things the real Jeanne d'Arc felt. Those are all the things I lived and felt."
She might remember all of that, too, I thought but didn't say. It felt like the wrong thing to say in that moment.
If someone told me that my Echidna clone was just as much a real person, a real Taylor Hebert, as I was, just because she had all of my memories, too, would I have been able to accept that? Could I say a dark mirror was equally as valid as the original?
No. And when you looked at it like that, Jeanne Alter was just as much Jeanne's dark mirror, a tainted reflection corrupted by Flauros' Grail.
Even if we said Jeanne Alter's feelings were valid, that didn't mean what she was doing wasn't wrong. Real or fake, she was still the enemy, and we had to stop her. Whether or not she was the genuine article would just make it more or less tragic.
"We should get some sleep," I said. "Tomorrow, we'll be meeting whoever is at Thiers. We can't afford to be exhausted, especially if they attack before asking questions."
"You're right." She offered me a radiant smile. "Thank you, Taylor. Your words helped dispel my doubts."
I gave her a smile and a nod, perfunctory. I didn't know how I'd really helped her when she mostly seemed to have talked herself around, but if she thought I'd helped, then I wasn't going to argue. Turning away from the fire, I settled down, pillowed my head beneath one arm, and closed my eyes. Jeanne did something similar.
A long breath eased out of my nostrils, and I tried to still my mind long enough to sleep.
It seemed only seconds later that I was waking up to the morning sun on my face, feeling like I hadn't much rested at all.
The fire had burned down at some point, and as I gingerly sat up, I found everyone mostly where I'd left them the night before. The twins had shifted and moved around a little, but Siegfried remained where he was, utterly still but for his even breathing, and next to me, Jeanne began to stir, as well, probably because she'd felt me moving.
Briefly, I closed my eyes and stretched out my senses, feeling out my swarm. I'd lost some in the night, of course, to predation and any number of other factors, but nothing major had disturbed them. Of course not, because it would have jolted me awake, but it never hurt to check.
A mental prod at the thread connecting me to Arash got me a silent affirmation back, a sort of wordless "I'm here" to let me know he hadn't been assassinated in the middle of the night. It only took a moment's concentration to send the order for him to make his way back from wherever it was he'd been keeping watch.
Now that everything else had been taken care of, I stood gingerly, sighing, and went over to wake up the twins. They were about as enthusiastic about getting up as I was, because as much as you could get used to sleeping on the ground and learn to live with the associated aches, those aches never stopped being new when you woke up to them in the morning.
Siegfried was roused with nothing more than a quiet grunt to show his discomfort. He stood slowly and carefully, mindful of his wound, but although I thought he must have fallen asleep sitting there for the entire night, he showed no signs that he'd ever even started to doze.
I would have bet that if I asked him, he would have told me that he'd been awake and on guard the whole time. I wasn't sure I could even doubt it.
Arash returned around that time, and a quick chat later, Romani sent us provisions for our breakfast — that showed up five feet in the air above Mash's shield. Small mercies that none of it was fragile enough to make a mess.
After a brief and largely tasteless meal (accented by some chocolate protein bars that were actually pretty good), we started up our journey again and continued our hike towards Thiers.
"Do you have any more information about the Servant in the city?" I asked Romani as we walked.
"Sorry, I don't," he answered. Static tinged his words around the edges. Without a ley line terminal, a stable connection to Chaldea seemed like it was too much to ask for, but Romani and his sensors were the only line of information about the Servant at Thiers and the larger movements by Jeanne Alter that we had.
"Nothing?"
He shook his head. "I can tell you that he doesn't seem to have moved outside of the city itself, and also that there doesn't seem to have been any significant drop in the city's human population, but even this far out, I'm just speaking in a general sense."
My lips pulled into a frown. "What about Jeanne Alter and her forces? Do we have any idea what they've been up to for the last week?"
Romani shrugged and sighed, leaning back in his chair. "Sorry, I can't tell you much there, either. I've been checking back in whenever you guys settle down for the night, but the best I can give you is that there's been movement by Servants. I couldn't tell you one way or the other what she's doing or why, only that she is doing something."
That was more helpful than nothing, and we stuck to that for a while, discussing different things she might have been doing and reasons she might have been shuffling her "troops" around. Probably trying to spare the twins' feelings, Romani kept things steered away from the obvious, that she was going out and burning down whatever town, village, or city caught her eye on any given day.
I didn't think the twins missed that, but neither of them brought it up themselves. They were inexperienced, not stupid.
Eventually, we found ourselves on a road that seemed to have been excavated out of the hillside, a relatively narrow pass that had a steep upward slope to the right, enough space for a decently sized merchant caravan to ride, and then another steep slope to the left. The drop was sheer enough that I didn't like the odds of us surviving uninjured if I or one of the twins fell down it.
"— at Lyon," Romani was saying. "I shouldn't need to tell you, but she definitely knows you were there and she definitely knows you killed Saint Martha and Phantom. The next Servant she sends is definitely going to be even harder to fight. You guys need to be on your guard. She might even send two."
"Being double-teamed is cheating," Rika muttered sourly.
"Doctor Roman," said Ritsuka, who had been mostly silent the rest of the conversation, "has anything happened at La Charité?"
Romani sighed, grimacing. At length, he reluctantly said, "There are no human life signs at La Charité, as of now."
Ritsuka scowled, staring hard at the ground. His fists clenched. Rika, too, looked miserable, and Mash had the appearance of a kicked puppy.
I didn't want to say that I'd told him so. This was one of those things I would have gladly been wrong about.
"That doesn't mean anything on its own," Romani added. "It's entirely possible that the people who evacuated all left for another town. They might have —"
Something chimed on Romani's end, and he lunged forward, eyes wide, and shouted, "Incoming Servant detected!"
We had barely a moment to register his words before something fell out of the sky like a ballistic missile.
"Master!" Mash shouted, and she threw herself in front of the group, her shield materializing in front of her.
The other Servant landed with a thunderous crash some twenty feet or so down the road, kicking up hunks of rock with the impact. They'd moved so fast that I hadn't even had time for my bugs to pick up their movement before they'd landed.
She, I realized as I took in her figure. Definitely a woman, dressed in a long, almost military-style coat, knee-high boots, and elbow-length gloves, all accented with small plates of gold armor and all predominantly white and blue with red piping. Her long, golden hair looked frankly ridiculous in a pair of tails that reached almost to her knees.
The most striking thing, however, was not her appearance nor the tiny lance she carried in one hand, but the blazing star of a shield strapped to her other. At its center was a gold ornament with eight points, but radiating out from those points were eight spokes of pure energy, light solidified.
For an instant, she reminded me of Glory Girl.
"Halt!" she said firmly, brandishing the glittering, crystalline head of the miniaturized thing she called a lance at us. "Take not one step further! If you value your lives, turn around and leave this place immediately!"
She tilted her head back, staring down at us imperiously. It only made my mental comparison to Glory Girl all the stronger.
"I am the Lancer class Servant, Bradamante!" she declared. "The town of Thiers and its people are under my protection! You're not welcome here!"
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
So this isn't perhaps the discussion a lot of people were expecting Taylor and Jeanne to have first, but I never found a good place for them to talk about the bugs, so it can't be helped, I suppose. Looking back, I tried to stretch out Orleans a little so that the team wasn't bouncing around nearly as quickly as they were in canon, but I didn't succeed as well as I wanted to, so for Septem, I'll have to look into fixing that. Give the team a little more time to breath between the major story beats.
Yes, you understood that implication correctly. Yesterday, I finished up the last chapter of Orléans — Chapter XXVII: Kyrie, Eleison.
Oh? You're saying I didn't address the elephant in this chapter? Yeah, I didn't want to deal with Elizabeth and Kiyohime, so they got put on the chopping block. Elizabeth kinda made sense with Carmilla in the Singularity, but since Carmilla is dead, that story beat is, too, and it made much more sense to have a French Servant (or at least Frankish, if I understand my European history right) show up in the French Singularity. Originally, I thought, "Maybe Charlemagne?" But he didn't work as cleanly and I haven't actually played Extella Link, yet. I'm not overly fond of Astolfo, so Bradamante got to go to bat, since her only feature in FGO NA so far is a single Christmas event.
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out, and especially to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best, and your continued support is invaluable. If you like what you're reading and want to support me as a writer so I can pay the bills, I have a Patreon. If Patreon is too long term, I have a Ko-fi page, too. If you want to commission something from me, check out either my Deviantart post or my artist registry page for my rates. Links in my sig. Every little bit helps keep me afloat, even if you can only afford a couple dollars.
