Codex Abramelin [Noble Phantasm]
Grimoire of the Ancient Magic
The Book of Abramelin. The Noble Phantasm of Nicolas Flamel, the book he is said to have possessed that held the secrets of all magecraft. It is also said to have been the origin of Flamel's knowledge of magic.
However, the book dates itself to 1458 AD, nearly 40 years after Nicolas Flamel died. Its connection to Flamel is therefore entirely fictitious and has little at all to do with him in fact, even if its attribution to him allows it to function as a Noble Phantasm.
Lesser translations exist which are essentially useless to anyone practicing any form of magecraft, but the original book possesses numerous Formulcraft rituals and Kabbalistic spells that exceed the knowledge of modern magi, including the process of creating a Philosopher's Stone. A priceless tool that any family in the Mage's Association would happily go into debt to possess.
Acting as a kind of Magic Crest for a man who never possessed one, Flamel can perform any form of magecraft written inside the book itself, although he has a preference for the alchemical functions. Simply as a matter of familiarity.
Truthfully, Flamel will admit, the contents of the Codex are neither as extensive nor as groundbreaking as the myths imply. For their time, they would have been exceptional, but many of these spells have been rendered obsolete by the advance of technology.
Class: Rider
True name: Aífe
Gender: Female
Height/Weight: 165 cm / 53 kg
Alignment: Neutral Good
Strength: B
Endurance: A
Agility: A+
Magic: C
Luck: D
Noble Phantasm: A+
CLASS SKILLS
■ Magic Resistance: A
■ Riding: A+
PERSONAL SKILLS
■ Discernment of Potential: B
An intuition of others' "limitations." Mostly used in regards to teaching, in battle, it becomes possible to understand when the enemy is holding back or preparing a trump card, although its nature is still impossible to so simply grasp.
■ Blood-stained Queen: EX
The attribute of the Queen of Warriors. Effectiveness of Anti-Army Noble Phantasms increases. Also, in single combat, her abilities related to battle are boosted, however Noble Phantasms other than Anti-Unit are significantly reduced.
■ Primordial Runes: —
The primal runes spread throughout the world by the Norse god, Odin. Though their instruction was identical, Aífe cannot use them as effectively as Scáthach, particularly in regards to things like clairvoyance.
■ Cáe Cless: A++
The martial arts wielded by the ancient Celts of Ireland and Scotland. At this level, their usage can result in the localized flexure of the fabric of space and time. She is an unrivaled master. Normally, an unlisted skill falling under the purview of her Noble Phantasm. However, because she is lacking her tutelary aspects, it exists independently.
NOBLE PHANTASMS
■ Rígan di Bíastae|Dominion Over Beasts
Rank: A+
Type: Anti-Army
Range: 2-50
Maximum number of targets: 300
■ Gáe Bolg Prototype|Soaring Spear of Deadly Thorns
Rank: B
Type: Anti-Unit
Range: 5-40
Maximum number of targets: 1
CHARLES PERRAULT
Class: Caster
True name: Charles Perrault
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 180 cm / 76 kg
Alignment: Lawful Good
Strength:E
Endurance: E
Agility: D
Magic: C
Luck: B
Noble Phantasm: B
CLASS SKILLS
■ Territory Creation: —
■ Item Construction: D
PERSONAL SKILLS
■ Thirty-nine Fountains: A
A skill that allows the easing of the burden of supporting his Noble Phantasm's extensive energy costs. Through strategic placement of "fountains" that concentrate magical energy from the surroundings, the cost is drastically reduced. Replaces the Territory Creation skill.
■ Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns: A+
The marriage of Modernity and Antiquity. By establishing that all works of his era are either the equal or greater of the works of the ancient writers and mythologers, the weight and mystery of the beings in his fairy tales is enhanced, and their performance and conceptual strength is proportionally increased.
■ Father of Fairy Tales: A++
He was not the originator of the genre known as fairy tales. However, he was instrumental in their development and popularization, and therefore, having left an indelible mark on the history of literature, he possesses an unbreakable connection to those stories which arose from his.
In practice, the creations of his Noble Phantasm are thusly more susceptible to the influences of later interpretations of his stories. As their progenitor, he must accept responsibility for the children spawned from his own works.
NOBLE PHANTASMS
■ Tales of Mother Goose|Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals
Rank: B+++
Type: Anti-Unit
Range: 0
Maximum number of targets: 1
HENRY MORGAN
Class: Rider
True name: Henry Morgan
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 185cm / 77kg
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Strength: D
Endurance: C
Agility: B
Magic: D
Luck: A+
Noble Phantasm: A+
CLASS SKILLS
■ Riding: B
■ Magic Resistance: D
PERSONAL SKILLS
■ Golden Rule: B
The talent for acquiring wealth. Owing to a particular skill for investing his riches, Henry Morgan became quite wealthy over the course of his life and owned several legitimate properties.
■ Voyager of the Storm: A+
The appropriate level for Henry Morgan, a military genius with great tactical and strategic acumen. With great cunning, he led his fleet of ships to several "impossible" victories throughout his career, and was even granted the rank of admiral by the government.
■ Terror of the Spanish Main: A+
The fierce disposition of the man who became so synonymous with the word "pirate." Owing to the tales of his sadism and his fame as a hero of the English, this composite skill incorporates effects similar to both Charisma and Innocent Monster. When engaging with another party, he will seem more monstrous or more heroic depending upon whether he is friend or foe.
NOBLE PHANTASMS
■ Port Royal|Captain Morgan's Fortified Redoubt
Rank: B++
Type: Anti-Army
Range: 10 - 99
Maximum number of targets: 1000 people
■ Port Royal Cannonade|Sequential Military Bombardment
Rank: A+
Type: Anti-Army
Range: 10 - 99
Maximum number of targets: 1000 people
■ Morgan's Expeditionary Force|Plundering the Spanish Main
Rank: A+
Type: Anti-Army
Range: 10 - 99
Maximum number of targets: 1000 people
NICOLAS FLAMEL
Class: Caster
True name: Nicolas Flamel
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 185 cm / 78 kg
Alignment: Lawful Good
Strength: D
Endurance: D
Agility: C
Magic: A+
Luck: A+
Noble Phantasm: A
CLASS SKILLS
■ Territory Creation: A
■ Item Construction: EX
Only in regards to tools used and forged through alchemy does this skill become truly exceptional. In all other areas, it is equivalent to Rank A.
PERSONAL SKILLS
■ The Alchemist: A+
The capacity to utilize the form of Alchemy specifically practiced by the Western magi of the Clock Tower and Mage's Association. As it is an "older" form, it is technically closer to its Egyptian roots than the form practiced by more modern alchemists.
■ Philosopher's Stone: A+
The creation of a "true" Philosopher's Stone that can bestow a form of limited immortality upon others.
■ Squaring the Circle: EX
A skill related to Pioneer of the Stars. Regarding specifically the study and application of magecraft, feats that are normally considered "beyond the scope of his abilities" enter the realm of possibility. Because it applies so specifically to revolutions in the field of alchemy, it cannot function in regards to other forms of challenges.
■ High Speed Incantation: A
NOBLE PHANTASMS
■ Flamel|Fixing the Volatile
Rank: A
Type: Anti-Unit
Range: 0
Maximum number of targets: 1
■ Codex Abramelin|Grimoire of the Ancient Magic
Rank: EX
Type: Anti-Unit
Range: 0
Maximum number of targets: 1
SAMUEL BELLAMY
Class: Rider
True name: Samuel Bellamy
Gender: Male
Height/Weight: 186 cm /75 kg
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Strength: D
Endurance: B
Agility: C
Magic: E
Luck: B
Noble Phantasm: B+
CLASS SKILLS
■ Riding: B
■ Magic Resistance: D
PERSONAL SKILLS
■ Golden Rule: A-
The talent for acquiring wealth. Although the worth of the treasures Samuel Bellamy captured is considered without peer among pirates, as a result of having lost it and his life so soon after acquiring it, the effectiveness of this skill is somewhat reduced.
■ Voyager of the Storm: A+
Samuel Bellamy was a man of great charisma, wildly celebrated among his crew and beloved by every single member. Although his skill as a sailor was not extraordinary, his charismatic nature truly was exceptional among pirates.
■ Prince of Pirates: A++
A unique combination skill born from his peculiar values as a pirate. Merging skills like Valor, Mental Pollution, and Battle Continuation, as well as others, it is particularly useful in tense negotiations and increases the odds of success in Luck or Charisma checks.
NOBLE PHANTASMS
■ Whydah Gally|The Prince's Fortune
Rank: B+
Type: Anti-Army
Range: 20-40
Maximum number of targets: 500 people
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And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way... Chapter CLIV: Victorian Fairy Tale
The reveal that Jekyll was, in fact, Flamel's Master didn't really faze anyone that much after the first few seconds, but Marie had enough outrage to make up for it. The twins and Mash took it mostly in stride, after they had a moment to be surprised, and Mordred didn't seem to care all that much in the face of all the other things that were currently on our collective plate. Emiya even accepted it like all of the puzzle pieces had suddenly fit together neatly, and Arash might just have figured it out on his own and kept quiet out of respect for Flamel and Jekyll's privacy, because that was the kind of person he was.
Jeanne Alter, of course, didn't really care, Jackie didn't understand what the big deal was, and Nursery Rhyme was as placid and serene as she almost always was.
Marie, however, was furious, to the point that Romani had to step in to get her to calm down, although he himself wasn't too happy either. Not before she started tossing around recriminations about how much the deception put our mission at risk and a few accusations of sabotage, but both Jekyll and Flamel took those on the chin, like they'd been expecting exactly that sort of reaction.
Maybe they had been. Neither of them was naive enough to believe that we would have just let it slide and moved on. We had taken them into our confidence, made them a part of our mission, crucial and critical as it was, and to some degree, they had abused that trust.
I couldn't find it in myself to be too angry with them. I wanted to be, but I'd spent most of the last few days suspicious of Flamel to one degree or another, and while knowing this sooner might have avoided some of that, it might just have made me suspicious of Jekyll, too.
Either way, we couldn't afford to spend the entire afternoon on it. Emiya went and made us a quick lunch while we all cooled down, and once that was eaten — in a very awkward silence — we had to get ready and leave again.
I hadn't said so out loud, but I had a new suspicion about who M was. With Perrault all but confirmed to be involved and the forest of thorns from The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood on full display, my theory was that the Demon God in charge of making this Singularity had twisted Perrault to his cause the same way Medea the younger had been, leaving the creations of his Noble Phantasm to handle all of the more challenging aspects of managing things.
If that was the case, then M might just be the queen from the same story, the prince's mother, with ogre in her blood, who grew resentful of the Sleeping Beauty and her children and demanded each night to eat one of them. If I was right, then we literally couldn't afford to wait until the morning anyway, even if we had been tempted to, because Renée might not last the night.
And on a more practical note, I didn't want to find out what might come of the evil queen if she swallowed the Philosopher's Stone in Renée's body. I was sure that it would be nothing good.
Fortunately, Flamel's Noble Phantasm proved as useful as Jekyll had suggested it would be, and when we stepped out into the mist, the only thing that made me want to gag and cough was the smell. The effects of his Noble Phantasm canceled out both the underlying toxicity and the volatile magical energy, but the rancid scent was only marginally improved from what I remembered of it when we first arrived.
It was tempting to put on my mask, but we needed as united a front as we could get, and with moods soured by any or all of the things that had come up in the aftermath of Renée's kidnapping, we needed that unity desperately. It wasn't pleasant to go without my mask, but as a show of solidarity with the rest of the team, I did.
"I guess it was too much to hope for, that this odor would have been taken care of, too," Tohsaka muttered disgustedly.
"I'm gonna spend the first three days back at Chaldea huffing scented candles," Rika agreed, no more pleased than he was.
Jackie looked up at me, concerned. "Mommy?"
The only thing I could really do was give her a reassuring smile and tell her, "It's okay, Jackie. It's working."
This didn't seem to satisfy her, so she stayed glued to my side for the rest of the trip — close enough to grab my mask in an emergency, I noted with a strange sense of pride — but she didn't kick up a fuss about it either.
It seemed to take twice as long to get back to St. Paul's Station as it had getting from there to the apartment an hour ago, no doubt owing to our group being so much larger and so many of us having to huddle around Flamel, but we got there without running into any enemy forces and no sign of M's crow. Not, of course, that we could have seen it if it was perched motionlessly somewhere nearby, not with the fog being as thick as it was, but there were no overt signs of its presence.
I was going to assume she was watching us anyway. There were always dangers to assuming your enemy was more competent than they were, but underestimating the enemy was always worse, in my experience. Better to act as though she saw everything we were doing.
By the time we made it to the staircase leading down into the Underground, there was no indication of any further enemy action. The brambles and thorns, however, were still just as present as they had been when we left, and it was no less hazardous making our way down into the station. It was made all the more so by the fact that Jekyll, Tohsaka, and I had to stick so close to Flamel so that he had to exert himself as little as possible.
"Still think we should just burn all this shit down," Jeanne Alter muttered mutinously.
"If we're right about what's going to be waiting up ahead, then you'll have plenty to burn before this is over," I told her.
She rolled her eyes. "You know what they say about promises, Master."
"Don't make one you can't keep," Rika chirped.
"Exactly."
Somewhere in there, Ritsuka seemed to recognize a pop culture reference, but whatever it might have been, he didn't feel like sharing, so I let it drop. No one else looked to be all that interested in pursuing it either.
The mood was just that dour.
Like the trip to the station, climbing down off of the platform and trekking through the tunnel proved just as slow and cumbersome, and if our pace had been slow earlier, then it was positively glacial now. Fortunately, nothing had changed down here either, so there were no new growths for us to watch out for or closed off passages to stymie our progress. Just the same forest of thorny branches jutting out of every possible surface like some kind of warning to stay away — and now, to leave Renée to whatever ultimate fate M imagined for her.
We didn't heed it, of course, for all of the obvious reasons.
It took us the better part of another quiet hour to finally reach the spot we'd originally marked off, the place where we had been stumped before, and a quick check of the map and the location of Renée's communicator showed that we were not that far from her. She was, however, still some one-hundred-fifty meters below us.
"We're here," I announced.
Everyone stopped and looked around. Flashlights swung, passing beams of intense light over each of the walls, but the tangle of branches remained stubbornly unmoved. No entrance had magically opened up for us.
"You sure, Senpai?" asked Rika doubtfully.
"Thought this shit was supposed to just open up for us or whatever," Mordred agreed.
"I'm sure," I said.
A moment of uneasy silence passed, and everyone kept looking. Fruitlessly, because there was no sign of a passageway or a break in the branches. Nothing had changed from when we were last here.
"Maybe…it was actually further along the line?" Mash suggested.
Maybe. I'd chosen this spot originally because it was the closest to the center of the Associaton's Terminal, so I could very well be wrong. The problem was, this was also the closest we were to Renée's position on the map; going forward or back would just take us further away.
"Maybe she was just talking shit out of her ass," Mordred muttered darkly.
Tohsaka hissed an admonishment for her language, but as she always had, she ignored him completely.
"Maybe…it's like a spell, and it needs an incantation," Ritsuka suggested.
That…actually wasn't a bad idea. In fact, we had an example of that sort of thing right here, didn't we?
"Like when Alice summons the Jabberwocky," said Tohsaka, realizing the same thing I just had.
"The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame," Nursery Rhyme recited.
"An excellent suggestion, Ritsuka," Jekyll praised. "I fear, however, that it may find itself running afoul of a singular obstacle that we might find difficult to surmount. Are there any amongst us who is so familiar with the story that he might recite from memory the relevant passage?"
No one answered. Not even me. It had been too long, and my memory of the exact wording was fragmented and useless. I remembered the story beats and the plot points, not the prose itself.
"You've gotta be shitting me," said Jeanne Alter. "Are you saying that we have to go to a library and check out a book before we can get to the final battle here? Seriously?"
Unfortunately —
"'Your Highness,' said he," a new voice announced, "'more than fifty years ago I heard my father say that in this castle lies a princess, the most beautiful that has ever been seen. It is her doom to sleep there for a hundred years, and then to be awakened by a king's son, for whose coming she waits.'"
The tunnel writhed and squirmed, the branches twisting and churning, recoiling like shadows from the light.
"This story fired the young prince. He jumped immediately to the conclusion that it was for him to see so gay an adventure through, and impelled alike by the wish for love and glory, he resolved to set about it on the spot."
They pulled apart in the middle, spreading wide and bunching up at the sides until the section of tunnel they had concealed was laid bare. There was enough space between them for two of Babbage's Helter Skelter to stand side by side.
"It's working!" Arash declared.
"Hardly had he taken a step towards the wood when the tall trees, the brambles and the thorns, separated of themselves and made a path for him. He turned in the direction of the castle, and espied it at the end of a long avenue."
And at last, the lines between the bricks glowed, and then the bricks themselves swiveled, turned, and spun inwards, folding away into each other and sinking through the wall to form an entrance, an entryway through the wall. At the bottom, more bricks unfolded outwards, forming a staircase that led down and into another tunnel, tall enough and wide enough that even Asterios could have easily squeezed into it and comfortably made his way through.
What lay at the bottom, it was impossible to see. The stairway turned or swerved or something somewhere deeper down, and the flashlight on my communicator simply wasn't strong enough to reach it.
"Whoa," Rika whispered.
"Okay," said Jeanne Alter, reluctantly impressed, "I have to admit, that's pretty cool."
Mordred snorted. "That? It's a parlor trick. You ever meet Gawain? Ask that guy about Rigomer. Makes this look tame."
"The method of protection is unique, but the tunnel itself is fairly standard," Flamel agreed. "Mister Andersen. I was wondering where it was you had gotten off to."
The thump of his oversized book snapping shut echoed in the quiet of the tunnel, and Andersen stepped closer to the group, into the light of our flashlights. They glinted off his glasses as he adjusted them.
"Mister Andersen," said Mash, "how did you know?"
"I followed them, of course," Andersen said. "When Renée fled the apartment, I trailed her in spirit form. That mangy cat and his master never even sensed me — one of the perks of being a Servant with such a pathetically weak Saint Graph. I might as well have been a fly on the wall for all the attention they paid me."
"Cat?" asked Arash, brow furrowing.
"The eponymous Puss in Boots, as he introduced himself," Andersen confirmed. "He dressed pretty smartly for a cat, but then I suppose that's part of his story, isn't it? While the wicked wolf chased her off, Puss waited for Renée on the street and coerced her cooperation through threats. At that point, it wasn't hard to guess just who was involved. A forest of thorns? A monster wolf that could mimic others' voices? A talking cat that used its wits and the promise of violence to get its way? As a fellow author of fairy tales, the answer couldn't have announced itself to me more clearly if it was carrying a sign."
Arash grimaced, a look of pained regret twisting his face. "Let me guess, an orange tabby?"
Andersen smiled thinly. "From the sound of it, you had the chance to meet him, too. You shouldn't punish yourself too harshly. That cat's entire story is about how he used trickery and deception to take his master from a penniless orphan to a prince of the kingdom. There's no shame in being tricked by him."
I wasn't the only one who looked Arash's way.
"Arash?" Mash asked.
"Renée's been sneaking food to an orange tabby for the past couple of days," he admitted. "It looked and behaved like an ordinary cat, so I assumed it was just a clever stray and left it alone, but…"
But it obviously wasn't.
"So even someone like you can get taken in by a good enough conman," Emiya remarked.
Arash sighed. "It seems so."
If Puss was another one of M's spies, then there was likely quite a bit more about us that she knew than I was really comfortable with, although exactly how much was up in the air. Our numbers, for sure, and at least some of our identities, as she had demonstrated. It didn't really change anything, but it was still frustrating that she knew so much about us and all we had were guesses based upon logical conclusions.
At least we could confirm Perrault was among the enemy's forces. Not only because the forest of thorns opened the way it had, but because a talking cat calling itself Puss in Boots all but cemented it.
"I'm guessing you're coming along," I said to Andersen. At least he'd finally been helpful. I could give him a little leeway for that.
He smiled another thin smile. "After I had to go all the way back to that bookshop just to make sure I could be here with the correct passage to make sure you could all get through? If I'm going to have to sit around and accomplish nothing else for the rest of this farce, then I might as well do it where I can see whether or not I'm doomed."
"How noble of you!" Jeanne Alter said with a nasty grin.
"We're grateful for your help, Mister Andersen," Ritsuka said diplomatically.
"You can repay me by winning," Andersen said bluntly. "Put an end to this mess so we can all go home and call it a day."
"Yes," Flamel replied grimly, "yes, I suppose we ought to, hadn't we? After all, that which doesn't belong in this era has no place in it. It must be removed, no matter what."
"Abe…" Rika murmured.
"Fuck that," Mordred said immediately. "We'll figure something out. First, though, we gotta go and kick some pretentious bitch's ass. We can worry about everything else after we're sure there'll be an after to worry about." She huffed. "Once this bitch is in the ground, we can focus on the important stuff. Like finding someplace for Renée to stay after all the rest gets booted back to where it belongs."
"Uhn!" Fran agreed.
If only it could be that simple.
"Then let's get going," I said.
No one disagreed, and we filed into the tunnel and down the steps in much the same order as we'd been going. Mash and Mordred took point, as both our first line of defense and our strongest close quarters offense, the best response we had if we were ambushed. Arash and Nursery Rhyme took up the rear, with us Masters squished in the middle, Tohsaka, Jekyll, and me crowded around Flamel.
The stairs went down quite a ways, curving eventually into a gentle spiral that we couldn't do anything except follow. There was no way to tell exactly how much farther down they went either, as it was a single tunnel down and there wasn't some giant shaft that let us see exactly how deep the spiral stretched. It was not like they showed in the movies, where a look over the side showed an enormous drop down into a dark pit. It was only a single hallway that looked as though it was some magical gateway to another world, and all we had to do to reach it was to go all the way to the bottom.
I kept an eye on the map the entire way, watching the distance between us and Renée's communicator slowly shrink. Flamel probably thought he went unnoticed every time he glanced over at it anxiously, but I didn't comment on it. It wasn't like he didn't have a reason.
What I really wanted to know was how Angrboða connected to everything. How did the vents all reach this far? How did they all pump steam out from the machine and into the air? How had they been made? Were they constructed at the same time as this underground lair, all in the span of a few days? The logistics of it made my head spin.
Most importantly, if we had to disable the machine and disconnect it from whatever system it was using before we could retrieve the Grail, how did we do that? I wasn't sure we would have an answer until we were looking right at it.
Eventually, the stairway reached an end, and we found ourselves walking into a tunnel not all that dissimilar from the ones that the Association had excavated beneath the British Museum. Walls made of stone bricks that curved up into the ceiling, cast iron braziers that contained wooden torches, eternally burning — a feat, considering the fog still oozed through the corridor, leaving the walls and floor damp and slippery.
"Incredible," said Mash. "There are…no records of this place in proper history. Could it be that this was part of some national secret, or…did M construct all of this herself?"
I guess I wasn't the only one wondering about that.
"It's rather like a castle, isn't it?" said Andersen. "Built upside down, stretching towards the center of the Earth instead of up towards the sky."
"Wouldn't that mean we're technically standing on the ceiling?" Emiya pointed out.
Andersen grimaced. "…Maybe not quite that way, since that would mean the floor would be curved for some nonsensical reason, but I think the comparison stands."
Considering who we were pretty sure we were going to find up ahead? Yes, a fairly apt comparison. It even made a further degree of sense if Perrault had simply manifested Sleeping Beauty's castle underground, connecting it to a tunnel that Babbage might have helped construct. We would have just descended through one of the towers, in that case.
It seemed a little far-fetched, but I didn't have much in the way of better ideas.
The ever-present steam made it hard to see much of anything too far ahead of us, but as we walked, the clinking of the automata further on was too distinctive to miss.
"Guess M wasn't stupid enough to leave this place completely undefended!" Mordred said, and barely had the words left her mouth before she was racing off to crush them all.
"Sir Mordred!" Mash called after her, and she looked ready to give chase until Ritsuka set a hand on her shoulder.
"Let her handle it on her own," he told Mash. "She needs to blow off some steam, and she can handle it by herself.
Through the fog came the sounds of battle, but especially the distinctive clatter of the automata breaking beneath Mordred's strength and their shattered pieces tumbled across the stone floor. Mash relaxed and heaved a sigh.
"You're right," she said. "It sounds like it's just some automata. Sir Mordred can deal with them on her own."
"Gotta hand it to British," Jeanne Alter drawled, "she sure knows how to smash some weak little dolls to bits."
A few moments later, the sounds of battle came to a sudden stop with one, last warble skidding across the floor, and then Mordred returned, completely untouched but somewhat less tense than she had been a minute ago.
"Coast is clear," she announced gruffly. She flicked what must have been some oil off of her sword with a single rough swing.
With the enemy guard taken care of, we kept going, passing the remnants of her skirmish along the way. Bits and pieces of a number of automata — all of them too destroyed to properly count — were strewn about all over, jagged and cracked. A hand with its too-long fingers laid there, a sculpted impression of lips and a nose laid over there, a thigh that had been snapped in half, a crumpled torso with huge chunks ripped out, an entire arm. Mordred hadn't been gentle with them.
No one commented. The mood was still fairly dire, and none of us could blame her for working off some of her frustration after everything.
The corridor we were walking through eventually emptied out into a grand entrance hall, an enormous thing stretching up something like sixty feet with a vaulted ceiling. To our one side, there was what would have been the main entrance of a castle, with large windows whose curtains were drawn. The little we could see through the gaps showed only black earth outside. To our other side, there was a staircase, a short one with broad steps that reached up to another set of doors and then split to travel up both sides of the wall and towards balconies that overlooked the rest of the hall.
What else might be up there, I couldn't see. The fog obscured the finer details, and if not for that, then the lack of any light except the torches would have done much the same.
The final route was across from us, another hallway leading on someplace else.
"Crap," said Rika. "Multiple choice. I always sucked at those questions."
My immediate, visceral reaction was to ask how, but this wasn't the time or the place.
"And now the obvious question," said Flamel, "which door do we take?"
Which door, indeed. I felt like the corridor across from us almost certainly had to be a waste of time. If it led anywhere at all, then it wouldn't lead to anywhere that had enough space to accommodate Angrboða. If we went left and up the stairs, those doors probably led into the great hall, and that was probably more than big enough to contain the giant steam machine. Whether or not Renée would also be there, that was a harder question.
I wished I could use my bugs. They would have made exploring this place a whole lot easier.
The last option was the main entrance, which would no doubt take us "back outside." What that might mean, I could only imagine. Maybe nothing. Maybe the door would open up and there wouldn't be anything but dirt on the other side, or maybe it wouldn't open at all because the dirt was in the way.
It seemed like the easiest one to test.
"We've done most of the rest in reverse, haven't we? Come down from the tower where Sleeping Beauty rested and into the castle's hall," I said confidently. "We'll try the main entrance first."
"As reasonable a supposition as any," Jekyll agreed.
"Uhn," Fran grunted, doubtful.
Most of the rest were just as dubious about it, but no one contradicted me, so we walked out into the entrance hall and made for the large front doors.
He made to follow it, but Arash's hand found his arm and held him back.
"Don't!" he cautioned Flamel. "Remember what we're up against! Has Renée ever called you 'Father' before?"
Realization sparked in Flamel's eyes. "She hasn't."
A low, dark chuckle reverberated throughout the hall, and Mash gasped, leaping up and into the air above us. My head swiveled and my neck bent to follow her, but I only caught a faint glimpse of something huge falling from the ceiling before the only thing I could see was Mash's legs and backside.
The screech of something sharp dragging down the surface of her shield screamed in my ears like nails on a chalkboard, and whatever it was bounced off as the force of the collision threw Mash back the way she'd come. She landed behind us, none the worse for wear.
That was when I got my first look at the wicked wolf.
Calling him a werewolf wasn't inaccurate. The hindlegs were definitely canine, with the characteristic second joint and everything, curved backwards, with a tail that lazily swung back and forth like a pendulum, but the torso was incongruently human, with a broad, enormous chest and shoulders that spanned twice the width of his lower body. His long arms were half again as long as they should have been, with humanoid fingers and thumbs and wickedly long, sharp claws. His head, meanwhile, was just as huge, with a maw large enough that it looked like he could indeed have swallowed a little girl in one go and teeth long and sharp enough to gnaw through her bones.
He reminded me of Lung, half-transformed, only covered head to toe in dark fur instead of silvery scales. It was the eyes, however, that made him look truly terrifying, a shade of poisonous yellow so bright they seemed to glow and ringed on the edges with bright orange, making them look as though they were made of fire.
"Clever little lamb," rumbled the wolf. His eyes swiveled, taking us each in at once. "Ah, and if it isn't the morsels from earlier! It seems you've brought me a larger meal, this time. How kind of you to feed this poor, starving wolf!"
"Alice!" Tohsaka barked.
"— and burbled as he came!" Nursery Rhyme finished.
The Jabberwocky sprang into existence already in motion, leaping toward the wicked wolf without a sound. It attacked immediately and without hesitation, landing a series of rapid blows — that accomplished absolutely nothing, because the wolf didn't even flinch.
"This again?" the wolf complained. "I can't eat empty air, little morsel."
But Nursery Rhyme was already calling upon another of her monsters. "— shun the frumious Bandersnatch!"
What came forth next was both similar and yet nothing like the Jabberwocky. Compared to the surprisingly humanoid Jabberwocky, in fact, it was far closer to an animal, some bizarre cross between a dog, a cat, and a lizard. It moved on all fours with long, feline legs, and yet it crouched low to the floor like some kind of reptile and leapt from place to place like a frog. Folds of skin wrinkled along its neck, and a head crowned with jagged, mismatched spikes bared a mouth full of sharp, pointed teeth.
Mottled green and black skin flickered in the light of the torches as it moved, bouncing from place to place almost as though it was teleporting, and it came at the wicked wolf from behind, neck lengthening and extending as it sank those fangs as deep as it could into the wolf's shoulder. The instant it had latched on with its jaws, the rest of its body followed, neck retracting, until it had attached itself to the wolf, sharp claws sinking in wherever they could find purchase.
"More trinkets?" the wolf thundered. "More toys? I hunger, little morsel! I will have you all!"
"Tohsaka!" I barked at him. Remember the plan! I didn't say, because I didn't need to.
"Right!" said Tohsaka. "Alice!"
"Don't worry, Papa!" Nursery Rhyme said. "My friends and I can keep him here! It's time for you to go and rescue the princess! Make sure you give her a kiss to wake her up, okay?"
Tohsaka's face flickered through several different emotions before settling back on solemn determination. "Right. Alice… I'm ordering you not to die, got it?"
She giggled. "Of course!"
Mash covered us as we turned back to the doors. Together, Emiya and Arash reached for the handles to open them.
"Still not sure we should be leaving her behind," Ritsuka muttered.
"The Jabberwocky, the Bandersnatch, and the wicked wolf are all creatures of fantasy," Flamel explained. "If they can die at all, then they must die in accordance with how their stories say they died. Otherwise, all that can be done is to hold them off until either they or their master runs out of the energy to sustain them."
"Then we'd better be fast," was all Tohsaka said in reply.
The massive doors opened inward with a creak, and I half-expected a ton of dirt to come tumbling through the door, but what waited on the other side wasn't solid earth, it was…
"Another tunnel?"
"How did they dig all of these tunnels so gosh-darn fast?" Rika demanded.
"You won't escape ME!" the wolf howled from behind us.
The sound of ripping flesh and the wet splat of blood landing on the ground echoed, and Emiya turned back first out of all of us, hand reaching up as though to grasp something on his back ("Trace, on!"), and suddenly, he was holding…an ax?
By the time I turned around to watch the path of his throw, the ax had already left his hand and hit his target, cutting deep into the wolf's shoulder.
The wolf howled.
"KILL YOU!" he roared. "KILL YOU, KILL YOU, KILL YOU!"
The Jabberwocky got in his way before he could even try, but the wolf ignored its punches the same as before, digging his claws into the Jabberwocky's flesh and wildly tearing chunks away.
"Jabberwocky!" said Nursery Rhyme. "The ax! Use the ax!"
And it did, grabbing the handle of the ax — so tiny looking in its massive fist — and yanking it free. The wolf let out another furious howl as blood spurted from the wound, but he didn't stay still to let the Jabberwocky swing the borrowed ax his way, instead throwing himself backwards so quickly he almost appeared to teleport. Almost as an afterthought, he ripped the Bandersnatch off of his back and threw it so hard against the wall that the entire hall quivered.
The ax wound, however, was not so quick to close and vanish nor so swiftly ignored, and I wasn't the only one who realized it.
"Emiya!" Rika began.
But Nursery Rhyme twisted to look back at us, waving over her shoulder with a smile. "Thanks for the ax, Mister Emiya! Take good care of Papa and go teach that lady a lesson, okay?"
Right. Because even if we killed the wicked wolf, it would only be a delay. It was not a Servant, and therefore it didn't have a Saint Graph and wasn't summoned the way a Servant would be. It could very easily be summoned back, forcing us to waste time and energy to face it every time, and the only way to get rid of it for good was to eliminate Perrault. There was no point in fighting it ourselves and no point in trying to kill it.
I grabbed Rika by the wrist and pulled her along, and she yelped before falling into step. Ahead, Mordred charged into the tunnel and towards the ominous glow that emanated from further in, and the rest of us followed in roughly the same formation we'd been using, with Arash and Mash bringing up the rear. Arash peppered the wicked wolf with arrows as he went, but they accomplished almost nothing, and the rare few that penetrated past the fur were easily ignored. The wicked wolf had eyes only for Nursery Rhyme and her Jabberwocky. The Bandersnatch might as well have been a gnat buzzing around his head.
Past the huge double doors, there were a couple of stone steps, but we practically flew down them and onto the dirt floor that made up the tunnel. Unlike the corridor we'd walked through and the winding flight of stairs we'd descended before, this was all roughly hewn rock and packed earth, not all that dissimilar from the cavern in Fuyuki that had housed the Great Grail, where King Arthur had waited for us.
The instant Mash was clear, the doors swung shut with a bang.
It was tempting to look back — Rika and Ritsuka both did, glancing over their shoulders — but I focused on the tunnel ahead and the glow that awaited at the end of it. The fog was still there, but not quite as dense as it had been everywhere else. Not so thin that I would have dared to step outside of the radius of Flamel's protection without my mask on, but thin enough that it was easier to see the tunnel around us once our flashlights were turned on.
Ten, twenty, thirty, fifty feet passed in total, and then a gate loomed ahead of us, jutting out of the rock incongruently. It matched the castle hall and the corridor with its curved ceiling, but it looked odd, like it had been buried beneath millennia of sediment and only this part, the gateway itself, had been excavated.
Another thirty feet disappeared beneath us, and then we were through. On the other side —
"Whoa, wait, this looks way too familiar!" said Rika.
— a massive cavern easily a match for the one in Fuyuki and at least the size of the one beneath Mount Etna. The eerie glow came from some point in the distance, where a massive shape loomed through the darkness and the steam, an enormous, thousand-armed construct with a body the size of a small house and tubes that connected it to the ceiling.
"It's just like the Grail cavern in Fuyuki," Mash breathed.
"Yes," Emiya agreed, suspicious, "yes, it is."
And standing in the way, waiting for us…
"Welcome, Chaldeans."
…a pair of cold, yellow eyes above a thin-lipped smile appeared from out of the fog.
"I do believe I made you a promise, didn't I?"
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
We're closing in on the end, now. I'm taking some liberties here, mostly because canon London just reused assets between the Association's tunnels and the tunnels used for M's underground lair. Also because there are some differences between here and canon, so there's that, too.
A certain someone will finally get her full reveal next chapter. Not sure how many of you will be surprised, but I hope I get at least a few.
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, Mark, Peter Parker, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
If you aren't up for that for whatever reason, then you can support the story by leaving a like on the chapters and a comment about what you enjoyed or didn't enjoy.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way... Chapter CLV: The Evil Fairy
"Poor, poor Renée," said M as she slowly stalked closer, little more than a tall, lean silhouette against the fog. There was a mocking lilt to her voice, a false concern so transparent that it fooled no one at all. "It seems that her companions — indeed, even her dearest father — care not at all for what becomes of her."
Flamel moved before the words even finished registering in my brain, and the ground rippled as pillars of stone shot up from the cavern floor and surrounded M in a prison until the only thing visible was her face. The instant she was caught, they transformed into steel, creating a kind of twisted sarcophagus.
"Abraham!" Jekyll cried, alarmed.
"You will tell me what you did with Renée," Flamel snarled. "Now."
"How rude," said M calmly. "Is this how you treat all of your hosts as they come to welcome you into their homes? Have you no manners at all?"
Green light poured out from around her face.
"From dust you were born, and dust you shall become," she intoned dramatically. Her words tumbled together so quickly that it was almost hard to pick out the individual ones. "Behold your magic, for now it is undone!"
Cracks formed in the surface of the steel trap, spilling more green light out into the air, and then the entire thing exploded, throwing clumps of dirt — not steel — out in every direction and clearing the air around her. For a moment, a handful of seconds that might not last longer than that, there was nothing obscuring her at all.
Finally, we got a good look at the person we were dealing —
My thoughts ground to a halt.
"Ho-lee fuck," Rika said breathlessly. "Maleficent!"
And it was. She looked distinctly more real than the last time I remembered seeing her, but the high cheekbones, the ruby red lips, the devilish horns that jutted up from her head, the black robes, they all looked like they had been ripped right out of the 1959 movie.
"W-what?" Mash squeaked.
"That…shouldn't be possible," said Emiya, just as spooked as I was.
"It seems I need no introduction," M said lightly, smiling. "But you look quite disturbed — perhaps a less intimidating form might better suit the situation?"
She spread her arms, her robe billowing around her.
"A pleasing face masking fury and rage," she nearly sang, voice deep and resonant, "now abandon it for wisdom and age!"
And just like that, the lean, youthful visage melted away, cheeks drooping and skin sagging as she grew forty years in less than four seconds. Her body shrank and filled out until she was hunched over her staff, gripping the top with gnarled hands. Deep wrinkles formed around her mouth and her eyes, crow's feet so prominent they looked carved from stone.
"Would this be more to your liking?" she asked, voice thinner and reedier. "As close to the description given as can be, sparse though it was, isn't it?"
She was just like the wicked wolf. No, that was obvious the instant I realized who she was, because even though Rika called her Maleficent — a neat and tidy M name to fit with what we knew about the conspirators behind this Singularity — I knew the story behind the movie. The basics had been done right, for sure, but once you got past her introduction and the first few acts she performed in the movie, Maleficent started to become more and more a creation of the animators, directors, and storyboarders than Perrault himself.
"You shouldn't exist," I found myself saying before I could stop myself.
Because the evil fairy in The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood had only had a single role, had shown up to the celebration of the princess's birth, taken offense at both not being invited and at the hastily arranged accommodations being substandard compared to the other fairies, and then cast the curse on the infant princess. After that, she disappeared from the tale, forgotten. She hadn't even been given a name, but then again, in Perrault's version, I didn't think any of the characters had one.
The aged cheeks pulled into a cold smile. "Shouldn't I? And yet, whether you think so or not, here I am, aren't I?"
"You will find," Emiya murmured, echoing something that he had said what felt now like a lifetime ago, "that most Heroic Spirits will be mellowed out and moderated by how perspectives changed over the years."
A chill swept down my spine. He'd said that to Rika about Cúchulainn to help her understand that the Servants we met weren't going to be flies trapped in amber, perfectly preserved exactly as they had been in life, but evolving people changed by the advance of social equality and societal expectations. Heroic Spirits could be changed by their legends and by what people thought of those legends centuries later, even if those changes completely distorted the original myth.
I should have considered that sooner.
The evil fairy laughed and was consumed by green fire, her cackles echoing, and a moment later, the tall, slender form of Maleficent stood before us again.
"And how fortunate for me that is," she said gleefully. "Why, I think I should thank that man for having bestowed upon me such a precious gift. His name was…Walt, wasn't it?"
"I don't think that's possible," Ritsuka managed to say, although it came out a little shaky.
"A shame," said the evil fairy. "But I think, instead, that you all will served as fine substitutes —"
A gout of flame suddenly leapt across the distance, growing larger as it did and consuming the evil fairy in her entirety. The remaining magical energy in the thin fog that still lingered about ignited, too, and I had to wince and fight the urge to close my eyes and turn away as the pyre burned.
But the flames turned green, and that echoing laughter rang out as they slowly died away. The evil fairy stood there as she had before, completely untouched and sneering triumphantly at us.
"Fuck," said Jeanne Alter. "That bitch isn't even singed."
"Wanna try that again?" Mordred asked dryly.
"Fuck you, British."
"Fire?" the evil fairy crowed. "How pedestrian! How quaint! Why, I might even have felt that — if it were thrice as hot, that is!"
"She's another creature of fairy tale," Flamel said grimly. "We will find, I think, that she is equally impervious to our attacks as the wicked wolf was. The only way to kill her would be to do so in the same way she died in her story."
And she didn't die in her story. She was so much closer to a plot device than a proper character that no other mention had been made of her once she performed the function for which she existed, and only a vague implication that may just have been imagined by the literary scholars hinted that she might have been the crone whose spindle the princess had pricked her finger upon.
Even if we accepted that as truth, so what? The crone hadn't died either.
"There's something I'm not getting," said Rika, lowly and for once serious. "If she's M, and M is the mastermind who did all of the funky indoctrination stuff to Mister P and Babbs, and she's just another fairytale…thing from that other guy's NP, then… Who's really behind all of this?"
A very, very good question, and one I wasn't sure I had the answer to. M was, supposedly, the one twisting all of the other Servants to do her bidding, but if she was, in the end, just another manifestation of Perrault's Noble Phantasm, then who or what had twisted Perrault to begin with? Another one of those Demon Gods? I didn't have a better answer.
If so, where was it hiding? In Angrboða?
"Well?" said the evil fairy. "Care to try something else? Poor Renée is waiting for her rescue, and, why, I seem to be the only thing standing in your way, aren't I?"
"Abraham," Jekyll muttered, "have you aught else we might attempt?"
"We…could try running down her stock of magical energy," said Flamel, "but if she is connected directly to the Grail, then…"
Then she had functionally infinite energy to call upon. Even if we obliterated her entire body in one go — without doing any significant damage to the cavern, that was, and risking our own lives — then she might just reform like nothing had happened. Balmung could definitely destroy her, and so could Aífe's Thunder Feat, Mordred's Clarent Blood Arthur, Jeanne Alter's La Grondement du Haine, and just about every large scale attack we had.
But would she stay dead? Would she actually die if we killed her?
On the other hand, she wasn't a Servant, not really. She was the product of Perrault's Noble Phantasm, and that meant Perrault had to be around here somewhere. The easiest and safest way of getting rid of her would be to simply get rid of Perrault. She and the wicked wolf would both just vanish once he was gone, leaving the path to the Grail free and clear.
The only trouble was, Perrault himself might be hooked up to the Grail, and she was still standing in that path, so we needed some way to remove her from it, or at least some way of getting around her in the meantime. A distraction to keep her busy instead of brute force to take her out and hope she stayed out.
Arash abruptly spun around, arms blurring as he fired off a barrage of arrows behind us, and a furious yowl told me who he was aiming at before I even turned to look. An orange tabby in nobleman's clothes threw himself out of the way, managing to avoid all but the trio of arrows that ripped his cloak to shreds.
"You were careless, Puss," the evil fairy scolded him.
"My apologies, Madam," the cat said in a faint French accent. He slowly stalked around our group, keeping himself turned towards us the entire time and ready to dodge again if he needed to. Arash kept his bow aimed at the cat, but held back on attacking again. "I'm afraid I could not contain my bloodlust at the very last second. That Archer's sight was much too clear."
The evil fairy hummed. "No matter. It would have been convenient, had you managed to take out one of their Masters, but it makes no real difference, in the end."
Another enemy…but at least this meant that we knew where Puss was. We wouldn't have to worry about him ambushing us now that he was in plain sight.
"Huh," said Rika, like she was asking about the weather. "Hey, Arash, that's the guy who kidnapped Renée, right?"
"That's him," Andersen answered. "That hat, those clothes, those boots, there's no mistaking Puss in Boots this close up."
Rika nodded. "Right. Emiya? Kill him."
Emiya didn't even hesitate. In a single blur of movement, he'd nocked an arrow on his bow — a simple looking longsword, reshaped into a thin shaft of metal like some kind of giant needle — and pulled back on the string. Puss didn't even have time to react before his head simply vanished in an explosion of blood and gore, leaving the rest of him to fall to the ground limply.
"Holy shit!" Jeanne Alter burst out, delighted.
"Damn," said Mordred. "Didn't know you had it in you."
"M-Master?" Mash asked, surprised.
"You know that's not going to accomplish anything," Andersen said.
"Yeah," Rika admitted. "But it made me feel better."
"It was cathartic," Flamel agreed grimly.
"How utterly ruthless of you," the evil fairy said with a smile. She glanced over at the headless cat. "Puss. Stop playing around and pull yourself together."
The body suddenly leapt gracefully back to its feet, landing on all fours, and an instant later a new head had formed, blossoming from the bloody neck like a flower in bloom. Puss rolled his head and shoulder as though working out a kink, and then with a sigh, stood back up on his hindlegs.
"Now, was that truly necessary?" he asked, exasperated. "Even if it is not a permanent wound, I happen to quite like my head, thank you. It is my best feature."
"At least you didn't piss him off," Ritsuka muttered.
So if we couldn't kill either of them or deal any real, meaningful damage, then a distraction really did seem to be our only option.
Arash, I asked him silently, do you see Renée or Perrault over there anywhere?
He frowned and squinted through the fog towards Angrboða, and a moment later, told me, Not clearly, no. There's a lot going on over by that giant steam engine, so they could be anywhere over there.
Great. Another consideration: we couldn't just toss every Noble Phantasm with a blast radius at them unless we wanted to risk Renée's life, too, nevermind what might happen to the Grail if it got caught up in things by accident. We had to be more precise than that.
The third thing I needed to keep in mind: Jekyll, Tohsaka, and I couldn't leave Flamel's side, and a group that big wasn't going to sneak around them without being noticed. Mash wasn't exactly stealthy either, and having the twins rush off with our best defense when we might need it would be dangerous at best and fatal at worst.
If all we needed was Perrault dead, however, then we didn't strictly have to be the ones doing it. As long as he died, that was all that mattered. It didn't have to be one particular knife that did the job, let alone mine.
"Flamel," I said lowly, "can you keep up your Noble Phantasm while you fight, or is it too much for you?"
He grimaced. "It would be better not to split my focus. My apologies — I allowed my temper to get the best of me when we first laid eyes upon her and unnecessarily put you at risk."
It wasn't okay, but it was understandable. I couldn't blame him for flying off the handle when the evil fairy showed up, especially with her mocking. Not when Renée's life hung in the balance. Not when she was responsible for kidnapping Renée in the first place.
Maybe she was pushing a few of my buttons, too.
"Then don't push yourself."
"I thought Doctor Jekyll was his Master," Tohsaka muttered.
"I have no business commanding a battle," said Jekyll lowly. "If it would see this business done and settled, then I will gladly submit to her judgment on the matter."
Good. No need to worry about him trying to countermand me, then.
Jeanne Alter, I projected down our bond.
She twitched, lip curling, but gave no other obvious signs that she'd heard me at all. Yeah?
I need you to relay a message to Ritsuka and Rika, I told her. We're going to keep Maleficent and Puss distracted, so we need to treat this battle like we're taking it seriously.
For a moment, she didn't respond. What do you mean by "seriously?"
Everything is on the table except large scale Noble Phantasms, I said bluntly.
Her cheek twitched, threatening a smile. Now you're speaking my fucking language. Sure, I can let the dweebs know.
"Plotting, are you?" asked the evil fairy knowingly. A cruel smile curled her lips. "Very well. I suppose I can afford you a moment to realize the hopelessness of your situation. But only a moment."
"You are too generous, Madam," Puss demurred, "but if that is your wish, then I suppose I cannot convince you otherwise."
The evil fairy chuckled lowly. "Never let it be said that I am not magnanimous."
Puss's muzzle curled into a passable imitation of a grin. "Perish the thought!"
The relaying of the plan was entirely visual. Without a direct line, I could only watch the expressions on the faces of the others — first the twins, then Emiya, Mordred, and Mash — as they traded back and forth on the details, such as they were. I took those few seconds to contact Arash.
I'm going to send Jackie on ahead to take care of Perrault, I told him, and he stilled, finger twitching on the bowstring. While she searches for him and takes him out, we'll be keeping Puss and the evil fairy's attention entirely on us, however we can.
Got it, he replied, and then predicted me. I'll make sure Puss doesn't go running off after her either.
I gave a slow, shallow nod. Good.
Aloud, I said, "We don't have any other choice. We have to go through her if we want to find Renée and take back the Grail. We can't afford to destroy either, so no Anti-Army or Anti-Fortress Noble Phantasms."
Deliberately, I let myself be loud enough that the evil fairy and Puss could both hear us, but not so loud that it would seem intentional.
"Right!" said Mash. "We have to rescue Miss Renée!"
Mordred clicked her tongue. "No Noble Phantasms? That's how it's gonna be, huh?"
"She doesn't ask for much, does she?" Emiya agreed dryly, adding to the ruse.
"What're you two complaining about?" Jeanne Alter drawled, readying her sword. "A handicap is going to make this fun!"
"For a total nutjob, maybe," Andersen muttered.
"Uhn," said Fran. "Uhn uh-uh-ah uhn?"
"I'm sorry," I told her.
"Uh-uhn," was her reply, grudging but understanding. She might be superhuman, but being merely superhuman wasn't enough in a battle between Servants.
Jackie, I saved for last, while we're keeping them busy, I need you to sneak away and go over towards that big machine. You need to find a Servant in there — a man with a book, probably hooked up to it — and kill him. It's the only way we can defeat that fairy and Puss.
Jackie nodded to me. Okay, Mommy! We understand!
"Done?" asked the evil fairy archly. "Then let us, as they say, start Round Two."
She raised her hands and held her staff high above her head. "Scorching heat with deadly aim, now carry on the winds a ball of flame!"
A swirling ball of fire formed swiftly in front of the head of her staff, growing from a baseball to a beach ball almost instantly, and as the final word left her lips, it shot towards us like a cannonball. Mash threw herself forward and blocked the entirety of it with a grunt as it washed over the surface of her shield, licking at the edges almost greedily.
"She just cast Fireball!" Rika yelped.
"Yeah?" said Mordred. "Then I'm gonna cast sword!"
As though that was a signal, everyone else leapt into action, Puss first and foremost. With a yowl, he charged our way, claws extended like knives, and Emiya met him, discarding his bow for his favored pair of twin swords.
They were not evenly matched. Even from the start, it was obvious that Puss, for all his talents, was an ambush predator used to using surprise and brute force to take down his enemies, ripping them apart with his claws. Emiya might not have had the same level of skill as someone like Aífe or Hippolyta, but it was still more than Puss had, and so whatever difference there might have been in physical ability, the gap between their skill levels closed it.
That didn't mean that Puss was easily taken down either, though. He seemed to favor alternating between hit-and-run tactics and sudden, vicious assaults, swiping for every vital point he could with his razor sharp claws before retreating to try again. Against a human or a Caster who couldn't fight back, it probably would have been that simple, just because he had so many sharp weapons attached to each of his paws, but Emiya was also the sort of fighter who preferred to wield multiple weapons at once.
Mash, of course, stayed back, always between us and the enemy so that she could block anything aimed our way at a moment's notice. Mordred and Jeanne Alter, on the other hand, gladly took the fight to the evil fairy, rushing to follow her as she backpedaled away from us so smoothly that she looked like she was gliding.
"Light, attend to me and become my shield!" she incanted. "Storm, cast judgment upon my foes afield!"
A translucent barrier formed in front of her, a curved pane of green light large enough to have protected our entire group and then some, and Mordred and Jeanne Alter crashed into it, only to suddenly rebound as wind burst out of the pane and sparks of electricity shot up their swords and into their bodies.
They both landed and rolled, Mordred digging her hands into the dirt to bleed off momentum and Jeanne Alter using her sword as a sort of brake as it carved a gouge.
"Fuck!" Mordred cursed furiously. The hand on her sword suddenly spasmed, and her gauntlet creaked as she forced herself to grip the hilt even tighter. "The more shit I see you do…the more you remind me of someone I really don't like!"
"Save your mommy issues for later, British!" Jeanne Alter snapped at her.
"Fuck you!"
Again, they leapt towards the evil fairy, and again, the shield bounced them backwards with a burst of wind and the sizzle of lightning, leaving Mordred's already messy hair to start to stand on end. Jeanne Alter seemed at least slightly better off, but no less frustrated.
A quick surge of mana and a brief second to aim sent a Gandr shot directly at the barrier, testing it, but as I expected, I didn't get anywhere. It splashed uselessly against the pane of light and dissipated, ineffective. So it didn't just block brute force, it was just a general shield meant for protection, and there weren't any tricks we could use to overwhelm it.
"Was that supposed to do anything?" Jeanne Alter asked me snidely. I didn't bother to offer a response.
A third time, the two of them kicked off the ground, Mordred putting even more strength behind her sword now so that it crackled with the red jolts of her mana burst and Jeanne Alter adding flame to her swing, but just like the last two times, the pane of light took them without complaint and threw both Servants back. The evil fairy laughed maliciously, smug.
"Finding things a bit difficult?" she asked mockingly.
"Of course she has some of that fairy bullshit, too!" Mordred groused. "Fucking of course she does!"
She is called the evil fairy, I thought but didn't say. It wouldn't help. And technically speaking? It didn't matter. Our goal wasn't to kill the evil fairy to begin with.
Fran suddenly leapt into motion, sprinting away from the group without any warning whatsoever. It caught even me by surprise, and by the time I reached out to try and hold her back, she was already halfway to the evil fairy's barrier.
She wasn't a part of our planning session, I realized, so she didn't know that we didn't actually have to get through that barrier at all.
"Fran!" Mash and the twins called after her.
Mordred's head spun around, but Fran was already past her, and she scrambled to follow. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"Uhn!" was all Fran said.
She planted her hands against the barrier, and the gust of wind blew her back as she struggled to stay standing, but the burst of electricity traveled up her arms — and directly into the transformers nestled behind her ears. They hummed and glowed, whining for a split second, and then settled back down again.
The realization of what she was trying to do jolted in my stomach.
"Mordred, Jeanne Alter!" I ordered. "Keep her steady!"
"You outta your fucking mind?" Mordred snapped back at me. "She's gonna get herself killed!"
"Just do it!"
"Rah!" Fran shouted, rushing back towards the barrier again.
"Shit!"
Mordred and Jeanne Alter raced to follow, and this time, when Fran placed her hands on the barrier, they dug in their heels and braced her by her shoulders. The wind whipped up and tried to force them away, throwing their hair all over the place, and the lightning crackled as it zapped Fran over and over again, but they all held strong.
And the jolts of electricity continued to flow up Fran's arms, some splitting off and sparking over Mordred's armor and Jeanne Alter's fingers, but most of it traveling up into the transformers on Fran's head. They spun up, whirring and grinding, glowing as they soaked up the electricity like a sponge, and Fran set her shoulders as her arms strained. I couldn't see it from behind them, but I could imagine her gritting her teeth.
Long seconds passed as they struggled against the push of the barrier, more and more lightning flowing into Fran's transformers, and they continued to whine, louder and louder with each passing second, glowing brighter and brighter. There had to be some kind of limit, I knew, and I had no doubts that Fran knew that just as well, but when she would reach it and what that limit was, I had no idea.
Then, suddenly, the transformers opened up all the way, revealing spinning wheels of white plasma, and Fran let out a growing shout.
"GRAH!"
And a veritable lightning storm burst out of her hands as all of the electricity she'd been absorbing was abruptly released in the opposite direction. A blinding flash lit up the cavern, bright as the sun and probably just as hot at the epicenter, and the crash of shattering glass was almost drowned out by the thunderous, echoing BOOM that shook me down to my bones.
The evil fairy's startled shout, however, came in loud and clear.
I was still blinking away the spots in my vision when she pulled herself back to her feet, disheveled and furious.
"You wretched worm!" she howled. "How dare you!"
She lifted up her staff again, energy flowing into the bejeweled head, but Mordred gave her no chance to incant and raced across the distance. Faster than fast, she planted the blade of her sword in the evil fairy's gut, tip first, splattering red blood across the cavern floor.
"Not so fast, bitch!"
"That's my line, British!" Jeanne Alter crowed as she came down from the other side. She lopped off the evil fairy's arm, leaving the sleeve and the staff to go flying. "Not so tough without your fancy-schmancy magic, are you?"
"ENOUGH!" the evil fairy roared, and she exploded into green fire, throwing both Mordred and Jeanne Alter away. The flames licked at her body as her severed arm slowly reformed, but her expression remained furious and incandescent.
"If you insist on being such a nuisance," she hissed, "then we shall see how you knights in your shining armor fare against a foe more fearsome than your petty skills can match!"
She threw up her hands and her arms, and the green fire grew brighter and hotter until I could feel it on my face even from where I was. The evil fairy became nothing more than a silhouette against the backdrop, a shadow cast upon the wall of fire with glowing eyes.
"With sharp teeth and cruel horns and wings in flight, armored in scales as black as the night!" her voice rang out, echoing and resonant. "My breath becomes fire, my nails become spears, now turn into the monster born of men's fears!"
The silhouette grew, larger and larger and larger, until it towered over us in a way that was frighteningly familiar. The arms thrown to either side twisted and morphed, becoming wings as the neck elongated and the horns expanded and lengthened. The eyes became like twin pits of molten flame as her torso stretched outwards, and the billowing cloak spread out and lengthened into a pair of gigantic legs and a long, serpentine tail.
Fuck. Damn it, Disney, if you were going to pick a villain to change so much from her original depiction, couldn't you have chosen a character from a completely different fairy tale?
"Oh," said Rika. "Oh, oh, oh, I remember this part!"
"So do I," her brother said, "although right now, I'm really wishing I didn't!"
"Oh dear," said Flamel. "That's not good."
"Abraham?" asked Jekyll.
A booming sound echoed through the cavern, and with a sweep of her wings, the evil fairy revealed her new form in all its terrible glory. Standing nearly as tall as Fafnir had, with glistening scales black as pitch and a deep, purple underbelly, where the evil fairy had once been was now a massive dragon. Her maw was filled with teeth at least as long as I was tall, sharp and bone white, and her claws were dark and curved like the blades of scythes, digging deep furrows into the ground. Her presence filled the entire cavern, suffocating and malevolent, pressing down on me like a knife against my throat.
Haloed in the ominous light glowing from Angrboða, she looked far more like the evil dragon of legend than Fafnir had.
"What the fuck is this?" Mordred screamed. "How the fuck did you do that?"
A booming echo bounced off of the cavern walls, staccato and barking, and it took me a second to realize it was the evil fairy's laughter.
"Fuck me," said Jeanne Alter, "she turned herself into a goddamned dragon!"
"Th-this isn't a part of the original fairy tale!" Mash insisted.
"Wait, really?" asked Rika. "Disney lied to me!"
The evil fairy breathed in, chest expanding as it filled with air, and her head reared back as more green fire licked at the corners of her mouth. Magical energy surged and condensed into a point somewhere in what had to be her lungs. Her intent was obvious.
"Mash!"
But if it was obvious to me, it was obvious to Ritsuka, too, who called out to Mash urgently.
"Right!"
Mash planted her shield in front of the group. "Lord Chaldeas!"
And the familiar rampart formed, building itself brick by brick until a translucent curtain wall stood between us and the evil fairy. No sooner had it finished forming than did the evil fairy's head snap forward, mouth flying open, and the flames building in her throat were unleashed upon us in a torrent, a line, a stream of fire like napalm. It washed over the surface of Lord Chaldeas, so hot that I could feel some fraction of the heat even behind that protection, but the flames that could probably have melted my flesh from my bones splashed impotently against the barrier and spread to the sides before flickering into nothing.
For several long seconds, the stream kept going, but eventually, the evil fairy had to run out of breath and it petered out, leaving her to glare with her baleful eyes at the shield that had blocked her attack. With a snarl, she swung her massive claws at it instead, and a cacophonous screech split the air, but it was no more effective than her firebreath had been.
Of course not. She might have looked more the part of the evil dragon of legend, and she even had a degree of the metaphysical weight behind her, but at the end of the day, Fafnir had still been more. Facing up against him had been the first time I'd been really, truly frightened of an enemy for a long time, and a puffed-up fairytale villain in the shape of a dragon just didn't inspire the same kind of terror.
"Hey, Senpai?" Rika said somewhat nervously. "Now might be a good time to get Sieggy in on the action, don't you think? You know, since dragons are kinda his specialty?"
"Sieggy?" Jekyll asked, bewildered.
It wasn't the worst idea, but —
"It won't mean anything," I told her. "She's not a real dragon. She's a character from a fairy tale. Balmung can't kill her."
"Don't you remember?" Andersen added. "A creature of fairytale can only be killed by what killed them. Even if you brought a hero like Siegfried here to fight her, he won't be able to do anything more than what Mordred and that pyromaniac are doing."
So there was no point. We weren't trying to kill her, just keep her busy until Jackie found Perrault. Bringing Siegfried in to fight her would just be wasting a charge of our Shadow Servant system that we might wind up needing here fairly soon.
Past Lord Chaldeas, the evil fairy sucked in another breath, more fire licking at the edges of her mouth.
"Mash!" Ritsuka cried again.
Another blast of flame slammed into Lord Chaldeas, and in the light it provided, I could see the beads of sweat beginning to form on Mash's forehead as she continued to hold the barrier up. A keening groan was strangled in her throat, but she didn't let our defense falter for even a single second.
"I-I'll hold on for as long as I can, Senpai!" Mash reassured him.
How much longer that was, however, might not be all that long. Maintaining a Noble Phantasm as strong as Lord Chaldeas for an extended period of time couldn't be easy, and the amount of energy she had to pour into it to keep it steady was probably going to get very expensive very quickly.
"Hey, fairy bitch!" Jeanne Alter's voice called. "You screwed up big time turning yourself into a dragon, you know!"
The stream of fire cut off, and the evil fairy's massive head turned her hellfire eyes to Jeanne Alter, a snarl rumbling in her throat. Jeanne Alter just grinned.
"Because me? I'm the Dragon Witch. Your scaly ass is mine."
She leapt at the evil fairy, and the dragon recoiled, a roar ripping out of its maw as it tried to maneuver away. What the evil fairy had traded for in raw power, however, she had lost in speed and dexterity. She could wiggle, she could writhe, she could twist and turn, and if she got in the air, she could probably match a modern passenger jet for speed, but here, in this cavern, unable to get too high or too far without smashing into the roof of the cavern or into its walls, there was a limit to how quickly she could maneuver.
Jeanne Alter landed on her shoulder, and then went further up and climbed the back of the scaly neck. The evil fairy thrashed and tried to throw her off, but couldn't, because Jeanne Alter just stabbed her sword into the scales to keep herself steady and attached and used it like an ice ax. No matter how hard the evil fairy tried, tossing her head back to and fro, flapping her wings in some vain effort to smack her loose, Jeanne Alter clung on and kept going.
Eventually, she reached the head, and she reached out to take hold of each of the pair of crooked horns.
"Now," she commanded, "heel, you ginormous bitch!"
But it didn't work, not completely. The evil fairy fought the order with everything she had, massive body twitching and muscles bulging as she forced herself to move as though wading through molasses. It seemed to take enormous effort to do just that much, like her whole body was being weighed down by gravity and she was struggling to keep her bulk from collapsing in on itself. Her huge jaw worked, sparks of flame wafting from out of her throat and the corners of her mouth, but never building back up again to a full blast.
How long would it last, I had to wonder. The evil fairy wasn't enough of either a fairy or a dragon to be completely controlled, and as long as she could continue to draw on more power from the Grail, she might be able to force the issue by releasing a huge burst of energy to throw Jeanne Alter off.
With a gasp, Mash let Lord Chaldeas fade, panting as her arms shook.
"That's not going to hold her forever," I said.
"It just needs to hold her for long enough, right?" Ritsuka countered.
"It may not," Flamel warned. "If she has been clever enough to manage as much as she has, then once she has calmed down, she will contrive a method of escape. It may be as simple as transforming back into her natural form."
And there was no telling if she didn't have some sort of spell set up to hurt Renée that she could use the instant she had her wits back about her. I should have considered that sooner, because she very well might have put something in place to punish us if we pushed our luck or the odds started to turn against her.
"Wait!" said Rika. "Wait, wait, wait! I think I know how to kill her!"
"Uhn?"
Ritsuka shook his head. "We aren't trying to kill her —"
"For good, I mean!" Rika clarified. "Look, the dragon thing isn't something she can do in the OG fairy tale, right? That's what you said, isn't it?"
"The evil fairy doesn't even have a name in the original story," Andersen told her.
Rika nodded. "Then the rest of this, it's all stuff she can do because Disney added onto her, isn't it? In that case…!"
She could be killed the same way as she died in the movie?
My first reaction was to deny it. The literary purist in me didn't even want to entertain the idea. But when I put that first instinct aside…
"Maybe," was all I said.
"We've got nothing to lose by trying," said Arash.
We really didn't.
"Go for it, Rika."
Her grin was bright enough to light up her face.
"Mo-chan! Come quick!" she called over to Mordred.
Mordred jogged back over to us, keeping an eye on the struggling evil fairy as she did, and when she reached us, she said, "What? Make it quick. That don't look like it's gonna keep."
"I need you to do your best knight errant impression!" Rika said swiftly. "I'm gonna say an incantation, and then I need you to throw your sword straight at Maleficent's heart!"
Mordred did a double-take, eyeing Rika with utter bewilderment. "Throw my sword? You outta your mind?"
"Just trust me!" Rika insisted.
She had some obvious reservations about it, but reluctantly, Mordred did as Rika said and held out her sword, waiting as she watched the evil fairy strain. Rika held her hands out to the blade of Mordred's Clarent, fingers splayed as though she was about to deliver a blessing.
"Sword of truth, fly swift and sure," she breathed out, "that evil may die and good endure!"
Mordred did another double-take. "What?"
Rika just pointed at the dragon. "Throw it!"
Mordred hesitated another second, and then, as the evil fairy drew back, groaning and shaking its head, pulled her arm back, braced herself, and threw her sword like a javelin.
Against all sense and reason, it flew straight, tip first, and pierced the dragon's heart.
The reaction was immediate: the dragon reared back, the paws of its front legs grasping desperately at the wound even though they were too large to grip the much smaller sword, and a loud, agonized roar ripped out of its throat, half massive, furious beast and half dying, tortured woman. The cavern around us shook with the sound, vibrating, and for a second, I thought all we had accomplished was to make her even angrier than she had been.
And then the dragon fell, collapsing as though all its strings had been cut, and landed with a weighty thud on the cavern floor, sending the ground beneath us to trembling. It laid there limply, eyes closed and acid green tongue lolling out of its mouth, as a large pool of purple blood slowly grew beneath it.
Just as she had been in the movie, the evil fairy had been defeated.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
I think this is going to very much be a hit or miss kind of chapter. It's going to depend entirely and completely on what you think of a certain someone and how I interpreted her for this chapter and Hereafter in general. I'll release their material pages to accompany next chapter, when the last bit of spoilery information is no longer a concern.
For now, however... Well, there' s not a lot I could say that wouldn't reveal too much, so I guess I just have to leave it in everyone's hands to read and give their feedback. I imagine some of you saw this coming because you were paying attention to all of the flags I've been waving in your faces the past dozen or so chapters, but I hope that you still enjoyed the end result.
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, Mark, Peter Parker, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
If you aren't up for that for whatever reason, then you can support the story by leaving a like on the chapters and a comment about what you enjoyed or didn't enjoy.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way... Chapter CLVI: "M"
For several long seconds, the evil fairy simply laid there, a grotesque tableau, like some kind of mockery of a butterfly pinned to the ground. Purple blood continued to seep across the cavern floor, slowly and steadily.
"I-it actually worked?" Ritsuka asked, stunned.
"Fuck me, it did," Mordred agreed.
I could hardly believe it either. The reasoning had been sound enough, sure, but some part of me still hadn't thought that there was any way the evil fairy could be killed by relying on something that flimsy — especially when the "incantation" Rika had used wasn't even a spell she had cast, it was just a bit of poetic nonsense from the movie. There was no way it should have worked the way it did.
Jeanne Alter hopped down off of the horned head and strode back over our way. "Ugh, killjoys, the lot of you. I almost had that bitch." She grimaced down at the smear of purple splattered across her boots and tried to wipe it off in the dirt. "Her blood couldn't even be red either. What a disappointment this whole thing turned out to be."
The dragon's body suddenly shifted, and we all nearly jumped at the shock — but it was just shrinking, the wings and the scales flaking away like so much steam. No longer lodged in anything, Mordred's sword, Clarent, fell to the ground with a clatter. She went over and retrieved it, inspecting it for any chips in the blade or other damage.
"Hope all of that shit made sense to someone," Mordred said gruffly. "Thought I'd gotten used to that sorta thing, but you mages keep pulling more stuff outta your asses that throws me for a loop."
"I must admit, Sir Mordred," said Jekyll, "that I had not much of an inkling what was happening just now either. The fundamental principle, I believe I understand as well as I ever expect to, but the specifics elude me."
"Trust me," Andersen said dryly, "you're better off not knowing. At least this way, you don't have to come to terms with how ridiculous that entire sequence was. Walt Disney — if I ever have to meet the man myself, then I'm going to have a few choice words for how he reinterpreted all of these fairy tales. Good grief."
"We should hurry," Flamel said abruptly. "We need to find Renée — she must be here somewhere — before Perrault conspires to reconstitute the evil fairy again —"
"You vermin," the evil fairy growled feebly, and before our eyes, her body slowly picked itself up off of the ground. An enormous, gaping wound bled more purple blood down her front, struggling to close, but against all odds, she was still alive. "You worthless, wretched scum."
"Holy crap," said Rika, "she's still alive like that?"
"You didn't really think it would be that simple, did you?" Andersen scolded her. "Whatever she might look like and whatever name she might use, that creature is not the 'Maleficent' you think she is!"
"It was worth a shot, wasn't it?" Rika squawked.
Because Disney had introduced both strengths and weaknesses to her, but at the end of the day, she was still the evil fairy from the story, not Maleficent from the movie. The wound she was even now trying to heal was proof that those influences were not nothing and that they could change her, but at the core, her story was the story Perrault had penned, not Disney.
Damn. I knew it couldn't have been that easy.
"The bitch doesn't know when to stay down," Jeanne Alter said, brandishing her sword.
"She really does remind me of that witch way too much," Mordred agreed.
"You will…all of you…rue the day you set foot in this era!" the evil fairy snarled. She lifted up her staff, an ominous light glowing from the rounded head. Even I could feel the amount of magical energy she was gathering for that.
"Stop her!" Flamel commanded urgently.
And it couldn't be for anything good.
"Arash!"
A brace of arrows leapt across the distance, cutting through the air, and they landed with unerring accuracy in several blows that would have been fatal — if she wasn't a creature from a fairy tale. She ignored them completely, like they weren't even there, even though the shafts jutted out of her flesh like the quills of a porcupine.
The fact that they were pushed out almost immediately probably had something to do with how contemptuously she treated them.
"A roving titan from beyond the skies," she began, voice thready but venomous, "with strength that space and time defies —"
Mash choked. "E-even something like that?"
"Now sate your hunger with this meager treat —"
But mid-sentence, she stumbled on the air, gasping, and clutched desperately at her wounded heart. Eyes wide, she spun about, reaching out towards the giant steam engine desperately with her one free arm.
"No!"
And just as suddenly, burst apart into motes of glittering dust, vanishing before even a single one could land on the ground. The magical energy she had been gathering just dissipated, seeping out into the atmosphere until it had diffused back into the air.
In the wake of her disappearance, a moment of silence passed, and was interrupted —
Beep-beep!
— by Romani, who frantically demanded, "— summon a black hole? A singularity within a Singularity?"
What?
He was pushed aside bodily by Marie, who scolded him, "That wasn't funny, Romani! That was no joking matter!"
"I-I wasn't joking!" his voice protested. "She seriously, actually tried to summon a black hole inside that cavern! How does a character from a fairy tale even know what that is, anyway?"
The evil fairy…actually tried to summon a black hole here? Of all things? Just…how would that have worked with her plans? Wouldn't it have destroyed everything in the cavern, including both Angrboða and her creator, Perrault? Even if she could have survived the black hole itself, she would have been committing suicide by destroying her link to the world, so what was the point of that?
Or maybe, like Bakuda, she had some method of controlling its size and strength, a method of modulating it so that it only sucked us up and then evaporated. In that case, maybe it wouldn't have been such a stupid move after all.
"What would happen if there was a singularity inside a Singularity?" Ritsuka asked seriously.
It was Romani who said, "The whole thing might have collapsed from the paradox! The entire spacetime might just have unraveled!"
A shiver went down my spine. And we would have been screwed either way. The thing that got me was, how were we meant to have stopped her, considering how quickly she got the incantation off and the fact that she had just ignored our actual attempts? If even Rika's little trick with Mordred's sword hadn't worked, would trying to take her head off — even if only to delay her — have slowed her down at all?
I hated that I didn't have an answer.
"Director," I said, "have Renée's vital signs changed at all?"
"No," Marie answered. "They've remained steady this entire time."
Flamel released a gusty sigh, as though he was breathing out all of the weight that had been pressing down on his shoulders this entire time. "Thank goodness."
I nodded. "Then we'll contact you once we've rescued her and secured the Grail."
"I'll be waiting for your report," Marie replied as though it was a foregone conclusion, and then the line cut out. I worried for a second how much of that confidence was a front she put on, but there was nothing I could do to help her right now except finish this up and bring the team back home safely.
"Pardon my curiosity," said Jekyll, "but if it isn't too much trouble for me to inquire, what, precisely, is this object you refer to so simply as a black hole?"
My lips pulled into a line. How to explain this one?
"It's a distortion in the fabric of space and time," Mash preempted me. "An object formed when a massive enough star dies and collapses inwards under its own weight, forming a region where gravity is so strong that even light can't escape its pull. At the center is what's called the singularity, an unobserved spacetime where all known laws of physics are believed to break down, and the term for which these Singularities are named."
I wasn't the only one who looked at her, a little surprised she knew so much about it.
"You are," Flamel said, pausing to choose the next words carefully, "remarkably well-informed on the subject, my dear."
Mash blinked at him, and then her cheeks pinked a little as she seemed to realize what she'd said. "Ah, y-yes, well, um… Most…of my time growing up was spent reading, so I guess you could say I have a very eclectic knowledge base. I don't know that much about it, really, it's just that I was curious about the origin of the term we use for these circumstances."
"It's way more than I know," Rika opined. "What I know about physics can only fit in a high school textbook."
"Because if it's not from an anime, movie, or video game, you don't care enough to look it up on the internet," Ritsuka added. Rika stuck her tongue out at him, as she was wont to do.
"Goes to show what happens when you lock someone up in a box for most of her life and don't give her much else to do but read," Andersen commented.
The mood sobered. Ritsuka in particular looked tempted to say something nasty to Andersen, but held his tongue.
"Let's go rescue Renée," Arash said, trying to get our minds off of Mash's circumstances by focusing on the task at hand.
"Yes."
Emiya chose that moment to rejoin us. "That cat disappeared on me mid-fight, so I'm guessing the plan worked."
"It did."
"Someone's did, at least," Rika grumbled petulantly.
Jackie? I asked.
"Here, Mommy!" Jackie chirped, suddenly beside me as though she had been there all along. I wasn't the only one startled, nor the only one who jolted a little in my surprise, but no one commented on it because she had snuck up on all of us.
"You found Perrault, then?"
She nodded.
"We found a man with a big book inside the Angry Body machine," she answered succinctly. "He didn't move even when we stabbed him, but he disappeared so he must have been the right guy, right, Mommy?"
A quick glance up and down her cloak showed no bloodstains, which wouldn't have necessarily been an indication of much of anything if Jackie actually cared about keeping blood off of her clothes, but the fact that the evil fairy, Puss, and presumably the wicked wolf had all disappeared afterwards meant that she hadn't just killed some random person. Whether or not it actually was Perrault would be impossible to prove now, but since our enemies had vanished, it functionally didn't matter.
I nodded. "That's right." Then, since I didn't have any better ideas for how to reward her, I defaulted to what I'd been doing the last few days and gave her a few gentle pats on the head. "Good job, Jackie."
Jackie didn't seem all that picky, like she didn't care what kind of validation she received as long as it was validation. She preened under the attention, smiling a very open, childlike smile.
"What about Renée?" Flamel asked worriedly.
"Jackie? Did you find Renée while you were looking through that machine?"
Jackie nodded. "We found that nice lady who cooks that good food, too, but she was sleeping and trapped inside the machine, and we didn't know how to get her out. Mommy wants her in one piece, right?"
The alarmed look that Jekyll and Flamel were both sending me might have been funny in different circumstances.
"Yes, Jackie, we don't want to hurt Renée."
Jackie nodded again. "We thought so, so we left her alone for Mommy and Mister Flamel to rescue her."
Flamel heaved out another sigh. "Thank goodness."
"I'm happy for you," Ritsuka told him.
"As am I," Jekyll agreed.
"Thank you for your kind words," said Flamel, and then he turned to Jackie. "My dear, could you be so kind as to lead us to her?"
Jackie looked to me for permission, and I nodded, so she looked back to Flamel and said simply, "Okay. We'll lead you there."
"I'm very grateful."
We hadn't even made it a single step before a familiar voice called, "There you are, Papa!"
We all turned to find Nursery Rhyme skipping our way, completely untouched and uninjured, like she hadn't just been engaged in a fight with a monster wolf big enough to make a try at swallowing her whole. Then again, she would be, wouldn't she? After all, she had her Jabberwocky and her Bandersnatch and who knew what else to draw on, and if she ever had to fight directly, she was probably in pretty big trouble already.
"Alice," said Tohsaka. "You're okay."
"Yup!" she said brightly. "We played with Mister Wolf for a while, but he didn't want to follow any of the rules of our games, so I was glad when he vanished with a poof all of a sudden. Jabberwocky was getting tired, and Bandersnatch wasn't strong enough to hold him back. Plus," she wiggled her thumbs, "he doesn't have thumbs the way Jabberwocky does, so he can't hold an ax."
"I see," said Tohsaka. "Well, the important part is that you made it out of that fight without getting hurt, so I suppose the rest of it doesn't really matter."
Nursery Rhyme giggled. "But I am really tired, Papa!" She held out her arms. "Piggyback ride?"
Tohsaka grimaced, and for a moment, looked like he intended to refuse her, but then his will visibly crumpled and he heaved out a sigh of longsuffering. "Fine."
He turned around and bent down, offering his back to his Servant, who let out a delighted, "Yay!" and climbed astride him as though she really was nothing more than an ordinary little girl. Rika, watching, tried to muffle her sniggering, and Ritsuka hid his smile behind his hand as Mash smiled openly.
Emiya, on the other hand, didn't bother hiding his smirk or his quiet chuckles, and neither did Jeanne Alter or Mordred. Tohsaka gamely ignored them all, even as his cheeks pinked and his face twisted into a miserably embarrassed expression.
"Up we go!" Nursery Rhyme cheered as Tohsaka stood back up.
Jackie gave me a considering look, so the only thing I could do was promise her, "Maybe later. Rescuing Renée comes first."
Jackie bobbed her head in a nod. "Yes, Mommy."
"Jackie made it!" Nursery Rhyme said.
Jackie smiled and said, "Alice made it, too!"
And for just that moment, they looked like ordinary girls again — but only for that moment.
With the entirety of the group gathered together again, Jackie led us off towards the giant steam engine that dominated the center of the cavern, and the closer we got to it, the more obvious it became exactly how large it really was. It wasn't something you might see in a museum, displaying the first steam engine ever created, nor was it a larger, bulkier model meant to serve as the heart of an old-fashioned train. No, it was much, much bigger than that, an enormous steel dome with holes spaced throughout to leave room for stacks that jutted out of them, large enough to fit an entire house inside several times over. The whole assemblage towered over us, so tall that even Servants might not be able to make the jump in a single go, not without transitioning into spirit form.
Inside of that steel dome, there was the main machinery, and insulated by the outer structure, it was humid and a good ten degrees hotter than the cavern itself. Some of the stacks belched thick, hissing steam from the tops, but others stretched further up and connected to a kind of scaffolding that formed the structure for a network of pipes that disappeared into the ceiling. These, no doubt, were the method Babbage was using to pump the fog out into the city, the vents that had blown steam almost right into my face earlier.
I couldn't have explained how it all worked. There were belts that whirred and turned the wheels, and the wheels turned the gears, and the massive chambers contained and compressed the heated steam, that much was obvious enough, but what each mechanism did and how each of the individual functions came together to produce the end result, I had no idea.
"I'll give him credit for one thing," Emiya murmured. "That Babbage really knew how to build a steam engine."
"It really is incredible," Mash agreed. "It's just like…the Fuyuki Great Grail. There's so much magical energy, it's no wonder the fog is so toxic to normal humans. This is, without a doubt, more than enough mana to summon so many Servants."
"I don't see Renée anywhere, though," Ritsuka said.
"She's this way," Jackie told him, and led us around the machinery.
"Make sure not to touch anything," I warned the twins. "This is a steam engine. It's going to be very hot."
"You don't say," Rika muttered, eyeing the metal as though it was a snake that would snap at her and bite.
Angrboða wound up being three main steam chambers, one in the center sandwiched by one on either side, and on the one end, they all connected down to what I would guess would normally have been the most basic part of the engine, the chamber where wood or coal was burned to heat the water into steam. Instead, however, fastened into a strange contraption just in front of it —
"Renée!" Flamel exclaimed.
— was a familiar white-haired woman, apparently unconscious. She was, bizarrely, dressed in some kind of strange, white gown trimmed in gold, arms thrown out to the sides as though she had been crucified, and a red glow surrounded her body.
"That can't be," said Emiya, sounding spooked. "The Dress of Heaven?"
"It is not," a new voice announced from behind us. "It is nothing more than my half-hearted attempt at recreating it. For all my talents, however, it seems that replicating such a thing is simply impossible without the Winter Saint herself."
We all spun around, startled, surprised to find that a man had snuck up on us somehow, completely unnoticed. My first thought, absent of any logic, took in his clothing — from the ascot to the tweed jacket to the long coat — and wondered how a civilian had managed to get down here with us. Immediately after that, however, I knew he couldn't be, not if he could actually answer Emiya about something no one else here seemed to know anything about.
Also, his hair was blue. He didn't seem like the kind of man to dye it, not by the look of his face, so that meant it had to be a side effect of some kind of magecraft. Kadoc had those kinds of marks, too, because his eyes were just too bright an amber to be natural and I doubted his hair was gray for any of the usual reasons.
Was this…another mage from the Association? One that had escaped the attack, just like Tohsaka had? Or…
My eyes narrowed on him.
…was he in on the entire thing?
"Hold on a second," said Emiya. "That blue seaweed hair… I've seen that before, a lifetime ago. You can't be…"
"M," I guessed.
Red eyes turned first to Emiya, and then to me, dispassionate, like I was just barely worth noticing. Despite being surrounded by Servants, he didn't seem at all concerned by their presence.
"I am the one your ally, Victor Frankenstein, referred to as M, yes," said M. "The mastermind behind this entire farce of a Singularity, the leader of Project Demonic Fog. My name…is Makiri Zolgen."
If he was expecting any of us to recognize it, none of us did, and if that disappointed him, he gave no indication of that either.
Mordred took a threatening step towards him, brandishing her sword. "So you're the one trying to destroy London, is what I'm hearing you say, bastard!"
"Not London," said Makiri. "Not merely London, no. A single city, even one so prominent, would not be enough to unmoor this Foundation of the Human Order. No. Project Demonic Fog is a plan to destroy all of Britain. Only then can this pillar be broken and the course of proper history destroyed in accordance with my king's wishes."
"King…?" Mash said softly. "Then, just like Professor Lev, you're…!"
"A disciple of the King of Mages," Ritsuka concluded.
Did that mean he was possessed by one of those Demon Gods, too? If he was, then the very last thing we could do was let him take the Grail out of Angrboða and use it to summon its true form.
"So you're another one of Solomon's lapdogs," I said, trying to get a rise out of him. Maybe it would make him chatty enough to reveal more about what King Solomon was up to and why these Singularities were even happening. "Here to make sure everything goes to plan, I'm guessing."
But his expression didn't change, but for taking a brief moment to close his eyes. I would have called it resignation if he emoted in any other way, but the rest of his face remained placid.
"If you have already deduced that much, then there isn't much more for me to say," said M. "You betray your ignorance, however, to speak his name so freely. Now that you have drawn his attention here, my own course of action has been set in stone."
Drawn his attention…? Hold on. Was Solomon so powerful that just saying his name was enough to summon him?
"You might be a mage, but you're still just human, aintcha?" said Mordred. "Whatcha gonna do with my sword in your heart?"
"He's human?" Jekyll asked, surprised.
"You didn't notice?" Mordred retorted. "This guy, he ain't got no presence as a Servant. He's standing right in front of us, ain't even bothering to try and hide, and he's got none of that weight you'd expect from a Servant."
"Being fair…" Andersen began meaningfully.
"If he's a Servant that can hypnotize Professor Babbage and Paracelsus, then he's nowhere near as weak as you are," I said bluntly.
He winced. "Harsh," he allowed, "but a fair point."
Mordred's face screwed up. "Shaddup. Even without all of that, my gut tells me, this guy's completely human. Alive, even. Whether he's part of this era properly or got yanked forward like Tohsaka did, well, that part I'm less clear on."
Judging by his clothes, I was willing to bet on the former.
"And yet," Mash said, indignant, "you're willing to destroy the era you live in, Makiri Zolgen?"
"Of course, I tried to resist," Zolgen said ruefully. "But it was useless from the beginning. There was no point. The future has been incinerated. The past has been incinerated. The present has been incinerated. Whether I resisted or not, that could not be changed. Our king has already decreed that it must be so, and so it is so. Attempting to fight against him was futile. No matter what I did, these things were immutable."
"And so, you contrived of this mad plan to use the Holy Grail in conjunction with Professor Babbage's machinery to drown London — to drown Britain — in fog," Flamel concluded grimly. "I see. There is a madness to it, but I understand. There is only one other question I have, Makiri Zolgen: what purpose does Renée serve in this plan of yours?"
"Is it not obvious?" Zolgen replied. "Your brilliance is well-known, Nicolas Flamel. Your crafting of a Philosopher's Stone is a matter of record at the Association. That you would not have one upon your summoning? Inconceivable. That you would hide it? The clearest choice, in your circumstances. Then, where else would you have hidden it than in the homunculus you crafted? For that very purpose, I would assume. A clever ruse, but obvious to anyone familiar with your history."
Flamel's face drew into a deep scowl. "I did not ask you to enumerate my failures, Zolgen, nor my strategic and tactical missteps. I asked you, for what purpose did you kidnap my daughter?"
"Why else?" said Zolgen. "To use the Philosopher's Stone inside of her to amplify the output of Angrboða and accelerate the progress of Project Demonic Fog. For those purposes, the homunculus herself is unnecessary, so long as the Stone remains intact."
But this was the wrong thing to say, because Flamel slapped his hands to the ground and a pillar of stone thrust up and out fast as lightning, catching Zolgen in the chest. He was flung, bodily and violently, backwards, tumbling out of one of the openings in Angrboða's massive shell. Flamel followed him immediately.
"Abraham!" Jekyll called, but Flamel was too angry to listen to reason and all the rest of us could do was race to keep pace with him as he stormed towards Zolgen.
"Your logic is reprehensible," Flamel seethed, "your choices indefensible, and your treatment of Renée unforgivable! Makiri Zolgen! A mage of your caliber will not have been done in by that! Stand and face my judgment!"
For a second, Zolgen was still, and then he slowly pulled himself back to his feet, hair disheveled and clothing scuffed and dirtied, but aside from a trickle of red blood from one side of his mouth, uninjured.
"Yes," said Zolgen. "At this point, there is nothing left to say, is there? The time for words has passed. With the power of my king, I shall destroy the whole lot of you, and then the final Heroic Spirit will be summoned and Project Demonic Fog completed."
A brace of arrows — two volleys, one from Arash and one from Emiya — slammed into Zolgen, and as a human and not a Servant, the sheer power behind them lifted him up off of his feet and threw him back even further, blood trailing in his wake. It happened too fast for me to see much more than the initial hit landing center mass, but given how good our Archers were at hitting their targets, I had no doubts they'd been aimed at vital points like his heart and lungs.
This time, Zolgen did not tumble as he had from Flamel's first blow. Instead, his body simply flew across the distance as though it had been picked up and tossed by a giant hand, not unlike people did when getting shot by high powered weapons in the movies. He landed on his back with a thump, splayed out like a cadaver in a morgue.
"Well, that was anticlimactic," Rika said.
"Futile," Zolgen's voice rasped.
"He survived that?" Rika squeaked.
"Jackie!" I ordered. "Hurry!"
"My king has already…unleashed the evil lurking in my heart!"
Jackie leapt towards Zolgen's body, dashing across the distance as a black blur and pulling out a pair of her knives as she went, but she was already too late. Before she could reach him, Zolgen's body expanded to twice its normal size and then exploded, flesh ripping apart as something inside of him tore its way out of his skin. A black mass of writing, leathery flesh, rapidly growing larger and larger before our eyes.
Jackie, not knowing what was happening or what else to do, could only retreat and come back to my side, eyeing the lump warily.
"It's another Demon God!" Rika announced unnecessarily.
"What?" Mordred demanded. "You know what the fuck that is?"
"Fuck me," Jeanne Alter groused, "another one?"
"My god in heaven," Jekyll breathed.
"What…what is this?" Flamel gaped.
Fran gaped up at it. "Ah…ah…"
The mass of flesh began to elongate, reaching up towards the cavern ceiling, and the black, leathery skin split, opening up spiraling rents in the surface through which raw, red flesh glistened and massive red eyes began to protrude. The magical energy seething off of it was so potent and so thick that the innards seemed to glow with it, casting an eerie light across the steam that was still being pumped out by Angrboða.
"What have you done to yourself?" Tohsaka whispered.
"Magical energy response intensifying," Mash reported. "The reading matches our previous encounters with Flauros and Forneus. Senpai…that really is another Demon God!"
"So we were right," Ritsuka concluded grimly. "There really was another one controlling this Singularity. That means…it's also responsible for messing with Paracelsus and Babbage's minds."
And twisting them into evil caricatures of themselves, bent on destroying all of the things they would have wanted to protect.
"Yeah."
A deep, rumbling groan thundered through the cavern, and the ground beneath our feet shook with the force of it. A crash from somewhere above announced the Demon God smashing into the ceiling, leaving bits of dirt to fall down around its bulk like dust. It seemed entirely unconcerned as its massive eyes swiveled as though attempting to focus on something much, much too small for it to properly see.
"Please don't be Nazara," Rika muttered, hands clasped as though in prayer, "please don't be Nazara, please don't be Nazara…"
At some point, when we weren't, you know, about to face another huge monster and could safely talk, I was going to have to get the story behind that particular reference out of her, if only because she seemed to take it so seriously.
"BARBATOS," thundered the Demon God ("Yes!" Rika breathed, barely audible over its booming voice. "Thank god!"). "THAT IS THE NAME OF THE EVIL THAT LURKED INSIDE OF ME. BARBATOS, THE DEMON GOD, ONE OF SEVENTY-TWO. I SHALL USE THIS ABOMINABLE FORM AND ITS OVERWHELMING POWER TO DO AS I MUST, CHAMPIONS OF PROPER HISTORY, AND CRUSH YOU ALL."
Every single one of its eyes suddenly swiveled towards us, and I knew what was coming, what was about to be unleashed on us —
"Master!"
— but so did Mash, and as a Demi-Servant, she was just faster on the uptake and faster to move. By the time my mouth was starting to open, she had already thrown herself in front of us, raising her shield, and like she was daring Barbatos to try and get past her, she shouted:
"LORD CHALDEAS!"
The familiar ghostly rampart formed not a moment too soon, because a series of explosions rocked its surface and sent the ground beneath our feet quivering. Oily black smoke jetted backwards in thick plumes, happening too quickly for one to disperse before the next took its place. Mash let out a soft grunt with each one, but the barrier never fractured and never wavered. Every hit was blocked perfectly and flawlessly.
Eventually, however, the bombardment had to stop, leaving behind a faint ringing in my ears. There was no better time to take control of the situation and arrange the counterattack than that reprieve.
"Nicolas!" I called over to him. I retrieved my mask from my equipment pouch and swiftly set about getting it on. "Get Renée out of that thing! That'll hopefully delay whatever he's attempting to do with Angrboða!"
Flamel startled, looking at me incredulously, like he was surprised that I wasn't surprised. I guess he hadn't realized exactly how much experience the last four Singularities had bought us. Much as I hated it, this was now the third Demon God we'd had to face, and I imagined that — seeing as Barbatos had basically confirmed there were seventy-two in total — we'd have to face more of them going forward.
"Tohsaka!" Ritsuka said, picking up where I'd left off as I pulled my mask over my face. "Stay with him! You can't go out in the fog!"
"You don't need to remind me!" Tohsaka snapped back. "Tch! But fine! Alice, lend them a hand!"
"Okay, Papa!" Nursery Rhyme chirped.
"Emiya!" said Rika. "Time to pull out the big guns!"
"Without bringing the whole cavern down around us, you mean?" he snarked back.
"Duh! You got anything in that magic bag in your noggin that can do that?"
He smirked. "Heh. One or two I can give a try, I suppose."
"You guys have seriously seen something like this before?" Mordred asked.
"Twice," said Jeanne Alter. "Killed them, too. Try and keep up, British."
"Keh! You ain't nearly as hot shit as you think you are, Bumpkin!"
"A VALIANT EFFORT," Barbatos boomed. "BUT ULTIMATELY, POINTLESS. YOUR END IS INEVITABLE. ALL YOU ACCOMPLISH NOW IS TO DELAY IT. THERE IS NO FUTURE WHERE YOU SUCCEED, EVEN IF YOU DEFEAT ME HERE. THE FATE YOU SEEK TO DENY HAS ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN."
"Ha!" crowed Jeanne Alter. "He's pulling out the whole goddamn playbook! What's that you said it was, Master, something about an overlord list?"
"Evil Overlord List!" Rika clarified. "And I'm glad he hasn't read it! This would be a whole lot harder if he had!"
"Go!" I ordered them, cutting across the commentary. Mordred and Jeanne Alter traded one more look, then took off, racing towards Barbatos. "Ritsuka! We're going to need some reinforcements!"
"Right!" Ritsuka answered with a nod, and clenched his fist. Lines of light raced up and down his uniform. "Aífe!"
I followed my own advice and fed the starter charge into my own mystic code. "Siegfried!"
"Hippolyta!" Rika added, joining in unexpectedly.
"Come forth!"
A trio of magic circles bloomed across the cavern floor, and from them, a familiar trio of Servants arrived, shadows lifting up off of the ground and filling in until Aífe, Hippolyta, and Siegfried stood in front of us.
"Another one of these things, huh?" Aífe asked as soon as she appeared.
"So it would seem." Siegfried lifted his sword. "I'm sorry, Queen Aífe, but I'm afraid this one will be mine to kill."
"Ha!" Aífe barked. "If you want to make it a competition, then I'm happy to oblige!"
"I'm afraid that support will be all I can do for this one," Hippolyta said apologetically. "Nothing in my arsenal can deal damage with a wide enough spread to meaningfully hurt that thing, so I'm fine if all I manage to do is distract it for you."
You can't use Balmung at full power, I told Siegfried, and then to Aífe, I added, Our best bet is likely to be Ochd Deug Odin. Can you keep the blast contained enough to stop it from destroying this whole place and burying us down here?
"Of course," she answered aloud. "Give me enough room and I'll burn this one up, too."
"It seems I shall have to endure this handicap," Siegfried said. "Queen Aífe, I shall clear the way for whatever it is Master asked you to do." He smiled. "However, if I should kill this creature on accident, I trust there will be no objections?"
Aífe's lips pulled up into her familiar shark-like grin. "I can't wait for the day you and I get to go head to head for real."
Siegfried's smile grew wider. "I look forward to that, as well."
"We shall have to make a day of it," said Hippolyta, "because I would like the chance to test myself against the both of you as well."
"Go!"
And they raced off, too, running to join in on the action, where Mordred and Jeanne Alter were cutting into Barbatos — to not much effect at all. As expected, this one was just like the previous ones, and it was simply too big for ordinary sized swords and basic weaponry to do much damage. Despite Arash's arrows being strong enough to shatter boulders and Mordred's raw strength being enough to give Herakles a run for his money, they were using paring knives to cut into a thick oak. They were doing so little damage that Barbatos was frankly ignoring them, and even Hippolyta would take a minute or two to ramp up to the point where her fists did anything meaningful.
Barbatos did, however, take notice of our increased numbers.
"MORE SERVANTS?" he rumbled. "I SEE. SO YOU HAVE CONTRIVED SOME METHOD OF INDEPENDENTLY CALLING UPON SERVANTS TO WHOM YOU ARE CONTRACTED, STORING PATTERNS OF THEIR SAINT GRAPHS FOR RAPID DEPLOYMENT. HOW NOVEL. AS EXPECTED OF A GENIUS LIKE LEONARDO DA VINCI."
"What?" squeaked Rika. "He knows Da Vinci-chan?"
"BUT TRINKETS AND CLEVER PLOYS WILL NOT BE ENOUGH TO SPARE YOU WHAT IS TO COME."
The eyes all swiveled and turned our way again, and Mash gasped out, "Lord Chaldeas!" a second time, deploying her Noble Phantasm to block the next series of explosions.
"Nicolas!" I barked back at him, because he was still just standing there, staring, apparently unaware that we had to stay right where we were to protect him and the others and he was just forcing us to do that longer. "Stop standing around and go! You have a daughter to rescue, don't you?"
At last, Flamel jolted, and this seemed to get through to him. "Yes," he said, "yes, of course. Forgive me, I lost myself for a moment there. Doctor Jekyll," he addressed his Master, "with me, if you would. I believe I will have need of your assistance."
"Of course, Abraham, of course," Jekyll replied, just as spooked.
They hurried off back into Angrboða's massive shell, disappearing into the steam as Tohsaka trailed behind them. Jekyll only gave one, last glance over his shoulder at Barbatos, eyeing the monstrosity with some mix of disbelief and terror.
"— and burbled as he came!"
The Jabberwocky formed in midair, loping off to join the fight.
"— frumious Bandersnatch!"
And a short moment later, the Bandersnatch followed it, skittering across the ground not unlike a bug or some kind of giant lizard. They attacked with fists and claws, ripping into Barbatos and his leathery flesh and tearing out fistfuls at a time.
Even these additions weren't enough to make much of a dent, of course, but they weren't useless. In fact, Barbatos was healing a lot slower than either Forneus or Flauros had, and that was when I realized the key difference between him and them: he didn't have the Grail. As powerful as he was and as much magical energy as he had, Barbatos wasn't supplementing his power with the Grail, and therefore wasn't able to heal as quickly or dish out powerful attacks in as rapid succession.
Which meant he should be a lot easier to put down.
Taking hold of all of our Servants' bonds at once was an unusual feeling, and my mind felt a little thinner than I was used to, like I was spreading myself out too far, but it didn't stop me from managing it.
Retreat, I ordered them all. Back up and make some space. Jeanne Alter, use your Noble Phantasm and burn that thing to a crisp.
Ha! Jeanne Alter crowed as though she couldn't realize that I was the only one who could hear her. I win, motherfuckers! This one's mine!
Various assents from the others followed, completely ignorant of her smug declaration, and no one protested. They all knew what was at stake, and they all knew the limits we were working under.
A moment, a few, scattered seconds as the rest of our team put some distance between them and the giant pillar of flesh. The enormous eyes watched them go, tracking each of them simultaneously without seeming to care about what they were doing or trying to stop them. And then, a surge of magical energy lit up in the middle of the cavern like a candle in the dark —
"La Grondement du Haine!"
— and Barbatos was engulfed in flame.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
So! I...can't really say much about this one without spoiling some things, but the degree to which you're surprised will obviously vary. It's a hazard of writing this sort of thing, so there are some pitfalls that just can't be helped.
Having said that, though... Well, I think I can still pull a few surprises out for everyone. We'll have to see. There's only a couple of chapters left in this one, no more than 3 or 4, I think, and the real surprise is still waiting for the chance to drop.
Charles Perrault [Heroic Spirit]
Father of Fairy Tales
An author of several famous fairy tales, many of which have been adapted by a certain media company based in America. It might be said, however, that his tales became even more famous than he could ever have been, and so there is this strange situation where his Noble Phantasm is incredibly powerful, but is hobbled by his mediocrity as a Servant.
Born in Paris, 1628. His family was wealthy, and his education was excellent for the time period. He was afforded many uncommon advantages, and it can be said that he experienced fewer tragedies than most. However, later in life, many of the things which he had built up for himself were taken because of petty politics, and so he dedicated himself to the writing of epic poetry and fairy tales for the sake of his children.
Despite this being his strongest and best remembered contribution to history, it was only the last decade or two of his life. Much of his time previous was spent on other things and pursuing other avenues, such as the establishment of the Academy of Sciences and architectural design. He was involved in the court of King Louis XIV. A treatise he wrote defending the fledgling advance of theater genre later known as opera instigated the Quarrel of the Moderns and the Ancients, a cultural debate on the value of his era's art compared to the art of the long past.
In the end, Perrault died an unremarkable death in 1703 at the age of 75. Even the father of such fantastical tales can die in such a simple and ordinary way.
A magical forest of brambles and thorns. It denies entry to those who are not permitted, presenting an impassable barrier of branches and thorns to block the path forward. The two sides of the barrier are isolated from each other, separating points of connection between the outside and the inside such that there is only a seamless wall of branches with no entrance or exit. Only the prince who ventured forth to rescue the captive princess may pass, and the forest will contort to allow him entry.
Originally from "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood," another of Charles Perrault's fairy tales.
It requires a great deal of magical energy to form and maintain. However, in the case that there is in fact a princess in need of rescue lying in wait behind it, it will become both stronger and weaker at the same time, simultaneously becoming "more real" and sturdier and yet also creating a proper entryway to permit the princess's rescuer.
In the case that it is merely being used as a defensive construct, however, it will require more magical energy and effort to maintain as a result of the mismatch between its purpose in the original story and the purpose for which it is being used. It would normally require everything Perrault has to merely keep it manifested, preventing him from making use of other aspects of his Noble Phantasm.
Regarding the original story, the enchanted forest was a measure put in place by one of the good fairies to protect the castle and the princess from any who might seek it out with malicious intent, permitting only the prince destined to rescue the princess to pass. Some later additions made it instead the work of the Evil Fairy. For the purposes of this work, the way that might change the forest itself is fundamentally not explored.
Hereafter Material: Maleficent the Evil Fairy [Term]
A character from the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, preserved in the Noble Phantasm, Tales of Mother Goose. Through that Noble Phantasm, she can be manifested as a sort of false Servant, possessing the skills and Saint Graph of a Caster class Servant. Even so, her performance would normally be substandard, but because she is also borrowing the mythology of the fairies, she shows an unusual level of power.
Originally, the evil fairy from Sleeping Beauty had no name. Because of later adaptations of the story, however, and later representations of the character, particularly those of a film made by a certain media company in the mid-20th century, she has gained further identity and even a true name. As a result, her personality is more complete, and she has become much closer to a real person than simply a character from a fairy tale.
However, Maleficent is not a fully realized person. Because she is still a character from a fairy tale, she is trapped in the mindset and the characterization of that fairy tale, and so she cannot change or be reasoned with, nor can she be swayed by logic. She must be the evil fairy. It is her inescapable destiny.
For that reason, she is the most dangerous character Perrault might manifest, because she cannot stop herself from betraying him to fulfill her own purposes.
The form she takes is reminiscent of her film adaptation, with a flowing cloak and a pair of horns, and she possesses the ability to shapeshift into a myriad of forms, including a dragon. However, for various reasons, while any of these forms might be intimidating or powerful, because she cannot become a true dragon, even in this form, she could not compare to a real one.
The villain of the fairy tale known as "Little Red Riding Hood." Similarly to the Evil Fairy and Puss in Boots, a character preserved in the Noble Phantasm of Charles Perrault.
Only ever referred to as "the wolf" and "the wicked wolf," in this original version of the fairy tale, there was no rescue that came. The wolf ate both Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. A "successful" villain. However, because of later additions to the tale, he is somewhat susceptible to axes, and wounds received from them will be slower to heal and require more of his energy.
Similarly to the Evil Fairy, there is no negotiating with him or pleading for mercy. The wolf will act as his tale dictates that he must, luring his prey in, tricking them into lowering their guard, and then consuming them without remorse.
As a creature out of a fairy tale, his form is somewhat more malleable than an ordinary Servant. Because his story is associated with him possessing the traits of "big eyes, big ears, big arms, big legs, and big teeth," those are traits he must possess. As those are subjective descriptors, however, it is his target to whom he must appear so large, and so his exact size and strength will vary depending upon the attributes of whoever he is targeting. The larger his victim, the larger he must be as a result.
Furthermore, he can cast a kind of suggestive spell with his voice by mimicking the voice of a person dear to his target, to the point that even a flimsy disguise becomes convincingly deceptive. The effect becomes more pronounced in the circumstance that he has actually met the person in question, and the spell becomes all that much harder to break as a result.
Hereafter Material: Tales of Mother Goose [Noble Phantasm]
Tales of Mother Goose [Noble Phantasm]
Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals
The compiled fairy tales originally written by Charles Perrault, including the likes of Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, and Cinderella. A compendium where these tales exist and are preserved, and where they might be found again.
The natural appearance of this Noble Phantasm is deceptively simple, having the look of nothing more than a thick, leather bound book that might be found in any number of antique bookstores or personal libraries, although this one in particular might seem more at home in a museum. Embossed with gold lettering along the cover and spine, at first glance, it would be impossible to discern the true nature of such an unassuming book, even though its value is unmistakable.
This book actually contains everything from the fairy tales inside of it, from the characters to the settings and architecture, and through this Noble Phantasm, any of these things may be brought to life and manifested into reality. In the case of the characters, depending upon the character in question, they will even be granted a status akin to a Servant, including a functioning Saint Graph, although naturally, none of them are true Heroic Spirits, and therefore the quality of their Spirit Origins is lower than normal.
Of course, the cost associated with manifesting these existences is also proportional to the quality and size of the object or character in question. Manifesting even a single one of these false Servants would be a taxing endeavor, and likely require the entirety of Perrault's focus. In the end, the true limit on the strength of this Noble Phantasm comes from Perrault himself, whose reserves of magical energy are much lower than the average Caster Servant, and therefore, the degree to which his Master can make up the difference.
