Chapter XXXVI: Le Bel Inconnu
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
Chapter XXXVI: Le Bel Inconnu
The landing in Septem was no more comfortable than the one in Orléans.
The jolt of gravity reasserting itself upon my body jarred my knees and my stomach and my head, and my thoughts spun out as my self suddenly expanded outwards into the local insect population. I stumbled under my own weight, dizzy and confused, and my breakfast made a rebellious attempt to claw its way back up my throat.
But unlike last time, I knew what to expect. I swallowed against the rising nausea, and with the force of my will, I took an iron fist to that galaxy of lights and bent it into a familiar shape, with myself at the center like the inexorable, inevitable hold of a massive black hole.
A deep breath hissed passed my lips and filled my lungs, and only then did I open the eyes that I hadn't realized were closed to find a hand outstretched in offering. Arash smiled down at me, friendly and welcoming, neither judging nor condescending.
I took it and let him steady me as I straightened. There was no way he didn't notice the slight wobble as my skewed sense of balance nearly pitched me sideways, but he didn't mention it at all, he just held my hand a little tighter so that I didn't slip.
"R-Rayshift successful, Master," Mash said from nearby, panting a little herself.
"Are we all here?" I asked. "Sound off!"
"I-I'm here!" Ritsuka rasped.
"G-gimme a second, my soul needs to catch up with my body!" Rika said breathlessly.
"Here," Arash chimed in unnecessarily.
"Me, too," said Emiya.
Mash sighed. "We all made it safely again."
I looked at each of them in turn, tagging them all with at least one bug each from my newly replete swarm, but none of them looked like they were injured or missing body parts or anything like that. Just that those of us with actual, physical bodies were still getting our bearings from the disorientation of the Rayshift.
With our safety established, I turned instead to the world around us, taking in the green grass, the gentle slopes of the countryside, and the thick, densely leaved forest that sprawled nearby. The air was crisp and warm, filled with the salty brine of the nearby river —
River?
My brow drew down as I spun around, honing in on the lifeforms that weren't in the soil, the air, or the trees, but far, far below us, deep in the water. The familiar stench of saltwater wriggled up my nostrils, and I took cautious steps towards it as I made my way to the shoreline. There was no beach, no sandy white dunes, but the land gently sloped into the placid surface of the water regardless, going suddenly from sprouts of green grass to the deep, dark navy of a still river.
Except it couldn't be a river, could it? It was too quiet, too gentle, and just too deep, and most importantly of all, there, down below, were something that didn't live in rivers or streams, and I wasn't totally sure, but probably not even lakes.
"Crabs?"
I got closer to the shoreline, and what had to be two or three miles across from me was the opposite shore. A look up and down either side didn't show me anything else that would tell me what was going on, but whereas the left side seemed to just go deeper inland, narrowing as it went, the right side seemed to expand out as the land itself tapered off.
"This isn't a river," I realized suddenly. "This is a coastline."
So the reason why I could feel crabs down there at the bottom of the gulch was because that wasn't a freshwater river, it was an inlet from the ocean. It was seawater all the way down.
"It can't be…"
I wasn't an expert on geography, and while I'd studied the map of the Roman Empire as best as I could during our break from Orléans, it was just too much land to commit everything to memory in the span of a few weeks. Either way, I didn't remember any inlets like this along Italy's coast, none that were anywhere near Rome itself.
"Senpai?" Ritsuka asked.
Arash came up next to me. "Is something wrong, Master?"
I whipped around. "Mash!"
Mash startled and jolted to attention.
"Y-yes, Miss Taylor?"
The little gremlin popped up on her shoulder from out of nowhere. "Fou, fou?"
"Fou's tagged along again!" Rika exclaimed. I ignored them both.
"Romani said we were supposed to land within walking distance of Rome, didn't he?"
"Y-yes, he did!" she squeaked, but it was a question I'd already known the answer to.
I spun back around to the shoreline. "Then where the hell…"
A twist of my wrist and a few swift button presses brought up the map that Da Vinci had so very helpfully loaded for us, showing the coastline that we were all standing near, framed by lush, green forest and grassland. But it was all wrong. The inlet went from east to west — or west to east, whatever — like someone had reached down and ripped the land open, letting the ocean fill in the gap.
Zooming out didn't make the situation any better, and a thread of furious dread curdled in my stomach the further out I zoomed. Slowly, the familiar line of the French coast resolved itself, with the dot representing our team far on the northwestern end.
"We're in France," I muttered numbly.
"WE LANDED WHERE?" Rika demanded at full volume, her voice an entire octave higher than normal.
Mash was already pulling up her own map, brow furrowing as she slowly started to realize the same thing I had.
"Gaul," she said clearly, "on the coast of what would be Brittany, France in the modern day."
"What?" Ritsuka asked faintly.
"Oh," said Emiya, his eyebrows slowly rising towards his hairline.
"This," Arash said, troubled, "is very far off course."
"YOU DON'T SAY!" Rika shouted hysterically. She grabbed fistfuls of hair on each side of her head and scrubbed her scalp roughly. "DAMN IT!"
"Fou, fou!" the little gremlin agreed.
My communicator was on in a flash. "Romani!"
Nothing but static answered me.
"Fuck!"
"Something must have happened to throw us off course," said Emiya.
"STOP STATING THE OBVIOUS!" Rika howled.
"Calm down, Rika!" I snapped at her.
"YOU CALM DOWN!" she snarled back at me, her face contorting with her fury. "WE'RE ON THE OTHER END OF THE GODDAMN CONTINENT!"
"And there's nothing we can do about it, right now," Arash told her firmly. "Getting angry about it won't change anything."
Rika whirled towards him, arms stretched out and fingers curled into claws, and she looked very much like she wanted to wring his neck or scream at him some more, but before she could, she turned away and threw up her hands towards the sky. "UGH!"
I understood the urge. It was lucky none of them could see the crabs down below, because if they could, they would have seen them scrambling about, snapping at each other with their pincers and wrestling whenever they came within spitting distance of one another. That outlet for aggression was the only reason it didn't show on my face or in the local insect population.
I took a deep breath to try and calm down. It didn't really help that much.
"Master, Miss Taylor," Mash cut in, looking upwards. "It's here, too."
We all followed her gaze and looked up at the midday sky, and there, far, far above, looming like the eye of an unfeeling god, was the ominous ring of light that we had seen in Orléans. It looked exactly the same, a blot of dark, inky blue surrounded by bright, white light, so far up that even the clouds seemed nearer by comparison.
"Could this have caused interference in the Rayshift that scrambled our landing coordinates?" Mash wondered.
"I don't have any better ideas," I replied.
We still didn't even know what that ring of light even was. Romani had suggested some sort of large scale, atmospheric magecraft placed in satellite orbit in the stratosphere, but to my knowledge, Chaldea hadn't discovered anything new about it during our stay in the Orléans Singularity since we first discovered it or in the month they'd had to study the readings since.
Had it thrown us off course? I didn't know. Could it even throw us off course? I didn't have the first fucking clue.
"Maybe we landed here for a reason," Ritsuka suggested. "What if something's happening nearby?"
"No sign of enemy combatants," Mash reported. "And I don't hear any fighting or monsters nearby, either. I'm sorry, Master."
A quick shift of my focus and a bit of maneuvering with my swarm showed nothing out of the ordinary disturbing the local bugs. Not that it necessarily meant anything at the speed Servants could travel, but at least at that moment, there was no one close enough to be in range of my swarm.
"If the Grail is in Rome," Emiya began slowly, crossing his arms, "it could be that whoever has it has set up stronger defenses than Jeanne Alter did. We might have bounced off of a large scale bounded field covering the entire city."
"Could that really explain how we landed so far off course?" Mash wondered. Emiya shrugged helplessly.
"I don't have a better explanation."
"It's moot, either way," I cut in. "Whatever caused us to land so far from where we intended to, we still have to get to where we were supposed to be. There's no point in tossing theories around, right now. We need to start moving."
"Rome is almost two-thousand kilometers away, though," Mash mumbled worriedly.
The strangled groan that ripped out of Rika's mouth sounded more like a distressed Chihuahua than a human being. I let it slide, because two-thousand kilometers wasn't exactly my idea of a leisurely jog, either.
"There's nothing we can do about it," I said. "One way or another, we need to get to Rome. At least we didn't land in Britain, where we'd have to find a way across the English Channel."
"You know, some people take swimming across it as a challenge," Emiya remarked casually.
I lanced him with a pointed glare, unamused. Not helping.
"You, shut up!" Rika snapped at him, pointing with one outstretched index finger.
"It's a good thing we have the e-bikes Da Vinci designed for us," said Mash. She went over to the box and opened it, pulling out one of the e-bikes that had made the trip with us. Considering how far off course we were, I didn't think it was a bad idea to count our blessings that the box — and the bikes inside it — hadn't wound up on the south coast of Portugal. Or worse, sinking into the Mediterranean Sea.
"We'll have to find a good road," I agreed. "Once we have a better idea of our heading and a more direct path to Rome, we can plot out our course and make good time."
Hopefully. I wasn't sure just then whether it would be good luck or bad luck to run into whoever was holding the Grail on the way. In any case, some quick mental math told me that a generous estimate put us at about three days of travel, and that was only if we could get a good road, good weather, and the good fortune of about ten hours of travel per day at the bikes' top speed.
Realistically, it was probably going to be more like a week and a half. Strictly speaking, even that was technically making really good time, because going by foot would probably mean months of travel.
"Ah," Mash muttered as she fumbled with the folded e-bike. "Miss Da Vinci made it seem so easy, but I can't seem to get it to work."
She struggled with the thing, tugging on different parts and testing them, but always careful to control herself so she didn't wind up accidentally breaking it.
Rika got closer and reached out. "Here, let me try, Mash."
Dutifully, Mash handed it over, and Rika took it to make her attempts. First, she tried flicking her wrist the way we'd seen Da Vinci do, but that didn't do anything except almost rip the thing out of her hand, so she turned to the same sort of experimental tugging that Mash had been doing. She was a lot less careful than Mash, but she also wasn't nearly as strong, so she mostly wound looking just as Mash had, only a lot more frustrated and with twice as much grunting, growling, and expletives.
I shook my head and pulled up my map again, barely paying attention as I searched for the nearest major road that we could use to cross the French countryside. We didn't exactly seem to be swimming in options, because while a lot of the framework for the France we'd seen in the Orléans Singularity was there, large swathes of it were either missing outright or much diminished from what would be there in fourteen-hundred years.
"It's busted!" Rika finally declared, giving up.
Emiya sighed and shook his head as he went over to her. "Here, let me show you how it works. Watch closely now, Master."
I watched idly as he demonstrated the mechanism that would let the bike unfold and then the one that would let it be folded back up, committing it to memory, and then turned back to the map as he demonstrated it several more times for Ritsuka and Mash, too.
Fortunately, while the France we knew in Orléans was largely missing, the one thing that the Romans had been meticulous about was building roads. Not out of some kindness for the locals, but because they needed quick, efficient ways of crossing the country themselves. Obviously, they couldn't possibly have maintained their empire if they had to trudge through a jungle at every turn, militarily or economically.
And we happened to be in luck, because there was a road nearby — within walking distance, in fact, less than two miles away. It wouldn't take us straight to Rome and it actually meandered a lot more than I would have liked, but barring us actually having landed at our intended drop point, it was probably the best we could have hoped for. Better, at least, than untamed wilderness and no roads at all.
"Ritsuka, Rika, Mash, come here," I ordered.
The three of them froze in the middle of playing around with the e-bikes. They'd been practicing folding and unfolding them while I studied the map, and after a moment of hesitation, they finished folding or unfolding their bikes, depending on which they'd been in the middle of, and set them aside as I stepped closer, as well.
"We need to sync up our map data," I told them as I thrust my hand out, communicator on my wrist.
"Oh!" said Mash. "Right! I forgot we could do that!"
She held out the arm bearing her communicator, too, and after sharing a look, the twins did, as well.
"You just need to press these buttons in this order — no, Rika, that one and then that one, not the other way around — the next one over, Ritsuka — now hold it until it beeps…"
It took a couple of tries and a bit of trial and error on the twins' part, but eventually, we managed to get our maps synced up so that they had the same road highlighted that mine did.
"So why did we need to do that anyway, Senpai?" Rika asked when we were done. "I thought Da Vinci-chan gave us all the same maps anyway."
"If you look at your maps now, you'll see one particular road stands out on them," I explained. "That's the closest road to where we are now. It's not a straight line to Rome, but it's good enough to get us there. In case something happens on the way and we get separated, we'll all agree to meet up at the next town on that road. Got it?"
"Smart thinking," Emiya said approvingly.
Rika grinned. "That's why they pay you the big bucks, Senpai."
"Technically, the three of us are in the top five wealthiest people in the world, back at Chaldea," I said with a smug little smile.
The twins blinked at me. "Wait, what?" said Rika.
"No one told you?" I affected mild surprise, because of course it hadn't come up before. Who was around to pay us, right now? The UN and Mage's Association were both gone with the rest of the world. "Being a Master is one of the highest paying jobs in Chaldea, right behind the heads of the various departments. Right now, the only one richer than us is Romani."
And Marie, of course. But her pay would probably be suspended for the duration of her… Well, if there was ever a proper time to call it "living impairment" unironically, this was it.
"You're shitting me," Rika blurted out.
"Starting salary for a Master candidate fresh out of training is eighty-thousand," I told her. "Most of Team A was pulling in at least twice that."
"Dollars?" Ritsuka squeaked.
"American, yes. Singularities also count as hazard pay."
Our back pay once this was all over would probably bankrupt a small country.
"Holy shit," Rika breathed. "I'm gonna be a millionaire before I'm twenty!"
Mash cleared her throat pointedly.
"We should find the nearest Ley Line Terminal first, before we start the journey towards Rome," she said. "Doctor Roman and Miss Da Vinci are probably worried about us. It would be a good idea to check in."
Rika perked up, spine straightening as a grin pulled her mouth.
"That's right," she said brightly. "We have to beat him up for landing us on the other side of the continent!"
"Rika," her brother warned sternly.
"Verbally! Verbally beat him up! He deserves it for getting us so far off course!"
"You're right, Mash, we should check in with Romani before we go," I agreed, purposefully ignoring Rika's comment. I reached for the zipper on my pack so I could let out my ravens and get them in the air. They couldn't provide the topographical map my bugs gave me, but their eyesight was easier for me to parse. "I'll send my ravens out to scout ahead."
Mash nodded and brought up her map again. "According to the map Miss Da Vinci provided, the nearest Ley Line Terminal should be —"
She, Emiya, and Arash all stiffened at once and spun to face the same direction, further off towards the east. I hated to admit that it took me a moment to realize why.
"Servant detected!" Mash announced urgently, confirming my suspicions.
An instant later, I felt something small moving fast enter the range of my bugs. It raced towards us, weaving an unerring path through the foliage at the speed of a fighter jet.
At the same moment, our own three Servants positioned themselves in front of us three Masters. Mash's shield manifested with a heavy thunk, Emiya's muttered incantation produced the twin blades he favored in a flash of light, and Arash had already half drawn the string of his bow before it had even finished solidifying.
I was a bare second slower, retreating a safe distance from our defenders as I drew in a swarm as best as I could, and Rika and Ritsuka were only another second or two behind me, tense and waiting. They braced their arms but held them low, like a pistol drawn but pointed at the ground, finger resting on the trigger guard.
"An enemy?" Ritsuka asked.
"I don't know," was the only answer I could give.
Whoever it was made no attempt at hiding their presence, so our incoming Servant was either so confident in his skills that he wasn't worried about facing three Servants by himself or he didn't need to hide because he wasn't here to start a fight. I was prepared for the former but hoping for the latter.
A blur shot out of the woods and landed easily on a patch of grass a little further along the shoreline, resolving into a person who lifted an arm and waved. A boy, cherub-faced with a broad grin.
"Hoy!"
His wild, flyaway hair was a vivid auburn that shone purple under the sun, framing familiar eyes the color of freshly spilt blood. The mantle — or shawl, or whatever it was — that hung about his shoulders and the loose-fitting trousers that billowed around his lean legs were both a deep maroon, trimmed in gold and patterned with Celtic knots. A thick, heavy ring glinted from the thumb of one hand. By far the most remarkable thing about him, however, was his youth, because he couldn't have been older than ten.
There was no mistaking him as a Servant. The presence he exuded carried the weight I'd come to associate with one, and if that wasn't enough, then the wicked-looking spear he carried one-handed solidified it. The thing was the poisonous yellowish green of a newly sprouted sapling, one piece from pommel to tip, with pointed barbs like spines sprouting from the base of its two-pronged head. It was also almost twice as long as he was tall.
"Hi there!" he said brightly. "You know, you really shouldn't be here!"
"We got lost," I replied dryly. Rika snorted loudly from my left. "We'll be leaving as soon as we can."
"How about now?" the boy suggested.
"I'm afraid this isn't something we can rush," Arash said diplomatically, smiling a disarming smile. "We don't want any trouble, but there's something we need to take care of before we can get going."
"The only people who have business around here are the ones who are looking for trouble," the boy shot back. There was an undercurrent of threat in his voice.
After a moment, Emiya snorted, too, and he visibly relaxed, although he never quite let go of his twin swords.
"We're not the only ones who shouldn't be here," he said confidently. "Does your mother know where you are, kid?"
The boy Servant's only response was to grin again, and damn it, there was something familiar about it, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what.
"Who do you think sent me?"
Emiya's stance shifted, and whatever response he was expecting, it apparently wasn't that one. "Well, damn," he said, nonplussed. "She's here, too?"
"You're standing on her land," the boy confirmed.
That meant something to Emiya, and even Arash seemed to have at least some idea of what that meant, but all I could think up was some warlord who had laid claim to this area during the instability of the Singularity. Whoever she was, she was probably another Servant, but that didn't exactly narrow the list down. There were plenty of heroes whose legends had gotten started because of their mother's love and tutelage.
Should I hope that this kid wasn't Achilles? The clothing wasn't Grecian, but that wasn't necessarily proof positive that it wasn't. And if it was… Arash might be able to pull off the shot necessary to hit his heel, but I didn't like the odds of fighting the greatest hero of the Trojan War, pint-sized or not.
Arash, I began.
Let me try to handle this, Master, he sent back.
"This doesn't have to turn into a fight," Arash tried. He took one hand off his bow to press it to his chest. "Listen, I'm an Archer class Servant, Arash Kamangir." Next, he gestured to the other two standing with him. "This guy here is Emiya, also an Archer class Servant, and that's Mash. She's a Shielder, in case the gigantic shield didn't give it away."
"U-um, nice to meet you?" Mash offered uncertainly.
"These are our Masters." Arash gestured back to us. Rika, for some reason, decided to wave. "We're with an organization called Chaldea, here to fix this deviant history."
"Th-that's right!" Mash chimed in. "We're here to retrieve the Holy Grail and fix the changes it made to proper history! We don't have any reason to fight a Servant who isn't guarding the Grail. In fact, if you were summoned as a Rogue Servant to fight the Singularity, we could be allies!"
If they were hoping that would be enough to sway the kid, then they were likely very disappointed that it didn't.
"Chaldea?" the boy said skeptically. "Never heard of it."
"That's 'cause technically we haven't done anything yet…" Rika mumbled under her breath.
"Hey, that's a good thing!" Arash said with a grin. "That means we've been doing our job right! We only show up when something has gone wrong so we can put it back the way it's supposed to be."
"Don't care why you're here or what you want," the kid said mulishly. "You're on Mom's land. We want you off."
Arash chuckled awkwardly. "So it's like that, huh…"
"It's no use, Arash," Emiya told him, grinning a lopsided grin. "This kid is that hero's son. He came here looking for any excuse he could get to fight. The only way to get him off our backs is to give him the spanking he deserves."
That strangely familiar grin came back. "You can sure try."
The words hung in the air for a long moment, thick with tension, and I took that moment to squint at the kid with my Master's Clairvoyance to try and get a clue about who and what we were dealing with. I might as well have been staring at a blank sheet of paper, because although I could see his stats — all fairly impressive, if I was being honest — everything else was obscured as though covered in a thick fog, even his Servant class.
The hell?
Sorry, Master, Arash sent me apologetically, it looks like there's no avoiding this one.
That was the only warning I got before the kid burst into motion, crossing the meager distance with lightning speed, and before I could even blink, he was in Emiya's face with that spear of his, aiming for a killshot. Emiya seemed prepared for him, because he deflected the spear up and over his shoulder with a grunt.
"Mash! Protect the Masters!" was the only thing he took the time to say.
"R-right!" Mash nodded, and then she fell back to place herself directly in front of us as Emiya counterattacked with his twin swords.
But despite his size and apparent youth, that boy was an expert fighter, and he pulled back himself, deflecting Emiya's swords with the shaft of his spear using a move that looked like it defied physics, even with what little of it my eyes managed to track. On the backswing, he lashed out with his spear again, swiping up towards Emiya's eyes and forcing Emiya to back away.
The boy didn't allow Emiya even an instant of reprieve. The strength of a spear should have been its range, but the boy raced forward like a whirlwind, using his smaller, slighter physique to get in closer than his weapon should have allowed. His strikes were wild and vicious, but so precise that it seemed like everything Emiya could do to avoid getting skewered.
And from behind, Arash appeared, stony faced and solemn, holding the haft of an arrow as though it was a dagger. He descended upon the boy with intent to kill, the tip of his arrow aimed right for the boy's heart. It was a chilling reminder that Arash, for all of his smiles and his genial nature, was a hardened warrior, just like any other Servant.
Mash gasped. "Arash — !"
The boy wouldn't be done in that easily. He dodged around the blow and used the shaft of his lance to catch Arash's wrist, twisting the stab off course and forcing Arash and Emiya to dance around each other to keep from stepping on the other's toes. Two short hops carried the kid back to where he'd started, none the worse for wear.
Just like that, the conditions had been reset. The boy grinned a savage grin, bestial and wild.
"Good, you're not boring," he said lightly, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "I was afraid you Archers would go down too fast, since you're supposed to be useless up close."
"The Archer class isn't exclusive to bowmen, you know," Emiya said sardonically. "It's really more about using projectiles. Your old man technically qualifies, although he'd probably show up even younger than you."
"Rika," I mumbled to the girl next to me. "Has Emiya said who that kid is, yet?"
I saw her glance at me out of the corner of my eye, and then her brow furrowed for a moment as she no doubt asked Emiya about it across their bond. A moment later, she scowled and told me, "He says he'll tell us later. It'll be 'funnier that way.'"
…I take it back. He and I aren't compatible at all.
Suddenly, the kid burst into motion again, twice as fast as before, and there was no more time for planning, because he rushed Arash first, and with a single swipe of his lance, the arrow Arash had been using as a dagger snapped like cheap plywood. The edge of the blade tore a cut into one arm, forcing Arash to retreat, and instead of pursuing, the kid bounced back towards Emiya, sweeping his lance upwards with so much strength that it ripped Emiya's shortswords right out of his hands.
Two disarming blows in less than a second. In the time it took to blink, he'd rendered both of our primary attackers defenseless.
The kid grinned. "Got you!"
Except in the instant it took Emiya to backstep and adjust his footing, two more identical swords appeared in his hands, and the kid's follow up attack was deflected to the side. The boy was so surprised that he barely avoided Emiya's counterattack, throwing himself back and away, and a thin red line carved itself across one bicep, a mark of how narrowly the kid had avoided a blow that would have been disarming in an entirely different sense.
Rather than be upset, the kid just grinned. "Heh. Looks like I've gotta stop underestimating you, Mister Emiya."
"Whatever do you mean?" Emiya drawled. "I'm just a simple bowman. Nothing I can do is all that special."
"We're playing that game, then? That's okay." The kid adjusted his stance, turning to the side and aiming the tip of his spear towards the ground. Emiya stiffened and immediately started to backpedal. "I'm really good at that, too!"
In a flash, the boy closed the distance again. "Gáe —"
"Shit!"
"— Bolg!"
But rather than try to stab Emiya with that weird stance, the kid swept the butt of the spear down, and Emiya, who was caught by surprise, couldn't avoid having his shortswords torn out of his grip again. They crashed and clattered to the ground, leaving Emiya half hunched over and defenseless.
"Surprise!"
And the kid, using the momentum of his disarming blow to spin his spear around, was now poised to stab Emiya with the two-pronged tip.
"She never actually taught me that one!"
"Emiya!" Rika cried. "By my Command Spell —"
It wasn't going to be fast enough, and I pulled the swarm I'd been gathering in to collapse on the two of them, for whatever that might do, but that wasn't going to be fast enough either — until Arash appeared just as suddenly out of nowhere, holding the swords that Emiya had first lost. With a fearsome shout, he brought them both down on the haft of the kid's spear, right beneath the spines at the base of the head.
With a thunderous crack, the spear split, and the head went flying up and away, tumbling through the air to land in the water with a wet plop.
Arash wasted no time, and he swung out again, aiming for the kid's neck this time with a scissoring blow, but the boy twisted the remains of his spear and it was the haft that was severed instead of his neck. It gave him enough time and room to throw himself backwards and away from Arash and Emiya.
For a moment, the whole place seemed to freeze, hanging there as the momentum stalled. The ever-present grin on the kid's face had finally fallen into a scowl, and he regarded the two remaining pieces of his weapon with disgusted frustration.
"Aw, man!" he said at last. "Mom's gonna be so pissed!"
Emiya chuckled. "I think that's the least of your worries here, Connla."
Mash gasped. "Connla?"
"Connla?" Rika parroted. "Who's Connla?"
"Wait." My brow furrowed as the dots started to connect in my head. Half-remembered courses on major Heroic Spirits from the British Isles came back to me. "Isn't that Cúchulainn's kid?"
He'd been barely a footnote in Chaldea's primers on prominent heroes, though. His mother, Aífe, had technically gotten more mention.
"Cú actually had a kid?" Ritsuka asked incredulously.
"I guess what Director Marie said about him being a horny dog was pretty on the mark, huh," Rika said.
"S-Senpai!" said Mash, scandalized.
The kid, Connla, closed one of his eyes and smirked. "If you know who I am, then you know what geasa I'm bound by, and you should also know that I'm just as good at hand to hand as I am with that spear. You sure you wanna pick that fight, Mister Emiya? I'm not allowed to say no."
"And what makes you think the two of us were taking it all that seriously, either?" Emiya said lowly. "Do you really think either of our Noble Phantasms are as limited as yours is?"
Something flashed in Connla's open eye. "That almost sounds like a challenge, Mister."
Were they…actually about to get into a pissing contest? A grown man and a toddler? Enough of this. We're wasting time and energy.
I took a step forward, pushing the swarm I'd been gathering back, and Connla's eyes snapped immediately to me. Feral and calculating, like a wolf sizing up another predator that had strayed too far into its territory. Now that I knew he was Cúchulainn's son, the familiar grin and the blood red eyes made it all the more obvious. Like I should have known from the beginning.
"You said your mom's here, too, right?" I began. "Where?"
His smirk grew broader. "Here."
Smartass. Maybe I should've expected that from a kid whose legend had ended at the age of seven. He'd never had the chance to grow up, so expecting anything more than a recalcitrant brat was probably asking too much.
"Is she near the Ley Line Terminal?"
Connla's eyebrows rose slowly. He let out a low whistle, although his voice was way too high pitched to match what I'd heard out of his father's mouth. "You're a sharp one, lady."
Not really. It was simple logic. If his mother had claimed this land as her own, then the natural place for her to stake that claim was atop the Ley Line Terminal that gave her access to essentially unlimited magical energy. I had no idea what class she was or what her Noble Phantasm would be, but it was basic enough that I was confident I was right. Without a Master or the Holy Grail — and I hadn't ruled either of those out yet, but my luck wasn't good enough for us to find the source of the Singularity right after we landed — tapping the ley lines was the only way to get a consistent source of power.
"We just need to use the Ley Line Terminal to establish a connection with the rest of our team," I told him. "If your mom lets us do that, we can be there and gone in less than an hour without any trouble."
And if Aífe turns out to be the one in possession of the Holy Grail? Arash asked me.
We crush her immediately, was the reply I didn't hesitate to give. But I seriously doubt we'll be that lucky.
Luck, you call it, he mused.
When it went against our experiences in both Fuyuki and Orléans? Yeah. Luck was the only right term.
"We really don't mean to intrude," Mash added, "but we arrived very far away from where we meant to, so we need to contact Doctor Roman and Miss Da Vinci to let them know we're okay!"
Connla regarded the both of us for a long, silent moment, and then, at length, he threw back his head and laughed. Once more, he reminded me of Cúchulainn, only younger and smaller.
"I don't see what's all that funny about it," Rika muttered.
"He does remind you of Cú, though, doesn't he," Ritsuka remarked.
Rika made a dubious sound that seemed like a grunt that had been caught in her nostrils. "I'm not so sure that's a good thing, Onii-chan. If he tries to get in my pants, all belts are off."
"I think you meant, 'all bets are off,' Rika."
"I know what I said."
"Alright!" Connla said once he'd finished laughing. "I'll take you guys to see Mom so you can ask her to use the ley line!"
Mash let out a long sigh, loosening her grip on her shield, and even Emiya and Arash finally started to really relax.
"But," Connla went on ominously, "whether she'll actually let you, well, you might just have to fight her for it, first."
His grin this time was a shark's, a thing of malice and hunger, full of teeth.
"And Mom's unbeatable."
Next — Chapter XXXVII: Joyeuse Garde
The landing in Septem was no more comfortable than the one in Orléans.
The jolt of gravity reasserting itself upon my body jarred my knees and my stomach and my head, and my thoughts spun out as my self suddenly expanded outwards into the local insect population. I stumbled under my own weight, dizzy and confused, and my breakfast made a rebellious attempt to claw its way back up my throat.
But unlike last time, I knew what to expect. I swallowed against the rising nausea, and with the force of my will, I took an iron fist to that galaxy of lights and bent it into a familiar shape, with myself at the center like the inexorable, inevitable hold of a massive black hole.
A deep breath hissed passed my lips and filled my lungs, and only then did I open the eyes that I hadn't realized were closed to find a hand outstretched in offering. Arash smiled down at me, friendly and welcoming, neither judging nor condescending.
I took it and let him steady me as I straightened. There was no way he didn't notice the slight wobble as my skewed sense of balance nearly pitched me sideways, but he didn't mention it at all, he just held my hand a little tighter so that I didn't slip.
"R-Rayshift successful, Master," Mash said from nearby, panting a little herself.
"Are we all here?" I asked. "Sound off!"
"I-I'm here!" Ritsuka rasped.
"G-gimme a second, my soul needs to catch up with my body!" Rika said breathlessly.
"Here," Arash chimed in unnecessarily.
"Me, too," said Emiya.
Mash sighed. "We all made it safely again."
I looked at each of them in turn, tagging them all with at least one bug each from my newly replete swarm, but none of them looked like they were injured or missing body parts or anything like that. Just that those of us with actual, physical bodies were still getting our bearings from the disorientation of the Rayshift.
With our safety established, I turned instead to the world around us, taking in the green grass, the gentle slopes of the countryside, and the thick, densely leaved forest that sprawled nearby. The air was crisp and warm, filled with the salty brine of the nearby river —
River?
My brow drew down as I spun around, honing in on the lifeforms that weren't in the soil, the air, or the trees, but far, far below us, deep in the water. The familiar stench of saltwater wriggled up my nostrils, and I took cautious steps towards it as I made my way to the shoreline. There was no beach, no sandy white dunes, but the land gently sloped into the placid surface of the water regardless, going suddenly from sprouts of green grass to the deep, dark navy of a still river.
Except it couldn't be a river, could it? It was too quiet, too gentle, and just too deep, and most importantly of all, there, down below, were something that didn't live in rivers or streams, and I wasn't totally sure, but probably not even lakes.
"Crabs?"
I got closer to the shoreline, and what had to be two or three miles across from me was the opposite shore. A look up and down either side didn't show me anything else that would tell me what was going on, but whereas the left side seemed to just go deeper inland, narrowing as it went, the right side seemed to expand out as the land itself tapered off.
"This isn't a river," I realized suddenly. "This is a coastline."
So the reason why I could feel crabs down there at the bottom of the gulch was because that wasn't a freshwater river, it was an inlet from the ocean. It was seawater all the way down.
"It can't be…"
I wasn't an expert on geography, and while I'd studied the map of the Roman Empire as best as I could during our break from Orléans, it was just too much land to commit everything to memory in the span of a few weeks. Either way, I didn't remember any inlets like this along Italy's coast, none that were anywhere near Rome itself.
"Senpai?" Ritsuka asked.
Arash came up next to me. "Is something wrong, Master?"
I whipped around. "Mash!"
Mash startled and jolted to attention.
"Y-yes, Miss Taylor?"
The little gremlin popped up on her shoulder from out of nowhere. "Fou, fou?"
"Fou's tagged along again!" Rika exclaimed. I ignored them both.
"Romani said we were supposed to land within walking distance of Rome, didn't he?"
"Y-yes, he did!" she squeaked, but it was a question I'd already known the answer to.
I spun back around to the shoreline. "Then where the hell…"
A twist of my wrist and a few swift button presses brought up the map that Da Vinci had so very helpfully loaded for us, showing the coastline that we were all standing near, framed by lush, green forest and grassland. But it was all wrong. The inlet went from east to west — or west to east, whatever — like someone had reached down and ripped the land open, letting the ocean fill in the gap.
Zooming out didn't make the situation any better, and a thread of furious dread curdled in my stomach the further out I zoomed. Slowly, the familiar line of the French coast resolved itself, with the dot representing our team far on the northwestern end.
"We're in France," I muttered numbly.
"WE LANDED WHERE?" Rika demanded at full volume, her voice an entire octave higher than normal.
Mash was already pulling up her own map, brow furrowing as she slowly started to realize the same thing I had.
"Gaul," she said clearly, "on the coast of what would be Brittany, France in the modern day."
"What?" Ritsuka asked faintly.
"Oh," said Emiya, his eyebrows slowly rising towards his hairline.
"This," Arash said, troubled, "is very far off course."
"YOU DON'T SAY!" Rika shouted hysterically. She grabbed fistfuls of hair on each side of her head and scrubbed her scalp roughly. "DAMN IT!"
"Fou, fou!" the little gremlin agreed.
My communicator was on in a flash. "Romani!"
Nothing but static answered me.
"Fuck!"
"Something must have happened to throw us off course," said Emiya.
"STOP STATING THE OBVIOUS!" Rika howled.
"Calm down, Rika!" I snapped at her.
"YOU CALM DOWN!" she snarled back at me, her face contorting with her fury. "WE'RE ON THE OTHER END OF THE GODDAMN CONTINENT!"
"And there's nothing we can do about it, right now," Arash told her firmly. "Getting angry about it won't change anything."
Rika whirled towards him, arms stretched out and fingers curled into claws, and she looked very much like she wanted to wring his neck or scream at him some more, but before she could, she turned away and threw up her hands towards the sky. "UGH!"
I understood the urge. It was lucky none of them could see the crabs down below, because if they could, they would have seen them scrambling about, snapping at each other with their pincers and wrestling whenever they came within spitting distance of one another. That outlet for aggression was the only reason it didn't show on my face or in the local insect population.
I took a deep breath to try and calm down. It didn't really help that much.
"Master, Miss Taylor," Mash cut in, looking upwards. "It's here, too."
We all followed her gaze and looked up at the midday sky, and there, far, far above, looming like the eye of an unfeeling god, was the ominous ring of light that we had seen in Orléans. It looked exactly the same, a blot of dark, inky blue surrounded by bright, white light, so far up that even the clouds seemed nearer by comparison.
"Could this have caused interference in the Rayshift that scrambled our landing coordinates?" Mash wondered.
"I don't have any better ideas," I replied.
We still didn't even know what that ring of light even was. Romani had suggested some sort of large scale, atmospheric magecraft placed in satellite orbit in the stratosphere, but to my knowledge, Chaldea hadn't discovered anything new about it during our stay in the Orléans Singularity since we first discovered it or in the month they'd had to study the readings since.
Had it thrown us off course? I didn't know. Could it even throw us off course? I didn't have the first fucking clue.
"Maybe we landed here for a reason," Ritsuka suggested. "What if something's happening nearby?"
"No sign of enemy combatants," Mash reported. "And I don't hear any fighting or monsters nearby, either. I'm sorry, Master."
A quick shift of my focus and a bit of maneuvering with my swarm showed nothing out of the ordinary disturbing the local bugs. Not that it necessarily meant anything at the speed Servants could travel, but at least at that moment, there was no one close enough to be in range of my swarm.
"If the Grail is in Rome," Emiya began slowly, crossing his arms, "it could be that whoever has it has set up stronger defenses than Jeanne Alter did. We might have bounced off of a large scale bounded field covering the entire city."
"Could that really explain how we landed so far off course?" Mash wondered. Emiya shrugged helplessly.
"I don't have a better explanation."
"It's moot, either way," I cut in. "Whatever caused us to land so far from where we intended to, we still have to get to where we were supposed to be. There's no point in tossing theories around, right now. We need to start moving."
"Rome is almost two-thousand kilometers away, though," Mash mumbled worriedly.
The strangled groan that ripped out of Rika's mouth sounded more like a distressed Chihuahua than a human being. I let it slide, because two-thousand kilometers wasn't exactly my idea of a leisurely jog, either.
"There's nothing we can do about it," I said. "One way or another, we need to get to Rome. At least we didn't land in Britain, where we'd have to find a way across the English Channel."
"You know, some people take swimming across it as a challenge," Emiya remarked casually.
I lanced him with a pointed glare, unamused. Not helping.
"You, shut up!" Rika snapped at him, pointing with one outstretched index finger.
"It's a good thing we have the e-bikes Da Vinci designed for us," said Mash. She went over to the box and opened it, pulling out one of the e-bikes that had made the trip with us. Considering how far off course we were, I didn't think it was a bad idea to count our blessings that the box — and the bikes inside it — hadn't wound up on the south coast of Portugal. Or worse, sinking into the Mediterranean Sea.
"We'll have to find a good road," I agreed. "Once we have a better idea of our heading and a more direct path to Rome, we can plot out our course and make good time."
Hopefully. I wasn't sure just then whether it would be good luck or bad luck to run into whoever was holding the Grail on the way. In any case, some quick mental math told me that a generous estimate put us at about three days of travel, and that was only if we could get a good road, good weather, and the good fortune of about ten hours of travel per day at the bikes' top speed.
Realistically, it was probably going to be more like a week and a half. Strictly speaking, even that was technically making really good time, because going by foot would probably mean months of travel.
"Ah," Mash muttered as she fumbled with the folded e-bike. "Miss Da Vinci made it seem so easy, but I can't seem to get it to work."
She struggled with the thing, tugging on different parts and testing them, but always careful to control herself so she didn't wind up accidentally breaking it.
Rika got closer and reached out. "Here, let me try, Mash."
Dutifully, Mash handed it over, and Rika took it to make her attempts. First, she tried flicking her wrist the way we'd seen Da Vinci do, but that didn't do anything except almost rip the thing out of her hand, so she turned to the same sort of experimental tugging that Mash had been doing. She was a lot less careful than Mash, but she also wasn't nearly as strong, so she mostly wound looking just as Mash had, only a lot more frustrated and with twice as much grunting, growling, and expletives.
I shook my head and pulled up my map again, barely paying attention as I searched for the nearest major road that we could use to cross the French countryside. We didn't exactly seem to be swimming in options, because while a lot of the framework for the France we'd seen in the Orléans Singularity was there, large swathes of it were either missing outright or much diminished from what would be there in fourteen-hundred years.
"It's busted!" Rika finally declared, giving up.
Emiya sighed and shook his head as he went over to her. "Here, let me show you how it works. Watch closely now, Master."
I watched idly as he demonstrated the mechanism that would let the bike unfold and then the one that would let it be folded back up, committing it to memory, and then turned back to the map as he demonstrated it several more times for Ritsuka and Mash, too.
Fortunately, while the France we knew in Orléans was largely missing, the one thing that the Romans had been meticulous about was building roads. Not out of some kindness for the locals, but because they needed quick, efficient ways of crossing the country themselves. Obviously, they couldn't possibly have maintained their empire if they had to trudge through a jungle at every turn, militarily or economically.
And we happened to be in luck, because there was a road nearby — within walking distance, in fact, less than two miles away. It wouldn't take us straight to Rome and it actually meandered a lot more than I would have liked, but barring us actually having landed at our intended drop point, it was probably the best we could have hoped for. Better, at least, than untamed wilderness and no roads at all.
"Ritsuka, Rika, Mash, come here," I ordered.
The three of them froze in the middle of playing around with the e-bikes. They'd been practicing folding and unfolding them while I studied the map, and after a moment of hesitation, they finished folding or unfolding their bikes, depending on which they'd been in the middle of, and set them aside as I stepped closer, as well.
"We need to sync up our map data," I told them as I thrust my hand out, communicator on my wrist.
"Oh!" said Mash. "Right! I forgot we could do that!"
She held out the arm bearing her communicator, too, and after sharing a look, the twins did, as well.
"You just need to press these buttons in this order — no, Rika, that one and then that one, not the other way around — the next one over, Ritsuka — now hold it until it beeps…"
It took a couple of tries and a bit of trial and error on the twins' part, but eventually, we managed to get our maps synced up so that they had the same road highlighted that mine did.
"So why did we need to do that anyway, Senpai?" Rika asked when we were done. "I thought Da Vinci-chan gave us all the same maps anyway."
"If you look at your maps now, you'll see one particular road stands out on them," I explained. "That's the closest road to where we are now. It's not a straight line to Rome, but it's good enough to get us there. In case something happens on the way and we get separated, we'll all agree to meet up at the next town on that road. Got it?"
"Smart thinking," Emiya said approvingly.
Rika grinned. "That's why they pay you the big bucks, Senpai."
"Technically, the three of us are in the top five wealthiest people in the world, back at Chaldea," I said with a smug little smile.
The twins blinked at me. "Wait, what?" said Rika.
"No one told you?" I affected mild surprise, because of course it hadn't come up before. Who was around to pay us, right now? The UN and Mage's Association were both gone with the rest of the world. "Being a Master is one of the highest paying jobs in Chaldea, right behind the heads of the various departments. Right now, the only one richer than us is Romani."
And Marie, of course. But her pay would probably be suspended for the duration of her… Well, if there was ever a proper time to call it "living impairment" unironically, this was it.
"You're shitting me," Rika blurted out.
"Starting salary for a Master candidate fresh out of training is eighty-thousand," I told her. "Most of Team A was pulling in at least twice that."
"Dollars?" Ritsuka squeaked.
"American, yes. Singularities also count as hazard pay."
Our back pay once this was all over would probably bankrupt a small country.
"Holy shit," Rika breathed. "I'm gonna be a millionaire before I'm twenty!"
Mash cleared her throat pointedly.
"We should find the nearest Ley Line Terminal first, before we start the journey towards Rome," she said. "Doctor Roman and Miss Da Vinci are probably worried about us. It would be a good idea to check in."
Rika perked up, spine straightening as a grin pulled her mouth.
"That's right," she said brightly. "We have to beat him up for landing us on the other side of the continent!"
"Rika," her brother warned sternly.
"Verbally! Verbally beat him up! He deserves it for getting us so far off course!"
"You're right, Mash, we should check in with Romani before we go," I agreed, purposefully ignoring Rika's comment. I reached for the zipper on my pack so I could let out my ravens and get them in the air. They couldn't provide the topographical map my bugs gave me, but their eyesight was easier for me to parse. "I'll send my ravens out to scout ahead."
Mash nodded and brought up her map again. "According to the map Miss Da Vinci provided, the nearest Ley Line Terminal should be —"
She, Emiya, and Arash all stiffened at once and spun to face the same direction, further off towards the east. I hated to admit that it took me a moment to realize why.
"Servant detected!" Mash announced urgently, confirming my suspicions.
An instant later, I felt something small moving fast enter the range of my bugs. It raced towards us, weaving an unerring path through the foliage at the speed of a fighter jet.
At the same moment, our own three Servants positioned themselves in front of us three Masters. Mash's shield manifested with a heavy thunk, Emiya's muttered incantation produced the twin blades he favored in a flash of light, and Arash had already half drawn the string of his bow before it had even finished solidifying.
I was a bare second slower, retreating a safe distance from our defenders as I drew in a swarm as best as I could, and Rika and Ritsuka were only another second or two behind me, tense and waiting. They braced their arms but held them low, like a pistol drawn but pointed at the ground, finger resting on the trigger guard.
"An enemy?" Ritsuka asked.
"I don't know," was the only answer I could give.
Whoever it was made no attempt at hiding their presence, so our incoming Servant was either so confident in his skills that he wasn't worried about facing three Servants by himself or he didn't need to hide because he wasn't here to start a fight. I was prepared for the former but hoping for the latter.
A blur shot out of the woods and landed easily on a patch of grass a little further along the shoreline, resolving into a person who lifted an arm and waved. A boy, cherub-faced with a broad grin.
"Hoy!"
His wild, flyaway hair was a vivid auburn that shone purple under the sun, framing familiar eyes the color of freshly spilt blood. The mantle — or shawl, or whatever it was — that hung about his shoulders and the loose-fitting trousers that billowed around his lean legs were both a deep maroon, trimmed in gold and patterned with Celtic knots. A thick, heavy ring glinted from the thumb of one hand. By far the most remarkable thing about him, however, was his youth, because he couldn't have been older than ten.
There was no mistaking him as a Servant. The presence he exuded carried the weight I'd come to associate with one, and if that wasn't enough, then the wicked-looking spear he carried one-handed solidified it. The thing was the poisonous yellowish green of a newly sprouted sapling, one piece from pommel to tip, with pointed barbs like spines sprouting from the base of its two-pronged head. It was also almost twice as long as he was tall.
"Hi there!" he said brightly. "You know, you really shouldn't be here!"
"We got lost," I replied dryly. Rika snorted loudly from my left. "We'll be leaving as soon as we can."
"How about now?" the boy suggested.
"I'm afraid this isn't something we can rush," Arash said diplomatically, smiling a disarming smile. "We don't want any trouble, but there's something we need to take care of before we can get going."
"The only people who have business around here are the ones who are looking for trouble," the boy shot back. There was an undercurrent of threat in his voice.
After a moment, Emiya snorted, too, and he visibly relaxed, although he never quite let go of his twin swords.
"We're not the only ones who shouldn't be here," he said confidently. "Does your mother know where you are, kid?"
The boy Servant's only response was to grin again, and damn it, there was something familiar about it, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what.
"Who do you think sent me?"
Emiya's stance shifted, and whatever response he was expecting, it apparently wasn't that one. "Well, damn," he said, nonplussed. "She's here, too?"
"You're standing on her land," the boy confirmed.
That meant something to Emiya, and even Arash seemed to have at least some idea of what that meant, but all I could think up was some warlord who had laid claim to this area during the instability of the Singularity. Whoever she was, she was probably another Servant, but that didn't exactly narrow the list down. There were plenty of heroes whose legends had gotten started because of their mother's love and tutelage.
Should I hope that this kid wasn't Achilles? The clothing wasn't Grecian, but that wasn't necessarily proof positive that it wasn't. And if it was… Arash might be able to pull off the shot necessary to hit his heel, but I didn't like the odds of fighting the greatest hero of the Trojan War, pint-sized or not.
Arash, I began.
Let me try to handle this, Master, he sent back.
"This doesn't have to turn into a fight," Arash tried. He took one hand off his bow to press it to his chest. "Listen, I'm an Archer class Servant, Arash Kamangir." Next, he gestured to the other two standing with him. "This guy here is Emiya, also an Archer class Servant, and that's Mash. She's a Shielder, in case the gigantic shield didn't give it away."
"U-um, nice to meet you?" Mash offered uncertainly.
"These are our Masters." Arash gestured back to us. Rika, for some reason, decided to wave. "We're with an organization called Chaldea, here to fix this deviant history."
"Th-that's right!" Mash chimed in. "We're here to retrieve the Holy Grail and fix the changes it made to proper history! We don't have any reason to fight a Servant who isn't guarding the Grail. In fact, if you were summoned as a Rogue Servant to fight the Singularity, we could be allies!"
If they were hoping that would be enough to sway the kid, then they were likely very disappointed that it didn't.
"Chaldea?" the boy said skeptically. "Never heard of it."
"That's 'cause technically we haven't done anything yet…" Rika mumbled under her breath.
"Hey, that's a good thing!" Arash said with a grin. "That means we've been doing our job right! We only show up when something has gone wrong so we can put it back the way it's supposed to be."
"Don't care why you're here or what you want," the kid said mulishly. "You're on Mom's land. We want you off."
Arash chuckled awkwardly. "So it's like that, huh…"
"It's no use, Arash," Emiya told him, grinning a lopsided grin. "This kid is that hero's son. He came here looking for any excuse he could get to fight. The only way to get him off our backs is to give him the spanking he deserves."
That strangely familiar grin came back. "You can sure try."
The words hung in the air for a long moment, thick with tension, and I took that moment to squint at the kid with my Master's Clairvoyance to try and get a clue about who and what we were dealing with. I might as well have been staring at a blank sheet of paper, because although I could see his stats — all fairly impressive, if I was being honest — everything else was obscured as though covered in a thick fog, even his Servant class.
The hell?
Sorry, Master, Arash sent me apologetically, it looks like there's no avoiding this one.
That was the only warning I got before the kid burst into motion, crossing the meager distance with lightning speed, and before I could even blink, he was in Emiya's face with that spear of his, aiming for a killshot. Emiya seemed prepared for him, because he deflected the spear up and over his shoulder with a grunt.
"Mash! Protect the Masters!" was the only thing he took the time to say.
"R-right!" Mash nodded, and then she fell back to place herself directly in front of us as Emiya counterattacked with his twin swords.
But despite his size and apparent youth, that boy was an expert fighter, and he pulled back himself, deflecting Emiya's swords with the shaft of his spear using a move that looked like it defied physics, even with what little of it my eyes managed to track. On the backswing, he lashed out with his spear again, swiping up towards Emiya's eyes and forcing Emiya to back away.
The boy didn't allow Emiya even an instant of reprieve. The strength of a spear should have been its range, but the boy raced forward like a whirlwind, using his smaller, slighter physique to get in closer than his weapon should have allowed. His strikes were wild and vicious, but so precise that it seemed like everything Emiya could do to avoid getting skewered.
And from behind, Arash appeared, stony faced and solemn, holding the haft of an arrow as though it was a dagger. He descended upon the boy with intent to kill, the tip of his arrow aimed right for the boy's heart. It was a chilling reminder that Arash, for all of his smiles and his genial nature, was a hardened warrior, just like any other Servant.
Mash gasped. "Arash — !"
The boy wouldn't be done in that easily. He dodged around the blow and used the shaft of his lance to catch Arash's wrist, twisting the stab off course and forcing Arash and Emiya to dance around each other to keep from stepping on the other's toes. Two short hops carried the kid back to where he'd started, none the worse for wear.
Just like that, the conditions had been reset. The boy grinned a savage grin, bestial and wild.
"Good, you're not boring," he said lightly, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "I was afraid you Archers would go down too fast, since you're supposed to be useless up close."
"The Archer class isn't exclusive to bowmen, you know," Emiya said sardonically. "It's really more about using projectiles. Your old man technically qualifies, although he'd probably show up even younger than you."
"Rika," I mumbled to the girl next to me. "Has Emiya said who that kid is, yet?"
I saw her glance at me out of the corner of my eye, and then her brow furrowed for a moment as she no doubt asked Emiya about it across their bond. A moment later, she scowled and told me, "He says he'll tell us later. It'll be 'funnier that way.'"
…I take it back. He and I aren't compatible at all.
Suddenly, the kid burst into motion again, twice as fast as before, and there was no more time for planning, because he rushed Arash first, and with a single swipe of his lance, the arrow Arash had been using as a dagger snapped like cheap plywood. The edge of the blade tore a cut into one arm, forcing Arash to retreat, and instead of pursuing, the kid bounced back towards Emiya, sweeping his lance upwards with so much strength that it ripped Emiya's shortswords right out of his hands.
Two disarming blows in less than a second. In the time it took to blink, he'd rendered both of our primary attackers defenseless.
The kid grinned. "Got you!"
Except in the instant it took Emiya to backstep and adjust his footing, two more identical swords appeared in his hands, and the kid's follow up attack was deflected to the side. The boy was so surprised that he barely avoided Emiya's counterattack, throwing himself back and away, and a thin red line carved itself across one bicep, a mark of how narrowly the kid had avoided a blow that would have been disarming in an entirely different sense.
Rather than be upset, the kid just grinned. "Heh. Looks like I've gotta stop underestimating you, Mister Emiya."
"Whatever do you mean?" Emiya drawled. "I'm just a simple bowman. Nothing I can do is all that special."
"We're playing that game, then? That's okay." The kid adjusted his stance, turning to the side and aiming the tip of his spear towards the ground. Emiya stiffened and immediately started to backpedal. "I'm really good at that, too!"
In a flash, the boy closed the distance again. "Gáe —"
"Shit!"
"— Bolg!"
But rather than try to stab Emiya with that weird stance, the kid swept the butt of the spear down, and Emiya, who was caught by surprise, couldn't avoid having his shortswords torn out of his grip again. They crashed and clattered to the ground, leaving Emiya half hunched over and defenseless.
"Surprise!"
And the kid, using the momentum of his disarming blow to spin his spear around, was now poised to stab Emiya with the two-pronged tip.
"She never actually taught me that one!"
"Emiya!" Rika cried. "By my Command Spell —"
It wasn't going to be fast enough, and I pulled the swarm I'd been gathering in to collapse on the two of them, for whatever that might do, but that wasn't going to be fast enough either — until Arash appeared just as suddenly out of nowhere, holding the swords that Emiya had first lost. With a fearsome shout, he brought them both down on the haft of the kid's spear, right beneath the spines at the base of the head.
With a thunderous crack, the spear split, and the head went flying up and away, tumbling through the air to land in the water with a wet plop.
Arash wasted no time, and he swung out again, aiming for the kid's neck this time with a scissoring blow, but the boy twisted the remains of his spear and it was the haft that was severed instead of his neck. It gave him enough time and room to throw himself backwards and away from Arash and Emiya.
For a moment, the whole place seemed to freeze, hanging there as the momentum stalled. The ever-present grin on the kid's face had finally fallen into a scowl, and he regarded the two remaining pieces of his weapon with disgusted frustration.
"Aw, man!" he said at last. "Mom's gonna be so pissed!"
Emiya chuckled. "I think that's the least of your worries here, Connla."
Mash gasped. "Connla?"
"Connla?" Rika parroted. "Who's Connla?"
"Wait." My brow furrowed as the dots started to connect in my head. Half-remembered courses on major Heroic Spirits from the British Isles came back to me. "Isn't that Cúchulainn's kid?"
He'd been barely a footnote in Chaldea's primers on prominent heroes, though. His mother, Aífe, had technically gotten more mention.
"Cú actually had a kid?" Ritsuka asked incredulously.
"I guess what Director Marie said about him being a horny dog was pretty on the mark, huh," Rika said.
"S-Senpai!" said Mash, scandalized.
The kid, Connla, closed one of his eyes and smirked. "If you know who I am, then you know what geasa I'm bound by, and you should also know that I'm just as good at hand to hand as I am with that spear. You sure you wanna pick that fight, Mister Emiya? I'm not allowed to say no."
"And what makes you think the two of us were taking it all that seriously, either?" Emiya said lowly. "Do you really think either of our Noble Phantasms are as limited as yours is?"
Something flashed in Connla's open eye. "That almost sounds like a challenge, Mister."
Were they…actually about to get into a pissing contest? A grown man and a toddler? Enough of this. We're wasting time and energy.
I took a step forward, pushing the swarm I'd been gathering back, and Connla's eyes snapped immediately to me. Feral and calculating, like a wolf sizing up another predator that had strayed too far into its territory. Now that I knew he was Cúchulainn's son, the familiar grin and the blood red eyes made it all the more obvious. Like I should have known from the beginning.
"You said your mom's here, too, right?" I began. "Where?"
His smirk grew broader. "Here."
Smartass. Maybe I should've expected that from a kid whose legend had ended at the age of seven. He'd never had the chance to grow up, so expecting anything more than a recalcitrant brat was probably asking too much.
"Is she near the Ley Line Terminal?"
Connla's eyebrows rose slowly. He let out a low whistle, although his voice was way too high pitched to match what I'd heard out of his father's mouth. "You're a sharp one, lady."
Not really. It was simple logic. If his mother had claimed this land as her own, then the natural place for her to stake that claim was atop the Ley Line Terminal that gave her access to essentially unlimited magical energy. I had no idea what class she was or what her Noble Phantasm would be, but it was basic enough that I was confident I was right. Without a Master or the Holy Grail — and I hadn't ruled either of those out yet, but my luck wasn't good enough for us to find the source of the Singularity right after we landed — tapping the ley lines was the only way to get a consistent source of power.
"We just need to use the Ley Line Terminal to establish a connection with the rest of our team," I told him. "If your mom lets us do that, we can be there and gone in less than an hour without any trouble."
And if Aífe turns out to be the one in possession of the Holy Grail? Arash asked me.
We crush her immediately, was the reply I didn't hesitate to give. But I seriously doubt we'll be that lucky.
Luck, you call it, he mused.
When it went against our experiences in both Fuyuki and Orléans? Yeah. Luck was the only right term.
"We really don't mean to intrude," Mash added, "but we arrived very far away from where we meant to, so we need to contact Doctor Roman and Miss Da Vinci to let them know we're okay!"
Connla regarded the both of us for a long, silent moment, and then, at length, he threw back his head and laughed. Once more, he reminded me of Cúchulainn, only younger and smaller.
"I don't see what's all that funny about it," Rika muttered.
"He does remind you of Cú, though, doesn't he," Ritsuka remarked.
Rika made a dubious sound that seemed like a grunt that had been caught in her nostrils. "I'm not so sure that's a good thing, Onii-chan. If he tries to get in my pants, all belts are off."
"I think you meant, 'all bets are off,' Rika."
"I know what I said."
"Alright!" Connla said once he'd finished laughing. "I'll take you guys to see Mom so you can ask her to use the ley line!"
Mash let out a long sigh, loosening her grip on her shield, and even Emiya and Arash finally started to really relax.
"But," Connla went on ominously, "whether she'll actually let you, well, you might just have to fight her for it, first."
His grin this time was a shark's, a thing of malice and hunger, full of teeth.
"And Mom's unbeatable."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Surprise? I mentioned a while back about how I wanted to try and fit Aífe into this story somehow, and then I considered Septem and went, "Well, why not?" Why not, indeed. How many of you actually realized it was Connla before he pretended to use Gáe Bolg, and how many were completely shocked when he finally got named?
There are several parts of this chapter I really like. The fight...I actually wanted to make it closer to a fight in FSN, in terms of how it felt, but it wound up like this, instead. That's fine. This is good, too.
I'm throwing some more surprises your way next chapter. Get your boots strapped on, because some of them might just knock your socks off.
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out, and especially to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best, and your continued support is invaluable.
If you like what you're reading and want to support me as a writer so I can pay the bills, I have a Patreon. If Patreon is too long term, I have a Ko-fi page, too. If you want to commission something from me, check out either my Deviantart post or my artist registry page for my rates. Links in my sig. Every little bit helps keep me afloat, even if you can only afford a couple dollars.
There are several parts of this chapter I really like. The fight...I actually wanted to make it closer to a fight in FSN, in terms of how it felt, but it wound up like this, instead. That's fine. This is good, too.
I'm throwing some more surprises your way next chapter. Get your boots strapped on, because some of them might just knock your socks off.
Special thanks to everyone who has helped me out, and especially to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best, and your continued support is invaluable.
If you like what you're reading and want to support me as a writer so I can pay the bills, I have a Patreon. If Patreon is too long term, I have a Ko-fi page, too. If you want to commission something from me, check out either my Deviantart post or my artist registry page for my rates. Links in my sig. Every little bit helps keep me afloat, even if you can only afford a couple dollars.
