Great Servant Largo
A young man stood at the other end of the warehouse yard. His headband barely kept a spiky mop of red hair in line. He wore a billowing leather trenchcoat. And a cape. And a breastplate. Gilgamesh also thought he’d spotted the collar of a Hawaiian shirt underneath the coat. In this context, the boy’s monocle almost seemed an afterthought; a final footnote of weirdness for a servant whose grip on reality – even accounting for the brevity of their past encounter – had always seemed rather tenuous. And while Gilgamesh wasn’t quite sure what a “hax final boss” was supposed to be, he suspected that the label was derogatory.
But Rider was here.
Gilgamesh’s hands clenched in his golden gauntlets. Finally.
“Ah, Rider,” Gilgamesh said. “So you made it to the final three, eh? My successors must have been pathetic indeed to lose against a boy who hides in imaginary worlds. But then, one would expect decay from a world no longer under my rule.”
Rider glared. That anomalous monocle glinted. His voice boomed across the battlefield.
"Video games are a conduit for the soul!” he said. “They expand our lives! Channel our imagination! Test our skillz! Games exist as a channel for the boundless energy of people all over the world! It is a medium you are incapable of understanding! Also, Ilya offered me b33r if I beat you.”
Gilgamesh raised an eyebrow. The air shimmered behind him. A golden field appeared. Maces, swords, axes and billhooks wrought of wondrous materials poked through it like blades of grass.
“I have no need to understand the weakness that tempts you out of the real world, mongrel…though I suppose your quest for beer is more comprehensible.”
“B33r,” the young man said.
“What?”
“B33r. With two letter 3’s.”
Gilgamesh scowled.
“What?!” he said. “How does that even--How did you—“
Rider raised his hand to the heavens. Arcs of crimson lightning crackled down the length of his body. The clouds of the Fuyuki night sky rumbled, spinning in an otherworldly maelstrom of red fog. A void appeared at their center. It spread.
“Ph34r with gr34t ph33r.”
Rider’s Aria plunged Gilgamesh into a sprawling cityscape of concrete and neon. The memories he’d received for Heaven’s Feel told him that this was Tokyo. But…not.
A reality marble.
An army stood in front of him. It was an eclectic lot. Worm-eaten animated corpses in red berets moaned in its front ranks. Mechanical bipeds marked with police symbols leveled automatic cannons in his direction. They gave a hydraulic whirr as they stepped forward. Gem-encrusted girls in miniskirts and pigtails flitted through the air like pixies. And at their head was Rider himself, standing on a multi-story, rotting, lizardy critter with a pink bow on its head.
Rider raised his sword.
“Mess up his systemz!”
A roar came from the assembled mob, and it surged forward. The reanimated dead squelched as they raced across the tarmac. Police sirens screamed on the automatons. Bolts of pink, heart-shaped energy streamed from the flying girls. The blasts threw up plumes of cement dust and shrapnel all around the Golden King.
Gilgamesh only smirked, and pulled out his trump card. Crisscrossing red lines glowed across the black blade of the Enuma Elish. The otherworldly Noble Phantasm thrummed with power.
It fired.
All around him, Gilgamesh watched as the most elaborate Reality Marble he’d ever seen dissolved. Pieces of the sky fell, or were rotted away. Skyscrapers sank into the ground. Chasms appeared in the streets, consuming automatons and walking dead alike. Screeches. Bleeps. Moans.
Finally, Gilgamesh stood in the warehouse lot again. Rider loomed over him. The irritating Servant stood on that dragon-looking thing’s head. Pistols brandished. Smile in place.
Rider charged. Thousands of tons of reptilian malevolence hurtled forward with the speed and force of a bullet train.
Gilgamesh snapped his fingers.
Noble Phantasm upon Noble Phantasm rained down on Rider’s mount. Axes tore gashes in its stomach. A war flail blasted off one of its vestigial arms, spraying the creature with gore. The lizard slowed. By the time it came within a hundred meters, it looked like a lizard-shaped block of Swiss cheese used as a pincushion.
It reeled. The eyes went dim. With a final roar, it shuddered and crashed to earth with a massive THUMP. The sound of its fall echoed through the lot.
Rider rolled free. He was already firing both pistols.
Gilgamesh frowned. The mongrel just couldn’t die easily, could he? Rider was elusive, too – he zigzagged and darted behind cover even as he moved forward. The Golden King kept firing as well. His Noble Phantasms laid down a firestorm. Sooner or later, one of those explosions would find its mark.
Rider, of course, had other ideas.
BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM—ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting!
Gilgamesh growled. He’d had to throw an armored forearm over his face to deflect Rider’s counterfire. It interfered with his aim. His Noble Phantasms went wide. Every deserted building within a thousand foot radius dissolved into ash and rubble.
Click.
Click.
Gilgamesh grinned. He uncovered his face and prepared to unleash another barra—
“Ow!”
Oh. That wasn’t…Rider must have thrown his empty pistol at Gilgamesh’s fac—
“Ooooow!”
Two empty pistols. Well, at least—
“AAAAGH!”
…and an aluminum baseball bat.
A trickle of blood ran down Gilgamesh’s nose. He held his hand up to it, and—
Yes.
Broken.
The Golden King shook so hard that he seemed to be vibrating. He screamed, and summoned two swords from the Gate. He didn’t care which. Really, he didn’t. One of them looked sort of cold and icy, judging from the condensed fog. The other burned white-hot. If he’d been in a better mood, he probably could have told you what they were.
“YOU! BROKE! BY! DOZE! BONGREL!”
Rider drew his own sword. It was absurdly large, even for a two-handed weapon.
“PREP4R3 FOR PANTLESS NINJ4 FURY!!!!”
Without consciously meaning to, Gilgamesh stopped moving for a split-second and furrowed his brow. A mind that should have been concentrating on Rider’s angle of attack instead noted with some confusion that Rider was, in fact, actually wearing pants. The pause was almost too long.
Almost.
Gilgamesh threw the fire sword upward. Sparks shot off in all directions, singeing his cheeks. One of them burned a thin path through Rider’s disturbingly vertical hair.
Immediately, the Golden King swiped his ice blade across Rider’s chest. He was rewarded by a hiss of pain. And blood. Lots of blood.
But then, Rider’s wrist twisted. The motion sent Gil’s sword spinning into the air. It also sent Rider’s blade deep into Gil’s body. The golden armor folded.
“AAAAGH!”
The scream was mutual. But then, Gilgamesh could think pretty well through waves of pain. Always had.
The Chains of Heaven shot through the Gate. They wrapped around Rider’s legs, sending him sprawling onto the ground. His sword clattered as it fell.
Gilgamesh half-ran, half-limped over. He kicked Rider’s sword away, and then drove his own weapon into his fallen opponent’s chest.
Rider’s shout of pain was loud and delectable. Gilgamesh drank it like wine. Such was the price of marring his perfect body. Especially his nose.
“Addy last words, bongrel?”
Rider looked up through that mop of hair. His breaths were ragged. Gilgamesh could hear the wet slur from blood in his lungs. Yet for some reason, he was still grinning.
“I was tanking for the g!rli3.”
“…What.”
And then, Gilgamesh sensed it. The surge of power to his right.
“EX-“
No. No. No.
“gg, Archer,” Rider said.
Gilgamesh wheeled so quickly that he nearly toppled over. His eyes snapped to the tiny, glittering figure in the distance.
“Sab—“
“-CALIBUR!”
Light hurtled toward him, vaporizing everything in its path. His armor melted at its caress. A wall of destruction. And it was beautiful.
With that final realization, the Golden King reentered the realm of myth.
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Originally Posted by RadiantBeam
