Inside the church
"How can he smile in a situation like that?"
Snowfield's largest church stood across the street from the hospital. In one corner of it, a woman muttered, drawing in her breath.
"And?" A somber man's voice echoed from behind her. "Judging by your gaze, miss...may I presume that you are that Saber's Master?"
The words of the priest dispatched by the Holy Church to oversee this Holy Grail War, Hansa Cervantes, caused the blonde woman who had been peering out the window, Ayaka Sajō, to glance briefly in his direction and then shake her head.
"I'm...not a Master."
"Oh? But I sense a path of magical energy linking you. Aren't you here in this church to seek sanctuary?"
"...No. I only came because Saber said this would be the safest place nearby."
Ayaka spoke brusquely, but with the bare minimum of courtesy for the priest's station.
Hansa was not especially put out and joined her in looking out the window at the street as he continued.
"Good grief. This is supposed to be a shelter. I can't have people treating it like a watchtower or a trench. Oh well, it's not a big deal. Using whatever you can is what war's all about. Especially wars between mages."
Hansa shifted his attention slightly upward and let out an aggrieved sigh.
"It looks like a Heroic Spirit's gotten up on the roof. Honestly, what does he think this sacred church is?"
X X
"I took you for a mere fly, but I see you are a shameless beggar."
The Heroic Spirit on the church roof appeared to take an interest in Richard for the first time. He turned not just his gaze, but his head to face him.
The golden Heroic Spirit looked down with less anger than pity in his eyes. Richard continued unperturbed.
"I suppose it was rude to ask you to give them to me! I would love to buy them, if I can afford them price!"
Richard persisted in speaking casually to the golden Heroic Spirit.
"But having laid eyes on such treasures, I can't suppress the feelings they inspire in me! I'd run into battle with as many of them as I can carry if I could! I assume, given your preemptive strike, that we're already at war, but for such fine pieces, I want to do things properly no matter the circumstances! I'd like to borrow these weapons as I please while we fight! How does that sound to you?"
"You have some nerve to joke like that while laying your hands on them so casually, mongrel!" The golden Archer scowled. "Still, it seems you have eyes to appreciate fine workmanship before letting glitter cloud your mind. As a reward, I shall permit you to stain my treasures with your blood. Receive it gladly."
By the time he finished speaking, he had already taken action and launched dozens more weapons out of thin air. They rained mercilessly down on Richard, who held both the new sword he had taken and the one he had come with.
They were slightly faster and more numerous than the previous attack.
Richard weaved between the weapons, planting his feet on the chunks of rubble they flung up and using them as stepping stones to leap high into the air.
"Since I'm risking my life for this joke, I'd like another favor from you!"
Then, twirling like an acrobat, he unleashed a weighty series of strikes.
"What I want isn't blood on your weapons."
"Oh-ho..."
"It's to leave just a little scratch on your magnificent armor."
Evading the oncoming swarm of deadly blows, Richard changed direction in midair.
He completely changed course without a stepping stone of any kind.
Although he must have been under considerable strain, he contorted his body still further, adding the force of his rotation to make his sword reach the golden Heroic Spirit.
Seeing that, the scowling Heroic Spirit drew the sword in his own hand.
"So, you, a mere gladiator, weave magecraft!"
The golden Heroic Spirit parried the nearly-surprise attack and dropped to the roof one level below the belfry, glaring at Richard, who held one of his treasures.
He did not shout angrily or lose his composure; his tone remained one of rebuke for a lack of courtesy.
"No, that wasn't me."
Richard judged that he was still unable to so much as bring the golden Heroic Spirit down into his arena and readied his swords again, grinning provocatively up at his opponent.
"It's a little joke my retinue played on you."
X X
"...He's fast."
The grotesque bowman, Alkeides, kept his distance and observed the new contender's capabilities with a cool gaze that belied his wild appearance.
His dexterity was probably about on par with the Amazon Rider's on horseback.
Alkeides could sense no divinity from him, which told him that the Heroic Spirit had been formed as a pure human.
His speed, however, surpassed human limitations and the magical energy that swirled around him was shrouded in a strange magical energy that was neither human nor divine.
He isn't strong enough to make my blood run cold. But purely in terms of speed, he may outmatch me. Depending on his Noble Phantasm, he merits caution.
Alkeides then recalled the power, similar to magical energy, that surged from Saber's body.
It was like...the Naiads that abducted my attendant Hylas...
He was on the verge of dredging up memories of the time he had left the Argonauts from the depths of his Spirit Origin when he was forced to abandon that train of thought.
The police officers around him had gotten back into formation and were showing signs of resuming their assault on him.
"Humph... I must apologize for focusing on other enemies during our confrontation."
"...You have no intention of withdrawing?" One of the officers asked.
Alkeides shook his head.
"Just as you have those you must protect, I have things I must steal. There is no need for us to understand each other. If anyone could find common ground with my intentions, such a villain would also be my enemy."
He would vanquish those who opposed him.
Those who made peace with him he would also destroy.
It sounded unreasonable in the extreme, but Alkeides continued as if to test the officers.
"What I am going to do is to slaughter a child unable to comprehend my reasons. Once I have done that, I will have no business with you. Will any of you forsake a child to save your own skins?"
He gripped his bow as he posed the question.
He did not draw the string. He merely gripped it.
Even so, if he were to suddenly swing his bow, casualties would result.
The quality of the Noble Phantasms the police officers held didn't matter.
The Heroic Spirit standing before them was beyond such distinctions.
All of their legs were shaking, but still, in spite of that, they did not flee. They did not even look away.
They were not unafraid. Some of them were holding back tears and chattering teeth. If this had been a normal mission, they would have called a temporary retreat.
But they understood.
If they retreated here, it would be the end.
There would be no heavily armed riot squad or National Guard coming to deal with the vicious criminal. Even if there were, they would never be more capable of facing him than they, armed with Noble Phantasms, already were.
They were the best.
They were there because they were the best pawns that the police, as an organization, had to offer.
They couldn't say whether that was a suggestion that their chief had implanted in them or routine that had seeped into them as autosuggestion. They, who were registered as Clan Calatin, had only their chief's assurance.
"You are justice."
Just those words without anything to support them.
But to those who believed them, those words were a spell, or perhaps a blessing, that bound action and fate.
And the one most bound by those words was a young officer who stood on the battlefield despite the loss of his right arm.
X X
Orlando Reeve, chief of the Snowfield Police Department, was one of the managers—or one might say the masterminds—of the "Fake Holy Grail War."
As far as the ordinary citizens were concerned, one of his subordinates, John Wingard, could have been called the ideal police officer.
When he had been barely old enough to understand what was happening, he had seen his mother's death on TV.
John's father had quickly turned it off to shield his son from that flame-shrouded scene, but that instant of fire had been indelibly engraved in John's mind.
His mother had been a police officer who had received numerous commendations for her achievements. He remembered that his generally unemotional father had told young John about his mother as bedtime stories to stop his crying.
When he thought back on it, it may have been a kind of curse.
Since then, John had been chasing the shadow of the mother he barely remembered.
He hadn't been told that his father was a mage, even by the time he joined the police force.
John was a third son and his oldest brother was to be the next head of the family, so as a mage he had only been regarded as his brother's spare.
His father had apparently concealed his true identity even from John's mother, but it seemed that higher-ups in the United States government, or rather certain departments that dealt with the field of magecraft, had been aware of his existence.
When it came to dealing with Mystery, no nation, no matter how powerful, could help lagging behind the Holy Church and the Mages Association.
It was in that context that John had been summoned to a certain police facility and informed of his origins. His father had apparently already agreed. John had been sold to the state on the condition that his father, who was estranged from the Mages Association, would receive the government's financial backing.
John had been confused, but the instant he actually performed magecraft himself, his skepticism vanished and he had been forced to accept the reality.
He had felt fear.
If this power really existed, then just how many cases had it been used to cover up? How many unsolved cases involved magecraft? How many innocent people had been wrongly convicted due to false information?
He could understand the concept of concealing Mystery. He could not, however, understand the concept of sacrificing others to do so.
For mages, it was a matter of course, but John had been raised as an ordinary person. In the midst of his anger at the unreasonable nature of mage society, Orlando Reeve had spoken to him.
"When heretics commit outrages, it takes other heretics to keep them in line."
John, having been headhunted by Orlando and assigned to a unit under his direct command, was transferred to Snowfield, where he learned a shocking truth.
"This city is going to become a battlefield for mages. Now that the government has taken action, there's no way to stop that.
"We could fight the government, but that wouldn't even be recklessness; it would be folly.
"That being the case, our duty is to continue to maintain order while it happens. We need to proof to all mages that here, the border with the world of magecraft is guarded.
"Never forget: if we fail, at worst eight hundred thousand people will be sacrificed."
He did not agree with everything the chief said.
He had even made attempts to get that plan abandoned, sure that no government could be so cruel.
The more he learned about the plan, however, the more he understood that no individual effort could possibly change anything in time. He came to believe that the course the chief proposed was the most rational.
They would take control of the course of the Holy Grail War and suppress the situation before harm came to ordinary citizens.
John believed that if they could do that, it would stand as proof.
If they had the power to overcome Heroic Spirits, the ultimate familiars, then they would become a major check against mages just by continuing to be there.
John did not understand that the monsters called mages would never stop for that sort of common sense. To mages, who would treat even their own lives as pawns in order to reach the Origin, a "check" that consisted only of great strength was just a fine subject for observation.
Not having been brought up as a mage, John could not even comprehend the cunning wiles that the Mages Association and the Holy Church, custodians of Mystery in the true sense, employed to spread their roots throughout the world.
And there was one more thing he had not understood.
No matter how spectacular a weapon he had, no matter how he honed his magecraft, mind, and body...there were horrifying monsters out there that would return it all to nothing.
The moment John realized that was the moment that the monster commonly known as a "Dead Apostle" that called itself Jester Karture had taken his right arm.
He had lost his arm completely when it had been "eaten" by the hematophage that called itself a Dead Apostle during the assault on the police station the day before. But because his supporter, Caster—Alexandre Dumas—had provided him with a new prosthetic arm, the chief of police had reluctantly permitted his return to active duty.
He had only been permitted to return as support for the other members of Clan Calatin and not to stand on the front lines...but they had quickly lost the ability to maintain a formation with any distinction between front and rear lines. Half of the nearly thirty police officers armed with Noble Phantasms had sustained injuries and were unable to move normally. It was the most the remaining members could do to maintain any kind of formation at all and were in no condition to put up a proper fight on their own now that Jack the Ripper had retreated.
They had also not anticipated another Heroic Spirit they had obtained information about in advance, Gilgamesh the King of Heroes, joining the fray.
He was currently engaged in combat with the newly arrived Saber, but the King of Heroes' fighting style was both bizarre and straightforward. He forced his opponents to surrender their lives through the force of overwhelming quantity. They had heard about his indiscriminately firing Noble Phantasms, but now that they actually saw it, they could do nothing but dumbly let the scene burn itself into their eyes.
John even wondered for a moment if they were only confronting the grotesque bowman in order to avoid facing the reality of the King of Heroes' power, but the Heroic Spirit in front of them was no less dangerous, so he abandoned the comparison as meaningless.
"What I am going to do is to slaughter a child unable to comprehend my reasons. Once I have done that, I will have no business with you. Will any of you forsake a child to save your own skins?" The bowman before them asked solemnly.
They had no obligation to answer him...but John opened his mouth before he knew what he was doing.
"If there were, I wouldn't laugh and I wouldn't be disappointed, either. But that doesn't mean I can let you through."
"Oh? You won't run, then?"
"...If I were keeping my cool and thinking ahead, I'd want to run. I doubt I'll be able to beat you no matter what I do... But I'm afraid of abandoning a kid in exchange for a future and a cool head."
After hearing that answer and scrutinizing John for a moment, however, the grotesque bowman made a strange pronouncement.
"...You have courage, son of man. I would not call you foolhardy. For that, I pity you."
"...?"
"No..." The bowman said to the bewildered John. "It's none of your concern."
The next instant, the bowman was standing right in front of John.
"Wha...?"
The movement appeared instantaneous, but it was achieved not through speed due to physical strength, but by moving in a gap in their attention.
The movement testified to the fact that the grotesque bowman did not rely solely on physical strength, but was also possessed of skill achieved through superhuman training. John, however, did not despair at it.
He had no time to appreciate the difference in power before the massive bow struck his neck.
Then, before he even knew what had happened to him, and before he had a chance to prove that he could fight with the prosthetic arm Dumas had given him...John Wingard was sent flying with a broken neck and smashed into the hospital's glass entrance door with a loud crash.
Originally Posted by RCM9698
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