Even as a pitiable police officer was about to lose his life, the duel between Richard and the golden Archer continued to unfold on the roof of the church.
The golden Heroic Spirit kept up a relentless series of attacks while still managing to appear unruffled. He nevertheless shot the occasional inquisitive glance at Richard, who continued to dodge his assault, and posed a question to him without dropping his haughty demeanor.
"Mongrel, I permit you to answer my questions."
"I'm honored."
He slackened his attacks, but there was no complacency or conceit in his opponent's eyes.
Richard could see plainly that taking advantage of the opportunity to charge in would only lead to his taking the brunt of a heavy counterattack. He therefore decided to halt for the moment and listen to what his opponent had to say.
"You've scraped through a similar predicament before, haven't you? I can tell by the way you dodge."
"Yes," Richard answered with a shrug, "I went through the same thing yesterday. It was all the other side up, though."
"...What became of your opponent?"
"We made friends. Our Masters—well, contractors—seemed to get along too."
Richard corrected himself in deference to Ayaka denying being his Master, but that did not seem to make much difference to his opponent, who showed no particular reaction to it. Richard failed to notice, however, that the golden Heroic Spirit's eyelids twitched in surprise at the words "we made friends." Even so, he could tell that his mood had changed.
Until then, he had been "eliminating an insolent pest." Now, however, his animosity had lessened and a different mood was filling the area in its place. It was an atmosphere that Richard had surrounded himself with in life, but that fact was lost on his present self.
"I see... They may be my friend, but they are as soft on others as ever."
The golden Heroic Spirit spoke with a wry smile. His words puzzled Richard, who had a bad a feeling about what was coming.
"What?"
"My friend." I've heard this somewhere before.
One day earlier, to be precise. When he had proposed an alliance to the Heroic Spirit he had met in the vast forest.
"You see, that one best friend of mine is rather hard to please. Whenever I try to make friends or form an alliance with someone, he says, 'I shall test you to see if you are worthy of my friend,' or something like that and chases them off with unreasonable demands."
Then, Richard noticed that, unlike earlier, all the space around him had begun to distort.
Oh, this looks like I'm going to die, doesn't it?
Surrounded on all sides by the Noble-Phantasm-launching distortions, Richard sensed "death" with every inch of his body.
The golden hero addressed him just as the Lancer Richard had met in the forest had said he would.
"I shall test you to see if you are worthy of my friend."
"Hey now, just because someone might take your friend doesn't..."
Richard began to crack a joke, but cut himself short.
He was not unperceptive. One look at the golden hero's expression was enough to tell him that his opponent could not be motivated simple covetousness, jealously, or any other vulgar emotion.
"Please forget I said that. It was immature of me."
"You did well to stop yourself. You have my compliments. If you had finished that sentence, I would have struck off your head and ended this without even bothering to test you."
Then, the golden hero addressed Richard not as a king, nor as a warrior, nor as a Heroic Spirit, but as a judge.
"Circumstances have changed. Mongrel, I acknowledge you not as riffraff, but as a 'seeker' worthy of my trial. If you survive, you will be my friend's ally and my certain 'enemy.'
"Should that time come, I will permit you to leave your blood on my treasures again, this time as a 'person.' Consider yourself honored."
X X
__________
Click, clack, clatter.
Clusters of little sounds wandered through the man's darkness.
Whispering voices mixed with the sounds of hard objects colliding faintly vibrated John's eardrums.
The metallic sounds, which refused to stop even while the voices spoke, sounded rough, but to John they seemed to have a musical elegance.
"Where am I...?"
He slowly raised himself.
Strangely, he felt no pain, but all his other sensations were hazy. Only smell tickled his mind—an appetizing scent the included fruit liqueur and toasting butter.
Then John realized that he was in a restaurant. Warm, orange light filled the air, but it was not electric light; it was the glow of candle flames.
John could see a single man sitting at the enormous long table illuminated by that glow, surrounded by stunningly beautiful women chatted amiably and occasionally refilled the man's glass.
"Um...I..."
When John tried to speak to the people around the table, the man elegantly wiped his mouth with a napkin and then leisurely turned to face him.
"Hey there. I see you're up."
"What...? Mr. Du—Caster?!"
It was Alexandre Dumas, the Caster who had made a contract with the chief of police and who was well known to John and the other members of Clan Calatin. Only his hair stuck up more and he seemed a little larger than when John had met him in his workshop.
"Um, what am I doing here...? Where's everyone else?"
At that point, John realized that Dumas was not looking at him.
"Huh?"
John tried to touch a candlestick, but his hand passed right through it. And that was not all—a beautiful woman carrying food passed walked right through him like a ghost. At that, John realized that he did not exist in that place.
His brief training as a mage must have borne fruit, because he recognized that this was no ordinary dream, but something of mystical significance.
"Relax. This is a restaurant. It's kinda high-class, though, so try not to make a scene. Friend or foe, I suggest you listen to what I've got to say for now."
At first it seemed like Dumas was speaking to John, but his words were actually directed at someone standing behind and a little to the side of him.
John was still confused, but he steeled himself and slowly turned to look behind him.
And there...stood a single wounded man.
Part of his body was wrapped in bandages, stained here and there by oozing blood. But both the white of the bandages and the dark red of the freshly dried blood were quickly wiped from his impression of the man.
Black.
The blackness of the man's coat seemed to express the color of his soul.
His skin was pale to the point of being sickly and his hair was far from dark. He must have been caught up in some serious trouble, because while John caught glimpses of fine clothes such as a nobleman might wear under his coat, the coat itself looked scorched all over. Still, John could not help feeling that the blackness of that coat was the man's true nature.
While John hesitated, the man in the black coat continued to glare warily at Dumas without uttering a word.
Dumas, perhaps sensing the man's bloodlust, shrugged and waved a hand.
"Oh, I take that back. I'm not a fan of getting killed, so let me make it clear that I'm not your enemy. If I were, you'd be on a ship to Hell by now. Am I wrong? Actually, considering the 'enemies' you took on, you'd be lucky if a trip to Hell was the worst you got."
Dumas picked up a nearby pitcher of water and poured it into a glass as he continued.
"Anyway, have a drink. If you need someone to taste it for poison, I'll do the honors."
At that, the pitch-black man addressed Dumas without relaxing his guard.
"Who are you...? Do you...know about me...?"
"Yeah, you could say that. I'm not directly involved, but I happened to find out about you. About what you've managed to get done and about what you're trying to do now."
At that, the dark man slowly rose to his feet, warier than ever. Dumas held out the glass of water to him and nodded at the seat across the table, as if testing him.
"Have a seat. A count shouldn't be standing around like that."
"..."
"Oh, or would you rather I call you something else?"
Then, Dumas uttered a proper name that was both the other man's outer surface and his innermost core.
"Edmond Dantès. Nice name. It'd look great in print, you know?
"Although 'Le Comte de Monte-Cristo' would make a better title for a novel."
X X
Central Snowfield
"A trial, is it?" Richard asked the man standing on the roof with him as he readied his sword.
"I see. I thought you were an Archer, but are you perhaps of the Ruler Class?"
Richard, drawing on the knowledge bestowed on him by the Grail, mentioned an Extra Class.
The golden Heroic Spirit, however, laughed scornfully.
"Fool. A Ruler in a Holy Grail War is merely an impartial scale that judges by the world's standards. There is nothing impartial about my judgments. The path I have walked and the wealth I have piled in my treasury are the scales that will judge you."
Faced with a Heroic Spirit who ostentatiously declared that he was the rules, Richard grinned cheerfully and nodded.
"A fool, am I? I get that a lot."
Richard sighed, resting his sword on his shoulder and glancing down at the road.
"I only came here in the first place because I heard that the guards who defend this city were going to investigate a Heroic Spirit spreading a mysterious plague and thought I might be able to do something to help. I suppose that encounters in the Holy Grail War do naturally lead to fighting."
"Do not dissemble, mongrel," the golden Heroic Spirit laughed scornfully. "What do you have to lament? You are enjoying this situation more than anyone."
"..."
Richard flashed a fearless grin by way of an answer and posed a question of his own to the golden Heroic Spirit.
"You know...your friend called that plague the 'black curse.' Those guards have assembled to do something about it, am I right? Are you certain you don't want to help him? We could always form an alliance."
Richard, who insisted on calling the police officers "guards," recalled what his ally Lancer had told him—that "if the curse and mud mix," it would be "a disaster"—while he waited for an answer.
The golden Heroic Spirit, however, kept his arms folded and his eyes fixed on Richard.
"That impertinent spell? I will blast it away when it shows itself. Nothing you do will alter that outcome. It is making itself a bit of a nuisance, but executing the source of the curse will put an end to that."
"I see. It's true that I've only just arrived and don't fully grasp the situation, but it sounds like your 'trial' will take everything I've got."
Richard cracked his neck and inquired about his current predicament.
"It's not just my life on the scales; it's my whole past and future all taken together. Isn't that right?"
"Enough chatter. Are you a fool who needs everything spelled out for him?"
Richard watched the golden Servant make this unreasonable declaration with a wry grin.
"I see. I can accept that. So, this is already a battlefield with survival on the line."
Then, as he spoke his next words, the Lionheart sprang into action.
"The pact is made. I'll take the words we just exchanged for war cries...and launch my invasion."
The instant he stepped forward, the distortions in the air around him began to shine. Then, as if all the stars that blanketed the night sky had fallen, innumerable Noble Phantasms rained down on Snowfield.
Richard leapt to the roof of the building next door to the church as "judgment" closed in on him from all sides. It was both an infinite series of blows and a never-ending single strike. Death closing in from every direction with no end in sight.
But Richard was not a beast to simply let himself be hunted. He was, after all, a Heroic Spirit who had manifested in the Saber Class, said to be the "best" of the seven.
Faced with the trial of the unfathomable golden Heroic Spirit, Richard began to unleash his own power as a hero with the Spirit Origin of a king.
The rain of Noble Phantasms poured down, some fast and some slow. Richard leapt on the roof as he wove his way between them.
Onrushing Noble Phantasms.
Richard kicked one of the weapons and twisted his body, dodging the flurry of blows that followed by a hair's breadth.
His movements were too rough to be called acrobatics and too elegant to called combat. He charged into the center of the oncoming blows, any one of which would prove fatal if it struck him, and as he had just declared, used his overwhelming speed to launch an invasion of that territory of death.
Richard readied the sword in his hand while contorting his body and slashed upward into the air with all his might. The radiance that overflowed from the arc of his swing scythed through the onrushing blades and created a new path for him to launch his own attack.
Even so, one wrong move would still cost him his life.
He walked that fine line between life and death with superhuman speed and muttered, not to anyone, but to encourage himself.
"I may not have many qualities that can match yours."
It was almost like a contract with himself.
"But...
"When it comes to speed, I'm more than your match."
Originally Posted by OtherSideofSky
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
