Chapter 15
Gold and Lions II
The King of Heroes clad in golden armor—Gilgamesh the "judge"—was still standing where he had started on the roof of the church.
The church roof was pincushioned with Noble Phantasm and had collapsed in places, but the ward set on it must have been powerful, because it remained barely recognizable as a roof.
To a casual observer, it looked like a beautiful dance.
Tine and the other mages actually watching the scene through farseeing spells were captivated by the sight of Saber dancing in the gap between life and death with incredible speed.
It was a contest between kings, but it was certainly not equal. The golden king stood on high and the other king struggled to supplant him. Taken the other way round, it looked like a greater king passing judgment on a lesser one.
But that was why he charged. If they were both kings, then which of them was superior would change with time and circumstance. Their battle was a struggle for that height. One might call it the world's smallest-scale "war," waged between the kings' Spirit Origins.
Of course, one of those kings was armed with the innumerable Noble Phantasms that his subjects had made and he had collected. The other, in contrast, had only seven "supporters."
The golden king and judge showered Saber with attacks without ever dropping his guard. Nonetheless, the king once said to "have the heart of a lion" kept up his advance, pushing himself to even greater speeds as he narrowly avoided death.
Superhuman speed.
It was usual for a battle between Heroic Spirits to appear superhuman. Even taking that into account, however, Saber's swiftness was extraordinary.
Speed due to his fundamental abilities as a Heroic Spirit.
Speed boosted through magecraft.
Speed that could only be attributed to some kind of "divine protection" associated with anecdotes of his exploits and bestowed on him by the Throne.
By combining all of them, he darted this way and that across the cluster of buildings that had become his battlefield with singular speed even for a Heroic Spirit, circling as he slowly but steadily closed distance.
The Lionheart's advance, once begun, was like a gale scything across land and sea. The peerless speed of his march was so great that legend had it "only a general blessed with protection against wind had finally succeeded in halting it."
Incredibly, the Lionheart, said to have raced across the battlefield with three times the speed of an ordinary charge, at last drew close enough for his sword to reach his opponent.
"So, you have the insolence to stand before me."
As good as declaring that he had only just begun, the golden king leapt backward while firing his Gate of Babylon in an effort to put more distance between himself and Saber.
But his efforts gave Saber the perfect opportunity.
"Ex...calibur!"
Saber's sword shone, the arc of its swing becoming a massive band of light that flew at the airborne golden Archer.
"Not so fast!"
Gilgamesh materialized countless shields in front of him, dispersing the band of light.
"To think that you would strike at me with a mere imitation of a relic of the planet. Were we not in the middle of your trial, such folly would merit death, mongrel! ....Hm?"
When the scattered light dissipated and the countless floating shields scattered, Saber was no longer to be seen in front of the golden king.
As he landed, he sensed immense magical energy from behind him, lower down the slanted roof of the church. The golden Archer turned to look, his eyes narrowed, and saw Saber with his sword poised to strike.
"Ex...calibur!"
A second band of light was fired up the slope. It was blocked by the countless shields, as the first had been...but this strike was an order of magnitude more powerful. It pushed the shields back, lifting the golden king several meters into the air.
"How dare you..."
The golden king saw through the gaps in his shield wall that Saber was holding one of the Noble Phantasms that he himself had fired.
"I told you I was going to borrow them, didn't I?"
Saber, still clutching the long sword, instantaneously slipped in directly underneath his airborne foe and made radiance envelop the blade once more.
The first time he had released the true name of his Noble Phantasm, the decorative sword he had originally held had shattered with a single strike. The Noble Phantasm shrouded in the aura of the age of the gods, however, remained intact after his second true name release and retained its properties as his Noble Phantasm.
He unleashed magical energy in a third band of light.
The golden king deployed shields beneath him and blocked the attack, but he was pushed higher into the air.
Then came the fourth band of light.
Saber gave his opponent no time to recover and followed it with a fifth and a sixth slash of light aimed skyward from the church roof.
Even more frighteningly, the interval between strikes was steadily shrinking. By the time he got past his twentieth slash, they had become a massive, continuous band of light firing from the earth into the night sky.
As if to say that this, too, was both an infinite series of blows and a never-ending single strike.
X X
Several minutes earlier, the hospital's front parking lot
A short while earlier.
In the parking lot situated between the hospital and Main Street.
The area had been cleared of people, so there were hardly any cars parked in the moderately spacious lot and no obstacles up to the hospital entrance that John had been flung into.
The attack on John had triggered every police officer with strength to spare to spring into action at once. Each of them held a different Noble Phantasm. "Fake" Noble Phantasms—mere relics that had lost their original Mystery and magical energy, but whose legends had been overwritten by Caster.
It would be fair to say that they attacked with every trick they could think of—feints, sneak attacks from blind spots, and more. It could even be justly said that their teamwork had improved since their battle with Assassin at the police station.
And yet Archer, having stolen Berserker's Noble Phantasm and gain the power of a demon, did not even make an effort to dodge them or to deflect them with his weapon. He took every blade and projectile aimed at him, but they had no apparent effect.
"Shit... Is he the same as that Dead Apostle Jester...?" One of the officers ground his teeth.
Memories of the moment they had been crushed in the police station flashed through their minds. Faced with what was becoming a repeat of that defeat, the members of Clan Calatin never considered fleeing. If they retreated, they would lose their raison d'être called "justice."
Like John, they carried their chief's nearly-hypnotic words. That said, an honorable death was not what they wanted. They continued to think of ways they might stop the monster confronting them.
While they thought, the now-grotesque Archer advanced.
But every attack they aimed at his vitals was stopped by the cloth he wore. When they attacked his exposed arms and sides, in contrast, they felt their attacks connect, but never managed to reach the level of an effective blow.
On top of the cloth that completely nullified their attacks, his bare body's specs must have been extraordinary as well. Given that he had also absorbed the demon's power—although the police officers did not understand exactly what had happened—they supposed that his endurance and resistance to magical energy must have improved as a result.
In that case, did the enemy facing them have any weaknesses at all?
While the words "give up" ran through the officers' heads, the grotesque bowman was steadily advancing step by step.
"...? Why doesn't he just rush us?" One officer asked.
"Yeah," another answered, "he could probably knock all of us out of his way in no time..."
At that, a woman who had been coolly observing the situation from a short distance away—Vera Levitt, the police chief's aide-de-camp and effectively one of the leaders of Clan Calatin—said:
"He's probably on his guard."
She was a true mage as well as a police officer.
Although she had been born the younger daughter of a mage bloodline, her elder sister's Magic Circuits were poor, and so she had been brought up by her mother, who carried on the family's Magic Crest. Her elder sister Amelia worked in Snowfield as a doctor, still ignorant of the world of magecraft.
Because her lineage had cooperated in running this Holy Grail War, Vera, as the heir, had joined the war having inherited a portion of her mother's Magic Crest. It was an incomplete succession, given that the Crest transplant was not yet complete, but her strength stood out among Clan Calatin and it would be no exaggeration to call her the chief's right hand.
Her next action was to take a little glass test tube that did not match her modern gear from her belt of equipment. She threw it in front of the enemy bowman and fired at it with the peculiarly decorated revolver she held.
Her bullet accurately pierced the test tube. A moment later, a smokescreen spread over a wide area.
And no ordinary smokescreen—a smokescreen charged with magical energy of a randomly shifting nature. Call it jamming for magical energy perception.
Watching the dense smoke—which naturally also obscured his vision—spread, the bowman muttered in a low voice:
"...Impudence."
Then, he moved his enormous body in a great leap, avoiding the smoke.
Vera had read the situation correctly.
The grotesque bowman—Alkeides—was wary, not of the police force, but of other factors—Saber, who had appeared without warning, and the King of Heroes, who had entered combat with him. They were fighting each other for the moment, but there was no telling when they might turn their attacks on him. He could also sense another Heroic Spirit's Spirit Origin on Saber's side and the presence of the monster that had stopped his initial attack on the hospital with a "shield of water" had not vanished.
This was not a duel to be fought honorably; it was a never-ending melee in which one had to outwit one's opponents and could not afford to show even the least opening at one's back.
Alkeides understood that. He could slaughter the police force spreading out and attacking him in an instant, but he would have to proceed carefully to do it without creating an opening. That was because the police force possessed more than a certain level of power. What they had acquired, the resolve to risk their lives, had not been for nothing.
There were twenty-five police officers on the scene. The rest remained in the station to guard the chief and to gather information. The bowman's hellhound—Kerberos—had appeared just as they had been about to dispatch an advance team to their target's hospital room, so none of them had reached the hospital room yet.
"How many do we send to Kuruoka Tsubaki's room?"
"If the Servant possessing Kuruoka Tsubaki is hostile, a small team will end up dying for nothing," Vera whispered her opinion to a female officer with a bow Noble Phantasm. "I would have liked to send Berserker, who could have dealt with it alone, but..."
Berserker had suffered serious damage to his spirit origin and had likely withdrawn with the aid of Flat's Command Spells.
"...If the Servant is capable of understanding that Kuruoka Tsubaki is being targeted, it should take action to protect its Master. The fact that she still hasn't withdrawn from the hospital means that either it hasn't noticed what's happening, doesn't intend to protect her...or is confident that it can protect her without moving."
Vera, thinking that the latter would be preferable, produced another several test tubes and scattered them around her. No sooner had the tubes, thrown with the aid of magecraft, flown through the air to cover a wide area than bullets shattered all of them, spreading more smoke over the area.
Vera was about to order someone to scout out the hospital room, taking advantage of the delay, when...
"A wasted effort."
The grotesque Archer flapped the demon wings that grew from his back, kicking up a wind charged with dense magical energy around him. The wind carrying sinister magical energy formed a number of small whirlwinds and began to catch the smoke as if devouring it.
"How are we supposed to deal with this shit...?" One of the officers asked, his cheek twitching.
Despair began to spread across the officers' faces...when a lone figure dashed through the smokescreen.
"Stop! It's no use!"
The officers called out to restrain the figure. They could not see its face clearly through the windstorms and trailing smoke, but they could tell that it wore the same uniform as they did.
Alkeides judged it to be a reckless charge.
No matter what sort of attack the approaching police officer attempted, it would have no effect on him. If he struck with his bare fists, the blow would ignore the protection of the Nemean lion's pelt, but in that case the attack would not even scratch him unless it was charged with a great deal of magical energy.
If he drew his bow, both of his hands would be occupied for an instant. That would obviously present the other Heroic Spirits with an opening. The King of Heroes, in particular, was capable of sending a lethal strike his way even while crossing swords with Saber. Even a "stray shot" could prove fatal if it happened to strike a gap in the Nemean lion's pelt.
If he only possessed the Noble Phantasm that gave him twelve lives, which had been left before his metamorphosis, he would probably have given little thought to the possibility and drawn his bow with all his might...but his present did not merit leaving such an opening.
In that case, he decided, he need only brush the attacker aside with one blow of his arm, as he had done to that first brave officer whose neck he had shattered.
Alkeides raised his arm and waited for the police officer concealed by the darkness and smoke to approach him.
Then, that instant, he sense immense magical energy swell up behind him.
"!"
This magical energy... Saber.
The Saber who had been fighting with Gilgamesh must have fired some kind of Noble Phantasm. Sensing that its magical energy was aimed not at him, but at the sky, Alkeides did not take his eyes off the small threat closing in on him from the front. It was an action born of his refusal to drop his guard against even the weakest enemy.
No.
It was not that he did not look away.
He could not look away.
It was an effect produced by his "mind's eye."
It was not instinct.
His accumulated skill and experience, his honed senses, and the flesh and blood that comprised him all dominated his spirit and refused to let him look away.
It was not the other Heroic Spirits he ought to truly be wary of.
It was the lone police officer closing in on him.
Everything he had built up told him so.
The reason why would soon become clear.
Behind Alkeides, a pillar of light pierced the sky and illuminated the face of the approaching police officer before him. At the sight of that face, which appeared through a tear in the smokescreen created by the whirlwinds, Alkeides muttered:
"What...?"
It was unmistakably the face of the man whose neck he had broken and who he had sent flying into the hospital entrance a short while before.
"Ooooooaaah!"
The officer let out a wordless roar and kicked the ground.
His instantaneous acceleration exceeded Alkeides' expectations. His arm moved to block, but before it could reach, the man's slight frame sprang at Alkeides with the force of a bullet...and delivered a flying knee to the bridge of the grotesque Archer's cloth-covered nose with all his might.
"J-John?!" The police officers shouted in surprise.
The way John had been sent flying earlier had put the words "instant death" into most of their minds. He might have Magic Circuits, but he lacked the Magic Crest which only one child in a lineage could inherit. If he had had a Crest, which would have performed self-restoration magecraft when he was on the brink of death, it would have been a different story, but no one had imagined that John could survive without one, much less reappear so much stronger that he seemed like a different person.
But he had.
He had reappeared shrouded in magical energy that far surpassed that of an ordinary mage and made use of that energy to enhance his body and nerves severalfold.
John.
I see. So, this man's name is John.
Alkeides, despite taking the flying knee and being knocked backwards, coolly noted information about his opponent as he spun in midair and landed feet-first.
Those feet, however, were swept out from under him by John, who had circled around even farther behind him without his noticing.
"Oh-ho..."
Alkeides sounded impressed. He then caught himself with one arm on the ground and used his free arm to block John's follow-up attack. The shock ran through Alkeides' whole body with a creaking of flesh and bone.
John followed it with a series of bare-handed strikes, continuing to batter Alkeides without giving him a chance to ready his bow.
What happened? He's like a different man... Or should I say he's matured?
He had gone beyond the level of ordinary humans, even for a mage. The experience Alkeides had built up over his lifetime warned him that the power surging from the police officer before him rivaled the enemy generals he had fought in ancient Greece in brute strength.
Is it his Noble Phantasm? Did Caster do something?
Alkeides noted that his body was being damaged, but it was not enough to make him register danger. Compared to when the Amazon queen had struck him using her Noble Phantasm, the pain was like being punched by a child.
And yet...he regarded the man before him with the greatest possible caution.
Why? Alkeides wondered as he fended off the flurry of blows. Why was I wary of this man?
The vortex of magical energy that had sprung up behind him ought to have concerned him more than strikes like these. And yet everything he had accumulated was telling him not to take his eyes off this human.
His strength is certainly more than human, but it hasn't reached the level of a warrior Heroic Spirit.
So why, he wondered as he continued to take blow after blow. His attention was first drawn to the unnaturalness of his opponent's attacks.
...Why doesn't he use his right hand?
Throughout his flurry of unarmed strikes, the police officer called John never attacked with his right hand.
This difference in his center of gravity... A prosthetic?
While attacking and defending at split-second intervals, Alkeides instantaneously deduced the truth of his opponent's unnatural movements.
That being the case, he wondered what that prosthetic hand could be.
Does it conceal a weapon? If so, it won't penetrate this pelt.
No, this man should already know that. Should I assume that it conceals magecraft, then?
Alkeides focused every nerve in his body on John's right arm while evading his close-quarters attacks.
It must be some kind of—No, is it...?
He felt a presence. A slight presence—a unique magical energy, or perhaps a curse—was escaping from the man's prosthetic hand. The instant that presence, which retained faint vestiges of the Age of the Gods, tickled Alkeides' nostrils and skin...
A chill of fear ran down Alkeides' spine.
Having noticed it, his instincts as a Heroic Spirit made him freeze in shock for just an instant.
No matter how much his Spirit Origin changed, it had a special meaning for him. It was because he knew its dangers better than anyone, because he knew the terror of it better than anyone, that he himself had soaked his special arrowheads in it.
"Damn you...!"
The instant Alkeides shouted, John's right arm shone darkly...and a peculiarly shaped blade appeared from it, forming the back of his hand.
A black liquid writhed around the prosthetic blade like a curse with a will of its own. It was one of the greatest calamities and most awful curses of the Age of the Gods, one that had killed countless heroes and even driven a certain great hero to take his own life—Hydra venom.
The blade coiled in that incomparably fiendish toxin closed in on a gap in Alkeides' cloth.
Impossible!
Has it survived into this era?! That water snake shouldn't be able to exist on the surface anymore!
He felt keenly how naïve his thinking had been.
The mages of this era could not hold a candle to those of the Age of the Gods, but they were intelligent enough to wield its remnants. Considering that his own Master likewise harbored the toxic, cursed mud in his body, he should have considered the possibility that his enemies possessed Hydra venom.
Faced with a weapon capable of killing him, Alkeides gripped his bow and leapt backward with all his might.
"...! Hurry! To the hospital!" John shouted to his nearby fellow officers once he was sure Alkeides had distanced himself. "I'll buy as much time as I can! Secure the target while I do!"
"John... What happened to you?!"
"I don't really understand myself...but it looks like Mr. Caster pulled something off for me!"
John then made to dash off, as if to say that they could talk later...when a chill ran through his body this time, causing him to stop in his tracks in spite of himself.
"...?"
John strained his eyes, his whole body breaking out in a cold sweat.
The grotesque bowman stood over twenty meters ahead of him. The intimidating air rising from him had magnified severalfold.
John had no difficulty figuring out why—the bowman had nocked an arrow to his bow.
He had fired arrows several times before, but this was different. He was serious.
The grotesque bowman spoke, paying his respects to John, who was trying to advance in spite of the chill.
"You who possess the means to kill me,
"I acknowledge you as my foe."
Originally Posted by Deathhappens
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