Alemania Avenue, Valparaíso
Day 02
Evening Phase - 10
Severe Cold (-32 °C/-25.6 °F)
Snowfall
(BGM)
“Well, that was quite something.”
“Um, it’s a good thing Miss Forvedge doesn’t live on the top floor,” murmured Sakura in awe.
“Eh? Ah, the building, right. Sorry, I was looking at something else.”
Assassin is guiding Sakura towards the Costa Mirador Building, whose rooftop has been literally shaved off. A cloud of dust rises at the base of the building, where pieces of concrete, steel and glass have fallen like deadly rain. Maria has somehow channeled her awesome radiance into an attack, and launched it towards Archer’s location.
“That’s…a little too simple to be a Noble Phantasm, but it doesn’t seem to be something she can do at will; otherwise she’d have used it this morning,” Assassin does not bother keeping her analysis to herself. “Or it may just be a spur of the moment and she won’t be able to pull it off ever again.”
“Is it safe to go there now…?”
“Well…” Assassin rests the back of her head on her hands. “Archer probably avoided that attack, but he wouldn’t stay in that spot. I’d say he is either moving to a different sniping spot, or retreating altogether. He’s now learned that taking Saver out won’t be as simple as it seemed. In any case, it should be safe there for now…unless a piece of building drops on your head or something.”
“Um, I’ll keep an eye for that.”
Assassin can easily figure out what is going through Sakura’s head. However, she acts not on that. It is not her place, she is not friends with Sakura Edelfelt, and she has no intention to become friends with her. So, they walk in moody silence, with the strange Servant leaving Sakura to her ruminations and self-criticism, with no other accompaniment but the howls of the wind and the ever-more-distant sounds of superhuman combat.
*** ***
Bismarck Square, Cárcel Hill, Valparaíso
watches the distant wreckage she had created with a cold gaze. It was the strongest Aura Slash she has unleashed, but she is not so delusional so as to believe it was a direct hit on Archer. Well, the point was to make him stop annoying her.
Unhesitatingly, she turns her back to the smoking building.
(BGM)
Without care for the obscene amount of magical energy she put into that attack, she turns her attention to the square. At the center, Lancer awaits, the close grip of his hands on the great spear belying his straight, seemingly relaxed posture.
“The woman has been taken to safety,” he declares. “I seek not to spill blood pointlessly.”
Stopping some eight to ten meters away, Maria stares at the Servant of the spear, her inhuman eyes incapable of projecting an emotion other than abject hostility. She says nothing, letting the wind howl wordless threats at the two. Even if she is not affected by it, the touch of the chilling wind feels cold on her exposed skin. Perhaps in other circumstances she would worry about the ordinary humans struggling to survive in this weather, but those thoughts do not exist in her mind at this point.
She does, however, acknowledge the other Servant’s sincere words.
“My gratitude, Lancer.”
The wind born of the frozen sea howled one more time. Icicles clinging to the roof of the nearby building shuddered, one of them breaking at the base and freefalling—
—crashing against the wall along with the rest of them, blown away by the impact of clashing weapons. Roof tiles are flung away in every direction, tree branches broken, and nearby cars flipped upside down. Deafening noise fills the plaza with every impact of spear and blade as the two Servants kick up the intensity with every passing second, as if turning their battle into a contest of speed. Lancer shows sublime technique, wielding the by-all-appearances unwieldy weapon, thick like a log, with unbelievable celerity. Both thrusts and swipes are parried away by fierce blows, the likes of which would make anyone expect either weapon to shatter in any second.
Lancer’s technique wins for a moment, and Maria barely manages to place her sword to her side before the spear’s strong shaft strikes her flank, flinging her off the plaza. It is sheer coincidence that she flies through the windowless frame of a building downhill, disappearing inside. Without hesitation, Lancer follows, his jump matching Maria’s flight path. The moment he sets foot inside the bedroom, he raises his spear to intercept Maria’s charge from the neighboring room. It becomes Lancer’s turn to be pushed off his feet and through the bedroom’s wall, his back crashing against the ice holding a teenage boy frozen in an unfinished shower. Maria charges again, and Lancer lets go of his weapon to dodge to the side in the bathroom’s limited space—the length of the spear almost matching the size of the room. Maria’s powerful radiance engulfs the entire room, tinting the tiles and the ceiling as if coated in gold.
Sword strikes ice, and a familiar glow erupts from the translucent prison, as the contingent defense spell engraved in it is activated. Unmindful of the ancient sorcery aiming to harm his opponent, Lancer reaches for the very end of the spear’s shaft, using his hands as a natural lever to suddenly lift the bladed end off the floor like a reverse guillotine.
But Saver, thoroughly unaffected by the ice prison’s spell, pulls both head and sword away, letting the spear pass through the space in front of her before using her sword to push Lancer’s weapon against the glowing ice block.
“Guh!” Lancer groans as his inferior Magic Resistance strains against the chilling spell. The two Servants then act simultaneously, Lancer dismissing his weapon into wisps of discarded magical energy at the same time Maria let’s go of it to try a decapitating slash. Lancer places his arms in front of his head, choosing to take the blow—even if his more aggressive tactics in this “second round” mean his defensive power is going down, he still has most of the defensive boost from his earlier waiting game.
Lancer is blasted through a door, crashing against the wall in front of it, but his weapon is already back in his hands when Maria pounces after him. They break through several walls in their violent exchanges of blows, ending up outside the apartment and in a hallway lined up with doors on both sides. Sparks fly as the Servants rush along the passage, the impact of their clashing swords blasting away the few doors not broken by the sheer cold at the eve of Fimbulwinter. Lancer clicks his tongue, displeased at finding himself pushed back by Maria’s ferocity—he was aiming for a more aggressive strategy to receive the benefit of his divine boon to attack power, but he found himself back on the defensive.
Five or so meters from the end of the passage, he hurriedly jumps backward to make some space before smoothly leaping out of the window three-stories high. Maria does not hesitate to follow, and almost immediately parries the whip-like aura lashing out of Lancer’s weapon. She lets the inertia of the parrying move pull her along, completing three-quarters of a turn in midair before unleashing an Aura Slash towards the Servant closer to the ground. By this point, though, Lancer has stabbed his spear on the snowy ground, using it as the axis to spin away from the radiant wave and the explosion of snow blasted upwards by the impact, completing the turn right as Maria lands to smash both his feet on her right side.
The swordswoman rolls a few times on the snow, but she is back on her feet in time to intercept the tip of Lancer’s massive spear. Yet another exchange of explosive blows, the violent intermingling of their auras of power releasing shockwaves that blast the snow away from the street, waves of white smashing against nearby buildings and the nigh-vertical cliff wall leading to Bismarck Square. They kick up the intensity yet another gear, exchanging positions over and over, each exchange a flash of light challenging the limits of visual perception.
They catch sounds of footsteps on the snow—soldiers in dark grab approach from a side street. Neither pays them heed, either as support or obstacles. Instead, they enter a tense lull in their battle, separating their legs and lower their stances. The bonfire-like radiance engulfing Maria slowly contacts and settles down into a fine layer of golden radiance, surrounding her and her sword like a second skin. The aura is not reduced, only concentrated, and the very air seems to hum and vibrate around her.
Lancer has every reason to be wary of his opponent’s unconventional melam. Hers is not like his own, invested by the goddesses to manifest as his favored weapon. Hers is not like the King of Heroes’, which strikes awe upon his enemies—the legend of the armies of Kish surrendering at the mere sight of Gilgamesh’s radiance is well-known to Lancer. Hers is more like…
Lancer concentrates his own radiance on the very tip of his spear, contracting the whip-like energy appendage into a long, thin needle. He will push himself as far as he has to, if anything to deliver the true name of this Servant to his Master.
“If you were one of my deities incarnate, I would recognize you!” he declares. Maria tilts her head almost unnoticeably.
“But you are no goddess of mine! Speak, swordswoman! What demon are you!?”
Saver’s melam pulsates, and the air around her distorts like a desert mirage. The physical body of her swords disappears within the intense concentration of power.
“Is it not obvious?”
It is hidden by her face mask, but Lacer simply knows her lips have curved into a smirk.
“The strongest.”
Maria attacks. The sword coated in gold strikes the radiant needle. Frozen cars parked on the sides of the street are flung as if weightless, wrecking themselves against buildings. Nazi soldiers assuming positions behind corners and windows and atop rooftops are blown away like worthless rags. And Lancer witnesses in alarm how the concentrated power on the tip of his spear is undone like a popsicle sublimated by extreme heat.
“This is…!” He has no more time to speak of think when Maria roars and he finds himself flung backwards by sheer physical strength.
The battle thus becomes more of a chase, with Lancer constantly on the defensive, retreating away from the rampaging monster clad in golden radiance. Sometimes they stay on the street, bouncing from the pavement to the walls of nearby buildings to the top of utility posts that break and collapse the moment Maria sets foot on them. Sometimes the battle carries them inside houses and buildings, thrashing through rooms and walls like living disasters. The only constant is that they are moving downhill, skirting the edge of Cárcel Hill down Cumming Avenue towards Concepción, eventually reaching a small square, practically next door to where, just this very morning, Javier Lucero met Sakura Edelfelt.
Lancer is the first to reach the point where the slope ends, Maria some twenty meters away. To his shock, instead of rushing to a melee, Maria sliced the carpet of snow between them: once to lift it off the ground, and a second time to propel it downhill like a white tidal wave. Her figure disappeared from his sight in the onrushing white. Lancer planted himself on the spot, parting the incoming wave with a swing of his spear before leaping over it and the cloud of snow dust—
It is precisely the boon of endurance consequence of fighting defensively all this time that preserves his body from being split in halves. Maria changed not her vector of attack, simply charging through the cloud of snow particles of her own creation to strike at Lancer the moment he tried to regain visibility by leaping over it. Maria follows him with his sight, as the Aura Slash blasts him well over the debris of Archer’s morning bombardment, and over the frozen sea until his back crashes harshly on the hull of a cargo ship trapped in the ice, about a hundred meters from port.
Lancer groans along with the punished metal, his body creating a depressing in the ship’s hull. Unlike the female Servant, who apparently has no other thing in her head but his destruction, Lancer has been thinking a lot even as he fights for his life. The blessing of Laz has elevated his physical prowess to match his opponent’s, of that he is certain. The blessing of Annunītum boosts either his offense or his defense even further, at the expense of the other. In either case, his physical prowess should be superior to the woman’s. When it comes to combat skill, Lancer felt they were about equals; if anything, he considers his skill with the spear superior to hers with the sword.
Then, how do you explain this? Why is he the one groaning in pain, smashed against the side of a cargo ship? Why is he the one being overpowered? Why is she the one who has victory within her grasp?
Why is she the one who feels immense in his presence, and he the one who is diminished in front of her?
“An effect…” he muses in the midst of his pain. “A Skill…or Noble Phantasm…that augments her prowess…”
He can see Maria in the distance. She has stepped into the main coastal thoroughfare, Errázuriz Avenue. Her weapon points straight up, and the reason becomes clear in a moment, as golden motes of magical energy begin to gather above the tip of the sword. Even from afar he can feel the vast amount of energy Maria is commanding, and he braces himself for a Noble Phantasm.
Unlike the attack on Costa Mirador, this time it is not her melam weaponized, but a standard concentration of magical energy…no, of course not. Lancer by now has realized that nothing this Servant does is “standard”. Just like magi can “color” their magical energy with their Origin, Elements and Systems, Maria has given her magical energy a certain “color”, as if purposely aiming to frustrate her opponent.
“It feels divine, but not,” grunts Lancer as he pushes himself off the hull, leaving behind a pronounced dent.
“It feels demonic, but not.” His knees bend as he falls on the solid ice sheet carpeting the Pacific Ocean. Maria’s accumulated energy has grown slightly larger than her head.
“It feels primordial, but not.”
Lancer realizes his opponent has not noticed: two vehicles of the Fourth Reich on Errázuriz Avenue, some hundred and fifty meters east of her position. One of them is equipped with a large cannon, and it is already aiming at the female Servant.
“Show me who you truly are, Saber!” Lancer shouts even if his words will not be heard, all the while he taps into his own magical energy. If Rider’s latest plan fails, he will have no other choice but to use his final trump card.
The cannon is fired with a dull, thrumming sound, and what comes out of it is not a solid piece of ammo. A spiraling blast of wind travels the distance to Maria’s position in a second, and the pseudo-Servant barely gets a glimpse of it before she slashes it apart—
“Wha—!?” Maria barely manages to blurt out as she loses control of her body, her muscles becoming uselessly taut. She is paralyzed, and mentally curses as the magical energy she had accumulated scatters away.
Just…this is just like Rider’s lightning magecraft.
Magical power that should have been nullified by her Magic Resistance somehow affects her, albeit partially. She will not be able to overcome the Fourth Reich unless she unravels this mystery.
But, that weapon? Is it, the Wirbelringkanone!?
It is only then that she takes a look at the source of the attack in the distance. While she is unfortunately too far to look at the vehicles with any degree of detail, it is enough to realize that they are not tanks, and only one of them has a three-meter-long cannon mounted on top. The other one carries two rows of parallel, likely perforated, steel rails, on which…
Rockets!? Nebel…no, Vielfachwerfer!
By the time her fingers begin to move, and the utter paralysis becomes a sluggishness comparable to swimming in mud, the rockets are already in the air, closing in on her position.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuuuuuck!”
*** ***
In an average two-story residence on Concepción Hill, a tired Javier Lucero is knocked to the floor by a threnody of explosions. A second man, Oliver Drake, is pulled back to consciousness by the terrible sounds.
In a certain hotel on Alegre Hill, the male of a pair of siblings is jolted awake by the explosions, and promptly and furiously demands answers from a trembling sister who cannot give them.
In a church on the southernmost spot where Concepción and Alegre Hills meet, Father Ricardo Scherer hesitates to climb the bell tower, sighing in self-deprecation at his own weakness before returning to the base of the altar to pray.
At the ground level of Costa Mirador Building, Sakura Edelfelt and the Assassin of the Black Sun look towards the distant sea with similar expressions of worry, albeit for vastly different reasons.
Inside a cave on the northernmost end of Concepción Hill, the thing which has claimed it as its lair growls in beastly unease—the explosions are way too close for comfort. Its captive stirs for a second, but quickly returns to a deep slumber.
In the chamber housing a Holy Grail, the Master of this singularity is brought out of their meditation by distant sounds louder than anything should be in this frozen world of their making. That person frowns, displeased by the distraction, but finally decides there is worth in concluding their labor and instead pay some attention to the frozen testbench.
*** ***
END OF EVENING PHASE
Originally Posted by Arashi_Leonhart
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