Originally Posted by
TwilightsCall
Kind of irrelevant, as he's still alive after that one Excalibur. And still doesn't answer the glaring issue of "how do you kill someone more than once simultaneously." The core of the issue is that Nasu cheated to get out of the Saber vs Herk fight because there was no plausible way for Saber to actually win. And if Saber couldn't do it, it's hard to believe any of the other KotR could.
Now if Saber had her super-retconned-destroy-Mars-from-three-galaxies-away Excalibur, then maybe she could have beat Herk, but SOMEBODY had to Command Spell her into not using Excalibur during that fight, so even that doesn't seem feasible.
Ah yes, with a bunch of extra addendums and caveats, they aren't lies anymore.
Even if I accepted those implicit assumptions (which I'm not sure I do), that undermines the whole point of including those lines in the first place. The reader isn't supposed to read "Berserker is the strongest Servant, he can probably take the other six down single-handedly" and say "oh but that's just SO FAR, I'm sure we'll revisit this evaluation in the future when we have more information." No one is going to read it like that, and its very clearly not meant to be read like that, as all of those kind of lines are used to set up payoffs later in the story when the lie is revealed to be a lie.
Both the narration and the characters are frequently wrong in F/SN, so relying on the opinions of characters isn't especially helpful.
But the bottom line is the Saber vs Herk fight in the woods was executed terribly, and you can't make me like it.