Several minutes earlier, on Main Street
"Is that...John?"
The man who had appeared and saved them was their colleague who, moments before, had been sent flying with a broken neck.
His sudden display of superhuman activity seemed to declare that he had truly been "reborn." The members of Clan Calatin were seized by confusion.
Vera's clear, ringing voice cut through their hesitation.
"Front line, fall back and shield the rear line! Rear line, support John with everything you've got!"
The barked orders from the normally quiet Vera snapped them back to awareness.
The officers each readied their own Noble Phantasm and surrounded John and the grotesque bowman in the positions she had ordered.
Far from support, those with close-ranged weapons would only be a hindrance against the bowman.
So, the officers judged that they ought to leave it to the long-ranged attackers in the rear line to serve as a distraction. And if that really was John, he ought to know how to coordinate with the rear line.
They planned to support John, and in the meantime find an opportunity to send half of their number inside the hospital as he wished...but several arrows launched by their enemy shattered their formation in an instant.
A burly officer a large shield Noble Phantasm tried to block one, but the instant the arrow struck, a shock like a blast from an adhesive grenade ran through the surface of the shield and launched him backward.
And the bowstring had not even been pulled fully taut.
The arrow had been just one of several diversionary shots fired without leaving an opening.
The officers were painfully aware that the only reason they, along with the city around them, had not been reduced to scraps of meat was that the Heroic Spirit had reason and, either by his Master's order or on his own initiative, was making some effort to maintain the Concealment of Mystery.
When he had first arrived with Kerberos, they had assumed he was a marauder without an ounce of concern for such things, but he was actually the opposite.
As far as that Heroic Spirit was concerned, using a beast like Kerberos to simply devour his enemies' flesh did more to preserve the Concealment of Mystery than fighting seriously himself would.
"Doesn't he have any weaknesses?!" One of the officers shouted.
It was true that John was moving on par with a Heroic Spirit, but his opponent's strength far exceeded their expectations of Heroic Spirits.
They had assumed that such strength must be unique to Gilgamesh and possibly the other Heroic Spirit—thought to be Lancer—who had clashed with the King of Heroes on the first day, but they were realizing too late that they had been naďve.
Still, they had known from the beginning that their abilities would not measure up to a Heroic Spirit's.
They needed to support John—who was likewise outside their calculations—and at least force the bowman to retreat.
The bowman must realize that wiping out the officers would not allow him to attack their Master or Servant directly.
In which case, at minimum, they only needed to convince him that it would not be worth it to continue.
Those were the thoughts running through the minds of more than a few officers...
When they realized that there was another police officer, apart from John, behind the grotesque bowman.
"!"
The officers wanted to shout at him to follow Vera's orders, but raising their voices would only alert their enemy.
When they focused their attention on the officer to see who was ignoring orders...they realized.
Before they knew it, the one officer behind the bowman had become two, who then soon became four.
It was not one of them.
It was none other than the Heroic Spirit who had been battling the archer in the guise of a police officer shortly before—the Servant Berserker.
Berserker—Jack the Ripper—had become a swarm of police officers.
Those officers, whose ranks had swelled noiselessly to sixteen, attempted to launch a surprise attack on their enemy's rear to support John.
But they were easily scattered.
Without turning to face them, the bowman twisted the grotesque wings that sprouted from his back and sliced through the first several Jacks who sprang at him.
"...So, you can still move."
The bowman spoke without looking behind him, in a tone that was equal parts admiration and exasperation.
While he spoke, he continued to fend off John's attacks with his bow.
The superhuman sense that had allowed him to deal with Jack approaching silently from behind him was truly worthy of the name "Mind's Eye," one of the remaining Jacks thought and called out:
"I'm impressed that you can use your newly stolen wings so well."
Other Jack's lunged at the bowman as he spoke.
The new Jacks no longer even had the appearance of police officers. They were an assortment of ordinary townspeople, doctors, the young and old, men and women.
Possibly Jack could no longer afford the effort to keep his appearances uniform. The Jacks looked like a pitiful human crowd gathered to assault a demon out of legend, or else to throw themselves on its mercy.
"Absurd."
Ultimately, Jack's power was not even what it had been earlier. Their movements were sluggish.
The bowman seemed to realize that, because he kept the majority of his attention on the human police officer in front of him.
An instant later, however, his assessment changed completely.
Countless black arms grew from Jack's shadows and coiled around the bowman's body.
"Hm...?"
Shadows.
He was surrounded by a jet-black vortex that seemed to swallow even the darkness of night.
Having recognized it as magecraft, the bowman—Alkeides—let his attention range around the area while continuing to deflect the police officer’s prosthetic hand with his bow.
He discovered a distortion in the scenery.
It was a crude illusion. No ordinary person would ever have seen through it, but it was obvious to a Heroic Spirit of Alkeides’ caliber.
“...So, you’ve come out of your hole, mage.”
Alkeides judged that it was Berserker’s Master and immediately grasped what the shadows meant.
They were merely a diversion.
If they had been a type of magecraft that inflicted direct harm, he would have been impervious to them.
It would be a different story if his adversary were a mage from the Age of Gods, but assuming that Berserker’s Master was a human mage and not a Heroic Spirit, that was impossible.
According to intelligence supplied by his own Master, Bazdilot Cordelion, Berserker’s Master was a genius from the headquarters of the Mages Association known as the Clock Tower. As long as he was a modern mage, however, his magecraft was nothing to fear, and the mage ought to be equally aware of that.
In which case, he ought to regard the shadows as a diversion.
As a matter of fact, Alkeides was aware that in his current situation, with multiple Heroic Spirits in his vicinity, a diversion was far more dangerous than any half-baked attack.
Accordingly, he made his next move with care.
“...Peck.”
That softly muttered word became a weighty curse scattered over the area.
John and the Berserkers were forced to retreat before the force of a horizontal swipe of his great bow.
Alkeides took advantage of that momentary opportunity to fire the multiple arrows in his hand at once.
In the twinkling of an eye, the shafts metamorphosed into birds of war with bronze beaks and talons, which launched themselves at the distortion in space on the sidewalk down Main Street.
The distortion was torn at each pass of the magical-energy-shrouded birds, revealing the figure of a young man in what had appeared to be empty space.
“Whoa! P-P-Play ball!”
The young man disturbed the surrounding air currents to avoid the birds’ attacks while hastily erected a mystical barrier.
A mighty shot from Alkeides, however, threaded through the whirlwind-scattered birds and pierced the pit of the young man’s stomach.
“...”
The avatar of destruction had torn its way through without regard for strong winds or mystical barriers.
It had accurately annihilated the young man’s core, shattering the surrounding flesh and bone as it destroyed his organs.
“Master!” Berserker cried from behind Alkeides.
“Flat!”
The police officer called John shouted the mage’s name as well.
His shout reminded Alkeides that the name in the information his Master had supplied him had been Flat Escardos and assured himself that he had disposed of Berserker’s Master.
The Magic Crest marked onto the mage’s body might activate automatically, force his fatal wounds to heal, and revive him, but Alkeides would not give it the time for that. He had already fired a second and a third arrow to destroy the mage’s entire body, Crest and all. The birds, which had gotten free of the gale, had also begun to peck at it.
However...
Just as the destruction was about to begin, the young man’s body began to fade like mist.
“What...?”
For a moment, Alkeides suspected an illusion, but he was quickly proven wrong.
He had definitely felt the “birds,” which were a part of his Noble Phantasm and linked to him by paths of magical energy, pierce his enemy’s body.
But it was a fact that the corpse was vanishing, almost like a Heroic Spirit’s.
Alkeides’ primary focus shifted to the question of the Master he had killed for only a few seconds.
And in those few second... he was completing his complex and bizarre spell.
“...Game select.”
The voice came from right beside Alkeides.
From among the Berserkers who had become corpses in that short time.
In the midst of that pile, one body Alkeides could not remember slaying moved its mouth and hands and rapidly performed magecraft.
A moment later... one of the arrows Alkeides had nocked burst, causing his now-grotesque frame to stagger for an instant.
Impossible.
Alkeides immediately realized what had been done to him.
The current of magical energy necessary to activate the Stymphalian Birds, part of his Noble Phantasm, King’s Order, had been tampered with and made to short-circuit.
That, however, was only the beginning of the spell.
“Ngh...!”
Just as he tried to regain his footing, he was struck by another wild burst of magical energy.
Alkeides was not a mage, but as his body was itself a mass of magical energy, every vein and nerve in it could be called a Magic Circuit.
All of them had become fuses and were setting off surges of uncontrolled magical energy one after another in a chain reaction.
Magical energy burst in his lean, steely arms.
Magical energy burst in the toes of his feet, so well-honed that they sometimes became blades.
Magical energy burst in the veins that ran throughout his body, deep and strong as the roots of the world tree.
Magical energy burst in his beautifully woven nerves.
Magical energy burst in each of his alveoli before he even had a chance to breathe.
Magical energy burst behind his eyeballs, hidden by his cloth.
Magical energy burst in part of his brain stem.
It burst, and burst, and burst...
The interval between bursts of magical energy grew shorter and shorter until at last he felt a massive explosion of magical energy near his heart.
He could not distinguish the pain from the heat of it.
Half of the wings on his back and the horns on his head snapped off. There was even an explosion of magical energy in the hand that held his bow, tearing off several of his thick talons.
The magical energy ran out of control inside his body as well, shredding parts of his organs.
But his Spirit Origin, once renowned as a great hero, was to be feared.
“...No!”
With a shout of effort, he stamped his foot down onto the street and poured his rampaging magical energy into the earth.
A moment later, the asphalt lifted in patches all along the street, which ran for several hundred meters, and ruptured pipes shot fountains of earth and water into the air in unison.
Many Heroic Spirits might have burst entirely at that point, but he had held his body together by the force of his sheer physical strength.
Even so, the resulting damage was extraordinary.
The backlash had torn up the street around him and a number of cars that had been parked along it were overturned and half scrapped.
Alkeides’ insides, however, had suffered far greater damage than the cars.
It would ordinarily be inconceivable for a single mage to inflict such damage on a Heroic Spirit.
Alkeides’ Spirit Origin, with its extraordinarily powerful Anti-Magic, was impervious to modern magecraft.
Meaning... it had backfired.
There was one part of his Spirit Origin whose Anti-Magic was weak.
It was also a part of Berserker, meaning that a path of magical energy had linked it to the young man who had until recently been its Master.
The mage had introduced a spell that disturbed the flow of his magical energy through the power of the Noble Phantasm he had stolen from Berserker—the part of him that had transformed into a demon, a kind of phantasmal.
Even so, it was no easy feat.
Unless the mage had a complete grasp of the complex flow of his magical energy in this condition, it would be impossible.
Meaning that he had accomplished that.
“I had to get this close for it to work,” the mage who had been hiding among the crowd of Berserkers said, revealing a relieved smile.
The Berserker corpses around him began to vanish. At the same time, the corpse of the mage Alkeides had just shot through disappeared completely.
It had been Berserker in the form of the mage Flat Escardos.
Circumstance piled on circumstance dulled Alkeides’ mind’s eye for an instant.
And that momentary unbalance... created a fatal opening.
A roar struck Alkeides’ ears.
It signaled that the police officer called John had poured all his strength into a desperate strike... and by the time it reached his ears, John was already upon him.
The blow momentarily broke the sound barrier.
It created a shockwave that sent Flat and the nearby rubble flying.
It took just an instant.
An impact ran through Alkeides’ side, feeling so weak to him that he almost doubted it.
It may have been a supersonic blow from a prosthetic hand transformed into a Noble Phantasm, but that was all it could do to Alkeides’ superhuman physique.
As a matter of fact, the impact had broken off the prosthetic hand’s blade at the base and the recoil had sent John tumbling to the ground several meters away.
But it had been enough.
John had put all his might into that blow of his prosthetic hand—a thrust of a blade dripping with hydra venom.
It would have been a fatal wound to almost any Heroic Spirit... but there was a reason it ate into Alkeides’ Spirit Origin with especial ferocity.
Death.
The pure curse of deadly poison.
The thing that had once driven Alkeides to end his own life coursed through his veins.
As it entered his body, Flat spoke the phrase that concluded his spell, signaling that his stratagem was complete.
“...Game over.”
He had created an opening for John, who possessed a strike worthy of being called final.
The steps he had taken to produce that moment of time were simple and obvious.
He had offered up his soul.
He had offered it to a Heroic Spirit of the Caster Class, whom he had known for only a few minutes.
X X
“My specialty as a Heroic Spirit is tinkering with tools that have a bit of notoriety and whip ‘em up into Noble Phantasms... but I don’t get many chances to work on a real Heroic Spirit.
“You see, I’d need the owner’s consent for that, which is normally a no-go.
“But when the pieces fall into place, an ‘exception’ comes out tasting the best.
“Basically, I’m gonna fiddle around with your ability to ‘become anyone’ and elevate it.
“I’ll make it so that you can turn into strangers even more perfectly.
“Of course, it’s up to you whether your Master counts as a stranger.”
Alexandre Dumas’ proposal had been quite a tradeoff.
It was to temporarily enhance Jack the Ripper’s abilities by combining one of his Spirit Origin’s skills, Thousand Faces, and his Noble Phantasm, Natural Born Killers, with one more “ingredient”—the essence of his Master, Flat Escardos.
It was a metaphor, of course; Dumas did not chop Flat up and toss him in a pot.
Still, for the Master and Servant whose links of magical energy Dumas strengthened and whose beings he artificially intermingled, it was equivalent to being thrown in a blender and turned into a mixture of ground meat.
For the Master, it meant having his own nature mixed with the Spirit Origin of a “killer.” It was impossible to foresee what side- and after-effects it might have. He might lose his magecraft, or unconsciously commit murders, drawn along by episodes associated with the Heroic Spirit Jack the Ripper.
There was no end to the conceivable negatives... but Flat had agreed without hesitation.
Jack had been fortified by Dumas’ Noble Phantasm and gained the ability to become the mage Flat Escardos down to the last detail, including his magecraft.
X X
Before they knew it, the pillar or light that had reached into the sky had vanished, and in its place, part of the church that had been its base had collapsed.
As darkness engulfed the area, a grave, but quiet voice rang out.
“...Why?” Alkeides asked Berserker, the poisoned blade that had broken off John’s prosthetic arm still buried in his side.
Alkeides understood that Berserker had used a perfect disguise to make him mistake Berserker’s Master’s location, although not how they had accomplished that, but that did not dispel his doubts.
“If you can completely become your Master, you could just as easily have done so and worked the spell on me yourself. Why did you risk your Master on the battlefield?”
Berserker, in the form of a police officer, answered:
“Simple. No matter how completely I become my Master, there are things I can never possess.”
At that, Alkeides shifted his gaze to Berserker’s Master, Flat Escardos, who was just picking himself up off the ground.
A second of the Command Spells on the back of his left hand was faded.
Alkeides realized that it had been the “final push” behind the spell that had sent his magical energy out of control.
“...So, you repurposed one of your own Command Spells.”
Command Spells only affected Servants contracted to their user.
It was impossible to overturn that principle and enforce a command on someone else’s Servant... but by skillfully rewriting its immense magical energy and using it to “hack” the path of magical energy that linked Alkeides to his Master... Flat had forced him to run a spell equivalent to ordering him to take his own life with a Command Spell.
“Well... I guess it was kind of a gamble... Your Master already used all their Command Spells, right, Mr. Archer? If they had even one left, I think I would have bounced off the strength of that connection.”
Seeing Flat smile that he had been lucky with a look of relief, Alkeides realized how abnormal the young man was.
“I see. I never expected you to have the ‘sight’ to perceive so much...”
Then, he muttered to himself in a voice too low for Flat to hear:
“So... it’s you.”
“?”
Flat looked puzzled, but Alkeides did not answer his unspoken question.
He had realized... that ‘death’ was eating into his body.
A “death” that had been enough to drive the human shell and soul from that hateful man, the “glory of god,” who had once been his other half.
Alkeides looked at the blade stuck in his side and then at John, the owner of the broken prosthetic hand.
To John, who still trying to rise, Alkeides said:
“Well done, child of man, my brother who rejects divine rule and stands on his own feet.”
There was a sound of spilling liquid—dark blood had dripped from under the cloth that covered the grotesque bowman’s face.
“If the power you were given had been a divine blessing, I would have slain you at once, but the power coursing through you is born of man and earth. The gods had no hand in it. And so, I praise this world, this age. You may have used the water serpent’s venom, but I congratulate you on producing a technique to destroy me while rejecting divine aid.”
Was his calm speech the mark of a Heroic Spirit who realized his end was near and meant to meet it with dignity?
John was under the illusion that it was, until Alkeides continued:
“And... I pity you, hero.”
“What...?”
Alkeides’ side was eaten away by the venom, melting into a black wound before John’s puzzled gaze...
But an instant later, the jet-black toxin was consumed by “mud” of an even more sinister hue.
“What?!”
The police officers, Flat, and the Berserkers froze in spite of themselves.
The mud-like mass of magical energy that welled up from Alkeides’ body enveloped the Hydra venom as if to consume it, to consume “death” itself, and was then sucked back into the wound.
“If I had merely throne off the robe of godhood, I would have suffered and then gone to my rest.”
The poisoned wound that eaten so deep it exposed his ribs and hipbone vanished, leaving his body fully restored in its place.
“Before my Spirit Origin twisted, I would have been willing to fall to that scratch. This venom alone may have been able to eat through all of my countless lives.”
Then, he stood before the speechless John and declared:
“But... we have both been unfortunate.”
There seemed to be a faint hint of resignation in his voice, but it immediately turned to anger.
“I have lost my twelve lives... but know that you cannot vanquish me, afflicted as I am with vile mud, with deadly venom.”
With rage, not at John and the others, but at himself, at limitless “power” itself, Alkeides bellowed as if pronouncing a curse.
“It will take more than venom to dye my corrupted blood... the flames of vengeance that my soul harbors!”
Then, his magical energy overflowed.
It was a writing of magical energy, but it became a physical wind that buffeted the bodies of all nearby.
A vortex of magical energy stained a dark red swept over the area. It was as if Alkeides had become a monstrous tornado.
The familiars that had been observing the battle were blown away. Magic Circuits screamed. The mere touch of the wind drove some to their knees.
Alkeides had not done anything.
This was the result of his mere presence.
“He wasn’t even... taking this seriously...” One of the officers muttered with a look tinged with despair.
“No, he was,” a Berserker answered with a wry grin.
“Until now, he’s been seriously scouting things out... I suppose. He’s been wary of everything around him.”
He was also wearing a look that said there was nothing more to be done and clearly considering how to make an escape with his Master.
“That was why we had to kill him completely here... before he devoted his full power to his murderous impulses.”
A moment later, Alkeides sprang into action.
His target, however, was neither the police force nor Berserker.
As if to say that they were now beneath his notice, the lone avenger kicked the earth.
That kick carried Alkeides high into the air... where he drew back the arrow he had nocked and loosed it without hesitation.
Loosed it at the Archer who, shrouded in an aura of divinity, was at that moment about to pass judgment on Saber.
Originally Posted by Kelp24
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