Interlude
Mercenary, Assassin, Pale Rider
“I’m glad you’re both better now!”
An innocent girl’s voice rang out in the garden showered in warm sunshine.
Squirrels, kittens, and other small animals scampered over the neatly trimmed lawn, and the countless little birds perched on the branches of a tree that grew in the garden were giving a modest singing recital.
If the word “heartwarming” took a physical form, it would probably be a scene like this.
There, the kind of vista seen only in picture books spread out in reality.
The two people the girl had spoken to, however, were totally divorced from that atmosphere.
One was a young man in black.
There were still traces of childhood in his appearance, and he could just as easily be called a boy. But in contrast to his looks, he wore an unsettling assortment of holstered guns, knives, and other weapons.
The other was a girl, her whole figure likewise in black.
Beneath her black cloak, which concealed as much of her face and skin as humanly possible, she was looking around her with a hint of confusion. If that were all, she would look like an ordinary woman in a niqab, but the black folds of her garment hid countless weapons, and something about her, unrelated to her dress, gave a general impression of danger.
The young man’s name was Sigma.
The girl was a Servant who had been summoned as Assassin in the “Fake Holy Grail War.”
A variety of circumstances had led the two of them to act together, but they were currently trapped together in the strange space.
“Yeah, thanks.”
“. . . You have my gratitude.”
Sigma and the girl Assassin each expressed their thanks.
The young girl—Kuruoka Tsubaki—responded by looking bashful and dashing awkwardly into the house.
“. . . That was Kuruoka Tsubaki.”
“So, that’s the girl who commanded a Heroic Spirit while unconscious.”
Both of them had already realized.
The girl’s parents, who lived in the same house with her, were clearly under the mental control of something . . . but only the girl was different.
She was subject to no mental restraint—truly free.
“Meaning that that black figure . . . was her Servant.”
The large figure that Kuruoka Tsubaki had introduced as “Mr. Black.”
Pale glows floated here and there inside the mass of shadows, roughly as tall as the tree in the garden and so dark that it seemed to suck in nearby light.
It had withdrawn into the house for the moment, but it had not appeared to have substance, so it would not be surprising if it sprang out of the ground without warning.
The thought prompted Sigma to increased vigilance and the girl Assassin to thought.
“Was it . . . really a Heroic Spirit?”
“It could also be a monster or wraith . . .” Sigma muttered, but the girl Assassin shook her head.
“No . . . I don’t think so. I did not sense any tremors of malice or hatred from that being. . . . No, I sensed no fluctuations of magical energy at all . . .”
The magecraft-user and Servant remembered how they had both been surprised by that “shadow” when they had woken up in the garden.
If it were hostile, it would already have dispatched them. . . . Considering that they had not been attacked in their sleep, they thought that it might not even recognize them as enemies.
“I don’t sense anything like consciousness from it, but it does seem to obey that child.”
Assassin’s words prompted Sigma to broaden his speculation.
“Maybe her Servant is something else and that ‘shadow’ is a familiar . . .?”
“It’s possible . . . but we lack sufficient information. That fiend—the hematophage—must know something . . .”
Assassin gritted her teeth beneath her veil.
But she could not sense the hematophage either.
He was certainly plotting something, but it would be difficult to locate him unless he made contact.
The two of them had just surveyed the area under the pretense of going for a walk, but they had found few signs of human life.
They had spotted the occasional human figure, but like Kuruoka Tsubaki’s parents, they had seemed to be under some form of mental control.
They could make conversation, but that was all.
They did not seem particular alarmed by Sigma’s armaments, nor did they seem to know anything about that world.
They had made numerous inquiries, but the people were ordinary civilians and unresponsive, and they had not been able to obtain any more information.
There was only one commonality—most of the people out walking claimed to have lived in the factory district but fled from a fire or some other disaster.
“The factory fire . . . I heard about it yesterday. A battle between Heroic Spirits.”
According to what he had heard from Watcher before he had lost contact, a Heroic Spirit who had not been involved in the battle had concealed the damage to the destroyed factory district, but it seemed that they had not been able to erase the fact that a fire had occurred.
The residents, however, had apparently displayed strange behavior and seemed, like Kuruoka Tsubaki’s parents, to be under some kind of mind control.
They could have carried their investigations further by taking destructive actions against those “people” and that “city.” But given that they did not understand the structure of that world or their enemy’s capabilities, that would be suicidal.
Sigma considered calmly and decided to investigate based on the fact that telepathy was usable.
“Ordinary civilians won’t understand the situation whether they’re under mind control or not.
“But . . . what about a mage who knows the hidden side of the Holy Grail War?”
X X
“You want to ask me something?” Kuruoka Tsubaki’s father said with somewhat vacant eyes.
“. . . Yes, somewhere away from your daughter, if possible.”
The mage, who had come as far as the front door at Sigma’s suggestion, glanced into the house and said:
“That could be tricky. I promised my daughter I’d read a book to her, so I can’t go far.”
“Oh, just down the street would be fine.”
“I see. In that case . . .”
Tsubaki’s father left his family’s property with no real resistance and followed Sigma to a little park nestled in the residential district.
“It really was coincidence that we ended up at your house, but I recognize you, Kuruoka Yūkaku.”
“Oh . . . Have we met somewhere before?”
“My employer’s name is Francesca. I have a deal with a man called Faldeus.”
At that, Kuruoka Yūkaku’s face took on a gloomy look.
“I guessed you were a magecraft-user when I saw your equipment. I see I was right. . . . But as I told Faldeus, the Grail War is the farthest thing from my mind right now. I can’t give you any . . .”
“No, I’m not asking you to cooperate with us,” Sigma cut in dispassionately. “Could you please tell us what’s going on?”
His tone was polite, but there was no emotion in it.
Sigma showed the face of a magecraft-using mercenary faced with a mage and tensed himself for a sudden attack.
Assassin was hiding in a corner of the park, keeping a watch on the area.
Given that conversation was possible, they planned to gauge the intentions of the person exerting the mental control by the information they were able to get from Kuruoka—or conversely, by the information he was unable to tell them—in his mind-controlled state.
However . . .
“Yes, I can do that. As far as I can see, the Servant protecting my dear little Tsubaki intentionally created this world. It’s outside my area of expertise, but I think it may be a type of Reality Marble.”
“. . .?”
“Tsubaki’s Servant is probably the embodiment of a concept. I’d say it’s the concept of death, nothingness, or disease intentionally given a personality. In Japan, my home country, a yōkai called a ‘yanari’ was created to explain houses creaking. That was a type of folk magecraft, deciding that it was a conscious being, giving it form, and taking mental measures against it. . . . Considering that Servant’s power, however, I believe it must be an entity recognized on a global scale. I think I could analyze it more accurately if I examined it carefully, but since I dropped out of the Grail War to live quietly with my daughter, I don’t have time for that.”
Calmly, casually . . . as if it were of no importance, Kuruoka Yūkaku began to give his opinion as a mage.
But despite that, his way of speaking made it clear that he was still subject to mental control.
He hasn’t been prevented from talking about magecraft . . . not even from speculating about the Servant’s identity?
Or is he being controlled to feed us false information?
But if that were the case, wouldn’t they make the extent of their control more ambiguous?
Sigma was confident that he could see through an ordinary person’s lies using his experience and technique as a magecraft-user.
But discovering the lies of a mage—especially one who had used autosuggestion to convince themselves they were telling the truth—would require more experience, talent, and specialized magecraft.
If I were connected to Watcher, I could compare it to information from the shadows to reach a conclusion . . .
Sigma’s Servant, Watcher, which was supposed to be gathering all visual and auditory information from across the city, but he was currently unable to contact it.
That was why he needed information that would help him get outside at any cost, but he would need more for that.
“Don’t you want to leave this ward?”
“What for? Our daughter Tsubaki is so healthy here.”
“Isn’t it possible that the Servant is controlling your mind to make you think that way?”
“Oh yes, it probably is . . . but what’s wrong with that?”
When he heard that, Sigma realized what the goal of the mental control was.
If Kuruoka Tsubaki’s Servant was causing the situation, then in all probability that Heroic Spirit was not acting to win the Holy Grail War.
Its behavior was genuinely centered on Tsubaki.
But he is technically a mage participating in the Grail War. He must have taken at least some precautions against mental control . . . Sigma thought, but he also knew that those precautions were not perfect.
There was a case in which skilled mages assembled for an auction of historical artifacts with mystical value had been betrayed and manipulated by one of their allies.
The mages in question had apparently been rescued by a Lord of the Clock Tower and, ashamed of their own blunder, had enrolled trustworthy members of their family in the Lord’s classes.
Sigma remembered the story because the Lord in question’s rise in power due to the connections he had formed with powerful mages in the process had been a hot topic among magecraft-using mercenaries at one time . . . but he dismissed the details as currently irrelevant.
The important point was that, given the right opportunity, precautions against mental control could be easily broken.
Encouraging him to escape or freeing him from the mental control . . . seems unfeasible.
I should ask Assassin later if she has a Noble Phantasm that can undo brainwashing . . . but from what I’ve seen, her Noble Phantasms seemed specialized to kill her enemies. I shouldn’t get my hopes up.
Sigma decided to try a different approach.
“. . . Umm, are you aware that your daughter is being targeted outside the ward?”
“Oh . . . Is she? That’s unfortunate.”
Kuruoka Yūkaku started to leave the park, heading for home. He did not seem especially anxious, but his expression did at least darken with concern.
“Thank you for letting me know. Still, Tsubaki’s Servant seems to be in the process of becoming practically unassailable, so I’m sure it will see her through this safely.”
“It’s . . . becoming unassailable?”
“Yes, just a bit before you woke up, it sent us a wonderful guard dog.”
“What do you mean?” Sigma asked just as Assassin approached them.
Sigma tried to stop Yūkaku, who was ignoring him and making his way home, but he saw that Assassin had a grim look in her eyes, decided that something must have happened, and decided to stop to hear what she had to say.
“What’s wrong?”
“. . . It appears that your conversation was . . . overheard.”
“. . .?”
“When you said, ‘Tsubaki is being targeted,’ it began to move.”
She turned her gaze toward Tsubaki’s house as she spoke.
When Sigma followed her gaze . . . time froze for him.
His brain was unable to grasp the situation. For fractions of a second, his mind went blank.
The thing that did that to a magecraft-user like Sigma, with his long experience as a mercenary . . . was a single large dog.
Although opinions might be divided as to whether it counted as a “single” dog.
Sigma had seen the thing that stood in the place Kuruoka Yūkaku was casually walking to once before.
It took him a moment, however, to realize that it was the same thing.
He was sure that “it” had been killed on Main Street and also that “it” had been at most the size of an adult elephant.
The thing that Sigma and Assassin stared up at with the beginnings of a cold sweat . . .
Was Kerberos, the three-headed guard dog of Hades, grown larger than a house.
X X
Snowfield, Factory District
“About your Noble Phantasm . . . Can you still use the birds and the dog?” Bazdilot Cordelion asked, servicing a pistol-shaped Mystic Code while members of the Scladio Family were busy repairing his workshop.
Alkeides lifted his dematerialization and stared at his own hands as he answered.
“. . . The birds won’t be an issue but activating Kerberos will prove difficult.”
“Are there limitations on the regeneration of the individual beasts?”
“No. Ordinarily, with your magical energy I should be able to reactivate them after a day. . . . But I can’t do it now. It seems its actual Spirit Origin was scraped away by that ‘black mist,’ along with three of the horses.”
“You have a Noble Phantasm that steals Noble Phantasms, but I never expected one of yours to be stolen. Still, the dog or horses falling into enemy hands shouldn’t pose a problem,” Bazdilot said dispassionately.
Alkeides, however, silently shook his head.
“Not necessarily.”
“. . . Does something worry you?”
“They may have been stolen, but the ends of the royal orders I was tasked with are the foundation of my Spirit Origin. Even if they are no longer mine, I know when they undergo a change.”
The vengeful bowman frowned beneath his cloth as he carefully probed the alterations in the “links” of his Spirit Origin.
“But . . . this is . . .”
After a short pause for thought, Alkeides clenched his fists.
Then, as magical energy mixed with mud and blood trickled from between his fingers, he whispered with quiet rage.
All the while recalling the familiar darkness of the other side that edged toward him through the faint link of magical energy.
“Could the one who controls that black mist . . . possibly be a relative of Hades?”
When he finally relaxed his fists, he murmured with the faintest hint of pity in a voice that not even Bazdilot could hear.
“In that case . . . even if I do not harm her . . . its Master is fated to be hunted eventually.
“Hunted by the true heroes . . . who safeguard the people.”
Originally Posted by SirGauoftheSquareTable
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