Somewhere in North America
"
Unbelievable…"
Those were the only words the observers covered in cold sweat could drag out of their mouths.
The place seemed to be a control room full of monitors but no windows, and on closer inspection, all four walls had magical boundaries on them.
Here was one of the places from where the government sector responsible for giving Faldeus orders—people that could be described as the masterminds of this Holy Grail War—watched the progress of the ritual.
They already issued the emergency code [Aurora fall], determining that a special bomb should be dropped to erase Snowfield City.
That's why only a handful of CIA officers with formal spellcaster training continued observation to gather accurate data until the very last second.
Weather observation satellites sent them observation footage in real time for them to camouflage and distribute to several agencies and the common citizen.
The man watching the monitor had been struck with terror when the giant hurricane compressed to minimal size in a matter of minutes.
But the truly startling part came later.
The magical observations did show one strong magical energy signal get swallowed by the hurricane, but he thought nothing of it, until less than a minute later, it caused a major alteration in the observed information.
"The hurricane…
was sliced…?"
It was like a child had taken one bite out of a pizza and returned the slice.
The hurricane, which took the form of a beautiful circle, lost a fan-shaped part starting at the center and opening up southwest.
And that was not all. The faint cloud layer in the surrounding area and the cloud scraps assumed to be split from the hurricane were also blown off.
The weather satellite picture showed what resembled a straight line drawn with a ruler.
If someone intimately familiar with past Holy Grail Wars, like say, Lord El-Melloi II, was watching the scene, they'd have immediately figured out what happened.
The flash of a Noble Phantasm.
A blow similar but not comparable to the planet's Holy Sword named Excalibur.
X X
West Snowfield
"What's going on there…?", Thia Escardos involuntarily groaned as he watched the torrent of magical energy split the sky. "Last I saw that Rider… she didn't have the Saint Graph necessary to pull that off."
She had magical energy leagues above the Saint Graph that he measured a few minutes ago.
This burst in amount of magical energy amount, clearly abnormal even taking into consideration the divine aura of the cloth he assumed to be her Noble Phantasm, was enough to take Thia's attention away from the El-Melloi Classroom.
(Weird…
None of them are fretting. So did they already know about that Rider's extraordinary strength?)
But he couldn't feel that much power back when they were confronting Ishtar.
Since he shared Flat's body and Magic Circuits, Thia retained his Master ability to measure a Servant's power.
When he looked at her, not too long ago, he clearly identified her Saint Graph as "certainly not weak but considerably inferior to the top Servants in this Holy Grail War".
(Then did removing Ishtar trigger something? …No, I'd have seen if it…)
Thia noticed a certain possibility, interrupting his previous thoughts.
"No way… Is this even possible? With this El-Melloi Classroom roster, maybe…?"
Toosaka Rin shot a charged Gandr at Thia during his epiphany.
"You must be confident if you're not even looking our way."
"Yeah, I am. You're nothing.", said Thia, dodging at the last second.
"Are you counting yourself invincible just because you sparred a bit with that Lancer? I don't think you've done enough to back it up.", Rin haughtily responded.
"I can't deny that."
Thia Escardos was on par with Servants in terms of magical power and movement, but his endurance was entirely reliant on magical energy barriers, with his physical build being not that different from Flat Escardos.
Therefore, Thia did not have the option to ignore Toosaka Rin's barrage of Gandrs.
Clashing with his magecraft, he can even compete with Enkidu—but conversely, when his magecraft is disabled, he has no hopes of winning.
"That's why I won't be careless or arrogant."
Gandr may be a simple Single Action magecraft, but Rin's version, called Finn Shot, is something he'd not come out of unscathed. Thia knew it and repelled the attack by rotating the magical energy around him.
However, the repelled Gandr was repelled back by another magical energy "rotation" a few meters ahead.
"Ah!"
(Was that… a wheel?)
A wheel-like Mystic Code ricocheted the Gandr with the same high-speed rotation of magical energy as Thia's.
He didn't even have the chance to remember what that was.
The bounced projectile bounced in multiple other rotations in a span of 0.3 seconds, accelerating like a pinball until the Gandr pierced Thia's back.
"...!"
Since he managed to put up a magical barrier at the last possible instant, his innards weren't soaked with the curse, but the impact was enough to throw him off-balance.
"You
two may be our veterans in the El-Melloi Classroom…"
Luviagelita was waiting for this moment to fire her own Gandr.
"but neither of you gets to look down on us."
Her Gandr had the same "Finn Shot" intensity as Rin's, and as before, the irregular trajectory provided by the countless "wheels" proved a threat to Thia.
"This is nothing…"
He swiftly controlled the "satellites" of magical energy deployed around him to crash against the Gandrs, to completely scatter the shots rather than deflect them.
But while he was doing it, Rin, Luvia, and many others with Gandr or similar attack methods opened fire.
The "wheels" swiftly circled themselves around Thia, skillfully ricocheting all projectiles and arranging the magecraft into the best possible vectors.
No matter how poorly aimed, the projectiles eventually homed in Thia's direction.
Being able to accurately reflect one type of Gandr is nothing special, but doing so with various kinds of magecraft required a rare level of control.
As Thia neutralized the incoming Gandrs and magical bullets, he spoke the name of the one manipulating the wheels.
"Org Rum…!"
Hearing his name, Org deployed more wheels.
The wheel-shaped Mystic Codes released from his hands rotated in high speeds, displaying magical energy afterimages as it did.
A facsimile of Projection.
The real wheels flew in circles, looking as if they had multiplied, and mixed with the fakes to weave a giant Bounded Field.
But this powerful "cage" of his was less of a magical wall and more of a physical one, meant to reflect any and all attacks coming from its interior.
"It was my sister who inherited the family's Magic Crest and I exist to be nothing more than the training wheels keeping her stable…"
It was thanks to his cage that the mages by his side could maintain continuous fire without hesitation.
They unleashed as much Single Action magecraft as possible, without bothering to aim.
A storm of varied techniques and curses.
But Org Rum's wheels brought everything together, altered the magecraft's quality and composition, and freely bounced back the shots so that everyone's attacks would converge on Thia.
"But our teacher's lessons inspired me toward a new goal…
support magecraft capable of making me into training wheels for anyone, not exclusively my sister."
Thia didn't let it show, but he was vexed because he knew exactly how precise of a magical energy control that required.
This man named Org was the same as Flat and Rin—
A student who learned devilish techniques at the El-Melloi Classroom.
Org Rum had once given up on his mage identity.
He came from a family that used a unique magecraft with wheels. Due to a minimal advantage in amount of Magic Circuits and his studious personality, Org was considered one of the best candidates to inherit the Magic Crest. But after many intersecting schemes unfolded, overturning his favorable lead, his older sister Jean Rum was chosen as the Magic Crest's heir.
And, as the family head predicted, Jean Rum was able to draw the full potential of Magic Circuits on the Crest engraved in her. Her forceful yet delicate steering left Org behind in the race before he knew it.
Jean later became known by the moniker of Gale Wheel and regarded as the greatest in the history of the clan of wheel-using mages. And after earning this reputation, she said she'd search for Ivan the Terrible's library and went freelance.
Org knew he'd never be able to reach his sister's level, neither in magecraft capabilities nor in freedom of spirit.
He entered the Clock Tower resigned to spend his whole like as
a spare for the case his sister met unexpected tragedy, but there he caught Lord El-Melloi II's eyes.
ーIn the world of magecraft, the wheel has many different meanings depending on the culture and religion… circulation and rebirth, alteration, harmonization, power at its purest, travel and exploration. What you can do depends on the context in which you use yours, but normally… front wheels and back wheels, not to mention additional pairs or training wheels,
display greater stability when used in conjunction. Without the option to inherit the Crest, you're faced with a choice. You can take the mapped path of supporting the family head or, using the keywords of your magecraft… you can leave your trail marks on unexplored snow fields. The ability to create new contexts is a privilege of the talented.
Lord El-Melloi II spoke the word "talented" with some level of resentment.
The main weapons his student Org used to improve himself were his naturally studious personality and the extensive knowledge that came from his bibliomania, a habit learned from his sister. Due to those, he managed to leave his marks on untreaded land.
The cluttered El-Melloi Classroom faced all sorts of troubles.
Through his multiple experiences being strong-armed into these situations, he was forced to fight together with multiple mages, and along the way, he naturally left his tracks on the snow.
Time and time again.
And with enough time, the marked tracks become roads.
He perfected a new form of Wheel Magecraft that can support many others individuals with Magic Crests of different lineages, not only his sister, thus reaching the rank of Pride.
He's not special in this regard.
Naturally, only a handful of people in the entire world of magecraft obtained the title of Pride or higher through circumstances similar to his.
Pride is that valuable of a title to the Clock Tower.
But
there's a place where the members of this handful gathered together.
The El-Melloi Classroom.
In the classroom, Org's case is one among many of his kind.
A lot of students faced the same circumstances: struggle due to an inability to notice their own talents.
Others were cursed by their talents.
Be it through the accumulation of small realizations or one grand lesson, they gained the means to break through the walls in their paths and climb to greater heights than they imagined.
This happened all the time in the El-Melloi Classroom.
Of course, this doesn't apply to everyone, as some, like Rin and Luvia, joined the class already with envisioned heights to reach.
Regardless, as a consequence of its alumni inevitably becoming high-ranking mages, the current El-Melloi Classroom has the open attention of every other faction.
This faction, considered a threat among the tumultuous Clock Tower, was now facing the monster named Thia.
"We don't believe we can fight you, who melted the North Sea's ice caps, head on."
Org's words were followed by a pair of twin sisters mocking Thia.
"Yup, nothing good's coming of it, y'know? We're just here to support Polyte."
"Mages gotta avoid these kinds of direct confrontations, for both side's sakes!"
Amidst their casual taunts, the twins expanded each other's magecraft.
"But, you should know it by now! We're very used to this kind of thing."
"Yeah, remember that time we threw hands with Touko? I thought the whole class would die!"
Many lineages had magecraft that let twin mages benefit from that trait. The Pentel sisters were one of them.
Other famous examples include the spell of Edelfelt family, popularly known as The Scales, and of a pair of brothers related to the Pentels, popularly known as Gum Brothers. Radia and Nazica's version of it regards the other sister as a mirror, and any magecraft that appears between the opposite mirrors is reflected by them, amplifying it through high-speed circulation and alteration.
"Well, the gist of things here is that if you pull off that advanced magecraft again, you blow this land up and we all die, am I right?"
"Which means we just need to stop you from using that and we're good… Hoy!"
The bullets that were mere Single Action spells momentarily expanded and occupied the space around Thia.
Their refined magecraft skills were a threat, but a very minor one if Thia was fighting them one on one.
But Thia knew that wasn't the case right now.
As proof, every time Thia tried to launch his magecraft at the ground to avoid the sliding wheels, a butterfly fluttered in its trajectory, altering distance and direction into something more undefined.
"I'm sorry, Thia Escardos.", dauntlessly spoke Werner, who could utilize magecraft on a similar level to that of a Servant by optimizing the conditions of the land he was on. "Honestly, in a fair fight, there's no logical way for us to defeat you, who survived fierce attacks from that incredible Lancer and is capable of destroying this entire land."
Countless more butterflies covered the ground as he spoke.
"Therefore, we decided logic has no place here…
as we won't fight fairly."
They were in Snowfield right after Ishtar had begun to recolor the planet's surface texture and was prevented from finishing.
Here, where the difference between the real and the arcane was
unclear enough due to this backlash, Werner's magecraft was at the best it's ever been.
"
We might be an outdated form of humanity from your perspective…"
"…Hh! How much do you people know about the Escardos lineage…?", Thia asked after noticing his opponent figured out Messara Escardos's intentions.
But instead of an answer, Werner responded with a courteous bow and words of provocation.
"
But do savor this full course of vain struggle from the mages you consider weaklings who won't survive the death of arcanity."
Werner's Papilio Magia blocked his attacks by making space ambiguous, and Org's Wheel Magecraft turned attacks he dodged into attacks that home into his back.
The paired mirrors of the Pentel sisters received support from Papilio Magia. Each other’s energy bullets were no longer the only ones amplified by the mirrors. They copied even Rin's and Luvia's Finn Shots as they entered the reflection.
Expectably, many members of the group were completely uninterested in being team players—but since their classmates understood their quirks, they knew how to exploit and incorporate their unique traits and make it part of their own magecraft.
The classmates fought over leadership without sabotaging each other's approaches, consequently dealing significant damage to Thia.
The situation clearly looked like a nightmare or some kind of joke, but in reality, they were very close to the worst match-up Thia could have.
He had the means to resist a one-on-one battle against a Servant.
It's a proven fact that he managed to hold out against Enkidu for some time, even if he was forced to use his trump card.
But in a situation with this much jumbled and complicated information, it becomes impossible to fully parse the flow of magical energy.
(Flat could…)
He remembered Flat Escardos and removed that thought from his head.
Thia wasn't clueless.
He knew that Flat's superior instincts and sensibilities made him better than himself at handling this situation, since Thia reacted to magecraft using thorough observation and calculations.
But he wouldn't cry over spilled milk.
Thia knew he wasn't in his element, so he exploded one of the "satellites" orbiting him, prepared to get hit in the process.
One of his objectives was to blow apart the magical energy constructions around him.
Because bullets of concentrated magical energy would just ricochet on the "sliding wheels" and "mirrors", he compiled complex magecraft into a special "mist" covering him in every direction.
This magecraft was lower on the power scale due to being compiled instantly, but its primary objective was being a smokescreen.
Thia spread the mist wider, hiding his figure and magical energy as he rose higher.
Flight magecraft is an advanced art comparable to magic.
It's normally something reserved to high-level mages inside the land they administer, but Thia could do it by operating multiple forms of magecraft with his transcendental magical energy control. That said, he couldn't reach the speeds of rule-breaking flight magecraft like Touko Travel or what he reached when Enkidu's cannon fire propelled him to the stratosphere.
Still, he didn't need that much speed.
It was easy to overwhelm them by shooting magecraft from the sky beyond their reach.
That was the winning plan Thia crafted while heading to the sky.
"
...Mm?"
He felt a powerful gaze coming from the ground below and stared back.
The next moment—an impact ran from the ground to the sky, cutting off his mist and nothing else.
"Ah!"
Thia looked below in search of clues for how they were are able to pinpoint his exact location and how they were able to conjure magecraft strong enough to blow away his mist without any noticeable build up.
What he found was an alumnus transferred to Astromancy, Mary Lil Fargo; and the son of a first-class lecturer, Fezgram vor Sembren.
Mary, who can foretell his position by seeing the picture through the stars' perspective with a divination-based application of Astromancy, was pointing directly at him.
"Her observations can get that accurate…?"
She couldn't possibly have heard Thia's mumbled, but Mary spoke on the ground below like she had guessed what he meant.
"Obviously not, I only guessed your general location. So I asked him to clear the mist off of the entire area."
Fezgram responded next to her with a bitter smile.
"Though I can't do anything better than just clearing this little mist."
Like his father, his usage of magecraft uncreatively followed the textbooks to the letter. He used it to systematically make Mystic Codes float in a 30 m² area.
While manipulating countless Mystic Codes with the precision of a calculator in his magical energy control, the student who chose to explore the route of taking the by-the-books approach to ground-breaking levels spoke.
For the Sembren family, which specialized through generations in magecraft that delivered shockwaves, his Magic Circuits were an improvement over his father's, but his output had a peculiar quirk.
He was great at controlling countless instances of small-scale magecraft in parallel, but poor at pouring magical energy for one gigantic impact—until he, too, found his answer at the El-Melloi Classroom.
Fezgram's magecraft operated countless Mystic Codes simultaneously, cleverly overlaying tiny shockwaves together to ultimately generate overwhelming force at the target area from any direction of his choice.
Each individual impact he generated made virtually no difference on its own, but their raw energy amplified as they synergized and resonated with each other.
A phenomenon very similar to how in the seas, the impact of waves builds up on other waves to ultimately form a giant wave.
This does more than simply build up power: it slips past Thia's eyes by controlling countless magical energy currents too tiny for him to easily detect—And by converging all the shockwaves at the area Mary pointed to, he creates a dispersive energy that instantly clears away the fog.
"Well, not that I ever expected my magecraft to damage your barrier..."
The moment Fezgram said that, Thia felt his body restrained by shockwaves from every direction.
"…!"
Those shockwaves were not administered by Fezgram's magecraft.
They belonged to someone else, and operated like a naturally occurring power rather than as magecraft.
That much was already clear to Thia before Fezgram's next words reached his years.
"All it needed to do was
let her lay eyes on you."
On cue, a voice filled with out-of-place cheer reverberated.
"Uh-huh! It's at these maybe-desperate-maybe-lavish times that it's important to remind everyone present that I'm a major character of the El-Melloi Classroom AND the teacher's mistress! The money and time I spent refining this can be paid out with everyone's grateful loyalty and Prof's body!"
Away from the group, Yvette L. Lehrman waved to Thia with exaggerated movements.
Ignoring the crowd of students telling her to shut up, the girl messed around, without ever letting Thia out of her sight.
She no longer had her usual eyepatch, its spot instead was occupied by a dense gold light.
Mystic Eyes of Compulsion.
They're Mystic Eyes that force specific actions on the stared individuals, and are one of the best techniques available to restrain someone's movement.
The bright light concealed her right eye socket, making it impossible to tell if her eye was an artificial one she personally polished from jewels or one she purchased on a Rail Zeppelin auction or some other supplier.
The Lehrman clan's artificial Mystic Eye manufacturing technique was so reliable that it was impossible to tell them apart looking only at their activated abilities.
But whether the eye was natural or artificial didn't matter now.
"If the power you used were the Mystic Eye of Distortion, you'd have ended me…"
As Thia had kept the threat of Yvette's Mystic Eyes in mind this whole time, he calmly mobilized the magical energy within him, altering his skin and the air around to have the same properties are as an anti-ocular Mystic Code—the Mystic Eye Killers.
"Mystic Eyes of Compulsion are extensions of Magic Circuits and a spell formula. You could catch Flat with them, but did you really think they'd work on me?"
Speed and ability to bruteforce solutions were Thia's elements, not Flat's.
Angry at how the wing missing from the pair kept returning to his attention, Thia rotated a satellite posthaste in order to shake off the thoughts.
He wanted to silence all the El-Melloi Classroom students below him, including Yvette, but it'd too dangerous to use the show of force that vaporized half of the North Pole.
If he used a pure destructive spell with high attack power, a few of the mages there would be able to decisively counter it.
(But… playing reactively is even more dangerous.)
Toosaka Rin was an Average One with a mechanism to respond to any spell in his repertoire, and Werner's Papilio Magia was another major problem.
(What am I supposed to do, then?)
Thia acknowledged that in his heart of hearts, he already knew the answer.
(Looks like we really are one and the same… I can't separate my heart from Flat Escardos.)
His magecraft of choice of Chaos Magick, what Flat did best.
It's a modern magecraft that tries to pick out the best from major systems all over the world, but its foundations are remarkably fragile, and normally cursed by its instability into not being able to enact great power.
But Flat's genius intuition allowed him to pull off
building a specialized foundation and application from scratch, exclusively to the phenomenon he wanted to enact, circumventing all issues through bogus magecraft even he was unable to replicate. That was the reason why he was feared and called The Unwanted Blessing.
However—Thia worked differently.
He had memorized all foundations and applications that Flat had previously constructed, and his calculations were capable of reaching results similar enough to what Flat would arrived at intuitively.
And so, Thia tried to use the full scope of his ability to create
chaos difficult to counter due to being impossible to comprehend.
While he was being freed from the grip of the Mystic Eye of Compulsion, Thia began charging one of the satellites orbiting him with magecraft simple but loaded with several different attributes.
He limited the range of his activated magecraft to the wasteland below him, where the ranks of the El-Melloi Classroom were distributed, and used the range restriction to increase its attack power.
Those who Flat called friends would be crushed by Flat's power.
(There's no point saying this to someone who is already dead… but sorry, Flat. I'm about to kill you in the truest sense.)
It would all end when he is released from the Mystic Eye and able to move again.
At that moment, his original spell A Clockwork Abaddon would settle his battle against Flat's life.
Thia was prepared to end it all—
But for one second, he was consumed by indecision and repentance.
That was ultimately fatal.
"
...Mm?"
Thia noticed an incongruence.
Yvette should logically be aware that the effects of her Mystic Eye of Compulsion were being dispelled.
However, she continued to glare at Thia with a daring smile.
Scared of what might happen, Thia launched the still incomplete "satellite". And when he did—
His world was engulfed in intense light.
X X
Half of the El-Melloi Classroom members were startled by the flash of light occupying their sight.
The few who understood what she did stared at Yvette with a face of "I didn't think you actually would".
What happened?
The event couldn't be simpler to verbally describe.
Yvette L. Lehrman shot an eye beam.
Nothing more.
There would have been nothing unusual about the scene if she were using offensive magecraft like her Mystic Eye of Blaze.
What made it abnormal was its inexplicable size and force. The immense power of the beam could probably melt a large tank or a jumbo jet in an instant, and on top of that, the strike still carried the Mystic Eye's original function of compulsion.
Even among the El-Melloi Classroom, few could readily accept the abnormality of the heaven-piercing beam that the lady in a pink gothic lolita dress fired from her eye.
"Girl… I know you said you'd do it, but really…? Are you insane?", Rin said to Yvette, flabbergasted.
Yvette stared at Rin after hearing the pot call the cattle black.
"What sane person would ever agree to come to this place? Ahahahaha! Nothing like a good laughter in times of pain! God, it hurts!"
The ashes of her right eye oozed out of its socket along with smoke and blood.
While Yvette wiped away the cinders of an eye so charred that it was impossible to tell if it was originally a real eyeball or an artificial Mystic Eye gem, she provided a proper answer to the question in many of her classmates' heads.
"You people know how our teacher is. He can't see anything without analyzing it and pestering us to try it."
That was enough of an explanation for all the classmates. They returned their gazes to the sky.
Lord El-Melloi II had a bad habit of analyzing magecraft on sight and passing it down for the student with the most adequate magecraft system to use, when he wasn't registering patents within the world of magecraft. Caules's Primeval Battery was an example of that.
This "it's your fault for not patenting it" attitude was a major cause for his epithet of Plundering Duke and the moral principle that let him convey the magecraft Yvette just used.
Luvia, familiar with what happened in a case a few years ago, named what this magecraft was based on.
"Preposterous… I cannot believe you genuinely pulled off the Mystic Eye Projector with your own eye…"
"Oops, stop there! Time out! No unlicensed namedrops allowed! It's just a parody! A silly little thing that bears no genuine resemblance to the Mystic Eye Projector! Are we clear? Nice, then this conversation is over! Back off! The last thing a Lehrman can afford is bad blood with Mystic Eye auctioneers!"
The Mystic Eye Projector was a piece of equipment of the Rail Zeppelin, a major Dead Apostle-operated Mystic Eye-collecting railway train involved in a past case with Lord El-Melloi II, his private pupil, Yvette, and Caules.
It is a secret art that consumes one of their stored Mystic Eyes as a bullet, rendering its internal Magic Circuits and Crest-like functions permanently unusable to explosively amplify the power of the Eye while also releasing a torrent of magical energy.
ーThere is no way we can do the same thing a superior Dead Apostle does. But that doesn't mean we cannot seek the same results. You just have to get to the bottom of this guiding idea of squeezing a Mystic Eye dry of its energy. The traditional Lehrman magecraft is ideal for this.
Remembering her mentor's words, Yvette tried to put on another Mystic Eye but couldn't.
"Ouch… Yeah, that's gonna stay unusable for a while…"
She put back her eyepatch, struck an idol pose, and talked to herself to pretend she was fine.
"Oh, Prof, you're definitely gonna find yourself stabbed in the back one day. Though that's rich coming from one of the fools that let you use her as your plaything!"
Originally Posted by Comun
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